The Founding, and the Phases Nobody Had Seen

The Founding, rebuilt

The last phase of the race had exactly one contested variable and it was decided before the phase began: whoever started hauling first won. Every quest in it was serial in count, so a player with nineteen envoys finished the whole list while their hauling was under 10% done, and a rival could do nothing during the phase to catch them. Six tasks replace the five that were there. Two of them are queues that owning more envoys cannot shorten, and one of them is the only thing in the phase that raises how fast you haul.

• ◆new
  NEW: Securing backing

  Nominate up to two envoys for the whole phase, and only they may court cities in it. An envoy walks to another player's city, sits with its leaders for 6 hours, and comes home with a pledge one hour later. Any Town Hall qualifies, there is no School requirement and no level floor. Ten different owners are needed, so two cities of one player count once and your own cities never count. Leaving early forfeits the visit outright, with no partial credit at five hours and fifty-five minutes. One envoy per city world-wide: a city a rival is already courting is shown closed to you, without naming who took it, which makes backing the one place in the phase where players contend for the same scarce thing.

• ⇄reworked
  Supply lanes are earned, not granted

  WasEvery phase ran on three supply lanes, fixed from the moment you founded

  NowThe Founding opens on two, and pledges buy the third at 2, the fourth at 5 and the fifth at 10

  The steps escalate deliberately. Two pledges is one envoy's first errand and it already buys back a lane, so the task pays from the very start, and the tenth pledge opens the fifth lane rather than being busywork against a ceiling reached at nine. Starting below the rate you have had all race is the point: the first two pledges do not add to a comfortable three, they buy back ground the phase took away. A player who secures nothing hauls slower in the last phase than they did in the first three; a player who secures everything ends up faster than they have ever been. The panel states the current lane count and what opens the next one.

• ◆new
  NEW: Cataloguing the founding deposit

  Seat one nominated scribe at the founding desk and it works through the fifty deposited fragments one at a time, each taking between 6 and 18 minutes. Fifty of them is about ten hours, and owning more envoys does not shorten it. The desk is a place, not a role, so the scribe has to be standing at your building site to be seated, which the deposit's own trips have already put five envoys in position for. Progress is durable: recalling the scribe stops the desk and keeps every fragment already catalogued, so reseating resumes where it stopped. Two bars, the fragment in hand and the fifty overall, and no minigame.

• ⇄reworked
  The founding deposit

  WasOne quest row reading "Make the site's final delivery and complete The Great Library", completed by the ceremony itself

  NowCarry 50 of your lore fragments to your building site, 10 to a trip, any number of envoys

  The ceremony used to validate the fifty texts, escrow them and start the finale walk all in one action. The first two are now their own visible task, days earlier. Its two refusals travel with it, so being told that two of your fifty are the same text, or that one is a text you have already deposited, happens minutes into the phase instead of an hour after your last chance to act. Each trip is an ordinary journey now rather than a flat half hour, so the envoy walks a real path and every map surface that draws a journey draws this one. Nothing is destroyed at any point, and a losing ceremony still hands all fifty fragments back with their tiers intact.

• improved
  The master works

  Was215,000 units of wood, stone, clay and metal

  Now188,000 units of wood, stone, clay and metal

  Cut when the lane curve moved beneath it. Sized off the slow half of the phase, on the assumption you are courting with both nominated envoys in parallel: the narrower opening costs about 18,000 units of ground by hour twenty-one, and 27,000 off the bill covers that with a margin. Deliberately not full parity, because a slower opening is the point of the narrower base. With backing secured the sink is around 41 hours; with none at all it is around 86.

• ✕removed
  Voices of the world

  WasSend your envoys to hear the voices of different city owners across Nandonia, scaled to how many players there were to visit

  NowRemoved

  One of the two purest count-serial tasks in the game. Ten separate errands divide by ten envoys, which is exactly the fault the phase was rebuilt to fix. Securing backing asks for visits to ten different players too, but asks for them one clock at a time.

• ✕removed
  Chart the frontier

  WasComplete 30 explorations anywhere in the world

  NowRemoved

  The other one. Thirty explorations is one wave for a wide roster and a wall for a small one, and it measured the size of your empire rather than anything you did in the phase.

• reduced
  Follow the omens

  WasExplore 5 tiles that carry one of your own scouting observations

  NowExplore 10 tiles that carry one of your own scouting observations

  Doubled, because it is now one of only two count-shaped tasks left in the phase and five was a single afternoon. A player holding no active observation marker at the instant their site enters phase 4 has it waived outright rather than being sent to build a scouting network from nothing.

