Hello everyone,

A big tidying-up. Everything the game already knew but never told you, said out loud; a way out of a board you cannot finish; and a Skyline that behaves the way it looks. Your daily puzzles, your streak, your town and your rewards are exactly as you left them.

The fix: prices you could not read

• After dark, the price on anything you could not yet afford was pale text on a pale button. In most languages all you could see was the acorn. Every one of those prices is readable again, in both the day and the night theme.
• It was never only the shop. Any button the game had dimmed carried the same problem after dark, including a day in the Archive you have not reached yet. They all read properly now.

When you are stuck

• After three hints on a board, a Show solution button joins Hint, Undo, Clear and Rules. It asks first, the way Clear does, and then puts the whole solution on the board.
• A board you asked to see is not recorded: no time, no streak, no points and no leaderboard entry. Coming back to it later, even from the Archive, plays it just for fun, and it says so.
• Every one of the sixteen dailies can show its solution. Carom plays its shots out from the opening table, and Bloom rings the flowers the solution taps.

Skyline

• A piece dropped while the one before it is still in the air now lands on top of it, and the aiming guide shows exactly where. It used to aim at the building as it stood a moment earlier, and a good drop could go straight into the sea.
• Every drop takes the same time to fall, from the first floor to the top. A lot's first drop used to fall for more than three times as long as one near the top, so the same wind carried it nearly three times as far.
• The pieces stay considerably bigger at the top of a tall building. They used to shrink until they were hard to place at exactly the point where placing them mattered most. The view slides down instead.
• From the fourth building of a run, a small shape beside the materials shows what you are building: a tower, a house, an office block or a lighthouse. You can aim for it now instead of finding out on the way up.
• A landing that only just missed says so. Every drop that was not perfect used to get the same word, whether you were a hair out or halfway to the edge.
• The windsock and the lean meter wait until they have something to say. On a first building the wind cannot blow and nothing is leaning yet, so a new player meets a much quieter screen.
• At the top of a tall building, the moment when a landing counts as perfect had become narrower than a single frame on some runs, so hitting it was partly luck. It is always wide enough to hit now. The crane at its fastest is slightly slower than it was, which means the highest floors play a little calmer and a score up there comes a little more easily than it did in 1.7.2.
• The height ruler can actually be read. It was pale marks on a pale sky, and it is the only thing that says how high you are once the view has zoomed out. Everything it marks is now a height a building can reach; four of its six landmarks stood above anything you could ever build.
• A landing that lines up perfectly is marked by a shape as well as a colour, so it no longer depends on telling two browns apart.
• The lot line says what the lot is worth. Containers, storeys and whole buildings have always scored more than crates, and the screen never mentioned it.
• The first piece of a stack says what it is and what it paid. It was the only drop in the game that landed in silence, and it is the one that cannot be perfect and starts no combo.
• The end of a run counts your perfect landings. The game had been counting them all along and never showed you.
• On a building with two stacks, the number on the ruler matches the stack it is pointing at. It used to show every floor on the plot, so four and four read as eight.
• Also on two stacks: the one lesson about leaning no longer arrives when both of your towers are standing perfectly straight.
• With calm animations on, the view eases up to the building instead of jumping to it. A cut on every landing is more sudden movement than the smooth climb it replaced, which is the opposite of what that setting is for.

What a level changes, and what Hint does

• Easy, Medium and Hard now say what they change before you choose: the size of the board, how many words, colours or balls, and what a level adds or takes away. It is under the chips on the play popup and in every puzzle's rules.
• The rules also say what Hint does on that puzzle, because it is not the same everywhere: in some it makes a correct move for you, in others it only points at your next step, and in Carom it plays a shot that counts as a shot. The Hint button itself says it too.
• Hard Verse tells you that its words may share letters, which the rules had always denied.

Things the game knew but never said

• The end of a Skyline run says what your floors are building toward on the Shore, and how many floors are still to go.
• A board you come back to says you are picking it up where you left off, instead of quietly starting the clock again. On the hub, a puzzle you have started today says so on its card.
• Undo says when there is nothing left to take back. A board picked up from a save starts with no history in most puzzles, and the button used to do nothing without a word.
• The result panel shows where your solve stands on today's board once Steam has it.
• The Archive shows how far each animal friendship has come, the way it already showed solves and floors.
• The snowflake beside your streak explains what a streak freeze is, and when one covers a day you missed, the game says so instead of quietly counting down.

Things that said something untrue

• A Friends leaderboard with only your own time on it now says none of your friends has played that board yet, instead of looking like a board nobody else was on.
• With Steam closed or not signed in, the leaderboards and the Challenges page say Steam is not connected. They used to tell you rankings were available in the Steam version, which you already own.
• An achievement earned while Steam was not running never reached your Steam profile. Every achievement you have earned is now sent to Steam the next time you start the game with Steam open.
• A challenge that runs out of time before you play it no longer disappears without a word; the Challenges page tells you. A challenge you sent says there is no answer yet and how many days your friend has left, instead of claiming it is waiting for an answer.
• Night is now Time of day in Settings: Auto, Day or Night. Your choice is saved, and Day or Night stays put instead of changing back fifteen minutes later.
• A seven-day banner promises the garden lantern only when seven days were really earned. A day a freeze paid for was counted toward it, and toward the Archive's "now" line, but never toward the reward itself.

