What changed

Written for somebody who plays the game rather than somebody who reads the code. The same list is a feed if you would rather not come back.

0.48.0 11 September 2026

Gameplay

Big units collide at the size they are drawn — knights and warhounds ten pixels, plague carts twelve, the ballista and catapult fourteen. A ballista stands beside a wall now instead of buried in it.
The computer no longer walls its own siege engines in. It checks that the widest thing a building trains can still get out before it puts down a house, a wall or a gate.
Units no longer squeeze through gaps narrower than themselves. Knights, warhounds, corpsedogs, ballistas and catapults route around a slit they cannot fit, and say so if there is no way through.
Blows take a moment to arrive: the sword is raised, the bow drawn, the catapult wound, and the hit lands a fraction later. Nothing hits harder — the wind-up comes out of the pause between swings.
Seven buildings block only the ground they stand on, so you can walk behind them: the Chapel, the Forge, the Spirit House, the Dragon Pen, the Blightworks, the Sepulchre and the orc Lumber Camp.
Behind ?mine=inside, a worker spends two seconds in the gold mine instead of six and carries less out. The same gold arrives over three times the trips, and a raider has somebody to hit.
Your own units press against each other instead of walking through each other. They still give ground under pressure; fully solid bodies are the next step, not a different plan.
Siege engines can be told to shell a spot: press ATTACK GROUND, then click anywhere — empty dirt, a ridge you cannot see over, the fog where their barracks was — and they fire until you stop them.
Trees can be knocked down, by siege fire and nothing else. A couple of boulders opens the tile a trunk stood on into ground your army can walk through; nobody is paid for the wood.
You can attack your own units, not only your own buildings — press A or Attack first. A plain right-click on your own soldier still escorts him, so you can never swing at him by accident.
Soldiers stop staring at an enemy they cannot get to. They leave a walled-off target alone and carry on the march, and one you point at it personally says so instead of standing there all match.
Towers hit flyers at double damage, which is what the panel has always said they do. An armed building used to shoot a dragon for the same number it shoots a footman for.
The computer stops moving house. Its first town hall stays home, so its walls, its buildings and the rung it climbs stay where its army is even after it plants a hall by a distant mine.
The computer defends its expansion. Attack any of its towns and the soldiers standing nearest that town answer; a hall by a far mine used to be the softest thing it owned.
A hall you scouted once and then lost sight of keeps the shape you saw. It no longer grows into a Keep or a Castle on your screen the moment the enemy pays for it out of your sight.
Patrol walks the whole route, not the first two points of it. Shift-click (or tap ＋ then tap) as many points as you like and the unit walks the circuit, corner to corner and back to the start.
A patrol that runs into a fight comes back to the leg it left, not to the beginning of its route, and a corner walled off since you drew it is skipped instead of stopping the whole beat.
Stop and Hold position can be queued like everything else: Shift-click a destination, press Hold, and the unit marches there and then stands its ground instead of stopping where it is.
Your own units have bodies to each other: a soldier meeting a friend in a doorway queues, goes round or waits. A second wave now forms a real second rank instead of standing inside the first.
Your workers are no longer walls. A soldier walks through the crowd at a mine or a lumber line instead of stopping dead behind one of them, and gold comes in a little faster at the opening.
Saved games and replays from before this update will not load: the rules of the simulation changed, and playing an old recording under new rules would show you a match that never happened.
The turtle builds a gate in its wall and uses it. The first segment of the arc is a door on the side you are coming from; it shuts when it sees something of yours, and opens again when you leave.
The computer repairs. Knock a hole in its town centre and two workers put down the pick and pick up a hammer, paying for the mend out of the same purse you do.
The computer defends with the soldiers who are actually there — the ones standing nearest the raid, not whichever six it built first — so its line no longer marches past a fight on the way to one.
The computer answers your air. Once it has seen a flyer of yours through its own fog it buys more of the units that can shoot at one; a raid it never sees is a raid it never prepares for.
The computer stops parking its army to save for a building it is not allowed to build yet. It spends that gold on the soldier it is short of and saves only for buildings it can actually put down.
The computer sends a worker out to find you about two minutes in, the way any player does. It knows where you live by minute three — and you can kill the scout on the way in.
The turtling computer lays its wall as soon as it has found you, has its barracks and has the wood, facing the side you came from. It used to be the last item on a nine-building list.
The Human computer builds its watchtower again: saving for the next hall had quietly outbid the one tower its soldiers muster under.
The computer's attacks set off for a spot they can actually reach instead of aiming at the middle of a building and working out a route into the wall.
The computer goes on climbing its hall. It buys the hall once its soldiers are short of nothing else, and keeps the money back from towers and shrines rather than from its barracks.
The computer stops buying kit for soldiers it does not own. It trains the wave first, so on easy its first attack arrives in about three minutes instead of eight.
The computer no longer walls itself in: it keeps its roads open and gathers about fifteen percent more gold for it, and on easy attacks in two to eight game-minutes instead of over ten.
The computer keeps the rest of its roads open too: it refuses to lengthen any walk its workers are using, and will not drop a building on the spot they were walking to.
A group sent somewhere moves as one group: it keeps formation on the way, each unit settles into its own spot around where you clicked, and a group that cannot all fit a gap waits its turn.
Melee units step closer to buildings before striking when space is clear, making attacks connect more naturally.
The Blacksmith occupies a tighter ground footprint, bringing workers closer to its walls and leaving more room to move around it.
Town halls occupy four tiles by three, freeing the extra ground row behind them. Upgrades keep the same footprint, so neighbouring paths and buildings stay usable.
The Lumber Mill, War Pit and Charnel House occupy ground that fits their shape. Workers can use the space behind them, and repair reliably at corners and reachable sides.
Every faction starts with its designed hero kit enabled, including its own spells, passive and ultimate.
Computer-controlled Revenants use Soulfrost, Dread and The Long Winter, and hold Grave Tide when its summons would feed a nearby rival too much experience.
Dread makes nearby enemy troops flee briefly. Their orders wait until the fear ends, and a frightened caster cannot cast.
The Long Winter gathers your Husks and raises nearby fallen bodies to fill the host. Each gathered Husk survives one lethal hit, and the Pale Crown resists slows while a protected Husk stays near.
Last Stand and Warsong take a brief cast commitment. Ordering the hero alone cancels it, and spent power is not refunded.
Moving or stopping an army preserves its hero's Last Stand. Select the hero alone to cancel; queued orders wait until the channel ends.
A level-two Revenant raises nearby fallen ordinary units as Husks, up to four living at once. Summons cannot raise more summons.
Your hero levels into something you choose: every level hands you a skill point and a Level up button, with a sentence for each thing he can learn. Bulwark or Executioner is your fork at level 3.
Hero abilities cost power, and his panel shows it — POWER 85/120 — on an enemy hero's panel too. The pool fills steadily, and pressing what he cannot pay for names the shortfall.
Every match has heroes in it. Each side raises one Champion at its town hall for no gold and four food; he climbs five levels, forks at the third, and can be raised again if he falls.
