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, and only then counts the years.
Balanceforge. Add --sandbox to the game's Steam launch options and the maker's own tuning panel opens: every rule the world runs on, laid out as a dial you can turn while the age goes on turning.
Turn back the years. Draw the timeline backwards, step a single year at a time, or run ahead to a distant one — and name any moment so that you can always return to it. Watch a valley fail, go back, change one number, and watch it live instead.
Ask whether it was truly better. A sweep carries your changes across many fresh worlds at once and shows you how long each one endured — proof, rather than a feeling.
Held apart from your own game. Balanceforge keeps a separate age of its own, so the world you care about is never written over. Nothing done there earns achievements — that is what keeps the ordinary game honest.
Two new remembrances. The Lifting, for raising land where a people can witness and name the deed. And Held Back the Night, for keeping a town standing fifty years longer than it would have stood without you.
Emberfall breathes again. When that world grew larger, its one cool refuge was left behind in the wrong place, and its people died young for it. The haven sits where it belongs now, and the age runs its full length.
Honest tools. An issue reported from a tuned world now says so, and long evenings of turning time back and forth no longer weigh the game down.
A full guide to Balanceforge waits on the Discussions board. And if you would rather not know why the rain comes when it does — simply do not type the words. The world plays exactly as it always has.