New to the city?

DOWNLINK is a free cyberpunk RPG you play entirely inside Discord by messaging a bot. You’re an operator in New Socales, a city that grew until nobody could govern it, with twenty actions a day to spend on contracts, training, crafting and trouble. Solo play is a complete game; crews, syndicates, duels and turf wars are there when you want other people.

Join the official DOWNLINK Discord, or any server that has the bot, then DM the bot /start. Character creation takes a couple of minutes, and your first contract is right after it. If your own server doesn’t have DOWNLINK yet, an admin can add it in about two minutes from the For Server Admins page. There’s no approval step.

No. There’s no app, no separate client and no website login. If you can DM a Discord bot, on desktop or phone, you can play.

It’s free to play during the alpha, and there’s nothing to buy. DOWNLINK will never be pay-to-win: your standing in the city comes from how you play, never from your wallet. If we ever charge for anything, it will be titles, cosmetics, convenience or a supporter subscription. That’s the whole list.

Cycles are your daily actions. You get twenty, and they refresh at midnight UTC. There are no cooldown timers and no energy bar calling you back: spend them in one sitting or across the day. When they run out, you’re done until the reset, so every action is a real choice.

Right. There are twenty skills across five disciplines: combat, tech, stealth, social and trade. You train what you use. As your skills cross thresholds, the city starts calling you something: titles you earn from how you actually play, not a class you pick from a menu.

Contracts are short, staged stories. At each stage you choose which of your skills to use, with the odds shown before you commit: slip in quietly, talk your way through, or go in loud. There are hundreds of them across six tiers, and the outcome is written out, not just tallied.

No. Solo play is a complete game from start to finish. When you want company, there are 2–4 player crew jobs coordinated through your DMs, drop-in district events, one-on-one duels, and syndicate raids on rival turf. The skills you train solo carry straight into all of it.

A player-run organization that spans servers. Syndicates share a treasury, have five ranks, form alliances, rivalries and wars, and can stake claims on districts to set local policy and collect a tithe. Your syndicate might have members in a dozen communities.

Yes. Your character is yours, not your server’s. Every server running DOWNLINK is a district of the same city: you can travel to the city’s own districts and to any other server you’re in that runs the bot, and your reputation goes with you.

At Grade 30 you can Rebirth: start over at Grade 1 with bonus points to spend, a clone of your old self in your network, and a generation title that shows how many lives you’ve run. The deepest story chapters only open to operators who have been reborn.

Yes, and we’re keeping it that way. New Socales has systems you’ll stumble into rather than read about. Play, pay attention, and the city will show you what it’s hiding.

Use /block in a DM with the bot. It’s silent, so they can’t tell. Use /report to send a report, with recent context attached, to the moderators of the district where it happened.

The setting is cyberpunk: crime, violence and morally grey choices are part of the flavor. There’s no explicit sexual content. Player handles and syndicate names are screened before anyone sees them, and a chat filter you control (standard by default, or hate-only, or off) masks slurs and abuse in what other players send you. It’s edgy, not cruel.

DM the bot /feedback, or use the feedback button in its menus. It goes straight to the developers, and during the alpha we read all of it. The game is actively shaped by the people playing it.

Yes. In a DM with the bot, open /profile, then Settings, then Delete account. After a confirmation screen showing what will happen, your character and its data are deleted immediately.