The computer rebuilds after it loses an army, even with its hero still standing. It was counting the hero as an army of one and sat on six hundred gold rather than training a fifty-five gold soldier.
The computer's hero marches with its army: he goes out with the wave, comes home when it does, and turns back for his soldiers when a chase pulls him off them.
The computer expands to a second town again: it holds the price back once it has found a mine worth having, puts the hall down within half a minute, and sends a work party over to dig it.
The Pale Crown fights from four tiles away. The Spooky Guys hero's frost bolt flies from his open palm, and he hits a little softer than the Champion and the Skullbreaker to pay for the reach.
Fall back is a verb you press, not a standing order. Right-clicking the button used to set your soldiers to flee any fight below a third health, silently, for the rest of the match. That is gone.
Fall back shows where they are going and can be pointed: press it and click a spot to retreat there. A chevron over each running unit points the way, and everyone can see it.
Enemy bodies block: a surrounded unit is trapped and has to be cut out, the way it works in the games this one descends from. Your own units still slide past each other.
Your Champion levels from your side's kills wherever he stands, keeps his experience when he falls, and wears his rank as a gold number both players can read. Raising him again costs 40 gold a level.
A Champion, behind ?hero=1 for now: one free hero a side, four food, two abilities on one fourteen-second clock, levelling as the match runs and committing to Bulwark or Executioner at level three.
Computer opponents stop expanding onto worked-out mines: they work out what the hole would actually pay before spending four hundred gold on the town hall beside it.
Computer opponents no longer get a head start by seat. Every machine player thought on its own beat, and the one that thought first kept a permanent edge in a mirror match; they now take turns.
The Warhound is trained at the War Pit and the Vampire at the Charnel House, so your elite comes off the same card as your other troops. Both still need the Spirit House or the Sepulchre first.
Your priest listens to you: a healer told to guard someone heals that someone first when they are hurt and in reach, instead of whichever wounded unit stood closer.
"That one" means that one. Archers you point at a target keep shooting it; the spread that stopped nine arrows flying at a one-arrow kill now applies only to fights units pick themselves.
The computer is a different opponent each seat. Two computer seats in one match no longer share a personality, and Easy no longer rushes a third of the time.
Weapons are two ladders. The smith sharpens everything that fights hand to hand; your lumber building sells a matching three-rung ladder for everything that shoots, throws or lobs. Same prices.
Your temple sells a choice: Take Up Arms, and your casters put the rite down and fight for double damage — or Keep the Vigil, and their power comes back 40% sooner. One at a time, changeable.
The Human Watchtower steels the ground around it: anything of yours within five tiles fights as militia, five more damage and a point of armour. Break the tower and it stops.
The computer lays a Watchtower on every personality now, so a Human opponent fights on its own ground instead of leaving its best trick unused.
The computer buys armour and the lumber yoke, not only weapons. It takes the cheapest rung it can afford across all three ladders, so they interleave the way yours do.
Orc and Spooky Guys banners lay defensive towers again. Static defence is counted in tower-equivalents, so an orc hovel with an attack on it is worth the fraction of a spire it actually is.
The smith sells armour: three tiers beside the three weapon tiers. A weapon rung is now worth what the weapon is worth — most units one, a mauler or knight two, a catapult five.
The lumber house sells Porters' Yokes: every worker carries two more gold or lumber out of every trip, for the rest of the match, for 200 gold and 300 lumber behind a second-tier hall.
Every seat in the lobby has an INCOME handicap, 100% down to 50% in tens: that seat banks that fraction of every load. It works on a human seat as well as a computer one.
On a Coves map your team shares one cove: allies start twenty-six tiles away in one walled pocket with a gate each. More gold lies in the open field than behind the wall, which is the point.
The Rusher finally rushes. Every wave after its first used to be half the size of what a Boomer or a Turtle sent, for the whole match; the first still leaves as early, and the rest are worth fearing.
An opponent whose army is wiped out builds another one. One was measured sitting on 661 gold with its War Pit idle for four and a half minutes because the money was earmarked for a Fortress.
An attacking army goes for the enemy, not the nearest wall: attack-move shoots soldiers first, then anything that shoots back, and chews masonry only when there is nothing else in sight.
A Knight needs a Blacksmith now. Every banner's elite costs one building beyond its barracks and a hall rung, the way the Warhound and the Vampire already did.
Auto-repair belongs to the peasant you gave it to. It applies to the selection now — one peasant mends, or six do — instead of putting your whole gold line on call as builders.
A match you have clearly won now ends. Two untouched building placements standing in a field used to count as an army you had yet to defeat.
Gates. Every banner can build a door in its own wall and open or shut it whenever it likes. An open gate is a hole for everybody, and shutting it puts whoever stood in the doorway outside.
Raising your hall hardens your walls and towers: half again as much health and two more armour on every wall, gate and tower you own, for nothing beyond the price of the rung. It does not heal them.
Your smith sharpens weapons: Sharpened, Honed and Deadly Weapons for 150, 250 and 375 gold, a point of damage each on every unit you own, with one rung behind each town-hall tier.
The computer buys the weapon rungs too, and saves for them the way it saves for a hall rung, so a player who upgrades is playing a harder game rather than an easier one.
A new map to pick: Coves. Every start sits in a horseshoe of rock with one gate, two small mines and double the opening wood. The rest of the map's gold is outside your wall, which is the point.
Raising a hall needs a Barracks, a War Pit or a Charnel House standing first. You could previously go for a Castle on the first frame of the match with the gold you start with.
Right-click one of your own units, or an ally's, and your selection escorts it: they walk with it, fight what it walks into, and go back to escorting afterwards. A priest heals them on the march.
Four maps to choose from: Open Field, Woodland (forest is the ground and the roads are cut through it), Lakeland, and Gold Rush with a hoard in the middle nobody can hold alone.
A computer ally will bail you out: down to your last coins with something burning, an allied machine with money to spare sends 200 gold, unasked, at most once a minute.
Easy's opponent gives you your setup time back: its first attack now waits for the later of four minutes and half again as long as it took to raise the army.
The computer stops sending everybody to the gold mine. It splits the workforce by what its own plan will cost and moves a worker across when the balance drifts, instead of deciding at 90 seconds.
The computer stops standing at its own supply cap. It keeps as much headroom as it can consume while a house goes up, instead of starting one only when there is no room left.
The computer spends its money and finishes its buildings: it buys the best soldier it can afford and holds back exactly what its next building costs, in lumber as well as gold.
The town centre climbs twice, and your elite, casters and flyers wait for it: the second rung for a knight or a priest, the third for the Aerie, the Dragon Pen and the Wailing Arch.
Towers shoot flying things properly: a tower, a spire and an orc hovel do double damage to anything in the air, so the answer to a dragon can be a building rather than a standing escort.
A gold mine is worth crowding, up to a point: five is the number it is built for, and the sixth and seventh each bring half a worker's gold. The panel says which side of the line a mine is on.
