Stage unlocked

New keys

What happens next

Type every letter?

You have been typing fast enough that the dim letters are probably getting in your way rather than out of it.

Gilding turns them back on. Every character in the passage is required, nothing skips ahead on its own, and the letters your stage has not taught yet turn gold as you type them. Gild every verse in a stretch and you earn gold leaf, which multiplies your score for the rest of the chapter.

It will not move your stage. A stage still opens on the keys it teaches, and the letters you gild are not those keys — in either mode. If you want to skip ahead, set your stage in the menu: that is the direct way, and it is one control instead of a side effect.

Either answer is fine and this is the only time you will be asked. The menu has the switch from now on, under Typing the dim letters — and beside it, under When you hit the wrong key, is the other setting for people who already type: let a wrong letter stand and take it back with backspace. Neither turns the other on.

Esc closes this and picks up where you left off · a thread is a phrase two passages share

The route

Not a reading order. Every thread below is a real link between what one passage says and what a later one does with it — and when you travel one, the shared phrase stays lit in place while the world changes around it.

Passages

Who is with you

Threads

A thread marked with ↩ is a doorway: an optional room partway through a passage that phases back into an older one for a few verses and returns you to the exact verse you left. Walking straight past one costs nothing and never closes anything off.

Esc closes this and picks up where you left off · the same card you get after every few verses

Your hands

Every finger

A key is counted against the finger that should strike it, because that is the finger the game knows — your browser sends a letter, never a hand. So the column that says most about technique is mean: a finger resting on its own keys answers quickly, and a finger you travel to cannot.

WPM is the usual measure: every five characters you type correctly counts as one word, so it can be compared with any other typing tool.

What to work on next

Worst keys

This stage — what is still missing

Verse by verse

Esc closes this and picks up where you left off · changes save as you make them

Scriptorium

Go somewhere else

Which text

Both are the whole Bible and both are free of copyright. What differs is the typing. In the King James roughly one word in thirty carries an archaic ending or pronoun — doeth, knowest, thee, thou, thy, ye — where in the World English Bible it is one in seven hundred. Its sentences also run about half as long again, strung together with colons and semicolons instead of being broken up by full stops, so there is further to type before you get to stop.

It does not touch your stage. The same letters are lit in either text and the same accuracy is asked of them — you have changed the prose, not the standard. It is the same curriculum in harder words: worth doing once you have been through this one, and available now if you would rather.

Your keyboard

The keyboard drawn on screen must match the board under your hands, and the report card has a row for the thumb you actually use.

Your stage

The stage decides which letters are lit. Setting it yourself is the honest way to skip ahead if you already type — nothing else moves it except earning it.

Typing the dim letters

Some letters on the page are dim. They need keys your stage has not taught yet, so the game types them for you and the cursor skips past them. If you already type, you can ask for all of them instead.

Gilding is for people who already type. With it on, every character is required and nothing skips ahead on its own; the letters your stage has not taught turn gold as you type them, and gilding every verse in a stretch earns gold leaf, which multiplies your score for the rest of the chapter. It does not move your stage — a stage opens on the keys it teaches, in either mode.

When you hit the wrong key

By default a wrong key does not move you along: the cursor waits where it is until you type the letter the page is asking for. If you are still learning where the keys are, leave it there — it stops you typing a whole wrong word without noticing.

The other setting is what every other keyboard does. The letter you actually typed stands in the cell, marked wrong, and the cursor carries on; backspace takes it back and steps you onto it again. Your accuracy counts every key you press either way, so nothing is hidden by it.

The ink cloud

Stop typing altogether and a cloud of ink drifts in and smudges finished work. Taking a long time over a single key never brings it — only stopping does. Turn it off if it nags rather than nudges; nothing else changes, and the game is fully playable without it.

Movement

The words slide past a point that never moves, and the scenery behind them slides at three different speeds. After a long sitting that can leave things drifting for a few minutes afterwards — still text seeming to wave, a stopped screen seeming to slide. It is harmless and it passes, but it is a reason to stop, and nobody should have to choose between practising and being comfortable.

With movement reduced the page steps forward instead of sliding, the scenery behind it holds still, and the flourishes over a passage run gently rather than stopping. Where you read does not change: the letter you are typing stays in the column it has always been in. Nothing is removed — every passage still looks like the place it is set in, and every chapter still plays what it plays.

Reading has nothing in it to reduce either way: it shows one word at a time, in one place, and nothing in it moves at all. On a day when your eyes have had enough, it is the quietest thing here.

Your operating system has a setting for this, and following it is the default. Set it here instead if you want it on one machine and not another.

Sound

The control at the bottom of the screen reports the audio device rather than the setting, so on there means the browser is actually playing. Browsers refuse to start audio until you have typed on or clicked the page, and suspend it again whenever the tab goes to the background; typing brings it back. If the game is silent while the control reads on, the line above is the browser's own account of the device, and it is the thing to send us.

Your hands

The per-finger table you get after every few verses, over everything you have typed rather than the last handful — plus the worst keys, how far this stage is from opening, and the shape of the last few weeks. It is here because a history you can only see by finishing something is one you cannot look at when you want to.

Which route

A route is a reading of the book, not a place in it. Choosing another one leaves you in the verse you are typing and changes what the map draws; a chapter you have finished stays finished on all four. If you would rather not start in Genesis, Wisdom is the shortest way in — a psalm is about a third the length of a chapter of Genesis, and in the proverbs nineteen verses in twenty are one whole thought with a full stop after it.

Reading

Reading is the same page shown one word at a time, each word landing on the same spot so your eyes never have to travel, with nothing asked of you. It speeds up gently the longer you stay with it; the up and down arrows set the pace, and Esc brings you back.

Chronicle

Sixteen chapters of nothing but names and ages — and Mahalalel lived eight hundred and thirty years — which every route steps over. They are here if you want them and no route will ever ask you for one. Be warned what they are: not numbers, since every number in the Bible is spelled out in words, but names. In 1 Chronicles 1 nearly half of all the words start with a capital, against one word in eight across the rest of the book, so it is mostly shifting.

The opening

Where to rest your hands, and the three short notes about how the page works. Worth a minute if you clicked past them, or if someone else is about to sit down here.

Progress

Local storage is cleared by accident more often than people expect. Export keeps the curve.

History

Elsewhere

Built by Shammah Chancellor — blog · source on GitHub · Finch