The first hour retold, a faster world, and a truer touch.
The first hour, retold. The guided opening has been rebuilt end to end. Its lessons now come in the order a god's hand actually moves, and each one stands beside the thing it teaches instead of on top of it — every arrow has room to be seen, and a control the lesson points at brings itself into view. A new lesson puts your hand on the gears of time. And on a 1920×1080 screen, where the opening had crowded and covered its own instructions since the first demo, it now holds its shape at every step.
The dawn of the age. Beginning a world used to stop everything: the picture held still, the music cut out, and there was nothing to do but wait and wonder whether it had died. Now the world's first years grow on their own, apart from the drawing of it, and you watch them come — the card counts the years as they pass, the music keeps playing, and if you change your mind, Cancel means Cancel.
Sharper to the touch.
Click the one you meant. When a crowd scatters in terror the people on screen are moving fast, and your click now takes the body you are pointing at rather than where it stood a moment before.
A third again as many frames. The simulation had quietly taken every core on the machine, leaving the picture nothing to draw with. Given its proper share it draws faster and thinks faster both — about a third more frames looking down on the world, and a world that turns quicker while you watch it.
Words you can read. The omen that warns of peril and the caption beneath your gaze were painted in inks that sank into the ground under them. They now wear the same rule as the names of places: larger, lit against the dark, legible at any hour.
One set of windows, day and night. Every dwelling keeps the same windows whether the sun is up or down, and each lamp keeps its own hour — households go to bed at their own bedtimes, and the flicker between them is gone.
Room for the act row. The two long act chips had pushed the status bar wider than it should ever be; they now ride a row of their own hung beneath it. And the Living view carries no region edges any more — it is the view that should simply look like the world.
The world itself.
Iron obeys its own rule. A world is no longer born with iron already sitting in its hills. There is none in the first year, and every grain of it is laid down where the rivers put it, as they carve.
No cast is ever free. A verb's price holds its floor after every discount your faith has earned, and the ladder of strength holds at the bottom of the scale too — a one-cell Cataclysm rain costs more than a one-cell Whisper, as it always should have.
Fixed.
An age kept while you were down among them. Keeping an age from below and opening it again gave you a grey map. The load now restores you exactly where you stood, and lets go of it honestly on the first frame.
A lesson that taught something untrue. The Chronicle lesson said that going down among the households was itself the act of witnessing. It is not, and the lesson now says what actually happens — in all eleven languages.
People no longer twitch as they set out, and moving the camera moves nobody: zoom is travel, and travel changes nothing about where your people are.
About ages kept in 0.37.0 — they still open. Because this update changes what iron does and what a cast costs, an age from the last version is retold from its own record rather than restored from its shortcut: it takes a little longer to open, and the world it retells may differ in small ways from the one you left. The load screen says so plainly. Ages kept from this version onward are unaffected.