The Creature

Roles it can take

• The leash panel on the HUD sets the Creature to Free Will or to one of four roles, Gatherer, Entertainer, Builder and Soldier, and R cycles the same list while a leash is up and no building or area tool is armed. Pick a role from the panel or the key when you want that kind of work favoured, and read the rope stripes to see which one is on.
• A role is a pull rather than an order: a Gatherer gets hungry about a quarter faster and hauls hard, an Entertainer grows lonely about a third faster, and a Soldier gets hungry a sixth faster and leans toward fighting. Match the role to the appetite you want it to act on, and keep using your own orders for anything exact.
• An assigned role holds its own low urges back for 90 seconds and then lets them return over the next 60, while any single urge that reaches 0.9 breaks through straight away. Assign the role just before a job you want done, and expect it to drift back to its own wants after a minute and a half.
• Stroking it while it works restarts that focus clock, at most once every 20 seconds. Pet it briefly when you catch it doing the assigned job and it stays on that job far longer.
• In Free Will it re-chooses its calling about every 90 seconds and again after a full sleep, scoring each role from its boldness, empathy and independence, the concepts you have praised and how much it trusts you, with a nudge toward whatever it already was. Praise the work you want more of and its own choices drift that way, so a stroked Builder becomes a Builder by habit.

The leash and the flag

• The panel offers NONE, LEARNING, COMPASSION and AGGRESSION, and the rope from your hand to the Creature’s neck appears only while one of them is up, striped in that leash’s colours with a band of them near your palm. Treat the leash as your standing instruction, because with NONE there is no rope, no flag and no R key.
• Learning doubles everything it learns and turns every click into a lesson, so it studies whatever you point at, people included. Leave it up while you are teaching, and switch away when you want it to greet, help or gather instead.
• Compassion makes its need for company build half again as fast and reads clicks kindly: people get entertained, animals and trees get played with, loose resources get carried to a storehouse, finished buildings get admired and building sites get help. Use it on a Creature you want sociable, and do not expect it to attack anything you point at.
• Aggression makes hunger build half again as fast and is the only leash that lets the Creature choose its own victims, taking the nearest stompable thing within 25 m, which includes your own villagers and buildings but never wild animals. Keep that leash away from your town or plant the flag to fence the hunt, and use an ordered attack when you want a chosen target.
• F, or a double click on the ground, plants the leash flag while a leash is up and your hand is empty; its ring is 25 m in radius, everything it searches for, gathers and casts at stays inside it, and it walks itself home once it is a tenth past the edge. Plant the flag to keep a worker in one district and take it back by hovering it and pressing F or clicking it, because a flag cannot outlive the leash it was planted under.

Teaching by stroke and slap

• Hold the left button on the Creature for a third of a second to start petting: the camera pushes in, the hand flattens into a stroking pose, and the bubble shows the one concept you are teaching plus a gauge for how it feels about it. Hold still and read that line and the panel beside it, which lists its feeling, its bond with you, how the village sees it and what it has learned to cast, because the topic is fixed for the whole session.
• Rubbing back and forth counts as a stroke at almost any speed, while a one way drag is judged by speed: under 400 pixels a second it strokes, past 2500 it slaps, and anything between the two counts as nothing. Rub in small circles to praise and make one fast swipe when you mean a slap, because a slow one way drag may not register at all.
• Only about one contact in ten to one in three actually registers, so a lesson usually needs repeating, and a registered slap adds a quarter to its trauma meter, which bleeds away at two hundredths a second. Repeat the stroke or slap a few times while watching the gauge, and stop slapping once it looks cowed or it will stay frightened for minutes.
• What you teach lands on what it was doing as much as 12 seconds earlier, and the pause where it stops and looks at you before acting is a question that the next registered stroke answers yes and the next slap answers no, dropping that idea for 25 seconds. Give your feedback straight after the deed you mean rather than mid swing, and treat that pause as a question worth answering.
• You can approve or scold without touching as well: shake the cursor up and down over the Creature to praise it, sideways to scold it, and a shake that answers one of its questions always lands and never adds trauma, though praising and then scolding the same thing inside 45 seconds costs it 15 per cent of its trust in you. Use the shake when your hand is full, and stay consistent, because it reads mixed signals as a reason not to rely on you.

Miracles it has learned

• It learns a miracle by watching you cast it within about 60 m, gaining a fifth of the way to knowing it with every cast and twice that while the Learning leash is up. Cast the miracle you want it to use near it a few times, three casts on the Learning leash or five without, and it will know it.
• Knowing a miracle is not enough: it must also be Bound at your Fanum before the Creature will cast it, and its panel row says whether it is still learning, can cast, or has not yet seen it. Bind the miracle at a Fanum before you expect help from it, and read that row to tell the two states apart.
• Its casting power is a separate meter that starts full: a cast spends a quarter of it, it refills very slowly on its own, ten times faster while it sleeps, and a meal adds a fifth back. Let it eat and nap after a burst of casting before you ask for more, and check the energy bar on its panel.
• Left to itself it pours water on fires and thirsty fields, heals the wounded and feverish, feeds crop growth, shields the threatened, answers a village food shortage, and throws a harmful miracle only at something it has been taught to enjoy hurting, which means a learned taste of 0.4 or more. Praise its aimed harmful casts if you want that side of it, and arm a miracle with a leash up and click a target to order one directly.
• An ordered cast answers back instead of failing quietly: if the miracle is unlearned, unbound or beyond its power, it shakes its head and the orb drops into your hand, and when it chooses a harmful miracle for a building by itself it never picks lightning. Read the refusal line before you blame the aim, and pick a different harmful miracle for buildings.

