It has been two weeks since the last build went up, and rather longer since the worlds in it started feeling emptier than they should. Those two facts turn out to be the same fact. So instead of a changelog, here is the whole of it: what went wrong, how we found out, what is already back, and why this is taking longer than we said. First, the confession. Vonkelveld's worlds had been getting qui…
The last stretch went into three things that are easy to describe and hard to build: making the world look like somewhere, letting the people in it speak to you, and finally letting you keep what you see. The world found its colour. · Twenty-four pigments. Every small thing on the ground — the crops, the carts, the roofs, the tools — now draws from one shared set of pigment roles instead of inv…
The world carries more colour while you simply watch it, and the family you follow no longer dresses like everyone else. A resting tone for the land. The richer colour and depth that photo mode brought no longer waits for photo mode. The view you read for hours now carries a gentle grade of its own. Photo mode still lifts off from there exactly as far as it always did, and its vignette stays wh…
Ages that span the centuries instead of crowding into the first of them, snow that finally smothers fire, and colour in the smallest standing things. The ages take their time. The world always held nine ages of dwelling, from the first hut to the standing spire — but six of them arrived inside the first eight centuries, and then the world waited, sometimes eleven hundred years, for anything to…
A screen that fits, panels that remember where home is, and a countryside that found its rivers again. The screen you choose. Visuals now opens with a single Display mode — Windowed, Fullscreen (Borderless) or Fullscreen (Native) — and a Resolution beside it. Fullscreen (Native) genuinely sets your display's own mode while the game runs and hands your desktop back when you leave; Borderless alw…
The first hour retold, a faster world, and a truer touch. The first hour, retold. The guided opening has been rebuilt end to end. Its lessons now come in the order a god's hand actually moves, and each one stands beside the thing it teaches instead of on top of it — every arrow has room to be seen, and a control the lesson points at brings itself into view. A new lesson puts your hand on the ge…
The largest update since Early Access opened: the world gains a third way to be looked at, and a great deal more world to look at. Go down among them. Until now you watched your people from above. Now there is a door. Take it and you step inside the year — the clock slows to the grain of hours, and a household's day happens in front of you at the speed it would really happen: fetching, tending,…
There has been no update for a week, and that is deliberate. What is being built underneath is the largest single change since Early Access began, and it cannot land in pieces. Here is what is coming, what is left, and one thing worth knowing before it arrives. The land became a system. · Water carves. Rivers wear at the ground they cross, carry what they take, and set it down where they slow.…
The last update gave your people a plea worth answering. This one fixes the part where you could not get to them. · Your hand reaches the one who is asking. If a soul called to you from far outside your cities, you could not select her, and Comfort would not land — every click fell on empty ground, however carefully you aimed. What you were seeing was a heartbeat behind where she actually stood…
When someone in your world asked for help, they had usually stopped needing it before you could reach them. This release changes what they ask for. · They ask about what they cannot mend alone. A hungry soul goes and eats — that was never a prayer, it was an errand, and it was finished before you looked up. Now a soul asks when her health is failing, and there is nothing she can do about that b…
v0.34.0 gave your world a face you could read. v0.35.0 is about the people living in it — where they are going, and how they get there. · They come home. A soul who sets out now has somewhere to arrive, stays a while when she gets there, and turns back for her own hearth. Before this, of a hundred and twelve people who ever left home in a long winter, not one ever came back, and not one had eve…
v0.34.0 is about looking at your world and understanding it. Six things were wrong with what you saw; all six are fixed. · Every city is its own. Each place now carries a colour drawn from the tradition of the region it stands in — neighbours read as kin, and no two of them are alike. A place keeps that colour for its whole life, whatever becomes of the towns around it. · A skyline you know it…
Vonkelveld runs on fields. Everything down there — heat, moisture, hunger, faith — is a number in a cell, pushed around by a small set of rules that have no idea what they mean. Someone asked me a question last week that I haven't been able to put down: if one of the people in that world became curious and worked out its physics, what would they find? So I went and checked. Not invented — check…
v0.33.0 gives your peoples a memory of their own — and it does not always match yours. · They tell stories about you. Every people now keeps the great turns of its own history — the winters, the droughts, the wonders you worked over their fields — and tells them by firelight long after the last witness is dust. · The telling drifts. Each lifetime of tellers reshapes what it inherited. A hard wi…
