You wake up
owing a debt
to a fire.

Pitch & Pillars

Lethal Company has the deadline. Content Warning has oxygen. R.E.P.O. has fragile cargo. We have the cold, and the fire as the one thing holding it back.

The fire is the chain. It feeds you warmth, light, food, and progression, and in exchange it owns your schedule and your economy. Every day you range out for fuel and materials. Every dusk you scramble home. Every night you sleep, and the fire spends what you stocked.

The five pillars

• The fire is the chain. Every system routes through the fire, the cold, or the distance from camp. If a feature touches none of those, it probably doesn't belong.
• No walls, no timers on screen. Pressure comes from things you can see and feel: falling light, rising wind, the storm wall, the warmth bar. You CAN walk into the dark. It will kill you, and that was your call.
• The story stays in the background. A player who skips every note and never touches the radio still gets a complete game. The lore is there for the ones who go looking.
• Danger is distance. The farther from the fire, the better the loot and the worse the odds. The map is the difficulty curve.
• Friendslop first. Two-man carries, arguments over what to burn, someone sprinting home at 2 percent warmth screaming on voice. Systems should generate stories, not tutorials.

Setting & Lore

Each player just woke up here. No memory of arriving, no idea where "here" is.

In co-op, everyone wakes in a different spot around the camp and converges on the fire because it is the only warm thing in sight. The camp is clearly lived-in and clearly not yours: the tent, the drying rack, a half burned journal, a radio playing a 1925 record to nobody. Up the hill there are seven graves. Nobody explains them.

The first legible line of the journal is the only tutorial the story gives: "feed the fire."

Rules for the writing

• The story never interrupts the game. No cutscenes, no forced reads, no lore gates.
• Drip feed, never dump. Every note answers one question and raises two.
• The entity, if there is one, is never named and never shown. What the player gets is wrongness that accumulates.

The wrongness

• New resources appear in the valley overnight, but never near the fire. The valley provides, but never where you are.
• Every clock in every ruin is stopped at the same time.
• The moon does not move.
• The radio only picks up music from about a hundred years ago. Sometimes it slips, like the band drops somewhere darker for a second.
• Things left outside the cabin overnight are gone by morning. Something takes them.
• The graves. Count them at the start of a run. Maybe count them again later.

Identity fragments

Rare finds that seem to belong to the players themselves: a photo, a watch with initials, a train ticket. Were you here before? Are you one of the graves? Never answered.

The Day Loop

One day is 10 to 15 real minutes. Four beats. This replaces the old night-gathering loop entirely.

Dawn is the reveal. Overnight resolution already happened while you slept: the fire ate its quota, the Offering Stone resolved, new resources appeared somewhere far out, and the night left evidence. Fresh tracks circling the cabin. Claw marks on the door. The sled someone forgot outside is gone.

Day is everything. Gathering, hauling, feeding the fire, crafting, the Offering Stone trek, cabin building, fishing. All of it competes for the same daylight. The core question of the whole game: is this worth the daylight it costs?

Escalation is spatial. The quota grows nightly. Nothing respawns near camp; new spawns land farther out. The harvest frontier expands outward at roughly the speed your gear improves. Nobody ever tells the player to explore. The fire's hunger does.

Dusk

The signature beat. It has to feel like an extraction, not a curfew.

The world is the clock

No countdown UI, ever. The player reads dusk from stacked natural signals:

• Light shifts amber, then blue. Shadows stretch.
• Wind picks up. The blizzard audio changes register.
• The storm wall on the horizon starts moving in, visible from almost anywhere.
• Wildlife audio drops out. Then the first calls start, far off.
• Warmth drain begins creeping up even in daylight gear.

Veterans read the wind and call the turn. New players learn by nearly dying once. Both of those are the game working.

The ramp, not the cliff

The scramble checklist

• Everyone back inside the light, then inside the cabin.
• Haul every loose resource indoors. Anything left outside is gone by morning.
• Stock the fire rack to quota. Then argue about overfeeding.
• Optional: leave an offering on the stone, if someone made the trek.

Night & Sleep

Night is a sleep phase, not a play phase. Going outside at night deals heavy cold damage even next to the fire. The night belongs to the valley.

