Straight from the changelog

What’s New

Everything that has changed in the world, newest first — written for the person playing.

Added

  • 🐑🥣 Your sheep must eat now — or they die. A sheep you own needs a day's feed every game day. Grazing eats the grass under it down to stubble, so a pen needs about ten grass blocks a sheep; and from November to April the grass does not grow back, so the flock lives on the hay you cut in the summer.
  • 🥣 The jata — a manger for your pen. Four stone and two planks — birch or driftwood — at the workbench, on the Livestock tab. Right-click it with hay to fill it: taða feeds a sheep two days, úthey one, and it holds 300 days. It feeds every sheep in the pen, and you can see the hay rise and fall in it.
  • The game warns you when your sheep are starving — an arrow at the edge of your screen points to them, turning red as death gets closer, and a warning greets you at login with a button that shows the pen on the World map. Look at one of your sheep and the line at the bottom says whether it is hungry.
  • 🎡 A crafting tab that is too long to fit now tells you so. Under the list it says *"▼ 2 more below — scroll or click"* in gold, and *"▲ 2 above"* once you reach the end. Click it to jump a page, or use the mouse wheel. The scroll bar on the right is thicker and brighter too.
  • 🌿 Grass slopes are green. Where grassland steps down a metre onto more grass, the step is drawn as grass all the way down, so terraces read as one grassy slope instead of a wall of earth. A bigger drop, or a drop onto rock, sand or water, still shows earth under a grass lip, like a real eroded bank. 🎯 haugur (#817).
  • 🌿 Grass shows on the side of a field. Where a home field, grassland or bog meets a drop — a cut swath, a dug edge, the top of a bank — its side now shows the grass standing along the top quarter, with the earth below. The edge of a cut hayfield is grass now, not roots. Only the top of the ground gets it, so a tall bank is not striped. 🎯 haugur's choice, and his three pictures.
  • 🐑 Sheep graze for longer. A sheep now keeps its head down and chews for eight seconds, and starts grazing about every 26 seconds, instead of dipping its head for a moment and walking on. 🎯 haugur: *"in nature sheep stand still longer while they graze."*
  • 🌾 Cut grass sits lower. Stubble is now a quarter of a metre below the uncut grass, so a cut swath shows a little step of earth and you can see from across the field what you have mown — about what a real scythe does to a home field. Sheep stand down on it rather than floating, building on stubble turns it back into the field, and a field with something standing on it cannot be cut. 🎯 haugur's idea (#813).
  • 🎁 A give can hand over a whole stack — prik 99 works now; it stopped at 64.
  • 🎁 An admin can give themself items — press T, type a name such as *ljár* or *taða 5*, press Enter. It is for testing, so a test is not lost to starving with a pack full of kit. Only an admin's account can use it; for everybody else T does nothing.

Fixed

  • 🌿 A grazing sheep gets its nose into the grass. It used to bow its head to chest height and bob it about. Now the shoulders dip, the neck reaches down from the shoulder and stretches out, and the mouth nibbles at the grass. 🎯 haugur: *"head should reach the ground for it to look convincing."*
  • 🐑 A grazing sheep stands still now. It used to keep walking with its head down. The same fault made a sheep that had walked up to its mate wander off again instead of staying beside it. 🎯 haugur: *"sheep stop to eat in nature."*

Added

  • 🌾 Hay. Make a ljár — a stone scythe, three sticks and two stone, on the workbench's Livestock tab — and press the right button on grass. The home field (tún) gives taða, the best hay there is; bog and grassland give úthey, meadow hay. What you cut turns to pale stubble and grows back in ten game days, in any month. Both hays are sheep feed, and taða gives the most twins. Digging up stubble gives you the turf back. The ljár lasts 300 cuts. 🎯 haugur chose every number, and the pictures.
  • 📖 A cookbook on the website. The new Cookbook page shows how every single thing in the game is made: what goes in, how many come out, and whether you need the workbench. The game still hides a recipe until you have found what it needs. The book shows them all, for when you would rather look it up. It also says what sheep eat, and how good each food is for getting twins. The page is built from the game's own recipes, so it cannot disagree with the game. What the cold, the rain and a fire do to you will come later.
  • 🔎 The cookbook has a search box. Type a name or an ingredient — *stone*, *axe*, *öxi* — and only the recipes that match stay on the page. You do not need Icelandic letters: *hnifur* finds Hnífur and *thari* finds Þari. 🎯 haugur asked for it.
  • 🐣 Lambs. Feed two of your own sheep a piece of turf in the same pen in December, and they walk together — and in spring there are lambs, usually twins. A lamb has its own body, follows its mother, skips about, and grows into a full sheep by 1 October. 🎯 haugur picked the lamb. 🧪 While it is being tested, any month will do and the lamb comes the next game day.
  • 🌊 Sheep eat seaweed and birch leaves too, and better food means more lambs. Seaweed from the shore gives the most twins for now; turf and leaves mostly one. Hay will be the best of all when it comes. 🎯 haugur: *"better feed, more twins."*
  • ❤️ A sheep that has already mated wears a little red heart over its head — so you can see which ones are carrying and which are done for the year. 🎯 haugur's idea.
  • 💙 A sheep you feed flashes blue, the way a sheep you hit flashes red — and pulses blue every few seconds while it is ready, so you can see which ones are waiting. 🎯 haugur's idea: *"flash and pulse"*.
  • 🐑 Sheep in a pen wander around inside it instead of standing against the wall.

Fixed

  • 📖 The cookbook's pictures load. Most of them showed as broken images on the website; they were stored in a way the website's build could not read. 🎯 haugur spotted it.
  • 🐑 A wild sheep could appear inside your pen. The flock that keeps a few wild sheep around you put new ones beside any sheep it found — including yours. It no longer spawns inside a pen, or beside your sheep. 🎯 haugur reported it (#800): *"i just put 2 in there, now there are 3."*
  • 🪨 You can build a sheep pen. A stone wall (grjótgarður) is stacked stone a metre and a half high, the way the old Icelandic sheep folds were built — six stone make six lengths — and a sheep cannot get over it. Put a wooden gate (hlið) in it, four sticks and two planks, and right-click to open and shut it. A shut gate holds a sheep; an open one lets you lead one in. It will not shut on somebody standing in it. This is where lambs will be born — that comes next. 🎯 haugur picked the wall and both pictures.

Changed

  • 🐑 Sheep can climb. They hop up a one-block step and walk down a drop of up to three, where before they were stuck on whatever flat patch they stood on — and they no longer float in the air in front of a step. That is why the pen wall is a metre and a half: a sheep hops a single block.
  • 🗂️ A new craft tab, Livestock. The lead, the tether peg, the stone wall and the gate are all made there now — the lead and the peg moved from Home.

Added

  • 🎣 A fishing rod — and it catches a real fish. Cast the float onto the water and watch: a fish nearby swims over, the float goes under, and you have a moment to pull. The fish you land is the one you saw come. Miss and it bolts. Wind slows the fish, and in a gale nothing bites. The rod is three sticks, a fishing line (færi) of two threads, and a hook (öngull) carved from a bone (bein) — which killing a sheep now gives too. 🎯 haugur: *"lets do the fishing line."*
  • 🪢 You can lead a sheep. Make a lead (taumur) from three threads, hold it and right-click a sheep, and it follows you — several at once if you have the leads. Too far ahead and the rope snaps. 🪵 And a tether peg (tjóðurhæll), two sticks: tie the sheep you are leading to it and they graze within five metres, still tied after a restart. You can see the rope. 🎯 haugur: *"lets do the lead."*
  • 🧵 A fourth turf house: the vefstofa. Put wool in and it spins it into thread (þráður) — one every minute, four from each wool, with no fuel, and it keeps spinning while you are away. It is built like the other houses (24 stone, 16 planks, 48 turf) and has a ball of thread carved on its board. 🎯 haugur: *"should we make a Menu (house) where you work with textils."* Thread will make a lead and a fishing line next.

Added

  • ✂️ You can shear a sheep. Hold a knife, look at a woolly sheep and press the right button: two bundles of wool (ull) go into your pack and the sheep walks off unharmed — and looks shorn. The wool grows back in about an hour, once the sheep has grazed. 🌸 In May and June you can pull the loose fleece off by hand, no knife needed, the way the first settlers did. A sheep killed just after shearing gives a bare hide, a skinn, instead of a gæra.
  • 🩸 You can see a hit land. A sheep flashes red for half a second each time your knife strikes it — and everybody standing near sees it too. 🎯 haugur: *"there need to be somekind of indication that im hurting it."*

Fixed

  • 🏘️ Right-click opens a turf house from anywhere on it, with an empty hand — the býtibúr, the skemma and the smiðja, the same as O and the same as a hearth. Before, only O worked on the houses. 🎯 haugur: *"i like right clicking with empty hand to work on them as well."*
  • 🔥 A býtibúr's fire cooks now. It never could: nothing lit it. Put in wood and something to cook and it lights itself, then goes out when the food is done — so it only burns wood while it is cooking. A búr already holding wood and fish starts the next time you open it.
  • 🔄 The búr's screen keeps itself up to date. Moving things in and out of its fire shows straight away, and you can watch the food cook without closing and reopening it.

Added

  • 🙌 You can pick a sheep up and carry it — and a sheep you have carried is yours. Stand close, look at it and press C. Press C again to set it down in front of you.
  • 🐑 A sheep you carried STAYS WHERE YOU LEFT IT, and it is there when you come back tomorrow. 🔴 This is the first time any animal in this game has survived the server restarting. Until now every creature was forgotten the moment you walked away — which is right for a fish in the sea, because nobody owns a fish, and wrong for a sheep.
  • Carrying is the only way to move a sheep, and that is not a shortcut. In other games you lead an animal on a rope. There is no rope in this world yet, no string and no flax — and the first thread there will ever be is spun from wool, off the sheep you cannot yet move. So you carry it.
  • 👀 Other people can see that you are carrying one, and the game tells you what is in your arms in the corner of the screen.

Fixed

  • 🧱 Sheep no longer stand half inside a wall. 🎯 haugur: *"look at the sheep half way in the wall."* The whole animal has to fit somewhere now, not just the middle of it.
  • 🏠 Sheep no longer stand on your roof. 🎯 haugur: *"there is still one standing on top of my skemma and búr."* They will not put their feet on a house — or a tree — and any that are up there come down.
  • 🌳 Sheep no longer stand in the trees. They were climbing onto the birch canopy and getting stuck up there — 🎯 haugur: *"they look like they are floating a little."* They will not put their feet on leaves now, and anything that ends up somewhere it cannot be falls down to the ground.
  • 🐑 The sheep walk the way they are facing. They were moving their legs and sliding sideways, like a toy being pushed across a table. 🎯 haugur: *"they glide sideways, like they are missing the brain."* It was the body, not the brain — the new one was turned a quarter circle.
  • 👀 They look around instead of staring off to one side. A sheep would pick somewhere to glance anywhere in a full circle, but its neck can only turn so far — so most of the time its head was simply stuck at the limit. Now it glances about within reach, and looks ahead in between.
  • 🎨 They have faces again. Every sheep was one flat brown from nose to hoof. The fleece is tinted and the bare parts — the face, the ears and the legs — are left their own colour, which is what a real Icelandic sheep looks like.

Changed

  • 🐑 The sheep are woolly, and they move in one piece. Their fleece now hangs in real locks instead of being painted on, and their legs, neck and head bend rather than being separate parts that swing. The gaps that used to open at the shoulders and the neck when a sheep turned its head are gone — there is nothing to open, because the body is no longer cut up.
  • 👂 They have ears and a tail, which the old body did not.
  • A sheep no longer rises and falls as it walks. That small bob is owed again and will come back with bending knees.

Changed

  • 🐑 The sheep have a new body, and their necks are straight. 🎯 haugur spotted what was wrong with the old one from inside the game: *"its body is moving to one way and then the head turns the other way making the neck do a s curve, looks funky."* He was exactly right. The picture the old sheep was built from had the animal's head turned toward the camera while its body pointed sideways, so the neck was twisted before it ever started walking — and turning its head in the game made the twist worse. The new sheep stands square, looks where it walks, and its neck is straight. It is also a smaller download than the old one, so the world loads no slower for having better sheep in it.

Fixed

  • 🔥 The skemma had a fire in it and should not have. Opening a skemma showed Food and Fire tabs, exactly like a búr. 🎯 Found by haugur: *"there should not be a fire in this menu."* Only the býtibúr cooks — the skemma is a store shed and the smiðja is the workshop.

Fixed

  • 🖱️ The white highlight box sits on the slot your mouse is on again. On a búr's Fire tab it was drawn about three quarters of a slot too low. 🎯 Found by haugur, who also remembered it happening before: *"we have had this bug before with other menus but you fixed it."* He was right — same symptom, different cause, so this time the fix is that one piece of code decides what is under the mouse, for the clicking and the highlighting both.
  • 📷 F8's picture shows your menus now. It photographed only the world, so a bug report about a screen — the pack, the crafting list, a búr — arrived with a picture of grass. 🎯 Asked for by haugur after exactly that happened. The whole screen is in it now, panels, bars and all.
  • ⛏️ The breaking cracks and the white outline sit on the block now, instead of floating above it. Both were drawn as a full cube, so on anything shorter than a metre they stood in the air above the thing you were hitting. 🎯 Found by haugur: *"see how the breakige is abouve the kjarr like its a whole block."* It affected six blocks, not just the scrub — the hearth, the torch, driftwood, söl and þari were all the same. Nothing was wrong with the breaking itself; only the drawing was in the wrong place.
  • 🗂️ The crafting screen has tabs, and eight recipes stopped being invisible. At a bench the list held thirteen recipes and showed five — every stone tool, the chest, all three houses and the spjót were off the bottom of the screen. 🎯 Found by haugur, who lost his spear and could not find the recipe to make another. Now: Wood tools · Stone tools · Houses · Home, and nothing scrolls.
  • 🎒 You can rearrange your own pack again while a búr, a chest or a hearth is open. Dragging something from your on-hand row into your pack did nothing at all on those screens — the stack just snapped back, with nothing said. 🎯 Found by haugur in play: *"could put it on hand but not into my own invetory."* It looked like a problem with fish and it was nothing to do with fish — stone and wood behaved exactly the same way.

