Dev journal

The fall behind one spawn camp used to stop half way up its wall, with its foam and mist hanging there: its water ended on the lip of a 45 m step in the rock. A fall is now carried on down the ground as it is drawn until it reaches the floor, so that one runs to the foot of the meadow wall. The white water at the foot, the mist, the roar and the wet rock sit where the water actually hits, not at the point downstream where the creek runs gently again.

Falls were also checked on ten worlds, not only the one they were tuned on. Most sat right. The small falls that drop off a ledge beside a bigger one had their white sheet diving tens of meters into the cliff and coming back out, or hanging a few meters off the rock. They land where the water meets the rock and follow the cliff face. In new worlds a fall that leaps off a cliff no longer sinks into the rock below its lip, and its creek no longer climbs uphill before the brink.

Still open: a fall that slides down a slab has almost no mist at its foot, the rock beside the water shows only a faint darkening, the small plunges’ landings stand a little proud of the rock, and on 4 of the 10 worlds checked there was no waterfall within about a kilometer of the start.

Development capture · The fall behind a spawn camp reaching the meadow, November 14

The steep bare granite, on cliff walls and outcrop slabs, is now a cool gray with dark water streaks, a tone of its own for each slab and tonal patches, where it was a warm beige that read as plaster. Soil, grass and plants are untouched. The darkening that came with the change was eased to about half, and the streak contrast and the cool hue were kept.

Up close, the big pale granite sheets on steep faces were smeared speckle when seen from horseback at 2 to 7 m. Those sheets carry a generated texture whose grain is soft. Up close it is now held back to its broad color and relief, so scanned granite grain carries the fine detail, and from 15 m or more a sheet should look as before. That change went in on a reading of the materials and has not been compared in the game yet.

Not checked yet: how the wall color looks in a packaged build. At the distance of the wall behind the start camp no lichen or patches show, and the wall gets no new joints, because the relief stays switched off.

Development capture · The granite wall behind the start camp in its cool gray, November 14

Three ways of giving the granite more structure are built and stay off in the default build. The first cuts relief into the rock itself. On bare slabs it adds exfoliation ledges with risers of 8 to 35 cm that face downhill, weathering pits, and a net of cracks that splits the slab into plates 2 to 4 m across. On cliff walls it cuts a few long, irregular joints that run down the whole face, with each slab between them one smooth tilted plane, a sparse slanted second set, and steps where a shell of rock has come away.

The second sets scanned cliff faces into the wall as panels. With them on, the wall behind the start camp reads as one continuous jointed rock wall. The third is in the wall’s surface: water tracks that run down from ledges, a rust tint and patches of color, and on rock seen from 2 to 7 m, crystal grain, fine relief and crack lines.

Why they are off: seen in the game, the wall relief still reads as parallel vertical grooves, and its cost and the way plants sit on it are unproven. In their one test in the game the panels’ scans, which come from a coast, read as horizontal ledges where Sierra granite is more massive and sheeted, and their far view and cost were not checked.

Experiment capture · The camp wall with the long joints switched on in a test, November 14

The falling water is being rebuilt, and most of the rebuild is switched off while it is judged. It starts from measurement: the motion of the water was measured from public-domain footage of Yosemite Falls. On the lower fall the water follows free fall to about 30 m/s at 60 m. On the upper fall the packets of water level off at 15 to 22 m/s. Packets come every 9 to 10 m and are 1 to 3 m long.

Built so far and off by default: water that slides on rock lies on it as a thin, dark, glassy film, white only in threads where it breaks. Free-falling water leaves the lip on an arc as a braided column in layered clumps, and ends in a ragged tongue instead of a square edge. The wall and slab beside the water darken as wet rock, with a larger cloud of mist at the foot.

None of it is good enough to switch on yet. In test frames the new sheet is darker and glassy but looks like plastic, with torn, hard-edged flaps. One pass made the slab water almost disappear up close, and the larger mist cloud can show as separate puffs. So the default build keeps the older sheet.

Two pieces did go into the default build on November 14: the white water is a duller white against the granite, and its packets ride down at the measured speeds, where they were capped at 14 m/s.

Experiment capture · A test frame with the wet rock and mist pass switched on, November 14

You wake about 4 m from the camp ring, and it is no longer an empty circle lost in knee-high grass. It holds a cold lay of 8 sticks, with 3 sticks, tinder and chert beside it, on a trampled bare patch (a 2.5 m disc), so the stones and the laid sticks show from where you stand. The lay and the kit belong to the camp, like the ring: you still start with empty hands.

Press E on the ring and you gather the tinder and a stick and kneel to the drill. Tap E to spin it, or work A and D as before; the tinder nest now shows beside the board. In a check run, E alone lit the fire 15 s after the first tap. R and Shift+R still work. The fire burns on dirt inside the stones instead of in dry grass, and every fire ring clears the same patch.

Walk 30 m or more from a lit fire and its smoke column keeps rising and fading, where it used to vanish after about 50 seconds.

Still rough: the edge of the clearing is sharp, the kit beside the ring is hard to make out from where you wake, and up close the flames still read as sheets over a hard-edged gray bed. A round of experiments on the fire’s look is built and switched off.

Development capture · The camp fire lit on its cleared patch, November 13

Ponderosa pines and incense cedars, the two commonest big trees, used to drop to simpler versions at 46 to 54 m and again at 62 to 72 m, right in the middle of every forest walk, and each change was a change of shape in one frame. They now keep full detail to 116 m, with the first step at 116 to 136 m and the second at 349 to 407 m, in line with every other mature species. A forest wall 50 to 80 m away shows full needle sprays where it had been blobby cards.

Shrubs had the same fault. Sagebrush, creosote, bursage and the coastal shrubs no longer rearrange as you walk toward them: the far step keeps the near step’s sprays, drops only the twigs and happens about twice as far out, at about 45 m for a sagebrush. Pushing through a willow or deer brush bends the leaves away without a brown flash.

It is not free and not finished. The trees cost about 3 ms more a frame on one test machine, a noisy figure, and that is still to be won back elsewhere. The swap at 116 m is still a swap: measured offline, 21 to 27 percent of crown pixels change when it happens, wherever the swap is put. Sagebrush still swaps at about 8 m.

Development capture · A pine stand across the meadow at full detail, November 13

Meadow grass used to swap to a simpler version at about 7, 16 and 48 m with a half-second speckled fade, which drew a stippled ring in front of you as you walked. Each level now eases onto the next one’s own blades before the swap: a blade the simpler version keeps moves onto its next shape, and a blade it drops shrinks into its root. Tussocks a few meters around you stay put instead of twitching and re-sprouting, and a plant at the end of its range goes out whole, with its shadow, instead of dissolving through noise that changed every frame.

Two older faults went the same way. In the late afternoon the long shadows of small plants along a forest edge 50 to 100 m away flashed lighter about five times a second, and they hold steady now. Grass you stand or sit in stays pressed down for as long as you stay, instead of springing back tuft by tuft after about two seconds.

Two fixes are in the build but not yet checked in play. The easing first left dark specks crawling over the grass while you stood still, because blades that had shrunk away on screen still cast full shadows; the shadows now shrink with them. And pale blotches 15 to 40 m ahead in a dry meadow at evening were pale ground the color of granite showing through thin grass, so ground the sod covers now keeps its sod. Small round pale spots about 1 to 2 m across remain.

Development capture · The meadow at evening with the easing grass, November 13

Sleep or skip time to dusk, or load a world at dusk, and a stand of firs against the sky is a dark silhouette from the first seconds. After any jump in the light (a world start, a time skip, the hand-off from sun to moon) the old light used to linger for about 40 s. Conifers drew bright mint-green crowns and orange trunks against a purple sky, and granite stayed gray instead of taking the purple of the dusk. In the check frame one small crown at the far edge of the view still drew pale.

Fast turns settle sooner too. Whip the view round in a meadow and the trees that swing into view used to darken slowly over 2 to 3 s while the screen brightened and then dimmed. The settle takes about 1 s, and the exposure adjusts inside the turn, where the motion hides it. Looking round slowly is unchanged. For about half a second after a fast turn the new tree line is still slightly lighter.

Grass and bushes ahead of you should also stop fading in all at once when you stop running. At a run the game was choosing each plant’s level of detail from where you had been up to a second earlier. This last change went in on a reading of the code and has not been confirmed in play.

Development capture · Conifers at dusk, seconds after a skip from noon, November 13

In sun a grizzly’s coat is shaggy brown with darker partings and a grayer face, and it stays one brown bear as you walk away past 15 m. Up close a bear wears a coat of single hairs, and farther off only its body is drawn; the far body takes the coat’s color, and the fur fades in between 14 and 11 m instead of swapping in a single frame. The fur bends with the body instead of standing off it in stiff strands.

Look it in the face from about 3 m. The eyes are open and dark where only a sliver showed, the muzzle is shorter, blunter and furred, the forehead rises over the eyes, the ears stand clear of the coat with furred bowls, and the nose is dark charcoal with carved nostrils. The long hair that hung under the chin is now short, close fur. The face’s light and dark pattern comes from public-domain photographs of grizzlies.

When it lunges, the mouth opens. Both bears’ bodies began as generated models sealed at the lips, so the jaw only bent the muzzle. They now have lips that part, gums, a tongue and teeth, with 5 cm canines on the grizzly.

Still open: the open mouth’s teeth last read as a crowded pale row, and no check has filmed the open jaw since the muzzle was reshaped. At three-quarter view the nostrils are only a small dark opening. The underside read near-black at 13 to 25 m when far and near were last compared, on November 11.

Development capture · The grizzly’s head in a check run, November 13

The meadow’s grass carpet used to end in a hard line about 60 m ahead. Past it the ground was a pale, smooth band with sparse blades up to the forest edge, and the line moved with you, which read as the world loading in as you walked. A filmed walk found almost no single pops: the ring was the fault. The carpet now reaches about 120 m, so the grass should run up to the trees with no flat band following you.

Where the grass does end, each piece lies down into the ground instead of vanishing, and the ground beyond is matte and takes the meadow’s own cured straw color for the date and height. Gliding over a late-summer meadow no longer drags a pale disc along under you. Measured 25 m up, the step in brightness at the edge of the grass fell from 2.2 times to between 1.1 and 1.2 times, with the hue matched.

Still visible: from the air a softer edge in grass density, and on foot grass blades that go soft and streaky while you move with the DLSS upscaler on. The cost of the longer range measured within noise on a busy graphics card, and a clean measurement is still owed.

Development capture · The meadow grass reaching the trees, November 12

On open ground at noon the sun is 7.2 to 9.1 times as strong as the fill light from the sky. It was 1.3 to 1.7, and a real clear day is 7 to 10. Shadows read deep and sunlit ground bright, with less milky fill. Dusk and night look as before.

That change left tree crowns in shade near-black. The light on them was right, and the picture was crushing it on the way to the screen. On open sunny views, crowns against the light read dark green instead of black, though still darker than in photographs.

A day the weather calls clear also draws a clear sky, deep blue with a few small clouds, where every clear day used to carry a pale veil of cloud. High granite is brighter as well. A rule meant for dark, frost-shattered crests had been turning bare high granite dark and lichen-green, and far granite walls had been darkened twice. On November 12 that made high slabs and domes read pale cream-tan instead of cool gray. Two days later the color of steep bare granite changed again: since November 14 cliff walls and outcrop slabs are a cool gray with dark water streaks.

Still off: the forest floor keeps more of the open sky’s fill than a real canopy lets through, and granite is still darker than the photographs, with mottling that reads as dirt.

Development capture · A high granite slab at noon under a clear sky, November 13

Start the fire drill and you kneel on both knees with your toes tucked under and your trunk upright, the way an 1870s photograph shows a hand drill being worked, instead of dropping into a deep squat. Both hands reach the spindle in first and third person, fingers flat and together along the shaft, and whatever tool you were holding is put away while you work.

The spindle is a straight stick like the ones you gather, about 2 cm thick and 86 cm long, standing nearly upright with a hand’s width of shaft above your palms. It used to be the lay’s crooked stick shrunk to a 0.25 cm line that turned by itself, while your first-person hands stopped 27 to 47 cm short of it. They now sit 2.7 to 4 cm from the shaft. In first person your look stops short of straight down, so you see a palm on either side of the spindle and the shaft running down to the board.

Still visible: in first person your hands fill the middle of the view instead of its lower half, and in third person the near hand’s fingers fan a little. Only the male body was filmed, and the female body’s arms are shorter.

Development capture · Both palms on the spindle in first person, November 12

Sit on the main menu for a while, leave the seed field blank and press Create. The search for a starting valley, which took 25 to 40 s, is over in under half a second, because the menu has already done it. Once the menu has been up for 2 s it picks the seed a blank field will use, finds that world’s start, builds the ground around the camp, and then builds the far ridges in view along with their forest.

It is the same world you would have had: same start, same camp, same facing. Type a seed and the menu switches to it once it has stayed unchanged for 1 s. Continuing a world, loading one or choosing another seed cancels the work.

On the test machine, after 20 s on the menu, the time from the click to control fell from 80.5 to 51.7 s on one world and from 103.7 to 80.8 s on another. After 90 s on the menu the far ridges make the difference: without them one world’s loading page timed out with 5 far tiles and 11 blocks of far forest missing, and with them it lifted with all 12 tiles in place.

The gain is smaller than it sounds. That run still took 65.1 s from the click to control, against 69.0 s with nothing prepared, because the loading page itself is now the long part. These are single runs on a shared machine. It only helps a new world: continuing a saved one gets nothing from this.

Development capture · A world prepared on the menu, as its loading page lifts, November 12

Each of the black bear’s three colors has been matched against photographs of real bears. The black one reads black with a cool sheen and a tan muzzle, where it had read blue-gray in sun and then a warm brown-black. The brown one went from a saturated orange-tan to a darker chocolate, and the cinnamon from bright orange to a reddish brown, matched against public-domain park photos of real brown and cinnamon black bears.

The coat is shorter and denser, in small irregular locks instead of long combed ribbons, and its hairs vary from light to dark instead of drawing one flat color. Walk away from a black one past 15 m and it stays black instead of turning brown, and the pale net of lines that covered a bear’s body at 16 to 25 m is gone.

The body changed too. The head had read as a teddy bear’s: the ears now stand 3 cm taller and clear of the fur, the muzzle is 2.5 cm longer and narrower at the tip, and the line from forehead to nose runs straight. The back no longer rises at the withers, and the dark fin that stood 13 to 14 cm above the back when a bear lowered its head to graze is gone. A black bear walking away from you walks where it used to trot.

Still visible when last compared: the brown is a little grayer than the photo’s warm chocolate, and the cinnamon’s blond back hardly shows.

Development capture · A brown black bear grazing, November 12

A playtest showed a low granite bank across a meadow covered in short parallel dark slashes and dark ovals. From 110 m out the ground draws far shrubs and their shadows as a pattern laid from straight above, and on a slope that pattern stretched down the fall line: round 0.5 m crowns became ovals and their evening shadows became long slashes. It also landed on rock that is bare up close. The pattern now fades out on steep ground, from about 37 degrees and fully by 45 degrees, and ground drawn as bare granite or talus carries no shrub cover or shadows. Flat meadow and forest ground are unchanged.

Two more wall faults followed on November 13. A band of dark saw-teeth up the cliff beside a waterfall, seen behind one start camp, is gone: the ground’s wetness was being stretched up near-vertical rock, one tooth per 4 m cell, and it now fades out with slope, full below 35 and none above 55 degrees. Upright shrubs are also no longer placed where the ground falls away under their roots, so tall brush should not hang off a cliff face while shrubs stay on ledges. That one has no after picture yet.

Still visible in the meadow view: the bank is a soft mottled gray without joints, and its edges form a level shelf.

