Changelog: Difference between revisions

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The '''newest updates''' are listed first. Amber is the valley's currency.

== v0.57.10 — Crop Mastery — The Farm Learns Your Hands ==

* FARMING HAS MASTERIES NOW (from user testing: “easiest skill to 99, but it has no masteries”). Every crop carries its own 1-99 mastery ladder, fed by harvests — the same ladder every action has had since v0.29, transplanted to the plot grid. Slow crops pay more mastery per harvest, so every crop climbs at the same pace per plot, and growth runs around the clock — the farm learns while you hunt.

* '''The perks are farming-shaped.''' M25 grows that crop 5% faster, M50 doubles every 10th harvest — counted, never rolled, with a “2× in 3” countdown on the plot card — M75 another 5% faster, and M99 pays +25% of the base yield through the same honest carry crafting uses. More food and more seeds from the same plots, growing with use.

* '''Breadth clears land.''' Your total crop mastery across all fifteen crops crosses three milestones, and each one CLEARS ANOTHER FARM PLOT — up to thirteen plots with Farmland maxed. The new strip above the plots tracks the sum, and locked plots now say exactly what opens them: a Farmland level or a mastery milestone.

* The harvest button now shows the exact count the engine will pay — doubles, the M99 carry, compost and potion yield included — instead of the base yield it used to print.

* The welcome-back summary counts crop mastery earned while you were away, and Ascension keeps every crop ladder: your hands remember.

== v0.57.9 — The Warden's Survey Shows You The Pile ==

* '''The survey is a chart and one button now.''' It used to be ten rows, one per ground, each reprinting the same list of grounds you could pay with — eighteen buttons for a choice with two inputs, one click per map traded, and rows offering to sell you an 81st map of ground you were one skeleton from finishing.

* The new header draws every ground you have opened: maps held against digs that ground still owes. That picture is the whole problem — your stock is parked at the two wings you nearly finished, and everything you still owe is somewhere else.

* Under it, one conversion. The game picks the wing you are CLOSEST to being able to finish but cannot fund yet, tells you what your spare buys there — “85 spare maps → 17 Scorched Wash digs, enough to finish the wing” — and does the whole trade in one click. Drag the slider for less, or aim it at any other ground.

* SPARE now means something exact: maps beyond what a wing can still use, worked out from the skeletons it owes and its own skull rate. The converter only ever spends those, so it can never eat a map you were counting on.

* And it collapses. The Survey is housekeeping wedged between the dig picker and the cave picker, so it folds to a single line that names the opportunity — open it when you want it.

* On a phone the chart turns on its side and the button goes full width, instead of wrapping ten rows into twenty-eight lines of near-identical blocks.

== v0.57.8 — The Dispatch Button Tells The Truth ==

* '''Clicking dispatch always does what it says now.''' A dino holding a gathering job has never been allowed to ride out — quit the job first — but the war-party picker didn’t know that: it offered jobbed dinos as free, the stable refused the send behind the scenes, and the picker closed as if the squad had left. Reported within the hour; fixed the same night.

* Jobbed dinos now show dimmed in the picker with the reason — “on a job — Fish for Minnow” — exactly like injured, marching and already-dispatched dinos always have, and ★ Best three only picks dinos who can actually go.

* And if the stable ever refuses a send for any reason, the picker now STAYS OPEN and says so, instead of quietly swallowing the click.

== v0.57.7 — Dispatch Missions Are War Parties Now ==

* '''Dispatch missions are kill missions now.''' The eleven gathering errands retired — your hired hands already gather in the background, so the bay flies a different flag: SIXTEEN STRIKE MISSIONS, one against every rival tribe on the ladder, from a half-hour raid on the Mudfoot Clan to a ten-hour war on the Mostly Harmless. Each strike still hauls home the tribe’s own plunder, tuned to about one hired hand’s take.

* '''Weapons and gear drop from the kill.''' A returning war party rolls the rival’s blueprint sheet, a piece from their armoury, and their signature relic — the same odds a hands-on raid victory pays. Their war banner stays raid-only: the flag is the trophy of beating them yourself.

* '''The strikes ride the rivals ladder.''' A strike opens once the tribe below it has fallen to you hands-on, and locked rows name exactly who to beat first. The Mudfoot strike is open from your first tame, and every mission wears its rival’s own mark.

* Squad math is untouched — your dinos’ gear has always counted, and weakness still costs time and bruises, never the haul. A squad caught mid-flight on a retired errand steps down at the stable immediately, ready to ride out again.

== v0.57.6 — Every Forager Comes Back With Seeds ==

* EVERY SEED A FORAGER TURNS UP NOW DROPS AT 35%, from Crimson Berries at level 1 to World-Tree Fruit at 97. Seeds used to trickle at 4–25% depending on which patch you happened to be standing in; the farm shelf now fills at a pace you can count on.

* '''And every foraging rung grows something.''' Plains Fiber, Fern Fiddleheads, Bog Mint and Duskplums turned up no seed at all — at the new rate that would have left them earning LESS than the rung below them, which is a trap rather than a choice. They each carry their era's seed now: Wild Seeds on the two early rungs, Thornvine in the swamp, and for Duskplums a triple handful of the Duskroot it is named after.

== v0.57.5 — A Hunter Brings Back The Whole Kill ==

* A HIRED HAND ON A HUNT NOW BRINGS BACK EVERYTHING THE KILL CARRIES, not just the meat — the hide, the bone, the biome material, even the rare trophy. The meat is still guaranteed; everything else is a roll, one per hunt.

* A HUNTING HAND IS WORTH ABOUT DOUBLE A MEAT-ONLY ONE, and that holds at every rung of the ladder: each hunt's extras are tuned against its own meat, so a level-1 hunter and a level-97 hunter both roughly double rather than the deep kills running away with it. A hand never rolls better odds than your own hands do. The job sheet names the real odds before you pick ("also 17% 1× Hide, 13% 1× Bone").

* Gathering jobs are unchanged — foraging, logging, mining and fishing hands still bank their guaranteed drops and nothing else.

* '''The hired hands tab sorts by diet.''' Chips for Herbivores, Carnivores and Omnivores with their counts. "All" orders the whole board by diet; picking one shows just that diet. The tab keeps counting your whole crew either way.

* The Hand Ledger and the skill-page bars tell rolled goods apart from promised ones: a guaranteed line reads "≈345/h", a rolled one reads "~66/h" in a quieter voice, with the odds behind it in the tooltip. An average is never dressed up as a promise.

== v0.57.4 — The Hand Ledger — The Crew’s Hauls On The Books ==

* '''The hired hands tab keeps a ledger now.''' Every background gather goes on the books — one line per hand per item, its count growing as the dino works, so you can see exactly what each hired hand has brought in. Offline hauls land there too: come back from a night away and the ledger already tells the story.

* '''The rates sit right on top.''' The ledger head shows your whole crew’s per-item take (≈ per hour, summed across every working hand), and each line carries its hand’s own live rate while the job runs. A line whose hand has since stopped or changed jobs stays as a “past haul” — history outlives the job.

* The old “latest gathers” chips retired in the ledger’s favor; the skill pages’ hired-hand bars still show their own recent gathers.

== v0.57.3 — Dino Jobs — Every Dino Works Its Diet ==

* '''Dinos have jobs now.''' Any healthy stabled dino can take its own background gathering job — not just the one buff worker per skill. HERBIVORES forage, log and mine; CARNIVORES fish and hunt; OMNIVORES do any of it. [[Hunting]] is a hired-hand trade for the first time: a carnivore on a hunt job brings home its guaranteed meat on the same no-rng background clock as every other hand (chance drops, XP and rares stay hands-on, as always).

* THE DROVER’S PADDOCK is a new homestead structure: each of its 21 levels adds one dino job slot, so with the Foreman’s Whistle the crew ceiling climbs from 3 all the way to 24 working dinos.

* PICKING A JOB now works like the [[Tribe]] page: the [[Stable]]’s Hired hands tab is a crew board, and each dino opens a job sheet — every trade its diet allows, banded with a “Best for them” shortlist, every rate priced for THAT dino (veteran levels and niche included), locked rows shown with their unlock reason.

* Existing background tasks carry over automatically — the dino that held each skill’s task simply keeps it as its own job. A task the new diet rule forbids (a herbivore that had been fishing, say) stops with a note, exactly like the old boot sweeps.

* A jobbed dino eats from its diet’s pantry like any working dino, pauses while hungry, and can’t be dispatched, stasis-cased or sent to fight while on the job — pull it off the job first (joining your pack does that automatically, as it always has for workers).

== v0.57.2 — The Demo Fence Holds Even Against A Hand-edited Save ==

* THE DEMO’S LEVEL FENCE NOW GATES WHAT YOU CAN DO, not just what you can gain. The save file is an editable document by design — but in the demo, a save edited past level 20 now buys you rendered numbers and nothing else: every action, crop and unlock reads your EFFECTIVE level, which rests at the fence. Everything below 20 plays exactly as before.

* FULL-GAME PLAYERS ARE UNTOUCHED — the clamp exists only when the game is launched through the demo’s own Steam app. Beta saves, web saves and the save format itself are all exactly as they were.

== v0.57.1 — The Demo’s Welcome Page Tells The Truth ==

* THE DESKTOP WELCOME PAGE now speaks demo when the demo is what you launched. The old card pitched cloud accounts, web play and Settings → Cloud — none of which exist inside the demo — so it has stepped aside for the thing that IS true: this is the real valley fenced at level 20, your save lives on this machine, and buying the game lifts the fence and continues the same run. Nothing starts over.

* The full game’s welcome page is untouched, and the Send-feedback door works in both — demo players’ bug reports land in the same inbox.

== v0.57.0 — The Steam Demo — The Valley Up To Level 20 ==

* '''Primal idle has a demo on steam.''' It is the whole valley up to LEVEL 20 in every skill — the same game, the same updates, the same save. Skills rest at the top of level 20 (the bar sits full; nothing is lost, nothing hoards invisibly), and everything you build carries STRAIGHT into the full game on the same machine: buy it, launch it, and your run simply continues.

* '''The fence is honest.''' The first time a skill reaches the fence, one screen says where the valley continues — after that, capped skills wear a quiet badge and the game leaves you alone. Below level 20 nothing is squeezed: full bank, full stable, full homestead.

* A FEW ENDGAME DOORS WAIT FOR THE FULL GAME and say so where they stand: the Alpha [[Arenas]], the [[Museum]] beyond its entry hall, the clans’ late-map outposts, and everything behind the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]].

* '''For full-game players nothing moves.''' The fence exists only when the game is launched through the demo’s own Steam app — the game you own never caps, never badges, never pitches.

== v0.56.1 — The Intro Film Shows Up Every Launch, And The Skip Pill Stays Put ==

* OWNER TEST ROUND — first real Mac and Windows builds of the v0.55.15 launch pair found three field bugs the simulator never could. All three are fixed.

* '''The film sometimes never played on mac.''' MacOS can quietly carry the "already played this launch" marker across app restarts, so the previous run ate the next one. The marker now only counts against in-app reloads (importing a save, restoring from the cloud, walking the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]]) — a real launch always opens on the film, and the welcome page got the same cure.

* AUTOPLAY IS A LADDER NOW, NOT A COIN FLIP. If the system refuses sound-on autoplay, the film starts muted and your first click or keypress brings the sound back. If even muted playback is refused, the film waits for a touch and steps aside on its own after six seconds — never a stuck black screen.

* '''The windows skip pill stopped vanishing.''' About a second after launch, Windows promoted the video onto a hardware layer that painted over the "Hold Esc to skip" pill (resizing the window brought it back). The film and the pill now each hold their own layer, so the pill stays put from the first frame to the last.

== v0.56.0 — The Curator's Survey — A Finished Wing Keeps Paying ==

* '''Finishing a museum wing used to end it.''' The [[Museum]] was the only thing in the valley that wanted a dig map, a journal page, a skull or a fossil u2014 so the moment a wing stood complete, everything that ground produced turned to vendor trash, and the Curatoru2019s Desk that bought your pages simply VANISHED off the page while the [[Delving]] panel and the [[Bank]] both went on pointing at it.

* '''The desk changes job instead.''' A completed wingu2019s Desk stops selling skulls and starts buying your leavings: that groundu2019s dig maps, its Field Journal pages, and any duplicate skull whose skeleton already stands. Each is stamped into a CURATORu2019S SEAL u2014 maps by tier (11 at the deepest ground, 20 at the shallowest), pages at the Desku2019s own price, and a spare skull at three pagesu2019 worth, which is exactly what the dig already pays you for a duplicate.

* THE MUSEUMu2019S PATRONS STOCK A SHELF, and amber cannot buy any of it. The [[Museum]] Annex lends you its back rooms (+4 bank slots a rank, six ranks); the Wardenu2019s Stasis Wing keeps two more dinos in amber a rank; and the DEEP SURVEY TEAM funds a permanent extra excavation crew.

* '''That last one is the point.''' Dig slots have only ever come from the [[Delving]] ladder u2014 which stops at level 75 u2014 and one 0.2% relic, so every level after 75 added maps and no way to spend them. The Deep Survey Team is the first excavation slot in the game you can simply go and earn, and it is bought with the exact surplus those levels produced.

* IT OPENS PER WING, not at 57/57. Every ground whose wing already stands is surveying the moment you load; the ones you are still filling keep their old Desk, unchanged, and a skull you still need can never be sold out from under you. The shelf is priced as a long tail u2014 the whole thing is roughly 335 hours of surplus u2014 and it re-stocks after the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], so the sink renews instead of running out.

== v0.55.18 — Excavations Reach The Contract Board ==

* '''Digs were invisible to the bounty board.''' The whole fossil chain u2014 maps, crates, skulls, the [[Museum]] u2014 sat outside the Fang Mark economy that every other activity in the valley feeds. [[Delving]] had ONE contract in thirty-three, and the board had no way to even see an excavation.

* '''Two new writs.''' The [[Excavation]] Writ wants six digs dug out; the Deep Survey Writ wants twelve. Both are gated on [[Delving]], so they never deal to someone with no maps and one slot, and both are sized to the 12-hour rotation rather than to a caveu2019s tempo u2014 twelve is 38% of what four slots can dig on the slowest ground in the game, which leaves room for the manual collect every find needs.

* THEY COUNT WHEN YOU DIG THE FIND OUT, not when the timer ends. A dig that finished while you were away is parked in its slot and has not counted yet u2014 the same line the Excavator track and the toast have always drawn.

* '''And two bounties were gated on the wrong skill entirely.''' The Delveru2019s Writ has been gated on EXPEDITIONS since v0.25: it dealt to players who had never lit a torch, and withheld itself from delvers whose [[Expeditions]] lagged. The Harvest Writ was gated on [[Taming]], copied from the Tameru2019s Writ beneath it. Both now gate on the skill they actually ask for, and a new rule ties every bountyu2019s gate to its subject so a third one cannot happen quietly.

== v0.55.17 — The Dig Picker Is Drawn Once, And Says Which Ground Still Owes You ==

* THE SAME TEN BUTTONS, THREE TIMES OVER. The [[Excavation]] panel drew its map picker INSIDE every empty dig slot u2014 so with three slots free you got the same ten Start-a-dig buttons three times, thirty buttons deep. It is drawn once now, under the slot grid, and it starts the dig in your first free slot.

* '''And it no longer disappears when you need it.''' The old picker lived inside empty slots, so the moment every slot was busy your whole map stock vanished from the page u2014 exactly when you want to look at it. It stays put and says "Every slot is digging u2014 collect one to start another".

* '''The grounds that still owe you skeletons are marked.''' Every map button used to look identical, with nothing to say which ground was worth spending on. The ones whose [[Museum]] wing is unfinished now carry a count of the skeletons still missing; the rest read "this wing stands complete" on hover.

== v0.55.16 — The Warden's Survey — Spare Dig Maps Buy The Ground You Need ==

* PLAYER REPORT — "I have all of the museum upgrades except the last pack, so Iu2019m 52/57. But Iu2019m at level 89 and I have like 351 digging maps." Both halves of that are the same bug seen from opposite ends. Dig Site Maps drop per cave WIN and are spent per dig SLOT, and every map is locked to one biome u2014 so a cave mints its own groundu2019s maps about two and a half times faster than every slot in the game can burn them, and roughly thirty times faster across an offline night, while the one ground you still owe skeletons trickles in from somewhere else entirely. You end up drowning and starving at once.

* THE WARDENu2019S SURVEY opens on the [[Delving]] page, under the dig slots: trade a stack of spare maps for a single map of the ground you actually need. The price is 4 maps for the shallow grounds, 5 for the middle, 7 for Cinder Terraces, Skyfall Scree and The Shattered Bed. You always lose maps on the swap and you can only survey into ground you have already opened, so it is a way to spend dead stock u2014 never a shortcut past running the right cave, which stays several times better.

* '''The museum costs exactly what it always did.''' The survey changes WHERE a dig happens, never how many digs a skeleton takes or how long one runs: the full 57-species hall is still about 386 digs and 381 slot-hours. It also rescues the other end of the ladder u2014 the Sunken Barrow is the most expensive wing in the game and nobody at [[Delving]] 80 goes back to the Sunlit Grotto for its maps.

* '''The fifth dig slot exists now.''' The Echo of the First Warden grants one, and the [[Excavation]] panel has never drawn it u2014 it built exactly four slots no matter what you owned, so the rarest relic in the caves did nothing at all. It appears, and a locked slot no longer invents a [[Delving]] level it cannot reach.

* '''And the panel stopped fibbing.''' A skull you have already found is announced as the spare it is, instead of "the [[Museum]] will want this someday" u2014 which at 52/57 is nine finds in ten. Journal pages for a wing you have finished say so, rather than flashing READY at a Curatoru2019s Desk that closed when the wing did. And the headline no longer says "about one dig in twelve": the real rate runs 14% on the shallowest ground down to 8.6% on the deepest, and now it says that.

== v0.55.15 — The Desktop Launch: An Intro Film, Then A Welcome At The Door ==

* OWNER REQUEST — the Steam builds get their opening. Launch the Windows or macOS app and the intro cinematic plays full-screen before the valley shows. The web at primalidle.com is untouched twice over: it never plays the video, and it never downloads a byte of it — the file only ships inside the desktop bundles.

* '''Hold esc to skip.''' A held key, never a tap — the pill in the corner fills for one second while you hold and the film steps aside; let go early and it resets. A stray keypress can never eat the intro by accident.

* '''Then a welcome at the door.''' As the film fades, the launch lands on the sign-in screen’s sunset and rising embers with a short letter from the developer: a thank you for playing a passion project, credit to the Mostly Harmless Guild for beta testing the valley, and where Send feedback, the Discord and the wiki live (the info button, bottom right). One amber button — Enter the Valley — walks you in.

* '''The cloud pitch on it is honest.''' A cloud account is optional: saves live on this PC and in Steam Cloud with no account at all. Creating one in Settings → Cloud opens web play at primalidle.com right now — your Steam purchase is the key, no code — and apps for iOS and Google Play come later down the road.

* '''Both are yours to turn off.''' Settings → Game grows two desktop-only rows — "Intro video" and "Welcome page" — for anyone who wants to jump straight in. Each shows once per LAUNCH, never once per reload: importing a save, restoring from the cloud or walking the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] repeats neither.

* '''It can never strand you on a black screen.''' A build without the film, a file that will not read, a webview that refuses autoplay — every one of those quietly steps out of the way (worst case the film plays muted), and the valley loads exactly as before.

== v0.55.14 — Exchange Gear Beats The Forge Too, Not Just The Bench ==

* FOLLOW-UP TO v0.55.13, AND A CORRECTION TO IT. That version made the Mark Exchangeu2019s tack beat every saddle and barding you can CRAFT or find. It missed the forge u2014 and the forge was the real rival all along, because a forged saddle takes the SAME slot as a bought one. Fitting one unequips the other; they never stack.

* '''The test could not see it.''' Forged pieces are blueprint ROLLS, not items, so the v0.55.13 check walked right past them and stayed green while four of six Exchange pieces lost to a forge. Two of those forges need no ascension at all: a Sunstride Saddle rolls up to 17 swiftness off [[Crafting]] 60, a Frostbound Barding up to 26 guard off [[Smithing]] 70 u2014 both reachable long before you could grind the marks.

* '''Every piece now clears the ungated forge outright.''' Huntmasteru2019s Saddle 18 swiftness / worker u00d71.30 and Trailwarden Barding 27 guard / 13 power hold the 60-mark entry pair.

* '''And each slot keeps a crown no blueprint can take.''' Longstride Saddle 23 swiftness beats even a PRIMAL Moonshadow roll; Nightwarden Barding 35 guard beats a primal Moonlit; Duskwarden Barding 18 power beats the best Moonlit that will ever come off the anvil; Ridgeback Saddleu2019s worker u00d71.48 is untouchable by construction, because no forge can roll a worker buff at all. The top-wave forge still carries power a saddle never will, so it keeps the best TOTAL sheet u2014 the Exchange owns the records, not the game.

* '''The rotation is 100 marks flat.''' Four one-week-in-four specialists are not a price ladder, and the old spread had Nightwarden costing 20 marks more than Duskwarden for exactly the same expedition score.

* '''Three blurbs that were false are gone.''' V0.55.13 shipped lines claiming no crafter cut a better saddle and nothing forged matched the guard u2014 both untrue against a forge roll, and one of them named the forge directly. Two new pins now walk every Exchange piece against every ungated forge band and check each slot still holds its crown, so a blurb cannot outlive the numbers again.

== v0.55.13 — The Exchange Saddles Show Their Stats — And Earn Them ==

* PLAYER REPORT — "the weekly saddle doesnt show the stats". It never did. Only the two permanent exclusives LOOKED like they did, because their numbers were typed into the flavour line by hand; the weekly and this-week-only gear showed a sentence and nothing else. EVERY EXCHANGE GEAR ROW NOW PRINTS ITS STATS, read straight off the item, so it can never quote a number the item does not have.

* '''And they were not worth the marks.''' Half the Exchange gear lost to something you could simply make. Longstride Saddle beat a [[Crafting]]-80 Skyleather Saddle by two swiftness — for a saddle that turns up one week in four. Ridgeback and Huntmasteru2019s were SLOWER than it. Duskwarden and Nightwarden both carried less guard than a smithed Moonstone Barding, while Nightwardenu2019s own description called itself the heaviest guard ever stocked.

* '''All six pieces now top the ladder.''' Huntmasteru2019s Saddle 15 swiftness / worker u00d71.32 and Trailwarden Barding 23 guard / 13 power are the entry pair — above every craftable and every trail-cache piece, on every stat they carry. The weekly exclusives specialise from there: Longstride Saddle 20 swiftness is the fastest tack in the game, Ridgeback Saddle worker u00d71.42 the hardest-working, Duskwarden Barding 18 power the sharpest, Nightwarden Barding 30 guard the heaviest wall there is.

* '''Priced for what they are.''' The exclusives go 45 u2192 60 marks, Ridgeback and Duskwarden 75 u2192 90, Longstride 60 u2192 80, Nightwarden 90 u2192 110. Every one still liquidates for less amber per mark than selling the marks raw, so the Exchange stays a gear shop and never an amber printer.

* '''The ladder is pinned now.''' A test walks every Exchange gear offer against every craftable and droppable piece in the same slot and fails if one of them stops winning u2014 and a second test forbids a blurb from quoting a number the row already derives, which is how the stale "+30% worker buff, +10 swiftness" line survived the saddle it described.

== v0.55.12 — A Tool For The Taming Skill ==

* TESTER REQUEST — Macenzie: "I know we get tools for different skills like gathering, mining, etc to increase speed. What do you think of a something for taming." THE BOLA IS NOW ON THE TAMING PAGE, and it is a full sixth-rank ladder, not a token.

* THREE WEIGHTED CORDS, SIX RANKS. Flint → Bronze → Iron → Silver → Obsidian → Starfall, gated at [[Taming]] 10 / 25 / 45 / 65 / 82 / 94 — the same rungs the Sickle, Axe, Pick and Rod climb. Each rank takes 4% off every taming timer, so a Starfall Bola in hand is 24% faster taming, forever.

* '''It costs what a pick costs.''' 2,000 amber for the first rank up to 1,360,000 for the last, 2,042,000 for the full ladder — no taming discount and no taming premium. A bola is weights on a cord, so the bill is the same mineral core the other tools pay plus the cord that ties it: rope at the first two ranks, braided heavy rope at the Silver rank, and two Primal Sinew for the Starfall.

* '''It stacks with kibble.''' The tool cut lands OUTSIDE the capped speed stacks, exactly like every other tool rank, so it multiplies with kibble mode’s 15% instead of being swallowed by a ceiling. Best case on the deepest tames — a Starfall Bola and a full kibble bowl — is a little over a third off the clock.

* '''The speed breakdown shows it.''' Open any taming card’s timer and the Bola has its own labelled row, reading the same number the engine applies. Nothing about tame chance, stats or levels moved — this is the clock, and only the clock.

== v0.55.11 — The Grand Hall Was Underselling Itself ==

* '''Tester report.''' "Says 2 percent faster forever grand hall but I see 5 percent increase in drop down bonuses." Both numbers were on screen at once and they disagreed. THE 5% IS THE REAL ONE — the banner was the liar, and it has been corrected.

* THE GRAND HALL HAS PAID 5% SINCE v0.36.8. Mounting every species in the valley makes every skill in the game work 5% faster, forever, and it has done exactly that for twenty versions. The speed breakdown you opened was reading the live multiplier straight out of the engine; the [[Museum]] page’s celebration banner was reciting a number typed into it back in v0.28.5, when the prize really was 2%, and never touched again when the balance pass raised it.

* '''Nothing got faster and nothing got slower.''' If your hall is already open you have been collecting the full 5% all along — this is the page catching up to your save, not a buff. The dropdown was right about your character the whole time.

* '''The banner no longer knows its own number.''' It now asks the engine what the Grand Hall is worth and prints the answer, so does the "mount all 57 to open the Grand Hall" promise on the way there. Both read whatever the game actually applies — if that value is ever tuned again, the words move with it the same day.

== v0.55.10 — Two Maxed Bloodlines That Were Not The Same ==

* TESTER REPORT (with screenshot): "Both of these say max bloodline but have different stats." Two Giganotosaurus, side by side in the [[Stable]], both labelled BLOODLINE MAXED u2014 one showing 127 guard, the other 114. THE LABEL WAS WRONG, NOT THE DINOS.

* '''A bloodline hits its ceiling one stat at a time.''' Power, guard and swiftness each climb to their own wall (the speciesu2019 best roll, times five generations of imprinting, plus this lineu2019s mutations). The stall card called the WHOLE bloodline maxed the moment ANY ONE stat reached its wall u2014 so a dino finished in power and swiftness, with three points of guard still to climb, wore the same badge as one that was genuinely done.

* '''The chip now tells the truth.''' Only a line at the wall in all three stats reads "bloodline maxed", and it wears the accent colour. Anything still climbing shows the ceiling it is climbing toward instead u2014 "breeds at 97 / 54 / 41 u00b7 ceiling 97 / 57 / 41" u2014 so two different dinos can never read as the same dino again.

* '''Hover it for the rest.''' Which stats are finished, which are still climbing, and exactly how many points each has left to go. In the reported pair that reads "guard is 3 short of its 57 ceiling" u2014 the number you would otherwise have had to work out from two cards side by side.

* NO STATS CHANGED, and no breeding maths changed. Every dino passes on exactly what it passed on yesterday u2014 the game was clamping correctly all along and simply describing it wrong. If you were about to shelve a "finished" parent, check it again: it may have had room left.

== v0.55.9 — Every Skill Keeps Its Own Auto-drink ==

* TESTER REPORT (with video): "If you click off the auto-drink in one skill, it removes the auto-drink for other skills." It did. EVERY SKILL NOW HAS ITS OWN AUTO-DRINK SWITCH, and switching one off leaves the other twelve exactly as you left them.

* '''What was actually wrong.''' The game stored ONE auto-drink setting per potion EFFECT, and thirteen skills each have their own speed brew u2014 Miner's Brew, Chef's Tonic, Angler's Brew, Lumber Tonic and the rest all count as u201cspeedu201d. So all thirteen shared a single switch. Arming [[Mining]] lit the auto pip on [[Cooking]], [[Fishing]], [[Logging]] and everywhere else; arming a second skill silently disarmed the first; and tapping the pip off on any page took the setting away from all of them. Walking through the skill menus was enough to lose it. The four double-yield brews shared a switch the same way.

* AN AUTO-DRINK NOW ONLY CHANGES WHEN YOU CHANGE IT, on the skill whose tile you tapped. Arm [[Mining]] and [[Cooking]] and [[Fishing]] all at once and all three keep pouring their own brew, side by side and offline, exactly as each was set.

* XP POTIONS ARE UNCHANGED and still share one switch everywhere u2014 a Focus Tonic really is one buff no matter which page you drink it on, so one switch is the truth there. The same goes for the attack, defense, regen and crop brews. Only the effects the game runs SEPARATELY PER SKILL were split, because those were the ones being lied about.

* '''Your existing setting survives.''' An auto-drink you armed before this update stays armed on the skill it was really pouring for, and simply stops claiming to be on for the twelve skills it never actually poured for.

== v0.55.8 — Crafting And Alchemy Finally Get Weather ==

* '''Tester report.''' "[[Crafting]] speed bonus is missing from weather effects." It was u2014 and so was [[Alchemy]]'s. Every other skill in the valley has had a sky that favours it since weather shipped; those two had none at all, in any weather, in any season, ever. MORNING MIST NOW SPEEDS CRAFTING BY 10% (damp air keeps cord and hide supple u2014 dry ones crack) and RAIN NOW SPEEDS ALCHEMY BY 10% (soft rainwater is the brewer's water). Both skies already existed and neither got rarer, so this is straightforwardly two skills that idle faster on days they used to ignore.

* '''Mist and rain keep everything they already did.''' Mist still wanders prey close for a 12% double on [[Hunting]]; Rain still speeds [[Fishing]] 10% and waters your crops 12%. Nothing was moved aside to make room.

