Pre-alpha · old-school MMO · in a browser tab
Old-school rules, under a hard sun.
Tiles, a 600 ms tick, skills that take months and a market run by players — the shape you know, being built in real 3D for a browser tab. The world is a volcano they farm from the inside.
Pre-alpha · old-school MMO · in a browser tab
When you die, they lay you in the ash
— and you leave a hole shaped like a person.
On a one-life character, that hollow stays where you fell, for good. The rest is the old shape: tiles, a 600 ms tick, long skills and a market run by players, being built in real 3D for a browser tab.
No public build yet. No release date.
What it is
It plays like the old ones. It opens like a web page.
If you’ve played Old School RuneScape you know the shape: one persistent world, everybody in it at once, and a click on the ground to walk there. Emberworks keeps that shape on purpose.
What changes is everything between you and the world. It’s real 3D, it runs in the browser you already have, and there is no launcher, client or download in the way.
- Movement
- Click a tile. The server steps you one tile per 600 ms tick.
- Other players
- Everyone in a zone sees everyone else in it.
- Authority
- The server decides what happened. Your browser only asks.
- Install
- None. It’s a tab.
All four of these run today, in a pre-alpha slice.
The look
Plain shapes. One hard sun.
The geometry is simple on purpose — cut blocks, stone, timber, the shapes one person can actually build. The budget goes into light instead.
A single low sun, so shadows run long and tell you how tall things are. Ash in the air, so the far side of the world fades out instead of stopping. The sky is the same ash as the fog; there’s no painted backdrop behind it.
The sun and its shadows run in the slice today. The colour grade and the ash haze are the next two pieces of work.
The world
They farm the inside of a volcano.
A live caldera thirty kilometres across, and nine hundred people in it. From the top down:
- The rim
The town.
- Under the rim
Forges built into fumaroles: a six-metre chimney and no fuel store. The mountain does the heating.
- The inner slopes
Forty terraces of farmland, cut in switchbacks. Volcanic soil grows almost anything; that is why anyone is here.
- The floor
A lake of floating pumice. One raft has a house on it, and it drifts.
The lake rises four centimetres a year, and the terraces rise with it. Lately the vents have started to pulse in a rhythm, and the water is turning milky. The mountain is doing arithmetic about them.
Designed, not built. The slice runs in a 64 × 64-tile stand-in zone of crates, barrels and a forge.
Death
Pompeii’s plaster casts aren’t bodies. They’re holes in the ash, filled in eighteen centuries later.
Emberworks takes that literally. When a one-life character dies for good, they leave an ash hollow where they fell: a void the exact shape of the person.
It is never cleaned up. Other players can find it, and stand in it.
| Mode | When you die |
|---|---|
| RespawnDefault | You drop what you carry and walk back. |
| One life | One character, one death. The world keeps your hollow. |
| Hollow | One life, no trading, no bank. Everything you own is on your body. |
Permanent death has a border.It only counts past the edge of the safe regions. A dropped connection in a safe region is an ordinary death, not the end of a character.
And it isn’t instant.When a one-life character goes down, the ash takes ten minutes to set. Anyone who gets there in time can dig them out.
Designed, not built. None of this is in the slice yet.
How it plays
The hours are in the skills, not a quest log.
One person can write a few hours of quests a month. A skill ladder doesn’t run out. So progress is the old kind: pick a skill, get slowly better at it, and sell what you make to other people.
The first of eightFarming
The terraces. Plots are shared, and anyone can harvest what’s ripe — someone can take your crop, and that is a story the world tells about you.
- SmithingForges in the fumaroles, so fuel costs nothing.
- CookingStone ovens on vent heat.
- PotteryTerrace clay. Every pot and jar in the world.
- MiningObsidian and pumice.
- AlchemySulphur and mineral salts.
- FishingThe pumice lake.
- BladeworkThe only way to fight at launch. No bows and no spells: nobody here ever had magic.
The economy is run by players: what you make, you sell to other people. The intended model is free to play with an optional membership, and nothing for sale makes you stronger. That is an intention, not a promise — nothing is for sale.
Planned. None of the skills are built yet.
Status
Where it actually is
Pre-alpha, one developer. This is all of it.
Runs today
- An authoritative server. It owns the world and steps every player one tile per 600 ms tick.
- Click-to-move on a tile grid.
- Other players in the same zone, as placeholder bodies.
- One sun, with real-time shadows.
- A colour grade, baked ambient occlusion, and ash haze over distance.
Next
- The first real zone, 120 × 120 tiles, replacing the 64 × 64 stand-in.
- Characters that read as people from 24 m, rather than capsules.
- Content that can be replaced while the server runs, with rollback. Built and in review; not on the main branch yet.
Designed, not built
- The caldera, the eight skills, trading, the three death modes and the hollows.
Doesn’t exist yet
- Screenshots. A public build. A release date.
- A final name. Emberworks is the world’s name; the game’s may change.
Intended, not promised
- Free to play, with an optional membership.
The list
One email, when there’s a tab you can open.
No newsletter. When a public build exists, one message with a link. That is the whole arrangement.