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, visiting, carrying home what it gathered. Zoom was only ever travel; it changed what you could see, never what the world was doing. This is different, and the way back is the same place you came in.
Being there is written down.
The Chronicle records at the grain you were there at. Watch a hard year from far off and it keeps a region; be down among the households while the year turns and it keeps people, by name.
The world calls you. It knows which of its years was the worst, and it asks — and its summons never waits behind anything else.
Hallowed ground. The places you stood over keep the ones who died there, and say their names.
A world that wears.
Water moves earth. Rain erodes, rivers carry and lay down what they carried, and in time they strip their own beds.
Wells run dry, and salt follows kindness. Groundwater is finite, and a country watered too generously salts itself.
Fire spreads, and burns out. It catches on fuel and runs; forest that goes does not simply come back.
Iron and stone, and the roads that carry them. Deposits lie where the ground put them, and trade moves along the roads your people made.
Hard years. Seasons turn, and wind, snow, ice, dust and plague arrive as themselves. Worlds are born as themselves too — the stores, the snow and the herds are there from the first year.
Nights, towns, and speed.
The sun stops being a fiction. The night you see is the night the world is simulating, and a lit window means someone is home — they kindle one homecoming at a time.
Towns behave like towns. Clutter thins as a place grows, carts keep their lanes instead of blinking between them, and a street carries traffic in proportion to the town around it.
The long freezes are gone. Frames that once took ten seconds in a large city no longer happen.
The first hour was rebuilt. The opening lessons are re-timed to the world's real clock, hand you the power they ask you to spend, and say why a refused cast was refused.
Please read — ages kept before this update cannot be opened. This update changes the shape of the world itself: the quantities a world is made of are no longer the same ones. An age you kept earlier was played in a world that no longer exists, so replaying its acts under these laws would hand you a world you never made, wearing your save's name. Rather than do that, the game refuses, and says so: "This age was kept before the world learned to wear and change. It cannot be retold under the new laws — begin a new age." Ages kept from this version onward are unaffected.