The game keeps your place, and something is rising in the west
CropCorp can be put down now. A run is a persistent thing: it autosaves at every dawn, one file per run with the difficulty locked inside it, and the front door lists your open games as CONTINUE rows. Resuming does not throw you into the fray — the farm opens paused, holding the morning exactly where you left it, with a welcome card and the whole village waiting for your first move. And defeat deletes the save. The door lists open games; a fallen farm is a score, not a file. The proof is the part worth writing down: a save loaded and immediately re-captured reproduces itself with zero mismatched lines out of a hundred and eleven, and two separate resumes of the same save played out to the line identically — which means a bug found in a resumed run is still a bug you can reproduce.
Death has an explanation now, too. The down banner names the culprit — “A BAILIFF GOT YOU — BACK UP IN 3” — and the end screen says how the run actually ended: which of the Taxman’s employees finished the granary. On Hardcore it says it more finally. One noun per death; it is surprising how much of “why did I die?” is answered by who.
The village got more personal in two small ways. Families now claim a specific house when they move in, and pressing [E] on any front door tells you who lives there — “the Tanner family lives here” — with the addresses riding along inside the save file. And an armed militia villager finally looks armed: an iron cap and an iron-tipped pike, on the moment the equipment research lands. The damage bonus had existed for weeks, invisibly, and this project’s playtests have ruled on that more than once: a system nobody can see is not in the game. The same photograph that proved the pike also caught a two-week-old bug nobody had noticed — a drafted villager’s sleeves never changed colour with the new job.
The biggest new thing is the humblest: a book. Press [H] anywhere and the ledger opens on a handbook — a couple of dozen titled topics in chapters, each a numbered how-to: the farm, the defence, the village, the forge, the run. It obeys a no-spoilers law by construction: a topic only exists on the page once its system exists in your run, so the book grows with the game and can never explain something you have not met. A topic about a real place carries a WALK ME THERE button that closes the book and sends the guide trail to that thing in your actual layout — better than any screenshot, because it is never wrong about where things are. And the contents column has search-as-you-type, which taught the HUD some manners: while you are typing, the whole keyboard belongs to the search box, so spelling “wall” no longer flips hotbars behind the sheet.
Balance work continued in the background with a sharper instrument, and it returned one clean finding: a defence line that holds comfortably at three fronts dies on the arrival of the fourth, and deepening the turrets — even absurdly — barely moves that number. The lever that buys days at two and three fronts buys almost nothing at four. Whatever answers the fourth front, it is not on the turret shelf; it is structural, and it is now the sharpest open design question in the project.
And on the western horizon, past the farthest ground any farm has reached, there is now a tower. Grey podium, window-banded floors, the tie-red seal over its doors, a red beacon on the mast — the tax office’s own grammar at headquarters scale. It starts at three floors. Clear a chapter, and the next morning it has one more, refreshed at every dawn, and the chapter’s “what’s new” board says only this: look west. they are building too.