Added

  • 🥫🍲 The fish in your búr are right there on the Fire tab. Under the fire there is now a shelf — In the búr — drag up to cook — showing what is in the store that this fire can cook. Drag straight up into the cooking boxes. 🎯 haugur, the hour the fire shipped: *"my fish are in the other tab, so if i want to cook them, i have to first drag them to onhand switch to fire and drag them there."*
  • 🍳 And it works the other way: drag a cooked fish down onto the shelf and it is filed away in the búr without ever touching your pack.
  • 🥫 The býtibúr has a fire in it now, and it cooks. Open a búr and it has two tabs at the top: Food, the 54 slots you already know, and Fire. The Fire tab is the same three groups the hearth has — what to cook, wood under the flame, and what comes out.
  • 🔴 A búr's fire makes no charcoal. Only food comes out of it, because only food keeps in a búr. The hearth is where charcoal is made; the búr is where you cook.
  • 🍲 Everything else is the same as the hearth — sixteen fish to a birch log, cooking doubles what a fish is worth, and the screen keeps itself up to date while you watch.
  • A búr's fire does not keep you warm. A hearth in a room turns the cold off; this one only cooks.
  • 🔱 You can catch fish. Make a Spjót at the bench — one stone and one stick, the cheapest thing in the game — then get close to a fish, point at it, and left-click to thrust. You have to be within about three and a half metres, so you must actually wade out to them rather than take one from the bank.
  • 🐟 A bigger fish is an easier target. A lax is over a metre long and a bleikja is half that, so the salmon — which is also the one worth most — is the one you are most likely to hit.
  • 🍖 What a fish is worth: a þorskur fills a quarter of your food bar, a lax well over a third, an ufsi or a bleikja an eighth. But raw food stops at half the bar however much of it you eat — you need to cook it to get past that.
  • 📦 Fish live in the býtibúr, like all food, and not in a chest.
  • 🍲 You can cook now. Open a hearth and it has two boxes for what you want to cook, the fire with two boxes of firewood under it, and four boxes on the right for what comes out. Put raw fish in the left, wood underneath, and wait.
  • 🍳 Cooking doubles what a fish is worth, and takes the lid off. A cooked þorskur fills half the bar where the raw one filled a quarter — and cooked food can carry you all the way to full, which raw food never can.
  • 🪵 One birch log cooks sixteen fish, about nineteen seconds each. The wood still turns into charcoal as it burns, and the charcoal shares the same four boxes as the cooked food.
  • ⏳ The screen keeps itself up to date while you stand at the fire, so you can watch the fish come out.
  • If all four boxes on the right are full, the fish stays raw and waits. Nothing you put in the fire is ever lost.
  • ⚙️ The spear wears out after about a hundred and fifty fish, and then it is gone — the same as every other tool.

Added

  • 🌿 The shore is food now, and it needs no tool at all. Walk to the water and there is söl on the rock — dulse, the red-brown weed Icelanders have eaten for a thousand years. Aim at it with an empty hand and take it, the same way you pick up driftwood. It is worth about what a crowberry is worth.
  • 🌊 And two more seaweeds, for making things with rather than eating. Þari — the olive wrack with the little air bladders — lies on the wet rock above the water, and beltisþari, a taller kelp, grows out on the seabed where it is deeper. Icelanders did not eat these. They fed them to sheep through the winter, spread them on the home field and burned them dry.
  • 📦 Where each one lives follows from that. Þari and beltisþari go in a chest or a skemma, like any other material. Söl is food, so it goes in the búr — which is the one place food can live.
  • 🫱 You can carry all three, stack them, and drag them about the same as anything else.
  • 🌊 The sea looks like the sea when you are standing in it. Wade in far enough to go under and the world turns a glacial green, and you can only see about thirty metres instead of all the way to the horizon. Before today, going under water changed nothing at all — the seabed looked like a dry gravel plain with fish hanging in the air.
  • 🌑 And it gets darker the deeper you go, slowly, down to about twenty-six metres. It never goes properly black — you would not be able to find anything, and the point of being able to see into the water was the fish.
  • 🐟 The fish stay bright. They carry their own light rather than the sky's, so the water darkens around them and they do not go with it. A fish deep down is still a fish.
  • 🎨 haugur chose the colour of the water, off four side by side.
  • ⬜ You still cannot swim or drown, and there is still nothing overhead when you look up — the surface of the sea is not drawn from underneath yet. The sea looks like water; it does not yet behave like it.

Added

  • 🐟 The fish swim in shoals now. One fish in a group leads and the rest follow it, each keeping its own place a little behind and to one side — so a shoal travels as a shoal instead of as a crowd of fish that happen to be near each other. 🎯 haugur asked for this one in his own words: *"i just want the schools to look natural."*
  • 🐟 And a shoal scatters when you wade at it, then gathers again when you stand still. Nothing was written to make that happen — it falls out of the fish caring more about you than about each other.
  • About one fish in ten never joins anything and swims alone all its life. Ufsi and bleikja keep the tightest groups; a lax is a traveller and keeps almost none.
  • 🐟 There is a fourth fish in the sea: the bleikja. It is an arctic char — the smallest fish in the water, silver with a faint pink flush along the belly. A char is really a river fish, and a real Icelandic one comes down to the sea for about seven weeks in midsummer before going back up; ours has not learned to leave yet, so you will meet it all year.
  • 🧊 AND ALL FOUR FISH ARE SOLID NOW. They used to be photographs standing up in the water, the way a cardboard cut-out stands up — flat, and nearly invisible edge-on. Each one has an actual shape now: round, with the light falling across its side, and it still looks like a fish when you look straight down at it from a rock. 🎯 The bleikja was built that way first so it could be judged against the flat three, and haugur judged it: *"the body looks much better"*, *"more filled"*. Then the other three followed the same afternoon.
  • 🐟 And their tails came back. The first solid fish had its tail fan squeezed shut into a blunt point — 🎯 *"ummm where is the rest of its tail"* — because the shape was measured at too few points along the fish and the tail is where a fish changes fastest. The tail is a thin fan again on every one of them.
  • There are no more fish than before. The sea still holds the same number near you; the þorskur and the ufsi each gave up a few places so the bleikja could have some.

Fixed

  • 🐟 The fish work properly now. They were upside down, they all swam at the same height in a row, and you could follow one down into the sea bed with a shovel. 🎯 haugur found every one of those by playing and reported them from inside the game. They swim at their own depths now, the right way up, and they stay in the water.
  • 🏖️ And there are far more of them, close to shore — about four times as many, thickest in the shallow water where you can actually see them.

Added

  • 💧 There is a block for falling water now, and it is called fossvatn. 🎯 haugur named it and chose its colour and its picture. You cannot see it anywhere yet — making the waterfalls themselves turned out to be a bigger job than a day, and it is parked until we come back to it.
  • 🔍 You can see into the water. The sea, the lakes and the rivers used to be a solid blue lid — now you can see the bottom through them. Shallow water by the shore looks bright over the sand, and deep water stays dark, so you can tell how deep it is just by looking.
  • 🎚️ And you decide how clear it is. Press Escape, open Graphics, and drag Water clarity. It changes while you drag. All the way to the right is the solid water the game had before, if you liked that better.
  • 🐟 THERE ARE FISH IN THE SEA. Walk to the shore and look into the water: þorskur, swimming about, and there are plenty of them. 🎯 haugur chose how the fish looks from four pictures. You cannot catch one yet — the spjót comes next, and until then they are there to be looked at.
  • 🔍 And the water is clearer. It was 72% solid this morning; it is 35% now, because at 72% a fish under the surface was almost invisible. You can still set it yourself under Escape → Graphics → Water clarity.

Added

  • 🌊 The water moves. The sea, the lakes and the rivers are no longer a still picture — the surface lifts and settles, the way water does on an overcast day. 🎯 haugur: *"what do we need to do to get the rivers moving."*
  • It is the surface breathing, not a current. The water does not yet run downstream, so a river moves but does not visibly flow one way. That is the next piece of work, and it needs to know which way each river runs.
  • 🎛️ There is a switch for it — Moving water, on the Graphics tab of the Escape menu. Turn it off and the water is exactly as still as it was before.
  • Nothing in the world changed. No block moved, nothing anybody built is affected. This is only how the water is drawn.

Added

  • 🔍 The map zooms right in, and the streets have their names on them. It used to stop about a kilometre and a half across; now it goes down to about a hundred and fifty metres — close enough to read *Tjarnarvellir* or *Reykjanesbraut* off the map. 🎯 haugur: *"if i zoom close enough i like to see the streets with names."*
  • 🏠 The map has a Back to home button. One press and you are at the hearth you last lit — the same place you wake if you die. 🎯 haugur: *"add Back to home button on the map that returns you to your hearth."*
  • **Until you have lit a hearth it says *No home yet* and is greyed**, and tells you that lighting a fire is what makes one. A button that did nothing would be worse than no button.
  • 🗺️ And it works everywhere in Iceland, not just at home. The close-up used to be a fixed patch around where we started, so Reykjavík, Akureyri and everywhere else had no streets on the map at any zoom.
  • Zoomed out past about three kilometres, only the main roads are drawn. Every street in Reykjavík at that scale is two megabytes of map and a solid grey smudge; the big roads are what you steer by anyway.
  • Where we started has almost no streets on it, and that is not a fault — it sits on the lava at Hraunin rather than in the town. The streets begin a couple of kilometres north-east.

Fixed

  • 🕳️ The holes in the world are gone. Flying over a river or a canyon, you could see straight through the ground to the sky — the game only drew a band of world about 128 m tall around you, and anything deeper than that simply was not there. 🎯 haugur, over Gullfoss: *"Why is there a hole there"*. The band is 160 m now.
  • It costs a quarter more world to load. That is the trade, and it was chosen deliberately: a hole you can see the sky through is worse than a slower arrival. Making the world arrive smaller is the next big job.
  • 📷 A bug report finally carries your screenshot. Pressing F8 has taken a picture of your screen since the beginning — and not one of them ever arrived. The game sent the picture in one format and the server accepted only another, and threw it away without a word. Both ends now agree.

Fixed

  • 🏔️ You can go into the highlands. Teleporting anywhere high — Vatnajökull, Langjökull, the interior — used to drop you into empty sky and you fell forever. The game only ever drew the ground between about 30 m below sea level and 96 m above it, wherever you were, so most of Iceland had nothing in it. It now follows you uphill. 🎯 haugur: *"it worked, im standing on vatnajökull."*
  • Standing on a mountain, the valley far below may still not draw. The game keeps about 128 m of height around you. That is a limit we know about.

Fixed

  • 🏠 Your buildings no longer follow you. Teleporting somewhere new used to bring the storehouses with you — hanging in the sky, or buried underground. 🎯 haugur: *"whereever i went my skemma and stuff followd sometimes in the sky sometimes underground."* They stay where you built them now.
  • 🐛 The bug reporter's picture is small enough to send. Pressing F8 on a big screen produced a picture of several megabytes, and the server refused it. It is scaled down and compressed now.

Added

  • 🎛️ There is a menu now. Press Esc. A panel in the middle of a dimmed world, with tabs across the top and a big Play game button at the bottom that puts you back in the world. It is also what greets you when you come in from the Play button on the website, so the game finally has a front door.
  • 👁️ You can choose how wide your view is — the Field of view slider on the Main tab, from 60° to 110°. It has always been fixed at 75°, which is where it still starts.
  • 📍 Going to a place by coordinate, and the weather buttons, moved somewhere you can find them. Perfect day, Winter night, Norðurljós and Rain are on the Main tab of the menu now, along with the coordinate box. They used to be in the dev tools, behind Shift + P.
  • 🔊 An Audio tab, honestly labelled. Volume, music and sound effects are remembered. Nothing in the game makes a sound yet — the tab says so on its own face, and the settings are waiting for the day it does.

Changed

  • 🧍 A bug report now says who filed it. Press F8 and your name goes on the ticket, so we can come back and ask you about it — and so two people reporting the same evening are two reports rather than a puzzle. It goes on because you are signed in, not because you typed it. The form on the website carries your name the same way now. **On the practice server, where nobody signs in, a report says *an anonymous player* and is just as welcome.**

Added

  • 🔨 You can see how worn a tool is. A thin bar along the bottom of the slot, which empties as you work and warms from gold to clay when the tool is nearly finished. A new tool shows nothing — the bar only appears once it has broken its first block. 🎯 haugur chose it from four drawn at true size.
  • ✉️ You can invite somebody straight from your account page. The invite form was only ever at /invite, and nothing on the site linked to it — you had to know the address. It is a box on your own page now, with the list of everybody you have already asked one click away.

Fixed

  • 📄 Your account page said the game had no crafting, no inventory and no survival mechanics. All three have existed for weeks — you can starve, fill a storehouse and build a house from a recipe. The sentence was written when it was true and nobody ever re-read it.
  • 🔦 A torch put on a turf house sits ON the house now. It used to stand almost half a metre out in front of the wall, hanging in the air — and beside a doorway it cut straight through the door. 🎯 haugur photographed it himself, in the bug he filed from inside the game.

Added

  • ✉️ An invite can arrive by email now. haugur types an address on the site and a letter goes out from his own mailbox with the code in it and a link to make an account. It is the first email this project has ever sent — until today there was no way to send one at all, and every code was handed over in person. The code is still the only way in, and it still works handed over by hand.
  • 📖 The guide has a new chapter: The Controls. Every key and both mouse buttons in one place — moving, breaking, the row of ten slots, the dev tools window and F8. It was read off the game's own code rather than remembered. 🔴 The two that stop people playing are at the top: you must click the window before anything responds, and you must *hold* the left button to break a block rather than click it.

Fixed

  • 📖 Some guide pages were showing stray backticks around words like Esc and Henda. They were meant to be styled as keys and instead the marks themselves were printed.

Added

  • 🏘️ Three turf houses, and a row of them is a farm. The storehouse now has two companions: a skemma, which holds everything *except* food, and a smiðja, whose door opens the crafting list instead of holding anything at all. They are the same building and cost the same; the carved board above the door tells them apart — a fish, a chest, or an axe and hammer crossed.
  • 🏘️ Houses snap together. Place one beside another and it jumps flush against it and turns to face the same way, so three in a row read as one farm rather than three sheds. That row is a *burstabær*, the old Icelandic farmhouse where every part had its own gable facing the yard.
  • 🏠 You can now take a house down by hitting it anywhere, and open one by looking anywhere on it and pressing O. It used to want the door.
  • 📖 **The guide has a new chapter: *Cold, Wind and Rain*. Frost, wind and rain have been making you burn food faster for a while now, and no page anywhere explained it — so the one thing in this game that can actually kill you was the one thing nobody had written down. It says what each kind of bad day costs, and the four places you can stand: open ground, the lee of a wall, indoors, and indoors with a fire lit. Two pages were also saying you cannot die.** You have been able to since the 3rd of September, and they say so now.

Fixed

  • 🏠 You can now look anywhere on a storehouse and press O to open it. Before this you had to aim at the very bottom of the door, which is one cell out of the two hundred and twenty-five the building fills — so the menu was there but almost impossible to find. Aim at a wall, the roof or the far gable and the door still answers. Right-clicking is unchanged and still wants the door, because right-clicking a wall with something in your hand is how you build against the house.