* '''The boosts panel now names who is actually paying.''' A season's own passive u2014 Blaze speeding [[Mining]], Frost speeding [[Fishing]] u2014 rides in the same number the weather does, so on a Clear day in Blaze your Mining page said "Clear Skies u00b7 5% faster" while Clear Skies' own description reads "nothing helps; nothing hinders". It now reads "Blaze season", and when the weather AND the season both pay it names both: "Heatwave + Blaze u00b7 15% faster".

* '''A storm's expedition bonus stopped underselling itself.''' Storms have paid the greater of +10 score or 3% of the trail's difficulty since v0.36.7, but the weather chip only ever quoted the +10 u2014 so on a difficulty-1100 trail the top bar said "+10" while the expedition page's own ledger said "+33 score", both on the same screen. The chip now states the real rule.

* And the sky row on the hunting and expedition pages draws its proper icon instead of a raw emoji, like every other icon in the game.

== v0.55.7 — Every Delve Wants Its Own Light ==

* EVERY CAVE NOW BURNS ITS OWN LIGHT, and every light is its own recipe at the [[Crafting]] bench. One torch used to open all ten biome caves, which meant the deepest delve in the valley asked no more of your workshop than the first one did u2014 and Crafting had nothing to offer a delver but a better spear. Nine new lights fix that: the Pitchwood Brand, the Bogfire Lamp, the Sporelight Lamp, the Brimstone Flare, the Brinewick Lantern, the Rimeglass Lantern, the Coalheart Lantern, the Stormglass Lantern and the Voidwick Lantern, one per cave, up the ladder.

* THE BENCH RUNG ALWAYS SITS BELOW THE CAVE IT LIGHTS u2014 [[Crafting]] 8 for a [[Delving]]-10 cave, Crafting 80 for the Delving-90 one. That gap is deliberate and it is pinned: no cave you can walk into today can be walled off tomorrow behind a bench you cannot reach, and the [[Chronicles]]' delving note (and so the Sigil, the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] and Ascension tier V behind it) can never end up locked by a Crafting level. If your Crafting trails your Delving by more than a tier, though, the deeper caves will now wait for you u2014 which is the whole point.

* '''Your torches are not wasted.''' The Torch stays exactly what it was, keeps its [[Crafting]] 5 recipe, and still opens the Sunlit Grotto u2014 so a stack of three hundred still burns, and the tutorial quest still works.

* THE AMBER DOOR'S DEEPLIGHT LANTERN MOVES TO CRAFTING 90, up from 60, so the last cave in the valley genuinely asks the most of your bench instead of less than four of the caves above it. THE DOOR ITSELF DOES NOT CLOSE: if you are already delving it with [[Crafting]] under 90, every lantern you have banked still burns and the Door still opens u2014 what waits is CASTING MORE, until your bench catches up. Everything else about the lantern is untouched, and 90 still sits under the Door's own [[Delving]] 95.

* '''The caves still feed the lights they burn.''' Each new light is made of the cave ladder's own materials u2014 Stalactite Chip, then Glow Moss, then Cave Pearl, then Echo Shard u2014 and from the Cinder Vault down, every cave drops the deepest material its own light asks for. The shallower part of the bill comes from the cave one tier up. [[Amber]] Resin is still in every recipe and still comes out even, exactly as it has since v0.36.8.

* Lights are keys, not merchandise: every one of them sells for 8 amber, far under what it costs to make, so nobody is ever tempted to vendor the way into their own cave. And nine new items means the Completion Log's Items line has nine more to find u2014 your percentage will dip by a hair until you have lit them all.

== v0.55.6 — The Shop Shelf Keeps Its Markup For Rich Wardens Too ==

* '''The last free-amber loop is shut.''' V0.55.5 fixed the trader's side of this; the shop had the same hole. Its shelf charges four times what an item is worth precisely so buying from it can never be a way to MAKE amber u2014 but every bonus that raised what you get PAID (the [[Ancestral Monument]], [[Amber]] Affinity, Friend of Wardens) left the shelf price flat, so at a full amber bonus that fourfold markup had quietly decayed to about two-and-a-half. Raw Meat cost 12 on the shelf and the trader would pay 13 for it.

* SHELF PRICES NOW CARRY YOUR AMBER BONUS, exactly like the trader's do, so the markup is a true 4u00d7 at every level of wealth. As before, IN PRACTICE NOTHING CHANGES: if your income is up 55%, so is the price, and a shelf of potions costs the same share of your day's earnings that it always did.

* '''If you have never ascended you will not see a single price move.''' The Monument alone cannot reach the level where any of this bit u2014 these loops only ever opened for wardens deep into ascension perks.

* The shelf and the till agree, too: the price on a card now comes from the same place the purchase is charged from, so what you are quoted is what you pay.

== v0.55.5 — The Trader's Cut Works On Amber-boosted Wardens Too ==

* THE TRADING POST COULD BE FARMED FOR FREE AMBER, and the richer you were the better it paid. The trader's 25% cut is meant to be the reason you can't just buy from him and sell straight back u2014 but every bonus that raised what he PAYS you (the [[Ancestral Monument]], [[Amber]] Affinity, Friend of Wardens) left what he CHARGES exactly where it was. Past about +25% amber gain his cut had eaten itself, and past that he was paying more than he asked.

* HIS PRICES NOW CARRY YOUR BONUS TOO, so the cut is a real 25% at every level of amber gain instead of only for wardens with no bonus at all. IN PRACTICE NOTHING CHANGES FOR YOU: if your amber income is up 55%, the trader's asking price is up 55%, and a day's shopping costs exactly the share of your income it always did. What stops working is buying and immediately selling for a profit u2014 which was never meant to work.

* '''The real trade is untouched.''' Buying on a Surplus day and selling on an In-demand day is still the whole game at the [[Trading Post]], and still pays exactly what it always did u2014 the profit is in WAITING, which is what the spread was always there to insist on.

* The same hole let the BANK outbid the trader's own asking price on nineteen of the twenty-six goods once your amber gain was maxed. That is closed by the same change.

== v0.55.4 — Age Catalysts Drop Four Times As Often ==

* TAKING AN OUTPOST NOW PAYS ITS AGE CATALYSTS ONE TIME IN FIVE, up from one in twenty. Everything else about them is the same: the fort still pays its OWN count when the roll lands, so a Sundered Bastion capture is still four catalysts and a Briar Den is still one u2014 depth still matters, it just no longer takes twenty banners to see any of it.

* THE MATERIAL AGE LADDER IS GATED BEHIND THESE and nothing else drops them, which is what made a 5% roll bite so hard. A masterwork blueprint you may never need is a fine one-in-twenty chase; the currency your whole camp advance waits on is not.

* THE BLUEPRINTS AND GEAR ARE UNCHANGED at 5% u2014 the catalysts used to share that number and now have their own, so the two can move apart from here.

* '''The card tells the truth about it.''' An outpost's catalyst chip reads "20% per capture" because it now takes its odds from the very roll the strike makes, not from the blueprint rate sitting next to it.

== v0.55.3 — Two Achievements Were Counting The Old Roster ==

* '''The curator card argued with its own progress bar.''' It read "Mount all 54 skeletons and open the Grand Hall" while the bar underneath filled towards 57 u2014 46/57, not 46/54. The bar was right: there are 57 species in the valley, and one skeleton for each. Only the sentence was stale.

* MASTER TAMER HAD THE SAME ROT, QUIETLY. "Tame all 54 species" also wanted 57. That one had no visible mismatch to give it away, so it had been wrong for longer without anyone being able to see it.

* NOTHING ABOUT EITHER GOAL CHANGED u2014 both already required 57, and every mounted skeleton and tamed species you have still counts exactly as it did. The cards simply say the true number now.

* '''And they will keep saying it.''' Both sentences are generated from the live creature list instead of typed by hand, so the next species to join the valley moves the wording along with the goal.

== v0.55.2 — The Trader Brings As Much As He Takes ==

* '''The trading post now stocks as much as it buys.''' Every one of the 26 goods had a daily BUY cap well under its SELL cap u2014 the trader would take 6 Sky Opals off you but only ever had 3 to hand over, 4 Abyssal [[Amber]] against 2. Both numbers are now the same on every row, so whichever side of the counter you are on, the day's cap is the same.

* '''It lands hardest where the shelf was barest.''' Sky Opal 3 u2192 6, Abyssal [[Amber]] 2 u2192 4, Ember Topaz 5 u2192 8, Starfall Melon 5 u2192 8, Vale Heartfruit 6 u2192 10, Deep Sapphire 6 u2192 10, Moonstone 8 u2192 12. The gems were the point of the change: buying one on a Surplus day and selling it on an In-demand day is the whole trade, and a shelf holding two barely let you make it.

* '''The workhorses got deeper too.''' Iron Ore and Flamegrain 30 u2192 45, Redwood Log 24 u2192 36, Cloudbean 20 u2192 30, [[Amber]] Resin and Frostgourd 15 u2192 24, Echo Shard 12 u2192 20, Skyfruit 10 u2192 16 u2014 fewer gathering trips when the recipe wants one more stack. The early rows climb as well: Gourd and Raw Meat to 100, Sunroot and Hide to 80.

* '''Nothing else moved.''' Prices, the Surplus/In-demand bands, the amounts the trader will buy, the special orders, and the Trader's Charter's +25% per rank are all exactly as they were u2014 and the Charter still multiplies these new numbers, so a rank-4 Charter doubles every one of them.

== v0.55.1 — The Two Vault Ladders, Retuned ==

* THE REINFORCED VAULT NOW PAYS +3 SLOTS A RANK, up from +2, at exactly the prices it always charged u2014 and every rank you already own counts. A rank-9 vault jumps from +18 stacks to +27 on the spot; a maxed rank-100 one from +200 to +300. The [[Amber]] Exchange's bank line was the cheapest slot in the game and the slowest to matter; now it moves half again as fast for the same amber.

* THE MASTER VAULT SETTLES AT +6 A RANK, down from +8. The [[Exotic Broker]] still deals in double the Exchange's volume per rank, but the two ladders now read as one line rather than the tier-1 vault being a rounding error next to it. A maxed rank-49 Master Vault holds +294 stacks instead of +392. Prices are untouched there too.

* '''At the very top the two moves all but cancel.''' Everything maxed is 725 stacks, up from 723 (32 base + 99 Storage Hut levels + 300 Exchange + 294 Broker). Below the ceiling it depends which line you bought u2014 if you went deep into the Broker without the Exchange ladder behind it, your cap comes down.

* '''Nothing in your bank is lost if that happens.''' Everything stays exactly where it is; you simply cannot open a NEW stack until you are back under the cap. Selling or using anything you already hold frees you up straight away, and the next Exchange rank is cheap.

== v0.55.0 — Crafted Armour Is Worth Wearing Again ==

* '''Every piece of armour you make just got three times better.''' Hide Vest goes from 3 defense to 9 (plus 2 attack), Hide Leggings from 5 to 11, Iron Plate from 8 to 26, Obsidian Plate from 15 to 53 u2014 nineteen pieces in all, across [[Crafting]] and [[Smithing]]. The rule they now follow is the one the game always meant to: what you can MAKE should be about as good as what DROPS one biome back. Always worth wearing on the way somewhere, never better than the reward for getting there.

* This is the other half of v0.54.9. That version made Hide Leggings possible to build; the trouble was that a def-5 legging was worse than the loot lying around where its materials came from, so there was little reason to bother. [[Crafting]] armour had been sitting at roughly a THIRD of its intended strength since v0.36.58, and nothing measured it u2014 the tests checked that each tier beat the one below and that drop sets stayed ahead, both of which a far-too-weak ladder passes perfectly.

* '''Crafting and smithing now feel different.''' A [[Crafting]] piece is light: it spends a quarter of its strength on attack, so Fiber Tunic is 4 attack / 20 defense. A [[Smithing]] piece is heavy and pure defense u2014 Iron Plate is a flat 26. Same total, spent two ways; pick the line that suits you.

* '''Mostly harmless hit the gym.''' With everyone's gear this much better the final rival gauntlet would have stopped being the wall it is meant to be, so the [MH] crew are about 10% tougher across the board u2014 Keltar's crown now costs what it always did.

* Your existing gear upgraded itself. Armour is stored by name, not by numbers, so whatever is on your character right now is already the new, better version.

== v0.54.9 — Hide Gear No Longer Needs Cave-deep Materials ==

* '''Starter armour is starter armour again.''' Stitch Hide Leggings sits at [[Crafting]] 32 and gives 5 defense u2014 but it was asking for Deepchitin, which only drops in the Cavern Depths. Getting there meant [[Hunting]] 60, or three guardians down and [[Expeditions]] 30, by which point the Depths are handing you a 20-defense set for free. Hide Vest, Wooden Shield, Bone Helm, Copper Cap, Bronze Helm, Bronze Shield and Bronze Greaves were all locked the same way: the gear you make to reach a place was sitting behind reaching it.

* Every crafted armour recipe now asks for a material you could already have gone and got at that recipe's own level. The whole low ladder u2014 everything from Copper Cap at 25 up to Bronze Greaves at 48 u2014 takes RIDGEPLATE, a new Redwood Wilds plate that drops from Redwood hunts (from [[Hunting]] 25) and the Redwood patrol ([[Expeditions]] 15). Fiber Tunic and Iron Plate take Bogscale, Iron Helm takes Deepchitin, and the rest of the ladder steps up one biome at a time from there. The deep materials keep their place at the top, where the recipes that want them are already past them.

* Because the materials got closer to home, the recipes also got cheaper: Bone Helm's bill drops from 3 Slagplate to 2 Ridgeplate, Fiber Tunic's from 3 Reefshell to 2 Bogscale. Mangrove-Frame Shield moved from [[Crafting]] 63 to 66 so it sits at or above the Slagplate it now asks for, instead of reaching two biomes past the swamp it makes you stand in.

== v0.54.8 — Delves Are Counted As Delves ==

* '''Your away report knows the difference now.''' A night spent underground used to come back reading "[[Expeditions]] — 381 won", even if you never set foot on a surface expedition: every cave delve was being added to the expedition tally. Delves now get their OWN row in the "While you were away" summary, with their own wins and their own escapes, and the Expeditions row counts only the expeditions you actually ran. Nothing about the runs themselves changed — the loot, the XP and your contract progress were always split correctly; it was only the report that lumped them together.

* The injury lines under that summary also stopped blaming a loss that never happened. Since runs stopped being lost outright, wounds come from fights ground out the hard way, so the line now says so instead of "injured on a lost expedition".

== v0.54.7 — Send Feedback From Inside The Game ==

* TALK TO US, RIGHT FROM THE VALLEY. The info button's panel (bottom-right corner) grew a SEND FEEDBACK row: write what broke or what should exist, and it lands straight in the team's inbox at hello@replyallgames.com. Your email rides along so we can reply — prefilled if you're signed in — and "Attach my current save" (on by default, untick it if you'd rather not) sends the exact state you're looking at, which is the single most useful thing a bug report can carry. Steam-linked accounts are tagged so we can find you there too.

== v0.54.6 — The Rite Of Refinement Shows Its Buttons ==

* PICK YOUR PRICE, VISIBLY. The Rite of Refinement's two payment choices — the rare-material bill or a Quality Whetstone — were always clickable, but they dressed like plain text, so nothing said "choose one." They now wear proper button chrome, matching the Take off / Rite / Salvage row above them: the material bill in the green go-ahead style, both lighting up on hover.

== v0.54.5 — The Catalyst Owns Up To A Dry Clutch ==

* '''No more silent misses.''' Arm a Primal Catalyst, hatch the clutch, see no mutation — and until today the game said nothing, which read as "the Catalyst did nothing." It always did its job: it AIMS the mutation roll, it never forces one (except the pity clutch). Now a Catalyst-armed clutch that rolls dry says so in a toast — which stat it was set on, how deep your dry streak runs, and when the pity guarantee lands. A mutated clutch still announces the mutation itself, exactly as before.

* Mutation toasts also stopped mumbling: they used to sign off with a stray "+0 amber · title unlocked" instead of their own words. Fixed.

== v0.54.4 — The Primal Catalyst Walks Through The Door ==

* '''Your catalyst hoard is safe now.''' The Primal Catalyst has whispered "it will matter enormously, someday soon" since long before the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] existed — but its only use, aiming Mutation Lines clutches, unlocks two walks in, and until today the walk wiped your hoard with the rest of the bank. No more: Catalysts now carry through EVERY ascension at full stack, the Ledger of the Door says so, and the item itself now promises it. Collect with confidence.

== v0.54.3 — The Coach Stays Home After The Amber Door ==

* '''No more berry lessons for veterans.''' Ascending resets the First Steps quest chain with the rest of the run — and the Getting Started coach read that as "brand-new player" and popped up with step 1 of 6. Anyone who has walked the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] has definitionally finished the game once; the coach now checks your ascension count and never triggers past the first walk.

== v0.54.2 — The Cloud Stops Arguing With The Amber Door ==

* '''Ascending no longer trips the save picker.''' Walking the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] starts a fresh run on purpose — but the cloud-sync safety net read those small new numbers as "you lost 169 million XP" and recommended your own past. The sync brain now counts ASCENSIONS FIRST: your ascended save is recognized as the future it is, the picker stays closed after a walk, and if it ever does appear (real progress from another device) it shows an Ascensions row, explains which side walked the Door, and never red-flags your prestige as "far less progress".

* '''You arrive through the door now.''' Ascending lands on a proper arrival — a wash of amber light, the Sparks you banked, and a reminder that your old valley is archived on this device (Settings → restore can always bring it back).

== v0.54.1 — The Amber Door Looks Pressable ==

* '''The door is a button now.''' "Approach the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]]", "Arm the Door" and "Walk through the Amber Door" rendered as bare lines of text — the most momentous press in the game gave no hint it could be pressed. All three now wear real button chrome: raised, amber-edged, glowing on hover, and the final walk sits dimmed until you arm it.

== v0.54.0 — NICHES — Every Species Gets A Job, And The Staircase Is Complete ==

* '''Every species gets a job.''' For everyone past their FOURTH walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], 35 species now wear a JOB TITLE on their card — a fact about the species, printed plainly with its stars: GATHER SPECIALISTS for the four hired-hand skills, HAULERS and PATHFINDERS for dispatch squads, and the EGG TENDER. Every one of the 13 species the min-maxers politely called dead tames carries at least two stars. Every tame matters again.

* '''The specialists work faster.''' A hired hand of a matching species works 20/40/60% faster on its base pace by stars — under a hard honesty ceiling of 0.45× your own pace, now real engine math: idle NEVER beats playing. The skill page bar wears the chip, and the hourly numbers already include it.

* SQUADS GET SMARTER, NOT BIGGER. The squad’s best HAULER brings home 8/16/25% more of a mission’s guaranteed haul; its best PATHFINDER cuts the trip 5/10/15%, already in the countdown you watch. Only the best of each counts — no stacking puzzle, and the dispatch sheet names exactly who and how much.

* THE OVIRAPTOR’S AURA, MADE OFFICIAL. Egg Tenders cut every egg-lay timer 15/25/40% by stars — and the Oviraptor formalizes at 2★, EXACTLY its famous −25%, so nothing changes for a single stable today. The egg ledger finally names who is tending.

* A new score row for your next walk: 25 points per NICHED SPECIES standing in your stable or stasis when you ascend — breadth, the thing the Census taught you to build, finally pays.

* Below four ascensions nothing changes: same intervals, same hauls, same timers, byte for byte. And with this, THE POST-ASCENSION STAIRCASE IS COMPLETE — Rift Ranks, the Bounty Board, the Completion Log, Mutation Lines, Item Quality, and Niches: six systems, one per walk through the Door.

== v0.53.1 — Groundwork: Every Species Learns Its Job ==

* '''Groundwork for niches.''' The staircase’s sixth and FINAL system — the count-4 finale — is wired in under the floorboards: 35 species carry a JOB now (Gather specialists for the four hired-hand skills, Haulers and Pathfinders for dispatch squads, and the Tender), every one of the 13 forgotten tames among them. The honesty ceiling on hired hands becomes real engine math, and a new score row will pay 25 per niched species you keep. None of it is visible yet — the star chips and crew hints arrive with their own update.

* For everyone below four ascensions — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same intervals, same hauls, same egg timers, byte for byte.

== v0.53.0 — ITEM QUALITY — The Forge’s 1% And The Rite That Chases It ==

* '''The forge learns perfection.''' For everyone past their THIRD walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], every cast now has four grades instead of three: 70% Common, 24% Fine, 5% Masterwork — and at the very top of the band, the 1% PRIMAL FORGED. A primal piece BEATS the Primal set piece in its slot, glows amber wherever its name appears, and is the only way past the gear the Door already gave you.

* '''The rite of refinement.''' Any forged piece you own — in the locker, on your back, or fitted to a dino — can be re-cast IN PLACE: pay 15,000 amber plus HALF the blueprint’s rare bill (exactly what salvage would return), or burn ONE Quality Whetstone instead, and the forge rolls the piece fresh. You keep the BETTER of the two casts, always — the Rite never hands back a downgrade, and your fitted gear never leaves its slot. No XP, no locker shuffle: the forge’s endgame is the amber, the mats, and the 1%.

* '''The whetstone finally cuts.''' The Quality Whetstone — stocked at the [[Rifts#The Rift Bazaar|Rift Bazaar]] and the Bounty Exchange since the staircase opened — now has its verb, and a third source: every α-rank rift boss win has an 8% chance to drop one.

* SEVEN TOP BLUEPRINTS, ONE PER SLOT. Valeglass Warblade, Riftwarden Aegis, Sky-Tempered Casque, Vale-Heart Cuirass, Stormstride Greaves, Moonshadow Saddle and Moonlit Barding — levels 88–99 across [[Smithing]] and [[Crafting]], sheets sold one-off at the [[Rifts#The Rift Bazaar|Rift Bazaar]] at count 3. Each one’s PRIMAL window is the only cast that out-rolls the matching Primal set piece; a masterwork merely ties it. The 90-to-99 forge grind finally has a reason.

* TWO LIFETIME TITLES ride the anvil — PRIMAL SMITH at your first primal cast, THE VALE’S OWN MAKER at six (one for every forged slot) — plus a new score row for your next walk: 75 points per lifetime primal cast.

* Below three ascensions the forge does not change: same casts, same odds, byte for byte.

== v0.52.1 — Groundwork: The Forge Learns What Perfection Is Called ==

* '''Groundwork for item quality.''' The staircase’s fifth system — the count-3 forge endgame — is wired in under the floorboards: the 1% PRIMAL FORGED grade at the very top of every blueprint’s range, the RITE OF REFINEMENT (re-cast a piece you own and keep the better roll, never the worse), the Quality Whetstone’s long-promised verb plus its third source, seven TOP-TIER BLUEPRINTS at levels 88–99, and two new lifetime titles. None of it is visible yet — the Rite and the new grade arrive on the forge with their own update.

* For everyone below three ascensions — which today is everyone — the forge does not change: same casts, same odds, byte for byte.

== v0.52.0 — MUTATION LINES — Breeding Finally Has A Finish Line ==

* '''The bloodlines awaken.''' For everyone past their SECOND walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], the [[Stable]]’s breeding pen learns lineage: every pairing tracks a MOTHER LINE and a FATHER LINE, each with its own visible counter to 20. Each clutch, each unfinished side has a 6% chance to mutate — +2, permanently, to one of the four stats. And HEALTH CAN FINALLY MUTATE.

* '''The game can never quietly rob you.''' Every 12th dry clutch of the same pairing is GUARANTEED to mutate, and the dry counter is on screen — on the pen while a clutch runs, and the moment you pick a pair.

* '''Aim the mutation.''' The Primal Catalyst — hoarded since the breeders first whispered about it — is burned at clutch start to land that clutch’s mutations on the stat YOU choose. The smart play writes itself: arm it on the guaranteed 12th clutch.

* '''Taming 90 opens a second pen.''' Two pairings at once, twice the line’s pace — the 90-to-99 grind finally has a parallel project.

* '''The dynasty is the summit.''' A side at 20 is finished; at a combined depth of 40 a pairing goes sterile — the 20×20 DYNASTY, worth about +80 on a chosen stat, is a real finish line, not another treadmill. Every dino’s card wears its line badge and its bloodline’s own colour; the detail card itemizes exactly what the line added, stat by stat.

* Your current dinos lose nothing: every stat stays, every old mutation stays baked in, and both counters start clean. TWO LIFETIME TITLES ride the ladder — LINE KEEPER at a finished line, DYNAST at the summit — plus a new score row for your next walk: 15 points per mutation on your deepest bloodline.

* Below two ascensions breeding does not change: same rolls, same odds, byte for byte. The nursery flow you know — egg, care prompts, imprint, graduate — does not change at all.

== v0.51.1 — Groundwork: The Bloodlines Learn To Remember ==

* '''Groundwork for mutation lines.''' The staircase’s fourth system — the count-2 breeding redesign — is wired in under the floorboards: mother and father lines with visible counters to 20, a 6% chance per side per clutch, +2 flat to one of FOUR stats (health finally included), a forced mutation every 12th dry clutch of a pairing, the Primal Catalyst’s long-promised verb, a second breeding pen at [[Taming]] 90, and a real finish line at the 20×20 Dynasty. None of it is visible yet — the bloodline panel arrives on the [[Stable]] page with its own update.

* For everyone below two ascensions — which today is everyone — breeding does not change: same rolls, same odds, byte for byte.

== v0.51.0 — THE WHOLE JOURNEY — The Staircase’s Last Step ==

* '''The valley keeps your score.''' For everyone past the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], the Completion Log now opens with THE WHOLE JOURNEY: one honest percent for everything you have ever done — the plain average of five bars for SKILLS, MASTERY, COLLECTION, BESTIARY and FEATS, recomputed live from your save and never stored. The log counts everything the Census ignores, and gates nothing.

* FIVE RANKS wait along it: WAYFINDER at 25%, CHRONICLER at 50% (+1% all skill XP), VALLEY ELDER at 75% (+2%, replacing), PRIMAL SCHOLAR at 90% (+3%, replacing), and THE COMPLEAT PRIMALIST at 100%. Only your best rank counts, and it is remembered FOREVER — ascending resets your skills, never your rank.

* '''The rewards show their face.''' Primal Scholar GILDS the whole panel in amber. The summit grants the BANNER OF THE VALE — +15 expedition score from the bank, a Trophy Case heirloom that survives every ascension. Two lifetime titles ride the ladder: Wayfinder at rank 1 and The Compleat Primalist at the top.

* '''The xp ledger comes clean.''' The skill-page buff drawer now itemizes every XP source by name — potions, Ascension perks & tiers, and your Log rank — and the total is exactly their sum. (Ascension XP was always paid correctly; the drawer just never quoted it. Now it does.)

* Below one ascension nothing changes — same numbers, same odds, byte for byte. With this, all three rungs of the first staircase are open: Rift Ranks, the Bounty Board, and the Completion Log.

== v0.50.1 — Groundwork: The Valley Starts Counting Your Whole Journey ==

* '''Groundwork for completion log ranks.''' The last of the first staircase’s three systems is wired in under the floorboards: one overall completion percent averaging five live axes — Skills, [[Mastery]], Collection, Bestiary, Feats — with five ranks along it, two new lifetime titles, and the Banner of the Vale waiting at the summit. None of it is visible yet — the log ranks arrive on the completion page with their own update.

* For everyone below one ascension — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same numbers, same odds, byte for byte.

== v0.50.0 — THE WARDEN'S BOUNTY BOARD — The Staircase's Second Step ==

* '''The wardens are hiring.''' For everyone past the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], a bounty office opens on the [[Hunting]] page: hold one bounty at a time, pick your TIER, and the board deals the quarry — cull ten of them for a flat purse of WARDEN’S MARKS. The deck is fixed: reloading never rerolls a deal, and walking away burns it.

* FIVE TIERS climb with your [[Hunting]] level, exactly the ladder your new cycle re-climbs: Novice at level 1 (free, 21 Marks) · Seasoned 35 (95) · Veteran 55 (192) · Elite 75 (368) · Apex at 90 with the Vale guardian down (554). Taking is always free — each tier’s fee is the price of ABANDONING, never more than you hold.

* '''The hunt leans your way.''' While a bounty is live, its target pays +25% [[Hunting]] XP — the card shows the boosted number — and alpha prey cross your path half again as often. Your target’s card wears a bounty chip counting the cull.

* THE BOUNTY EXCHANGE spends Marks: the AUTO BOUNTY LEDGER (6,000 — finished bounties chain straight into the next), the WARDEN’S LONGSPEAR (3,000 — hunts against your target run 15% faster while it’s in hand), the TROPHY HARNESS (2,400 — alphas half again as often anywhere, worn), the WARDEN’S STANDARD (1,500 — +10 expedition score from the bank), Quality Whetstones and Primal Catalysts for the systems still coming, and Ration Crates of salted meat. Everything the Exchange sells survives future ascensions in the Trophy Case.

* '''Two lifetime titles.''' CULLER at 10,000 lifetime Marks and WARDEN OF THE VALE at 25,000. Lifetime means lifetime — the record spans every ascension, and neither can ever gate the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]].

* '''New score to chase.''' Every 50 lifetime Marks is a point toward your next walk — the long title alone is worth 500.

* Below one ascension nothing changes — same hunts, same drops, same odds, byte for byte. The staircase’s next rung, Completion Log ranks, arrives as its own update.

== v0.49.2 — Groundwork: The Wardens Post Their First Bounties ==

* '''Groundwork for the bounty board.''' The second post-Ascension system is now wired in under the floorboards: the Warden’s Bounty Board’s five-tier ladder, its Marks currency, the Bounty Exchange and its gear, and two new lifetime titles. None of it is visible yet — every piece waits for a walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], and the board itself arrives on the [[Hunting]] page with its own update.

* For everyone below one ascension — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same hunts, same drops, same odds, byte for byte.

== v0.49.1 — Under The Floorboards: One Ledger Of Where Every Item Goes ==

* No gameplay change — this is plumbing, and honest plumbing deserves a note. The game now keeps ONE shared ledger of what consumes every item (bills, tool ranks, camp costs, museum skeletons, planting, pantries, tributes, bank passives, quest holds), where before two separate copies of that knowledge could quietly disagree.

* The hoard-or-sell verdict on every bank tooltip and the item flow reference chart now read from that same ledger, so they can never again contradict each other about whether something has a job.

