The Unfinish’d

What this is

The Unfinish’d is a world shared by everyone playing it. There is one of it, it keeps running when you leave, and what you build stays where you built it.

You can treat it as a survival game — gather wood and stone, mine iron, forge better tools, buy land, raise a house. You can treat it as an adventure — there are people here with problems, and working out what to do about them is the game rather than a list of tasks. Most people do both.

Two things are worth knowing before you start. Nothing marks itself on your map: no floating icons, no arrows, no quest markers. And the world does not wait for you — some things people ask of you have a deadline, and missing one changes what happens next rather than failing a quest.

Your first hour

You arrive with a letter in your pack. Read it — open the menu with M, go to Inventory, and click it. It tells you where you are and what the first journey is.

Then

• Walk to the village and talk to people. E speaks to anyone standing near you. Most of them want something.
• Chop and gather. Face a tree and press E with an axe in hand. Stone comes from boulders, with a pickaxe.
• Watch your pack. There is a weight limit, and it is not generous. Sell what you do not need to the Merchant.
• Get indoors before dark, or carry a torch (F). Night is genuinely darker than you expect and not everything out there is friendly.

Controls

Keyboard and mouse

Controller

A pad works throughout, and it builds too.

On a phone

On anything with a touchscreen the controls appear on their own. The left of the screen walks — put a thumb down anywhere and the stick appears under it — and anywhere to the right of that looks about. Both work at once.

Down the right-hand side: E to use what you are standing at, ! to swing, O to hold your shield up, ^ to jump, X to change tool, Q to build, and M for the menu. A thumb on a button presses the button rather than starting a walk.

Staying alive

You have a hundred points of health. It mends on its own, slowly. Eating something mends it about three times faster for a while, so food is worth carrying even though nothing here starves you.

• Falling hurts past roughly a two-storey drop, and the damage climbs steeply after that. Horses do not soften it.
• Water is safe. You swim automatically when it is deep enough, and a horse swims with you.
• Night is the dangerous part of the day, and the Gloom is the dangerous part of the map. Carry a torch, or stay in.
• If you die you wake at the village, or at your own home if you have made one, lighter by a small healer’s fee. You keep what you were carrying — except Memories, which slip away.

Land

The world is divided into parcels, thirty-two metres square. Press G to see the grid. Standing on one and pressing B buys it; the price depends on what the land is worth — flat, dry, near a road and near water all cost more.

Owning a parcel means you decide who builds on it. You can let everyone in, keep everyone out, or grant particular people the right to build. Unowned land is open to anyone, which is why the village edges tend to fill up.

The allowance

Each parcel carries a limited amount of building — 150 worth. A plain one-metre prim costs 1. A prim stretched to two metres by two by two costs 8, because it is charged by its bulk, not by being one thing. A foundation is charged by the ground it covers.

Your chest

Build a Chest on your own land (M, Build, under Basics: 4 wood). Walk up to it and press E: the lid lifts, with your pack on one side and the chest on the other — drag things across. Every chest you own opens the same store, so one by the forge and one in the house hold the same goods. Lost it? The green dot on the compass points home to it.

Build mode

Press Tab. The tools appear on the left, the mouse comes free, and you can still walk around whatever you are making.

• Click a piece to work on it. Click open ground to put it down.
• Drag the piece itself to slide it about; drag an arrow when you want one direction exactly.
• Right-drag looks around. The wheel moves you closer.
• Q builds another wherever you are pointing.

The four tools

You do not have to click the buttons: hold the key and the tool changes for as long as you hold it, then hands itself back. It will not change tool in the middle of a drag.

Snap and fine

Snap steps movement in quarter-metres and turns in fifteen degrees — leave it on and walls line up. Fine makes a drag move the piece a fifth as far as the mouse, for when a quarter-metre is still too much.

Shaping prims

A prim is a plain shape with no art of its own. Everything players build is made of them.

