You close the client and the world carries on. Eggs hatch, crafts finish, auctions close, shops restock, and your Order’s Covenant runs its month down. None of it waits for you, and none of it is visible unless you are sitting in front of the game.

The companion app is a thin link back into a world you are currently absent from. It is not a second way to play Bestia. It is a way to stay in correspondence with the place while you are somewhere else.

Five Rules That Keep It Honest link

The app can act on the world, not merely watch it. That is a dangerous power to hand a phone, because the game’s principles rule out the obvious version of it — no global price board, no global quest finder, no magical interfaces.

Five rules make the difference. Every feature below obeys all five.

The last rule is the load-bearing one. A player who is logged in wins every race against a player with a phone, at every task, always. The app is how you avoid losing ground while you are away — never how you get ahead of the people who are actually there.

One feature breaks that rule on purpose. Ranging really is the better way to chart, to sense and to move mana and just to explore the Bestia world while connected to the real world, and it is allowed to be because it asks for something a keyboard cannot give: you have to get up and walk. What that costs the people who cannot is set out under Limits.

Two useful things fall out of the first two rules:

Information becomes a trade good. The app only knows what a courier told it. A player who travels knows more, and can sell what they know. That is a profession the app creates rather than one it deletes.

Nothing teleports. Your trade post’s owner fees still have to be collected in person, so the app dispatches a carrier to fetch them — and a carrier can be robbed. The rule survives intact, and somebody gets paid for the errand.

What Arrives link

The ledger’s plain reading surface. Everything on it has an age.

Each of those sends a notification when it finishes. It is worth saying plainly that the app’s most valuable feature is probably telling you an egg you started before breakfast is ready.

Keeping in Touch link

The one thing the app carries at no delay is words.

Your party, your guild and anybody who whispers you reach you on the phone exactly as they reach you in the client. The bond is thin, but it is thin enough to carry writing, and writing is all this costs — no goods, no gold, no position. None of it is an instruction to the world, so none of it travels at courier pace, and none of it hands an absent player anything a present one does not already have.

• Party and guild. Read and written from the app. The /p and /g your guildmates are typing at a keyboard arrive on the phone, and what you write back lands in their chat log.
• Whispers, both directions, to anybody you could whisper to in person.
• Local say, does not work via the app as the master is gone.

The skill gates hold. Chat and whispers still want Basic Skill Lv. 2 and parties still want Lv. 5, on a phone exactly as at a desk. An app does not teach you to speak.

What it cannot do is put you in the fight. You can be told a raid is going badly; you cannot help with it. Hearing about it and being asked to come are two different things, and the second one is a muster.

Ranging link

The body stays put. Something else goes for a walk.

A Master who is logged off is in the other dimension, and a Master in the other dimension is not lying idle — they are simply not here. The spirit still drifts along the mana bond, and where it drifts it can look, listen, and touch mana.

Ranging is the app turning your real walking into that drift. Your phone moves, your spirit moves. When you log back in, your Master is standing exactly where you left them, because the body never went anywhere.

Anchoring and Scale link

The app does not map the Earth onto the world. It maps movement.

• When you log off, the app anchors to where you are — both in the real world and in Bestia.
• Every metre you walk from there moves your spirit three metres in Bestia. It is the same 3× the world already uses to run Bestia time faster than real time. A step here is three strides there.
• When you log in, the anchor is thrown away. The next session starts wherever your Master actually is.

The world is 128 km across, so roughly 43 km of real walking crosses all of it — a few weeks of ordinary commuting rather than an expedition.

Two consequences matter more than the arithmetic.

The app never sends you anywhere real. Only displacement counts, so no place in Bestia corresponds to any particular street, building or address. The app can ask you to walk some distance in some direction. It can never ask you to go to a place.

Where you live does not matter. There are no fixed points of interest to be near or far from. A player in a city and a player in a village who walk the same distance range the same distance.

What a Spirit Can Do link

A spirit can carry mana. It cannot carry matter. That one line decides the whole feature.

Ranging is reconnaissance and mana work. It is never transport, and never a shortcut across the map.

Charting on Foot link

Charting an area is already a walking minigame. Three to five points spawn 300 to 800 metres away, each has to be reached, and each ends in a moving-compass check. At 3× that is 100 to 270 metres of real walking per point.

