The Descent

Overview

The Descent is the app's long arc, and it runs alongside your level rather than replacing it. Levels answer the question of how much you have done in total, which is a fine question, but it rewards the marathon sittings and quietly tells everyone else they are behind. The Descent answers a gentler one: how many days did you show up at all, and it treats a twenty-minute evening exactly the same as a lost weekend.

Everything runs off a single number called your banked days. Each day you do enough to fill a small daily measure, that day is banked, and your banked-day count goes up by one. Seven named stages sit along that count, and reaching one changes what the app looks like and how deep the spiral has pulled the colours.

The Tap and the Jar

There are two things to picture, and the app draws both of them for you: a glass jar with your day floating inside it, and the tap perched on its lip that fills it.

The Tap

You earn XP wherever you like, and none of it is special-cased: a session, a handful of bubbles, a quest, a mantra, a run down the rabbit hole, all of it counts the same. The progression.log page has every source and every multiplier on it, and the Descent does not care which of them you used. Nothing is diverted and nothing is skimmed on the way, so the XP filling the jar is the same XP raising your level, counted twice for two different purposes rather than split between them.

Everything you earn today lands in the tap first, and holding the tap is what pours it into today's jar. That is a press and a hold rather than a click, so you keep the button down and the tap dips under your finger, a ring closes around its head, a tone ladder climbs rung by rung with the ring, and the moment the ring completes the handle thuds, the stream lands and the readout counts up alongside the rising liquid instead of running ahead of it. The hold is deliberately short, starting around seven tenths of a second and stretching towards a second and a half when you have a lot waiting, so a trickle is a quick press and a whole evening is one you feel yourself making.

Letting go early costs you nothing whatsoever. The tap shivers, drips once, and keeps every point that was waiting for whenever you next come back to it, and what is waiting survives you switching tabs or closing the app entirely, because it is worked out afresh from the server's own count of your day rather than being tallied up inside the window. Your XP was recorded the moment you earned it, and the pour is how you get to watch it arrive rather than the thing that makes it count.

The Cap

The jar is today, and only today. Its capacity is not a flat number for everybody, because a fixed daily target would be punishing on your first evening and meaningless by level 100. The server sets the cap and it scales with your level, so the ask stays roughly proportionate to where you already are, and nobody ever reaches a point where the day fills itself by accident.

Banking the Day

You do not have to fill the jar. The day banks the moment the jar passes one fifth of its cap, so twenty percent is the whole requirement and everything above that line is momentum rather than obligation.

the day is banked once  jar > 20% of today's cap

A fifth of a day's measure is a short sitting of almost anything, which is the point. As the app itself puts it, banked days are the only thing that moves you down the Spiral, and a day counts once, so a quiet evening that just clears the line is worth exactly as much to your descent as a five-hour session. The heavy day still pays you in XP and levels, it simply does not buy you two rungs.

Overfill

The jar takes a little more than it holds, so a long night is not wasted the moment the level reaches the brim, and how much more depends on how far down you already are:

The overfill is a visual reward more than a mechanical one, because the day has already banked long before you get near the brim. It is there so the jar keeps responding when you are deep in something and do not want the interface to stop acknowledging you.

Midnight

The jar empties at midnight UTC, whatever your local clock says, and it starts the next day at zero. The XP does not go anywhere when that happens, because the jar was never holding it in the first place. Think of the jar as a picture of today rather than a bank: your XP, your level, your sparkle points and your banked-day count all carry on untouched, and the only thing that resets is the drawing.

The Seven Stages

Stages are keyed on banked days and nothing else, so no amount of XP, no level and no purchase moves you along this ladder. Before your first banked day you are at The Edge, which is the app's way of saying you are standing at the rim and nothing has been banked yet. After that:

Two of those rungs do something beyond the name: Deep Water widens the jar's overfill from 120% to 125%, and Crush Depth widens it again to 130%. The rest of what a stage changes is atmosphere, because each one pulls the palette a little further down, darkening the fog and the unlit parts of the spiral map while leaving anything you actually have to read alone. By Bedrock the app is a noticeably deeper room than the one you installed.

Time Away

Life happens, and the Descent is built on the assumption that it will. Missing days costs you nothing at all, and coming back is made easier rather than harder:

• Your fill rate rises while you're away. Every day you miss adds 4% to the rate at which XP fills the jar, and it keeps climbing toward a ceiling of double, which it reaches once you've been away twenty-five days.
• You collect that raised rate over your first three days back. It's the one bonus your time away earned rather than a second one stacked on top of it, and it runs for the first three days you return before settling back to normal, so the week you come back is the easiest week you'll have.
• Your banked days sit where you left them. They don't decay, they don't expire, and there's no streak to break.

The Monthly Leaderboard

The competitive side of the app is a monthly leaderboard, and it's the one thing in the app that still turns over on the first of the month. It ranks people on the XP they gained during that month, so the table is always a picture of the month it's named after rather than a record of who installed earliest, and rotating it is what keeps a new arrival able to place on it.

What changed is what the rotation costs you, which is now nothing. The board scores you, it doesn't own you, so when it rotates the old standings are archived and a fresh table opens while your level, your XP, your skill tree, your sparkle points, your streaks and your banked days all carry straight through as though nothing happened, because as far as they are concerned nothing did. The app puts it plainly when the turn comes round: the monthly leaderboard has rotated, which it does at the start of every month so everyone gets a fresh run at the rankings. The full rules for the table are in leaderboard.htm.

Nothing Resets

For a long time this app ran a monthly wipe, and the manual said so in several places, but that's finished and there are no more wipes coming. The server suppresses the wipe permanently, and the promise made when the Descent shipped was the plain one: nothing was wiped, and nothing will be.

Your level, your XP, your streak and everything you have unlocked carry forward, and they will keep doing that from here on. Spelled out:

• Your level and XP. They only go up. There is no monthly return to level 1 and there is no all-time view you have to go and find to see your real number, because the number on your profile is the real number.
• Your skill tree. Every node you have bought stays bought, including the whole XP economy that used to be refunded and re-purchased every month. Sparkle points are yours to spend once.
• Your streaks. Login streak and quest streak both survive the turn of the month.
• Your banked days and your stage. The Descent has no reverse gear at all.
• Your achievements and your account. As they always were.