New prim puts a one-metre square on the ground a couple of paces in front of you, already in your hand. From there:

• Shape — square, wedge, tube or ball. The piece keeps its place, size, turn and paint; only the solid changes. A wedge is a roof.
• Stretch it on any of the three axes, up to twelve metres.
• Copy this piece makes a second exactly like it, half a metre to the side. Copying is how anything bigger than a shed gets built: shape one wall properly, then take four of it.
• Take this down (or Del) removes the one in your hand and gives the materials back.
• Undo last change (or U) steps back through what you did, thirty deep — every drag, paint, reshape and deletion is its own step, including a piece you took down by aiming at it and pressing E.

Facing & texture

Every side of a prim can be faced separately. Choose Paint and the kit appears in the palette: six surfaces, six colours, and a size.

• Surface — plain, stone, brick, planks, shingles, plaster or a ruled grid. Each is a pattern of light and shade, so it works in any colour.
• Colour — bare stone, whitewash, sandstone, granite, slate or timber. Below them, Pick a colour opens a wheel and paints in anything you like; choosing one of the six named finishes again puts the wheel away. The six stay because they say what a wall is made of, which is a better thing to say than #85603D.
• Size — how many metres of wall one repeat covers. Smaller and bigger change both ways at once; narrower and wider stretch the pattern across the face only, and shorter and taller up it. One drawing of planks gives floorboards, cladding or long thin battens depending on which pair you pull.
• Clear — how much of what is behind shows through. Glass, water, a lantern pane. It stops short of invisible, because a piece you cannot see is a piece you cannot get hold of again.
• Glow — how much light the surface gives off. A glowing face reads as bright at midnight instead of going the same grey as the wall behind it. Clear and glow together, in a bright colour, is a beam of light.

Click a side to face it; Face all sides does the whole piece at once. The side under your pointer lights up before you click, so you always know which one you are about to change.

Patterns are measured in metres of real wall, not in fractions of the piece. Stone reads the same size on a one-metre block as on a twelve-metre wall, courses line up across two prims stacked together, and stretching a wall slides more brick past rather than smearing the brick that is there.

Moving pieces

Any piece can be set moving. Take hold of it, open Motion in the palette, and choose:

• Spin — turns the piece where it stands, about the axis you point the buttons at, up to half a turn a second.
• Sway — walks it out to somewhere and back again, in whatever time the cycle says. It leaves and arrives at a standstill rather than snapping back to the start.
• Make this the root, then take hold of another piece and Attach to the root. An attached piece takes the root's movement on top of its own — which is how a spin becomes an orbit, and how a rig of beams becomes one machine that moves together.

Nothing about this is sent while it runs. A spin is a rate, and every player works out where the piece is from the world clock they already share, so a rig turning in an empty village costs nothing and everyone sees it at the same angle.

A set lives on one patch of ground: pieces more than a chunk apart cannot be attached to each other. A rig saved as a blueprint keeps its links, and raising it somewhere else rebuilds the whole machine.

Posters

Menu → Posters → Add a picture. Bring a PNG, JPEG or WebP of any size; the game scales it to 512 across, saves it small, and keeps up to eight for you. A photograph that arrives as three megabytes is stored as about ten kilobytes, which is why a village full of boards costs nothing to walk through.

To put one up: choose Paint in the build palette, pick your picture from the Poster row, and click a side. A poster covers that side entirely — the pattern and the repeat size go with it, because a picture fitted to a face has nothing to tile. Choose none to go back to a bare wall.

Keep them decent. Anything indecent or hateful is taken down and the account that put it up goes with it. A picture is known by its contents, so taking one down blanks every board wearing it at once and the same file cannot be uploaded again by anybody.

Unfinished places

The Hollow Hills are land that stopped completing itself, and it is not the only thing that never got finished. Here and there the world holds a place that obviously should have something in it and does not — and anybody can stand on the gap and look at it.

Closing one takes a memory. Not money, not materials alone: the knowing of how it went. Find out how, bring what it takes, and it is built — and it stays built, for everybody, permanently. Only one person ever has to know.

