System mechanic — new player

Character Creation and the Home Meadow

What happens when you first make a character, and where you first spawn

Character creation is genuinely just two choices

Making a new character is exactly this: pick a name, and pick one of two starter pets — a cat or a dog. That's the entire creation process; appearance is handled separately afterward in the Character Creator, which opens automatically right after (press [N] any time to reopen it and change your look later).

Cat or dog — the real numbers

Read the table plainly: the dog is better in almost every real way — more damage, 50% more HP, and faster movement. The cat's only actual edge is a bite that lands very slightly more often (0.05 seconds quicker per attack), which isn't enough to make up the difference in total damage output.

For a long time, the character-creation screen described the cat as "quick" — which reads as "moves fast," and on that reading it simply wasn't true. The wording was later corrected to describe what's actually different about the cat rather than implying a speed advantage it doesn't have. Nothing about either pet's stats changed — a wording fix, not a rebalance.

Whichever you pick is with you immediately — your chosen pet is automatically summoned right next to you the moment you spawn in, rather than waiting back at a kennel for you to go find it. Your starter pet also has a real, uncapped chance to save your life outright: while it's within a short distance of you, any single incoming hit has a 40% chance of being negated completely — blocked entirely, for any amount of damage — rising to 75% while it's wearing the Ochre Warpaint. There's no cap on how much damage a block can absorb; a hit large enough to one-shot you can still be swallowed whole.

Dying on Earth costs nothing — and used to pay too much

Death on Earth is deliberately gentle: you wake at full health at the nearest settlement under the message "They took you in," and lose no cash, items, or experience for it. What you're not told is that a survived hit trains your Hitpoints and Defence skills in proportion to the damage it actually did — and for a stretch, the fatal blow that actually killed you counted too, at full value, since it's the largest single amount of damage any hit ever deals. That made dying on purpose, repeatedly, the fastest way in the entire game to level Hitpoints and Defence: a fresh character at spawn could level from 9 total to 17 in about fourteen seconds of deliberate deaths, with each death making your max health (and so the next death's payout) bigger than the last. Only a hit you actually survive trains anything now — dying trains nothing at all, matching the "no loss" promise the rest of death already made.

The Character Creator: your face is a picture, not a 3D head

Your character's actual appearance isn't a traditional body built from separate hair, hat, top, bottom, and colour-palette choices — an earlier version of the Character Creator worked exactly that way, and was removed entirely and replaced with the same photographic-billboard approach described on the Nextbot Art page. Your character is a two-layer composite: a head image and a body image, drawn one above the other on a single flat billboard that faces the camera, the same way most creatures and townsfolk in this game do. There are 7 heads and 5 bodies to choose from — 35 combinations before you touch anything else — and each layer can be independently scaled, offset, mirrored, and adjusted for hue, tint, and brightness, so two players who pick the exact same head and body can still end up looking meaningfully different.

The two layers are kept from ever visibly separating at the neck by a real geometric guarantee, not a fixed pixel offset: however you've scaled the head and body independently, the game calculates whether they still overlap enough at the seam to hide it, so a legal combination of settings can never produce a visible gap between your head and your body.

Your exact look can be exported as a share code — a short string encoding every setting — so a character's appearance can be copied or shared with someone else without screenshots or guesswork.

The small portrait in the corner of the HUD is a live render of this same composite, not a separate hand-drawn face — for a stretch after the Character Creator was rebuilt, it briefly kept showing an old hand-drawn portrait built from the deleted hair/hat/colour system instead, a leftover nobody had noticed was still reading fields nothing else in the game wrote to anymore. It now shares the exact same rendering path the Character Creator's own preview uses, so the two can never drift apart again the way they briefly did.

That portrait could also get permanently stuck blank for a repeated, real complaint — "my character image in the bottom left has disappeared again, this has kept happening over and over again." The cause turned out to be a latch: the portrait marks itself as "currently repainting" before it starts, and only clears that mark once the repaint actually succeeds — so if any single repaint ever failed for any reason, the portrait would refuse to try again for the rest of that session, no matter how many more times its trigger fired. Every failure path now clears the mark whether or not the repaint itself worked, so one bad attempt can no longer permanently disable the ones after it.

Where you actually start: the Home Meadow

As of this writing, a new character no longer wakes up inside Penjamin City itself — that changed at a later date, described below — but the disc of gentler terrain around the city, roughly 3,500 units in radius and centered on it, is still there, still referred to internally as the Home Meadow, and still where the rest of this section applies.

• Most of the game's procedurally-scattered regions are hidden inside this disc — costs nothing, since those regions are tiled everywhere else too.
• Three specific locations are the exception and survive inside the Meadow anyway: the Quiet Place (a chapel), the Haunted Cathedral (a church), and the Pit Stop (a garage). Each exists at exactly one fixed spot in the entire game world, so hiding them here would have removed them from the game outright.
• The terrain itself is flattened toward a gentle grass band, so a brand-new character isn't dropped into difficult ground on their first steps.