Maps stop looking generated: the ridge and its gates are back on every team map, lakes and boulders have bays and lumps, and the mirror is gone. Old saves and shared seed links will not load.
Flying units have their own building, one per race, and it is the only thing it makes: the Aerie, the Dragon Pen and the Wailing Arch. The flyers cost the same; the building is the price.
The computer opponent builds air and flies it. No plan it plays had ever asked for a flying unit, on any race, so the Hammerwing, the Dragon and the Ghost were things only you ever fielded.
The turtle builds walls of its own: a short eight-segment arc on the side it has seen you coming from, once its towers are up. It will not box itself in, and the ground behind it stays open.
Walls. Each costs wood and needs your barracks first: humans build stone with the most armour outside a keep, orcs sharpened logs that hurt what chews them, Spooky Guys frail packed bone.
The computer players take their turns evenly spaced through the second rather than in a bunch at the end of it, so no seat gets the short end of the clock by construction.
Easy leaves you alone for the first four minutes, and comes with more when it does come. It used to march at about two and a half minutes, which is barely a barracks.
The first player no longer has the game on his side: units were walked in build order, so the first seat always swung first and won 70.7% of 140 mirrored matches. The walk turns round now.
Your soldiers can be told to pull out of a fight before they die in it: Fall back when hurt (X) walks them home below thirty percent health, keeping whatever you had queued. Raging orcs are exempt.
The computer opponent is not always the same one. Opponents vary by seed and by seat now, and Easy never sends the rusher at all; every single-player match used to hand you one.
Repairing a building under fire is billed honestly. A barracks could take eighteen hundred points of damage back and never cost a splinter; you now pay for every point you mend, once.
Wounded units actually retreat. With a retreat threshold set, every unit below it walks home — it used to reach about one in nine — and whatever you queued behind the fight is still waiting.
The duel map is the same map for both players, tile for tile. Woods, rock and water were mirrored a tile out, so one seat opened with trees the other did not have.
Repair is paid for, in gold and lumber: a third of what the building cost, charged as the health bar climbs. When you cannot pay, the worker downs tools and the game says so.
A repair crew no longer beats an army. A worker is worth about half a soldier now: two hold a barracks against one footman, four against two, and anything thinner loses the building.
Every unit is priced against the armour the game actually charges, not a flat percentage: the footman costs six more gold, the knight trades a point of plate for five, and a raider trades fairly.
The Spooky Guys can take a hit now. They had been charged for regeneration they never live to receive: the corpsedog goes 36 to 53, the ghost 50 to 68, the zombie 28 to 38, the vampire 50 to 67.
The warhound and dragon were paying for a swing the old pricing did not measure, and gain ten hit points and six. The Hammerwing gives nine back, because it was the one flyer getting a discount.

Interface

Pressing PLAY brings up the loading screen first, so the second or two of building the map and baking sprites is a bar filling rather than a page that has stopped.
Every way into the game has a loading screen now — the stump, the title and a bar that fills. The gallery used to sit black for nine seconds and now counts the sprites out as it builds them.
Caster and champion abilities answer their own keys again. Each has a square of its own on the command card instead of sharing one with Patrol, Guard or Fall back and never winning the key.
The battle behind the main menu stays the whole window when you pick a race, instead of shrinking to a rectangle floating in the middle of the screen until you reload.
The third number in your top bar is food, not supply, and the wicker basket beside it is a turkey leg. A House, a Hovel or a Crypt feeds five more soldiers, exactly as it did.
PRACTICE on the main menu opens three short scenes: pick one hurt man out of a heap, pull a wounded man back behind your line, spend a Champion's skill point at the right moment.
Draw your army's route with your finger: press MOVE and drag a path, and every stop you draw is a waypoint — the same orders a desktop player spells out with a row of Shift-clicks.
ALERTS over the battlefield opens the whole trail of attacks and losses, newest first; tap a line and the camera goes there. On a phone an attack you missed is reachable for the first time.
The end-of-match screen no longer says you sat on a fortune: it was counting the 750 gold and 350 lumber you start with as unspent. It now names the worst moment you really did hold a pile.
A patrol draws its beat: the route is shown in its own dashed line while the unit is selected, closed in a loop, including the leg back to the start. It used to draw nothing at all.
The Patrol button stays lit while you lay points, so a five-point route is five clicks instead of five trips back to the command card, and the status line counts them as you go.
Every key is yours to move, including the ten building and eight unit letters. Put the barracks on J and the button, its tooltip, the hints and the in-game key list all say J from then on.
The key screen says when a key is already taken and offers SWAP THEM or LEAVE IT — including a global key landing on a letter the command card needs, which used to break that button silently.
Keys can be changed in the middle of a match. The pause menu has a REMAP KEYS page with the same rows as SETTINGS, and a key moved there works on the very next press.
Put one key back, or all of them, or everything: every changed row grows its own undo, and there are RESET LETTERS, RESET ALL and RESET TO DEFAULTS at the bottom.
A third letter set, GRID: every command-card button answers to one of the twelve keys under your left hand — Q W E R, A S D F, Z X C V — laid out the way the card is, on any keyboard.
New games start on the GRID letters. A set you have already chosen, or any key you bent by hand, is untouched, and MNEMONIC and CLASSIC are one click away in SETTINGS.
Demolish, Cancel training, Open gate and Level up can be moved like everything else. They were the four command-card buttons with no row on the key screen at all.
Anything you rebind reads correctly everywhere. Tooltips and the letter in the corner of a button used to print the key the game shipped with rather than the key you had chosen.
The scoreboard tells you who you were playing: every computer seat carries its plan on its row — "Rusher — get at you before you were ready · 3 waves sent".
The Champion's Devotion draws its edge on the ground — a quiet dashed ring at the exact distance the aura reaches, all match, for both players.
Your units' health bars are quartered by three dark notches and an enemy's stays a plain bar, so whose soldier is about to die is not a question of telling green from red.
Gold mines are a diamond on the minimap instead of a gold square — a dark ring with a bright centre, findable without the colour at all, where every building is a square.
The main menu stops holding the war behind it at arm's length: the dark wash over the whole screen is gone, and the loose text carries its own dark edge so it still reads over grass or snow.
A Warcraft III hotkey preset. SETTINGS → KEYS offers this game's role letters or Warcraft III's own (Town Hall H, Farm F, Barracks B, Footman F, Knight K), in all three races at once.
The build menu works on a Cyrillic, Greek or Hebrew keyboard: the seventeen build and train keys answer to the key in the same physical place and print the character engraved on it.
The interface-size setting works on a phone. It scales up as far as you ask; it will not scale down, because a shrunk button stops being something a fingertip can hit.
A phone can go home: HOME sits at the head of the group strip, and tapping it twice picks up your next town hall, exactly as the keyboard's two keys do.
The tactical pause is reachable with a thumb: the pause menu has a STOP THE CLOCK — KEEP ORDERING row. It is refused in an online match, where everybody else's clock keeps running.