• ◆new
  NEW: One envoy, one role

  During The Founding an envoy holds at most one role at a time. A hauler cannot secure backing, a courting envoy cannot catalogue, and the scribe can do neither. The role frees the moment the job ends. The two nominated roles, up to two backing envoys and one scribe, are recorded for the whole phase and vanish with it. Without this rule the answer to "how do I finish backing faster" would be "own more envoys", which is the fault being fixed, and parking ten envoys at ten cities would be the winning move. The envoy picker refuses a role an envoy is barred from, so you find out before you commit rather than after.

The Founding Ceremony

The race ends in one fixed hour, and the first ceremony in the world to close raises The Great Library. Everything about that hour is now visible to everyone.

• ⇄reworked
  The Founding Procession is the Founding Ceremony

  Was"The Founding Procession": an envoy described as walking to your building site carrying the founding deposit

  Now"The Founding Ceremony": one envoy presides over a rite that takes one fixed hour

  The name outlived its fiction twice. The envoy never travelled, because the hour has always been flat and distance has never bought anything in this race, and the phase rework moved the carrying of the fifty texts into the deposit task days earlier, so by the time the finale ran the deposit was already at the site and catalogued there. Renamed everywhere a player reads it: the panel, the button, the picker, the outcome screens, the gate sentences and the world announcements.

• improved
  Everyone watches it, on the map

  For that hour the site's plate stops being one landmark among many. It grows, its surface fills purple, and a pink bar counts the hour down, with a pulsing ring on the tile. Every ceremony in the world pulses in phase, so two of them running at once read as one race reaching its end rather than two unrelated events. Previously the plate and the ring read only your own site, so the last hour of a world event was visible to the one player already watching their own panel.

• improved
  A signed-out visitor sees it too

  The map already showed a visitor who has not signed in the terrain, city names, scores, natural wonders and ruins. The whole wonder-race layer sat behind a sign-in: no building sites, no phase plates, no ceremony. All of it is public now. A visitor owns nothing and has surveyed nothing, so they see exactly what any signed-in player sees about a rival site without surveying it: the tile, the phase, the status, the segments and a running ceremony.

• improved
  The map says what is being raised

  Until the monument exists its name appeared nowhere on the map, so a ceremony plate could say a rite was under way without saying what for. The wonder being raced for now travels with the board, which is the one payload a signed-out spectator receives.

The Halls Rise, and The Archive Wing

Last time we said we were not going to tell you what was in the phases after Groundworks. The race has been through them, so here they are. Both pay a buff on completion, both carry a heavier sink than the phase before them, and both spread their quests across parts of the game that have nothing to do with hauling.

• ◆new
  NEW: Phase 2, The Halls Rise

  64,500 units of materials, and the first phase to ask for clay and metal: 30,000 wood, 25,000 stone, 8,000 clay and 1,500 metal. Beside it, Chronicle the cities, which wants your envoys in 20 different cities across Nandonia, counting distinct cities rather than distinct owners, and paying the visited owner a small trickle of Cultural Influence for being chronicled. And Gather knowledge, 15 lore fragments recovered from any source at all: exploration, wonder visits, ruin delves or expeditions. Completing the phase pays 700 Cultural Influence, or 1,050 for the first player in the world to do it.

• ◆new
  NEW: Halls Ascendant

  The phase 2 completion buff, Epic, 24 hours: envoy travel time reduced by 15%. It does not shorten supply-run hauling, which runs on a flat hour by design, so it cannot be turned back on the race itself. It does speed the envoy's own travel home before a haul begins, like any other journey.

• ◆new
  NEW: Phase 3, The Archive Wing

  112,000 units: 50,000 wood, 42,000 stone, 17,000 clay and 3,000 metal. Four quests beside the sink. Survey rival sites sends your envoys to other players' building sites, and its target scales to how many other sites exist when the phase opens, so a world with no rivals yet is not asked for the impossible. Consult the monuments wants 10 investigations spread across several different discovered wonders, drawn from a list frozen when the phase opens. Survey your building site sends an envoy to break ground on what lies beneath it. And The excavation is what that survey uncovers. Completing the phase pays 1,100 Cultural Influence, or 1,650 for the world first.

• ◆new
  NEW: Archivist's Favour

  The phase 3 completion buff, Legendary, 24 hours: lore fragment discovery chance increased by 20% while exploring, delving or investigating wonders. It compounds with Keen Senses and Explorer's Vigor rather than replacing either.