Development capture · The granite bank across the meadow, in the check for the fix

Walk toward a mule deer and it stands, looks and flicks its ears, then walks off long-legged without sinking. Each leg now works as three long segments that turn together, with the hoof flat on the ground, and standing, grazing and dying are motions made on the deer’s own body. The walk is faster, 1.01 m a second where it was 0.79. A playtest had found the deer moving badly: each leg was solved as two bones with the lower leg rigid, so the body sank and the stride was short, and the standing, grazing and dying were horse motions. The skeleton was refitted: the thigh bone had been 13 cm, shorter than a real doe’s, and the tail’s bones ran into the belly. The hind legs now open out and the tail hangs.

The coat’s colors were redone on November 12. The white rump, throat and belly are now whole patches of the coat; before, each hair chose its color alone, which left 28 percent of them as pale flecks. Does are summer tan and bucks winter gray-tan. The near coat and the body drawn past the fur strands now sit close together in color.

Not settled: the doe still reads warm orange in strong sun, and the neck and tail are stiff. Past about 14 m, where the fur strands stop, a deer in sun looked thin and see-through; a fix landed on November 13 without a frame to prove it. The playtest report behind that fix also covered the deer’s animation, and that half is still open.

Development capture · A buck in the recolored coat, November 12

Start a new random world and look into the distance as you get control. In tests on November 9 the far forest was complete and the sharp far terrain in view was all or nearly all there. Before, 4 to 11 pieces of far forest and 3 to 6 sharp far tiles were missing when the page lifted.

The far forest used to get no work before you had control, and half of the sharp far tiles in view started 25 s late. The forest now starts when the page does, and the tiles start sooner. The page may stay up to 32 s instead of 25, and lifts once the far view and near world are ready and the frames have settled. In steep country it no longer hangs on the last pieces of ground: one cliff-heavy piece that took 81 s to build took 2.1 s.

A world you have started before comes up faster still: the nine pieces of ground around you are read back from disk, and on one measured start the first frame came 17.7 s after the world started instead of 46.3 s.

It is still a long wait. When this landed a new world took about a minute from the click to control (58.2 s on average for one seed), and on another seed the last 2 far tiles missed the 32 s limit. Three days later, on a heavily loaded machine, one page timed out with 5 far tiles and 11 blocks of far forest missing, unless the menu had prepared them.

Development capture · A new world as its loading page lifts, with the forest already on the rim, November 9

The western juniper of the sagebrush steppe was a scrubby pale tree that a playtest reported as broken. Every juniper there now draws as one of three trees built from scans of Utah junipers, chosen by its size and standing at the scan’s own height: 5.0 m, 3.3 m or 2.5 m before each tree’s own variation, with real bark on the limbs.

Manzanita in sage and chaparral country is a full leafy shrub with red stems at every distance. It used to turn into a bare red skeleton from 4 m out, which read as broken dead trees. Chop one and the notch and stump sit on its stems.

The knee-to-head young pines and incense cedars are rebuilt as well. Real branches grow out of the stem, in yearly whorls on the pine and a dense spiral on the cedar, the pine’s needles are bundles of three on its shoots, and the cedar’s sprays start on their twigs, where both had been flat cards around a stick. Young ponderosa and lodgepole saplings fade between detail levels instead of popping in a whole cluster at a time.

Still visible: the juniper’s crown is more open and twiggy than a real juniper’s dense dome, the tree reads shrub-sized against the sagebrush, its trunk bark is smooth and reddish where it should be weathered gray, and the inside of the crown goes near-black. The young pines were checked only in offline renders when they landed, and their limbs still wear the adult’s orange plate bark.

Development capture · A juniper in the sagebrush, November 8

Stand at a lake’s edge and look down the shelf. The wave-washed bed is stone and granite sand coated in an olive film, where it used to read as bright turquoise. The coated stones run down to the depth where a lake of that size lets mud settle (about 1.7 m in a small mountain lake, deeper in a bigger one), and below that the bed is mud, as before. The deep water keeps its dark blue.

The glowing cyan patches on steep drowned rock are gone, and so is the bright turquoise rim that lakes wore from a distance: the shore goes dark into the deep water. Beside all water, lakes and creeks alike, the ground darkens and turns glossy in a ragged wet band about 1 to 2.5 m wide, and river and shore boulders take the same wet line.

Still off: sunlit shallows keep more blue than photographs of the real lake they were measured against, because the surface reflects the sky. Far lake water and the sky it reflects are unchanged.

Development capture · Green shallows under a granite shore, November 8

Under a granite scarp the foot of the slope now carries the wall’s fallen rock: granite chips and cobble against the wall, and blocks that grade coarser down to the toe. Before, a scarp standing inside gentle ground had a band of plain soil with a ruled edge under it. The game looked for fallen rock only where the ground itself counted as rock, and a scarp like that is drawn as bare rock over ground that counts as soil, so nothing was ever placed under exactly those walls. Any face steeper than 50 degrees now counts as a wall. Worlds are generated the same: this changes only what is drawn on them.

Still visible: the pale ground under the wall reads as a surface treatment with too few big blocks, and in a test view of a surveyed Sierra wall the far soil aprons are brown-gray where the photo of the real place shows pale talus.

Development capture · The pale apron of fallen rock under a granite scarp, November 8

The reins were rebuilt in rounds across November 6 and 7. They keep to their own side of the neck, with no right angles and no crossing through the head, and hang as fixed-length leather with weight, settling and swinging a little as the horse moves. Held, both reins hang alike in a loop that sags about a quarter of the span from bit to hand. Your rein hand rides low, just ahead of the saddle horn, about 18 cm closer to the bit than before.

One round went wrong on the way. The rule that keeps a rein out of the neck took the space under the horse’s jaw for the inside of its chest and pushed the rein there, stretching the far rein to about twice its length (283 cm for a rein of about 120 cm) and pulling it tight over the crest. An unridden saddled horse now carries each rein looped round the horn on its own side, in a loose U.

The bridle’s cheek strap stays on the skin from behind the ear to the bit ring. At a ridden walk the head now sits on the middle of the body; it used to be turned to the near side, so the left rein looked shorter, as if you were steering.

Still visible: a long upper run of rein from the fist at a stop, a short bit of the far rein above the withers on an unridden horse, and a grip that still reads blocky.

Development capture · A rein hanging in a loose loop on an unridden horse

Get knocked down in first person and have a friend help you up: the view no longer jumps as you finish standing. At that moment the camera used to snap back about 29 cm and turn at 659 degrees a second. The view now moves back at most 3.6 cm a frame and turns at most 177 degrees a second, and your own head never comes into view after you stand.

Lying face down, the view turns at most 100 degrees off the way your head lies, so you can no longer look in through your own collar. Thrown from a horse at speed, your body leaves the saddle with the horse’s speed, so the camera no longer lands meters past it. A film showed the throw from outside, but that camera has not been filmed through the rider’s own view.

Third person had its own fault: after a trip the camera sat 1 to 2 m ahead of the body, looking down at it from in front. The camera now stays behind and above the fallen body while you lie there and get up. That fix went in on November 14 and has not been filmed in the game yet, and a first-person view pressed into the rock you fell against is still open.

Development capture · Knocked flat in first person, looking up past your boots, November 7

A black bear usually huffs, pops its jaws and walks off. A grizzly usually stands up to look you over, then bluff-charges and stops a few meters short. Every bear huffs before it touches you, and a real attack has a cause: you surprised it close, ran, kept walking at it, hit it, or came near its kill. In the first 10 minutes of a life a bear bluffs more often, but not always.

A blow lands only where the paw reaches. The bear drives in as it strikes, and if you or your dog are out of reach the swing misses, with up to 2 swings. Before, a black bear’s swat counted with the dog 1.69 m away, middle to middle, and air between them. You hear it too: a heavy thud and rake when a paw lands, a bite through cloth when its teeth do.

The black bear has its own rearing, display, bluff stop, swats and maul, and it speaks through the whole encounter as the grizzly does. A bear that breaks off leaves at a brisk walk instead of turning slowly on the spot: in a check with a black bear and the dog, the standing turn before it walks off fell from 2.13 s to 0.72 s. Turning, a bear shuffles its paws round instead of snapping them across, and one movement fades into the next while it is still moving.

Not yet judged in play: whether those fades look smoother. No check filmed the black bear’s calls when they went in.

Development capture · A grizzly closes on the dog, November 12

The daytime picture uses a camera’s daylight white balance, 5800 K instead of 6500 K. The sky is a deeper blue, and sunlit granite and far forest lose their yellow-tan cast and read closer to the neutral gray of photographs. Brightness is unchanged.

Haze, fog, clouds, bloom and the tone curve were each tried first and barely moved the color of the sky. The white point did. Sunlight is already warmed by the air on its way down, and the old white point drew it tan and grayed the sky.

A day later the balance began to follow the sun. Under a low evening sun, sunlit granite stays near neutral instead of going beige. Golden hour keeps its warmth, though less of it than before, and dusk is untouched. The shift eases in over 25 s.

Still off: the sky in photographs is deeper still. At a low sun, rock lit mostly by the sky reads bluer than it should, and at golden hour one view’s sky and lake turned a little more cyan.

Development capture · A creek below granite walls with the daylight white balance, November 8

Picking things up no longer needs careful aim. E still takes whatever sits inside the narrow 28-degree cone around your look, and when that cone is empty it now takes the item closest to where you look, up to 75 degrees off it, so a stone at your feet comes up with one tap. In logged play before the change, 63 of 77 presses made on foot found nothing. Since then 9 of 40 have, and most of those were presses made after a pile was already empty.

Those presses now get an answer. Press E where there is nothing to take and, in first person, your hand reaches toward where you look; in third person you bend and reach to the ground ahead, with a soft generated sleeve rustle. A burst of presses within 0.6 s gets one answer, and a press that takes something never does. A fault that could refuse pickups after your view had turned past 360 degrees is fixed too.

Development capture · Reaching for nothing in third person, November 12

Look into any creek. The water is clear and you see the bed: stones in many sizes and real scanned shapes, rounded, angular and flat, packed tighter in fast water and sparser in pools. Under the water they are wet and a warm tan-brown, darker where it is deeper, and the stones above the waterline stay dry and pale. Before, a creek was flat gray water over gray mud.

Where the sun reaches the bed, a moving net of light plays over the stones, the pattern that ripples focus onto a real creek bottom, and it stops in the shade of the bank. The cobbles stand up a little from the bed, the shallow edges are pale sand and pebbles, and the bank just above the water carries a darker wet band.

The big white boulders standing in the stream have not been changed to match yet.

Development capture · Cobbles under clear creek water, November 6

Walk a lakeshore in a new world on the mountains terrain. A big lake no longer meets its valley wall in a sheer face straight out of the water: every lake and tarn has a graded shore, a toe of beach and slab at the waterline that bends into a talus slope, with the wall set back behind it. The toe runs on under the water as a shallow shelf, so the beach meets the water in a soft pale band, and grass and young pines grow on it. Ponds and lakes of every size get the same smooth banks as the creeks, so the waterline follows a curve instead of a 4 m grid zigzag.

Where a lake does meet a cliff, the water drops straight off deep and dark, as it does under real Sierra walls, and the pale shelf stays only under gentle shores. Along a big lake the forest breaks into gaps that reach the water and thins where the ground is rock or scree. Cattails stand only by sheltered still water: ponds and small lakes keep them, and big lakes with more than 300 m of open water do not.

Still visible: the band of trees along a big lake’s far lower shore reads as one continuous row. A change of November 14 gives a pond one water color over one bed out to its round shore, where a playtest showed a stepped rectangle; it is in the generator and has not been filmed in the game yet.

Development capture · A big lake’s shore below its valley wall, November 6

Look back at ground you just left. The place where you were used to turn into a square blue void with dark walls and trees floating in the air while the distant landscape caught up. The old ground now stays drawn until the far view replaces it.

New worlds started in rough ground no longer refuse and ask for another seed: the start search skips spots where a rock lip sits inside your body and picks the next clear one a few meters away. Granite outcrops at the edge of the loaded area also no longer show a thin crack along the border.

Still visible: a faint striped patch at the left edge of the coast view this was checked in.

Development capture · Ground just left behind on the coast, still drawn, November 6

Every lodgepole pine used to be the same tree, and on the high-country route used to check the build, 84 percent of the forest is lodgepole. Each one now draws as one of five builds chosen by its size: the original, a fuller one, a self-pruned one with an open patchy top, an old tree on a long clear trunk under a dome, and young poles. Each has a trunk you bump into, can be felled for timber and has its own shape in the far forest.

It shows most at a forest edge by a meadow and in the trees above a river: mixed heights, open crowns with bare trunks, and a few tall old trees over the line.

Still there: the trees stand in even spacing and rows, they are all one color, and no saplings or understory grow beneath them.

Development capture · Lodgepoles of mixed height above the river, November 6

Distance has air. Far ridges turn paler and bluish-gray and the sky pales toward the horizon (summer haze up to 3.5 km). Clouds have lit tops and gray shaded bases where they were thin white puffs.

The midday picture is also about a stop brighter. In the valley where it was checked, sunlit meadows, granite and forest sit at the lightness of real photographs instead of a dim, murky version of them, and bright granite and clouds reach near-white without clipping. The cause was the camera’s midday darkening, set in October for brighter ground than the world has since, not the sky. The blue straight overhead is a little lighter and less heavy too, where it was a dark navy.

Still off: clouds are rounded puffs with no high thin cirrus, and cliff walls about 1 km away look much as before. Later checks found high granite slabs still darker than their photographs. A day the weather calls clear draws only a few small clouds since November 13, so pick a day with more cloud to see the shaded bases.

Development capture · A lake and a far range through the haze, November 6

In late August the high valley meadows are no longer July green. The drier and moist turf is straw and tan in patches, the wet ground by the water stays green, and taller tufts of cured bunchgrass stand through the dry meadow. The turf had been following a lowland calendar 55 days late.

The wet sod cures too. Away from the water its sedge browns at the leaf tips, so the meadow where you wake reads straw-olive instead of lime green, while the sod at the water’s edge and in wet swales stays green. Farther out, past where single grass blades stop being drawn, a meadow’s color follows the date and the height: summer green, then late-summer gold, then autumn straw, instead of one fixed color all year. Meadows above about 1900 m had been treated as six weeks behind the season, and run on their own measured rate.

These are modest steps. The near and middle meadow is still greener than the reference photograph, which is straw-gold everywhere, and there are no stones or litter in the meadow yet.

Development capture · The meadow where a world starts, curing toward straw, November 6

Whatever you select is in your hand in first person: sticks, flint, tinder, rope, boughs and every other item with a model, small things in a loose fist and long ones held near one end, where you used to see empty gloves. Holding nothing, your hands hang at your sides below the view while you stand and walk, and come up only to do something: sprinting, punching, reaching to pick something up.

Look down on foot and you see your own chest, legs and boots. Your head and hair stay out of the view, and your shadow’s head nods with where you look. Only one pair of arms is ever drawn: while your hands are up, the body’s own arms leave the view, so there is no second hand on the stick at a run.

A held stone was reworked across November 5 and again on November 8. It now sits cupped in your palm: the palm is turned up under it, the wrist is dropped a little and the fingers wrap round its far side, where it once balanced on flat fingertips. It settles into your hand over a moment instead of snapping into place. Flint and other small things are held the same way, and fiber and tinder are squeezed in the fist instead of lying on an open palm.

Still off: the tip of the thumb hovers a little above the stone instead of pressing across it, and running with your eyes down about 60 degrees the boots mostly leave the view.

