Once an hour, every save file on the server is read and everything in it is counted. That is the whole of it - there is no separate ledger, and nothing adds up totals as the game is played. The census opens the same files the game writes and counts what is inside them.

• It reads save files, once an hour. Every player who is logged in is saved every fifteen minutes, so what somebody is carrying right now can be up to that far behind.
• It reads every save file, staff accounts among them. Nothing is left out of these totals, so a staff member's bank is in them like anybody else's.
• Items in shop stock and items lying on the ground are not in anybody's save and are not counted. An item dropped on the floor leaves these totals until somebody picks it up.
• A noted item is counted as the item it is a note for. A note is redeemable one for one at any banker, so counting it separately would overstate how much of something exists. Searching for one finds the item it notes.
• Shop value is the price the game's own configuration gives an item, before a shop's stock multiplier and before anything a player would actually pay. It is not a market price and nobody trades at it.

The census counts items, not owners.

Everything in Zanaris enters the game through legitimate means, by playing the game. Items enter by being mined, fished, monster drops, bought from shops, looted from spawns. There are other ways items can enter into the game and they are the reason this page exists.

1. An admin can create items with a cheat.

Zanaris runs as a production server, and that setting decides what is possible. On a production server the item cheats are restricted to admin accounts - a moderator cannot use them - and every one of them is written to the log below. There are four:

• ::give - puts an item, or several, straight into the admin's own backpack.
• ::givemany - the same thing, up to a thousand at once.
• ::givecrap - fills the admin's backpack with twenty-eight random items.
• ::giveother - puts an item into another player's backpack. They must be logged in at the time.

All four put items into a backpack. There is no cheat that puts an item on the floor. An admin can of course then drop it like any player, and anybody who walks past can pick it up - which is exactly why the item is logged the moment it is created, and not when it moves.

The log records what actually arrived, not what was asked for. A request for a thousand into a backpack with four free slots creates four, and four is what it says.

2. Whoever runs the server can edit a save file.

Every account is a file on the server, and the person who owns the machine can open one and change the numbers in it. Nothing in the game happens, so nothing in the game logs it. The same is true of the database behind it, of the files that set shop stock and drop rates, and of restoring an old backup over the current saves.

There is no log that can catch that, because the log lives inside the thing being edited. What catches it is this page. The census reads the save files an hour later and counts what is in them, so items that appeared from nowhere still turn up in the totals - and the totals are published whether or not anybody wants them to be. It cannot say who did it. It can say that it happened.

Every row the spawn log holds, newest first: no window, no cap. It is meant to be empty, so there is nothing to paginate and nothing to summarise - a row here is drama to be farmed.

Everything above is done by three files, and they are worth more to you than this page is:

• SaveCensus.ts - what runs every hour.
• SaveReader.ts - how a save file is read.
• economy.ts - how the contents are counted and written.

A transparency page that oversells itself is worse than none, so here is the limit of it.

We cannot prove which code the server is running. The source above is what we say we run. Whoever owns the machine can run something else, and a server that reports its own version is reporting a string somebody chose to print. There is no arrangement of a server you control that makes its own claims about itself trustworthy - that is a property of who holds the keys, not of how carefully the page is written.

The past is not yet tamper-evident. Today these pages show you the newest count. If we quietly changed an older one, you would have nothing to check it against.

That part we can fix, and intend to. We will publish an API that hands out each hourly census as it was taken, so anybody can keep their own copy of the record rather than trusting ours. Once enough people hold copies, changing history stops being something we can do quietly - it becomes something that disagrees with everybody else's copy.

That still would not prove what the server is doing right now. Nothing we can build will. It would prove we have not been editing what it already did, which is the part worth having.

Until then, what these pages offer is narrower and still worth something: the count is published every hour, it includes the people running the server, it is the same count whoever is reading, and the code that produces it is public. The rules are on the rules page, and every ban and mute is on the ban record.