Vonkelveld · published
Ages that span the centuries instead of crowding into the first of them, snow that finally smothers fire, and colour in the smallest standing things.
The ages take their time. The world always held nine ages of dwelling, from the first hut to the standing spire — but six of them arrived inside the first eight centuries, and then the world waited, sometimes eleven hundred years, for anything to change again. Two clocks disagreed: raw growth rushed the early rungs, while the slow work of advancement sat almost shut. Advancement now runs where it could not before, and age itself owns most of the ladder rather than growth alone. An era now takes roughly two and a half to three and a half centuries, and all nine span a long world instead of its childhood. In free play the tower and the spire are genuinely reachable; in the harder worlds they are something you earn by keeping the world alive long enough to raise them.
Snow no longer feeds fire. Fire spread through deep snow, and it was not an illusion — through a long winter, flame stood on snow-covered ground for four ticks in five. The cause was not in the fire rules but underneath them: snow is water that has stopped moving, and drawing it up out of the ground left the ground reading as dry. Snow-covered land was the driest land in the world, so snow did not fail to stop fire — it armed it. Fire now weighs wetness as the ground's own moisture plus the snow standing on top of it. A dusting still burns. A snowfield does not.
Colour in the small things. Every small thing that stands in the world — roofs, carts, crops, tools, the goods at a market — now draws from one shared vocabulary of pigments instead of each recipe inventing its own. Forms take the sun on one side and the shade on the other, following the same line of dawn the land does, and each lays a small contact shadow where it meets the ground, so a thing sits ON the world rather than floating just above it.
Someone down there is asking. Descend to the street where a calamity has broken the ground, and the households living on it now ask you for help. A raised-hands mark stands over every asking cell, and a ring holds while your gaze rests there. One family speaks at a time — the one nearest its own deadline — and that deadline is its own larder rather than any clock. An asking household stays home. A single blessing can answer a whole broken street at once.
Streets that lie between the buildings. Streets used to be laid down first and built against afterwards. They are now the space the buildings leave — the boundary drawn between neighbours — so a street runs where a street would truly run, and its ends meet the junctions they were reaching for instead of stopping just short of them.
Earth has real ground. The Earth map's mountains were eleven hundred lumps placed by hand. It now carries one true height field: its ranges run where ranges run, its coasts are coasts, and its rivers find the sea by descending rather than by being told where to go.
A world can end. A scenario with a failure condition could idle forever at a single soul. The line asked for literally nothing left, while the world quietly regrows people from its own greenery — so nothing left could never arrive. That line now falls at fifty souls, the count the score already shows you. Free play is untouched and still never ends; recovery is its promise, and it keeps it.
Faster. Each tick used to copy the whole world forward before changing any part of it. It now copies only what the tick can actually write — the same world, byte for byte, with that copying down from 27.5% of a step to 8.9%.
Also in this update:
Herds go around towns and around open water instead of walking into them.
Fields and worked land pass beneath the roads that cross them.
Warmth no longer paints the open sea.
A running world no longer starves the streets of a camera you have parked.
The First Light farmstead states its own exposure, and the first dawn is spaced to seven.
Names take the right article in eleven languages.
A work's threshold can be set per scenario.
A note on ages you have kept. This update changes how the world behaves — snow, fire, and the pace of the ages — so an age kept by an earlier version is retold from its own record instead of restored from its saved picture. It will open, and it will tell you: “This age was kept by an earlier version — its retelling may differ.” Nothing is lost. The world is re-lived under the new laws, and the age re-keeps itself the next time it is saved.