Life is Binary

Basic Controls

• Movement: W A S D or Arrow Keys.
• Run: Hold Shift while moving. (Pro-tip: If all your vitals are above 80%, you automatically run much faster!)
• Interact / Pick up: Left Click on objects or items.
• Drop / Throw: Right Click to toss an item you are holding.
• Smartphone: Press Tab or click the phone icon to open your in-game smartphone.
• World Map: Press M or click the map icon to open the global map (zoom, pan, and see player stats).
• Inventory: Press I or click the bag icon to open your backpack.
• Pause Menu: Press Escape to save and exit or change settings.

Your Vitals

Managing your character's life is the most important part of the game. If your overall Life bar reaches 0%, you die. You can continue by paying 100 Bits, which refills all your bars, but it's best to stay healthy.

• Hunger: Eat Burgers, Steaks, Instant Noodles, or Snack Mix to keep hunger at bay.
• Hydration: Drink Water, Coffee, or Redbull. Some items affect your Energy too.
• Energy: Depletes over time and when you run. Sleep in your bed or drink Energy drinks to restore it.
• Creatine / Exercise: Keep your muscles healthy by exercising on the treadmill or taking Creatine supplements.
• Mood: Play the Arcade game or interact with entertaining items to keep your mood up.

BP-157: Available in the vending machine, this powerful multi-vitamin completely fills your Hunger, Hydration, Energy, and Creatine bars. The 2-Day, 5-Day, and 10-Day variants also apply a buff that dramatically slows down how fast those vitals drain for that many in-game days.

Farming & Economy

You start with a small amount of Bits and some seeds. Farming is your primary way to earn more Bits.

1. Open your phone and use the QuickMart app to buy seeds if you run out. Orders are delivered to your front porch. Note: Every delivery includes a 1 Bit Ping Tax that goes to the community fund!
2. Equip a seed and left-click on the dirt patches outside to plant it.
3. Equip Water and left-click the planted seed to water it. (Plants won't grow without water!)
4. Wait for the crop to fully grow.
5. Harvest the crop and sell it at the Trader Bay monitor inside your house for Bits.

As you earn more Bits, you'll level up, unlocking the ability to buy better seeds and expand your backpack size.

Crypto Miners

Want passive income? Buy a Crypto Miner from the desk shop or craft one. Once placed in your house, a Crypto Miner will passively generate Bits every single in-game day it is active.

• Miners must be placed and turned on (Left click to toggle).
• Active miners display their bit generation rate on their front screen.
• Miners use electricity. Watch your power meter to ensure you don't blow a fuse! Upgrading your Power Meter adds capacity to the Global Power Grid.

Global Community Systems

Your actions on the island affect the global community! Two major global stats are tracked on your map: the Global Power Grid and the Ping Tax Fund.

• Ping Tax Fund: Every time you order an item from QuickMart, you pay a 1 Bit Ping Tax. These Bits are pooled into a massive community fund. Every 7 days, this fund is disbursed back to active players. If you do nothing, you earn a minimum 1% dividend—but the more Ping Tax you pay and the more electricity you supply, the bigger your share!
• Global Power Grid: By crafting and installing Heavy-Duty Fuses into your Power Meter, you don't just increase your own capacity for Crypto Miners, you also contribute to the total Global Power Grid shown on the map screen. Supplying more power directly increases your weekly Ping Tax dividends.
• World Map (M): Press M to open the global map. You can zoom with the mouse wheel, click and drag to pan, and hover over other players to see their stats, coordinates, and send them a Friend Request right from the tooltip.
• Your Stats: Your game progress is now saved even if you haven't created a full account yet! Registering an account will safely carry over your stats. View your personal gameplay statistics (Hours Played, Games Tried, Seeds Grown, Crafts Built, Money Spent) by opening the login/profile menu on the top-right.

Crafting & 3D Printing

Your house is equipped with a 3D Printer and a Crafting Bench. These allow you to turn basic materials into valuable electronics and furniture.

• Blueprints: You will occasionally find or receive Blueprints. Pick them up, Right-Click, and select "Read blueprint" to learn new recipes.
• Crafting Bench: Here you can combine materials like Copper Wire, Glass Tubes, and Silver Bars to craft advanced items like Heavy-Duty Fuses.
• 3D Printer: Use printed brackets and other materials from your Safe or Bag to print new furniture, miners, or decorative items.
• Deliveries: Pay attention to special deliveries! You might get free crafting materials dropped on your porch on certain days (like Day 10 and Day 20).

Pick Up & Quantum Drop Zones

Two square dotted-line pads sit on the floor of your apartment, one outgoing and one incoming.

• Pick Up Zone: incoming packages from QuickMart, friends, AI NPCs, and bonus deliveries land here. Walk over to grab them or right-click to claim everything at once.
• Quantum Drop Zone: outgoing packages go here. Place the items you want to ship, then open the Drone Drop console to dispatch them. Each shipment costs 1 qubit. The blue dotted square is the visual marker — if you drop something on it, you can ship it.

Drone Drop Courier

The Drone Drop app on your phone (and the in-apartment console next to the Quantum Drop Zone) is the only way to get items from your inventory to anyone else in the world. Each dispatch costs 1 qubit.

1. Place the items you want to ship on the Quantum Drop Zone (or use the console's "Pull from inventory" shortcut).
2. Open Drone Drop, switch to Friend or AI Mission mode.
3. Pick a recipient (or pick which AI mission this shipment is for).
4. Hit Dispatch Drone (1 qubit). You'll see the drone animation lift off with each line item.

