Science-Based 100% Dragon MMO

You are a dragon. Only dragons. A persistent shared world, third-person over-shoulder flight.

Every trope here has a real mechanism behind it, and the Codex shows you its equation with your own dragon's live numbers plugged in.

The loop

Hunt → thermoregulate → grow → hold territory → breed. Death is not a reset: you respawn as your own hatchling, inheriting your traits with mutation, lineage generation +1.

The eight systems

1. Energetics — Kleiber's law is real: BMR = 70 · M^0.75 kcal/day. (Check it: a 70 kg human comes out at 1694 kcal/day and 82 W. Reality: ~1700 and ~80.) Your reserve is fat, not a number — mass × 0.13 × 9000 kcal/kg. A deficit eats your own body.

2. Flight — L = ½ρv²S·C_L. Wing loading is mass/area. The full Pennycuick power curve decides what flight costs: induced power falls as 1/v, parasite climbs as v³, so the sum is U-shaped with a real minimum-power cruise. Hovering is the expensive corner — for a 400 kg adult it costs 3.2× the cruise minimum. That is why a standing launch is a different question from flying, and why past a mass threshold you simply cannot flap-launch. Find a cliff. Find a thermal.

3. Square-cube is not a metaphor — surface area goes as M^(2/3) while mass goes as M. Grow isometrically and you lose flap-launch around 70 kg. Pour growth into mass without paying for wings and you end at wing loading 909 — a brick with flaps. Over-invest in wings and a 400 kg adult flies fine. That choice is the game.

4. Thermoregulation — a two-node core→skin→air model with real insulation and vasomotor control: constrict to hoard heat, dilate to dump it. Shivering thermogenesis runs to 5× basal and it starves you. Evaporative cooling (panting, respiratory water loss) is what makes flapping possible at all — birds shed most of their flight heat this way. Storm air is humid, which throttles it. Flapping self-limits: heat kills muscle power and dead muscle cannot flap, so a big dragon settles into an emergent flap/soar duty cycle it never chose.

5. Fire is a bioreactor, not magic — gut methanogens ferment carrion into CH₄ (15.6 mol/kg, first-order in substrate, peaking near 38 °C). The sac fills by the ideal gas law, P = nRT/V, and vents at 3.2 bar because the culture inhibits on its own product. A platinum-group catalyst gland lights the exhale — the spark makes a kernel, the exotherm carries it. Cold body or a spent gland means misfire, and the blowback burns you. Flame reach is jet physics: ~190 nozzle diameters. A hatchling gets 3.5 m. An adult gets 15 m.

6. The hoard is a heat sink — and this is why dragons hoard. Metal conducts where still air insulates; a pile charged by day gives heat back at night and shields the hide it touches. But a cold pile is a heat leak, so a hoard is a battery you charge, not a blanket you find. Its thermal mass is what buys you time away from the nest.

7. Dominance resolves by DISPLAY — posture, roar, fire plume, scored on visible fitness that costs what it shows. Combat only if the display ties, and it is kcal-expensive and it injures. Territory is scent marks plus your thermal signature.

8. Lineage — a clutch needs 28–34 °C. You brood it skin-on-shell like a bird; the hoard behind the scrape only buys you a short absence. Predators take unguarded eggs.

Controls

WASD steer · Space leap / flap · Shift tuck & dive · F breathe · E eat · C bask & rest · R display & roar · Tab map · Esc pause

Death

Starvation. Hypothermia. Hyperthermia. Stall and impact. A lost fight. Then: gen +1.

A note on honesty

Metabolic, thermal and fermentation processes run on a compressed clock (240× real time) so a session is playable. The equations are real; only the clock is fast. The Codex says so too, in entry 13.

Every mesh and every sound in this world is procedurally authored in Luau — the dragon's body is rebuilt from its own live morphology, so what you spent growth on is what you see.