Devlog #8: A House You Can Live In
Lights, floors, a kitchen, and furniture you can move without tearing it down. Then I looked at my own base at night and found half of it was pitch black.
Posted 2026-09-30 · Foundation MVP phase
Last week the base became something you draw. This week it became somewhere people live. The difference only shows up after dark.
My base, 22:57 on day 153088. Every warm patch is a light somebody built.
Light
Torches, braziers, lanterns and candelabra. They light themselves over the ten seconds of dusk and go out over the ten of dawn, along with everything else in the world.
I got this wrong twice before getting it right, and both times in ways no test could have told me about. The first version kept half brightness halfway out, so four lights in one room added up to a flat cream puddle with the floor art erased underneath it. The second fixed the brightness and turned into fog rising off the ground. What shipped is a hard core and a thin tail, and I only know it works because I sat and looked at a room at night with one torch in it, and then with four.
The candelabrum got redrawn after the first look too. One pixel candles vanish at play zoom.
Rooms that do something
Floors came in: planks, gravel, stone, flagstone. They are not decoration. A floor gives beauty and it gives speed, and gravel is the interesting one, because it is fast and ugly and cheap. A gravel path out to the field is not the same decision as paving a hall. Measured on a live hero: 60 pixels per second on gravel against 50 on grass.
Beauty is counted per room, and a beautiful room slows down how fast a hero's mood falls. It does not hand out a bonus. It buys time.
Wood, stone and iron change a piece's price and its beauty, never what it does. A stone chest holds the same hundred items as a wooden one. The rule behind all of it is that nothing should be a straight upgrade of anything else.
A kitchen, and telling a workbench when to stop
Raw food can be cooked now. A campfire turns 3 raw into 1 meal, a stove turns the same 3 into 2, and a meal is worth nearly twice as much hunger and more than twice the mood. Cooking is its own priority row, so a House decides whether it is worth a hero standing at the fire.
The first version sent the cook to the nearest station, the way the smith works, and my cook burned 54 food at the campfire for 19 meals while the stove stood idle next to it. Same walk, double the yield. Yield wins now.
And the workbenches learned the order that was missing: make until I have 25 in stock. They had "make 10" and "make forever", and forever is how my pantry went from 86 food to 2. A bench can hold several of these, paused, reordered, one list.
Moving what is already standing
Until this week, moving a chest two tiles left meant demolishing it and losing half the cost.
Now it is a job. You pick the piece, you pick where it goes, and a builder walks over and does the work. The piece stays standing and stays working the whole time, which is not politeness: there is nowhere for a hundred items to live while a chest is in the air.
This includes the Throne. The territory stays where the House was founded, so dragging your Throne across the base does not drag your border with it.
The part nobody sees
I asked whether any of this survives a thousand players, then measured instead of guessing.
The fact that governs everything: no player's base ever sleeps. A base with a building in it keeps simulating whether you are logged in or not, so a thousand accounts is a thousand simulations running all day. Three things I was sure would be the problem were not: the number of processes, the network messages, and the database. It was pathfinding.
One change at a time, each one measured: tick lag down about sixfold, logging in from 287 ms to 23 ms. Squeezed onto three cores to fake a heavier world, the old code could not answer a login at all. It timed out. The new one takes a tenth of a second.
And then I looked at my own base
Last night, with all of the above working, half of my House was pitch black.
Territory grows as your House levels up. Sight never grew with it. I had also just taught the Throne to move, and its sight went with the sprite while the border stayed at the founding stone. The hole had been there for weeks and I had never noticed, because until this week there was nothing inside the base worth looking at.
Measured: 1218 tiles of territory, 878 of them lit. 74.7%.
The fix is a rule, not a number. Your claim is an eye: a House sees exactly what a House holds, from the same circles that draw the border, so the two cannot drift apart again. Even then the west side kept a dim rim, because the fog fades over the last 15% of any circle and I had put that fade inside the walls. The eye is wider than the claim now by exactly the width of the fade.
1218 of 1218.
The game got pretty enough that the dark started to bother me. That is a good problem to have.
Next
Equipment becomes real objects instead of a number in a column: rarity, rolled affixes, and the name of whoever forged it. Armour will finally do something.
Steam capsule art is still the thing I keep not doing.