Gaggle Studios · Game Design Document · v0.0.3 · August 2026

Camp Haven

A cozy multiplayer camping game that runs in a browser. You are a small animal on an island. You fish, you forage, you cook, you decorate a patch of ground, and you do all of it with your hands free enough to talk to whoever came with you. There is no combat, no losing, and nothing you can miss by being offline.

Browser & desktop Up to 16 players per camp Invite-code camps, no matchmaking Sessions of 20–120 minutes No combat · no fail state · no FOMO

01 — What the game is

A shared campground that visibly grows

Camp Haven is a cozy multiplayer camping sim. Up to sixteen people share one campground — a persistent world with its own invite code, created by whoever started it. You play a small customisable animal: a cat, dog, capybara, goose, duck or frog, in whatever colours you like. You fish, forage, cook, garden, decorate and talk. Nothing attacks you and you cannot lose. The worst outcome of any action is a wasted ingredient or a fish that got away.

The central twist

Your money and your backpack are yours alone. The camp's level is not. Every fish anyone catches, every mushroom anyone picks, every recipe anyone works out feeds one shared progress bar — and when that bar fills, the world physically changes for everybody at once. A trail blocker clears. A cooking station appears. Lanterns go up around the hub. A rope bridge spans the gorge.

Personal progression is what you carry between camps. Camp progression is what you cannot.The rule that settles every gating argument in the design

That single split does a lot of work. It means a veteran who wanders into a brand-new camp arrives with their gear and their know-how but not with access — the places are still closed, because the place is closed, not the verb. It means their catches pay full XP into the young camp they're standing in, so a visitor is a gift rather than a shortcut. And it means the reason to invite people is structural rather than social nagging: more hands genuinely build the camp faster, and everyone can see it happening.

The four pillars

Pillar one

Your hands stay free

Fishing has a 12.5-second wait between cast and bite, and that wait is not dead time to be optimised away — it is the conversation window. Chat is reachable from every state in the game, including mid-minigame, and any key will hook a fish while you are typing.

Pillar two

Nothing can be missed

No seasons, no login streaks, no timed windows that punish the friend who logged off. Crops wait patiently. Star pieces you earned spawn the next time you join, however long that takes. Scarcity lives in the forecast, never in a trapdoor.

Pillar three

The world tells the truth

The in-world notice board renders its numbers from the content database, so changing the game rewrites the tutorial instead of making it stale. If a level-up says lanterns went up, lanterns went up.

Pillar four

Company is paid for, never required

Standing together at a fire pays a bonus. Wishing on a shooting star pays more when friends wish too — into your own pile, so inviting people is never competitive. But every single loop in the game closes solo.

The shape of a session

A game day is 24 real minutes, so two and a half days pass in your first hour and the whole day/night cycle is a first-session experience rather than something you read about. Weather flips between clear and rain on its own. The rarest fish sit behind two conditions at once — the Lake Emperor needs night and rain — so trophy hunting is about being in the right place when the world lines up, not about grinding one spot for six hours.

24 min

One full game day

Players per campground

Named places, in three zones

Fish across eight waters

02 — What you actually do

Four verbs, learned in five minutes

Fish, forage, cook, decorate. The whole starter loop closes inside a forty-metre circle with no purchases and no tutorial quest chain. Bug-catching arrives as a fifth verb about ninety minutes in, bought rather than granted, because earning the net feels better than being handed it.

1GatherCast into water, or hold to pick a forage spawn. What you get depends on the zone, the time band, the weather and your gear.

2ConvertBring what you caught to a fire. Matching a recipe cooks a dish and, first time, discovers it permanently.

3SpendSell the surplus at the camp store for acorns. Buy bait, rods, tools, seeds, furniture.

4GrowEverything you did fed the shared camp bar. It fills, the world changes, and the pool you were gathering from gets wider.

Fishing — the primary loop

Stand near water, hold to charge a cast — how long you hold sets how far the bobber flies, and at the coast that distance decides which pool you are fishing. The server picks the species at the moment of the cast and hides it. Somewhere between five and twenty seconds later you get a bite, and then a short reaction window, and then one of three small minigames chosen by what bit:

Reaction

Three to five timed pulses. The marker gets faster and the window gets narrower as the fish gets rarer.

Tension

Six seconds of keeping a needle inside a drifting band. The band narrows with rarity.

Pattern

A four-to-six arrow sequence played back, then repeated from memory in one eight-second phase.

The crucial rule: how well you play shifts the quality of the fish, never the species. A perfect run pushes hard toward two and three stars; it cannot conjure a legendary out of a common pool. Rarity is decided by where you are, when you are there and what rod you bought — skill decides how good the one you get turns out to be. Scoring zero loses the fish, and that is deliberate: the failure is easy to avoid and it makes the catch mean something.

Foraging

Spawn points refill on timers per zone. Walk up, hold to gather. The item is rolled by the world, not per player, so two people looking at the same bush see the same thing — your tools and buffs shift quality and quantity only. Some spawns are hidden and need a lantern to see at all, which is what makes night in the forest worth walking into.