Added

  • 🏠 The storehouse — the búr — can be placed, and it is a real building, not a pile of blocks. Hold one, point at a clear, flat plot and place it: a turf-roofed, stone-walled house with a driftwood gable, five metres wide and nine long, stands up facing you. Walls stop you, the roof shelters you. ✅ haugur placed the first one the same afternoon — *"other that that it is awsome"* — and three things he saw were fixed within the hour: the game no longer freezes while it appears, the back of the house is plain planks (the first one had a door at both ends), and the door is darker than the gable so you can find it. It was twelve long; he asked for shorter. 🚪 And then a real door. His second look — *"the door it self kinda does not look like a door"*, and the shaded side *"to dark"* — gave the doorway a photograph of a driftwood plank door (he chose it from four), lifted the shaded side so it reads by day and still goes dark at night, and made the top half of the doorway count as the door when you hit it. 🥫 And the door opens. Right-click it — or look at it and press O — and the storehouse's screen appears: 54 slots, and only food keeps in it, the mirror of the chest, which takes everything but food. Taking the building down brings the food back. 🎒 The storehouse has a real picture in the pack now, a render of the building itself. ⌨️ O opens any menu you are looking at — the workbench, a hearth, a chest, a storehouse door — the same as a right-click. 🔨 And you can make one. At the bench: 24 stone, 16 planks and 48 turf — turf is what a shovel gives you from grassland, moor, heath or scrub. A building's worth, on purpose. 👻 And you see where it will stand before you place it. Hold the storehouse and aim at the ground: a grey shadow the size of the building lies where it would go, and turns red if something is in the way or the ground is not flat — and if you place anyway, the game says which. Hitting a wall says *take it down at the door*; ten hits on the door take the whole thing down and give it back, food and all.
  • 💀 You can die now, and you wake at your hearth. Until today nothing in this game could kill anybody — hunger took your health down to a sliver and stopped there. It no longer stops. Running out of food is still the only way to die: there is nothing to fight and no fall will hurt you. Cold, wind and rain kill by making you burn food faster, so the weather is what turns a long day outside into a dangerous one. It is slow, and the screen tells you why the whole way down. 🏠 Light a hearth and that is where you wake up. The most recent one you lit is the one you go back to — so lighting a fire on a trip moves your bed, which is worth knowing. If you have never lit one, you wake where you first arrived. 🎒 Dying costs you everything you were carrying. ✅ What you are wearing stays on, and anything you left in a chest or a hearth is untouched — it was never at risk. You wake with full health and a full stomach: the cost of dying is your pack, not a second death. 🏠 And the hearth tells you. Open one and the line under the fire says which of three things it is to you: *Your home — you will wake here*, *Not your home — add wood to make it so*, or *Light it to make it your home*.

Changed

  • 🩹 Cracks heal. A block you chipped but did not break loses its cracks and goes back to full strength after ten seconds. Before this, every accidental tap left a permanent mark — and the blocks worst affected were the ones you stand beside most: your own chest, hearth and workbench all ended up scarred by stray clicks while aiming at something behind them. ✅ Nothing is lost that you were actually working on: the ten seconds count from the last hit, so a block you keep hitting never heals under you, and letting go of the mouse for a moment still costs you nothing.

Added

  • 📦 You can build a chest. Six planks at the workbench, either kind, in a ring with nothing in the middle. Put it down, right-click it, and it opens with twenty-seven slots and your own pack underneath, so you can drag things between the two. The clicks are the same as your pack — left-click takes a stack, right-click takes half, click a slot to put it down. Food will not keep in a chest, and it says so when you try. A pantry — a búr — is what food will go in, and it is not built yet. ✅ Breaking a chest gives you back everything inside it, so a chest in the wrong place is never a disaster. But it has to fit in your pack: a full chest holds more than you can carry, so it refuses to break until you have taken some out. That is the game saying *empty it first*. ✅ And what is in a chest is safe from dying, whenever dying arrives — you only ever lose what you are carrying.

Fixed

  • 🖱️ Menus give you the mouse back on their own now. Opening the workbench left the mouse still captured by the world — no cursor, nothing to click a slot with — so you had to press Escape before you could use the screen you had just opened. It also meant the mouse wheel still changed which tool you were holding instead of scrolling the list. ✅ Now any menu — your pack, a workbench, a hearth, a chest — hands the mouse over the moment it opens, and gives it back when you close it.
  • 🔨 The workbench was hiding four of its recipes, including the chest. The list of things you can make had grown to nine and the panel had room for five — and the ones that did not fit were simply not drawn, with nothing on the screen to say anything was missing. 🎯 haugur went looking for the chest he had just been told about and it was not there. The three stone tools — steinöxi, steinhaki and steinskófla — had been missing the same way since the day the tools arrived, and nobody noticed because they had been put into a pack by hand rather than made at a bench. ✅ The list scrolls now. Roll the mouse wheel over it. The small numbers on the right of the panel — 1–5 / 9 — say which part of the list you are looking at, and a slim bar down the right-hand edge shows where you are in it, so you can see at a glance that there is more below.

Changed

  • 🖱️ The mouse wheel changes which tool you are holding. Roll it to step along the row at the bottom of the screen. Hold Ctrl and roll to zoom, which is what the wheel used to do on its own. 🎯 haugur asked for it so he could test faster, and it stayed because it is simply better.
  • 🔥 The hearth stopped lying about what is in it. Feed it driftwood and open it up, and it showed you birch — it only ever knew *how much* wood was in a slot, never *which*. It knows now. 🎯 haugur, having fed one: *"i placed 2 but there where not 2 on stock in the hearth."*
  • 🪵 Either mouse button picks driftwood up. Left-click used to do nothing at all on a heap, because there is nothing to break. 🎯 haugur: *"i left click it with empty hand nothing happens."*
  • 🪵 You can saw driftwood into planks. One piece of rekaviður makes two rekaplanki in your hands, no bench — and driftwood planks now make sticks, torches and all six tools, exactly as birch ones do. 🎯 haugur named it. ✅ So the shore finally takes the pressure off birch, which is scrub on this ground and does not grow back.
  • 🪵 Driftwood gathers in bays now instead of scattering along the whole coast. 🎯 haugur: *"i picked 2 or 3 and i cant find anymore."* It was arriving the whole time — hundreds of metres away each time. A walk to the shore is a destination now, not a lottery.
  • 🪵 Driftwood washes up on the shore. Walk down to the beach and there is timber on it — a heap of weathered pieces lying in the sand. Aim at it and click once with your hand to pick it up; there is nothing to break and you need no tool. 🎯 haugur: *"accept the poor coast, slow trickle is fine."* It is meant to be scarce — at most six heaps on the whole shore at a time, arriving faster when it has been blowing. It is wood, so it burns in your hearth and builds a bench, and it is worth twice a birch log in trade. ✅ Either mouse button picks it up — 🎯 haugur: *"it works beautifully."*
  • 🪓 Your tools look like real tools now. The axe, pick and shovel in your pack are photographs instead of flat drawn shapes, so they match the blocks, which have been photographs all along. 🎯 haugur: *"i would really like our tools in game to look like that please."* The tool in your HAND has not changed yet — that is a separate step, and a riskier one.
  • 🪵 Driftwood is scarce on purpose. 🎯 haugur: *"accept the poor coast, slow trickle is fine."* Our shore is a poor one for driftwood — the rich ones are far to the north — and that stays. Wood arrives on the tide, slowly. ✅ This was the decision; the entry above is it working.
  • 🖐️ You hold the real thing now. The axe, pick and shovel in your hand are the same pictures your pack shows — they used to be one shapeless block on a stick, whichever tool you carried. A held block is a proper cube.
  • ⛏️ The cracks are thicker. 🎯 haugur, having played them: *"crack lines should be thicker, maby 2 or 3 times thicker."*

Fixed

  • 🧱 You cannot walk through things any more. Walking into a tree used to carry you to the top of it, and walking into a wall at the bottom of a cutting sent you all the way to the top of the world. Walls stop you now.
    • ✅ A step is still a step. A single block with open air above it can be walked up, so a staircase does not suddenly need jumping — you are stopped by a tree because your head would be inside the trunk, not because it is tall.

Changed

  • ⛏️ Breaking a block shows CRACKS spreading across it, instead of a white box closing in. They deepen as you work, and — with the change below — they stay on the block when you stop.

Added

  • 🪓⛏️🥄 There are tools. Six of them — an axe, a pick and a shovel, in wood and in stone — made at the workbench from two sticks and a head.
    • Each one only works on what it is for. The axe is for wood, the pick for rock, the shovel for ground. The wrong tool is no better than your bare hands, so it is worth carrying all three.
    • A stone tool is about twice as fast as wood, and lasts three times as long: a wooden tool breaks 100 blocks before it wears out, a stone one 300. Then it is gone — there is no mending it yet.
    • 🖐️ You can see what you are holding. The tool is in your hand on screen.
    • Iron tools do not exist yet, because there is no iron to make them from. When bog iron can be dug, they appear.

Changed

  • ⛏️ Letting go of the mouse button no longer costs you your work. Damage now belongs to the block, not to your hand: stop half way through a big rock, walk off, come back later, and it is still half broken.
    • It is remembered on your own machine, for now. Reload the game and the world is whole again, and other people do not see your half-broken blocks.
  • 🔨 An iron tool is now enormously better than it was — three times what it used to be. Nothing can make one yet; it is the number waiting for the day something can.

Added

  • 🥶 Getting rained on now makes you hungrier. Being wet costs half of what wind costs, and it costs the same whether it is July or January.
    • The worst weather now empties a full food bar in about 22 minutes rather than 25. A December storm on open ground is a harder place to stand about in than it was yesterday.
    • 🔴 This is what makes a mild wet day dangerous. The cold only begins at frost, so +4 °C and pouring used to cost you nothing at all.
    • 🏠 A roof stops it. A wall does not — out of the wind and still wet, which is what standing behind a wall in Iceland is like.
  • 🌧️ It rains. When the weather says it is raining, you can see it — and the harder it rains, the more of it there is.
    • 🏠 Not under a roof. Step inside and it stops. The lee of a wall is not a roof — you are out of the wind and still getting wet, which is exactly what standing behind a wall in Iceland is like.
    • 🚶 The rain stands still and you walk through it, rather than following you about.
    • ⬜ Snow is not built yet. The game already knows when it is falling as snow instead; it just is not drawn.
  • 💨 Fires smoke again. A hearth sends up a slow column; a torch gives off a thin wisp. It drifts sideways as it rises and fades away.
    • A cold hearth does not smoke. Only things actually burning.
    • 🔴 This is the second attempt. The first one stopped the world drawing the moment a fire came into view, and it was withdrawn the same day.

Fixed

  • 🧊 The world froze after one frame. On staging, the game drew once and then stopped — nothing moved, flying did nothing, the dev tools did nothing, and the frame counter sat at its last number so it *looked* like it was running. 🎯 haugur: *"it looks like staging refuses to draw the world after 1 draw."*
    • 💨 The smoke is withdrawn until it is right. It went in yesterday and it is what broke this. Fires burn and light as before; they just do not smoke.
    • It only bit where a fire was in view, which is why dev seemed fine and staging did not — and why it survived a day of testing.

Added

  • 🔦 Mine the wall out from under a torch and it falls into your pack. It no longer hangs in mid-air. The same happens if you replace the wall with something too small to hold one — a hearth has no side worth nailing to.
    • A full pack refuses the break instead. The wall stays where it is, exactly as a block you have no room for stays in the ground. Nothing is ever destroyed quietly.
  • 🔦 There is light in the world. A torch lights 8 metres around it, and a burning hearth 12 — so a turf house with a fire in it is a lit room, and a torch on the wall of a passage shows you where you are going.
    • 🔥 A cold hearth lights nothing. Only a burning one glows, and it goes dark when the last log burns out.
    • Light does not go through walls. It spreads round corners the long way, losing one metre of reach for every metre it travels — so a torch just inside a doorway lights the doorway and not the room beyond it.
    • 🔴 This is the first light this game has ever had. Until today the sun and the sky were the only things that lit anything, and a December night was simply dark.
  • 🔦 You can put a torch up. Stand one on the ground, or fix one to the side of a wall — the game works out which from the face you aimed at, so there is nothing to choose. It lights itself and burns for ever, and its flame moves like the fire in your hearth, because it is the same fire.
    • A wall needs to be a whole block. You can stand a torch on a hearth, but you cannot hang one off it — there is barely a side there to fix it to. Scrub and birch leaves will not hold one either.
    • Not on a ceiling. A torch hanging above you is a lantern, and there is no lantern.
  • 🪵 Birch is worth more than firewood now. A birch log saws into two planks, a plank splits into two sticks, and four sticks and a charcoal make four torches at the workbench. So one log is four sticks, and four torches cost two logs — one sawn, one burnt.
    • 🧱 Planks are a block you can build with. Sawn boards, and the first thing in the game made of wood that is not a whole tree.
    • 🔦 And you can put the torches up — see above.
    • 🔴 Deliberately meaner than Minecraft, where one log gives four planks and a single stick makes four torches. Birch is scarce here and it does not grow back, so light costs the same wood the iron will need.
  • 🔥 A fire keeps you warm. Light a hearth indoors — in a turf house, or under any roof you have built — and the cold stops costing you food altogether. Out in a December storm a full food bar empties in about 25 minutes; sitting by your own fire it is back to the full hour.
    • It has to be under a roof. A campfire in open weather is a campfire in a gale, and it does not help. The walls and the roof do most of the work already; the fire does the rest.
    • And it has to be in the room you are standing in. A fire on the far side of a wall is somebody else’s fire.

Fixed

  • 🕳️ Putting up a torch no longer punches a hole in the ground. Standing one on a block made that block's top disappear, and fixing one to a wall did the same to the ground in front of it — you could see straight through the world. 🎯 haugur found it in the first minute: *"if placed on wall the ground infront falls away, if placed on ground the top of block falls away."*
  • 🔦 And a torch is made of wood again, on all four sides. The first ones came out white on top and black down the sides — and then, once that was fixed, two of the four sides were still missing, so walking round a torch showed you the inside of it. 🎯 haugur: *"if i put a kyndill on the ground and spin around it, 2 faces of it are transparent."* Both were one-line mistakes in how the post was built, and both are now caught by tests.

