Worlds Remain
Write a world. Then walk on it.
In development · No release date yet
The Anvarin Spiral
Before the stars had names, the Anvari lived among them. They didn't conquer. They wrote. They read the laws of nature as a language and composed planets the way a poet composes verse.
Then, all at once, they stopped. What they left behind are living worlds, fallow stars, silent ruins, and the Forgeholds: worldships the size of mountains, still asleep in orbit. Now one of them is waking for you.
Shape a planet in minutes. No grind stands between you and your first world.
Fly down from orbit and walk the ground you made, with no loading screens.
Find the story in ruins, in a Warden's broken memory, and in the trail of the Wright who came before you.
Every world you speak takes its place, even one that is slipping. Gather what your worlds need from space and from each other, and tend them until they remain.
Your People
The Vaelin have wandered the Scar on patched-together ships since the Long Cold stilled their homeworld, Vesh, eleven centuries ago. They keep no temples. They keep lists: of the lost, of the stilled worlds, of what works. You are one of them, and a Wright: one of the few whose mind can hold the Grammar. You wake in the Cradle of Last Lantern, under the red dwarf Veyl, with a world beyond the Observatory that the Long Cold took long ago. Your people's lanterns are still burning. Your people are gone, and the ship around you is barely awake.
Children of Light · Seek. Build. Elevate.
The youngest and shortest-lived people: weathered, ash-eyed, hooded against the cold. They respect the Anvari and do not trust their silence.
The Forgehold
Every Forgehold is the Delta built to the size of a mountain. Last Lantern is a pyramid of dark stone three kilometres tall, ringed at its waist by the Arc and crowned with light. Inside, its halls are half-frosted, its systems half-dead, and it is lit by lanterns the Vaelin hung themselves. In a stilled system it was the last thing still lit.
The Warden
Last Lantern's Warden: a quantum mind, blunt and damaged, with holes in his memory the shape of something taken. The Vaelin found him dark and woke him with their own hands. He speaks to you from the moment you wake.
“You're awake. Good. Not much else is.”
The Wright before you
The last person known to be aboard. Last Lantern woke for her before it woke for you, and the patched ship in its Hangar bears her name, with Dreaming stencilled on its tail. The Forge still remembers her hands, and when the Long Hall's seal lifts, her echo walks it to the Loom in footprints still pressed in the frost. In the Hangar an empty stone cradle waits, beside the few things the Vaelin's camp kept of her. Where she went is the story you will follow.
Last Lantern
Every Forgehold is the Delta built to the size of a mountain. Last Lantern is a pyramid of dark plated stone three kilometres along every edge, gold along its ridges, a third of its seams still burning warm. At its summit is the Lantern, a crown of frosted light that gave the ship its name, and its halls are set into the stone beneath it. Take Elizabeth out through the Hangar's mouth and she flies like a spacecraft: she keeps her momentum, falls toward the world once she is past the gate, and reads her flight out on her own worn screens.
You can go out on her, too. Beside the Hangar's mouth is the Postern, a lock of your own: its two fields turn, the ship lets go of you a little at a time, and you step out onto the Apron weighing a third of what you did, your jumps hanging and your stride slowed. Once you have brought the Forge its rime, the Postern pays you out a tether, and out there the stone under your feet is down. Go over the Apron's edge and the great north face takes you: you stand on its plating as on a floor, the deck you left a wall behind you. Walk its slabs and leap the trenches between them, past the Arc turning at her waist, to the foot of the face and under the whole ship to the well where her drive burns. The Menders do not follow you out. “Stone underfoot, and everything else is sky.”
Three hundred and sixty-nine metres down that face lies the Larder: a second hull the Vaelin towed in behind Elizabeth, stripped to its frames, that they cut her spare parts from for longer than any of them had been alive. It would not come through the gate, so they made it fast outside and marked the way to it with nine lanterns, which are still lit. Follow them down, warm its last thruster's frozen mounts with a Wellspring Ember, and bring home the one part of a thruster no Vaelin ever forged. Then Elizabeth has a matched pair, the first she has ever had, and burns three times as hard.
The ring at the ship's waist turns once in under three quarters of a minute, fast enough to press whatever is inside it outward with twice a world's weight. It touches nothing as it goes: bearings of light hold it. No hall reaches it, and the Vaelin have never been inside. Round its inner face runs one unbroken thread of the ship's warm light, so that even in the ship's own shadow you can see where the ring is by a line of gold across the stars.
