First Light: Resown

You are the Facer, keeper of a terraced hillside and of the bronze face-plate the keepers before you polished.

Every night the zyme — a pale, luminous ferment — wells up out of the fog-filled valley and climbs the terraces plot by plot, eating whatever grows there and swelling toward the shrine at the top of the hill.

At first light you turn the plate to the rising sun and throw its beam down the slope. Where it lands the bloom hisses off the soil — and leaves the ground scorched. Scorched ground grows nothing until it is resown, and seed only comes from harvest.

So every dawn is a triage: burn enough, and keep enough to sow.

Survive five dawns with the shrine untouched.

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The day

A full day is two minutes, and it turns whether you are ready or not.

Night	40 s	The zyme wells up on the lowest terrace and climbs. The plate is dead — there is no sun in it.
First light	30 s	The window. The beam burns at full strength: a bloom hisses off in about two seconds.
Day	40 s	Crops grow. The beam is a quarter as strong. Harvest what is ripe.
Dusk	10 s	The last sowing, then the light goes.

The soil

A plot goes bare → sown → crop → ripe. Harvesting a ripe plot returns it to bare and puts two seed in your hand; sowing costs one.

The zyme can take any plot. Burn it off and the ground is left scorched — still sowable, but it is where the bloom spreads back fastest.

And a crop that stands a whole night beside a bloom comes up leavened. The ferment has worked it, and it pays four seed instead of two — if you have the nerve to leave it standing one more night.

Reading the hill

• Top left — which dawn you are on, the phase, and how much of it is left.
• Top right — where the sun is, and what the plate can do with it.
• Left edge — how far the bloom has climbed toward the shrine. When that column fills, the light goes out.
• Bottom left — seed in hand. It is the whole economy.
• Across the bottom — the Almanac: the notes of the keeper before you, read aloud.

Controls

Play it with a mouse and keyboard, with a controller, or with a finger.

	Keyboard & mouse	Controller	Touch
Walk the terraces	WASD	left stick	on-screen stick
Raise the plate (hold)	hold left mouse or Space	RT	Face
Sow / harvest the plot you face	E or right mouse	X	Tend
Pause	Esc	Start	Pause

While the plate is up you are rooted to the spot, and walking turns you instead of moving you. The beam goes where you face, and lands on the first plot within about two plots of you.

On a menu: W / S or the left stick walk the rows, Space or A chooses, Backspace or B steps back — and on a touchscreen every row is a button, so you just tap the one you want.

What to look for

• The hour before dawn, when the froth is at its widest and the plate is still dead in your hands.
• The moment the sun clears the ridge and the plate lights: the beam pool on the soil, the steam coming off a burnt plot.
• A leavened crop standing alone on a terrace you should probably have burned.

One piece of advice

From the margin of the almanac, in the last keeper's hand:

Burn what you must and no more; the soil remembers a hasty hand.