KERNEL READY. POLYFAULTS IN FIELD.
POLYFAULT is a top-down arena shooter behind a hostile-helpful DOS shell. You are an operator, not a pilot. Each session loads a chassis image into the field and points it at polyfaults — squares, triangles, pentagons, hexagons with mass they should not have. Destroy them to recover cycles (CYC). Spend those cycles on eight ALLOC stats. At checkpoints the kernel offers a firmware load: a new image, or HOLD the one you have. The clock does not stop.
TEN MINUTES. THREE BOSSES.
A career run is 10:00. At 3:00, 7:00, and 10:00 the field spikes. Farm until the mark, then fight a CORE SPIKE — a polyhedral kit with armor, a tell, a strike, and an open core. Each run rolls one early, one mid, and one final from seven kits: TETRA, CUBE, OCTA, DODEC, ICOSA, ARCH, KERNEL. Clear all three and the field resolves. Die and the chassis panics. REBOOT is a warm boot. SHELL unloads to the prompt. Quitting is not a rank.
54 IMAGES. EIGHT STATS. PER-RUN MODS.
LOAD IMAGE at L15 / L30 / L45 — twin guns, drones, traps, slugs, body-ram, invis, writable-sector greens, and the rest of the 54-image tree. HOLD skips a tier.
ALLOC eight stats: HP.REGEN, HP.MAX, BODY.DMG, AMMO.SPD, AMMO.PEN, AMMO.DMG, RELOAD, MOVE.
RUN MOD at L10 / L20 / L30 / L40 — Aim, Power, or Rapid. Mandatory. Cleared when the process dies.
THE TERMINAL IS THE WORLD.
Green phosphor. Scanlines. C:FAULT> on every shell. Death is PANIC. Pause is BREAK. The wiki is a chassis tree, not a lore dump. CONFIG, STAT, RANK, and FLAGS live under SYS. No company. No villain. No war speech. Farm, alloc, load, panic, reboot.
STEAM
FLAGS — 76 achievements, kernel titles
CYC — Steam leaderboard (plus a local RANK.DAT of your top runs)
Cloud — profile sync
Steam Input — Xbox, PlayStation, Steam Controller, Steam Deck layouts