Guns that learn, and the wall at day 31
The turrets have been the same scarecrow since the first playable wave. From tonight they have careers.
Walk up to any gun, press [E], and its card opens over it in the ledger’s paper: three tracks — SHARPER SHOT, QUICK LOADER, LONG EYES — two ranks each, bought with planks. The price deepens per gun rather than sitting flat, so pouring ranks into the post that covers your main door is an investment with a rising cost, not a shopping list you clear. Every rank hangs a gold band on the post, so a veteran gun looks like one from across the field — and, as it turned out later, from directly above it.
The Thresher joins it as the first gun that is not simply better: squat, slow, short-sighted, and its husk hits everything within a few metres of where it lands. The scarecrow stays the fast single-target truth. Nothing here obsoletes anything — that is the rule this whole ladder is built on.
The reason you want one arrives from chapter two: the intern pack. One spawn ticket brings five knee-high, quick, paper-thin collectors, and a single-target gun wastes a whole shot on each of them. Swarms punish a wall of scarecrows, heavies shrug off threshers, and that is the first thread of a web where your layout has to answer a question rather than just exist.
Two structural fixes went in underneath. The granary now sits in a sacred plaza — pale paving, nothing may ever be built on it, and it is where you get back up when you fall, which ends the business of respawning on the roof of your own fortress. And placement finally has one authority: the placement ghost had been running its own private physics test that the actual build path never ran, so the ghost could show red where building was legal and green where it was not. That box is deleted; everything now asks the same gate.
Then the most useful tool of the night: a run can now start at any chapter, with the rings won, the roads laid, the lanes open and a tested defence already raised. A day-31 playtest used to cost an evening; it now costs one command. What it reported is the honest bad news the upgrade economy exists to answer — chapter two plays to day 16, chapter three is a real fight to day 23, and chapter four kills you in three minutes with 77 defences standing. No quantity of scarecrows answers day 31.