* Nothing about drops, recipes, prices or odds moved — the item flow chart regenerated byte-identical, and the sell-freely list is unchanged, item for item.

== v0.49.0 — RIFT RANKS — The Staircase Begins ==

* '''The first step of the staircase.''' For everyone who has walked the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], the three rift zones reveal what was always underneath: today’s four boss fights were only GAMMA RANK. Two harder cuts open above each — BETA at 1.5× difficulty paying 45 Rift Shards, ALPHA at 2× paying 75 — listed under their zone exactly like arena tiers, with mastery, tooltips and the battle screen all working unchanged.

* '''Harder does not mean unfair.''' A rank’s damage arrives in more, smaller strikes: the worst single hit at Alpha is the same size as at Gamma — the fight is longer, never spikier. That promise is enforced by the balance suite, not just written here.

* '''Earn your way up.''' Beta reveals after 8 wins against that boss; Alpha after 8 Beta wins. Every rank card names exactly where you stand — “Win it 8× to reveal — 3/8” — and every boss card now counts its wins.

* '''Rift sigils.''' Every Beta or Alpha attempt costs one sigil, minted automatically every 12 rift patrol wins — the rank row’s chip tracks your purse and the next mint. The Sigil Press (1,800 shards, one-off) quickens the mint to every 10.

* '''The riftheart relic.''' Alpha bosses alone carry it: a 6% drop, guaranteed by your 25th Alpha win, worth 8,000 amber — and held, it steadies every rift fight (+25 score, its own line in the strength breakdown). It survives future ascensions in the Trophy Case.

* '''The bazaar grows.''' Three offers appear at count 1: the Quality Whetstone (120) and Primal Catalyst (400) — fuels for staircase systems still to come, worth hoarding now — and the Sigil Press (1,800).

* '''New score to chase.''' Rank first-clears feed your ascension score: 60 per Beta, 100 per Alpha — 640 points toward the next walk through the Door.

* Below one ascension nothing changes — same fights, same drops, same odds, byte for byte. The staircase’s next rungs, the Warden’s Bounty Board and Completion Log ranks, arrive as their own updates.

== v0.48.2 — Groundwork: The Rifts Learn About Ranks ==

* '''Groundwork for rift ranks.''' The machinery for the first post-Ascension system is now in place under the floorboards: Beta and Alpha versions of the four rift boss fights, the Rift Sigil economy that will meter attempts, the Riftheart Relic’s chase, and three new [[Rifts#The Rift Bazaar|Rift Bazaar]] offers. None of it is visible yet — every piece waits for your first walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], and the full reveal ships with its own update.

* For everyone below one ascension — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same fights, same drops, same odds, byte for byte.

== v0.48.1 — The Drover's Drills Card Stops Exaggerating ==

* '''The drover’s drills card told an old story.''' It still promised “each drill adds +5% of hands-on pace” — the worker-rates update trimmed the two drills to +2% and +1.5% a while ago, and the card never heard. It now reads the real number for the exact drill you are about to buy, straight from the data, so it can never drift again. The drills themselves never changed here — only the words. The “they work at X% now” half was always honest.

* The rest of the camp and hired-hand copy was audited against the worker-rates plan at the same time: every other number a tooltip or card quotes (the kit soft cap, the furnace speed, the pace-share pile) already derives from live data and matched.

== v0.48.0 — PRIMAL ASCENSION — The Amber Door Opens ==

* '''The amber door opens.''' Primal Ascension is here: the valley’s true endgame. Once you have finished everything the Warden’s Census counts — every skill at 99, every species, the museum, every quest, every chronicle, every Guardian, arena tier and rift boss, and (almost) every achievement — you may walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]]: your run resets, and permanent power follows you out the other side. Nobody is ever forced through; until you qualify, the new Ascension page is a completion tracker, not a button.

* '''The warden’s census.''' The Ascension page appears once all ten Guardians have fallen, showing a live checklist of 100% completion. Every line derives from the game’s real content, so future updates raise the bar for anyone who hasn’t crossed it. You only prove 100% once — after that, the Door stays earned forever, and later walks just need the Guardians re-felled and a rising score bar beaten.

* '''Amber sparks.''' Everything you have ever done feeds one score, shown row by row — and the rows always sum to exactly the total. Sparks pay one-for-one on NEW high water only: nothing pays twice, and rebuilding a reset system to where it was pays nothing until you push past it.

* '''The perk shop.''' Fifteen permanent perks, 40,000 Sparks for the full catalog — faster actions, deeper memory, richer amber, a head-start kit, preserved companions and more. Every bonus is its own labeled line outside every cap in the game, so every rank you ever buy always does something. That promise is written on the shop page and enforced by a test.

* '''Amber bond.''' Chosen companions survive the reset inside the stasis vault, held in amber — they keep their levels, imprint and name, and step out as you rebuild stable space. The bond starts small (at most 4 on your first walk, even at max rank) and deepens by one with every ascension.

* '''Ascension tiers.''' Five free bonuses that arrive automatically as your count grows, from Echo of the Door (+5% all XP) to Warden Ascendant — which also demands The Sigil.

* '''The trophy case.''' Nothing crafted is ever lost: The Towel, the Don’t-Panic Pendant, the Improbability Charm, every war banner, the depths relics, the quest trinkets and the rift uniques all survive the wipe and keep working.

* '''The ledger of the door.''' Ascension is irreversible, so the confirmation is a full-screen ledger — LOST, KEPT, GAINED — generated from the very list the engine resets, with your live numbers. On your first walk you type ASCEND to confirm, and a complete copy of your save is archived on this device first (Settings → restore), so a misclick can never destroy a year-long run. The Door also refuses politely while anything is in flight — a fight, a raid, a squad, a dig, a clutch — and names the blocker.

* SIX NEW ACHIEVEMENTS wait beyond the Door, none of which count toward the Census — an achievement that requires ascending can never gate the first ascension. Every Spark Spent is, quite deliberately, the longest chase in the game.

* For everyone else: nothing changes. A player who never touches the Door keeps playing exactly the game that existed yesterday, byte for byte.

== v0.47.11 — Groundwork: The Amber Door Gets Its Face ==

* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Primal Ascension step three of four: the art. Twenty-eight new hand-drawn icons join the registry — the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] sigil, the Amber Spark, all fifteen perks, the five tier medallions, and the six achievement marks — drawn in the same flat, palette-only style as every other icon in the game.

* Nothing shows them yet: no page, no shop, no ceremony references a single one of them. They are in place so the final step — the Ascension page itself — arrives as pure wiring instead of a mountain of art and logic in one change.

* One step remains: the page and the ceremony.

== v0.47.10 — Groundwork: The Amber Door Learns Its Prices ==

* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Primal Ascension step two of four: the numbers. The fifteen permanent perks and their Spark prices (40,000 for the full catalog), the five free tier bonuses, the score weights behind every row of the breakdown, and the Trophy Case list — read from the game’s own item data, so any future one-of-a-kind effect item joins it automatically.

* Every perk is now wired into the exact spot in the game where its bonus will apply — action speed outside every cap so every rank always delivers, XP, amber, expedition score, offline hours, injury healing measured separately from Sturdy Bandages, camp and hired-hand pace with its own 20% family cap, and the wanderer gate with its built-in guard. All of it reads exactly zero until someone actually walks through the Door, which is still impossible: the page and the ceremony are step four.

* The balance report gained a whole section grading the new economy — the catalog total, every speed cap, the honest gap between the catalog and a lifetime of Sparks, and the rising bar’s exact ladder — so none of these numbers can drift quietly.

== v0.47.9 — Groundwork: The Amber Door Gets Its Hinges ==

* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Primal Ascension — the prestige system where a finished valley can be traded for permanent power — has started building, and this update lays its invisible machinery: the master list that marks every piece of your save as RESETS or STAYS, the score calculator, the payout rule, the refusal logic that names anything still in flight, and the rebuild routine itself. None of it is switched on, nothing is visible, and no save changes shape by a single byte.

* The master list is checked by the computer: every jar on the save shelf must carry its label or the game refuses to compile, so no future update can ever forget to decide what ascension does to its data. A test also walks a real player save through a full rebuild and proves nothing marked STAYS is ever confiscated.

* Three more steps follow before anything shows: the numbers (perks, tiers, weights), the art, and finally the Ascension page and the ceremony itself.

== v0.47.8 — Nothing Is Handed To You Any More ==

* NO BLUEPRINT OR PIECE OF GEAR IN RIVALS OR OUTPOSTS IS GUARANTEED ANY MORE — every one of them is a 5% roll. Six outposts used to hand over a masterwork pattern the moment you took the fort; they now guard it the same way they guard everything else.

* '''The tribe relics join them.''' The Reaver's Hook, Swampjaw Maw, Obsidian Edge, Frostfang Cloak, Skyplume Mantle, Accord Signet and Mostly Harmless's trio were free on your first victory and a 12–15% re-roll after. They are now a 5% roll on EVERY win, first or hundredth — and the roll still favours whichever one you are missing.

* '''That cuts both ways.''' A relic is no longer a one-and-done, so a tribe you have already beaten is worth raiding for its relic just as much as a fresh one.

* The Apex Accord's Apexforged Edge pattern was the last blueprint riding an odd rate (15%) — it moves onto the same 5% roll as the rest, and no pattern lost its home in the move.

* '''Age catalysts join them.''' A capture used to hand over 1–5 of them every single time, and that is now a 5% roll as well. A fort still pays its OWN number when the roll lands — the Sundered Bastion is still worth four — so a deep outpost is still worth more than a shallow one. Catalysts also come from the Mark Exchange and from quest rewards, and neither of those changed.

* One thing did NOT change: a catalyst that gets through is still never eaten by a full bank. Rarer should not also mean losable.

* Because nothing rare is promised any more, the raid no longer refuses to start over relic bank space; it only asks for room for the stockpile it definitely pays. Every card and tooltip now says exactly this — the scouting sheet quotes the relic chance instead of promising a first-win reward, and an outpost card states its catalysts with their rate instead of as a flat number.

== v0.47.7 — Rare Spoils Go To 5%, And The Cards Show What You Get ==

* THE BLUEPRINT AND GEAR ROLLS ADDED IN v0.47.6 GO FROM 0.5% TO 5% (dev note: “lets make it a 5% drop rate”). Ten times more likely on both rolls — about one win in ten now pays something rare instead of one in a hundred. [[Rivals]] and outposts both.

* RIVAL CARDS AND OUTPOST CARDS NOW SHOW WHAT A WIN ACTUALLY PAYS, the way action cards always have: how many of each guaranteed item you get (×12 Hide, ×60 Ginkgo Log) and the drop rate on anything that is not certain. No more guessing what is behind the row of icons.

* The two rare rolls get their own dashed chips — 📜 for the masterwork blueprint and 🛡️ for the armour or weapon — each showing 5% and naming, on hover, every piece it could pay.

* Outpost cards had never listed their spoils at all; they now carry the same row, including the masterwork sheet the deeper forts guarantee.

* The rare chips quote the roll rather than a per-item share, because the roll favours what you have not got yet — so hovering tells you the pool and the real 5%, never a made-up number for one piece.

* Housekeeping in these notes themselves: entries used to credit changes to a word no reader outside the workshop could place. Every one now reads as a plain dev note, dev call or dev report.

== v0.47.6 — Rivals And Outposts Can Drop Blueprints And Gear ==

* '''Every rival victory and every outpost capture now rolls two long shots.''' A masterwork blueprint sheet at 0.5%, and a piece of armour or a weapon at 0.5%. Roughly one win in a hundred pays something rare — this is a nice surprise on a raid you were doing anyway, never a sensible way to farm gear.

* '''Both prizes match the rung you beat.''' The Mudfoot Clan and the Briar Den pay Thunderfoot pieces and the Sunpetal Hood pattern; Mostly Harmless and the Sundered Bastion pay Sundered pieces and the Emberheart Plate or Apexforged Edge. A harder fight never pays a softer prize.

* THE ROLL PREFERS WHAT YOU ARE MISSING — an unstudied pattern over one you already know, a piece you do not own over a duplicate — the same courtesy signature repeat rolls have had since v0.36.7. Once you hold the lot, dupes pay amber as they always did.

* Gear means armour and weapons: helms, cuirasses, greaves, aegises and spears. Talismans stay a trail find. All twelve blueprint patterns are reachable this way, including the three no guardian carries, and the Field Guide now lists both the raid and the strike on every item they can drop.

== v0.47.5 — The Icons Are 20% Bigger ==

* EVERY ICON IN THE GAME IS NOW 20% LARGER (dev note: they “seem a little small”). Sidebar art, action-card headers, bank tiles, item chips, battle badges — all of it. 20% is the exact point where the art grows and the layout does not: sidebar rows measure the same 44px they always did, so nothing reflows and the same number of entries fit on screen. Pushing on to 35% started making rows taller, so it stops here.

* On a 320px phone the top bar is the one row with no space to give — the bigger icons pushed it 10px off the edge. That strip alone keeps the old size below 360px; everywhere else, including the rest of that same phone screen, gets the full 20%.

== v0.47.4 — The Rest Of The Icons Get The Same Outline ==

* v0.47.3 OUTLINED THE SKILLS AND BIOMES; THIS DOES THE OTHER 937. Every remaining drawing in the game — items, creatures, weapons, potions, crops, fossils, tribe crests, camp buildings, pets, eggs and every UI glyph — now carries the same crisp dark edge around its silhouette. That also closes the seam v0.47.3 opened, where outlined skill icons sat directly above flat ones in the sidebar.

* The edge lands on silhouettes only, never on the shading inside them: a stone stays one solid rock instead of a cracked one, and a dino's jaw shading does not become a black stripe across its face.

* Glyphs already drawn as line art (the chevrons, boost arrows, XP graph, drifting mist, fibre strands, sun rays) are deliberately untouched, as is the Mostly Harmless crew's own mark — that one stays exactly the flag they supplied.

* ON STEAM, THE ACHIEVEMENT BADGES MATCH AGAIN: all 288 achievement icons (144 earned plus their locked grey twins) are re-rendered from the new art, so the badge Steam shows is the same drawing the game does.

== v0.47.3 — Skill And Biome Icons Get An Outline Pass ==

* '''The skill and biome icons pop now.''' [[Mining]], [[Logging]], [[Hunting]], [[Smithing]], [[Farming]], [[Foraging]], [[Fishing]], [[Cooking]], [[Crafting]], [[Alchemy]], [[Taming]], [[Expeditions]], [[Delving]], and all ten biomes (Grasslands through Skyreach Plateau) now carry a crisp dark outline around every shape, plus a few hand-placed highlights — a bright bowstring, sparks off the anvil, a glint on the pickaxe — so they read as bold stickers instead of flat color blobs, especially at the small sizes the sidebar and action cards actually render them at.

* This is the first pass on the icon registry's highest-traffic pages — the rest of the set (items, creatures, gear) keeps its current flat style for now.

== v0.47.2 — A Frozen Tab Can’t Bury Your Save ==

* A PHONE TAB THAT SAT FROZEN FOR A DAY COULD WAKE UP JUST LONG ENOUGH TO SAVE ITS DAY-OLD MEMORY OVER YOUR REAL SAVE (Shae’s report, Aug 12) — the next boot then trusted the buried copy, greeted you with “away for over a day”, and pushed it to the cloud. Three locks now stop it: the one-tab guard remembers a newer session even after that session has CLOSED, so a thawed old tab freezes instead of writing its goodbye; every save now refuses outright to overwrite a newer one; and boot takes a second opinion — if the cloud copy out-leads this device on progress when it shouldn’t, the “which save?” choice opens instead of a silent push.

* A tab caught behind like this now says so honestly: “This tab fell behind — nothing from this tab was saved”, with Play Here reloading from your newest save. No more claiming it saved when it deliberately didn’t.

* The Settings sync journal logs the averted burial as its own event (boot-regressed), so a screenshot shows the guard firing, not a mystery dialog.

== v0.47.1 — The Crew Keeps Up With The Real You ==

* v0.47.0 MEASURED THE CREW AGAINST A PLAYER WITH NO TOOLS, NO MASTERY, NO GEAR (beta report, same day): against a real endgame player — who moves ~2× that fast — a maxed camp landed nearer 1.3 players’ worth than the promised 2–3. The yardstick is now YOU as you actually play: tiers climb 1 / 1.35 / 1.7 / 2 and Ages ×1.2 → ×2, so a fully built crew lands ~2.7 real players’ worth. Roughly double yesterday’s rates, still nowhere near the old firehose.

* GEAR PAST +30 KIT PAYS AGAIN (beta report: “no need to bother beyond bronze”): the hard cap becomes a soft one — +1% pace per point to +30, then +1% per 10 points beyond. A 195-kit worker now works at +46.5% instead of +30%, the deepest kit in the game at +54%. Sentinels still count every point.

* The tooltip pile shows the soft cap honestly: “kit 195 → +46.5 (soft cap)”, and the numbers still multiply to exactly the clock you see.

* Fresh camps are untouched again — a Stone-Age Novice gathers exactly what they did yesterday and the day before.

== v0.47.0 — The Tribe Works For You, Not Instead Of You ==

* YOUR CAMP GATHERED TOO MUCH, TOO FAST (a dev call): a fully built crew was hauling roughly 288 players’ worth of goods an hour. The whole workforce now tops out around 2–3 players’ worth — camp automation is a strong second pair of hands again, not a replacement for playing.

* '''Workers now match each node’s own pace.''' A crew member works at a % of YOUR speed on that exact action — deep, slow nodes take them proportionally longer, exactly like they take you longer. Before, the deepest nodes were bizarrely the cheapest to automate; that inversion is gone.

* The [[Tribe]] page tells the honest story: each worker’s tooltip now shows “crew pace X% of yours”, every multiplier in the pile, and the exact clock on their current node.

* GEAR ON GATHERERS IS CAPPED AT +30% pace (it kept its full power for Sentinels on watch): a Primal Warspear made berry-picking four times faster, which was silly. The tooltip shows both numbers — your kit score, and the capped bonus the pace actually uses.

* [[Tribe#Material Ages|Material Ages]] recut: ×1.1 → ×1.5 across Bronze → Moonstone (was ×1.5 → ×6), tiers 1 / 1.15 / 1.3 / 1.5 (was up to ×3.5). Artisan lines follow the same cut. Fresh Stone-Age camps are UNTOUCHED — a new Novice gathers exactly what they always did.

* '''Dino hired hands.''' The two Drover’s Drills now add +0.02/+0.015 (was +0.05 each), so a fully drilled, max-veteran, best-species dino tops out at ~40% of your pace instead of ~49%. Undrilled dinos never moved. Drill prices unchanged.

* Nothing banked was taken: stockpiles, shelves and everything already collected stay exactly as they were. Only the clocks changed.

== v0.45.5 — The Little Steam Mark Is The Real One ==

* THE SMALL STEAM ICON — on the “Linked to Steam” row and the sync-reminder toast — is now Valve’s actual mark (the same official art the buttons wear), not our hand-drawn stand-in. One glyph, everywhere, the real one.

== v0.45.4 — The Sign-in Screen Speaks One Language ==

* THE STEAM BUTTON IS GONE FROM THE SIGN-IN SCREEN (a dev pass): one flow everywhere — email and password, with signup carrying your Steam purchase invisibly on desktop. Returning desktops still sign in through their link automatically at launch; the button had become a second door to the same room.

== v0.45.3 — One Door: Your Purchase Is Your Key ==

* THE DESKTOP HAS ONE DOOR NOW (a dev flow pass): Settings → Cloud shows just “Create a Primal Idle account” — no separate Steam button. Clicking it opens the signup form directly, with NO registration code on a Steam desktop: your purchase IS the code.

* '''Accounts are born connected.''' A desktop signup carries your Steam ticket, and the server verifies the purchase, links your Steam, and records the entitlement the moment the account is created — Settings shows “Linked to Steam — Account ID” from the first boot, and it stays through every restart.

* No more silently-created accounts: “Continue with Steam” now signs in ONLY through an existing link — an unlinked Steam gets plain words (“create your account first”) instead of an invisible throwaway account.

== v0.45.2 — Once It’s Connected, It Stays Connected ==

* “LINKED TO STEAM” NOW SURVIVES A RESTART (dev report): the game asks the server for your link on every boot instead of remembering it only until you closed the window — the linked row, with your Account ID, is there on relaunch and on a fresh install alike, web included.

* '''Linking is now one clear ritual.''' The button says “Link with Steam”, and clicking it asks for your Primal Idle email and password right below — the server checks your Steam purchase and your credentials, links, and that’s that. The same form serves a brand-new device.

* Typing the account you’re already signed into just verifies your password and links — no surprise “which save?” dialog for a link that changes no save.

== v0.45.1 — Dev Accounts Can Link Before Launch ==

* FOUND LIVE IN TESTING, FIXED THE SAME HOUR: before launch nobody can pass the “bought it on Steam” check — including dev accounts — so the new link gate refused the very accounts building it. The server now honors an exempt list for the dev and playtest accounts, and every refusal is logged with the exact verdict and Steam ID so the next mystery answers itself.

* The “Too many attempts” wall is gone for normal play: each Steam action now has its own allowance (30 per 15 minutes instead of 10 shared across sign-in, linking, purchase checks and email attach) — the desktop’s own background sign-ins no longer eat the budget your buttons need.

== v0.45.0 — Your Steam Finds Its Real Account ==

* CLICKED “CONTINUE WITH STEAM” BEFORE SIGNING IN? No longer a dead end: type your web account’s email and password into Settings → Cloud → “Add an email”, and when the game says that account already exists it now OFFERS it — one click signs you into your real account and brings your Steam along, purchase and cloud saves included.

* The same heal works from the sign-in screen: “I already play on the web — sign in”, then accept the link offer — it no longer refuses because of the throwaway account your first click created.

* Nothing lost, nothing guessed: the throwaway’s save is filed into your account’s “Restore an older cloud copy” list, and when both sides hold real progress the conflict dialog asks YOU which run continues — never a timestamp.

* Real accounts stay protected: a Steam identity only ever moves off an invisible no-email account. Two accounts on purpose stay two accounts.

* '''Linking is for owners.''' If the Steam account hasn’t bought Primal Idle (or only borrows it via Family Sharing or a free weekend), the link buttons now answer “Buy Primal Idle on Steam to link this Steam account” with the store link — and after a successful Steam sign-in or link, a notice reminds you to run a Sync now so Steam gets your latest save.

== v0.43.18 — Every Account Button Knows Whose Colors It Wears ==

* “LINK THIS STEAM ACCOUNT” (Settings → Cloud) and “LINK ACCOUNTS” (the first-run link offer) now wear the same official dark Steam dress as the sign-in buttons — white Steam mark, Steam’s own dark, no orange and no green (a dev pass, fourth sweep).

* “ADD EMAIL” on a Steam-born account goes stone-grey with the PI monogram, matching “Create a Primal Idle account” — because that is exactly what it does: it gives your Steam account its Primal Idle side for web & mobile.

== v0.43.17 — The Steam Button Goes Full Steam ==

* “CONTINUE WITH STEAM” now wears the real thing (a dev pass, third sweep): the official white Steam lockup on Steam’s own dark — no more orange — in Settings → Cloud and on the desktop sign-in screen alike, and the two can no longer drift apart.

* The account button now carries the PI monogram, goes stone-grey, and stacks under the Steam one — each button explains itself with a line underneath: Steam is one click with no password; a Primal Idle account adds web & mobile cloud saves that stay in sync with your Steam progress — take the valley with you.

== v0.43.16 — The Link Buttons Wear The Mark Too ==

* “LINK THIS STEAM ACCOUNT” — in Settings and in the first-run link offer — now carries the Steam mark like its sign-in siblings (a dev pass, second sweep).

== v0.43.15 — The Cloud Buttons Say What They Mean ==

* SETTINGS → CLOUD, DRESSED PROPERLY (a dev pass): the Steam button wears a truer Steam mark, the account button carries the campfire and says what it is — “Create a Primal Idle account for web/mobile saves” — and once you’re signed in through Steam the row shows your Account ID so support questions start with the number on screen.

== v0.43.14 — Steam Sign-in Stops Rejecting Its Own Ticket ==

* '''Under the hood.''' The server’s sanity check on Steam sign-in tickets capped them at half the size Steam actually issues, so every genuine ticket was refused as bad-ticket before Steam was even asked. The cap now fits real tickets with room to spare — and a refused shape gets logged with its length so it can never masquerade as a Steam verdict again.

== v0.43.13 — The Desktop Opens Straight Into The Valley ==

* NO MORE LOGIN WALL ON DESKTOP (a dev call): the Steam build now opens directly into the game on your local save — Steam Cloud already roams it. Cloud sign-in and Steam account linking live in Settings → Cloud, including a one-click “Continue with Steam” right there.

* '''The sign-in screen got its act together.''' Choosing “Continue with Steam” no longer shows the email form underneath it, the button wears a proper drawn Steam mark, and on desktop you can always back out with “Keep playing without an account”.

== v0.43.12 — Steam Sign-in Presents Its Credentials Properly ==

* '''Under the hood.''' “Continue with Steam” was refused with bad-ticket — Steam bakes an identity string into each sign-in ticket, and the server has to present the SAME string when verifying. It now does, for sign-in, linking, and the purchase check alike.

== v0.43.11 — Steam Sign-in Stops Depending On The Host ==

* '''Under the hood.''' The server now talks to Steam via curl instead of PHP URL streams — the shared host shipped allow_url_fopen off in a place no setting of ours could reach, which held every Steam sign-in at "unreachable". No player-visible change beyond Steam sign-in actually working.

== v0.43.10 — The Steam Build Knows Who You Are ==

* SIGN IN WITH STEAM (desktop): the first-run screen now leads with “Continue with Steam” — one click and your account exists, no email, no password, no registration wall inside a purchase. Already play on the web? Pick “I already play on the web”, sign in as usual, and the game offers — never assumes — to link the two so purchases and cloud saves are shared.

* '''A linked machine signs itself in.''' Launch through Steam and the login screen simply closes itself. And the 90-day password re-entry is gone on desktop — an expired session silently renews through Steam instead of signing you out.

* '''Steam-born accounts can go web.''' Settings → Cloud gains “Add an email to play on the web”, upgrading a Steam-created account with a real address and password — same save, same progress, now on any browser.

== v0.43.9 — Steam Achievements Get A Firm Handshake ==

* STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS COULD SIT OUT A WHOLE SESSION IN SILENCE (dev report, first desktop runs on Windows and Mac). The bridge refused to write until Steam handed over the player’s stats — a handshake the current Steam client may never volunteer on its own. The desktop build now asks for those stats itself the moment Steam connects, so the write gate opens every time and the boot sweep can restore your whole earned history.

* '''And the sync narrates itself.''' The desktop console (right-click → Inspect) now reports the bridge coming up, every unlock batch, and both boot sweeps with exact counts — so a missing popup is a five-second read instead of a guessing game.

== v0.43.8 — Ten Achievement Tracks Stop Sharing Faces ==

* NINE ACHIEVEMENT TRACKS NO LONGER WEAR THE SAME ART (dev report, from the Steam build-out). Three tracks shared one star, two shared a medal, two a compass, two a basket — and Warband’s banner was a twin of Raider’s flag. Sage now carries a scroll, Perfect Cast a starmetal blade, Drillmaster the drill whistle, Naturalist a leaf, Delegator the work ledger, Muster the worker quarters, Herdmaster the grand stable and Warband a captured stockade — every one drawn from art the valley already owned. The Log page and the Steam badges both pick it up.

* THE OUTFITTED TRIAL WEARS A SADDLE instead of borrowing the fleeing runner’s boots — equipping gear on a dino finally looks like it.

* AND A NEW BUILD GUARD makes the whole class of bug impossible: no two tracks can ever share registry art again, and every Trial badge stays one of a kind.

== v0.43.7 — Obsidian Greaves — The Smithed Ladder Finally Has Legs At The Top ==

* OBSIDIAN GREAVES CAN NOW BE FORGED (player request). The smithed heavy line runs bronze, then iron, then obsidian — and bronze and iron both finish with greaves, while obsidian gave you a helm, a plate, a bulwark, a spear and a blade and nothing at all for your legs. So the best legs a smith could make were still Iron Greaves, ninety levels in. Not any more.

* FORGE THEM AT SMITHING 91 IN THE ASHEN PEAKS, from 3 Obsidian, a Skysteel Ore and a Valehide. They give 14 defense — above the Obsidian Helm and Bulwark, below the Plate, which stays the tier’s best single piece as the hardest thing in it to make.

* '''And skysteel ore finally has something to be made into.''' Until now the only thing in the valley that wanted it was the last rank of the tool ladder, so a plateau full of it mostly went to the trader. Now it is the frame these greaves are built on.

* Nothing else moved. No existing piece was retuned, no recipe changed, and the Collector achievement now counts the one new item.

== v0.43.6 — Dispatch Tells You What A Mission Brings Back, On Every Screen ==

* THE DISPATCH PICKER NOW SHOWS WHAT THE MISSION BRINGS BACK, ON DESKTOP TOO (tester report). Picking between eleven missions on a wide screen, all you got was a name and a difficulty number — the haul was only ever spelled out on the phone, in the mission sheet. The chosen mission now prints its guaranteed haul, with your squad’s multiplier already applied, and it does so on both screens: the phone’s sheet closes the moment you pick, so it lost the same information one tap later.

* '''The trading post now says why you would ever buy anything.''' Every line on that page was about selling, which made the Buy buttons on the deep gems look like a mistake — they have no use but trade. They are not a mistake: a price re-rolls inside its own range every market day, so something picked up on a Surplus day and sold back on an In demand day turns a profit, and a stockpile is how a Charter special order gets filled the day it appears.

* EVERY MARKET CARD NOW PRINTS THE RANGE ITS PRICE MOVES INSIDE, so "Surplus" and "In demand" stop being moods and become numbers you can measure today’s quote against. A Deep Sapphire pays between 156 and 312 depending on the day; now you can see that before deciding whether to hold or sell.

