Vonkelveld

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• Patch Notes·19 Sept 2026Official

  Performance patch — v0.49.1

  A small patch, and all of it is speed. The world steps faster at every speed you can set, big cities no longer hitch as you glide in toward them from the far map, and the card that names an animal now lands on the animal you can see. Nothing about the world itself changed — the same seed and the same deeds rebuild exactly the same history, down to the byte, so your saved worlds open exactly as they did. All of it is in the demo as well.The world steps faster. The years go by roughly 1.6 to 1.9 times quicker at the higher speeds, and it is the same world, byte for byte. Two of the heaviest things a step did were doing work they did not need to: the water, heat and weather were carried across the map in a way that had to be redone whenever the work was divided up differently, and every single tick re-asked every town about a standing request that had not changed since the last time it was asked. Both were rebuilt. A step now costs between 39% and 47% less time, and the busier and bigger the world, the more of that you get back.Big cities no longer hitch as you glide in from the far map. The far-map city silhouettes were rebuilt from scratch on every world refresh — at the busiest towns that was a stall of tens of milliseconds on every approach, and at the very largest a hang of most of a second. They are now built once per town, and updated only when that town's ground actually changes.Hovering the world over open country no longer costs frames, and the animal card lands on the animal you see. Naming the herd, yard animal or bird under the pointer used to recompute every animal in the world each frame, and could name where an animal was about to be rather than where it was drawn. The card now reads the very positions on screen, including while a herd walks toward somewhere you have sent it.About your saved worlds. Nothing to do, and nothing to read. The world's rules did not change in this patch, so a world you saved under v0.49.0 opens exactly as it did before: no re...
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• Announcements·18 Sept 2026Official

  The God's Own Hand

  Your hand is in the world now: the towns ask you for works and raise them themselves, blessings rest on the things you touch, four new powers join the bar, and towns grow into their land instead of arriving full-grown.You can ask a town for a work. Walk among your people, name the ground for a Well, a Granary, a Bridge, a Terrace, a Cistern, a Shrine, a Kiln, a Market Green, a Watchtower or a Hallowed Yard, and the people decide whether to raise it — the asking is yours, the raising is theirs. Every work you named is in The Works, and a click takes you to it. The tutorial teaches the asking at the door, in your own words: “You may ask.”Blessings rest on things and stay while they stand. Seven of them — a Blessed Hearth, a Vocation Dream, a Witness Tree, First Fruits, a Gathering Ground, a Shared Table and the Herald — and everything you have blessed is listed in Blessed Things, where every row takes you to it. A blessed table gives its town a feast day; stand among them and the street gathers to eat together. Bless a herd with a Herald and you can watch the blessing work: inside the wardstones the herd fills out while the country beyond stays thin.Portents, and what the street needs. Write a sign on the sky over a place — a comet, a strange dawn, wheeling birds — and the people beneath read it; some heed it and act, and those who do are remembered. A chip on the bar counts the needs standing legible right now — a household short of its want, hands waiting at a stalled work, an appointed day held — and opens a panel that takes you to each one. Three quiet powers put a thought in a sleeping mind, and sometimes the waking act follows.Four new powers. Strike Fire: put flame on the ground and from that moment the fire is the world's, walking with the wind through old forest and dying on thin grass, the ash coming home as fertility; soaked ground and snow refuse you, and say why. Hard Frost: killing cold on a region that lifts on Warm Region's own clock. Cut a Channel: dr...
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• Patch Notes·7 Sept 2026Official