Easier to reach

• Verse takes a word one tap at a time: tap the letters, then tap the last one again to try it. Quilt sews a patch from two tapped corners. Dragging works exactly as it did, for anyone who prefers it.
• A controller can reach everything around a board now: Back, Settings, the difficulty pill and the buttons underneath, with a ring showing where you are. The pill opens with the same button as everything else.
• The Town's and the porch's buttons are on that path too.
• Esc on the Wheel opens Settings, as it does on every other board.

Smaller fixes

• A solved board's result panel has Rules on it, so you can reread how a puzzle works without replaying it. A board you solved earlier in the day also offers Look at the board.
• Ignore on a challenge asks first. It sat right beside Play and could not be undone.
• Changing difficulty, or going straight on to the next puzzle, in the middle of a board no longer files that half-finished board and its clock under the wrong one.
• With the colour-safe palette on, every mistake flashes in the colour-safe error colour. Several puzzles still used a red of their own, and a wrong patch in Quilt now carries a second marker as well.
• The Archive fits a small window again. Its rewards, its calendar and its row of totals no longer run past the right edge.
• In the demo, a day in the Archive that belongs to the full game shows a padlock and explains itself when tapped, instead of a greyed-out button.
• The squirrel's friendship reward is a scarf, which is what the squirrel is drawn wearing. The text had promised a flower behind its ear.
• Ticking a companion on the play popup keeps its name in your own language. Ticking one used to switch that name to English, in every language but English.
• The backyard says why it will not be played with. Petting a sleeping animal, or one taking cover from the rain, gave a small grey puff and nothing else while the cursor still promised something would happen. Offering food an animal does not want says so too.
• Back goes where you came from. A board opened from the Archive returns to the Archive, and one opened from a challenge returns to the Challenges page, instead of both landing on today's hub and losing your place.
• Which leaderboard view you were on is remembered between sessions, as the game already claimed it was. Friends stayed Friends until you closed the game.
• The Challenges page fades in like every other screen instead of appearing in one jump.
• The first time you open the game, the welcome ends on a puzzle to try rather than on sixteen names you have not met. The demo has always done this.

The Trading Post

• A row of chips under the title jumps straight to the paints, the wallpaper, the floors, the windowsill or the lampshades. The page is a long one, and dragging past four sections to reach the floors was the worst thing about using it.
• The page says how much of the shop you own, and each section says how many of its own things you have.
• A strip of small pictures shows what you have on right now in all five places at once. Before this the only way to find out was to scroll the whole page looking for the words In use.
• Buying something gives a little more than a changing number: the thing you bought settles, and so does your acorn count.
• The page says what a solve pays: two points on Easy, four on Medium, six on Hard. That is the whole of how the shop is paid for and it was never written down anywhere.
• Something you cannot afford says how many more acorns you need, rather than only that you cannot have it. The streak freeze says it the same way.
• Buying a streak freeze updates the count beside the button. It used to sit still until the page was rebuilt for some other reason.
• A controller can move through the whole page: the jump chips, the strip of what you are wearing, the conversion rates, every row and the freeze. The focus ring was already being drawn on buttons a controller had no way to reach.

The Shore and the Town

• The Shore says what the beach is growing toward and how far along you are. Thirty five things are earned onto that beach and bay, and the screen named after them never mentioned a single one.
• The panel at the end of a run keeps its buttons on screen. On a small window with Larger text, Back to the shore could fall off the bottom.
• The Town shows the things you have earned. It was painting a bare hillside, so the sheep, the orchard, the windmill, the pennant and the rest all vanished on the way across the bay, which looked exactly like losing them.
• Clear town is not offered when there is nothing to clear. On a new save it would arm, ask if you were sure, and then empty eight empty lots.
• Sharing says what happened. One route said it had copied the line without mentioning the postcard it had just saved, another said nothing at all, and both went quiet if the postcard could not be written even though the line was already on your clipboard.
• The writing on a postcard cannot run into the logo in a long language.
• On the Shore, the buttons along the top no longer overlap each other in the longest languages at the smallest window size.

Today's allowance

• A source that has earned everything it can for the day now says when it comes back, in your own clock, instead of showing the same two numbers it showed yesterday. The Shore's daily points fill in a run or two, so that row was reading as though it had stopped working.
• Finishing a Shore run once the day's points are spent no longer reads as though the run did not count. The points are done for the day; the leaderboard never is.
• The shop also notices the day turning over while it is open, which it did not before.

Unchanged

• The sixteen dailies you already know, the backyard, the Archive, your streak and your rewards are exactly as you left them, and every board already played deals exactly as before.
• Nothing about what a real solve earns has changed: the same points for the same puzzles, and the same prices in the shop. Replaying a board for fun no longer pays Wheel bonus-word points or moves your Checkmate rating, which it was never meant to.
• The demo shares this build. The Shore, Skyline, the Town, Checkmate and Buttons are full-game only there.

If something still looks wrong, tell us in the discussions. We would rather fix it the same day.

See you at the cottage.