Development blog
Design decisions, system rewrites, and screenshots from the Godot build — the same posts we link from Reddit and social.
Formation drags face the way you pull. Attacks from behind re-slot in place instead of wheeling through bodies. Soldiers only slide — no teleports — and building relocate is gone.
Drying one cell no longer rescans the whole map. A flowing 64×64 lake drops from about 20 ms to about 12 ms script time — same depths.
Thought badges over settlers, a problem-alert stack, place-and-pop juice, and a compact stats panel — so the settlement reports itself instead of hiding in inspectors.
Battles get Total War chrome: bronze unit cards with live busts, gold facing markers, cavalry that plow through, and raid AI that pins and flanks instead of blobbing.
Ponds, shallow pads, ditches, and cliff falls share one continuous surface — depth-graded color, soft shores, downhill lanes — instead of tiled teal slabs.
Idle settlers stop burning unused animation clips, haul picks skip beaten depots, and the tutorial reads less like a chatbot.
Native sparse CA keeps ponds cheap, digs and raises rejoin the flow map, and turning a well on no longer freezes the frame.
Day, night, title, and combat beds no longer hard-cut at the loop — a long equal-power self-crossfade hides the AI join.
Hunters finally hold the standoff, shoot wood-and-iron arrows, and stop marching into melee after the first volley.
The build UI now speaks ten languages, failed ghosts say why, and day/night agent work is budgeted so the colony does not hitch when the sky changes.
Thirst sends a colonist to a wet cell. Everything else — jobs, stockpiles, happiness — exists so that trip is not the only thing that happens.
An aqueduct here is terrain surgery, permeable piers, and a Blender UV map — not a single pretty bridge prefab.
Dragging a housing district should not mean hand-rotating forty huts on a terrace grid. We ported a solver.
The first water pass looked fine in screenshots and lied about where flow went. We threw it out.
We picked a 200×200 grid before we had pretty art. That choice still pays rent every week.