System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Ink House

"I do not put that on people who have not been. Floor 8. Come back."

A randomly-placed building — rarer than a hut, marked with a pink strip over the door — housing a tattooist and a chair. Sit at the chair (walk up and press [E], or use the [ ] shortcut anywhere near one) to open the parlour: 250 coin per design applied, 100 coin to remove one. There are eight places ink can go — face, neck, collarbone, chest, both arms, both hands — and only one design at a time per part; putting a new one on an already-inked spot simply replaces it.

Ten designs, seven for sale

Every design is drawn procedurally onto a shared canvas rather than stored as separate art per skin tone — heavy black strokes over whatever colour the body part already is, in a tribal / cyber-sigilism style, so ink reads consistently no matter what a character looks like underneath it.

Three you cannot buy, only earn

Three designs — Floor Count, The Tall One, and The Empty Chair — are gated on the deepest floor a character has ever reached in The Dream, a permanent high-water mark that only ever rises. Money can't unlock them, and going broke can't take them away. Trying to buy one before you've been deep enough gets refused outright, with nothing charged: "I do not put that on people who have not been. Floor [X]. Come back." Deliberately, these three are the ugliest designs in the set — not meant to look good, meant to be recognised by someone who has also been that deep themselves.

A second, free-drawn tattoo system exists as groundwork, not as a shipped feature

According to the development log, a later request asked for something noticeably different from what's described above: tattoos a player draws themselves on any non-transparent pixel of their character, permanently bound to that specific body, and visible to other players. That can't be the system above — the presets above paint onto a fully opaque canvas with no transparency at all, so "any pixel that isn't transparent" can only mean the character's actual portrait art, a completely different, alpha-based surface. Investigating that request turned up real, still-unbuilt groundwork: strokes stored as normalised coordinates rather than a painted bitmap (a handful of strokes work out to a few hundred bytes, cheap enough to save and eventually send to other players, against hundreds of kilobytes for a raw painted image), a binary transparency mask proven to reject strokes drawn off the character's art, and ink that's deliberately designed never to be removable once applied. None of it has shipped — "visible to other players" specifically can't yet, since the multiplayer client doesn't transmit character appearance of any kind — and whether this new system would replace the presets above or exist alongside them is still an open decision, since the drawing, the permanence, and the binding-to-a-specific-body-part logic work identically either way and didn't need to wait on an answer to be built.

Version history

• Tattoos added, directly from a request for a tattoo shop — the ink system itself shipped first, with the building it belongs in following shortly after.
• The Ink House building added, giving the ink system an actual place to be found in the world — built as an ordinary entry in the game's existing wild-structure generator rather than a second, parallel placement system, so it gets the same collision, doors, and looting every other wild building already has for free.
• Three earned-only designs added, gated on Dream depth — giving a deep dive a permanent, visible record beyond just the crystal it pays out, since nothing about how a character looked had ever shown where they'd actually been.

Trivia

• Every part of a character can carry at most one tattoo at a time — there's no way to layer two designs on the same arm, since a second one would simply overwrite the first texture underneath it anyway.
• The bracket-key shortcut for opening the parlour was originally a free door that worked anywhere; it was later restricted to only function while actually standing at a real tattooist's chair, prompting a direction to the nearest Ink House instead everywhere else.