New Player Guide

From nothing to your first cooked fish, as fast as possible.

The fastest way: play right here

If this page is being served by a running node, just open Play. You'll spawn in the middle of the map. Click the ground to walk. That's it, you're playing.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Walk to water (the blue tile, top-left) and click it. You'll start fishing: a raw fish lands in your inventory every so often.
  2. Catch three or four, then walk to the campfire ♨ and click it. You will burn most of them. Everyone does. Burn rate falls as your cooking level rises.
  3. Click a cooked fish in your inventory to eat it: it heals. You'll want that, because:
  4. Click a goblin. Combat runs itself once engaged: you trade blows every interval until one of you falls. Goblins drop bones, sometimes ore — and often forage. You cannot pick forage up: click it where it lies and you eat it on the spot for six hitpoints. It rots quickly, so take it during the fight rather than after.
  5. Alch a log. Click any priced thing in your pack and choose Alch it. It comes apart for four coins and twenty-five magic experience — your first spell, castable from level one. Four coins is meant to be poor: a keeper pays far better, and what alchemy buys is not having to walk to one.
  6. Drink at the well. Every town has one. Stand beside it and click: you are restored to full, free, with no waiting. It is why a town is somewhere you come back to.
  7. Don't die carelessly. Death sends you back to spawn and destroys everything you're carrying. Skills, your name and your coin survive; goods don't. Selling at a keeper is how a day's work becomes safe.

That's the doorstep. Past it lies the rest: settlements with banks, anvils and stalls — the axe man, the armourer, the seedsman who is the only source of seed in the world — banks and anvils, the dangerous Wilds where the best ore and the skeleton-knights are, waystones to recall across the map, star gear to forge, a brewhouse to build, and a whole frontier to chart. The Manual has all sixteen skills and everything else.

Join the live world with your own node

The browser window above already makes your key on your own machine and keeps it there: it is generated in the browser, never sent anywhere, and every deed you commit is signed locally before it is gossiped. (Only if your browser cannot do Ed25519 at all does the node sign on your behalf, and it will say so.) What the window does not do is verify: it trusts this site's node to tell it the truth about the world. To check every tick yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it, run a full peer. Your machine computes the whole world independently, checks each finalized interval against the constitution, and never trusts a state it did not recompute.

git clone https://github.com/intervalplace/interval
cd interval && npm install
node join.mjs yourname

Your citizen appears in the world for everyone. Your key is written to identities/ on your machine and never leaves it. The constitution check runs first: if your SPEC.md does not hash to this world's rules, the node refuses and tells you both hashes.

The name you pass is what your window calls you. It is not yet the name the world knows: a name in the ledger is claimed once and held forever, with no release and no transfer, and claiming one asks for a standing of 50. That is an afternoon of doing almost anything. Until then you are your key, which is the truest name you have anyway, and you get to see the place before you decide what to be called in it.

By default your citizen simply exists while your node verifies the world. Add --chop to run the example executor, a bot that trains woodcutting and banks its logs. Write your own executor with sdk.mjs: bots and people enter this world the same way.

Run your own world (two minutes)

You need Node.js 22.5+.

git clone https://github.com/intervalplace/interval && cd interval
npm install
node serve.mjs yourname     # then open http://localhost:8787

Prefer a terminal? node play.mjs yourname: WASD to move, g gather, x attack, f cook, e eat, q quit.

Three things worth knowing on day one