the gluebook
Staying AliveView .md

The Creatures

Out past the safe ground the four lands are not empty. Each one keeps its own animal, and they do not all want to talk.

Every creature, with its numbers

These are the base numbers, what you meet at the fringe of a land, at level 1. Everything deeper is the same animal scaled up, see below.

Creature Health Power Speed XP Where
Sett Badger 22 5 7 12 the Shore, and everywhere
Wild Boar 40 7 5 22 the Mire
Slag Wolf 32 9 8 24 the Ashfell
Meadow Stag 38 0 7 30 the Hollow
Burrowing Badger Burrowing Badger 32 8 6 28 the Dead Forest, and the frontier
Dark Wolf Dark Wolf 62 11 8 34 the Dead Forest, in pairs
White Wolf White Wolf 95 13 9 44 the Dead Forest, deep north, alone
Nipper 14 5 9 12 the Ocean
Snapper 22 7 9 18 the Ocean
Gulper 30 9 8 26 the Ocean
Reef Shark 70 13 9 55 the Ocean, three of them

The badger is the fair first fight. The wolf hits hardest of the four old land animals and never travels alone. The boar is the meatiest. The stag has zero power until you touch it, and then it is the most dangerous thing in the four lands.

The White Wolf is the hardest ordinary animal in the world: nearly three times a Slag Wolf's health, more power, and faster than you. It hunts alone, so there is no pack to pull, just one very bad fight.

What they drop

Creature Drops
Sett Badger hide 60%, bone 10%
Wild Boar hide 85%, bone 25%, iron fittings 2%
Slag Wolf hide 85%, bone 22%, iron fittings 3%
Meadow Stag hide 80% x2, bone 25%, iron fittings 5%
Burrowing Badger hide 80%, bone 25%, iron fittings 4%
Dark Wolf hide 90%, scrap 35%, bone 25%, the bloody long sword 0.024%
White Wolf hide 95% x2, scrap 50%, bone 25%, the bloody long sword 0.048%
Nipper, Snapper, Gulper fishbone 70%, one or two
Reef Shark fishbone 100%, three or four, plus a guaranteed Ocean Treasury

Three small rolls ride on top of the tables. Any creature of level 8 or higher has a 2% chance to drop a waystone shard. Any creature of level 10 or higher has a 0.008% chance to drop a party flashlight, and the same chance again for a portable terminal. And every hostile kill quietly rolls for a cosmetic look, covered below.

Each line rolls on its own, so a good boar can give you hide and bone and a fitting at once. The stag is the best iron fittings source in the world at 1 in 20, and it drops double hide. It is also the fight most likely to kill you. That is not a coincidence.

The bone rates came down on 6 August 2026, by about half across the board. Bone stopped being something you dig up and became something the world holds a running count of, with a ceiling on how much can exist at once. A drop rate that fills that ceiling in an afternoon is not a drop rate, it is a queue. Halving the ordinary animals spreads the same amount of bone across more of the day and more of the players. The bosses were left exactly as they were, because a boss is already rare enough to be its own throttle.

Loot does not go into your bag. It falls on the ground where the creature died, yours alone for 5 seconds, then anyone's, and it is gone in 90. Walk over it to pick it up. Loot never scales with the creature's level: a level 11 wolf drops exactly what a level 1 wolf drops.

Nothing is a bottomless well

Hide, scrap and fishbone that drop off a creature are minted from that zone's pool, the same pool the gather nodes draw from, and only at the moment you pick them up. Kill in a zone whose hide has run dry and the hide simply does not appear.

Iron fittings and keystone work the same way now. Until 6 August 2026 they did not: they were the last two things in the world that dropped without anything counting them. Each ground that drops iron fittings now holds a share of the world's 3,800, sized to what that ground can actually produce, and the world's whole 1,500 keystones sit on Knacker's Pass where the boss stands. Same rule as everything else: when a ground is out, the drop stops appearing there.

Bone is the one that works differently, and it is not a loophole. It does not come from the zone's pool, it comes against the world's live count, and it stops for everybody at once when the world is full.

Killing is not a way around scarcity. It is another door into the same room.

