Hi. I'm Chris. If you've caught a stream, or talked to me for more than about ninety seconds, you already know: my brain is going in fifty different directions at all times, and it does not slow down for meetings, meals, or load-bearing conversations. Somewhere around direction thirty-one there is usually an idea worth keeping, and until now those ideas lived on sticky notes, in half-finished sentences, and in the patient memories of people I have cornered at parties.
So this page is the fix. When an idea sprints across the road, it gets written down here instead of derailing whatever I was doing. Some of these are jokes that refuse to stay jokes. Some of them are dead serious and just sound unhinged. I honestly cannot always tell which is which, and that is where you come in: the arrows on each one tell me which squirrels deserve to be chased and which should stay in the tree, and the discussion box is where you talk me into it or out of it. No account needed.
And before you dismiss the whole page: two of the ideas below already escaped into the actual game. This is a working document with a body count.
The squirrels
Somewhere in the old rulebook it says that changing your mind should cost you something. Set a skill to unlearning and half the experience it drained was destroyed on the way out. That idea came from an era of game design that also thought a night of bad luck should undo a week of play, and I have never been able to explain it to a new player without hearing how it sounds.
What made it worse is where it ended up. The reliable way to avoid the loss was to buy the item that skipped it, so a rule about the cost of changing your mind turned into a thing you paid coin of the obsidian to get out of. I do not want that trade in the game.
So it is gone. Untraining returns every point of experience it drains, in every school. The scrolls stay for anyone who wants the instant version, because paying for speed is fine, but from here on no untraining destroys experience.
Forty-five days. Roughly a hundred changes a day landing on the chaos shard. This morning the universe looked at those numbers and scheduled a multi-hour power outage for my entire block, which I choose to read as the grid tapping out before I did. So today started late, and for a few hours the squirrels ran completely unsupervised.
Fear not though. The lights are back on, and the timing is almost suspicious, because the age of chaos is now shifting toward the age of balance. After a month and a half of changing everything at full speed, the next stretch is about weighing what all of that actually did to the game and tuning it until the scales sit level. The chaos shard keeps its name. It has earned it.
People keep asking why I have disappeared into client performance for weeks. Here is the honest answer. I want to be able to put a hundred and fifty people in one room, set off the fireworks, and have everybody still dancing instead of watching a slideshow of themselves dancing.
That is the actual goal. So I filled a castle with a hundred and fifty players to find out how far off we are, and the answer was far enough that a party that size would have arrived as a series of photographs. There is a profiler in the client now and I have been walking through the frame looking for anything that gets worse when more of you turn up. Two of the things I found got worse with the square of the crowd, which is the technical way of saying the game was charging you extra for having friends. Those two are fixed, and the script work in a hundred and fifty player frame came down by about eleven milliseconds because of it.
The fireworks are a real part of this and I am not being cute about it. Nothing in the game limits how many effects can be going at once, and a proper celebration gets to somewhere around two thousand eight hundred of them at the same time. I am putting off capping that for as long as I possibly can, because a party where the fireworks run out is not a party, it is a meeting.
I do have to warn you about one thing. PvP is going to get faster out of all this as well. So are sieges, control points, and every other occasion where a lot of people end up in one place hitting each other instead of dancing. There is sadly no way to make the game run well for a ballroom without also making it run well for a brawl, and believe me, I looked. An unavoidable side effect of the dance party work. We will all have to live with it.
Cora Cuz'avich asked for this one, and Cora was right.
Every decoration in this game is wearing a collision box several sizes too big for it. You know the feeling. You have a chair and a table and you would like the chair to be under the table, the way chairs have been going under tables for several thousand years, and the game turns the chair red and holds it a hand's width away like the two of them have had a falling out. Two crates that obviously want to touch, refusing to touch. A plant hovering politely off a wall.
So there is a Tighter Fit button in decorating now. Switch it on and whatever you are holding gets a collision 25% narrower while you are placing it. Not shorter, just narrower, so things still sit on top of each other properly. Put it down and it goes back to its normal size, so nobody walks through your furniture afterwards, and it still will not cross your property line no matter how hard you shove.
Chests, crafting stations, and planting beds do not get to play. You have to walk up to those and click them, and I would rather not ship the ability to bury your own crafting table in a wall. Everything else is fair game.
This one is a peace treaty.
Jack has had it with standing at an anvil watching a bar fill up. He wants to load the table, press the button, and go do something else. Laz went the other way entirely and was very taken with the idea of a character who never earns a single point of experience and never advances at all, ever, on purpose.
So here is the compromise that keeps both of them quiet. There is a Quick Craft checkbox on the crafting table now. Tick it and the timer goes away, the craft resolves the moment you press the button, and you gain no experience for it. Same materials, same chance of ruining the thing, same wear on your tools, same item at the end. You are paying for the speed out of your experience bar.
Jack gets to stop watching the bar. Laz gets to craft for a thousand hours and finish exactly where he started. I get to find out what this does to the economy, which is the part I am slightly nervous about, so vote away if you have opinions.
Public safety notice. If you scrolled the work log and saw the wrasse screenshots, I am sorry. That art is the original from ten years ago, posted exactly as it came back out of storage, and it is hideous.
Now that I have wiped the blood out of my eyes and can see again, I can tell you two things. One, you now know one of the reasons these things got pulled in the first place. Two, they are getting a real quality pass before any of them are released back into the wild.
For the newer players: the Cave Wrasse is not a fish. It is a weird sperm-shaped lizard thing that lives in caves and survives on dragon droppings and shed dragon skin, which tells you everything you need to know about the neighborhoods it hangs out in. I want it back, and I want it back with multiple new visuals, new abilities, and new behaviors, so you can never again assume the wiggling shape at the edge of your torch light is the harmless one.
Also a boss. Something down there has been eating dragon leftovers for a very long time, and it has been doing well on them.
This page. You are looking at it. The idea was: what if the ideas had somewhere to go that was not the middle of a sentence about server migrations. It took longer to pick the name than to build the page, and the name was never really in question.
Vote on whether this page should exist. I will keep it either way, but the buttons will make us both feel better.
What if you put dungeon room pieces inside a chest, closed the lid, and the chest assembled them into your dungeon for you. I said this out loud one day, nobody stopped me, and it is in the game right now as a test item: drop rooms in, close it, confirm, and the pieces bolt themselves onto your open doorways with a different layout on every roll. Whatever does not fit stays in the chest and tells you why.
I am telling you this so you understand the stakes. Everything else on this page is an idea exactly like that one, except nobody has stopped me yet.
An optional render mode that flattens the lighting into bands, inks the outlines, and pushes the color toward painterly, so the game you are already playing looks like the classic Ultima art I grew up staring at. Same world, same characters, different universe.
This one also escaped. It is real, it is experimental, and it is in internal testing while we decide if the art direction holds up. That is two escapes out of the first two squirrels ever posted, which statistically makes this the most dangerous page on the internet.
The squirrel pen · general discussion
Each squirrel above has its own discussion. This thread is for the page as a whole: ideas you think I should chase, objections to the entire concept, or sightings of squirrels I have mentioned on stream and failed to write down. Comments are plain text, held to basic decency, and may be trimmed.