The living world

Wildlife

Manta rays circle each island. Jellyfish drift underneath by day and rise to deck height at night.

The server doesn't send us where each creature is. It sends a headcount per island and the time on its clock. Your browser then runs the same movement maths the server runs, from that clock. That's why the creatures glide instead of jumping every few seconds, and why what you see matches the game rather than approximating it.

Islands vary. Bigger ones support more animals, and populations rise and fall over time, so some islands are busy and some are nearly empty. That's the world, not a bug.

The sky whale

There is one whale in the whole world, and it migrates. It works through every island of one region in turn — about a quarter of an hour of “it is here, go and look”, a minute or two overhead each island — and then it leaves across open sky for the next region and that one has no whale at all until it comes back. A full lap of the world takes a little over two hours, so any given island is passed once in that time. Seeing it is meant to be an event.

On the map the solid legs are the tour inside a region and the dashed legs are the crossings between them. The note under the map says which region it is over right now, which one it is heading for, and how long until it gets there.

It calls every couple of minutes, and the ring on the map is where the current call is sounding from. The call carries much further than the whale can be seen, so in the game you hear it coming a good while before it appears — and while it is crossing open sky towards you, that call may be the only warning your region gets.

The animal itself was finished and left in Worlds Adrift, but never given anything to do. The whale is theirs; where it goes is ours.

Ships

Each ship is drawn as the actual outline of the hull someone built, seen from above, pointing the way it's heading.

Positions arrive every few seconds. Between updates we move a ship along the speed the server last reported. A dashed outline means we're estimating; a solid one means that's exactly where the server put it. We stop estimating after a few seconds rather than let a guess drift.

Travellers

Players show up as plain dots. No names, no accounts, nothing that says who anyone is. The dots are given a scrambled id so a marker doesn't teleport between updates, and those ids are thrown away and remade every time the server restarts.

Islands

Click any island for what's on it: ore, trees, databanks, wildlife. Zoom in past a few kilometres and islands take on their real coastlines and names.

Who's watching

The watching number is how many browser tabs have this page open right now — not how many people, and not which ones. Two tabs count twice, and a tab you close fades out after about half a minute.

To count them at all, your browser makes up a random number when the page loads and sends it back with each update. Nothing else: no cookie, no account, no location, no record of where you came from. Reload and you're a new number. We keep a running total once a minute, and that total is all that's ever written down.