Cosmetics and the Dossier

Cosmetics

The Rule

Everything sold or earned in Resident Evil Online changes how something looks and nothing else. Because Survivor is read by eye and by ear, "nothing else" is held to precise limits:

• Shape and tier. A cosmetic keeps the silhouette of what it dresses. A light helmet still looks like a light helmet and a heavy one like a heavy one; a pistol still looks like a pistol.
• Brightness. Nothing is darker, duller, or better hidden against a wall or in the dark than the plain item it replaces. A dress or gear piece that blends into the night is never made.
• No light, no sound. No cosmetic glows, flickers, or makes a sound of its own. Footsteps are footsteps.
• Every dress covers the same skin. Cloth hides a Mark (The Infection, The Mark), so what cloth covers is fixed and the same in every look: the body, the arms to the wrists, and the legs to the ankles. No dress, gear, or charm covers the hands, the neck, the jaw, or the lower face, where the lines reach at Fracture, or the eyes, where a Plaga shows in the Valley. Every wound tears and stains a dress the same way. No look makes anyone harder to read than another.
• Hit areas are the body's. No cosmetic changes the size of a survivor, a Turned, or a monster, or where it can be hurt.
• Forms keep their strain. A monster's look keeps its strain's colors and patterns and every weak point the strain gives it: the glowing core of Uroboros, the yellow eye-tumors of the G-Virus.
• Gestures stay shared. The raised hand, the lowered weapon, and the signal to follow are the same for everyone, because survivors use them to talk. Poses bought or earned are for the Dossier.
• The tone holds. Everything worn could be worn by someone in these places, at that time (Each Thing to Its Time, below). Event dress may be macabre; it is never a joke. The one joke anyone ever wears is put on them by a Warden, for what they did on a doorstep: the TROUBLEMAKER strip and the Valley's hat (Survival, The Doorstep Record). Neither is owned, sold, or kept past the night.

Companions and the Stranded are never dressed: Leon Kennedy in a Survivor night is who the records say he was. Every original survivor can be dressed.

Each Thing to Its Time

Everything a survivor wears in a night belongs to that night's time. A look can be worn only in the worlds whose time could hold it, and a look that belongs to no world a night is set in stays in the Wardrobe that night.

World	Everyday dress	From the records
Raccoon City, 1998	What people wore in a Midwestern city in September 1998	Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil (the Arklay Mountains, July 1998), Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, and both files of Resident Evil Outbreak: the uniforms of the S.T.A.R.S., the R.P.D., the U.B.C.S., and the Umbrella Security Service; the emblems of the S.T.A.R.S., the R.P.D., the U.B.C.S., Umbrella, the Kite Bros Railway, the Raccoon Zoo, and J's Bar; Mr. Raccoon and the lion medallion
The Valley, 2004	What villagers wore in rural Spain in 2004, and what an American abroad might have	Resident Evil 4 and Separate Ways: the attaché case charms, and the dress of the agents, mercenaries, and villagers of those records
The Ruins, 2026	What people wear in 2026	Resident Evil Requiem, and the BSAA, which exists only from 2003

• Every look has its worlds. Each dress, gear look, finish, charm, and emblem is marked with the worlds it can be worn in. A plain wool coat or a pair of work boots may belong to all three; a S.T.A.R.S. vest belongs to Raccoon City, 1998, alone; a BSAA set belongs to the Ruins alone, because no BSAA existed in 1998 or in the Valley's records. Something of the records is worn only in the world of its records.
• What is not worn in a night is free of it. Forms dress a Turned shape, and a shape belongs to its strain, which ΜΝΗΜΗ seeds in every time that holds the virus, so Forms are worn in every such world. Portraits, frames, backdrops, figurines, models, and diorama pieces never enter a night, and belong to no world.
• Crosstime nights. When the barrier between times falls (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Crosstime Weekends), a survivor may wake in a look of either time on that night.
• Events. An event's dress belongs to the worlds of its event (Seasons and New Content, The Calendar Rule).
• Echoes too. Echoes wear looks drawn from the Wardrobe as often as players wore them in that world, and only looks of that world (Echoes in the Wardrobe, below).
• In the Night. ΜΝΗΜΗ never runs as fact what the records do not hold (ΜΝΗΜΗ, What She Will Run), and a uniform worn five years before it existed would be one more thing she could not check. She dresses every body in what its place and year could have held, and lets the sleeper choose inside that.

Looks

A player dresses their survivor once for each world, and never item by item before a night.