== v0.43.5 — The Top Bar Stops Squeezing Itself Off The Screen On A Phone ==

* THE TOP BAR NO LONGER GETS CRUSHED BY A BIG AMBER TOTAL (bug report). On a phone, the richer you got the more the bar squeezed everything to the left of your amber count — the Stop button ended up with no room at all and sat on top of the weather chip, and on a small phone the row ran off the edge. The amber count now holds its place and the running-action chip keeps a real width at every phone size.

* '''Number notation actually changes when you change it.''' Switching between Standard and Compact in Settings only ever redrew numbers that happened to be counting up at that moment — your amber total looked right, while prices, bank stacks, gear stats and mastery totals kept the old style until something else moved them. Every number on screen now follows the setting the instant you pick it.

* PHONES NOW START ON COMPACT, DESKTOP ON STANDARD. Compact ("28.9M") is what keeps the bar readable on a narrow screen, and the long form has plenty of room on a desktop. It is only the starting point — the Settings dropdown still wins, and each device remembers its own answer, so your phone and your computer can differ.

* The narrowest phones also drop the sword monogram and the weather countdown from the bar rather than let the row overflow. Both still live one tap away in the weather panel.

== v0.43.4 — A Clearer Message When Something Else Answers For The Server ==

* '''Cloud errors no longer show a raw programming error.''' If something other than the game server answered — a wifi sign-in page on a cafe or hotel network, or a maintenance page — the cloud panel showed "TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'rev')", which told you the name of a property and nothing else. It now says the reply could not be read, and what usually causes that.

* This affected signing in, creating an account, loading your cloud save, uploading it and listing older cloud copies — all of them showed the same unhelpful line, or failed in an odd way, when a page pretending to be the server got in the way.

* Nothing about your save changes. This is only what you are told when the connection is being intercepted: the game already refused to trust the reply, it just described it badly.

== v0.43.3 — Big Saves Stopped Uploading When You Closed The Tab ==

* THE LAST SAVE BEFORE YOU CLOSE THE TAB NOW UPLOADS ON A BIG SAVE TOO (bug report). Once a save grew past a certain size, the goodbye upload — the one sent as the page closes or you switch away — was refused by the browser before it ever left, and the game reported it as a connection problem. The ordinary upload that runs every minute was never affected, which is why saving by hand always looked fine.

* Nothing was lost: the every-minute upload still ran, so the most a big save could ever be behind was the last minute of play. Now the goodbye upload is sent as an ordinary one when it is too big to send the fast way, so that last minute goes up as well.

* THE ERROR MESSAGE STOPPED BLAMING YOUR CONNECTION for things that were never your connection, and the sync journal in Settings now records failed uploads with what went wrong — including the case where the browser refused to send at all.

== v0.43.2 — Forged Saddles And Bardings Show Up On Your Dinos ==

* FORGED DINO GEAR IS VISIBLE IN THE STABLE AGAIN (bug report). A saddle or barding you forged from a blueprint never appeared in the [[Stable]] — not in the slot picker, and not on the dino after you fitted it. The stall just showed an empty slot.

* Nothing was lost and nothing needs re-forging: the piece WAS equipped the whole time and its power and guard were counting towards that dino in every fight, hunt and dispatch. Only the page failed to say so. Your gear locker was never touched.

* Forged pieces now sit alongside crafted ones in the saddle and barding pickers, with their ★ rolls shown, and unequipping works on either kind.

== v0.43.1 — The Bank Gets A Farming Shelf, And Sorts By Type ==

* '''Seeds and compost have their own shelf now.''' A new [[Farming]] tab in the bank holds everything you put into a plot, instead of it being lost among the berries and mushrooms on the [[Foraging]] tab. The crops you grow stay where they were — they are still food.

* '''Sort.''' TYPE NOW WORKS ON THE ALL TAB, grouping your whole bank shelf by shelf in the same order the tabs run in, alphabetically within each. Handy when you want to see everything at once but not in the order you happened to pick it up.

* There is also an Expedition tab now. Trail spoils, rift finds, artifacts and depths hauls — 82 items — had no tab of their own and could only be found by scrolling All or searching by name.

== v0.43.0 — New Accounts Can Ask For A Registration Code ==

* '''Creating an account on the web can now ask for a registration code.''' The sign-up form has a new box for one, and when the code is switched on, a new account needs it. Primal Idle is heading for Steam, and this is simply the front door being on the latch for a while — it comes off again when the web version opens up.

* IF YOU ALREADY PLAY, NOTHING CHANGES. Signing in is untouched, your save is untouched, and you will never be asked for a code — it is only ever asked when a brand-new account is being made. The box on the sign-up form is optional and can be left empty whenever the door is open, which is how it ships.

* Turned away without a code, the form now points you at the Steam page and the studio site instead of just going red.

== v0.42.1 — The Campfire Tells You What They Are Good At ==

* THE WANDERER AT THE FIRE NOW TELLS YOU WHAT THEY ARE GOOD AT BEFORE YOU DECIDE (player request). Every villager is born with a knack for one job, and until now you only found out after welcoming them in u2014 so Welcome/Turn away was a coin flip you could not read. The fire says it plainly now: "a knack for [[Mining]], +5% pace on that work". Same wanderer, same knack, same everything; you just get to see it while the choice is still yours.

* Nothing is rerolled behind the scenes, and nothing can be: a knack has always been worked out from who the person IS rather than rolled when they join, so the fire is only reading out what was already true. Turn someone away and the next arrival is a different person, exactly as before.

== v0.42.0 — Rivals Are Real Fights Now ==

* RIVALS ARE FOUGHT NOW, NOT COUNTED. Every rival in every tribe has real armour and a real health bar, and a duel plays out against them the way a hunt or an expedition does: your blow has to get through their guard, their bar falls by what you actually hit them for, and the next one steps up whole. Raids were the last corner of the game where a fight was a number ticking down.

* A RIVAL YOUR BLOW CANNOT GET THROUGH NEVER FALLS u2014 and the card says so plainly instead of quoting you a number. Come properly armed and nothing has changed: every duel is exactly the length it always was, and the loot, the cooldowns and the Apex track are untouched. Come under-armed and you will feel it, in time and in blood.

* The rivals board and the scouting sheet now quote the duel you would actually fight, armour and all, instead of an estimate from your war score alone.

== v0.39.8 — Rivals Fight Back Properly Now ==

* '''A rival you cannot hurt no longer falls eventually.''' Duels used to end after a fixed number of bouts decided by your war score u2014 which meant any raid could be ground out if you were patient enough, no matter what you were carrying. [[Rivals]] now have real armour, and your blow has to get through it: land a strike that their guard turns aside completely and they simply never go down, while every bout still costs you blood. It is the same rule hunts and expeditions have followed since the gear wall arrived; raids were the last place you could win by waiting.

* AND THE FIGHT NOW ANSWERS TO YOUR WEAPON, NOT JUST YOUR SCORE. A rivalu2019s bar falls by what you actually hit them for, so a sharper blade genuinely shortens the duel and a heavily armoured rival genuinely lengthens it. Come to a raid at the gear the ladder expects and NOTHING has changed u2014 every duel is exactly the length it always was. Turn up under-armed and you will feel it in time and in blood, which is the point.

* The rivals board and the scouting sheet quote the duel you would actually fight, armour and all u2014 not the old score-only estimate.

== v0.39.7 — The Rival Health Bar Is Real Now ==

* THE HEALTH BAR ABOVE A RIVAL IS A REAL BAR NOW, not a picture of the bout counter. It used to be drawn by working backwards from how many bouts you had left, over a health number invented purely for the drawing. The fight itself owns it now: the rival steps up with their own health, it falls as you land bouts on them, and the next one steps up whole. Nothing about how long a duel takes has changed by a single bout u2014 this is the same fight, told truthfully.

== v0.39.6 — Groundwork: Rivals Get Their Stat Blocks ==

* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Every rival fighter in the game now has a real combat block u2014 health to drain, guard your blow has to get through, and a swiftness they slip with u2014 90 of them across all 16 tribes. Nothing reads those numbers yet, so duels play exactly as they did today; this is the first of four steps towards rivals being fought the same way hunts and expeditions are, rather than counted out.

== v0.39.5 — The Two Sides Of The Fight Line Up Again ==

* '''Ticking auto-eat no longer shunts your half of the screen downwards.''' The battle view is meant to read as two matched columns — you on the left, the beast on the right, their cards starting on the same line. Turning Auto-eat on added the “next bite” bar to your side only, which pushed your Food card and everything under it 22 pixels below the enemy card, so the whole screen sat slightly crooked for anyone playing with Auto-eat on — which is most people. Both sides now hold the same line whether Auto-eat is on or off.

== v0.39.4 — The War Party Stops Quoting Nonsense ==

* '''A siege you cannot win no longer quotes you a number with seventeen digits in it.''' Every bout of a siege costs your war party blood, and a wounded member swings for nothing — so if the fort wounds your whole team, the team’s strike drops to zero and the defender can never be felled. The card said that out loud in the worst way available: “falls in 9007199254740991 bouts”. It now says the defender NEVER falls, and that this team has no strike left in it — which is your cue to withdraw and rest them rather than feed the fort more blood.

* AND THE OUTPOST LIST WARNS YOU BEFORE YOU MARCH, not after. Pick a strike team who are all still nursing wounds and the fort’s line now reads “never falls” instead of quoting the same enormous number as a plan. Hovering says why: every member of this team is wounded, so it lands nothing — rest them, or pick others.

* The rivals board and the scouting sheet learned the same manners for raid duels. Nothing there can reach the bad number today — your bare fists still count for something — but the guard is in place so a future balance pass cannot quietly turn it back on.

== v0.39.3 — The Trail Stops Lying Too ==

* A TRAIL RUN YOU CANNOT WIN NOW SAYS SO, INSTEAD OF SHOWING YOU NONSENSE. Last version taught a hopeless HUNT to stop pretending; expeditions and delves never got the same lesson, and they were in worse shape. Walk into a run whose guard your strike cannot get through and the beast’s health read “NaN”, its bar drew as a broken sliver, and the line under your health promised the Triceratops “falls in NaNs”. Every one of those now reads the plain truth: the beast sits at its full health, the bar is full, and the line says it NEVER falls — nothing gets through.

* '''And the pantry clock came back from infinity.''' On those same runs the Food card said your food lasts “Infinityd” — which read like good news and was the exact opposite, since a run with no end is precisely where you want to know how long you can stand there being bitten. It now gives you the real number: on a hopeless Grasslands patrol, 1h 47m against a 20h away cap, with the warning that you can die before you get back. That is the number that decides whether it is safe to close the tab.

* THE HEALTH BAR ON A TRAIL RUN IS NOW THE ENGINE’S OWN, not a second copy drawn from the clock. It used to work out how far along the fight was by multiplying your progress by the number of exchanges — fine on a run that ends, meaningless on one that does not, which is exactly where the NaN came from. The view now reads the same bar the fight is emptying, so what you watch and what is happening cannot drift apart. Hunts were fixed this way last version; the trail has caught up.

== v0.39.2 — A Hunt You Cannot Win Stops Pretending ==

* '''A hunt you cannot win no longer looks like one you are winning.''' If your strike could not get through a creature’s hide, the card still put on the whole show: the beast’s health bar slammed from full to EMPTY once every interval, the words “next Woolly Bison winds up” slid past underneath, and a fresh one stepped up — over and over, exactly like a kill on a loop. Nothing was dying. That empty bar was the wind-up animation blanking it, not damage; the creature was standing at full health the entire time. The wind-up is a between-KILLS flourish, so a hunt with no kill in it now plays none at all: the card sits there, dead still, showing the beast at full health, which is the truth and always was.

* '''And the clock stopped promising a kill it could not deliver.''' The line under your health read “9.0s per kill” on a creature that was never going to fall — not a glitchy number you would question, just the beast’s ordinary rate sitting there looking like a promise. It reads “never falls — nothing gets through” now. Between those two, the game was quietly telling you the truth in two small grey stat rows while showing you a kill in the two biggest moving things on the screen; both of those now say the same thing as the footnotes.

== v0.39.1 — Four Fights On The Trail ==

* '''The four trail battles are real now.''' An expedition or delve is no longer one health pool wearing four costumes — the Approach, Skirmish, Clash and Showdown are four separate enemies, each with its OWN health, attack, guard, swiftness and difficulty, escalating every time: the opener is the easy one, the Showdown is the fight. Guardian and rift-boss runs cast the boss itself as the Showdown; arenas are a single champion duel, as a pit fight should be.

* EVERY STAT DOES A JOB, AND NONE OF THEM ROLLS DICE. The enemy's attack is its hit each exchange. Its health is the bar you drain. Its GUARD blunts your strike — half its guard comes off every blow you land, so a shelled enemy takes more exchanges. Its SWIFTNESS is a dodge percent, priced in deterministically: a 12%-dodge enemy slips exactly that share of your blows on a fixed cadence you can watch — the bar stalls when it dodges — and the card's "wins in N" stays exact arithmetic, because v0.39.0's no-dice rule stands.

* '''The fight card itemizes the whole run.''' Four lines, one per enemy — its bar over your effective strike against it, how many exchanges it takes, what it hits back for — above the same run totals as before. The enemy card shows the one you are fighting RIGHT NOW: its real hit range, guard, dodge and bar, with "falls in N exchanges". The countdown under the run bar now names the current creature and counts to ITS kill, then the next one steps up.

* '''The stage pills stopped lying.''' They used to advance on even quarters of the clock; now each stage owns exactly its share of the fight — a 2-exchange Showdown holds the last third of a 6-exchange run, and the pill flips exactly when its enemy falls.

* '''Your costs at the intended gear did not move.''' The stage stats ship tuned so a keeper at the gear line for the content fights a 6-exchange run ([1, 1, 2, 2] across the four enemies) for exactly the old food bill and exactly the listed run time — the difficulty number on the card still means what it meant, and every stage's difficulty sums to it. Come in UNDER the line and the new stats bite harder than the old model did: guard and dodge punish a weak strike twice.

* Every one of the ~180 stage enemies is ordinary game data (a new stages file), generated once from each biome's real creature roster — the same species the trail has always named, now with the stats to back it — and hand-tunable per action from here on. The trail's cosmetic per-run enemy rotation retires; each run's cast is now fixed and real.

* '''No gear now means no kills.''' Your blow used to be floored at one point of damage no matter what — so bare hands against a Giganotosaurus behind 57 guard still chipped it down, and given enough food and patience a keeper in nothing at all could walk the Sundered Vale and win. The floor is gone: a strike that cannot get through the guard deals NOTHING. The bar does not move, the fight has no end, and you stand there eating while the enemy works on you. Nothing tells you off and nothing stops you — the stalled health bar and the draining pantry are the lesson.

* THE FIGHT IS A FIGHT NOW, NOT A TIMER. Blows land as the clock runs instead of the whole battle resolving in one instant when the timer filled. The enemy's health is real, it drains as you swing, and the run ends when the last one falls rather than when a clock says so. At the gear the content expects, every number is exactly what it was yesterday — same length, same damage, same loot. What changed is that you can watch it happen, and that a fight you cannot win simply never finishes.

* '''And the things that should happen before a fight now do.''' A cave torch or an arena tribute is spent when you SET OUT — win, lose or die in there, you paid to get in — and a full bank turns you back at the door instead of after a fight it could not pay you for.

* '''Excavations moved up the delving page.''' It now sits directly under the [[Mastery]] Pool, above the delve view, instead of jumping to the bottom of the page whenever no dig was running — so the maps, the ground counters and the Start-a-dig slots are in the same place every time you open [[Delving]], mid-dig or not.

* '''Rival duels bite back too.''' Raids had the same hole expeditions did: an outmatched raider paid in MORE bouts, never in harder hits — so a keeper in no gear could grind through the first nine rival tribes with zero risk, just time. Past the four-bout fair line every blow now lands harder on the same curve as expeditions, and armour blunts it the same way. Fighting rivals near your strength is unchanged; punching five tiers up is now the gamble it always claimed to be.

* '''The fight you commit to is the fight you get.''' The battle plan is now frozen the moment each run starts: a weather change, gear swap, heat shift or party reshuffle mid-run lands on the NEXT run instead of silently retiling the current one at the finish line. The card you read before starting is the fight that resolves — exactly, every time.

* '''Hunt cards stopped over-warning.''' The hunt damage range now shows the hit AFTER your Guards' shielding and the pack's soak — the same mitigation the fight actually runs — instead of the raw worst case. Raid duels got this honesty fix back in v0.36.64; hunts finally match.

* '''A raid resolves the same no matter how you watch it.''' Regeneration and buff timers now tick BETWEEN bouts exactly as they do between action completions, so a gauntlet fought in a background tab returns the identical outcome to one fought at the wheel.

* GEAR MATTERS AGAIN — YOU CAN LOSE THE HARD ONES NOW. Being under-geared used to multiply how MANY blows you took and never how hard, and since auto-eat holds you above half health, a small hit could never kill you no matter how many landed: a keeper in no gear at all could walk the Sundered Vale and win, just slowly. Now overshooting a trail's intended length makes every exchange land harder — on plan is unchanged, twice the intended length hits ×1.4, four times hits ×2 — so wildly out-of-depth runs end in a flee or a grave instead of a long stroll. ARMOUR IS WHAT BUYS THE RIGHT TO PUNCH ABOVE YOUR WEIGHT: defence blunts that penalty (and only that penalty), so for the first time a heavy loadout is what lets you attempt content above your tier. Fighting the content you are geared for costs exactly what it cost yesterday.

* '''Guardian heat works again.''' Stacking heat on a biome has been raising the difficulty number on the card while the four stage enemies quietly ignored it — the authored blocks were fixed, so a red-hot guardian fought exactly like a cold one. Heat now scales every enemy on the trail: more health, harder hits, and the per-stage difficulties still add up to the number the card shows.

* '''The scouting report was under-quoting the bill.''' On a four-fight trail it multiplied the whole run by the SOFTEST enemy's hit — so it quoted the price of the easiest fight four times over. It now adds the four fights up. The battle view's enemy bar had the same class of error: it drew a slightly different drain than the engine was actually doing, and now falls by the exact number the fight uses.

* '''The verdict caught up with the trail.''' The stat sheet's "The fight" row was still grading runs against the old single-fight yardstick, so a four-fight trail at EXACTLY the intended gear — a 6-exchange run, on plan — read "A grind — bring food". It now grades against the run's own plan: at or under the plan is a fair fight, past it is the grind, past double is ruinous (duels and arenas keep their old grading — their yardstick never moved). The row also explains itself on hover: the count is exchanges — blows traded across all four fights — not the number of enemies.

* AND HUNTING IS A FIGHT NOW TOO — THE LAST PLACE GEAR DIDN'T MATTER. A hunt granted the kill on the timer no matter what you were carrying: the creature's health was never a number the game read, so your weapon changed how the bar was DRAWN and nothing else, and a keeper in nothing at all could bring down a Woolly Bison by simply waiting. Your strike now has to get through the creature's hide. Bare hands still take everything up to the Deinosuchus in Murkwater Swamp and NOTHING from the Cave Crocodile onward; from there a weapon is the price of entry — the Dire Mammoth asks for the cheapest stone blade you can make, the Vale Colossus for a real one. Below the line the hunt still bites you and you can still stand there auto-eating: you just never kill anything, exactly as on the trail. Carry any weapon at all and your kills, XP and loot per hour are to the second what they were yesterday.

* '''And the hunt sheet stopped lying to match.''' The health bar used to drain on your raw attack with a floor under it, ignoring the hide entirely — so bare-handed you watched a bar empty while nothing died. It now falls by the exact strike the hunt itself uses, so a strike that cannot get through leaves it sitting precisely where it started. Two readouts that were quietly false went with it: the hunt sheet swore every hunt was "always winnable" and told you the creature "falls every 10.4s" — it now shows YOUR STRIKE against the hide, reads "nothing gets through" when it does not, and says the thing falls "never". The scouting report on the card says the same before you commit. Nothing blocks you and nothing scolds you: the bar that will not move and the pantry that keeps draining are the lesson.

* AND NOTHING SAYS "INFINITY×" AT YOU ANY MORE. A fight your strike cannot get through has no exchange count, and the surfaces were printing that fact as the literal word: the badge on an action card read "Infinity×", the fight row read "wins in Infinity", and a raid you brought no war score to promised to fall "in 9007199254740991 bouts". Every count now reads ∞, and the lines around it say what they mean — "never wins", "never falls", "nothing gets through" — with the scouting report and the fight card explaining that your strike is not getting through the guard and that the only thing the run spends is food.

* AND A HUNT IS PRICED LIKE A TRAIL NOW, NOT A DELIVERY. Your weapon used to decide only WHETHER a creature could die, never how fast: a keeper scraping one point past a Woolly Bisonu2019s hide killed it exactly as quickly as one who could halve it in a blow, because the kill landed on a timer either way. The creatureu2019s health is real now and your strike takes it down swing by swing, so the kill takes as long as the fight actually takes. COME PROPERLY ARMED AND NOTHING MOVES u2014 four swings is the line every hunt is tuned to, and any weapon the biome hands you is comfortably over it, so every hunting rate in the game is exactly what it was. Come under-armed and you pay in time: a stone blade at the Woolly Bison drags each kill from 9 seconds to 23. Come with nothing and it never falls at all. The Falls-in row on the card tells you the swing count before you commit, and the health bar you watch is now literally the bar the hunt is emptying u2014 not a drawing of one.

* '''And the free ride ends earlier than it did.''' The hide every wild creature wears got twice as thick (dev call, after seeing the first pass): bare hands can still fell the Compy, Titanis, Gallimimus and Pachy u2014 the whole starting ladder u2014 and stop dead at the Wild Raptor instead of carrying you all the way to the Cave Crocodile. They are slower at it than they were, mind: past the Compy a bare-handed kill drags, and the first stone blade you knap puts every one of those four back on its listed time. u201cBring a weaponu201d is a lesson you now learn at level 40 rather than level 60, and it keeps mattering: a stone blade will no longer scratch a Dire Mammoth at all, where before it managed a very slow kill. As ever this only touches keepers who turned up under-equipped u2014 the weapons each biome hands you clear its own hunts with room to spare, and nothing about a properly armed keeperu2019s rate has moved by a single point.

== v0.39.0 — Attrition — The Coin Flip Is Gone ==

* '''The coin flip is gone.''' A fight is no longer a hidden dice roll dressed up as a battle — it is attrition. The enemy has a real health bar (difficulty × 6), your gear and party land a real strike each exchange, and the fight takes exactly as many exchanges as the arithmetic says: bar ÷ strike, rounded up. Whether you win was decided by your stats when the run began; watching a fight go badly and losing anyway to a dice roll cannot happen any more, because there is no dice roll.

* '''The card tells you the whole fight before you start.''' "wins in 4 exchanges · take ~62". Strike vs bar, the exchange count, the expected damage bill, and the food math — all computed by the same function the fight itself runs, so the preview and the outcome cannot disagree. The old win% is gone from every card, sheet and scout view; a fight has a SIZE now, not odds.

* UNDER-POWERED RUNS STILL WIN — they just cost more. Come in below the intended gear and the fight runs long: more exchanges, more damage, more food, and the run itself takes proportionally longer on the clock (a 8-exchange grind takes twice the listed time). Master the content and the fight shortens to a single exchange — the run then takes its listed time, never less. Losing a run outright no longer exists.

* '''The only ways out early are the pack or the grave.''' If the pantry runs dry mid-fight and the next exchange would end you, your party tries to drag you clear — the swiftness escape roll, now the one deliberate roll left in a run, because surviving your own provisioning should not be a certainty. No party, no food, no luck: the death rules from v0.38.29 apply unchanged.

* '''Getting hurt moved to where the hurt is.''' Party injuries no longer ride lost runs (there are none) — they ride STRUGGLING wins: grind a fight out past the 4-exchange anchor and every member risks the same injury the old losses carried. Win inside the anchor and the pack walks out clean. Cave wounds still fester at double time, and Stalker's Greaves still stop that.

* '''Hunts show the real kill.''' The creature's actual health — the same number its ecology card has always listed — now drains in strikes sized by your attack, so a better weapon visibly lands fewer, bigger hits. The hunt's pace, loot and XP are untouched: the interval is still the clock, and your rates are byte-identical to before.

* '''Rival duels and sieges count bouts now.''' A rival fighter or outpost defender falls after a fixed number of bouts — at the anchor score one bout, at parity two, at half strength four — and the [[Rivals]] page and outpost picker print exactly that ("falls in 3 bouts") instead of a percentage. Every bout a defender still stands costs siege blood, so a weak war party still routs; a strong one sweeps.

* '''Dispatch missions never fail any more.''' An under-strength squad comes back LATE — up to three times the printed clock — and hurt, with the weakest members carrying the injuries, but they always bring the full haul home. The picker prices all of it before you send: the real return time, the lateness multiplier, and exactly how many will come home hurt.

* The Pearlscale Vest's old "half damage on cave losses" now halves the bill in cave fights that run past the anchor — the fights that replaced losses. The Riftbound Trinket's +6% win chance is now +6% strike, worth the same push. The battle log's third number is the fight's length in exchanges instead of odds that no longer exist.

* If a run turns hopeless mid-fight with no food and no escape, the protective stop still catches you exactly as it always has (with death rules active, death is death — v0.38.29 stands).

* The line under the run bar now says what actually ends the run: "Terror Bird falls in 12s", counting down live to the killing blow, instead of "run resolves in 12s" — the run was always over when the creature died; now the clock says so.

== v0.38.29 — Auto Eat ==

* '''Auto eat is two numbers you own now.''' Instead of one hidden rule, the Food card carries two dials: EAT AT — the health you start eating at — and HEAL TO — the health you stop at. Both open at 50%, exactly where the old hidden rule sat, so nothing about your keeper changes until you move them. A hit that would knock you out is still always answered, whatever the dials say. [[Hunting]], taming, delving, expeditions and raids all read the same two numbers.

* A BITE BAR under your health tells you when the next mouthful is coming. It drains as damage lands and empties exactly when auto-eat fires, reading "at worst 2 hits · 24s" off the real damage range and the real fight clock — worst case, always, so it is a floor the fight can beat but never break. Your health bar gains two marks to match: the bite line, and the wounded line.

* BELOW A QUARTER HEALTH YOU FIGHT WOUNDED — your defense counts for half until you climb back over the line. Health finally protects something, which is what makes a higher heal-to worth paying for: set it high enough that heal-to minus one bad hit stays clear of the line, or you fight every swing with half a guard. The damage range and win chance on screen move the moment you cross it, because they read the same number the fight rolls.

* IRON STOMACH, a new [[Amber]] Exchange upgrade, raises both ceilings — +5% eat-at and +10% heal-to per rank, five ranks, up to 75% / 100%. At rank 0 both dials sit at the free 50% you already had.

* '''You can now die while you are away.''' Until now the game quietly refused to kill you offline: the pantry ran dry, your action stopped, and the rest of the night was simply lost. Now an away window plays by the same rules as being at the keyboard — run out of food or meet a fight you cannot match and you die, losing one equipped piece and waking at full health. It can only happen ONCE per away session, because dying stops the action. Raids and sieges still never run while you are away, so they can never kill you there.

* The welcome-back screen leads with it: what killed you, how far into the night, which piece fell, and how many wins in that biome bring it home. There is a BUY IT BACK button right there — priced higher than a death at the keyboard, because you were not there to fight for it. Winning the piece back in its biome costs exactly what it always did.

* A FOOD CLOCK in the Food card says how long your pantry lasts against the away cap — "food lasts 4h 12m · away cap 18h" — and turns red when you would die before you got back. Provisioning is now a decision you make with open eyes before you leave.

* Fixed: the death screen claimed a flat "win 3 expeditions" to reclaim your gear. Reclaim has scaled with the depth of the biome that killed you since v0.36.7 — up to 12 in the deepest rift — so the screen now says the real number.

* The two Auto Eat sliders are gone — the numbers just follow Iron Stomach now. Picking them was busywork: the best setting was always the highest one you could reach, so the Food card states what you eat at and heal to, and shows how far up the Iron Stomach ladder you are. Buy a rank, both numbers rise. Nothing to fiddle with, nothing to forget.

* '''Regeneration is listed in active effects now.''' You have always healed slowly on your own — that is why your health climbs with auto-eat switched off — but no screen had ever said so, which made the checkbox look broken. It sits with your potions now, reading "Regeneration · always · +1 HP every 4s", and the number is your real one: Stone House levels and any regen brew are already in it. The Active Effects list also shows up even when you have no potions running, since regeneration is always one of them.

* Dying now shows you dying. The death screen leads with your health bar emptied to 0 before it tells you what it cost — you still wake at full health when you dismiss it, exactly as before, but the moment reads as a death instead of a number that blinked.

* Every area now has a jump button on the skill pages, including the ones you have not reached yet. The [[Expeditions]] page was drawing sections for the Sundered Vale and all three rift zones while its jump bar quietly skipped them, so the shortcut row disagreed with the page under it. Locked areas sit in the row dimmed with a padlock — the jump still works, and takes you to what waits there.

* '''Heal your whole pack without leaving the fight.''' Sagebind Salve has always patched up every dino marching with you, but the only button for it lived on the [[Stable]] page — so mid-hunt you had to walk away from the fight to use it. There is now a "Heal the pack" button in the pack box on the battle screen and on the Player page, showing how many of your dinos are hurt right now. If you have no salve banked the button greys out instead of disappearing, and hovering it (or tapping it on a phone) tells you what to brew and at what level.

* Fixed: hovering the "Heal the pack" button drew two info bubbles on top of each other, both saying the same thing. One now.

