Spiritvein
Spiritvein

A cultivation sandbox

Spiritvein

Dig deep. Cultivate deeper.

A 2D sandbox of stone and essence. You start with a cracked core, a manual that burned in your hands, and a world that will not hand you anything. Everything you become, you dig for.

Descend
A wooden house under wet mountains, lanterns lit, a man sitting on the porch step.

Something walked past your window, and the air has not finished trembling.

Through the shutters, you can see a figure going east. Dark robes. A wide brimmed hat.

There is a book on the floor by your bed. It was not there last night.

The pages go to ash between your fingers, and the ash goes somewhere you do not have a word for yet.

“I will not help you. This is your path now. That is the first lesson, and the only one I intend to repeat.”

A lantern-lit pavilion over still water, lotus in the rain.

The debt

Twelve stones, every third day

The man in the hat has told the city to look after your family, and the city expects to be paid in spirit stone. Your father breaks stone honestly. Your mother grows what the alchemists cannot. Neither of them can hear the air the way you now can.

So the coffer by the door becomes your clock. Keep it fed and the house stands while you are under it. Later the house grows with you: a smithy in the west wing, an alchemy lab in the cellar, a forge on the third storey, a workshop past the garden. Each room takes a hire, and each hire brings patterns the book never learns.

“If you're going down there, bring me back anything that's still growing.”Mum
The family house on the surface, in game.
In game: the family house on the hill.

The first law of the ground

Ore ripens

Leave a vein of ordinary ore alone and it slowly fills with essence until it is spirit stone. Strip-mine it and you have iron. This is a stretch of rock. Take your lantern into it.

Ore taken0
Spirit stone0
Still ripening0

Drag to dig. Tap on a phone.

In the game a vein takes days to ripen. Here it takes about a minute. Patience is the whole economy.

A cultivator with a lantern at the mouth of a flooded cavern of stone pillars and waterfalls.

The deep country

Essence is everywhere, and yours nowhere

Below the surface band the world takes on an aspect. Each column of the deep belongs to one of the five, and the country, its stone, its beasts and its essence all follow it. The deeper you go the denser the essence, and the less the depth cares whether you live.

  1. FireThe CinderlordCinder hounds run the ash country.
  2. WaterThe MistcoilMist serpents in the drowned halls.
  3. WoodThe ThornfatherBramble stalkers under the roots.
  4. MetalThe ShardmotherKeen shards where the iron is thick.
  5. EarthThe GravewardenDreg golems where the dead are buried.

Five countries, five ancients at the bottom of them. The core you build takes the flavour of what you dared to reach.

An underground town of forges and lantern bridges beneath green-lit cliffs.
In game: a ruin veined with teal in a lit pocket of dark earth.
In game: a ruin in the earth country.

Hands

Make what you need

Smithy, forge, loom, still, alchemy lab, enchanter's table. Every piece rolls a grade, and your hands get better with every one. Plate and robes are cut from what you hauled up yourself. Geodes are rare and never cracked open: an enchanter fuses one into a single piece, and a weapon carries its flavour on every blow.

Nothing in this world is free. No faction pays your stones, your treasures or your rites.

A cultivator in blue robes looking up as lightning strikes through the broken roof of a stone chamber.

Cultivation

Sitting still is the work

Everything else is preparation for sitting still. Bank essence, build a room worth breaking through in, and when the core is full, call the heavens down on it. You fight the tribulation in a chamber you built yourself, and if you lose, the heavens take the room.

  1. CrackedWhere you start. The core leaks.
  2. CloudedTribulation: the Echo
  3. ClearTribulation: the Gale
  4. RadiantTribulation: the Pyre
  5. SovereignTribulation: the Crown

Clouded: the body spends everything, and the hand lets go on the plinth.

Arts, weapons and the guard

Beasts strike back

Five weapons, each with its own choreography and its own guard: the sabre, the spear, the daggers, the hammer and the fan. Hold to block and spend qi; press at the right instant to parry. Your arts speak in the voice of your aspect.

An art striking a beast, in game.
The Rainkeeper, mid-fight.
In game: a lava grotto deep in the fire country, the pressure reddening the frame.
The fire country, deep.
The sabre's guard against a beast, in game.
The sabre's guard.

Bloodlines

Every cultivator is a line

Each playable cultivator carries a themed bloodline, named when you make them and renamed at every core state as it is revealed and refined at the shrine. Choose one to read its names.

You

    The new-game screen: ten painted portraits to choose a cultivator from.
    In game: choosing who you are.

    After Clouded

    Four powers come recruiting

    The sect, the guild, the corporation and the royal house each want you, and each wants something different. They read what you have actually done. The clock is visible: you are sixteen when you wake, a year is thirty days, and the recruiting closes at twenty.

    1617181920

    The Sect

    Reads your deeds in combat. Its keeper comes onto the plaza for a two-minute trial against someone well above you. Stand through it to pass. Bring him to the yield to impress.

    The Guild

    Twenty-five quests and five ancients slain. Then a commission: a piece your hands know, at Great grade, in seven days.

    The Corporation

    Reads your holdings, your payroll and your sales. Its audit is still being written.

    The Royals

    Every room of the house built, a hire in each, four upkeep cycles paid in full and two bloodline refinements. Miss a payment and the count starts over.

    In game: the corporation's plaza under painted peaks and a red pagoda.
    In game: the corporation's plaza.

    Miss every window and the tier becomes something else entirely.

    A traveller with a staff meets a great moss-antlered stag in a rain forest of waterfalls.

    The world within

    Make a world of your own

    A cultivator who goes far enough builds a world inside themselves, and your family moves into it. The egg the master left on the sill has been warm for as long as you have been able to hear him. It will not hatch out here.

    The inner world in game: trees, water, a shrine mound and the egg.
    In game: a world within.
    “When you have made a world of your own, carry it to the heart. What comes out will be of your world's own flavour, and it will know your name before you have told it.”
    A low painted table with two cushions.

    Together

    One world, two seats

    Host a world and a friend takes the second cushion. One simulation is the truth and every seat talks to it, so what one of you digs, the other sees fall.

    The films

    Three films, in the game

    The score

    Music that knows where you are

    The game plays by context: the surface by day and by night, each of the five deeps, the towns of each power, the seat, every tribulation and every ancient in three movements. Turn the sound on and this page does the same as you scroll. Or choose a piece.

      A snow temple with a great bell above a sea of clouds and a thousand peaks at sunrise.

      The game is about becoming a god.

      Spiritvein is in development. The first hour is written, painted and scored.

      Simulation
      Pure Rust, fixed tick, deterministic. A replay is a seed and a command log.
      Client
      Godot 4 through godot-rust. Built to run on integrated graphics and the cheapest CPU around.
      Art
      Painted dolls and paintings, generated films and a generated score, every piece chosen by hand.