• ⇄reworked
  The excavation

  WasThree entries into the shaft, ever, with each envoy's own delve progress counted, so floors a previous envoy had already cleared still counted toward the total

  NowTwenty floors cleared in total by anyone, unlimited entries, and each envoy re-clears from the top

  The old shape was gameable: the cheapest route through the phase was to send fresh envoys at floor 1 and pull them out before anything got hard. No envoy may now leave with rewards before depth 8, so a descent has to be worth making. When the twentieth floor falls the dig is finished, the shaft seals, and the envoy that cleared it is paid 100 Cultural Influence on top of whatever that floor yielded. The exit gate lifts with the seal wherever that envoy is standing.

• ✕removed
  The shaft's tremor

  WasA tremor mechanic priced the shaft's limited entries and the credit that overflowed them

  NowRemoved

  It existed to price a limited entry, and there is no longer a limited entry to price.

• improved
  The dig's completion bonus is paid where you can see it

  The 100 Cultural Influence for finishing the dig used to be awarded the instant the twentieth floor banked, mid-delve, with nothing on any screen to say it had happened. A number moved and no sentence explained it, which is much the same as not being paid. It is carried up with the rest of the haul now, counted into the same total the floor's own rewards go through so the level bar and the itemised breakdown stay one piece of arithmetic, and reported separately as well, because finishing the dig is a different sentence from clearing some floors.

• improved
  A groundbreaking costs nothing, and a finished dig offers no further floor

  Breaking ground on your own site was being charged for as though it were an ordinary exploration. It is free. Separately, an envoy already down the shaft when the twentieth floor fell kept descending: the seal only ever refused new entries, so the quest was complete, the shaft was closed to newcomers, and one envoy was still digging with nothing left to give. Both the result the screen reads and the server's own refusal now consult whether the dig is finished, and the refusal says so in those words rather than reporting that the ruin has no more depth.

Surveying a rival

A survey opens a window on a rival site's progress, which is the intel the board otherwise hides. It used to cost nothing but the walk.

• ⇄reworked
  A survey takes five minutes, and the envoy does the work

  WasThe survey resolved inside the request that asked for it, and the envoy was free again in the same breath

  NowFive minutes on the clock, with the envoy committed for every second of it

  An envoy walked across the world, surveyed, and was available again instantly, with nothing on the map ever showing it working. Ordering one now starts a clock and changes nothing else: the quest credit, the intel window and the snapshot all land when the work does. The snapshot is taken at completion rather than at the order, because five minutes of a rival's progress is exactly what intel is for and freezing the older figure would deliver a report that was stale before it arrived. A surveying envoy says so and counts itself down.

• reduced
  A site may be surveyed once every twelve hours

  WasRe-surveyable at will, though a repeat bought nothing

  NowA 12 hour cooldown per site, stated on the board before you make the trip

  Re-surveying the same site never moved the quest counter and the intel window was still open, but nothing on the board remembered where you had already been, so envoys were being spent on it anyway. A surveyed site now carries a tick instead of an invitation to go back.

Supply runs, patrons and recalls

Hauling is what moves the sink bar in every phase, and three separate faults were making it worse for exactly the players who could least afford it.

• improved
  A supply trip never arrives empty

  WasA trip carried whatever the patron city happened to have stored when the envoy arrived

  NowA trip carries at least 150 units however empty the city is, split across resources on the same proportional rule the capacity split already uses

  Phase 1's sink was a threshold, not a difficulty curve. The players who cleared it did so in 7 to 15 hours, on Town Hall 19 and 20 storehouses holding hundreds of thousands, for whom the whole sink was one decision. The players stuck on it were 54 to 112 hours in at under 30%, not for want of envoy capacity: their envoys could carry 400 to 480 a trip and were arriving with 5 to 36 units, because a small city spends what it collects as fast as it collects it and an hourly trip scoops up only what has trickled in since the last one. One run made 55 trips for 260 units. The floor alone puts phase 1 at two to three days, which is what it was meant to take, and it binds on nobody who has stock.

• improved
  A patron slot is an occupancy, not a life sentence

  WasA city that had ever supplied the site kept its slot for the rest of the phase, even after the run was recalled

  NowThree runs at a time, and a recall frees the slot the moment the run ends

  A player with one or two envoys had to choose between supplying the site and doing anything else with them until the phase turned over, which is the opposite of what a recall is for. Delivery rate is unchanged, because there are still at most three haulers on the road. What widens is which cities may supply one phase.

