Devlog #4 — Hold the Wall

Posted 2026-05-28 · Foundation MVP phase, week four

For four weeks your House could build, gather, and grow. It could not yet defend.

This week it can. The first layer of base defense is in the ground — walls, gates, and traps — and for the first time a wolf pack at nightfall has to work for it.

Walls that mean something

A wall is the simplest defense and the hardest to get right. Drop one and it becomes a real obstacle: wolves and heroes alike now route around it, pathfinding live across the whole map. Seal a perimeter and the only way in is the gap you leave.

But a wall under construction is just a pile of lumber — it shouldn't stop anyone until it's actually standing. So now it doesn't. You can lay foundations across a doorway and people still walk through until the last stone goes up. (More on why this mattered below — it bit me hard.)

Gates with three minds

A gate is a wall you can change your mind about. Click one and you get three modes:

• Closed — sealed to everything hostile. Your own heroes still pass; wolves see a wall.
• Open — anyone walks through. Useful, dangerous, your call.
• Auto — closed to threats, but marked so you know at a glance it's self-managing.

The faction logic runs in the pathfinding itself: a closed gate is a wall to a wolf and a doorway to you, in the same tile, at the same time. That single idea — the same wall is solid or open depending on who's asking — is the spine of every smarter defense to come.

The things beneath the grass

Then there's the spike pit. Cheap, made of wood, and patient. It sits flush with the ground — your heroes stroll right over it — until something with teeth steps on the tile. Then it triggers once, for a lot, and a full-health wolf simply stops existing. After that it's a spent hole in the dirt until someone re-arms it.

And that's the part I'm proudest of: nobody has to re-arm it by hand. An idle builder, with nothing to construct or repair, walks to the nearest spent trap and re-loads it for a third of its build cost. Your defenses maintain themselves while you're offline, the same way your woodcutters keep chopping. The base is alive whether you're watching or not.

Iron bear traps — which hold a target in place instead of killing it — are next on the list. The plumbing is already in the ground for them.

Behind the curtain

Defense systems are where bugs come to throw parties. Three stories from this week.

The invincible wolf. A tester put a spike pit in a doorway, a wolf walked in, took fifty damage, and died — on the server. The client got the death, removed the sprite, and showed nothing there. But the server kept the corpse in memory at zero HP, still walking, still biting. An unkillable ghost wolf you couldn't see proceeded to murder the entire House. The cause was one line: a dying wolf was being swept back into the living list a tick after it died. One filter fixed it. The screenshot of a hero dying to nothing will haunt me.

The hero who walled himself in. Another tester sealed his base, leaving one gap, then built a trap in the gap — and the construction site, like every site at the time, blocked the tile. His base was now perfectly sealed, including against his own starving heroes, who couldn't reach the food inside. That's the bug that taught me construction sites shouldn't block. A half-dug pit is not a fortress wall.

The wolves that wouldn't leave. Pathfinding for a pack of wolves, recomputed every tick against a 500×500 grid, will quietly eat a server alive — especially when the target is walled off and the search explores the entire reachable map before giving up. The fix was a cache (only re-plan when something actually changes) and a hard cap on how far a single search may look. Wolves now move smoothly, give up when they're genuinely stuck, and vanish at dawn.

Three hundred eighty-four tests green, and a new rule written into the playbook so the ghost wolf never returns.

Join the journey

A House isn't just what you build — it's what you can hold. This week Stand Eternal grew teeth: walls to shape the fight, gates to control it, and traps in the dark to punish anything that comes for your people.

The wolves are only practice. The real sieges come later.

Long live the Houses.