• A Look is a whole survivor's dress. It holds the dress, a gear look for every slot, a finish for every kind of weapon, the charm, the emblems, and the hair, all of one world. The body is the survivor's own and stays the same in every Look (The Survivors, Creating a Survivor).
• Built for a world. A Look is made for one world, and its editor in the Waiting Dark shows only what that world can wear. Owned looks of other times are shown greyed, with the worlds they belong to.
• Chosen before the waking. Each world has one Look marked as its own. When ΜΝΗΜΗ assigns a night in that world, the survivor wakes in it, with nothing to change. A player can keep up to five Looks for each world and let the night choose among them at random instead.
• A world with no Look. A survivor who has none for a world wakes in that time's plain everyday dress, which everyone owns.
• Free. Looks and their places are never sold.

What Can Be Owned

Kind	What it is	Where it shows
Dress	Outfits for a player's original survivor, among them the uniforms of the records: S.T.A.R.S., R.P.D., U.B.C.S., Umbrella Security Service, BSAA. They are worn as the survivor's own, never as a familiar face's	Survivor, in the worlds of its time
Gear	Looks for what a survivor wears on the head, body, belt, and back	When the survivor puts on that kind of gear
Finishes	Looks for a weapon: a pipe, a fire axe, a handgun, a shotgun	Whenever the survivor holds that weapon
Charms	Small things that hang from a bag or a weapon, as the attaché case charms did in Resident Evil 4: an ink ribbon, a green herb, a Mr. Raccoon, a lion medallion, a Spencer crest	On whatever bag or weapon the survivor carries
Emblems	Patches for a vest or a sleeve: S.T.A.R.S., R.P.D., U.B.C.S., Umbrella, BSAA, Kite Bros Railway, Raccoon Zoo, J's Bar	On the survivor's dress and body gear, in the worlds of its time
Figurines	The small collectibles the series has always hidden in its rooms: Mr. Raccoon, the Mr. Raccoon Memoriams of the ruins, Mr. Charlie, Mr. Everywhere, the Goats of Warding, the Clockwork Castellans	The shelf of the Dossier (The Dossier, in this document)
Forms	Looks for a Turned shape or a monster: a Licker, a Crimson Head, a J'avo, a Burnside-class	A player's own Turned
Poses, backdrops, frames	The pieces of a Portrait	The Dossier
Diorama pieces	The building blocks of a diorama: walls, floors, ceilings, doors, windows, stairs, furniture, props, lights, and weather	The player's diorama (The Diorama, in this document)
Models	Full-size, posable models of the people and creatures of the records, from Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine to a Licker, a Tyrant, the Nemesis, a Ganado, or El Gigante	The player's diorama. Never in a night
Diorama kits	A whole room sold together, with its walls, its door, its furniture, and its light: an Umbrella laboratory, the S.T.A.R.S. office, a village house, a castle hall, a corridor of ARK	The player's diorama

Gear in Survivor

In Survivor, a survivor wakes with nothing but their dress. Everything else they wear, they find (Survival). A player's gear looks appear on what they find.

• Putting it on turns it on. A player whose Look for Raccoon City, 1998, is an R.P.D. set wakes in its dress. When they find a riot helmet and put it on, it becomes the R.P.D. helmet, in the riot helmet's shape. When they find a security guard's vest and put it on, it becomes the R.P.D. vest. A bag becomes the R.P.D. pack.
• Everyone sees it. Every survivor sees every other survivor in the looks that survivor's player chose. A player sees others in theirs, and is seen in their own.
• The look belongs to the player, not the item. A survivor who takes off the helmet and drops it drops a plain riot helmet. Whoever picks it up and puts it on wears it in their own helmet look if they own one, and as a plain riot helmet if they do not.
• A set is made for every tier. A gear look is drawn once for each tier of its slot, so an R.P.D. helmet on a hard hat and an R.P.D. helmet on a riot helmet still read as light and heavy.
• Finishes and charms follow the hands. A found handgun takes the player's handgun finish when they pick it up, and loses it when it leaves their hands. Their charm hangs from whatever bag or weapon they carry.
• At the Turn, everything carried falls. Gear and weapons drop where the survivor fell, plain again, for anyone to take; the one exception is what an Afflicted keeps in its hand (The Turned). The body rises in the player's Form for its strain and shape, and a shape that keeps a human outline, like the zombie, keeps the dress it died in. A squad that meets a friend at the bottom of a stairwell an hour later may meet them in that dress.

In the Night, none of this is strange. ΜΝΗΜΗ composes every body she runs from the Remembered, and a helmet is only a helmet to her. What it looks like on a sleeper is what the sleeper asked her to show.

