Mutation

What is Madness?

Madness is a value from 0% to 100% that represents how close a Beyonder is to losing their mind - and their control over their own power - entirely.

It replaces the old Safe Mode system. There is no longer a way to simply “turn on” protection. Instead, every Beyonder must actively manage their Madness level.

Madness will gradually decrease on its own over time, but the recovery is extremely slow. Certain spells can also reduce it.

At 100% Madness

If your Madness reaches 100%, you lose control of your own power. What happens next depends on how strong you already are - see What happens when you lose control? below. For a weak enough Beyonder this can still mean losing everything permanently, but for most established characters it no longer does.

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Temporary, Permanent, and Godhood Madness

Several components determine how low your Madness can fall:

Type	Description	Can it be healed?
Temporary Madness	Standard Madness gained from most sources	Yes - slowly over time, or via certain spells
Permanent Madness	Madness gained from dangerous advancement, pathway switching, Ordeals, and certain powers	No - cannot be treated by any means
Godhood floor	A minimum carried by a seated Sequence 0 god, set by the throne’s base floor and relieved as their congregation grows	Only through church anchors, or eligible Church relief events

Your effective minimum is your Permanent Madness plus whatever Godhood floor your congregation hasn’t relieved yet. Healing, passive recovery, gifts, and abilities stop at this combined floor - they can never push you below it.

A seated god starts at a 90% base floor, which an active, growing congregation relieves toward 0% as it approaches 30 effective anchors. Thrones below Sequence 0 carry smaller base floors (75% at Sequence 1, down to 25% at Sequence 4; Sequence 5 and weaker carry none at all), each with its own anchor requirement. See Sequence 0 for how a throne and its congregation actually work.

Why the combined floor never reaches 100%

However high your Permanent Madness and Godhood floor add up, the game will never let your resting floor exceed 95%. A floor of exactly 100% would be an inescapable loop - the floor would be the thing killing you, and also the thing putting you right back at 100% a few seconds later. Reaching 100% and losing control is still very much possible; it just has to come from temporary Madness climbing the rest of the way, not from the floor itself.

If you’ve ascended to godhood, standing within 24 blocks of your god lightens the load: believers there take 10% less incoming Madness (and 15% slower Tiredness gain) while the aura is active.

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What can cause Madness?

There are several ways to accumulate Madness:

• Advancing with incomplete acting progress or an incomplete ritual
• Switching pathways before the relevant safe threshold, or switching to a non-adjacent Pathway
• Being driven crazy by your own abilities (e.g. Hanged Man pathway)
• Being driven crazy by other players’ abilities (e.g. Visionary pathway)
• Letting your Spirituality sit below 10% of its maximum - every couple of minutes spent there adds a slow drip of Madness
• Paying for a spell you can’t quite afford: if an ability would fail only because you’re a little short on Spirituality, the shortfall can be paid in Madness instead (a punishing 0.2% Madness per missing point) rather than failing outright - but the game refuses the trade outright once it would put you at 90% Madness or higher

Sequences are no longer skippable

Potions only ever advance you exactly one Sequence at a time now - drinking a potion for anything further than the Sequence directly below your current one is simply refused, with no Madness cost and no way around it. If you’ve heard stories of players skipping several Sequences at once for a pile of Madness, that’s an older version of the system; it isn’t how advancement works anymore.

Advancement risk

Default potion advancement rules:

• At least 95% Acting is required before you can advance past a Sequence at all - below that, the potion simply refuses to work, and repeated attempts risk a control-loss roll of their own. Between 95% and 100% Acting, you can advance anyway, at the cost of temporary Madness that scales up to 30% at exactly 95%.
• Every Sequence you’re advancing through has an assigned ritual score. Completing it in full costs nothing; leaving it incomplete lets you advance anyway, for a proportional share of up to 40% temporary and 10% permanent Madness - the confirmation screen always shows you the exact numbers before you drink. This applies to every advancement, from Sequence 8 all the way down to Sequence 0, not just the early game.
• Failed or cancelled advancement does not charge these penalties.

The confirmation screen shown before drinking is authoritative for the attempt. Server administrators may adjust these default values.

Pathway switching

A switch must still advance you by exactly one Sequence: the potion must be for the next Sequence after your current one.

Switch	When safe	Risk before/without safety
Adjacent Pathways	The switch lands you at Sequence 4 or stronger	25% temporary, 10% permanent, 75% survival
Lord of Mysteries group	The switch lands you at Sequence 3 or stronger	55% temporary, 20% permanent, 20% survival
Non-adjacent Pathways	Never treated as a safe neighboring switch	45% temporary, 15% permanent, 35% survival

A safe neighboring switch still requires complete acting and ritual conditions to avoid their separate penalties. Transfer-token pathway changes are exempt from pathway-switch Madness.

