v0.16.1: True Names & Befriend-to-Message — NPCs Get Personal

📖 True Names for Every NPC

FIXED a player-reported issue first: city panels, incoming letters and dialogue titles showed raw internal IDs like seed_qingyun_city_merchant_0. The fix went further — every NPC now gets a true name generated deterministically from their ID (100 surnames × 70 given names, xianxia style): think Li Qingyun, Su Ruochen, Lu Chenzhou. Names display as "Name (Type · Realm)", e.g. "Li Qingyun (Wandering Merchant · Qi Refining 3)". The same NPC keeps the same name forever, and two merchants in one city are no longer both just "Wandering Merchant".

🤝 Meet First, Message Later

Courier letters used to be broken AND backwards. Broken: sending a letter consumed a "message talisman" item that never dropped or sold anywhere — not a single letter could ever be sent. Backwards: total strangers would randomly write to you out of nowhere. Now the system works the way friendship should:

• Talk face-to-face (city panels or exploration encounters) to raise affinity: +2 per exchange, capped at +10 per game day per NPC.
• At 30 affinity, messaging unlocks everywhere at once — the button appears on their city chip, they start writing to you, and they join your contact list.
• Strangers no longer write to you until you've actually met them.

💌 Letters Cost Spirit Stones

With the never-dropping talisman gone, sending a letter now costs 20 spirit stones. Face-to-face chatting stays free — the stone cost is the premium for remote convenience, and letters still raise affinity a little based on their length. Compare: a teleport to the capital costs 100, a fortune reading 200.

🔗 One Relationship, Everywhere

The dialogue window used to have its own relationship bar that reset to a fixed value every time you opened it — disagreeing with the city panel's affinity progress. It now reads the same source of truth: what you see in the dialogue window, the city panel and the messaging gate is one number.

🩹 Fixes From Your Reports

• NPC names showed raw internal IDs in city panels, letters and dialogue titles (player report) — fixed with the true-name system above.
• The contact list always showed affinity 0 due to a broken lookup — now reads the live value.
• The "message" button on city chips opened the inbox without selecting that NPC — it now jumps straight to your thread with them.
• Letter-send failures used a blocking alert dialog — now a light toast.

No save-format changes this release. Old saves load as-is; every existing NPC gets their true name automatically.