Added

  • 🔥 The hearth has a menu. Right-click a hearth with an empty hand and it opens: two slots for the wood that burns, four for the charcoal it makes, with your own pack and belt underneath so you can drag things in and out with the mouse. A hearth is now somewhere to keep your charcoal, not only somewhere to make it. 🎯 haugur asked for exactly this: *"i would also want to be able to move wood and chacoal from my onhand inventory with the mouse, that adds the role of charcoal storage to the heath."*
    • You have to walk to it. The menu opens only at the hearth, never from the pack. 🎯 haugur: *"there is no need for players to walk to hearth or smíðabekkur, these menus should only be available if you interact with these items."*
    • The wood slots take wood and the charcoal slots take charcoal, so nothing has to tell you off — the wrong thing simply will not go in.
    • 🔴 Right-clicking a hearth no longer tips everything into your pack. That was a stop-gap from before the menu existed, and it is gone.
    • 🐛 Charcoal had never had a picture. It showed as a bare number in every slot that held it, anywhere in the game. Fixed.

Changed

  • 🔨 The crafting list you get from E now shows only what your hands can make. It used to also list the things that need a smíðabekkur, greyed out with *"Needs a Smíðabekkur"* under them. Right-click the bench and you get the bench's own list, exactly as before. 🎯 haugur: *"only hand, and smíðabekkur show its menu and same for hearth."* A station's menu belongs to the station.
    • What you lose, said plainly: nothing now tells you that eldstæði exists until you are standing at a bench.
  • 🔍 The bars, the slots and the pack are much bigger on a big screen. They used to be drawn at one fixed size no matter what you played on, so the larger your monitor the smaller everything looked. Now the game works out how much to enlarge them from the size of your window — on a 2560 × 1440 screen everything is drawn 1.75 times bigger, and the row of ten slots along the bottom covers a third of the width instead of a fifth. 🎯 haugur asked for it: *"they may be alot bigger, they are small, images are small and text is hard to read."*
    • Nothing was redrawn — it is the same picture, enlarged, so the numbers, the item pictures and the small labels all grow together.
    • A small screen is unaffected. The game never draws anything smaller than it used to.

Added

  • 🔥 You can see the fire now. Flames stand up out of a lit hearth — real ones, that move and never repeat themselves.
  • 🪨 And the hearth is low. It was a full cube, which was always wrong: it is now a quarter of a metre, a ring of stones on the ground that you look down at rather than a block you look at. You step onto it without jumping.
    • It still gives off no light. The flames brighten what is behind them and light nothing around them. That is the next big piece of work.
    • And no smoke yet.
  • 🔥 The hearth burns. Put a birch log in it and it lights — just click it while you are holding one. No flint, no fire steel, nothing else needed.
    • 🪵 One log burns for about five minutes and leaves one piece of charcoal behind, which stays in the hearth until you come and get it. A long December night takes about four logs.
    • ⚫ Charcoal will not burn in it. Try, and it tells you so on screen: the fire takes wood only. The charcoal is for other things later.
    • ✋ Click the hearth with an empty hand to take everything out of it.
    • It still does not give off any light, and it will not keep you warm yet. Those are the next pieces of work. Nothing can kill you yet either, and that stays true until the fire really does warm you.
    • ✅ Breaking a hearth gives you back everything inside it — the wood, the charcoal and the hearth itself. This line said the opposite until 2026-08-28, and it was wrong: it was written before the hearth learned to hand its contents back the same day, and never corrected.
  • 🔨 The workbench looks like a workbench. It had a hammer put on the lid and a saw down the sides, so you can tell what it is from across the room instead of it looking like a stack of planks.
  • 🖱️ Clicking a workbench always opens it now, even with something in your hand. So you can no longer build a block by aiming at the bench itself — aim at the ground beside it.
  • 🔨 You can make things now. Press E and the pack has a second page, Craft. It lists what you can make, with a little picture of what each one is made of — four boards in a square for the workbench, four stones round a log for the hearth.
    • 🔴 It tells you what you are missing. A recipe you cannot make yet is still on the list, greyed, saying "You need 2 more stone" — so you know what to go and find instead of clicking something that does nothing.
    • 🪵 The workbench is 4 wood and you can make it with your bare hands. Everything else needs the bench: walk up to one and click it, and the crafting page opens with more on it.
    • 🔥 The hearth is 4 stone and 1 wood, at the bench.
    • The hearth still does nothing once you put it down — no light, no warmth, nothing burns. That is the next piece of work, not an oversight.

Changed

  • 🛣️ The roads are real surfaces now, not flat grey. Reykjanesbraut runs through the world, and until today it was a plain colour you walked over without noticing.
    • The motorway is dark asphalt with pale chips of stone in it — the basalt our roads are actually made of.
    • A street is paler, older and cracked, so you can tell a street from a motorway at a glance. That was the whole point: two roads that look the same are one road.
    • A gravel road is crushed grey basalt, the kind you drive inland on.
  • ♨️ Geothermal clay — the hot orange ground you get around hot springs — has its picture too. It is hot, but nothing bad happens if you stand on it yet. Whether it should burn you has not been decided.
  • 🎨 The ground looks like Iceland now. Almost every block you walk on has been redrawn from a real photograph instead of being built out of coloured dots. Twenty-one of the thirty-four blocks are done. The moss, the lava, the gravel, the mire, the sand, the birch wood and the turf all changed, and they were redrawn one at a time with haugur choosing each one.
    • ❄️ Glaciers have a face at last. White ice with fine blue cracks across the top, and grit frozen into the sides — the ash our own volcanoes put there. It is the brightest thing in the game, which is how a glacier should be.
    • 🌊 The water is bluer. ⬜ It is still not see-through. That is not a picture we can draw — the game has to learn to look *through* a block, and that work has not been done yet.
    • 🌸 The heath was redrawn from two photographs haugur took. It took a dozen attempts before it stopped looking like a carpet.
    • 🪵 Birch trunks are pale grey, nearly silver — never brown. A brown trunk is a tree from another country.
    • 🍂 The leaves never turn orange, on purpose. The calendar in the game is the real one, so autumn colours would be wrong for nine months of the year.
  • 🐛 Two blocks had a white stripe round them and nobody had noticed. The grass and the scrub had been carrying it for twelve days. It happened because the sky had crept into the edge of the photograph they were drawn from. Both are fixed, and there is now a check that refuses a picture with the sky in it before anyone sees it.

Added

  • 🥶 The cold can hurt you now, and the weather has stopped being scenery. Real Icelandic weather has been in the game for weeks and has never once mattered. Now standing out in it costs you food:
    • ⏱️ A full food bar lasts about an hour when you are comfortable, and about 25 minutes standing out in the worst weather. It never slows you down, never stops you building and never takes the controls away. It just makes you hungry faster. You can always walk out into the storm — you just have to have eaten.
    • 🏠 Where you stand is most of it. Open ground costs the most. Get behind a wall and the wind stops costing you. Get properly indoors and most of the cold goes too.
    • 🎯 **And it is the *right* wall.** The game knows which way the wind is blowing today, so the sheltered side of a rock changes when the weather does.
    • 🌡️ The cold starts at frost, not at every chilly day — Iceland averages about 5 °C, and being cold half the year with no coat and no fire would just be miserable.
    • 💬 The screen says why, under the bars: Berskjaldaður — exposed — and which of frost and wind is doing it.
  • Two things you cannot do anything about yet, on purpose. There is no fire to sit by — a fire indoors will switch the cold off completely, and it is built and waiting for the campfire. And there are no clothes — wool will buy you a great deal and will never make you immune.
  • Rain and snow still cost you nothing. They should, but you cannot yet *see* rain falling or snow lying, and being made cold by something invisible would be unfair. It is one number away on the day they are drawn.

Added

  • 🏠 The game knows when you are indoors. Until today nothing in it could answer *"is there sky above you"* — and that is the question the cold has been waiting on. There is now a Shelter line on the readout card, and it says one of four things:
    • Á bersvæði — open ground. Nothing between you and the weather.
    • Í vari — behind a wall. 🎯 **And it is the *right* wall**: the game knows which way the wind is blowing today, so the sheltered side of a rock changes when the weather does.
    • Inni — indoors. A roof over you and no way out to the sky nearby.
    • Inni við eld — indoors by a fire. You cannot reach this one yet, because there is no fire in the game to sit by. It is built and waiting.
  • Nothing costs you anything yet. The cold does not bite, and shelter buys you nothing — this is the groundwork, and the cold itself is the next thing. A birch tree is not shelter, by the way: standing under scrub with holes in it does not keep an Icelandic wind off you.

Added

  • 🍖 The two bars on the screen have started moving. They have been drawn since Tuesday and stuck at full, which looks exactly like a broken game. Now:
    • ⏱️ Time makes you hungry. The food bar falls steadily whether you are building or standing still — from full to empty in about an hour of play. It does not drain faster when you work: this is a game about building, and a meter that punishes you for building is not wanted.
    • ❤️ Food is what buys your health back. Hurt and fed, and your health climbs while the food bar pays for it, one point for one. Hurt and hungry, and it does not.
    • 🔴 Nothing can kill you yet, and that is on purpose. An empty stomach takes your health down to 1 % and stops there. Dying will arrive with the hearth — because dying costs you everything you are carrying, and there is nowhere in the world yet where your things are safe.
    • 💬 The screen says why, under the bars: Svangur (hungry), Sveltandi (nothing left to eat), Að ná sér (getting better).
  • 🍇 You can pick berries. Point at the lyng — the heath, which is about a quarter of the ground — and right-click. You get a krækiber or a bláber, and the heath is left where it is. Then right-click while holding it to eat it: ten berries takes you from empty to full.
    • A patch you have picked needs about five minutes before it bears again. Walk on to the next one — that is what berry picking is.
    • They can be picked in any season for now. They should only grow from midsummer to autumn, and they will; a season would have meant nothing to pick and nothing to test until the calendar came round.
    • Berries are a start, not the food. Fish is meant to be what you actually live on, and the berries in the real record were a supplement, never a staple.
  • 📖 A guide chapter on breaking, carrying and the pack. The site's Guide had three chapters about time, weather and the northern lights, and nothing at all about the things you actually do. It leads the Guide now, and it starts with the part everybody gets wrong: *hold* the mouse button to break something, do not click it.

Added

  • 🖐️ Your hand goes dark at night. It used to stay bright whatever the sky was doing, so at three in the morning it was the brightest thing on screen. It now takes the light of wherever you are standing.
    • It never goes completely black, even on the darkest winter night — a hand you cannot see at all looks like a hand that failed to draw.
  • 🗑️ You can throw things away. Pick a stack up in the pack and put it on the Henda mark at the bottom right, and it is gone. The game says what it threw away, so you always know.
    • 🔴 There is no undo. That is why it takes two deliberate steps — pick it up, then carry it across the panel — and why the mark sits well away from every slot, where a slip of the mouse cannot reach it.
    • It works on anything, including a stack you are wearing.
    • Nothing lands on the ground. There is nowhere for it to land: this world has nothing in it but blocks. What you throw away is destroyed.
  • 👕 The pack now has four slots for what you are wearing — a húfa on your head, a peysa, buxur and skór, in a row of their own under the ten in your hands. Each empty slot carries a faint outline of the garment that belongs in it, so you can tell the hat slot from the shoe slot at a glance.
    • There is nothing to put in them yet, and that is expected. No wool, no vaðmál and nothing woven from either exists in the game. The clothes arrive with the cold, which is the last big system still to be built — this is the place they will go.
    • Nothing you mine can land in them. A full pack is still a full pack at thirty-four slots; the four on your body are not extra carrying space.
  • 🎒 Press E and the pack opens — and you can move things around in it. Twenty-four more slots above the ten you carry in your hands, and the mouse moves anything between them, either way.
    • Click a slot to pick the whole stack up, then click another to put it down. Right-click picks up half, which is how you split a stack.
    • Click the slot it came from, or anywhere off the panel, to put it back. Nothing moves until you put it down somewhere.
    • Drop a stack onto the same thing and the two join up. Drop it onto something different and the two swap places.
    • E or Esc closes it, and the mouse goes back to turning your head.
    • The world waits while the pack is open. Walking and flying stop, and the ground behind the panel is dimmed to say so.
    • You must be signed in for it to be kept, exactly as before. Without an account the pack is emptied when you close the page.

Added

  • 🎒 You have a pack, and what you break goes into it. Ten slots along the bottom of the screen for what is in your hands, and the block you just mined lands in the first free one. Each slot shows a small picture of the block, its name, and how many you have.
    • Choose a slot with the number keys 1 to 0, or step along with Tab. Whatever is in the chosen slot is what you are holding, and what you place.
    • When the pack is full the block stays in the ground. You cannot mine any more of it until you make room — it does not drop on the floor to be lost.
    • Most of the landscape is worth carrying now — stone, sand, gravel, turf, heather, scrub, leaves, ice, even the road surfaces. A few things give you nothing, and water cannot be carried at all.
    • You must be signed in for your pack to be kept. Playing without an account works, but everything you gather is gone when you close the page.
  • 🎮 The screen now tells you how you are. Two bars above the slots — one for health and one for food — and a gauge below them for cold and heat. They do not move yet. Nothing can hurt you, nothing makes you hungry and the weather does not reach you, so they sit full and comfortable. The dials are built before the machinery on purpose, so the machinery has somewhere to arrive.

Changed

  • 🔴 Building is no longer free — you build with what you have gathered. Until now you could place any block, anywhere, for nothing. Now a block comes out of your pack, and when the pack has none of it you cannot place it.
    • This takes away something you had, and it is deliberate. Placing that costs nothing makes building a doodle rather than a decision: you never have to go and find anything, and nothing you gather is worth keeping.
    • What you break is what you can build with. Mine móberg and you can place móberg.
    • Middle click now picks the slot holding what you are looking at, instead of handing you the material. If you have none of it, it says so.
  • ⛏️ Breaking a block is a hold now, not a click. Press and keep the button down: a pale box closes in on the block to show how far along you are, and your hand swings while you work. Hard stone takes longer than a bush — móberg about four seconds, a birch trunk three and a half, scrub barely a third of a second.

Changed

  • 🗺️ The hillsides no longer look like a map.
    • Seen from the air, the land used to be covered in flat bands that followed the height of the ground — exactly the contour lines on a printed map. They were real: the ground is built a metre at a time, so it had to step, and every step lined up with a contour.
    • The elevation data we build Iceland from only sees the land every ten metres, so anything smaller than that is simply not in it. Iceland's ground is lumpy at arm's length; the data cannot know that.
    • So the land now carries its own fine lumps and gentle swells, and the bands have broken up.
    • Everything anyone had built was removed by this change, which was agreed beforehand — the ground itself moved, so a wall built on the old ground would have ended up floating or buried. Roads, houses and water were left exactly where they were.
    • Known and not finished: close up, the ground now reads as square patches on a regular grid rather than as natural hummocks. It is being left that way for the moment on purpose, to be looked at properly.

