The Greathold is a connected civilization of Holds. Each Hold inhabits a Vault: a large dungeon-formed chamber or chamber system whose core maintains a particular biome. Routes join Holds along the mountain spine and lead from them into contested dungeon regions.
A Hold is the ordinary unit of local life. Its active workshop sites, resident and visiting delvers, institutions, population, and local core encounter the same markets, contracts, news, and civic consequences. Cross-Hold effects require a named route, contract, institution, core relationship, or Greathold-wide mandate.
The simulation does not place workshops at coordinates on a shared Vault floor. A workshop interior may be a spatial HOLD scene, but its economic presence consists of Hold-local workshop sites, not plots on a city map. Contracts, friendships, customers, and research partners connect stable identities without making them spatial neighbours.
Workshops and presence
A workshop has one durable identity: owner, seal, practice, portable knowledge, history, and relationships. It has one civic home, which supplies ordinary social and civic relevance for its single seal. Changing that home is prospective and atomic; wealth, facilities, and operations elsewhere never multiply the franchise.
A workshop site is the workshop’s productive body in one Hold. It owns the facilities and methods installed there, local storage and custody, staff or assistants, listings, orders, reservations, production history, and access to local institutions and infrastructure. A workshop may establish sites in any viable Hold by committing real local facilities and resources. Registration alone creates no capacity, demand, market visibility, or claim to floor space.
Closing a site cannot erase or relocate its body. The world host admits closure only after unaccepted listings and reservations are withdrawn, accepted obligations settle or transfer under their terms, and every facility, inventory lot, staff commitment, and local custody claim receives an explicit sale, transfer, dismantling, abandonment, or other terminal receipt.
An authenticated foreground session renews one workshop-wide presence lease for 36 hours of world-host time. Background work and client heartbeats cannot renew it. At expiry, one atomic dormancy transition checkpoints bounded automation across every site, removes their unaccepted listings, releases live reservations, and removes future civic routing. The dormant identity retains its history, relationships, seal, knowledge, debts, custody records, sites, and completed acts while producing no continuing demand, production, discovery, notification, or population pressure.
Accepted contracts and orders state their dormancy terms when accepted. Each site settles its obligations exactly once: they may complete before expiry, settle from escrow, transfer to a named institution, or default or cancel under agreed terms. Dormancy cannot erase an obligation or keep a workshop live indefinitely.
Returning reactivates the same workshop identity and its eligible sites. The player may keep or change the workshop’s civic home without moving its productive bodies. Relationship history and portable knowledge follow the identity; facilities, inventories, staff, active orders, and installed capacity remain at their sites. Goods move between sites only through receipted transfers over named routes.
Institutions and local circulation
Each Hold begins with simulated civic and commercial institutions operating under a versioned founding distribution policy. The initial arrangement gives them sensible facilities, inventories, budgets, reserves, service obligations, procurement practices, and expedition contracts. It creates a viable starting economy without pretending that institutions are human workshops or that their success is permanent.
Players govern institutions indirectly. Ratified policy can change charters, mandates, budgets, taxes, subsidies, procurement priorities, reserves, access and rationing, import and export rules, infrastructure investment, safety, service obligations, and extraction limits. These safeguards may be narrowed, underfunded, privatized, consolidated, or abolished through the same civic process that created them.
Institutions choose individual purchases, production, schedules, services, and contracts from ratified policy plus their actual money, facilities, staff, inventories, knowledge, route access, and outstanding obligations. An impossible mandate produces an attributable refusal, shortfall, cancellation, default, rationing decision, or insolvency event. Policy creates neither goods nor successful outcomes.
Opening and sustaining Holds
A new Hold begins when delvers survey a Vault, routes and institutions make settlement viable, and players voluntarily make it their civic home or establish workshop sites there. Opening responds to sustained active community pressure, institutional load, or chosen frontier play rather than lifetime account totals. It is a committed event inside the Greathold, never a server or matchmaking shard.
Holds persist when their population becomes quiet or their economy fails. Institutions continue acting from whatever mandates, assets, and capacity survive while dormant workshops remain absent from live simulation; circulation may shrink or stop. Settlement recommendations may favour an economically viable quiet Hold, but relocation is voluntary and no Hold is merged, wiped, restocked, or discarded to repair population balance.