System mechanic

Achievements

Opened with [ (left bracket) · 258 achievements across 9 categories

Nobody tells you this panel exists in the normal course of play. For a long stretch of the game's history it wasn't even in the game's own controls reference — an audit that compared every actually bound key against the printed help list found 39 keys bound and only 38 written down, and the missing one opened Achievements. If you've never pressed [, you've been missing a genuine, substantial system.

How it's built, and why the count is honest

Before this existed, the game already had a Trophy Room with milestone rows like "Total Kills 33/1000" — a stats page with targets on it, but not a real achievement system: nothing counted a total unlock count, nothing told you the moment you'd earned something, and there was no way to see the full locked list of what there was to go for. The Trophy Room was left exactly as it was; Achievements is a separate, new system built alongside it.

Every single achievement tests a number the game was already tracking — roughly ninety existing save fields, from lifetime kill counts to hours played to which off-world locations you've physically stood on. Nothing here invented a new statistic or asked you to do busywork solely to unlock a checkbox. The high count comes from tiers: one stat with five thresholds is five real achievements, since 10 kills and 25,000 kills aren't the same accomplishment — the same way most games of this kind handle a deep counter.

The nine categories

Skills — Total Level tiers.
Combat — kill counts, bestiary completion, apex/terror kills, siege waves survived, cities razed, and one-off achievements for specific fights (defeating the rival city, defeating Poseidon).
Endurance — deaths, hours played, distance travelled.
Wealth — cash held, treasury vault, interest earned, total spend, rent collected, casino wagers and wins, goods sold.
Exploration — world explored, biomes visited, The Dream depth, waypoints placed, Teleporter anchors found.
Worlds — visiting every off-world destination the game has.
Property — properties owned, rented out, furnished, buildings built, factories built.
Factions — task-board contracts completed, settlements held.
Life — marriage bond level, pets, cosmetics, spells unlocked, the skill tree, login streaks, oaths, the Spire's mastery climb, and a handful of specific milestones (getting married, finishing every questline in the game, bringing about The Revelation, and — yes — contracting ligma).

A few worth knowing about by name

"It Is Done" — for bringing about The Revelation. The achievement's own title is the exact line the game prints when that event finishes.
"You Have Ligma" — the game's own description: "Contract ligma. Congratulations."
"Every Sky There Is" — visit every off-world destination in the game.
"The Whole Committee" — finish every questline in the game.
"Salt and Ruin" — defeat Poseidon.

Its companion: the Collection Log

A separate but closely related system, the Collection Log, tracks every item you've ever personally obtained across the game's full item list — 2,187 entries — giving each one the same "??? until you've actually found it" treatment the bestiary gives creatures. It counts loot, crafting, merchants, quests and fishing alike, since everything passes through the same single function that hands items to you. Deliberately gives no reward for completing it: a "collect everything" achievement would get un-earned for every player who'd already finished it the moment a single new item was ever added to the game, so this stays a personal checklist rather than a race against future updates — though it did later gain its own fixed-count milestone achievements, Collector, Hoarder and Archivist, precisely because those can't be un-earned the same way.

How it's stored

One field on your save, mapping each achievement's id to the timestamp you earned it — so the save only grows by a small amount no matter how many you unlock, and an achievement can never be un-earned. It's checked on a 2.5-second timer against numbers already sitting in memory, so it costs nothing extra per frame. The one genuinely new thing it had to start tracking was which off-world locations you've actually visited — nothing recorded that before, since nothing needed to.

Version history

Added, directly requested: "add achievements to the game... as many as possible." Built from what the game already counted rather than inventing new tracking, which is why the count could responsibly go as high as it did.
Fixed the achievements hint appearing on a menu screen where it could never be seen — it had been added to the title-screen controls list, but that list only exists before a character is loaded, and the code adding the hint only ran after one was.
Fixed the key itself being missing from the game's own help panel, found by an audit comparing every bound key against the printed reference rather than trying to spot the gap by reading — the same method that separately found two other undocumented uses of a different key.