MythOS Playtest · published
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## 🌐 The Seamless World — movement rebuilt from the ground up
- **Maps are bookkeeping, not walls.** Rooms are real places in one continuous space: step onto a room and you're **in** it, wanderers get swallowed by the rooms they walk into, and leaving puts you **beside** the door you used — at any map depth.
- **Every mover obeys the same physics.** Combat movement, idle roamers, army autopilot, overland travel, gates, and manual moves all **pathfind around walls** now — no more ghosting through solid rock, no more "ended up IN the wall" (anyone already stuck gets healed on load).
- **Doorways matter.** Door glyphs on the map, real thresholds, chokepoint fighting, and retreats that never flee *onto* the room they're escaping.
- **Aim is true.** Travelers no longer target a phantom point half a map away from their destination — and the AI can aim moves at landmarks ("the fountain", "north gate") with the engine resolving the real tile.
## 👁️ Real sight & detection
- **Sight is a real distance on every map scale** — a guard with 60‑ft vision can't watch a 62‑mile region anymore. Creatures can get genuine **super‑sight** ("50 miles") as an override.
- **You always know who sees whom:** `👁 SPOTTED` and `🌫 LOST` lines print for every detection change, and stealth checks log their true rolls.
- Sight crosses map seams — hiding just inside a doorway no longer makes you invisible to the hallway.
## 🐎 Honest speed & time
- **Everything moves at its OWN speed** — characters by agility, armies by their slowest unit's nature, vehicles by hull + engines — with a 🏃 speed chip on every window showing exactly how it was computed. Hand‑set speeds always win.
- **Scale‑aware:** cross a room in moments, a region in honest days — and the autopilot finally agrees with the travel clock.
- **Smooth march:** armies, vessels, caravans and travelers advance on *every* time step by the exact minutes elapsed — no more hourly lurch.
- **Travel bills honest time** ("165 miles in 30 minutes" is dead), party trips are billed once, "pass N hours" always works, manual clock control got a **+10m** button — and the frozen‑world bug (turns that advanced zero minutes and froze the simulation) is root‑fixed with an engine‑side time audit every turn.
- **Manual clock control plays nice with the AI:** passing time by hand leaves a marker so the next AI turn isn't disoriented, and the **"No AI strategy" checkbox finally sticks**.
## ⚔️ War: muster, seats & defense
- **Armies can ride.** Transport units (trucks, wagons, dropships, sky-barges…) now carry slower units: enough seats and the army marches at **transport speed**; any overflow walks and honestly sets the pace. Big things take more room (a siege engine won't fit in a jeep), and transports can **whitelist** who boards (an APC set to *infantry* refuses cavalry). The 🏃 speed chip shows exactly who's riding or how many seats you're short.
- **Terrain slows you by percent.** Deserts, swamps, deep snow, jungles, mountains, rubble, asteroid fields, nebulae and more — an **all-genre default set works with zero setup**, matched by place names and tags, and units tagged `sand`/`hover`/`flying` and the like simply ignore it. Your Environment Hazards can define custom terrain the same way.
- **Territory matters.** Marching through land owned by an enemy is **slower and drains supply 1.5× faster** (no foraging in hostile country); your own or allied roads speed you up and ease the drain. Fully automatic from ownership and diplomacy.
- **Logistics units are real.** Units with a supply capacity (or tagged as baggage/convoy/support — supply wagons, quartermasters, freight haulers) keep soldiers supplied on the march; armies without coverage bleed supply. Garrisons and foraging still restore it.
- **The whole game understands it.** The AI *designs* these units for your genre, *recruits* them when raising armies (a new force-composition doctrine: seats for the slow units, roughly one supply unit per 5,000 soldiers, terrain-fitting troops for the route), the **Auditor** validates every key with instant fixes — including a "dead whitelist" warning when nothing could ever board a transport and a shortfall notice when an army is seats short — and the **Creator forms, cheat-sheets, Codex, and meta-mode manual** all carry the new fields with plain-language help.
- **Armies muster at legal sites only** — your owned settlements, military locations, or your faction's **Seat/HQ**. Every faction now has a Seat (with a SET HQ button), self‑healing if lost.
- **Military assets hold their posts** — armies never wander idly; the new **Defend stance** anchors a force, intercepts intruders, and returns to its post afterwards.
- **Fights stay clean:** enemies keep a pursuit **leash** (no infinite chases), parallel duplicate combats merge into one (**one fight only**, even in old saves), the fallen don't block corridors, and life‑drain is capped.
## 🎲 Encounters — you decide how monsters appear
- A dedicated point‑and‑click **ENCOUNTERS tab**: spawn chance, per‑place adjustments, tag‑combination exceptions (`city` safe, `city + slum` dangerous), monster level scaling, party scaling, reactions, elite/ambush odds, and variety controls (invent vs. reuse creatures).
- **The engine rolls, the storyteller obeys** — no more monster railroading; and a **🎲 ENCOUNTER button** rolls one by hand with zero AI. Encounters also stop piling on while a fight rages next door.