The four animals

Each land has its signature animal, the one you meet most:

  • The Hollow has its stags, the deer.
  • The Shore has its badgers.
  • The Ashfell has its wolves.
  • The Mire has its boar.

That signature is the animal that roams each land, but it is not the only thing out there. Hostile packs cluster deeper in, and they mix: wolves den in the Hollow, boar bruise through the Ashfell, and mixed bands hold the middle of every wild. And one place gathers them all: past the frontier line on the far east of the Field, boar and badger packs and a wolf den hold the ground. That frontier is the nearest real fight to home.

The Foal Pen and the town stay clear. Nothing hunts you on home ground.

The Dead Forest, far north

North past the Hollow is the world's newest ground, and its hardest. Nothing here is a beginner's fight, and it is laid out in three bands that get worse the further north you walk.

  • The southern edge holds Burrowing Badgers, around level 6 to 11, in ones and twos. They dig, and they will come up somewhere other than where they went down.
  • The middle wood belongs to Dark Wolves, level 11 to 15, always in pairs. Pulling one pulls two.
  • The deep north is White Wolf ground, level 16 to 19, and each one hunts alone.

The wolves up here also drop something the rest of the map does not: hide and scrap, rather than the hide-and-bone of the older lands. If you want scrap without walking the Ashfell, this is the other door, and the White Wolf drops double hide on top.

The Scarecrow stands up here too, and he has plenty to say.

Deeper means stronger

Each land runs 120 tiles on a side, and the danger climbs the further in you push. Creatures gain one level for every 12 tiles you walk from the entrance, up to level 11 at the deepest corner of a land.

Each of those levels adds +35% of its base health and +20% of its base power. It adds up fast: a level 12 wolf carries nearly five times the health of the one you met at the gate and hits over three times as hard. A level 19 White Wolf up in the deep north is running about 694 health. That is not a slightly tougher animal. That is a different animal wearing the same skin.

The name and level float over every creature, so you always know exactly what you are walking up to. Read it before you swing.

Lil Knacker, at the top of the road

There is one boss in the live world, and he stands at the top of Knacker's Pass, at the glue factory's door.

Lil Knacker
Health 2,800
Power 52
Level 35
XP 2,400, split by damage dealt
Respawns every hour

He is nothing like the animals above. He fights like a powered up human, he chills and freezes, he cannot be rooted, at half health two pale nags come trotting in beside him, and the whole zone sees his health bar.

His loot is per participant, not a pile for whoever landed the last hit: deal at least 1% of his health and you roll your own drops, charms and treasuries and rarer things. He is the only source of keystone (5% per participant) and the only source of relics (2%). The whole fight, and the full loot table, live on his own page.

Two other things are in the game's data and not in the live world: the glue blob and the glue golem. Nothing you can reach today drops from either. They arrive with the deep content.

Killing pays in levels

Put a creature down and you earn XP, and XP is what levels you. There is a catch: a kill only pays well if the fight was fair. Killing at or above your level pays up to half again. Killing far below you falls away to 15% of the listed XP. The world does not reward bullying the weak.

Your level is what gates the bigger plots, so the hours you put into the wild are the hours that buy you land. See The Field.

They also drop looks

Every hostile kill quietly rolls for a cosmetic: 0.15% for an uncommon, 0.04% for a rare, 0.008% for a legendary. Four animals roll better than that: the Slag Wolf and the Meadow Stag double all three, the Dark Wolf triples them, and the White Wolf rolls six times, the best cosmetic odds anything in the live world carries. If you are hunting looks rather than materials, the deep north is where you hunt.

When anyone in the world lands one, the whole world hears about it.

Never trust the deer

One warning. The stags in the Hollow look harmless, and they are: their power is genuinely zero until the moment you hit one. Strike a stag and it turns, and it does not turn a little. It comes back at 12 power, 8 resistance, faster than you, with half again its health, and it will chase you down. It also lands crits more often than anything else in the world, and hits twice as hard when it does.

It is the best iron fittings drop in the game and the fastest way to lose your bag. If you are going to start that fight, be sure you can finish it.