The shared world

There is only one world in KEKRUNE, and every frog lives in it together. It isn't a copy made for you, and there are no separate rooms. When the sun sets on you, it sets on everyone. When rain sweeps across the grove, every frog out there gets wet. If someone feeds the wayfire, you see it flare. A creature someone else is chasing is the same creature you can see, standing in the same spot.

The world is made of three places so far, joined by roads you can walk:

• The Kindling Grove: where every frog wakes. A calm clearing, the wayfire, and danger growing outward and after dark.
• The West Road: the way out, with fords, forks and folk who live along it.
• Harrowfield Farms: fields, a mill and scarecrows. Something has gone wrong with the furrows.

One clock

The world keeps a single clock, and it runs for everyone. A full day, from dawn to dawn, lasts about one real hour. The clock in the top right corner shows the hour, the sun or the moon, and which day of the world it is. Hover over it and it tells you in words: dawn, noon, dusk and so on.

• The sun rises a little after half past five and sets towards seven in the evening.
• Lamps light themselves around six in the evening and go out after dawn. They never all light at once, and never at quite the same minute two days running.
• The moon has phases, so some nights are brighter than others.
• The folk keep to the clock too. They work, rest, eat and gossip by the hour, so the person you're looking for may simply have gone to bed.

Weather

The weather is the same for everyone, and it follows the place it's in. A summer meadow gets clear and calm days, misty mornings, overcast skies that may turn to light rain, breezy and windy spells, and now and then a real thunderstorm. It never snows in the grove.

The weather is more than scenery:

• Rain puts out open flames. A light drizzle won't, but proper rain or a storm will douse your torch and an unsheltered fire. A lantern behind glass keeps burning.
• The ground remembers. Puddles fill and dry, paths turn to mud and take deeper footprints, and dew settles at dawn.
• Some creatures only come out in certain weather. Keep an eye on the scarecrows when it rains.

Light and dark

Light is the heart of this world. The grove's legend is a god's light, and its folk guard what is left of it. Some creatures love light and some fear it, and the dark is when the dangerous ones hunt.

Your lights:

• Torch ([T], or hotbar key 2). It burns for 1200 seconds of lit time, and only while it's lit, so put it out when you don't need it. When it runs out, all you're left holding is a stub.
• Kindle, the spell everyone knows. It makes a small ember that hovers beside you.
• Fires and lamps. The wayfire never goes out. Other fires can be lit, fed and relit with [E] if you're carrying a lit torch or flint.

What light does to creatures:

• Wickmaws sleep through the day. At dusk they creep toward the nearest light, whether that's a lamp, a fire or a frog carrying a torch, and nibble. In heavy rain their flames sputter and they grow weaker and shyer.
• Ditchmaws rest folded in the ditches by day and hunt in packs in the dark. They fear light. Near a fire or a lamp they fold their legs over their mouths and back away, so the wayfire is a safe place to wait out a bad night. A light you carry is not a shield, though. A hunting Ditchmaw flinches at your torch for a moment, then comes on and bites.
• One rule beats all of these: anything you strike will fight back. No light will protect you from a fight you started.

The Hushed

Purple belongs to the Hushed. They are the corruption creeping into the world: ordinary animals taken over, their fur turned grey, purple veins showing, their eyes glowing purple and their movements wrong. Crows, foxes, boars and sheep have all fallen to it so far. Wherever you see purple, you're looking at the Hushed. The world's own magical creatures glow ember-warm and never purple, so you can always tell the two apart.

What a hunter should know:

• They hear you. A Hushed creature notices a spell cast within 8 tiles, and laughter too. Cast near one and its eyes flare. Then it's coming.
• Night makes them bolder. The Hushed Fox and the Hushed Boar hunt after dark, and the fox comes closer to the ring.
• Distance means danger. The farther you go from the ring and the fire, the more Hushed you'll meet, and the deadlier they get. Toward the Grovebridge, the boars are the grove's hardest fight.
• Some rise only at certain hours. In Harrowfield, things come up out of the furrows at dusk and sink again at dawn. One of them walks only once a night.

Being a good neighbour

Because the world is shared, so is everything that happens in it. The creature you leave half-dead is still half-dead for the next frog. Experience is split by how much damage each frog did, so everyone who helps gets their share. Creatures come back where they belong, but never while somebody is standing close by their spot. And when you find a quiet hour at the wayfire with strangers around you, enjoy it. That's the world working as it should.