Changed

  • 🌳 The trees are not flat on top any more.
    • About two big birches in five now carry a little more foliage above the crown, so a wood has a skyline instead of everything ending at the same height.
    • Only the big ones. The small shrubby birches are unchanged.
    • The trees around you have changed shape, so a wood you know will look a bit different. Nothing you built has moved — the ground is exactly as it was, and the trees only ever gained leaves, never lost any.
  • 🍃 The birch trees have leaves instead of green boxes.
    • You can see through a crown now — sky and branches show through the gaps, and the edge of a tree is ragged rather than a clean cube.
    • It was never the picture that was wrong. A crown was drawn as one sealed box, so there was nowhere for a leaf to be. The tree was hiding itself from the inside.
    • How thick the foliage is, is a single number we can change, so if the crowns want to be airier or denser that is a small adjustment.
    • Nothing in the world moved. Trees are standing exactly where they were, and anything you have built is untouched.

Changed

  • 🎨 The ground looks like something now.
    • Ten blocks have real textures instead of generated speckle: the moss-on-lava the town is built on, heath, the birch wood floor, grass, gravel, móberg, raw lava, grágrýti, and the birch trunk — which now has proper silver bark on its sides and growth rings on the cut end, like a log should.
    • Blocks are drawn at four times the detail they were. Still hard pixels, still unmistakably blocks — just far more in each one, the way a texture pack changes Minecraft without changing what it is.
    • The world's colours shifted with them. The old colours came from a map legend, chosen to be readable on a printed map. These come from the pictures, so moss-on-lava is dark olive on near-black rock rather than pale green — which is what it actually looks like.

Added

  • 🌌 Norðurljós — the northern lights are in the sky.
    • They read the real geomagnetic record for whichever real year your world drew, so the aurora on a game night is the one that really happened on that date — the same idea as the weather.
    • You need three things at once, exactly as in real life: a dark sky, a clear one, and an active sun. Miss any of them and there is nothing to see — which is why there are no northern lights in June.
    • A quiet night still shows a low green band in the north; a strong one fills the sky with rays and gets a purple edge along the top.
    • Cloud hides them completely — unlike the sun and the moon, which stay faintly visible so you can tell where they are. The aurora is far above the weather, so there is nothing to see through an overcast sky.
    • 🌌 They cross the sky. The lights come up from one horizon, arch over and run away to the other — and they snake as they go, rather than sitting in a fixed arc. On a quiet night the arch is low in the north; on a strong one it passes almost straight overhead.
    • 🎬 Dev Tools → Norðurljós poses the best case in one click: a strong night, clear sky, no moon. The real sky obliges far less often.
    • The colours were measured from twenty photographs rather than invented.
    • The game now carries thirty years of the actual geomagnetic record (1996–2025), three-hourly, from the German research centre that publishes it. So on a game night playing 2017, the aurora will be the one that really happened on that date — the same idea as the weather, which already works this way.
    • How strong, how high and what colour is worked out from three things the game already knows: how dark it is, how cloudy it is, and how active the sun was. Miss any one of them and there is nothing to see — which is why you will never see the northern lights in June, exactly as in the real Iceland.
    • The colours were measured from twenty photographs rather than invented.
  • 🕐 The world has a clock, and the date is in the corner of the screen. A day in the game lasts 20 real minutes, on a calendar of 365 days that repeats. It starts on 25 May at six in the morning, and the date and time now sit at the top of the heads-up display.
    • The clock stops when nobody is playing. Come back after a fortnight away and the world is where you left it — not eighteen months older. It is one clock for everybody on the server, so you are all in the same day.
    • There is no year. The calendar comes round again and the seasons repeat. The game keeps a private count of days for itself, shown as Day among the smaller numbers, so it can still work out that a wood was cut long ago.
    • ✅ The sky follows the clock, and so does the weather. *(This said neither did. Both landed later the same day — see the sun and the weather entries above.)*
  • 🌟 The sky has things in it — stars, the sun and the moon.
    • The sun and the moon are up there where they really are, and you can find them by looking. Not detailed — a disc each — but the moon is drawn large enough that you can read its phase, which matters, because the phase is how much light you will get that night.
    • ⭐ Stars on a clear night, wheeling slowly round the north as the night passes. They are invented rather than real constellations.
    • 🌕 The moon lights the ground. A full moon on a clear night is enough to walk by; the light fades as the moon wanes, and cloud takes it away.
    • 🌑 And the dark is now real. The night used to be held artificially bright because there was nothing to see by. There is now — so a moonless, overcast night is very nearly black. Until there is fire to carry, a dark night is a night to wait out.
    • ☀️ You can still make out the sun through cloud, faintly, the way you can in Iceland. Stars you cannot — cloud hides those completely.
  • 🌇 Sunsets happen where the sun is. The warm colour now gathers around the sun and low down, instead of being spread evenly round the whole sky — which is what a sunset actually looks like, and was settled by photographing the same evening facing toward the sun and away from it.
  • ☀️ And an Icelandic summer night is light again. June and July were coming out as a dark red night; they are now what they should be — daylight almost round the clock, with a little colour near the horizon.
  • 🔴 Fixed: the sky had been stuck on one colour all along. The sky itself never changed with the weather or the time of day — it held whatever colour it had when the game loaded. The ground lighting *did* change, which is why it was hard to spot. Skies now go from a clear blue day through dusk to a dark night, as they were always meant to.
  • 🛠️ Dev Tools is tidier. Everything is now under World, Sky & light, Graphics and About, one open at a time — and there are two one-click scenes at the top: Perfect day and Winter night.
  • 📊 A status bar along the top of the window. The date and time, the weather, your height, your ISN93 coordinate and who you are now live in one strip across the top instead of in the card at the bottom left — and that card is five rows shorter for it.
    • The bar is not part of the game window. The world begins underneath it, so a click on the bar can never be mistaken for a click on the world. That is what makes it safe to put buttons up there later, and the right-hand side is deliberately left empty for them.
    • To use it while playing, push the mouse up. Once you are looking as far up as the view goes, keep pushing and the game hands the cursor back. Esc still does the same thing.
    • What stayed in the bottom card is everything about what is in front of you — the street, what you are standing on, what you are aiming at, what you are holding — plus the smaller diagnostic numbers.
    • The picture is about 34 pixels shorter, which is the cost of the bar having its own space rather than floating over the world.
  • 🌦️ The sky now shows you the weather. The archive of real Icelandic observations was already loaded; from today it reaches your eyes rather than only the server's diagnostics.
    • A clear day is blue and a grey day is grey. The colours are not invented — every one of them was sampled from haugur's own photographs of the Icelandic sky. Overcast is the ordinary state and looks it; a clear sky is genuinely blue and, for the first time, is lighter toward the horizon than overhead, which is what the photographs show it doing.
    • ☁️ Þoka. When the record says the sky was obscured, fog closes in: the world goes flat pale grey and you can see a couple of hundred metres instead of most of a kilometre. Nothing is lost — it is still there when the fog lifts.
    • 🌧️ Rain darkens the sky. Nothing falls that you can see yet, so a darker sky is how a wet day announces itself.
    • ☀️ Sunshine has sharper shadows. A clear day moves light out of the sky and into the sun, so the world gains contrast rather than simply getting brighter.
    • A weather line in the corner, under the date: the temperature, the wind with its gust, and what the sky is doing in the ordinary Icelandic word for it — *heiðskírt*, *léttskýjað*, *hálfskýjað*, *skýjað*, *alskýjað*, *þoka*, *rigning*, *snjókoma*. Underneath, among the smaller numbers, which of the five weather regions you are standing in and which real year the world drew.
    • Two people standing far apart get different weather, because Iceland is five regions and it can gale in the Vestfirðir while the east is calm.
    • Snow still does not lie on the ground. The record knows how deep it was and the corner of the screen will tell you, but nothing settles yet — that needs a block half a metre tall, which is a separate piece of work.
    • The weather changes gradually rather than at a step. The observations are three hours apart; the sky walks between them over about half a minute instead of jumping.
  • 📖 A guide chapter explaining time — *Time, the Day and the Year*, in the Game Guide. Why a day is twenty minutes, why there is no year number, and why the clock stops when nobody is playing.
  • 🌅 The sun crosses the sky, and night falls. The sun now rises and sets where and when it really does in Iceland, and the light and the sky colour follow it down.
    • The sun is highest at about half past one, not at noon. That is not a mistake: Iceland keeps the same time all year while sitting a long way west, so midwinter sunrise really is around twenty past eleven.
    • In June you will barely see night. In December you get about three and a half minutes of daylight out of every twenty-minute day, and you will do most of your work in the dark.
    • The night sky colour was measured from photographs of real Icelandic nights rather than picked. It turns out to be the same blue as the day sky, a long way down.
    • The dark is not yet as dark as it should be. There is nothing to make light with — no torch, no fire — so night is held a little brighter than real until there is. *(This also said there was no weather and that the sky was overcast at all times. Both stopped being true later the same day.)*

Changed

  • 📖 The weather chapter has been restored, and this entry corrects itself. Earlier today this changelog said the guide had been wrong to describe a *different* real year each time the calendar comes round. That correction was itself the mistake. The game really will draw a new real Icelandic year every game year — thirty-five of them, shuffled, so no year returns until all the others have had their turn. Some summers are kind and some are harðindaár, exactly as the chapter always said.

Added

  • 📖 There is a Guide on the website now. A new Guide link in the header, and the first chapter is up: Weather and the Year.
    • It explains the thing that surprises people most — the weather in this game really happened. It comes from Veðurstofa Íslands' own measurements, at a station about a kilometre and a half from where you start.
    • It also covers what the Icelandic year does to you: seventeen and a half minutes of daylight at midsummer, three and a half at midwinter, why a day is twenty minutes, and why some years are kind and some are harðindaár — hard years.
    • There is a section on Blíða, if you would rather build in the sunshine and skip all of that.
    • The game does not do all of this yet. The chapter describes how the world is designed to work, and it is here first so the design can be read and argued with before it is built.

Changed

  • 🌿 You can look at a bush, and cut it. The crosshair used to pass straight through kjarr and report the ground underneath, so the HUD said *Birkiskógur* while you were plainly pointing at scrub. It now stops at the bush, names it, and left click cuts it. Placing a block where scrub is replaces the scrub instead of stacking on top of it.
    • The sea still lets the crosshair through, deliberately — otherwise you could never reach the seabed.
  • 🏷️ **The ground of birch country is now called *Kjarrlendi*, not *Birkiskógur*.** It was named after the forest back when one block had to *be* the whole forest. The wood is now the ground plus the scrub plus the trees, so the floor gets its own name — and kjarr growing on kjarrlendi reads correctly in both directions. In English it is Birch scrubland.
  • 🌾 There was far too much birch, and it has been thinned to about a fifth. The habitat map was being read wrongly. It marks a third of this ground as *birkiskógur*, and we took that to mean a third of it has trees on it. It does not: Náttúrufræðistofnun's class is **"birkiskógur *og kjarr*", defined as low, discontinuous woodland and scrub with a sparse canopy** — a patch of it is birch *country*, not a patch of trees.
    • haugur caught this with a camera, not a computer. Six recent photographs of Straumsvík — lava, moss, dead grass and *"hardly any trees"* — against a world claiming a third of that same ground was woodland.
    • The trees are also lower. A full-grown one is now 3 m and a young one 2 m, down from 4 and 3. NÍ's own wording is *"hæstu tré >1m"* — the *tallest* clear a metre. On this lava coast a four-metre birch should be rare, not ordinary.
    • One big tree per 32 × 32 m now, instead of nine.
    • ✅ Your builds are untouched again. The places you have already been keep their exact ground and simply get the new, thinner planting — checked by a test that strips the plants out of the old and new worlds and proves the ground underneath is identical.

Added

  • 🌳 There are trees. A third of the world is birch woodland — birkiskógur — and until now nothing stood in it, which is why everything looked like a lawn stretching to the horizon. Now birch grows there: low kjarr scrub you walk straight through, small trees about 3 m tall, and full-grown ones about 4 m.
    • They are Icelandic birch, not Minecraft trees. Real kjarr is 2–4 m and bent by the wind, so a full-grown one here is three metres of trunk and a small crown — nothing like the big oaks of other games.
    • The trunks are pale, almost silver, which is the most recognisable thing about Icelandic birch and the thing that makes a wood look like a wood.
    • No two trees are the same. Each crown is thinned differently, so a stand of birch does not look like rows of identical furniture.
    • About one column in ten carries a tree, the rest scrub or open ground. haugur picked that from two pictures of the same 20 metres side by side — the denser version he first asked for turned out to be a solid roof of leaves you could not see through.
    • 🍂 Autumn gold and red are not in yet, but the leaf colour is kept somewhere that makes them cheap to add.
  • The ground under a birch wood is greener and lighter than it was. It used to be the colour of birch scrub *seen from far away*, because there was no scrub to see. Now that the scrub is a real thing standing on the ground, the ground is what is actually underneath a birch wood: grass, low herbs and fallen twigs.

