Privacy, in plain language.

Railcove is a free open alpha you play in your browser. This page describes what the game stores to run your account and keep your save, what it sends, and how to have it deleted.

Your account

Creating an account stores your email address, the display name you choose, and a hash of your password. Passwords are hashed with argon2id; the password itself is never stored. Your account records whether your email has been verified and when the account was created.

On your account page you can add optional pronouns and a short biography, and change them or your display name at any time.

Your game

The server keeps your save so you can continue where you left off: story progress, choices, relationships, quests, inventory, gifts, Hearts and mini-game results. It also keeps a history of the story passages and choices you’ve made, receipts that stop a reward from being granted twice, and a record of each mini-game round you start.

Reading, sound and motion preferences stay in your browser’s local storage and are not sent to the server.

Signing in and cookies

Railcove uses one cookie, hb_session. It is HttpOnly, so page scripts can’t read it, and lasts up to 30 days. It holds a random sign-in token; the server stores only a hash of that token with its expiry time. Signing out removes that session, and resetting your password signs out every session. There are no other cookies.

Verification and password-reset links also carry a random token. The server keeps only its hash, its purpose and its expiry: 24 hours for verification and 1 hour for a reset. A link stops working and its token is deleted once it is used.

Email we send

Account email is sent through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). Railcove sends only transactional messages: an email verification link, a welcome message once you’ve verified, a password-reset link, a notice after your password changes, and a notice when a local AI agent is connected to your account. There is no marketing email. Images in these emails load from static.railcove.com.

Each time one of these emails is sent, the operator receives a separate, redacted delivery audit containing only the kind of email, the recipient address and the time. The audit never includes the message itself, its links, tokens or any account credentials.

Local AI agents

Web AI chat is Coming soon, and Railcove does not send your conversations to any AI service. After you verify your email and choose a character’s romance route, you can connect your own local AI agent, such as Codex, Claude Desktop or Hermes. For each agent token you create, the server stores a hash of the token, the label you gave it, and when it was created, last used and revoked.

When your agent saves a conversation turn, Railcove stores your message and your agent’s reply, a short summary and up to 12 remembered facts for that character, and a count of turns used each day (up to 10, by UTC date). Your agent reads your recent turns, summary and remembered facts back from Railcove, so that information also passes through the agent and whichever AI service it uses, under that service’s own terms.

Hosting

Railcove runs on Amazon Web Services in the US East (N. Virginia, us-east-1) region, on an Amazon Lightsail server with its PostgreSQL database. Like any website, the server processes your IP address to deliver pages. The game keeps a short-lived, in-memory request count per IP address to slow down bursts of requests; it is not written to the database. Email images and the videos on the help page load from static.railcove.com, served by Amazon CloudFront in the same AWS account, which also processes your IP address to deliver them.

No analytics

The game has no analytics, advertising trackers or third-party scripts. Its fonts, artwork and music are served by Railcove itself.

Support requests

You can reach the operator through the support form or by emailing privacy@railcove.com or support@railcove.com. Emails to these addresses are forwarded to the operator’s inbox. Both emails and support form submissions are copied into Linear, the support tracker the operator uses, and into the project’s private issue tracker. Those copies include your email address, name, topic or subject and message. For form submissions made while signed in, they also include your account ID and whether your email is verified. On the way to the trackers, a request waits in an Amazon SQS queue in the same AWS region for at most 14 days.

Deleting your account

The alpha doesn’t have a delete button. To delete your account, email privacy@railcove.com from the address on your account, or send a privacy or deletion request through the support form. Deletion requests are handled like other support requests, so they are copied into the trackers described above. Deleting an account removes its profile, save, story history, sessions, email links, agent tokens and agent conversations. Redacted delivery audits already sent to the operator are separate emails and are not part of your account.

Questions about your data are welcome at the same address.