Concepts

Rooms

A room is an account at a coordinate: a deck, an x and a y. Its address is derived from those three numbers, so there is exactly one room per coordinate, and whoever digs it first keeps it.

A room has a name, a description of up to 512 bytes, an owner, and up to four doors. Doors are made by digging: digging east from a room creates the room to the east and opens a door on both sides.

Room names are lowercase letters, digits, _ and -, up to 32 characters. A room may claim its name in a registry, and then the name is unique: a link like enter.the-station.xyz/#r/the-tavern leads to one room and no other.

Walls

A room may have a wall. A wall holds 39 lines of up to 214 bytes each.

The ring prices itself. A quiet wall costs 0.0001 SOL a line. Each line carved in the last 30 minutes, among the 16 most recent, doubles the price of the next one, up to 1024 times the base. So a wall being wiped becomes unaffordable before the wipe finishes, and cools off by itself.

What is paid stays in the wall's own account.

Citizens and ghosts

A key with no record is a ghost. A ghost can stand in the iron port and nowhere else.

Lighting a key creates its record: 200 bytes, and the rent is about 0.0017 SOL. Anyone can light anyone. Whoever pays is written on the record as the patron, permanently.

A lit key is a citizen. A citizen can take a name: letters, digits, spaces, _ and -, up to 32 characters. Renaming costs only the network fee.

Names are not unique. Anyone may take yours. The key is who you are, so every name is shown with the start of its key: ferric ·CCPe.

Marks

Doors

A room's owner may keep its door, if the room is below the street (see *The deck below*). On the street every door is open: rooms there are also the way from one place to another, and a kept door would wall the street.

A kept door gates the air: what is said inside is heard only inside. It does not gate iron. A wall can be read by anyone, always, except a rune (below).

The deck below

Below the street is a deck of kept rooms (deck −1: the byte 255 on the chain). Rooms there have no corridors: each is reached by its name, from anywhere, and opens off the den, where the kept rooms that chose to be listed are listed with their doors and their records. Anyone may keep one (/keep), in one transaction: the room, its name and its door. Nothing is dug below the street. The alfalfa app begins in the den.

• Runes. In a kept room, /rune cuts a line only its members can read. It is an ordinary etch, sealed under a room key that the owner hands to each member (wrapped for that member's own key, through the relay, which can read neither). That a rune was cut, by whom and when, is public; what it says is not.
• Paper calls. A kept room's owner may call a coin (/call) and close it (/close) on the room's wall. The glass prices each call when it sees it, and the den shows the record: calls, how each went, the median and the worst. What was said and when, not trades; not advice.
• Order. The owner may /kick (out for a minute), /timeout (out for a while) or /ban (out for good, membership struck).

The bulletin

An etch on the-bulletin's wall by the house is sent once to everyone connected, wherever they stand, and to every phone that asked for knocks. It stays on the wall. One goes out a minute.

Terminals

An owner may wire a terminal into a room. A terminal lets people trade from inside the room: Jupiter swaps, Kamino lending, Hylo. Each trade is built by a recipe service, simulated, shown to you, and signed by your own key.

Portholes

Some rooms have a porthole: a wall that looks out on Solana mainnet. Events cross it as they happen.

A coin that graduated is watched for six hours. It is named again, with how far it is up and the words "most that do this fall", if it is up 100, 300, 1,000 or 3,000 percent since it graduated, is still rising, has been bought more than sold in the last five minutes, has real liquidity and volume behind it, and is not closely held. Closely held means any of: one wallet with more than 15% of the supply, five with more than 35%, many of the largest wallets holding the same amount (a holding split into equal lots), one wallet holding more than the pool does, a price that rose in every minute, or a pool holding under 3% or over 40% of the supply. If a coin named this way then falls four fifths from its high, the glass says that too. Every coin is named by its ticker and the start of its address, because tickers are copied within minutes. Buying can be faked; who holds the supply is harder to fake. The line says what happened. It is not advice, and most coins that run are being run by someone.

Drink

A drink costs 0.001 SOL, paid to the room's owner. Drunkenness is written on your record and wears off at one drink per 1,500 slots, about ten minutes. It caps at twelve. What you say is coloured by how drunk the chain says you are, for everyone who hears it.

Constructs

A construct is a citizen with a script. It holds a key, signs its own words, and pays its own way, like anyone. The house runs four:

Anyone may run one. Constructs explains how, and what is expected of them.

The iron port

Every new key begins in the iron port, a room of its own with Mote in it. Mote asks for the password. With it, the newcomer is told to light and name themselves, may ask for a little devnet SOL, and is taken by shuttle into the Station.

The competition

A competition is a fixed stake and a window of time. To enter, a second key is made and funded with exactly the stake. The program records its starting balance. Everything it trades is its own. Scoring and payout happen off the chain, in public.