In scavenger games like STALKER, DayZ and Escape from Tarkov you loot the world and sell to a trader. This game puts you in the trader's seat. You never leave your stall. Scavengers come to you to sell loot, buy gear and take jobs, and everything you know about the world is what they tell you.
Every screen below is a mockup in the look the designer decided on 2026-10-15, not the built game. Names and places are samples. The binding rules live in vision.md, look-and-feel.md and roadmap.md; this page follows them.
The loop
They come to you. Scavengers live their own lives in the zone. Now and then one walks up to your stall to sell what they found and buy what they need.
You trade. Their bag on top, your storage below. Space in your storage is scarce.
You send one out. Hire a scavenger to scout or scavenge a place. They name their price and buy their own gear from you.
They go into the zone. In real time, one second is one second. With a radio they check in as they go; without one you wait.
They come back, or not. A returning scout brings a report in their own words. A dead one costs you no fee, but what he saw dies with him.
You apply the intel. Nothing reaches your map by itself. You tap each bit of intel onto the map, and the dark land opens up.
Better gear keeps scouts alive, live scouts bring intel and goods, and that makes better business. That is the whole game.
What makes it this game
Strategy and economy. You depend on scavengers for supply. Later you refine what they bring and sell better gear back.
Real time, 1:1. No fast-forward. The tension is attention: whom to serve, whom to let walk.
The map is intelligence. It starts as a tiny known spot in the dark. Rough Areas ("somewhere in the swamp") and exact places only appear when a scout tells you and you apply it.
Gear is the key. A light gets you into the dark, a gas mask through the fumes. Gear also decides what a scout notices.
Storytelling. Scavengers are loud, strange people with their own voices. Reports and logs are their words, not system text.
Soft failure. No game over. Losing your best scavenger slows you down; others remain.
One shared world. Every player runs a stall in the same world. Rival traders compete for the same scavengers and the same loot.
The stall: home
The one place you are. A pixel-art side view: planks, a window, shelves of goods, a hanging lantern, the scavenger leaning on the counter. There is no tab bar: the terminal on the counter opens your reports, the map on the wall opens the map, and they blink when something is new. A thin strip on top of every screen shows the day, the time and your money. Only the window follows the time of day; the lantern flickers, dust drifts, and the scavenger blinks and breathes.
HomeThe stall, side view. Someone waits at the counter.Time of dayThe sky in the window goes day, dusk, night. The room stays lamp-lit.
At the counter
A person card: a blinking portrait on a name plate, a trait line, then their words. You never speak full lines; you pick short intents. A person looks the same on every screen.
Counter talkTheir words in the rounder voice font, your intents as pixel buttons. Written notes (diaries) use the same font in another colour on a beige, faintly dithered patch.TradeTheir bag on top, your storage below, the price and your offer between.StorageA terminal grid. Every item takes the cells it needs.
The map
A digital pixel-art zone map in the spirit of ZeroSievert. Unknown land is dim, coarse blocks; applied intel spreads real tiles out from the spot with a dither edge. Areas are filled rust discs that say "somewhere in here"; places are small square dots, and your stall is the amber lantern. Main roads are concrete slabs, side roads dirt track. A burning or flooded place shows in the ground itself. Height is drawn as terraces: steps with a lit top edge and a dark face. A cliff is a black ledge whose shadow falls away from the light. Tap a place for its card, and from there send someone.
The map screen.
The whole zone, one mockEvery decided terrain look on one map. The sea on the east edge: sand, then light shallow water, then dark deep water with waves. A river runs to it, dark deep in the middle, light shallow at the sides with stones and reeds, with dark banks, a plank bridge where the slab road crosses and a shallow ford where the dirt track does. Woods, swamp, the town, furrowed fields, a fenced rail yard. The rail line ends at a station by the sea: a hall with its roof fallen in, a platform, a wagon on the siding, and the whole ground radiated. On the beach lies the wreck, a rusted hull broken in two, its dot on top. The hill with the watch post is terraces; the mesa with the mast and the quarry pit are ringed by the black edge, lit on the north and west, shadowed on the south and east. Each hazard has its own colour and effect: radiation is dark red with a touch of purple in stepped noise blotches (a fallout field, and the station), fog at the foot of the watch post hill is a white dither; the depot burns and the pump station stands in water. Two rust Areas, one still in the dark; coarse fog blocks with a dither edge; the edge ruler and the top bar.