Friend-or-foe colours can be changed during a match. A COLORS row in the pause menu steps through the same three the backslash key cycles, and applies at once.
The minimap shows what you are holding: everything in your selection wears a white ring on the panel. A shape, not a colour, so it reads on any dot and never covers the dot's own colour.
Guard a friendly unit from the command card on desktop or touch. Crowded hero-and-worker command cards keep every button on screen.
Controls explain that minimap pings mark the map in solo games and also reach allies in multiplayer. The phone's tooltip no longer suggests a keyboard shortcut.
Inspect every hero ability, including passives and future ranks, for its rules, cost and tradeoffs. A learning preview explains what improves without spending the point.
HUD buttons let you read a tooltip and slide away to cancel, and a cancelled press no longer toggles autocast.
Clearer controls, help and results: phone instructions match the gestures, keyboard hints follow your bindings, and save and replay messages explain what happened.
Hero abilities have named command-card buttons and keyboard routes, including Soulfrost's friendly-Husk target and Grave Tide's toggle on touch.
F reaches Finishing Blow and melee training; look at selection moves to End. Custom key remaps are preserved.
Space cycles through your attacks and losses without detouring through routine chatter or revealing where an enemy taunt came from.
On a phone, selecting a mixed group tells you that tapping a portrait picks one kind out.
Pull your most wounded soldier out of a fight in one tap: an extra portrait at the head of the group row, marked with an arrow, selects whichever of them is closest to dying. It gives no orders.
Control groups on a phone: the strip is back above the command card. Tap a chip to recall, tap again to jump the camera there, hold to make a group, and ＋ then tap to reinforce it.
A ＋ button above the command card queues orders behind the last one, so a finger can plot a route across the map or the minimap and give a rally point more than one leg.
Hold the idle-worker count on a phone to send every loafing worker back to the nearest job.
The HUD stops re-drawing its icons every frame — about twelve hundred throwaway images a second. They are drawn once now, which steadies the frame time on a phone.
The end-screen charts mark the moment you were first attacked, next to the lead-change mark that was already there.
The end screen says what killed you: when one pairing did most of the damage it names it — "Your footmen died mostly to their catapults."
A full training queue says so before you press: with five jobs queued the button greys out. Three barracks with one slot left between them still train.
Idle workers go back to what they were doing: the idle-worker key sends a gold worker to a mine and a lumber worker to a tree, not to the nearest node of either kind.
On a phone the "under attack" rows are a proper thumb target.
A missing replay link names the two real causes — a mistyped link, or a match never shared — instead of blaming an expiry that has not existed since 2026-08-30.
The menu battle follows your race: changing the banner changes the near side of the live war behind the menu, without cutting away or leaving an older battle running underneath.
Pick the season. A SEASON row under MAP: green, autumn, badlands or snow, on any map and any seed. AUTO still lets the seed choose, and the host picks for a room.
On a phone, press and hold anything to read its card — name, health, owner, what is happening to it and its upgrades. Lift without moving and nothing happens; your orders and selection are untouched.
Your allies call for help in a skirmish, and you can point at the map. The minimap hold and Alt+click did nothing outside a room, so a computer ally being raided had no way to say so.
Take Up Arms no longer lies about your casters: the ability button stayed lit and announced a totem that was never staked. It now says so before you press, and says to buy the rite back.
Watch a replay at half speed. The transport bar opens with a ½ beside 1x, 2x and 4x. The live game still stops at 3x, past which your orders land too late to have been yours.
Hover a unit, yours or theirs, and it names the upgrades it is carrying — +2 dmg (Honed Weapons). Select it and the panel adds a chip per rung, worth what that rung is worth to that body.
Heavy armour has a name and a chip: Footmen, Knights and Vampires carry Plate, three or more off every blow, with its own icon and its own sentence on the info panel.
Something points at the rung your lumber building sells: one line, once, when your hall reaches the tier that unlocks it — your lumber mill sells bigger loads for lumber.
Your casters have a button, and you can take it off them. It wears the same travelling gold border as every standing order; right-click (or double-tap) to hold it, press it to stake a totem now.
You can see when an ability is coming back: the button darkens and the cover drops a notch at a time, counting down over the last five seconds. Only on the long ones.
The game tells you an Orc gets angrier as it bleeds. A row of chips under a unit's numbers names what it is carrying and what it is worth right now — "+21% swings" on a half-wounded mauler.
The admin dashboard says how to read a chart and nothing about the code behind it — the ticket numbers, spec paths and column names are gone.
The lobby draws the map you are about to play — the actual world from the seed, with woods, lakes, gold and every start position in its banner — and the seed and size that made it, underneath.
Every seat's control reads INCOME 100%, which is what the bare cycling percentage always meant: the share of every load that seat banks.
Placing a building on a phone no longer commits when you lift your thumb: slide to move the ghost, pinch-pan with it still standing, and press BUILD when it is where you want it.
Dragging a wall still lays a wall. Walls and gates keep the drag-out row and every other building treats a drag as "no, over there". On a mouse a drag still lays a row of anything.
A placement can be backed out of, visibly: BUILD and a red ✗ sit side by side on the card while you place, and the line at the top of the screen names them. The two-finger tap still cancels.
The building you are placing sits closer to your thumb: the clearance is measured from the footprint's bottom edge, so a keep barely lifts and a single wall lifts the full amount.
The ally panel starts closed on a phone, every match. The tab opens it in one press, and a desk still remembers your choice.
The words that say "two-finger tap to cancel" are a button now. One press lets go of exactly what a two-finger tap would: the armed verb, never the army you armed it for.
The minimap on a phone held sideways grows with the screen, up to the tablet's size, instead of being a flat 104 pixels on every handset — about a third more map to aim at on a big phone.
The map can coast when you let go of a drag, if you want it to: SETTINGS → GLIDE on a phone, off by default.
The main menu opens on the halls instead of sliding onto them. The slow camera walk is unchanged; the quarter-second lurch on the way in is gone.
You can tell us something is wrong without leaving the match: REPORT A PROBLEM in the pause menu, optionally with the recording. No name, nothing about who you are, and it waits for a connection.
The pause menu is sized for a thumb — every row, the speed steps, the volume sliders and a saved game's LOAD and DELETE. The grab strip on a slider was half the height of the one you saw.
SETTINGS → CONTROLS on a phone is the gestures now, not twenty-five unpressable key bindings: nine lines of what your thumb can do, including the additive box you could not have found on your own.
The game works with no signal. A skirmish, your saves, your replays and the gallery all open on a plane, and installing it to a home screen gets an app rather than a bookmark that fails.
A new version arrives on its own, and never in the middle of a match — it waits until you are out of a game or a room, and a room that turns you away for an old build fetches the new one for you.
The seed you type is the seed you play. The box takes digits only, says so at once, and offers the number pad on a phone; a seed in the address bar is honoured instead of drawing a new map every load.
Menus can be read aloud: the name, invite, room-code and seed boxes, the sliders, the seat colour swatch and every key on the controls screen now tell a screen reader what they are.