Changed

  • 🌳 The world has been regenerated (worldgen 14), and the places you had already built now get trees too. Trees are new terrain, so at first the patches you had touched kept their old treeless ground — square bare lawns sitting in the middle of a wood. They have been brought forward, and nothing you built was given up to do it. Every block you placed is exactly where you put it; only the ground around it caught up.
    • This was safe only because the new version adds trees and changes no ground at all, which is checked by a test rather than assumed. The next time the world changes it may not be safe, and then the old ground stays — that protection is what stops terrain moving underneath a house.
  • 🌿 Kjarr lies flat to the ground, as it does in real life. Birch scrub was a full metre-tall cube, which made a quarter of the world look like a raised plateau. It is now 25 cm — a low mat you walk straight over.
    • This is the first thing in the game that is not a whole cube, and it needed real work underneath: a short block no longer hides the side of the block next to it, so terrace edges and tree trunks stay visible instead of getting holes punched in them.
    • ❄️ It is also how snow will work when weather arrives — light snow a few centimetres deep, deeper snow in stages, exactly the way Minecraft does it.
  • 🔍 Dev Tools can now turn off one piece of the picture at a time. A new What is crawling section switches off the block textures, the corner shading, the per-block brightness, and the new distance fade — one by one, with no reload. It is there so the far-away ground that boils and speckles on a Windows machine can be pinned on the thing actually causing it, by the only person who can see it happen.
    • A Mip level dropdown pins the texture to one level of detail. Level 4 is a single flat colour with nothing left in it that could shimmer, so if the ground still crawls at level 4, the texture is innocent.
  • 🧱 The ground has texture. Blocks look like things now, not like shades. Every block is drawn from a small picture instead of one flat colour, so you can see moss cushions, bare stone, crowberry clumps, grass, dead birch twigs and the grain in rock.
    • Moss-grown lava shows soft moss on top with black lava breaking through, and a band of moss spilling over the edge onto the rock below. That band is 6 pixels deep because the real moss mat is 38 cm deep — it is a measurement, not a border.
    • Heath is drawn from the actual plant survey of that habitat: 42% moss, 12% crowberry, 14% bare stone, 5.6% pale lichen. The picture *is* the research.
    • Móberg is speckled with dark basalt lumps in a paler matrix, the same on all six sides — which is how you tell rock from anything growing at a glance.
    • The sea is deliberately almost featureless. The Atlantic under Icelandic cloud is, and a strong repeating ripple across a seventh of the world would look like a tiled floor.
    • Nobody painted any of this. The pictures are built from numbers in a data file, so "fewer crowberry clumps" is a number you change, not a drawing you redo.
  • 🌾 Distant ground is no longer one flat sheet. Every block is now very slightly lighter or darker than its neighbours — under a tenth either way, fixed for each spot in the world so a block never changes when you look away. A hillside used to be one unbroken colour; a texture cannot fix that, because beyond about 100 metres the texture is smaller than a pixel on your screen.
  • 🪨 Blocks can have a different top and sides — ground now sits on something. Moss-grown lava is the case that shows why: it *is* moss growing on lava, so the top is the soft grey-green of the moss and the sides are the near-black basalt underneath. Walk up a step and you can see what the ground is made of, the same way a Minecraft grass block shows soil under the grass. Heath and birch woodland get their own volcanic soil underneath too. Móberg is deliberately the same on every face — rock is the same stuff all the way through, and that sameness is what makes it recognisable at a glance among everything that grows.
  • 🌑 Corners and edges are visible now — the world has depth. Every place blocks meet is gently darkened, the way a real corner is: light reaches the middle of an open field easily and the inside of a notch hardly at all. Until now a hillside was one unbroken sheet of colour with nothing to tell you where one block ended and the next began, and the 1 m terrace steps in gentle ground were invisible. Anything you build gains its own shading too — a wall now reads as a wall rather than a flat shape, and the ground beside it darkens where it meets. It costs nothing in frame rate: it is one number per corner, worked out when the ground is first drawn.

Fixed

  • 🖥️ The info panel no longer swells across the screen when you start playing. The list of controls lived inside the panel, and the panel sized itself to fit its widest line — so clicking into the game turned a small corner card into a slab most of the screen wide, dragging eleven rows of numbers up in size with it. The controls are now one thin line along the bottom, and they fade away after nine seconds once you are playing. They come back whenever they have something different to say — switching between walking and flying, or letting go of the mouse. haugur's report.
  • ✅ The far landscape is fixed. Blocks were drawing each other's textures. Every block face has to say which picture to draw — móberg, moss, sand. That number travelled to the graphics card as a *decimal* rather than a whole number, picked up a tiny rounding error on the way, and was then rounded down: a face meant to say 30 arriving as 29.999998 drew block 29's texture instead. The result was whole faces wearing the wrong material, scattered across the view and worst where blocks are small and far away. It now rounds to the nearest whole number.
    • This is why turning the render scale up never helped. Drawing more pixels cannot rescue pixels that are fetching the wrong picture; it just averages more wrong ones.
    • ✅ Confirmed on the machine it was worst on — an RTX 3050 laptop — 2026-08-07.
  • 🌄 Far-away ground settles instead of fizzing. Corner shading and the small per-block brightness difference are carried by the shape of the world rather than by a picture, so nothing smooths them out once a block gets small on screen. Both now ease off between 60 m and 200 m. Close up, nothing changes, and it can be switched off in Dev Tools. haugur's call, having looked at both: leave it on — it makes a small difference at long range.
  • The entry below claimed this was already fixed on 2026-08-07, and it was not. Left here rather than deleted, because a changelog that quietly removes a claim it got wrong is worse than one that corrects it. Original text follows.
  • ✨ Distant ground no longer crawls and shimmers. Looking across the landscape, the far ground was a mess of moving speckle. Two causes, and the second one is the interesting one:
    • The textures had too much fine random speckle in them — the finest detail a picture can hold, which is the worst possible thing to look at from far away. Halved.
    • Asking for sharp Minecraft-style pixels up close switches off the smoothing that keeps distant ground steady. They are one setting, not two, so it is a genuine either/or — and there is now a switch in Dev Tools to try both, plus a render scale which is the same trick a Retina screen does for free. That is why the same build looked fine on a MacBook and bad on a much more powerful Windows laptop: the Mac was hiding it, not avoiding it.
  • 💡 The shadowed side of things is no longer black. Anything facing away from the sun — a wall, the side of a hill, the móberg letters somebody built on the lava — was coming out as a flat black cut-out, and the world as a whole was too dark to play in comfortably. The cause: the only light that reached a surface facing away from the sun was a single flat glow that treated every surface identically, which is nothing like standing outdoors. Outside, a wall in shadow is lit by the whole sky, and on an Icelandic overcast day that is the brightest thing there is. The sky now lights the world as well as sitting behind it — so changing the sky's colour changes the colour of the light too. The daylight you now get is haugur's own setting, found by dragging the sliders until it looked right, and it is a starting point rather than a final answer — the world it was judged against is still almost empty, and light is judged by what it falls on.
  • 🌅 There is a sky. There genuinely was not one before — the world was drawn against black, while distant terrain faded toward a pale blue-grey, and those two meeting along a hard line is why the horizon looked like a cut-out in every screenshot. The sky and the far distance are now the same colour, so the land fades into it instead of stopping dead.
  • 🎨 The ground has its colours back. Every surface in the world was arriving on screen bleached and far too pale — birch woodland, heather, moss-grown lava and the sea all turned up as more or less the same washed-out green-white, and telling one from another by eye was genuinely hard. They were the right colours the whole time. Something between the palette and the screen was brightening every one of them until it ran out of room and went white: moss-grown lava was authored as a soft grey-green and was reaching you as pure white. The world now looks the colour it was designed to be.

Changed

  • 🎨 The ground is a different colour — all of it. The old colours were guesses. These come from haugur's own photographs of the real places, and three of them were plainly wrong:
    • Birch scrub was too green. Icelandic kjarr seen from a distance is olive, not leaf-green — small leaves, grey bark and bare ground showing through. It is now olive, and that alone changes how most of the world looks.
    • Lyng was too colourful. And it turns out lyng is mostly moss — Náttúrufræðistofnun's own figures for this habitat are 42% moss against 12% crowberry. The biggest part of our heath block is not heather at all.
    • The sea was far too bright and blue. The North Atlantic under Icelandic cloud is dark grey-green.
    • Sand and gravel were far too pale — they were the colour of quartz beach sand, and Icelandic sand is ground-up black basalt.
    • Móberg is lighter, so you can tell it apart from the ground you build on. It was almost exactly the same brightness as birch woodland before, which is a real problem for a block you build with.
  • 🌍 THE WORLD HAS MOVED. It is no longer central Hafnarfjörður. It is now Hraunin, the lava coast west of Straumsvík — the same size, about 1.4 × 1.15 km, eight kilometres down the shore. Everything is different: every hill, every stretch of coast, every block.
    • Why: the game's first level is Landnám, Iceland as it was at settlement. The old area was three-quarters town and had almost no birch — nothing of the landscape the settlers actually arrived in. You cannot build a settlement-era world on top of a modern one.
    • The new ground is what Landnám needs: about a third birch woodland, another third lava — the heather-and-moss kind — and a real coastline with a shore, which matters because driftwood is the settlers' main timber and fish their main food.
    • There are no houses or streets in it at all, apart from Reykjanesbraut running through, which will be taken out for the settler world.
    • Four old place names are in there: Hraunsnes, Markaklettur, Skógarhóll and Stóri-Grænhóll.
    • Hafnarfjörður is not gone — the town, Urðarstígur 10 and Flensborgarskóli all still exist in the data and come back with the Abandoned world later. Nothing has been thrown away.
    • You now start in the middle of the new area, 379 m from the sea.

Added

  • 🔲 The block you are looking at is outlined. A thin dark box, the same idea as Minecraft's — so you can see exactly which block a click will hit instead of guessing.
    • It matters more here than it does in Minecraft: our ground is one flat colour per landscape type, so a birch hillside is an unbroken field of the same green and neighbouring blocks are genuinely hard to tell apart by eye.
    • It appears whether or not you are able to build, because "what am I pointing at" is worth knowing either way.
  • 💾 The world is saved. What you build stays there — through a restart, through a redeploy, and for anyone else who walks past it afterwards.
    • Only the changes are stored, never the landscape. Iceland is reproduced from the national elevation data every time it is needed, which is the only reason a country at one metre per block fits anywhere at all.
    • Every block you place or break is recorded as yours, with the time.
    • The safeguard that matters: a patch of ground somebody has built on remembers which version of the world-builder made it, and is rebuilt with *that* one forever. Without this, improving the landscape would move the ground under everybody's houses — and it would do it silently. If the game is ever asked to rebuild such a patch with a version it no longer has, it now refuses and says so rather than guessing.
  • 👤 The game knows who you are. Press Play on your account page and the world opens signed in, with your name in the corner.
    • What you build is recorded as yours. That matters in a world two to ten people share: "who felled this wood?" is a real question, and it is far cheaper to record the answer from the start than to work it out later.
    • You can still walk around without signing in — you simply cannot change anything. The heads-up display says "Not signed in" rather than letting clicks do nothing.
    • The link the Play button opens carries a pass that is good for two minutes and one use, and the game removes it from the address bar the moment it reads it. Sharing that link with somebody gets them nothing.
  • ⛏️ You can build. Until now you could walk, fly and look, and that was all. Now the world is something you can change.
    • Left click breaks the block you are looking at. Right click places one. Middle click picks up whatever you are pointing at, so you can build with it — that is how you choose your material for now.
    • The heads-up display gained two lines: what you are looking at and what you are holding.
    • You can reach about six metres, which is six blocks — everything here is life-sized.
    • Everyone sees it. If two of you are playing, what one of you builds appears for the other straight away.
    • If the game refuses an edit it now says why on screen — "too far away", "there is already something there" — instead of doing nothing.
    • It is not saved yet. Everything built disappears when the server restarts. Saving is the next piece of work, and it is being built deliberately in this order so that nothing anyone cares about is at risk while the saving code is new.
    • Not in the flat debug view. Flat terrain is at a made-up height, so anything built there would be in the wrong place in the real world.
  • 🛠️ A Dev Tools window — press Shift+P. A place for the instruments that help build the world but are not part of playing it. It has three things to start with, and there will be more.
    • Go to a coordinate. Paste in two numbers and press Teleport. It takes Icelandic national-grid coordinates (355825 399796 — the pair the HUD shows you) *and* ordinary latitude and longitude copied off Google Maps or ja.is (64.0709, -21.9549). It works out which one you gave it and tells you what it understood before you press the button, so a misread is visible rather than mysterious. Icelandic decimal commas are fine too.
    • Search the whole of Iceland. Every address, land parcel, place name and building in the country — 637,431 of them. Type part of a street name, an örnefni, a landnúmer, or what a building is for, and press Go on any result to be taken there. You do not need Icelandic letters: typing urdarstigur finds Urðarstígur and thingvellir finds Þingvellir. It tolerates a typo, so reykjavikurvegr still finds Reykjavíkurvegur.
    • Filter what you are looking for — Allt · Heimilisföng · Byggingar · Landeignir · Örnefni. Searching a house otherwise returns the address, the house and the garage as three separate lines; pick Heimilisföng and you get just the address.
    • Every result says which town it is in — "Hverfisgata 3, Hafnarfjörður" and "Hverfisgata 3, Siglufjörður", so you can tell two streets with the same name apart. You can search by town too: hverfisgata siglufjörður.
    • The flat-terrain switch has moved here from the corner of the screen. G still works exactly as before.
  • You can now leave the world, and it will tell you. The world is still only central Hafnarfjörður, but the search covers the entire country — so it is one click to Akureyri, where there is no ground and none will arrive. A red banner across the top says so, because otherwise the screen simply goes empty, which looks identical to the game being broken.
  • 🏠 Urðarstígur 10 looks like Urðarstígur 10. haugur's own house now has its real colours — light grey corrugated steel walls, a black roof, and the dark grey cellar it sits on — and, for the first time, a roof shape: a proper gable with a ridge along the long wall, instead of a flat-topped box. And its garage is there. OpenStreetMap has never drawn that garage, so the world had no way to know it existed; the national property register does, and gives its size to the centimetre — 7.00 × 4.50 metres. It has been placed on the real plot, clear of the house, and comes out at exactly the 31.5 m² the register says. Both appear in the flat-terrain view (G) too.
  • Only this one house. Every other building on the street is still a plain grey box, deliberately: a building gets colour and a roof only once somebody has looked at the real one, so an unfinished building looks unfinished rather than looking finished and being wrong.
  • The roof is stepped, not smooth, because a roof made of one-metre cubes is a staircase — the same way Minecraft roofs are. And there are no window frames: at one metre per block a window surround is a single cube.
  • Urðarstígur has houses on it. Fifty-eight buildings now stand in the block around Urðarstígur — real ones, in their real places, at something close to their real sizes. Each is built from three sources at once: its outline is traced from aerial photographs by OpenStreetMap, its height and age and what it is made of come from the national property register at HMS, and the ground it stands on comes from the elevation model. Urðarstígur 10 — haugur's own house — comes out at 93 m², against 95 m² on the 1993 site plan. Thirty-seven of the fifty-eight heights are the register's own measurement rather than a guess. They appear in the flat-terrain view (G) as well as the normal one.
  • They are boxes, and they have no roofs. The heights are to the *eaves*, so every gabled house reads about one roof too short — Urðarstígur 10 stands 5 m where the drawings say about 7 m to the ridge. They are also all one grey. Twenty-three of them are a house and its garage sharing a single outline, so the garage comes out as tall as the house. This is a first look, not a finished street.

Changed

  • worldgenVersion is now 12. Urðarstígur 10 and its garage changed shape. Nothing else moved, and nothing is saved yet.
  • worldgenVersion is now 11. Terrain has changed under the Urðarstígur block: the ground beneath every one of those outlines is flattened to the building's base before the walls go up. Nothing is saved yet, so nothing can have been lost — but from here on a bump like this would move ground under anything built on it.
  • The front page of the site looks completely different. It is called *Kvöldvaka*, after the winter evening in the baðstofa when the work was done by lamplight and the stories were told — which is how every creature in this game reached us. The dark stays, and the northern lights and the stars stay, but the light in the room is now a lamp rather than a screen: a warm amber against a cold teal-black, instead of green on grey. A bergrisi — a rock-giant — now stands in the sky behind the headline, lit from below, with his iron staff and a puffin sitting on top of it. He is drawn by hand, in code, and the staff is not invented: *járnstaf í hendi* is in the 800-year-old source. The three boxed "features" have gone; the same three things are now a numbered list with room to breathe.

