Friends and Private Messages

Wanderer has always been a world full of other people you could see but not really talk to. There was chat, and there were the names drifting past on the road, and not much in between. From today there is: you can add other wanderers as friends, and send those friends private messages.

Adding a friend

Open ☰ Menu → Friends. Type someone's name, or tap their name in the online list to open their profile and use Add friend there. They get a request; nothing happens until they accept it.

That last part is the whole design. A friend request is the only thing a stranger can send you, and it carries no message — just a name. Nobody can put words in front of you until you have decided you want to hear from them.

Messages that wait

Wanderer is a game you leave running. You look in, see what your character got up to, and go back to your day. A messaging system built on the assumption that both people are staring at their screens at the same moment would be the wrong system for it.

So messages are kept. Send one to a friend who is offline and it is simply there when they next log in, with an unread badge on the menu. Nothing is lost because nobody was looking.

Each conversation keeps its history. If you and a friend part ways and unfriend each other, the conversation stays readable to both of you — you just cannot send anything new to it.

Blocking and reporting

Every conversation has both, and they do different jobs.

Block stops everything, both directions, immediately: no messages, no friend requests, and the conversation disappears from your list. The person you blocked is not told. Unblocking does not put the friendship back — it only means they can ask again.

Report attaches the message itself to a moderator's queue. This is the only way a moderator ever sees a private message: they do not browse conversations, and there is no screen anywhere that would let them. A report captures what was actually said, on the server, at the moment you report it — so it survives the sender deleting the message, changing their name, or deleting their account entirely.

That last point is deliberate. When someone deletes their Wanderer account, every private message they were part of goes with it, in both directions. The one exception is a message that had already been reported, which is kept as evidence. If someone treats you badly and then disappears, the report is what remains.

The quiet parts

A few decisions you will hopefully never notice:

• One message per few seconds, shared with public chat — you cannot get around the limit by

alternating between the two.

• The chat filter applies to private messages too, but the automatic warnings it hands out

in public are silent here. Telling a whole server that somebody misbehaved in a conversation nobody else can see would rather defeat the point.

• Private messages never reach Discord. The bridge that carries public chat to the Discord

server cannot see them, and there is a test whose only job is to fail loudly if that ever stops being true.

Friends and messages are live for everyone now. Say hello to someone.