Travel Between Lands

Some persistent servers are linked into a group of lands: separate worlds, each on its own server, that characters can travel between. This page covers how your character lives in one land at a time, how to travel and what you can take, how to mark out new trails, your party’s own train and rail yard, and raids into raid worlds.

On a server that is not linked to other lands, trails lead nowhere and none of this applies.

Your home land

Your character lives in one land at a time, its home.

• New characters start on the mainland. To live anywhere else, travel there.
• If you join a land that is not your character’s home, the game tells you which land your character belongs to and links you to it.
• Travelling moves your home with your character.
• When you die, your home stays in the land where you died if you have an assigned bed there, and your next character starts beside that bed. Without a bed, your home goes back to the mainland. Sleep in a free bed to make it yours (see Saving your character).

Using a trail

Trails are the posts and gates that lead to other lands. Examine one to see where it leads, or why it is closed.

1. Stand beside the trail and use it.
2. Confirm the trip. Your character leaves this land with what they wear and carry.
3. The game sends you to the other land’s server. Join it to continue as the same character, with the same skills, looks, hunger and thirst. If that land cannot take your character in, you find them back where they left.

You can set off only with a BYOND account (not as a guest), awake, at full health, and not restrained, buckled or pulling anything. A trail can also be closed for a moment while the world saves or while someone else is using it.

What you can take

Only things that can be rebuilt exactly at the other end travel. Everything must be worn, held or in a pocket or belt slot; nothing may be packed inside anything else.

You can take at most 40 items. If something cannot travel, the trail lists what to leave behind first.

Marking out a new trail

Anyone can build a trail marker from 10 wood (construction section). A new marker is closed.

1. Use it and choose the land the trail should lead to.
2. The staff are asked to approve it. They may approve it, change where it leads, or reject it.
3. Once approved, the marker opens and works like any other trail, both for leaving and for arriving travellers.

Only the player who marked out a trail can change an unanswered request. You can have at most three trails waiting at once, and must wait about ten minutes between requests. Trail markers never lead to the rail yard; only a party’s own train goes there.

Party trains

A party, meaning your faction or you alone if you have none, can build its own train. It lives in the rail yard, a land of its own with a berth for every party.

Building the train

1. Lay a straight run of at least 8 rails (see Trains).
2. Build a railway works office from 20 wood (trains section of the crafting menu) within two tiles of that track.
3. Use the office and confirm to start your party’s train project. A party has one project or train at a time.
4. Hit the office with materials until it has 200 iron, 60 steel, 150 wood, 30 glass and 40 cloth. Anyone can contribute; the office takes only what is still missing from a stack. Use the office to see what it still needs.
5. When the last material is in, the train is finished and the office becomes your party’s station.

The office keeps the delivered materials, so vehicles cannot crush it and explosions do not destroy it. Progress and the finished train are saved with the world, and a renamed faction keeps its project.

Your party is always your current faction. A solo player who finishes a train and then joins a faction boards as that faction, and someone who has left a faction can no longer board its train.

Riding to the rail yard

Party members board at the station office. The trip takes you, with what you can carry, to your party’s berth in the rail yard, and your home moves there.

• The first member to arrive claims a free numbered berth for the party; everyone after arrives at the same berth.
• Each berth has a three-car train: a locomotive cab, a common car with tables and racks, and a sleeper with ten beds and crates. Its walls cannot be broken, and its doors open only for your party.
• Sleep in a sleeper bed to make it your bed, so that if you die, your next character starts aboard.
• Use your berth marker to ride back to the land your party came from. You arrive at your party’s station.
• If the yard is full, a party that has never ridden its train cannot board until a berth frees up.

Raiding a train

Other parties in the yard can force a train’s doors with weapons, kicks, gunfire or explosives, but only while a member of the owning party is playing in the yard. While the owners are away, the doors are sealed. A door gives way after enough damage (gunfire counts for half), then stays open; it is never destroyed. A member of the owning party secures a forced door again by hand.

Raid worlds

Some trails lead into a raid world: a dangerous extraction-style zone that persistent characters enter to loot and then leave. Nobody lives there.

• Getting out. Use an extraction point to go home to the land you came from, with what you wear and carry. The same carry rules apply as for any trail, so plan what you bring back.
• Dying. If you die in a raid world, your body and gear stay there, and your home goes back to the land you came from. Your next character starts there, beside your bed if you have one.