Devlog #6: A Wolf Standing Still
Bigger pantry, heroes that go farm when food runs low, and a server that stopped writing to the database for wolves that were not moving.
Posted 2026-09-16 · Foundation MVP phase
Last week the House starved while I was asleep. Here is what I changed so it does not happen again, and what I found while fixing it.
Food
Two changes.
Every storage building had room for 5 food. Three heroes eat about five meals an hour each, so the whole House could hold about twenty minutes of food. If the farmer got busy with something else, it ran out. The limit is 30 now. That's about two hours for three heroes, and you can raise it in the storage panel.
The other change is new behaviour. When food is running low and someone is already hungry, every idle hero stops what they're doing and goes to farm. If there's no farm, they hunt. This ignores the priority rows. Before, if you had Farm set to zero, your heroes would starve next to a planted field, and there was no way out because reviving a hero costs food too.
Two exceptions. A hero on tower duty stays on the tower. A soldier keeps fighting while there's something hostile around.
Towers
Towers now unlock at Keep tier 2. Tier 1 still has walls, gates and traps. A new House has no stone or iron yet, and the first night should be hard.
A wolf standing still
I got a warning email about database load. It was probably about something else, but it made me look at what the server actually writes to the database, and I didn't like what I saw.
Every wolf was saving its position five times a second. Even when it wasn't moving. A wolf standing still, blocked by a wall, or biting something wrote the same coordinates over and over until dawn. Six wolves is thirty writes a second for nothing.
Deer didn't do this. Heroes didn't do this. Only wolves.
The hunger tick was the same story. Every five seconds, for every base, the server ran six database updates for hunger, energy, mood and health, then read all the heroes back to see what it had written. Add the building wear on top and it was about ten database calls every five seconds. To subtract a few numbers.
Both are fixed. Wolves keep their position in memory and only save when something happens: damage, a new target, a bite, a trap. Hunger, energy and building wear also stay in memory and get saved once a minute, and whenever a hero eats, sleeps or leaves.
With one player this changes nothing you can see. But a quiet base used to cost about two database writes a second. With four hundred bases that's eight hundred a second, all day, mostly noise. Now a quiet base costs a few writes a minute. This is the kind of thing that decides how many players one server can hold.
Two bugs
While I was in there I found two more.
When a wolf bit a hut down to zero, the hut didn't collapse. The code looked in the database for huts at zero, but nothing had saved the zero yet. So it found nothing, reloaded the hut with its old health, and the bite was lost. A few seconds later the wear tick would bring it to zero anyway, so nobody noticed. Fixed.
The same code was also reloading every hero from the database whenever a hut collapsed, which moved everyone back to wherever they were last saved. Also fixed.
Steam
The store page is in progress. The studio name is Eternal Forge. The privacy and support pages are up on the site because Steam needs them. What's missing is the capsule art and one more screenshot. More when there's something to show.