Krat

Lore & Background

In the industrial sprawl of the city, the Puppet Factory stands as a cathedral of wood, wire, and thread. Krat works there, surrounded by half-finished limbs and the smell of linseed oil, shaping Puppets from raw material into something that breathes in rhythm with the city's gears. The Puppetsmiths are not merely mechanics; in the old stories passed along by the Puppets themselves, they are closer to midwives, pulling a new identity out of inert matter and whispering the first lie that makes the Puppet believe it is real.

Krat's particular brand of craft is pragmatic and unsentimental. Where other Puppetsmiths in the broader lore may be romanticized or mythologized, Krat comes across as a working artisan: calloused, direct, more interested in the integrity of a joint than in the philosophy of consciousness. Yet the Puppets that leave the Factory carry Krat's fingerprints in their gait, in the particular creak of their necks, in the way they pause a half-beat too long before speaking. That half-beat is the tell. It is the seam showing.

The player's relationship with Krat is transactional at first—upgrade a Puppet, buy a material, move on—but the item descriptions and optional interactions slowly peel back the layer. Krat knows what the Puppets are. Krat chose to make them anyway. That quiet, complicit choice echoes the game's central question: if you build a performer and hand it a script, is the performance yours, or does it belong to the one on stage?

In Their Own Story

The Factory floor was quiet except for the tick of cooling metal. Krat stood over a workbench, a half-assembled Puppet slumped against the leg, its glass eyes catching the amber glow of the furnace. A new commission sat in the leather satchel by the door—someone wanted a face that would smile on command, that would never flinch. Krat picked up the chisel, set it against the wooden jaw, and for a long moment did not strike. Outside, the city's bells rang their hollow toll. The Puppet on the bench blinked, or seemed to. Krat set the chisel down. Picked it up again. The strike was clean. The smile was not.

Reader's Guide

What is known: Krat operates from the Puppet Factory, the early-game industrial zone where the player first learns to craft and upgrade Puppets. The Puppetsmith's bench is the functional heart of the area, and the player returns repeatedly to modify their Puppet's build, swapping parts and tuning performance. In-world, the Puppets speak of the Puppetsmiths as origin-figures, and Krat is named among them in several item descriptions tied to crafting materials.

What is contested: Whether the Puppetsmiths are a single guild, a scattered lineage, or something closer to a myth the Puppets tell themselves to explain their own existence. Some optional dialogue hints that not all Puppetsmiths are benevolent, and that the act of creation carries a cost the maker may not survive. Krat's own backstory beyond the Factory is sparse, leaving room for player interpretation.

What the player uncovers: Scattered item descriptions in the Factory and later zones reference the "first stitch," the "lie given at the joint," and the idea that a Puppet's performance is a contract with its maker. These fragments tie directly into the game's core themes: identity as performance, truth as the thing hidden behind the smile, and the player's own role as both audience and hand on the strings. Krat is the reminder that every performance has a backstage, and someone in the dark is watching the seams.

Did You Know?

• Krat's workshop in the Puppet Factory is one of the earliest interactive crafting stations the player encounters, anchoring the game's Puppet-upgrade loop from the start of the adventure.
• Several crafting-material item descriptions in the game reference the Puppetsmiths as origin-figures, positioning Krat within a broader mythos of creation rather than as a simple vendor.
• The Puppets that populate the city's streets are the products of Puppetsmiths like Krat, making the character a quiet god-figure in the world's cosmology despite their workshop-level, hands-on demeanor.
• The game's central theme of identity-as-performance is embodied in the Puppet Factory itself: the place where the 'lie' of being alive is first stitched into wood and wire.