Devlog #9: The Long Way In

Posted 2026-10-07 · Foundation MVP phase

Until this week you could walk a hero from one corner of the world to the opposite one in about five minutes. The map was 500 tiles on a side. It was a village pretending to be a world, and everybody who looked at it knew.

A hundred million tiles

It is now 10,000 tiles on a side. One world, everybody in it, no shards and no instances.

Size by itself is only a longer walk, so the shape arrived at the same time. Five rings around a centre. You start on the outer edge, and everything worth having is further in.

Which ring a tile belongs to is worked out from the tile itself, every time, from nothing. There is no table behind it and no file. A hundred million tiles and not a single byte stored.

That is the rule the whole engine is written to. At this scale the world has to be computed rather than remembered, and anything that genuinely must be stored has to earn its place. Asking which ring a tile sits in costs seventy five nanoseconds, so the simulation can ask as often as it likes, for any tile, forever.

Six biomes fill it, and each ring leans toward a face of its own, so the ground underfoot tells you roughly how deep you have come without opening a map.

Four things you cannot cross

Between every two rings runs a band of its own kind. From the outside in: a river, a swamp, a ravine, and lava.

You cannot mine them. You cannot damage them, demolish them, or build against them. Walk the entire length of one and you will not find a gap, because there is not one anywhere.

A fresh world has no way inward at all. That reads like a wall across the content, and it is the opposite, which is the next section.

The only door is one a player builds

A bridge costs 500 wood, 500 stone and 100 iron. That is a project your House commits to, not an afternoon.

It can only stand where the band narrows, and those places come out of the shape of the land rather than out of my hands. I did not place a single one of them. The geography decides where a crossing is possible, and players decide whether one exists.

Whoever builds it owns it. The alliance leader sets the toll, capped at 100 of one resource per crossing, and the owner and their allies walk through for nothing. What everybody else pays does not appear in a treasury somewhere. It piles up in a coffer on the bridge itself, and somebody has to walk a hero out there and carry it home.

Bridges come down. They have to, or the first alliance to reach a threshold owns it for the rest of the game, and I have played that game. Building one takes your House days and losing one does not, which is deliberate: a bridge is meant to be a position you defend, not a trophy you park on. But you cannot pull one down from the far side of the world. Your territory has to be touching it.

The quiet part, for anyone who likes the plumbing. The land a bridge stands on is empty wilderness that nobody lives in, so that part of the world is asleep nearly all of the time, and a sleeping part of the world cannot answer questions. Bridges are therefore kept in an index that belongs to the world rather than to the ground under them, and both halves of the pathfinder read it. That index is the difference between a hero routing through your bridge and a hero deciding the far side of the world cannot be reached.

The wolf problem

I finished the equipment system on Sunday. A master blacksmith can now forge a sword with four rolled affixes on it and his own name attached.

On Monday I went looking for something to kill with it, and remembered that the only hostile thing in this world is a wolf. A wolf has 25 health. A sword does 30 damage.

One swing. The Legendary and the plain one both kill that wolf in a single swing, and a hero with nothing in his hands does it in two. I had spent two weeks building a progression system with nothing on the other end of it.

So the woods got a boar in them, and the high ground got a bear.

Both are territorial, and that word is doing real work. A night wolf walks to your base because you live in it; it came to you, and the fight ends when one side stops moving. A boar was already in that wood when you arrived. It will fight you for walking into it, and it will not follow you out of it. It is the first thing in this game that is dangerous because of where it is standing rather than because of what hour it is.

How dangerous depends on how far in you went to meet it. Every ring inward adds a quarter to a beast's health and to its bite, decided once when it is born and carried with it for life. A bear on the outer edge is a serious fight for a prepared House. The same bear four rings in has 455 health and takes a hero apart in three bites through iron armour. None of that is tuned to you. A new player and a veteran standing on the same tile are looking at exactly the same animal, because the difficulty belongs to the ground.

What a lair is for

Beasts wandering around a wood are weather. You route around weather.