Cooking

The station you have determines how many ingredients you can combine: the campfire takes one, the cooking station two, the camp kitchen three. Submitted items are matched exactly against the recipe list. Match, and it cooks into a dish whose star rating comes from the average of what you put in — but never falls below the best single thing in the pot, so a trophy fish is not dragged down by its companions. Miss, and you get a Campfire Surprise worth almost nothing — which is the game's cheapest and best teacher.

Discovery is the accelerator. The first time you match a recipe it enters your book forever and pays a large one-off bonus that scales with the recipe's tier. A player who experiments beats a player who grinds, and that is the intended reading.

The garden and the orchard

Every campsite comes with a garden bed from the free tier upward. Carrots take fifteen real minutes; onions three quarters of an hour; dewberries two hours; rainbud eight; sunsaffron twenty. The orchard's trees are measured in days — an apple tree is thirty-six real hours, a honeynut seventy-two. None of it wilts, dies or expires. It is a rhythm, not a faucet: you set something going and you come back to it.

Timing reference — how long each thing takes

Action	Time	Note
Cast charge	1.1 s	Sets distance, and at the coast, which pool
Bite delay	5–20 s	Averages 12.5 s — the conversation window
Reaction window	1.2 s	Any key works, even mid-sentence in chat
Minigame	~2–8 s	Depends which of the three
Recast cooldown	3 s
One full fishing cycle	~25–30 s	The rate card assumes 27.5 s — about 131 casts an hour
Gather hold	1.5 s	0.75 s with the forage-speed buff
Forage respawn	60–180 s
Cook timer	20–45 s
Buff duration	4–11 min base	×2.5 at three stars; hard ceiling under 30 min
Full game day	24 real min	1 game hour = 1 real minute

03 — The world

Haven Isle

The island is ringed by sea and climbs to peaks in the north — a little over 300 metres across at its narrowest, 430 at its widest. Two barriers cut it into three, and where you can stand is the spine of the whole progression: a wide river you cannot ford, and a mountain wall you cannot climb. Twenty-three named places sit across the three zones. The coastline here is the game's own measured waterline; every pin is at its designed coordinate.

Drag to pan · scroll to zoom · hover a pin

Zone 1 — the camp, open from the startZone 2 — across the bridge, camp level 6Zone 3 — through the pass, camp level 12

1
The HubOn foot · The clearingCampfire, store, notice board, cooking station and the campsite lawn. Everything is sold and cooked here — on purpose, so the camp never decentralises.
2
The LakeOn foot · LakesideThe starter water, castable eighteen metres from where you spawn. Sixteen species, and the dock a new player casts from in their first thirty seconds.
3
The ForestOn foot · ForestMushrooms, morels and the first properly dark place. A sign asks you to come back at a higher level — but nothing physically stops you walking in.
4
The North TrailOn foot · ForestThe climb toward the mountain wall. It ends at the rock face, where the pass will one day be cut.
5
The Upper ReedbedsAcross the bridge · MarshThe first thing you reach across the bridge — jetties, cattails and lily pads on the river's far bank.
6
The OrchardAcross the bridge · MeadowCommunal fruit trees on days-long timers, and the honey-and-fruit end of the recipe book.
7
Riverbend MeadowAcross the bridge · MeadowButterfly fields, rare bugs and picnic tables built for shared dishes.
8
Berry HighlandsAcross the bridge · HighlandA terraced plateau up a switchback. Bramble mazes, highland berries, beehives.
9
Frog MarshAcross the bridge · MarshThe river's delta on boardwalk stilts. Marsh tubers, a dusk frog chorus, twelve species in the channels.
10
The Old GroveAcross the bridge · Deep pinesThe pines' dark heart: night-only glowcaps, firefly rings, mushroom circles.
11
Lighthouse PointAcross the bridge · CoastThe far cape. Deep-sea casts off the rocks — and the first place where how far you cast decides what you catch.
12
Sandy CoveAcross the bridge · CoastThe long beach. Tide-pool foraging, driftwood after rain, and sand you can draw on.
13
Meadow CampgroundAcross the bridge · MeadowA second lawn in the southern grass, for when the ring by the fire runs out.
14
The Ferry DockAcross the bridge · CoastWhere the merchant's boat ties up. The south coast's front door.
15
Little IsleAcross the bridge · CoastReached by rowboat from the boathouse. Fish that rise nowhere else, and bottles washing in with letters.
16
The Graywatch PeaksThrough the pass · AlpineThe northern massif. Thin-air herbs and the roof of the island.
17
The FallsThrough the pass · AlpineThe river's true source, pouring off the Graywatch. A plunge pool with eleven species and a legendary den.
18
Mirror TarnThrough the pass · AlpineAn alpine pond above the treeline: ice-clear fishing and starfall's best reflection.
19
Hot Spring HollowThrough the pass · AlpineSteam on the mountain's shoulder. The soak pays the communal fire bonus while two or more campers sit in it.
20
Echo BurrowThrough the pass · Deep pinesA cave mouth under the roots. Lantern required; blind cave fish; chalk walls underground.
21
The Deep PinesThrough the pass · Deep pinesOld timber running the length of the northern shelf.
22
The Fire TowerThrough the pass · AlpineA ranger's watch to climb — the whole isle in one panorama, and a logbook of things spotted.
23
The Sea StacksThrough the pass · CoastGull rocks off the northern point — a long cast and a postcard photo.