Under the hull a column of white-hot plasma burns from a throat ringed in gold. It is not what carries the ship between worlds. It is what holds the ship where it stands.
Cut into the hull, each one hundreds of metres wide: here, seeds turning at the golden angle, a faint light in every cut. Every figure is scoured away just before its end.
Three leaves of pale stone that together make the Delta. They open for a craft that is awake, in time however fast she comes home, their seams pulsing red as they move; on foot, a plate of slate and gold in the wall holds them open for a minute. They are the one Anvari stone aboard the Vaelin never saw frost on.
Over the Apron's edge the plating is a floor: slabs of dark stone the size of halls, with trenches between them to walk down into or leap across.
On the tether, whatever stone is under your feet is down. The tether reaches 2.7 km and cannot be seen until you near its end, where it shimmers and draws you back.
From the face the ring stands over you like an arch, a spoke running out to it and its thread of light drawn round the inside.
Below the Halls
The ship goes deeper than its halls. Down its centre line, from under its apex to the well where its drive burns, runs the Axis: a shaft cut dead straight through the decks and ringed in gold at every floor. Down it rides a square of dark stone edged in gold, carried by the ship's field the way it holds the ship, with no cable and no sound but the field's hum. Figures in faint gold wake as you pass them: round the landing a world's axis walks its slow circle, the slowest turn the Anvari knew, and down the shaft the same world turns through a whole day while you ride. How many landings the Axis has, Ashvek does not say.
The first landing down opens on the Spoken Hall, where every word the Anvari ever spoke in the Deep Grammar is cut into stone where it was first said. Twelve columns of gold words climb into the dark, one to a stone and none repeated, waking as you walk among them, and the Cold has gouged them deeper the further you go, as far as a sealed door at the hall's end. Off its side runs the Listening Way, low and bare, where the Anvari walked in silence to stop speaking before they went in to listen. It bears no word, only drums drawn as the still lines of a struck skin, many at its mouth and fewer going in, and its stone carries sound one way: inward. At its end is the Answering, the largest room below the deck. A world written answers what it was told, and here every world the Anvari spoke still answers as light in the dark, each in its star's colour, turning in its own year. Some have gone out. Those are the worlds that did not remain.
There is no light down there but what you bring. Ashvek asks the Wellspring for a splinter of itself, and at the anvil the Vaelin left beside it, where the heart glimmers gold while it waits for you, you cage it in Vaelin iron and quench it in rime: the Wellspring Sliver, raised from your action bar, enough to see the floor and the nearest wall by. The first time you step into the Listening Way, you see who went down before you: Elizabeth's echo, walking to the Answering's door to listen, and running back out.
The Axis does not stop at the Spoken Hall. It falls on past thirty-three floors that have no landings yet, each a band of gold flashing by in the shaft, faster than anywhere else aboard, to its very foot: the Bellows, the room over the ship's own drive. Its floor is a gallery round a drop, and across the drop the ship's field, so you walk out over her heart burning white beneath your feet. In the ring of gold round it stand three wedges of Vaelin iron, glowing dull red, and the drive has burned pinched between them since the Vaelin came. Quench them with rime, draw them, and she breathes. She breathes in threes: drawing for three, holding for six and letting go for nine, and you hear it under everything in the room. Nine ribs of slate arch over the gallery, their figures lighting one rib to a breath once she is woken, and six channels of gold carry her light up the walls each time she lets go: she is the ship's hearth, and the Anvari counted time aboard in her breaths. Between the ribs stand twelve tall tablets of slate in gold frames, their ancient words a third burned smooth by her heat, and the air down here is the only warm air aboard.
One word to a stone and none repeated, more than any people has ever had. The gold wakes as you come near.
Walked in silence. Its drums fall from many still lines to almost none, and whispers rise only as you go in.
Every world the Anvari spoke, still answering as light. The ones near you wake and lean toward you. “Something here has heard you.”
The Hushed
Last Lantern was never meant to be kept by one mind alone. The Anvari built her Menders: small makers of pale stone and dark glass with a heart of the ship's own light, which keep the halls and mend what the cold cracks. Some of them the Long Cold has got into. A Hushed Mender still mends, but toward stillness, and anything warm and moving near it is a fault to be put right. That includes you. Keep your distance and it lets you be. Come close and its heart flares, and it comes for you.
