The Forge Tells the Truth

Pathfinders —

A pathfinder wrote to us last night with four complaints about the Forge, and every one of them was right. Worse than right: in three of the four, the Forge had been doing the thing you asked it to and simply refusing to show you. That is a harder failure than a broken button, because there is nothing to point at. You move a slider, nothing happens, and you conclude the slider is decoration.

It was not decoration. It was a lie of omission, and here is the end of it.

The build sliders move you

Stocky to slender, short to tall. You dragged them and the explorer above did not change — on either order, which is what made it look like the whole feature was unfinished.

It was not. Your choice was being recorded, sealed and drawn correctly on your Character tab the whole time. It was the Forge’s own preview — the one you were looking at while you dragged — that had been left out of the reckoning. The one screen where seeing it matters was the one screen that did not show it.

It shows it now, on both orders, and your feet stay planted on the ground as you grow instead of drifting off it.

Hair takes a colour

Five tints were offered. Two of them dimmed your hair a little. Three did nothing you could name, and for forty-five of the hundred and three styles the whole row was inert — you could press every swatch and watch your head stay exactly as it was.

The reason is that the pack our art comes from paints every head in a single orange, and the old method could only ever darken what was already there. Ask it for blonde and it hands back orange. Ask it for silver and it hands back orange.

Hair is repainted now rather than shaded, which makes real colour possible for the first time — so there are eight: ginger, black, dark brown, chestnut, blonde, platinum, ember red, and the tidewater teal of the deathless. They step with arrows instead of a row of dots, one named colour at a time, and the explorer above changes on every press.

Your beard follows your hair, which it never did. Every bearded Emberkin in the realm has been wearing a white beard, and none of you mentioned it, which we choose to read as tact.

Fifty-eight haircuts, not a hundred and three

The list was never as long as it looked. Fifteen of those shapes appeared four times each, in four colours baked into the art — so scrolling it felt like a colour picker cycling on its own, offering you the same cut over and over. Now that hair takes a true colour, those copies have nothing to say. One entry per haircut, and the colour is yours to choose.

Hair drawn to cover the ears now covers them.

You can see the mouths

There are fifty-one mouths for the living and ten for the deathless, and they were all there, and every one of them was being drawn on your face. But the row showed each option framed against your whole head, and a mouth is a very small thing on a whole head. Fifty-one tiles, all of them looking like the same blank chin.

Every face row now zooms to the feature you are actually choosing. The mouths look like mouths.

Your face, on every board

A caching fault meant the small portraits — leaderboards, the Hearth, another pathfinder’s profile — could show you someone else’s face, or a face with no features at all. Two explorers who differed only in the face were being counted as the same explorer. Mended, and your own edits reach every board now instead of only your Character tab.

The intro stops asking twice

The opening pages asked you to name a hero and pledge an order. Then the oath asked for your order. Then the Forge asked for your name.

Nothing you typed on that first page was ever sent anywhere — it was only held on your own device to fill in the two questions coming. Which meant, in practice, being asked the same two things twice, the first time before anyone had told you what an order was.

That page now does what it was always pretending to do: it introduces Emberkin and Tidewatchers, their crests and what they are, and says plainly that the oath is coming. You swear once, at the oath. You are named once, at the Forge.

Also on the road

Scavenger missions may now ask for a walk alongside what they ask you to find, and the log and the giver’s board name it honestly rather than calling a half-walk a hunt. A relic’s reveal tells the truth about what it is. Milestone relics announce themselves — several of you are carrying relics you were never told you had earned, and they will be named to you as they come.

And the Romanian sweeper has been let out at last. It has been idle since the tongue was added, through a fault entirely on our side; the quests waiting behind /ro will fill in over the coming days.

Walk well, and keep telling us what you find. This one was all yours.

— Magister Aldwyn Hale, Keeper of the Ledger