longshore
A coast, some fish, and whoever you can hear. Nothing is at stake and nothing decays.
What it is
You walk about, you fish, you talk. That is the whole of it.
It runs over LoRa radio on loraline, so the people on the shore with you are the people your antenna can reach. No server, no account, no internet.
The number that goes up is how many kinds you have ever caught. It never goes down, nobody is ranked on it, and being away for a month costs you nothing.
Nothing like catacomms
catacomms is four minutes, everybody present, every machine agreeing on one room to the byte. That needed turn locking, state hashes and divergence detection, because a disagreement there would matter.
Here nobody is racing anybody and my catch does not change your water. So there is no consensus to reach and no engine to keep in step. You keep your own state, your position rides along on a heartbeat, and if my view of you is a second stale then it is a second stale.
Which leaves something better than tolerable. In catacomms a stale view is a fault and the game stops. Here it is distance: somebody at the edge of your range updates rarely and hazily, somebody beside you is crisp. The fidelity of the world falls off with the radio.
The coast
Derived from a seed and never transmitted. Everyone who types the same
--coast is on the same coastline without a byte crossing the air.
Bays, headlands, reed beds, rocks standing out of the water, and the odd island
you cannot walk to.
The fish
Forty-two species across four waters. What is biting depends on where you sit, the hour and the month, so a year has a shape and so does an afternoon.
| water | some of what lives there |
|---|---|
| open sea | herring, mackerel, cod in winter, and a moonfish once in a very long while |
| shallows | dab, flounder, bass at dusk, glass eels in spring |
| reeds | roach, perch, pike, and a wels catfish on a summer night |
| rock ledge | wrasse, conger after dark, red mullet in late summer |
Across a whole coast and a whole year: 40% common, 38% uncommon, 8% scarce, 2% rare, 13% boots and driftwood. A given spot at a given hour is lopsided, which is the reason to get up and walk somewhere else.
A cast is derived from the place, the day, the hour and a salt, so anybody can check that a cast produced what was claimed.
Fishing
Tap the water to fish it and you walk to the nearest place you could cast from, and cast when you arrive. Tap the land to walk. Tap again to strike.
A bite comes in seven to twenty-four seconds, and you have under three seconds to strike. Walking away cancels the cast. That is the only way to be wrong at this.
When something takes the float it turns red and throws ripples, and a mark appears over your head so the others can see it. On the strike the name and size float up and fade, and land in your log. Somebody else landing one shows the same way over their head, because the name and the size are already in the fourteen characters riding on their heartbeat.
What anybody says appears above them as well as in the panel. There is sound, synthesised in the page: a plop on the cast, a knock when something takes it, a lift when you land one. The knock is the one that matters, because you will be looking somewhere else.
What it can't do
Six people, and you cannot be joined by a stranger
Everyone announces themselves periodically, and if two transmit at once both packets are lost. Nobody is going to wander in because they happened to be online. A coast with nobody on it is not peaceful, it is empty.
There is nothing else to do
No crafting, no building, no second skill. With four people a second activity splits the group, and being together is the point.
The band is yours to get right
It transmits on licence-free spectrum that differs by country. Read loraline's setup first.
Playing
You can be standing on the coast in about two minutes with nothing but a laptop. Fishing alone needs nobody to talk to, so it needs no radio.
Play longshore From an empty computer to a line in the water.