1 November 2026

Two weeks since the last entry. Most of it went into folding a long queue of parallel work back into one build: one integration branch, built and tested in full every round, then pushed. As before, Claude sessions wrote the code (ChatGPT built the creature editor and much of the wildlife), and I made the calls.

Everything below is in the current build. The last section is what's coming, and none of it is in yet.

/// Hair is back

Hair, brows, lashes and beards show on every body again: 206 hair fits were rebuilt for the current bodies. The designer's Randomize button now rolls a hairstyle too, and only one that fits.

/// Heads are numbered

The designer lists heads as "Head 1", "Head 2" and so on, and bodies as "Body 3 (Female)". You never see where a face came from.

/// No more empty boxes

Some menus, loading lines and buttons showed empty boxes or garbled characters. That's fixed: the loading screen reads cleanly, and buttons only use symbols the font has. A check now runs on every build so it doesn't come back.

/// Pick an era

New Game starts with an era: Medieval or Futuristic. Each player type has a tooltip, and a short scrolling guide explains the choice.

/// Athletics

A new Athletics skill grows from walking, running, jumping and carrying. It raises walk speed and jump height, and fit colonists tire less from moving.

/// Skills fade, at different speeds

Unused skills fade, but nothing fades below level 30, and above that the fade speeds up the higher the level. Physical skills and mental skills fade differently. Memory and Muscle Memory come in tiers, set by traits and genes, that slow or speed up the fade. Long Memory is now called Great Memory; old saves keep it.

/// Wildlife and plants

Animals now wander, flee, hunt and get hunted, and plants and ground cover grow on the voxel terrain. ChatGPT built the creature editor (developer builds only for now) and much of the wildlife. Predators can hunt colonists, and a game setting turns that off.

/// Coming next (not in the build yet)

• Xenotypes, starting with the Vampire and the Sentinel.
• Aging and Final Years: people age, grow old and die of it, and some genes stop that.
• Character types: roles such as trader, raider, prisoner and slave, separate from biology.
• Stronger differences between men's and women's bodies and faces.
• Landmarks on the world map.

A free alpha demo is coming. No date yet.

Generative AI was used for much of the code (Claude, and ChatGPT for the parts named above) and some assets.