HOLLOWTIDE

A Diablo-shaped MMO where the world dies every seven days and your final ten seconds become a ghost.

Pure Rust. Pure WASM. WebGL2. WebSocket. redb. One HTML file. No engine. No JS framework. No SQLite.

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The hook (the thing that makes this special)

Every other MMO treats death as a setback. Hollowtide treats death as content creation.

Soul Echoes

When you die, the server saves the last 10 seconds of your existence — every position, every facing, every swing, every flinch — as a Soul Echo anchored to the spot where you fell.

Your echo loops there forever. A translucent ghost of your final moments, replaying.

Other players, walking through the world, see motes of light wherever death has happened. Stepping close, they can:

• Witness — stand in the echo for its full loop, gain a sliver of XP and unlock a one-line entry in the shared chronicle ("Here, on day 3 of the Embertide, Mira fell to the Hollow Knight").
• Exorcise — destroy the echo for a fragment of the dead player's gear (random one item shard).
• Commune — pay a soul-coin to learn one of the dead player's final-moment skills for a single use.

Locations with many deaths become haunted. Boss rooms grow forests of looping ghosts. Famous deaths become pilgrimage sites. Newcomers are greeted not by NPCs explaining the world but by the silent re-enactment of everyone who came before.

The world remembers.

The Reaping

Every Sunday at 00:00 UTC, the Reaping happens. The world is unmade and reborn with new geography, new themes (Embertide, Frostfall, Bloodmoon, Eldritch...), new bosses, new biomes — but echoes from the previous epoch persist as shadow-residue in the new world's terrain. You walk through a frost zone and faintly see the silhouettes of where players died last week in the volcano.

When the world dies, every character dies with it. What carries forward is your Soulfragment — 10% of your stats, one chosen item, and your accumulated chronicle entries. Weekly veterans are stronger than weekly newcomers, but only modestly. Every Sunday, every player starts roughly even.

This means:

• No content treadmill exhaustion — the world is fresh weekly.
• No alt-character grind — your one character is your soul lineage.
• Real FOMO without subscription pressure — miss a week, you miss an entire world.
• Built-in social rituals — last night before the Reaping is a party. The first night is a rush.

The Underworld (between reapings)

For 6 hours after the Reaping (Sunday 00:00–06:00 UTC), the Underworld opens. All of the past week's echoes congregate in a shared shadow-realm. Living players (those who saved a Soulfragment with the "Hunter" trait) can enter and battle the echoes for their stored loot before they dissolve. PvE only, but high-stakes — a brutal six-hour scramble for the cream of last week's deaths.

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v0 status (this commit)

• ✅ Pure-Rust client (WASM), WebGL2 renderer, isometric tile world
• ✅ Single index.html host loads compiled wasm
• ✅ Axum server with WebSocket endpoint
• ✅ 20Hz tick loop, server-authoritative state
• ✅ Movement, basic combat, mob spawning + AI
• ✅ Soul Echoes — death recording, ghost looping, witness/exorcise interactions
• ✅ redb persistence with auto-snapshots
• ✅ Live chat
• ⏳ The Reaping (epoch reset) — scaffold exists, scheduled job pending
• ⏳ The Underworld — designed, not yet built
• ⏳ Soulfragment carry-over — designed, not yet built
• ⏳ World themes / biomes — designed, not yet built
• ⏳ Professions, AH, dungeons, raids — designed, not yet built

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Stack

Layer	Tech
Client engine	None. Hand-written.
Client language	Rust → WASM via wasm-bindgen
Rendering	WebGL2 (one shader, batched sprites)
Networking	WebSocket, binary frames, postcard wire format
Server	axum + tokio
Persistence	redb (single-file embedded ACID KV)
Snapshots	postcard blob to world.snapshot every 30s
Total Cargo deps	~12 across both binaries

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Run it

Requirements: rustc (stable), wasm-pack.

# one-time
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install wasm-pack

# build + run
./build.sh
cd server && cargo run --release

Open http://localhost:8080 in two browser tabs. WASD to move. Click a mob to attack. /die in chat to test the echo system. Walk through a glowing mote to witness.

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Layout

hollowtide/
├── Cargo.toml          # workspace
├── shared/             # protocol types (used by client + server)
│   ├── Cargo.toml
│   └── src/lib.rs
├── server/             # axum + tokio + redb
│   ├── Cargo.toml
│   └── src/main.rs
├── client/             # wasm-bindgen + web-sys + WebGL2
│   ├── Cargo.toml
│   └── src/lib.rs
├── web/
│   └── index.html      # the entire frontend host
├── build.sh            # compile client → web/pkg, run server
└── README.md