Terms

Plain language, short, and no surprises: EMBERDUST is free, it is provided as it is, and there is nothing in it that is worth money.

Playing

You may play EMBERDUST for free, as often as you like, for personal enjoyment, at home or at school or anywhere a browser works. Nothing is installed and no licence key is involved.

No purchases, and nothing of value

There is no way to give anyone money through this game, and nothing in it can be exchanged for money.

• Embers are an in-game counter earned by playing. They have no monetary value and cannot be bought, sold or cashed out. They exist to buy upgrades and skins inside this game and for nothing else.
• Sending Embers to another player is a small courtesy the build supports: one player pays an amount out of their own balance, and the other is offered it — straight away if they are playing, or the next time they open the game if they are not. A gift is offered, not imposed: the game names the sender and the amount and asks the recipient to accept or decline, and nothing is added to their balance unless they accept. It is not a trade, a market or a payment: both balances live only in the two browsers, there is no escrow and no way to reverse a gift once it has been collected. A gift is left as a note in the public table the leaderboard uses, which is why keeping it off the board is enforced rather than assumed, and why a player who clears their cookies gets a new identity that cannot collect gifts sent to the old one. See Privacy for exactly what that note contains.
• Skins are cosmetic. They change how your character looks and nothing else — no stat, no speed, no hitbox, no ability. Some are earned by beating a boss, some are bought with Embers. None can be bought with real money.
• Trails are cosmetic in the same way: a wake drawn behind your character, bought with Embers. The build refuses to let a trail reach any damage, speed, health or crit calculation, so a trail cannot make you better at the game.
• Supplies are one-run head starts bought with Embers. They are consumed at the start of a solo run, cannot be transferred, and have no value outside the run they were bought for.
• The tutorial is a practice round. It pays no Embers, records no score and advances nothing: nothing you do inside it can reach your save except the flag that says you have seen it.
• The leaderboard is a scoreboard among players. There is no prize, ranking payout or competition entry attached to it.
• The run card is a picture of a run, made on your own device and sent by you. It is a picture, not a record: it can be edited by anyone with an image editor, so it proves nothing to anyone and confers nothing. The leaderboard is the only claim to a time the game keeps, and it is friendly rather than enforced.

Fair play

Play however you like, including badly. Two things are not welcome, because they spoil it for other people:

• Offensive names. The scoreboard name is the only free-text field in the game. Keep it usable by anyone who might be looking at the board. Names can be cleared.
• Attacking the service. Do not flood the score submission endpoint, script attacks against the host, or do anything intended to stop other people playing. Submissions are rate-limited and abusive traffic can be blocked.

Provided as it is

The game is provided without warranty of any kind. It may break, change, or be unavailable; progress stored in your browser may be lost when you clear site data or when an update changes how saving works; and no backup of your progress exists anywhere else, so there is nothing to restore it from. By playing you accept that this is a free hobby project and not a service with an uptime promise.

Scores and names may be reset

The leaderboard can be cleared, in whole or in part, to give everyone a fresh start or to remove offensive names — and it has been. Scores are not permanent and are not property.

Changes to these terms

These terms describe the game as it works today. If a future version changes something material — for example if it ever introduced an account, an ad or a payment — the pages on this site would be updated before that version shipped. As of today the game has none of those things.

Questions

There is no support desk and no contact form; the About page explains why. What is stored, where it is stored and how to delete it is all set out on the Privacy page, and the How to play page covers the game itself.