Development covered 1 Oct 2026 to 1 Oct 2026 (commit dates).
These idle game updates share a source: three first-session testers, watched closely, each of whom broke something I considered finished. Thirty commits, every one a response to a specific minute of a specific playthrough.
The tutorial card that outlived its welcome
The first-visit controls card closed on one input only: its Got it button. A player who simply walked on kept it floating over the minimap for the whole session, and the cost stayed invisible until I checked what sits behind it. The opening sky crossing waits for the card to clear before it spawns a passer-by with a first quest hook. Three testers sat through forty and even sixty minutes with the card up, and none of them ever met the encounter the design promises in the first minutes.
The card retires itself after 480 pixels of walking now, which measures the thing that matters: whether the controls have been tried. A dismissal button measures compliance and nothing else. The first version of that rule carried a bug with a lesson in it: the map layout landing moves the player to their sect's spawn in a single jump of hundreds of pixels, which retired the card on the first frame it appeared. Only per-frame movement counts now, because a person cannot walk four hundred pixels in a frame.
Herbs picked for the wrong quest
With two gather quests open, both kinds of herb wear the same diamond, and nothing distinguishes a pick that counts from one that does not. A tester working one quest picked seven of the other quest's herbs, watched seven identical toasts, and quit hers at zero of three. A pick that advances a quest names it and its count now: Herbs Along the Road, three of three.
The tracker had the adjacent problem. Set Out pins the quest you chose to the tracker card, but a story gate auto-accepts its quest at the front of the list, and the tracker follows the front, so returning to the map put a different quest on the card than the one you set out for. For ten minutes after a deliberate choice, an auto-accept waits its turn. Session-only, nothing saved, and a manual accept behaves exactly as before.
Buttons that admit they are working
The market's sell button said Sell for the five to thirteen seconds a sale takes, and a tester read a dead tap into the silence and pressed again. It says Selling now, and the pawn, barter, ghost market, merchant and crystal counters all say Working while they are busy. The rule: a button that cannot respond twice should look like a button that cannot respond twice.
Links got the same honesty. The cauldron's restock hint linked to the market and landed one row under the specific ware it meant, so the guidance named Spirit Herb and the screen showed Roadside Spirit Herb at the top. A link that names one ware lands on it and rings the stall now.
Reading a phone without hovering
Three stats hid their meaning behind hover. The spirit-root stat printed a bare letter R on a phone, because its tier lived in a tooltip a touchscreen never shows; the tier sits beside the letter now. A stat's explanation opens on tap. The offline return card printed a bare +7 where it meant seven levels, which a first-time player cannot parse; it says Lv +7, and the offline progress page explains what the card settles when you return.
Sharper rules for the novel's plates
The illustration side got its own set of rulings, drawn from the first full review run. Approved picks re-render at a sharper master size, because a generation seed does not survive a canvas change and each plate needs its own pass at the larger dimensions. Character references get redrawn empty-handed, since the atlas frames bake in props the plates must not carry. Extras never wear the hero's face, night beats stay dark, and the placement contract is set: first screen, tail paragraph, apart from entity cards, kept out of the chapter text. Seven pre-breakthrough quest lines were rewritten to read true whether or not the player has already crossed, the same order-independence rule the main story dialogue was held to.
One line of a different flavor closes the set. The rival's opening slur told a player who rolled a strong spirit root, twelve separate times, that their root was base. The insult is now gutter-born rather than accurate, which is the correct amount of unfairness for a villain.
If that reads like your kind of hour, the game is here, and the spirit root trial page covers what the registration roll means.
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