I deleted your chats

I got lazy and stopped writing these, on the theory that hardly anyone reads them. There are two accounts on this site that are not mine, which makes the theory very nearly right and completely wrong at the same time. If you are reading this, you are most likely one of those two, and I owe you a straight answer about what just happened to your history.

I spent the last stretch taking the game apart on the assumption that nobody was out here. That assumption cost you the chats you had. They are gone.

Why they could not come with me

A chat used to be a conversation with a character. It is now a visit to a world: you arrive in a room, the people who live there are already in it, and you walk from room to room. Every old conversation points at a character and at nothing else, and in the new shape there is no such thing as a chat with a character to point at. Carrying them over would have meant inventing a world for each one and handing it back to you as if it were yours. It seemed better to say plainly that they are gone.

What did survive

Your account. Your login, your password and your token balance came through untouched — sign in and everything except the history is where you left it.

What else changed

The front page is not where you left it either, so here is the short version.

• The homepage is a map now. Every world is a star; the lines between them are just there to make it a constellation rather than a scatter of dots. Click one and you get a card; enter from there and you pick up your last visit if you had one.
• The character catalogue moved to /characters. Nothing about it changed, it just lives at its own address instead of squatting on the front page.
• Seven new worlds: a free port at the edge of the charts, a village around nine hot springs, a city bureau for things that are not supposed to exist, a compound above the city with a bell, a walled house where the lamps burn all night, a garrison at the cold end of a supply line, and a private works full of half-finished machines.
• Thirty characters now live somewhere. They used to be four. If a character has a home, their page will offer to take you there, and you arrive in the room they actually live in rather than at the front door.
• One voice in a chat, instead of a narrator and a character talking over each other. And a move between rooms is part of the turn that made it, rather than a notice stapled above it.

It is the same game with a lot less propping up. It should simply be nicer to sit in.

Not done yet

The new worlds have no artwork — the map does not need it, but the world pages look bare. Twenty-five characters still have nowhere to be. And the fonts finally load, which is less of a feature than an admission.

Sorry

Genuinely — for the history, and for building as though the lights were off. They were not.