Bookmarks and discovery

The 🔖 Bookmark Gun is a fifth study-class weapon: like the Wiki / Grok / Etymology / Memetic guns, it deals zero damage and exists to save instead of destroy. Hit a post with it and the post gets pinned to your public bookmark page. From there, the rest of the player community can browse what you saved, and the 🌀 STUMBLE THE BOOKMARKS launcher turns every player's bookmarks into a shared discovery feed.

How to bookmark a post

1. Press E to open the inventory. 2. Find the 🔖 Bookmark Gun in your backpack — it lives there by default, unequipped. 3. Drag it onto any hotbar slot (1–9). The gun it replaces lands back in your bag. 4. Press the corresponding number key to switch to it, then aim at any post-boss and press Space. 5. The post hits, a quick +🔖 Bookmarked! toast pops up, and a save chime plays.

Hitting the same post twice is a no-op — the second toast says Already bookmarked. instead of double-saving. You can fire up to 30 bookmarks per session as a soft cap; the game throttles further hits with a polite toast so you don't accidentally firehose an entire timeline.

Where bookmarks live

Every bookmark you save lands on your public profile at /p/<your-handle>/bookmarks. The page is read-only, server-rendered, fully indexable by search engines and AI crawlers, and structured as a grid of cards — one per post — with the source badge (X / HN / arxiv / etc.), the author, the title or body, the first attachment image when there is one, and a ▶ Blast button that loads that single post into a fresh game session.

The bookmark page is its own canonical URL. You can share it like any other profile link. Stickering one onto your main /p/<handle> page or pinning it from your other socials is a way to turn your blast log into a public reading list.

The StumbleUpon launcher

The 🌀 STUMBLE THE BOOKMARKS button lives in the title screen Options menu under MORE FREE TIMELINES. Tap it and the game pulls a random sample of fifteen bookmarks from across the entire player community — every save from every player who's ever fired the Bookmark Gun — and launches that as a Timeline session. Every hit is a post somebody else thought was worth keeping.

The HUD chip up top reads 🌀 STUMBLE THE BOOKMARKS for the duration of the session so you remember how you got there. Each post-boss in the feed retains its original source tag (X, HN, arxiv, …), so the experience is genuinely heterogeneous — you might blast a hacker-news thread, then a tweet, then an academic paper, all in one three-minute run.

Stumble mode is anonymous-friendly. You don't need an X account to use it; guests can stumble freely. The mode never charges COINS — bookmarks already paid the storage cost when their author saved them.

How discovery scales

Every new bookmark widens the stumble pool. The maths is generous to small communities — even with a handful of players each saving twenty posts apiece, the stumble feed already has hundreds of entries to pick from, drawn from sources that no individual player would have collected alone. As the player base grows, the stumble feed becomes denser and more eclectic, and the per-handle bookmark pages become tiny curated recommenders.

Search engines see this too. The bookmark pages are indexed under /sitemap.xml for the top-100 most-active players, so a player who builds a strong reading list gets organic search traffic to their profile.

Future: build a level from your bookmarks

The Bookmark Gun's storage shape is intentionally identical to the post array a Creator Zone level uses. That means a future Creator Zone v1.5 feature can let you turn a selection of bookmarks straight into a published Timeline Level — pick fifteen of your saves, hit publish, share the level link. The work to scaffold this is already in place server-side; the editor UI is the missing piece. No commitment on dates, but the path is clear and the storage doesn't need to migrate.

Failure paths

• Hit cap reached — toast says "Session bookmark cap reached (30)." Restart a new session to reset.
• Same post twice — toast says "Already bookmarked." No new entry, no extra storage.
• Network error — toast says "(bookmark network error)" and the projectile is consumed. Retry by firing again at the same post; the idempotency check on the server catches duplicates.
• No login + no guest — toast says "Connect or play as guest first." Bookmarks need an identity to attach to. The game auto-mints a guest UUID at first play, so this normally doesn't fire.

Anti-pattern: bookmarks are not for muting

The Bookmark Gun does not affect what posts the boss queue serves you. It saves a copy. If you want a post to stop appearing in your feed, use the 💣 Nuke or the Nukelist UI (Player Menu → Nukelist) — those are the suppression tools. Bookmarks are pure curation, never censorship.

Want to learn what each weapon actually does in combat? → Controls and weapons.