The Hub

Campfire, store, notice board, cooking station and the campsite lawn. Everything is sold and cooked here — on purpose, so the camp never decentralises.

Zone 1 · open from the startThe clearing-80, 30 m

Three zones, two barriers

The island is not a gradient of difficulty spreading out from a campfire. It is three pieces of land, and two of the joins are physical.

Zone one

The camp

Everything west of the river and south of the wall: the hub, the lake, the forest, the north trail. Its internal gates are soft — a sign says "come back at level four" and nothing physically stops you walking in. A new player gets to know one place thoroughly, and being told "not yet" by a sign is a gentler teacher than a wall.

Zone two

Across the bridge

Everything east of the river — eleven of the twenty-three places, more than the other two zones combined. The river is eighteen metres wide and there is no ford. The bridge is a camp upgrade at level 6 — the whole camp builds it together, and the day it opens is the day the world visibly doubles.

Zone three

Through the pass

Everything north of the mountain wall — the peaks, the Falls, Mirror Tarn, the hot spring, the fire tower. The wall runs coast to coast and is sealed at both ends. The way through is cut, not unlocked. Mining, ore and scaffolding arrive across four rungs before the wall finally opens at level 12 — the last rung of the build-out.

Sequencing them this way is deliberate. The river is the first physical barrier, and it arrives only after the camp has been lived in. Zone 2 carries the most content because crossing the bridge should be the single biggest "the world got bigger" moment in the game — bigger than any level-up, because it is a thing the camp built rather than a number that ticked over.

The design rule for the whole island is a travel budget: no repeating loop may sit more than about sixty seconds' sprint from the campfire. Acreage is allowed to be scenery; loops are not allowed to be far. With a 24-minute day, an evening is three real minutes long, and the whole trophy economy assumes you can reach any water inside a window's opening. Walking is also the one activity where your hands are not free — every travel minute is subtracted from the conversation the game exists for.

Selling and cooking stay at the hub, permanently and deliberately. Decentralising the economy would let a sixteen-player camp scatter into sixteen private loops, and the one resource that cannot respawn is the other people.

Eight waters, and why water is the content multiplier

Rarity is rolled first and the species drawn second, from whatever is eligible in that cell — this zone, this time band, this weather, this rarity. The consequence is structural and worth understanding: adding a new fish to a crowded cell dilutes the fish already in it, but adding a whole new water creates thirty-two fresh cells that dilute nothing.

Water	Species	Where	Opens
The Lake	16	The starter water — castable 18 m from where you spawn	Immediately
The River	17	The barrier itself — fishable from the near bank	Immediately, from Zone 1
The Surf	10	The first 13 m of sea off any beach	Zone 1 has coast too
The Deep	9	13–45 m out — a long cast only	Wherever you can reach the coast
The Delta	12	Frog Marsh's channels	Across the bridge
Mirror Tarn	10	Alpine, above the treeline	Through the pass
The Falls plunge pool	11	The river's source, off the Graywatch	Through the pass
Echo Burrow	7	Underground, lantern required	Through the pass

The surf and the deep are the same beach: how far you cast selects which pool you are fishing. It is the first place where the charge-up meter stops being flavour.

The river is worth noticing twice. It is the barrier that holds back half the island, and it is also seventeen species you can fish from the near bank on your first evening. The thing keeping you out is the same thing giving you something to do while you wait — which is the shape every good gate in this game tries to have.

Gates, and what a gate is for

A locked path must have something real behind it, or it is just a wall. The island is small enough that no gate is protecting travel time — every one of them is protecting a reveal. There are only two kinds.

Gate	Kind	Opened by	What is behind it
Zone 1's interior — the forest, the deeper woods	Soft	A sign, and your own judgement	Mushrooms, morels and the dark. You can walk in early; the sign only tells you what you are walking into.
The river	Hard	The bridge, at camp level 6 — built by the whole camp	Eleven places: the orchard, the highlands, the marsh delta, the old grove, the southern meadows, the coast, the lighthouse, the isle.
The mountain wall	Hard	A pass, cut with a pickaxe, at camp level 12	Eight places: the Graywatch, the Falls plunge pool and its legendary den, Mirror Tarn, Hot Spring Hollow, Echo Burrow, the deep pines, the fire tower, the sea stacks.

The difference in feel is the point. A soft gate is the game saying you are early. A hard gate is the game saying not yet, and here is exactly what it will take — a structure the camp raises together, or a tool one of you goes and earns. Neither is ever a level number alone, because a number that ticks over while you were fishing is not a moment.

The day, the weather and the rarest things in the game

A game day runs 24 real minutes, split into four bands: morning (05–10), day (10–18), evening (18–22) and night (22–05). Weather has a 15% chance of flipping each game hour, which is once a minute in real time.

Expected experience per catch is almost perfectly flat across all sixteen combinations of band, weather and water — a spread of under 2%. That is intentional and it is the most load-bearing balance property in the game: there is no wrong time to log on. The bands change which fish and what it is worth, never the rate at which the camp grows. Nobody is ever playing at the bad hour.