The first is the ford on the Keeper's road. Two dressed abutments face each other across the water on the way to the Ward Beacon, with nothing between them. Wade it and you cross with your shield down, which is a poor way to arrive at the Gloomline. Somebody once counted that bridge on a stick and dropped the stick.

The second is the cut that stops short, past the seam in the flooded gallery at Greyridge. The pump empties that gallery for about a minute and the hills fill it straight back — because the cut that should carry the water away runs twenty feet and stops, tool marks still on the face. Open it and the gallery is dry for good. Nothing appears; a place simply stops filling up.

The third is the Pale Furrow, and it is the one that changes the map. The Sainted did not wall the Gloom — they ploughed against it, a shallow trench along the line of it sown with a pale seed, and where the furrow runs the murk stands off. Three lengths of it survive, every one stopping mid-stride. Plough all three and the Gloomline comes back a hundred and twenty metres: ground that was murk this morning is the Hallow'd tonight. It can never take the whole thing — the Hills stay.

And once the line is three furrows back, a person can stand in the middle of the Hollow Hills and think, which is where the Right Name is remembered. Saying it costs nothing and moves nothing: the murk stays, the things in it stay, and the grass underneath stops looking like something that gave up. A name is not an eviction.

Two more change how far you can get. The Names of the Roads is what the Sainted did instead of marking them: they named their roads and taught the names to children, and the milestones are worn blank while the rhyme is still being skipped to in the lane. Know them and the roads appear on your map — and the going is easier where they run, because they are still there under the grass. The Deepcut is why every shaft in every mine stops at the same depth: there is a seam down there that does not break, it answers. Cut it on the slant and keep it wet, and what is under it is thick with green.

Not every memory finishes a place. Two of them are rules rather than blueprints. The Second Fire is how a flame is fed rather than struck, and anyone who knows it can keep a torch alight in a village the dark has got into — though not in the Gloom itself, which was never ours to light. The Quiet Hour is the hour before dawn, when the Unfinish'd stop noticing: it happens whether or not anybody knows it, and what the knowing buys is being told the moment it starts.

Buildings that work

A sawmill saws the woodland it stands in whether or not you are there, and goes on doing it while you are logged out. Walk up and press E to empty its yard.

Two things decide whether one is worth building. Where you put it: a mill in deep forest earns its keep, and one on a bare hillside is an expensive shed — it saws the trees around it, and the game reads the real woodland under it. And the yard fills up: it holds forty-eight logs and then stops, so a mill is somewhere you come back to rather than somewhere you forget.

Farming

A crop plot costs six wood and a measure of seed. Stand on it with seed in your pack and press E to sow; press it again when the crop is ready and you cut it — and get the seed back, so a farm feeds itself after the first sowing. Buy that first measure from the Merchant.

It ripens on the clock, whether you are logged in or not, and how fast depends on the ground: open green ground grows grain, forest floor does badly, and rock, sand and snow do nothing at all. You can see how far along a crop is — a plot wears bare tilled earth, then sown ground, a sprout, a half-grown crop, and finally the full-grown picture, which appears only when it is genuinely ready to cut.

Besides the two grains the Merchant sells seed for four garden crops, and they are not four versions of each other — each wants different ground, so where you put a field is a reading of the land:

The ground wears out

Cutting a crop takes something out of the soil, and the soil puts it back on its own if you leave it alone — about an hour and a half from worked out to fresh again. Corn is a heavy feeder, carrots are a light one, and a plot tells you its condition every time you look at it: in good heart, a little tired, tired, worn thin, worked out. A tired bed greys off, so you can see which of your fields needs resting from across the valley.

What makes that interesting is the table above. As ground wears it drops off the bottom of that list one crop at a time: tomatoes give up first, then corn, then carrots, and potatoes keep going longest. An exhausted field is potato country. How far it falls depends on where you started — the best valley floor worked to nothing will still grow carrots, and ordinary good ground will not.

All four are edible raw and barely worth it — the point of a vegetable is what the campfire does with it. Four of any of them make a root stew; three and a flatbread make a field pie.

