System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Prentice Step

No HP, no collision, no attack, no inventory, no effect on any number in the game. They walk behind you and they watch. That is all they will ever do

A low stone step with a chalked slate and a leaning lantern post, standing just outside the city wall — deliberately the nearest station of its kind to a brand-new character. Press [E] and a child gives you their name and falls in behind you. They ask, over time, to be shown twenty-four things. There's no fight to win here, no resource to spend, and — genuinely, completely — nothing at all to earn. What this system actually does is connect every other system in the game to each other, for the first time, without paying a single coin to do it.

The verb this game never had: showing somebody something

The game's own development notes are unusually direct about the problem this solves. Every system up to this point — mining, fighting, oaths, claims, every station and every ledger — was a private transaction between one player and one machine; nothing ever depended on another person being present when you did it. An apprentice inverts that: the thing you were already going to do becomes something you do in front of someone, which the notes call "a new verb, not a new number."

It's also framed as the answer to a harder design question the game had been sitting on: how to connect eight separate stations, four separate loops, a claim and an oathstone, without inventing a meta-currency that would cheapen all of them. An apprentice's askings — "show me the still," "show me the pyre," "show me a stone raised on your own ground" — turn a player who's only ever touched three of eight stations into someone with a small person walking behind them asking about the other five. The only thing that satisfies the asking is actually going and using them, exactly as they already work, for exactly the rewards they already pay. Nothing is buffed, nothing is bundled, and no currency is minted to make it happen.

The twenty-four things

A killing. A vow. A stone raised on your own ground. The Meltwater Still. The Pauper's Pyre. The Oddments Bench. The Spire of Years. The Milestone Road. The Long Ledger. A deed of the day. The kiln. The Moon. The burning mountain. What's under the ground. Nightfall. The city. The sky. The water. Being afraid. A coin earned. Getting better at something. Something you built. The long walk. And how to wait.

Each one ticks the instant it happens, with a line of dialogue in the child's own words. They can be shown in any order, over however long it takes — there's no time limit and no wrong sequence.

Graduation

Show an apprentice all twenty-four and they graduate — walking out of your life to stand at the Step forever as one more figure in a growing row, while a brand-new child immediately takes their place, ready to be taken on in turn. The game announces it plainly: "[Name] has been shown all 24 things and is a journeyman. They stand at the Step now." This never ends and the row never shrinks — the visible row caps at 24 figures for rendering's sake, but the underlying roll of everyone who's ever graduated on that character is never truncated.

[F8] opens the Prentice Book: who's currently with you, what they've been shown, what they're still asking for, and the full roll of everyone who's graduated. Dismissing a current apprentice with [E] only ever sends them back to wait at the Step — nothing in this feature can ever destroy progress; the only thing that clears an apprentice's count is completing all twenty-four.

What it pays

Nothing. Not one coin, not one item, not one point of XP, not one skill tick, not one stat, not one drop, not one unlock that gates anything else, not one point of damage in either direction. A player who never walks out to the Step plays exactly the same game as one who never knew it existed. The apprentice itself has no HP, no collision, no attack, and no inventory — it cannot be hurt, cannot fight, and cannot affect a single enemy, drop, or number anywhere in the game.

The game's own notes explain what this ruled out along the way: a meta-currency or "mastery" track paying out for using every station was rejected outright as power creep wearing a hat; a ninth station was rejected because eight stations having no reason to know about each other was the actual complaint, not a shortage of stations; a companion that could fight, tank, carry, spot, or heal was rejected in one line as new power that changes how combat feels, which was explicitly off the table.

Version history

• The Prentice Step added, as the answer to a design brief asking how to connect the game's stations, loops, claims and oaths to each other without a shared currency. Reads a wide set of other systems' save data (the Still, the Pyre, the Bench, the Spire, the Road, the Ledger, Daily Deeds, Oaths, the Kiln, skills, build pieces, cash, bank balance, lifetime kills) to know when an asking has been satisfied, but never writes to any of them — the feature cannot corrupt another system's data because it's structurally incapable of touching it.
• A wrong distance claim corrected. Player-facing text once described the Step as "by a wide margin the nearest station in the world," which wasn't true — the Step's own detection radius is actually larger than several other stations', not closer. Fixed in the wording rather than the placement, since the Step genuinely is close to the city gate; the claim about being the single nearest station specifically was simply wrong.

Trivia

• Deliberately, no character ever loses anything by this feature's existence — a save written before the Prentice Step existed simply loads as a character who has never walked out to it, and no retroactive credit is ever granted for lifetime stats, on the same principle the game's Oaths system already established: an asking only means something if it was satisfied while a specific child was actually watching.
• Every graduate's name is generated deterministically from how many children that character has taken on in total, not randomly — so the exact same save, loaded any number of times, always produces the exact same roll of names in the exact same order.