Legendaries sit behind two conditions at once — a band and a weather — so the chase is about being somewhere when the world lines up. Since a full day passes every 24 minutes and rain arrives on its own, that is a matter of patience and company rather than a calendar.

04 — Progression

Two ladders and a book that never closes

The camp level opens places and stays behind when you leave. Your personal rank opens verbs and tools and travels with you everywhere. The Almanac is a collection you fill for yourself, and it is the only one of the three with no end.

Shared

Camp level

Per campground. Twelve rungs today, heading to twenty. Opens zones, stations and facilities bolted to this island. Levels faster with more people.

Personal

Rank

Per player, portable. Eight ranks. Opens the right to claim a campsite, the rods, the lantern, the basket, the watering can. Never deflates, whoever else is online.

Personal

The Almanac

Every fish, ingredient and recipe, each with five things to fill in. Nearly a thousand entries to chase, and a size record that mathematically never stops improving.

The camp ladder

Open a rung to see what it pays in. The gaps grow smoothly — each is roughly 1.2 to 1.3× the one before — while the camp's income grows in steps as zones and gear arrive. The design alternates what a rung pays in, so no two consecutive levels feel like the same kind of reward.

Two rungs are not like the others. Level 6 opens the bridge and level 12 opens the pass, and the six rungs between them are partly about building toward the second one: the pickaxe, the ore, the larder it piles up in, and finally the scaffolding against the wall. A camp should be able to watch its next zone coming for hours before it arrives.

L1A bare clearing0 XP
Campfire, camp store, lake dock. One-slot cooking. Seven emotes. A starter rod and no money. The lake is castable eighteen metres from where you stand, and the river's near bank is a short walk east — seventeen more species you can fish long before you can cross to them.
L2Campsites and seeds300 XP
Seeds reach the store, so the garden starts, and campsites open — three pads on the lawn by the fire. About eleven minutes in for a new player, and the first proof that the bar does something.
L3Herbed bait and the furniture shelf800 XP
A stronger rarity shift than basic bait, and something to put on your pad now that you have one.
L4Two-slot cooking1,500 XP
The cooking station appears. Recipe complexity doubles and discovery bonuses go from 50 to 100, which is the moment experimenting starts to outrun grinding. The signs at the forest edge stop warning you off around here too.
L5Basket, gloves, and the bug net2,500 XP
Foraging becomes a real income stream. The bug net goes on sale at 600 acorns — about thirteen minutes of income once you are here, and the intended end-of-first-session prize. The camp is now as good as Zone 1 can make it, and everyone has spent an hour looking across the river.
L6The bridge spans the river — Zone 2 opens3,800 XP
The biggest single moment in the game. Eleven places open at once — the Upper Reedbeds, Riverbend Meadow, the Orchard, Berry Highlands, Frog Marsh and its delta, the Old Grove, the southern meadows, Sandy Cove, the Ferry Dock, Lighthouse Point. More than twice the land the camp has lived on, and the sea becomes fishable from a coast you can finally reach.

It matters that this is a structure. A level-up that clears a blocker is a number ticking over; a bridge is a thing the camp built, standing where everyone can see it, that was not there yesterday.
L7Lanterns strung around the hub5,500 XP
The lantern reveals hidden forage within ten metres, and glow bait — the best in the game, better again at night — reaches the shelf. Night stops being something that happens to you and becomes somewhere you go, which matters most in the new woods across the river.
L8The workshop tent, and the first pickaxe7,500 XP
The fine rod goes on the shelf at 2,500 acorns — the big-ticket purchase, where the real gate is the saving rather than the level. The bait bench lets the camp craft bait from forage.

And mining arrives. There is ore in the rock at the head of the north trail, and a pickaxe on the workshop bench to get it out. Nobody says yet what it is for. Standing at the seam, you are looking straight up at the mountain wall.
L9Denser undergrowth10,000 XP
A campground-wide bump to rare and legendary spawn weight — the first upgrade that helps everyone passively, whether they are online or not. The seam runs deeper, and ore starts stacking up faster than anyone has a use for.
L10The camp kitchen, and the larder13,000 XP
Three-slot cooking: the seven tier-three recipes, the longest buffs, and the showcase dishes built on legendary catches. Orchard saplings reach the store, so the fruit trees become a project rather than scenery.

The camp larder opens beside it — shared storage any member can deposit into or withdraw from. It is the most communal thing a camp can own, and it is where the ore goes.
L11The cut begins16,000 XP
Scaffolding goes up against the mountain wall, and a beach fire ring appears on the south coast — a second place to earn the gathering bonus, and a second place a group naturally ends up.

The scaffolding is the point. For the first time the camp can see the next zone being worked toward instead of waiting on a number. People walk up the north trail just to look at it.
L12The pass is cut — Zone 3 opens19,400 XP
The end of the build-out. The wall opens and the north is walkable: the Graywatch Peaks, the Falls and its plunge pool with eleven species and a legendary den, Mirror Tarn, Hot Spring Hollow, Echo Burrow, the deep pines, the Fire Tower, the sea stacks.

