keel

keel is the mod where the ground learns to move. stand on a deck and it holds you; walk it while it sails and your feet stay where you put them, through every turn — the whole trick the line is named for, built once in tklib and inherited by every hull that will ever come. no subworlds, no physics engine dragged in: ships are crafted whole, their shapes known the way a house knows its rooms.

the humblest hull is the raft: three planks over three string, laid on any open water, poled along with a click and a beat between strokes. it comes out the wood you lashed it from — twelve trees, twelve rafts — wearing the very string its recipe spends, drawn across the plank grain.

the sloop is the first real ship. a raft, that wood's planks, and a sailcloth of wool make her: an oblong hull with trapdoor bulwarks and a gangway amidships, a mast dressed by the state of her canvas, a grindstone wheel at the stern. click the wheel and you stand the watch — tap forward and back to work the sails through their four states (anchored · bare poles · half sail · full sail), hold left or right at a rudder that answers slow at a standstill and harder with way on, sneak to step away. the ship answers the sails, not the mouse. at anchor her chain hangs over the starboard bow, past the waterline, so you can read her state from the shore.

one player at the helm and another walking the deck is the point of all of it — a deck two friends stand on in the same wind. and the deck under keel is the deck under everything the line has charted: the trade sails of the seafarers, corsair's black flags, aloft's gondolas in the sky. the first timber is laid.