Other People, and Telling Us When Something Breaks

All of this is built and you can use it now. The character walks, their name is written above their head, and the reporter files a real ticket.

You can see each other

Until now the world had things built by nobody. A wall would appear, a tree would go, and there was never anyone there.

Now there is. Another player shows up as a settler in wool and a hooded cloak — the same one for everybody — walking about the farm. He turns as they turn, and his legs move as they walk.

He is drawn where they actually are, corrected ten times a second, and smoothed so he glides rather than jumps between updates. That smoothing costs about a tenth of a second, so somebody sprinting past you is very slightly behind where the game thinks they are. Nothing you do depends on where their body is drawn — you cannot be blocked by them, and nothing you build is judged against them.

When somebody closes their window, their settler goes. If you can still see someone standing perfectly still who has gone home, that is worth telling us about.

Their name is written above their head

You can tell who is who. The name floats just above a settler's head — the name on their account, so Maggi shows up as Maggi.

It only shows for people within about thirty metres of you, which is a house length and a half. Further away than that and you see the settler but no name.

There are two things worth knowing, because otherwise they look like faults:

• A name shows through a hill. If somebody is standing on the other side of a rise, close enough to be within thirty metres, their name is drawn over the hill rather than hidden behind it. This is why the distance is kept short.
• Nobody's name shows over your own head, including yours. You are looking out of your own eyes, so there is nothing there to label.

If somebody has no account, they get no name at all rather than a made-up one. That only happens on the practice server, where nobody signs in.

What is deliberately missing

• No arms swinging. His cloak covers them. The legs are what tell you he is walking.
• You cannot see yourself. There is no view from behind your own shoulder yet.

Press F8 when something is wrong

This is the most useful thing you can do for the game.

Nearly every fault in Land of Fire and Ice has been found by somebody looking at their screen and saying that is not right. Not by tests — the tests were green through almost all of them.

Press F8 and a box opens with a picture of your screen already in it. Type what happened and press Send it. The first line becomes the title, so start with the short version:

The door would not open

and then, after an empty line, what actually happened:

I hit it ten times and nothing happened.

You do not have to take a screenshot, find it and attach it. That is done for you — and so is everything else that is hard to remember afterwards:

It works with the pack open, which is exactly when a pack fault is on screen.

Your name goes on it because you are signed in, not because you typed it — the game asks the server who you are rather than taking your word for it. On the practice server, where nobody signs in, a report says an anonymous player and is just as welcome.

If the game stops knowing who you are

It can happen, and it used to happen silently. The game remembers you for as long as the tab is open. Close that tab and come back from a bookmark, and it has forgotten — you could still walk about and look at everything, but nothing you built would save, and nothing on screen said so.

Now it sends you to sign in and brings you straight back. Usually you will not even notice: the website remembers you for thirty days, so it hands you back to the game without asking for anything.

If it does ask for your password, that is because the website had forgotten you too. Type it and you land back in the world where you left off.

⚠️ If you end up back in the game and it still says you are not signed in, something is genuinely wrong — press F8 and tell us. The game will not keep throwing you at the sign-in page, on purpose: going round in circles would be worse than standing still.

If you would rather write it up later, there is a page on the website under Report a bug. It has no picture, so F8 is better if you can — and if you are signed in, your name goes on that one too.

What happens then

It becomes a numbered ticket the moment you press send, and the box tells you the number. Nobody has to copy it anywhere.

⚠️ Do not use it for ideas or wishes — those are worth more said out loud, and they get lost on a bug list.