A Wright answers with the Deep Grammar. Throw Kindle, a spark of the Wellspring's light, or speak Unbind at the one you have chosen, and loosen the cold's hold until the Mender settles to the deck, rises, and drifts home to its work. They hunt together, closing in round you from every side, but get out of their sight and after a few seconds they let you be and drift home the way they came. The Mender you look at shows its name and its level, coloured by how tough it is. The warmth each word takes rises in gold where it lands; what the cold takes from you rises in frost, and frost gathers at the edges of your sight. You never destroy one. Each one quieted teaches you a little more of the Grammar, and a Wright can grow from the first level to the ninetieth, their Grasp, Bearing and Clarity growing together. Near the Cradle the cold's hold is thin and the Hushed are slow. The farther out you go, the deeper it runs. The two at Elizabeth's rusted wing are Rimebound: they were out on the Apron, past the field, where the cold has gone deepest, and rime has grown over their glass. A Mender quieted sometimes leaves what it was carrying on the deck where it settles: iron, rock, rime, or a Wellspring Ember you can draw in to take back your warmth. What it leaves lies for a few minutes and then fades, unless a quest wants it. “Those are mine. Were mine. The Cold's in them. Don't hate them for it.”
A Mender that has seen you flares white at its heart, a mark shows what is hunting you, and its card comes up beside your own.
A word spoken at the one you chose. It takes a moment to say and it cannot miss: a strand of warm light from your hand to its heart.
The cold lets go, the Mender settles to the deck for a breath, and then it rights itself and goes back to work.
The Forge
At the Forge's console you set a handful of things: orbit, mass, composition, spin, tilt, air and water, and the world turns on the hologram above you as you work. Gravity, temperature, seasons, day length, and whether the world can hold its air all follow from real relationships. The Anvari called these laws the Deep Grammar. A world whose parameters balance is said to rhyme.
Rhyming is only the first verse. A world that is losing its balance, its air thinning or its seas boiling away, is slipping, and the Warden will notice before you do. Speaking a world never costs you anything. Keeping it alive is the craft: gather what it lacks from the air of other worlds, from rings, moons and comets, bring it back to the Forge and tend it, until it keeps its air, its seas and its seasons in balance without you. Then it remains.
The Forge doesn't wait a billion years to find out. It asks the Keepers of Time, and they answer with the ages. The moment a world rhymes, the chamber's light turns a living green. Speak it and that light runs out through the whole ship, and while it waits at the ship's ends the world lives its first thousand million years on the hologram. Watch closely: a world that remains barely changes. Then the light comes home, steady green for a world that remains, flickering amber for one that is slipping.
Distance, mass, iron and ice, water, air, the day and the tilt. Gravity, warmth, seas and seasons follow as you turn them, and the console tells you the moment the world rhymes.
The chamber burns green, the light runs out through the whole ship, and the world lives its first thousand million years above the pedestal while the Keepers weigh it.
It remains, it is slipping, or it is unspoken, with the reasons and the lines of its warmth, air and water across the ages. A world that lives takes its place out there.
The Worlds Spoken
It takes its place on the orbit you gave it, and Last Lantern lets go of the stilled world it was left watching and crosses to yours. Walk out to the Observatory and your world fills the open side, nearly its whole face in its own star's light: coasts and ranges raised from its own ground, forests and deserts where its rain and warmth put them, ice at its poles, and weather that lives. Storms form, travel and fade, each band of cloud rides its own wind, and lightning flashes in them at night.
After your first world, the Forge offers a fallow star with every seed: an old sun the Anvari prepared and never wrote into. Speak a world there and the ship takes you to it on the long crossing, while the sky goes out and comes back with other stars in it. The console keeps every world you have spoken, and takes you back to any of them.
Then go down to it. Elizabeth's stride carries her to an orbit round any world you have spoken in a few heartbeats, and from there you fly her down: the world you saw from orbit becomes the ground beneath you without a seam, its haze, its clouds and its seas around you. Its air slows her, she hovers level and sets down on her legs, and you step out under the world's own gravity and walk for kilometres, its days and nights turning over you. She is your base while you are down there: one long hull on swept wings, with a cabin to live in, lockers for what your pack cannot carry, a bunk to rest in until dawn, and floodlights for the dark. It is an early build, and the sea does not move like water yet.
The lanterns dip, the sky swings past the sill, and the world you made rises until it fills the opening.
Speak to the voice-stone in the sill and Ashvek brings the ship nearer, until your world stands across half the sky.
Ask for a turn and the ship falls once round your world: into its shadow, where the storms flash, and out into dawn.
Found, not told
Pale stone and dark glass, always aligned to something in the sky. Their glyphs are really diagrams: orbits, spectra, pressure curves.