Development capture · Looking down at a run with a stick in hand, November 6

Blond and other light hair no longer looks grainy or felted in the shade: under trees the cap reads as smooth strands. The braid also stopped jolting when you turn sharply. A trick meant to steady the hair on quick turns was kicking every strand, a sudden shove the size of your walking speed and then the opposite shove 3 frames later. Hair now follows the animated head, and the female scalp has a measured shape under it instead of a sphere that overlapped the roots.

On your left hip the rope coil swings out and clears your thigh when you walk, run and sprint, where it used to cut into it; the sheath and pouch swing a little too. On November 14 the belt gear was refitted against the whole body (thighs, calves, waist, forearms and hands) with a damped hang, so the coil should rest on the outside of the thigh, sway a little and settle. That version went in from measurements made outside the game and has not been filmed in it yet.

Still imperfect: hair coming apart while you spin on the spot is not confirmed fixed, and the pouch can be squeezed in a deep crouch, in the saddle and on a high step.

Development capture · Blond hair in the shade of trees, November 5

Start a new world and the foot of a waterfall has a plunge pool worn into the ground: level, a few meters deep, with the creek spilling out over its sill. Before, the water lay on the slope at the foot as dark shards. A fall that drops into a lake keeps its pool too.

The pool reads as clear teal water with a rounded shore, green-blue going dark with depth, and it lies level right up to the rock. Getting there took several rounds: the first pools tilted up the wall behind them like a slanted mirror, then read as a dark box, then carried dark spots every few meters. The foam at the foot sits on the pool’s own surface round the impact, with a pale green-blue glow of bubbles, and a soft haze of spray hangs over it.

Still rough: white streaks on the steep outlet below the pool, no wet band or foam line along the shore, and no boulders on the rim. The small falls that drop off a ledge beside a bigger one have no pool yet.

Development capture · A plunge pool under a tall fall, November 5

Glide over a valley meadow and it is no longer flat green felt. It is mottled wet and dry, with willow lines. Meadows and the gentle shores of ponds and creeks below the treeline keep their grass and soil to the water’s edge, so no pale gravel blotches lie on them; only glacial tarns on scoured rock keep rock and gravel shores.

Sage country changed the same day. Its bare soil and grit are the gray-brown of the east side instead of pale granite grit, far sagebrush reads as gray-green crowns, the small rock patches read as weathered outcrops with sage around them, and the band from 110 to 240 m past the near shrubs is no longer bare.

Still open on November 5: the meadow reads a bit dark from glide height next to photos.

Development capture · A valley meadow from glide height, November 5

Start the game on an RTX graphics card and it draws with DLSS at Quality, about 67 percent render scale, unless you saved a render scale of your own. Settings > Graphics > Upscaler switches between DLSS and TSR, and the choice is kept. A card without RTX gets TSR at 100 percent, and the row just says TSR.

In one run on a test card that switched between the two every 5 s along a 2 km gallop, the graphics card’s time per frame fell from 57.6 to 45.2 ms. The view ahead looks the same. Grass at your feet is a touch softer, and a later check found grass blades go soft and streaky while you move.

It took three tries. DLSS became the default on October 30 and was pulled back twice that day, because starting with it lost the graphics card on the first frames. It returned on November 5, after the cause was found and the packaged game made 24 of 24 clean cold starts. Since October 30 a teleport, a respawn, a camera switch, a zoom or a sudden turn of 60 degrees or more clears the upscaler’s memory of earlier frames, so the old view cannot smear into the new one.

The same page has a Frame Gen row for DLSS frame generation, Off or Auto, and it is off by default. Auto only engages while the game holds exactly half the display’s refresh rate, at 60 frames a second or more, and generated frames have not been proven on screen yet.

Development capture · Meadow grass at your feet, drawn with DLSS at Quality, October 30

A grizzly’s first swat knocks you down. Down under it, the bear pins you with its forepaws and bites in bursts of two or three, holding and shaking for about a second each time, then stands over you with its head down on you. Once in a mauling it takes hold and drags you a couple of meters, and it may hook you over with a forepaw. Your breathing goes fast and shallow and the view presses low.

Lie still and it leaves sooner. Shout and it bites again; get up and run and it comes back for you. From November 5 you can hold the middle mouse button to cover, face down with your hands over the back of your neck, and its bites hurt half as much. Left mouse kicks at its face, or stabs if you hold a knife. That makes it let go of a drag and makes it angry: a black bear runs off after two hits, a grizzly only sometimes.

Better not to get there. Beside a burning fire, or with a lit torch in your hand, a grizzly displays and walks off instead of charging, unless you hit it. Your dog, if it is nearer the bear than you are, often draws it off: the bear chases and swats the dog, which yelps unhurt, and then leaves. On horseback it strikes the horse, which shies. A friend’s shout near the bear can pull it off you.

Still unproven: no check run has yet filmed the drag or the roll.

Development capture · A grizzly faces the dog, November 12

Listen while you glide. The wind past your ears rises and brightens as you speed up, and it is louder than it was. Fly slow, or let the wing go light, and the hide sail flutters and luffs, then goes quiet once it loads up. Meeting the edge of a thermal gives a soft swish of air, and on a real pull the frame gives a low wood-and-rawhide creak, at most every 7 s.

Speed shows as well. The view widens by up to 8 degrees as you near top speed with Shift+W. The fast shiver that came with it is a slow, small sway since November 4, and the view no longer twitches on bumps in the air. Reduce camera motion, under Controls in Settings, turns these view effects off.

A beeping variometer, which sounded when you were climbing, went in on October 29 and came out the same day in favor of the sounds of the wing itself, and no whistle tone was added. The sail sounds are generated, and they and the creak were picked by measurement, not yet by ear.

Development capture · A steady view at 40 m/s over a meadow river, November 4

Glide past a tall waterfall and the sheet holds together as you move: white ropes run down it with darker, glassy water between them. It used to be a flat white board drawn as a see-through stipple. The water falls in staggered vertical columns, the sheet widens as it drops and sways in the wind, thin strands peel off both edges as threads, and spray tears off the lip. Moss grows in the spray beside it.

At the foot the water ends in a churning white core. The foam stays round the impact instead of sprawling more than 50 m down the creek, a soft haze of spray hangs there, and mist drifts up the wall. Stand close to a big fall and there is a deep pounding under the roar, from its own recording. Nothing sits in the falling water any more: a boulder on the wall used to show as a dark squiggle low on one curtain.

It is not right yet. From a distance the sheet still shows fine wavy stripes, and checks on November 14 found that a fall sliding down a slab reads close up as a pale, nearly see-through ribbon with wavy ridges. A rebuild of the falling water is in progress and switched off.

Development capture · The falling sheet from the side, November 4

Glide past a tall waterfall on a granite wall and the rock beside it reads as lit granite, with only the wet darkening right along the water. The big black, stair-stepped slabs that stood there were not shadow. The river’s water level at the brink was carried down onto the cliff below it, so the ground drew those patches as deep river bed.

The wall keeps its blocks, ledges and recesses as you come in. That relief reaches about 450 m out, so a wall no longer flips to flat facets as you approach, and three small black teeth that stood on the face are gone. Ledges on a sheer wall are bare granite instead of dark plates of soil, and they look weathered, with dark lichen, grit and rough rock, not pale polished strips.

Two more marks left the wall beside one camp’s fall on November 13: a band of dark saw-teeth, one every 4 m, where the ground’s dampness smeared up the cliff, and a mud-brown band of sand that no ground that steep could hold. Dark vertical slots low on that wall are still visible.

Development capture · The wall beside a tall fall, November 4

You can always fight back. With anything selected that has no use of its own (a plant bundle, ore, sticks, meat), left and right click throw the punch combo. With the glider selected you can punch too, until you open the wing. The right hand strikes with what it holds: a lump of ore or a stick lands heavier, while a leaf or fiber bundle is a plain fist. Press the middle mouse button to shove with both open hands; it pushes a wolf or another player back into a stumble and barely hurts.

In third person you now stand like a fighter, feet apart, rear heel up and knees soft, both fists up with the elbows down, and every punch turns the hips and shoulders into it from the feet. On November 10 the rear fist came off the face (it sat about 7 cm in front of the mouth) to the height of the left fist, and the jab and cross began to reach 96 percent of the arm at contact, up from 76 and 88.

A wolf bite no longer takes your sprint for minutes. It staggers you, you limp at once by how bad it was and cannot sprint for the first few seconds, then you run again while the limp fades over about 15 to 20 seconds. Other players see the limp. Only a very bad wound load, health about 45 percent or under, still keeps you hobbling.

Still the same: in first person the jab and cross at contact look almost unchanged.

Development capture · A cross at full reach from the fighting stance, November 10

Grizzlies no longer run away. One that notices you turns on you with its head low and its ears back, popping its jaws, huffing and slapping the ground with both forepaws. Stand still or back away slowly and it walks off. Walk at it and it bluff-charges, skidding to a stop a few meters short. Turn and run and it chases you down at a flat-out gallop, swats you over and bites. Since November 7 the outcome is less fixed: a grizzly usually stands up to look you over, then bluff-charges and stops short, and a real attack needs a cause such as running or walking at it.

It has to notice you first. It smells you from far downwind, hears you running and sees you moving, so standing still or crouched you can get much closer. A grizzly that is unsure stands up on its hind legs to smell the air. Hit one and it comes for you; hurt it badly and it runs. Each bear has its own nerve.

You hear it as well: huffs, jaw pops and sniffs up close, a woof and often a roar when it charges, and its paws thumping on the ground as it comes. The calls are generated.

Still approximate: the rearing and the bite were checked against public-domain park footage only at one-second stills, and the charge, the skid stop, the ground slap and the swat are keyed from written accounts of bear attacks.

Development capture · A grizzly pulled up short of a survivor at the end of a bluff charge, in a check run on November 11

Gallop in third person and you sit a half seat on your legs instead of bobbing behind the stride, with your rein hand following the horse’s mouth. The saddle front no longer sinks into the withers: the saddle is carried by the back and the shoulder blades under it, and rides up when the withers rise.

Under it is a felt pad with real thickness, about 2 cm off the coat, where the old pad was crushed to about 1 cm. Where the felt can give, it does, and the back lifts the saddle only after that. Behind the cantle, the wide strap to the saddlebags follows the curve of the croup down to each bag instead of dropping straight through the air with a hard corner.

A playtest then showed the horse’s hip coming up through that strap at the trot and gallop. The strap now moves with the coat under it. That fix, of November 14, was checked on the studio stage and has not been looked over in the normal game yet. Still open, measured outside the game: the cinch dips into the belly at the trot, and the saddlebag bottoms still touch the horse’s thigh by up to 3 cm.

Development capture · At a canter across the meadow, the dog following

Forest cover follows the surveyed Sierra at more heights. Mountainsides more than about 800 m under the treeline stand as closed as the real ones: slopes of 25 to 45 degrees went from about half the surveyed tree cover to matching it, with gaps and rock showing on the steepest pitches. Steep canyon sides in the conifer belt also grow deer brush rooted in the rock’s cracks, though since November 13 not where a shrub would hang off a near-vertical wall.

Higher up, lake basins and valley floors hold real lodgepole and red fir stands down to the water, where they had been dry alpine steppe with a thin whitebark scatter. High basins are wet from the snow that melts off the slopes around them, not only from rain. Whitebark stays on the knobs and ridges, and the cracks of the granite knobs hold low, dark, wind-shorn whitebark and tan cured grass in place of bright green bushes and young ponderosa.

From far off, forest well below the treeline draws denser, and since November 6 distant crowns keep the shade they have up close.

Still wrong: high far slopes stay bald, and pale ground and rock show between far crowns, so far forest reads brighter than in photos. The forest changes need a new world.

Development capture · Pines climbing a steep granite slope above a forested valley, October 31

On a sunny afternoon, look over open, flat, bare ground for a thin swirling dust devil a few meters across. It stands at the foot of a strong thermal, climbs a few tens of meters and fades out with height. Fly to it, turn tightly around it and you climb: 48 m in 35 s in the test flight. Close to the lift, small bright specks rise past you, seed fluff and insects carried up in it. Over trees, water or steep slopes there is no dust, and weak thermals show none.

Two faults had kept the lift out of reach. The air measured your height from a rough version of the terrain that sat up to about 190 m above the real ground, so it took the glider to be underground and gave no lift. It also kept a private clock: every session began at midnight for the air, with no thermals for the first five minutes, then a new day every twenty minutes whatever the sky showed. The air uses the ground and the sky you see, so thermals are strong in the early afternoon, weak in the morning and evening and gone at night. At 1 in the afternoon the test film showed 4 to 5 dust devils within 700 m.

Circling holds you in the lift. In a steady turn the wing slows from 18 toward 13 m/s, so the circle tightens to about 37 m across instead of 56 m. Each world has its own thermal map.

Development capture · Banked hard in a thermal over the forest, October 30

The standing dead firs at meadow and forest edges were smooth poles with flat tops. Each now ends in a torn spike where the stem broke, narrows through its old crown and carries 16 to 26 thin branch stubs and a few broken limbs, and it keeps that outline from far away. Where the bark is gone, the bare wood is a scan of real rough wood, with its checks, splits and grain.

The high country has a second kind. On granite knobs near whitebark and lodgepole pines stand bare, sun-bleached silver snags, 6 to 9 m tall with broken tops and short dead stubs, about 8 a hectare in loose patches. Lodgepole stands no longer grow the barked fir snag.

The tall dead firs also stopped flickering and going see-through. The game had treated each one as a speck 8 cm tall at its foot, so the whole trunk stopped drawing whenever the foot was hidden or out of view. You could walk through them, and now they block you.

Still wrong: the silver snag’s stubs look a little evenly cut, and whitebark wood has no spiral grain yet. The dead fir’s bark, which read bleached near-white in full sun beside living trunks when it was rebuilt, may still do so.

Development capture · A silver snag on a granite knob, October 29

Mule deer wear fur, the way the horse, the wolves and the dog do: about half a million strands grown on each deer’s own body and taking their color from its own coat, with a white rump, a black-tipped tail and a dark forehead. The flat painted look is gone, and so is the stretched, crumpled skin that showed behind the front leg when a deer ran.

A buck is no longer a doe with antlers. He has his own body, about 1.85 m long to her 1.6 m, with a thick neck, a deep chest and a tucked belly. His big rack is wide and brown with paler tips, and it forks twice the way a mule deer’s does. Close up, from under 2 m, a deer’s eyes are wet and dark, with lids and a spark of sun in them, and the fur stops short around each one.

Still open at the end of October 30: the coat appears a moment after a deer first comes into view, the ears can look blotchy, and a crease shows at the base of the buck’s neck. The coat’s colors were redone on November 12.

Development capture · A mature buck grazing at the forest edge, October 30

Meadows had bare, grass-free circles in them. Inland ground was dotted with invisible rock sites meant for sea stacks, buried 1.4 km under the land, and each one cleared a 12 m ring of turf, seed heads and flowers. The world generator now places sea stacks only at sea, so in a new world the turf runs unbroken and the coastal stacks are where they were.

Smaller plants came up out of the ground as well. Ferns, sedges, deer brush, sagebrush, lupines and saplings had each been pushed half their height into the soil, so only the tips showed, and they now stand on their stems. Grass on rising ground, which a fault in how snow buries plants had pressed into the slope, should stand at its full height again. That fix was made from reading the code and has no before and after frame yet.

A new plant grows on moist, shaded conifer floors: the western sword fern, built from a scan, with fourteen fronds arching out of a crown. It sways, bends when you walk through it and gives a little fiber when picked. Lupine flowers were redrawn from public-domain National Park Service photos, a soft blue instead of saturated blobs. Other flowers and shrubs still use drawn sheets, because there are no free scans of the Sierra species.