A revert: discovering the city is meant to be rare again

According to the development log, a new character now wakes up at a random point in the wilderness — a random direction and distance (200 to 4,400 units) from the world's origin, rejecting spots that land in the sea, on top of a settlement, in a lava crater, in an irradiated zone, or inside any of the game's other named regions — rather than always waking up inside Penjamin City itself. This is a deliberate return to how the game used to work, restoring a function that had sat unused, but never deleted, since spawning inside the city became the default many hundreds of versions earlier. The stated goal is for finding a city to be something a new character genuinely has to look for again, rather than something handed to them for free at the moment of creation.

The revert shipped with a real, if short-lived, bug: a character could spawn inside a named region — the sort of large, hand-decorated area (a specific forest, for instance) that carries its own props instead of the game's ordinary scattered trees and rocks — and find literally nothing to gather anywhere nearby, sometimes for well over a thousand units in every direction, with no ordinary Woodcutting or Mining node in reach at any level. It was found by actually playing a freshly-created character rather than only checking where it landed, and fixed the same way it was found: the random spawn point now rejects landing inside any named region at all, not only the handful it already excluded.

Because the random spawn point and the fixed Home Meadow disc no longer share the same anchor, they don't line up perfectly any more either: working out the same range the game itself uses, roughly four out of five new characters still land inside the Meadow's gentler terrain, but a real minority — those who happen to spawn on the far side of the range, away from the city — now start their very first moments somewhere the rest of this section doesn't apply to at all.

The tutorial-breaking bug this created, and how it was fixed

Flattening the terrain had an unintended side effect: ore only spawns on elevated rock above a certain height, and the flattening pushed nearly everything below that threshold. Measured at one point: 108 rocks within 1,500 units of spawn, and not one carried any ore — while the tutorial explicitly asks a new player to gather six iron and craft an Iron Sword. Fixed by lowering the ore-spawn height requirement, but only inside the Meadow — same ore types, same odds, just permitted on the gentler ground the Meadow itself created.

Your first fight could silently do nothing, and it was fixed the same way

A brand-new character's hotbar starts with only two things in it — a pickaxe in slot 1 and an axe in slot 2 — and, deliberately, no weapon at all. There's no unarmed attack in this game, so until you craft or find one, you genuinely cannot fight yet. The Meadow's hostile spawner places something new every few seconds regardless, and around half of what turns up there is a stag with a genuine 276 HP. Clicking on one with a tool selected used to do absolutely nothing — no damage, no message, no clue why. The game now tells you plainly the moment this happens, and only while you're aimed at something alive, so it never interrupts ordinary mining: with no weapon anywhere in your hotbar, that's "That will not fight. Craft a weapon at the crafting table" — a Butter Knife costs a single iron bar and is the cheapest way in. Once you're carrying any weapon anywhere in the hotbar, the message instead names the exact slot to press, e.g. "That will not fight — press [3] for your Butter Knife."

Version history

• The Home Meadow created, centered on the player's actual spawn point (not the world's raw origin, which is off-center from where characters are actually placed).
• The three unique locations preserved inside the Meadow, after the initial version was found to be hiding them along with everything else.
• Fixed the no-ore tutorial bug described above.
• The starter pet auto-summoned at creation, standing beside you from the moment you spawn rather than waiting in the kennel.
• Fixed swinging a tool at an enemy doing nothing, silently, described above.
• Fixed the cat's "quick" description being untrue. See the stats table above.
• A starter Butter Knife added to the default hotbar, then removed again. The ten slots originally advertised a sword, a bow and a wand a new character had never actually owned — all three were craftable outputs, not starting gear. A cheap Butter Knife (1 iron bar, the weakest weapon in the game) replaced them so a brand-new character could fight at all. Later removed again at the operator's own request: a fresh character today starts with no weapon whatsoever, on purpose, and has to craft or find one before their first fight — existing characters were never touched by either change.
• The Character Creator rebuilt entirely, on request. The old version — separate hair, hat, top, bottom, and body-build choices from named lists, plus a colour palette — was deleted outright and replaced with the two-layer head-and-body composite described above, matching the same photographic approach the rest of the game's creatures and NPCs use.
• Fixed dying being the fastest way to level up in the game, described above — the same rule that trains Hitpoints and Defence from damage you survive was, until this fix, also paying out on the hit that actually killed you, at the largest value any single hit in the game can produce.
• Reverted to a random wilderness spawn, described above — a genuine revert rather than new code, restoring a spawn function that had sat unused, but never removed, since city spawning became the default many hundreds of versions earlier.
• Fixed the wilderness spawn dropping a character somewhere with nothing to gather, described above — the random spawn point was rejecting only a handful of specific place types, not the whole broader category of named region a brand-new character could still land inside with no ordinary trees or rocks anywhere nearby.

Trivia

• The Home Meadow's centering bug existed because the very first version measured distance from world coordinates (0,0) rather than the actual chapel spawn point 512 units away — visibly lopsided around a walking new character (a 2m15s walk one direction against 3m02s the other) before it was corrected.
• Seventeen of the twenty regions that would normally spawn within Meadow range are tiled regions occurring everywhere else too — only three are one-of-a-kind, the entire reason the exception list is so short.