The camp is finished as a mechanism — every station, every tool, every zone. This is the founding state, not the destination: everything past here is the Standing.

What more people does to the pace

Sixteen people genuinely do sixteen people's work, and the design does not pretend otherwise. Each individual's award shrinks as the camp gets busier, but the camp's total rate always rises. Drag the slider:

Campers actively contributing: 1 camper

1.0×

Each person earns

1.00×

The camp earns

1,940 XP/hr

Shared camp rate

10.0 hours

To finish the build-out

Campers contributing	Each person earns	The camp earns	Shared rate	To finish the build-out
1	1.0×	1.00×	1,940 XP/hr	10.0 h
2	0.8×	1.60×	3,104 XP/hr	6.3 h
3	0.7×	2.10×	4,074 XP/hr	4.8 h
4	0.6×	2.40×	4,656 XP/hr	4.2 h
5	0.5×	2.50×	4,850 XP/hr	4.0 h
8	0.5×	4.00×	7,760 XP/hr	2.5 h
12	0.5×	6.00×	11,640 XP/hr	1.7 h
16	0.5×	8.00×	15,520 XP/hr	1.25 h

The multiplier steps down to a flat floor of half at five people and stops there, so past five the camp's total scales linearly. A full camp clears the entire twelve-rung build-out in roughly seventy-five minutes. That is accepted rather than tolerated: a busy camp finishing the build-out in one evening is the fantasy, and none of it touches the two things that never deflate — your rank and your Almanac. Every member of that camp still owes their own hundred-plus hours of collection, and no amount of other people fills it for them.

One rule makes this liveable: the number is shown. A multiplier that silently halves your XP is the one thing a cozy game cannot have. The head count and the current multiplier are on screen, named, in plain language.

The personal ladder

Ranks 1 to 5 all land inside the first two hours; the top two are the long tail. Personal XP is paid for firsts and breadth — the first time you catch a species, the first three-star, the first trophy-sized one, the first visit to each place — while camp XP is paid for volume. One action pays both, on different formulas, so you never choose between them.

Rank	XP	What opens
1	0	Fish, forage and cook from minute zero — and the Almanac, mostly empty
2	200	The Marshmallow Roast emote, and a second cooking pot. The first thing that is yours rather than the camp's — and because it only plays near a fire, the first thing you own is the first thing you show someone.
3	600	The right to claim a campsite, and seeds
4	1,300	Basket and gloves — one more per pick, better forage quality
5	2,400	Sturdy rod, lantern, and the Premium Tent — the rod is the first real shift in what rises to your line
6	6,500	Watering can and a second garden bed — four cells watered in one action, on eight cells
7	13,300	The fine rod and the Cabin. The single most personal object in the game
8	22,000	Trailkeeper. Storage doubles, the Almanac's final facet and its set rewards open. The bar ends here, and it says so — what remains is the book.

There is no gear tier above the fine rod, ever. A rod treadmill would convert the endgame into a stat chase, and the depth is meant to go into windows, stars, sizes and sets instead of into multipliers.

The Almanac

A portable, append-only book covering every fish, every ingredient and every recipe — 194 rows, each with five things to fill in: caught, your best size, the best stars you have landed, where and when you first found it, and whether you currently hold the camp's record for it. Five states per row, from blank through rumoured — a silhouette plus whatever conditions you have worked out — to caught, starred and held.

It carries a catch-up mechanic that nobody has to be told about: a maxed camp cannot pre-fill your book. A newcomer joining a finished camp fills it faster than the founder ever could, because the three-slot kitchen makes their discoveries worth three times as much. Arriving late is compensated structurally rather than apologised for.

Honest completion times

Line	Median	What actually limits it
First of everything — fish, forage, bug, dish, harvest	~20 min	Nothing; it is the onboarding
Every fish	7–13 h	The legendaries. The rarest is several hours on its own — it is available about 8% of the clock
Every ingredient	15–25 h	A three-real-day floor: one is orchard-only behind a 72-hour sapling, one is capped at one a day
Every recipe	20–30 h	A four-real-day floor. The three-slot kitchen is camp level 10
Every row at three stars	120–200 h	Three to five extra catches per row, multiplied by every condition window
Size records	Never	The chance your next catch beats your own best is 1/(n+1) — logarithmic, endless, never frustrating

The collection already has a real-day floor and it did not need a season to get one. Three real days minimum for the ingredient book, four for the recipe book, purely from growth timers.

Where the numbers come from, and how much to trust them

Every hour figure in this document derives from one modelled play rate: a 27.5-second fishing cycle, 131 casts an hour, about 1,940 shared XP and 2,880 acorns an hour for one player. That rate is modelled, not measured, and it carries an error bar of roughly ±35%. Under a relaxed 35-second cycle the build-out is 12.7 solo hours; under all-out dock camping it is 7.5. Read the tables as the shape of the curve, not as commitments — an instrumented hour of real play is a standing prerequisite before any threshold is treated as final.

05 — Playing together

How the design tries to get people into the same place

Every social feature in Camp Haven is one stroke of the same engine: invitation → co-presence → dividend → expression → next invitation. The design never requires company, and it never makes company merely pleasant — being together has to pay something you can point at.

