Time
Nearly every meaningful action takes one or more hours. When the clock passes midnight, the day advances. The calendar keeps moving whether the day was productive or not.
PUBLIC RECORD • POLICY • DEVELOPMENT
Game Guide
Ten Thousand Schools is a martial-arts life simulator. The game is not only about winning fights. You have a job, rent, limited energy, relationships, injuries, and a finite number of hours. The main challenge is figuring out what kind of martial artist your character can become without letting the rest of their life collapse.
Lost? The complete screen menu sits directly below the compact character HUD and remains available while you move through long desktop sections. Press / anywhere to search all sixteen screens. Open Character Overview when you want the next class, injuries, competition, goals, relationships, latest result, and current suggestions; urgent problems are still named on the overview even while it is closed.
Quick start: your first week
You can make a character with only the basic fields and leave the advanced options alone. Career mode is the best first game because it gives you the intended balance of money, fatigue, training, and progression.
Open the focused first-week beginner guide for a shorter checklist you can keep beside the game.
- Create a character.Pick a name, age, motivation, and background. The rest can stay at its default value.
- Explore Bellweather.Schools and useful locations are not all visible on the first morning. Exploration opens the city.
- Keep working.Your starting money will not last forever. Rent is due every seven days and training has real costs.
- Join one school first.Cross-training is useful later, but one reliable instructor is easier to manage while you learn the game.
- Train, then recover.Hard sessions create more progress and more fatigue. Sleep, food, stress, and injuries change how useful the next session will be.
- Read the action result.After an action, a result card appears at the lower edge of the screen and stays with you even if the button was far down the page. It explains what changed—or why the choice could not be completed—then closes on its own.
- Do not rush competition.Build technique familiarity, attend classes, spar under supervision, and enter an event when the game shows that you qualify.
The basic loop
Money
Work pays for rent, food, tuition, travel, equipment, treatment, entry fees, and eventually larger projects. A martial career can earn money, but it is not dependable at the beginning.
Energy and fatigue
Energy is what you can spend right now. Fatigue is what has built up over time. A short rest may restore energy without removing deep fatigue.
Health and recovery
Health is your general condition. Nutrition, stress, injuries, housing, sleep, and medical care all affect recovery. Ignoring these systems eventually makes training worse.
Relationships
Teachers and other people remember what you do. Trust opens instruction and opportunities. Rivalry, fear, obligation, loyalty, and respect are separate values.
Long-term direction
You can compete, teach, research, own schools, found an organization, create a style, travel, retire, and continue through a successor. You are not required to do all of it in one character.
What the top numbers mean
| Number | What it means | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Money | Spendable cash. | Keep enough for rent, food, tuition, and emergencies. |
| Energy | Short-term capacity for actions. | Low energy blocks demanding actions. |
| Fatigue | Accumulated physical and mental load. | High fatigue reduces training quality and raises risk. |
| Health | Overall physical condition. | Injuries and neglected recovery pull this down. |
| Nutrition | How well fueled the character is. | Buy groceries before you run out of meals. |
| Morale | Confidence and willingness to keep going. | Losses, stress, isolation, and bad choices can damage it. |
| Stress | Pressure from work, money, conflict, and overcommitment. | Rest, breathing work, housing, and relationships can help. |
| Reputation | Your combined standing in the local community. | Different groups can view you differently. |
What every game section is for
Daily actions, general condition, injuries, personal history, goals, ethics, and the most immediate things your character needs.
Jobs, shifts, housing, rent, and property. Use this when money or recovery has become the problem.
Clothing, protective equipment, training tools, maintenance, shops, and equipment requirements.
Bellweather locations and the wider travel network. Explore locally before assuming a school or service does not exist.
Your schedule, upcoming bills and events, simulation pace, training cycles, and longer-term planning.
Instructors, tuition, classes, school culture, relationships, training plans, and progression through a curriculum.
Everything you have observed or learned, its stage, practice history, prerequisites, evidence, safety notes, and related forms.
Supervised weapon traditions, equipment, certification, history, and safety gates. This is simulation content, not instruction.
Research, tactics, anatomy, history, culture, teaching, ethics, and the other things a serious martial career can study.
