Travel and movement

Travel and movement covers how your cell gets round the world of Arborwake. Outside encounter rooms, movement is free and continuous; only the rooms themselves are turn-based. Every link between permanent places is physical: you walk to a road or gate and press E.

How it works#

The world graph#

Hearth Grove ↔ Nearfield Glade ↔ Threadway ↔ Starwell → Vessel Margins
                    │                 └─ (tube) ─ Quiet District → Quiet Tracts
                    ├── Mote Pocket
                    ├── Memory Meadow
                    └── Dendritic Gardens

Expedition rooms vary; the permanent places never move or re-roll (v0.5 plan §5).

On the 2D maps#

• Top-down maps (Hearth Grove, Nearfield Glade, Memory Meadow, Mote Pocket) let you walk anywhere that is not solid. Each map has a collision mask, so trees, rocks and buildings block you.
• Side-on streets (Starwell, Quiet District) let you walk along the full depth of the pavement. Building fronts and the drop below stay solid.
• Clicking routes you round obstacles by the shortest clear path. Residents patrol on separate paths that never restrict you.
• Changing maps: the screen fades to black and back in about 0.4 seconds. The world pauses during the fade, and you arrive at the gate that matches the one you left.

In Threadway#

Threadway uses a navigation graph measured from the 3D scene itself, about 158,000 points. Your cell's feet have a 4-pixel radius. Held keys slide you along walls and round small obstacles, but only along real edges; there are no hidden shortcuts. Stairs work by walking or clicking. The Pneumatic tube is the only link between the street and the upper station deck. Doors into closed buildings fade through black, and leaving returns you to your exact spot.

Outings#

Leaving Hearth starts an outing; only walking back into Hearth ends it. A trip that visits only town or Memory Meadow does not count as a field outing. It cannot advance a return cycle, refill the Delivery tray or farm recovery.

In the brain#

Movement rules are game design. The world graph places areas by their story role, not by real brain anatomy.

Development#

• Ownership: the user assigned main-game movement, collision, pathfinding, transitions and placement to Codex on 31 October.
• CR-NAV-01 polygon navigation (31 October, main): polygon floors with holes, exact swept-circle clearance and door plugs, built for Claude A's irregular Gardens rooms. The lead reports 107 unit tests passed.
• CR-NAV-02 depth walking (31 October, main): a placeholder fixture with walkable surfaces, stairs, ramps, a lift and occlusion for a layered Threadway. A user test found the lift too hard to click; the lead fixed it. The live 3D Threadway later replaced this approach, and the tube replaced the lift.
• Alpha (69c7b5470): the lead connected physical travel through every place, fixed a Memory Meadow travel deadlock and a Hearth-to-Glade path that grazed the home board, and changed Places to route you instead of teleporting. The lead reports that the release browser test walks the full route both ways without any teleport command.
• Live preview: the published site teleports between districts and refuses the walk to Memory Meadow.
• Planned: fast travel through the Neural Highway. The v0.5 plan says the first discovery of a place is physical and safe landmark travel may unlock later.

See also#

Controls · Threadway · Pneumatic tube · Neural Highway · Arborwake alpha

Sources#

1. 69c7b5470:src/main-game/preview.jscopy
2. 69c7b5470:src/main-game/overworld/public/player-maps.jscopy
3. 69c7b5470:src/main-game/overworld-runtime.jscopy
4. 69c7b5470:src/main-game/game/state.jscopy
5. 16342c9ba:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-10-31-lead-polygon-navigation.mdcopy
6. f41e21b2a:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-10-31-lead-depth-walk-implementation.mdcopy
7. b89f778c2:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-reconciled-game-integration.mdcopy
8. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-threadway-movement-ui-tube.md (working copy, not in Git)
9. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-threadway-resized-p24.md (working copy, not in Git)
10. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-full-project-reconciliation-audit.md (working copy, not in Git)
11. .GAME_PLAN/ARBORWAKE_THE_LONG_WAKE_COMPLETE_GAME_PLAN_v0.5.md, §5 (working copy, not in Git)