== v0.38.28 — The Game Fills The Window ==

@@ Line 2: / Line 2: @@
 The '''newest updates''' are listed first. Amber is the valley's currency.
+== v0.57.10 — Crop Mastery — The Farm Learns Your Hands ==
+* FARMING HAS MASTERIES NOW (from user testing: “easiest skill to 99, but it has no masteries”). Every crop carries its own 1-99 mastery ladder, fed by harvests — the same ladder every action has had since v0.29, transplanted to the plot grid. Slow crops pay more mastery per harvest, so every crop climbs at the same pace per plot, and growth runs around the clock — the farm learns while you hunt.
+* '''The perks are farming-shaped.''' M25 grows that crop 5% faster, M50 doubles every 10th harvest — counted, never rolled, with a “2× in 3” countdown on the plot card — M75 another 5% faster, and M99 pays +25% of the base yield through the same honest carry crafting uses. More food and more seeds from the same plots, growing with use.
+* '''Breadth clears land.''' Your total crop mastery across all fifteen crops crosses three milestones, and each one CLEARS ANOTHER FARM PLOT — up to thirteen plots with Farmland maxed. The new strip above the plots tracks the sum, and locked plots now say exactly what opens them: a Farmland level or a mastery milestone.
+* The harvest button now shows the exact count the engine will pay — doubles, the M99 carry, compost and potion yield included — instead of the base yield it used to print.
+* The welcome-back summary counts crop mastery earned while you were away, and Ascension keeps every crop ladder: your hands remember.
+== v0.57.9 — The Warden's Survey Shows You The Pile ==
+* '''The survey is a chart and one button now.''' It used to be ten rows, one per ground, each reprinting the same list of grounds you could pay with — eighteen buttons for a choice with two inputs, one click per map traded, and rows offering to sell you an 81st map of ground you were one skeleton from finishing.
+* The new header draws every ground you have opened: maps held against digs that ground still owes. That picture is the whole problem — your stock is parked at the two wings you nearly finished, and everything you still owe is somewhere else.
+* Under it, one conversion. The game picks the wing you are CLOSEST to being able to finish but cannot fund yet, tells you what your spare buys there — “85 spare maps → 17 Scorched Wash digs, enough to finish the wing” — and does the whole trade in one click. Drag the slider for less, or aim it at any other ground.
+* SPARE now means something exact: maps beyond what a wing can still use, worked out from the skeletons it owes and its own skull rate. The converter only ever spends those, so it can never eat a map you were counting on.
+* And it collapses. The Survey is housekeeping wedged between the dig picker and the cave picker, so it folds to a single line that names the opportunity — open it when you want it.
+* On a phone the chart turns on its side and the button goes full width, instead of wrapping ten rows into twenty-eight lines of near-identical blocks.
+== v0.57.8 — The Dispatch Button Tells The Truth ==
+* '''Clicking dispatch always does what it says now.''' A dino holding a gathering job has never been allowed to ride out — quit the job first — but the war-party picker didn’t know that: it offered jobbed dinos as free, the stable refused the send behind the scenes, and the picker closed as if the squad had left. Reported within the hour; fixed the same night.
+* Jobbed dinos now show dimmed in the picker with the reason — “on a job — Fish for Minnow” — exactly like injured, marching and already-dispatched dinos always have, and ★ Best three only picks dinos who can actually go.
+* And if the stable ever refuses a send for any reason, the picker now STAYS OPEN and says so, instead of quietly swallowing the click.
+== v0.57.7 — Dispatch Missions Are War Parties Now ==
+* '''Dispatch missions are kill missions now.''' The eleven gathering errands retired — your hired hands already gather in the background, so the bay flies a different flag: SIXTEEN STRIKE MISSIONS, one against every rival tribe on the ladder, from a half-hour raid on the Mudfoot Clan to a ten-hour war on the Mostly Harmless. Each strike still hauls home the tribe’s own plunder, tuned to about one hired hand’s take.
+* '''Weapons and gear drop from the kill.''' A returning war party rolls the rival’s blueprint sheet, a piece from their armoury, and their signature relic — the same odds a hands-on raid victory pays. Their war banner stays raid-only: the flag is the trophy of beating them yourself.
+* '''The strikes ride the rivals ladder.''' A strike opens once the tribe below it has fallen to you hands-on, and locked rows name exactly who to beat first. The Mudfoot strike is open from your first tame, and every mission wears its rival’s own mark.
+* Squad math is untouched — your dinos’ gear has always counted, and weakness still costs time and bruises, never the haul. A squad caught mid-flight on a retired errand steps down at the stable immediately, ready to ride out again.
+== v0.57.6 — Every Forager Comes Back With Seeds ==
+* EVERY SEED A FORAGER TURNS UP NOW DROPS AT 35%, from Crimson Berries at level 1 to World-Tree Fruit at 97. Seeds used to trickle at 4–25% depending on which patch you happened to be standing in; the farm shelf now fills at a pace you can count on.
+* '''And every foraging rung grows something.''' Plains Fiber, Fern Fiddleheads, Bog Mint and Duskplums turned up no seed at all — at the new rate that would have left them earning LESS than the rung below them, which is a trap rather than a choice. They each carry their era's seed now: Wild Seeds on the two early rungs, Thornvine in the swamp, and for Duskplums a triple handful of the Duskroot it is named after.
+== v0.57.5 — A Hunter Brings Back The Whole Kill ==
+* A HIRED HAND ON A HUNT NOW BRINGS BACK EVERYTHING THE KILL CARRIES, not just the meat — the hide, the bone, the biome material, even the rare trophy. The meat is still guaranteed; everything else is a roll, one per hunt.
+* A HUNTING HAND IS WORTH ABOUT DOUBLE A MEAT-ONLY ONE, and that holds at every rung of the ladder: each hunt's extras are tuned against its own meat, so a level-1 hunter and a level-97 hunter both roughly double rather than the deep kills running away with it. A hand never rolls better odds than your own hands do. The job sheet names the real odds before you pick ("also 17% 1× Hide, 13% 1× Bone").
+* Gathering jobs are unchanged — foraging, logging, mining and fishing hands still bank their guaranteed drops and nothing else.
+* '''The hired hands tab sorts by diet.''' Chips for Herbivores, Carnivores and Omnivores with their counts. "All" orders the whole board by diet; picking one shows just that diet. The tab keeps counting your whole crew either way.
+* The Hand Ledger and the skill-page bars tell rolled goods apart from promised ones: a guaranteed line reads "≈345/h", a rolled one reads "~66/h" in a quieter voice, with the odds behind it in the tooltip. An average is never dressed up as a promise.
+== v0.57.4 — The Hand Ledger — The Crew’s Hauls On The Books ==
+* '''The hired hands tab keeps a ledger now.''' Every background gather goes on the books — one line per hand per item, its count growing as the dino works, so you can see exactly what each hired hand has brought in. Offline hauls land there too: come back from a night away and the ledger already tells the story.
+* '''The rates sit right on top.''' The ledger head shows your whole crew’s per-item take (≈ per hour, summed across every working hand), and each line carries its hand’s own live rate while the job runs. A line whose hand has since stopped or changed jobs stays as a “past haul” — history outlives the job.
+* The old “latest gathers” chips retired in the ledger’s favor; the skill pages’ hired-hand bars still show their own recent gathers.
+== v0.57.3 — Dino Jobs — Every Dino Works Its Diet ==
+* '''Dinos have jobs now.''' Any healthy stabled dino can take its own background gathering job — not just the one buff worker per skill. HERBIVORES forage, log and mine; CARNIVORES fish and hunt; OMNIVORES do any of it. [[Hunting]] is a hired-hand trade for the first time: a carnivore on a hunt job brings home its guaranteed meat on the same no-rng background clock as every other hand (chance drops, XP and rares stay hands-on, as always).
+* THE DROVER’S PADDOCK is a new homestead structure: each of its 21 levels adds one dino job slot, so with the Foreman’s Whistle the crew ceiling climbs from 3 all the way to 24 working dinos.
+* PICKING A JOB now works like the [[Tribe]] page: the [[Stable]]’s Hired hands tab is a crew board, and each dino opens a job sheet — every trade its diet allows, banded with a “Best for them” shortlist, every rate priced for THAT dino (veteran levels and niche included), locked rows shown with their unlock reason.
+* Existing background tasks carry over automatically — the dino that held each skill’s task simply keeps it as its own job. A task the new diet rule forbids (a herbivore that had been fishing, say) stops with a note, exactly like the old boot sweeps.
+* A jobbed dino eats from its diet’s pantry like any working dino, pauses while hungry, and can’t be dispatched, stasis-cased or sent to fight while on the job — pull it off the job first (joining your pack does that automatically, as it always has for workers).
+== v0.57.2 — The Demo Fence Holds Even Against A Hand-edited Save ==
+* THE DEMO’S LEVEL FENCE NOW GATES WHAT YOU CAN DO, not just what you can gain. The save file is an editable document by design — but in the demo, a save edited past level 20 now buys you rendered numbers and nothing else: every action, crop and unlock reads your EFFECTIVE level, which rests at the fence. Everything below 20 plays exactly as before.
+* FULL-GAME PLAYERS ARE UNTOUCHED — the clamp exists only when the game is launched through the demo’s own Steam app. Beta saves, web saves and the save format itself are all exactly as they were.
+== v0.57.1 — The Demo’s Welcome Page Tells The Truth ==
+* THE DESKTOP WELCOME PAGE now speaks demo when the demo is what you launched. The old card pitched cloud accounts, web play and Settings → Cloud — none of which exist inside the demo — so it has stepped aside for the thing that IS true: this is the real valley fenced at level 20, your save lives on this machine, and buying the game lifts the fence and continues the same run. Nothing starts over.
+* The full game’s welcome page is untouched, and the Send-feedback door works in both — demo players’ bug reports land in the same inbox.
+== v0.57.0 — The Steam Demo — The Valley Up To Level 20 ==
+* '''Primal idle has a demo on steam.''' It is the whole valley up to LEVEL 20 in every skill — the same game, the same updates, the same save. Skills rest at the top of level 20 (the bar sits full; nothing is lost, nothing hoards invisibly), and everything you build carries STRAIGHT into the full game on the same machine: buy it, launch it, and your run simply continues.
+* '''The fence is honest.''' The first time a skill reaches the fence, one screen says where the valley continues — after that, capped skills wear a quiet badge and the game leaves you alone. Below level 20 nothing is squeezed: full bank, full stable, full homestead.
+* A FEW ENDGAME DOORS WAIT FOR THE FULL GAME and say so where they stand: the Alpha [[Arenas]], the [[Museum]] beyond its entry hall, the clans’ late-map outposts, and everything behind the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]].
+* '''For full-game players nothing moves.''' The fence exists only when the game is launched through the demo’s own Steam app — the game you own never caps, never badges, never pitches.
+== v0.56.1 — The Intro Film Shows Up Every Launch, And The Skip Pill Stays Put ==
+* OWNER TEST ROUND — first real Mac and Windows builds of the v0.55.15 launch pair found three field bugs the simulator never could. All three are fixed.
+* '''The film sometimes never played on mac.''' MacOS can quietly carry the "already played this launch" marker across app restarts, so the previous run ate the next one. The marker now only counts against in-app reloads (importing a save, restoring from the cloud, walking the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]]) — a real launch always opens on the film, and the welcome page got the same cure.
+* AUTOPLAY IS A LADDER NOW, NOT A COIN FLIP. If the system refuses sound-on autoplay, the film starts muted and your first click or keypress brings the sound back. If even muted playback is refused, the film waits for a touch and steps aside on its own after six seconds — never a stuck black screen.
+* '''The windows skip pill stopped vanishing.''' About a second after launch, Windows promoted the video onto a hardware layer that painted over the "Hold Esc to skip" pill (resizing the window brought it back). The film and the pill now each hold their own layer, so the pill stays put from the first frame to the last.
+== v0.56.0 — The Curator's Survey — A Finished Wing Keeps Paying ==
+* '''Finishing a museum wing used to end it.''' The [[Museum]] was the only thing in the valley that wanted a dig map, a journal page, a skull or a fossil u2014 so the moment a wing stood complete, everything that ground produced turned to vendor trash, and the Curatoru2019s Desk that bought your pages simply VANISHED off the page while the [[Delving]] panel and the [[Bank]] both went on pointing at it.
+* '''The desk changes job instead.''' A completed wingu2019s Desk stops selling skulls and starts buying your leavings: that groundu2019s dig maps, its Field Journal pages, and any duplicate skull whose skeleton already stands. Each is stamped into a CURATORu2019S SEAL u2014 maps by tier (11 at the deepest ground, 20 at the shallowest), pages at the Desku2019s own price, and a spare skull at three pagesu2019 worth, which is exactly what the dig already pays you for a duplicate.
+* THE MUSEUMu2019S PATRONS STOCK A SHELF, and amber cannot buy any of it. The [[Museum]] Annex lends you its back rooms (+4 bank slots a rank, six ranks); the Wardenu2019s Stasis Wing keeps two more dinos in amber a rank; and the DEEP SURVEY TEAM funds a permanent extra excavation crew.
+* '''That last one is the point.''' Dig slots have only ever come from the [[Delving]] ladder u2014 which stops at level 75 u2014 and one 0.2% relic, so every level after 75 added maps and no way to spend them. The Deep Survey Team is the first excavation slot in the game you can simply go and earn, and it is bought with the exact surplus those levels produced.
+* IT OPENS PER WING, not at 57/57. Every ground whose wing already stands is surveying the moment you load; the ones you are still filling keep their old Desk, unchanged, and a skull you still need can never be sold out from under you. The shelf is priced as a long tail u2014 the whole thing is roughly 335 hours of surplus u2014 and it re-stocks after the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], so the sink renews instead of running out.
+== v0.55.18 — Excavations Reach The Contract Board ==
+* '''Digs were invisible to the bounty board.''' The whole fossil chain u2014 maps, crates, skulls, the [[Museum]] u2014 sat outside the Fang Mark economy that every other activity in the valley feeds. [[Delving]] had ONE contract in thirty-three, and the board had no way to even see an excavation.
+* '''Two new writs.''' The [[Excavation]] Writ wants six digs dug out; the Deep Survey Writ wants twelve. Both are gated on [[Delving]], so they never deal to someone with no maps and one slot, and both are sized to the 12-hour rotation rather than to a caveu2019s tempo u2014 twelve is 38% of what four slots can dig on the slowest ground in the game, which leaves room for the manual collect every find needs.
+* THEY COUNT WHEN YOU DIG THE FIND OUT, not when the timer ends. A dig that finished while you were away is parked in its slot and has not counted yet u2014 the same line the Excavator track and the toast have always drawn.
+* '''And two bounties were gated on the wrong skill entirely.''' The Delveru2019s Writ has been gated on EXPEDITIONS since v0.25: it dealt to players who had never lit a torch, and withheld itself from delvers whose [[Expeditions]] lagged. The Harvest Writ was gated on [[Taming]], copied from the Tameru2019s Writ beneath it. Both now gate on the skill they actually ask for, and a new rule ties every bountyu2019s gate to its subject so a third one cannot happen quietly.
+== v0.55.17 — The Dig Picker Is Drawn Once, And Says Which Ground Still Owes You ==
+* THE SAME TEN BUTTONS, THREE TIMES OVER. The [[Excavation]] panel drew its map picker INSIDE every empty dig slot u2014 so with three slots free you got the same ten Start-a-dig buttons three times, thirty buttons deep. It is drawn once now, under the slot grid, and it starts the dig in your first free slot.
+* '''And it no longer disappears when you need it.''' The old picker lived inside empty slots, so the moment every slot was busy your whole map stock vanished from the page u2014 exactly when you want to look at it. It stays put and says "Every slot is digging u2014 collect one to start another".
+* '''The grounds that still owe you skeletons are marked.''' Every map button used to look identical, with nothing to say which ground was worth spending on. The ones whose [[Museum]] wing is unfinished now carry a count of the skeletons still missing; the rest read "this wing stands complete" on hover.
+== v0.55.16 — The Warden's Survey — Spare Dig Maps Buy The Ground You Need ==
+* PLAYER REPORT — "I have all of the museum upgrades except the last pack, so Iu2019m 52/57. But Iu2019m at level 89 and I have like 351 digging maps." Both halves of that are the same bug seen from opposite ends. Dig Site Maps drop per cave WIN and are spent per dig SLOT, and every map is locked to one biome u2014 so a cave mints its own groundu2019s maps about two and a half times faster than every slot in the game can burn them, and roughly thirty times faster across an offline night, while the one ground you still owe skeletons trickles in from somewhere else entirely. You end up drowning and starving at once.
+* THE WARDENu2019S SURVEY opens on the [[Delving]] page, under the dig slots: trade a stack of spare maps for a single map of the ground you actually need. The price is 4 maps for the shallow grounds, 5 for the middle, 7 for Cinder Terraces, Skyfall Scree and The Shattered Bed. You always lose maps on the swap and you can only survey into ground you have already opened, so it is a way to spend dead stock u2014 never a shortcut past running the right cave, which stays several times better.
+* '''The museum costs exactly what it always did.''' The survey changes WHERE a dig happens, never how many digs a skeleton takes or how long one runs: the full 57-species hall is still about 386 digs and 381 slot-hours. It also rescues the other end of the ladder u2014 the Sunken Barrow is the most expensive wing in the game and nobody at [[Delving]] 80 goes back to the Sunlit Grotto for its maps.
+* '''The fifth dig slot exists now.''' The Echo of the First Warden grants one, and the [[Excavation]] panel has never drawn it u2014 it built exactly four slots no matter what you owned, so the rarest relic in the caves did nothing at all. It appears, and a locked slot no longer invents a [[Delving]] level it cannot reach.
+* '''And the panel stopped fibbing.''' A skull you have already found is announced as the spare it is, instead of "the [[Museum]] will want this someday" u2014 which at 52/57 is nine finds in ten. Journal pages for a wing you have finished say so, rather than flashing READY at a Curatoru2019s Desk that closed when the wing did. And the headline no longer says "about one dig in twelve": the real rate runs 14% on the shallowest ground down to 8.6% on the deepest, and now it says that.
+== v0.55.15 — The Desktop Launch: An Intro Film, Then A Welcome At The Door ==
+* OWNER REQUEST — the Steam builds get their opening. Launch the Windows or macOS app and the intro cinematic plays full-screen before the valley shows. The web at primalidle.com is untouched twice over: it never plays the video, and it never downloads a byte of it — the file only ships inside the desktop bundles.
+* '''Hold esc to skip.''' A held key, never a tap — the pill in the corner fills for one second while you hold and the film steps aside; let go early and it resets. A stray keypress can never eat the intro by accident.
+* '''Then a welcome at the door.''' As the film fades, the launch lands on the sign-in screen’s sunset and rising embers with a short letter from the developer: a thank you for playing a passion project, credit to the Mostly Harmless Guild for beta testing the valley, and where Send feedback, the Discord and the wiki live (the info button, bottom right). One amber button — Enter the Valley — walks you in.
+* '''The cloud pitch on it is honest.''' A cloud account is optional: saves live on this PC and in Steam Cloud with no account at all. Creating one in Settings → Cloud opens web play at primalidle.com right now — your Steam purchase is the key, no code — and apps for iOS and Google Play come later down the road.
+* '''Both are yours to turn off.''' Settings → Game grows two desktop-only rows — "Intro video" and "Welcome page" — for anyone who wants to jump straight in. Each shows once per LAUNCH, never once per reload: importing a save, restoring from the cloud or walking the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] repeats neither.
+* '''It can never strand you on a black screen.''' A build without the film, a file that will not read, a webview that refuses autoplay — every one of those quietly steps out of the way (worst case the film plays muted), and the valley loads exactly as before.
+== v0.55.14 — Exchange Gear Beats The Forge Too, Not Just The Bench ==
+* FOLLOW-UP TO v0.55.13, AND A CORRECTION TO IT. That version made the Mark Exchangeu2019s tack beat every saddle and barding you can CRAFT or find. It missed the forge u2014 and the forge was the real rival all along, because a forged saddle takes the SAME slot as a bought one. Fitting one unequips the other; they never stack.
+* '''The test could not see it.''' Forged pieces are blueprint ROLLS, not items, so the v0.55.13 check walked right past them and stayed green while four of six Exchange pieces lost to a forge. Two of those forges need no ascension at all: a Sunstride Saddle rolls up to 17 swiftness off [[Crafting]] 60, a Frostbound Barding up to 26 guard off [[Smithing]] 70 u2014 both reachable long before you could grind the marks.
+* '''Every piece now clears the ungated forge outright.''' Huntmasteru2019s Saddle 18 swiftness / worker u00d71.30 and Trailwarden Barding 27 guard / 13 power hold the 60-mark entry pair.
+* '''And each slot keeps a crown no blueprint can take.''' Longstride Saddle 23 swiftness beats even a PRIMAL Moonshadow roll; Nightwarden Barding 35 guard beats a primal Moonlit; Duskwarden Barding 18 power beats the best Moonlit that will ever come off the anvil; Ridgeback Saddleu2019s worker u00d71.48 is untouchable by construction, because no forge can roll a worker buff at all. The top-wave forge still carries power a saddle never will, so it keeps the best TOTAL sheet u2014 the Exchange owns the records, not the game.
+* '''The rotation is 100 marks flat.''' Four one-week-in-four specialists are not a price ladder, and the old spread had Nightwarden costing 20 marks more than Duskwarden for exactly the same expedition score.
+* '''Three blurbs that were false are gone.''' V0.55.13 shipped lines claiming no crafter cut a better saddle and nothing forged matched the guard u2014 both untrue against a forge roll, and one of them named the forge directly. Two new pins now walk every Exchange piece against every ungated forge band and check each slot still holds its crown, so a blurb cannot outlive the numbers again.
+== v0.55.13 — The Exchange Saddles Show Their Stats — And Earn Them ==
+* PLAYER REPORT — "the weekly saddle doesnt show the stats". It never did. Only the two permanent exclusives LOOKED like they did, because their numbers were typed into the flavour line by hand; the weekly and this-week-only gear showed a sentence and nothing else. EVERY EXCHANGE GEAR ROW NOW PRINTS ITS STATS, read straight off the item, so it can never quote a number the item does not have.
+* '''And they were not worth the marks.''' Half the Exchange gear lost to something you could simply make. Longstride Saddle beat a [[Crafting]]-80 Skyleather Saddle by two swiftness — for a saddle that turns up one week in four. Ridgeback and Huntmasteru2019s were SLOWER than it. Duskwarden and Nightwarden both carried less guard than a smithed Moonstone Barding, while Nightwardenu2019s own description called itself the heaviest guard ever stocked.
+* '''All six pieces now top the ladder.''' Huntmasteru2019s Saddle 15 swiftness / worker u00d71.32 and Trailwarden Barding 23 guard / 13 power are the entry pair — above every craftable and every trail-cache piece, on every stat they carry. The weekly exclusives specialise from there: Longstride Saddle 20 swiftness is the fastest tack in the game, Ridgeback Saddle worker u00d71.42 the hardest-working, Duskwarden Barding 18 power the sharpest, Nightwarden Barding 30 guard the heaviest wall there is.
+* '''Priced for what they are.''' The exclusives go 45 u2192 60 marks, Ridgeback and Duskwarden 75 u2192 90, Longstride 60 u2192 80, Nightwarden 90 u2192 110. Every one still liquidates for less amber per mark than selling the marks raw, so the Exchange stays a gear shop and never an amber printer.
+* '''The ladder is pinned now.''' A test walks every Exchange gear offer against every craftable and droppable piece in the same slot and fails if one of them stops winning u2014 and a second test forbids a blurb from quoting a number the row already derives, which is how the stale "+30% worker buff, +10 swiftness" line survived the saddle it described.
+== v0.55.12 — A Tool For The Taming Skill ==
+* TESTER REQUEST — Macenzie: "I know we get tools for different skills like gathering, mining, etc to increase speed. What do you think of a something for taming." THE BOLA IS NOW ON THE TAMING PAGE, and it is a full sixth-rank ladder, not a token.
+* THREE WEIGHTED CORDS, SIX RANKS. Flint → Bronze → Iron → Silver → Obsidian → Starfall, gated at [[Taming]] 10 / 25 / 45 / 65 / 82 / 94 — the same rungs the Sickle, Axe, Pick and Rod climb. Each rank takes 4% off every taming timer, so a Starfall Bola in hand is 24% faster taming, forever.
+* '''It costs what a pick costs.''' 2,000 amber for the first rank up to 1,360,000 for the last, 2,042,000 for the full ladder — no taming discount and no taming premium. A bola is weights on a cord, so the bill is the same mineral core the other tools pay plus the cord that ties it: rope at the first two ranks, braided heavy rope at the Silver rank, and two Primal Sinew for the Starfall.
+* '''It stacks with kibble.''' The tool cut lands OUTSIDE the capped speed stacks, exactly like every other tool rank, so it multiplies with kibble mode’s 15% instead of being swallowed by a ceiling. Best case on the deepest tames — a Starfall Bola and a full kibble bowl — is a little over a third off the clock.
+* '''The speed breakdown shows it.''' Open any taming card’s timer and the Bola has its own labelled row, reading the same number the engine applies. Nothing about tame chance, stats or levels moved — this is the clock, and only the clock.
+== v0.55.11 — The Grand Hall Was Underselling Itself ==
+* '''Tester report.''' "Says 2 percent faster forever grand hall but I see 5 percent increase in drop down bonuses." Both numbers were on screen at once and they disagreed. THE 5% IS THE REAL ONE — the banner was the liar, and it has been corrected.
+* THE GRAND HALL HAS PAID 5% SINCE v0.36.8. Mounting every species in the valley makes every skill in the game work 5% faster, forever, and it has done exactly that for twenty versions. The speed breakdown you opened was reading the live multiplier straight out of the engine; the [[Museum]] page’s celebration banner was reciting a number typed into it back in v0.28.5, when the prize really was 2%, and never touched again when the balance pass raised it.
+* '''Nothing got faster and nothing got slower.''' If your hall is already open you have been collecting the full 5% all along — this is the page catching up to your save, not a buff. The dropdown was right about your character the whole time.
+* '''The banner no longer knows its own number.''' It now asks the engine what the Grand Hall is worth and prints the answer, so does the "mount all 57 to open the Grand Hall" promise on the way there. Both read whatever the game actually applies — if that value is ever tuned again, the words move with it the same day.
+== v0.55.10 — Two Maxed Bloodlines That Were Not The Same ==
+* TESTER REPORT (with screenshot): "Both of these say max bloodline but have different stats." Two Giganotosaurus, side by side in the [[Stable]], both labelled BLOODLINE MAXED u2014 one showing 127 guard, the other 114. THE LABEL WAS WRONG, NOT THE DINOS.
+* '''A bloodline hits its ceiling one stat at a time.''' Power, guard and swiftness each climb to their own wall (the speciesu2019 best roll, times five generations of imprinting, plus this lineu2019s mutations). The stall card called the WHOLE bloodline maxed the moment ANY ONE stat reached its wall u2014 so a dino finished in power and swiftness, with three points of guard still to climb, wore the same badge as one that was genuinely done.
+* '''The chip now tells the truth.''' Only a line at the wall in all three stats reads "bloodline maxed", and it wears the accent colour. Anything still climbing shows the ceiling it is climbing toward instead u2014 "breeds at 97 / 54 / 41 u00b7 ceiling 97 / 57 / 41" u2014 so two different dinos can never read as the same dino again.
+* '''Hover it for the rest.''' Which stats are finished, which are still climbing, and exactly how many points each has left to go. In the reported pair that reads "guard is 3 short of its 57 ceiling" u2014 the number you would otherwise have had to work out from two cards side by side.
+* NO STATS CHANGED, and no breeding maths changed. Every dino passes on exactly what it passed on yesterday u2014 the game was clamping correctly all along and simply describing it wrong. If you were about to shelve a "finished" parent, check it again: it may have had room left.
+== v0.55.9 — Every Skill Keeps Its Own Auto-drink ==
+* TESTER REPORT (with video): "If you click off the auto-drink in one skill, it removes the auto-drink for other skills." It did. EVERY SKILL NOW HAS ITS OWN AUTO-DRINK SWITCH, and switching one off leaves the other twelve exactly as you left them.
+* '''What was actually wrong.''' The game stored ONE auto-drink setting per potion EFFECT, and thirteen skills each have their own speed brew u2014 Miner's Brew, Chef's Tonic, Angler's Brew, Lumber Tonic and the rest all count as u201cspeedu201d. So all thirteen shared a single switch. Arming [[Mining]] lit the auto pip on [[Cooking]], [[Fishing]], [[Logging]] and everywhere else; arming a second skill silently disarmed the first; and tapping the pip off on any page took the setting away from all of them. Walking through the skill menus was enough to lose it. The four double-yield brews shared a switch the same way.
+* AN AUTO-DRINK NOW ONLY CHANGES WHEN YOU CHANGE IT, on the skill whose tile you tapped. Arm [[Mining]] and [[Cooking]] and [[Fishing]] all at once and all three keep pouring their own brew, side by side and offline, exactly as each was set.
+* XP POTIONS ARE UNCHANGED and still share one switch everywhere u2014 a Focus Tonic really is one buff no matter which page you drink it on, so one switch is the truth there. The same goes for the attack, defense, regen and crop brews. Only the effects the game runs SEPARATELY PER SKILL were split, because those were the ones being lied about.
+* '''Your existing setting survives.''' An auto-drink you armed before this update stays armed on the skill it was really pouring for, and simply stops claiming to be on for the twelve skills it never actually poured for.
+== v0.55.8 — Crafting And Alchemy Finally Get Weather ==
+* '''Tester report.''' "[[Crafting]] speed bonus is missing from weather effects." It was u2014 and so was [[Alchemy]]'s. Every other skill in the valley has had a sky that favours it since weather shipped; those two had none at all, in any weather, in any season, ever. MORNING MIST NOW SPEEDS CRAFTING BY 10% (damp air keeps cord and hide supple u2014 dry ones crack) and RAIN NOW SPEEDS ALCHEMY BY 10% (soft rainwater is the brewer's water). Both skies already existed and neither got rarer, so this is straightforwardly two skills that idle faster on days they used to ignore.
+* '''Mist and rain keep everything they already did.''' Mist still wanders prey close for a 12% double on [[Hunting]]; Rain still speeds [[Fishing]] 10% and waters your crops 12%. Nothing was moved aside to make room.
+* '''The boosts panel now names who is actually paying.''' A season's own passive u2014 Blaze speeding [[Mining]], Frost speeding [[Fishing]] u2014 rides in the same number the weather does, so on a Clear day in Blaze your Mining page said "Clear Skies u00b7 5% faster" while Clear Skies' own description reads "nothing helps; nothing hinders". It now reads "Blaze season", and when the weather AND the season both pay it names both: "Heatwave + Blaze u00b7 15% faster".
