TIMBERBOUND

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Timberbound

You came back for a tree that was worth nothing.

The constellation is a constellation now.

A star chart, not a flowchart. The Foreman Constellation was thirty cards on a grid with the connections drawn across them. It is a sky now: the company at the centre, the six branches radiating from it, every node a star on the ring of how deep it sits. Stars you own glow in their branch’s colour and a ring around each fills rank by rank; the ones you can afford pulse, the ones within reach are dashed, and the rest wait dark among the others, gold once mastered. Drag to look around, scroll or use the buttons to zoom, hover for what the next rank does, and double-click to invest.

Quieter leaves. The wind is now mostly the air itself — a soft rise and fall that brightens as it strengthens — with the leaves only a faint texture under it.

Previously, in R16.3: the ponds held the forest, and the forest got voices. Still water. The ponds were tinted tiles with a slow swell. On high graphics they now mirror the forest standing around them — trunks, crowns, the sky between — through their own ripples, a mirror when you look across them and clear when you look down into them. The other settings mirror the sky’s colour the same way.

The wind, rebuilt. The first wind sound was a handful of looped, filtered noise recordings, and it sounded like one. It is now generated as it plays, following how real wind is made: the air’s colour slides with its speed and follows its loudness a moment late, the speed wanders at every time scale at once, and the leaves are a crowd of small soft rustles whose number rises with the wind rather than a hiss that gets louder. Nothing in it repeats. (Fixed since: the first cut of the leaves rattled in strong wind, and the crowns shivered harder the longer you played; both are gone.)

The forests have voices. Songbirds and a wood pigeon in Greenhollow, tits and a woodpecker drumming on the Pinefall ridge, crickets and an owl in the Moonbloom, cicadas and a kite in the Emberwild heat, glassy pips in the Astral canopy, a ptarmigan’s rattle on the Rimeglass, a nightjar churring and frogs in the Rootwake, cicadas in the waste — out among the trunks, with a little of the forest’s echo on them. Strip a forest and it goes quiet, like the flock.

Previously, in R16.2: the wind came through the forest. Wind you can see. The whole forest used to sway as one, on the same slow swell. Wind now comes in gusts that travel: you see the far crowns lean first, then the grass at your feet flattens, the motes in the air are swept sideways and a few leaves come loose.

The trees show the axe. The side you are cutting from opens up as a tree loses heart, the fresh wood pale in the notch, so a tree three blows from falling looks it. A crown that goes over throws its leaves, and the wind takes them. A regrown tree comes back whole.

The title screen is the forest. The menu used to sit on a dark smear. It now frames the wood where you left off: the camera lifts a little, tilts up into the canopy and turns slowly while the light moves, and pressing play eases you back behind your own eyes.

Photo mode. Press P on desktop: the game pauses, the interface and the axe step away and the camera comes loose — WASD to fly, Space and Shift for up and down, the wheel to zoom, Enter to save the frame as a PNG. P again to come back.

Previously, in R16.1: rare trees became wood again, and the dark got lights in it. Rare trees look like trees.Rare trees look like trees. In six forests out of eight the rare tree was painted its forest’s accent colour and then lit in the same colour all over — a neon post standing in the wood. Its bark is now that forest’s own timber leaned toward the accent, and the light seeps out of the grain instead, bright enough to bloom. It still reads from across the stand; up close it is a tree with something in it.

The axe is in the forest with you. It had lights of its own, the same in every forest at every hour, so it sat on top of the picture like a sticker. It now takes the forest’s own sky light and the real sun, from wherever the sun actually is, so the light moves over the blade as you turn.

Things meet the ground. On desktop, where a trunk meets the floor, where one leaf block tucks under another and where a log lies in the grass, the light now falls off the way it does in a real corner, so the forest stands on its floor instead of being set down on it.

The air has a floor. Fog is darker at your feet than up among the crowns, as it is in any wood lit from above — gently in most forests, and most of all in the Umbral Rootwake, which was one flat purple wall and is now a dark floor under light falling from far overhead, with its flowers glowing on the ground. The motes in every forest’s air are soft points instead of square specks, and in the dark forests they give off light.

Previously, in R16.0: the sun got into the forest. The light is real. The canopy used to be a single number: one dimmer for the whole forest, with painted patches of sun laid on the floor to stand in for the light that gets through. On desktop the sun now casts shadows, and the crowns decide where it lands — coins of light on the floor and up the trunks wherever the leaves line up thin, drifting as the crowns sway, and real shade where they do not. The same gaps put shafts of light in the air between the trunks. It also fixes a quiet fault in the old sun: it was aimed at the middle of Greenhollow, so from Pinefall onward it shone in almost flat from the east whatever the hour, and never reached the tops of the crowns.

Leaves let light through. Look up into a crown with the sun behind it and it glows where it is thin and goes dark where it is deep. The black specks that sprinkled every canopy — the hollow inside each crown, seen through holes in the leaf texture — are gone, and every leaf cube carries its own shade, lighter at the top and the rim, darker underneath.

