This update ships early, and honestly: a save made while zoomed all the way in could fail to load in v0.44 — silently, so it looked like the Continue button did nothing. That is fixed, and it could not wait for the rest of the week's work.
A save made up close loads again. If you saved while walking among your people and Continue seemed to ignore you, it was not your save — it was us. Loading now restores exactly the world you left, however deep you were standing in it when you left it.
You arrive at the founding. The Long Winter and its kin now begin 100 years earlier. Instead of inheriting a settled world and a chronicle of failures you had no chance to prevent, you arrive as the world is new — and watch the first hearths light, the first towns rise, the first roads find each other. The world is new and the sun is kind; its long story begins with you watching.
Worlds open in half the time. Beginning a saga takes seconds now, not a long stare at a loading bar.
Zooming is smooth. The stutter at the border where the close-up world appears is gone.
Cisterns build where they matter. The cistern used to demand desert; now it can be raised wherever the ground still thirsts for what a cistern gives — which turns out to be most places people live. The one world too rain-soaked to ever need one, honestly, no longer pretends otherwise.
Terraces keep soil; they do not conjure it. A terrace now catches the earth the rain would carry away and lays it down as soil — real accounting, no invented ground. Fields fed by terraces grow from what the land actually holds.
About your saved worlds. Because the world's rules genuinely changed, a save from before this update will be retold from its own history the first time you open it — a short note will say so, once. Nothing is lost: your seed and your deeds are the save, and the world rebuilds faithfully from them.