Ordinary life moves into the valley
2026-07-19, morning
Not every day in this diary is about Vex. This one is about sheep.
The village pen used to hold hand-placed props standing in for livestock. Now it holds two sheep, a goat, two hens, and a rooster who actually wanders inside the fence like an animal instead of a decoration, with the old props kept as stand-ins only if a real model is ever missing. Tend the pen once a day and you get eggs, milk, and wool. The rooster crows when night lifts, which meant teaching our sound system to survive gracefully if that one clip isn’t loaded yet, a small defensive habit we’re glad we’ve built by now.
Hunting arrived alongside it: eleven ordinary animals scattered around the valley ring, timid deer and rabbits, a couple of aggressive boars, none of them wild Vex, all of them oblivious to the Vigil’s rules because, as we put it in our own notes, the valley always had ordinary animals in it. No party, no hunt, that’s the one hard rule. Win the fight and you walk away with venison, hide, tusks, meat, pelt, whatever that animal actually gives, and once something’s been hunted it doesn’t respawn, the same rule we already use for captured Vex. Verified the whole loop start to finish: trigger, fight, no capture button anywhere in sight because you can’t tame a rabbit, spoils in the satchel.
We also placed the ruin chamber’s central figure at her true, story-correct scale for the first time, after a placeholder had stood in at the wrong size for a while. We’re deliberately not going to describe that scene here beyond that. It’s one of the most important rooms in the game and it deserves to be met in the game, not summarized in a diary.
On the release side, three build items landed in one sitting: a proper Addressables pipeline, a version number quietly stamped in the corner of the menu (v0.1.0, if you’re curious, and yes we checked it renders), and confirmation that our Addressables are staying fully local for now rather than remote, which closes off a whole category of risk we’d rather not carry this early. Nine new items joined the database to back the hunting and farming loops: venison, hide, antler, tusk, boar meat, rabbit pelt, wool, eggs, goat milk.
Honest note: several threads of work landed in the same tree on the same day, ours plus an unrelated narrative pass already in flight, and we made a point of verifying the two actually compiled and played together before calling it done rather than assuming they would.