Sending someone out: the Mission Creator
An order form, filled in from the place card. You pick who goes: everyone at your stall, and the ones loyal to it who are away right now, each with their price and four skills: Observation, Combat, Stealth and Scavenging. Any other skill shows only when a known challenge on the way tests it, like Athletics for deep water. You pick a goal, Scout or Scavenge for now. You don't hand out gear: the scavenger buys his own from you, and if the place needs something he lacks, he says so. His fee is his price, set by his negotiation skill, no haggling, and you pay it when he is back. After SEND the form folds up and his mission log opens.
The order formWho, where, goal, his warning, his fee on amber tape.After SENDHis first line is written: he is on his way.
While they are out
A radio panel: one chip per person out, with signal bars, then their check-ins as a log being written. Only a scavenger with a radio checks in, in real time, whenever something important happens to him out there. One without a radio sends nothing until he is back, and the log says so. Someone overdue fades: the portrait drains of colour and flickers to static, the step before lost.
Radio panelWho is out and what they said.No radioHis whole story arrives at once when he returns.OverdueKettle should have been back yesterday.
The report
The inbox is a terminal list, newest first. A report is a portrait card: a big blinking face, one stat line (days out, bag, wounds), then the story in the scavenger's own words. Intel sits in it as amber label tape; tap a bit to put it on the map — one tape at a time, with no bulk-apply button (`APPLY ALL` was retired 2026-10-24). Someone who never came back keeps a grey row whose portrait is static, with nothing to open.
Inbox, then reportTap a row and the report slides over; Back returns to the list.
Ledger and settings
Both are terminal panels. The ledger is a log of every coin: day headers, one line per event, amber in, rust out, the balance at the bottom. Settings are a few pixel switches and your transfer code for moving to another device.
LedgerWhere the money went.SettingsSwitches and the transfer code.
The world
Shared truth, private intel. One world for every player. Your map shows only what scouts told you and you applied. Intel has a date and can go stale.
Risk follows value. Ordinary scouting is not that deadly. The best loot sits in deadly ground; with the right gear, skill decides who survives.
Many ways to die. Radiation, fights and hunger all show up. Scavengers can fight each other, armed ones more readily.
Rich places run dry. High-value places empty and refill over time. A scavenger remembers a place he found picked clean.
Loyalty. Serve someone well and they keep coming back: names and faces that become your heroes. Your stall competes with the others on distance and loyalty.
Bodies stay. A dead scout's gear and pack lie on the body for whoever finds it first.
The land. The zone ends at the sea. It is safer near the stalls and deadlier toward a core, with deadly pockets anywhere. A scavenger walks about 6 km/h, slower in rough ground, so a trip takes from ten minutes to a day or more. Cliffs and quarries, open fields, rail yards, deep and shallow water each test a skill. Seasons, weather and rare zone events change the ground, so what you know of it goes stale.
Radio comes later. Early on a scout can only report in person. Later radios bring live news, on a public channel everyone hears.
Where it stands
M0, M1
done
A server and a living world that runs on its own, headless: scavengers loot, fight, sell, die, and are replaced.
M2
in progress
Traders join: accounts, a stall each, scavengers choosing stalls by loyalty and depleting places are built. Hiring, private intel and a rough debug client come next.
M3
next
The first playable slice on an Android phone: scout, intel and goods, refine, sell. The screens on this page.
M4+
later
A fun test with friends, then depth: more regions, crafting, diaries, automatic orders, appeal, trust, radio.
Still open
Storage rules in detail: grid size, item shapes, rotation.