Build 25164474

In “The Raising” a town learned to build something together. This update is about who else is out there while it does — the world's animals, ten kinds of them that were designed a long time ago and never let in.

Ten more kinds of animal live in the world now. Pigs and donkeys in the farmyards, goats on the high ground, deer in the temperate woods, wolves in the cold forests, foxes from the steppe to the trees, ostriches on the dry plains, walruses and polar bears on the cold coasts, and songbirds over the forest canopy — each with its own shape and walk, a voice from the herd bank, and its own name when you point at it. Chickens scratch about on settled ground beside the cattle and sheep: the first two-legged animal in the world. Two honest limits: the world re-deals which animal every herd is when a species joins, so herds are not where they were yesterday; and how often you meet each newcomer follows its ground — on the default world a deer or a donkey is a rarer sight than a pig, because their ground is.

A herd stays the animals it was. Sheep no longer turn into cattle halfway across a field and back again. A herd is decided by the ground it belongs to and carries that with it wherever it wanders; before this it was re-decided every frame from whatever animal suited the cell it had just stepped onto. The shape-shifting had been padding the world's herds — a herd that could be anything was at home anywhere — so honest herds meant a third fewer animals, and the world carries more herds now to make up for it: you should see about as many animals as you did before, each of them one thing. Wild herds are drawn from the world's own animal stock too, not from how green the ground looks, so ground the hunt has emptied no longer shows herds standing on it. Changing the world under a herd can still change what it is — warm a cold coast, or let a town grow out over a meadow, and the herd standing there may become the animal that now belongs there. Walking no longer does it; re-making the ground still can.

Prosperous cities have their farmland back. A thriving city's belt could stand completely bare — not one field anywhere in it or near it — while a dying town down the road kept its farms, and the only farms you could reliably find were strung out along a river. The ground was never the problem. It was good enough to farm; the world was simply refusing to draw a field on it. Now it draws them: on the world we measure against, all fifteen prospering cities that carried no farm at all now carry farmland, and two other worlds got theirs back with it. Separately, a thriving town no longer works its own soil past the point where anything can be sown — the working of the land can thin a belt but never strip it. The world itself is unchanged: same towns in the same places, the same soil, the same history, to the byte. This does not grow you a better world; it stops the game hiding fields that had every right to be there. You still will not see fields in the middle of a city — that inner ring is deliberately kept clear for streets — so the farms come back to the belt around the town, not inside the walls. And it is not every world: three of the eleven were measured to have the problem and were fixed, and the other eight already drew their farms correctly and were left alone. One town in the Burning Age still carries no field, and that one is honest — its ground really is too poor.

The first hour is First Valley's own story. It is no longer a list of lessons. Each thing you are taught leads into the next because of what it did: you call the rain and the fields drink, you bless the ground that drank and it outgrows everything around it, you warm the frost and you watch the cold pull back. After a cast the world keeps running in front of you for about five seconds rather than freezing while a panel talks — the consequence is the whole point of the lesson, so the consequence is what you are shown. The story closes on the four works your own casts kept standing, and everything that is chrome rather than story — the gears, the panels, the map — has moved to a short coda you can skip. You can leave at any point, and Next is ready the moment it is on the screen. Two limits, deliberately kept: four beats are a silent watch with no panel and no button at all, and a panel holds its own Next back for a second or two while you watch what your cast did.

Burned ground comes back to life. Burn a town to the ground and its own ash now feeds what comes after: people move back onto the burned ring and are living on it again within two generations. Before this, the ground you burned stayed empty for ever — the green came back, and nobody ever did. The other half of that work — a ruin handing its own name back, so the town you burned is called what it was called — is held for an update of its own: for now the people return to the ground, but the name does not.

Your works answer you. Point at a kiln and you get the kiln: works now answer the pointer before the trees and walls around them, and people still answer before everything. Click a work's icon from above and the camera takes you down to it, close up, with the work in the middle of the screen. Every raised work flies a standard, gold with your hand on it for the ones you named, and stands at its town's current form. And a saved game picks up its half-built works exactly where they stood — a work that was waiting on stone still waits after a reload, instead of quietly eating the ground around it and building nothing.

A blessed plant keeps its ground, and its line. A blessed plant now outlives the field around it, as promised: the one you touched keeps standing where it stood, even after the town has grazed its field bare. And bless a second plant in a town that already carries the line and it joins that line instead of standing alone — its row says whose line it joined, and the line grows from both plants.

Earth asks for what it means. Earth's goal now says what it asks of you, in your own language: see five settlements rise on ground your own hand made ready. The Goal panel used to show the name of the missing sentence where the sentence belonged — in all eleven languages, in every release since v0.44. Earth's New Game card was promising something different again, the old goal of carrying people into every quarter of the world, so the card and the panel were asking for two different things. Both say the same true thing now.

Beginning a world. Cancel a world that is still being made and you land back on the New Game page with your scenario, seed and difficulty exactly as you set them. Before this, cancelling dropped you into a world that looked like yours, played like yours, and could never be saved — it kept no record, and Continue would not have it. The same fix gives the screen back after the two other ways a new world can fail to arrive: a scenario that will not build, and a world too large for your graphics card.

About your saved worlds. The world's rules genuinely changed again — a world where burned ground comes back is not the world where it stays dead — 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.