A greyed-out command button says which kind of no it is — ONE AT A TIME on a second hall, QUEUE A UNIT on Repeat with nothing on the anvil — instead of all reading as "no gold".
On a phone you can build a group up out of two places: hold on a unit you already have and the box you drag ADDS to your selection, with a plus in the ring. Tight around one unit, it drops that one.
The seat list is readable and stays out of the way: seat numbers pick their own ink, the list stops where the room stops and fades at the bottom, and your own row wears a gold ring.
The menus say when there is more below: a small chevron sits at the bottom edge whenever there is more screen, and goes out when you reach the end.
A phone is no longer offered EDGE SCROLL and CAMERA, which need a pointer and arrow keys. Both are drawn only where there is a mouse; the minimap ground toggle stays on both.
The menus are sized for a thumb: every button outside a match meets the same minimum the command card does, the seed and room-code boxes with them, and the volume sliders have a band to land in.
Send an ally gold by tapping the gold. The figures are the buttons now, and on a phone the panel is a sheet across the bottom instead of a column that fitted one and a half allies.
Two Spooky Guys buildings stopped promising creatures that do not exist: the Charnel House makes Corpsedogs and the Headless, not Ghouls, and the Sepulchre wakes Vampires, not Wights.
Orc soldiers no longer offer a standing order they will never take. Orcs will not pull out of a fight on their own, and the Fall back button now says why before you press it.
A building site says how many workers are on it and what the next one is worth: "Building 40% — 3 working, 2 extra each worth half a worker". A site with nobody on it says that instead of 0%.
The game no longer offers to resume a match it cannot resume, and when a save genuinely cannot be picked up it says so in its own words instead of borrowing the shared-replay wording.
Blood rage was selling itself short: the card said "up to 35% faster" when that is how much the swing timer shortens. It says half again as many swings now, which is what you actually get.
The Bone Gate says something about itself. Its description was copied word for word from the Bone Wall, so the one building that opens and shuts never mentioned opening or shutting.
A locked building tells you what it needs, in full: "NEEDS LUMBER MILL" over up to three lines, instead of a bare name cut off wherever the button ended — "LUMBER M", "CHAPEL AN".
The food readout warns you without relying on colour: two short of the cap it picks up a "!", and at the cap it wears "!!" inside a red frame.
The install card names a browser only when it knows which one you have, instead of telling a Windows touchscreen about Safari's bars.
A phone opens straight into the game. The screen about the game and its button are gone; a link into a match opens the match. Getting rid of the browser's bars waits as INSTALL beside SETTINGS.
Installed to a home screen the game is called "No Lumber" rather than "Lumber" — closer to its real name, and still short enough not to be cut off.
You can see where a building is going before you put it there. The ghost sits above your finger, follows the drag, and the building goes down where you LIFT. A mouse is unchanged.
Playing upright is a layout now, not a stack: the minimap is half the size, everything under the board sits in one column, and a mixed selection gets two rows of portraits.
MENU stopped hanging off the side of the screen. An idle peasant used to push the top bar wider than the glass; the bar makes room, and MENU is a thumb-sized target rather than a 30px sliver.
The end-of-match screen fits on a phone: the player table reads as a stack of labelled figures, and SHARE and NEW GAME wrap into a grid instead of sitting off the right-hand edge.
The minimap dots are smaller, so a base is a cluster you can count rather than one coloured blob. A building still draws bigger than a unit and no longer shrinks when the fog closes over it.
Your units and buildings are on the minimap. They were drawn and then painted over by the terrain every frame, so the panel had only ever shown ground, trees, mines and your view box.
The minimap stops showing enemy buildings you have never scouted. Remembered ground now, the same as the world: what you last saw is what you see, not a live feed out of the fog.
Buildings are bigger than units on the minimap. They drew at exactly a footman's size on every board but one, so a town centre and a peasant were the same dot.
You can turn the minimap's ground off, in SETTINGS: the woods, the mines and everybody's dots stand on black. It costs the ground, the lakes and the fog, so it is a look rather than a new default.
Touching the screen no longer starts a countdown you did not ask for: the hold ring waits a moment before appearing, so only an actual hold ever sees it.
The ally tab reads 1 ALLY rather than ALLIES 1, which looked like a slot number rather than a count.
A menu too wide for your tablet can be dragged across to see the rest of it. Both axes drag now; a pinch is still refused.
The title is full size again on a 1440x900 laptop, where the main menu was quietly shrinking its own wordmark a step to make room, and then still would not fit in a 1512x790 window.
The menus no longer zoom out from under your thumb. A two-finger pinch on any screen outside a match used to magnify the whole thing, with no way to undo it on an iPhone. They still scroll.
The ally panel is a tab until you want it: a small ALLIES tab in the corner, open and shut with a press, remembered. If an ally comes under attack the tab says so without being opened.
Minimap dots keep the dark ring that lifts them off the ground. It was one canvas pixel, which on a non-doubling display is often no pixel at all, so an army on grass had nothing separating it.
Double-tap the minimap to send your army there. The first tap jumps the view — that is how you aim — and the second sends them. A fast double-click with a mouse still just re-centres.
A locked button tells you everything it is waiting for, not the first thing: "Knight requires a Blacksmith and a Castle".
An allied commander points at the map when they are being attacked, so you find out where they need you without reading the message log.
The orc wall is a Stake Wall now, not a "Spiked Wall" — it is built from sharpened stakes, and the three walls read Stone, Stake and Bone.
The site is served over HTTPS always. Typing the address without it used to load plain HTTP, and Safari correctly said "Not Secure"; the certificate was always fine, the redirect was missing.
You can see what you paid for: WEAPONS I, II or III in the top bar, and DMG 9 (+2) on the info panel — for an enemy unit too, which is how you find out how far ahead they are.
TODAY'S MAP sets the shape and the map as well as the seed, so everybody playing it is on the same one. Change any of the three and the button stops being lit, because you have left it.
The main menu opens on a fight. The war behind it is a rush against a walled hall now, waiting for the assault to arrive, instead of five workers going to work under a four-minute truce.
The map description on SET UP A MATCH is printed once, not twice. The duplicate line under the row shifted the rest of the panel when a map had a longer sentence.
The first two tutorial hints tell you to select a worker before they name a key: "Press B, build a House" does nothing at all unless you are already holding a peasant.
The key list in the pause menu has its own CONTROLS page and all of it fits on the screen, in as many columns as your window has room for, with long lines indented where they carry on.
The selection panel stops cutting off its own last line on a phone, where there is no hover card to read it in instead, and it takes about a third of the bar rather than all the spare room.
A locked building on the build menu shows you the building: the strip naming what you still have to build no longer covers the smithy's base, the tower's plinth or the wall's lowest course.
The white box on the minimap draws all four of its sides again. On a screen without pixel doubling it was usually one or two lines, which read as something broken rather than as a viewport.
The health bar above an upgraded town centre stops being drawn through it. It was hanging at the Keep's height — 8 pixels inside a Castle, 17 inside a Citadel.
