Development covered 6 Sep 2026 to 7 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
The last stretch before a release is where I go looking for a category of problem that never shows up as an error. The game is correct and the screen is wrong. Nobody can see the simulation, so the screen is what the player treats as true.
Almost fifty small changes this week, and a surprising share of them were this one shape: the idle game interface disagreeing with the game underneath.
Numbers that are computed twice
The recipe list showed a brewing time that did not include the speed bonus the craft itself applies, so the same recipe quoted one duration in the list and a different one once you selected it. Those recipes make the potions in the game's pill catalogue, so the duration is a number players plan around. A technique card reported its effect about ten percent below what actually took effect, because a bonus was included where the effect is applied but not where it is described.
The bag offered to sort by name and sorted by the internal identifier instead, which looks almost right in English, produces a nonsense order in every other language, and is invisible unless you are reading carefully in a language you speak.
An offline popup stated the cap as forty eight hours in its text while the real cap is worked out from your account. The text was right when it was written.
Each of these is a value derived in two places, one for the player and one for the system, and it is the same failure I keep meeting in different clothing. When a number appears on screen, it should be the number the code will use, and both should come from the same place instead of two calculations that agree today. The heart-methods in question are listed in the catalogue of arts and heart-methods.
Affordances that promise wrongly
Two consumables give their benefit while you hold them, and both still had a Use button. Pressing it consumed the item and threw the benefit away. Nothing failed, because the game did what the button said, and the button should not have existed.
Elsewhere there was a disabled control that could not say why it was disabled, when the reason was as simple as already being friends with that person, and a legend teaching a colour the player will never encounter. A view reset framed the set of nodes from your previous realm instead of your current one. Two buttons on the same card both answered where do I do this and sent you to different places.
And my favourite, because it is so ordinary: a pinch to zoom handler attached to the window instead of to its own panel, so two fingers anywhere in the game zoomed a diagram on a screen you were not looking at.
The clock going backwards
One genuine simulation bug, worth its own paragraph because it will happen to anyone building idle mechanics.
Everything here is derived from elapsed time. If the system clock moves backwards, which it does when a device corrects itself, elapsed time is briefly negative and the whole loop sits still until real time catches up. On a device that had drifted, that could be minutes of a game that had simply stopped.
Wall clock time is not monotonic, it is a number the operating system is free to revise. Anything that steps forward on a difference of two readings needs to decide, explicitly, what a negative difference means.
Why this sweep is worth doing on a schedule
None of these appear in any log. They do not fail a test, because the test asserts what the code computes, and the code computes correctly. They are only findable by using the thing and reading what it says with the suspicion of someone who has never seen it before.
For an idle game the point is sharper than usual. The player never watches the simulation, only the idle game interface: a number going up and a sentence about why. That sentence is the product.
Read every number for yourself in the browser; the series continues at Incremental RPG.
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