  What Walks the World

  In “The Raising” a town learned to build something together. This update is about who else is out there while it does — the world's animals, ten kinds of them that were designed a long time ago and never let in.Ten more kinds of animal live in the world now. Pigs and donkeys in the farmyards, goats on the high ground, deer in the temperate woods, wolves in the cold forests, foxes from the steppe to the trees, ostriches on the dry plains, walruses and polar bears on the cold coasts, and songbirds over the forest canopy — each with its own shape and walk, a voice from the herd bank, and its own name when you point at it. Chickens scratch about on settled ground beside the cattle and sheep: the first two-legged animal in the world. Two honest limits: the world re-deals which animal every herd is when a species joins, so herds are not where they were yesterday; and how often you meet each newcomer follows its ground — on the default world a deer or a donkey is a rarer sight than a pig, because their ground is.A herd stays the animals it was. Sheep no longer turn into cattle halfway across a field and back again. A herd is decided by the ground it belongs to and carries that with it wherever it wanders; before this it was re-decided every frame from whatever animal suited the cell it had just stepped onto. The shape-shifting had been padding the world's herds — a herd that could be anything was at home anywhere — so honest herds meant a third fewer animals, and the world carries more herds now to make up for it: you should see about as many animals as you did before, each of them one thing. Wild herds are drawn from the world's own animal stock too, not from how green the ground looks, so ground the hunt has emptied no longer shows herds standing on it. Changing the world under a herd can still change what it is — warm a cold coast, or let a town grow out over a meadow, and the herd standing there may become the animal that now belongs there. Walking no longer does it; r...
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• Patch Notes·2 Sept 2026Official

  The Raising

  In “The Founding” you arrived early enough to watch the first towns take hold. This update is about what those towns do next — they decide to build something, and the whole street turns out for it.A town raises its own works, and the street turns out to them. A well or a granary used to accumulate quietly until, one year, it simply existed. Now every work has a raising. When that day comes the plot itself announces it: the four open corner pegs of the surveyor's mark close into a frame, and from that day every household near enough turns out to the site, day after day, until it stands. Nobody arranges this and nobody has to be asked — it is the town's own doing, and if you go down among them you will find them gathered at the plot.You can watch a work finish. Standing down among your people, a rising work used to complete only after you left and let the years turn — so the one thing the close view exists for happened off-stage. A work you named yourself now finishes while you are watching it: a span of days you can sit through, not a year you have to walk away from. And once it stands, it stands whole, at whatever distance you are looking from.The progress meter tells the truth. It counted only what had been carried in and stored, never the labour already given — so a work could read nothing done while the entire street was working on it, and it read nothing done for exactly as long as you stood there watching. It counts the banked labour now as well as the material, and the roster keeps up while you are down there instead of freezing the moment you arrive.Fire is a season, not a resident. Two things were wrong beneath it. A dying blaze was minting value out of nothing — the accounting handed back to the ground whatever it was short, over and over, and across a long world that compounds. And the rule that exists to catch exactly this could not see fire spreading to its neighbours, so it was never going to catch it. Both are fixed. With honest books underneath, fire'...
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• Patch Notes·31 Aug 2026Official

  The Founding

  This update ships early, and honestly: a save made while zoomed all the way in could fail to load in v0.44 — silently, so it looked like the Continue button did nothing. That is fixed, and it could not wait for the rest of the week's work.A save made up close loads again. If you saved while walking among your people and Continue seemed to ignore you, it was not your save — it was us. Loading now restores exactly the world you left, however deep you were standing in it when you left it.You arrive at the founding. The Long Winter and its kin now begin 100 years earlier. Instead of inheriting a settled world and a chronicle of failures you had no chance to prevent, you arrive as the world is new — and watch the first hearths light, the first towns rise, the first roads find each other. The world is new and the sun is kind; its long story begins with you watching.Worlds open in half the time. Beginning a saga takes seconds now, not a long stare at a loading bar.Zooming is smooth. The stutter at the border where the close-up world appears is gone.Cisterns build where they matter. The cistern used to demand desert; now it can be raised wherever the ground still thirsts for what a cistern gives — which turns out to be most places people live. The one world too rain-soaked to ever need one, honestly, no longer pretends otherwise.Terraces keep soil; they do not conjure it. A terrace now catches the earth the rain would carry away and lays it down as soil — real accounting, no invented ground. Fields fed by terraces grow from what the land actually holds.About your saved worlds. Because the world's rules genuinely changed, a save from before this update will be retold from its own history the first time you open it — a short note will say so, once. Nothing is lost: your seed and your deeds are the save, and the world rebuilds faithfully from them.
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