The Spooky Guys rungs are called Barrow, Catacomb and Necropolis, in that order. They used to run the other way, so the grandest word was printed on the smallest building you could own.
A town centre raising a rung shows a gold bar under it and the panel counts it up — "Raising the Castle 55%". An enemy who can see your hall can see you teching, too.
You can cancel a hall you have started raising and three quarters of the gold comes back. The button used to warn you that you could not, which was a lie about the game.
Fall back is a button you press, not a switch you flip: press it and the soldiers you hold walk home now. Right-click (or double-tap) to make it a standing order instead.
A standing order looks like one: gold marching round the edge of the button, where an armed verb waiting for your click is a still gold frame. Reduced motion holds the border still.
Patrol and Repair have their own cursors: a there-and-back pair of arrows, and a hammer. Patrol wore the attack crosshair and Repair had no cursor at all.
Escape lets go of one thing at a time — the armed order, then your selection, then the pause menu. On a phone the two-finger tap does the same three steps.
The game tells you the gesture your own machine uses: "right-click" to a mouse, "double-tap" to a thumb, and every armed order says how to cancel it.
Holding a button on a phone reads it and nothing else. It used to switch a standing order on after six-tenths of a second, so looking up a cost quietly changed something. That is a double tap now.
The demolish button names the hall you actually have, instead of offering to "Demolish Keep" on a finished Citadel.
Your town centre is called what it actually is. Every screen still said Keep after you raised a Castle or a Citadel, and drew the rung-one sprite. Fixed everywhere at once, for all three races.
The top bar reads SUPPLY where it read FOOD, and a unit costs supply on its tooltip and in the warning when you are blocked. One word for one thing; the basket is unchanged.
The portrait beside a selected unit is framed on the unit, not on the box it is drawn in. A hammerwing used to sit half outside its own portrait and a skeleton lost its raised arm.
A button you cannot afford and one you have not unlocked no longer look the same: a locked one keeps its frame bright, wears a padlock and prints what it is waiting for across its own face.
Portraits show the unit you actually selected — the three zombies are told apart by the stripped arm and the opened belly — and the crop is framed off the head instead of the sprite box.
The game warns you that a building would wall your workers off from the gold while it is still a ghost under the pointer. It is a warning, not a refusal: walling a choke on purpose is allowed.
A phone can answer in a team room: a SAY button over the chat lines, an ALL / ALLIES label that switches who hears you, and a thumb held on the minimap drops a ping for your allies.
BLOOD: OFF, in Settings beside motion and shake. Deaths still leave a corpse; what goes is the spray, the stain and the trail of drops. Two players may disagree and play the same match.
TODAY'S MAP, in the lobby beside the seed box: everybody in the world gets the same world today, the summary keeps your best time, and it changes at midnight UTC.
The game admits how the air works: a swordsman cannot hit a flyer, anything that shoots hits one for half again as much, and a flyer does half damage to buildings. All three are on the panel.
Every refusal has a voice. A right-click with nothing selected used to be swallowed whole, which is indistinguishable from a click the game missed; a refused order now says why, once.
The game teaches you how to gather. The hint that said "right-click a gold mine" was answered before the match began, so it now rides with the idle-worker hint, where you actually need it.
A building selected alongside your troops says why it is not taking orders, instead of being ringed and counted while the card quietly belongs to the footmen.
The white flash before the game appears is gone: the page is the game's own dark from its very first frame.
The game tells you which build it is, and now it is telling the truth. It read "dev" on the live site; it reads v0.1.0 · <commit> now, and stays on screen in SETTINGS, STATS and the pause menu.
The ally strip, the chat lines and the replay transport fit a phone: all three are clear of the deck at a size a finger can hit, and a button a finger touched no longer stays lit all match.
Press a command button on a phone and it tells you what it is before you buy it — the name, the blurb, the cost and any refusal, up while your finger is still down. Sliding off buys nothing.
Surrendering in a team game says something: YOU SURRENDERED · THE MATCH PLAYS ON, with the graphs and the score. Being knocked out while an ally still stands still waits for the result.
The selection panel tells the truth about a militia peasant. It swings for double with an extra point of armour near your buildings, and the panel went on printing the ordinary numbers.
The Gryphon Rider is the Hammerwing and the orc Spirit Lodge is the Spirit House. Nothing about either changed but the name.
On a phone only one command button is lit at a time. Arming a verb puts every other one out, and the ring goes out the moment the click it was waiting for is spent.
The armed button and an autocasting button no longer look the same: a dashed gold frame, two solid corner brackets and a solid edge — three marks you can tell apart with the colour covered.
Nothing tells you to press a key on a device with no keyboard: tooltips drop "[W]" and "[ESC]", and a mixed selection says to tap a portrait instead of naming Tab.
The tutorial hint no longer sits on top of what a unit is saying — both boxes are in one stack — and "tap to hide these" is its own small button underneath instead of buried mid-sentence.
The ring that fills under a long press is above your finger rather than under it, where your own thumb was covering the one thing telling you how much longer to hold.
The menus keep out from under the notch. On an iPhone with a Dynamic Island the tops of the menus began underneath it and the build stamp sat under the home indicator.
The lobby fits a phone held upright: below 600px each seat is two lines instead of six squeezed columns, and START is a button the width of a thumb instead of running off the edge.
On a touch device the lobby stops printing "arrows or tab to move · enter to change" at a player with no keyboard, and CONTROLS is a readable list rather than a screen you can only escape with a key.
The main menu opens on HUMANS unless you have chosen otherwise. It used to take its banner from whichever two races the backdrop battle had drawn, so scenery picked your race.
Surrendering in a team match shows your summary straight away: you are out, the match plays on behind it, and the screen says so.
The main menu shows which build it is, at the bottom — read it back to us if something goes wrong.
The one-click first match is called QUICK MATCH, so the button says that it skips the lobby. SET UP A MATCH sits beside it until you have finished a game; after that both become a single PLAY.
Your Champion is one press away: F1 takes the camera to him with him selected, and on a phone a Champion badge beside the idle-worker count does the same.
The command buttons stay on the screen in a narrow window. The minimap and the card keep their size and places, and the selection panel gives up the width instead of the card falling off the edge.

Art

The stump is back on the main menu on a phone: above NOT ENOUGH LUMBER held upright, beside it held sideways, and the lettering gives up no pixel to make room.
The orc Watch Spire and the Spooky Guys Bone Spire stand on the whole tile they take up — banked into a mound, stepped onto a plinth — instead of being poles on a square of grass nobody could walk on.
A Warchief's Sunder now knocks the Shield Oath apart on the body it lands on, the pieces tumbling to the dirt, instead of the shield simply stopping being drawn as if the oath had run out.
Shoot something out of the sky and the hit lands on the creature — the ring and the spray of blood ride up with the body, on the chest, instead of appearing on the ground beneath it.