Berries

There are berry bushes scattered through the open country. Walk up to one and press E to pick a handful. No tool, no coin, no land — berries are what there is to eat on your first morning, before you can afford a rod or a measure of seed.

Bushes grow on ground that would grow anything: open green country, not bare rock, sand or snow. Where the Gloom has had the ground they grow ashberries instead, which are worth nearly twice as much — the far country has always paid better and asked more.

A bush you strip stays bare for about seven minutes and then has fruit on it again, so a hedge you know is worth walking back along. What you have picked is yours alone: nobody can strip a hedge before you get to it.

Fishing

The fish rack on the village square sells a rod for 40 coins as well as suppers. Hold the rod, stand at the water’s edge and press E to cast — the line goes into the nearest water you are facing. Then wait. Somewhere between three and eleven seconds later something takes it, and you have under two seconds to press E again. Pull too soon and the line comes back bare; too late and it is gone.

What you catch depends on where you cast, the same way a sawmill depends on its woodland. The shallows hold silverfry and reedling. Deep water holds riverback, and now and then a mooneye. Water the Gloom has had holds palefin and hollowjaw — and those are not worse fish, they are what fishing the other half of the world gets you.

You can eat a fish raw off the bank, and it will do you a little good. Carry it to a campfire instead — anybody’s campfire, not only your own — and press E to grill the whole catch at once, one wood a fish. Grilled, it is worth two or three times as much: a mooneye off the fire mends more than anything the bakery sells.

Cooking

Lay a campfire (three wood), stand at it and press E to open its book — the same page the forge uses, with recipes instead of tools. Anybody’s fire will do, not only your own; what a recipe spends is always yours.

The book runs on one idea: a loaf keeps you fed and mends little; a stew mends a great deal and does not last. Each has a clean version made of grain, and an ashen one made of ashgrain — and since ashgrain only grows in ground the Gloom has had, the ash half of the book is what cooking the blighted half of the world gets you. Neither side is the upgrade.

Other players

You see what everyone else is carrying and doing: the weapon or tool in their hand, their shield going up, a bow being drawn, every swing, and their arrows in flight. An arrow somebody else looses is there to be seen and ducked — it does no damage, and you cannot pick it up.

A health bar appears under a player's name when they are hurt, and lights up for a moment each time it drops, so a blow landed while you were looking elsewhere still registers. Nobody whole wears one — a field of full bars is a heads-up display, while a bar that appears when somebody is bleeding is information.

Standings

Menu → Standings. Five boards, ten names each, built from the account records the world already keeps — so somebody who has not logged in for a month is still on them.

• Wealthiest — what is in the purse this minute.
• Creatures felled — everything of the Gloom that has gone down to you.
• Furthest travelled — ground covered on your own feet and on horseback. A hop to the workshop, a coach ride and waking up at home are not travel, and none of them count.
• Memories collected — knowings you have held. Selling one does not un-know that you held it, and holding the same one twice is still one memory.
• Most deaths — not every list is one to be top of.

If you are outside the ten, the page still tells you where you stand. Level pegging shares a place rather than being ordered arbitrarily, so two players with the same purse are both fourth.

Foundations

The ground here is rarely flat, and a house on a slope is a miserable thing to build. A foundation is a terrace you place like any other piece: its top sits level, a lip above the highest ground it covers, and its skirt follows the ground down and buries itself.

Build on top of it and everything stands square. The top and the skirt take their own facings, so flagstones over a bank of rough stone is one piece, not two.

There is no terraforming in this world and there will not be: the ground is generated rather than stored, so a hole dug in it would have nowhere to live. Foundations are the answer to a slope.

The workshop

A flat green mat ruled in metres, a mile and a half from anywhere anyone lives, where prims and stone cost nothing and nobody owns the ground. It is always daylight there, and no horses wander across it. Get there from the menu under Build, or from the build palette itself.

Two ways back: Back where I was returns you to the spot you left from, and Go to my home takes you to the home you have made at an inn.

Shaping a building out of prims is slow, fiddly work that wants twenty tries. Doing it on your own parcel means paying for every try and living with the wreckage of the ones that did not work. The workshop is where the first draft happens.

