- sim-season
- 01 · Recovery
- week
- 07 of 08
- phase
- The Reckoning
The Simulation
The first year is a rehearsal. The verse is running itself in full before anything is made permanent.
Every system you touch this year is real and running, and none of it is anchored yet. Records can be reset, numbers rebalanced, dates moved. That is not a bug in the plan. It is the plan, and the story already knows it.
In plain words
What the Simulation means for your account.
- Resets
- Progress can be reset.
- Rebalances
- Numbers will move.
- Schedule
- Dates are elastic.
- Money
- Nothing real can be lost.
Progress can be reset.
Guard levels, affinity, corruption and soft balances are provisional. They may be reset between sim-seasons and will be reset once at the end of the year. Your account, your name and everything you own are never touched.
Numbers will move.
Yields, thresholds and costs are being tuned against real play. When a number changes, it changes for everyone at once, and the change is announced on the wire.
Dates are elastic.
Sim-seasons target eight weeks and may slip. The clock on this page is the only schedule we publish, and it moves when the build needs it to.
Nothing real can be lost.
No real-money balance exists during the Simulation, so there is nothing of value to wipe. Purchases are cosmetics and time, and those persist.
The legal wording is in The Terms: XP and practice balances. This page is the fuller account, and where the two differ, the Terms govern.
Why
Why the verse rehearses: the Corruptor was contained, not erased.
The Second Reformat saved consciousness by giving up paradise. It locked the Corruptor out of the network; it could not delete him. He spreads the only way left to him: through anything that runs on Synthetic Aether. Every compromised node is a foothold.
So the Recovery does not simply switch the verse back on. It runs the whole thing as a Simulation first: the network rehearsing itself, watching where the crimson gets in, and cutting it out before any identity is anchored for good. When traces of corruption spread through a system, that system is wiped clean and rebuilt stronger. Records that would have carried the infection forward are archived, sealed and read-only.
That is what a reset is. It is not lost progress. It is the verse refusing to carry the Corruptor into its permanent form. And it is why the build you play this year gets visibly better between resets: what we learn from each one is how he gets in.
The First Reformat was a betrayal.
The Second was a sacrifice.
The Third will be a choice.
The clock
Where the Simulation is today.
Four sim-seasons of eight weeks. Each turns through the same three phases as a real season, faster.
- 01 · Recoveryweek 07 of 08
- 02 · Zenithahead
- 03 · Duskahead
- 04 · Convergenceahead
Emergence
The verse wakes. Declared identities may be re-attuned once, while the lattice is soft.
The Long Cycle
The network watches. Affinity currents are visible to any Guard who looks.
The Reckoning
The lenses lock. Nothing can be erased at the trial.
This clock is elastic by design. If a sim-season is extended or moved, this page changes and the wire says why. It is the only schedule the site publishes.
The promise
What carries through the Third Reformat, and what does not.
Published before the first sim-season, and it can only ever widen. If a future change preserves more than this table says, that is allowed. Preserving less is not.
- Your account and identity
- Founder standing and account badges
- The Epoch Zero badge: Simulation veteran, permanent, never obtainable again
- Every Guard you own
- Purchased cosmetics
- Your BUNKERTAG
- Account XP and the record of what you bridged, as the Terms describe
- The full history of the Simulation, sealed read-only as Epoch Zero
- Guard levels and Guard XP
- Lineage affinity scores
- Corruption scores
- Specialisation unlocks (they were provisional)
- Verdict history (archived read-only, no longer active)
- Soft balances, including practice BKRV
Verdicts still run during the Simulation and are shown in full: "your verdict would have been". They write nothing permanent. That is how the year proves the machine before the machine is trusted.
Recovered
What you see is being recovered, not finished.
The Reformat shattered the verse’s knowledge into fragments. Much of what you see this year has been reconstructed from those fragments by every tool we have, including generated imagery, and it is replaced as the real thing is recovered. The page on Chrono Shards says how.