None of it needs redesigning. The minigame was written for a player with legs, and the app simply supplies the legs. The difficulty tiers carry over, and so do the 10 per km from explored land, the 0.5 per percent of mana concentration, the 10 per level of Cartography, and the vicinity cooldown after a failure.

Ground charted this way is the same ground, on the same collective map, as anything charted at a keyboard.

Mana Work link

This is where ranging stops being a pleasant side activity and starts mattering to the world.

Mana density drives rift events, mana storms, and what spawns where. The three Orders disagree about it completely: Chaos wants it raised, Eternity wants it walked back down, the Circle wants it held inside a band. A ranging spirit carrying the right mana nudges it, slightly, along the ground it covers.

Slightly is the point. One member’s walk to work moves nothing worth measuring. Ten members covering their ordinary week move a region — and a rival Order ranges the same region back the other way.

It fits the scoring the Covenants already use. A Covenant is counted in region-days: presence, sustained over time. That is exactly what a month of commuting produces. The Circle’s Covenant is weighted by how contested a region is, so the best place to walk is the one a rival Order is walking too.

And it gives the Orders something they badly need — a way for the two thirds of the membership who are at work to still be doing their Order’s work.

It is not free. Ranging into heavy mana draws on the sleeping body’s stamina. The drain stops at a floor and can never kill you; an app must not starve somebody who forgot to close it. But you can log in tired, and a Master under a third of their stamina walks slower and recovers worse.

Keeping It a Walk link

Displacement counts only inside a band of human walking speeds, reached by any means. A car or a train contributes nothing. That single rule does three jobs. It keeps ranging a walking mechanic rather than a driving one. It removes any reason to range while doing something that needs your attention.

Standing Orders link

Your Master is doing nothing while you are away. Your Bestia need not be.

The postal system already lets players train and assign Bestia to run delivery routes instead of leaving it to NPC couriers, and a Bestia already earns experience for ordinary work — 3 per km travelled, 2 * resource_level + 5 per unit gathered, at roughly half the rate of fighting. Standing Orders are how you set that going from the app:

• Run a route. Assign an idle Bestia to a postal run, and it earns the courier’s cut that would otherwise be lost to an NPC.
• Work a deposit. Send a Bestia to gather from a resource node you have already charted.
• Change order of your Bestia. You can send them to different locations or switch their orders e.g. stop working in the mine and deliver goods instead.
• Breed. Pair two Bestia in a breeder, prime it with up to three scrolls, and collect the egg when it hatches.

This is deliberately the slow, safe half of the game. None of it makes you stronger in a fight. It makes you better supplied, which is what the crafting economy actually runs on.

It is not free of risk either. A Bestia on the road can be killed, and whatever it was carrying is lost with it. Insurance already exists as the answer, and a standing order is exactly the situation it was written for.

The Broker’s Wire link

The most useful thing an absent player can do for the people who are present is put paid work on the boards.

Every commission is funded into escrow before anybody sees it, so a commission posted from a phone is real, paid work waiting for whoever is online to pick it up. Your gathering backlog gets done while you are at your desk job, and somebody who is logged in gets a job that was worth doing.

• Post Gather, Transport, Bounty and Escort commissions, funded from gold you already deposited with a broker in person.
• Read the boards of towns you have visited, and hear from brokers you hold local honor with. The news travels at courier pace, so it is always a little out of date. There is still no global quest finder, and a phone does not quietly become one.
• Sign a contract from wherever you are.

That last one deserves a warning rather than a footnote. Signing still enforces the level floor, and it still posts collateral the moment you put your name to it. Sign something you cannot get to, and the deadline runs out while you sleep: you lose the stake, you lose honor, and the brokers talk. The app hands you rope. What you do with it is your business.

Trading by Letter link

Prices in Bestia are local by design. You see what things cost where you are standing and nowhere else, because knowing that grain is cheap in the west is knowledge you earn by travelling — and that is the whole basis of playing a merchant. A phone that showed every price at once would delete the profession in an afternoon.

So the app does not show you prices. It shows you reports, and it lets you act on them the way a merchant abroad always has: through an agent, by letter.

