Development covered 22 Sep 2026 to 23 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
Every list in a game has an empty state, and it is the least designed screen in most of them. You write "Nothing here yet" once, it looks fine in the editor, and you move on. This window I found that four of mine were telling players something false, and that each false sentence led them to do the wrong thing.
The underlying mistake was identical in all four. A panel showed "there is nothing here" without having established that there was nothing here.
One sentence, three situations
When a panel has no rows to draw, there are at least three reasons. The data has not arrived yet. It arrived and there genuinely is nothing. Or it never arrived, because the connection dropped. Those want three different responses: wait quietly, invite the first action, or say plainly that the information is out of reach right now.
My panels treated all three as the second one. The results:
The bag printed "Your bag is empty. Explore the world to find items!" under a header that said 1 / 8 slots. It said it on every category tab with no matching items and every search that found nothing. So a player who mistyped the name of a pill they owned was told their inventory was gone, and a player looking at the Recipes tab was sent out into the wilderness for something the General Store sells.
The guild list said "No guild is recruiting yet. Found the first one" when the list simply had not loaded. That invites a player to spend a founding cooldown, and possibly collide with an existing guild's name, over a list nobody could read. The discussion hall said "No one has spoken here yet. Say the first thing", so the first post went into a forum that was merely unreachable. The paid store said the catalogue was empty, which on a store reads as "this shop is broken".
The fix is an order, not a message
Each panel now distinguishes the three states in a fixed order: still loading, then failed, then empty. Only when the first two are ruled out does it say there is nothing. A failed read gets its own line, for instance "The catalogue could not be reached. Nothing you own is affected", which answers the question the player is actually asking. The bag now says which kind of empty it is and, for an empty category, where that category of item comes from. Bag space grows with storage treasures, and the Spirit Storage Pouch entry shows the first of them.
A small stele board on the map had the same disease in its purest form. When it had nothing to show, it drew nothing at all, which on a flaky connection told the player that not one person in the whole game had ever left a word in that spot.
An empty state should name the way out
The second half of the work was empty states that were true but useless. The Recycle Counter said "Nothing sellable in your bag right now." Correct, and a dead end, on one of the first market screens a new player opens. It now says where sellable stacks come from and offers a button to go there. The Pawnbroker got the same treatment, plus a line saying what it accepts, because a player opening it for the first time has no idea. The pawnbroker guide covers how those loans work.
The dispatch board answered an empty roster with "All disciples are busy or none recruited." That is two different states in one sentence, and a sect with zero disciples was being told its disciples were busy. It now splits them and tells the empty case where disciples come from.
One I deliberately left alone: the weekly auction says "No lots this week." There is no next step to offer, and inventing a door would be worse than an honest full stop.
A number that looked like a probability
The same reading pass found a cousin of the empty-state lie. The dispatch card showed a chip reading "45% success". The number was not a probability. It was the share of combined power that your side held, and the actual mission outcome depends on that share in a much steeper way. At the values the chip displays, "40%" meant about a four percent chance, "45%" about ten, and "58%" about ninety-five. A player who trusted it lost nine times in ten at 45, and one who skipped a 55 passed up a near certainty.
For now it says "power share", which is what it is. Computing the real odds is a separate change I would rather do carefully than guess at in the label.
What I check now
For any panel that can be empty, I ask three questions. What does it show while it is waiting? What does it show when the information could not be fetched? And when it really is empty, does it tell the player where to go next? If any answer is "the same line as the others", it is lying to someone.
The bag knows the difference now: fill yours, free in the browser.
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