Development capture · A meadow with its turf unbroken, October 29

Walk into a scanned boulder, block, slab, stump or log and you stop at the surface you see. All 25 scanned rocks, logs and stumps have a solid shape now, where a granite erratic used to let you walk in until your eyes were at its middle. You can no longer walk up a big boulder’s side like a ramp, and cliffs, walls and tors keep their hollows and overhangs open.

A blow counts when the pick is visibly on the stone. At the edge of your reach the swing leans in, or bends lower, until the point goes in, and a swing that stops on a log, a wall or an animal no longer pays out ore from the rock behind it. Ore rocks that were being judged as animals, so that no blow did any work, take the pick like any other rock.

A granite boulder takes nine swings, gives a stone at each, then falls apart into two to four more, and E picks them all up. The stones at the foot of a rock on a slope sit on the ground instead of hanging in the air, and the big gray boulders in meadows can be mined.

Still open on October 31: a very low rock could be out of reach from straight on, and small stones in talus and on open ground could not be picked up. Each blow then cut a flat slice off the rock; since November 3 the pieces break on rough faces.

Development capture · The pick’s point on a granite boulder, October 30

The rock of the high country now follows the real Sierra Nevada. The mountain core is granite, and dark metamorphic rock sits in it as long, narrow bodies a few km to about 28 km long, running north-north-west, the way the Ritter Range does. Any world lands at about 10 to 15 percent dark rock. Before, the rock map was big random patches and the high ground was mostly dark. A dark tint meant for those peaks had also spread onto granite beside them, so a granite knob over a lake came out dark gray-green. Those knobs are light again.

The dark peaks read as dark gray rock with snow patches, their rubble darkened and patched with gray-green and rust lichen. Summits above about 3,200 m take their forms from laser surveys of the Ritter Range, the Minarets and the Cathedral Range, with sharper ridges.

The same knobs lost their fake creeks. Roughly every 80 m a creek ran straight down each bare face, because every creek started at a fixed point whether or not any ground above could feed it. A creek now stays dry down a steep slope near its start and becomes water where the ground eases.

Still wrong: the summits read bumpy more than knife-edged. Where the old map had volcanic rock in the high country its cinder cones are gone, so that ground changed shape. New worlds only.

Development capture · A light granite knob over a lake basin, with dark peaks behind, October 30

Loose rock used to look pasted onto the ground. Every boulder, talus block and stone now knows the real ground under it: the exact ground line, the ground’s own color at that spot (forest litter, meadow sod, granite soil, scree or snow) and how wet the site is. At its foot a rock takes the ground’s color in a ragged band, with a damp dark line where it meets the soil and darker shading low down. On wet sites by creeks and meadows dark moss grows at the foot, and grit and needles settle more on the faces that point up.

The rocks repeat less. Four more rocks scanned from real stone joined the set: a jagged lichen-streaked boulder, a big faceted boulder, a low cluster of broken rubble and a weathered loose stone. Kinds of rock that lie side by side on one slope or apron draw different scans, so the same rock no longer repeats across a talus field. A big rock also keeps its whole footprint clear of tree and tall shrub trunks, where a pine could grow out of a boulder before. That places about 3 percent fewer rocks.

Still wrong: distant small rocks read smooth and pale, and soil and debris banked against each rock’s foot are not built yet.

Development capture · Scanned stones set in turf at noon, October 29

The cut stumps in the conifer forests are scans of two real stumps, with real bark relief, a weathered top and their own root flare meeting the soil. They are 2.6 to 3.3 m across the roots and about 1 m tall, set 12 percent into the ground. Their bright wet-forest moss is dried to gray-brown wood and lichen, because Sierra summers are dry, and the foot fades into the color of the forest litter.

The fallen branches on the forest floor and the sticks around the trunks are scans of real dead branches too, forked, cracked and peeling, where there had been a smooth gray stick with one texture everywhere. A fallen log can no longer be placed through a stump or a rock, and dead wood and scanned granite boulders fade between detail levels as you walk up instead of switching in one frame.

Still wrong: the stump scan carries its own skirt of debris, so from close up it reads as a mound more than a stump. Pine cones and twig fans are still the older models.

Development capture · Scanned dead branches on the ground, October 29

Walk up to any big pine, cedar, fir or oak and the bark is sharp, every crack and plate. Ponderosas, incense cedars and lodgepoles had been showing a blurry brown smear up close, because the game kept the trees’ bark at a tiny version to save memory. It now always loads in full for all 14 kinds of tree, at a cost of about 0.8 GB of video memory. The giant sequoia’s flared foot keeps its full bark too.

The white fir, the big gray-barked fir, changed more. Its bark is a scan of real bark with deep corky furrows and ridges you can see in the light, in place of flat painted bark. A faint line that ran around the trunk at chest height is gone, and the bark reads ash-gray instead of near-black: its color had been measured off a mossy trunk in deep shade.

Since November 3 every trunk also sits in a collar of fallen needles, or leaves under oaks, darker right at the bark and fading out in patches toward the edge of the crown, with a soil stain up the bottom of the trunk. On dry open ground the needles lie in sparse patches. Whether a collar ever reads as a drawn circle, shows on grass or bushes, or pops in as you walk is not yet checked in play.

Development capture · Pine bark at arm’s length, October 29

Two bears share the map. Black bears roam the conifer forest, the oak woodland and the meadows, about one to a square kilometer, out by day and at dusk. California grizzlies, gone from the Sierra since the 1920s, are back as they were before 1850: they live lower, in valley grassland, foothill oak and meadows, and are rarer. Both den from December to March, so you will not meet one in snow.

They move like bears: a flat-footed walk with the heel down, slow and rolling at the shoulders, a faster amble, and a gallop when they bolt. Both wear coats of real hair. About a third of black bears are black and the rest chocolate brown or cinnamon, picked for each bear. A calm black bear grazes with its head down and its shoulders high, a pose keyed from park footage of a black bear grazing.

A bear can be butchered like a deer for a lot of meat and fat, a heavy hide, sinew and bones, and a grizzly gives the most of any animal. Birds near a bear go quiet and the jays scold over there, so you can hear one before you see it.

When they arrived both bears were shy and ambled off as you came near. That lasted until November 3, when grizzlies began to stand their ground. Since November 5 black bears react to you the same way, though they are shy and most still walk away. There are no cubs yet.

Development capture · A grizzly in a meadow, November 12

Look across a forested valley on a clear full-moon night and the far trees are dark and cool, like the trees beside you. Before, the forest past about 200 m stayed bright, warm and daylit under a black sky, as if a daytime mountain had been pasted under the night.

The cause was the warm light that bounces up off the ground. It was a fixed brightness that kept its daytime value all night, and it lit everything in the distance. It now follows the light that is really on the ground, sun or moon, so it fades through dusk and the far forest darkens with the ground near you. Midday is exactly as before.

The dog and the wolves stopped glowing white after dark as well. Their fur took in the night sky with nothing blocking it, so a coat in the grass glowed and lit the ground under it. Each coat scatters less sky as night falls, and looks the same by day. The lasting fix, letting grass shade fur the way it shades the ground, is not done.

Development capture · Far ridges under a full moon, October 29

Watch yourself from behind in a straight glide: the body hangs straight down from the hands with the legs together. It used to hang slanted in an S shape under the bar, because the sideways lean of the run and jump animation showed through. In a turn the whole body swings out with the turn and settles with a little sway, like weight on a strap. Fly straight and it hangs plumb again.

Since November 4 the wing’s roll eases into and out of a turn instead of stopping dead, and the body held at the bar turns with it, so the pilot’s head jolts less while banking. Hair moves smoothly in a fast glide instead of snapping back to its resting shape. One or two head jolts remain in hard thermal turns, where the swinging body reaches the end of the arms’ slack.

Development capture · Hanging plumb under the bar in a straight glide, October 29

Climb above the forest in a new world and the granite basins hold water. Glaciers leave closed rock hollows behind, and in the game those stayed dry, because the only standing water came from where rivers end. Each one now holds a small lake, called a tarn, full to its rim, and a creek leaves at the low point. A count on October 28 over high ground between 2,700 and 3,700 m went from 0.47 lakes and ponds per square kilometer to 0.98, against 1.1 on the USGS map of the real Sierra.

A lake’s waves depend on its size, as real ones do: wind can only build waves over the open water it crosses. On a 5.5 hectare tarn in a 2 m/s breeze that means 1.6 cm ripples about 0.4 m long, so the far shore’s trees and granite are mirrored. Big lakes keep their wind waves, and from the air those no longer form a regular grid.

A tarn’s bank rises gradually from the water (one that stood as a pale 12 m wall climbs about 15 m over 48 m), and granite boulders are placed along lake banks. High tarns sit in rock basins with rims, and a deep hollow stays closed or keeps its tarn instead of a creek cutting a canyon through the ridge to get out.

Still wrong when this was filmed: a hard line crosses the mirrored image partway down the water, which shows in the picture. No lakes dammed by moraines exist yet, only rock basins.

Development capture · A 5.5 hectare tarn mirroring its far shore, October 29

Mule deer graze the meadows, grassland, oak woodland and mountain forest in bands of 2 to 6, out from dawn to late evening. They arrived at about 10 to the square kilometer, the abundance of the years before 1850. Since November 3 there are more of them, and they live in the mixed-conifer and high forests and along streams too.

Spook one and it stots: all four feet leave the ground together in stiff-legged bounces, the way mule deer flee. The head nods as it walks. The tail flicks at flies and swings out on turns, and a deer is never quite still: its ears swivel and flick, and its head comes up from grazing to look around. Startled, it puts its ears forward and its tail up.

About half the herd are bucks from August to February, with racks from a single spike to four points a side. A startled deer snorts, does bleat softly as they graze, a hurt deer bawls, and hooves sound different on grass, rock, gravel, snow, sand and water. A dead deer is butchered stage by stage, as a horse is: fat, hide, meat, sinew and bone.

The calls and hoof sounds have not been checked by ear in the game yet. The deer’s first walk and run did not hold up in play and were rebuilt on November 11.

Development capture · A young buck crossing a dry meadow, October 30

Flat ground is enough to fly from. Open the glider on flat ground with R and hop with Space: the launch lifts you about 13 m and you fly roughly 15 s, 260 m. Near the ground the wing levels out instead of diving in, and a fast, gentle touchdown is a clean run-out, not a tumble. Hold Shift as you touch down and you keep running while the wing folds. Pressing E with the glider open folds the wing. The glider cannot be made yet: since October 8 a new world starts with empty hands, so it comes from the pack’s creative tab.

The wing glides about twice as far as it did, at about 18 to 1. In the air, Shift+W speeds you up to about 34 m/s and costs much less height than diving; W alone still dives. A run down a bumpy slope stays a run until your feet are about 0.4 m off the ground, at a jump or the lip of an edge, and only then does the wing take you, so a launch no longer stutters between flying and landing on every bump.

The camera stays centered behind you while you explore, glide or ride, and moves over the shoulder only while you draw the bow or charge a throw.

A fast, low dive (about 40 m/s) could outrun the ground being built ahead of you, and the game then took your keys and mouse for up to 18 seconds while the wing flew on by itself. Since October 30 nothing in the air is held: gliding or falling, you keep full control.

Development capture · A hop from flat ground, seven seconds in, October 28

Coyotes live in the meadows. Look for one along the edge of a meadow, grassland, sage or oak woodland between 16:00 and 09:00, in late-afternoon and morning light. It watches you, slips away once you come within about 22 m, and bolts if it is struck. It walks, trots, canters and gallops on a canine skeleton, with its feet planted instead of sliding.

Its amber eyes are real eyes seated in the head. A hurt or dying coyote yelps. A dead one can be butchered like a deer, for a pelt and a little meat, and one left to rot goes down to a dog-family skeleton with a long narrow skull, canines and a long tail, where it used to leave a sheep’s. Wolves do the same.

Coyotes arrived with seasons for animals: a species can now be out only in its own months, so an animal that dens or hibernates can be gone for the winter. Coyotes and deer stay all year.

Still open: the yelp has not been listened to in the game yet, and the rotted skeleton was last seen standing on its legs. A change that lays it on its side has landed but has not been seen in the game.

Development capture · A coyote in the meadow, October 28

Walk the high country 150 to 500 m below the treeline, on the gentle benches between the forest. Bare, ice-polished granite slabs show again where the ice-age glaciers scoured the ground, the way Desolation, the Tuolumne domes and the Cathedral benches look. The round before had covered almost all gentle granite with soil. About 6 percent of gentle subalpine ground is open slab now, close to the real share of 5 percent, and most of it sits where the ice slid.

The pattern of rock and forest is fitted to fourteen real Sierra survey areas. Forest near the treeline still follows the measured canopy: flats and benches are closed, and steep slabs stay open. New worlds only.

Development capture · Bare granite above the forest in the high country, October 28

Punch at a sheep grazing at your feet and the blow lands. A fist reaches about 50 cm from your eyes and a sheep’s back is about 95 cm below them, so punches at a low animal used to meet nothing. Now you bend and step in: both fists go the whole way, the view dips part of the way, and in third person your body bends with the blow. A punch thrown while you are pressed against an animal lands as a shove.

Tools close that last half step too. The axe steps in up to 80 cm, so a swing at a sheep 1.8 m away lands, and your view follows three quarters of the step, so the arm no longer stretches until its open shoulder end shows in the corner of the view. The pitchfork had no attack at all; it now jabs with the stone spear’s thrust and punctures. A jab lands 0.15 s after the click, the pitchfork 0.36 s and the axe 0.5 s.

Sheep also turn aside and step around you instead of walking through your body; that is proven in tests and not yet filmed. Still wrong: a sheep can stand inside a tree trunk, a fight with a biting wolf has not been checked, the pitchfork borrows the spear’s thrust in third person, and once in four check runs every swing in a new world was refused, for a cause not yet found.

Development capture · Bending into a punch at a grazing sheep, November 10

Look closely at any bare granite slab. Every crack used to be a hard, near-black line of one width. A crack now shades softly into the rock: the inside is the rock’s own color in shadow, one edge catches the light and the other falls into a shallow shade. Thin cracks swell and pinch along their length, and about half of them are only color seams, healed or hairline, as on real exfoliated granite.

In a new world the joints themselves changed. They bend together in shared arcs over 5 to 30 m, like sheet joints over a dome, instead of running as near-straight ruled lines. The blocks between them are 3 to 6 m across, where they had been a dense grid of 1 to 2 m, and the cut slots in the ground follow the same curves.

The bigger blocks were checked on a map of the cracks. They had not been filmed in the game when they landed.

Development capture · Soft-shaded cracks on a granite slab, October 27

Black oaks, blue oaks and the alders and willows along creeks now leaf out, turn and bare on dates taken from Sierra records, and by height: a stand on a canyon wall turns before one in the valley and leafs out later. At about 1,500 m a black oak leafs out from mid May to mid June, peaks in color around October 27 and is bare by late November. Far forest trees turn and go bare with them.

After a snowfall the snow sits on every tree crown where snow lies at that height, and it stays while the air is below freezing, so a cold morning after a storm is white and a warm afternoon is mostly shed. Meadow flowers and sward green up and cure with height too: a meadow 1,000 m higher greens about two months later. Snow lines on the ground itself, and earlier melt on south slopes, are not drawn yet.

Development capture · A black oak in the fall check, October 27

The coast lost its tiled look. Before, every small block of seabed had its own straight-sided shelf and the sea drew a thin white hexagon around each one. Waves first broke in a single line out where the water is about a meter and a half deep; since October 28 each breaker rides in as its own white roller with a foam trail thinning behind it, and calm water where nothing breaks stays clear and turquoise.

The orange patches along sea cliffs and reef edges were subsoil showing through, and most of that is grass or rock now. Some pale patches remain on the beach, and their source is still to be found.

