The world and story of Time Heroes

Time Heroes is set in Timelands, a universe where time spent is not lost. A minute lived here leaves a small trace behind, and the whole game sits on that.

This page covers the part of that world you meet inside the game: the Stillness, the eggs, the colonies, the network pilots call the Dial, and three names that keep turning up in the records.

What Timelands is

Timelands is the name of the entire place you play in: the Nexus you stand in, the star chart above it, and all 10 known worlds from the first forest to the Edge of Time.

The strange property of this universe is that it does not forget time. Somewhere else a minute passes and is gone. Here it leaves a mark you can measure.

You are the Time Hero

The hero is the player. Pets are pets, creatures and companions, and none of them is a hero.

Nobody in Timelands bends time. A Time Hero is someone who gives their own time to it. Give a minute and a trace forms. Give an hour and a world keeps changing a little longer. Put thousands of people together and whole regions hold out against the Stillness.

Why TimeStars exist

TimeStars form on their own while you spend time in Timelands, 1 per minute. They also arrive from gift codes and rewards, so your balance is not a readout of the hours you have played.

In the fiction a TimeStar is the trace a lived minute leaves behind.

The Stillness

The threat in Timelands is not time breaking. It is change stopping. When the Stillness settles over a region, the clock keeps running and nothing new happens.

• Lightning in a storm strikes the same spot, over and over.
• A wave reaches the shore in exactly the same shape.
• A torch burns and never gets any shorter.
• A door closes, and seconds later closes the same way again.

What an egg is

An egg is a creature of Timelands in a waiting state. Living things here evolved a very old defence against the Stillness: when a region stops changing, some species close themselves into a shell and wait it out.

So an egg holds someone who started waiting. Hatching ends that wait, and the first thing out of the shell looks at you because you are the one who ended it. Lumine, the archivist, puts it in a single line: the rare one is not the one born stronger, it is the one that waited longer.

Colonies, and what an Anchor is

One hero can carry their own existence through a Cycle. A group can do something larger. When people live, build and remember each other in the same place for long enough, that place begins to resist the Stillness, and Timelands calls the result an Anchor.

A colony is a point where players know each other, share a name and keep a common record, and in Timelands that shared memory is what holds a place together.

The Dial, and three names in the records

The star chart is the map of the jump network, and pilots call it the Dial. The 10 known worlds sit on it as destinations. Distance is counted in jump units, the length of one hop on that network.

Three names come up again and again in what Timelands leaves behind: Quantulon, Exulon and The Mind. The game does not explain any of them on your first day, and neither does this page.