The five mechanisms

Structural

One bar, everyone's work

Shared camp XP is the whole thesis: private effort becomes a visible, shared world. It is also why a camp is worth joining rather than founding — someone else already built the bridge.

Positional

The fire gathering bonus

Standing within six metres of a lit campfire with other people pays 10% more camp XP per extra camper, up to 40% at five. It is the only mechanic that pays purely for proximity — and it is deliberately ordered after the crowd multiplier, so it reads as a partial rebate on the cost of a busy camp. The crowd costs you; standing in it together buys some of it back.

Positional

The newcomer flag

While a camper in their first hour is at the fire, everyone there gets a flat 25% instead. One number and one flag turn a camp's oldest players into the tutorial.

Asynchronous

Camp chalk

Free at level one, no kit, no grind. Crouch and draw freehand on the ground itself in fourteen colours. It persists with the campground forever. The moment it exists for: you log off, your partner joins tomorrow, and the first line in their chat is "while you were away: Mika drew in chalk around camp" — and there it is, on the ground where you both always stand, too big to miss. Nobody had to ask "did you see it?"

Synchronous

Starfall

On about two evenings in five, the notice board announces from the first tick: shooting stars after dusk tonight — every extra camper who wishes adds a star piece to everyone's pile. Each wisher gets 2 pieces plus 1 for every other person who wished, capped at 6. Solo two, a couple three each, four friends five each. Every streak is server-scheduled so everyone sees the same one at the same moment, and "did you see that one?" is always answerable.

Expressive

Campsites in the open

Your own patch of ground on the lawn by the campfire, with a tent you can upgrade to a cabin and a garden bed from the free tier up. Deliberately no walls and no interior — decorating happens where people walk past and comment, because the audience is the point of decorating.

The rule is printed on the notice board, because a rule the game never states does not exist — and that printed line is the invitation mechanic. It is the thing one partner screenshots and sends, and it works before the event has even started. On why Starfall's formula is public

Generosity, and its infrastructure

Two verbs, and between them they cover everything. Gifting is synchronous and atomic — hand something to someone standing next to you. Mail is the asynchronous half: a post stand at the hub, up to 500 characters, one item or an acorn attachment, a per-sender cap so no one can flood you. Acorn attachments exist for one specific reason: without them there is no verb in the game that lets a veteran stake a new friend a thousand acorns for a rod.

There is no trade screen and there will not be one. Escrow machinery is the game announcing it expects your friends to cheat you.

Records, not leaderboards

Every catch rolls a size, skewed toward small so a big one means something. The camp record book holds a per-species best for the campground and names the holder and how long they have held it, never the centimetres. Dethronement is written to be elegiac rather than competitive: "Willow's record held 51 days." Holder names are snapshots that outlive the player's profile — the design already believes the endgame is being remembered by a place.

The trophy mount, which consumes the fish, stays the only place a catch and its number are physically displayed together. The record book is the index; the mount is the museum.

What the design refuses, in writing

The refusals matter as much as the features, because each one is a specific failure mode someone had to argue for and lose.

Global or weekly leaderboardsA wall of one unbeatable number is a leaderboard with worse texture. Records are the answer.
Versus contests and timed windowsTier thresholds turn a hands-free wait into a group deadline — worse than versus, because the player who came to chat now costs everyone a tier. The derby is cooperative, day-long and has no announced target.
Trade screens and marketplacesGifting plus mail is the complete generosity infrastructure. Price discovery between friends is not a feature.
Seasons and date-exclusive contentBanned twice in writing. Conditions are the rotation; the notice board is the forecast.
Daily login rewards and watering streaksA break condition is a punishment schedule. The orchard's twenty-hour cooldown is the right shape: miss it for a week and lose nothing.
A private house interiorIt would be the game's first wall — avatar hidden, chat severed through a door, a long solo activity in a game whose premise is one shared twenty-metre bubble.
A second campsite lawn far from the hubSplitting the campsite ring splits the population, and population is the one resource that cannot respawn. If sites get scarce, the existing ring grows.
Capacity-limited fishing spotsIt would turn "go stand next to your friend on the dock" into a queue.
Prestige, New Game+ and bars that never fillA bar that never fills is exactly the chore chart this game is a reaction against. Both ladders end, and say so.
Idle play counting as companyThe desktop idle widget can never wish on a star and never counts toward the contributor tally. "More friends" has to mean more people, by construction.