• ⇄reworked
  A recalled envoy walks home from where it actually was

  WasRecall was instant: an envoy drawn most of the way to the site reappeared at home the moment the button was pressed

  NowThe envoy walks back from the point on the route it had reached, and stays committed for every second of it

  The walk is priced at the full trip window per unit of distance, deliberately slower than the haul itself, so standing at the site costs an hour and halfway costs thirty minutes. Under a minute is floored to nothing, because a single-digit countdown holding a slot is noise rather than a journey. A run recalled on its opening travelling leg still ends at once, since that envoy is genuinely in transit on ordinary rules and already walking to the city a recall would send it to.

• improved
  Hauling envoys are drawn walking their route

  They were invisible rather than motionless: no route line, no plate, and a map tracker that called a supply run idle. They now walk the route, carry a pink plate that counts the delivery down, and answer a tap that finds them. The three phase 4 panels share one shape, so an envoy on a six hour commitment reads as at least as much of an event as one hauling stone, with the portrait, title, city and level every other surface gives it. Supply Runs also moved directly under Building Materials, since the haulers are the only thing that moves the number they were sitting three panels below.

Your site, on the map

• improved
  The founding picker docks beside the map instead of covering it

  Choosing where to build meant reading a popup that hid the world the choice is about. The picker now sits beside the map, centres the view into the free area rather than behind the panel, and says what each candidate city is worth knowing for. A player who has not founded also gets a real briefing on My Site: phase 1 exactly as it will look the moment they found, its quests at zero and its materials bill, built from the same code the founded site uses so the preview cannot describe a different set of quests to the one you are given.

• improved
  Every site tile answers a tap

  Tapping your building site opens its own action menu, which names what is being built and offers only the actions that tile actually has. A site outside every plot used to be a dead tap zone entirely. A running floor draws as a progress bar rather than a button, a delving envoy is not offered for hire, and the button that opens the dig says Delve, which is the word the quest now uses too.

• improved
  The site appears the moment it is founded

  It used to wait for the next map refresh. The site plate also wears its owner's nameplate, the World Wonder nav counts the outstanding work, and each World Wonder tab has its own URL so a tab can be linked and reloaded.

• improved
  The race reads on a phone

  The founding tiles were effectively invisible at 320px, the panel was sharing its corner of the map with the tile actions, and a supply run read as idle. All three are fixed, the tab badge takes the icon's place on a narrow tab rather than overflowing, and the phase plate survives 125% browser zoom.

The Call, and the reward you now claim

The Call of the Scholars filled and the race opened. Several things about how it paid out were wrong, and one of them was silently costing founders their title.

• ⇄reworked
  Founder of the Call is Answerer of the Call

  WasThe envoy title "Founder of the Call"

  NowThe envoy title "Answerer of the Call"

  "Founder" borrowed a word from the race, where a player really does found a building site. Nobody founds a Call: the scholars issue it and players answer it. The existing title was renamed rather than replaced, so anyone who already had it keeps the same one.

• ⇄reworked
  The Call reward is claimed, not paid out silently

  WasThe reward was pushed at you when the bar filled, and two failure paths paid nothing at all with no explanation

  NowA claim opens when the bar fills and stays open for the whole race, with the envoy of your choosing

  The old payout skipped anyone whose last scoring envoy no longer resolved, and those players got no influence, no title and no sentence about it. There is a fallback ladder now: the envoy you ask for, then the one that scored your last point, then your highest level active envoy. Claim it from Your part on the World Wonder page, with the outstanding claim badged on the nav and on the Call tab, and a success screen when it lands. Never claimed by the end of the race, it settles itself. The title is granted claimable and collected at the Merchant's Hall, like every other title.

• improved
  The reward is never half paid

  If the title could not be granted, the influence was awarded anyway and the claim was stamped as taken, so the founder kept the influence and lost the title permanently and silently. It is all or nothing now: the claim refuses before anything is written and you retry, rather than spending your one claim on half a reward.

• improved
  The Call freezes the moment the bar fills

  WasContributions kept being recorded through the whole gap between the bar filling and the race opening at the next midnight, up to a full day

  NowThe Call closes when the bar reaches its target

  The shared bar sat at a tidy full while the per-player figures beside it on Voices of the Call went on climbing, and a player below the founder threshold when the bar filled could cross it hours afterwards, which contradicts what the threshold means.

