Every screen photographed while the owner worked, a cart at the road, and trees with limbs

The owner’s morning brief was a second pass on the new HUD layout: resources to the top as icons, the day alone, the countdown centred, the bottom bar shrunk to the action bar, and every ledger-like screen made to hold its own text. The rule for a pass like that is that every screen gets photographed for his eye – and he was at the PC all day, so no window could open. The engine will render to nothing at full size if asked the right way, and once it did, forty-nine photographs of the new layout came off the machine while he worked: every ledger tab in its dock, every morning of a ten-day run, the shelf, the gun card, the door, the end card. Seven faults showed in them that no headless gate could have seen – cards three across in a dock half a screen wide, a gun card drawn across the strip, a countdown printed twice, a build stamp through the carry line – and each is fixed behind the same switch, with the old layout byte for byte what it was.

Two of his standing asks were built the way he described them. The trader now comes with his cart: a two-wheeled timber cart with a load of cut stone and a donkey at the shafts, stood on the road’s verge the morning he is drawn, the carter beside it in his own voice – you walk up and press the one key, and he leaves when the collectors come. And the trees are redesigned from scratch as a candidate: a tapered bole with a root flare and grooved bark, limbs that fork under a lobed crown, a spruce in whorls, an apple that fruits – a quarter taller, sized to vary tree by tree. Their first two palettes stood near-black beside the old trees under the engine’s light, which is the kind of thing only a picture tells you.

The ten-day band on this tree holds ten of ten, read twice; the low-end rig reads the same frame as yesterday’s kit; and a finding from the night was re-proven with its confound removed – declaring a navigation area class, with nothing in the world using it, moves the simulation from the first day.

Late in the evening the automated tester gave up a secret it had kept for weeks. Two runs of the same seed on the same build, with the same switches, could come out two different ways: the farmer sowed the first field three seconds apart, and everything after leaned on that. It only happened when the machine was busy with something else, which is why no bisect of the code ever found it. The cause was the engine’s garbage collector, which runs on the wall clock: under load it fires on a different frame of game time, the objects it clears come back in a different order, and one navigation query breaks a tie the other way. Test runs now collect garbage on game time instead, and a ten-seed band run quietly and a ten- seed band run under a full package cook came out identical on every line of every day. Every balance number taken before tonight carries that noise; from now on a one-seed difference between two arms means something again.