The full social feature set, and what each one is for

Feature	Shape	The reason it exists
Proximity chat	20 m bubble, moderated, rate-limited	The unit of social design. Campsite siting, the no-interior ruling and the fire radius are all argued in terms of staying inside it.
Emotes	8, one fire-adjacent only	The Marshmallow Roast plays only near a fire, so using it puts you next to someone.
Nameplates	Names over avatars	Before them, campers were anonymous animals until they spoke.
Seeing others fish	Rod, line and a bobber that dips on their bite	In a sixteen-player game built around fishing, remote players used to stand at the water empty-handed.
Catch bursts	Scaled by rarity, fires for remote catches	A common is a polite sparkle; a legendary is a white-gold column you can see from across the lake. Other people's luck is a shared event.
The camp larder	Shared storage from camp level 5	The most communal facility a camp can own, and the direct answer to what a camp is for once gear is personal.
Photography	Camera pose is visible to everyone; polaroids save locally	Photos are social at capture time — a raised camera gathers a huddle and everyone hits an emote. A weekly prompt on the board carries no reward and no verification: pure invitation.
The merchant boat	Arrives on forecast dates, docked all session	Sells camp upgrades, so every purchase is a visible change to the shared camp. Docked all session rather than for a window, so it can never be a trapdoor.
Hot Spring Hollow	A soak that pays the communal fire bonus	A second group-payoff venue away from the hub, so the map has more than one place a group naturally ends up.
The delivery rail	Owed things wait indefinitely and arrive on your next join	No badges, no expiry, no summons. Mail, star pieces, derby shares and garden yields all ride it.

What playtesting changed

The sharpest note from an outside playtester was a single sentence: "'chat away' is a lie, because if you chat you are very likely to miss the fish." The game makes that promise out loud, so this was a broken promise rather than a missing feature — and the cause was not reaction time. While the chat box had focus, no key reached the game at all. Now, while a bite is live, any key hooks the fish and the keystroke interrupts typing rather than landing in the text box.

That fix had a knock-on nobody expected. Common and uncommon fish had been exempted from losing on a bad minigame score, justified explicitly as not punishing "the player who is mid-sentence in chat". Once chatting no longer ate the hook, that justification expired — so the exemption went, and a zero score can now lose any fish.

A second bug was purely multiplayer, and only ever hit guests: movement allowance was being discarded between network messages, so a bursty connection quietly lost metres. A six-metre run could land you 1.7 metres from where you started, permanently, and the game would then tell you that you were "too far away" to fish. On the host's own machine there is no network jitter, which is exactly why it never happened to the person testing.

Two process lessons were written down and kept: a check that cannot pass is worse than no check, and a broken check got blamed on the user — the first reading of that failure was "you must have had the game open." It was a bug, and the person was innocent.

06 — Content

What is actually in the box

Fish across 8 waters

Ingredients, bugs and crops

Recipes, 6 known at the start

Named places

Items on the store shelf

Quests on the notice board

Shared camp upgrades to buy

Playable animal species

How rarity is distributed

The forty-five gatherable items are not all foraged: eleven are bugs caught with the net, seven are grown in a garden bed or picked from the orchard, and one only falls out of the sky.

Content	Common	Uncommon	Rare	Legendary	Value range
Fish (92)	24	28	27	13	8 → 180 acorns
Ingredients, bugs & crops (45)	19	17	8	1	4 → 90 acorns

Recipes split 29 / 21 / 7 across the three station tiers. Six are known from the start; the other fifty-one are discoveries, and together they are worth a substantial fraction of the whole climb. Every legendary fish sits behind two simultaneous conditions.

What things cost

Item	Acorns	What it does
A seed	4	Carrots are fifteen real minutes
Camp pot	180	A second cooking slot at your own site
Basket	250	One more item per gather
Gloves	300	Better forage quality
Lantern	400	Reveals hidden forage within 10 m
Sturdy rod	600	Better odds on uncommon, rare and legendary
Bug net	600	The fifth verb — about 13 minutes of income
Trophy mount	1,200	Displays one fish and its size, permanently, to everyone
Premium Tent	1,800	Awning and lantern, a bigger pad, twelve pieces of furniture you can place, eight garden cells
Fine rod	2,500	The largest rarity shift in the game, and the last rod there will ever be
Camp upgrades	400–3,000	Twelve shared structures the whole camp can see — mostly dressing, but a few are real facilities: a drying rack, a greenhouse, an apiary
Cabin	9,000	A real shell, a bigger pad, twelve garden cells

For scale: a player earns roughly 2,880 acorns an hour. The campsite ladder tops out around 10,800 — a weekend arc, not a month — and it exists partly to be the large acorn sink the game otherwise lacks after the fine rod. It buys places rather than power, which is the one shape the design does not refuse.

Campsites

A ring of pads hugs the hub at sixteen to twenty-two metres — close enough that a camper at their own site is inside the campfire's chat bubble or a footpath's. Fewer, closer, louder. Three open when campsites do, and the ring grows as the camp levels, reaching eight by the Standing. Three tiers: a free tent at claim, a Premium Tent, a Cabin. Guests never place, move or take anything on your pad; the verbs simply do not appear for them. Decorating awards no XP and grants no buffs — expression is never power.

A tier-up fires a camp-wide line — "Maple's cabin just went up by the east path" — because the reveal is the housewarming. Sites never expire, packing up is free and returns everything, and your tier is remembered forever.

07 — Where it goes

The Standing, and everything after the build-out

Camp level 12 finishes the camp as a mechanism. Levels 13 to 20 are a different kind of ladder: each rung banks one Camp Boon, chosen at the notice board by any member, first claim wins, nothing expires. The camp picks eight from an open catalogue — so no two mature camps look alike, and a person who joined yesterday can be the one who chooses boon eighteen.