• ◆new
  NEW: The bar filling gets its own moment

  It used to announce nothing at all, so a player who was away came back to a changed page and no explanation. The Call reaching its target now plays through the same centred, backdropped screen a wonder completion uses, closes only on its own button, and names the time the race opens with a countdown to it. It is recorded durably like every other world moment, so it is re-delivered to exactly the player it exists for: the one who was not at their computer when it happened. World announcements also surface on every game page now, not only on the map.

The board, and the quests

• improved
  The board reads in the order the race was actually run

  WasSites tied on completed quests were ordered by when they started

  NowThe tie breaks on the time of the last quest completion

  Reported from a live board: a player who finished all three of a phase's quests first sat below one who finished them later, which is the opposite of what a board is for. The ladder also stops opening on empty phase groups, and leads with where the race actually is rather than with a phase nobody has reached.

• ◆new
  NEW: Race quests speak

  Race quest progress was completely silent: the only way to learn a race quest had moved was to be looking at the page and refresh. They get the same progress toast the daily quests have had for months, in race purple rather than success green, with the bar running to full and COMPLETE! rising off it, plus a burst on completion. Progress earned while you were away is played back one toast at a time rather than collapsed into a recap that tells you a number instead of showing you the moments.

• improved
  A phase gate opens the moment it is due

  WasThe countdown reached zero and the phase changed up to five minutes later, when the next sweep ran

  NowThe gate opens on the next read, so arriving at zero shows you the new phase

  Nothing was broken: the gate applied correctly three and a half minutes later, on a five minute scheduler. But the page counts down to a time and the sweeper is a different clock, so a player watched a timer hit zero and kept seeing the old phase. Reported as "the countdown finished and nothing happened".

• improved
  A backing visit names the player, not just the city

  The panel said an envoy was putting the case to a city, while the quest counts ten different owners, so a player who owns eight cities read as eight chances rather than one. It names the player, with the city at the end of the journey where it belongs.

Four Library skills are yours to plan again

Ten days ago these four cards were locked until a Great Library stood. That was a block on planning rather than on doing: an envoy may perfectly well study toward a Library that is still being raced for, and refusing the card told a player their own skill tree was not theirs to arrange. All four can be learned now and carry a caveat instead. What each one buys still waits for the building.

• improved
  ThesisScholarship · Tier 3

  UNLOCKS: Your envoy studies a lore fragment from your journal for Cultural Influence based on its rarity, from 100 for a Common up to 500 for a Legendary. Studying does not consume the fragment. Each fragment can be studied once and deposited at the Great Library once, in either order.

  WasRequires the Great Library

  NowLearnable now, with a warning that it does nothing until one stands

  The study action itself still refuses with no Library in the world, which is the check that actually protects the mechanic. The card can be bought early; it cannot be used early.

• improved
  Library CuratorScholarship · Tier 4

  Your envoy earns 2x Cultural Influence for every lore fragment you deposit at the Great Library. Requires: Great Library.

  WasRequires the Great Library

  NowLearnable now, with a warning that it does nothing until one stands
• improved
  ArchivistScholarship · Tier 4

  UNLOCKS: Your envoy sends lore to the Great Library by courier instead of travelling there, for 50 wood and 25 stone per fragment. Requires: Great Library.

  WasRequires the Great Library

  NowLearnable now, with a warning that it does nothing until one stands
• improved
  Master ArchivistScholarship · Tier 5 · capstone

  When a deposit of yours completes a lore entry at the Great Library, your envoy earns bonus Cultural Influence worth 2x everything that entry's fragments are worth. The Library counts every player's deposits towards an entry, not only yours. Requires: Great Library.

  WasRequires the Great Library

  NowLearnable now, with a warning that it does nothing until one stands
• improved
  The warning appears on both paths

  The browsable tree and the lesson plan that actually spends the points agree, so the caveat cannot be missed by learning the card from the other screen.

Master Builder

The Building Upgrade Queue was two unrelated mechanics behind one unlock and neither worked properly. The bulk upgrade was a bare dropdown and a button orphaned below the city list, clipped 80px off-screen at 320px, offering nine buildings and excluding the Town Hall, the one building that raises every other building's ceiling. The per-city queue did not exist on mobile at all, and it accepted entries for buildings that could not be upgraded and then discarded them on the next tick. Nothing about the feature is a queue any more, so it is rebuilt as three tools and renamed.

• ✕removed
  Building Upgrade Queue

  WasQueue building upgrades in each city and they start automatically as soon as the city can afford them, plus a one-tap upgrade across all your cities. 300 gold.