+* '''A storm's expedition bonus stopped underselling itself.''' Storms have paid the greater of +10 score or 3% of the trail's difficulty since v0.36.7, but the weather chip only ever quoted the +10 u2014 so on a difficulty-1100 trail the top bar said "+10" while the expedition page's own ledger said "+33 score", both on the same screen. The chip now states the real rule.
+* And the sky row on the hunting and expedition pages draws its proper icon instead of a raw emoji, like every other icon in the game.
+== v0.55.7 — Every Delve Wants Its Own Light ==
+* EVERY CAVE NOW BURNS ITS OWN LIGHT, and every light is its own recipe at the [[Crafting]] bench. One torch used to open all ten biome caves, which meant the deepest delve in the valley asked no more of your workshop than the first one did u2014 and Crafting had nothing to offer a delver but a better spear. Nine new lights fix that: the Pitchwood Brand, the Bogfire Lamp, the Sporelight Lamp, the Brimstone Flare, the Brinewick Lantern, the Rimeglass Lantern, the Coalheart Lantern, the Stormglass Lantern and the Voidwick Lantern, one per cave, up the ladder.
+* THE BENCH RUNG ALWAYS SITS BELOW THE CAVE IT LIGHTS u2014 [[Crafting]] 8 for a [[Delving]]-10 cave, Crafting 80 for the Delving-90 one. That gap is deliberate and it is pinned: no cave you can walk into today can be walled off tomorrow behind a bench you cannot reach, and the [[Chronicles]]' delving note (and so the Sigil, the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] and Ascension tier V behind it) can never end up locked by a Crafting level. If your Crafting trails your Delving by more than a tier, though, the deeper caves will now wait for you u2014 which is the whole point.
+* '''Your torches are not wasted.''' The Torch stays exactly what it was, keeps its [[Crafting]] 5 recipe, and still opens the Sunlit Grotto u2014 so a stack of three hundred still burns, and the tutorial quest still works.
+* THE AMBER DOOR'S DEEPLIGHT LANTERN MOVES TO CRAFTING 90, up from 60, so the last cave in the valley genuinely asks the most of your bench instead of less than four of the caves above it. THE DOOR ITSELF DOES NOT CLOSE: if you are already delving it with [[Crafting]] under 90, every lantern you have banked still burns and the Door still opens u2014 what waits is CASTING MORE, until your bench catches up. Everything else about the lantern is untouched, and 90 still sits under the Door's own [[Delving]] 95.
+* '''The caves still feed the lights they burn.''' Each new light is made of the cave ladder's own materials u2014 Stalactite Chip, then Glow Moss, then Cave Pearl, then Echo Shard u2014 and from the Cinder Vault down, every cave drops the deepest material its own light asks for. The shallower part of the bill comes from the cave one tier up. [[Amber]] Resin is still in every recipe and still comes out even, exactly as it has since v0.36.8.
+* Lights are keys, not merchandise: every one of them sells for 8 amber, far under what it costs to make, so nobody is ever tempted to vendor the way into their own cave. And nine new items means the Completion Log's Items line has nine more to find u2014 your percentage will dip by a hair until you have lit them all.
+== v0.55.6 — The Shop Shelf Keeps Its Markup For Rich Wardens Too ==
+* '''The last free-amber loop is shut.''' V0.55.5 fixed the trader's side of this; the shop had the same hole. Its shelf charges four times what an item is worth precisely so buying from it can never be a way to MAKE amber u2014 but every bonus that raised what you get PAID (the [[Ancestral Monument]], [[Amber]] Affinity, Friend of Wardens) left the shelf price flat, so at a full amber bonus that fourfold markup had quietly decayed to about two-and-a-half. Raw Meat cost 12 on the shelf and the trader would pay 13 for it.
+* SHELF PRICES NOW CARRY YOUR AMBER BONUS, exactly like the trader's do, so the markup is a true 4u00d7 at every level of wealth. As before, IN PRACTICE NOTHING CHANGES: if your income is up 55%, so is the price, and a shelf of potions costs the same share of your day's earnings that it always did.
+* '''If you have never ascended you will not see a single price move.''' The Monument alone cannot reach the level where any of this bit u2014 these loops only ever opened for wardens deep into ascension perks.
+* The shelf and the till agree, too: the price on a card now comes from the same place the purchase is charged from, so what you are quoted is what you pay.
+== v0.55.5 — The Trader's Cut Works On Amber-boosted Wardens Too ==
+* THE TRADING POST COULD BE FARMED FOR FREE AMBER, and the richer you were the better it paid. The trader's 25% cut is meant to be the reason you can't just buy from him and sell straight back u2014 but every bonus that raised what he PAYS you (the [[Ancestral Monument]], [[Amber]] Affinity, Friend of Wardens) left what he CHARGES exactly where it was. Past about +25% amber gain his cut had eaten itself, and past that he was paying more than he asked.
+* HIS PRICES NOW CARRY YOUR BONUS TOO, so the cut is a real 25% at every level of amber gain instead of only for wardens with no bonus at all. IN PRACTICE NOTHING CHANGES FOR YOU: if your amber income is up 55%, the trader's asking price is up 55%, and a day's shopping costs exactly the share of your income it always did. What stops working is buying and immediately selling for a profit u2014 which was never meant to work.
+* '''The real trade is untouched.''' Buying on a Surplus day and selling on an In-demand day is still the whole game at the [[Trading Post]], and still pays exactly what it always did u2014 the profit is in WAITING, which is what the spread was always there to insist on.
+* The same hole let the BANK outbid the trader's own asking price on nineteen of the twenty-six goods once your amber gain was maxed. That is closed by the same change.
+== v0.55.4 — Age Catalysts Drop Four Times As Often ==
+* TAKING AN OUTPOST NOW PAYS ITS AGE CATALYSTS ONE TIME IN FIVE, up from one in twenty. Everything else about them is the same: the fort still pays its OWN count when the roll lands, so a Sundered Bastion capture is still four catalysts and a Briar Den is still one u2014 depth still matters, it just no longer takes twenty banners to see any of it.
+* THE MATERIAL AGE LADDER IS GATED BEHIND THESE and nothing else drops them, which is what made a 5% roll bite so hard. A masterwork blueprint you may never need is a fine one-in-twenty chase; the currency your whole camp advance waits on is not.
+* THE BLUEPRINTS AND GEAR ARE UNCHANGED at 5% u2014 the catalysts used to share that number and now have their own, so the two can move apart from here.
+* '''The card tells the truth about it.''' An outpost's catalyst chip reads "20% per capture" because it now takes its odds from the very roll the strike makes, not from the blueprint rate sitting next to it.
+== v0.55.3 — Two Achievements Were Counting The Old Roster ==
+* '''The curator card argued with its own progress bar.''' It read "Mount all 54 skeletons and open the Grand Hall" while the bar underneath filled towards 57 u2014 46/57, not 46/54. The bar was right: there are 57 species in the valley, and one skeleton for each. Only the sentence was stale.
+* MASTER TAMER HAD THE SAME ROT, QUIETLY. "Tame all 54 species" also wanted 57. That one had no visible mismatch to give it away, so it had been wrong for longer without anyone being able to see it.
+* NOTHING ABOUT EITHER GOAL CHANGED u2014 both already required 57, and every mounted skeleton and tamed species you have still counts exactly as it did. The cards simply say the true number now.
+* '''And they will keep saying it.''' Both sentences are generated from the live creature list instead of typed by hand, so the next species to join the valley moves the wording along with the goal.
+== v0.55.2 — The Trader Brings As Much As He Takes ==
+* '''The trading post now stocks as much as it buys.''' Every one of the 26 goods had a daily BUY cap well under its SELL cap u2014 the trader would take 6 Sky Opals off you but only ever had 3 to hand over, 4 Abyssal [[Amber]] against 2. Both numbers are now the same on every row, so whichever side of the counter you are on, the day's cap is the same.
+* '''It lands hardest where the shelf was barest.''' Sky Opal 3 u2192 6, Abyssal [[Amber]] 2 u2192 4, Ember Topaz 5 u2192 8, Starfall Melon 5 u2192 8, Vale Heartfruit 6 u2192 10, Deep Sapphire 6 u2192 10, Moonstone 8 u2192 12. The gems were the point of the change: buying one on a Surplus day and selling it on an In-demand day is the whole trade, and a shelf holding two barely let you make it.
+* '''The workhorses got deeper too.''' Iron Ore and Flamegrain 30 u2192 45, Redwood Log 24 u2192 36, Cloudbean 20 u2192 30, [[Amber]] Resin and Frostgourd 15 u2192 24, Echo Shard 12 u2192 20, Skyfruit 10 u2192 16 u2014 fewer gathering trips when the recipe wants one more stack. The early rows climb as well: Gourd and Raw Meat to 100, Sunroot and Hide to 80.
+* '''Nothing else moved.''' Prices, the Surplus/In-demand bands, the amounts the trader will buy, the special orders, and the Trader's Charter's +25% per rank are all exactly as they were u2014 and the Charter still multiplies these new numbers, so a rank-4 Charter doubles every one of them.
+== v0.55.1 — The Two Vault Ladders, Retuned ==
+* THE REINFORCED VAULT NOW PAYS +3 SLOTS A RANK, up from +2, at exactly the prices it always charged u2014 and every rank you already own counts. A rank-9 vault jumps from +18 stacks to +27 on the spot; a maxed rank-100 one from +200 to +300. The [[Amber]] Exchange's bank line was the cheapest slot in the game and the slowest to matter; now it moves half again as fast for the same amber.
+* THE MASTER VAULT SETTLES AT +6 A RANK, down from +8. The [[Exotic Broker]] still deals in double the Exchange's volume per rank, but the two ladders now read as one line rather than the tier-1 vault being a rounding error next to it. A maxed rank-49 Master Vault holds +294 stacks instead of +392. Prices are untouched there too.
+* '''At the very top the two moves all but cancel.''' Everything maxed is 725 stacks, up from 723 (32 base + 99 Storage Hut levels + 300 Exchange + 294 Broker). Below the ceiling it depends which line you bought u2014 if you went deep into the Broker without the Exchange ladder behind it, your cap comes down.
+* '''Nothing in your bank is lost if that happens.''' Everything stays exactly where it is; you simply cannot open a NEW stack until you are back under the cap. Selling or using anything you already hold frees you up straight away, and the next Exchange rank is cheap.
+== v0.55.0 — Crafted Armour Is Worth Wearing Again ==
+* '''Every piece of armour you make just got three times better.''' Hide Vest goes from 3 defense to 9 (plus 2 attack), Hide Leggings from 5 to 11, Iron Plate from 8 to 26, Obsidian Plate from 15 to 53 u2014 nineteen pieces in all, across [[Crafting]] and [[Smithing]]. The rule they now follow is the one the game always meant to: what you can MAKE should be about as good as what DROPS one biome back. Always worth wearing on the way somewhere, never better than the reward for getting there.
+* This is the other half of v0.54.9. That version made Hide Leggings possible to build; the trouble was that a def-5 legging was worse than the loot lying around where its materials came from, so there was little reason to bother. [[Crafting]] armour had been sitting at roughly a THIRD of its intended strength since v0.36.58, and nothing measured it u2014 the tests checked that each tier beat the one below and that drop sets stayed ahead, both of which a far-too-weak ladder passes perfectly.
+* '''Crafting and smithing now feel different.''' A [[Crafting]] piece is light: it spends a quarter of its strength on attack, so Fiber Tunic is 4 attack / 20 defense. A [[Smithing]] piece is heavy and pure defense u2014 Iron Plate is a flat 26. Same total, spent two ways; pick the line that suits you.
+* '''Mostly harmless hit the gym.''' With everyone's gear this much better the final rival gauntlet would have stopped being the wall it is meant to be, so the [MH] crew are about 10% tougher across the board u2014 Keltar's crown now costs what it always did.
+* Your existing gear upgraded itself. Armour is stored by name, not by numbers, so whatever is on your character right now is already the new, better version.
+== v0.54.9 — Hide Gear No Longer Needs Cave-deep Materials ==
+* '''Starter armour is starter armour again.''' Stitch Hide Leggings sits at [[Crafting]] 32 and gives 5 defense u2014 but it was asking for Deepchitin, which only drops in the Cavern Depths. Getting there meant [[Hunting]] 60, or three guardians down and [[Expeditions]] 30, by which point the Depths are handing you a 20-defense set for free. Hide Vest, Wooden Shield, Bone Helm, Copper Cap, Bronze Helm, Bronze Shield and Bronze Greaves were all locked the same way: the gear you make to reach a place was sitting behind reaching it.
+* Every crafted armour recipe now asks for a material you could already have gone and got at that recipe's own level. The whole low ladder u2014 everything from Copper Cap at 25 up to Bronze Greaves at 48 u2014 takes RIDGEPLATE, a new Redwood Wilds plate that drops from Redwood hunts (from [[Hunting]] 25) and the Redwood patrol ([[Expeditions]] 15). Fiber Tunic and Iron Plate take Bogscale, Iron Helm takes Deepchitin, and the rest of the ladder steps up one biome at a time from there. The deep materials keep their place at the top, where the recipes that want them are already past them.
+* Because the materials got closer to home, the recipes also got cheaper: Bone Helm's bill drops from 3 Slagplate to 2 Ridgeplate, Fiber Tunic's from 3 Reefshell to 2 Bogscale. Mangrove-Frame Shield moved from [[Crafting]] 63 to 66 so it sits at or above the Slagplate it now asks for, instead of reaching two biomes past the swamp it makes you stand in.
+== v0.54.8 — Delves Are Counted As Delves ==
+* '''Your away report knows the difference now.''' A night spent underground used to come back reading "[[Expeditions]] — 381 won", even if you never set foot on a surface expedition: every cave delve was being added to the expedition tally. Delves now get their OWN row in the "While you were away" summary, with their own wins and their own escapes, and the Expeditions row counts only the expeditions you actually ran. Nothing about the runs themselves changed — the loot, the XP and your contract progress were always split correctly; it was only the report that lumped them together.
+* The injury lines under that summary also stopped blaming a loss that never happened. Since runs stopped being lost outright, wounds come from fights ground out the hard way, so the line now says so instead of "injured on a lost expedition".
+== v0.54.7 — Send Feedback From Inside The Game ==
+* TALK TO US, RIGHT FROM THE VALLEY. The info button's panel (bottom-right corner) grew a SEND FEEDBACK row: write what broke or what should exist, and it lands straight in the team's inbox at hello@replyallgames.com. Your email rides along so we can reply — prefilled if you're signed in — and "Attach my current save" (on by default, untick it if you'd rather not) sends the exact state you're looking at, which is the single most useful thing a bug report can carry. Steam-linked accounts are tagged so we can find you there too.
+== v0.54.6 — The Rite Of Refinement Shows Its Buttons ==
+* PICK YOUR PRICE, VISIBLY. The Rite of Refinement's two payment choices — the rare-material bill or a Quality Whetstone — were always clickable, but they dressed like plain text, so nothing said "choose one." They now wear proper button chrome, matching the Take off / Rite / Salvage row above them: the material bill in the green go-ahead style, both lighting up on hover.
+== v0.54.5 — The Catalyst Owns Up To A Dry Clutch ==
+* '''No more silent misses.''' Arm a Primal Catalyst, hatch the clutch, see no mutation — and until today the game said nothing, which read as "the Catalyst did nothing." It always did its job: it AIMS the mutation roll, it never forces one (except the pity clutch). Now a Catalyst-armed clutch that rolls dry says so in a toast — which stat it was set on, how deep your dry streak runs, and when the pity guarantee lands. A mutated clutch still announces the mutation itself, exactly as before.
+* Mutation toasts also stopped mumbling: they used to sign off with a stray "+0 amber · title unlocked" instead of their own words. Fixed.
+== v0.54.4 — The Primal Catalyst Walks Through The Door ==
+* '''Your catalyst hoard is safe now.''' The Primal Catalyst has whispered "it will matter enormously, someday soon" since long before the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] existed — but its only use, aiming Mutation Lines clutches, unlocks two walks in, and until today the walk wiped your hoard with the rest of the bank. No more: Catalysts now carry through EVERY ascension at full stack, the Ledger of the Door says so, and the item itself now promises it. Collect with confidence.
+== v0.54.3 — The Coach Stays Home After The Amber Door ==
+* '''No more berry lessons for veterans.''' Ascending resets the First Steps quest chain with the rest of the run — and the Getting Started coach read that as "brand-new player" and popped up with step 1 of 6. Anyone who has walked the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] has definitionally finished the game once; the coach now checks your ascension count and never triggers past the first walk.
+== v0.54.2 — The Cloud Stops Arguing With The Amber Door ==
+* '''Ascending no longer trips the save picker.''' Walking the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] starts a fresh run on purpose — but the cloud-sync safety net read those small new numbers as "you lost 169 million XP" and recommended your own past. The sync brain now counts ASCENSIONS FIRST: your ascended save is recognized as the future it is, the picker stays closed after a walk, and if it ever does appear (real progress from another device) it shows an Ascensions row, explains which side walked the Door, and never red-flags your prestige as "far less progress".
+* '''You arrive through the door now.''' Ascending lands on a proper arrival — a wash of amber light, the Sparks you banked, and a reminder that your old valley is archived on this device (Settings → restore can always bring it back).
+== v0.54.1 — The Amber Door Looks Pressable ==
+* '''The door is a button now.''' "Approach the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]]", "Arm the Door" and "Walk through the Amber Door" rendered as bare lines of text — the most momentous press in the game gave no hint it could be pressed. All three now wear real button chrome: raised, amber-edged, glowing on hover, and the final walk sits dimmed until you arm it.
+== v0.54.0 — NICHES — Every Species Gets A Job, And The Staircase Is Complete ==
+* '''Every species gets a job.''' For everyone past their FOURTH walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], 35 species now wear a JOB TITLE on their card — a fact about the species, printed plainly with its stars: GATHER SPECIALISTS for the four hired-hand skills, HAULERS and PATHFINDERS for dispatch squads, and the EGG TENDER. Every one of the 13 species the min-maxers politely called dead tames carries at least two stars. Every tame matters again.
+* '''The specialists work faster.''' A hired hand of a matching species works 20/40/60% faster on its base pace by stars — under a hard honesty ceiling of 0.45× your own pace, now real engine math: idle NEVER beats playing. The skill page bar wears the chip, and the hourly numbers already include it.
+* SQUADS GET SMARTER, NOT BIGGER. The squad’s best HAULER brings home 8/16/25% more of a mission’s guaranteed haul; its best PATHFINDER cuts the trip 5/10/15%, already in the countdown you watch. Only the best of each counts — no stacking puzzle, and the dispatch sheet names exactly who and how much.
+* THE OVIRAPTOR’S AURA, MADE OFFICIAL. Egg Tenders cut every egg-lay timer 15/25/40% by stars — and the Oviraptor formalizes at 2★, EXACTLY its famous −25%, so nothing changes for a single stable today. The egg ledger finally names who is tending.
+* A new score row for your next walk: 25 points per NICHED SPECIES standing in your stable or stasis when you ascend — breadth, the thing the Census taught you to build, finally pays.
+* Below four ascensions nothing changes: same intervals, same hauls, same timers, byte for byte. And with this, THE POST-ASCENSION STAIRCASE IS COMPLETE — Rift Ranks, the Bounty Board, the Completion Log, Mutation Lines, Item Quality, and Niches: six systems, one per walk through the Door.
+== v0.53.1 — Groundwork: Every Species Learns Its Job ==
+* '''Groundwork for niches.''' The staircase’s sixth and FINAL system — the count-4 finale — is wired in under the floorboards: 35 species carry a JOB now (Gather specialists for the four hired-hand skills, Haulers and Pathfinders for dispatch squads, and the Tender), every one of the 13 forgotten tames among them. The honesty ceiling on hired hands becomes real engine math, and a new score row will pay 25 per niched species you keep. None of it is visible yet — the star chips and crew hints arrive with their own update.
+* For everyone below four ascensions — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same intervals, same hauls, same egg timers, byte for byte.
+== v0.53.0 — ITEM QUALITY — The Forge’s 1% And The Rite That Chases It ==
+* '''The forge learns perfection.''' For everyone past their THIRD walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], every cast now has four grades instead of three: 70% Common, 24% Fine, 5% Masterwork — and at the very top of the band, the 1% PRIMAL FORGED. A primal piece BEATS the Primal set piece in its slot, glows amber wherever its name appears, and is the only way past the gear the Door already gave you.
+* '''The rite of refinement.''' Any forged piece you own — in the locker, on your back, or fitted to a dino — can be re-cast IN PLACE: pay 15,000 amber plus HALF the blueprint’s rare bill (exactly what salvage would return), or burn ONE Quality Whetstone instead, and the forge rolls the piece fresh. You keep the BETTER of the two casts, always — the Rite never hands back a downgrade, and your fitted gear never leaves its slot. No XP, no locker shuffle: the forge’s endgame is the amber, the mats, and the 1%.
+* '''The whetstone finally cuts.''' The Quality Whetstone — stocked at the [[Rifts#The Rift Bazaar|Rift Bazaar]] and the Bounty Exchange since the staircase opened — now has its verb, and a third source: every α-rank rift boss win has an 8% chance to drop one.
+* SEVEN TOP BLUEPRINTS, ONE PER SLOT. Valeglass Warblade, Riftwarden Aegis, Sky-Tempered Casque, Vale-Heart Cuirass, Stormstride Greaves, Moonshadow Saddle and Moonlit Barding — levels 88–99 across [[Smithing]] and [[Crafting]], sheets sold one-off at the [[Rifts#The Rift Bazaar|Rift Bazaar]] at count 3. Each one’s PRIMAL window is the only cast that out-rolls the matching Primal set piece; a masterwork merely ties it. The 90-to-99 forge grind finally has a reason.
+* TWO LIFETIME TITLES ride the anvil — PRIMAL SMITH at your first primal cast, THE VALE’S OWN MAKER at six (one for every forged slot) — plus a new score row for your next walk: 75 points per lifetime primal cast.
+* Below three ascensions the forge does not change: same casts, same odds, byte for byte.
+== v0.52.1 — Groundwork: The Forge Learns What Perfection Is Called ==
+* '''Groundwork for item quality.''' The staircase’s fifth system — the count-3 forge endgame — is wired in under the floorboards: the 1% PRIMAL FORGED grade at the very top of every blueprint’s range, the RITE OF REFINEMENT (re-cast a piece you own and keep the better roll, never the worse), the Quality Whetstone’s long-promised verb plus its third source, seven TOP-TIER BLUEPRINTS at levels 88–99, and two new lifetime titles. None of it is visible yet — the Rite and the new grade arrive on the forge with their own update.
+* For everyone below three ascensions — which today is everyone — the forge does not change: same casts, same odds, byte for byte.
+== v0.52.0 — MUTATION LINES — Breeding Finally Has A Finish Line ==
+* '''The bloodlines awaken.''' For everyone past their SECOND walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], the [[Stable]]’s breeding pen learns lineage: every pairing tracks a MOTHER LINE and a FATHER LINE, each with its own visible counter to 20. Each clutch, each unfinished side has a 6% chance to mutate — +2, permanently, to one of the four stats. And HEALTH CAN FINALLY MUTATE.
+* '''The game can never quietly rob you.''' Every 12th dry clutch of the same pairing is GUARANTEED to mutate, and the dry counter is on screen — on the pen while a clutch runs, and the moment you pick a pair.
+* '''Aim the mutation.''' The Primal Catalyst — hoarded since the breeders first whispered about it — is burned at clutch start to land that clutch’s mutations on the stat YOU choose. The smart play writes itself: arm it on the guaranteed 12th clutch.
+* '''Taming 90 opens a second pen.''' Two pairings at once, twice the line’s pace — the 90-to-99 grind finally has a parallel project.
+* '''The dynasty is the summit.''' A side at 20 is finished; at a combined depth of 40 a pairing goes sterile — the 20×20 DYNASTY, worth about +80 on a chosen stat, is a real finish line, not another treadmill. Every dino’s card wears its line badge and its bloodline’s own colour; the detail card itemizes exactly what the line added, stat by stat.
+* Your current dinos lose nothing: every stat stays, every old mutation stays baked in, and both counters start clean. TWO LIFETIME TITLES ride the ladder — LINE KEEPER at a finished line, DYNAST at the summit — plus a new score row for your next walk: 15 points per mutation on your deepest bloodline.
+* Below two ascensions breeding does not change: same rolls, same odds, byte for byte. The nursery flow you know — egg, care prompts, imprint, graduate — does not change at all.
+== v0.51.1 — Groundwork: The Bloodlines Learn To Remember ==
+* '''Groundwork for mutation lines.''' The staircase’s fourth system — the count-2 breeding redesign — is wired in under the floorboards: mother and father lines with visible counters to 20, a 6% chance per side per clutch, +2 flat to one of FOUR stats (health finally included), a forced mutation every 12th dry clutch of a pairing, the Primal Catalyst’s long-promised verb, a second breeding pen at [[Taming]] 90, and a real finish line at the 20×20 Dynasty. None of it is visible yet — the bloodline panel arrives on the [[Stable]] page with its own update.
+* For everyone below two ascensions — which today is everyone — breeding does not change: same rolls, same odds, byte for byte.
+== v0.51.0 — THE WHOLE JOURNEY — The Staircase’s Last Step ==
+* '''The valley keeps your score.''' For everyone past the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], the Completion Log now opens with THE WHOLE JOURNEY: one honest percent for everything you have ever done — the plain average of five bars for SKILLS, MASTERY, COLLECTION, BESTIARY and FEATS, recomputed live from your save and never stored. The log counts everything the Census ignores, and gates nothing.
+* FIVE RANKS wait along it: WAYFINDER at 25%, CHRONICLER at 50% (+1% all skill XP), VALLEY ELDER at 75% (+2%, replacing), PRIMAL SCHOLAR at 90% (+3%, replacing), and THE COMPLEAT PRIMALIST at 100%. Only your best rank counts, and it is remembered FOREVER — ascending resets your skills, never your rank.
+* '''The rewards show their face.''' Primal Scholar GILDS the whole panel in amber. The summit grants the BANNER OF THE VALE — +15 expedition score from the bank, a Trophy Case heirloom that survives every ascension. Two lifetime titles ride the ladder: Wayfinder at rank 1 and The Compleat Primalist at the top.
+* '''The xp ledger comes clean.''' The skill-page buff drawer now itemizes every XP source by name — potions, Ascension perks & tiers, and your Log rank — and the total is exactly their sum. (Ascension XP was always paid correctly; the drawer just never quoted it. Now it does.)
+* Below one ascension nothing changes — same numbers, same odds, byte for byte. With this, all three rungs of the first staircase are open: Rift Ranks, the Bounty Board, and the Completion Log.
+== v0.50.1 — Groundwork: The Valley Starts Counting Your Whole Journey ==
+* '''Groundwork for completion log ranks.''' The last of the first staircase’s three systems is wired in under the floorboards: one overall completion percent averaging five live axes — Skills, [[Mastery]], Collection, Bestiary, Feats — with five ranks along it, two new lifetime titles, and the Banner of the Vale waiting at the summit. None of it is visible yet — the log ranks arrive on the completion page with their own update.
+* For everyone below one ascension — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same numbers, same odds, byte for byte.
+== v0.50.0 — THE WARDEN'S BOUNTY BOARD — The Staircase's Second Step ==
+* '''The wardens are hiring.''' For everyone past the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], a bounty office opens on the [[Hunting]] page: hold one bounty at a time, pick your TIER, and the board deals the quarry — cull ten of them for a flat purse of WARDEN’S MARKS. The deck is fixed: reloading never rerolls a deal, and walking away burns it.
+* FIVE TIERS climb with your [[Hunting]] level, exactly the ladder your new cycle re-climbs: Novice at level 1 (free, 21 Marks) · Seasoned 35 (95) · Veteran 55 (192) · Elite 75 (368) · Apex at 90 with the Vale guardian down (554). Taking is always free — each tier’s fee is the price of ABANDONING, never more than you hold.
+* '''The hunt leans your way.''' While a bounty is live, its target pays +25% [[Hunting]] XP — the card shows the boosted number — and alpha prey cross your path half again as often. Your target’s card wears a bounty chip counting the cull.
+* THE BOUNTY EXCHANGE spends Marks: the AUTO BOUNTY LEDGER (6,000 — finished bounties chain straight into the next), the WARDEN’S LONGSPEAR (3,000 — hunts against your target run 15% faster while it’s in hand), the TROPHY HARNESS (2,400 — alphas half again as often anywhere, worn), the WARDEN’S STANDARD (1,500 — +10 expedition score from the bank), Quality Whetstones and Primal Catalysts for the systems still coming, and Ration Crates of salted meat. Everything the Exchange sells survives future ascensions in the Trophy Case.
+* '''Two lifetime titles.''' CULLER at 10,000 lifetime Marks and WARDEN OF THE VALE at 25,000. Lifetime means lifetime — the record spans every ascension, and neither can ever gate the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]].
+* '''New score to chase.''' Every 50 lifetime Marks is a point toward your next walk — the long title alone is worth 500.
+* Below one ascension nothing changes — same hunts, same drops, same odds, byte for byte. The staircase’s next rung, Completion Log ranks, arrives as its own update.
+== v0.49.2 — Groundwork: The Wardens Post Their First Bounties ==
+* '''Groundwork for the bounty board.''' The second post-Ascension system is now wired in under the floorboards: the Warden’s Bounty Board’s five-tier ladder, its Marks currency, the Bounty Exchange and its gear, and two new lifetime titles. None of it is visible yet — every piece waits for a walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], and the board itself arrives on the [[Hunting]] page with its own update.
+* For everyone below one ascension — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same hunts, same drops, same odds, byte for byte.
+== v0.49.1 — Under The Floorboards: One Ledger Of Where Every Item Goes ==
+* No gameplay change — this is plumbing, and honest plumbing deserves a note. The game now keeps ONE shared ledger of what consumes every item (bills, tool ranks, camp costs, museum skeletons, planting, pantries, tributes, bank passives, quest holds), where before two separate copies of that knowledge could quietly disagree.
+* The hoard-or-sell verdict on every bank tooltip and the item flow reference chart now read from that same ledger, so they can never again contradict each other about whether something has a job.
+* Nothing about drops, recipes, prices or odds moved — the item flow chart regenerated byte-identical, and the sell-freely list is unchanged, item for item.
+== v0.49.0 — RIFT RANKS — The Staircase Begins ==
+* '''The first step of the staircase.''' For everyone who has walked the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], the three rift zones reveal what was always underneath: today’s four boss fights were only GAMMA RANK. Two harder cuts open above each — BETA at 1.5× difficulty paying 45 Rift Shards, ALPHA at 2× paying 75 — listed under their zone exactly like arena tiers, with mastery, tooltips and the battle screen all working unchanged.
+* '''Harder does not mean unfair.''' A rank’s damage arrives in more, smaller strikes: the worst single hit at Alpha is the same size as at Gamma — the fight is longer, never spikier. That promise is enforced by the balance suite, not just written here.
+* '''Earn your way up.''' Beta reveals after 8 wins against that boss; Alpha after 8 Beta wins. Every rank card names exactly where you stand — “Win it 8× to reveal — 3/8” — and every boss card now counts its wins.
