Your first Polis window
The P key, ten sections, and your first claim.
Press P. One window, ten sections: notices, contracts, organisations, land, the market, storage, the court, then the registry and the guide below a rule, and the bank as the account card at the foot.
Where to start
Take a homestead. One chunk, free. Beyond that land costs, and it is taxed; the first sixteen plots are exempt.
The guide inside the window is not decoration: it explains each section where that section is, so you never need it open in a browser beside the game.
What the code does, and what it does not
The code is a notary and an archive, never a judge. It records obligations, watches the terms it can verify objectively, and publishes the outcome. It does not stand in the way of a breach.
The terms delivery, payment, non-aggression and collateral are judged by
code. A promise is free text: a bench may be asked whether it was kept, but it
carries no fine and the code never forms a view about it.
A bench decides guilt and nothing else. What the breach costs is a fixed tariff the system works out on its own. And permanent exile is a question of its own, put to the whole server.