  NowRemoved

  Master Builder replaces it, at 400 gold. The feature is the same purchase under the hood, so anybody who already owns it owns Master Builder and its three tools at the 300 gold they paid. Nothing to re-buy.

• ◆new
  NEW: Smart Upgrade

  One press makes a single pass down your priority list in every listed city: try each listed building type once, in your order, skip what that city cannot afford, and stop at the bottom. At most one level per listed building per city, so the work a press does is bounded and knowable. It lives at the foot of My Empire, replacing the clipped bottom bar. Scope is the filtered set rather than every city you own, which turns the existing filter and search controls into targeting controls, and the button states its scope so a filtered press cannot surprise you. Pagination does not narrow it: a player on page 2 of a thirty city empire still meant all thirty.

• ◆new
  NEW: A priority order you set once

  The order is account-wide and is what Smart Upgrade walks. Upgrading five building types across twelve cities used to be sixty interactions, or a dropdown change and a click repeated until the stockpile was gone.

• ◆new
  NEW: Auto-upgrade, per building, on mobile too

  A toggle on each building's detail pane inside the upgrade card: that building raises itself in that city the moment the city has the resources. It fires when the city is credited rather than on a thirty second poll, so it happens when it happens. A failed toggle now says so instead of quietly doing nothing.

• improved
  Upgrade one building type includes the Town Hall

  It sits inside the Smart Upgrade menu now rather than orphaned below pagination, and the one building that raises every other building's maximum level is finally in the list. The results screen afterwards reports what each city actually built rather than a count, and carries its own upgrade and celebration art.

The Steward's Report

The Steward was sold as the thing that watches your empire while you are gone, and what it handed back was a flat list of sentences with no total anywhere and no sense that anything had been gained. Worse, the feature's real problem was that a completion has two separable parts, clearing the envoy so it is not blocked and consuming the outcome so you never see it, and the Steward did both. Only the first is what anyone wanted to buy.

• improved
  The Steward collects instead of consuming

  Was"Automatically completes your envoys finished explorations, wonder investigations, and decodings, so you never have to claim them one at a time."

  NowFinished work is still settled the instant it finishes, and everything it found is kept in a log you read at your leisure

  No envoy ever idles waiting for a click, which is the part that was worth buying. What no longer happens is the result being thrown away. Training and trade routes are settled too, and the rare finds, Legendary and Epic fragments, ruin discoveries and wonder discoveries, are held back unopened with an Open it action, so the reveal survives being away. Outcomes are still rolled at the moment the work finished, not deferred to when you look, because deferring would recreate the stuck-envoy problem as a design feature.

• ◆new
  NEW: The report leads with the haul

  One bordered sheet in three bands, using the same parchment language the wonder outcome screens use. The header band carries the Steward's portrait, the total Cultural Influence at display size, and every resource with a non-zero total. The whole period's earnings are the first thing on the screen, where before there was no total anywhere.

• ◆new
  NEW: Your envoys, and who levelled up

  A band of one row per envoy that earned something in the period, and only those: a list of everyone who did nothing is a roster, not a report. Each row carries the portrait with a level badge, what it earned, and a bar toward its next level. An envoy that crossed a level says "Reached level N" and its badge turns gold.

• improved
  The whole row is the disclosure

  Every rollup row used to spend a line on its own "Show all N" link. The row itself opens now, and a rollup expands to the individual entries with what each one paid, rather than repeating its own total. A row names its subject and where it happened: an arrival in open country reads as a place, a training entry names the lesson rather than just the school, an exploration names the ground it crossed and the fragment it turned up, and a city named in a sentence is drawn with its banner.

• improved
  The Journal link works, and names the fragment

  "Read Inscription in your Journal" named neither the fragment nor its rarity, and it navigated behind the still-open panel so nothing visibly happened. It names the fragment and its rarity now, and closes the panel on the way. Two links rendering flush against each other with no gap is fixed as well.

• ◆new
  NEW: Where it lives

  A nav item after Map everywhere except the map itself, where it is a marker at your capital instead, so the unread count can never appear in two places at once. The report opens on what you have not seen, with earlier entries below it.

Auto-Explore

Three reported defects and two nobody had noticed. The rule about which tiles an envoy may survey lived only in the browser, so an unattended envoy did not have it.

• improved
  It stops exploring ground it should never touch

  WasWonder tiles, ruin tiles and city centres were all fair game to an auto-exploring envoy

  NowAll three are excluded

  The wonder page and the delve modal own their tiles, and an unattended envoy should not survey somebody's town square. Foreign land stays explorable, because envoys may walk anywhere and interaction between players is the point.