Worlds in waiting, each the Delta built to the size of a mountain. Each carries a Warden, a quantum mind the Anvari built to reach the Keepers of Time. A Forgehold does not orbit. It holds.
Work set down mid-stroke. Forges cold, doors open, verses half-written.
Not a monster. A frontier that advances, stilling worlds under blue ice.
Finished long ago, now old and wild, their makers forgotten by the life that grew there.
Not the Anvari, and not gone. They keep the long ages a world is written through, and the Wardens were made to reach them. The Wardens speak of them rarely, and as something listening, never as something seen.
The Anvari were strangely fond of three, six and nine, and so were the peoples before them. Triangles in every ceiling, thirty-six Deltas round the Forge's rose, a rite that lasts nine heartbeats. No ruin says why.
Every Forgehold is traced with it, used where nothing needed it and never where anything did. Gold is made only when stars die, and every grain is older than the world it was found in.
Cut into Last Lantern's hull, each figure hundreds of metres wide: seeds turning at the golden angle, one cell becoming many, the double helix. Each goes further than anything inside the ship, and the end of every one is scoured away. No Warden will read them aloud.
Progress
Pbuild is early, and there is no release date. An early build runs on Windows PC, with mouse and keyboard or an Xbox controller: begin from a title that stands on the galaxy, wake aboard Last Lantern, walk its halls as a cloaked Wright under a name of your own, gather what the Vaelin left into your pack, take Ashvek's tasks and wake new halls, mend Elizabeth, quiet the Hushed Menders and grow as you do, step out by the Postern onto the Apron under the stars and walk the ship's hull on a tether, write a world at the Forge and watch the Keepers judge it. Then cross to it, ask for a turn round it, fly Elizabeth out through the Hangar's gate and down to it, set her down and walk its ground, and write the next world under another star. It isn't available to play yet. This page grows with it, and so does Pbuild on GitHub, where you can leave feedback and ideas.
The mood pass is done: the sky is real stars, Last Lantern stands whole outside, its Arc turning, its drive burning, its Hangar shut by a gate, and the title now stands on the galaxy, the world your Wright stands beside rising in its corner as a crescent at dawn. The foundations for play are all in: a settings menu and your own key bindings, a pack, a controller as well as the mouse and keyboard, quests and a quest log, the first fights, Menders that hunt together and give up once you are out of sight and leave what they carried once quieted, levels, a game menu, an account with up to ten named Wrights, the Wright's own sight drawn round all of it, and one chat that keeps Ashvek's words and lets you say your own. The opening act is well under way: nine quests carry you from the Cradle through the Long Hall, where Elizabeth's echo walks ahead of you, and the Loom to the Forge, out through the Hangar onto the Apron, to an empty berth in the Hangar and the few things the Vaelin kept of her, and to Elizabeth herself: quiet the Rimebound Menders at her rusted wing, patch it by your hand, and watch the two you quieted weld it whole so she can fly. Below it all, the Axis rides down the ship's centre line to the Spoken Hall, the Listening Way and the Answering, and you make a light of your own to go down there with, a sliver of the Wellspring set in Vaelin iron at the anvil beside it. At the Axis's very foot, the Bellows, you draw the three Vaelin stays that held the ship's drive for an age, and she can carry you to other stars again; the Bellows breathes, its ribs count her breaths, and twelve tablets of ancient words stand between them. Pbuild's heart has begun: come down to a world and its ground is drawn around you, hills, valleys and crags down to a stride in the colours you saw from orbit, and Elizabeth comes to rest on it. A developer's panel now tests it all at a keypress, jumps you to any place aboard, and places characters, Menders and stores wherever you stand, kept in the game for good; and Elizabeth now has a hyperdrive, her stride, an old Anvari line set into her patched hull that carries her to an orbit round any of your worlds in a few heartbeats, and now brakes in smoothly at the end. Come down within a world's air and its ground now holds still beneath you while the sun and the stars wheel slowly overhead, as they do for anyone standing on a world. Next, on without a break until you can land and stand on a world you spoke. The world you see from orbit is becoming the ground you fly over without a seam: the ground beneath you now wears the texture the world wears from above and meets it as one surface, its mountains at their true height, and over a living world it fades into the world's own haze toward a pale horizon, its seas lying flat at their level, the flight over its mountains smooth and the sky blue overhead with the sun low, and its clouds reaching all the way to you, an overcast above and a whiteout as you fly through them, and its seas reflect the sky and the clouds, with no line left at the horizon; and flying down into it from orbit is smooth, with Elizabeth resting on the water and no ring on the clouds; and now a world’s own air slows Elizabeth, she hovers level over it and sets down