Core Loop

Arx has no resource treadmill and no expanding-radius earn loop. Its loop is advance into unknown dark → read the room with your hands → resolve or avoid → convert what you found into access.

Three nested timescales

~10 seconds — the verb loop. Look, reach, grab, throw, push, drink, light, draw a rune. Almost every verb is a physical act performed with the mouse rather than a menu selection. This is the layer Arkane kept and refined for twenty years afterwards.

~5 minutes — the room/encounter loop. Enter an unlit space; decide whether to burn a torch (which makes you visible — see Stealth & Light); resolve the obstacle by melee, spell, lockpick, key, or conversation; loot; move on. The obstacle usually admits three or four solutions, and the choice is a build expression, not a dialogue option.

~1 hour — the access loop. Quests come from the city hub and resolve deeper in the stack. What you bring back is rarely money — it's a key, a rune, a password, a name. Progress is measured in doors that now open, and the XP that trickles in from those acts converts into build points at level-up (Character Build).

What the loop actually spends

There is no time-of-day clock and no fuel meter. The consumables are:

Resource	Refilled by	Pressure it creates
Health	Slow passive regen, potions, Heal	Attrition across a level, not per-fight
Mana	Slow passive regen, potions	The hard throttle on the magic build
Torches / light	Found, bought, or Ignit	Visibility ↔ safety trade
Hunger	Food, cooking, Create Food	Low-grade housekeeping, punishes hoarding nothing
Lockpicks / durability	Purchase	Converts failure into cost, not a wall

Two of these — mana and light — are the ones the design leans on. Everything else is background attrition.

Why the RPG layer is a modulator, not the engine

Level 0 → 10 is the whole game (XP table caps out at 178,000; see Character Build). Ten level-ups yield 10 attribute points and 150 skill points on top of a 16/18 starting allocation. That's a narrow build space by RPG standards — deliberately so. The stat layer's job is to decide which manual verbs are available to you at all (can you pick this lock, read this item, survive this hit), while the moment-to-moment quality of play stays in the player's hands.

Where this shows in the code

The player's melee damage is max(1, STR × 0.5 − 5) + CloseCombat × 0.1 — at starting stats (STR 6) that's the floor value of 1. The build layer barely contributes early; the swing timing and positioning are doing the work.

Related

Simulation & Interaction · Player Journey · Tensions & Lessons