The Controls

All of this is built and works today. Every key on this page was read off the game's own code, not remembered, so if one of them does nothing for you, that is worth reporting with F8.

Click the window first

Nothing responds until you click the game once. That click hands the mouse to the game so it can turn your head. Until then the mouse is still the browser's, and the keys go nowhere.

Press Esc to get the mouse back. You need it back to use any of the menus, and the game hands it to you by itself whenever a menu opens.

The menu

Press Esc and the menu comes up. It is the same menu that greets you when you arrive from the Play button on the website, and the big Play game button at the bottom puts you back in the world.

The world map

A real map of Iceland, drawn from the same national maps the world itself is built from. Drag to move, the wheel to zoom, and the two buttons take you to the whole country or straight to where we live.

Reykjavík, Akureyri, Vatnajökull, Gullfoss, Hekla and about fifty more are named on it, the glaciers and the big lakes are drawn, and you and anybody else playing show up as dots.

Getting back to your hearth

🏠 The Back to home button takes you to the hearth you last lit — the same place you wake up if you die. It is the quickest way back from anywhere in the country.

⚠️ If you have not lit a hearth yet the button says “No home yet” and cannot be pressed. Light a fire in a hearth and it becomes your home; the hearth's own screen says so when it is yours.

Zoom in far enough and the streets have names

Keep zooming and the roads appear, and then their names — Reykjanesbraut, Ásbraut, Tjarnarvellir. It goes down to about a hundred and fifty metres across, which is a house and its garden. This works anywhere in Iceland, so you can find a street you know before you go and stand in it.

⚠️ Zoomed out past about three kilometres, only the big roads are drawn. Every street in Reykjavík at that scale would be a grey smudge you cannot read.

⚠️ Where we started has almost no streets on it. That is not a fault — it sits on the lava at Hraunin, outside the town. The streets of Hafnarfjörður begin a couple of kilometres to the north-east.

🔴 The whole island is the world. Click anywhere and you go there.

Iceland is yours to walk about in — the coasts, the lakes and rivers, the gravel deserts of the interior, the mossy lava, the birch woods, and the ice caps. Vatnajökull is real and it is 1,465 metres up. Everything is built from the same national maps the ground itself comes from, so a place is where it actually is.

⚠️ You may fall for a moment when you arrive somewhere far away. The ground has to reach you across the country before you can stand on it. Wait; it comes.

The rivers lie flat. A river runs in long level stretches with a drop between one stretch and the next, the way water really behaves — it does not tilt down a hillside. Where a river drops a long way there is a step in it, and those steps are where the waterfalls will go.

⚠️ A river is narrower than the one on a map of Iceland, because the water only fills what is actually below its own surface. Ground standing higher inside a river stays dry, as an island or a bank.

The bright box in Hafnarfjörður is where we started. It is the only part anybody has built anything in, which is why it is drawn brighter — not because the rest is empty.

⚠️ The menu does not pause the game. There is no pausing: other people are in the world with you, the day goes on, and bad weather is still eating your food while you read it. If you are cold and hungry, deal with that first.

Esc always means back. With a chest or your pack open it closes that; with nothing open it brings up the menu; with the menu up it puts it away.

Moving about

⚠️ Flying is on when you arrive. It is a testing convenience, not part of the game as it is meant to be played. Press F once and you are standing on the ground like everybody else.

Doing things

🔴 Hold the left button — do not click it. Breaking takes time, and the cracks that appear are the game telling you it is working. A single click starts the crack and then stops. This is the thing people miss most often.

O is for anything with a menu: a hearth, a chest, or the door of any of the four turf houses. You can aim anywhere on a house, not just at the door.

🐑 Picking a sheep up

Stand close to a sheep and look at it. The line that normally says what you are looking at will offer it first. Press C to pick the sheep up, and C again to set it down in front of you.

🔴 A sheep you have carried is yours, and the world remembers it. Before this, every animal in the game was forgotten the moment you walked away — which is fine for a fish in the sea, because nobody owns a fish. A sheep you picked up stays where you left it, and it is still there when you come back tomorrow.

⚠️ Carrying is the only way to take a sheep somewhere, and that is not a shortcut we took. In other games you lead an animal on a rope — and there is no rope in this world yet, no string and no flax. The first thread there will ever be is spun from wool, which comes off the sheep you cannot yet move. So you carry it.

🐑 A sheep is solid. You cannot walk through one. Walk into it and it slowly gives way, so a flock can never shut you in. You can nudge a sheep along like this, but not through a wall or a fence, and not into the sea.

👉 Three things worth knowing:

• You can see the sheep. It is in your arms on screen, it sits in the slot you had chosen along the bottom, and the readout says A sheep — both arms. Other people see it in your arms too.
• 🔴 Your hands are full. You cannot break or place anything while you are carrying a sheep — put it down first, and the game will tell you so.
• You can only carry one at a time, and the game will say so.