• Limit orders. Buy forty sacks of grain at Ashfen, no more than 12 gold the sack. The letter travels, the order is filled at whatever the price turns out to be, and anything above your limit is simply not bought. You find out afterwards.
• Relisting. Items an auction house posted back to you are already sitting in a postbox beside it. Putting them up again costs a fresh listing fee and no travel.
• Collection. Send a carrier to empty your trade post’s till and post the coin on to you, for the usual freight fee.

Trading on news six hours old is a real disadvantage, and it is meant to be. A merchant standing in the market beats you every time. What you get in exchange is that your capital is not idle for the fourteen hours a day you are not playing.

The Covenant Watch link

An Order’s Seasonal Covenant runs for one real month, and is already described as a public quota “shown to everyone as a progress bar”. The world’s own fate is already described as “one gauge, publicly readable, showing where the world currently stands against its predicted hour”. Both were specified on the Factions page long before anybody thought about phones. The watch is where they live.

• Your Order’s Covenant bar for the season now running, and what it managed last season.
• The world gauge T — how far this world has run against its predetermined life span. It is the single number all three Orders are ultimately scored on.
• The current Doomsday stage, from Omens through to Cataclysm. A doomsday takes six months to a year to unfold, which is a pace a phone suits far better than a play session does.
• Regional influence — but only for regions where your Order keeps a temple, or where you have charted the ground yourself.

If you range, your own month of walking is counted here too, against the same bar as everybody else’s.

Reading the world gauge accurately is a Circle speciality, so the instrument that does it is Circle-made. The other two Orders can buy one, and the Circle decides what it costs them.

Musters link

World events are rare, emergent and over quickly. They need bodies at short notice, and most of an Order is at work.

A muster is a call an Order puts out to its members’ ledgers: a rift has opened at Ashfen, and we are going. It carries the place, the reason, and how long the caller thinks they can hold. Logging in and travelling there is still entirely on you, and most of the time you will not make it. Sometimes you will, and that is the point.

This is the feature that most directly answers keep players connected. Everything else in the app tells you what already happened. A muster tells you something is happening now, and asks.

The Charthouse link

World Exploration promises this outright: the world “is meant to be mapped collectively by the playerbase, and anyone can check that collective progress by viewing the shared world map online.”

The charthouse is that promise, in your pocket:

• Your own charted ground, drawn over the collective map of everything the server’s players have explored between them.
• Somewhere to plan a route, mark what you want to look at next, and queue a survey target for when you log in — or go and chart it on foot, by ranging.
• Chart fragments traded with other players. Maps are items, Cartography merges them and the post moves them — so the trade happens in the world, and the app only arranges it.

What the App Cannot Do link

A short list, and a firm one.

• No fighting. No combat of any kind, at any range.
• No moving. Your Master is exactly where you logged out, and will be there when you get back. Ranging moves your spirit; it never moves your body.
• No travelling. Nothing in the app shortens a journey. Couriers travel; you do not.
• No hands. No crafting at a bench, no rituals, no catching, no building.
• No searching the world. No global price board, no global quest finder, no lookup of any kind that a person standing in the world could not perform themselves.

The rule underneath all of them: the app never grants a power that exists only because you own a phone.

Limits link

Honest about where this stands:

• None of it exists yet. The public API is a promise on the REST API page and nothing more. Most of what the app would read — quests, NPCs, shops, currency, the whole economy — is designed but not implemented, and the servers currently drop their database on every restart.
• Notifications need a budget. A game with this many timers can generate an unpleasant number of interruptions. What is worth waking somebody up for is a design question of its own, and it is not answered here.
• Ranging asks for something not everyone can give. Making the walk genuinely the best way to chart, sense and move mana is a deliberate choice, and it costs players who cannot walk far, or at all. Two things soften it and neither removes it: displacement counts by any means inside the same speed band, so a wheelchair counts exactly as a pair of legs; and everything ranging achieves stays achievable in the world on your own two feet, only slower. That is a real trade, and it belongs in writing rather than in the small print.
• The charting timer is unresolved. The minigame puts a time limit on reaching each point. On a phone that limit has to run in Bestia time, or come off altogether, because nothing in this game may ask somebody to hurry across a road.
• The ledger’s reach is unspecified. How far the bond stretches, whether a finer ledger reaches further, and what a Master with no ledger at all can still see are all open.