Terms of Service

You must be at least 13 years old to create an Ottopedia account, and you must tell the truth about your age when you sign up. Your age decides real safety rules, like spending limits. You can correct it later in your Trust Center — but one change is never self-serve: a teen account can't promote itself to an adult one, because that unlocks real-money features, and it requires verification. The 13+ floor is enforced by our servers, not just written here.

Younger children exploring the world together with a parent, on the parent's own account and by the parent's choice, is a family decision we respect — but accounts of their own come at 13.

If you are 13–17: real-money spending on your account starts at zero, and only a parent or guardian in your family circle can raise that cap (never above $200 a month). Without a guardian's explicit say-so, a teen account cannot spend real money at all. Marketplace selling always requires a verified adult account.

Don't harass, bully, threaten, or deliberately upset other people. Don't post content that doesn't belong in a room shared by a nine-year-old and their grandparent. Don't wreck things other people made.

Don't try to break in: no probing other people's accounts or families' data, no cheating the economy, no automating the world to farm rewards, no working around safety limits — including age and spending rules.

Ottopedia keeps an audit trail of important actions, and every account has a kill switch that instantly revokes its compute permissions, cancels its running jobs, and pulls back its shared media. If someone breaks these rules we can step in — quietly fix it, warn, restrict, or in serious cases close an account.

Anything you create or upload — rooms you decorate, photos and clips in your family's Gallery and Theater, memories you save with Marlow — belongs to you. You give Ottopedia only the permission it needs to do its job: to store your things and show them to exactly the people you chose to share them with.

Private media is encrypted before it is stored (AES-256-GCM). Honesty about where we are: today Ottopedia's own server does that encrypting and holds the keys, so our systems could technically access what you upload — we don't browse it, but "we can't" would be a lie, and we don't lie on this page. A small preview image and your caption are kept readable so your shelves load fast. Moving the keys fully into your family's hands — so we couldn't look even if asked — is the designed end state the code is built around, and this page will change the day it ships.

If you ever publish something publicly (a separate, explicit choice — never a default), you're telling us it's yours to publish and kind enough for the town square.

The Ottopedia world — its rooms, artwork, music, writing, code, and the six companions (Otto, Codey, Marlow, Vera, Keen, and Arcade) — belongs to Ottopedia. You're welcome to screenshot and share your adventures; please don't rip the assets, resell the art, or present the characters as your own work.

The same respect runs the other way: if you believe something in Ottopedia infringes your rights — yours or anyone's — write to us and we'll take it seriously and act quickly.

Ottopedia's four in-world currencies — Glow, Current, XP, and Tickets — are playful rewards. They have no cash value, cannot be bought with or sold for real money, and cannot be traded outside the game. This is enforced in the game's own economy code, and every earn and spend is written to an append-only ledger — your recent activity shows in your Trust Center, and the full history comes with your data export.

If a bug or abuse inflates balances, we may correct them to keep the world fair. Play balances are part of the game, not property — though we treat wiping anyone's progress as a last resort, and the ledger means changes are visible, never silent.

Where real-money purchases are offered (like the optional Otto Club), payment is handled by Stripe, a dedicated payment company. Your card number goes to Stripe, never to Ottopedia — we don't see it and we don't store it.

Real-money spending on a 13–17 account starts at zero and stays there unless a guardian in the family circle explicitly raises the cap (at most $200 a month). With a zero cap, checkout can't even begin — so there's no sneaky path around it. Marketplace selling requires an adult, Stripe-verified account; direct marketplace purchases require an adult account with a Stripe-funded budget.

Otto Club is a subscription handled by Stripe: it renews automatically until cancelled. Write to us any time and we'll cancel it, effective at the end of the paid period. If any purchase goes wrong, write to us and we'll sort it out honestly.

Ottopedia is built by a small team and is honest about its edges. Features that are simulated, in development, or switched off are labeled that way in the world — we don't fake progress or dress demos up as live systems.

The companions' conversations are handcrafted dialogue. Real AI chat is switched off by default; if Ottopedia's operator ever turns it on, it is labeled in the world, every message is something you chose to send, spending ceilings apply, and the message text is not stored. The Compute Garden runs in simulation in the live world today.

You can export your data and delete your account at any time from the Trust Center. Deleting is real: your personal information and creations are removed as described in the Privacy Policy, which also explains the small set of anonymized bookkeeping records that must be kept.

We can suspend or close accounts that break these rules. For anything short of serious abuse, we'll say what happened and why — and if you think we got it wrong, write to us; a human re-reads it.

If Ottopedia ever had to wind down a feature or the world itself, we would say so plainly and give you time and tools to take your things with you. No silent shutdowns.

Ottopedia is a small, family-built world, provided as-is. We take safety and reliability seriously — server-enforced limits, an audit trail, encrypted media — but we can't promise the service will always be available, bug-free, or exactly the same tomorrow. To the fullest extent the law allows, Ottopedia's liability is limited to what you paid us (for most families: nothing).

Which country's or state's law governs these terms, and how formal disputes would be resolved, will be added here after legal review — this draft doesn't pretend to answer that yet.

We may update these terms as Ottopedia grows. When we do, the date at the top changes, and meaningful changes get announced plainly — not buried.