s&box

1.0.8

21 August 2026

Rulers look the part. A king wears a golden circlet and a robe down to the ground instead of the common shirt and legs, a village head wears a hat and a cloak. Before, power was a single dot above the head that nobody could read, and every ruler looked exactly like the crowd around him
Villages want a crown of their own. Roughly once every three decades a village weighs up its own banner, and one in four of those times it raises it: new name, new colour on the map, its own capital, its own king and a war with the kingdom it left. Before this, a kingdom only ever broke apart from disaster, so a peaceful one could stand as one piece for centuries
The village panel now says who rules there: the kingdom, which village is its capital, the name of the king and the name of the village head
A crown marks the capital right on its label on the map, so the main village of a kingdom can be found at a glance
Forests are planted, not respawned. A felled tree no longer pops back on the very same square: the woodcutter carries off saplings and puts two of them down nearby, never right against another trunk, and each one takes about a year to grow. The map stops being a wall-to-wall green carpet and turns into groves with young growth between them
History now reports famine. Starving was the most common way to die in the world and the only cause the chronicle stayed silent about: people died in their thousands, villages tore into each other, and the player saw the consequences with no idea what for

Big worlds run far faster: a world of twelve thousand people used to crawl at four frames per second and now runs at sixty seven
The reason was a crush, not the numbers. Villagers piled into one spot until thousands of them stood inside each other, and every single one kept checking hundreds of neighbours around him, every tick, forever
Now a packed tile simply turns people away, a crush scatters everyone instead of only the idle, and villagers wander across the whole land their village owns
A crowded village finally lets settlers go, even while the kingdom still has small villages elsewhere
The capital can rise up too: a kingdom that had swallowed the world was a single loyal capital where nobody could ever revolt, so the late game had no unrest at all
Rebels wear their own colour now: a rioter drops the banner of the crown he rose against and turns red, head to toe, so an uprising can be read off the map at a glance instead of looking like an ordinary crowd
An uprising is a real one: a riot used to raise fifteen people no matter the size of the city, which in a town of fifteen hundred souls meant one percent rising up, invisible. Now it is a fifth of the town, up to three hundred
A village left with no ruler at all now elects one of its own after a year or two. Before, a leader was only handed out along with the crafts and only to someone with no work yet, so a large village never got one: everybody there already had a job. The biggest village of a measured world, ten thousand souls, had no ruler and therefore could never riot, because there was nobody to riot against
A city that has just been through a riot stays quiet for the next twenty years, so an uprising reads as an event instead of background noise
Hunger for homes is felt properly: a village where most people sleep outside is now truly angry, where before it shrugged the same way whether one man or a thousand had no roof
Repair crews also level stray rock and odd patches of bare ground left by old blasts

A grazing animal used to swallow a full-grown oak in one bite. Herds stripped whatever stood on the tile under them, trees included, and that was the biggest eater of forest in the world
The chronicle no longer lists every book ever written, nor every shed that fell apart, so wars, famines, plagues and uprisings are not buried under them. Measured before the fix: twelve of the last fourteen entries were a building falling into ruin
The world panel is now called History