Sequence 0

What is a throne?

There are 22 thrones, one for each normal Pathway (outer Pathways do not have one). Whoever sits a throne is that Pathway’s god: Sequence 0, a title above their head, a row in the public Pantheon, and one spell nobody else in the world has.

This is the top of the ladder. There is nothing above it.

A throne cannot be taken from a seated god - ever

There is no seat war for Sequence 0, and there never will be. A god has no acting bar, so a war against one is unwinnable by construction. A throne changes hands for exactly one reason: its god stopped showing up.

That single rule is why the road to a throne is as long as it is. If a seat cannot be contested once it is held, the contest has to happen before it is held - that contest is the vigil, and everything in this page up to the rite itself is how it works.

---

Before you can even try

Four things are checked before any requirement is. These are refusals, not failures - no amount of preparation gets around them. You are turned away outright if:

• The Pathway is an outer Pathway.
• You are not Sequence 1 on it.
• It is not your primary Pathway (your census match).
• You are already involved in a vigil somewhere else.

If none of those block you, six real requirements stand between you and declaring.

The six requirements

#	Requirement	What it takes
R1	The Uniqueness, accommodated	You hold your Pathway’s Uniqueness and have accommodated it to at least 95%. A holder at 94% fails; a 95%-accommodated player who is not the holder also fails.
R2	A congregation	Your church’s effective anchor weight reaches 20. That sits under what a single active core site run by a Sequence 1 leader can produce on its own - a test of does a congregation exist, not do you run the biggest town on the server. Believers of any Pathway count; believers of yours count for more. You must be its leader, co-leader, or angel.
R3	A 30-point ritual set	A Sequence 0 ritual set, scored like every other sequence’s. See the next section.
R4	The stake	31,104 banked Overflow - half a Sequence 1 acting bar, and deliberately the exact price of a paid Uniqueness challenge. A fallen god re-ascending inside their grace period pays half of this instead.
R5	Fourteen days at Sequence 1	Calendar days on this Pathway since you last advanced or arrived here, not active-play days - a holiday must not restart godhood, and no timezone is favoured. A fallen god’s grace period waives this.
R6	A Sequence 0 potion	Brewed in the cauldron from three Sequence 1 Beyonder Characteristics of the same Pathway, and nothing else - no supplementary half. This is deliberately the rarest ingredient price in the game.

The potion is a requirement, not an advancement

Drinking a Sequence 0 potion on its own does nothing - it is refused outright. A throne is never drunk into existence. Only the ascension rite itself consumes it.

/coi ascend shows you all six as a live checklist, so you always know exactly what is missing. /coi ascend board shows everyone else’s progress on the public race board, and /coi ascend private takes your name off that board - never out of the count.

---

The eight legendary deeds

R3 asks for a ritual set worth 30 points - the same mechanic as every other advancement, just carrying the highest number in the game. What makes a Sequence 0 set different is the legendary pool: eight deeds tied to things the server actually watched you do, each worth 10 points, and only ever rolled for Sequence 4 and below. Every one is recorded automatically the moment it completes, except the last, which staff certify by hand.

Deed	Earned by	Tally needed
A seat war fought to its verdict	Won or lost, both sides are credited - you simply have to stand in one	1
A Uniqueness defended	Hold yours through a paid challenge	1
Devout church service	Attend church services	10
Your honorific invoked	Be the resolved target of a successful honorific chant	1
An Ordeal survived	Come through an Ordeal with your Beyonder intact	1
A pinnacle bounty	Complete a bounty objective while standing at Sequence 1	1
Diligence kept	Earn acting on seven separate Tide days	7
A story ritual	Certified by staff - see below	1

Your set is assigned, not chosen

Rituals are dealt to you from the pool, so you will not necessarily draw all eight of these - and you can ask staff to reroll an individual entry. Up to 10 of the 30 points can also be covered by service instead of advancements: a church service is worth 1 point, a bounty objective 1, a staff-approved story ritual 2, a seat war fought 3, and a Uniqueness defended 3.

The story ritual - the deed you earn from us

The eighth deed has no automated hook, on purpose. It exists for things worth more than the server can measure:

Stage a public, server-wide event that enacts your Pathway’s role - the role it actually plays in the novel - and make the server live through it.

Not a screenshot, not a solo grind: an event that was announced in advance, that other players attended, that had consequences, and that could only have been run by a Beyonder of your Pathway. The Fool might convene a Tarot Club above the fog; the Red Priest might declare and fight a real, consented war between two churches; the Hanged Man might broker a treaty between two genuinely hostile factions and make it hold.

