The Worlders

What Worlders is

How to Play

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Worlders is a browser game about a small island and a slow afternoon. You chop trees, break ore, fish, and sell what you carry. There is no combat, no hunger bar, and no way to lose what you gathered.

The camera is fixed — a three-quarter view you cannot rotate or tilt, which is why W is always up-screen no matter which way your character faces. You walk at 5.5 tiles a second. It is desktop only; a phone gets a polite notice instead of the game.

There are three places to be: Arrival Island, the big home island where the trees and the Trader are; The Mines, a dark cave that is the only source of ore; and The Harbour, a small seaside plaza for fishing and standing around with other people.

You need a Worlder

How to Play

This comes second on purpose, because it is the first thing that can stop you.

A Worlder is a character NFT, and owning one is what the game checks. If your wallet holds none, the server refuses the join outright — “You need a Worlder to play.” — and you get a screen with exactly two exits: look around as a guest, or connect a different wallet.

Sign-in is a message you sign, not a transaction: nothing leaves your wallet and no gas is spent. The session lasts 7 days, and your browser remembers the address, so coming back inside that week walks straight in. On day eight the landing says your sign-in expired and asks for the same wallet again.

Chop your first tree

How to Play

Press 2 for the Axe, walk within 2.8 tiles of a tree, and press SPACE. You do not have to keep pressing it — holding a target starts a work session that swings on its own until the tree comes down or you walk away.

One swing is 0.55 seconds and a tree is 55 swings, so about 30 seconds of standing your ground. It pays 25 coin and 2 wood.

The trees are not yours

Arrival’s 82 trees belong to the world, and everyone standing in it sees the same ones. A tree another player felled is a stump for you too. Two people can hold a claim on one tree at a time; a third is told someone else is on it.

Payment is the part that surprises people. Every swing you land is worth 1/55 of a tree, but coin only changes hands in whole trees’ worth — so if you split a tree evenly with someone, the moment it falls usually pays neither of you. Your half is not lost: it sits on your running tally and pays out as soon as your swings add up to a full tree, whichever tree that turns out to be.

Felled trees come back after a random 60–300 seconds, rolled per tree, so a cleared patch fills back in unevenly rather than all at once.

Arrival Island

The Three Maps

detail⤢ full frame

A 120×120 grid holding an island roughly 100 tiles across, of which about 6,300 cells are open ground — though only 5,874 of those can actually be walked to. The rest is cliff top the game lets you see and never climb.

Meadow in the middle, woods along the west and north-west, a village and a fenced farm to the east across the bridge, a pond in the south-west, and a beach cove on the south shore with a two-tile pier running out into open water.

You arrive standing on the Portal Dais: a violet platform of two steps — an outer ring and a raised inner podium — framed by a grey stone lip and ringed by six ice-capped rune posts. It is also the island’s fast-travel pad. Walk onto it and the FAST TRAVEL menu opens by itself; you press 1 or 2 to pick where you are going. Nothing to unlock, no cost, and a guest can use it exactly like anyone else.

The swing: hold a tool, press SPACE

Gathering

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The hotbar is fixed and cannot be rearranged: 1 Hoe, 2 Axe, 3 Pick, 4 Rod, 5 Pouch. SPACE uses whatever is in your hand. The Hoe does nothing yet — swinging it flashes “Farming — coming soon”.

Everything breakable is counted in swings, and you accrue per swing, not per break: each one banks a fraction of a reward, so leaving a vein half-stripped still pays you for every whole unit you finished.

That fourth column is the whole node — what you bank if you strip it by yourself. Your actual take is your share of the swings, so a stone vein worked by a full crew of six hands you one unit, 15 coin and 1 ore, not the whole 90. Sharing does not cut your earning rate, though: every swing pays the same whoever else is hitting the rock, it just strips the vein six times faster.

All four kinds pour into one generic ore stack — the HUD only ever says “ore”. What the kind changes is the vein: how much coin a unit pays, and how long that unit takes to dig.

Fishing is the odd one out: no shared node, and letting the bite window lapse is harmless — the line lands an ordinary fish on its own: 6 coin instead of 12, plus the fish itself, a separate item the Trader buys for 8 more. But you can fail it. Press SPACE during the wait, before anything bites, and the fish leaves with nothing; you idle about 1.4 seconds before the line recasts itself.

The shelves are empty

The Economy

The Trader buys. The Trader does not sell.

There are 35 goods in the catalogue — six tools, three consumables, sixteen auras, eight colour swatches, two passive unlocks — and none of them are on the shelves right now. Pressing E opens a panel with two tabs instead of five: SELL, and STYLE for the four auras that levelling gives you. The tabs for tools, items and unlocks are not hidden by a setting; they simply do not render when there is nothing in them.

All four kinds of ore — stone, copper, gold and crystal — go into one generic ore stack that always sells for 15. What the kind changes is the vein: it sets both the coin a mined unit pays and how long that unit takes to dig out.