• improved
  It explores outward instead of drifting east

  The neighbour search took the first match from a fixed list, which biased it east and then west. It now tries the current tile first and then ranks neighbours, breaking ties at random. Ground your own other envoys have already charted is deprioritised rather than excluded: it is worth less, not worthless, and excluding it would strand a large empire.

• improved
  An envoy no longer gets stuck on a question

  WasAn unanswered exploration choice held the envoy's mission slot forever

  NowReturn events are answered by a policy you set, or explicitly left for you

  Choose Ask me, Prefer lore, Prefer Cultural Influence, Prefer resources or Choose at random. Ask me is the default and stops the envoy for your decision, exactly as before, but it is now a choice you made rather than the only behaviour. Decide opens the modal straight from the envoy row.

• ◆new
  NEW: An account-wide settings panel

  All envoys, Select envoys or Off, above the roster on My Envoys, with the return-event policy beside it. The mode is read off the envoy flags themselves rather than stored separately, so the panel and the row's own checkbox can never disagree.

• improved
  A departure says so

  An envoy dispatched by Auto-Explore published nothing the game could show, so it simply vanished from where you left it. The departure now reaches the screen, closes or explains any open action on that envoy, and an envoy waiting on a decision joins the attention badge.

Every buff and debuff has its own picture

Until now every buff in the game except Verdant Blessing rendered one shared badge, and every debuff another, so a row of four active effects was four identical pictures. Twenty six effects get art of their own, drawn to be told apart at 20px, and it appears everywhere the effect does rather than only in the list.

• improved
  The art follows the effect

  A buff's own picture appears wherever you meet it: the envoy row, the popover, the effect list, the outcome screens. Effects added after the art was drawn are still on the shared badge and are listed as such in the code, so the next one cannot quietly join the generic pile: the five wonder perks, the three race phase buffs, the Evergrove's Deep Register, and two wonder debuffs.

Elsewhere in Nandonia

• ◆new
  NEW: The Diamond Market has a price band

  WasAny positive price was accepted, and anything above 50 gold per diamond quietly raised a moderation signal

  Now25 to 500 gold per diamond, refused outside the band at listing time, and the sell form shows it

  These are sanity bounds, a fat-finger guard and an outer limit on how much gold one listing can move between two accounts. They are not a claim about what a diamond is worth: this is a player-driven market and it discovers its own price inside the band, so a listing near either edge is a pricing decision and nothing else. The old signal inferred a fair price from what a land claim costs and flagged anything dearer as suspicious, which was flagging price discovery rather than cheating, so it is deleted rather than retuned. The bounds bind at creation only, so a listing already active outside them stays sellable.

• improved
  The Welcomers establish at Town Hall 8

  WasA welcomed player established at Town Hall 10

  NowTown Hall 8

  Ten was most of a play session away from a new arrival, and a gate most of them never reach pays nobody and motivates nobody. The check is at or above rather than exactly equal, so a player already past the new level establishes on their next Town Hall upgrade instead of being stranded unestablished forever.

• ◆new
  NEW: Naming the orders

  The lore reader has told players an organization's name is determined by player votes in four places since it shipped. The endpoint behind that promise worked and nothing could reach it, so nine organizations sat waiting with no vote ever cast. The ballot opens in the reader now, and a voter reads the winning name wherever that order is mentioned afterwards. A custom name goes to the moderation queue rather than publishing itself, because it becomes the name the game uses for that order in every story that credits it.

• improved
  Leaderboards is back, under World Wonder

  WasLeaderboards vanished from the navigation for the length of a race, reachable only by typing the URL

  NowA sub-item of World Wonder, the way Journal sits under Library

  Handing the nav slot to the race was the right call, since the nav is full and the race is temporary. Dropping the displaced page off the map for weeks was not. With no race running, nothing changes.

• ⇄reworked
  Specialist

  Was"Complete an entire skill branch", awarded for spending five skill points

  Now"Learn a capstone skill"

  The description and the condition described two different things, and neither was what the achievement was for. There are ten capstones, two at the bottom of each tree's fork paths, and learning any one of them awards it.

• improved
  The Merchant's Hall is never called the shop

  The word survived in a dozen places, including the First Purchase achievement, a message card and the customize modal. The Hall has a name.