Added

  • The site finally has a typeface of its own. Headings are set in EB Garamond and everything else in Alegreya Sans, and both now come from our own server instead of from whatever happened to be installed on your computer — so the site looks the same on a phone, a Mac and a work laptop. Both were checked letter by letter for Icelandic: þ, ð, æ, ö and every accent. The headline face turned out to lose its *ð* and *þ* at its lightest weight on a dark background — *mýrarrauði* ended with a faded tail — so the file we ship simply does not contain that weight any more.
  • Four proposals for what the site should look like — palettes, typefaces and original artwork, side by side in one page you can open in a browser: Design/samples/00_directions.html. Nothing has been changed on the site yet. The darkness, the northern lights and the stars stay in all four; what differs is whether the site should feel like a cold document, a warm storybook, a flag, or a game. One of them draws the four landvættir — dreki, gammur, griðungur and bergrisi — as a mark each, one per quarter of the country, straight from the passage in *Heimskringla*.
  • An answer on the Icelandic flag and the coat of arms. We asked whether we could use them. The short version: the coat of arms is reserved by law to the state, and the flag cannot be our logo — but the flag's three official colours are ours to use, and so are the four landvættir themselves, because they are 800-year-old literature. So they are what the designs are built from.

Fixed

  • The faint grey text is gone from the front page. Nothing on it is set in a washed-out grey any more; where text needs to be quieter it is a different colour rather than a fainter one, and every colour on the page is comfortably readable. Measured, not guessed: the palest text is now 8.84:1 against the background, where 4.5:1 is the readable minimum and the old page went down to 1.98:1. The sign-in and registration pages have not been changed yet — that comes next.
  • The credits at the bottom of every page are readable. The Landmælingar Íslands and OpenStreetMap attributions are a condition of using their data, and they were set so faintly (1.98:1 and 2.75:1) that nobody could actually read them.
  • The menu no longer breaks apart on a phone. At phone width the top of the site was splitting words in half — "What's / New", "Sign / in". It now wraps onto a second line instead.
  • Some text on the site is too faint to read, particularly on the sign-in page where it sits over the northern lights. Measured rather than guessed: the palest grey currently in use comes out at 1.98:1 against the background, where 4.5:1 is the readable minimum. Now written down as a rule with numbers so it stops happening. Not yet corrected on the live site — that comes with whichever design is chosen.

Added

  • There is a website, and you have an account. https://staging.lofi.asgeir.is — sign in, see what has changed, and click through to the game. Accounts are invite-only: haugur gives you a code and you redeem it. No confirmation email arrives — the game has no post office — your account works the moment you make it, and if you forget the password haugur sets you a new one.
  • A staging world, separate from the one being worked on. https://play.staging.lofi.asgeir.is is a copy that only changes when something is ready, so the ground stops moving under you while you are standing on it.
  • The world got bigger — south, to take in Hamarinn and Flensborgarskóli. The test area is now 1,400 × 1,150 m instead of 1,400 × 950 m. The school standing on top of the rock is the most prominent thing in the town's skyline and it was 80 m outside the old edge, so there was no way to go and look at it. This is a worldgenVersion bump (8 → 9): terrain near the old southern edge is generated slightly differently, because water is fetched clipped to the world's bounds and those bounds moved. Nothing is built yet, so nothing moves underneath anything.
  • A switch that flattens the town, for checking the map. Press G, or click Flat terrain in the corner readout, and the ground goes completely flat while the streets, kerbs, pavements and water stay exactly where they are. Press it again to put the landscape back. You stay where you are standing — that is the point: stand on a lump, flip the switch, and see whether the lump was a building. If you were flying, you keep flying. The address bar follows the switch, so ?flat=1 still works and a reload comes back to the view you were looking at. It is the street plan of Hafnarfjörður with the landscape taken away, which makes it easy to see how the roads really line up. The harbour, the tjörn and Lækurinn stay visible as flat blue shapes. It is a debug view, not a change to the world — an orange banner says FLAT across the top so it can never be mistaken for the real terrain, and leaving the ?flat=1 off puts everything back. Nothing is generated differently for anyone else.
  • There is water. The sea fills the fjord and the harbour up to sea level, over a bed that shelves away from the shore rather than dropping off a cliff. The tjörn and Lækurinn are there too, sitting at the height of the ground around them. You can fall in — water is not solid.
  • Flying is faster, and builds up speed. The base speed is up from 28 to 36 m/s, and holding a direction for four seconds ramps you up to four times that over the next six — enough to cross the whole test area in about ten seconds. Let go and it resets. Hold Alt as well for more again. While flying, the readout shows the multiplier instead of telling you that you are standing on air.
  • The world is much bigger, and it now has edges you can find. The test area is central Hafnarfjörður — from the harbour in the west across to Hraun in the east, and from Hraunkambur in the north down to Flensborg. 1,440 m by 992 m. It takes in the harbour and Lækurinn, so there is water to look at once water exists.
  • You can see further, and choose how far. - and = change the view distance, from 64 m out to 768 m. The readout shows how far you are seeing and how much is still loading. Your choice is remembered.

Changed

  • The world now loads ahead of you and lets go behind you. Before, every piece of ground you had ever seen was kept for as long as the tab was open, so a long walk slowly ate the machine until it gave up. Ground you have left behind is now released.
  • Looking around is slower and steadier. Mouse look was fast enough that a normal flick of the wrist spun you most of the way round. It now turns about half as far for the same movement.
  • You can set your own mouse speed with the [ and ] keys — anywhere from a quarter of the standard speed to three times it. The setting is remembered the next time you visit.

Added

  • The block palette — all 73 vistgerðir habitat classes mapped to 20 block materials, including mýri (the only bog-iron source), birkiskógur (the only charcoal source) and mosahraun, the moss-grown lava Hafnarfjörður is built on. Generated from the real habitat data rather than hand-typed.
  • Terrain generation from the real elevation model. The generator turns Iceland's 10 m national DEM into 1 m blocks, interpolating the nine metres in between so hillsides are slopes rather than 10 m staircases.
  • The first real chunk of Hafnarfjörður exists. Generated from the national elevation and habitat data in 110 ms: ground climbing from 3.8 m at the harbour to 12.6 m inland, correctly identified as built-up town.
  • Terrain streams from the server to the browser. Nine chunks — 96 m × 96 m of real Hafnarfjörður — arrive in 440 ms and become 57,744 triangles of ground you could stand on, if there were legs yet.
  • 🎮 It is live at dev.lofi.asgeir.is. Real Hafnarfjörður, streamed and rendered.
  • You can walk around it. Mouse look, WASD, run, jump, and fly. The mouse wheel pulls the camera back so you can see the landscape from a distance.
  • Real Icelandic streets. Every road in the country — Strandgata, Reykjavíkurvegur, Austurgata — laid into the ground where it actually runs, with its name floating above it.
  • A readout showing where you are: the street you are on, your height above sea level, and your real Icelandic national-grid coordinates.

Fixed

  • The sea is no longer a hole in the world. Everything below sea level was never loaded at all, so the harbour was not flat ground — it was nothing, with the town floating beside it.
  • The view no longer turns upside down when you look straight up or straight down. Zoomed out, the camera swings opposite to where you are looking, so looking up sent it underground — and from below, the ground is invisible and the world looks inside out. The camera now stops at the ground instead of going through it.
  • A jumpy mouse no longer whips the view around. Some mice, and some ways of connecting to a machine, occasionally report one enormous movement. That used to be obeyed literally, in a single frame.
  • Config-file probes now return "not found" instead of a page. Within two minutes of the site going live, bots were scanning for configuration files. Nothing was exposed, but the server was answering politely enough to invite more; it now says nothing is there.
  • Development/00_Engineering_Standards.md — §7 worldgen versioning, §8 conventions
  • Planning/STATUS.md — live project state
  • D11: player guides are generated from the game's data files, so they cannot go stale. This file is hand-written because "what changed and why it matters" is not derivable from data.

Added — 2026-09-25 (night)

  • 🔪 You can make a knife — a hnífur. Two stones over a stick at the workbench.
  • 🐑 And kill a sheep with it. Strike it and it bolts; catch it and strike again. The third strike drops it — it falls onto its side, and meat and a sheepskin (gæra) go straight into your pack.
  • 🍂 The autumn is worth waiting for. Between 1 October and 1 December a sheep gives three of each instead of one — that is réttir, when the sheep come down from the hills fat after a summer of grazing.
  • 🥩 Cook the meat at a fire, the same as fish: raw meat fills you only to half, cooked meat all the way.
  • 🔒 Wild sheep and your own only. A sheep somebody else has carried home is theirs, and the game will say so — unless you carry it off. A sheep you pick up is yours. The *sauðaþjófur*, the sheep thief, is an old figure in Icelandic history.

Added — 2026-09-25 (evening)

  • 🐑 A sheep is solid now. You cannot walk through one any more — you stop against it the way you stop against a wall. 🎯 haugur: *"a sheep must block you."*
  • 🤏 Keep walking and it gives way. A sheep you push slowly moves out of your path, so a flock can never shut you in. You can nudge one along like this — but never through a fence or a wall, and never into the sea.
  • 🐑🐑 And sheep no longer stand inside each other. Two that bump now step apart.

Added — 2026-09-25 (later)

  • 🐑 You can SEE the sheep you are carrying now. It is in your arms on the screen, it takes the slot you had chosen in the row along the bottom, and the readout says A sheep — both arms instead of *empty-handed*. 🎯 haugur: *"there should be a sheep block in on hand inventory to show you that you have one, also Holding: in HUD says im empty hande even tho im carrying a sheep."*
  • 👀 And other people can see it too — a sheep held across the chest, on their body, not a label.
  • Your hands really are full while you carry one. You cannot break or place anything until you put the sheep down, and the game says so. That is new, and it follows from what the screen now shows: a sheep in the slot you would otherwise build from.

Added — 2026-09-17 (late evening — two more fish in the sea)

  • 🐟 There are three kinds of fish in the sea now, not one. The ufsi — saithe — is the small dark one with bright silver sides, and the lax — salmon — is the big silver one. 🎯 haugur chose both pictures out of four each.
  • 📏 They are different sizes on purpose, so a shoal looks mixed: an ufsi is a little smaller than a cod and a lax is a good deal bigger. You can tell which is which at a glance, and the big one is the one worth most.
  • 🐟 There are no more fish than before — the same number, shared between the three. So there is less cod than you have been seeing, which is how it was meant to be: the old amount was turned up for testing.
  • 🐠 A lax is the hardest to get near. It notices you from further off and runs further. Holding still still works on all three — that is the trick, and it is what fishing with a spear will be.
  • You still cannot catch any of them. The spear is next.

Changed — 2026-09-17 (the world should draw faster)

  • ⚡ The game builds the world about twice as fast. It was asking the same question about the same blocks millions of times over, the slow way; now it looks the answer up instantly. Nothing about the world looks different — it is exactly the same picture, built in half the time.
  • This may not be the whole of the stuttering when you fly somewhere new, and we will know when haugur flies in and presses F8. It is the first real measurement we have ever had of it.
  • 🐛 A bug report keeps everything you typed. Before, anything past the first eighty characters was quietly thrown away — so a report could end in the middle of a word.
  • ⏱️ And a bug report now remembers the last thirty seconds, not just the moment you pressed the key. Nobody presses F8 during the stutter; they press it just after.

Changed — 2026-09-17 (you come back where you were)

  • 📍 Closing the game and opening it again puts you back where you were standing. Until today it always put you at the same fixed spot, however far you had walked — so anybody testing something far from the start flew there again every single time.
  • Dying has NOT changed. You still wake at the last hearth you lit. That is what a hearth is for, and it is a different question from where you come back to.
  • 🐟 And the fish look right now. They are far narrower than they were — a real cod is about 10 cm across, not 31 — so they no longer read as two sheets of paper. They nose up and down when they climb or dive instead of sliding along flat. And they are redrawn every frame rather than ten times a second.

Changed — 2026-09-17 (the fish are alive)

  • 🐟 The fish in the sea are alive now. They turn, they keep out of the rocks, and — the part that took the most work — they notice you.
  • Until today every fish swam in a dead straight line, and every fifteen seconds it jumped back to where it started and did it again. It looked like a queue of fish going past. It was one fish, on a treadmill. 🎯 haugur, watching it: *"its a xerox copy of a picture of a cod floting in a sea that has no movement."*
  • 🎣 Wade towards them and they drift away. Stand still for a few seconds and they come back. 🔴 That is how you will catch one: patience, not speed.
  • 🐟 One fish in ten is braver than the rest and lets you get much closer. On a bad day that is the one you eat.
  • 👀 They look exactly as they did — the same photograph, the same shape. Everything that changed is about how they move.
  • Two things are missing on purpose, so they are not faults. Water does not slow you down yet, so you can still simply run a fish down; and there are fewer fish than there were, deliberately, until we have measured what they cost.

Changed — 2026-09-11 (decided)

  • 🌍 The world is going to be all of Iceland. Today it is 1,400 × 1,150 m of Hafnarfjörður; that stops being *the world* and becomes *where we started*. You will get around by teleporting, from the map you can already open.
  • ⬜ Where we have not designed a block yet, the ground will be plain grey — honestly saying *nobody has made this yet* rather than guessing at it.
  • Nothing has changed in the game yet. This is the plan, written down so it is not a conversation somebody has to remember. The first piece of work is the sea: the game knows where the water is only inside the box we started in.
  • ✅ That first piece is done — the game now knows where every coast, lake and river in Iceland is. You cannot see any difference yet, because you still cannot leave the box. It is the thing that was stopping the world from growing, not the growing itself.

Changed — 2026-09-15 (the lag)

  • 🗜️ 🔴 The world is sent compressed now. It never was — the game's own files were, and the *world* was not, which is an easy thing to believe you had already done. Measured at 131 to 1: a full view around you was about 31 MB and is now well under one. If you play on the same network as the server you will not notice this at all. It is for playing from somewhere else.
  • ⚡ 🔴 The world arrives far faster when you fly. The server used to make the ground one piece at a time, waiting for each before starting the next — and almost all of that time was spent *waiting* on other machines rather than doing anything. It now makes several at once while sending them in the same order as before, so the ground under your feet still arrives before the horizon.
  • 🧠 And it remembers sixteen times as much of the world. The patch it kept in memory was smaller than a third of what you can see at once, so flying across your own view threw it away as you went — and flying back was exactly as slow as flying out.
  • ⏱️ Your FPS readout now shows the worst frame, not just the average. 🎯 haugur: *"i get a little tearing and studdering… still my hud is telling me that im at 60fps."* He was right and the readout was wrong — an average hides the one slow frame you actually feel. It now reads 60 · worst 210 ms · 3 slow when there is something to report, and just the number when there is not.
  • 🧱 The Chunks row says how long each piece of world is taking to arrive, which is the difference between *your connection is slow* and *the server is thinking*.
  • 🐛 A bug report sent with F8 now carries both of those, so *"the game is laggy"* arrives with the numbers behind it. You never have to read anything off your screen and type it in.

