Every model signed, a kinder light, and a second player in the village
A day of sign-offs first. He walked the whole review row in the game, one model at a time, and by the evening every model in the game has his tick: 29 shipped as they stood, the woodcutter’s beard lowered, and all eleven yard animals authored fresh (the cow and goat had their eyes one layer behind the face; the horse and donkey got new heads). The animals walk now — legs cut out of each model as rig parts and swung in a trot — and the yard’s size bug went with it. Two dogs ship as the pet choice, a sheet puppy and a yellow Labrador; whichever you do not take lives its dog days at the granary. A bug on the way: every walking dog’s trot had been snapping its root to the world origin since day one (“two dogs in the same place jumping”).
Then the light. The sun sits higher and softer, shadows keep light in them, the contact-shadow seams are gone, and no face is left dark; the front door grew a SHADOWS switch (NONE / SOFT). The three storage bins by his pin — logs, stone, food — are timber cribs that visibly fill to a hundred, and the bins are unified: wood is logs then planks, minerals are stone, ore, ingots, food is grain then flour.
Under everything, a navmesh. Every walker — villager, collector, dog, critter — now paths around what you place, and the mesh rebuilds the tick a thing lands. The A/B on one seed: three villagers wedged without it, none with it, and the cutters brought home nearly three times the logs by day four.
The gun view got its missing verb. [U] buys the cheapest next rank across every gun, over and over, until the purse is empty, with a receipt; the battle map wears an up-mark on every gun that can take a rank and counts them in its banner; and over the build shelf a rank catalogue shows what a gun’s three ranks buy, side by side, with the bands it will wear. Save-and-quit landed too: in prep the run saves where you stand, clock included; during a wave the dawn save stands and the menu says so. The cellar rail is the character screen now — a mirror for boy or girl, the outfit dummies, and a dog bed that chooses your dog.
And at night, co-op’s first ten slices went in over plain IP: a second player joins the host’s village, sees the farm — trees, buildings, walls, guns, stone, villagers, collectors, shots, dogs, plans — and can chop, mine, fight, carry, place a plan and tear one down, every one of those a request the host answers by its own rules. The guest’s HUD reads the host’s day, clock, stock and build bar. It is the beginning of co-op, not co-op: the host’s economy is the only economy, boards and the front door stay on the host’s screen, and there is no online sign-in yet — that is the next slice.