For AI missions specifically: the Quantum Drop Zone is the only way to complete an NPC fetch quest. The NPC will not pay you out from chat alone — even if you have the items in your pocket. They'll politely point you back to the Quantum Drop Zone if you try.

Phone DMs & AI NPC Friends

Open the phone (Tab) and tap a contact to chat. Three AI NPCs are now in the world, each with their own persona and mission style:

• Maya — chatty plant-loving organizer who pitches lighthearted civic-event fetch missions (rally feeds, town-hall potlucks).
• Rex — gruff blue-collar fixer with a sharper, transactional tone.
• Nova — terse hacker-coded contact with stripped-down, slash-prefixed missions.

Politics in mission flavor is intentionally generic and fictional — no real parties, politicians, elections, or current news events. Just neighborhood civic life: rallies, town halls, voter drives, council meetings.

Mission Flow (AI NPCs)

1. An NPC offers a fetch mission in chat ("Ship 3 carrots for the rally feed — 25 Bits, you in?"). The mission tag appears under their bubble with the items + reward.
2. Tap ✓ Yes, accept or ✗ No, pass. The buttons send "yes" / "no" as chat replies and only show on the latest unanswered offer.
3. Gather the items via farming, crafting, or QuickMart.
4. Place the items on the Quantum Drop Zone in your apartment, open the dispatch console, pick the mission, and ship the drone (1 qubit).
5. The NPC immediately drops a "Drone just dropped off the package — thanks!" message into the thread and Bits land in your wallet.

Premium missions: bigger multi-step jobs that include a blueprint (e.g. T200 Advanced Miner). The NPC mails you the schematic to your inventory; you craft and ship for a much larger payout.

Curated missions: hand-authored story steps from the Shadow Planet arc (see below). When one is available, the NPC will pitch it instead of a random fetch.

Shadow Planet & Field Notes

A multi-step storyline runs across all three NPCs about the Shadow Planet — the source of the evil energy bleeding into the other planets you can spot through your telescope. The arc is curated by the showrunners and unfolds in level-gated stages so it builds as you play.

• Curated missions look and feel like normal NPC missions but tag a clue when complete.
• Every clue you collect is filed into the Field Notes phone app as a chronological dossier.
• Complete the full arc to lower the Mind-Force battle threshold against the Shadow Planet — your final showdown is easier the more dossier evidence you've gathered.

Karma

Karma is your long-term reputation, shown on every player-stats panel as a tier label and a signed score. It floats up for good deeds and down for bad ones, persists across restarts, and is never reset just for paying coins.

Good deeds (positive karma):

• +5 — Complete a regular AI NPC fetch mission via the Quantum Drop Zone.
• +8 — Complete a premium (blueprint) mission.
• +10 — Complete a curated Shadow Planet arc mission.

Bad deeds (negative karma):

• −3 — Decline an offered mission. (One-offs are fine; serial decliners drift toward Sketchy.)
• −5 — Successfully hack another player (skim, surge, or bot surge — they're all hostile).
• −10 — Get arrested.

Every karma change pops a brief floating toast at the top of the screen so you feel the consequence in the moment, not just on the stats panel later.

GL1TCH

Your floating-toaster roommate shadows you around the apartment — chat, help, and attitude. It can get into trouble.

• Battery: the bot drains power over in-game days. Top it up at the charging dock or it slows down.
• Surge / Bot Surge: if another player hacks you and routes a bot surge, your GL1TCH enters a panic loop — it stops running to you, freezes a short distance away, and spins in circles waving its arms back and forth.
• Recalibrate: walk over to the Recalibrate console to clear the panic state. The bot resumes its normal behavior immediately.

Cyber Ops & Hacking

The Cyber Ops panel (in the player map) lets you run an SSH-style breach minigame against other live players. Outcomes:

• Skim — quietly transfer Bits from their wallet/bank to yours.
• Surge — fry their Heavy-Duty Fuses, damaging their power infrastructure.
• Bot Surge — push a hostile payload to their GL1TCH, putting it into the panic loop above.

Risks: each failed hack increases your fail streak. Hit the threshold and the police trace and arrest you — your character is sent to jail until a future game day, and a "BUSTED" overlay locks the screen for a few seconds. Every successful hostile hack costs −5 Karma; getting arrested costs −10 Karma.

You can also defend against incoming hacks by raising your Cyber Security level. Both your security and hack skill levels show up in your stats panel.

Telescope & Planet Discovery

Climb to your roof and use the telescope to scan the sky.

• The lens starts broken — find or craft the parts to fix it before you can spot anything clearly.
• Once fixed, you can identify and discover planets. Each discovery is recorded on your stats and shown around your home base on the World Map.
• The Shadow Planet is a special target tied to the curated Side Quest line — the more clues you collect in your Field Notes, the more vulnerable it becomes to a final Mind-Force confrontation.

Pause Menu & Player Stats

Press Escape to bring up the pause menu. The right column has two tabs:

• Leaderboard — global rankings by Watts (power supplied), Days alive, and Bits earned. Defaults open in the pause menu so you can immediately see where you rank.
• Your Stats — the full unified stats list: Karma, Profession, Farm level, wallet, lifetime earnings, packages shipped, ping tax share, planets discovered, hack/security levels, and more.

The same Your Stats list appears in the Settings modal and on the welcome screen, so you can browse your progress from anywhere.

Binary Invaders Arcade

Need a break from farming? Head over to the arcade cabinet in your living room.

Play Binary Invaders! Use A and D to move your ship and Spacebar to shoot. Defeat the waves of descending 1s and 0s. Watch out—some will dive down to attack you!

For every wave you clear, you'll earn 5 Bits, which will pop out of the machine when you finish playing.