The keeper's field guide to a fallen star and the eight shapes it may take.
Every mote begins the same way and ends somewhere different. The first four shapes are fixed — every keeper sees them. What waits at day seven is not.
A fragment of star-matter wrapped in the thin, glassy crust its fall baked around it — dark outside, bright within, its light leaking through one slow crack. Three presses of the select button warm it enough to break open.
The keeper names the mote before it hatches, which is the only decision in the game that cannot be undone.
Round, bright and almost entirely appetite. A motling burns through hunger and energy faster than any later form and sleeps early, at eight in the evening. It has no personality yet — only the beginnings of one.
Care during this stage counts double in practice, because care mistakes made now follow the mote all the way to its adult form.
Ears arrive, and with them opinions. This is the first form that can misbehave, refuse food, and be praised or scolded — so it is where personality genuinely starts to move.
Wings unfold and the mote stops needing you quite so much. It stays up until ten, plays harder, and starts showing the temperament it will carry into adulthood — the last stage at which that temperament can still be steered.
A keeper watching closely can read which adult form is coming by day five or six, from how the flit reacts to food, praise and play.
A keeper names their own mote, once, on the night it hatches — that name is theirs alone. The names of the kinds are older and belong to nobody: they are what generations of keepers settled on for the shapes they kept seeing. A motling is simply a little mote; a pip is a seed; a flit is named for what it does the moment it gets wings. Sylvet comes from the old word for woodland, embryn from ember, gloam from the gloaming, quillo from its soft spines, and orrin from the sound a keeper makes when a thing will not stop asking. Aurelia means golden, and most keepers say it only once in their lives.
At seven days the flit becomes one of four adults. Nothing is random here — the game reads the mote's dominant spirit and the quality of its upbringing, in that order, and picks accordingly.
the quiet grove-keeper
Antlered, mossy, and calm. The form a gentle or shy mote grows into when it has been raised steadily and kindly.
the small furnace
Broad, flame-crowned and warm to the touch. Grown from a mote that was played with constantly and encouraged to be brave.
the horned trickster
Violet, long-limbed and grinning. Not a punishment — a gloam is a delightful pet — but it is what mischief and inattention both produce.
the returned star · secret
Radiant, symmetrical, haloed in blue. Most keepers will never see one, and the game never tells you it exists.
Two numbers decide the branch. The first is spirit — five traits that rise and fall with what you do. The second is the care score, a single figure standing in for how well the mote was raised.
| Spirit | Raised by | Leads toward |
|---|---|---|
| GENTLE | Patting, praise, quiet toys | SYLVET |
| SHY | Unanswered calls, unfair scolding | SYLVET |
| BOLD | Winning mini-games, the comet kite | EMBRYN |
| CURIOUS | Playing often, meeting visitors | EMBRYN |
| MISCHIEF | Sweets, and praising bad behaviour | GLOAM |
The care score averages the five needs — hunger, happiness, health, hygiene and energy — then subtracts six points for every care mistake and adds a small bonus for discipline. A care mistake is recorded when an attention call goes unanswered for roughly forty-five minutes of mote-time, or when illness is left untreated until it runs its course.
Radiance is a separate thing from shape. A mote's form is decided once, at day seven, and never changes again — a sylvet stays a sylvet for the rest of its life. Its radiance is the aura it wears, and that moves constantly: care feeds it, neglect drains it, and it can travel all the way down to nothing and back up again without the creature ever becoming something else. A starved sylvet is still a sylvet. It is simply a dark one.
Radiance shows from the moment of hatching, but barely — a hatchling glows at about 5 out of 100, a halo you have to look for. Below about 3 there is no aura at all.
Keepers have always sworn that a wish made on a falling star comes true. A mote is a fallen star — and the old superstition runs both ways. A lantern kept bright is a talisman: while your mote burns well, small things go your way. A lantern gone hollow is a curse you carry: doors stick, milk turns, moths gather at the glass. You cannot throw the curse away — a mote can never be abandoned — you can only care for it until the light comes back.
Read it in the sky. A bright lantern draws extra twinkles to the canopy — and shooting stars come more often. Catch one with the middle button before it fades and your wish comes true on the spot: dew, a honeydrop, a tonic, a little glow. An ill lantern empties the sky of stars; moths at the glass are the gloom's first messengers, arriving before the turn. See moths, act now.
The omen dial. The last page of the keeper log reads your fortune on a seven-band dial — BLESSED · BRIGHT · FAIR · PLAIN · DIM · ILL · CURSED — with a fortune for each real day. Bright days bring a fine-mooded merchant and lucky dew after games; ill days raise market prices (never medicine). A redeemed mote keeps the ember blessing: its fortune never falls below a small floor again. The ones that came back from the dark are luckier than the ones that never fell.
When the aura reaches full radiance, the glow outgrows the brass — white light fills the whole lantern screen — and the mote rises through the canopy to take its place back in the sky. The keeper's next spark falls the moment they are ready for it.
No mote in MOTE dies of neglect. Poor care produces a different creature and a dimmer farewell, never a grave. That is the deliberate departure from the original.
Two characters visit the lantern rather than living in it. Both arrive unannounced, roughly once a day, and neither can be summoned.
A moth merchant. Opens the market at half price, then leaves whether you buy or not.
A small blue visitor. Cheers the mote considerably and nudges it toward curiosity.