Cogworks — The COGHEIM Building System

The Vocabulary

COG, Cogworks, And Fitting Out

Your quarters are aboard a Strider. The Strider walks. You can be hanging a lantern in your berth while the deck sways and the badlands go past the window. The building system isn't a side activity bolted onto that — it's the settlement.

COGConstruction & Outfitting Gear — the tool. A brass instrument on your belt, and a MAXIOM module.

CogworksThe craft. What you do with it. “I was up till three doing Cogworks in the galley.”

Fitting OutBorrowed from real shipbuilding — the stage where a launched vessel gets its interiors.

Why not just call it base building? Because it isn't a base. A base is a place you return to. Cogworks builds the inside of a moving city that several hundred people live in at the same time. The word had to carry that.

The Pattern

Every Building System Anchors To A Spot On A Map — Except One

Fallout 76's C.A.M.P., Fallout 4 Settlements, Warframe's Clan Dojos, FFXIV and ESO housing — we have enormous respect for all of them. Several are the reason this genre has builders at all. But run the same six questions across each, and the pattern holds.

	Camps & Settlements	Clan Halls	Instanced Housing	Cogworks
Expressive to build in	✓	✓	✓	✓
Other people live there	✕ visit	✕ visit	✕	✓
Survives you logging off	~	✓	✓	✓
Goes anywhere	✕ plot	✕ static	✕ static	✓
Free of land scarcity	~	✓	✕	✓
Outlives your leadership	✕	~	✕	✓

Plenty of great games live in those columns — we play them too. Every one of them is anchored to a spot on a map. That's the assumption Cogheim breaks.

What's Different

Six Ways Cogworks Breaks The Pattern

Not bigger. Not more complicated. Different, because the thing you're building inside of moves.

A Strider crew standing at the rail, the fortress-city rising behind them

Other People Live In What You Build

A Strider carries 200–300 players. The corridors you lay out are corridors other people walk every day. The workshop you fit out is where someone repairs their Iron Frame. Not “come and look at my house” — this is where we live.

There Is No Land To Be Scarce

You do not queue for a plot. You do not lose your home to a timer. Your berth comes with belonging to a Syndicate. The constraint is space aboard the ship — shared equally, expandable through play, never auctioned.

A family aboard a Strider looking out at the fortress-city towers ahead

It Moves, And You're Inside It

When the Syndicate crosses the disc, everything you built goes with it — because it was never on the ground. No static plot. No server-hop displacement. No lottery.

It Belongs To The Vessel

Cogheim has Mutiny and Succession — leadership changes, politically, driven by players. The build persists through those events and outlives your tenure, becoming part of a vessel's history.

Zero Pay-To-Win, Decor Included

Crownmarks are cosmetic-only. They can never buy build budget, build slots, materials, or faster construction. If you see a wall in Cogheim, you can earn that wall.

You Build With Your Hands

Cogheim is diegetic-first. Building happens through in-world benches, tools, and the MAXIOM interface — not a menu that pauses reality.

How It Will Feel

Structure Snaps. Decoration Doesn't.

Two layers, because the systems that feel best all do this — Dojos and C.A.M.P. both snap structure and set decoration free.

StructureWalls, floors, stairs, bulkheads snap to a fine 25cm grid with 15° rotation — small enough it stops reading as a grid. A ±12cm free nudge after placing breaks the machine-perfect look.

DecorationFurniture, lights, signage, clutter place freely — any position, any angle, surface-snapping, no grid whatsoever.

Why not fully freeform structure? Honestly: because it would spend the engineering budget on the axis where we don't win. Every wall placed on a Strider must replicate to hundreds of players on a moving reference frame. Arbitrary angles mean runtime-generated corners, regenerated collision and navmesh, and a much heavier network cost — all to buy an expressiveness most builders already get from the decoration layer.

We'd rather spend that budget on the thing walking across the world with your build inside it.

Cogworks draws on a modular kit — wall panels, window walls, door walls, floors, ceilings, stairs, railings, bulkhead hatches. Every piece is finished on both faces, so a wall looks right from the corridor and from the deck outside. Panels carry a deliberate 2cm overlap at their edges: no hairline gaps, no light leaks, no matter how you place them.

Where We Actually Are

Read This Before Believing Anything Else

Nothing described above is a shipped feature. Cogheim is being built in the open by a very small team, and the parts that are real are real because they were tested — not because they were announced.

Element	Status
Strider interiors, walkable	In development. Blockout built and walked; hull locked and measured Aug 2026.
Modular interior kit	Specified, production starting — 18 structural pieces, 22 hero props.
Quarters fitting-out, Alpha scope	Specified, save contract built. Cold Berth single room only.
Full building across all rooms	Design specification. Post-Alpha. Not built.
25cm / 15° placement + free decoration	Design proposal, Aug 2026. Not built, not validated.
Persistence through Mutiny / Succession	Design intent. Not built.
Durable storage (database, save service)	Unsolved architecture question. Blocks more than building alone.
200–300 players aboard one Strider	Ambitious target requiring validation — prototypes, load tests, cost analysis. Not demonstrated.

We'd rather tell you this now than have you find out later. If you've been promised a building system before, you already know why that matters.