• Sleep vote. All players in a bed starts the night.
• Staying up is not free. The fire keeps burning your night stock in real time while you dawdle. "One more craft" has a price. (Experiment flag: try a paused variant later, compare the feel.)
• The transition is an audio scene. Wind. The fire settling. Footsteps in the snow outside. Something brushing the cabin wall. The radio clicking on by itself for three seconds. You skip the night, but you hear enough of it to dread it.

Overnight resolution

The 3 AM emergency

The one sliver of night gameplay, kept rare so it stays terrifying. If the fire is starving mid-night, one player gets shaken awake: the fire is dying. Dash out in lethal cold, maybe 30 seconds of survivability, throw fuel on, get back inside. Everything outside is active. A punishment and a story generator, not a routine.

Morning evidence

The night always leaves a note. Tracks circling the cabin. Claw marks. A shutter open that was closed. Evidence scales with how deep into the run you are and how close the fire came to dying. It is the horror payoff for a night you never see.

The Fire

The outdoor bonfire at the center of camp. It is supernatural and we never explain it. It was burning before you woke up.

It stays outdoors forever, no indoor hearth: the fire is the landmark, the town square, and the god you pay rent to. The fire is why you wake up tomorrow. That is its whole design.

The rack, the quota

Next to the fire stands the log rack. What is in the rack at nightfall is what the fire has to survive on. The rack IS the quota interface: one glance says "we are 20 burn short tonight."

The quota is the fire's nightly appetite in burn value, and it rises every night. Starting point for tuning: night one around 20 burn, roughly +30 percent per night. The first night is easy on purpose. The curve gets mean.

Overfeeding: growth stages

Surplus beyond quota is never wasted. It accumulates toward the fire's next growth stage, and at each stage the team chooses what the fire becomes. No menu. The choice happens at the fire, and the fire physically changes: bigger pit, taller flame, new stone ring. The fire's size is the team's progress bar, visible from across the valley.

Failure, graduated

Burn Economy

Everything you can pick up has a burn value, the way Lethal Company scrap has a sell value. The fire is the counter you sell it to.

One number, one verb (throw it in), two outcomes (survive tonight, grow the fire).

Numbers are placeholders. The shape matters: junk hauling should out-earn stick gathering per trip, and premium fuel from deep zones should out-earn junk. Distance pays.

Two-man carries. Big furniture needs two players, moves slow, blocks sprinting. Deliberate friendslop: the armoire hauled through a blizzard at dusk is the story the group tells afterward.

No gold, no shop. The old currency loop is dead. Materials go to the workbench, burnables go to the fire, weird things go to the stone. Three sinks, no currency.

The Cabin

You start with the tent that was already in the camp. Building the cabin is the first team project.

Indoors is a real state. It is where resources are safe overnight, where you sleep, where the night cannot reach. No door-holding minigame: the cabin holds as long as the fire does. The threat at the walls is audio and evidence, not a breach mechanic. Keep it that way until playtests demand otherwise.

The radio moves in with you. It survives the upgrade.

Warmth & Cold

The cold is the antagonist. Warmth drains with distance, weather, wetness, and hour. It refills near heat.

Warmth as the leash

There is no wall around the camp and no rule that says stay close. Early gear gives you maybe 90 seconds of comfortable range. That is the leash. Every gear upgrade visibly extends the radius you can work in, so progression is exploration range. Range is earned, not unlocked by a timer.

• Weather: blizzard gusts spike the drain. The always-storming baseline stays, it is the identity of the place.
• Wet: falling into the pond or lake doubles the drain until you dry by a fire.
• Hour: late dusk multiplies the drain. Night is lethal in under a minute, even beside the fire.
• Health: one bar (hunger folded in). Warmth at zero drains health fast. Shivering and screen frost telegraph the stages.

Secondary hearths. Some ruins have fireplaces you can light and feed. A forward base extends your working range but splits the fuel economy. "We cannot afford two fires" is a great argument for a group to have.

The Workbench

The mundane half of progression. A bench in camp where scavenged materials become personal gear.

The split that matters: the fire is team progression, the workbench is your loadout. No shop, no gold, no magic. That all lives elsewhere.

Placeholders. Recipes should read at a glance and use at most three material types.

