What you can ask for
There are no commands to memorise. Here is the kind of thing people ask Cog for, and what comes back.
For Paper worlds with Cog · The hosted beta is still learning, and results vary by request.
One sentence, "a treehouse village up a giant oak", and this is what came back. Drag it round for a proper look. One sentence, "a treehouse village up a giant oak", and this is what came back.
Real requests
Watch it being built → Cog carves the ravine, steps the walls back in shelves so they read like real rock, and sends a waterfall over the rim into a plunge pool at the bottom. Ask for a village on the floor and they will put one there.
Watch it being built → Cog picks the spot, lifts the deck up clear of the water on piers instead of dumping a wall of dirt across it, rails both sides, and walks it end to end.
Cog works it out from the sentence and builds a hollow yellow sponge you can walk into: round eyes, buck teeth, freckles, holes right through him, a white shirt and brown trousers, and a bed and a table waiting inside. 24,688 blocks of him, and you can go in the front door.
Watch it being built → Three timber huts in the branches with pitched roofs and lit windows, walkways between them and ladders down to the ground, under a canopy you could hide a house in. Thirty-five thousand blocks. There was no treehouse waiting to be found; Cog designed it from the words, the same way they would design a dragon, a lighthouse or your dog.
Watch it being built → A cartoon blaster with a glowing muzzle that fires from your hand. Cog draws it, packs it into a resource pack and sends it to everyone in the world without a restart; anyone who declines the pack keeps playing. Then they write the arena: stand on the pad to get a blaster, everyone's health shows under their name, kills count up the side, first to five wins. The blaster and the rules are two different kinds of file, and Cog makes both.
Cog lays out a plot with streets running through it and a square in the middle, puts houses along the streets and lights the lot. No house sits inside another, and every front door can be reached from a street, because a village where you cannot get to half the doors is a model of a village.
Watch it being built → Curtain walls with a rampart walk along the top, a tower on each corner, a hall in the courtyard and a gatehouse you walk straight through. Then Cog goes round the outside looking for a way in that is not the gate, and tells you what they found: one castle came back sealed, with 1,721 places you can stand inside it and no way out with the gate shut.
Stepped stone with the courses banded so it catches the light, a lit passage in from one face, and a chamber at the heart of it tall enough to stand up in.
Cog digs the basin, shelves the edges so it shallows out instead of dropping away, lays a sand shore round it and fills it to one flat level. Then they go back and count the water, because water is the one thing that leaves if you let it. It is all still in the basin, and none of it is out on the grass.
Cog cuts the mounds and fills the hollows until the whole plot sits at one height, ready to put something on. Ask for a hill instead and they raise one with a proper shoulder on it, rather than a cone.
A galleon sitting down in ninety-six blocks of sea, with white foam breaking at the bow. Two gun decks with the cannons run out, a raised stern castle with windows in it, three masts, rigging, a bowsprit and the skull and crossbones at the masthead. Cog’s first go was a model boat in a bathtub, and they said so themselves before fixing it.
A nose cone that tapers properly, fins standing off the hull with daylight between them, an engine bell underneath with the glow inside it, and a gantry tower alongside with walkways and floodlights. Twenty-two thousand blocks, up in five seconds.
Cog lays the pitch with its markings and goal frames, then writes the rules that make it a game: stand on your team pad and it hands you snowballs, put one through the goal mouth and the score goes up and the whistle goes, first to five and the fireworks go off. It goes live while everyone is still standing on the pitch, and nobody installs anything.
The same one, not one like it. Cog keeps every design they have drawn, so a second copy goes up in about eight seconds instead of the six minutes the first took to work out. They also remember where they put things, so asking for something on a spot that is already taken gets you "there is already a SpongeBob house there, want me to build beside it?" rather than a house on a roof.
Gone in half a second. Then they check the space really is empty before saying so. The design stays in the library, so you can have it again somewhere better whenever you like. Cog can only take down things they built themselves. They work from their own record of what they put where, so nothing anyone else made is ever at risk.
Cog finds the game you mean rather than building a second one, changes the winning score, puts it back into the running server and tries every rule again. Every one, because the rule nobody mentions is the one that breaks. Twenty-two seconds, and the pitch, the pads and the other eight rules are exactly where they were.
Same trick, different game. Start pad, finish line, a clock that runs between them and a scoreboard that remembers. Cog writes the rules, loads them into the running world, then sets off every one themselves to check it fires before telling you the course is ready.
A full loop of track with a hill in it, powered rails so you keep moving, timber supports underneath and a cart waiting for you. Cog lays every rail with the right shape through the curves and the climb, then puts a cart on it and watches it go round before they tell you it is ready.
Sticky pistons, wire and a lever, laid block by block. Flip the lever and a solid wall slides across the doorway. Flip it back and the doorway is simply there again.
You did not say how wide, what out of, or which way round the creek. Cog decides. Cobblestone, three wide, bridged over the water, graded up the rise, and lit with torches so nothing spawns on it at night.
A ferris wheel built from circuits that already work, so the lever does what a lever should. Flip it on and the wheel turns. Flip it off and it stops.
Cog walks with you on their own two feet, around the trees and over the hills, at the pace anyone else walks. No teleporting. Say "stop following" and they stop.
Cog chops until they have the amount you asked for, then tells you the number that actually made it into the bag.
Cog takes the crops that are ready and leaves the ones that are not, then replants every square behind them. Come back tomorrow and the farm is still a farm.
Cog heads underground, cuts a staircase down and lights it as they go, checks their pickaxe is up to the ore, mines it and carries it home to you.
Cog fights with the best weapon they are carrying, and they come home before their health runs out. Coming home with less beats not coming home.
Cog walks to the chest, puts in or takes out exactly what you named, and tells you the count that moved.
Five floors, windows on each one, battlements around the top, and a spiral stair inside that rises one block a step, so you can climb it.
Playing the game properly
Big builds are the showy part. The rest of the time Cog is a second pair of hands in your world, and each of these is tested on its own before it gets strung into a bigger errand.
Good habits
Anyone can place blocks. What makes Cog good company is that they play the way a careful player plays, without being asked.
Going underground, they cut a staircase and put torches in as they go. You can walk down after them, and walk back up again.
A wooden pickaxe on iron ore gives you nothing at all. Cog checks the tool matches the ore before they swing, so the ore is still there when the right pickaxe turns up.
Wiring is fiddly and one wrong block kills the whole circuit. So their contraptions come from a library of circuits already built and checked, which is why the lever works the first time and every time after.
Drop below a certain health and they disengage and leave, mid-fight if they have to. Your loot comes back with them.
Pulling a crop early destroys it for nothing. Cog takes what is ready, replants it, and lets the rest keep growing.
A rule that installs perfectly and never fires is invisible: the scoreboard is up, the pitch is laid, and one rule in nine quietly does nothing forever. So every rule they write gets triggered on purpose, and the result read back off the server, before they tell you to go and play.
Before they lay a block of anything they have designed, they stand back and look at it from the front, the side and above, and say out loud what is wrong with it. Then they fix it and look again. The first draft of the rocket had its fins fused into one solid skirt. By the fourth they were separate blades you could see daylight through.
Every job comes back with what actually happened: what went down, what is in the bag, what is in the chest. Not your own request read back to you.
Ask and forget about it
The whole round trip runs without you watching: Cog goes, finds it, mines it, walks back and puts it in the chest. You get told when it is in there.
Cog goes back over the job before saying it is finished, so you are not the one who finds out otherwise. How Cog checks their own work →
Read next
Invite-only beta
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