Echoes in the Wardrobe

Echoes wear dress, gear, and Forms drawn from the Wardrobe as often as players were seen wearing them in that world, and only what that world can wear (Each Thing to Its Time, above), and never a trophy (Trophies, in this document), so that nothing on an Echo tells a survivor that it is one. A shared Echo wears its owner's looks.

The Dossier

Every player has a Dossier: a personnel file in the style the series has always kept, with a photograph clipped to its cover. The photograph is the Portrait, a small scene the player builds and the first thing friends see.

The Portrait

A Portrait is a three-dimensional scene, built and saved like a photograph.

• The subject. The player's original survivor in any dress and gear they own, or one of their Forms.
• The pose. Standing, crouched, leaning against a concrete wall, sitting on the hood of a wrecked cruiser, holding a weapon in its finish.
• The camera. Angle, distance, height, tilt, and lens, set freely, as long as the subject's face stays in the frame.
• The backdrop. A place from the maps: the R.P.D. lobby, the clock tower in the rain, the subway platform, the crater's edge, the village plaza, a castle hall. Or the player's own diorama (The Diorama, below).
• The light. Any condition the place allows: day, night, rain, or blackout.
• The frame. The folder the photograph is clipped to: an Umbrella personnel file, an R.P.D. case file, a S.T.A.R.S. roster card, a BSAA dossier.
• The shelf. Up to five figurines along the bottom of the file.
• The plaques. Up to three lines from the player's own Ledger: nights survived, clean extractions, cures given away, the Stranded brought out.
• The emblems. Up to three, pinned to the cover.
• The marks. The First Run plaque and the Patron mark, for those who hold them.
• The standing seal. In the top corner of every Dossier sits a small seal that shows the player's doorstep standing (Survival, The Doorstep Record). It cannot be hidden, moved, covered, or bought away, and it changes only when the record does. Each seal has its own shape as well as its own color, so it reads for everyone (Presentation and Technology, Readable by Everyone):

Standing	Seal
Peaceful	A white circle
Warned	A yellow triangle
Notorious	An orange square, with the word Griefer beside it
Infamous	A red cross, with the word Griefer beside it

The seal speaks only of the doorstep. Betrayal inside a night, a lie, a stolen dose, a shot in the back on an open street, is part of Survivor (The Living, Betrayal) and never touches it. A Peaceful seal says a player keeps the safe rooms' peace, not that they can be trusted.

A player who wants their original survivor leaning against a concrete wall in the Ruins at night, in Umbrella dress, a Clockwork Castellan on the shelf and their count of cures given away under the photograph, builds exactly that.

The Diorama

Every player also has a diorama: a room of their own, built piece by piece, kept behind the Portrait. The Portrait is a photograph; the diorama is the place it was taken. Anyone who can open a player's Dossier can step into their diorama and walk around it.

• The space. One room, up to about twelve meters by twelve, and five high, on one or two levels. A player builds it from nothing, or starts from a kit and changes it.
• The pieces. Walls, floors, and ceilings in the materials of the records: R.P.D. wood panelling, Umbrella white tile, mansion stone, village plaster, castle masonry, the concrete of ARK. Doors, from the R.P.D.'s carved emblem doors to a laboratory airlock. Windows, stairs, railings, and rubble. Furniture and props: desks, specimen tanks, an item box, a typewriter with an ink ribbon beside it, filing cabinets, a gun rack, herbs in pots, a church pew, an operating table.
• The light and the weather. Lamps and emergency lights, each placed and aimed. The hour and the weather outside the windows, from any the maps allow (The Worlds, Time and Weather).
• The models. Up to twelve in a room: the player's own survivor in any dress and gear they own, their Forms, and models of the people and creatures of the records. Each takes a pose from its own list, and every pose is one the records or the game already use: Leon Kennedy aiming down a corridor, Ada Wong at a window, a Licker on the ceiling, a Tyrant halfway through a door.
• The limits. A room holds up to three hundred pieces. Nothing can be written freely: signs, labels, and screens show only the lines the shop sells. Models cannot be placed in contact poses outside the ones their lists hold. The tone holds here as everywhere (The Rule, in this document).
• More than one. A player can keep up to five dioramas and choose which one stands behind the Portrait.

Building a scene. A player who wants an Umbrella laboratory starts from the laboratory kit: white tile, a specimen tank with something in it, a sealed airlock, a red emergency light turning. They place their own survivor at the console in a lab coat, William Birkin behind the glass, a Hunter in the tank, and HUNK in the doorway, rifle up. They set the hour to night and the light to blackout, take the Portrait from the airlock window, and every friend who opens their Dossier can walk in.

Where the pieces come from. Most diorama pieces and kits are in the Wardrobe, for Ribbons or money, at the prices of The Economy. The models of the Heavy and of the named are unlocked only by deeds in the nights, and some pieces and models are trophies that can never be bought (Four Ways to Own, below).

