r/myst

Hi r/myst,

This product contains trademarks and/or copyrighted works of Cyan. All rights reserved by Cyan. This product is not official and is not endorsed by Cyan. No game assets or text are included. The plugin draws its own glyphs and numerals; if you already have a D’ni font installed, it can use it, but none is provided.

Some of you were kind enough to respond to my earlier posts about this, so here is a proper write-up of where the project is now.

Age Writer is an Obsidian plugin that turns what you write into Ages. You describe a world in a short block of text, and the plugin reads it, paints it, and tells you whether it would hold together. It's a fan tribute to the idea behind the Descriptive Art: a world is only as good as the words you chose.

✍️ How it works

In a note, you write a code block tagged age, with one line per element:

Frozen world. A white sun. Fog and ice.

The plugin turns it into an Age panel with:

Glyphs for everything you wrote, one per line, like the page of a book
A short description of the place, generated from your words
A linking window onto the Age: sky, weather, terrain, light, painted and animated
A stability readout, with the numbers behind it for each axis: cosmological, geological, metaphysical, weather, ecological
D'ni coordinates for the Age, shown in numerals

The same note and the same seed always give the same world. The seed comes from the note's name, so renaming a note changes its world.

⚖️ Stability is the game

Every element has a weight. Write something contradictory (an ice world under a lava sky) and the Age becomes unstable. Write something coherent and it holds. An Age is only as stable as its weakest axis, and the panel shows you which one.

World types: frozen, lava, desert, ocean and jungle worlds, each with its own look and its own rules
Riches and scars: you can ask for gold, silver, gems, pearls... but riches destabilize the Age. You can offset that by deliberately adding scars (scorched ground, poisoned air, barren soil...). Several scars are needed to balance one rich vein, so it's a real trade-off
Quantities: few / normal / many for trees, ruins, water, rain and so on, both in the picture and in the stability math
Sun colors, day and year length, window size, and more

🖋️ The Law of Change

If you rewrite an Age you've already explored, you don't edit it, you distort it. Touching the description of an explored Age raises its instability, and if you leave it alone it slowly heals, a bit more each day. Unstable linking books get damaged pages, and a very unstable Age can make the link flicker, drop you somewhere else, or fail.

🌍 A Relto-like hub

A hub note is your refuge: a painted floating island with a cabin and a shelf of books (your Ages, colored by stability), linking pillars, and pages that add elements and sounds.

D'ni time, computed live, in D'ni numerals (toggle in settings)
Your pages and linking books, with damaged books shown when an Age is unstable

🔊 Sounds

Everything is synthesized in real time with Web Audio. Nothing is sampled from the games, and the plugin ships no audio files.

Linking sounds: every time you link to another Age you hear a short linking sound. There are five variants, picked at random (never the same one twice in a row), each one slightly varied
Ambient soundscapes for each Age and for the hub: wind, water, rain, fire, crickets, thunder, chimes...
Book-opening sounds, and static when a link is unstable
Listen to the Age with one click. Sound only starts when you press play, and stops by itself if you leave the note

📓 Journal, puzzles, and your own blocks

Exploration journal: a journal for an Age that writes itself from the notes that link to it, with a glyph sketch in the margin, alterations and mechanisms. Choose the voice (Atrus, Gehn or Miller), in English or French
Puzzles attached to Ages (sound locks, crystal imagery, frequency networks)
Cover page for each Age, exportable as SVG
A library format to define your own blocks with your own weights and reactions, no recompiling
French and English interface

🔤 About fonts

The D'ni script is displayed only if a D'ni font is installed on your computer. The plugin doesn't ship any font. I've tested it with a D'ni font installed on my own machine, and it works. Without a font you simply get plain text.

⚠️ Unofficial fan project

Age Writer is an independent, non-commercial fan tribute to the Myst series. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Cyan Worlds. Myst, Riven, Uru, D'ni and related names belong to their respective owners. I use them only to say what inspired the project.

No assets from the games: no artwork, music, sounds, text or fonts
The Ages are generated from what you write
Free, open source, no ads, no donations

🧪 Status

It's a beta. I've tested it on desktop Obsidian with a light theme Not published yet

Thanks for reading, and happy writing. I'd love to see the Ages you make.

You might have seen my posts over the last couple of days. Age Writer is now out.

It's a free, open-source plugin for Obsidian (the note-taking app) that lets you write Ages the way a Writer would.

You describe a world in a few lines of a code block: a sun, water, sand, a fern, two moons. The plugin reads it back like a Descriptive Book: a description, a stability (stable, unstable, dying), and a living linking window onto the world with its own sky, shore, night and moons. What you leave unwritten is drawn from the dark, always the same way for the same book. Rewrite a world you've already explored and you damage it.

Worlds follow a simplified physics (star, orbit, core, air, water, light). Easy mode explains what doesn't hold; strict mode makes it cost stability and suggests the line you could write to fix it.

Your Ages stand on a shelf in your Relto: a floating island with a cabin, linking pillars, a pond, and a cat that sleeps by the fire in the evening. There's an Imager you can tune to an Age (crystals, lens, atmosphere, then lock), and a surveyor's notebook on the cabin table to check your work.

Run Generate a random Age for an instant world, or follow the welcome note, which is itself an Age.

This is sandbox mode: you write, explore and furnish at your own pace. A game mode is planned, and more to come.

Everything is local: no network, no AI at runtime. Every picture is drawn by code and every sound is synthesized.

Thanks for all the comments so far, and tell me what you'd want in the game mode.

Install

In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Age Writer"

Links

Plugin page: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/age-writer

Fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Cyan Worlds. No Myst asset (font, image, sound) is included. MIT licence.

This product contains trademarks and/or copyrighted works of Cyan. All rights reserved by Cyan. This product is not official and is not endorsed by Cyan. No game assets or text are included. The plugin draws its own glyphs annumerals; if you already have a D’ni font installed, it can use it, but none is provided.

Age Writer: an unofficial fan-made Obsidian plugin where you write Ages and the world decides if they hold, UPDATE