The red plane was a roof at eye level, and the same piglet ran away five times

Two findings tonight, both found by reading the raw evidence instead of the summary of it.

The red plane. The owner had asked what the “large flat red plane in the sky” was. The first answer, from the night before, was a house roof seen from inside — the camera clipping under the eaves. Three fixes followed that diagnosis: hide the roof when the camera is under it, widen the margin, key it on the hero instead. Every one of them fired in the log. Every photograph came back pixel-identical. A geometry dump finally said why: hero 4.6 m in front of the lodge, camera 10 m behind him — nobody was under anything. The camera simply rides at 274 cm, and the lodge roof was a flat 40 cm slab centred on 280. Seen edge-on from its own height, a flat roof on four thin posts is a red plane with sky behind it. So the fix is a roof that says “roof” from any height: two pitched leaves at 22° meeting at a wooden ridge, the smithy’s lean-to pitched to 16°. No hide logic survived. Docs/devlog/2026-08-28-red-plane/.

The piglet. The ten-day census said “4 stories asked” on every seed, and a pacing question was built on it. The raw log said QUEST offered 'MILA' on days 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. An ask that expired unanswered was never marked, so the picker took the same first quest every time. A player who walked past Mila’s door once would never meet the other seven families. Now an unanswered ask is passed over until every other story has had its turn; the same seed gives MILA → OLD TOMAS → ROSA → GRANDPA BERN → THE ASH FAMILY. The census prints distinct stories now, and counts the forest too.

Also: the tester launcher installs the Visual C++ runtime itself (the owner’s own second PC refused to start the game; the fix was in a text file nobody read), and Docs/NIGHT_SHIFT_HISTORY.md reconstructs the night logs lost on the 28th from their contemporaneous checkpoints.