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World System — islands, portals, gates

Canon

The world is three kinds of place:

  • The Hub — the central safe island: spawn, markets, quest NPCs, and the portal rings. Combat is disabled. Always accessible to everyone.
  • Personal islands (and guild islands — designed in the guilds session) — the skyblock home base. Never gated; travel between hub and personal island is always free.
  • Adventure islands — the shared progression world: resource islands, profession zones, combat zones, boss arenas. These are what the unlock system gates, per player.

Islands drift in the void, and the void is the wall: the only way onto an adventure island is its portal. There is no region-permission engine, no invisible barrier system — one enforcement point, the portal check.

Each adventure island carries one owner-edited gate requirement. At launch every gate is a skill-level check (e.g. a mining island gated by Mining, a combat zone gated by Combat Level). The gate is evaluated live at every entry — nothing is stored, because skill levels only ever rise (no death penalty), so "unlocked" is a permanent, derived fact the moment you qualify. Every arrival path — portal, warp, any future teleport — runs the same check; there is no way to be carried past a gate by another player.

The ladder is island tiers, branched by activity: adventure islands are grouped into a small fixed set of tiers from early game to endgame, and within a tier the branches run in parallel — a gathering island gated by its gathering skill, a profession zone by its profession's skill, a combat zone by Combat Level. No island ever requires another island; tiers are a legibility grouping, never a chain. A dedicated miner walks the mining branch to its end without touching combat, and vice versa.

Portals show one of three states: Unlocked, Locked (inactive, showing the exact requirement and your current progress toward it), or Coming Soon (island not yet released; also the state of any island missing from the data file). The first time you qualify for an island, the celebration rides the existing level-up notification — a toast that names what you just opened.

Dying on an adventure island returns you to the Hub. Death still costs no progress of any kind — the portal trip back is the whole price.

Inside an island there are no checks at all: depth is gated softly, by the danger itself — stronger creatures, ore that needs better tools. If some future interior truly must hard-gate (a raid antechamber), it becomes its own island with its own portal rather than an interior barrier.

graph LR
    P[Personal island] <--> H[Hub]
    H --> R1[Tier ring: early]
    H --> RN[Tier ring: endgame]
    R1 --> A[Gathering island]
    R1 --> B[Combat zone]
    RN --> C[Boss arena]

Decisions

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-01 — topology: hub + personal islands + adventure islands (ratified 2026-07-16)

Skyblock-first: the personal island stays the ungated home base; the shared RPG content lives on a gated ladder of adventure islands reached from the hub. The V1 zone list (Skeleton Zone, Desert Island, volcanic regions, Crystal Depths) maps onto the adventure tier.

Rejected: shared-world-only (MMO shape — violates the skyblock-first framing); personal-islands-only with instanced content (kills the shared-world feel the vision's social systems depend on); hub + personal with all adventure content instanced per party (persistent shared islands are the substrate; instancing stays the external dungeon mods' domain).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-02 — portal-only travel; the void is the wall (ratified 2026-07-16)

The only path onto an adventure island is its portal, so the portal check is the entire enforcement surface. Anti-skip falls out of topology instead of machinery.

Rejected: a per-region permission engine (V1's full stack — heavy machinery with no payoff once the void separates islands); invisible barriers (immersion-breaking and bypass-prone); interior hard gates (second enforcement system — see D-WORLD-SYSTEM-08).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-03 — gates are stateless: checked live at every entry (ratified 2026-07-16)

A gate is a pure function of the player's current progression. No unlock component, no persistence, no migration surface. Sound because every gate source is monotonic: skill levels never decrease (no death penalty), and future deed gates read the Almanac, which only accretes.

Rejected: stored per-player unlock flags (a component + codec + migration surface bought for nothing while all gate sources are monotonic); discovery-based warp state (V1's earned-warp idea — adds stored state for a convenience the tier rings already provide).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-04 — gate vocabulary: skill levels now, deeds later, quests reserved (ratified 2026-07-16)

At launch every gate is a skill-level requirement (Combat Level for combat zones). The requirement format is extensible: boss/deed gates arrive later as Almanac reads (still stateless), and a quest-flag requirement type is reserved for the quests design session — adventure islands may additionally gate on quest completion once that system exists. Reputation is not a gate type; no reputation system is designed.

Rejected: shipping V1's full multi-system gate list (quests, reputation, NPC checks) at launch — designing against undesigned systems; reputation gates (system is a parking-lot title, nothing more).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-05 — island tiers, branched by activity (ratified 2026-07-16)

Tiers group islands by progression stage for legibility (one hub portal ring per tier); branches within a tier are parallel and independently gated by their own activity's skill. Off-spec players never wall-hit content they don't play.

Rejected: linear chain (V1's flow as written — forces every player through the same content in the same order); fully free ungrouped graph (no legible "where am I" story; noisy hub).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-06 — every arrival path runs the gate (ratified 2026-07-16)

Portal use, warps, and any future teleport into an adventure island all evaluate the same gate, with the same denial message. Closes V1's "use other players to skip progression" hole (friend-teleport past a gate).

Rejected: checking only at portal use (leaves every future teleport mechanism a bypass).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-07 — death on an adventure island respawns at the Hub (ratified 2026-07-16)

Owner ruling. The portal trip back is the entire cost of death — time, never progress; the no-death-penalty promise is untouched.

Rejected: respawn at the island's portal entry pad (tighter boss-retry loop, but the owner prefers the hub round-trip as death's one honest cost); respawn on the personal island (longest loop, punishing for group content).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-08 — island interiors are soft-gated only (ratified 2026-07-16)

No checks inside an island: depth is gated by danger (creature strength, ore tiers needing better tools). Interiors stay walkable; death is cheap by promise. Specific interior scaling is tuned in the Mining & Caves session. The sanctioned escape hatch when an interior truly must hard-gate: split it into its own island with its own portal (keeps D-WORLD-SYSTEM-02's single enforcement point).

Rejected: interior hard sub-gates (re-introduces the rejected region-permission machinery).

D-WORLD-SYSTEM-09 — portal states: Unlocked / Locked / Coming Soon (ratified 2026-07-16)

Locked portals stay inactive and show the exact requirement plus current progress. Coming Soon marks unreleased islands and is the automatic state of any island absent from the data file (fail loud, never silently open). First-qualify celebration hooks the existing level-up notification — no new state.

Rejected: V1's six-state taxonomy (Quest Locked / Boss Locked / Reputation Locked as distinct states — they collapse into Locked with requirement text).

Tuning

  • data/world-islands.json — the island catalog: tiers, branches, per-island gate requirements, release status. Owner-edited; island entries beyond the V1-named examples are illustrative until the owner fills them. An island missing from this file is Coming Soon.

Implementation

No owning mod yet. When one is built: gate checks read progression cross-mod via JDK-typed APIs (hfskills skill-level reads; later hfalmanac deed reads), never shared lib-api types — per the root CLAUDE.md progression invariants.

Open questions

  • Total-Level capstone island — deferred to the Endgame Systems session (parking lot).
  • Quest gates on adventure islands — reserved requirement type; wired in the quests / Lore & NPC session.
  • Interior danger scaling per island (creature levels, ore-tier placement) — Mining & Caves session.
  • Events-world entry/exit and lifecycle — its own session (parking lot); the events world is not an adventure island and this page does not gate it.
  • Guild-island visiting rules — guilds session; personal/guild islands are outside this page's gating.
  • Whether fast travel ever exceeds the hub portal rings (direct island-to-island links) — UNKNOWN; not needed at launch.