INTERVAL
A world that runs on rules, not servers.
What is this?
Interval is a small online world in the spirit of early-2000s browser games. Tallyholm is one island divided into seven countries: the Greenwood, the Heartlands, the Downs, the Moor, the Crags, the Fens and the Wilds — and nineteen named places within them. Every citizen inhabits the same place. Cut timber in the Greenwood, dig the Crags, fish the Fens, fight the skeleton-knights that muster in the Wilds, forge star gear, brew ale in a house you have made your own, chart the frontier and sell the way, keep a stall in a town so somebody else does not have to walk, unmake what you cannot carry into coin, and raise a watchfire so the road is lit for whoever comes after you. Every 600 milliseconds the world advances one interval, and everything that ever happens, happens on one.
The difference is underneath. There is no game server. The rules are written in a public constitution, every node computes the world independently, and a quorum of witnesses named in that constitution certifies each interval, producing a proof of what happened that anyone can check against the founding record alone. Under a network split the world stops rather than fork: a stopped world, never two worlds. Nobody can shut it down, charge for it, or change it out from under you. An update you don't like is just a different world you don't have to move to.
Free forever. No company, no servers, no subscription. The world runs on the computers of the people playing in it, and stays alive as long as anyone cares.
Your key is your character. A cryptographic keypair on your machine. No account, no password reset, no one to confiscate it.
Any window you like. There is no official look. This site's client is one window among many; the same world renders in a terminal, in ASCII, or in whatever anyone builds.
No combat level. A citizen is introduced by their standing, the sum of all sixteen skills, and their calling, the trade they are best at. Combat is three skills of sixteen, and this world does not rank its people by their capacity for violence.
Bots hold the lanterns. An executor runs its own node, like everyone else, so the same script that grinds woodcutting is also verifying every interval and enforcing the constitution on everyone, itself included. The rules never ask whether a citizen is human; automation is priced into the economy, and presence cannot be automated.
The island
The world is an island named Tallyholm, a tally being the split stick whose two halves prove each other, which is how this world stays real. What follows is not a picture of the map: it is the map, and the living copy is computed in your browser from the seed by the same functions every node verifies. Seven towns, two passes through the Ridge, a causeway walked once and recalled to forever, and one island in the northwest that appears on no road and carries no label.
Start here
Play in this browser: choose a window, one click. Or read the New Player Guide to run your own world in two minutes, and The Manual for everything else. Standings live on the Hiscores.