The village wakes up
CropCorp stopped being a defence prototype tonight. There are villagers now, and they work for themselves.
You do not order individuals about. You set how many bodies go on each job — woodcutter, miller, builder, militia — and the village gets on with it. Woodcutters walk out to the groves and fell trees for logs, the miller turns logs into planks at the windmill, and builders spend those planks patching the granary back together between waves. Trees leave stumps and grow back, so woodcutting is a job rather than a resource you strip once. Villagers who get too close to the fighting drop their tools and run for the nearest house, and anyone badly hurt goes home to rest until they are fit to work again.
The wave loop changed shape to match. There is no victory screen any more, because there was never meant to be one — the kingdom always falls. Days now roll one into the next, each wave bigger than the last, each day earning you another turret to place. The run ends when the granary comes down, and the score is how many days you held it. The automated harness currently manages eleven days before the collectors get through.
Two bugs were worth the evening on their own, and both were the same mistake wearing different clothes. The mill was originally sited south of the granary, which meant every villager walking to work steered straight into the granary’s collision and stood there forever — the miller produced nothing for nine straight days before anyone noticed. That is the same failure as the hero getting stuck on his own barricade the night before: direct steering with no way out of a corner. Villagers now sidestep when they have been pressing into something for too long, and the mill moved to the village side of the farm.
One thing the numbers made obvious: the economy massively over-produces. By day eleven the village was sitting on 257 spare planks with nothing to spend them on. Repairs alone are not a big enough sink. Buildings and defences need to cost something.
The same night the renderer got stripped back for cross-platform reach — Lumen global illumination and virtual shadow maps are gone, since a game made of untextured cubes gains nothing from them and they were exactly what would have locked out Switch and punished Steam Deck. That came with an honest cost: without global illumination there is no bounce light, and the first screenshots afterwards had the hero rendering as a black silhouette against the grass. The answer was not to put Lumen back but to light the scene properly — a brighter sky fill and a dim, shadowless fill light from the opposite side. Classic three-point lighting, free on every platform, and the farm reads better now than it did with the expensive version.
