The design constitution
Most screen-time apps drift toward whatever retains: shame streaks, expiring rewards, paid shortcuts. Traverse is built the other way — a written constitution comes first, and any mechanic that breaks a law is rejected, however well it would monetize. Here it is, in full.
The atlas grows from focused seconds — never from gold, never from money. Spending gold, even to break focus, never erases growth; buying decorations never advances it. The wallet and the world are walled off from each other.
This is a wellbeing app. Nothing wilts, dies, un-inks, or guilt-trips you for a bad week. Progress is monotonic: charted land, prestige, and the archive only ever go up.
A lapsed streak resets your earning rate to baseline — and nothing else. If you come back after a month away, you are at worst where you started, never "behind".
The only speed boost is the streak multiplier, capped at ×1.5. No permanent multipliers of any kind: consistency is rewarded, but never mandatory, and there is no power creep to chase.
You earn only while actually blocked. You spend at one gold per second of unlock. And gold, unlock time, streaks, and boosts are never sold for real money — selling the intervention would invert the entire point of the app.
Everything gold buys — structures, decorations, the Treasury — touches zero growth state and completes at purchase. A drained balance makes breaking focus expensive again, so decorating your atlas is itself good for you.
Prices and consequences are stated truthfully, especially on the unlock screen. Unlocking "pauses today's momentum clock" — it never "loses" you anything, because by design it doesn't.
Hold us to these. If you ever find a screen in Traverse that breaks one, tell us — that's a bug of the most serious kind.