Ink & potions. Spelling words pays off by part of speech:

• Spell a noun → earn ink (your currency, shown top-left). Spend it at the Stall on the home screen (walk up and press E, or tap SHOP) to grow your satchel.
• Spell an adjective → brew a potion that matches its meaning. Each adjective sits on a “dumbbell” — an attribute (speed, size, light) with two opposite ends: a self-buff you drink and an antonym that (soon) debuffs every beast on screen. So swift→Speed, big→Size, bright→Reveal; their opposites slow/small/dark brew the debuff potions. Potions stack in the HUD.

Flasks (the Apothecary — P / ⚗️). Each potion has a flask whose size = how many uses it holds. Collect more synonyms of a pole to grow its flask; spell the attribute noun (speed/size/light) for a bonus. A full flask can’t brew more until you drink one.

Drink a self-buff potion with 1/2/3 or by tapping its HUD button — each lasts 25 seconds:

• Size (from big) — grow bigger, with longer attack reach.
• Speed (from swift) — move faster.
• Reveal (from bright) — the minimap shows the whole map and which screens still have letters.

Rewards repeat: re-spelling a word spends its letters again and pays again.

Word of the Day. Each day the Wordsmithy shows a bonus word — always built from letters you've unlocked, so you can always collect what you need. Spell it once for a big ink bonus.

Mad Libris. The lectern right of the Wordsmithy. You start with one fable; recover the rest one at a time — beasts rarely drop a page, or bind the next one at the Stall with materials beasts drop. Restore a story by filling each blank with a collected word that matches the needed part of speech (noun/verb/adjective/adverb). Matching the original word earns bonus ink. A word can be used in a chapter only once, ever — so keep learning new ones. Finish every recovered chapter to add the book to your Wordhoard.

The Atlas. The globe in the Wordhoard, right of the lectern. It opens a world board of countries, seas, lakes and mountain peaks — every one of them a proper noun, and every proper noun starts with a capital letter. That's why a capital is abroad in the world every day: hunt it like any other letter-creature and it banks (capitals are kept overnight and never fill your satchel). Places on the board stay redacted — you get its kind, its continent and how many letters it has, but the name is yours to remember. Spell a place at the Wordsmithy and it inks itself onto the board: start with a capital letter (⇧ on the tray) and finish from your satchel. Case is the whole trick — turkey is a bird, Turkey is a country. Spell a country and its capital city and the region lights up and you earn that country's flag. Place names live in the Atlas, not your word collection. You can travel the board without the mouse: the arrow keys step to the neighbouring place the way a map reads, [ and ] (or the ◀ ▶ buttons) sweep one layer west to east, and 1–7 frame the World and each continent.

Writing inklings (the Scriptorium). Inklings are caught; beasts are fought. A swing passes straight through a letter-creature; to take it you write the letter, stroke by stroke, following the numbered dots — swing at it, or stand at it and press E, and the pad opens. Every inkling on a screen is wearing a real typeface, and the ghosted letter under your pen is that typeface's own — so what you are judged on is whether your ink fills that letter. That is what the pens are for. A typeface's thick-and-thin is a record of the tool that wrote it: a broad nib held at an angle writes thick across its edge and thin along it, a pointed nib spreads on the downstroke, and a round one has no contrast at all — which is the whole of sans-serif. So pick the pen that wrote this face: too thin and you can't fill the letter, too fat and your ink spills outside it. You always get the letter, whatever you pick — only the typeface is at stake, and a botched trace costs you nothing but another go. New pens are bought with ink at the Stall, and one face per screen means a letter in a face you want becomes somewhere to walk.

The Scriptorium (📜). Your album — a type specimen sheet of your own hand. Every face gets a row of 26 cells: a cell you've earned shows the letter you actually drew (with a gold bar for its grade), an empty one shows that face's own letter, ghosted, so you can see what you're hunting in the hand you'll have to hunt it in. Press A to swap between a–z and A–Z — capitals are a separate collection, not a longer one — and click a face for its plate: where it comes from, and its anatomy called out on your letterforms. A cell keeps your best ever grade, so meeting a letter you already own is still worth writing. Filling a quarter, a half and all of a face's alphabet pays ink; finishing a face outright pays a framed specimen for the Wordhoard. Press T for the Tree of Faces: the same letter in every hand, arranged by kinship — the view the per-face sheet can't give you, since you can only see that a Didone's stress is vertical by putting it next to a Garalde's. Every row names the pen that face wants and what it costs at the Stall, and completing every face on a whole branch pays a printer's type case.

The Sound Board (🔡). A crossword you spell by sound, not by letters. The tiles are the phonemes you've fished — your Fish Phoneme collection is the bag — and a play counts when the line of phonemes you lay matches some real word's pronunciation: /t u/ is two, too and to, because they sound the same. Like Scrabble, every run your tiles form (the word itself and each crossing word) has to be a real sound, and the premium squares multiply — plus three of this board's own: ◆ pays triple for any vowel, ≈ triple for any fricative (the hissing sounds), 🔊 double for any voiced one. The board never ends and never resets: it's one crossword you add a word or two to, drifting outward forever, so drag it (or use the arrow keys) to look around and ⌖ Recentre to come home. Laying a tile spends it — that sound comes off your Phonicon for good, which is what fishing is for. Each play pays ink (a tenth of its score, up to 40 a day) and inks any word it spells into your Word Hoard, and every play you hook onto the last adds +0.1× to the multiplier. When you'd rather start somewhere fresh, 🌱 New patch lets the next word go anywhere free — at the cost of the whole chain — and ♻ Trade buys a new rack for a little ink.

Creatures & the bestiary (B). Out in the field you'll meet more than inklings — pests, cubes, and hazards that drop book-binding materials (paper, glue, thread, wax, leather…). Beat one and its loot drops on the ground — walk over it to collect (the Magnet feat later makes drops drift to you) — but grab it before The Kindle scorches it. Cheese heals a heart. The bestiary logs every creature you've beaten and reveals more (stats, drops, lore) the more of that creature you defeat.

Feats (C). Collecting verbs levels you up along word-count milestones per category (1, then every few — bigger categories space rewards out further). Rewards interleave passive boosts and abilities: Motion → move speed + Slide; Competition → attack + Finisher/Combo; Perception → Divine (a daily letter peek in the library) + Treasure Sense (drops glint); Possession → satchel space + Magnet; Body → max hearts + Second Wind (recover a heart when you stay out of combat). More verb categories arrive later.