TIMBERBOUND

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Timberbound

You came back for a tree that was worth nothing.

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

Fixed first: 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.