Embertide

The cold never lets up; your cabin bleeds heat to the freezing world outside, hour after hour, drawing down your banked warmth. !burn loads firewood into the stove (one piece at a time, or a whole armful with !burn <species> <n>) and the heat it gives off tops that warmth back up. Keep the reserve topped and you stay warm; let the cold draw it down to nothing and your hearth goes dark.

This is the whole lesson: not all firewood is equal. A dense, well-seasoned hardwood throws far more usable heat per piece than a light softwood, so a single armful carries you far longer between reloads. Choosing the right wood is the difference between warm and dark.

Every load you burn also earns embers, your score, scaled to the heat it delivered. Energy regenerates over real time and fuels gathering and splitting your wood.

Fresh-cut wood is green, heavy with water, and green wood smolders: most of its heat is wasted boiling off that moisture instead of warming you. Your starter woodpile comes green, and it dries over real time, the moisture creeping down toward seasoned. A dense oak can take many months to season; a light softwood dries far faster.

So the real craft is to think ahead: the wood you burn tonight is only as good as how long it has been drying. Check !stock to see whether each pile reads “seasoned” or still “seasoning”; a seasoned piece delivers far more usable heat than the same wood burned green. Stack your wood early, and let time do the work.

Your starter pile won’t last forever. Type !forage to head out and gather a fresh species you don’t already have; it costs energy, which slowly refills over time, so you can’t strip the forest bare in one sitting. Foraged wood comes in green and soaking wet, just like real fresh-cut wood.

Then prep it: !split breaks your piles down so they dry faster, and !season stacks them to age (and tips you a few embers for the tidy work). Forage early, split and stack, and by the time the cold deepens you’ll have seasoned wood ready, instead of scrambling to burn something green.

You don’t just keep a fire; you keep a cabin, and a draughty cabin throws your heat straight back to the cold. The cabin has a heat-loss rating (its UA, shown on !cabin); the lower it is, the less wood the night demands of you.

Tighten it up over time: !gather brings back building materials (a separate resource from firewood) and !chink spends materials and energy to seal the gaps, lowering your heat loss a notch at a time. A well-chinked cabin is one of the biggest survival edges there is, and every chink also hardens it a little against the fires to come.

Surviving the Long Winter is as much about spirit as warmth. Your hearth keeps a morale meter (the Heart, on !status) that drifts up when you’re warm and steady and sags when you’re left in the cold. There’s no losing for low morale; it only slows how fast your energy comes back, so a discouraged keeper forages and splits a little less.

Lift it the way real northerners do: a warm cabin, neighbours around the fire, and the lights overhead. When the aurora is up, !aurora to step out and watch it (a real morale boost), and weathering a hard cold snap leaves you a little prouder, too.

Embers aren’t only a score; they’re your currency. !shop opens three upgrade tracks: a sturdier shelter (a bigger warmth reserve and less creosote per burn), better tools (a richer forage haul for less energy), and a hydraulic splitter (wood seasons faster). !buy shelter, !buy tool, or !buy splitter raises one a level; the upgrades are permanent and survive even a rebuild.

But the powered tools run on gas, and gas is finite. Each forage with the saw and each pass of the splitter burns a little fuel; run the tank dry and they quietly drop back to hand tools, slower, but they still work. !refuel buys a can while the world still has fuel, but only in Act 1. Once the Big One takes the grid, the pumps are dead and you make do with axe and maul.

When the cold finally wins and a hearth goes dark, that’s not the end. !rebuild raises a new hearth on the ashes of the old: the nights you survived bank as Survivor Lore, and the more lore you carry, the stronger your next start: a deeper warmth reserve, more wood, and more energy to begin with.

Your embers, your upgrades, and your Firewood-dex all carry across, so every winter you’re a little wiser and a little better equipped. Embertide is a roguelike at heart: you’re meant to go dark, learn the woods, and come back harder.

When the real sun acts up, the cold comes down. A cold snap is a window of hours your fire has to survive, and the secret is coaling. Some woods (oak, black locust, osage) burn down to deep, long-lived coals; burn those during the snap and your fire rides out the whole window unattended while you sleep. Light, low-coaling softwood burns out fast and leaves you scrambling. The bell warns you when a snap is forecast and when it hits, so stock your best wood ahead.

Check !status during a snap to see how many watches you’ve covered. Burning high-coaling wood banks watches fast; if you’re still caught short, !watch lets you tend the fire by hand to cover one more (it costs energy). Cover every watch and you weather the snap and earn embers; fall short and the cold drains your heat reserve. Good wood buys you sleep.

And no one weathers it alone. If a neighbour is offline when the cold lands, use !rally <player> to stand their fire-watch for them, the mercy valve that keeps a real-time crisis humane. Between a well-stocked communal pile (which auto-covers the short) and rallying neighbours, a prepared settlement carries everyone through the night.

Embertide runs in acts. Act 1 is the world you know: fuel at the pump, the grid humming in the background. But in the campaign’s final year the Big One looms: a geomagnetic superstorm that can also break early if the real sun screams to Kp 9. When it hits, it takes the grid for good and sets the world alight.

The fires don’t just threaten you: they come for your wood, your cabin, and your stores, and a hoarder with a towering pile has the most to lose. Prepare before it lands: !firebreak clears defensible space, !chink hardens the cabin, and !melt banks water to fight the flames. Then the world turns to Act 2 (colder, grid-dark, the long aftermath), and survival means living off what you laid by.

Nobody weathers the Long Winter alone. Found a settlement with !found <name> in any channel and it becomes your camp; the people in that channel can !join to gather round its fire. One settlement lives per channel.

Roles (forager, splitter, fire-keeper, scout) are colour for now; set yours with !role. Your settlement shares a communal woodpile (!give / !commons) that auto-covers a short member through a cold snap, you can !rally to stand an offline neighbour’s fire-watch, and !leaders keeps a friendly scoreboard. When the cold comes down, a snap alert is posted right into your settlement’s channel.

Every settlement keeps a shared woodpile. Donate to it with !give <species> <qty> and check it with !commons. Stocking it with high-coaling hardwood is the most generous thing you can do, and the most strategic.

When a cold snap catches a neighbour short, the communal pile automatically covers their missing watches before their own reserve takes the hit, best-coaling wood first. A well-stocked commons means nobody freezes for being asleep, at work, or in the wrong timezone. Mercy for the individual, pressure on the group.

Every species you forage, scout, or burn is recorded in your Firewood-dex. !dex shows how many of the woods you’ve discovered; !dex <species> opens that wood’s real card: BTU per cord, coaling, ash, and seasoning time, straight from the database. The game is a way to learn the real encyclopedia.

Burn a species through a survived night and your mastery of it rises. !scout seeks out the rare woods you haven’t met yet and pays a few embers for a brand-new find. Your dex is yours; it follows you even if a hearth goes dark, so every winter you get a little wiser.

And the woods you meet are the ones that truly grow in your cold country; you won’t forage a tropical hardwood in the sub-Arctic, though a passing trader might carry one through.

Firewood is a cold-country craft, and every wood in the encyclopedia is sorted into one of five climate regions, hardiest to most heat-loving: Boreal, Cold-Temperate, Temperate, Subtropical, and Tropical. The grouping isn’t guesswork; it’s read from each tree’s real botany, the same way a botanist places a species by its genus. The spruces, firs, birches, aspens, and alders that ring the taiga are Boreal; the oaks, maples, ashes, beeches, elms, and cherries of the northern hardwood forest are Cold-Temperate; and it warms on from there through the Temperate gums and box-woods to the Subtropical acacias and mesquites and, at the far end, the Tropical teaks and ebonies.