Write to staff before you run it, not after - tell them what you are planning, when, and who it involves. They will tell you whether it counts and what would make it count.

---

Declaring, and the vigil

With all six requirements met, you declare. Your stake is spent, your Sequence 0 potion goes into escrow with its expiry frozen (so it cannot be traded away or crystallise while nobody can drink it), and the whole server is told.

A 72-hour window opens. Any other eligible Sequence 1 player on that Pathway may pay the same stake to contest you during it.

If nobody does, the window closes and you move straight to the rite.

If somebody contests

The highest bid standing at the window’s close wins the right to contest; every other bid is refunded in full. A seven-day contest follows, scored in War Points earned from real acting gains - exactly the metric a seat war uses. Standings broadcast once a day from the second day on. These are calendar days, not contested-only days: both of you chose to be here, so absence simply scores zero.

Ties go to the ascender - they hold the Uniqueness and already passed every requirement, so a draw changes nothing.

Verdict	Loser pays	Winner gets	Armed afterwards
Ascender wins	Challenger burns half their stake	The ascender proceeds to the rite	14-day contest ban on the challenger
Challenger wins	Ascender burns half their stake	The Uniqueness - not the throne	7-day pathway cooldown, 14-day winner protection on the Uniqueness, 24h re-declare cooldown on the ascender

A challenger who wins does not become a god. They take the claim and then have to walk the whole road themselves - including regrowing 95% accommodation from zero. The beaten ascender keeps their seat, their tenure, and every other requirement they already had.

Every exit without a verdict refunds you in full

Withdrawn, outbid, the throne filled under you, cancelled, an error - every one of these returns your stake and your potion whole, and arms no cooldown. Withdrawing is free for the first 15 minutes; after that it costs half, because a declaration is broadcast server-wide and cannot be spammed for free. A lost contest burns half the stake but still returns the potion whole - it bought a claim on the throne, and the throne itself was never taken.

Once the vigil is decided, you have 48 hours to be online for the ceremony before it lapses on its own - stake back in full, no cooldown, because nothing irreversible has happened yet.

---

The summons and the herald

Winning the vigil summons you. You have 24 hours to pick your hour before the rite starts on its own, and 7 days before an unanswered summons is returned to the gate as forfeited.

When you answer it, the server gets 10 minutes of warning: a boss bar, a card in chat, the coordinates of where it is happening, and a one-minute call. /coi ascension where shows them any time during the countdown. Those ten minutes are for everybody else to arrive - you are not rooted yet, so walk to the spot and let the crowd gather.

Ceremonies are serialised: if two are summoned close together, the second waits and is told whose rite it is queued behind.

The rite

The whole act runs about two and a half minutes, and it belongs to your Pathway - the sky changes, the ground changes, and all 22 Pathways ship their own set piece rather than a recoloured copy of a shared one.

A few things worth knowing if you are standing in one:

• It cannot be interrupted by rivals. From the moment it begins you are invulnerable and cannot be hard-controlled. A rite ends early for exactly three reasons: you left, staff aborted it, or you entered a state no rite can survive. Damage is never one of them.
• Nothing is spent until the halfway point. Up to then the rite can abort freely and you lose nothing at all - the stake and the potion stay exactly where they are and you can answer the summons again. The throne is actually taken at the halfway mark, and that moment is the one irreversible tick.
• Witnesses are paid. Stand within 24 blocks of the rite and you get 3% of your own acting bar, a flash, and 30 seconds of Regeneration.
• The crowd chants. Five times during the rite a cry goes up - your Pathway’s own line - and anyone who answers it in chat earns another 1.5% of their bar per call. Answer all five and that is worth more than one acting trigger, just for showing up. Any installed language’s wording is accepted, and punctuation, spacing and case are all forgiven.

When the throne is taken, the whole server feels it for a few minutes, wherever players are standing - the Fool drags everyone down one sequence, the Sun turns night to glare, the Door sets nearby doors slamming, the Tyrant brings rain and a tsunami that was never actually there. None of it can kill you, strand you, disarm you, or take anything permanent from you, and nothing it does survives a restart.

The spot where it happened is marked permanently on the map (BlueMap and squaremap both show it) - the site outlives the god.

---

What godhood grants: Deity Authority

Becoming a god hands you Deity Authority, one spell with three faces, shared by all 22 thrones with no per-Pathway code behind it - a 23rd throne is a config edit, not a rewrite.