Development capture · A cove with the new surf line, October 27

High country 150 to 800 m below the treeline reads as forest and rock the way real Sierra country does. Benches, gentle slopes and hollows between the granite carry full stands of pine, taken from measured canopy cover, while the slabs between them stay bare. A further round filled the flats 150 to 500 m below the treeline and the far mountainsides just under it.

Bare slabs were still plain up close when this landed, and the granite basins that read as dry steppe have held forest down to the water since October 31.

Development capture · A granite bench with its pine stand, October 27

Each ground texture used to be one photo laid edge to edge the same way across the world, so from a few meters to about 60 m out you could see the same blotches in rows. The ground is now cut into cells about 2 m across (1 m on bare rock), and each cell shows its own part of the photo, turned and sized a little differently. On steep rock the grain still runs downhill, and the cost in frame time was within noise.

The long straight streaks on the near slab are tree shadows and grain seen at a low angle, not repeats.

Development capture · A slab and subalpine forest with the new ground, October 27

The forest floor changed in three ways. Closed stands no longer grow a lawn between the trunks, forest interiors are no longer crushed dark, and fallen logs and limbs lie in the stand, with more in the closed ones. The needle duff is browner. Far trees were also re-baked to match the near ones.

It is checked against real forest photos, and the open meadow beyond the stand is still plainer than the photo.

Development capture · Under a red-fir stand, October 27

Scanned boulders and rock forms are now set into the ground instead of resting on it, coastal stacks come in more varied shapes, and a pebble skirt that had drawn straight-edged plates under the water around shore rocks is cut off. Iron-rich outcrops show rust-orange gossan that stains the rock downhill from each one.

The finer color variation on the large slabs is not seen in a frame yet.

Development capture · A rusty outcrop on a slab, October 27

Shadows from trees, shrubs and rocks are sharp and meet the ground where they should. They were off because about one start in four to fifteen lost the graphics card on its first frames. A setting that skips one occlusion step cleared 48 of 48 test starts, and the sharper shadows cost no more than the old ones in testing; the crash still came about one start in 60 until its cause was found and fixed on November 4.

Dense meadows briefly showed an overflow note on screen after this landed, and that is hidden.

Development capture · Shrub and boulder shadows with virtual shadow maps, October 25

The shape of the granite slopes under about 170 m now comes from real aerial laser surveys of Tuolumne, the Cathedral Range, the Yosemite domes, high cirques and Desolation, in place of hand-written noise. Look at the hillsides above a meadow: rounded glaciated slabs with tree islands in place of jagged needle slopes and striped ledges. The small swells, hollows and steps underfoot on meadow floors and slab benches are real surveyed relief. New worlds only.

Development capture · A meadow under a granite dome on surveyed terrain, October 24

New worlds grow meadows where the ground holds water: valley floors beside creeks, rivers and lakes, glacial trough floors, cold hollows and seeps. They have a sharp forest edge and no trees standing in them, and they cover about 5 to 9 percent of the conifer belt, the biggest 25 to 40 ha on trough floors. The sward is wet, moist or dry by how high the water table sits, sedge, corn lily and wildflowers grow in it, and young lodgepoles creep out onto cold ones. High meadows are meant to cure to late-summer straw; until November 6 they stayed July green in late August, and they are still greener than photographs.

Far tiles beyond about 2 km now draw meadow where there is one. The high country has almost no flat ground for them.

Development capture · A meadow beneath the granite, October 23

Bare rock on the mountain slopes is no longer smooth 4 m facets. Within about 120 m it is redrawn finely and split by long joints, with cross joints ending in T junctions, so slabs break into irregular plates; since October 28 the joints in new worlds bend in shared arcs and the blocks between them are 3 to 6 m across. The cracks wander, swell and taper, and since October 27 they shade softly into the rock, one edge lit and the other in shallow shade, while the wide ones are clean slots with straight walls. You can collide with the plates, and plants sit in the cracks.

Thin joints stay visible out to about 60 m, and farther off they fade so walls show their big joints and shadows. New worlds only.

Development capture · Joints in a granite slab, October 23

The slope where fallen rock comes to rest, down to about the wall’s own height below its foot, used to be grass and soil like the hillside. It is now gray broken rock. Open granite also carries lichen patches a few meters to fifteen across, so a slab 100 to 300 m away looks mottled, and the big talus boulders show pale granite scanned from real rock instead of a furry generated pattern.

Where a ledge meets a cliff, the ground and rock textures no longer stretch into streaks.

Development capture · Talus below the walls, October 22

The high desert looked like bare sand before. The sagebrush flats now have about twice as many sagebrush shrubs, packed closer, with dry bunchgrass tufts, fine gravel and a few cobbles in the gaps, so the hills read gray-green. It is placement data, so it reaches new and existing worlds.

Development capture · Sagebrush slopes at mid range, October 23

Sunny dry grass in the oak woodland and the open foothills was a strong orange-gold that read like spray paint from far off. It now takes the pale straw of real late-summer grass at the same brightness, and the ground’s color saturation fell from 0.36 to 0.30 in the oak woodland.

Development capture · Oak woodland with straw-colored grass, October 22

Walk a mixed-conifer or red-fir stand and look up: about one tree in eight is now old growth, with a thick trunk clear of branches for half its height, heavy limbs, and a flat or domed top where the leader broke long ago, some with a bare dead spike. Each stands with more room around it, and the younger trees are spaced off it.

Ponderosa, Jeffrey pine, white fir, red fir and incense cedar all grow old trees, and every one can be felled like its species. A new world shows it best.

Development capture · A conifer stand over granite, October 22

Climb above about 3,300 m in a new world and the ground is no longer one beige felt. Green sedge turf lies in the hollows, along creeks and lake shores and below lingering snow, while the knobs and windward slopes are gray fell-field gravel with stones, cushion plants and sedge tufts. Summer snowfields lie in the north-facing hollows, with crisp melting edges and green turf where their water runs.

At the treeline itself, whitebark pines stand in clumps in the joints of the bare granite up to the ridgelines, lodgepoles keep to the benches, and the knee-high wind mats spread wide across the gravel and ledges, about 2.7 times the tree cover there was. Saved worlds keep their land.

Development capture · Alpine ground above the trees in a check run, October 21, the night before it reached the build

On the moderate and steep slopes of the mountains the bedrock now shows through its thin soil in whole joint blocks. Convex noses, ridges and the colder, steeper ground come out bare and stepped, while turf and trees keep to the hollows, ledges and open joints. Each bare block is its own tilted flat face with 2 to 6 m steps at its edges, and the joints between them fill with grit and turf, drawing dark lines that read from a few hundred meters.

Loose boulders no longer sit on top of the in-place blocks, and montane forest slopes around 2,000 m keep most of their soil. The large landforms under the blocks are still rounded, and that is the next step. New worlds only.

Development capture · A high-country slope after the joint-block change in a check run, October 22

Open sunlit ground was drawn 1 to 1.4 stops brighter than real photographs of the same kind of place. Midday exposure was matched to them, so oak woodland, sagebrush and granite read with real contrast and color, and the sky was deeper. On November 6 midday was made about a stop brighter again, because the ground had since become darker than this setting assumed.

Forest interiors keep their brightness, mornings ease in, and golden hour and night are unchanged.

Development capture · Midday exposure matched to photographs in a check run, October 21

Under a conifer stand the needle litter, duff and loam are now the cool gray-brown of a real Sierra floor instead of orange-brown, a little darker under closed crowns. The litter reaches past each crown by about a third of the tree’s height, so the floor turns to duff before you are under the trees, with pockets of bare soil and moss where it is damp.

Granite slabs between the trees keep their tops bare, with litter only in their cracks and low sides.

Development capture · Needle litter across a conifer stand in a check run, October 22

Too many trees stood alone and evenly spaced. Measured old Sierra forests have most trees in tight groups of five to eleven with gaps between, so the forest now forms groups, with only about one tree in seven standing alone, and pines root a little more often in the cracks and benches of granite slopes. New worlds only.

Each tree’s needles and leaves are a little lighter or darker, warmer or cooler than its neighbors’, so a stand no longer looks copied. The far forest used to stop 2 km out and now reaches 4 km at about the same cost, and past that, forested ground draws as dark crowns instead of bare rock.

Development capture · The far forest reaching 4 km in a check run, October 20, the night before it reached the build

Sage country read as bare sand at about 7 percent shrub cover, where real sagebrush steppe measures 15 to 40 percent. Sagebrush now sits on the ground’s true surface with about twice as many plants, roughly 20 to 30 percent cover nearby. Far slopes still looked sparser than they are when this landed; since November 5 the band from 110 to 240 m past the near shrubs no longer draws bare.

Open ground in the oak woodland and dry foothills is now a golden dry-grass sward with brown soil in its gaps, and sagebrush steppe is gray-brown grit with bunchgrass through it, with sand only where the ground is really sandy.

Development capture · Denser sagebrush in a check run, October 21, before the steppe ground turned from sand to grit

Climb above the valley rim and the forest thins and the trees get shorter, then gives out near the top of the subalpine belt to open alpine ground. A windward ridge loses its trees first, and a sheltered hollow keeps a clump a little higher. Until now 30 m white firs stood on every summit, even at 3,800 m.

The high country has its own trees: lodgepole pines in the subalpine forest, whitebark pines above them in multi-trunk clumps that press down into knee-high wind mats at the line, red firs in the snowy upper forest and Jeffrey pines on the dry granite side. All can be chopped.

Development capture · The treeline over granite from above in a check run, October 22, a few hours before the clumps reached the build

In new worlds, cliffs stand steep with towers, buttresses and ledges instead of slumping into rounded blobs, and layered rock shows cliff bands and benches. Sunlit slabs carry dark water streaks and darker joints, and flat valley floor beside the big domes keeps its soil and trees.

The flat orange patches on cold summits and the salmon bands on sagebrush slopes now draw gray-buff grit and scree, and ravines and spurs come at uneven spacing instead of evenly spaced grooves.

Development capture · A valley wall over the forest in a check run, October 17

New world now opens the full creator with Body, Face, Skin, Hair, Clothes and Saved tabs. Face sliders cover eyes, brows, nose, mouth, jaw, chin and cheeks; there are skin tones, weathering, eye colors, eight hairstyles, beards from full to clean shaven, and dyed shirt and trouser colors that keep their wear.

The Body tab shows the survivor in underwear and has build sliders, from skinny to heavy and soft to muscled. Randomise makes believable people. Joining a friend’s world asks once for your survivor, and the pause menu has Survivor to change your look.

Interface capture · The creator in a review run, October 13

Eyes blink every few seconds, make small glances, look at a nearby player’s face, and narrow or widen with the light; closed lids meet in a clean lash line. In the creator they follow your pointer.

Skin has fine pores, real folds and natural color, with soft lips and teeth that look like teeth. Hair has depth between locks and takes the world’s light, and long styles swing as you turn and rest on the shoulders and pack. Far away, hair draws as light cards.

Development capture · The female survivor in the creator, October 14

Lake water uses a detailed ripple field, shared by near and distant water, with wave strength following the weather, and reflections no longer flicker with fine grain. The repeating pattern seen from high above stayed open until November 5, when a big lake’s waves stopped forming a regular grid from the air.

Distant trees now cast shadows onto exposed ground, improving forest contact from valley overlooks, and far mountains shade the same across terrain-tile borders.

Development capture · The detailed lake ripples in a check run, October 11, the day before they became the default

Getting up after a backward fall now draws both knees in during the first push, instead of the right boot trailing ahead. The right knee lifts with its boot as he rolls onto his hands, rather than snapping across the floor.

The hand-supported roll is steadier. The right hand no longer darts away and snaps back under the shoulder, and both hands lift in two readable beats. In the test films the worst step of the right shin fell from about 31 cm to between 9 and 13 cm a frame. Wider falls and other directions still need work.

Development capture · The first-person view during a backward get-up, with both knees drawn in, October 11

In first person, a heavy hit or trip carries your view with your body, lowers the held tool and shows the bracing arms. The free hand reaches first to catch you, with its fingers opening as it reaches, while the tool hand keeps its grip.

Falling backward keeps your own face out of view and returns you to standing with less camera kick. A forward trip can still land the hips before the hand, and the wrist of the tool hand can still jitter, which is being worked on.

Development capture · The first-person view mid-fall after a backward knock, October 11

Look at a range from a summit or across the valley and the slopes break into spurs, ravines and ridgelines that drain off every peak, near and far.

Look out past the valley and the land runs on to 49 to 57 km, where it used to stop about 17 km out, so distant ranges stand on the horizon. High summits in late summer are bare rock, with snow in streaks down the north-facing ravines.

Rivers bend in rounded curves, and beside a river the banks fall away gently instead of dropping into 12 m dirt walls. Shrubs, rocks and logs on a lake’s far bank now reflect as themselves, lit by the light bouncing around them, instead of as hard black shapes.

Development capture · A valley on the mountains terrain in a check run, October 8, just before it reached the build

A granite boulder you break with the pickaxe shows real gray granite on its broken faces, with the stone’s black and white grains at their true size, instead of a blurry brown smear.

A young ponderosa’s branches no longer show their bark stretched into long streaks when you look down on one.

Development capture · A freshly broken boulder in a check run, October 8, just before the grain fix reached the build

Look closely at a stump top or a cut in a log and the wood shows real growth rings, off-center and wobbly, wide near the middle, with a softer reddish heartwood. The top of a big tree’s stump is the axe’s flat chopped steps, without the thin spikes that used to stand up over it. The rings read plainly again after a fix.

A chopped lying log is a V of two flat faces, with each blow’s step running straight across it. Fell a big tree so it crashes into a smaller one, and the small one now snaps at its foot and comes down too.

Development capture · A fresh stump and the log’s broken end in a check run, October 9

The horse now wears a bridle: a leather headstall over the poll behind the ears, a browband, a loose-ring bit at the corners of the mouth, and two reins that run from the bit along the neck into your left hand.

Get on and look from the side, standing still and then walking. When this landed your left fist closed round the reins about a hand above the saddle horn; since November 7 it rides low, just ahead of the horn over the withers. The rein ends hang down the near shoulder, and since November 7 each rein loops round the horn on its own side when nobody is riding. A playtest on November 6 found the reins bending at right angles and crossing through the head, and they were rebuilt as hanging leather over the next two days.

Development capture · A ride check in the horse-tack work, October 8, with the rein along the neck

The cabin got a finish pass. Wattle walls show round hazel rods pressed into ochre daub, thatch walls show their binding rods and deeper reed, roof bays meet without a step at the seams, and every wall darkens a little toward the ground in the same way, so the materials weather together.

The first time you set a wall, roof, door or window of a new kind, the game no longer stalls for a few seconds while that piece is built: every cabin piece is readied under the loading page. With a wall or a roof on your hotbar and no floor near, the piece now shows as a gray ghost where you look, standing on the ground, with “Needs a floor”. Before, nothing showed at all and the slot seemed to do nothing. R turns it, Q changes its shape, and near a floor the wall snaps to its edge.

Two rules arrived with it: a roof cannot be held up by half walls alone, and a half wall cannot go in under a roof. If a friend opens a door just as you press E on it, your press no longer shuts it again.

Development capture · A log cabin in a check run early on October 8, minutes before the finish pass reached the build

Throw a spear, a bone harpoon, a javelin or even an arrow at a trout you can see in the shallows. If the point meets the fish where it swims, the fish is yours, pinned to the bottom where the point came down. Everyone near sees the splash, and a struck trout thrashes in a burst of spray. Miss, and the whole pool bolts for half a minute. Water deeper than about a meter is safe from you. Later the same day a hard throw into a shallow stream stopped passing straight through the water without a splash.

