The day shift: an office, a friend, and land that pays
Left in charge for eight hours, the build grew its two most requested prototypes. The prologue: the game now cold-opens inside CLAUSE & CO. — COLLECTIONS DIVISION, where you are the taxman. Serve three repossession notices at glowing desks, collect a coin for each — paperwork pays brisk and clean, that is the point — then the Director promotes you to FIELD COLLECTOR and your first assignment smash-cuts into the farm tutorial you already know, now the second scene of a story. Under 90 seconds, skippable, behind -CCPrologue until its writing pass.
Pip the companion (-CCCompanion): a teal, red-capped farmhand two-thirds your height who follows at your heel, fights whatever gets near you, chops the tree you are not chopping, and at 30% health retreats to your side for a breather — unkillable by design, because a companion that can die is an escort quest and a companion that needs a breather is a character. Built for co-op-shaped futures and for not holding the farm alone. The bug worth writing down: a spawned Character without an AIController ignores movement input silently — the first Pip stood rooted at spawn for three simulated days while looking perfectly alive in screenshots. A heartbeat log caught it; the heartbeat stays.
Smaller but felt: invisible sky barriers seal the map edge (you could jump out of the world); ring-grown trees are now old growth — deeper rings grow visibly bigger trunks worth up to 8 logs, so expansion pays on the ledger and not just on the horizon; three new skills (Strong Arms, Quick Draw, Green Thumb) round the pool to ten; and every hotbar slot draws its own blocky pictogram. New ring ground now grows wildflower tufts and hay bales from the run’s seed — won land reads as a meadow you freed, not a lawn the game unrolled.
And the struggle came back, measured. The week’s power gifts (levels, skills, housing, fatter forests) had quietly made the defaults immortal — fifteen harness runs showed the granary pinned at full health while towers piled to 35, and no toughness knob touched it, because arrival rate is the real wall: wave size only extends the queue. A sweep of the spacing knob found 0.65s between arrivals reproduces the intended shape exactly — an average run falls to chapter 1’s teeth around day 10, a good run crosses into chapter 2 alive. Shipped as the provisional default; the final number belongs to a human hand on the controller.
