HOLLOWMAST — Send something back

One · money

A small donation

Genuinely small. This runs on a free hosting tier and always will, so there is no burn rate to cover and no target to hit — a few pounds is a real contribution here, not a rounding error.

Buys the domain and a year of it being online.

Two · words

A bug report or an idea

What broke, what confused you, what you kept wishing the game did. One sentence is plenty. There is a box further down and it takes about twenty seconds.

Buys a fix, or the next thing that gets built.

Three · data

Letting the game report back

First-party, with no name, email or account. Reports cover the run, the machine running it, and a random browser identifier that distinguishes repeat visits. The full field list is below.

Buys the answer to "where do people stop?"

The first one

If you'd like to put money in, thank you.

I'd rather say this plainly than dress it up. Nothing is gated, nothing is nagged, and there is no version of this game you get for paying. A donation buys a bit of time to keep building it, and that's the whole pitch.

If money is tight, please skip this one. The other two further down are worth as much to the game as a fiver is, and one of them is free to give and takes twenty seconds.

For what it's worth, this isn't the only plan: the website is expected to carry advertising eventually, which is a way of paying for itself that costs you nothing but a bit of screen. It will never go inside the game, and you'll be asked before anything sets a cookie — the detail is here.

There is nowhere to send money yet. Rather than put up a button that goes to a page that doesn't exist, this space stays empty until there's a real one behind it.

The other two ways to help are live right now, and they're the ones the game actually needs at this stage.

The second one

Tell me what broke, or what it's missing.

Both are equally useful and the box below takes either. Be as blunt as you like — "I had no idea what to do on the second night" is a better report than a polite one that leaves it out.

The third one

Letting the game send its own reports.

A game like this is balanced blind. I can play it for a hundred hours and still not know that most people quit on night three, or that one graphics card renders the water wrong. A small first-party report can answer both, and every recorded field is below.

What is recorded

Build and report build number, report type and schema version
Run seed, state, day, level, difficulty, playtime, kills and whether developer tools were used
Milestones page loaded; run started; first shelter and craft; tutorial finished; days one, three and seven survived; what the first craft produced
Ending death or win, with the cause when it was a death
Errors and bug notes message, stack, where it happened, and any optional text typed after pressing F8
Machine browser and language, graphics card and class, window size, pixel ratio, graphics quality, frame rate and seconds the page was open
Session a random id for this page load and why it ended
Install a random id this browser keeps, so repeat visits can be told apart from first ones — clearing site data removes it
Time and country the client time, receipt time and request country; the receiver does not store the IP address

What is not recorded

You no name, no email, no account — there isn't one to have
Saves your world and your character stay in your browser
Browsing nothing about where else you go — the install id is read by this game and nothing else, and it says nothing about you beyond "same browser"
Third-party tracking no advertising tracker, third-party analytics or third-party code in the game file
Selling it goes to one place I read, and nowhere after that

It's free. It's staying free.