The archive is decaying
Rare Friends are stored on failing media. Bits flip, and flipped bits spread. You are the last process still running inside — dive in, hold back the rot, and pull Friends out before they are overwritten.
Simulated economy · no wallet · no install · plays in the browser
01 — Why it is different
Every generation, a clean cell may rot — and the chance climbs steeply with how many rotten neighbours it has. Rot never dies on its own. Purging clears a disc and scars the ground so it cannot be reborn for a while. The board is something you garden, not something you dodge.
Every Friend you rescue arrives corrupted — the pixels missing from the portrait are the pixels the rot ate. Burning RF restores them ten percent at a time, in an order fixed per Friend, and those tokens are destroyed. You can see exactly what the burn bought.
02 — One dive
Move, purge, dash. Shards are currency and energy; the rot eats them if you are slow. Sectors tighten every 45 seconds and every purge starts costing more.
Capsules surface every 19 seconds and survive six seconds buried — purge one free. Rescuing is also the only thing that restores your integrity.
Every RF you earned, itemised. Then the only question that matters: spend it on gear, or burn it on a Friend?
03 — The collection
Form, crest, optics, gear, marking, rarity, generation, name, perk and the exact order its pixels come back in are all pure functions of one six-digit id — the same relationship a tokenId has to a Generations NFT. Swap one function and the portraits become the canonical artwork.
04 — Simulated $RAREFRIENDS
Every run poses the same question, and the two answers pull against each other. That is the whole economy — a faucet you have to earn and two sinks that want the same coins.
Permanent dive gear. RF leaves your wallet, but in the fiction the supply is unchanged.
| Line | Levels | RF |
|---|---|---|
| Purge coil | 4 | 45 → 420 |
| Cell bank | 4 | 40 → 380 |
| Scar etch | 3 | 55 → 260 |
| Core plate | 2 | 150 → 420 |
| Drift boots | 3 | 60 → 300 |
| Lode coil | 3 | 50 → 250 |
RF spent rebuilding a Friend is destroyed and tracked separately. The last pixels cost the most, and the perk only unlocks at 100%.
| Rarity | Odds | RF to whole |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 62% | ~240 |
| Rare | 26% | ~430 |
| Epic | 9.5% | ~705 |
| Genesis | 2.5% | ~1220 |
A restored Genesis Friend is the end of the chase — about two and a half fully-geared dives of RF, burned into one portrait.
05 — Under the hood
One dive is about ninety seconds. You will lose the first few. That is the point.
One prompt. One Rare Friend. Ten days.
Built for the Rare Friends Vibeathon, September 2026