The three race pointers are one size and one gesture now, a closed hand with a finger up, each ending in its own wrist: a gold-banded bracer, an oxblood sleeve, a violet shroud in three torn flaps.
A soldier under a Shield Oath has a shield planted in front of him: it slides in as the oath is sworn, stands while it holds, and sinks into the ground when it lapses.
The Warchief's Warsong smear works at every facing. His speed echo was laid straight out behind him and hidden under his own body when he walked toward you; it is swept to one side now.
Every hero ability has a button of its own — a shield on a fist, a horn, a sword in the ground, a shield coming apart, a war drum, an empty hood, a hand out of the earth, a frost star.
Buildings are heard coming down whoever brought them down, and the collapse lands when the building does. It used to play only for your own Demolish button, a second early.
Sunder looks like something breaking: four hard-edged shards burst off the struck body and fly without falling — nothing else in the game throws debris that ignores gravity.
Ancestral Rite shows where the strength came from: a small jointed thing crawls from the corpse to the Skullbreaker's feet and closes on them as his health rises.
Soulfrost looks like two spells on one button. At an enemy, a slab of ice drops across its shoulders and leaves a frost crust; at your own Husk, a bright mote arcs back to the Crown.
Grave Tide's raise comes out of the ground instead of sparkling: four pale spikes break upward out of the dirt and settle back, and the new skeleton stands up between them.
Shield Oath shows on the soldier you spend it on: two armour caps close onto his shoulders as it lands, stay for as long as the protection does, and come off outward when it runs out.
Fall In leaves a trail: every soldier the shout frees kicks up a bright scuff line and drags one for the whole three seconds he is quick, so you can see who was let go and which way they went.
Warsong marks the ground and the orc: six dark cracks are torn into the dirt where he stood, and he drags a smear of himself behind every step for the twelve seconds the window lasts.
The empty ground on a map has a reason to be empty: a broken wall foot, a fallen course of stone. Rare on purpose, scenery only — nothing walks round them or hides behind them.
Worn earth no longer sinks into the grass in its shadows: its two darkest steps sit above the grass instead of crossing over. The two grounds still do not separate strongly enough without colour.
Long Winter protection surrounds skeletons with translucent facets instead of oversized shoulder plates, and stays visible through ordinary hit flashes.
The Champion visibly grips his sword in profile, with clearer arms and blade poses in rear-diagonal attacks.
Walls and towers keep their fortified appearance when your town hall reaches its final upgrade.
Repairs sound at the worker's hammer strike, with no stray sparks in the middle of the building, and switching or cancelling a repair carries no old hammer sound into the next job.
Human town halls have a solid rear hall and clearer roof connections through both upgrades, so workers behind them look properly placed.
Units and heroes have new responses with distinct personalities, clearer acknowledgements and a few new complaints.
Last Stand has a held sword pose, a field boundary you can see and protection marks on the men inside it. The pose and the field end when the channel is cancelled.
A unit taking a hit visibly flinches — its upper body shifts aside under the blow, even mid-swing at whoever hit it, so you can see which bodies are being worked on.
Your Champion turns through the corners. All four are drawn now — the sight set toward the way he is going, the brow jutting, the skull falling away — instead of the front view wearing a turned body.
Your Champion faces the way he is walking. His great helm has a brow over a short sight, the skull falling away to his neck and a chin over his gorget, instead of a flat drum.
Each of the three heroes has a voice of his own — the Champion low and unhurried inside a great helm, the Skullbreaker the deepest growl, the Pale Crown flat and airy with a wobble under it.
When your Champion takes a hit he looks like it: head thrown back, plume knocked flat, shoulders rocking over planted feet and his greatsword sagging, drawn in all eight facings.
The Skullbreaker swings a maul again — a flat-topped slab half again as wide, lit on top and shadowed beneath, instead of a tapered stone head that read as the mauler's axe from across the field.
Your Champion has two legs when he walks past you: the near leg stands clear of the far one with a dark line between them, instead of baking into one stump under the tabard.
Your hero catches a different light: a thin gold line down the edges the sun falls on, on the card, the badge and a gold-ringed minimap dot too. Enemy heroes wear it as well.
The Champion no longer looks like a promoted footman: a flat-topped great helm, a plume nearly twice as tall sweeping back over his shoulder, a cloak to the knee, and a point on his greatsword.
The Champion's greatsword swings in all three views: the blade turns on every beat, both fists stay on the hilt, and the blow lands on the frame the game holds longest.
A catapult and a ballista fire without leaving the ground. Their wheels stay planted while the carriage above does the moving, instead of the whole machine hopping in place with every throw.
The necromancer no longer swings his own staff over his own face: the first beat of his cast and his attack used to put the skull squarely over both his eyes.
The Spooky Guys Revenant has his own body: the Pale Crown, a dead king who never touches the ground — no legs, a robe narrowing to a point above his shadow, a spiked crown, frost leaving a bare hand.
The orc Warchief has his own body: the Skullbreaker, wearing a beast's skull with two horns past his shoulders, a hide mantle and a two-handed stone maul he strikes the ground with.
Casters visibly cast. Staking a totem, raising a skeleton and mending a soldier each have their own six drawings and a spark that leaves the staff, instead of looking like another swing.
A struck catapult keeps its arm. A siege engine lurches only as far as it can without any of it leaving the picture — the throwing arm and a dragon's wingtip used to fall off the sprite.
Your dead keep their faces. A corpse keeps the colours the living unit wore all the way down, instead of one-pixel details blinking out partway through the fall.
A dragon keeps its head while it dies. Anything carried above the shoulders — a reared neck, the Knight's crest, the catapult's arm — used to be cut off the moment the body started to fall.
The lumber mill has a saw again, a toothed blade cutting a log on a bench, instead of a disc on the wall that read as a shield. The war pit's mouth is lit along its far edge.
Units lean into a turn — the shoulders go round the corner before the feet do and straighten as the heading settles. Nothing changes on a straight run, and carts and catapults roll flat.
The orc palisade and war gate are lit properly, so a wall on dirt reads as a row of logs instead of scuff marks on the ground.
Buildings no longer have small holes punched through them: the lumber mill's pennant, the gap behind the blacksmith's anvil, the war pit's rim and a wedge the fortress and warhold both carried.
Meadow flowers are scattered through the grass instead of falling into neat rows.
The orc Stronghold and the Spooky Guys Barrow reach the back of the ground they stand on, with a deeper timber breastwork and more stone over the tomb mouth. They used to stop eight pixels short.
Units flinch when they are hit: head and chest knocked back under the flash, feet planted. A catapult, ballista or plague cart is shoved on its axles instead, and keeps hold of what it is carrying.
The main menu shows the battle. The fight behind it used to be dimmed to a texture; it is a live match now, in daylight, at dusk or at night depending on the race you last played.
The Corpsedog stands like a dog: 23 rows instead of 21, with a deeper barrel and a clear band of daylight under it. The depth is in the chest, so it still measures smaller than the Warhound.