So the world also has lairs, which are the first thing in it you can go to rather than wait for. What a lair is depends on how deep it sits.

Out near the edge it is a doorstep. Walk up, it spits a wave at you, kill the wave, that was the encounter.

Further in it stops being an event and becomes a problem. It keeps producing on a timer and it does not stop for anything except its own destruction, which makes it the first building in this game that a hero can take apart. Until this week everything anybody built was indestructible, including other people's.

Deepest of all, it is a raid. Three waves, each one worse than the one before, and you do not knock the thing down. You go through it. Clear one and it pays you, and then it sits with its mouth choked with rubble for a full day before anything comes out of it again.

I want to be straight about where this sits, because it is the beginning of something and not the shape of it. What went in this week is the skeleton: three kinds of creature, one kind of structure, three ways that structure can behave. That is enough to prove the parts fit together and nowhere near enough to fill a world of a hundred million tiles.

What comes after it is the interesting half. More creatures, each with habits of their own rather than a different number of hit points. Bosses that one House cannot sensibly take on, which is the first thing in this game that will make two Houses talk to each other for a reason other than war. And events that arrive on their own schedule and hand a House something to react to, so that the deep rings are somewhere things happen rather than somewhere things merely are.

The point of this week was to build somewhere for all of that to live.

Nine bears, two bears

I turned a raid loose on a test House to watch one work. Nine bears, the House nine tiles away, the trigger caught, health bars up.

Then I counted the bears, and there were two.

The client, asked directly, said nine. Asked where they were, it said six of them were standing on one tile and three on the tile beside it. Seven of the nine still had full health, because only the two on top of the heap had ever been close enough to bite anything.

Nothing in this game had ever stopped two things from standing in the same place. It had simply never come up. Wolves arrive two or three at a time, and a pile of two reads as two. Nine is where it stops reading as anything at all.

It turned out to be three problems wearing one coat.

The first is the obvious one. Everything that moves now has a body with a radius, and two bodies that finish a moment inside each other push apart. The tempting version of this is one creature per tile, which sounds correct and is not: positions are continuous, so two bears can obey that rule perfectly from either side of a tile boundary while standing two hundredths of a pixel apart. The version that genuinely works snaps movement to tile centres, and that drags occupancy into the pathfinder, where it would change five times a second forever, and the pathfinder is already the most expensive thing in the simulation. Radii cost a microsecond per patch of world and never touch it.

The second is that all nine bears had chosen the same hero, because the picker asked who was nearest and then stopped asking. It asks who is nearest and least surrounded now, and a pack walking into a House splits itself up without being told to.

The third I would never have found without the first two. A bear is forty pixels across and a hero is thirty two, so touching one costs thirty six pixels of distance. A bear's bite reached thirty four. A wolf's reached twenty two against the same thirty two. Every melee range in this game was shorter than touching, and always had been, because when nothing keeps bodies apart the attacker simply stands inside whatever it is hitting and no one is any the wiser. The moment bodies began to be respected, that short reach turned into a chain holding the bear welded to the hero's chest, and I finished the day looking at four bears around a hero with no hero visible between them.

Reach is touching plus a little now, for all of them. The measured distance from a bear to the hero it is eating went from 24 pixels to 36. And heroes draw in front of whatever is attacking them, so you never lose your own people inside a crowd.

One more thing fell out of it. A test that had been failing on two runs in three, which I had been ready to write off as flaky, turned out to be telling the truth: with two bodies splitting every shove evenly, a hero sent eighty pixels with his brother standing in the way lost half of every step and took twice as long to get there, pushing his brother ahead of him like a plough. Whoever is walking does not give way now. Whoever is standing still steps aside.

Next

Equipment. I promised it last week, it landed on Sunday, and it is getting its own post because the map changed underneath it and the two stories do not touch each other anywhere. The short version is that a sword is an object now, with a rarity, affixes rolled one at a time, and the name of whoever forged it, and that last part is the one that matters.

Steam capsule art is still the thing I keep not doing.