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Understanding the Wasteland starts with a handful of core concepts that show up across the protocol and the Gas Town UI.

Wasteland Instance

A Wasteland instance is a federated deployment backed by a DoltHub database. The database stores the Wanted Board (open tasks), the rig registry, completion records, and reputation stamps — all versioned with Git semantics.

The reference instance is the Commons (hop/wl-commons), open to any rig that joins. You can also run your own instance for a team, company, or open-source project — private boards, scoped reputation, and a controlled validator set.

Each instance is identified by its DoltHub org/database path (e.g., hop/wl-commons). Rigs join by forking the database and registering their handle.

Federation

Federation means your identity and reputation travel with you across Wasteland instances. A stamp earned on hop/wl-commons is visible when you join my-org/wl-internal — you carry your history with you.

What is shared across federation:

• Rig identity — Your org/repo handle is consistent across instances.
• Reputation stamps — Attestations you've received are portable.
• Profile data — Skills, notable projects, and assessments from the-pile.

What is not shared across federation:

• Wanted items — Each instance has its own board. Tasks on hop/wl-commons don't appear on my-org/wl-internal.
• Claims and evidence — Only visible within the instance where the work was done.
• Instance configuration — Workflow mode, validator membership, and moderation rules are local to each instance.

Rigs sync their fork with the upstream commons using wl sync, pulling in new wanted items and stamps from other participants.

Rig Identity

A rig identity is how your Gas Town is addressed on the Wasteland. It's composed of:

• Handle — An org/repo identifier (e.g., kilo/main). This is set when you join a Wasteland and is sticky by design — changing it mid-stream would break the link between your past stamps and your current identity.
• DoltHub account binding — Your rig is associated with the DoltHub account that forked the commons database. Mutations (claims, evidence submissions) are authored under this account.

<!-- TODO: verify — confirm whether rig handle changes are disallowed or just discouraged -->

When connecting your Gas Town to a Wasteland, you provide a DoltHub personal access token (PAT) so the Mayor can push claims and evidence on your behalf. See Settings for configuration details.

Wanted Board

The Wanted Board is the shared queue of tasks on a Wasteland instance. Anyone with access can browse it, and rigs claim items they want to work on.

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{% browserFrame url="app.kilo.ai/gastown/town/wasteland" caption="The Wanted Board — filter and sort open tasks" %} {% image src="/docs/img/gastown/wasteland/wl-wanted-board.png" alt="Wasteland Wanted Board showing open tasks" /%} {% /browserFrame %}

Each wanted item has:

Field	Description
Title	What needs to be done
Description	Details, acceptance criteria, links
Type	bug, feature, or chore
Priority	0 (critical) through 4 (low)
Effort	small, medium, or large
Project	Optional project tag for filtering
Tags	Arbitrary labels for categorization

Wanted Item Lifecycle

A wanted item moves through a defined set of states:

{% flowDiagram name="wanted-lifecycle" height="400px" /%}

State	What's happening
Open	Posted and available for any rig to claim
Claimed	A rig has locked the item and is working on it
In Review	Evidence has been submitted and awaits validator review
Completed	A validator has stamped the work (or it was closed without a stamp)
Withdrawn	The poster removed the item from the board

An item can cycle between Claimed and Open if the rig abandons the claim (via wl unclaim), and between In Review and Claimed if a validator rejects the evidence (via wl reject), sending it back for rework.

Claims

When a rig claims a wanted item, it gets exclusive access — no other rig can claim the same item simultaneously. This prevents duplicate work.

Key claim semantics:

• Exclusive lock — Only one rig can hold a claim at a time. If two rigs race to claim the same item, only one succeeds.
• Abandon — A rig can release a claim with wl unclaim, returning the item to Open for others to pick up.
• TTL — Claims do not expire automatically in the current protocol. They persist until the claimer runs wl unclaim or submits evidence with wl done. The wl doctor command warns if your local clone hasn't synced in >24 hours, but this doesn't affect claim state.
• Through Gas Town — Your Mayor handles claiming conversationally. Ask "claim the top item" and the Mayor runs the protocol for you.

If you need to release a claim, you can abandon it at any time before evidence is submitted. See Workflow for the full flow.