Fixed — 2026-09-15 (the rivers, again)

  • 🪜 The staircase came back at Gullfoss, and is gone again. The rule that decides where a river steps down was asking the question at a single point, and in a braided stretch that answers wrongly. The whole river decides once now. 🎯 haugur spotted it within an hour.
  • 🪨 Specks of ground no longer poke up through a flat river. Anything with water on every side and standing less than two metres proud is drowned. A bank is never touched — a bank has dry land behind it.
  • The ground changed again — worldgen 20. Nothing anybody built has moved; everything placed is at Hraunin, 6.9 km from the nearest river.

Changed — 2026-09-15 (the rivers, again)

  • 🌊 🔴 THE RIVERS LIE FLAT AND FILL BETWEEN THEIR BANKS. The ground changes again — worldgen 19. 🎯 haugur: *"the water logic needs to fill up the space between waterlines, in nature water always lies flat."*
  • ✅ The water level comes from the middle of the river's own edges now, not from the bottom of the channel. A river as wide as Jökulsá á Fjöllum is no longer too wide to measure — that is why it came out corrugated this morning.
  • ✅ And the river runs in flat stretches with real drops between them, instead of following the land down in one-metre stairs. On Hvítá that is ten steps where there were thirty-two.
  • The drops between the flat stretches are meant to be there. That is where the waterfalls will go.
  • ✅ Nothing is dug out. Ground standing above the water inside a river stays dry — an island, or a bank. The only cut is a metre of channel underneath the water, which is what the game has always done and is what lets a small brook on flat ground exist at all.
  • ✅ Nothing anybody has built has moved. Everything placed on either world is at Hraunin, and the nearest river is 6.9 km away.

Changed — 2026-09-15 (the rivers)

  • 🏞️ 🔴 THE RIVERS HAVE MOVED. This changes the ground itself — worldgen 18. Until now a river's surface was taken from the ground under each block, so the water was painted over whatever the map said was river — including the side of a valley. At Gullfoss the water was 95 m wide with the ground under it climbing 17.7 metres, and there was dry ground sitting between two stretches of water four metres apart. 🎯 haugur found it from inside the game.
  • ✅ A river now lies flat across its width, the way water does. It fills the bottom of the channel and anything standing above that is bank.
  • Rivers are narrower than they were, because the water now stops where the ground rises. At Gullfoss it comes out about 60 m wide — which is roughly the real river.
  • There are gaps where a river drops sharply. That is where the waterfalls go, and they are the next piece of work.
  • ✅ Nothing anybody has built has moved, and this is not a hope. Every block placed on either the game or the test world sits at Hraunin, and the nearest river is 6.9 km away. The change only ever touches water.

Added — 2026-09-11 (the island)

  • 🌍 The world is the whole of Iceland. It was 1,400 × 1,150 m of Hafnarfjörður; that is now just where we started. You can walk out of it in any direction, and the ground keeps going.
  • 🗺️ Every place on the World map can be visited. Press Esc, open World map, and click somewhere. You land on the real ground at the real height — Vatnajökull is 1,465 m up, and it is a long way down.
  • ❄️ The glaciers are ice. Vatnajökull, Langjökull and Hofsjökull, 10,470 km² of it — about a tenth of the country.
  • 🌱 And everywhere else looks like itself: the gravel deserts of the interior, the mires, the mossy lava, the birch woods, the lakes. Iceland is 22% gravel plain and 17% heath, and now the game knows that.
  • Where you started has not changed at all. Not one block of it moved — that was checked, twice, before anything was switched on.
  • Driftwood still only washes up where we started. Six pieces spread along 8,556 km of coastline would be six pieces nobody ever finds, so how much driftwood a whole country's shore should hold is still to be decided.

Added — 2026-09-11 (evening)

  • 🗺️ There is a map of Iceland. Press Esc and pick World map. Drag to move it, the wheel to zoom, and two buttons take you to the whole country or straight to where we live.
  • 🏷️ About fifty places are named on it — Reykjavík, Akureyri, Ísafjörður, Höfn, Vatnajökull, Gullfoss, Geysir, Hekla, Dettifoss, Mývatn, Þingvellir and the rest — with the glaciers and the big lakes drawn.
  • 🧍 You are on it, and so is anybody else playing.
  • 🔴 The bright box in Hafnarfjörður is the world — click anywhere inside it and you go there.
  • Everywhere else is drawn but you cannot go there. The rest of Iceland has no sea, no roads and no buildings yet, so there would be nothing to stand on. The map says so rather than taking you somewhere empty.

Added — 2026-09-11 (later)

  • 🖼️ The Graphics tab is built. Everything about the picture is in the menu now — press Esc.
  • 👀 You can choose how far you can see, with a slider. It was + and - and nothing else, which you could not find unless somebody told you. It is the first thing to try if the game feels heavy, and it now says the distance in metres and how much the game has to keep loaded to give it to you.
  • 🔍 Render scale and crisp block edges moved out of the dev tools, with a line saying what crisp costs: hard Minecraft pixels, and a little less smoothing in the distance.
  • 🧪 And the four "what is crawling" switches — these are a test, not a setting. Turn them off one at a time, look at the far ground, and say which one stops the shimmering. Leave them all on for ordinary play; the tab says so.

Fixed — 2026-09-10 (evening)

  • 🔐 The game no longer lets you play as nobody without saying so. If it has forgotten who you are — which happens when you close the tab and come back from a bookmark — it now sends you to sign in and brings you straight back. Usually you will not notice: the website remembers you for thirty days and hands you back without asking for anything. Before this, you could walk about for an evening, unable to build and never told why.

Fixed — 2026-09-09 (late night)

  • ⛏️ Jumping in a tunnel no longer throws you up to the surface. 🔴 The first bug anybody but haugur has reported from inside the game (#561) — *"Jumping underground spawns you overground."* The game looked for the ground starting a metre above your feet, so underground it found the roof of your tunnel, decided that was the ground, and stood you on top of it — then again the next frame, riding you up through the rock. A jump is no longer treated as a landing.
  • 🧱 And you bump your head on a low ceiling instead of pushing into it. Nothing had ever checked for something solid above you.
  • 🏠 Your home hearth is remembered after you close the window. 🔴 It was not, and had never been. Lighting a hearth made it your home only until you left — come back the next day, die, and you woke at the beginning instead. The guides have promised this on four pages the whole time.
  • 🍖 Your food and health are remembered too. You used to come back on a full stomach however hungry you were when you left, which quietly made starving much harder than it was meant to be.
  • 📍 The account page can say where you are. *"Where you are"* said *"You have not set foot in the world yet"* to somebody who had played for fifteen days 🎯 — haugur saw it on his phone, next to a card saying he had placed 4,384 blocks. The game now writes down where you stood, while you walk and when you leave.
  • You still start where you always did. Where you were standing is written down and shown on the website, but the game does not yet put you back there — that is a separate decision.

Added — 2026-09-09 (night)

  • 📈 Your account page now says what you have done. 🎯 haugur: *"also lets build this mechanism."* The Progress card used to say the game kept no record of it. It always has — every block anybody has placed or broken has been written down since the beginning, and the page simply never read it. It now shows how many days you have played and since when, how many blocks you have placed and broken, and how many houses you have standing.
    • Your own only. Nobody else's numbers, and no table comparing the family.
    • Placed and broken do not add up to everything you have done, and that is right: lighting a hearth changes one block into another rather than putting one down or taking one away, so it counts as neither.
    • A house counts as standing if it is still there — if you took it down again, or built over it, it is not counted.

Added — 2026-09-09 (evening)

  • 🧍 You can see who somebody is. A player's name is written just above their settler's head. 🎯 haugur: *"i need to have players name above the head of their carachter."* Until now everybody looked the same, so with three of us in the world there was no way to tell who had built a wall or who was walking past. It is the name on their account, so Maggi shows up as Maggi.
    • Names show for people within about thirty metres — a house length and a half. Further away you still see the settler, just not who it is.
    • A name shows through a hill. Somebody standing behind a rise still has their name drawn over it. That is why the distance is kept short, and it is worth knowing so it does not look like a fault.
    • Your own name is not drawn over you, and somebody with no account gets no name at all rather than a made-up one.

Changed — 2026-09-09 (later)

  • 🌿 Birch scrub is knee high, and looks like bushes instead of green lino. kjarr covers about a third of every birch area and was drawn as a flat green box. It is two crossed, see-through planes now — small tufts you walk through, each one shifted a little so they do not stand in rows. 🎯 haugur went and looked at it in the game and raised it from ankle height to knee height — *"i think i made a mistake to select 0.25, i think 0.5 would be better."*

Fixed — 2026-09-09 (later)

  • 🪜 Walking up steps looks like climbing now, instead of the world dropping. 🎯 haugur: *"when i walk down them all is fine but when i walk up it like my character is not moving up but the whole world is movin down."* Your feet used to jump a whole metre in a single frame. They still do — but your eye now takes about a tenth of a second to catch up, which is what climbing looks like. Walking down was always fine because falling is spread over many frames.

Added — 2026-09-07 (latest)

  • 🧍 You can see each other. Until now the world had things built by nobody — a wall would appear and there was never anyone there. Another player is now a settler in wool and a hooded cloak, walking about, turning as they turn, and his legs move as he walks. No name above anybody's head yet, and you cannot see yourself.
  • 🐛 Press F8 when something is wrong. A box opens with a picture of your screen already in it — you do not have to take a screenshot, find it and attach it. It sends which build you were on, where you were standing, what time it was in the world, how big your window is, and anything the game complained about, all of which are hard to remember afterwards. It becomes a numbered ticket the moment you press send. There is a page on the website too, under *Report a bug*, but it cannot take the picture for you.
  • 🔨 The crafting list can see into your chests. Since a few days ago the bench has been *building* from anything in a chest, býtibúr or skemma within a hundred metres — but the list still went by what was in your hands, so a row said *you need 2 more stone* with the stone in a chest right behind you. Clicking it worked; it just did not look as though it would. Now the row lights up. It looks when you walk up to the bench, so if somebody else fills a chest while you stand there, close the screen and open it again.

Fixed — 2026-09-07 (latest)

  • 🪧 The carved board sits flat on the wall now. 🎯 haugur: the signs *"stand out from the wall"* — and they did: each board floated 39 centimetres in front of the house, out in the open air beside the door, which is why a row of them looked wrong from any angle but straight on. The board was told to stand one centimetre off the wall, and it obeyed — it was being measured from the wrong surface. It now hangs a centimetre off the piece of wall it is actually nailed to.

Added — 2026-09-04 (latest)

  • 🔦 A torch beside a turf house now lights the house — and the carved board on it. The torch lit the ground and the walls around it and left the house itself dark, because the house is a photographed 3D model drawn beside the world rather than part of it, so the torchlight the world carries never reached it. ✅ haugur put torches on all three and confirmed it: *"it works fine house light up."* 🪧 The board took one more go — it has its own picture and its own lighting, and it stayed dark on a lit wall, which looked worse than nothing lighting at all.
  • 🔨 The bench really does build from your chests now. It shipped broken: the game looked for your containers using your exact position, and you stand between blocks rather than on one, which the lookup refused. It took your pack alone and told you that you were short. ✅ Confirmed working: *"crafting seem to work fine."*
  • 🔨 The bench builds from your chests and storehouses, not just your pack. Anything in a kistill, a býtibúr or a skemma within a hundred metres now counts towards what you can make, and the crafting takes it straight out of them. You do not have to fetch it first. 🏘️ So a burstabær becomes a workshop: keep your stone in the skemma at one end and build at the bench at the other. It takes from your own pack first, and then from the nearest container outward. The screen has not caught up yet. A row may still look greyed out and say *you need 2 more stone* when the stone is in a chest behind you — click it anyway and it will be made. Making the list know what your chests hold is the next piece of this.

Changed — 2026-09-04 (latest)

  • 🪧 The carved board is smaller, rougher, and hangs on the wall to the LEFT of each door. It is three rough driftwood planks with split ends now rather than one tidy panel, 0.80 m across instead of 1.20, weathered pale grey-brown — driftwood, the one timber this island has to spare and the one you pick up off your own beach. 🔴 It spent an afternoon on a post in the yard and came back. The post was a way of never having to measure the house's 3D model again — which had put the board wrong four times in one day, missing entirely, five times too big, and floating a third of a metre off the wall. A row of them turned out to look cluttered, so the board is back on the gable, beside the door — and it still measures nothing. Where it hangs is a number, in metres, that somebody chose.
  • 🪧 **The food house is called a *býtibúr* now**, not a *búr*. A býtibúr is the little store off the baðstofa in a real turf farmhouse, where the food was kept and handed out — so it is the name of the job the building does. The other two keep the names they had: the chest house is a skemma and the crafting house is a smiðja.

Fixed — 2026-09-04 (latest)

  • 📦 A skemma no longer calls itself a búr. Open the chest house and the screen said Búr across the top — the food store's name on the one building that refuses food. It was picking the name off the number of slots: twenty-seven meant a chest and anything bigger meant the food store, and the skemma has fifty-four exactly like its neighbour. It says Skemma now, and the name comes from the building rather than from its size, so the next fifty-four-slot thing we build cannot inherit somebody else's name.
  • 📦 And a skemma refusing food said the wrong thing too. It told you food *"will not keep in a chest"* while you were standing in a house. Both refusals now name the building you are actually at, and say where the food goes instead.
  • 🏠 **Three messages about the houses said *storehouse* when they meant any of the three — including when you try to put one on ground that is not clear or not flat. They say turf house** now, which is true of all three. And *"take it down at the door"* was left over from before you could hit a house anywhere.

Added — 2026-09-04 (earlier)

  • 📷 The tool in your hand is the photograph now. The pack has shown photographed tools since 2 September, but the axe you actually held was still a flat drawing, so the same axe was two different pictures depending on where you looked. Now it is one.
  • 🧱 And a block you are holding wears its own picture. It is still a cube, which is deliberate — a thing you can place should look like the thing you are about to place — but it is the block's real surface now. Holding turf used to put a flat green cube in your hand in the middle of a textured world.
  • 🖐️ Your hand has moved into the corner of the screen, out of the middle of your view. It was worked out from how wide the game's view actually is rather than nudged until it looked right, and it gives you a clearer view of the world in front of you.
  • 🎯 The aiming dot is bigger, with a dark ring around it, so you can find it against bright sky and dark rock alike.