Your bench

The platform is divided into sixteen benches, and one of them is yours — the same one every visit, so your work is where you left it. You arrive standing on it. The dark lines ruled across the floor show where it ends, and that line matters: it is exactly where a blueprint stops. The finer grid between them is a metre a square, so you can see what the snapping is snapping to.

Sweep my bench clears your own plot. It asks twice, and it is not undoable.

Blueprints

A blueprint is a building remembered as instructions rather than as a building. Stand on a parcel, name it, and save — everything standing there becomes a plan, with its shapes, sizes, turns and every painted face.

Arm a plan and the build key raises the whole thing somewhere else. Raising one costs the materials it would have cost to build, and it must fit the allowance of the land you raise it on. The plan is checked in full before a single piece is laid, so you never get half a house.

So the loop is: design free in the workshop, save the plan, raise it at home where it costs. If you would rather not shape prims at all, a plan someone else drew works exactly the same in your hands.

Getting about

Walking is slow on purpose. Horses are the answer: find a wild one, stand near it and press E to tame it, again to ride. A tamed horse is yours and stays where you leave it. N asks it to follow you, or to wait.

Rest at an inn to make somewhere your home, and the coach will carry you back to it for a fare. Dying takes you home too, which is a better reason to have one than the bed is.

J opens the map. It shows where you have been.

Mines & forging

Six mountains in this world are hollow, and they are the only ones that will ever be: everywhere else is a heightmap and stays that way. Inside, you dig with a pickaxe — real digging, cut where you swing, and the hole you make is there for everyone, permanently.

The deeper you go the better it gets. Stone near the surface, iron below it, gold and emerald deeper still, and bedrock at the bottom that nothing will break.

Take iron to an anvil and forge a better pickaxe, which bites a bigger hole and works faster. Gold smelts into coins. The loop is chop, mine, forge, mine faster, build.

The anvil makes weapons too: swords, clubs, axes and daggers, in stone or iron. The material sets how hard a weapon hits — everyone starts with a wooden sword; stone bites harder, iron hardest. The kind sets how it fights: a dagger is quick and light, a sword is the all-rounder, a club is slow but knocks things off their feet, and an axe lands the heaviest single blow. Whatever you hold, let it recover between swings (the charge meter shows it): a hurried blow lands weakly.

Quests

Nobody here gives you a task list. Someone has a problem, they tell you about it, and what you do next is yours to work out. A grieving woman mentions her husband kept something in the shed; the shed is where you would expect a shed to be; what is in it is not marked.

The journal records problems you have been told about, rumours you have heard but not confirmed, people you have met and places you have found. It updates when you learn something, not when you complete a step.

Some of it is timed. If someone asks you to do something before dark, dark is a real time and the answer changes after it. Nothing is failed forever — but the story does not wait, and what you find later may be different from what you would have found in time.

The first journey starts with the letter you arrived holding, and with the crying you can hear near the village well.

Memories

Some knowledge in this world is an object. A Memory is a thing you carry, and while you carry it you know something — a rite, a truth about what happened here — that changes what you can do and what people will say to you.

Because it is an object, it can be given away, traded, or lost. Dying loses it. That is the point: knowledge here has a price and an owner.

When it goes wrong

I have lost a piece I was building

Open build mode and press Bring lost pieces back. It finds anything of yours stranded high above the ground or buried under it and returns it to the surface, wherever it ended up. Pieces inside a mine are left alone.

I am stuck in the scenery

O squeezes you free to the nearest open ground.

I fell under the world

You will be put back on top of it within half a second. If you were under it when you logged out, logging in will seat you on the surface.

A handle will not move

If you are looking almost straight down the arrow you are dragging, the game refuses the drag rather than flinging the piece a hundred metres. Turn the view a little and it works.

My build lost its paint

That was a bug in moving a painted piece with the arrows, fixed on 10 September 2026. Paint applied since then survives being moved.

Something else

Tell Stuart. The world is small enough that he will have heard about it before you finish typing.