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A Voluntary Access Fee, or VAF, is money you can choose to send the people who run the game — nobody is ever billed, and there's no feature on 3Scapes gated behind one. The mud has been free since it opened its doors, and that isn't changing. Free doesn't mean costless to run, though: bandwidth, hardware and hosting all have to be paid for somehow, and that somehow is players deciding, entirely on their own, to pitch in. The in-game help file sums up the arrangement neatly: "It's kind of like PBS, but with monsters."

The Marble Group Inc. — the small, non-salaried company behind 3Scapes and its sibling mud 3Kingdoms — publishes exactly where a VAF dollar goes. A quarter covers ISP and hosting bills. Another quarter goes to replacing and upgrading hardware and software. A fifth is set aside for taxes, legal work and accounting. A further fifth funds general operations, savings and charitable giving. The last dime is earmarked, tongue firmly in cheek, for their "World Domination Initiative" — their joke, kept exactly as they published it.

Since The Marble Group Inc. is the outfit behind the payments, that's the name that shows up on a card statement. The easiest route in is their VAF page, which walks through checkout via Square; partway through you'll be asked which of their games — 3Scapes or 3Kingdoms — the purchase should benefit. Once that clears, drop a line in-game with mail VAFS and your transaction ID so the credit lands on the right character. Prefer paper? The mudlib's own help still lists a mail-in option, shown below — with your character name written into the notes, and whole dollars only, since any stray cents get truncated.

VAF costs inside the game come in two families. Reselectable enhancements are consumable — buy the same one again whenever you need it — and include things like 15 VAFs for three shots of remote identify, 20 VAFs to erase a scar, another 20 to fully untrain a skill you've soured on, 25 VAFs to wipe your Best Kill clean, or 30 VAFs for three shots of remote uncurse. Permanent enhancements are one-time character upgrades instead: 5 VAFs buys one additional linktell name, while that same 5 VAFs buys five additional names on your mywho list, and letting yourself tellblock everyone at once costs 10. That's a sample, not the full list — vaf list <enhancement> in-game shows every option with its current price. Worth knowing: those in-game prices sit on a different scale from the dollar credit packages sold on the web checkout — one is what things cost once you're playing, the other is how you buy the credits to spend there, and the two aren't meant to line up one-to-one.

However you funded it, redeeming happens at the Vault of Ancient Fables, where Guardian Atriel walks you through whatever you'd like to pick up. Your balance belongs to you as a person, not to a single character — it's shared across everyone you play — but the moment you spend on an enhancement, that pick belongs permanently to whichever character used it. Directions and the relevant commands are below.

Looking for the rest of what 3Scapes offers off-game? Head back to ~/community. Thanks for keeping the lights on.