System mechanic — read this before you press buttons in City Hall
The Revelation
A one-time, permanent, 82-second world-changing event · triggered by the "BREAK THE SEALS" button in City Hall
City Hall is one of the very first buildings on the road out of spawn. A brand-new character, six minutes old, with no cash and nothing equipped, can reach this button. For a long stretch of the game's history, clicking it did what it does below with zero confirmation — that's since been fixed (see Version History), but it's still worth reading this before you go looking for what City Hall's buttons do out of curiosity.
What it is
The Revelation is a scripted, Book-of-Revelation-themed apocalypse sequence that plays out over 82 seconds once triggered, then permanently, visibly changes your world:
| Time | Beat |
|---|---|
| 0s | "A great silence falls over the land." |
| 5s | The sun turns black; the sky and fog darken. |
| 10s | The moon turns to blood — a red moon appears overhead. |
| 15s | The sea turns to blood. |
| 21s | Visibility drops sharply — "a third of the light struck." |
| 26s | A starfall of 20 falling stars. |
| 32s | Eight plague strikes — fire and hail rain down. |
| 42s | A horde of 14 hostiles is loosed ("the locusts of the abyss"). |
| 56s | Armageddon — a horde of 22 plus another 14-star starfall, together. |
| 82s | "It is done." The event ends. |
What stays afterward
Once it ends, the toast reads "And there was a new heaven and a new earth" — but the world doesn't fully reset. The sky and fog stay a permanent dark red, and the sea stays bloodied. There is no way to undo this once the sequence completes. It's a one-time event per character — triggering it again on the same character isn't possible once it's been witnessed. The same red is reused by a much smaller, temporary event — a Blood Moon — and the game specifically checks whether you've actually broken the seals before letting a Blood Moon's dawn restore the water, so the two effects can never cancel each other out.
All of the strikes, hordes, and falling stars are placed around wherever you were standing when you broke the seals, using a fixed random seed tied to that moment — the same sequence would play out identically for anyone else replaying the exact same event record, which is a deliberate design choice from when this system was built with a future multiplayer server in mind.
How you trigger it, and how it's guarded now
The button lives in City Hall, labelled "BREAK THE SEALS." Clicking it now shows a confirmation: "BREAK THE SEALS? This brings about the Revelation. It cannot be undone, and it happens to this character only once." Confirm, and the countdown begins immediately, saved to your character right away so the event survives a reload — if you quit mid-sequence and come back, you resume exactly where the timeline left off rather than restarting or losing it.
Version history
- Rewired to be multiplayer-shaped while still running single-player: the event's timing was changed from a local frame-time counter to an absolute timestamp saved with the character, specifically so a reload mid-event couldn't strand the world half-transformed forever (the version before this had exactly that bug — quitting partway through left the sky permanently black and the sea permanently blood-red with the event never actually finishing). This is the earliest version this page can confirm the event by; it may be older still.
- Fixed the button having no confirmation at all. Found by opening City Hall on a brand-new character: the button's own label already said "this cannot be undone," and one click did it anyway, with no gate and no warning — reachable by any character at the level everyone starts at, minutes into the game. Every other irreversible action in the game asks first (deleting a character, giving up while stranded); this was the one place that convention was missing, on the single least reversible thing in the entire build. Fixed with the confirmation text quoted above.
Trivia
- City Hall's other big buttons — declaring a siege, going to war with the rival city — were already gated or at least intentional-feeling. Breaking the seals was the one dramatic action in the building that wasn't, which is specifically what made it worth fixing.
- The blood moon during the event is purely a rendered effect and isn't tracked as world state; the sea staying bloodied afterward, by contrast, is a real, permanent change.