Build 25279460

🐛 FIXED: New Saves Had Zero NPCs

Every newly created character started with an empty NPC roster — the seeder ran before city data finished loading (which only completed ~42 seconds after boot) and silently skipped. Exploration encounters therefore only ever said "you met a mysterious stranger" with nothing to interact with, and city panels showed no residents. Fixes: character creation now waits for city data; the admin/city file loads run in parallel (city data ready tens of seconds sooner); and old saves with an empty roster are automatically re-seeded on load — no action needed.

💬 NPC Dialogue Without Any AI Setup

The NPC encounter window used to be an AI-chat interface — players without a configured AI model (most players) were greeted with a disabled input and nothing else. It now runs the built-in script dialogues: proper greeting, meaningful choices, and requirement checks (realm, level, spirit stones, items, reputation). AI chat still works if you have it configured — the script mode is the fallback that guarantees everyone can talk.

🎭 Thirteen Personas, Not One Generic Peddler

Thirteen written dialogue sets — wandering merchant, sect supplier, mystery dealer, herbalist, blacksmith, passersby, elders, innkeepers, storytellers, fortune tellers, gate guards, teleport mages, and a mysterious beggar — are now distributed across NPCs by stable assignment. Meet enough cultivators and you'll find each one has their own story.

🤝 Choices Have Real Consequences

• Merchants: view their goods in the city market (wandering merchant offers included).
• Fortune teller: pay spirit stones for a reading on fortune, love, or your future.
• Blacksmith: jump straight to the forging screen.
• Teleport mage: pay to warp to your continent's capital city.
• The beggar: give him food or stones — he may repay your kindness. Giving items/spirit stones is deducted for real; rewards really enter your bag (with full-bag protection).

🎁 Seven Story Items

Charity rations, a beggar's token, a mystery jade pendant, a millennium lingzhi, the Scripture of Forgetfulness, an explorer's map fragment and an Alchemy Primer — all with unique line-art icons (tome, map, token...) and names in all three languages. A guard test now ensures no dialogue ever references an unregistered item again.

🩹 Display Fixes From Your Reports

• Inventory filter bar showed raw keys like inventory.filter.category.all — the view and the translation file disagreed on the path. Fixed along with 9 more references of the same kind (NPC dialogue hints, sect shop refresh, skill level requirements), plus a repo-wide audit test (≈2900 references) that turns any new missing key red.
• The exploration page showed raw IDs like qingyun_prefecture in the title and search tag — a display computed before data finished loading never refreshed. Now it shows the proper Chinese name (e.g. 青云府) as soon as data arrives.

No save-format changes this release. Old saves load as-is; empty-NPC saves self-heal on load.