Teachers, friends, rivals, family, romance, social boundaries, favors, memories, and the lives NPCs are living around you.
Competition, professional work, teaching, media, records, licenses, retirement, and every non-owner career track.
Opening and running schools, staff, students, facilities, budgets, branches, community programs, and succession.
Building a personal method from techniques you genuinely understand, then testing, naming, ranking, and teaching it.
Councils, federations, guilds, politics, service, founding a new organization, elections, recognition, and sanctions.
The reference library: arts, curricula, historical notes, visual catalogs, and material that explains the larger world.
Your full action history, production ledgers, system health, and review information. Use it when you are not sure what just happened.
Schools, training, and techniques
Finding a school does not mean every class or technique is immediately available. Schools have tuition, schedules, culture, membership rules, instructors, and relationship gates. Instructors may require attendance, trust, basic experience, or safe supervised practice before they offer harder material.
Technique stages
A technique normally moves from being observed to being introduced, familiar, practiced, reliable, and eventually mastered. Knowing the name of something is not the same as being able to use it. Drilling builds familiarity; supervised classes improve it more safely; sparring and competition test whether it holds up under pressure.
Training quality
Duration and intensity are only part of the result. Your energy, fatigue, health, nutrition, stress, teacher, equipment, school culture, training phase, and current injury all matter. When a hard session produces less progress than expected, check the character's condition before assuming the game ignored the action.
Why a training button may be disabled
- You have not discovered or joined the school.
- The class is not currently available.
- You do not have enough money, energy, equipment, trust, or prerequisite experience.
- An injury or safety requirement blocks the activity.
- The action belongs to a different mode, location, or career stage.
Sparring, competition, and combat
Combat is turn-based and represents tactical decisions, not button speed. Range, position, balance, stamina, accumulated damage, score, known techniques, preparation, and the opponent's habits all matter. A good choice can still fail; the game is comparing both characters and the current situation.
- Prepare first. Train the relevant techniques, manage weight and injuries, scout when possible, and arrive rested.
- Read the current position. A choice that works at striking range may make no sense in a clinch or on the ground.
- Watch stamina. Repeating the hardest option is not always the strongest strategy.
- Protect the career. Unsafe choices can have consequences beyond a single score or result.
- Use the replay. The combat log explains how the position and score changed.
Different events use different rules. Boxing, grappling, wrestling, forms, mixed events, controlled smokers, historical scenarios, and Legends trials are not scored the same way.
Game modes
Career
The normal long-form game. Money, injury, aging, work, and competition are balanced around the intended experience.
Sandbox
Lets you change funds, starting skill and reputation, location, available school arts, learning speed, injury severity, aging, competition, economy pressure, historical framing, and whether labeled Legends content is enabled. Creative sandbox is useful for testing systems.
Challenge
Gives one focused objective, a deadline, and a reward. A challenge can fail while the character and save continue.
Historical
Uses a specific historical setting with documented, disputed, oral, and fictionalized material labeled separately.
Legends
An explicitly fictional, cinematic mode with impossible abilities and supernatural scenarios. It makes no real-world claims.
Saves, logout, export, and import
The game saves to the server after successful actions. Your browser remembers the private save identifier so it can resume the right character. There is no username or password account in Alpha 3.0.
- Logout removes the currently selected character from the active browser session. It does not delete the server save.
- Local roster remembers recently used save identifiers on this browser. Clearing browser data can remove that list.
- Export save downloads a complete JSON backup. Keep it private because it contains the character name and simulation state.
- Import save creates a new cloud save from a valid exported file. It does not overwrite the old save.
- Ironman is chosen during advanced creation. It keeps one automatic server timeline and disables export or imported copies. This cannot be changed after creation.
- Old saves are migrated forward when opened. Alpha 3.0 currently uses schema 29.
Frequently asked questions
I just started. What should I do first?
Explore, work at least one shift, buy food when needed, discover a school, and join one that fits your schedule and budget. The new in-game Next Steps panel also reads your current save and points toward the most useful immediate action.
Does the game save automatically?