Keep your eyes on the ground in dry country, among sagebrush and juniper and in the desert, and along lake and creek shores: now and then an old obsidian arrowhead lies there. There are five kinds: leaf-shaped, banded side-notched, corner-notched with a mahogany streak, a tiny translucent bird point and, very rarely, a fluted Clovis point. Fit one to a shaft at Crafting 3 for an obsidian-tipped arrow. It cuts deeper than stone but shatters more often on rock and bone, and your bow shoots it first.

Development capture · A trout holding in a clear shallow, October 8

Open the book with B and turn to Skills: each skill shows its level beside its name and, under its bar, the next thing it opens, such as “At 2: stone spear”. Make a stone axe on your first night and Crafting reaches 2, which opens the stone spear the same night. Arrows wait for Crafting 6, the bow for Woodcraft 8, and cabin walls for Building 9, so a first hut is wattle or thatch.

Mining is a skill now: every blow into ore trains it, and working a seam out pays most. A wolf you cannot butcher yet shows a gray mark naming the Hunting level it needs. When a skill levels up you hear the book’s pencil scratch once, and the Skills page carries a fresh pencil note saying what you reached, which fades once you have read it.

Level gates belong to the world, and a new world keeps them on for everyone in it. A hen now gives a small bone, so gorge hooks and a fishing pole are possible on the first day, and anyone can take meat from a wolf, though its hide still needs Hunting 30. A world saved before this change opens with each skill at the level its experience is worth now.

Development capture · The Skills page with Crafting at level 4, October 8

Press C to lie down and you now crawl up on your forearms and knees instead of the flat frog crawl. Crawling tires you: after about forty seconds of it you crawl slower until you rest. Being weak, hurt or cold now slows a crouch and a crawl the way it slows a walk.

Development capture · Crawling on the forearms on a granite slope, October 8

Building pieces now show on the ground. A log wall, log floor or log roof, a wattle, board, stone or thatch wall, a thatch roof or a sawbuck that you drop, throw or blow off a cabin with dynamite lies there as a short section of that piece: walls and roofs flat on their backs, the sawbuck on its legs. Before this they could not be seen.

Development capture · A log, a board and a wattle wall piece lying in the grass, October 8

Every wall bay of a cabin is now one whole made panel, in logs, riven boards, dry stone or wattle, each with its own doorway and window, and every roof bay is one made section, so walls and roof no longer show cracks, gaps or pieces clipping through each other. Log courses line up across the posts, and the floor has a squared rim timber.

Thatch is new. Tie a thatch wall in your hands from two poles, four sticks and twelve plant fiber and stand it on a floor’s edge like the others, and tie a thatch roof bay from three poles, six sticks and twenty plant fiber. Each roof bay keeps its own thatch or shakes, so a roof can mix them. From inside, the walls show their real logs, boards, stone, wattle and thatch instead of a blank back.

Through the day each material was remade closer to the real thing: the stone wall as fieldstone and split blocks of different sizes with deep joints, the wattle wall with its clay daub packed into the weave and crumbling at the top, the gables as one piece of riven boards with battens, a split-log cap along the ridge, and a half wall that is its own waist-high wall in every material instead of a full wall squashed to half height.

Development capture · A stone wall and a thatch wall under a mixed roof, in a check run on October 8

Make a survival pole: carve gorge hooks from a bone with a knife or a flake, then rig a pole from two sticks, a cord and a hook with Shift+R, like the spear. Cut bait from raw meat the same way; a bare hook catches nothing. Stand at a creek pool or a lake edge with the pole in hand, best at dawn or dusk, when rings show where trout rise. Hold left mouse to draw back and let go to cast.

Watch the float: it shivers when a trout nibbles, then goes under, and a click strikes. On the fish the rod stays up on its own. Hold left mouse to haul the line in and let go to ease when the fish runs and the rod creaks. Small trout come in within seconds; a big brown can still break you off if you haul against its run. A tired trout is lifted or beached onto the stones, flops there, and E picks it up to cook whole on a fire. Running or wading spooks the pool.

The rest came over the same day. Bites come within a minute at a good spot and trout jump often. The hand closes on the twine-wrapped butt of one willow rod that bends with the fish. Trout show in clear shallows as dark-backed shapes with their shadows on the gravel, a leap or a landing throws spray, and the field book gained a Fishing page with drawings of the pole, the gorge hook, the bait and all four trout.

Development capture · Waiting on a cast at a lake, in a film run on October 8

Hold E on a wall you built and a wheel opens with a large, clear picture of each choice in that wall’s own material: a stone wall offers a stone doorway, window and half wall, the other walls in your pack, and a pry bar to take it down. The one you point at fills in copper, the middle names it and says what it does, and letting go of E applies it.

Every doorway now has a flat stone step outside and a split-log threshold at floor height above it, so the way in reads as stone, step, door. The ground under and around a cabin is bare, so grass no longer grows up through the floor or against the bottom beam. The log doorway is taller and the log window a slim frame with a sill, to match the wall beside them.

Interface capture · The building wheel on a stone wall, seen from inside, October 8

The field book has a Building tab. Lash a sawbuck from four poles and one split wood and set it down where you want to build. Fell a few firs nearby and buck them where they lie: a cabin is made from the logs lying within 8 m of the sawbuck, 2.5 m each, and a wall takes four, a floor three and a roof two. At the sawbuck the book’s button reads Craft and counts the logs beside it.

Select a floor and a pale preview shows where it stands; left mouse sets it. Floors join at their edges, walls go on floor edges, and roofs go over floored bays once walls stand. Q shapes a wall as full, doorway, window or half, the corners notch, openings frame themselves and piers grow to the ground. Tap E on a door to open it, and hold E on any piece to take it back. Besides log walls there are framed walls on a knee-high plinth of split granite: weave a wattle wall in your hands, rive a board wall at the sawbuck, or lay a stone wall.

The same evening the cabin was remade from real things: peeled logs with knots, checks and weathered grain, each course different, a plank door with a Z-brace, iron strap hinges and a latch in every doorway, and a roof of split shakes in courses. For a day each window held a hewn frame with four small panes and a shutter; from October 7 a window is an open frame into the room.

Development capture · A cabin doorway in a check run on October 8, with the step and threshold added the day after this change

Dynamite is in the game. Light a stick at a burning fire, or anywhere with flint and steel in your pack: the fuse fizzes and spits sparks for about five seconds, then you throw it. From far away you see the flash before you hear it. A couple of meters away rings your ears, and holding it when it goes is death. A lit stick keeps burning wherever it goes, so you can pick one up and throw it back, or line several up for a chain.

A blast changes the world. Lay a lit stick against a boulder and a small rock breaks into stone and ore as if mined, a bundle shatters a bigger one, and a giant boulder only gets scarred; the pieces fly apart from the charge. On soil it digs a real crater and throws earth into a rim, mostly brown clods with some stones among them. Laid at the foot of a trunk it can bring the tree down: one stick cuts a trunk of about 25 cm and a bundle a big fir, and it falls the way an axe fells it, drops its wood and crushes whoever is under it. Too small a charge leaves a deep cut an axe can finish.

Buildings break too. A blast strips a lean-to’s boughs from a few meters and snaps its poles up close, and four sticks against a cabin wall blow that wall bay out, its heavy logs mostly dropping where light boughs fly. After a close blast the world goes muffled for a few seconds, highs first, while your ears ring, and the muffle reaches every sound. Dynamite cannot be made yet: since October 8 a new world starts with empty hands, so it comes from the pack’s creative tab.

Development capture · A blast among boulders in a test scene early on October 7, before the blast’s look was revised that morning

Your body now reacts when you are hit. A wolf bite or a blow rocks you back, the struck side gives, and you spring back without a pop. A hard shove makes you stumble a catch step or two toward where you are falling before your feet come back under you, and the body steadies once its feet are home instead of snapping back on a timer.

A big hit, such as a wolf lunge or a falling tree, throws you down for a second or three: you fall loose, lie there and get back up on your own, sitting up from your back or pushing up from your front. Your arms reach for the ground and your chin tucks before you land; thrown backward you sit down hard with a hand slapping the ground behind you, and knocked from behind your hands hit first and you land face down. Shoved into a tree, a rock or a wall, your shoulders take it and you push off, and a tool in your hand stays there. Hit while swimming, you flinch in the water.

Animals take blows the same way: strike a wolf, a sheep or a hen and its hip buckles or its neck snaps aside before it runs, and from October 8 an animal hit with a pick or a spear shows it every time. Friends see all of this on your body, and you see it on theirs.

Development capture · Knocked flat in a meadow, in a film run on October 8

Make a new world and choose Male or Female above the name. The world starts with you in that body and saves it with the world, and the page opens on your last choice next time. The female survivor was built weeks ago and kept switched off until now, so this is the first time she can be played.

Friends who join your world see your body, and they arrive in the body they chose last. Worlds saved before today keep everyone male.

Her head is its real size now and her hair is a darker, less orange brown in daylight. The deep crease that ran down the back of her shirt is gone, so it sits smooth under the pack. Her face is the part still being worked on.

Development capture · The female survivor in a check run on October 3

Cut a round off a felled tree and split it, and the pieces now look split: torn, wavy faces along the grain and chopped ends, where they had looked like flat sawn planks. Logs and split pieces wear their own tree’s bark at the right size, and rounds and split pieces land beside the stump, never inside it.

Put split wood on a fire and you see split wood on it, a stove length long and as thick as the billets you split, not small kindling. One billet is one billet in the fire, a few lengths stay a few pieces, and four stand together as a small teepee in the ring with more leaning around them. A fire ring now holds four billets, where it held fewer than three, and only a big banked fire runs out sooner, after about a day instead of two. Press E on the piece you are looking at and you pick up that piece, not the one beside it.

A felled white fir falls flat beside its stump again. After a new white fir model arrived it had been weighed as three times its wood, so it fell slowly and hung on its neighbors. The bark on the ponderosa and the white fir also lost the faint rings that ran round the trunk every meter or so, where the photographed pieces of bark joined. The joins are now staggered and blended, as the sugar pine’s were earlier that day.

Development capture · Split wood in a fire ring, October 3

The backpack is a real canvas rucksack now, a size you could carry, lying on your back whether you stand, crouch, lie down with C or swim. The gray tube round the neck is a loose cotton neckerchief, the eyes show their pupils, and the man’s hair is brown, not orange.

The shirt fits: slimmer sleeves rolled below the elbow, a small soft collar, tucked in with a little slack over the belt. The trousers bunch at the knees and on the boots instead of standing like tubes, and the pack straps sit on top of the shirt. The white triangle under his collar is gone, because that skin is sun-browned now like his neck, and his head is its real size.

Your hands no longer go into the rope, pouch or knife sheath on your belt when you stand or walk, in either body, and the arms sit a touch wider to clear them. The inside of the mouth is a muted pink with ivory teeth instead of hot red and blue-gray, and faces against the sun no longer glow orange-red round the edges.

Development capture · The new rucksack at a lakeshore, October 3

The sun’s light had been dimmed and slanted twice, so midday ran hot and every low sun was far too weak. Golden hour came out orange under a teal sky with a dark cliff, and sunset and early dusk had red-black or black skies. Now golden hour is warm under a blue sky, the last sun glows on the cliff tops, the sunset sky is peach and pink, and dusk fades from blue and pink into night.

Evenings also stopped going dark too early. At the game’s fast day your eyes were adjusting too slowly to the falling light, so from sunset on everything looked much darker than the light really was. Dusk now stays readable through the pink and purple twilight, and the moon takes over a little later, when the glow has nearly gone, so there is no black moment between dusk and moonlight.

The game also has a camera grade now: less glow round bright rock and sky, lighter corners, and a little more detail kept in the deepest shade under plants. In thick undergrowth on a sunny day the shade between the plants is no longer near black. Midday and the late afternoon look as before, the far distance is a touch hazier, and night is unchanged.

Development capture · Golden hour at the start camp, October 3

Fell a tree and walk up to the trunk where it lies: it is solid now. Swing the axe where you want it cut, starting near the thick end. A V opens a little with every blow until a round drops off onto the ground, as thick as the trunk itself.

Swing at the round where it lies and it splits and falls open, halves side by side with their fresh faces up, then quarters, until the pieces are firewood billets lying right there, as much wood as the round weighed. A blow aimed at a bigger piece beside a billet goes to the bigger piece: the axe looks through a billet.

Look at a billet and press E: it goes into your pack as wood, counted by its weight. Carry it to your fire and Shift+R puts it on, and the fire holds and burns it by its weight.

Development capture · Cutting a round from a felled trunk, October 3

Kill a sheep, hold your flint knife and press E on it once. You step round to its side, kneel beside it, never on it, even when you come at it from its head or tail, and work the knife for about six seconds, and then the meat is in your pack. The sheep stays where it fell. Come back half a day later and it has rotted to bones.

Your Hunting level decides how it goes. The cut gets shorter as you level, down to two seconds at 99, and more comes off: the fleece-on sheepskin from level 5 (a beginner often tears it), sinew from 10, fat from 15, bone from 20, and wolves and horses from 30. A hunting knife cuts faster than the flint one. From October 8 anyone can take meat from a wolf, and only its hide waits for Hunting 30.

Open the book with B, turn to Skills and then Hunting to see what harvesting opens at each level, and your tally, such as “Sheep harvested: 3”.

Development capture · Kneeling to harvest a sheep, with the game’s bars and hotbar in frame, October 1

Look down at a fern, a meadow flower, a sedge tuft or another small plant at your feet and press E. Your hand reaches down and pulls it up, and that spot stays clear for good, after a restart and for everyone in the world. Keep E held and the hand keeps pulling the plants you look at, so you can clear a patch.

It pays what the plant really gives in its season: fern fronds from the bracken for rope, yarrow for bandages, plant fiber from sedge tufts and cattails, and tinder from flowers gone dry, such as aster, goldenrod and corn lily late in the year. Paintbrush, groundsel and lupine came up and gave nothing until October 8, when every pulled plant began to give something and meadow flowers began to give plant fiber.

Woody bushes, like the deer brush under the pines, the low oaks in the granite cracks, sagebrush and coyote brush, need a knife or an axe in your hand and give sticks. With a bare hand you are told they are too tough to pull up.

Development capture · Reaching for a plant to pull, October 1

Press C to go prone. He steps back onto a knee, puts his hands down, brings the other knee back and lowers himself flat: belly, hips and thighs on the ground, forearms ahead, head just raised, legs straight back. W is a real low crawl, one hand pulling while the opposite knee is drawn up and pushes. A and D shuffle sideways, looking round turns him on the spot, and C gets him up through hands and knees.

In first person you stay at his eyes, low to the ground, with the view tipped toward it, and you see your hands reach out and pull you along. In third person the camera sinks and rises with him instead of jumping. On a slope he lies along it, and another player sees you lying down.

This is the third version in a day. The first lowered him onto his forearms, chest up. The second was rebuilt from real footage of lying down and crawling. The last made him lower and flatter, with the pack flatter on his back. On October 8 the crawl changed again: up on the forearms and knees, and tiring after about forty seconds.

Development capture · The second version, lying along a slope, October 1. A third that night made him lower and flatter

A new world starts on a valley floor, and that floor is a mountain meadow now, not a lawn: knee-deep sedge sod over the wet middle with golden groundsel heads through it, and stands of corn lily with the drier meadow’s flowers, goldenrod, lavender asters, red paintbrush and white yarrow, where the ground rises a little.

The season is real. The same meadow looks different on another date, because every plant flowers, seeds and cures by the calendar and its meadow’s climate. Gallop across the valley and the thick meadow fills in ahead of you a little each frame instead of in one heavy step.

