Anarchy first
Two weeks in which we made lots of small good things — and made one big decision: release nothing else piece by piece until Anarchy is ready.
A pause for the zombies
On August 24 we put Zombie Rush on pause: “we're shelving it for now and not working on it at all.” The mode stayed as it was; there just won't be any new work in it. The freed-up effort went into survival and into how players talk to each other. The same day the fishing screen finally became visible — with a line-tension bar and a fish-progress bar.
Regular chat became local: it's heard within forty blocks around you. To say something to everyone there's /g — and if nobody's nearby, the game tells you how many people are in the world and how to reach them. A private message now rings a short chime. The first candidate was a pretty “amethyst chime” — but it lasted more than four seconds and would have rung longer than it takes to read the message. We picked a shorter one.
Clans and kits got windows. Before that, three buttons of the main menu closed it and dumped a dozen and a half lines of commands into chat. Married players got a heart above their heads that changes with how long they've been married: gray for the first day, then dark, blue, red — and gold after a hundred and twenty days. On August 25 our own wings appeared — no flying yet; the first drawing read as a moth and was redrawn. And the crosshair in the over-the-shoulder camera, which pointed at the neighboring block, moved to where you'll actually hit.
On August 27 the biggest update so far went to the server — 247 changes. Players saw local chat, the clan and kit windows, the marriage heart, the wings and the bucket that same day.
Water that flows
For a long time the bucket could do only two things: fill up at the sink on an island and empty onto a garden bed. On August 26 it scooped water from the real world for the first time. Then it turned out water didn't always scoop — and behind that were three different causes in a row: in the middle of a river the bucket didn't scoop; standing in water and looking down, almost half of all view directions gave nothing; and while swimming it didn't work at all. And testing found that pouring water into water meant silently losing the bucket. All of this was fixed.
And on September 1 water started to flow: it spreads from its source and dries up without it — “past the seventh block it's dry”. You can scoop flowing water, and it pours out again as a source.
The August 28 turn
This day changed survival and the whole story that followed. The Buyer shop and gifts were removed from survival. Claims moved from commands into the menu and became visible: translucent walls with bright edges went up around plots — your own plot green, your clan's blue, someone else's red. And on the faces of your own plot appeared “extend” and “retract” handles: you now move the edge by hand, without a single command.
And that same day the second big mode was ordered — Anarchy.
A torch on a bracket and an outline that lived eleven hours
The end of August went into visuals. The torch became a three-dimensional stick for the first time, and on a wall — a stick on a bracket; before, it was a flat cross in the middle of the block. Light from all sources started reaching 38% further. Graphics settings were laid out across three tabs. Strange shadow stripes vanished from sand under a low sun. And the browser version stopped loading down the whole browser: in the start menu it used to fire more than ten thousand timers in two seconds, now — twenty-four.
There was also the story of the outline around the block under your crosshair. It was made in a day — with four settings and its own page. We looked at it in the game and decided: “The outline should probably go.” It lived less than eleven hours. That happens too, and it's fine.
On September 1 we made real registration in the app: a window with nickname, password and password repeat, and less than half a second after the last letter — “Nick is available” or “This nick is already taken”. Before, a new nickname with a password silently created an account, and a newcomer didn't understand what was wanted of them.
Item powers that started working
On September 1 and 4 the old ban on item powers and effects was lifted. In two days 42 powers got their own names — “Keenness”, “Heaven's Wrath”, “Insect Scourge”, “Velvet Touch”, “Fire Rite” — and for the first time began to act in combat and mining. Before that they were only drawn in the tooltip. On the morning of September 4 this update went to the server — and became the last thing players would see until October.
Our own top tier
In August the game had eight new minerals, and a full set of armor from each gave its own bonus. On September 5 we decided to make it simpler and fairer: there are two top tiers — amethyst and iridium, with no set bonuses, armor crafted as usual and able to take item powers. Iridium differs from amethyst only in rarity — and the next day it was given a number: iridium is five times rarer. The other six minerals were removed “for now” — hidden, not deleted.
The clan treasury was removed at the same time — a shared wallet we decided to reinvent later. Clans themselves, invitations, roles and chat stayed. And on September 5 the Anarchy world itself appeared — with its own land, its own pockets and its own money, for now only for development.
Freeze to make it in time
“Let's build Anarchy and then roll it out.”
On September 6 came the decision that shaped the whole next month: release nothing else piece by piece. The players' server froze on the September 4 version, and all work went into Anarchy. The next update would only happen on October 2 — and bring more than a thousand changes at once.