• improved
  A purchase says where the thing you bought lives

  Buying a feature told you it worked and not where to find it. The success screen names the surface, and for Master Builder names its three tools. A confirmation also shows the feature's own art before you spend, and a feature you already own empire-wide is no longer offered per city.

• improved
  The Boosts panel says what you have and what things cost

  Four buttons doing one job had drifted into two colours and two widths, and the balance in the header was a bare number and a gem sitting above four other numbers and gems. They are one control now, fixed width so the column lines up whatever the price, and the balance reads "Available to spend:".

• improved
  The Evergrove names which tree a find came from

  A vigil that drew from the ring said so without saying which of the four trees it was. It numbers the tree now, on the find and in the Journal.

Fixes

• "The World Map" envoy popover fits a 320px screen

  Anchored at the envoy's position and centred, a card roughly 351px wide could not fit a 320px viewport even perfectly centred: Travel, Nearby, Check In and Learn all sat off-screen and untappable. The map's primary actions, unreachable on the platform most players use. It clamps to the viewport and wraps, is three columns again at every width, and no longer covers the marker it belongs to.

• "The World Map" no longer leaks memory as you pan

  Each map layer left its drawing context behind when it rebuilt a frame, which grew until the tab gave up. Panning a large world on a phone is stable again.

• "Getting Started" page 5 of the booklet is finally shown

  The page introducing the Historical Society and the whole fragment-collection loop, over a thousand characters of it, had never been seen by any player: naming your first city refreshed a guard that navigated away before the page could render.

• "City names" the banner fallback was missing on five surfaces

  The city header, the empire list, the map canvas, a player's cities page and the leaderboard cards each got it wrong differently, one of them drawing nothing at all where its own comment promised a placeholder. One piece of code answers it now, including on the map canvas.

• "Merchant's Hall" the Features tab showed the list price, not yours

  The card, the modal and the After purchase line all showed the full gold price while the affordability check used your credited price, so a player who could afford the credited price got an enabled card and a disabled confirm button. The charge was always correct; only the arithmetic on screen was wrong.

• "Merchant's Hall" the badge counts the Land Deed waiting for you

  A welcomer with a First Welcome Deed sitting unclaimed at the Hall had no badge anywhere, because the Goals badge deliberately leaves it to the Hall and the Hall had stopped counting it. The Deed also claims at the Hall's own endpoint now, and the badge goes out when the claim is taken.

• "Travel" a building makes its whole plot reachable, not just its tile

  Both places that decide where an envoy may go agree now, so a building site or a structure inside a plot is reachable from anywhere in it.

• "Delving" leaving a ruin ends the run in it, instead of stranding the envoy

  Travelling away from a ruin also now says so before the journey is made, rather than after, and a voluntary return reports the envoy's actual condition and what the run really paid.

• "Exploration" a refused diary entry says why

  A Traveller's Diary entry rejected by moderation said "Please try again", telling the player to do the exact thing that cannot ever work. The server's own sentence is shown, in a toast, and a lifetime counter can no longer cost a player their exploration.

• "My Envoys" an envoy standing in a ruin is not offered for other work

  It was available for dispatch while mid-delve. Paranoid's own description also now says what it does, which is to block exploring beside another player's city rather than beside their land.

• "Grand Itinerary" a circuit's stops report once, and never offer a departed envoy

  A circuit in progress also no longer raises the Map attention badge, and a refused first leg no longer closes the manager its own cleanup needs.

• "Account" a suspended player is told they are suspended

  On the empire page a suspension flattened into "We could not load your cities" with a Retry that could never work.

• "Everywhere" seven dialogs gained a way out, and four surfaces that failed silently now say why

  The page error boundary is guarded too, the header row stops overflowing under the logo on a phone, and the arrival screen's Level Up card fills its column again.

• "Journal" the image fragment grid is one column at 320px

  The wonder investigation commit row also stacks on phones, mastery badges keep their shape, and the citizen icon is legible.

• "Home" a signed-out visitor is not greeted as a returning player

  The homepage also states what is coming next from the roadmap rather than from a hand-typed list, corrects four claims that were no longer true, and stops the hero and the footer jumping about as the page settles.

• "Resource icons" the new art actually reaches you

  The five resource icons were redrawn and browsers kept serving the old copies from cache, indefinitely. They are versioned now.

• "Wonders" a carving that named no envoy can be recorded at all

  And the Foundation Stone's own visit history is recorded rather than assumed.

• "Notifications" a diamond find and a skimmed trade share read as themselves

  Both arrived with placeholder wording, and a skim's city is the home city the share arrived at rather than wherever the envoy was.