Favor - you hand a believer of your own Pathway a slice of their own acting bar, out of a capped allowance that refills on the clock: 60 bar-percent a week, about 12 favors, 5% at a time, once per recipient per week, banking up to two weeks’ worth. The unit is always a percentage of their bar, never raw points, so one favor is worth the same to a Sequence 9 as to a Sequence 2. A Favor can never inflate Overflow, War Points, Uniqueness, your own progress, or anyone’s own run at Sequence 0 - a full bar is simply not eligible.

Behest - you ask a devoted member of your church to appear, to proclaim your name, or to make pilgrimage. Answering pays them one Favor from that same allowance - a behest is a favor with a task attached, never a second income stream. Every verb completes on something the member actively does (a click, a chant, a walk); none of them can move, damage, or disarm someone who did not act, so a behest can never pull anyone out of a dungeon or into a trap. Refusing or ignoring one costs Disfavor - a few days without Favor or Behest from that god, plus a real drag on acting gain and a one-off dose of madness. It touches nothing else: no uniqueness, no membership, no kit.

Presence - a passive aura within 24 blocks: believers of your Pathway nearby take 10% less incoming madness and 15% less tiredness gain. There is deliberately no acting bonus here - that would turn standing next to a god into an income.

What church membership buys, exactly: no stat at all. Favor reaches every believer of your Pathway whether or not they joined a church, and so does Presence. Membership unlocks exactly one thing - being addressable by a Behest - and the reward for answering is a Favor the god could have handed out for free anyway. A per-member devotion toggle lets anyone opt out of being summoned instantly and for free; opting back in waits a week.

Your honorific name also keeps working while you are offline: when someone completes a chant of it, your Pathway’s own blessing fires at their feet regardless of whether you are online to see it.

A fresh god sits at a 30% madness floor

That is not a bug - it is the price of standing above what a human mind is built to hold. A larger, healthier congregation pushes that floor down; letting your church decay pushes it back up. The floor is computed against your church’s anchor weight the same way other high-sequence madness relief is - see the Churches page for how anchor weight and madness floor relief work.

---

Keeping the throne

Be online and not AFK for twenty minutes, on at least four days out of any thirty, or the throne empties.

That is the entire cost of upkeep. Nothing else counts toward it - not abilities cast, not chants received, not anchors held, not time spent on another server in the network. Presence is the one metric nobody can argue with, and it is deliberately the cheapest thing a real player does by accident.

Four present days, not three or five, is deliberate: three would let an infrequent login hold a throne forever, and five would start punishing someone for one genuinely bad month. A brand-new reign can never lapse before the thirty-day window has even filled up once.

Going away? /coi god absence <days> declares a leave of up to 21 days, usable once every 60. The declared days are excluded from the window rather than paused inside it, so the question is postponed, not reset.

The warning ladder. You are warned privately at 14 days left on the clock, then publicly at 7, 3, and 1. The public half is not shaming - since nobody can ever take a throne by force, making an opening visible early enough for someone else to be ready for it is simply fair, and a god who is surprised by a public warning is exactly the god who was not reading the private ones.

If it lapses anyway, you are not wiped out:

• You drop to Sequence 1 on that Pathway, landing with 95% of a full bar.
• The throne empties and anybody who meets the gate may claim it.
• You get a 60-day grace period, during which re-ascending costs half the stake and your fourteen days of tenure are already counted as served.

Halved, never waived - a lapse should sting, but it should never be cheaper than the aspirant who spent two months honestly banking for their first attempt.

---

Command surface

Command	What it does
/coi ascend	Your live checklist, or answers a waiting summons
/coi ascend board	The public race board for every Pathway
/coi ascend status [pathway]	The checklist in chat
/coi ascend contest <pathway>	Contest an open vigil
/coi ascend withdraw	Pull your stake back
/coi ascend private	Opt out of being named on the board - never out of being counted
/coi ascension begin	Answer a summons
/coi ascension where	The active herald’s coordinates
/coi ascension notify [on|off]	Mute ceremony chat - never the bell or the boss bar
/coi ascension status	The active rite and the ceremony queue
/coi ascension gods [ledger <pathway>]	The Pantheon listing
/coi deity gods	The Pantheon window
/coi deity ledger <pathway>	That throne’s public record
/coi deity answer|refuse <id>	Answer or decline a Behest
/coi god	Your own throne status, or the rule if you are not a god
/coi god absence <days>	Declare a leave of absence
/coi god thrones	All 22 thrones and who sits them
/coi menu native	Prefer native client-mod screens over chest GUIs, where available

---

When the Epoch turns, all 22 thrones empty and everybody starts over - whatever is claimed is held only for now. That is what makes claiming one worth it.