✂️ Shearing a sheep

Hold a knife, look at a woolly sheep close by, and press the right button. The sheep is not hurt. Two bundles of wool (ull) go into your pack, and the knife wears a little, the same as a strike.

• A shorn sheep looks shorn. You can see at once which of your sheep have wool to give.
• The wool grows back in about an hour, which is three days in the game, but only if the sheep has eaten grass in that time — and only if it is not hungry. A sheep kept on bare ground stays bare.
• 🌸 In May and June you do not need a knife. The fleece loosens by itself in late spring, and you can pull it off by hand. Try it with an empty hand in any other month and the game will tell you it is not loose yet. That is how the first settlers mostly took their wool.
• 🔒 Wild sheep and your own, the same as the knife: not a neighbour's.

⚠️ Nothing uses the wool yet. It is meant to become thread, and thread the first rope this island has.

🪢 Leading a sheep

Make a lead (taumur) at the workbench from three threads, then hold it, look at a sheep and press the right button. The sheep follows you.

• It keeps within about three metres of you, and hurries when it falls behind.
• You can lead several at once, one lead each — enough to bring a small flock home. Not while you are carrying one: carrying takes both arms.
• Too far and the rope snaps. Get more than twelve metres ahead — by running, or jumping down a cliff — and the rope breaks. The sheep stays where it is and the lead comes back to your pack.
• To let one go, look at it with an empty hand and press the right button. The lead comes back to your pack.
• 🔒 A sheep you lead is yours, exactly like one you have carried — even if it was somebody else's.

You see the rope hanging from your hand to the sheep's neck, and everybody near you sees it too.

🪵 Tying a sheep to a peg

A tether peg (tjóðurhæll) is two sticks, whittled to a point, made at the workbench. Place it on the ground like a torch.

• Walk up to it with sheep on your leads and press the right button on the peg. Every sheep you are leading is tied to it.
• A tied sheep grazes and wanders within five metres of the peg, and it is still there, still tied, after the server restarts.
• To take them back, press the right button on the peg with an empty hand. They come back onto your leads.
• Pull the peg up and every sheep tied to it is free. Their leads go into your pack along with the peg.

Before there were fences, this is how an Icelandic farm kept an animal in the home field: a rope (tjóður) to a peg in the ground (tjóðurhæll).

🪨 Building a pen

A sheep can hop up one block, so a wall of ordinary blocks will not hold one. A stone wall (grjótgarður) is a metre and a half tall — stacked stone, the way the old sheep folds were built — and a sheep cannot get over it. Six stone make six lengths of wall at the workbench.

• Build a closed ring of stone wall. Round, square or any shape — what matters is that a sheep cannot walk out. A cliff or the sea can be one side of it.
• Put a gate (hlið) in the wall so you can get in and out. Place it while looking at the gap, and it sits across the gap.
• Press the right button on the gate to open it, and again to shut it. It swings open into the pen. A shut gate holds a sheep; an open one does not.
• 🔴 A gate will not shut on somebody standing in it, you or a sheep. Step through first.
• Lead your sheep in through the open gate, then shut it behind you.

A real Icelandic fold — a stekkur, or the great round rétt where the autumn round-up was sorted — was dry-stacked stone, a metre to a metre and a half high, with a wooden gate.

🌾 Hay

Make a ljár — a scythe — at the workbench, on the Livestock tab: three sticks and two stone. Hold it and press the right button on grass, and the grass is cut and the hay is in your pack at once:

• What you cut turns to pale stubble a quarter of a metre lower than the grass beside it, so you can see from across the field what you have cut.
• A field with something standing on it cannot be cut, and building on stubble turns it back into the field it was cut from.
• Stubble grows back in ten game days — a little over three hours of play — but only from May to October. ❄️ Nothing grows in the winter: grass cut or grazed in the autumn stays stubble until the spring.
• Stubble cannot be cut again until it has grown back.
• Each cut wears the ljár a little. It lasts 300 cuts and then it is gone.
• Hay is sheep feed, and the best there is — see Feeding your sheep and Lambs, below.

⚠️ This ljár is stone. A real one is iron, and the iron one comes later.

🥣 Feeding your sheep

🔴 Your sheep must eat, or they die. A sheep you own needs one day's feed every game day (a game day is twenty minutes of play). It gets that from grass, or from hay in a jata.