Gifts and carrying

• Hold something in the god hand and hover the Creature and the prompt changes to LMB to GIVE, and letting go within about four and a half metres hands the object over. Wait for that prompt before you release, or the object is simply dropped or thrown instead.
• It turns a gift down while it is already carrying something, stomping, casting, being petted, eating or asleep, and it turns down people and animals because they are bigger than it can lift, as well as anything out of reach, saying why each time. Wait for it to finish what it is doing and offer the gift from in front of it rather than dropping it on its back.
• What it does with a gift is its own choice: eat food when hungry, throw it, play with it, carry it to a storehouse that has room or wants that good, set it down gently, or examine a kind it has never held before, which it always does first. Hand it food when it is hungry, since a meal gives back a fifth of its casting power, and hand it wood or ore when the village has asked for that good so the delivery wins.
• Hold Shift with a leash up and no tool and the click changes jobs: a loose object is picked up, the ground puts down what it holds, a person, animal or building becomes a throw target, and a click on the Creature itself means eat what you are holding if it is edible. Use Shift for a hauling hand, and remember that it sets its load down after about twenty seconds if you leave it standing with no order.
• An idle and playful Creature will pick up a felled log or a loose rock and fling it about a third of the time its boredom fires, never more often than every 30 seconds. Keep loose piles away from a bored Creature or give it work, since a thrown bundle scatters and has to be hauled again.

The stomp

• Click a villager, an animal or a building with the Aggression leash up to order a stomp, and attack orders are never refused, though each one waits out an 8 second cooldown. Order attacks rather than leaving the leash to choose, because an ordered stomp is the only way to aim one at a specific person or structure.
• The kill is the foot, not the body: the foot has to come down within 170 cm of the target when the impact lands, which is 0.6 seconds after the swing starts, so anything that walks out from under it survives. Do not count a target dead until the foot lands, and expect a stomp aimed at a fleeing villager to miss.
• One stomp crushes a villager, kills an animal outright and destroys a building, and every building is fair game except a Fanum, which it goes to study instead. Use it to break a rival’s outbuildings quickly, and keep it away from your own town unless you are ready to rebuild.
• An assigned Soldier with a flag planted attacks the nearest rival company anchored inside the ring, killing rivals within three and a half metres, and it holds the strike while anyone who is not a rival is standing inside that circle. Give it the Soldier role and a flag when you want a company broken without risking your own people.
• Under Aggression it looks for its own victims twice a second, nearest first, and only while it is not already hauling, building, playing or carrying something, and wild animals are left out of that search. Treat the leash as a standing order to clear an area, and check what is standing inside the ring before you leave it up.

What it does on its own

• When no need has fired it looks for a miracle worth casting, then answers the village, hunting for a food shortage or gathering the wood and ore the town board is asking for within 200 m, then falls back on its role’s work and finally on something to do. Watch what it picks up, because it is usually telling you what your settlement is short of.
• Its own appetites drive the rest: hunger sends it hunting, fatigue walks it back to the spot where it arrived for a 40 second sleep, and loneliness sends it to a villager or to your hand. Expect a hunt and a nap about every two minutes of work, and use those moments to hand it a gift or start petting it.
• A nap is not wasted time: sleeping entrenches what it has learned and who it is becoming, banks casting power ten times faster than usual, and ends with a re-roll of its calling when the role is its own. Let a doze finish when you can afford it, because an interrupted nap banks only part of the rest and no dream at all.
• It also works unprompted: helping an unfinished building adds 8 per cent of the work before it leaves that site alone for 90 seconds, and a nine second performance gathers a crowd and lifts the mood of each villager who watches by up to about 0.14, less if they have seen that trick recently. Leave sites near it if you want that free progress, and let it perform in a square when mood is low.
• It watches you as well: your deeds within 60 m are judged against its own character, and if you kill someone it liked, meaning a belief of 0.35 or more, it walks to the body and cries over it for nine seconds. Decide what you want it to become before you act in front of it, because watching you is one of the ways it learns.

Giving orders

• A directed click is guaranteed while any leash is up, and with no leash it lands only as often as the Creature’s trained willingness to obey, which runs from a floor of 35 per cent to a ceiling of 98 per cent. Keep a leash up when you need a specific verb done, and answer its orders with strokes if you want those clicks to land without one.
• A failed obedience roll is not a refusal: it walks to the right object and does its own idea of what to do there, so a mis-click reads as a misunderstanding rather than a snub. Keep the leash matching the verb you want, and read the hover hint before you click.
• An order to walk to a bare patch of ground is the one it can turn down, and it does so until your relationship reaches a quarter trust or a quarter fear, because only a Creature that feels neither shrugs you off. Build the bond with strokes before you rely on bare ground orders, and remember that attack orders are never refused.
• Clicking the same spot again is not a new demand: it keeps the path it is already walking and re-plans behind it, so a nudge does not stutter the walk. Re-click freely to adjust a destination, and save a fresh click for a genuinely different target.
• A fresh order ends an open question, stops a show and cancels a held miracle, but it never interrupts a stomp that is already swinging. Give orders between swings rather than mid strike, and expect it to finish an attack it has started before it listens.