The air has the sun in it. Fog brightens and warms toward the sun, so you can tell which way you are facing and how far away a trunk is. A sky dome melts into each forest’s own haze and carries the sun itself. The picture goes through a lens: highlights roll off instead of clipping, bright things bloom, and each forest has its own grade. The light under the canopy takes its colour from the forest’s air, so a trunk in the Moonbloom is lit violet and one in the Emberwild orange, and a trunk in shade has a lit side and a dark side again instead of reading as a flat panel.

The score was rewritten around the old harmony. Each forest keeps its root, its chords and its scale, but the eighteen-second loop is now a thirty-two-bar piece that starts sparse, builds, peaks and thins out again, played on pads, plucked strings, bells and a breathy flute in a room with an echo. Every forest has its own tune, and the music comes forward while you work a stand and settles back while you walk.

Options › Display › Graphics (it was Render Scale) now chooses how much of this you get: high and medium add the shadows, shafts and lens; low is the plain forest as it was, for older machines. Phones get the lens and the new air without the shadows. And the forest is cheaper to draw than it was: every trunk used to be drawn six times a frame, once per face, and is now drawn once, so a frame with all of the above takes fewer draw calls than the old one did without it.

Previously: the whole wood was replanted. You used to arrive in a clearing ninety metres across, with the nearest trunk thirty-nine metres away and one direction in the Rootwake where you could walk a hundred metres before meeting a tree. Now there is one clearing — Mosswick’s glade — and the road, and everything else is trunks. From where you spawn the nearest is about ten metres off, the treeline runs down both verges of the path, and in most forests you cannot see the sky at all.

Each forest has its own air. Sight lines run from forty metres in the Umbral Rootwake to a hundred and twenty-six in the Rimeglass Basin, which still has to show you the view from the Glacier Elder. Canopies are taller — an ordinary Rootwake crown tops out above twenty metres and its giants pass thirty — and every forest carries a second storey of shorter, broader trees underneath. The floor is dark, broken by sunlight coming through the gaps overhead, and the patches drift as the crowns above them sway.

The road became a trail. It was fifty-five identical eight-metre slabs in a dead straight line. It now wanders, is about half as wide, frays into the leaf litter at its edges, and has roots crossing it.

Options › Display gains brightness and a field of view that reaches 120°; Options › Gameplay gains a forest regrowth switch, for anyone who wants a felled stand to stay felled. And felling cascades no longer bury the framerate: dropped wood past a certain count folds into the nearest pile rather than accumulating, so nothing is lost and the floor stops filling with objects.

Previously: trunks that land on things, and birds that notice how much of the forest you have taken.

Fixed then: ponds had no shore. Terrain steps in whole metres, you can climb one of them, and the pond rule cut a tile down regardless of what stood around it — so a pond that formed against a ridge was a hole you could walk into and never leave. An audit of all eight forests found two hundred and twenty-four such tiles, every one of them water. Every pond now has a graded shore, and the chime that marks a nearby keepsake has been rebuilt: it plays the collection fanfare with a note missing, so finding the thing finishes the phrase you were following.

Windthrow is the headline, and it costs nothing. A falling trunk is eight to eleven metres of timber, and it now lands on whatever is standing under it — anything inside that footprint takes the weight, and what goes over falls the same way, so a lined‑up stand comes down in a row and the cascade spreads over real seconds rather than all at once. There is no node to buy and no rank to raise. The only input is where you stand when you make the cut, which is the one thing a faller actually controls. Ignore it and you will still see it happen every dozen trees; aim for it and a working session yields close to double. In Pinefall a chain lays a chain of bridges, and in Emberwild it is the fastest way to starve the Magmaheart.

The forests are no longer empty. Each one now has its own birds — finches over Greenhollow, crows on the Pinefall ridge, moths in the Moonbloom dark, kites through the Emberwild ash, drifters in the Astral canopy, ptarmigan on the Rimeglass, nightjars in the Rootwake and vultures turning over the Gildenwaste. They roost in the crowns, they call to each other, and a trunk coming down puts the whole stand into the air. They are also the only thing in the game that notices how hard you are working: the flock is sized from the fraction of the forest still standing, so strip a grove and the wood goes quiet, and stays quiet until it grows back. Nothing about them touches the economy, and Options › Gameplay › Wildlife turns them off.

Previously: Emberwake was the headline. A trunk going over throws living cinders into whatever stands nearby, fire eats through heartwood on its own, and it spreads — so a felling charge that leaves a ring of half-dead trees now finishes the job while you walk to the next stand. Eighteen fires burn at once at most, and they go out when you leave the forest.

Bucking Cadence pays you for moving: fell a trunk, reach a different tree within three seconds, and the first bite carries the momentum. Seasoned Stock pays you for waiting: wood is worth more the longer it rides in the satchel, up to three minutes, which the drones can never collect because they sell the moment they are full. The satchel readout shows the premium as it builds.