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What are the effects of high Madness?

High Madness doesn’t just threaten loss of control - it actively impairs your abilities as it climbs through four stages:

Madness	Stage	Spirituality regen	Ability lockout
0-24%	Stable	Normal	None
25-49%	Warning	80% speed	None yet, but the warning starts
50-74%	Partial Loss	60% speed	A random quarter of your abilities (at least one)
75-99%	Critical	30% speed	A random half of your abilities (at least one)
100%	-	-	Loss of control

Locked abilities simply can’t be cast until your Madness drops back below the stage that locked them - the Abilities menu marks them so you can see which ones are currently out of reach.

Reducing Madness

Madness dissipates on its own at a slow baseline rate while you’re online, roughly doubling while you’re actually asleep in a bed and slowing down further if your Tiredness is high. Church membership and active ritual/anchor work can add to that baseline - see Churches.

Ordinary recovery and curing abilities can remove only recoverable Madness above your combined floor. Outside magic combat and PvP areas, Placate, Soul Suture, and Requiem use performance-based minigames: difficulty scales with the target’s Madness and recent attempts, and the score controls how effective the cure is. In combat and PvP areas, these abilities retain their normal chance-based behavior.

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What happens when you lose control?

Historically, hitting 100% Madness - or a handful of other triggers below - meant instant, permanent deletion of your character: no second chance, no animation beyond a brief warning, every hour of progress gone. That is now the exception rather than the rule. Losing control still always costs you something real, but for most established characters it regresses you rather than erasing you.

Who still gets the old outcome

If your strongest Pathway is still weaker than Sequence 6 (that is, Sequence 7, 8, or 9), you’re judged too weak to be worth sparing - the full old-style wipe still applies, unchanged, specifically so nobody can self-mutate on purpose for an easy, buffed Warden fight. At Sequence 6 or stronger on your best Pathway, you get one of three Ordeals instead.

The three Ordeals

Which Ordeal you get isn’t random - it’s decided by why you lost control, so the punishment always matches the cause:

• Bloodlust - triggered by Madness overflowing to 100%, or a failed Avatar takeover. You black out and become the mutated Warden itself, steerable from spectator mode for up to 90 seconds. The more threatening what you kill while rampaging, the fewer Sequences you lose when it ends; disconnecting or a server restart mid-rampage resolves you at a middling outcome rather than the worst one.
• Hollowing - triggered by a failed pathway-switch or new-Beyonder potion roll. Your soul is banished and must hunt down a living Wild Beyonder to take over as a new body, inside a 2-hour wall-clock deadline. Your Pathway never changes, only your Sequence - and the fresher and closer in kinship the vessel you find, the less you fall.
• Sealing - the catch-all for everything else: a broken Notarization contract, Hanged’s BlackArmor depravation cap, Visionary’s ascent, an admin’s manual mutate command, Fortune’s luck hitting its floor, or anything unrecognized. You’re confined, fully embodied, to your own private sealed realm for a 14-day sentence - shortened only by exile bounties while briefly released during a Crimson Moon, never by anything else.

Whichever Ordeal you draw, entering it always costs the same baseline up front: half of your current Sequence’s acting bar, any Uniqueness claim you were holding on that Pathway, and at least one Sequence of regression - Ordeal-specific scoring can make any of these worse, but never better than that floor.

Repeat offenders don’t keep getting mercy

Every time you enter an Ordeal, an offense counter ticks up; a clean 14-day stretch resets it. A 2nd offense inside that window adds an extra Sequence of regression and 15% permanent Madness on top of whatever the Ordeal already does. A 3rd offense inside the window skips the Ordeal entirely and applies the old permanent wipe - no exceptions. Progress is regressed, never erased, except in this one specific case.

The old wipe, when it still applies

Whether you’re simply too weak for an Ordeal or you’ve burned through your third offense, the outcome is the same as the old system always was:

• You lose all your abilities permanently
• You lose your pathway and sequence
• You lose all your items
• Your stripped power may manifest as a powerful mutant creature that hunts you and nearby players
• If the mutant is killed, it may drop a Beyonder Characteristic of your Sequence
• You receive a cooldown of three real days before you can become a Beyonder again

Prevention is everything

Unlike the old system, there is no Safe Mode to protect you. The best protection is still keeping your Madness low - complete your rituals, avoid reckless pathway switches, and use Madness-reducing spells when available. An Ordeal is survivable, but it is never free.