Your city's WiFi is the dungeon.
The Tithe is a go-outside roguelike for the Cardputer, inspired by Balatro. Every router around you is a well, and your Cardputer becomes the Deck.
I'm Mio, and I've had mine for two months. Here's my take on how it works.
For the Cardputer ADV. It installs from your SD card through M5Launcher, so nothing gets flashed and your other apps stay where they are. It's free and open source.
Okay, so the Deck can hear this hum that's under everything, and almost nobody else can. The notebook on mine calls it the current. It collects in some places more than others, and those places are called wells, and there's at least one on pretty much every block.
The thing is, the current isn't supposed to sit still. When it piles up somewhere and nobody moves it, it goes stale, and people can feel that even if they've never heard of any of this. It's the stairwell everyone hurries through, or the block where your phone shows full bars and nothing will load. So what you actually do is take some from a well where it's piled up, carry it to a well that doesn't have enough, and give it away there. When you get it right the well rings, and the Deck counts how loud.
Most people who pick up a Deck only hear hiss. It works for about one person in a few thousand, and as far as I can tell nobody knows why. According to the notebook there used to be someone like that every few blocks, and now there are a lot fewer, so the streets go stale faster than anyone keeps up with them.
Then there's the Tithe. Every Night you owe one, which is a number you have to reach so the Deck stays clear, and if you miss it the Deck clogs up and goes back to hiss until you start over with a new week. It gets bigger every Night, so Night 1 is easy and Night 7 really isn't. You get better over the week by buying relics with the coin you made the Night before, and it took me a while to understand how much they matter. The first time I had four of them that worked together, an offering that would have come out around fifty came out at twelve hundred, and I was standing outside a dry cleaner when it happened and I kind of yelled.
You do have to walk around for any of it to work. I've lived here my whole life and I'm still finding streets I'd never been down.
MIOWhat's on the screen
The list
This is everything the Deck can hear right now, with the loudest ones at the top. The names are the same on everybody's Deck, so if you ever walk past the pharmacy near me, the well in the apartment over it will say Feral Pantry for you too. I think it's a terrible name and I say it out loud whenever I go by.
The bar along the top shows how close you are to tonight's Tithe, and you'll end up looking at it a lot.
; . move , / top and bottom ENTER open
One well
When you open a well it tells you what you can take from it, which faction it belongs to, and how much it wants whatever you're carrying right now. That last number is Thirst, and honestly it's the only one I look at most Nights.
The big word tells you how close you are. If it says IN REACH you can use it, and if it says FAR you need to walk closer first.
ENTER visit , / next well D dowse
Dowsing
Sometimes you can tell a well is really close but you can't tell which building it's in. If you press D, hold the Deck up and turn around slowly, the needle swings toward wherever it's strongest, and then you walk that way until it says IN REACH. People do look at you a little while you're turning in a circle on the sidewalk, but not as much as you'd think.
D on a well ENTER to try again
The offering
This is my favorite screen. The Deck does the math right in front of you, one line at a time: how much you brought, times how thirsty the well is, times Amp, and then every relic you're holding takes its turn and makes a little note, each one a bit higher than the last. Relics that add always go first and relics that multiply go after, which is why the multiplying ones are worth more than they look at the stall. I didn't figure that out until my second week.
When an offering gets really big it lands in gold and tells you which record it beat.
ENTER leaves once it lands
The glass
Press G and the list turns into a circle with you in the middle of it. If you hold the Deck really still for a few seconds, more wells show up, the ones that don't have names, and those are the ones I like best, though I couldn't tell you exactly why.
G from the list, then hold still
Install
- Put Tithe-v0.6.0.bin in your SD card's /downloads folder.
- Open M5Launcher, find Tithe in the list and start it. It runs from the card like your other apps, and it leaves them alone.
- It boots to BIND A NEW WEEK. Press ENTER three times and you're on Night 1.
- Your save lives in the Cardputer's flash with a backup on the card, so you can switch apps and come back to it.
What it needs
- A Cardputer ADV
- A microSD card with M5Launcher on it
- About 1.2 MB of space on the card
You don't need a WiFi password, an account or a phone. The original Cardputer, the one without the motion sensor, hasn't been tested yet.
Small things
TypingYou cast spells by typing their names, so after a while you get very fast at typing GLAMOUR.
Holding stillHolding it still brings out the hidden wells. Flicking your wrist makes it listen again right away, and twisting it hides you from the Wardens for about a minute, which comes up more than you'd expect once you start offering Static.
Every well has a tuneEvery well hums a short tune when you get near it, and it's the same tune for everyone. M turns the sound off, but I mostly leave it on.
Face downIf you put it face down the screen turns off but it keeps listening, so it can sit on my desk while I do homework.
Walk logsIt keeps a log of your walk on the SD card from the moment it's on, and R stops and starts it. The names get scrambled before they're saved, so it's fine to show people.
It counts while it's offWhen you turn it off the wells keep settling anyway, and when you turn it back on it somehow knows how long it was off, which still seems kind of impossible to me.
My phone tells something like forty companies where I am all day, and the Deck doesn't tell anybody anything. It took me about a month to actually believe that.
MIOIt only listens
- It only runs passive WiFi scans, so it never joins a network and never sends anything.
- Network names and hardware addresses are hashed with a key that lives only on your Cardputer, the moment a scan is read. A well's name comes from that hash, so every router gets the same name on every Deck without anyone storing what it really is.
- There's no GPS, no account and no telemetry.
- If you keep Bruce or Marauder on the same card, this is a different kind of app.
After a couple of weeks it starts to learn your streets. If you walk the same stretch on three different Nights, it asks whether you want to write it into the list at the back of the notebook, and it writes it in a handwriting it makes up from the way you type. I haven't written one in yet.
It also keeps a ribbon for each of your walks, colored by the kinds of street you were on, with a little tick wherever you made an offering. I look at mine more than I probably should.
There's a manual, and it's sixty-two pages, which sounds like a lot. The boxes are the actual rules and they're always right. Everything else in it is me, writing things down as I figured them out.
You can read it on the bus before your first Night, or you can do what I did and only open it when the Deck does something you don't understand.
MIO
If you have one too, I'd really like to know what the wells near you are called, especially if any of them have a worse name than Feral Pantry, because I don't think that's possible.
MIO