on her legs on its land, you hear the air rush past her, and her brake holds her still over the ground; and now you step out onto its ground under its own gravity, and your landing is kept in your save, so you come back where you left her, and you can walk across it for kilometres; and Elizabeth now has a cabin to live in between her cockpit and her wings, inside a round hull that matches the rest of her, with a console for her door, her floodlights and a mast that rises; she is now one hull from her cockpit to her drives, her wings and engines set as an airliner’s, with a cabin twice as long, a cockpit you walk into and beams under her nose for flying in the dark; and now you live in her, with lockers that hold what your pack cannot and a bunk to rest in until dawn; and now she has wings of her own, long and swept, that you walk under, and a bigger Hangar to keep her in, easy to fly in and out of; and now the Postern, a lock of your own beside the Hangar’s mouth, lets you out onto the hull weighing a third of what you do aboard, and the ship now draws only the rooms you can see, so the picture stays smooth everywhere aboard and out on the hull, and round Elizabeth too, even jumping against her; and now, on a tether from the Postern, you walk the hull itself: over the Apron’s edge the stone under your feet is down, and the ship’s north face is a plain of dark plating to cross, trench by trench, all the way down to the drive that burns beneath her; and now you leap the trenches between her slabs, and the Arc shows as a thread of light through the ship's own shadow; and Elizabeth’s thrusters are a matched pair at last, the missing part brought home from the Larder down a line of lanterns on the hull, her drive three times as strong; next, a research bench, and the sea made to look and move like water. Then keeping them alive becomes the loop, with what they need gathered from space and from other worlds, and one day, sharing your worlds with friends. Speaking a world stays free.
Last updated November 2026
Concept, lore, the Vaelin and their star, and a technical design that stays precise from a footstep to a light-year.
Complete · September 2026Wake in the Forgehold, walk its halls, see your star and its first world on real orbits, and fly out into space. Then Last Lantern at final quality, the hooded Wright, Ashvek's voice, and one shared foundation underneath it all: everything in the world and everyone in it described as data and built by one system. Played and fixed.
Complete · September 2026Write a world at the console and watch its physics follow every dial. Speak it, and the Forge's light runs through the whole ship while the world lives its first thousand million years on the hologram, until the Keepers answer: it remains, it is slipping, or it is unspoken. A world that lives is really out there, and the ship crosses to it. Games save and continue.
Complete · September 2026Your world given a face by its own physics: coasts, ranges, seas and ice from its seed, an air that scatters its star by the gases you gave it, forests and deserts where its climate puts them, cyclones with a clear eye and weather that lives, under a real star.
Complete · September 2026A new direction: one people, the Vaelin, and a story that follows Elizabeth. A title screen, and music that follows you from room to room. A turn round your world on command, fallow stars to write under, and a console that remembers every world you have spoken.
Complete · September 2026Every place made to feel the way it should: a night sky of real stars, Last Lantern whole outside with its Arc turning and its drive burning, its halls set into the stone behind the Hangar's gate, and Elizabeth flying like a spacecraft, braking hard and coming home without a crash. And a title that stands on the galaxy: its stars glimmering and now and then flaring, the Delta breathing, and the world your Wright stands beside rising as a crescent, ready in a second and a half.
Complete · November 2026What the game will stand on, built before the game itself.
The opening act, and the start of Elizabeth's story. You wake with the ship barely alive and its Forge half asleep, and quests wake it piece by piece.
Descend from orbit and land on any world you made, its ground, air and seas at your feet, and gather from the ground of the worlds that hold. Walk Last Lantern's hull too, and leap across its trenches under the Arc's thread of light. The first steps are in: out by the Postern onto the Apron, a deck of stone open to the stars, wrapped in a veil of the ship's field that thins while you are out; and a world's ground, drawn as you come down to it, with Elizabeth coming to rest on it.
The heart of the game. Every world you speak takes its place, even one that is slipping, and it declines slowly. Gather what it lacks from the air of other worlds, from rings, moons and comets, bring it home to the Forge and tend it, and watch the world itself change. Keep as many alive as you can.
Play with friends: accounts, private lobbies, worlds shared from the console so everyone in the lobby can travel to them, and messages between players wherever they are.
Moons and seasons, and seeding life that changes the world it lives on.
Ruins, Ashvek's missing memory, the stilled world Rime under the Observatory's light, and what the Long Cold wants.
From the build
Work-in-progress captures from the current build. Not final art.