The fire is low. If something else has gone out, start here.
Salt Crown: Solnitsa is a single-player castle-siege roguelike — no account, no ads, no data harvesting. If your question is not answered below, email games@arkynate.com and we will get back to you.
What is Salt Crown?
Salt Crown: Solnitsa is a single-player castle-siege roguelike — FTL's crew triage, rebuilt as a castle under siege. You are the Warden of Solnitsa, a salt-mine keep, on the Night the fire is low. The castle is drawn in cross-section, every room visible at once, and you have four defenders and never enough of them. You give orders, they walk there, and the walking is the cost. The besieging Host is bound by the same folklore law that binds you: nothing crosses a threshold uninvited, nothing takes what is not owed, a name given freely is a claim. They do not storm you. They grind you until you break the law first — and the Tally is the bill for every time you do. A full Night is twelve Watches, about a quarter of an hour. You can pause whenever you like.
Where do I play it?
In your browser, free, right now: https://saltcrown.pages.dev/ It runs on desktop and on phones and tablets — anything with a modern browser. There is nothing to install and no account to make. An iOS build is in TestFlight; see the beta question below.
Why will it only play in landscape?
Because Salt Crown is a castle in cross-section, and portrait is not a layout problem — it is a game that does not exist. The whole point is seeing every room at once: the wall, the gate, the hearth, the well, the granary, the bell tower, the chapel and the undercroft, all on screen, all at the same time. Squeeze that into a portrait phone and four of the eight rooms fall outside the camera entirely. So the game refuses rather than degrades. Turn a phone or tablet to portrait and you get a single card asking you to turn it back. The iOS build is locked landscape-only at the system level and can never be held in portrait at all. Desktop browsers are left alone. A window taller than it is wide is a window you chose, and being scolded for resizing your own browser is worse than a cramped HUD.
Where are my saves? Can I move them to another device?
Saves live on the device that made them and nowhere else. On the web they are in your browser's IndexedDB storage for the site; in the iOS app they are inside the app's own container. There are two save domains — the run in progress and your longer-term profile — and both are kept with rotating backups against a bad write. There is no cloud save, no account, and therefore no way to move a run between devices, and no way for us to restore anything. Clearing your browser's site data, using a private/incognito window, or deleting the app erases your saves permanently. Some browsers also evict site storage on their own if the device gets low on space. If a run matters to you, finish it in one sitting. If you want the highlights kept, save the obituary card at the end — that is a PNG you own.
How do I report a bug?
Email games@arkynate.com. The single most useful thing you can include is the build string, and the reliable place to find it is the obituary card at the end of a run — the footer line reads "seed 1174480321 · build 1.0.0". The seed is worth sending too: it lets us replay the exact night you played. The title screen does not print a version, so if the game will not get far enough to produce an obituary card, just say so and tell us roughly when you played — we can work it out from the deploy history. Please also include: • Your device and OS version, and which browser if you are playing on the web • What you were doing — the Watch you were on, the room, the event card if one was open • What you expected to happen instead, and whether it happens every time • A screenshot or screen recording if you have one Screenshots are worth a great deal here. Most of what goes wrong in a game like this is either a specific screen shape or a specific board state, and both are visible in a picture and almost impossible to describe.
Is there a beta? How do I get the iOS build?
Salt Crown is on TestFlight, currently with an internal group only — it is not open to public testers yet. If you would like in when it opens, email games@arkynate.com with the Apple Account email you would use and we will add you to the list. In the meantime the browser version at https://saltcrown.pages.dev/ is the same game from the same build. There is one artefact and the shells wrap it; the iOS app is not a different or reduced version. TestFlight builds expire after 90 days, which is TestFlight's rule rather than ours. If a build stops launching, check for a newer one before assuming it is broken.
Does it need an internet connection?
Only to load. Once the page has loaded, a night plays entirely on your device — the simulation is local, deterministic, and never asks a server anything. The game does send anonymous gameplay statistics when it can, but that is fire-and-forget: it never blocks, never retries at you, and never surfaces an error. Playing with no connection at all changes nothing about how the game behaves.
The game will not load, or the screen looks wrong.
1. Hard-refresh the page. A stale cached build is the most common cause by a distance — Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + R. 2. Check you are in landscape. See above; portrait shows a rotate card, not the game. 3. Try a different browser. The game needs WebGL and IndexedDB; both are disabled in some hardened or private-browsing configurations. 4. Private/incognito windows will run the game but cannot save. That is the browser refusing storage, not a bug we can fix. 5. On iOS, force-quit and reopen. If it still misbehaves, email us with your device, OS, and browser — and a screenshot. Layout problems are almost always specific to one screen shape, and we cannot reproduce what we cannot see.
What data does it collect?
Anonymous gameplay statistics only: how far runs get, what killed them, which event choices get taken. No account, no name, no email, no location, no advertising, no tracking, no third-party analytics. Anything you type into the game — your defenders' names — is never transmitted and is not even written to the save file. The privacy policy spells out every field the game is capable of sending, in a table, and explains how to switch the statistics off entirely.
How do I delete my data?
Clear site data for the game's domain in your browser, or delete the app on iOS. That removes your saves, your settings, and the random per-install identifier. There is no account to close. If you also want the anonymous rows already sent to be purged, email games@arkynate.com — the privacy policy has the exact steps for finding your install identifier so we know which rows to delete.
I have a suggestion, or the balance feels wrong.
Please send it. Salt Crown is a young game and the numbers are still moving; "Watch 4 is a wall" or "I always pick the same option on this card" is genuinely more useful to us than a crash report. If you send the seed from your obituary card along with it, we can load the exact night you are describing and see what you saw.
Contact
games@arkynate.com — we read every message. Best-effort response within a few days; Salt Crown is a one-person project, so please be patient.