Devlog #7: Walls, Mountains, and Marching Orders

Posted 2026-09-23 · Foundation MVP phase

One week since the last devlog, and Stand Eternal changed more in those seven days than in the two months before them. Not "more features". Different game.

If you read the last one and pictured what the game looked like then, throw the picture away.

My own base this morning. The grey mass on the left is a mountain, and it is load bearing: it is the north wall. The red line is where my territory actually ends, tile by tile, not an approximation of it.

The base is yours to draw

Here is the change everything else hangs off.

The base used to be a list of buildings. You clicked Hut, you placed a Hut, the Hut was a thing with a roof and a name and a number. Very strategy game, very 2004.

Now you draw it. Walls go down tile by tile, like painting. A palisade segment is 4 wood, a stone one is 6, and you can upgrade a palisade in place without tearing it down. Doors are still doors, and they now open by themselves when someone from your House walks up to them, which sounds trivial and is the single thing that made the base stop feeling like a puzzle box.

Inside, furniture does the work buildings used to do. A straw bed and a proper bed instead of a Hut. An anvil, a fletching table, a tanning rack instead of a Smithy, a Fletcher, a Tannery. A table with benches where heroes actually sit down to eat, on a specific tile, instead of milling around in a zone.

And because walls are now tiles, the game can tell whether a space is enclosed. That turns out to matter. A hero sleeping on the floor recovers at half rate and wakes up in a worse mood. A straw bed outdoors is better than the floor. A real bed inside four walls and a door is the best sleep in the game. Nobody tells you this in a tooltip. You find out because your carpenter keeps waking up miserable and you eventually put a roof over him.

Farm plots went the same way: drag a rectangle, each tile becomes a plot, wheat grows through four visible stages on a wall clock, so a field you planted before logging off is ripe when you come back.

There are mountains now

Stone and iron used to be rocks lying on the grass. You walked up, you clicked, you got stone.

Now roughly a third of the map is rock, and it is terrain. Ridges, hills, boulders, iron veins threaded through them. It blocks movement. It splits the map into valleys and passes. If a mountain sits between your base and the forest, that is now a fact about your base.

And you mine it. Drag a rectangle over the rock face, mark it, and your miners chew through it two seconds a swing. A plain rock tile is three swings and three stone. An iron vein is four: one stone for the cap, then three iron underneath. When the last swing goes through, the tile becomes mine floor and you can walk into the hole you just made.

Inside your own territory, that hole stays. You are digging out a room. Outside it, the rock grows back after about a week of real time, so the world does not get strip mined by whoever showed up first.

There is a toggle on the Throne for people who want their mountain to stay a mountain: turn off "Heroes mine on their own" and your miners will only touch what you explicitly marked. I added it because the first thing I did with mountains was wall my base with one, and the second thing I did was watch my own miner cheerfully dig a door through it.

The Keep is now the Throne

Same tier, same territory radius, same hero cap, same upgrades. Different object.

The Throne does not hold your resources any more and does not have a health bar. Chests hold your resources: 30 wood and 10 stone, 100 slots, and a panel where you set a limit per item type so a chest can be "food only" if you want it to be. The Throne is the seat of the House, and eventually it gets taken in a siege rather than chewed down by wolves. "Keep tier" is "House tier" everywhere now.

Wolves, for their part, stopped eating buildings entirely. They come for heroes. And they only come one night in five, because the day/night cycle also doubled in length (four minutes of day, two of night) and a pack every single night was exhausting rather than tense.

Marching orders

You can give a hero a direct order now. Select, right click a tree, a rock, a chest, a construction site. They go and do it, then go back to their own business.

If you want to hold on to them, there is a "Take control" button. A controlled hero stops taking jobs from the priority list and waits for you. They still eat, still sleep, still carry their haul home, because I am not going to let a UI mode starve somebody. A little gold pennant over their head tells you who is on a leash. Logging out releases everyone.

Everything you are looking at is new

I spent a full day redrawing the game, and not in an art program. The tiles, the rock faces, the walls, the gate, the beds, the anvil, the towers, the traps, the farm plots, the mining markers, the item icons in the HUD: all of it is generated in code, from recipes with fixed seeds.