One day, a place to stand. A possible future feature, not scheduled, would let a player walk into a diorama as their survivor and use it in place of the menus between nights (The Refuge).

In the Night. A diorama is a room ΜΝΗΜΗ lets a sleeper arrange from the Archive: every wall is a photograph she keeps, every model a record she has rebuilt. She watches what they put in it. It is one more way of learning them.

Four Ways to Own

Not everything that can be worn or displayed can be bought. Some things in Resident Evil Online can only be lived, and those are the things players show off.

Way	How it is owned	Examples
Sold	In the Wardrobe from the day it is offered, for Ribbons or money	Most dress, gear, finishes, charms, emblems, figurines, diorama pieces, and kits
Earned or sold	Given free by a deed in the nights, and in the Wardrobe for anyone who would rather not wait	Backdrops and many frames: extracting by the Clock Tower earns the clock tower, by the Subway the subway platform, and a clean extraction from the Ruins the crater's edge
Unlocked	Not in a player's Wardrobe at all until they have done the deed. After it, it appears there, for Ribbons or money	The models of the Heavy and of the named: putting down a Tyrant unlocks the Tyrant, living through a Nemesis that hunted you unlocks the Nemesis, bringing Leon Kennedy out of a night alive unlocks Leon, and putting down Saddler, or being there when he fell, unlocks Saddler
Trophies	Given only by the deed. Never sold, never in the Wardrobe, never gifted	Below

Trophies

A trophy is proof. It is a look, a model, a frame, an emblem, or a diorama piece that exists only because its owner did something hard, and it can be had no other way.

• Earned only in the nights. A trophy is given the moment its deed is done, in an online night among real sleepers. Echoes can be part of the night, but a deed done alone in an offline night earns no trophy, unless the trophy says it can.
• Never for sale, never a gift. No trophy is ever in the Wardrobe, at any price, in Ribbons or money, and none can be given to a friend.
• It carries its night. Every trophy shows when and where it was earned: the date, the map, and the night's line from the After-Action Report. And it shows how rare it is: the share of all players who hold it.
• Never on an Echo. Echoes never wear or carry trophies (Echoes in the Wardrobe, above), so a trophy seen on a Dossier is always a player's own.
• Obtainable while its deed is. A trophy stays earnable for as long as the deed can still be done (The Service, Promise 3). A trophy of an event is earnable whenever that event returns.

Trophy	Its deed
The railgun's mark, an emblem	Be one of the survivors at the railgun when the Nemesis of the records falls to it (The People of Raccoon City, 1998)
Heavy Hunter, a frame	Put down a Heavy that is not named with no more than three survivors, companions included, and no secret weapon (Survival, Run First)
The long way home, a dress	Extract clean from five nights in a row
Nobody's hero, a figurine	Extract after giving away the only dose you ever held
The keeper of the peace, a pose	Keep a Peaceful seal through two hundred nights (Survival, The Doorstep Record)
The last seat, a diorama piece: the Clock Tower helicopter's door	Take the last seat on the last way out of a Raccoon City night with less than two minutes to impact
One in a hundred, a frame	Walk out of a night through the Crossing, and live (The Worlds, The Crossing)
The Merchant's best customer, a hat	In one night in the Valley, buy from every one of the Merchant's appearances

Secret trophies. Some trophies are never listed. Their deeds are not published anywhere, in the game or by Capcom, and the first sign most players see of one is someone else's Dossier. A few are among the rarest things in the game: a model that appears once in many thousands of nights, a piece earned only by a deed few will think to try. Players will find them, share what they found, and argue about the rest. That is the point.

In the Night. A trophy is ΜΝΗΜΗ's remembering on a sleeper's behalf: a mark in their file of something they did and will never recall. She gives it so that the hand that plays them can show what the sleeper cannot.

Where It Is Seen

The Dossier is shown on the friends list, to every member of a party as it forms in the Waiting Dark, in a night's lobby (below), on every page of the Ledger, and on the screen that closes a night, for the survivors who left on the last way out. It is never shown inside a night: Survivor has no name tags, and no Portrait.

In the lobby. Before every Survivor night, while it is assembled, the lobby lists every player who will wake in it, each by a card: their name, their standing seal, and their First Run and Patron marks. The card never shows the Portrait, the dress, or anything else of how their survivor looks, so no one can match a card to a body once the night begins: the strangers stay strangers, and only their reputation at the door goes ahead of them. Echoes are never listed. A player who does not like the company can leave the lobby before the night begins and go back to the queue, at no cost but the wait.