• 🌿 A grazing sheep eats the grass under it. Every day of feed it eats turns one block of tún, gras or mýri into stubble — the same pale stubble a ljár leaves. So a pen needs about ten grass blocks for every sheep to feed them all summer: the grass grows back as fast as they eat it.
• ❄️ From November to April the grass does not grow back, so a pen is slowly eaten bare and the flock lives on the hay you put up in the summer. That was the whole of Icelandic farming for a thousand years: how much hay you cut in August decided how many sheep lived through February.
• 🥣 A jata is a manger — stone slabs with a driftwood board along the front, the way the oldest Icelandic sheep houses had them. Four stone and two planks — birch or driftwood — at the workbench, on the Livestock tab. Put it in your pen and press the right button on it while holding hay: it takes as much as fits, and you can see the hay rise in it.
• Taða feeds a sheep for two days, úthey for one. A jata holds 300 days of feed — ten sheep for a month of game days.
• 🔴 It feeds every sheep in the pen. They do not have to reach it, and they eat grass first: the jata is only touched when the grass runs short.
• Breaking a jata gives you back the hay still in it.
• 🍽️ You can feed a sheep by hand, too — hold hay, turf, leaves or seaweed and press the right button on it. Hay counts for what it is worth; anything else for one day.

How long a sheep can go without food: 18 game days, about six hours of play. Look at one of your sheep and the line at the bottom tells you:

⚠️ When any of your sheep are starving, the game warns you — an arrow at the edge of your screen points to them wherever you are in Iceland, turning from amber to red as death gets closer, and the moment you log in a warning tells you, with a button that shows the pen on the World map.

🔴 The clock only runs while somebody is playing — but it is ANYBODY. If your family plays while you are away, your sheep are eating, and they can starve. Fill the jata before you go.

📖 The word for stock dying for want of hay was horfellir, and it was the great fear of every Icelandic winter. In the hard years of 1783–84 about four sheep in every five in the country died.

🐣 Lambs

Two of your own sheep, in the same pen, in December.

• Hold something a sheep eats and press the right button on one of your sheep:

The better you feed a ewe, the more lambs she has — the way it was on a real Icelandic farm, where single lambs meant a poor winter's hay. The sheep eats it and is ready for half a minute. 💙 It flashes blue when it eats, and pulses blue every few seconds for as long as it is ready — when the pulse stops, the half minute is up.

• Feed a second sheep in the same pen before that runs out. The two walk to each other, stand together a moment, and one of them is carrying a lamb. The game tells you.
• The lamb comes 143 days later — in spring, late April to late May, the way Icelandic lambs do. Most often twins; sometimes one, now and then three.
• A hungry sheep will not be ready. It eats what you give it, but feed it up first — Feeding your sheep, above.
• A sheep mates once a year. A lamb is too young to. ❤️ A sheep that has already mated has a little red heart over its head — carrying, or done for the year. Do not waste turf on it.

A lamb stays near its mother and runs to catch up if it is left behind, and now and then it skips about. It grows all summer and is a full sheep on 1 October — réttir, when the flocks come down from the hills.

• 🔪 Killing a lamb gives one piece of meat and no hide.
• ✂️ A lamb cannot be shorn — its fleece is too short.
• 🙌 You can carry one, like any sheep.

🧪 ⚠️ For now, while it is being tested: sheep will mate in any month, and the lamb comes the next game day instead of in spring. This will go back to December and 143 days.

The row of ten slots

The row wraps round, so Tab at the end takes you back to the beginning.

E closes a hearth or a chest as well, and so does Esc. The menu in front of you always gets the key first, so E never opens your pack behind something that is already open — and Esc closes what is open before it offers you the game menu.

Seeing more, or less

How far you can see is on the Graphics tab of the menu — press Esc. It says the distance in metres, and how much the game has to keep loaded to give it to you. The keys still work and do the same thing.

⚠️ Seeing further costs speed. If the game feels heavy, press - a few times before you blame anything else.

The same tab has a switch called Moving water. It is on, and it is what makes the sea, the lakes and the rivers lift and settle instead of standing still. Turn it off if you would rather have still water, or if the game feels heavy and you are working through what to switch off.

The dev tools

It has a search box. Type the name of a real Icelandic place — a farm, a street, a mountain — and it will take you there. The whole country is in the map, so almost anything you can name is somewhere to stand.

It also has the sliders for the sun and the sky, which is how the light gets adjusted.

⚠️ Most of what used to be here has moved into the menu on Esc: the coordinate box, the Perfect day · Winter night · Norðurljós buttons and the Rain switch are on the Main tab, and everything about the picture is on the Graphics tab. What is left in the dev tools is the search, the sun and sky sliders, and the flat view.

⚠️ Shift+P works even while you are typing in it. Everything else does not: the game deliberately ignores W, F, G and R while the search box has your keystrokes, or searching for Urðarstígur would walk you away mid-word.

When something breaks

Press it the moment you see the problem. It takes the picture itself and sends where you were standing, what the game was doing and what time it was. There is nothing to fill in but a sentence saying what went wrong.

It works with your pack open, which is exactly when a pack fault is on screen.