That sounds like a weird flex and it is actually a practical decision. It means a wall knows which of its neighbours are also wall and draws the right corner. It means rock gets a rounded edge where it meets open ground and a hard face where it meets more rock, so a mountain reads as a mountain instead of a chequerboard. It means four different rock faces instead of the same one tiled forever.

The one that taught me something: the first version of the mined floor was the same stone blocks as the wall in a lighter shade, and in play I could not tell what I could walk on. Correct-looking and useless. I redrew it as a smooth surface with pick marks.

Heroes leave home now

Old rule: a hero only worked in its own chunk. Felled your local forest and there was wood one screen over? Too bad. Everyone stands around.

New rule: if the resource exists anywhere, they will go get it. No distance cap. They walk out, work, and walk home. They will not step into another House's claim to do it.

This was the right call and it broke absolutely everything.

A chunk only knows about its own ground. So the moment a hero walks past the border, the part of the server steering it is reasoning about a place it has never seen, which looks to it like open ground. Result: heroes walking straight over mountains. Heroes walking through my own palisade. A hero who mined a rock fifty tiles away, stood there holding one stone, and could not figure out how to get home, because the only chest it knew about belonged to somebody else.

Each of those got fixed. Long walks are now planned in legs, and each leg ends on a gap in the border that is confirmed open from both sides, so the hero is handed off to the next chunk standing somewhere real, and that chunk plans the next stretch with ground it actually knows.

The part where my tools lied to me

Then this week's favourite.

I had all this working, and all my automated checks were green, and I was reasonably pleased with myself. And the report from playtesting was: the heroes are zigzagging on their way out to mine. Going one way, turning, going the other.

I looked. Checks green. Looked again. Still green. No hero standing inside rock, no route drawn through a mountain, nothing jumping, nothing stuck.

The checks were telling the truth about the wrong thing. Every one of them measured a moment: where is this hero standing right now, what does its current plan cross. A zigzag is not a moment. It is the shape of an entire journey, and every individual step of it is perfectly straight and perfectly legal.

So I built the thing that was missing: a tool that replays the route planner against the live world and compares what it plans against the shortest walk that actually exists. One number. Planned distance over ideal distance. 1.0 is perfect. 2.0 means the hero walks twice as far as it has to.

First run, first journey: 2.08. A hero leaving the base for a rock 42 tiles away was walking 87. It was leaving by a door on the far side of the base, because the code picked the exit nearest the destination and never asked how far away the exit itself was. The right door was 15 tiles away and got skipped for one 62 tiles away that happened to point slightly better.

The other one was worse and funnier. Mining opens up the mountain, obviously, that is the point of mining. But the navigation layer still asked the map generator whether a tile was rock, and the generator does not know you have been digging. On my test base there were 110 tiles that heroes had personally carved out with pickaxes and that the pathfinder still believed were solid mountain. And those tiles were, of course, exactly the ones around the rocks you would go mine.

After: every journey arrives, average detour 1.03, worst case 1.09. I sat and watched twenty one real journeys and not one of them went the wrong way.

The lesson I am writing on the wall: when something looks wrong on screen and your instruments say fine, the instruments are measuring something else. Go build the instrument that measures what you can see. Do that before you touch the code, or you will "fix" it four times like I did.

Smaller things

• Heroes have stars and a skill tree now. Duplicates of a hero level them up, each star grants a node, and the tree splits between their trade and combat.
• Your House can crown a King. Their category decides what everybody gets: a warrior King buffs damage, a merchant King buffs work, a diplomat King softens needs. Swappable once a day.
• Territory is drawn as a border on the ground now instead of a coloured circle, and it falls exactly where the rule falls. Your colour, your line: solid for yours, thin for allies, dashed for strangers.
• Scouts patrol your perimeter and push the fog back.
• New Houses get a shield for their first ten days, and it works both ways: nobody can hit you, and you cannot hit anybody.
• Construction sites, farm plots and rocks all have info panels now. Click a half built wall and it tells you what it is waiting for and whether your chests actually have it.

Next

The world is close to playable end to end: found a House, draw a base, feed it, wall it, dig into the mountain, defend it at night, expand. What it needs now is a reason to keep going, which means research, and the tech tree is the next thing on the board.

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