System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

A Day's Work (The Nine)

Move all nine of your skills in one stretch of play and the day is whole. It pays nothing at all — that's the entire point

Somewhere on your HUD, once you've touched more than one skill in a sitting, a quiet band appears reading A DAY'S WORK followed by nine two-letter tags and a fraction — one of ten ambient banners switched off by default, so you may need to turn it on from the Pause menu before you ever see it. That's the whole of it: a tracker for whether you've used every part of your character — not raised every skill's level, just used it once — in one unbroken stretch of play. It gives you nothing for finishing one. No coin, no item, no experience, no stat, no drop, no reputation, no buff, no unlock, at any number of days. The game's own source calls this the feature, not a missing reward: "A day's work is worth having done a day's work."

Why this exists

In this game's whole history, nothing has ever asked a character to use more than one or two of their nine skills at a time. A rock only ever wants the pick. A tree only ever wants the axe. An enemy only ever wants whichever one or two weapons you settled on years ago and has never once wanted the others. The result, left alone, is a narrow character: two or three bars race ahead while the rest sit exactly where they started, not because those skills are bad, but because nothing in the world ever gave you a reason to touch them. A Day's Work is that reason, deliberately built to pay nothing so it can never become another grind — it exists purely to notice, once in a while, that you used the whole of yourself in one afternoon rather than just the two-thirds every other system already rewards.

The nine

Every one of your nine skills counts, shown on the band by a two-letter tag:

A skill is marked the moment its experience is seen to actually rise — mine something, chop something, land a hit in the attack stance and another in the defence stance, cast a spell, loose an arrow, take a real hit on your own skin, cover ground (Edging trains passively while you move), and have something you summoned land a hit of its own. None of that has to happen in any particular order, and the game will never ask for a sequence — ordering it would turn a day's work into a checklist, which is exactly what this is built not to be.

The rules, and why each one exists

• No reward, ever, at any number of days. Nothing is granted for finishing one or for a streak of them — there's no list of past days to look back on either, only the day you're on, the most marks you've ever gathered into one, and a lifetime count of whole days finished.
• No order. The nine can be marked in any sequence, over as long as you like.
• No visible clock. A day lapses if you genuinely stop working — four minutes (240 seconds) of play passing with not one of the nine bars moving — but that countdown is never shown, hinted at, or announced in advance. The band simply going dark is the only notice you get. A visible timer would make finishing feel like a race, and racing is the one thing this was built to avoid.
• No hints. The band shows each tag lit or unlit and nothing else — it will never name a weapon, point at a biome, or suggest a route. You already know what your nine skills are.
• Nothing placed in the world. No station, no marker, no key binding. You start a day by working and end it by stopping — there's nothing to walk up to and nothing to press.
• Anywhere counts. The wilderness, a city, underground, indoors, the Moon, Vulcanis, Hell — there's no geography to this at all, and progress made in one place carries seamlessly into the next.

What the game actually tells you

A short toast appears at two moments. Cross a new personal-best mark count of four or more in one day (without finishing it) and you'll see something like "4 of the nine in one stretch of work — further into a day than you have ever taken one. 5 still sitting where they started." Finish all nine and you get a longer line: "Nine for nine. Pick and axe, the blade held forward and the blade held across, a spell and an arrow, your own skin, your own feet and whatever you set loose to fight beside you — every part of you put to work in one stretch, in no order anybody asked for, for nothing at all. That is a whole day's work." If a day lapses with two or more marks already lit, a third, gentler message runs: "You put your tools down long enough that the day went with them... Nothing is held against you." Marks below four never announce themselves at all — the band is the only feedback until you're meaningfully far in.

Version history

• Introduced as "The Eight." At the time, the game had exactly eight skills — Summoner didn't exist yet — so the day's work was built around all eight of them, with every design rule above already in place from the start.
• The Summoner skill was added as a second, independent path to a bigger combat team, well after The Eight already existed. It was deliberately left out of the day's-work tracker at first, since it trains passively from what your summons do in a fight rather than from a deliberate action you take — a defensible reason to exclude it, but one the game's own help text forgot to explain for a long stretch, still describing "eight skills" seventy-three versions after a ninth had shipped.
• The help text was corrected to explicitly explain why Summoner didn't count, found by sweeping the in-game help for numbers that describe game content and checking each one was still accurate.
• Summoner was ruled in, and The Eight became The Nine. The operator's call: "the Summoner skill is a combat skill and counts like the rest." The band, the help text, and the denominator all moved from eight to nine at once — old saves aren't rewritten, so nobody who had already made partial progress toward a day lost anything by the change.
• A contrast fix on the band's own lettering. The colour used for an unmarked tag measured well under accessibility guidelines against both the band's own background and the game world behind it — six of the nine letters in "A DAY'S WORK" were effectively unreadable in some lighting, not only on snow. Re-picked to the dimmest shade that actually clears the guideline, while keeping marked tags far brighter than unmarked ones so the distinction the band exists to draw stays obvious.

Trivia

• The band's own source code is written to cost almost nothing to run — behind a half-second poll, it reads exactly nine numbers off an object the game already holds a reference to, so a character with ten thousand finished days costs exactly what a brand new character costs.
• No past save is ever retroactively credited with days it didn't actually earn. Since no save anywhere records exactly when a skill's experience moved, there's no way to know whether any past stretch of play would have qualified — so every character starts this tracker from zero, however old they are.
• Loading a save, entering a world, or returning from a menu can never fabricate a mark by itself — a skill only marks on the specific moment its stored number is seen rising above the last value this system remembers, and that memory is reset fresh every time the world becomes readable again.