In “The Founding” you arrived early enough to watch the first towns take hold. This update is about what those towns do next — they decide to build something, and the whole street turns out for it.
A town raises its own works, and the street turns out to them. A well or a granary used to accumulate quietly until, one year, it simply existed. Now every work has a raising. When that day comes the plot itself announces it: the four open corner pegs of the surveyor's mark close into a frame, and from that day every household near enough turns out to the site, day after day, until it stands. Nobody arranges this and nobody has to be asked — it is the town's own doing, and if you go down among them you will find them gathered at the plot.
You can watch a work finish. Standing down among your people, a rising work used to complete only after you left and let the years turn — so the one thing the close view exists for happened off-stage. A work you named yourself now finishes while you are watching it: a span of days you can sit through, not a year you have to walk away from. And once it stands, it stands whole, at whatever distance you are looking from.
The progress meter tells the truth. It counted only what had been carried in and stored, never the labour already given — so a work could read nothing done while the entire street was working on it, and it read nothing done for exactly as long as you stood there watching. It counts the banked labour now as well as the material, and the roster keeps up while you are down there instead of freezing the moment you arrive.
Fire is a season, not a resident. Two things were wrong beneath it. A dying blaze was minting value out of nothing — the accounting handed back to the ground whatever it was short, over and over, and across a long world that compounds. And the rule that exists to catch exactly this could not see fire spreading to its neighbours, so it was never going to catch it. Both are fixed. With honest books underneath, fire's catch has been raised a little: a blaze needs marginally more to take hold, and what that buys is fire that comes as a season and passes, instead of settling in as a permanent smoulder.
Standing still is smooth, and the years run faster. Holding the close view over a busy town used to miss its frame budget on roughly eight frames in a hundred; it now misses well under one. Separately, the simulation itself advances about 27% faster — and changes nothing else by it: the same seed and the same deeds still replay to the same world, byte for byte.
For tinkerers. Balanceforge (F8) now shows and moves two more families of knobs, each on a tab of its own: the field-watch bands, and the nano constants — the cost of living, the larder ceiling and both seasonal amplitudes.
About your saved worlds. The world's rules genuinely changed again — a world where a work gathers a street is not the world where it does not — so a save from before this update will be retold from its own history the first time you open it, and 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.