Reference · game terms
Glossary
A short reference for the in-game terms you’ll meet across Vellestria — the currency, the carnet, the factions, the celestial cipher. Skim it at the start, or come back when a word in a puzzle margin loses its edge.
Gameplay
- Cogitats
- The in-game currency. You earn cogitats by solving puzzles and spend them on hints. Atlas Pro buyers receive a monthly stipend; everyone else accumulates them through play.Pricing
- Carnet
- Cora's leather-bound notebook, inherited from her grandfather Theodor. Five sections: a Journal of his letters, an Atlas of recovered map fragments, a hidden Codex, plus a Souvenirs replay archive and Themes for cosmetic customisation. The Journal and Atlas are the canon narrative core.Open the carnet
- Codex reveal
- A chapter-gated piece of intimate prose about a character, written in Cora's first-person voice. Reveals unlock as you complete chapters — the codex remembers what each character looked like to her before, and after, the chapter that taught her more about them.Codex
- Celestial cipher (sextant code)
- A substitution cipher Cora's great-grandfather Lambert co-invented in 1965 with the astronomer Aldous Branwen at the Stellar Cliffs Observatory. Thirty-six symbols — 26 constellations plus 8 lunar phases plus Venus and Mars — map to letters and digits. Cora learns it progressively across the eight chapters; her sextant is the reading instrument.
- Post-puzzle dialogue
- The short beat that fires after you solve a puzzle — usually one or two lines from a present character reacting to what Cora just figured out. Not every puzzle has one; the ones that do are deliberate emotional punctuation, not filler.
- Chapter cascade
- What unlocks when you complete a chapter: new characters in the codex, new fragments (on chapters 2, 4, and 6), new pages of the carnet, and the next batch of celestial-cipher letters. The cascade is atomic — one transaction, deterministic, server-side.
- Secret puzzle
- A hidden puzzle reachable through a hotspot on a lieu's illustration. Vellestria has eight of them. Finding all eight earns an achievement and a few extra carnet entries; missing them all does not block the saga. They are discovery rewards, not gatekeepers.
- Daily archive
- An Atlas Pro perk. Free players see today's daily puzzle and the seven before it; Pro subscribers see the full back catalogue, browsable by date. Cora's daily note is the small parchment ribbon at the top of the puzzle.Today's daily
- Streak recovery
- An Atlas Pro perk: one free recovery per month if you miss a daily puzzle and break your streak. Free players can still play yesterday's puzzle, but the streak counter resets. Pro buys you exactly one second chance per calendar month.
- Atlas Pro
- The paid tier. Six euros a month or a sixty-euro lifetime. Pro buyers receive a monthly cogitats stipend, a 30 percent discount on hints, the daily archive, streak recovery, and the cosmetic carnet themes. Lifetime breaks even after about ten months and is the cleanest way to back the studio for the four nations still to come.Pricing
World
- Fragment
- A hand-drawn vellum map page, roughly 30 by 40 centimetres, of a place erased from official charts. Theodor drew them across forty years. You recover three of them in Vellestria — more wait in the nations Cora has yet to reach.
- Lieu
- A place within a nation. Vellestria has eight: the Old Town, the Sealed Compass, Theodor's House, the Botanical Gardens, the Library Quarter, the Old Cemetery, the Councillors' Walk, and the Stellar Cliffs. Each lieu hosts a cluster of puzzles and one or two named characters.Atlas
- Faction
- An ideological grouping inside Vellestria's cartographic world. Three are active: the Cartographers' Council (the public institution), the Old Guard (the silent four-generation Verras resistance founded in 1845), and the Meridian (the older, opposing cell formalised in 1907). The Meridian are not cartoon villains — they believe they protect Vellestria from weaponised maps.
- Vellestrian
- The adjective for things and people of Vellestria: the maritime city-state where the saga begins. Vellestrian culture is harbour-oriented, parchment-conservative, slightly melancholic, and notoriously precise about charts.
- Sundered (Sundered Isles)
- The eleven islands north-west of Vellestria, half-erased from Council charts after the seismic upheavals of 1847. The Sundered are the second nation Cora will visit. Their tonal identity is fog, ritual, and old grief — a quiet counterpoint to Vellestria's harbour clarity.