The Auditor, the fence trap, and every hand prop in the game
Two of the day’s jobs were the same bug wearing different clothes, which is becoming a theme here. Villagers steer directly with no pathfinding, so a worker who ended up on the wrong side of your own fence would press into it until the day ended. They now clamber: a wedged villager vaults the fence in a short scripted arc and gets on with the job. Fences only — walls still mean what walls mean, and collectors still cannot follow. Between seven and thirty-eight clambers happen in a typical run, which is a measure of how often the old build was quietly strangling itself.
Builders also stopped only caring about the granary. In peacetime they patch damaged fences, walls and turrets nearest-first, a plank per tick, and idle villagers muck in with them — twenty to fifty repairs a run. Defences were previously built once and then slowly deleted.
The headline is THE AUDITOR, a sub-boss on wave five of every chapter. He is a third of the Tax Collector’s weight, slow, pale-suited, and carries a clipboard — the silhouette is the telegraph, the same trick the Bailiff uses. He is heralded on the morning HUD the day he visits, because nothing in this game should arrive in silence. Measured across three runs each: defeat on day 8/8/9 before him, 11/10/10 after. He makes the mid-chapter lull into a beat and the run lasts longer, which was not the obvious result.
He also exposed something absurd. Photographing him next to an ordinary collector showed the grunt beside him carrying a briefcase — and that briefcase had never been visible before, in any screenshot, ever. A prop-scale bug had been hiding every hand prop in the game. The axe, the clipboard, the money bag: all present in code, all shrunk to nothing on screen.
And the game grew a front door: a main menu over the live farm at dusk, with the volume knobs on it, and a CHOOSE YOUR FARMER screen — Warden, Captain, Ranger, Steward — that recolours the tunic and swaps what you are holding. Cosmetic for now; the skill tree is what will make the choice mean something.
