NPC Honesty
Most of this stretch went into NPC conversations.
When an NPC was asked about something it had no knowledge of, it invented an answer. Across thousands of recorded conversation turns, it never said it didn't know. It would produce a relative who doesn't exist, a promise nobody made, or agree to a shared history that never happened.
An NPC with no knowledge of a subject now deflects, asks a question back, or says so. Replies are checked for invented people before they reach you. Claims about a shared past are checked against what that character actually remembers. Real family and neighbour relationships load with the world, so villagers know who they're related to rather than defaulting to a generic acquaintance. On our hardest test questions, NPCs stay grounded about twice as often as before.
Conversations between NPCs now take place in the location the speakers are actually standing in, using what is actually there. Replies that ignored the previous line dropped from about one in 120 to one in 1,000. Mistakes about which speaker said what fell by roughly three quarters.
Inventory
The first pass of the inventory system is implemented and in testing. Objects exist in the world: you can search a location, pick items up, buy them, and carry them. NPCs have their own belongings and can hand items over or accept them during a conversation. Taking unpaid goods within sight of someone can be noticed. The economy is not built yet.
The Clock and the Sky
The clock now runs on real time — one game day per real day, real seasons, weather that follows them. Two older problems surfaced while building it. NPC daily horoscopes, which exist to vary their moods, had been calculated against the sky of January 1970, so no variation occurred. And the moon had never risen, meaning every night rendered shadows from a light source that was black. Both are fixed, and night brightness is now adjustable.
Posts
Posts are now formatted automatically as they enter the world: speech, private thought and narration are each marked, and chat-speak is converted to plain language. Deliberate dialect is left as written. The check that reads posts before they land works from a defined rulebook of what a character can know and own, and a rejected post comes back with specific instructions. Edits to posts are real — they persist, other players see them, and they survive a relog.
Locations
Location descriptions follow the in-game clock, refresh when the people present change, and only record what happened in that location. A place that has changed since your last visit describes itself again.
Also Fixed
The map boundary, which previously allowed walking off the world or along the sea floor; and NPC stress, which had been accumulating 3,600 times too fast — a villager reached maximum stress in about two minutes. Stress now accrues at its intended hourly rate, and a stressed NPC goes home and rests.
In Testing
Alpha testing continues, and we're still accepting applications in our Discord.