EXCAVARA // THE DEEP ARCHIVE
FIELD MANUAL
EDITION 01 · ISSUED TO ALL EXCAVATORS
You are going down a shaft to fetch a piece of music that somebody buried. Nothing in here is required reading — the shovel explains itself in about four seconds. But the rock keeps a few things to itself, and this is where they are written down.
1 THE JOB
A track is buried at the bottom of a shaft. You dig down to it. On the way the music assembles around you, layer by layer, until the full mix is playing and the record itself is lying in the vault. A descent takes roughly three to five minutes, which is the length of the song — that is not a coincidence.
You keep everything you dig up. Reach a core early enough and the first excavators mint that edition on-chain for nothing; after that the edition is closed for good.
2 CONTROLS
On a phone you get a thumb-stick. Rest your thumb anywhere on it and drag to steer; flick up to jump. Because it reads a direction instead of a button, you can hold down and sideways at the same time — digging while sliding along a seam, which is the one thing the arrows cannot do.
Prefer buttons? The ⇄ switch beside the pad swaps the stick for a four-way arrow pad — ◀ ▶ to walk, ▼ to dig, ▲ to jump — and remembers your choice on that device. Everything else lives in the panels around the edges; nothing on this page is required to finish a descent.
⚠ The shaft only goes down. You can jump two rows, and that is the whole of it. There is no climbing back out, so dig with the understanding that every metre is a one-way decision.
3 THE STRATA
The ground changes as you go. Each layer has its own colour, its own rock and its own temperament. These are the Deep Archive's five; a drop with its own palette descends through its own.
The seams between layers are not straight. They shear and speckle differently on every descent, so the border you crossed last time is not the border you will cross on the next one.
4 HOW THE TRACK ASSEMBLES
Every stem of the song is buried at its own depth, marked on the ruler above. Dig past one and it joins the mix and stays. Near the surface the whole thing is muffled, as if it were playing through the floor; the deeper you go the more the filter opens, until the mix is wide open at the core.
This is why there is no skip button and no preview. The only way to hear the last layer of a track is to be standing at the bottom of the shaft when it arrives.
Headphones. The bass layers arrive early and phone speakers cannot reproduce them, so half the descent goes missing on a laptop lid. This is the one piece of equipment the manual actually insists on.
5 WHAT IS BURIED
- ARTEFACTS
- Tapes, documents, photographs and stranger things, sorted into seven categories. Complete a category and the archive owes you something. Dig up one you already have and the second copy is counted, not thrown away.
- ONE-OF-ONES
- Exactly one of each is buried per world. When it is out of the ground, that is the only copy there was.
- RECOVERED FOOTAGE
- Photographs and stills the artist put in the ground themselves. Some worlds also hold a film, chiselled into the vault wall and playing at the bottom for whoever gets there.
- CRYSTAL VEINS
- They glow through the dark and pay out shards — 3 at the surface and more the deeper you break them. Shards buy supplies and gear; they are earned in the ground, never required.
- TOOLS
- REINFORCED SHOVEL — Digging is 30% faster. The earth gives way easier now. SIGNAL SCANNER — Buried artefacts now pulse through the darkness. There is also a pickaxe down there. Find it and one swing carries you ten blocks through the rock.
- HAZARDS
- Some things in the dirt should have been left alone. Break one and the signal is contaminated for a few seconds — the mix collapses to a rumble and comes back. It costs you time, not progress. Every world dresses its hazard differently; in one of them it is snakes.
6 THE LOADOUT
Before you drop in you pick 2 perks. Only 2, out of 5 — so every pick costs you another one, which is the entire point.
7 SUPPLIES
Carried into the field and spent from the panel while you dig.
The outfitter also sells lamps, trails and gear. None of it is needed to reach a core; all of it can be earned by digging.
8 THE OTHERS
You are not alone down there, though nobody can get in your way. Other excavators appear as faint diggers at their real depth, and the readout tells you who is below you and by how much.
You get 3 marks per descent. A mark is a heart left in the wall at the depth where something got you, and it stays in that rock for everyone who comes after. Older messages surface as echoes while you dig past them.
9 RANK
Every block, metre and artefact feeds one number, and that number carries you up a ladder of 22 titles — from SURVEYOR to ARCHIVE ETERNAL. It cannot be bought. Each calendar month is also its own season with its own board, and the top excavator of a season takes a trail that is not for sale.
10 BELOW THE FLOOR
The vault is not the bottom. Past roughly 698m the world runs out of prepared ground and keeps going anyway, colder and harder, with no core waiting at the end of it. There is nothing down there to collect. People go anyway.