## 🎮 Play the whole game by hand (no AI required)
- **Manual combat:** a real initiative panel (floating window) — pick a target, Attack (auto melee/ranged), use any skill, End Turn. Every roll, hit, and effect prints to the log; all effect types work (sleep, charm, DoT, heals, AoE, summons, resurrection). The AI is told the results and never re‑rolls.
- **Self‑narration:** write your own story beats with the ✍️ Narrate toggle; the AI continues seamlessly when you flip it back.
- **Manual everything else:** a true Level‑Up button (stats, HP and resources recomputed from your rules), advanced agenda options (everything the AI strategist can set), set jobs/status/sight by hand, send anyone traveling, roll encounters, control the clock.
## 🏗️ The new Unified Creator — build anything with a form
- Creating a character, location, item, faction, ability, vehicle, job — or a world **rule** (unit, building, tech, hazard…) — is now a **form**: each part is a card with plain‑language explanations, sensible defaults, and search pickers everywhere (never type an ID again).
- Stats and money come from **your world's own** attributes and currencies; monsters go straight to the bestiary; rule forms use the complete real templates from the rules menu. Cards start folded so it's never a wall of fields. 100% manual — or let the **AI Draft** prefill the form from a one‑line concept and edit from there.
## 🩺 Auditor 2.0 — your world's health clinic
- A free scan now grades your world **S–F** on a **World Health banner**, with live counts on every severity and domain filter, and search that also matches issue text.
- Every entity's problems are a **per‑issue checklist**: **⚡ Instant Fix** issues are exact engine repairs applied with **no AI at all**; **🤖 AI Fix** issues draft a plan you approve first. Batch fixing previews the instant/AI split before running (instant‑only option included) — and **28 more issue types** gained instant repairs.
- The new **📋 Inspector** shows any entity as readable cards — click any component or field to learn **what it actually does**, edit values directly, and save; problem fields glow red. Raw JSON stays one tab away with a live valid/broken indicator, and entity IDs inside issues are clickable.
- **🙈 Ignored manager** (restore any hidden issue), **↩️ Undo Last Fix**, and a fix for manual JSON saving, which had been silently broken.
## ⚖️💡 Balance & Ideas Studios 2.0
- The Balance stage is now a **comparison table** — entities as columns, stats as rows, one section per type, with the **▲ highest / ▼ lowest** per row highlighted so the outlier jumps out instantly, dice shown with averages, click‑to‑sort, and frozen headers for huge selections. All free, no AI. After **APPLY FIXES**, every stat the AI changed glows green with its old value on hover.
- The Ideas Studio's drafts arrive as **blueprint cards with checkboxes** — inject only the keepers. **Seed buttons** compose requests from *your actual rules* (fill supply‑chain gaps by name, gate tech‑less units, hazards for your real biomes, agendas for your real factions), and every inject prints a receipt and runs a **free integrity scan**.
## 🔬 Discovery → research → units
- Discovered tech is a **real research node** (auto threshold, prerequisites, description) that unlocks **multiple distinctly‑named units** — lean ones, with no phantom upkeep or nonsense species‑locks.
- The firewall that silently ate blueprint/trap actions is fixed, so discoveries actually create their content, and discovery agendas no longer misfire as construction.
## 🧠 The storyteller behaves
- **It can't act, speak, or travel for you on a talk turn** — venting or asking a question no longer moves your character or advances your plans.
- **The AI strategist leaves your own faction alone** (no phantom mandates/goals/units), and party followers stop picking up jobs you never gave them.
- Significant NPCs become **real characters**, your secrets stay secret, monster variety is enforced, stale officer statuses **clear when the task finishes** (no more "Traveling to Build Barracks" forever), and flaky "Logic Extraction Failed" turns are salvaged automatically.
## ✨ Quality of life
- **Open windows live‑refresh after every turn** — HP, research, and agendas update without reloading.
- Character sheets stay clean behind a **⚙️ EDIT** toggle; styled pop‑ups everywhere; combat/system chat lines are deletable; autosaves are true 10‑minute checkpoints; Genesis got a species chip‑picker and a bug‑triage pass; map fixes (living things render on top, right‑click menus never hide, persistent label toggle + size buttons).
- A stuck **AI Core Monitor auto‑clears**, and the **Set Travel button** was shrunk so coordinates fit on one line.
## 🩹 Data integrity
- **Linux:** X11 machines without working GL **no longer crash on launch** (the game boots in pure software, matching Wayland), and **Steam integration now initializes on Linux** (the missing steam_appid.txt is self-healed), so Cloud Pass works there too.
- Agenda‑built buildings get a **legal owner** (counted and taxed) with a one‑click repair for old orphans; broken loot is prevented and healed; an item can no longer "own" another item; quests are proper contracts instead of broken inventory items; the sticky "desperate" tag is cured; **party XP is shared** with everyone who fought.
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