Village technology, and the weapon is the build
Two orders landed together and turned out to be one system: the village needed an industry, and the hero needed a build. Ore feeds the guns, the smithy feeds your hands.
The important call was what the tiers hang off. Not player level — land. You dig where you conquered. Survive the first day and the smithy opens; put the Auditor down and an ore seam appears on the ring you just won, with a miner to work it; clear a chapter and the furnace arrives to turn ore into ingots. Everyone in a co-op game crosses each threshold at the same moment, because the threshold is a story beat rather than somebody’s XP bar. The Elder and the weaponsmith’s board teach every one of them — nothing in this game unlocks in silence.
Ingots are the second currency and they are deliberately scarce: they buy a gun’s third upgrade rank, where planks stop at two, and they will arm the smithy’s later tiers.
Then the other half. The weapon is the build. Three craftable weapons, each with its own weight, tempo and reach, and each with its own line of two active skills — the longbow’s volley and pin, the maul’s ground slam and haymaker, the war scythe’s whirl and reap. A weapon levels from kills made with it, and that level is the only place actives come from. They fill the fight face’s sockets, which were emptied of passives the session before precisely so these could live there. Nothing is permanent: put a weapon down, pick another up, and you are a different character with the same villagers.
Three bugs the verification pass caught, all worth the writing down. All three new buildings rendered as mills, because spawning an actor runs its setup immediately and the type was being set a moment too late — a law this codebase has now learned three times. The smithy stood inside the sacred plaza, the one patch of ground nothing may be built on, because code that spawns buildings was not obeying the rule the player’s own placement ghost obeys. And the autopilot cheerfully chopped trees through the defeat screen, since its idle branch fires whenever no collector is alive — which is also true the instant you lose. Only the photographs found the first two.
Five seeded runs afterwards: defeat on day 9, 8, 10, 10 and 9 — inside the band and tighter than it has been. The robot deliberately never touches the new industry, so that number is a floor rather than a forecast. Whether mining is worth its labour is a question for a human hand.
