Vessel is an online world you enter as an empty body.

You arrive with nothing but borrowed flesh, and everything after that is earned. Bread, a trade, a roof, a plot of land, the people who follow you.

The world is shared with every other player, and it keeps what you leave in it.

Everyone here is a Vessel.

The banker, the priest and the fisherman live by the same rules you do. They have the same kind of body, the same two hands and the same needs. Nothing they do is closed to you. The stall you buy from may be kept by another player’s Vessel while that player sleeps.

Marakeeps the bank
Torrenworks the forge
Hildpours at the Sunken Lantern
Brother Aldotends the cathedral
Watfishes the harbour
Younot yet awake

You are not the body. You are the consciousness that wakes inside it, and the Vessel is what you live through: its hands, its hunger, its skills and its belongings.

Death ends a Vessel for good. Its body and everything it carried stay where it fell, for anyone to find.

The Sunken Lantern inn on its rock at dusk, lit windows below the old town — The Sunken Lantern at dusk.

You wake on Brackenholm.

An island town where the Veilgates meet the sea. Priests walk the cathedral, Hild keeps the fire going at the inn and a stranger with empty hands can find work before dark. Everything the wider world offers can be tried here first. The one thing the island will not give you is land.

Your hands earn the rest.

Felling a tree, landing a fish or working at a bench is a labour, not a reflex. You read the wood or the water, choose how to go on, wait a moment and see what your choice made. Skills grow from use, and you decide which ones may fade.

Your body keeps its own accounts. It gets hungry and thirsty, feels the cold and gets hurt in one leg, one arm or the head. A day’s work buys bread, then better tools, then goods that other people come to you for.

A timber shelter and fence in the workshop yard, with the town on the ridge behind — The workshop yard, where most trades start.

Timber and stone houses on the cliff above the market lane — Above the market lane.

Wooden docks at Brackenholm harbour, with a cottage on the sea wall — The harbour, the last of the island before the crossing.

Then you want ground of your own.

Beyond the Veilgate there are no towns except the ones players build. You survey a plot with pegs and string, draw the house in the architect’s view and watch it rise, piece by piece, from the materials you carry to the site. Raise a claim and the land around it is yours, with your own rules for who may build there, take things or open a chest.

Neighbours become a society.

Landholders who swear to one society statue share a charter. They decide what counts as a crime on their ground and set the fines. They keep the gaol, the court, the market and the treasury, and the taxes from their lands fill its coffer.

Brackenholm cathedral and its stone courtyard, seen across the rooftops — The cathedral square, kept by the Brackenholm Charter.

A council runs it. The Vessel who woke on Brackenholm with nothing can sit on that council, if enough people will follow.

Building and land claims already work in development. Societies and their laws come later.

Where it comes from

Vessel takes its open life of skills, homes and trade from Ultima Online, its scale and first-person gloom from Daggerfall, and part of its thinking about living worlds from Raph Koster’s writing.

Not open yet

Vessel is in development and not open to players. There is no release date.

The wiki is the field guide to everyday play, written so the discoveries stay in the game.

Read the wiki