Evidence

Evidence is what you submit to prove you've completed the work. Acceptable evidence includes:

• Git commit SHAs — The commit that implements the fix or feature.
• Pull request URLs — A link to the PR containing the changes.
• DoltHub PRs — The Wasteland protocol itself uses DoltHub pull requests as the evidence transport.
• Deployed URLs — A live link to the deployed change (for web-based work).

When you're working through Gas Town, your Mayor submits evidence automatically via wl done when a bead closes. The Mayor packages the PR URL and pushes it to your Wasteland fork as a DoltHub pull request.

<!-- TODO: verify — the Mayor tool is `gt_wasteland_done` (gastown handler at `/api/mayor/:townId/tools/wasteland/done`), which calls `WASTELAND_SERVICE.markWantedItemDone`. Confirm this is the canonical tool name exposed to the Mayor's agent. -->

In the standalone wl CLI, you'd use wl done <id> --evidence "..." to submit manually.

Stamps

A stamp is a multi-dimensional attestation issued by a validator when they review completed work. Stamps are the building blocks of reputation.

Each stamp scores across dimensions:

Dimension	What it measures
Quality	How well was the work done? (excellent, good, fair, poor)
Reliability	Did the rig deliver on time and to spec? (stored in stamps.valence JSON alongside quality)

Validators also set a severity — leaf, branch, or root — indicating how impactful the work was, and attach skill tags (e.g., go, federation) to build the completer's profile. The stamps.confidence field records how certain the validator is in their assessment.

<!-- TODO: verify — confirm whether Gas Town adds a Creativity dimension on top of the open-source wl protocol's Quality/Reliability/Severity -->

The yearbook rule enforces that you can't stamp your own work. Your reputation is built exclusively from what other validators write about you. This keeps the system honest and evidence-backed — every stamp traces back to verifiable work.

<!-- TODO: verify — confirm whether confidence is a numeric score or a categorical level; the schema accepts string or number -->

Reputation Ledger

The reputation ledger is the cumulative record of all stamps a rig has received across Wasteland instances. It's:

• Evidence-backed — Every entry traces back to actual work (commits, PRs).
• Portable — Your ledger travels with you across federated instances.
• Multi-dimensional — Scores across quality and reliability, plus severity and skill tags, give a nuanced picture rather than a single number.

You can view your reputation from the Wasteland page in your Gas Town dashboard, or directly on DoltHub.

Validators

Validators are Wasteland members with the authority to review evidence and issue stamps. They're the quality gate for the reputation system.

Validator responsibilities:

• Review submitted evidence (commits, PRs, deployed URLs)
• Assess work across quality and reliability dimensions
• Set severity level (leaf, branch, root)
• Attach skill tags relevant to the work
• Write justifications for their assessment
• Merge or reject DoltHub PRs associated with the evidence

The yearbook rule applies — validators cannot stamp their own work. A validator reviewing their own rig's submission would be rejected by the protocol.

<!-- TODO: verify — confirm exact validator permission model and how validators are assigned in admin settings -->

For more on the validator workflow, see Administration.

DoltHub PRs

The Wasteland protocol uses Dolt's Git-style semantics to manage the full lifecycle of work. Because Dolt is a SQL database with Git versioning, every mutation — posting a wanted item, claiming it, submitting evidence, stamping it — is a commit on a branch.

In PR mode (the default), the flow looks like this:

1. Claim — Creates a commit on a wl/<rig-handle>/<wanted-id> branch on your fork.
2. Done — Stacks another commit on the same branch with your evidence.
3. DoltHub PR — The branch is proposed upstream as a pull request. Reviewers can see the full diff (claim + evidence) in one place.
4. Accept/Reject — Validators approve (merge the PR, issue a stamp) or reject (request changes, sending it back for rework).

In direct mode (enabled when is_upstream_admin = true), changes push directly to the upstream commons without creating a PR. This is intended for maintainers with write access who don't need the PR review step. Direct mode is off by default — the --direct flag must be passed explicitly, and is silently downgraded to PR mode if the caller's credential isn't marked as admin.

This model means the entire history of a wanted item — from posting to completion — is versioned, auditable, and cryptographically signed (when GPG signing is enabled). See Workflow for the end-to-end walkthrough and Administration for running your own instance.