Yes. Successful game actions update the cloud save. Exporting is still recommended before a major release or if the character is important to you.
What is the difference between a normal save and Ironman?
Normal characters save automatically and can also be exported as manual backup files, then imported as a separate cloud character. Ironman characters have one server timeline and cannot be exported or copied through import.
Why is a button disabled?
A dimmed button is unavailable; it is not still loading. The most common causes are money, energy, fatigue, membership, location, equipment, schedule, trust, qualification, or a prerequisite technique. Hover the button for a short reason, then check the nearby requirement list. Travel cards spell out every missing gate directly.
Why did an action give less progress than I expected?
Training is affected by fatigue, energy, health, nutrition, injury, intensity, duration, teacher quality, equipment, training phase, and diminishing returns. More time is not always better time.
How do I discover more schools?
Use Explore Bellweather from Life and check the Map. Some opportunities also come from people, travel, events, and reputation.
How do I learn a specific technique?
Find an instructor or school that teaches it, meet the membership and prerequisite requirements, then attend the relevant training. The Techniques page shows its current stage and history.
Can I train in more than one art?
Yes. Cross-training is a major part of the game, but it costs more time and money and can slow deep progress in any one curriculum.
What happens if I cannot pay rent?
The game applies financial and housing consequences. Work, change jobs, reduce expenses, move to cheaper housing, or use career income before the due day.
What should I do when energy is low?
Sleep, eat if nutrition is low, reduce stress, or choose a less demanding action. Energy and long-term fatigue are different, so repeated short rests may not solve deep overtraining.
How do injuries heal?
Time and rest help, but treatment, evaluation, rehabilitation, insurance, housing, training adaptation, and injury severity affect the outcome. Continuing to train hard can extend the problem.
How do I enter a competition?
Use Career to find an event, then meet its experience, membership, fee, equipment, health, weight, license, and preparation requirements. Events later in the ladder require a stronger record.
Can I lose the game?
Challenges can fail and careers can go badly, but most setbacks become part of the character's story. Bankruptcy, injury, retirement, a loss, or a damaged relationship normally creates different decisions instead of deleting the save.
Do NPCs change when I am not interacting with them?
Yes. The world advances as your character takes actions. Rivals train, people move, schools change, careers progress, and news or rumors can appear.
How do I become a teacher or open a school?
Build real curriculum experience, instructor trust, teaching skill, reputation, and money. Career tracks and Ownership show the exact qualifications as you approach them.
Can I create my own martial art?
You can create a style after you understand enough compatible material. The Style Lab measures coherence, pressure testing, standards, forms, teaching, and how students carry it forward.
What is passed to the next generation?
Institutions, schools, students, archives, knowledge, and parts of a legacy can survive. Personal physical mastery is not automatically inherited.
Is Legends mode supposed to be realistic?
No. Legends is openly fictional. Impossible techniques, supernatural energy, secret scrolls, and mythical trials are kept separate from the realistic and historical systems.
Is the game martial-arts or medical instruction?
No. Everything is a simulation abstraction. Read the Safety & Content Disclaimer and use qualified real-world professionals for training, health, nutrition, law, or emergencies.
Where are language and accessibility controls?
Open a character, then choose Profile & Settings in the top utility bar. That page includes language, right-to-left support, text size, contrast, reduced motion, color-vision support, and simplified view.
How do I report a bug or confusing screen?
Use the contact information at Logan Pendragon Forge. Include the section, character mode, action, expected result, actual result, browser, and device if possible.
Short glossary
- Action
- A choice that changes the simulation and normally advances time.
- Class
- A supervised school training session.
- Familiarity
- How well the character knows a technique outside ideal practice.
- Pressure testing
- Controlled resistance used to see whether learned material remains usable.
- Readiness
- A combination of condition, fatigue, training load, and preparation.
- Reputation
- How different communities currently see the character.
- Schema
- The version of the save format. Old saves migrate when they are loaded.
- Style coherence
- How well the parts of a custom style work together instead of being a random list.
- Trust
- An instructor or NPC's confidence in your character based on repeated behavior.
- World tick
- The background step that advances NPCs, organizations, events, and other parts of the city.