Vonkelveld · build 24758636 · published
The last stretch went into three things that are easy to describe and hard to build: making the world look like somewhere, letting the people in it speak to you, and finally letting you keep what you see.
The world found its colour.
Twenty-four pigments. Every small thing on the ground — the crops, the carts, the roofs, the tools — now draws from one shared set of pigment roles instead of inventing its own. A field of grain reads as grain from across the valley, and a street of roofs reads as a street.
The sun falls on things. Form tone runs across each shape at the terminator, the line where lit turns to shade. Things are round now. They were flat before and you could feel it without being able to name it.
Everything casts. Contact shadows sit under what stands on the ground, so a barn is on the earth rather than floating above it.
And a household asks.
When the ground stops being able to feed a family — where fire, salt, drought or your own calamity landed — they ask you for help. One voice at a time, never a chorus. The family's larder is the deadline: answer while there is food, or don't, and live with which it was. A household that runs out does not ask twice; it waits for the ground to heal. This is the first piece of a tier where the people are known individually rather than counted.
Earth, on real ground.
The Earth scenario has been re-authored on a single baked height raster. Where there were 1,117 hand-placed mountains, there is now the actual shape of the world — its ranges, its basins, its coasts — and the simulation runs on top of the real thing. It now sits second on the New Game page rather than behind an expander, because it should never have been hard to find.
Keep what you see.
Photo mode hid the chrome and composed a shot, then gave you no way to keep it. Press Enter and the frame is yours — written straight to your own photos folder, at full resolution, exactly as drawn. The ornamental border stays if you want it and goes if you don't.
Streets that grew.
A street is no longer drawn between buildings; it is the space the buildings leave. Street ends now meet their junctions instead of stopping near them. Towns look like they were lived into rather than laid out.
A longer age.
The era ladder has been re-paced onto its measured curve — roughly 250 to 330 years an era, across some 2,400 years of advancement. Ages take the time ages should take, and the age of the world now carries most of the weight rather than your output.
And one you found.
A player reported that fire was spreading through snow. It was true, and the cause was worse than the symptom: snowfall banked moisture into snowpack, which drained the exact field every fire rule was reading, so snow-covered ground registered as the driest land in the world. Ground dampness is now derived from both. Snow puts fires out.
New here?
Vonkelveld is a god-game about deep time. You shape a land and the people who settle it, then watch what they do with it over centuries — rivers carving, fires scarring, wells running dry, towns rising on the back of a good season and emptying after a bad one. Nothing in it is scripted. The history it writes is only ever what the parts did to each other, and it writes that history down.
Two weeks, 25% off
The sale runs for the next two weeks. There is also a free demo if you would rather see it before you decide.
On your saves
This release changes how the world advances and how ground dampness is measured, so a world begun before it will replay a little differently from here. Your saves still load, and the game will tell you when it is opening an older world. Nothing is lost.