At midday a sunlit meadow is no longer washed out, with a deeper blue sky, greener grass and granite walls that show their rock instead of a white sheet. Half of every sedge tussock’s blades had been drawn upside down, root in the air, and a fireweed spike or two showed its flowers at the ground. They stand on their roots again in every world.

Development capture · The valley meadow, October 1

The valley walls lose their horizontal white bands. They step back along their joints, with recesses and gullies, and from the meadow the granite no longer repeats one pattern across a whole wall. Look up at the rims from the valley floor and you see bare scoured granite, not a tan band.

Climb onto a bare granite slab, such as the dome above the camp, and you find erratic boulders in groups, loose blocks and flat plates, with grass, shrubs and young pines growing in the cracks.

The tall waterfall reads as falling white water down a dark wet stain on the granite, not glossy white lines painted on the wall. Walk to its foot, about 200 meters away, and the water streams down in moving sheets, mist rises over the foot above the trees and white water churns round the base. From across the valley it is one soft bright ribbon with a white foot, and the roar carries farther from the big falls.

Development capture · A bare granite slab, October 1

Glide low over a lake and the water no longer shows a giant copy of your hang glider. Lakes and rivers reflect the hills and sky where they really stand.

Follow a creek down to a lake in a new world and its water runs right into the lake instead of stopping on the sand a few steps short. Look along river and creek banks, especially on the bends: the water’s edge follows the ground instead of 4 meter stair-steps and straight lines.

Walk into a river or lake with your dog and its paws splash as your own steps do. Every animal does the same: a sheep, a horse, a wolf or a hen walking or running through water splashes.

Development capture · Gliding over a lake, October 3

Start a new world and most seeds now wake you on the floor of a glaciated valley, with granite walls in front of you, often a waterfall, and water and the forest’s edge beside the camp. The valley can be far from where the old start was, by design. About one seed in seven has no valley near it and starts in the forest as before.

Look along the valley: its walls and floor now carry on into the distance, where a gray ramp used to close it about 600 meters away. The walls stand steep, about 75 degrees at the rim, each with its own buttresses and recesses, and the rock fallen from them lies in cones with bare rock between them, not in one skirt. On most granite valleys a great dome stands on the rim, the wall cut up into its face, and in one test world it rises about 330 meters over the rim beside the camp.

The rock is real granite now, with joints, black water streaks and lichen, instead of the stretched white plaster pattern, up close and from across the valley. The dome’s curved sheets show as thin lines on its pale skin, and its bare face is streaked.

Development capture · The valley start as it looked on October 1

Press R with the torch, the flint knife and the hunting knife in your pack. The free hand sets the flint in the torch hand, strikes the steel down it twice, blows on the ember and the flame climbs out of the head, in first and third person. The fist closes round the shaft with the thumb over it, not laid up the handle.

Light a torch at a burning campfire and it catches in about two seconds, with no sparks.

Development capture · A lit torch at dusk, October 1

The campfire burns down like a real one. About a quarter of the way through a lay, one stick sags and falls in, a couple go with it, and the rest follow. The fallen sticks burn shorter into the coals. Sticks you put on lean against the cone while it stands, and once it has fallen they are laid across the fire, fresh brown wood that blackens as it burns.

Its bed builds up as it burns. The more wood a fire has burned, the wider and ashier its bed of coals gets: black charcoal pieces with cracked grain, half-burnt stick ends and drifts of pale ash, glowing in a few spots by day and dimly through its cracks at night, graying over as the fire burns down and after it goes out. It carries over in saves and is the same for everyone in multiplayer.

The flames burn from the wood: each tongue rises from a stick or from the coals under the lay, narrow enough that you can see the bed through them. At night the fire lights the ground the way a real fire does, bright close to the flames and fading into darkness a few steps away, where it used to floodlight the whole camp, and thin wisps of smoke catch its light.

Development capture · The dog by a night fire, September 29

Hold the bone javelin, or the harpoon, the stone spear or the iron spear, and hold right mouse to draw it back. Let go to throw. In third person the body plants, turns side-on with the spear level over the shoulder and the other arm pointing at the target, then drives the hips, chest and arm through and follows across.

The spear flies point first, like an arrow, and sticks point first in an animal or the ground. A sheep keeps it, and the harpoon’s barbs hold. Press E to pick it back up.

In first person the spear comes up over your right shoulder and levels out with its point toward what you aim at, your fist on the shaft low on the right. Let go and the arm drives it forward along the aim, it leaves from its point, and your open hand follows through and settles. The javelin’s bone point leads in your hand now: the model had been turned end for end at the source.

Development capture · Drawing a spear to throw, September 29

Press B and your field book comes up, held in both gloved hands and open at Crafting. The pack’s crafting tab opens it too. The mouse moves a pencil over the pages: click a category, a card or the search line and type.

Craft makes a hand recipe there and then. Lay Out puts a ground recipe’s parts down in front of you to strike or bind. Each card shows what it needs against what you carry, and the skill level it asks. The book has its own drawings, leather and page sounds, and its pictures are in color. Recipes you cannot make yet show the same picture faded gray under a padlock.

Q and E or the tabs turn the pages, the wheel brings the book closer, and B or Escape puts it away. The world keeps going and you can walk while you read. Later it gained a Camp page with the campfire and the fire ring, and in your own world a free build box on every card that first gives you whatever the card is missing, so you can test anything without gathering. Notes stayed blank until October 8, when its pages took the game’s keys.

Development capture · The field book at Crafting, September 29

When this landed the field book’s Skills page held eight skills that grow by doing; by November 5 there were eleven, Agility the newest. Felling a tree trains Woodcraft, lighting a fire Survival, picking berries Foraging, cooking Cooking, building your lean-to Building and harvesting Hunting, and everything you make trains the skill it belongs to.

Some recipes now wait for practice: the stone spear needs Crafting 2, arrows Crafting 3 and the bow Woodcraft 4. Everything for the First Night stays open from the start. On October 8 the levels were reworked: arrows now wait for Crafting 6 and the bow for Woodcraft 8. Each skill’s page shows what it opens and what earns it.

On the Woodcraft page, for example, a notch cut in a standing tree earns 6 points of experience, a tree brought down earns 40, and making what a level opens earns 15 to 70.

Development capture · The Skills page, September 29

The river by the first camp now runs downhill. Fast water races down the steep glacial step with white foam streaming along it, boulders stand in it so the rapids break around them, and calmer water drifts on the gentle reaches above. The steep step pours as white water instead of leaving bare squares of riverbed.

New worlds get a planned river in the mountains: it is cut downhill into its own channel with real banks, so the water no longer drapes up a bank or sits on a ridge. Its water follows its flow, deep and calm where the valley floor is gentle, then thin and fast as it pours down the step. It has pools too: deep, calm water against the outside of each bend, a shallow gravel bar on the inside, and quicker riffles where it crosses between bends.

Your current world keeps the river it was made with, because a save keeps its land, so start a new world to see this. Still to come: darker, more natural banks, bigger waves over the rapids, and the same planned rivers outside the mountains.

Development capture · A pool below a fall, September 28. The banks are still pale

Chop a big tree down the proper way, a notch on the side you want it to fall and then the back from the other side, and look at the stump. Its top is flat and chopped, a patchwork of axe facets with the growth rings showing and a darker rim by the bark, instead of a smooth pale bowl. Across it stands a torn ridge of pale splinters, slabs of wood that split into ragged tips and brushes of fibers, and the log’s end is torn to match.

The chips your blows knock out are thick wedges and curled chunks, some with their bark still on, lying in clumps where they came out, and every chip is there: a big tree used to show only a third of them. The notch’s upper face shows axe scars, and wherever two blows meet you see a crisp edge, a small step where one cut deeper.

Only the wood holds the tree now, never the bark. The strip your blows leave is about a tenth of the trunk in real wood, and a token blow on the back no longer counts as a proper back cut. Once the hinge has torn, the butt rides its stump for a moment, then slides off the edge and drops, and the log comes to rest beside the stump instead of lying across its top. As it goes over, a spray of needle sprigs and a twig or two come off the crown in the air and flutter down behind it.

Development capture · A fresh stump and the fallen trunk, October 3

The forest’s shade is lit by the ground and the trees now, not only by the sky. Walk into the trees on a sunny afternoon and the trunks and young conifers in shade go warm and olive instead of blue-gray, and the forest floor is a touch brighter. It runs a little faster than before, not slower.

The light from the sky stays where it was, because turning it down only sank the shade toward black. More detailed shadows were built and stayed switched off until October 25; the crash that kept them off was traced and fixed on November 4.

Development capture · Trunks and young pines in afternoon shade

Put an arrow into a grazing or standing sheep’s body, neck, legs or tail and it sticks where it hit and goes with the sheep when she runs. It stays in the body when you kill her, and harvesting drops your arrow beside the carcass, the same arrow with the same wear, to pick up again. A shallow arrow can work loose as she runs. An arrow that meets an animal also breaks far less often, one time in twenty instead of nearly one in three.

Sheep are hit where you see them. The game used to treat a sheep as one upright barrel at its middle, so an arrow at her head or rump could pass through while one under her belly counted. Now her body, legs, tail, neck, head and muzzle each count, the head too while she grazes, and where a sheep or a horse turns its head is decided once by the game, so a hit meets the head you see on any screen.

Still missing: an arrow in the head does not stay yet, an arrow into a sheep that is already running falls out, and a dead sheep that falls onto its arrow pushes the shaft into the ground.

Development capture · An arrow stuck in a grazing sheep’s flank

Dig down with the iron shovel and you will meet stones. The blade clinks and stops on a buried cobble, and once you have dug to it you can see it sitting in the pit. Dig round it, then swing at the stone itself: the shovel levers it out and it drops into the pit as a cobble or a large cobble you can pick up. They are real matter in the ground, one to three of them in a pit through forest subsoil.

The walls of a pit no longer smear: dug ground is textured from the side on its walls and from above on its floor, and a pit’s rim is a clean edge. The deepest corner can still look streaky when you see a wall almost edge on. A fault that could refuse every dig after the blade hit bedrock, or after loading a world you had dug in, is fixed.

Development capture · Pebbles and stones in the walls of a fresh pit

Follow a river downhill to where it ends and there is a real lake filling its valley to the lowest gap in its rim, with bays, arms up the side valleys and islands, its bed shelving down from the shore. Where a lake spills over, a stream leaves through a notch in the rim and runs on down its valley. From high ground, lakes stay in view on the horizon. The forest has small still ponds too, about one every ten square kilometers, each in its own hollow: dark water that holds the trees, with sedge and rush at the edge.

Walk to any coast. The sea has swell rolling in and surf breaking on the beach, which has a berm, dunes with grass, sand verbena and lupine behind it, dark wet sand at the water’s edge, and seaweed and driftwood along the tide line. At any creek you see its sand and pebbles through the clear shallows, the water darkening where it deepens and white only where it runs fast.

The climate is new too: within a few kilometers of any start you can walk into desert, warm rainforest, oak woodland, chaparral and open grassland. Saved worlds are redrawn with the new land, and you are set down on clear ground near where you saved. Known gaps: the breaking waves do not curl yet, and a few lakes whose ground would make the stream climb have no outlet yet.

Development capture · A lake shore with clear shallows, September 29

Take the iron shovel from your starting kit, look at open ground just in front of you and swing. The blade bites out a scoop of whatever it meets and carries it, a crumbly heap of that ground’s own soil sitting on the blade. Your next swing throws the load a few steps away, wherever you look, where it lands as a loose pile that slumps to a natural slope.

Keep digging and the pit deepens the way real ground does. Forest soil comes away easily, the gravelly weathered granite under it only scrapes off a little at a time, and bare granite stops the blade with a clank. Close to a tree, its roots stop the blade. The pit and the pile are real ground you walk down into and up onto, grass and pebbles go where the ground moved, and both are still there after you save and load.

A test with two connected players digs one pit from both sides across the edge between two pieces of the world, and each player sees and stands on the other’s digging. A friend who joins your world cannot use the shovel properly yet.

Development capture · Two scoops of forest soil, seen from above

A torch now burns in your hand or planted in the world, with firelight, smoke, cinders and embers that fade when you put it out. With a flint knife and a hunting knife in your pack, press R to light or snuff the torch you hold. Shift and R plants it on the ground within reach; empty your hands and press E to take it back. A new torch carries thirty minutes of fuel. Old empty torches in a saved world need replacing with a fresh one.

It looks like a real torch too. The flame is small, with crisp tongues, a faint soft glow, smoke and many small sparks: yellow orange with gray smoke by day, deeper orange at night. The charcoal crown reads lit gray in sunlight and black with glowing cracks in the dark, and the light reaches much further into the trees than it did.

Development capture · Held up at night in a pine stand

The start forest has its real trees now: ponderosa pines with thick, cinnamon plated trunks and incense cedars with flat fan sprays, instead of one gray fir stretched to every size. The patches of sun under the canopy have sharp edges. The cedars stopped glowing, too: their needles were three times too bright and read lime green in the sun, and now they are a deep yellow green, which makes the forest a little darker and moodier.

The forest floor grows as well. Grass stands in clumps with bare needle litter between, small gray granite gravel lies half buried in the duff, plates of bark lie around the big pines, and the young trees between them are real little pines and cedars instead of pale flat shapes.

Development capture · Cedars and ponderosa pines in the start forest

Your starting kit has a new, smaller glider, the Grizzly Manta: a bear skull, fur and stitched hide on a joined wooden frame, with hinged wings that fold and restrained flex in the wind. Both gloved hands close round its round wooden bar, in first and third person.

It flies toward where you look. Dive to build speed and pull up to spend it on height, carve turns with A and D, and use W and S to fine tune the pitch. Hold W and Shift to speed up; since October 28 that costs much less height than a dive, and W alone dives. One press of R, or of its hotbar key, opens or folds the wing on the ground or in the air: fold it in the air and you fall, and opening it again needs room below you. On the ground the survivor lifts the folded bar from his waist and spreads the wings, and folding reverses it.

Wind rush grows with your airspeed, and the hide flutters faster at speed and loosens when it carries no load, while the frame and the skull stay rigid. From October 8 a new world starts with empty hands, and the glider is no longer handed to you.

Development capture · Hanging from the bar over a pine stand

Ride a horse up a hill and it climbs at a canter where it used to drop to a slow walk. Hold Shift on the way up and it goes one pace faster, a gallop on any hill it will canter up and faster than you can sprint on foot. Pushing it uphill tires it quicker, and a tired horse only trots. It also reads a hill over its whole length now, not from the patch of ground under its belly.

Take the bow on horseback and hold right mouse: your rider draws for real in the saddle, back and arms turning into the shot and the bow arm out toward the horse’s head, while the seat and the feet in the stirrups stay put. Let go at full draw and the arrow flies. If you look more than about 35 degrees off the horse’s line, the body stops turning but the arrow still goes where you look.

The horse sounds like one now. Its shod hooves ring on stone and no two hits land alike, it answers your whistle with a soft nicker, and after a hard gallop it blows.

Development capture · Full draw in the saddle, sheep on the slope ahead

Walk up to any sheep: she wears a thick, lumpy cream fleece that fits her body and stays on her at every distance, with thinner wool on her legs and throat and a bare face. Shear her and the fleece comes off in strips while you work, leaving cream stubble rather than gray skin, and over the next two in game days it swells back.

The sheep also got a new body with a straight neck; the old one had its head turned sharply to one side before anything else touched it. Watch one graze: her neck bends down smoothly and her face goes down to the grass, the wool stays whole down her neck, and her hind legs bend at her own hips and hocks, so walking and trotting look right too.

