The Forestbook

1The fable

A lion catches a mouse and lets it go. Later the lion is caught in a hunter's rope, and the mouse comes back and gnaws it through. The Forestbook is that fable run as an economy, on a loop.

Two roles share one cycle. The Lion commits capital and cannot use it for anything else while the cycle runs. The Mouse commits attention: it plays, crafts, and cuts. Neither side finishes the cycle alone, and that is the whole design. Everything else in this document is the machinery that makes the exchange honest.

A wallet picks one role per cycle and keeps it until the next one begins.

2The cycle

The protocol is a small state machine with three phases. Anyone may call poke() to move it; nobody can hold it still.

Mercy

Lions pledge, Mice play, fees accumulate. The fees routed during Mercy are the cycle's Net Pressure. Mercy turns into Rescue once the pressure passes a threshold, but never before 18 hours; and it turns anyway at 30 hours, even if nothing happened.

The threshold scales with the capital committed — 0.05 AVAX of fees per million FOREST pledged — and is clamped between 0.5 and 2 AVAX. More capital asks for more activity, within bounds.

Rescue

The boosts stop and the direction of value reverses. The Rope appears across the Lion and the routing changes: half of every fee now goes into the FOREST/AVAX pool as depth. Rescue ends when both conditions hold — the Rope is cut through and the depth target is met — or after 16 hours, whichever comes first.

Settlement

For one hour the cycle is closed: Lions can withdraw, rewards for the epoch can be claimed once their root is posted, and Favor is final. Then Mercy opens again and the cycle counter increments.

3Prides and Grace

A Pride is the cooperative unit: up to five Lions and fifty Mice. Creating one costs 0.02 AVAX, which goes to the fee router like any other game fee.

A Lion's seat is taken when it actually pledges, not when it joins, so an empty wallet cannot squat a Pride. A Mouse that has not bought a mission pass in the current or previous cycle can be evicted by the founder. Nobody can drop a role and take another inside the same cycle.

Grace is what a pledge is worth to the Pride. It is measured in FOREST-seconds: the amount pledged multiplied by the time it stayed committed during the cycle. Grace is not a token and cannot be traded; it is the budget of boosts the Pride's Mice can draw on, and a Lion's reward weight follows the Grace its Mice actually used.

4Missions and crafting

A Mouse opens a mission, spends Energy, plays a short interaction and comes back with Claim Weight and seasonal resources: Thread, Wood, Stone, Iron. Energy and mission results live on the game server; only what pays or settles touches the chain.

A mission does not mint FOREST. It earns Claim Weight, a share of the epoch's fixed budget. Twice the players does not mean twice the emissions — it means the same budget, split more ways.

Five Thread and one Iron make one Cutter. One Cutter cuts one strand of the Rope.

5The Rope and the depth target

The Rope is sized when Rescue opens: ten strands, plus one per active Mouse — a Mouse that bought a mission pass this cycle — capped at a hundred. Counting only active Mice is deliberate: free memberships cannot inflate the work.

Each cut spends a voucher signed by the game server for one player, one Pride and one cycle. A voucher cannot be replayed, lent, or carried into the next cycle.

The depth target is 20 % of the fees routed during the Mercy that preceded this Rescue. It is measured in AVAX actually deposited into the pool since Rescue began — not in clicks, not in a counter that someone could nudge.

6Fees and where they go

The token itself carries no transfer tax; it is a plain ERC-20. Revenue comes from two places: the game's paid actions, and a hook on the pool that takes 1 % of the AVAX side of every swap. Both land in the same fee router, which splits whatever arrived since the last call according to the phase.

The reserve gathered during Mercy is released in one move when Rescue opens, which is why a Rescue can reach its target even if trading goes quiet. Deposits into the pool are capped at 1 AVAX per block and are never placed above a slow-moving reference price, so a pump cannot bait the protocol into buying high.

The operations share is fixed in the contract at deployment and paid on request, so an unreachable recipient can never block the split.

7FOREST

One billion FOREST, minted once, at genesis. No mint function, no owner, no burn privilege, no tax. The whole supply is handed to three contracts in the same transaction that creates it, and the token refuses to be created at all if any of them is wired wrong.

8Rewards

Each epoch lasts seven days and carries a fixed FOREST budget plus whatever AVAX the router paid into it. When an epoch closes, the game server publishes a Merkle root of the results; six hours later, claims open. Anyone can claim on anyone's behalf.

The contract refuses a root whose totals exceed that epoch's budget or pot, and it stops paying once the posted totals are reached. The server cannot mint, cannot overspend, and cannot reach into a future epoch. The team can cancel a root during the six-hour window; after that, only what the root says can be claimed.

Nothing is stranded. An epoch with no root rolls forward after fourteen days; what is left unclaimed after ninety days rolls forward too, into the epoch running at that moment.

9Favor

Favor is the long memory of the game. It is written when a reward is claimed, it cannot be transferred or bought, and it is capped per claim so a single bad entry cannot poison the register. A Mouse earns it by helping during a Rescue; a Lion earns it when the Grace it provided was actually used. Favor opens chapters, recipes, titles and cosmetics — never a better price.

10The market

FOREST trades against native AVAX in a Uniswap v4 pool with a 1 % pool fee and a hook. The pool opens single-sided: the whole launch share of FOREST is placed above the opening price, and no AVAX is committed by the team to start it. The opening price values the full supply at roughly 100 AVAX.

Only the project's liquidity manager may create this pool or add liquidity through the hook. That is not a lock on anyone else's tokens — anyone can buy, sell and hold freely — it exists so that the fee that funds the game cannot be diluted by a position the game does not know about.

11Safety rails

The rule the whole design answers to: a player's funds are never stuck. Everything below follows from it.

• A Lion's pledge is withdrawable at Settlement, and a Rescue cannot run past 16 hours, so one transaction always frees it — even if nobody else has touched the game for days.
• The state machine can never revert because a neighbouring contract is broken; it catches their failures and moves on.
• Accounting is by deposits and running totals, never by a contract's balance, so a donation can neither dilute a claim nor lock anything.
• Payments to addresses that might refuse them are claimed, not pushed.
• Every fee share, every budget and every deadline is a constant fixed at deployment, in one file, readable on chain.

The contracts carry 238 tests, including invariants and a full rehearsal of the real launch scripts against a fork of Avalanche. Two independent adversarial audits were run against them, each finding required to come with a working proof-of-concept; the findings they produced — none of them critical — were fixed and each one turned into a regression test.

12Status

Nothing is deployed on Avalanche yet. The contracts are written, tested and audited; the game opens in preview, where every balance you see is simulated and labelled as such. The token name and symbol, the operating addresses and the launch date are not settled at the time of writing.

When that changes, the addresses will be published here and on @forestbook_avax, and this page will say so in this same paragraph.