Vonkelveld entered Early Access three weeks ago. More than twenty updates later — capped yesterday by A Plea by Name — the world is deeper, kinder to newcomers, and stranger in the best ways. If you set your world down at launch, here is what it learned while you were away. If you never left, here is the road behind us, gathered in one place. · Your people ask for you by name. The greatest chan…
v0.32.0 deepens the lives you watch and retunes the Long Winter. · A plea by name. A person may now step forward and ask you, by name, for what they need. Answer, refuse, or let the moment pass — the world remembers every outcome, and an answered soul may take up a deed of their own. · The Long Winter cools in waves. The great cold now arrives in stages — hard bites, long retreats, even a false…
v0.31.1 makes the symbols and tracked lives on the world easier to understand. · World markers now explain themselves. Hover warnings for water, cold, crowding, or poor soil, as well as ripening circles, transitions, appeals, vigils, death wisps, relationship and focus markers, and close-view life motes. Their tooltips explain what is happening and, when relevant, which power may help. · Tracke…
v0.31 turns an age into something you can revisit, keep, and share. Watch its whole history unfold in forty-five seconds, or save one final image of the world your hand made. · Watch Epoch Timelapse. From Pause or The Saga So Far, replay the age from its first instant to the present. A story camera follows the world while Chronicle headlines and the marks of your interventions return in their p…
Your hand can now sweep across the world, and the world remembers where it passed. Draw ridges and valleys, watch shores and rivers answer, see people turn toward your works — then open an illuminated page that tells what this age became. · Sculpt in strokes. Press and drag with Raise Land, Sink Land, Send Rain, or Warm Region to paint a whole course in one gesture. A clear preview shows exactl…
This update is about hands. Yours, which no longer races a clock but chooses what is worth keeping. And mine, which set every number this world runs on — and is now open to you, if you want it. · Choose what endures. Every scenario used to ask you to survive as long as you could. It now asks what you will preserve, and what you will let go. The ending screen leads with what your hand kept safe,…
The world you shape has begun to look back at you. Its people carry thoughts you can read, they call up to you in their need and remember what you do for them, and the seasons turn across the living land. And for a hand that has never shaped a world before, a first valley now waits to teach. · The people, made legible. The souls you keep in your sight now show you what weighs on them — a hunger…
The young god's hand comes into its own. A cast is no longer a single touch — you choose its reach and its strength, you see what it did, and the world's people remember the acts they witness. This is the largest step yet toward a hand that feels like an act of god. · A hand with weight and reach. Shape every cast before you make it — how far it reaches, how hard it presses, from a whispered to…
This update smooths your first hour and lets the world speak more plainly — the first of several updates shaping a young god's earliest moments. · A clearer way in. A single button now leads straight into your first age, and each scenario names its first duty — what the world asks of you — before you step in. · The world guides you. Gentle hints speak at the right moments, the tutorial waits fo…
This update makes the game far harder to crash — especially on unusual hardware — and gives names to things that never had them. No simulation rules change: worlds, saves and replays behave exactly as before. · Steadier on every machine. Older graphics cards now get a clear message instead of a crash when a world is too large for them; enormous windows spanning several monitors and extreme wind…
This update sharpens how the world is lit and shaded, and gives the “why here” question a place to look. It changes no simulation rules -- only what you see. · Ask “why here” and the world listens. When you ask why a place is the way it is, the rest of the map gently darkens so your eye falls straight to the spot in question. The place is revealed by day and lifted by a soft moonlight glow at n…
This small update adds custom names for followed lives and folds the new action into First Light. · Rename followed lives. A followed peep can now receive a custom given name and a separate family name. · Family names carry through the household. Changing a family name updates related followed lives from the same household without changing lineage, behavior, score, or any simulation rule. · The…
This update rebuilds the First Light tutorial so new players can finish it on purpose, at a readable pace, without accidental victories or rewards firing early. · The tutorial now starts from a prepared world. First Light uses scenario-authored starting people and a settlement, so the first city is present when the lesson needs it. · Guidance is harder to miss or break. The opening panel stays…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.