Devlog #12: Dig In

Posted 2026-10-28 · Foundation MVP phase

An archer caught walking is a dead archer.

That has been true since squads first took the field in this game. Riders beat archers, and the only answer was to bring more archers than they brought riders. Numbers against numbers.

This week archers got a second answer, and it costs them their feet.

Dig in

Any squad can now entrench where its commander stands. Once it is dug in, it holds a fire zone with a radius of five tiles.

Inside that circle the archers fire on their own at whatever walks in, nearest first, without anyone taking a step. Spearmen and riders do not fire into the zone. They wait for contact, and when something reaches the line the whole squad fights as usual.

That changes what a squad is. A squad that has archers now means something different from one that does not, and a squad of pure spearmen gains nothing from digging in except standing still.

What it costs

• The commander cannot move. Not by order, not to chase, not when shoved. Right-click a dug-in hero to send them somewhere and the game tells you why nothing happened.
• Digging in takes five seconds, and so does getting up. Long enough that you cannot flick it on at every step, short enough to answer a column you can see coming. A countdown over the commander's head reads "Entrenching 3" or "Moving out 2".
• Needs do not take a break. A dug-in hero eats from the pack and sleeps on the ground, right there. Hunger is the price of holding a position, and you decide when it is too high.
• A squad in rout drops the stance at once. Running is running.

You can dig in from three places: the squad's card in the Army screen, the button next to Take control on the hero's own screen, or the E key with the hero selected.

The circle is visible, and that is the point

The zone is drawn on the ground in the colour of the House that owns it, and it follows the rule everything in this world follows: you see it wherever your House has eyes.

So the counter to dug-in archers is not a bigger number. It is going around. Riders who know where the circle is can flank it. Riders who charge across ground nobody scouted find out where it was the hard way.

That is the whole idea. The map gets geography instead of being a floor, and scouting stops being optional.

On your own walls

Dug in inside your own territory, a squad stops being "in the barracks" and becomes the archers on the wall. It shows up, it fires, and it does not rest: a squad standing watch does not heal the way a squad in the barracks does. Watching or resting is your call.

What it shoots today

Against beasts, the zone hits with everything it has. In testing, five veteran archers took a boar from 1000 health to 468 in three seconds, and a second boar eight tiles away never got scratched.

Against other Houses, not yet. Today a squad's volley does not know how to hit a hero, so the zone waits for squad against squad battles. When those arrive, the zone will follow the same rule as every automatic action in this game: in peace, it never starts a fight with another House.

Caught on the way

During testing, the countdown over the commander's head froze on one number for six seconds.

The reason is a good rule in the wrong place. The game draws the world slightly behind the server so that movement looks smooth, and that drawing clock stops on purpose when nothing new arrives, because guessing ahead would mean inventing where things are. In a quiet camp nothing new arrives.

Positions should wait. Countdowns should not. Every countdown in the game now runs on a clock that never stops: the downed hero's timer, skill cooldowns, captures, shields, siege camps, caravan arrivals. And a test now reads the code and fails if a new countdown ever reaches for the wrong clock.

Also this week

An army in the field still has to eat. Soldiers who marched out with a commander used to drop off the books: they stopped taking a bunk and stopped eating. That let you train up to your bunk limit, send everyone out, and train again, forever. Now a soldier in the field keeps a bed at home and eats from the House larder, and when the food runs out they desert from the field too, the cheapest to replace first.

The interface points where you are looking. The heroes screen moved to the left side, with work priorities along the bottom. Clicking a bunk or a training yard in the world opens the Army on the right section. Tabs and disabled buttons became readable.

Wishlist

Stand Eternal is on Steam. There is nothing to buy and nothing to install yet. The wishlist is how you hear when there is, and it is the single most useful thing anyone reading this can do for the game.

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Stand Eternal is a 24/7 civilisation MMO with one world, no pay-to-win, and the same game on PC and mobile. It is in development, and the devlog is how I show the work.

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