Day seven. The grid is mostly dark.
What grows, grows in real time.
A survival game where time is not a mechanic. Time is time.
BETA This is unfinished, and that is the point.
AFTER is being built in the open while people play it. Parts of it are rough, parts are broken, and parts are simply not made yet — a room that will not open, a button that does nothing, art that is going to be replaced. When you hit one of those, it is not you doing it wrong.
There is a Tell us button in the corner of every screen and it reaches a person, not a form. Most of what is already in here arrived that way — the hearts, the room view, the voice, this explanation. That is what makes it a community game: it is not finished because it is still being decided, and you are one of the people deciding.
90 seconds, read aloud.
This is the single most important thing to understand, and everything else follows from it. The clock runs at twenty-four times real speed.
It keeps running whether you are watching or not. Nobody pauses the weather because you closed a tab, and nobody pauses your hunger either. That is the whole premise: a world that does not wait.
So the one habit that matters: before you close the tab, make sure your survivor has food and water in hand. The game spends those stores on your behalf while you are gone — slowly, sensibly, the way a real person would — and you come back to somebody thinner and tired. With nothing in hand, you come back to a grave. The first survivor most people lose is lost to a weekend, not to a decision.
Plant a tomato and it takes the real weeks a tomato takes. Close the browser for a month and come back to a meadow where your lawn was, an empty water barrel, and a survivor who has been hungry the whole time. The server computes all of it from the clock, not from a loop.
Death is real here — the days behind a survivor matter precisely because they can be lost. But death is not the end of your account. You start with three hearts, spend one to bring a survivor back at full health, and earn another for every hundred days survived, up to ten. Days survived counts across every survivor you have ever had, so losing one does not lose the progress toward the next heart.
300+ real plants, trees, flowers, birds and animals, each placed only where it actually occurs. If you are on the Colorado plains, you get pronghorn and prairie turnip. Above treeline you get pika and alpine avens. Nothing invented.
A grocery store running on half power still has cold dairy on day seven. A pharmacy that lost power on day one has nothing but ruined insulin. Every stored item knows when it was stored and what the temperature has been since.
Inside a shelter the view is a cutaway — a vertical slice with the walls removed, every room and floor at once. Step outside and it becomes overhead. Indoors you plan. Outdoors you travel.
No account? Create one
BETA AFTER is unfinished and still being built. You will find rough edges — tell us about them and they get fixed.
Your progress is tied to this username. Write the password down somewhere real — there is no email reset yet.
Question 1 of 5
One last thing
We sent six digits to your inbox. Type them in to keep this save. You can carry on playing meanwhile — the code is good for 15 minutes.
Deleting a survivor erases that save permanently.
Rotate the sphere. Choose your ground. It decides what grows, what hunts you, and how long the season lasts.
Not a costume. Each body changes the numbers you have to survive with.
You can go alone, or bring up to seven. Every person eats and drinks every day — and every person is a pair of hands.
The coat depends on the climate — which is why the place came first. Whole outfits by season, or piece by piece, head to shoes. Every garment is numbers, not looks: warmth, rain, weight, noise.
What you leave is not lost — it will be out there, within a twenty-minute walk, in the kind of room such a thing lives in. A wrong choice is a journey, not a dead end.
The building came with the ground — but a house keeps its things where a house keeps things. Choose what stays in plain sight. The rest is in there somewhere, in the kind of room it belongs in, and finding it is yours to do.