Terms of Service

What Remains is a persistent post-nuclear survival game. Survivors can fight, steal, trade and betray one another through the game’s rules. These terms distinguish consequences inside the game from conduct aimed at the real person behind an account.

1. Acceptance

Creating an account and playing means you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not play.

2. Your account

Your account is yours alone, and you are responsible for everything done with it. Registration takes an email address and a password of at least twelve characters. Keep that password to yourself.

• Do not share your account, and do not play on anybody else’s.
• Actions taken through your account are treated as yours. A survivor’s death is permanent, so protect access to your account.
• Do not buy, sell, rent, gift or otherwise transfer accounts.
• Tell staff promptly if you think somebody else has got into your account.

3. One person, one account

Use one active account at a time. A dead survivor cannot return to play. A future replacement account must follow the game’s new-life process; it does not allow two active survivors controlled by one person.

In particular, do not use a second account to:

• send Cash, Bullets, items, vehicles or anything else to another survivor you control;
• place a bounty your main character then collects, in either direction;
• feed a character kills, losses, raids or jailbreaks;
• pad a Crew’s membership or shared reserves;
• scout, bait or absorb an attack on your main character’s behalf.

Completed gifts and trades between players are logged. Gifts do not guarantee anything in return; Cash on Delivery and the Holdings marketplace exchange the offered goods or deed for the listed payment together. Bounty placements and collections are recorded too.

If two people genuinely share a household or a network, say so before you play rather than after somebody notices. Real shared connections are ordinary; the same claim made only once an account is under review is not.

4. Game actions

Where available, the following are game actions when used through their intended controls. An unfavorable outcome is not, by itself, misconduct by the player who caused it:

• Manhunt. A permitted attack can kill a survivor permanently. The fallen survivor’s purse, banked Cash and personal inventory are lost. The killer receives no victim loot, only 90% of any posted bounty they collect.
• Jobs, Vehicle Recovery and Bandit Raids. These personal activities can succeed, fail, injure or jail a survivor under their stated rules. A personal Bandit Raid targets a world-owned site, not another player.
• Bounties. Paying a stranger to kill somebody, anonymously if you pay the surcharge for it.
• Compound defense. Bandit pressure can threaten shared buildings; a survivor may hunt an active attacker under the event’s published rules.
• Reconnaissance. Buying information about somebody without their knowing.
• Testimonies. Witnessing a killing and trading game evidence or silence through the game’s systems.
• Trades that go wrong. Gifts and informal agreements depend on trust. Use Cash on Delivery or the Holdings marketplace for a supported exchange of goods or a deed for payment; those systems do not enforce promises made outside the listed trade.

Ordinary game losses are part of play; an error, exploit or conduct violation remains subject to review. New survivors are protected for their first 48 hours, unless they choose to waive protection sooner. They cannot attack anyone while that protection holds.

5. Player conduct

Game rules permit conflict between survivors; they do not permit targeting the real people playing them. Do not do any of the following to a player:

• Harassment. Sustained abuse aimed at somebody, or following them from channel to channel to keep it up.
• Slurs and hate. Attacks on race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sex, gender, sexuality or disability.
• Threats. Threatening real violence against anybody, or their family.
• Sexual content involving minors, and sexualising another player.
• Exposing private information. Posting, or threatening to post, somebody’s real name, address, workplace, photographs or contact details.
• Taking it outside. Carrying a grudge to other websites, social media, somebody’s employer, school or family.
• Real-world coercion. Using personal information or threats outside the game to force a player’s decision. Trading in-game Testimony does not permit this.
• Impersonating staff, or claiming a decision came from them.
• Spam, advertising, and links to malware or phishing.

Saying it in a roleplay voice changes nothing. “My character would say that” is not a defence for any item on this list.

This applies everywhere the game lets you write: public profiles, the forums, the Notice Board, survivor and Crew names, and any channel added later.

6. Profiles & uploaded content

Public-profile formatting and images

Individual profiles and officer-managed Crew profiles may contain text decoration and up to four newly uploaded images. Legacy individual-profile images in former slots five through eight remain viewable and removable, but do not provide extra upload slots. Use the profile editor’s image control to upload a PNG, JPEG or WebP file no larger than 2 MB; it inserts an <img> tag at the cursor. Move that tag anywhere in your source to choose exactly where the image appears. Add an image description for players using screen readers, unless the image is purely decorative.

The profile editor accepts this limited HTML:

• Paragraphs and breaks: <p>, <br> and <hr>.
• Bold, italic, underline and strike-through: <strong>, <em>, <u> and <s>.
• Headings, quotations and lists: <h2>, <h3>, <blockquote>, <ul>, <ol> and <li>.
• Uploaded <img> tags may include descriptive alt text and a width from 1 to 1600 pixels. Images always shrink to fit the profile on smaller screens.
• A <span> may set text colour, weight, italic style, underline or strike-through, highlight colour, one of four text sizes, a game-provided body/display/monospace font, and left, centre or right alignment. Other styles are removed.

The editor also lets you choose one solid background colour for the player-authored profile section. The game chooses a contrasting base text colour automatically; explicitly coloured text may still be hard to read, so check the live preview before saving.

For example, <strong>bold text</strong> makes text bold, while <p style="text-align: center; color: #7a2f1f;">Centered coloured text</p> combines two of the allowed decorations. Paste markup like this into the editor and check the live preview before saving.

Links are not allowed in public profiles. Link tags are removed and their visible words remain plain text. External images, scripts, forms, frames, embedded objects, event handlers and unsupported markup are removed as well. Uploaded images and profile text remain subject to the conduct rules above, and staff may remove content that breaches them.

7. Real-money trading

Do not exchange anything in this game for anything of real-world value. Cash, Bullets, items, vehicles, Holdings, Crew seats and accounts may not be bought, sold, auctioned, rented or traded for money, cryptocurrency, goods, services or assets in another game: inside the game or anywhere else.

Both sides breach these terms: the buyer and the seller. Publicly offering to do it is enough, and so is arranging it off-site. In-game Cash cannot be purchased with real money.

8. Bugs & exploits

The game is in active development and being play-tested. Bugs are expected, and finding one is not a problem: using it is.

• Report a bug when you find it, and stop using the thing that is broken.
• Repeating something that pays because it is broken, duplicating anything, or getting around a cooldown, cost or limit by a route the game did not intend, is an exploit.
• Staff may reverse what an exploit produced (Cash, items, rank, a deed or a kill) whether or not the account meant to find it.
• Reporting a bug you found and did not use will never be held against you. Quietly farming one will.

9. Automation

Play with your own hands.

• No bots, scripts, macros, auto-clickers, browser automation, or anything else that plays for you or watches on your behalf.
• No scraping, and no hammering the game’s endpoints. Reach the game through its own pages.
• Cooldowns and timed actions are how the game paces a decision. A script that beats the waiting takes the cost out of a choice that is supposed to have one.
• Ordinary tools are fine: password managers, browser zoom, screen readers and other accessibility software.

10. Moderation

Whether something here has been breached, and what happens next, is decided by the game’s staff.

• Staff may warn, remove or edit content, reverse gains, suspend an account, or terminate an account permanently, with or without notice, and without a fixed schedule of penalties.
• Termination can mean losing everything on the account, with no compensation and no obligation to explain in detail.
• Staff may read posts, transfers, logs and game records in order to investigate.
• Staff do not referee ordinary in-game conflict or guarantee that they will reverse a death, failed trade, lost goods or bounty. They may investigate errors, exploits and conduct violations under these terms.
• Staff accounts are bound by these terms. Administrative actions require an audit record.