Development covered 30 Aug 2026 to 4 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
Progression games accumulate lists. As Myriad Immortal Sect filled out, the market, the sect exchange, the formation board, the treasure racks and the alchemy bench all became long, and most of what was in them belonged to a stage of the game the player would not reach for weeks.
That is not richness. It is a wall of things you cannot buy, cannot make and cannot use, with the three you can somewhere in the middle of it.
Filtering is the obvious answer and it is wrong
My first instinct was to show only what fits your current realm.
Two things break. You lose the view of what is ahead, and looking at what is ahead is a large part of why anyone plays this kind of game. And you cannot see the good stuff arriving, which is a real reward in itself.
So the shape is not a filter, it is a fold. Items far above your realm collapse into a single card that says how many there are, and the horizon is a setting rather than something baked in, currently two realms ahead. Near-future items stay visible, because they are the ones you are working towards. Distant ones become a number you can open when you are curious. What counts as two realms ahead depends on how the realm ladder works, if you are new to it.
One component does this for all five lists. That matters more than the rule itself, because if each screen implements its own version, the sixth screen will get a slightly different one and the game will feel arbitrary. The bench is the one deliberate variation: it folds, but it does not reorder, because the order of recipes there carries meaning that sorting would destroy.
The exemption that makes it safe
Then the obvious hazard, which I want to state plainly because I nearly shipped it.
A quest tells you to obtain a particular item. The item belongs to a realm above your horizon. The list folds it away. The game has now told you to find something and then hidden it from you, and the player is not wrong to conclude the game is broken.
So anything named by a quest you currently have open is never folded, whatever realm it belongs to. Objective or reward, it stays visible, in every list.
The general rule I would give anyone building progressive disclosure: your hiding rule needs an escape valve keyed to what the product is currently asking the user to do. Static rules about relevance are always wrong for the user who has just been given a task. The formation board is one of the five lists, and the formations and arrays guide shows what lives on it.
A small language trap on the way out
The fold card says how many items are hidden. In English, with one item, it read "1 more items."
Plurals are a real grammar feature and not a string with an s on the end. English needs one extra form here, and the other ten languages the game speaks each need their own rules, some with more forms than English has. Every list in the game now goes through that, which took an afternoon and removes a whole category of small embarrassments.
Also this week
A round of work on refusals, prompted by watching real sessions. A Sell button was pressable on a row whose price could not be worked out, and pressing it went through, so the player learned what they had sold by reading their own history afterwards. Another panel kept the balance it had before a refusal rather than the one the refusal reported, so every later message about being short of funds was quoting a number that was not true.
A refusal is a message. If you throw away the information it arrives with, everything you say after it is guesswork delivered with confidence.
Free to start, no install: see the folded lists in your browser, with more notes at Myriad Immortal Sect.
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