Past the Umbral Rootwake the road now runs out into the Gildenwaste: petrified groves bleached by a sun that never sets, standing like broken pillars in drifting dust. Aurumwood is the eighth timber, the Sunbleached Verdict is the eleventh axe, and the forests are now scattered with banked camps whose coals still breathe and claim posts staked by whoever was here first.

The constellation cards were also too small for their own text — several names and every locked requirement were being clipped. The cards are wider, the columns are spaced to match, and the canvas now sizes itself from the layout, so the next node to be added cannot overflow it.

The satchel was the bottleneck, so it is gone. Bottomless-ish Satchel now runs to rank 18, and above it sits Folded Hold — ten ranks that each multiply everything the last one held, ending north of twelve million pieces of wood. Carrying that much is pointless if you have to walk it, so meet the Hauler Drone: a tethered lifter that pulls wood off your back mid-swing, flies it to Mosswick, banks the crowns and comes straight back. Drone Manifold makes them bigger, faster and better paid, every fifth Charter seal adds another to the fleet, and they keep hauling while you are away.

Drones sell at the standing rate and never earn the Timber Futures bulk premium, which only pays on one enormous manual delivery. So the settings panel has a Drone Dispatch switch: leave it on and never walk again, or shut it off, hoard twelve million Voidbark, and haul the whole thing to the counter yourself for the biggest single payout in the game.

The forests themselves are busier now. Every tree casts a soft contact shadow on the ground, mushrooms cluster in the shade and ferns spread in loose patches, and the woods are scattered with evidence of a working operation: cut stumps ringed with chips, stacked cordwood between driven posts, sawbucks with a log still waiting, and lantern posts lining the road home that come into their own after dark.

Fixed this pass: stepping off a walkway into the gap between forests used to leave you hanging in mid-air just below the world, because the empty-space fallback height was being read as solid ground — the void now drops you properly and the forest carries you back to Mosswick. The licence gates were also built across the walking axis, so their pillars stood in the middle of the walkway instead of either side of it; they now straddle the bridge as arches. And the centre-screen callouts can be switched off in settings if you would rather read the forest than the captions.

This build also adds a company record of twenty-one achievements, from your first felled tree to maxing every node in the constellation; freshly cut trees now leave a stump behind until they regrow, so a worked clearing looks worked; and because a long run lives entirely in your browser’s storage, the menu can now back up and restore your save to a file.

Snow falls over the Rimeglass Basin, drifting and wandering rather than dropping straight down. And The Ledger in the shop keeps the running totals: hours worked, trees felled, crowns per hour, best combo, forests opened, nodes maxed.

Felling finally has weight. A trunk hitting the ground throws up dust and leaf litter, lands with a low thud, and kicks the camera if you are standing close enough to feel it. Footsteps follow the ground beneath you — soft on turf, sharp on Emberwild stone, muffled in Rimeglass snow — and a hard landing from a jump registers too. All of it routes through the existing camera-motion switch, so anyone sensitive to screen shake turns it off with the same control that stops the head bob.

The front screen has also been cut back to two choices — play, and options. Everything else moved one layer down into a grouped options panel (audio, display, controls, gameplay, save data, about), so the first thing you see is an invitation rather than a control surface. Escape now steps back one layer at a time instead of leaping straight into the forest.

Fixed: restoring a backed-up save did nothing. The browser fires its save-on-exit handler during the reload that follows a restore, which wrote the still-loaded old company straight back over the imported one — and, because saving rotates the current file into the backup slot first, quietly filed the restored save there instead. Saving is now locked the moment a restore or a new company is committed, so the swap survives the reload.

Mosswick’s shop was one endless scroll of six sections; it is now paged into Axe Rack, Constellation, Expansion and Record, with the header and its wallet pinned to the top so your crowns stay in view wherever you are. The constellation panel now shows what you hold and what will be left after the next rank — or exactly how much you are short — and Focus Next has moved down beside Invest where your hand already is. The Umbral Rootwake also gets its own music: it was rooted so low that the bass sat near 27 Hz and turned to mud, so it now sings a fifth higher on a sine voice with its own darker chord set. Every other forest’s score is untouched.

The interface has also had an accessibility pass. Well over half of the original type was set below 11px — some of it at 6 and 7 — which is simply too small to read comfortably. Every size in the stylesheet has been lifted onto a monotonic scale with a hard floor of 12px, the skill constellation and its nodes grew by a third to match, and the fixed-width HUD cards were widened so nothing overflows. Beyond that, Options › Display › Interface Size now scales the whole interface to 115%, 130% or 150% for anyone who wants it larger still — and because a scaled interface has less room to work with, the top row of the HUD now shares the space it has instead of stacking cards on top of each other. The pass also covers people who never touch a mouse: every control draws a visible focus ring when you tab to it, the options toggles announce their on/off state, and the constant HUD readouts no longer interrupt a screen reader, so it can announce the callouts that matter instead of every crown you earn.