How The Field works, behind the scenes.
One million tiles, each with one holder at a time, and no subscription on any of them. That raises fair questions — what a claim actually is, why there is no subscription, and what happens at the edges. The honest tour.
A grid of one million coordinates
The Field is a 1,000×1,000 grid. Every tile has a coordinate. About 36,500 of the million stand for a date (DD·MM·YY), which is why people look up birthdays and wedding days. A date’s six digits split in two, column then row: the example tile 12·06·24 sits at column 120, row 624. Regions open in sequence from the founding centre; a tile outside the open area can be claimed now as an Anywhere tile, and the named landmark tiles on the register sell one-of-one at listed prices.
What a claim actually buys
A claim buys your tile and its caption on The Field, plus whatever occasion package you add — galleries, guestbooks, slideshows with stated photo limits and upload windows. By default the upload window and the gallery close together, to guests, at the end of the hosting window; the gallery then stays in your workspace, and the tile stays yours, on The Field. On Story and Legacy, everything exports as a zip, which you should make before hosting ends — and the original of your highlight photo is worth keeping too.
Why there is no subscription
Storage costs fall every year while a claimed tile’s content is fixed after its upload window — so the cost of keeping a tile trends towards zero while the payment happened once, up front. The model is a graveyard plot, not a gym membership: sold once, maintained from the proceeds of The Field filling.
The picture nobody planned
Zoomed out, the claimed tiles form one image — a picture painted by everyone who claims, none of whom coordinated anything. Zoom in and every tile is somebody’s day. That accidental collective artwork is the whole idea, and it only gets better as The Field fills.