A counter and a purse

Release 0.1.23 went out this morning, a little before twenty past eight by the clock the servers keep, and it carries one thing: copper. The part of the game that deals in money was finished on the night of the nineteenth and then waited more than five days for the word to cut a client, which is the rule here: improvements gather on the branch, and a build is an event the person paying for the game calls, because each one costs about an hour of wall clock and a network version the zones have to be cooked again against. The server half went out first, at about a quarter to eight. Then the number was stepped, both halves were cooked, the three zones were rolled onto the new server build, the gate that sends two clients into it passed all seven of its checks, and the download page moved to the new installer, 126.3 MB as the last one was. The client archive is 346.9 MB, about eighty kilobytes more than 0.1.22's.

The counter is Halla Tideward, the harbourmaster on the deck at the tower's foot, and nothing counter-shaped stands beside her: she is the shop. Stand within three metres of her and press E, and her card in the journal carries a fourth button, TRADE, whatever her quest is doing; it puts the journal away and opens THE HARBOUR TRADE in its place, and Escape closes it as it closes every panel. The card is two lists and a purse. Under FOR SALE are the marsh's three materials at the catalogue's own prices, reed fibre at 12 copper, marsh hide at 30 and bog iron at 45. Under YOUR BAG is every stack you carry with what the counter pays for one, which for those three is 3, 7 and 11, and the counter buys every stack, since everything in the catalogue has a price. Click a row and a line under the lists names it and its price and says that BUY takes one, or that SELL parts with one; the one primary button reads BUY or SELL for the row you chose. One unit per press, on purpose: a box for typing a quantity on this screen would swallow the movement keys, so there is none, and no button for a whole stack yet. The card was photographed in the client's own preview with a stubbed bag and purse, and nobody has traded at the live counter yet.

The purse is the line at the counter's upper right, which reads Purse: 0 copper for every character on the live servers today, and the same line now sits under the count on the bag panel on I; there are still no coins on the HUD. Where the game does not know a balance it draws two dashes rather than a nought, because a nought would be a balance nobody read. Every act that moves copper is two steps. The zone asks the character service for the sale or the purchase under one key, so a dropped connection that asks again gets the first answer back rather than a second sale, and the service records what the act is worth. Then the zone asks the economy service to settle it, and the economy service prices it itself, from the catalogue, in the same moment it writes the one line in the ledger; the zone never names an amount. That is why a sale shows the stack leave the bag first and the copper arrive a moment later, and why, while an act is still being answered or settled, the counter refuses the next press with a sentence that says so and asks for a moment.

Crafting costs copper now. Every attempt that rolls, whether it succeeds or fails, costs a tenth of the catalogue price of what it makes and never less than one copper: a reed bow's attempt is 26, traveller's bread 3. The service reads your purse before it takes anything from your bag, so an attempt the purse cannot cover is refused whole, with a sentence that carries both numbers, you have 0 copper and this attempt costs 26, and a refused craft never rolled and costs nothing. And the first quest pays. Turning in What the Tide Left, Halla's quest, now settles its 500 copper the same two-step way, beside the Reedwoven drawing and the experience it already gave; in 0.1.22 the zone wrote that copper down and paid none of it. Five hundred copper is nineteen attempts at the bow.

What broke on the way. The counter's first build was refuted in review before it shipped, on how it handled presses that come faster than the answers, and was rebuilt the same night. On release morning the step that carries the new server to the zone host unpacked it and checked it, and then never let go of the connection it had worked through; it sat for about twelve minutes until it was ended by hand, and the zones were rolled onto the new build straight after. Making that step unable to hang on a finished job is written down as a piece of work of its own. Both cooks, one for each half, went green the first time.

One thing on the site that the last post did not mention: a privacy page, linked from the foot of every page, which says in plain words what the game keeps about you and what you can ask of us. It is marked as a draft not yet reviewed, and it names the questions still open instead of papering over them.

What is not in it, plainly. Nobody has earned a coin on the live servers, and a new character cannot yet: the ledger is empty, the quest that pays 500 still asks for five reed fibre that nothing in the world yields, the counter sells fibre for copper a new character does not have, and a kill still drops nothing, so there is nothing to sell either. So crafting, which cost nothing in 0.1.22, is refused today for anyone whose purse is empty, which is every character: the cheapest attempt costs one copper. Every piece is on the live servers and none of it has moved a coin there yet; the first coin can come from selling at the counter something a character already carries, and for a new character it waits on drops from the marsh, which are being built now. Reedhaven, which is what the starting town is called from here on, has two deer standing of the twelve creatures its zone allows, because the map marks places for only one kind of creature to stand. The four people of the town will be standing with their arms held out, the pose a body takes when no idle plays: the game looks for their idle in the wrong folder, which we found in the code and have not yet watched in the live zone. Some Swedish still shows: the realm list and the pause card read EU - Savhamn, the town's old name, and the character list and the Play card name every Calling by its internal Swedish word, vaktare where they should say Warden, and the same for the rest. There is no equipment panel, and the character glyph still says so. And there is no cost line on the crafting panel before you press; the refusal is where the price shows.