+* '''Rift sigils.''' Every Beta or Alpha attempt costs one sigil, minted automatically every 12 rift patrol wins — the rank row’s chip tracks your purse and the next mint. The Sigil Press (1,800 shards, one-off) quickens the mint to every 10.
+* '''The riftheart relic.''' Alpha bosses alone carry it: a 6% drop, guaranteed by your 25th Alpha win, worth 8,000 amber — and held, it steadies every rift fight (+25 score, its own line in the strength breakdown). It survives future ascensions in the Trophy Case.
+* '''The bazaar grows.''' Three offers appear at count 1: the Quality Whetstone (120) and Primal Catalyst (400) — fuels for staircase systems still to come, worth hoarding now — and the Sigil Press (1,800).
+* '''New score to chase.''' Rank first-clears feed your ascension score: 60 per Beta, 100 per Alpha — 640 points toward the next walk through the Door.
+* Below one ascension nothing changes — same fights, same drops, same odds, byte for byte. The staircase’s next rungs, the Warden’s Bounty Board and Completion Log ranks, arrive as their own updates.
+== v0.48.2 — Groundwork: The Rifts Learn About Ranks ==
+* '''Groundwork for rift ranks.''' The machinery for the first post-Ascension system is now in place under the floorboards: Beta and Alpha versions of the four rift boss fights, the Rift Sigil economy that will meter attempts, the Riftheart Relic’s chase, and three new [[Rifts#The Rift Bazaar|Rift Bazaar]] offers. None of it is visible yet — every piece waits for your first walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]], and the full reveal ships with its own update.
+* For everyone below one ascension — which today is everyone — nothing changes: same fights, same drops, same odds, byte for byte.
+== v0.48.1 — The Drover's Drills Card Stops Exaggerating ==
+* '''The drover’s drills card told an old story.''' It still promised “each drill adds +5% of hands-on pace” — the worker-rates update trimmed the two drills to +2% and +1.5% a while ago, and the card never heard. It now reads the real number for the exact drill you are about to buy, straight from the data, so it can never drift again. The drills themselves never changed here — only the words. The “they work at X% now” half was always honest.
+* The rest of the camp and hired-hand copy was audited against the worker-rates plan at the same time: every other number a tooltip or card quotes (the kit soft cap, the furnace speed, the pace-share pile) already derives from live data and matched.
+== v0.48.0 — PRIMAL ASCENSION — The Amber Door Opens ==
+* '''The amber door opens.''' Primal Ascension is here: the valley’s true endgame. Once you have finished everything the Warden’s Census counts — every skill at 99, every species, the museum, every quest, every chronicle, every Guardian, arena tier and rift boss, and (almost) every achievement — you may walk through the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]]: your run resets, and permanent power follows you out the other side. Nobody is ever forced through; until you qualify, the new Ascension page is a completion tracker, not a button.
+* '''The warden’s census.''' The Ascension page appears once all ten Guardians have fallen, showing a live checklist of 100% completion. Every line derives from the game’s real content, so future updates raise the bar for anyone who hasn’t crossed it. You only prove 100% once — after that, the Door stays earned forever, and later walks just need the Guardians re-felled and a rising score bar beaten.
+* '''Amber sparks.''' Everything you have ever done feeds one score, shown row by row — and the rows always sum to exactly the total. Sparks pay one-for-one on NEW high water only: nothing pays twice, and rebuilding a reset system to where it was pays nothing until you push past it.
+* '''The perk shop.''' Fifteen permanent perks, 40,000 Sparks for the full catalog — faster actions, deeper memory, richer amber, a head-start kit, preserved companions and more. Every bonus is its own labeled line outside every cap in the game, so every rank you ever buy always does something. That promise is written on the shop page and enforced by a test.
+* '''Amber bond.''' Chosen companions survive the reset inside the stasis vault, held in amber — they keep their levels, imprint and name, and step out as you rebuild stable space. The bond starts small (at most 4 on your first walk, even at max rank) and deepens by one with every ascension.
+* '''Ascension tiers.''' Five free bonuses that arrive automatically as your count grows, from Echo of the Door (+5% all XP) to Warden Ascendant — which also demands The Sigil.
+* '''The trophy case.''' Nothing crafted is ever lost: The Towel, the Don’t-Panic Pendant, the Improbability Charm, every war banner, the depths relics, the quest trinkets and the rift uniques all survive the wipe and keep working.
+* '''The ledger of the door.''' Ascension is irreversible, so the confirmation is a full-screen ledger — LOST, KEPT, GAINED — generated from the very list the engine resets, with your live numbers. On your first walk you type ASCEND to confirm, and a complete copy of your save is archived on this device first (Settings → restore), so a misclick can never destroy a year-long run. The Door also refuses politely while anything is in flight — a fight, a raid, a squad, a dig, a clutch — and names the blocker.
+* SIX NEW ACHIEVEMENTS wait beyond the Door, none of which count toward the Census — an achievement that requires ascending can never gate the first ascension. Every Spark Spent is, quite deliberately, the longest chase in the game.
+* For everyone else: nothing changes. A player who never touches the Door keeps playing exactly the game that existed yesterday, byte for byte.
+== v0.47.11 — Groundwork: The Amber Door Gets Its Face ==
+* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Primal Ascension step three of four: the art. Twenty-eight new hand-drawn icons join the registry — the [[Caves#The [[Amber]] Door|Amber Door]] sigil, the Amber Spark, all fifteen perks, the five tier medallions, and the six achievement marks — drawn in the same flat, palette-only style as every other icon in the game.
+* Nothing shows them yet: no page, no shop, no ceremony references a single one of them. They are in place so the final step — the Ascension page itself — arrives as pure wiring instead of a mountain of art and logic in one change.
+* One step remains: the page and the ceremony.
+== v0.47.10 — Groundwork: The Amber Door Learns Its Prices ==
+* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Primal Ascension step two of four: the numbers. The fifteen permanent perks and their Spark prices (40,000 for the full catalog), the five free tier bonuses, the score weights behind every row of the breakdown, and the Trophy Case list — read from the game’s own item data, so any future one-of-a-kind effect item joins it automatically.
+* Every perk is now wired into the exact spot in the game where its bonus will apply — action speed outside every cap so every rank always delivers, XP, amber, expedition score, offline hours, injury healing measured separately from Sturdy Bandages, camp and hired-hand pace with its own 20% family cap, and the wanderer gate with its built-in guard. All of it reads exactly zero until someone actually walks through the Door, which is still impossible: the page and the ceremony are step four.
+* The balance report gained a whole section grading the new economy — the catalog total, every speed cap, the honest gap between the catalog and a lifetime of Sparks, and the rising bar’s exact ladder — so none of these numbers can drift quietly.
+== v0.47.9 — Groundwork: The Amber Door Gets Its Hinges ==
+* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Primal Ascension — the prestige system where a finished valley can be traded for permanent power — has started building, and this update lays its invisible machinery: the master list that marks every piece of your save as RESETS or STAYS, the score calculator, the payout rule, the refusal logic that names anything still in flight, and the rebuild routine itself. None of it is switched on, nothing is visible, and no save changes shape by a single byte.
+* The master list is checked by the computer: every jar on the save shelf must carry its label or the game refuses to compile, so no future update can ever forget to decide what ascension does to its data. A test also walks a real player save through a full rebuild and proves nothing marked STAYS is ever confiscated.
+* Three more steps follow before anything shows: the numbers (perks, tiers, weights), the art, and finally the Ascension page and the ceremony itself.
+== v0.47.8 — Nothing Is Handed To You Any More ==
+* NO BLUEPRINT OR PIECE OF GEAR IN RIVALS OR OUTPOSTS IS GUARANTEED ANY MORE — every one of them is a 5% roll. Six outposts used to hand over a masterwork pattern the moment you took the fort; they now guard it the same way they guard everything else.
+* '''The tribe relics join them.''' The Reaver's Hook, Swampjaw Maw, Obsidian Edge, Frostfang Cloak, Skyplume Mantle, Accord Signet and Mostly Harmless's trio were free on your first victory and a 12–15% re-roll after. They are now a 5% roll on EVERY win, first or hundredth — and the roll still favours whichever one you are missing.
+* '''That cuts both ways.''' A relic is no longer a one-and-done, so a tribe you have already beaten is worth raiding for its relic just as much as a fresh one.
+* The Apex Accord's Apexforged Edge pattern was the last blueprint riding an odd rate (15%) — it moves onto the same 5% roll as the rest, and no pattern lost its home in the move.
+* '''Age catalysts join them.''' A capture used to hand over 1–5 of them every single time, and that is now a 5% roll as well. A fort still pays its OWN number when the roll lands — the Sundered Bastion is still worth four — so a deep outpost is still worth more than a shallow one. Catalysts also come from the Mark Exchange and from quest rewards, and neither of those changed.
+* One thing did NOT change: a catalyst that gets through is still never eaten by a full bank. Rarer should not also mean losable.
+* Because nothing rare is promised any more, the raid no longer refuses to start over relic bank space; it only asks for room for the stockpile it definitely pays. Every card and tooltip now says exactly this — the scouting sheet quotes the relic chance instead of promising a first-win reward, and an outpost card states its catalysts with their rate instead of as a flat number.
+== v0.47.7 — Rare Spoils Go To 5%, And The Cards Show What You Get ==
+* THE BLUEPRINT AND GEAR ROLLS ADDED IN v0.47.6 GO FROM 0.5% TO 5% (dev note: “lets make it a 5% drop rate”). Ten times more likely on both rolls — about one win in ten now pays something rare instead of one in a hundred. [[Rivals]] and outposts both.
+* RIVAL CARDS AND OUTPOST CARDS NOW SHOW WHAT A WIN ACTUALLY PAYS, the way action cards always have: how many of each guaranteed item you get (×12 Hide, ×60 Ginkgo Log) and the drop rate on anything that is not certain. No more guessing what is behind the row of icons.
+* The two rare rolls get their own dashed chips — 📜 for the masterwork blueprint and 🛡️ for the armour or weapon — each showing 5% and naming, on hover, every piece it could pay.
+* Outpost cards had never listed their spoils at all; they now carry the same row, including the masterwork sheet the deeper forts guarantee.
+* The rare chips quote the roll rather than a per-item share, because the roll favours what you have not got yet — so hovering tells you the pool and the real 5%, never a made-up number for one piece.
+* Housekeeping in these notes themselves: entries used to credit changes to a word no reader outside the workshop could place. Every one now reads as a plain dev note, dev call or dev report.
+== v0.47.6 — Rivals And Outposts Can Drop Blueprints And Gear ==
+* '''Every rival victory and every outpost capture now rolls two long shots.''' A masterwork blueprint sheet at 0.5%, and a piece of armour or a weapon at 0.5%. Roughly one win in a hundred pays something rare — this is a nice surprise on a raid you were doing anyway, never a sensible way to farm gear.
+* '''Both prizes match the rung you beat.''' The Mudfoot Clan and the Briar Den pay Thunderfoot pieces and the Sunpetal Hood pattern; Mostly Harmless and the Sundered Bastion pay Sundered pieces and the Emberheart Plate or Apexforged Edge. A harder fight never pays a softer prize.
+* THE ROLL PREFERS WHAT YOU ARE MISSING — an unstudied pattern over one you already know, a piece you do not own over a duplicate — the same courtesy signature repeat rolls have had since v0.36.7. Once you hold the lot, dupes pay amber as they always did.
+* Gear means armour and weapons: helms, cuirasses, greaves, aegises and spears. Talismans stay a trail find. All twelve blueprint patterns are reachable this way, including the three no guardian carries, and the Field Guide now lists both the raid and the strike on every item they can drop.
+== v0.47.5 — The Icons Are 20% Bigger ==
+* EVERY ICON IN THE GAME IS NOW 20% LARGER (dev note: they “seem a little small”). Sidebar art, action-card headers, bank tiles, item chips, battle badges — all of it. 20% is the exact point where the art grows and the layout does not: sidebar rows measure the same 44px they always did, so nothing reflows and the same number of entries fit on screen. Pushing on to 35% started making rows taller, so it stops here.
+* On a 320px phone the top bar is the one row with no space to give — the bigger icons pushed it 10px off the edge. That strip alone keeps the old size below 360px; everywhere else, including the rest of that same phone screen, gets the full 20%.
+== v0.47.4 — The Rest Of The Icons Get The Same Outline ==
+* v0.47.3 OUTLINED THE SKILLS AND BIOMES; THIS DOES THE OTHER 937. Every remaining drawing in the game — items, creatures, weapons, potions, crops, fossils, tribe crests, camp buildings, pets, eggs and every UI glyph — now carries the same crisp dark edge around its silhouette. That also closes the seam v0.47.3 opened, where outlined skill icons sat directly above flat ones in the sidebar.
+* The edge lands on silhouettes only, never on the shading inside them: a stone stays one solid rock instead of a cracked one, and a dino's jaw shading does not become a black stripe across its face.
+* Glyphs already drawn as line art (the chevrons, boost arrows, XP graph, drifting mist, fibre strands, sun rays) are deliberately untouched, as is the Mostly Harmless crew's own mark — that one stays exactly the flag they supplied.
+* ON STEAM, THE ACHIEVEMENT BADGES MATCH AGAIN: all 288 achievement icons (144 earned plus their locked grey twins) are re-rendered from the new art, so the badge Steam shows is the same drawing the game does.
+== v0.47.3 — Skill And Biome Icons Get An Outline Pass ==
+* '''The skill and biome icons pop now.''' [[Mining]], [[Logging]], [[Hunting]], [[Smithing]], [[Farming]], [[Foraging]], [[Fishing]], [[Cooking]], [[Crafting]], [[Alchemy]], [[Taming]], [[Expeditions]], [[Delving]], and all ten biomes (Grasslands through Skyreach Plateau) now carry a crisp dark outline around every shape, plus a few hand-placed highlights — a bright bowstring, sparks off the anvil, a glint on the pickaxe — so they read as bold stickers instead of flat color blobs, especially at the small sizes the sidebar and action cards actually render them at.
+* This is the first pass on the icon registry's highest-traffic pages — the rest of the set (items, creatures, gear) keeps its current flat style for now.
+== v0.47.2 — A Frozen Tab Can’t Bury Your Save ==
+* A PHONE TAB THAT SAT FROZEN FOR A DAY COULD WAKE UP JUST LONG ENOUGH TO SAVE ITS DAY-OLD MEMORY OVER YOUR REAL SAVE (Shae’s report, Aug 12) — the next boot then trusted the buried copy, greeted you with “away for over a day”, and pushed it to the cloud. Three locks now stop it: the one-tab guard remembers a newer session even after that session has CLOSED, so a thawed old tab freezes instead of writing its goodbye; every save now refuses outright to overwrite a newer one; and boot takes a second opinion — if the cloud copy out-leads this device on progress when it shouldn’t, the “which save?” choice opens instead of a silent push.
+* A tab caught behind like this now says so honestly: “This tab fell behind — nothing from this tab was saved”, with Play Here reloading from your newest save. No more claiming it saved when it deliberately didn’t.
+* The Settings sync journal logs the averted burial as its own event (boot-regressed), so a screenshot shows the guard firing, not a mystery dialog.
+== v0.47.1 — The Crew Keeps Up With The Real You ==
+* v0.47.0 MEASURED THE CREW AGAINST A PLAYER WITH NO TOOLS, NO MASTERY, NO GEAR (beta report, same day): against a real endgame player — who moves ~2× that fast — a maxed camp landed nearer 1.3 players’ worth than the promised 2–3. The yardstick is now YOU as you actually play: tiers climb 1 / 1.35 / 1.7 / 2 and Ages ×1.2 → ×2, so a fully built crew lands ~2.7 real players’ worth. Roughly double yesterday’s rates, still nowhere near the old firehose.
+* GEAR PAST +30 KIT PAYS AGAIN (beta report: “no need to bother beyond bronze”): the hard cap becomes a soft one — +1% pace per point to +30, then +1% per 10 points beyond. A 195-kit worker now works at +46.5% instead of +30%, the deepest kit in the game at +54%. Sentinels still count every point.
+* The tooltip pile shows the soft cap honestly: “kit 195 → +46.5 (soft cap)”, and the numbers still multiply to exactly the clock you see.
+* Fresh camps are untouched again — a Stone-Age Novice gathers exactly what they did yesterday and the day before.
+== v0.47.0 — The Tribe Works For You, Not Instead Of You ==
+* YOUR CAMP GATHERED TOO MUCH, TOO FAST (a dev call): a fully built crew was hauling roughly 288 players’ worth of goods an hour. The whole workforce now tops out around 2–3 players’ worth — camp automation is a strong second pair of hands again, not a replacement for playing.
+* '''Workers now match each node’s own pace.''' A crew member works at a % of YOUR speed on that exact action — deep, slow nodes take them proportionally longer, exactly like they take you longer. Before, the deepest nodes were bizarrely the cheapest to automate; that inversion is gone.
+* The [[Tribe]] page tells the honest story: each worker’s tooltip now shows “crew pace X% of yours”, every multiplier in the pile, and the exact clock on their current node.
+* GEAR ON GATHERERS IS CAPPED AT +30% pace (it kept its full power for Sentinels on watch): a Primal Warspear made berry-picking four times faster, which was silly. The tooltip shows both numbers — your kit score, and the capped bonus the pace actually uses.
+* [[Tribe#Material Ages|Material Ages]] recut: ×1.1 → ×1.5 across Bronze → Moonstone (was ×1.5 → ×6), tiers 1 / 1.15 / 1.3 / 1.5 (was up to ×3.5). Artisan lines follow the same cut. Fresh Stone-Age camps are UNTOUCHED — a new Novice gathers exactly what they always did.
+* '''Dino hired hands.''' The two Drover’s Drills now add +0.02/+0.015 (was +0.05 each), so a fully drilled, max-veteran, best-species dino tops out at ~40% of your pace instead of ~49%. Undrilled dinos never moved. Drill prices unchanged.
+* Nothing banked was taken: stockpiles, shelves and everything already collected stay exactly as they were. Only the clocks changed.
+== v0.45.5 — The Little Steam Mark Is The Real One ==
+* THE SMALL STEAM ICON — on the “Linked to Steam” row and the sync-reminder toast — is now Valve’s actual mark (the same official art the buttons wear), not our hand-drawn stand-in. One glyph, everywhere, the real one.
+== v0.45.4 — The Sign-in Screen Speaks One Language ==
+* THE STEAM BUTTON IS GONE FROM THE SIGN-IN SCREEN (a dev pass): one flow everywhere — email and password, with signup carrying your Steam purchase invisibly on desktop. Returning desktops still sign in through their link automatically at launch; the button had become a second door to the same room.
+== v0.45.3 — One Door: Your Purchase Is Your Key ==
+* THE DESKTOP HAS ONE DOOR NOW (a dev flow pass): Settings → Cloud shows just “Create a Primal Idle account” — no separate Steam button. Clicking it opens the signup form directly, with NO registration code on a Steam desktop: your purchase IS the code.
+* '''Accounts are born connected.''' A desktop signup carries your Steam ticket, and the server verifies the purchase, links your Steam, and records the entitlement the moment the account is created — Settings shows “Linked to Steam — Account ID” from the first boot, and it stays through every restart.
+* No more silently-created accounts: “Continue with Steam” now signs in ONLY through an existing link — an unlinked Steam gets plain words (“create your account first”) instead of an invisible throwaway account.
+== v0.45.2 — Once It’s Connected, It Stays Connected ==
+* “LINKED TO STEAM” NOW SURVIVES A RESTART (dev report): the game asks the server for your link on every boot instead of remembering it only until you closed the window — the linked row, with your Account ID, is there on relaunch and on a fresh install alike, web included.
+* '''Linking is now one clear ritual.''' The button says “Link with Steam”, and clicking it asks for your Primal Idle email and password right below — the server checks your Steam purchase and your credentials, links, and that’s that. The same form serves a brand-new device.
+* Typing the account you’re already signed into just verifies your password and links — no surprise “which save?” dialog for a link that changes no save.
+== v0.45.1 — Dev Accounts Can Link Before Launch ==
+* FOUND LIVE IN TESTING, FIXED THE SAME HOUR: before launch nobody can pass the “bought it on Steam” check — including dev accounts — so the new link gate refused the very accounts building it. The server now honors an exempt list for the dev and playtest accounts, and every refusal is logged with the exact verdict and Steam ID so the next mystery answers itself.
+* The “Too many attempts” wall is gone for normal play: each Steam action now has its own allowance (30 per 15 minutes instead of 10 shared across sign-in, linking, purchase checks and email attach) — the desktop’s own background sign-ins no longer eat the budget your buttons need.
+== v0.45.0 — Your Steam Finds Its Real Account ==
+* CLICKED “CONTINUE WITH STEAM” BEFORE SIGNING IN? No longer a dead end: type your web account’s email and password into Settings → Cloud → “Add an email”, and when the game says that account already exists it now OFFERS it — one click signs you into your real account and brings your Steam along, purchase and cloud saves included.
+* The same heal works from the sign-in screen: “I already play on the web — sign in”, then accept the link offer — it no longer refuses because of the throwaway account your first click created.
+* Nothing lost, nothing guessed: the throwaway’s save is filed into your account’s “Restore an older cloud copy” list, and when both sides hold real progress the conflict dialog asks YOU which run continues — never a timestamp.
+* Real accounts stay protected: a Steam identity only ever moves off an invisible no-email account. Two accounts on purpose stay two accounts.
+* '''Linking is for owners.''' If the Steam account hasn’t bought Primal Idle (or only borrows it via Family Sharing or a free weekend), the link buttons now answer “Buy Primal Idle on Steam to link this Steam account” with the store link — and after a successful Steam sign-in or link, a notice reminds you to run a Sync now so Steam gets your latest save.
+== v0.43.18 — Every Account Button Knows Whose Colors It Wears ==
+* “LINK THIS STEAM ACCOUNT” (Settings → Cloud) and “LINK ACCOUNTS” (the first-run link offer) now wear the same official dark Steam dress as the sign-in buttons — white Steam mark, Steam’s own dark, no orange and no green (a dev pass, fourth sweep).
+* “ADD EMAIL” on a Steam-born account goes stone-grey with the PI monogram, matching “Create a Primal Idle account” — because that is exactly what it does: it gives your Steam account its Primal Idle side for web & mobile.
+== v0.43.17 — The Steam Button Goes Full Steam ==
+* “CONTINUE WITH STEAM” now wears the real thing (a dev pass, third sweep): the official white Steam lockup on Steam’s own dark — no more orange — in Settings → Cloud and on the desktop sign-in screen alike, and the two can no longer drift apart.
+* The account button now carries the PI monogram, goes stone-grey, and stacks under the Steam one — each button explains itself with a line underneath: Steam is one click with no password; a Primal Idle account adds web & mobile cloud saves that stay in sync with your Steam progress — take the valley with you.
+== v0.43.16 — The Link Buttons Wear The Mark Too ==
+* “LINK THIS STEAM ACCOUNT” — in Settings and in the first-run link offer — now carries the Steam mark like its sign-in siblings (a dev pass, second sweep).
+== v0.43.15 — The Cloud Buttons Say What They Mean ==
+* SETTINGS → CLOUD, DRESSED PROPERLY (a dev pass): the Steam button wears a truer Steam mark, the account button carries the campfire and says what it is — “Create a Primal Idle account for web/mobile saves” — and once you’re signed in through Steam the row shows your Account ID so support questions start with the number on screen.
+== v0.43.14 — Steam Sign-in Stops Rejecting Its Own Ticket ==
+* '''Under the hood.''' The server’s sanity check on Steam sign-in tickets capped them at half the size Steam actually issues, so every genuine ticket was refused as bad-ticket before Steam was even asked. The cap now fits real tickets with room to spare — and a refused shape gets logged with its length so it can never masquerade as a Steam verdict again.
+== v0.43.13 — The Desktop Opens Straight Into The Valley ==
+* NO MORE LOGIN WALL ON DESKTOP (a dev call): the Steam build now opens directly into the game on your local save — Steam Cloud already roams it. Cloud sign-in and Steam account linking live in Settings → Cloud, including a one-click “Continue with Steam” right there.
+* '''The sign-in screen got its act together.''' Choosing “Continue with Steam” no longer shows the email form underneath it, the button wears a proper drawn Steam mark, and on desktop you can always back out with “Keep playing without an account”.
+== v0.43.12 — Steam Sign-in Presents Its Credentials Properly ==
+* '''Under the hood.''' “Continue with Steam” was refused with bad-ticket — Steam bakes an identity string into each sign-in ticket, and the server has to present the SAME string when verifying. It now does, for sign-in, linking, and the purchase check alike.
+== v0.43.11 — Steam Sign-in Stops Depending On The Host ==
+* '''Under the hood.''' The server now talks to Steam via curl instead of PHP URL streams — the shared host shipped allow_url_fopen off in a place no setting of ours could reach, which held every Steam sign-in at "unreachable". No player-visible change beyond Steam sign-in actually working.
+== v0.43.10 — The Steam Build Knows Who You Are ==
+* SIGN IN WITH STEAM (desktop): the first-run screen now leads with “Continue with Steam” — one click and your account exists, no email, no password, no registration wall inside a purchase. Already play on the web? Pick “I already play on the web”, sign in as usual, and the game offers — never assumes — to link the two so purchases and cloud saves are shared.
+* '''A linked machine signs itself in.''' Launch through Steam and the login screen simply closes itself. And the 90-day password re-entry is gone on desktop — an expired session silently renews through Steam instead of signing you out.
+* '''Steam-born accounts can go web.''' Settings → Cloud gains “Add an email to play on the web”, upgrading a Steam-created account with a real address and password — same save, same progress, now on any browser.
+== v0.43.9 — Steam Achievements Get A Firm Handshake ==
+* STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS COULD SIT OUT A WHOLE SESSION IN SILENCE (dev report, first desktop runs on Windows and Mac). The bridge refused to write until Steam handed over the player’s stats — a handshake the current Steam client may never volunteer on its own. The desktop build now asks for those stats itself the moment Steam connects, so the write gate opens every time and the boot sweep can restore your whole earned history.
+* '''And the sync narrates itself.''' The desktop console (right-click → Inspect) now reports the bridge coming up, every unlock batch, and both boot sweeps with exact counts — so a missing popup is a five-second read instead of a guessing game.
+== v0.43.8 — Ten Achievement Tracks Stop Sharing Faces ==
+* NINE ACHIEVEMENT TRACKS NO LONGER WEAR THE SAME ART (dev report, from the Steam build-out). Three tracks shared one star, two shared a medal, two a compass, two a basket — and Warband’s banner was a twin of Raider’s flag. Sage now carries a scroll, Perfect Cast a starmetal blade, Drillmaster the drill whistle, Naturalist a leaf, Delegator the work ledger, Muster the worker quarters, Herdmaster the grand stable and Warband a captured stockade — every one drawn from art the valley already owned. The Log page and the Steam badges both pick it up.
+* THE OUTFITTED TRIAL WEARS A SADDLE instead of borrowing the fleeing runner’s boots — equipping gear on a dino finally looks like it.
+* AND A NEW BUILD GUARD makes the whole class of bug impossible: no two tracks can ever share registry art again, and every Trial badge stays one of a kind.
+== v0.43.7 — Obsidian Greaves — The Smithed Ladder Finally Has Legs At The Top ==
+* OBSIDIAN GREAVES CAN NOW BE FORGED (player request). The smithed heavy line runs bronze, then iron, then obsidian — and bronze and iron both finish with greaves, while obsidian gave you a helm, a plate, a bulwark, a spear and a blade and nothing at all for your legs. So the best legs a smith could make were still Iron Greaves, ninety levels in. Not any more.
+* FORGE THEM AT SMITHING 91 IN THE ASHEN PEAKS, from 3 Obsidian, a Skysteel Ore and a Valehide. They give 14 defense — above the Obsidian Helm and Bulwark, below the Plate, which stays the tier’s best single piece as the hardest thing in it to make.
+* '''And skysteel ore finally has something to be made into.''' Until now the only thing in the valley that wanted it was the last rank of the tool ladder, so a plateau full of it mostly went to the trader. Now it is the frame these greaves are built on.
+* Nothing else moved. No existing piece was retuned, no recipe changed, and the Collector achievement now counts the one new item.
+== v0.43.6 — Dispatch Tells You What A Mission Brings Back, On Every Screen ==
+* THE DISPATCH PICKER NOW SHOWS WHAT THE MISSION BRINGS BACK, ON DESKTOP TOO (tester report). Picking between eleven missions on a wide screen, all you got was a name and a difficulty number — the haul was only ever spelled out on the phone, in the mission sheet. The chosen mission now prints its guaranteed haul, with your squad’s multiplier already applied, and it does so on both screens: the phone’s sheet closes the moment you pick, so it lost the same information one tap later.
+* '''The trading post now says why you would ever buy anything.''' Every line on that page was about selling, which made the Buy buttons on the deep gems look like a mistake — they have no use but trade. They are not a mistake: a price re-rolls inside its own range every market day, so something picked up on a Surplus day and sold back on an In demand day turns a profit, and a stockpile is how a Charter special order gets filled the day it appears.
+* EVERY MARKET CARD NOW PRINTS THE RANGE ITS PRICE MOVES INSIDE, so "Surplus" and "In demand" stop being moods and become numbers you can measure today’s quote against. A Deep Sapphire pays between 156 and 312 depending on the day; now you can see that before deciding whether to hold or sell.
+== v0.43.5 — The Top Bar Stops Squeezing Itself Off The Screen On A Phone ==
+* THE TOP BAR NO LONGER GETS CRUSHED BY A BIG AMBER TOTAL (bug report). On a phone, the richer you got the more the bar squeezed everything to the left of your amber count — the Stop button ended up with no room at all and sat on top of the weather chip, and on a small phone the row ran off the edge. The amber count now holds its place and the running-action chip keeps a real width at every phone size.
+* '''Number notation actually changes when you change it.''' Switching between Standard and Compact in Settings only ever redrew numbers that happened to be counting up at that moment — your amber total looked right, while prices, bank stacks, gear stats and mastery totals kept the old style until something else moved them. Every number on screen now follows the setting the instant you pick it.
+* PHONES NOW START ON COMPACT, DESKTOP ON STANDARD. Compact ("28.9M") is what keeps the bar readable on a narrow screen, and the long form has plenty of room on a desktop. It is only the starting point — the Settings dropdown still wins, and each device remembers its own answer, so your phone and your computer can differ.
+* The narrowest phones also drop the sword monogram and the weather countdown from the bar rather than let the row overflow. Both still live one tap away in the weather panel.
+== v0.43.4 — A Clearer Message When Something Else Answers For The Server ==