Development capture · The new sheep body in full fleece

In first person your empty hand hangs below the view (until November 4 it rested low on the right of the screen), and when you pick something up it reaches for it: look down at a stone and the hand opens toward it, palm to the ground, then closes and goes back. A stone you hold sat in the curl of your fingers then; since November 8 it sits cupped in your palm. At a blueberry bush the hand comes in cupped and the thumb rolls a handful off.

In third person, stand still and press E on a stone near your feet: he brings his back foot up, squats with a straight back and takes the stone with his free hand, the left if the pickaxe is in his right, holding the pick low beside his knee, then steps back into his stance. From further off, E still takes it at once.

Development capture · Reaching for a blueberry bush

Hold any tool, press F3 to step back and press F. He lifts it up to his face, turns it over twice and lets it back down, and you watch him do it. The pickaxe comes nearly half again closer and tips so you can read its cutting edge. The sledgehammer is held in both hands while he looks it over, because it has a second grip; a hatchet or a stone stays in one.

Every tool is held by its handle in third person now: both knives, the obsidian dagger, the sickle, the mallet and the shears used to be held up on the blade or the head. The stone axe is held in two hands, its blade faces forward, and the sledgehammer is a real one, its handle about half as thick as before and the whole tool shorter.

Development capture · Holding a tool up to look it over

Every world has one Australian Shepherd, born beside you the first time you play it; a world you already have gets its dog the next time you play. It is yours from the start. It keeps close at your side, trotting when you walk and galloping when you sprint, and a bank too steep to run straight up it takes on a slant.

Ride and it keeps up. On your horse it runs alongside a few meters out from the hooves, and on tight bends and through gaps it drops in behind you. At a full gallop it gallops too. Press G and it sits where it is and waits, even through a save and a restart; press G again, or H, the whistle that calls your horse, and it comes back to your side. There are no prompts: the dog shows you it heard.

It cannot be hurt, and it never blocks you. Up close its front legs look thin when it sits, and after a long stutter at a full gallop it can skate a meter or two to catch up.

Development capture · At your side while you walk

Walk to any creek, river or lake. The water is no longer one bright rippling sheet: it lies along its own slope, its surface detail rides the current, foam gathers in patches where the water actually runs fast, and still water carries small wind ripples. It is clear late summer Sierra water, so pale cobbles keep their color in the shallows and only the deep pools go green blue, and the trees and the sky reflect on the surface.

Where a sheet of water climbs a bank as flat triangles, that is the drawn shape of the ground. Narrow creeks cut into their own beds, with pools and banks you can walk, were built and measured and stayed switched off at the time: carved everywhere at once, two creeks meeting at the edge of a piece of the world could tear the land by more than a meter. Since November 5 creeks in new worlds on the mountains terrain run between smooth banks that slope to the water.

Development capture · Clear creek water beside the path

Start a new world and a hide hang glider is in your starting kit, on hotbar slot 2. Stand on open ground, press R to unfold it and run off a slope; press F3 to see yourself hanging under it. In the air, W and S pull the bar in or push it out to go faster or slower, and A and D lean you into a turn. Let go and it settles into its glide. Hold R near the ground to flare, and R on your feet folds it.

Stepped off a cliff with it folded? Double tap R to rip it open, if there is room below you.

Development capture · The first hide glider, over the dunes

The saddle never actually rested on the horse. It stood on a guess, too high and four centimeters left of the middle of the back. It is now measured onto the horse’s own back, a little wider for its barrel, settling into the dip behind the withers and centered, with the stirrups moved out to match.

On a hillside every animal used to lean into the hill; a horse now stands upright across a slope and its legs take up the difference, and riding down a dune its back stays flatter than the ground instead of pitching nose down. Over a jump the legs fold under the body: the front legs tuck under the chest, the hind legs push off and tuck, and the front legs reach ahead to land. Open your pack in the saddle and the character panel shows you standing on your own feet.

Development capture · The saddle and stirrup from the side

A horse’s hind leg has one joint more than its front leg, and the game had been solving both the same way. That froze the hock, the joint that does most of the work back there, so the hind legs were stiff poles hinged at the hip. They bend properly now, at a walk and at a canter.

Which way a joint folds used to be read off the animation, and that animation is damaged, so a leg could end up bending sideways across the horse. Each animal now takes its own forward from where its four hooves rest, and every leg folds the way the animal is built to fold.

Get off on a hillside and you stand on the slope. The spot the game checked was measured straight up from the ground, so on a slope it was really inside the hill, and it could refuse to let you dismount at all.

Development capture · At a canter, the day the hock started bending

Copper now breaks into four different pieces instead of four copies of the same lump. Mine a copper rock out and look at what is lying around it: one biggish chunk and several little angular ones, all of them smaller and flatter than the stones beside them, and each piece keeps its own shape when you reload.

The little ones come to rest nearer the broken rock than the old lump could, because a smaller piece needs less clear ground around it. The copper rock itself is unchanged: it is already real metal where the seam shows, but only about one per cent of the boulder’s surface is drawn as ore, which is a separate change still to come.

Development capture · Copper veins along the cracks of a boulder

A small creek used to cut a valley and draw almost no water: the old rule needed a whole four-meter square of ground to be inside the creek, which a two-and-a-half-meter creek never is. Water is now a real surface that lies level across the channel and is cut exactly where it meets the bank, so creeks, rivers and lake shores read as water meeting ground instead of steps. Measured on three seeds, a creek’s middle is wet along 98.6% of its length; the smallest creeks were dry along all of it. Where you can see water, you can drink it: the edge you see is now exactly the edge the game uses.

The trees are the size they are supposed to be. The world had been drawing each plant at whatever size its mesh was authored at, so the tall pines stood a meter high and the forest was ankle deep. Every plant is now scaled to its species: pines and firs stand 40 to 45 meters, oaks up to 7, junipers 4 and grass 1 (since November 8 the junipers are scanned trees built 2.5, 3.3 or 5 meters tall). The pine borrows the fir’s shape until it is modeled at its own size. Meadow grass is no longer treated as a tree you cannot walk through.

A day’s walk now changes the country you are in. Temperature and moisture vary over 48 and 32 kilometers with a finer layer on top, so a 25-kilometer circle around the start holds five to ten different environments where it held three to seven. That is still short of the eight to fourteen it should hold, and the limit now is how many environment types exist. Your saved worlds keep their ground and your things; the forests and plants around a camp can differ, because the climate that decides them changed.

Development capture · Water lying level in the creek below the peak

Gallop and then pull up hard, or turn sharply, on grass or soil, and the horse tears the ground out and throws it back: clods that turn over in the air and land, a sheet of grit thrown low, and the dust trailing behind you. Riding straight across firm ground does not tear it; working the horse does. Dry sand throws grains and no clods, damp soil comes away in lumps, snow throws powder and chunks, gravel skitters, rock throws nothing at all. The clods are real lumps, no two alike, turf green on the side that faced up and raw earth everywhere else.

Look behind you after riding over soft ground and the horse leaves a trail you can actually see, a line of hoof marks pair by pair; before, they were pressed but far too faint to find. Each ground keeps a mark as long as it would: minutes in snow and soil, less on grass, never on gravel or rock.

The horse takes a steeper pitch than you can climb on foot, which is the way round it should have been; on a slope each hoof tilts by exactly as much as the ground under it; and the walk, trot and run no longer catch with a jump at the end of every stride.

Development capture · Hoof marks left in sand, seen from the saddle

Holding Shift and the right mouse button still charges a throw, but letting go now starts the arm moving and the stone goes about a sixth of a second later, when the throw itself lets it go. Until then the stone is still in your hand and still in your pack. The throw is a real action on your body: a held charge sits where the charge says, and letting go plays the whole throw through, follow-through and all.

In third person the motion is a generated one, solved on the survivor’s own body in nine key poses: the rock taken back and down, the forearm laid back behind the head, the hips firing while the arm is still back, the elbow leading over the top, the release in front of and above the shoulder, then the arm carrying on down and across the body with nothing in it. It leaves the hand at about twenty meters a second with every joint inside its range. In first person the arm does not move yet; that is the next piece, and the one you will see most.

A full throw carries roughly sixteen meters instead of twenty. Nothing was weakened: this throw is a planted one with no step into it, and the distance came out of the motion rather than the other way round. A stone still kills a hen in one throw with room to spare.

Development capture · A stone back in hand after the hen was harvested

You could not pick up anything at all in third person: no stone, no ore, no berry would go in your pack, and the prompt would not even appear. The game measured whether something was within arm’s reach from the camera, which in third person sits nearly three meters behind you, so a stone at your feet was out of reach by a meter. It now measures from your own head and aims with your crosshair, which is the same thing in first person and the right thing in both.

Throwing in third person works for the same reason. The stone used to start from the camera behind your shoulder and the throw was refused for starting too far from you; it now starts from the hand the stone is drawn in, so the rock leaves the hand you can see.

Development capture · Third person on the path by the creek

Walk up to a horse and press E. It stands still for you and you climb on from whichever side you are standing on. Look down and you see its ears, head and mane.

Ride with W and steer by looking. Shift steps up a gait (walk, trot, canter, gallop) and Ctrl steps down; Alt looks around without steering. A gallop is about 34 km/h, turns wide at speed and goes around trees rather than into them. E gets you off: the horse slows first and you step down beside it.

In third person you put your left foot in the stirrup, lean in over the saddle as you spring up and swing your right leg over its back before you sit. Getting off runs the same way in reverse.

Development capture · Mounting from the near side, the day riding reached the build

Each hoof now lands in a real walking order, is laid flat only on the ground it actually stands on, and stays planted where it lands. As the horse speeds up the legs stride longer rather than faster. In the air a hoof keeps the line of its own leg instead of twisting its sole toward the ground below.

The rider moves with it: hips sway with the back at a walk, you rise and sit on alternate beats at a trot, sit deep at a canter, and stand in the stirrups leaning forward at a gallop. The saddle faces the right way, horn in front, your boots stand in the stirrups and your left hand holds the horn with the fingers closed around it.

After a long gallop, stop and watch the horse blow. Its breathing is quick and deep and settles over a minute or two, and a tired horse carries its head low.

Development capture · Front legs folded over a jump

Gallop across dry ground and look back. Dust kicks up off every hoof and hangs in a trail behind you, thickest on sand and dirt and barely any on rock or grass. The horse leaves a line of hoof prints in dirt, sand, snow and grass that stays about a minute and then weathers away. Through a stream the hooves throw spray; in snow they kick up powder; rain damps the dust. Pull up hard on grass or soil and it tears clods out of the ground.

Every hoof you see land makes its own sound: the four-beat walk, the two-beat trot, the drumming of a canter and gallop, soft thuds on the forest floor, clops on rock, crunch on gravel, splashes in water. At a gallop the horse blows out once with every stride and you hear the wind rise in your ears. The saddle creaks at a walk and the bit jingles from a trot up.

Keep galloping for a minute or two and its coat goes darker and glossy with sweat, then dries over the next few minutes. Canter at a fallen log or a low rock and it jumps by itself, taking off at the right moment and landing heavily to gallop on; press Space at a trot or faster to jump when you like. Walls and trees it will not try.

Development capture · Dry grass and lupine under the hooves

Ride a horse for a while and it becomes yours; the longer you ride, the stronger the bond, and it remembers you after you save and load. Get off, walk well away and press H. You whistle, the horse throws its head up toward you with a snort, canters while it is far, slows to a walk, and pulls up beside you with its left side to you, facing about the way you face, so you can get straight on. It finds its way round trees and rocks, and if there is no way through it comes as close as it can and waits.

Left alone, your horse stands a little while, then drops its head and grazes, now and then walking a few steps to fresh grass, and stays within a few meters of where you left it. Walk back toward it and it lifts its head and turns its ears on you. Walk into its back end and it steps away and swings round instead of standing like a wall.

Only its owner can ride it, so another player cannot take it. If the wolf comes within a few meters, the horse whips round and bolts at a gallop for a few seconds.

Development capture · Called from the far side of the slope

In third person the felling axe now chops on your body, and the chop lands on the tree you are looking at, including thin ones. The bearded axe, the bronze axe and the greenstone war axe got the same chop fitted to their shorter handles, and the stone axe you start with can fell trees too, which makes five axes in the family.

None of these swings was animated by hand. The system that built the felling axe’s chop built the rest from each axe’s own measured shape and weight, and it knows where you actually hold the knives, dagger, sickle and mallet, so it will not give those an overhead two-handed swing when their turn comes.

A swing at nothing follows through in front of you instead of stopping dead in the air. Aim at a rock or the ground within reach and it still stops where it lands. The body will not strike behind itself.

Development capture · The stone axe you start with

Swing the pickaxe in third person and the survivor does a real overhead strike: the pick goes up over the head, trails behind the hands on the way down, both hands meet at the butt for the blow, hips go back and knees bend, eyes stay on the rock, then the pick is levered out. The sledgehammer swings the same way. Nothing here was keyed by hand, bought or recorded: the motion was generated on each survivor’s own skeleton within real human joint limits, and the male and female survivors each have their own.

Hold the left mouse button to keep swinging. A blow that sticks in the rock is wrenched out with the hand still on the handle, not teleported out, and a pickaxe no longer hangs in the rock behind you when you walk away after a hit.

Known for now: a rock far to the side, very low or very high still mines, but the pick visibly misses it. Strike variants come next.

Development capture · The moment of contact, in third person

There is one hand now, and it is the same glove your character wears, holding every tool. Take out the pickaxe, then the axe, then the hatchet, then the knife: the hand is the same one each time. It used to be a different glove for the pickaxe and a separate baked one for each of the other twenty-three tools. Hold nothing and you still have a hand, loosely open at your side.

Press F on anything to bring it up close and look at the fingers. They close on that item’s own handle, because the handle was measured off the item’s mesh: a thin knife handle is gripped tighter than a thick pitchfork shaft, and nobody authored either. The knives and the dagger are held by the handle, blade up out of your fist; the sickle and the mallet by the handle below the crescent and the head. The thumb closes across toward the index finger, not down toward the wrist.

The glove is joined to your arm, shirt sleeve and all, through the whole inspect turn, and the sleeve changes with your shirt. In third person the body’s hand closes on the pickaxe the same way.

Development capture · One glove, every tool

Close up, your gloves are worn leather now: a pebble grain, a polished grip, knuckle scuffs, the panel and the steel buckle, matching the rest of the kit. The fingertips are the most worn part, only a shade or two lighter than the leather beside them and still clearly dark brown. In the first pass they came out so pale they read as bare skin. Measured, they were about five times brighter than the surrounding leather and within a few percent of the survivor’s own face, so they were repainted.

The gloves reach up under the rolled sleeve, with no bare band of wrist between glove and shirt, and taking clothes off and putting them back on keeps the face, chest and hands drawn however long you have been playing.

Development capture · The glove closed on the handle

Every item in your pack now shows a picture of its own model, lit and graded like the felling axe or the shovel. The stone pickaxe, the stone axe and the torch no longer show painted pictures, and neither do sticks, plant fiber, rope, berries, yarrow, raw meat, cloth, bandage, hide, feather, wood, chamomile, fern or acorns. Cooked meat and charcoal had no icon at all before; they have one now. The clothing icons were graded to match, so the pack and the character panel use the same pictures.

The tool icons read as one family again: the brightest is one and a half times the darkest, where it used to be three. A long item name tightens its letter spacing, then its size, so it fits on one line inside the item details panel instead of running over your character.

Interface capture · Every tool with its own icon

The western saddle is a real seat on the horse’s back, about as long as the withers, with skirts that wrap the barrel instead of a box around it. Walk around a sheep and it glances at you once, then grazes; it no longer keeps turning its rump toward you. The horse walks as soon as it moves and never slides on idle.

On the forest floor, tap E on a fallen branch, a loose stone or a stand of fireweed and it goes in the pack and stays gone after you quit.

Development capture · Left alone, it grazes