Crafting happens AT the bench, physically. UI shows recipes only when you are standing there. The cabin build and its upgrades run through the same materials pool: coat now or insulation now is a real argument.

The Offering Stone

A flat stone slab out at the old chapel. The one system that touches the supernatural directly, and it never says a word about itself.

The rates are the content

Nothing is documented in game. The exchange table is discovered by experimenting, and that knowledge is the reward: it becomes group lore ("pelts get you nothing, leave TEETH") and spreads between friend groups outside the game.

Impossible gear

Small passives and weird actives that mundane crafting can never make. A lantern that burns nothing. Boots that leave no footprints. A charm that makes the wolves hesitate one beat longer. One slot per player at first. Keep the power ceiling low: these are spice, not builds.

Deals with a price

Some returns cost more than the offered item: a max warmth chip, a voice that sounds wrong on proximity chat for a day, the radio refusing to play your song. Rare, always survivable, always story-worthy. The target sentence: "who let Dave take that deal?"

Fishing

Built and playtested already. Mechanics modeled closely on Gone Fishing, with a Dead by Daylight style skill check. Survives the redesign nearly unchanged.

A daytime activity that feeds people, fished from the pond near camp (shallow, safe, in view of the fire) or the frozen lake holes (better fish, farther, colder).

Food & Cooking

Light system, deliberately. No hunger bar. Food restores health and grants short warmth buffs, so eating well extends how hard you can push out.

• Berries: bushes in the near and mid valley. Eat raw, small heal.
• Fish: the main renewable. Raw is a poor meal, cooked is a good one.
• Soup: pot over the fire, needs the HOT stage. Fish or berries plus herbs, best meal, feeds the team.
• Rations: rare ruin finds. Good, instant, nonrenewable, and they carry lore weight. Whose rations were these?

Cooking requires the fire's HOT growth stage, which makes HOT a real competitor to WIDE and SLOW, and makes the cooking unlock feel like the camp maturing. Cooking is diegetic: pot on the tripod, put things in, wait, ladle out.

Not doing: spoilage, cooking minigames, recipe discovery trees. Food is fuel for people. The interesting decisions live elsewhere.

The Valley

A snowed-in valley ringed by impassable mountains. Procedurally generated per run from a seed, with authored structures dropped in by rules. Always storming. The world reveals itself in layers.

Danger is distance

Zones keep their names: Frostpine Forest, the Frozen Lake, the Frozen Wastes, the Deep Dark. Fixed compass bearings with seeded jitter, so maps are learnable across runs but never identical.

The storm wall

The whiteout is a visible storm front at the valley edges, and it closes in at dusk. It reads as weather, never as a wall, but it does the wall's job: it defines the playable space and the day's end. Walking into it is allowed. Visibility drops to arm's length, warmth drains several times faster, and the audio goes wrong. People will test it once.

Structures

Authored places dropped into the procedural valley by rules. Each one answers a piece of "where am I" and carries loot for its band. The ruins are the junk economy AND the storytelling.

Design rules

• Every structure readable as a silhouette in bad visibility from 40 meters.
• Every structure has at least one thing to burn, one thing to use, one thing to read.
• Never lock progress behind a structure. They are optional gravity, not gates.

Resources

Scarcity model

• Nothing respawns near camp. The near valley is a starter package, not an income.
• New spawns appear overnight in the mid and far bands only. The valley provides, never where you are.
• The practical effect: the harvest frontier expands outward at roughly the speed the quota grows. If tuning is right, teams always feel slightly behind.

Anti-hoarding: the left-outside-is-lost rule plus finite indoor storage keeps stockpiles honest. You cannot bank ten nights of fuel in a pile behind the cabin. The game stays about tomorrow.

The Roster

Every monster is a rule you can learn, and every rule has a counter you can execute under pressure. Deaths should feel like broken rules, not bad luck.

With night gathering dead, monsters are no longer the night threat. They are distance threats (each species owns a band), dusk threats (a couple get bold as light fails), and the night itself, which is never seen and never fought.

Tone budget: wolves are comedy, the Frozen are dread, the Wendigo is terror, the Worm is spectacle, the Night never shows itself. A session should hit at least two registers.