+* '''Cloud errors no longer show a raw programming error.''' If something other than the game server answered — a wifi sign-in page on a cafe or hotel network, or a maintenance page — the cloud panel showed "TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'rev')", which told you the name of a property and nothing else. It now says the reply could not be read, and what usually causes that.
+* This affected signing in, creating an account, loading your cloud save, uploading it and listing older cloud copies — all of them showed the same unhelpful line, or failed in an odd way, when a page pretending to be the server got in the way.
+* Nothing about your save changes. This is only what you are told when the connection is being intercepted: the game already refused to trust the reply, it just described it badly.
+== v0.43.3 — Big Saves Stopped Uploading When You Closed The Tab ==
+* THE LAST SAVE BEFORE YOU CLOSE THE TAB NOW UPLOADS ON A BIG SAVE TOO (bug report). Once a save grew past a certain size, the goodbye upload — the one sent as the page closes or you switch away — was refused by the browser before it ever left, and the game reported it as a connection problem. The ordinary upload that runs every minute was never affected, which is why saving by hand always looked fine.
+* Nothing was lost: the every-minute upload still ran, so the most a big save could ever be behind was the last minute of play. Now the goodbye upload is sent as an ordinary one when it is too big to send the fast way, so that last minute goes up as well.
+* THE ERROR MESSAGE STOPPED BLAMING YOUR CONNECTION for things that were never your connection, and the sync journal in Settings now records failed uploads with what went wrong — including the case where the browser refused to send at all.
+== v0.43.2 — Forged Saddles And Bardings Show Up On Your Dinos ==
+* FORGED DINO GEAR IS VISIBLE IN THE STABLE AGAIN (bug report). A saddle or barding you forged from a blueprint never appeared in the [[Stable]] — not in the slot picker, and not on the dino after you fitted it. The stall just showed an empty slot.
+* Nothing was lost and nothing needs re-forging: the piece WAS equipped the whole time and its power and guard were counting towards that dino in every fight, hunt and dispatch. Only the page failed to say so. Your gear locker was never touched.
+* Forged pieces now sit alongside crafted ones in the saddle and barding pickers, with their ★ rolls shown, and unequipping works on either kind.
+== v0.43.1 — The Bank Gets A Farming Shelf, And Sorts By Type ==
+* '''Seeds and compost have their own shelf now.''' A new [[Farming]] tab in the bank holds everything you put into a plot, instead of it being lost among the berries and mushrooms on the [[Foraging]] tab. The crops you grow stay where they were — they are still food.
+* '''Sort.''' TYPE NOW WORKS ON THE ALL TAB, grouping your whole bank shelf by shelf in the same order the tabs run in, alphabetically within each. Handy when you want to see everything at once but not in the order you happened to pick it up.
+* There is also an Expedition tab now. Trail spoils, rift finds, artifacts and depths hauls — 82 items — had no tab of their own and could only be found by scrolling All or searching by name.
+== v0.43.0 — New Accounts Can Ask For A Registration Code ==
+* '''Creating an account on the web can now ask for a registration code.''' The sign-up form has a new box for one, and when the code is switched on, a new account needs it. Primal Idle is heading for Steam, and this is simply the front door being on the latch for a while — it comes off again when the web version opens up.
+* IF YOU ALREADY PLAY, NOTHING CHANGES. Signing in is untouched, your save is untouched, and you will never be asked for a code — it is only ever asked when a brand-new account is being made. The box on the sign-up form is optional and can be left empty whenever the door is open, which is how it ships.
+* Turned away without a code, the form now points you at the Steam page and the studio site instead of just going red.
+== v0.42.1 — The Campfire Tells You What They Are Good At ==
+* THE WANDERER AT THE FIRE NOW TELLS YOU WHAT THEY ARE GOOD AT BEFORE YOU DECIDE (player request). Every villager is born with a knack for one job, and until now you only found out after welcoming them in u2014 so Welcome/Turn away was a coin flip you could not read. The fire says it plainly now: "a knack for [[Mining]], +5% pace on that work". Same wanderer, same knack, same everything; you just get to see it while the choice is still yours.
+* Nothing is rerolled behind the scenes, and nothing can be: a knack has always been worked out from who the person IS rather than rolled when they join, so the fire is only reading out what was already true. Turn someone away and the next arrival is a different person, exactly as before.
+== v0.42.0 — Rivals Are Real Fights Now ==
+* RIVALS ARE FOUGHT NOW, NOT COUNTED. Every rival in every tribe has real armour and a real health bar, and a duel plays out against them the way a hunt or an expedition does: your blow has to get through their guard, their bar falls by what you actually hit them for, and the next one steps up whole. Raids were the last corner of the game where a fight was a number ticking down.
+* A RIVAL YOUR BLOW CANNOT GET THROUGH NEVER FALLS u2014 and the card says so plainly instead of quoting you a number. Come properly armed and nothing has changed: every duel is exactly the length it always was, and the loot, the cooldowns and the Apex track are untouched. Come under-armed and you will feel it, in time and in blood.
+* The rivals board and the scouting sheet now quote the duel you would actually fight, armour and all, instead of an estimate from your war score alone.
+== v0.39.8 — Rivals Fight Back Properly Now ==
+* '''A rival you cannot hurt no longer falls eventually.''' Duels used to end after a fixed number of bouts decided by your war score u2014 which meant any raid could be ground out if you were patient enough, no matter what you were carrying. [[Rivals]] now have real armour, and your blow has to get through it: land a strike that their guard turns aside completely and they simply never go down, while every bout still costs you blood. It is the same rule hunts and expeditions have followed since the gear wall arrived; raids were the last place you could win by waiting.
+* AND THE FIGHT NOW ANSWERS TO YOUR WEAPON, NOT JUST YOUR SCORE. A rivalu2019s bar falls by what you actually hit them for, so a sharper blade genuinely shortens the duel and a heavily armoured rival genuinely lengthens it. Come to a raid at the gear the ladder expects and NOTHING has changed u2014 every duel is exactly the length it always was. Turn up under-armed and you will feel it in time and in blood, which is the point.
+* The rivals board and the scouting sheet quote the duel you would actually fight, armour and all u2014 not the old score-only estimate.
+== v0.39.7 — The Rival Health Bar Is Real Now ==
+* THE HEALTH BAR ABOVE A RIVAL IS A REAL BAR NOW, not a picture of the bout counter. It used to be drawn by working backwards from how many bouts you had left, over a health number invented purely for the drawing. The fight itself owns it now: the rival steps up with their own health, it falls as you land bouts on them, and the next one steps up whole. Nothing about how long a duel takes has changed by a single bout u2014 this is the same fight, told truthfully.
+== v0.39.6 — Groundwork: Rivals Get Their Stat Blocks ==
+* GROUNDWORK, NOT A CHANGE YOU CAN FEEL YET. Every rival fighter in the game now has a real combat block u2014 health to drain, guard your blow has to get through, and a swiftness they slip with u2014 90 of them across all 16 tribes. Nothing reads those numbers yet, so duels play exactly as they did today; this is the first of four steps towards rivals being fought the same way hunts and expeditions are, rather than counted out.
+== v0.39.5 — The Two Sides Of The Fight Line Up Again ==
+* '''Ticking auto-eat no longer shunts your half of the screen downwards.''' The battle view is meant to read as two matched columns — you on the left, the beast on the right, their cards starting on the same line. Turning Auto-eat on added the “next bite” bar to your side only, which pushed your Food card and everything under it 22 pixels below the enemy card, so the whole screen sat slightly crooked for anyone playing with Auto-eat on — which is most people. Both sides now hold the same line whether Auto-eat is on or off.
+== v0.39.4 — The War Party Stops Quoting Nonsense ==
+* '''A siege you cannot win no longer quotes you a number with seventeen digits in it.''' Every bout of a siege costs your war party blood, and a wounded member swings for nothing — so if the fort wounds your whole team, the team’s strike drops to zero and the defender can never be felled. The card said that out loud in the worst way available: “falls in 9007199254740991 bouts”. It now says the defender NEVER falls, and that this team has no strike left in it — which is your cue to withdraw and rest them rather than feed the fort more blood.
+* AND THE OUTPOST LIST WARNS YOU BEFORE YOU MARCH, not after. Pick a strike team who are all still nursing wounds and the fort’s line now reads “never falls” instead of quoting the same enormous number as a plan. Hovering says why: every member of this team is wounded, so it lands nothing — rest them, or pick others.
+* The rivals board and the scouting sheet learned the same manners for raid duels. Nothing there can reach the bad number today — your bare fists still count for something — but the guard is in place so a future balance pass cannot quietly turn it back on.
+== v0.39.3 — The Trail Stops Lying Too ==
+* A TRAIL RUN YOU CANNOT WIN NOW SAYS SO, INSTEAD OF SHOWING YOU NONSENSE. Last version taught a hopeless HUNT to stop pretending; expeditions and delves never got the same lesson, and they were in worse shape. Walk into a run whose guard your strike cannot get through and the beast’s health read “NaN”, its bar drew as a broken sliver, and the line under your health promised the Triceratops “falls in NaNs”. Every one of those now reads the plain truth: the beast sits at its full health, the bar is full, and the line says it NEVER falls — nothing gets through.
+* '''And the pantry clock came back from infinity.''' On those same runs the Food card said your food lasts “Infinityd” — which read like good news and was the exact opposite, since a run with no end is precisely where you want to know how long you can stand there being bitten. It now gives you the real number: on a hopeless Grasslands patrol, 1h 47m against a 20h away cap, with the warning that you can die before you get back. That is the number that decides whether it is safe to close the tab.
+* THE HEALTH BAR ON A TRAIL RUN IS NOW THE ENGINE’S OWN, not a second copy drawn from the clock. It used to work out how far along the fight was by multiplying your progress by the number of exchanges — fine on a run that ends, meaningless on one that does not, which is exactly where the NaN came from. The view now reads the same bar the fight is emptying, so what you watch and what is happening cannot drift apart. Hunts were fixed this way last version; the trail has caught up.
+== v0.39.2 — A Hunt You Cannot Win Stops Pretending ==
+* '''A hunt you cannot win no longer looks like one you are winning.''' If your strike could not get through a creature’s hide, the card still put on the whole show: the beast’s health bar slammed from full to EMPTY once every interval, the words “next Woolly Bison winds up” slid past underneath, and a fresh one stepped up — over and over, exactly like a kill on a loop. Nothing was dying. That empty bar was the wind-up animation blanking it, not damage; the creature was standing at full health the entire time. The wind-up is a between-KILLS flourish, so a hunt with no kill in it now plays none at all: the card sits there, dead still, showing the beast at full health, which is the truth and always was.
+* '''And the clock stopped promising a kill it could not deliver.''' The line under your health read “9.0s per kill” on a creature that was never going to fall — not a glitchy number you would question, just the beast’s ordinary rate sitting there looking like a promise. It reads “never falls — nothing gets through” now. Between those two, the game was quietly telling you the truth in two small grey stat rows while showing you a kill in the two biggest moving things on the screen; both of those now say the same thing as the footnotes.
+== v0.39.1 — Four Fights On The Trail ==
+* '''The four trail battles are real now.''' An expedition or delve is no longer one health pool wearing four costumes — the Approach, Skirmish, Clash and Showdown are four separate enemies, each with its OWN health, attack, guard, swiftness and difficulty, escalating every time: the opener is the easy one, the Showdown is the fight. Guardian and rift-boss runs cast the boss itself as the Showdown; arenas are a single champion duel, as a pit fight should be.
+* EVERY STAT DOES A JOB, AND NONE OF THEM ROLLS DICE. The enemy's attack is its hit each exchange. Its health is the bar you drain. Its GUARD blunts your strike — half its guard comes off every blow you land, so a shelled enemy takes more exchanges. Its SWIFTNESS is a dodge percent, priced in deterministically: a 12%-dodge enemy slips exactly that share of your blows on a fixed cadence you can watch — the bar stalls when it dodges — and the card's "wins in N" stays exact arithmetic, because v0.39.0's no-dice rule stands.
+* '''The fight card itemizes the whole run.''' Four lines, one per enemy — its bar over your effective strike against it, how many exchanges it takes, what it hits back for — above the same run totals as before. The enemy card shows the one you are fighting RIGHT NOW: its real hit range, guard, dodge and bar, with "falls in N exchanges". The countdown under the run bar now names the current creature and counts to ITS kill, then the next one steps up.
+* '''The stage pills stopped lying.''' They used to advance on even quarters of the clock; now each stage owns exactly its share of the fight — a 2-exchange Showdown holds the last third of a 6-exchange run, and the pill flips exactly when its enemy falls.
+* '''Your costs at the intended gear did not move.''' The stage stats ship tuned so a keeper at the gear line for the content fights a 6-exchange run ([1, 1, 2, 2] across the four enemies) for exactly the old food bill and exactly the listed run time — the difficulty number on the card still means what it meant, and every stage's difficulty sums to it. Come in UNDER the line and the new stats bite harder than the old model did: guard and dodge punish a weak strike twice.
+* Every one of the ~180 stage enemies is ordinary game data (a new stages file), generated once from each biome's real creature roster — the same species the trail has always named, now with the stats to back it — and hand-tunable per action from here on. The trail's cosmetic per-run enemy rotation retires; each run's cast is now fixed and real.
+* '''No gear now means no kills.''' Your blow used to be floored at one point of damage no matter what — so bare hands against a Giganotosaurus behind 57 guard still chipped it down, and given enough food and patience a keeper in nothing at all could walk the Sundered Vale and win. The floor is gone: a strike that cannot get through the guard deals NOTHING. The bar does not move, the fight has no end, and you stand there eating while the enemy works on you. Nothing tells you off and nothing stops you — the stalled health bar and the draining pantry are the lesson.
+* THE FIGHT IS A FIGHT NOW, NOT A TIMER. Blows land as the clock runs instead of the whole battle resolving in one instant when the timer filled. The enemy's health is real, it drains as you swing, and the run ends when the last one falls rather than when a clock says so. At the gear the content expects, every number is exactly what it was yesterday — same length, same damage, same loot. What changed is that you can watch it happen, and that a fight you cannot win simply never finishes.
+* '''And the things that should happen before a fight now do.''' A cave torch or an arena tribute is spent when you SET OUT — win, lose or die in there, you paid to get in — and a full bank turns you back at the door instead of after a fight it could not pay you for.
+* '''Excavations moved up the delving page.''' It now sits directly under the [[Mastery]] Pool, above the delve view, instead of jumping to the bottom of the page whenever no dig was running — so the maps, the ground counters and the Start-a-dig slots are in the same place every time you open [[Delving]], mid-dig or not.
+* '''Rival duels bite back too.''' Raids had the same hole expeditions did: an outmatched raider paid in MORE bouts, never in harder hits — so a keeper in no gear could grind through the first nine rival tribes with zero risk, just time. Past the four-bout fair line every blow now lands harder on the same curve as expeditions, and armour blunts it the same way. Fighting rivals near your strength is unchanged; punching five tiers up is now the gamble it always claimed to be.
+* '''The fight you commit to is the fight you get.''' The battle plan is now frozen the moment each run starts: a weather change, gear swap, heat shift or party reshuffle mid-run lands on the NEXT run instead of silently retiling the current one at the finish line. The card you read before starting is the fight that resolves — exactly, every time.
+* '''Hunt cards stopped over-warning.''' The hunt damage range now shows the hit AFTER your Guards' shielding and the pack's soak — the same mitigation the fight actually runs — instead of the raw worst case. Raid duels got this honesty fix back in v0.36.64; hunts finally match.
+* '''A raid resolves the same no matter how you watch it.''' Regeneration and buff timers now tick BETWEEN bouts exactly as they do between action completions, so a gauntlet fought in a background tab returns the identical outcome to one fought at the wheel.
+* GEAR MATTERS AGAIN — YOU CAN LOSE THE HARD ONES NOW. Being under-geared used to multiply how MANY blows you took and never how hard, and since auto-eat holds you above half health, a small hit could never kill you no matter how many landed: a keeper in no gear at all could walk the Sundered Vale and win, just slowly. Now overshooting a trail's intended length makes every exchange land harder — on plan is unchanged, twice the intended length hits ×1.4, four times hits ×2 — so wildly out-of-depth runs end in a flee or a grave instead of a long stroll. ARMOUR IS WHAT BUYS THE RIGHT TO PUNCH ABOVE YOUR WEIGHT: defence blunts that penalty (and only that penalty), so for the first time a heavy loadout is what lets you attempt content above your tier. Fighting the content you are geared for costs exactly what it cost yesterday.
+* '''Guardian heat works again.''' Stacking heat on a biome has been raising the difficulty number on the card while the four stage enemies quietly ignored it — the authored blocks were fixed, so a red-hot guardian fought exactly like a cold one. Heat now scales every enemy on the trail: more health, harder hits, and the per-stage difficulties still add up to the number the card shows.
+* '''The scouting report was under-quoting the bill.''' On a four-fight trail it multiplied the whole run by the SOFTEST enemy's hit — so it quoted the price of the easiest fight four times over. It now adds the four fights up. The battle view's enemy bar had the same class of error: it drew a slightly different drain than the engine was actually doing, and now falls by the exact number the fight uses.
+* '''The verdict caught up with the trail.''' The stat sheet's "The fight" row was still grading runs against the old single-fight yardstick, so a four-fight trail at EXACTLY the intended gear — a 6-exchange run, on plan — read "A grind — bring food". It now grades against the run's own plan: at or under the plan is a fair fight, past it is the grind, past double is ruinous (duels and arenas keep their old grading — their yardstick never moved). The row also explains itself on hover: the count is exchanges — blows traded across all four fights — not the number of enemies.
+* AND HUNTING IS A FIGHT NOW TOO — THE LAST PLACE GEAR DIDN'T MATTER. A hunt granted the kill on the timer no matter what you were carrying: the creature's health was never a number the game read, so your weapon changed how the bar was DRAWN and nothing else, and a keeper in nothing at all could bring down a Woolly Bison by simply waiting. Your strike now has to get through the creature's hide. Bare hands still take everything up to the Deinosuchus in Murkwater Swamp and NOTHING from the Cave Crocodile onward; from there a weapon is the price of entry — the Dire Mammoth asks for the cheapest stone blade you can make, the Vale Colossus for a real one. Below the line the hunt still bites you and you can still stand there auto-eating: you just never kill anything, exactly as on the trail. Carry any weapon at all and your kills, XP and loot per hour are to the second what they were yesterday.
+* '''And the hunt sheet stopped lying to match.''' The health bar used to drain on your raw attack with a floor under it, ignoring the hide entirely — so bare-handed you watched a bar empty while nothing died. It now falls by the exact strike the hunt itself uses, so a strike that cannot get through leaves it sitting precisely where it started. Two readouts that were quietly false went with it: the hunt sheet swore every hunt was "always winnable" and told you the creature "falls every 10.4s" — it now shows YOUR STRIKE against the hide, reads "nothing gets through" when it does not, and says the thing falls "never". The scouting report on the card says the same before you commit. Nothing blocks you and nothing scolds you: the bar that will not move and the pantry that keeps draining are the lesson.
+* AND NOTHING SAYS "INFINITY×" AT YOU ANY MORE. A fight your strike cannot get through has no exchange count, and the surfaces were printing that fact as the literal word: the badge on an action card read "Infinity×", the fight row read "wins in Infinity", and a raid you brought no war score to promised to fall "in 9007199254740991 bouts". Every count now reads ∞, and the lines around it say what they mean — "never wins", "never falls", "nothing gets through" — with the scouting report and the fight card explaining that your strike is not getting through the guard and that the only thing the run spends is food.
+* AND A HUNT IS PRICED LIKE A TRAIL NOW, NOT A DELIVERY. Your weapon used to decide only WHETHER a creature could die, never how fast: a keeper scraping one point past a Woolly Bisonu2019s hide killed it exactly as quickly as one who could halve it in a blow, because the kill landed on a timer either way. The creatureu2019s health is real now and your strike takes it down swing by swing, so the kill takes as long as the fight actually takes. COME PROPERLY ARMED AND NOTHING MOVES u2014 four swings is the line every hunt is tuned to, and any weapon the biome hands you is comfortably over it, so every hunting rate in the game is exactly what it was. Come under-armed and you pay in time: a stone blade at the Woolly Bison drags each kill from 9 seconds to 23. Come with nothing and it never falls at all. The Falls-in row on the card tells you the swing count before you commit, and the health bar you watch is now literally the bar the hunt is emptying u2014 not a drawing of one.
+* '''And the free ride ends earlier than it did.''' The hide every wild creature wears got twice as thick (dev call, after seeing the first pass): bare hands can still fell the Compy, Titanis, Gallimimus and Pachy u2014 the whole starting ladder u2014 and stop dead at the Wild Raptor instead of carrying you all the way to the Cave Crocodile. They are slower at it than they were, mind: past the Compy a bare-handed kill drags, and the first stone blade you knap puts every one of those four back on its listed time. u201cBring a weaponu201d is a lesson you now learn at level 40 rather than level 60, and it keeps mattering: a stone blade will no longer scratch a Dire Mammoth at all, where before it managed a very slow kill. As ever this only touches keepers who turned up under-equipped u2014 the weapons each biome hands you clear its own hunts with room to spare, and nothing about a properly armed keeperu2019s rate has moved by a single point.
+== v0.39.0 — Attrition — The Coin Flip Is Gone ==
+* '''The coin flip is gone.''' A fight is no longer a hidden dice roll dressed up as a battle — it is attrition. The enemy has a real health bar (difficulty × 6), your gear and party land a real strike each exchange, and the fight takes exactly as many exchanges as the arithmetic says: bar ÷ strike, rounded up. Whether you win was decided by your stats when the run began; watching a fight go badly and losing anyway to a dice roll cannot happen any more, because there is no dice roll.
+* '''The card tells you the whole fight before you start.''' "wins in 4 exchanges · take ~62". Strike vs bar, the exchange count, the expected damage bill, and the food math — all computed by the same function the fight itself runs, so the preview and the outcome cannot disagree. The old win% is gone from every card, sheet and scout view; a fight has a SIZE now, not odds.
+* UNDER-POWERED RUNS STILL WIN — they just cost more. Come in below the intended gear and the fight runs long: more exchanges, more damage, more food, and the run itself takes proportionally longer on the clock (a 8-exchange grind takes twice the listed time). Master the content and the fight shortens to a single exchange — the run then takes its listed time, never less. Losing a run outright no longer exists.
+* '''The only ways out early are the pack or the grave.''' If the pantry runs dry mid-fight and the next exchange would end you, your party tries to drag you clear — the swiftness escape roll, now the one deliberate roll left in a run, because surviving your own provisioning should not be a certainty. No party, no food, no luck: the death rules from v0.38.29 apply unchanged.
+* '''Getting hurt moved to where the hurt is.''' Party injuries no longer ride lost runs (there are none) — they ride STRUGGLING wins: grind a fight out past the 4-exchange anchor and every member risks the same injury the old losses carried. Win inside the anchor and the pack walks out clean. Cave wounds still fester at double time, and Stalker's Greaves still stop that.
+* '''Hunts show the real kill.''' The creature's actual health — the same number its ecology card has always listed — now drains in strikes sized by your attack, so a better weapon visibly lands fewer, bigger hits. The hunt's pace, loot and XP are untouched: the interval is still the clock, and your rates are byte-identical to before.
+* '''Rival duels and sieges count bouts now.''' A rival fighter or outpost defender falls after a fixed number of bouts — at the anchor score one bout, at parity two, at half strength four — and the [[Rivals]] page and outpost picker print exactly that ("falls in 3 bouts") instead of a percentage. Every bout a defender still stands costs siege blood, so a weak war party still routs; a strong one sweeps.
+* '''Dispatch missions never fail any more.''' An under-strength squad comes back LATE — up to three times the printed clock — and hurt, with the weakest members carrying the injuries, but they always bring the full haul home. The picker prices all of it before you send: the real return time, the lateness multiplier, and exactly how many will come home hurt.
+* The Pearlscale Vest's old "half damage on cave losses" now halves the bill in cave fights that run past the anchor — the fights that replaced losses. The Riftbound Trinket's +6% win chance is now +6% strike, worth the same push. The battle log's third number is the fight's length in exchanges instead of odds that no longer exist.
+* If a run turns hopeless mid-fight with no food and no escape, the protective stop still catches you exactly as it always has (with death rules active, death is death — v0.38.29 stands).
+* The line under the run bar now says what actually ends the run: "Terror Bird falls in 12s", counting down live to the killing blow, instead of "run resolves in 12s" — the run was always over when the creature died; now the clock says so.
+== v0.38.29 — Auto Eat ==
+* '''Auto eat is two numbers you own now.''' Instead of one hidden rule, the Food card carries two dials: EAT AT — the health you start eating at — and HEAL TO — the health you stop at. Both open at 50%, exactly where the old hidden rule sat, so nothing about your keeper changes until you move them. A hit that would knock you out is still always answered, whatever the dials say. [[Hunting]], taming, delving, expeditions and raids all read the same two numbers.
+* A BITE BAR under your health tells you when the next mouthful is coming. It drains as damage lands and empties exactly when auto-eat fires, reading "at worst 2 hits · 24s" off the real damage range and the real fight clock — worst case, always, so it is a floor the fight can beat but never break. Your health bar gains two marks to match: the bite line, and the wounded line.
+* BELOW A QUARTER HEALTH YOU FIGHT WOUNDED — your defense counts for half until you climb back over the line. Health finally protects something, which is what makes a higher heal-to worth paying for: set it high enough that heal-to minus one bad hit stays clear of the line, or you fight every swing with half a guard. The damage range and win chance on screen move the moment you cross it, because they read the same number the fight rolls.
+* IRON STOMACH, a new [[Amber]] Exchange upgrade, raises both ceilings — +5% eat-at and +10% heal-to per rank, five ranks, up to 75% / 100%. At rank 0 both dials sit at the free 50% you already had.
+* '''You can now die while you are away.''' Until now the game quietly refused to kill you offline: the pantry ran dry, your action stopped, and the rest of the night was simply lost. Now an away window plays by the same rules as being at the keyboard — run out of food or meet a fight you cannot match and you die, losing one equipped piece and waking at full health. It can only happen ONCE per away session, because dying stops the action. Raids and sieges still never run while you are away, so they can never kill you there.
+* The welcome-back screen leads with it: what killed you, how far into the night, which piece fell, and how many wins in that biome bring it home. There is a BUY IT BACK button right there — priced higher than a death at the keyboard, because you were not there to fight for it. Winning the piece back in its biome costs exactly what it always did.
+* A FOOD CLOCK in the Food card says how long your pantry lasts against the away cap — "food lasts 4h 12m · away cap 18h" — and turns red when you would die before you got back. Provisioning is now a decision you make with open eyes before you leave.
+* Fixed: the death screen claimed a flat "win 3 expeditions" to reclaim your gear. Reclaim has scaled with the depth of the biome that killed you since v0.36.7 — up to 12 in the deepest rift — so the screen now says the real number.
+* The two Auto Eat sliders are gone — the numbers just follow Iron Stomach now. Picking them was busywork: the best setting was always the highest one you could reach, so the Food card states what you eat at and heal to, and shows how far up the Iron Stomach ladder you are. Buy a rank, both numbers rise. Nothing to fiddle with, nothing to forget.
+* '''Regeneration is listed in active effects now.''' You have always healed slowly on your own — that is why your health climbs with auto-eat switched off — but no screen had ever said so, which made the checkbox look broken. It sits with your potions now, reading "Regeneration · always · +1 HP every 4s", and the number is your real one: Stone House levels and any regen brew are already in it. The Active Effects list also shows up even when you have no potions running, since regeneration is always one of them.
+* Dying now shows you dying. The death screen leads with your health bar emptied to 0 before it tells you what it cost — you still wake at full health when you dismiss it, exactly as before, but the moment reads as a death instead of a number that blinked.
+* Every area now has a jump button on the skill pages, including the ones you have not reached yet. The [[Expeditions]] page was drawing sections for the Sundered Vale and all three rift zones while its jump bar quietly skipped them, so the shortcut row disagreed with the page under it. Locked areas sit in the row dimmed with a padlock — the jump still works, and takes you to what waits there.
+* '''Heal your whole pack without leaving the fight.''' Sagebind Salve has always patched up every dino marching with you, but the only button for it lived on the [[Stable]] page — so mid-hunt you had to walk away from the fight to use it. There is now a "Heal the pack" button in the pack box on the battle screen and on the Player page, showing how many of your dinos are hurt right now. If you have no salve banked the button greys out instead of disappearing, and hovering it (or tapping it on a phone) tells you what to brew and at what level.
+* Fixed: hovering the "Heal the pack" button drew two info bubbles on top of each other, both saying the same thing. One now.
 == v0.38.28 — The Game Fills The Window ==

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