The opening boon catalogue

The camp hall

A roofed indoor space — the rain destination, and home of the record book.

The Fire Tower opens

Climbable, with a panorama and a camp logbook of things spotted.

Hot Spring Hollow

The soak: a cozy bonus that scales with how many people are in the water.

Drying rack & smokehouse

Fish into preserved ingredients — a real second cooking chain.

A second orchard ring

Six more plots and a third tree species.

The standing derby basket

Cooperative, windowless, day-long. Pays a cookable thing and no acorns.

The display tank

At the hall, filled automatically from the record book.

A permanent bonfire

At a place of the camp's choosing — a third spot that earns the gathering bonus.

World-state boons

Better rare spawns campground-wide, more frequent hotspots, a merchant who calls more often.

Two of the eight rungs are not free choices: they each add a campsite pad, reaching eight pads by the Standing. That is deliberate — it is the one mechanical reason to join an established camp rather than found a new one. Reaching level 20 puts the camp's name on the ferry route board and carves it into the island's signposts.

New content arrives as catalogue rows, never as new rungs. That is the whole headroom mechanism: no live camp ever has its progress re-priced by an update.

The systems on the way

System	What it adds
The Almanac, rendered	Most of the data already persists per player and simply is not shown. Nobody grinds a collection they cannot see — this is the single largest gain in felt content per hour of work anywhere on the list.
Cosmetics via sets	A set is a named collection over the content grid — the Mirror Tarn six, the rain-only nine, the alpine herbs — declared as a list plus a reward. The set is the unlock condition, the cosmetic is the payout, and both are data. This is how "many cosmetics to earn" ships without a single balance decision.
Bugs, properly	The emptiest content class in the game by a wide margin, and the same grid maths that makes new water so valuable applies to it.
Forecast and away-lines	The events already happen; they never reach an absent player. A record falling while you were away should arrive as a letter.
Lighthouse Point & Little Isle	Cast-distance pool selection at the cape; a boathouse and a shared rowboat glide to the isle. The first content where the sea is a place rather than a backdrop.
Titles	Deliberately last. They would be the game's first per-player have/have-not axis in a codebase where every unlock is camp-shared. If built: chosen not imposed, never a second nameplate line, behavioural conditions only, nothing hidden and nothing purchasable.

An artist-owned world

The island's shape is a single greyscale heightmap. An artist opens it in Blender, World Machine, Gaea or Photoshop, sculpts, saves and runs one command; the game reloads with the new landscape. Everything standing on the ground — trees, rocks, buildings, docks, fences — becomes GLB or FBX props placed by a plain-text manifest that an artist can edit directly or a tool can write. The goal is that owning the world does not require writing code, and that moving a tree never re-deals the position of every tree after it.

08 — Principles

The rules the design keeps returning to

These are not aspirations. Each one has settled at least one real argument, and several of them exist because the opposite was tried first.

Camp level opens places. Personal rank opens verbs.

Acorns are personal and already travel. This one sentence resolves every question about what a given unlock should hang off.

Hands travel; houses don't.

Your gear, your recipes, your Almanac and your money follow you everywhere. Your cabin, your camp's level and your records stay where they were earned. A lodge materialising in a bare clearing would make that camp's skyline imported rather than earned.

Gate the reason, not the land.

A locked path with nothing behind it is a refusal. A locked path with a plunge pool behind it is a reveal. The island is small enough that no gate is buying travel time.

Refusal precedes the press, with the number named.

🔒 Cabin — 9,000 acorns; you have 7,340. The game never lets you commit to something it is about to decline, and never declines without saying by how much.

Never charge for the door; charge for space.

Claiming a site is free and the free site is a real one, with its own garden bed. What money buys is room — a bigger pad, more you can place on it, more you can grow — never the key.

Expression is never power.

Decorating pays no XP and grants no buffs. Chalk is free at level one, because putting the date-night toy behind a grind taxes exactly the player it exists for.

A rule the game never states does not exist.

If a bonus is running, it is on screen with its number. If an event scales with friends, that formula is printed on the notice board — where it doubles as the invitation.

Records, not rankings.

Name the holder and the reign, never the centimetres. No cross-camp comparison, no directory publication, no global anything.

No order may destroy an item.

Every failure path in mail, gifting and delivery biases toward duplication over loss. Duplication is a bug; destroying someone's property is a betrayal.

Name your rate, or your table is decoration.

Any progression table that does not state the play rate it assumes is a guess wearing a suit. Every hours figure in this document names one, and admits its error bar.

Hosting is the terminal verb of a cozy game.On what a finished player actually does on a Tuesday

What a capped player does with forty-five minutes

Read the board — this week's photo prompt, the merchant forecast, which record fell while you were away. Two picks at the orchard on a twenty-hour cooldown, impossible to miss. Harvest the bed, plant something eight hours long before logging off. Chase tonight's window for a size record or a third star, not for the species — the reign, not the fish. Cook a three-star dish and hand it to someone, because a dish is a favour with a clock on it. Then decorate, take the week's polaroid, walk a newcomer to Mirror Tarn and mail them a thousand acorns.