System mechanic — added v217 · pays nothing, on purpose

The Haunt

Somewhere of your own, and nothing at all to tell you where it is

Every place this game has ever cared about was chosen for you. The city is where the city is. The Finder's post sends you where somebody else described. A round is a circuit of things the world itself put down. Dying sends you back to the spot that killed you — the map choosing for you in the rudest possible way. Nobody has ever had a place in this world they picked themselves, by nothing more than turning up there again. The Haunt is the one system built specifically to notice that verb: going back somewhere for no reason at all.

How a visit is earned

The wild is divided, invisibly and with no grid ever drawn, into 128×128 metre patches — roughly two chunks on a side, a piece of ground you can see across in one glance. Stand anywhere inside one patch, continuously, for 25 unbroken seconds of play, and it credits that patch with one visit. The patch then goes deaf for 180 seconds of play, so standing there forever earns nothing further, and hopping back and forth across the boundary line cannot be milked either. Leaving and coming back later is the only thing that adds a second visit — the unit this system actually cares about is the return, not the dwell.

2 visits — the game finally admits, out loud, that you've been here before.
4 visits — the patch becomes your ground.
If another patch ever overtakes your current ground in visit count, your ground moves there instead — and the lifetime tally of how many grounds you've ever held goes up by one. That number only ever increases; nothing is ever taken back.

What it deliberately doesn't do

No marker of any kind. No cairn, post, light, mesh or sprite is ever created. There is nothing to walk up to and nothing to press.
No waypoint, no coordinates, no bearing, no distance, not even the biome name. Nothing about a haunted patch is ever surfaced anywhere except a line of text spoken while you are physically standing inside it — and that line is one of ten ambient banners switched off by default, so even that much needs turning on from the Pause menu first.
No list. There is no book, no roll, no page of past haunts to leaf through — deliberately the one convenience that would have deleted the entire feature. A list of your places is a map, and a map means you never have to remember anything.
Pays absolutely nothing, however many times you return. No coin, item, experience, stat, skill, drop, reputation, buff or unlock, at any number of visits. Having somewhere is worth having somewhere, and that's all.

Where it counts, and where it never will

The exact same three exclusions as The Climb, for the exact same reasons: flying counts nothing, because hovering a jet over a spot for half a minute isn't going anywhere on purpose. Penjamin City counts nothing, because everybody already stands around in the city — a "haunt" that's always the market square isn't a haunt. And anywhere off the world entirely (the moon, Vulcanis, underground, indoors, a cutscene) counts nothing and takes nothing away either. Only time spent on your own two feet, out in the wild, genuinely qualifies.

No retro-grant, and why that's the correct call

Unlike some of the game's other quiet trackers, this one deliberately does not sweep an existing save and back-credit anything on first load. No save anywhere has ever recorded where a character has stood, let alone how often — so there is no evidence of a haunt to grant. Handing a veteran character a ground they never actually walked back to would give them the answer before they'd ever asked the question. Nobody loses anything, because nobody had any of this to begin with.

Version history

v217 — added. Ships with exactly the design described above: the 128m patch grid, the 25-second dwell / 180-second cooldown pair, the 2/4-visit thresholds, and zero visible feedback beyond a single line of text spoken only while standing on haunted ground. The same version also independently re-confirmed The Climb's elevation tracking was working exactly as designed — the same sixty-seven metre hill counted sixty-seven metres on foot and zero every other way it was tested (flying, the moon, underground, indoors, in the city).
A contrast fix on the banner's own lettering. Its background plate was partly see-through, and no ink colour could read clearly against it once composited over bright ground — the same problem A Day's Work's banner had. Fixed the same way: the plate went fully opaque and its ink was brightened by the smallest amount that clears a comfortable reading contrast.

Trivia

Up to 32 visited patches are held in memory at once; the least-visited ones are quietly forgotten first when that cap is hit, but a patch that's currently your ground is never a candidate for forgetting, and forgetting a patch never lowers any lifetime total the player has already been told about.
The game separately remembers the single highest visit count any one patch has ever reached, on top of the visit count of your current ground — a number that's tracked internally but, in keeping with the entire philosophy of this system, is never shown to the player anywhere.