Combat stays light: melee, flares, firebombs. You can drive things off, but combat is a tax, not an income. Drops feed the Offering Stone, which is the only reason to pick a fight on purpose.

Co-op & Roles

1 to 4 players, proximity voice, roles emerge and are never assigned.

A duo doubles up. Solo does everything, and the tuning must respect that: quota scales with lobby size.

Proximity voice from day one of netcode. Distance and the blizzard muffle voices. Shouting has a cost in wolf country. This one feature carries half the genre.

The daily arguments (the actual content)

• Overfeed the fire, or bank materials for the cabin?
• Burn the rope, or keep the rope?
• Push one more ruin, or turn back now?
• Whose fault was the sled?
• Take the Offering Stone deal, or not?

Design systems that put two good answers in the room. The argument is the game.

Death & Failure

Individual death stays cheap and funny. Team failure stays existential and shared.

Death costs a day of gear and a body run, not the run itself. The valley does not let you leave that easily, which is lore if you squint. Solo death skips to dawn the same way.

Meta progression: none for v1 beyond stats and scoreboards. Runs are self-contained.

Current Build vs Redesign

The Unity prototype is deep into the old design. Here is what carries, what changes, and what dies.

Carries over as-is

• The valley generator: seeded terrain, zones, mountain ring, forest, structure placement.
• Warmth, health, wet, movement feel, footprints, blizzard, the lighting.
• The full fishing system. The pond with real water and diving, the frozen lake.
• Monsters as creatures (bodies, animation, voices, hit feedback). Their placement logic changes.
• The tent radio: public domain 1920s records through the haunted AM filter, opens on The Prisoner's Song.
• Camp art, asset pipeline (Kenney, Quaternius, CC0 audio), the Lethal Company filter, HUD framework, debug tools.

Changes meaning

• Day and night INVERT. Day is the play phase, night is the sleep phase. Night-only gathering dies.
• The fire: from quota-meter-with-upgrade-menu to rack, burn values, growth stages.
• The tent: from set dressing to the starting shelter of the cabin arc.
• Resource regrowth: from reset-at-dawn to no-reset with outer-band overnight spawns.
• Camp confinement DIES. Replaced by the warmth leash, the dusk ramp, the storm wall.
• The enchanting table splits into the Offering Stone (at the chapel) and the Workbench (in camp). Shop and gold die.
• Monsters redistribute from night waves to distance bands plus dusk boldness.

Dies entirely

Night gathering · the intermission · the whiteout hard wall · fire upgrade menus · the shop · gold · the spell system (anything worth keeping folds into Offering Stone charms) · night spawn waves.

Netcode (unchanged, deferred)

NGO host-authoritative, Steam lobbies and relay, Dissonance proximity voice. The redesign makes the hardest sync window disappear: night is a sleep cut, so overnight resolution happens on the host while everyone stares at a black screen. Free lunch. Two-man carries and the sled stay hard. Do not start netcode until the solo game survives ten playtest days without design churn.

Pivot Roadmap

Ordered so the game is playable after every step. Single player first, netcode after the loop proves out.

Estimate honesty: phases 1 and 2 change the game's spine and should come as one continuous push. Everything after is separable.

Open Questions

Staying up past dusk

Current call: the fire burns real night stock while you dawdle. Experiment flag: try a paused variant later, A/B the feel.

Quota curve numbers

Start 20, +30 percent per night is a guess. Tune against real hauls.

Growth stage choices permanent?

Lean permanent. Choices should scar.

Frostbitten dawn: recoverable or death spiral?

Needs testing. Add pity valves if spiral.

The ember lantern

A carryable piece of the fire that burns down and forces a return trip. Still attractive, unclear if the new loop needs it. Park until Phase 3 plays.

Cabin: extend or improve only?

Lean improve only. Scope control.

The tent afterlife

Keep, store, or burn it for 30.

Multiple offering slabs deeper out?

Park until the first one proves out.

Wolf grab-and-drag

Needs a downed-state design first, or drag replaces down.

Meta progression for v1

Current call: none. Score only. Shareable run seeds are a free feature if determinism holds.

The name

Is it still Sleepless Night now that nights are for sleeping? The irony might be the point: you sleep, the night does not. Revisit before any public posting.