An orc losing a fight looks dangerous. Blood rage makes a wounded orc swing up to half again as fast, and a raging body now throbs brighter and faster the closer it is to dying. Not a red tint.
You can see the totem holding you: teal spurs close around the feet of anything caught in an orc Spirit Totem, which takes a third off its speed.
A peasant defending its home wears a helmet. Workers near your own buildings fight for double damage and a point of armour, and now put on a pot helm the moment they are in range.
The autumn moor rests. Its dense even mottle read as olive camouflage netting and hid the fallen leaves that are the point of the season; the floor is quiet now and the leaf litter is what you see.
Four new icons: the spirit totem, raise dead, blood rage and vampiric bite.
Worn ground stops being a rectangle. Bare earth used to meet the grass at right angles with a green line along its top edge; patches now wander, interlock and turn their corners on a slope.
The snowfield is snow again: a wind-packed crust streaked along the wind, with grit and dark earth where it has been scoured thin, instead of wet grey concrete flecked with white paint.
The badlands stop shimmering. The hardpan is a broad flat field with scattered grit and stones, so the sun-cracks that were always there can finally be seen for the noise that hid them.
The Watchtower's fighting gallery has an even rhythm: six matched openings with a post at each end, instead of seven crammed into room for six with a half-width one against the corner.
The Hammerwing's wings no longer disappear into the dirt. They were almost exactly the colour of worn ground; they are dark now, the way an eagle's are, and read against dirt, grass, snow and sand.
The icon in your browser tab is the game's own mark again. Five of the seven icon files were still painted in a wood colour the game stopped using; all seven are now cut from the same drawing.
The settings slider peg is a spool, not a pause button — wide at the ends, pinched in the middle with the gold fill showing through, so it reads as something a hand grips.
Nine buildings sat off-centre on their own ground — the Watch Spire and Bone Spire by two pixels on a tower twenty-eight wide. Every building and upgrade now stands square in its plot.
The Corpsedog stopped looking like an ox: pricked ears close to the skull, eyes forward over the muzzle where a predator's are, and a snout that catches the light. Same fix from behind.
The fortified Bone Spire is a Bone Spire again — four skulls and a pair of horns cradling the corpse-light — instead of the smooth ribbed drum that read as a water tank.
The Lumber Mill stopped claiming ground it does not hold: its stack of cut logs is against its own wall instead of five pixels out on open ground nothing blocked.
Peasants stopped looking like orcs from behind. Their greenish drab coat sat on orc skin at every step; it is sun-bleached homespun now, the same cloth much paler.
Spooky Guys buildings no longer look like they are being rained on: the summoning is deep violet, the faction's own colour, and the flat bright wisps are broken into drifting arcs at varying heights.
The fortified towers stand up straight. All three fortified crowns sat left of the tower under them — worst on the Bone Spire, where the drum hung four pixels clear of its own shaft.
The Mauler carries a greataxe — broad, rust-backed, honed, drawn at every angle of the swing, carried clear of his hip — instead of a hand-sized cleaver that read as a grey lump.
The Warhound has a tail. Seen from directly behind it did not, which left a broad grey animal with two ears and no way to tell what it was.
The Warhound stands on real legs and stopped looking like a bat: short forward-set ears on a broad skull, a snout that comes at you, and twice the daylight underneath. It is exactly as big as it was.
The orc palisade is a row of logs again: every stake has a lit face and a rounded shoulder, so it reads as sharpened timber bound with rope instead of a shadow with black scratches across it.
The Spooky Guys's cold light no longer looks like another player's banner. The corpse-light is a deeper cyan, so a sky player's Catacomb no longer wears the enemy's light beside their own colour.
Two holes patched in buildings you could see the ground through: the notch through the orc Stronghold's banner is a fold in the cloth, and the Citadel's missing six pixels of wall are stone.
Lumber is no longer a smudge next to gold. The stack of logs in the top bar is lit properly, so the three resources are three different pictures rather than three different colours.
The orc melee is the MAULER, and he is built like one: a quarter wider and a quarter heavier than a footman, with the shoulders, arms and stance to carry it, where he used to be drawn at parity.
The elites are elite on sight. The vampire is a head and shoulders over the line; the warhound has the chest and haunch of a war beast, where it used to be smaller than the orc beside it.
The mauler no longer carries the little hide buckler. It sat behind him and the wider body covered every pixel of it.
Four town-centre sprites had a gap punched through solid stone: the Castle and Citadel shared one hollow course of eaves, the Fortress and Warhold another. The masonry reads as masonry now.
The dragon is the size of a dragon: half again a footman's height, the widest thing on the field, wings sweeping out and down instead of standing up like ears, and a tail long enough to see.
The art-review sheet's greyscale column measures perceived lightness the way the palette was authored, so a green and a red that look equally light no longer show as different there.
The Citadel's upper tower had a row of blocks with holes punched through it; it is lit blocks with shadow between them now, matching the bands on the two towers below.
The Citadel's corner turrets land on a two-step corbel instead of ending their cornice in mid-air two rows above the first stone.
The Keep, Castle and Citadel had three holes punched through each corner tower. The towers are solid now, one running bond from eaves to door, with a clean ledge under the battlements.
The human hall's corner towers stand straight: both storeys are laid out on the tower's real width — four even piers with three slots between them — instead of a band that ran off one side.
Chopping a tree shows. A thicket comes down a step at a time like everything else in the wood, conifers show the notch the axe cut, and a half-chopped pine no longer stands on a thinner trunk.
Heavy things move like heavy things: a catapult leans into getting under way and rolls into its stop, and a dragon carries its momentum. Everything on two legs is as quick as ever.
A unit still coasting to a stop keeps walking. Its legs used to snap to standing while the body glided on for a few more pixels — a statue on a conveyor belt, worst on horses.
The autumn moor stopped looking like a chessboard. Its two ground colours were far enough apart that you could count the squares; they now read as one moor going over.
The woods are five kinds of tree, and every biome grows its own: a birch, a low thicket, badlands deadwood and thorn with no canopy, a moor with no spruce. A wood finally has a broken skyline.
The catapult and the ballista are siege engines now: proper wheels at the full width of the frame, a deck spanning the axle, an undercarriage under it, and a catapult a third taller than a man.
Your keep flies its banner on a pole you can see, and the Castle and Citadel stopped flying one they never had — a stray mast out of the great hall's roof going nowhere. That roof is slate again.
Stop is a hand again and Fall back is a boot. Stop has a thumb now instead of four even fingers that read as a comb, and all three stance buttons are pieces of armour, so they read as one family.
The Gate button shows a gate you can see through: a keystoned arch with two timber leaves standing open, instead of a solid round-topped slab that read as a headstone.
A building under construction looks like its race is building it: human timber scaffolding with a crane block, orc raked stakes under a flapping hide, Spooky Guys motes climbing out of a cold mist.
You can find your own bone gate in your own wall: two posts standing proud of the wall carry a heavy lintel, with the plate hung between them in bands against the wall's palings.
The fortified rung looks different, not just tinted: tall merlons on a lit string course, an iron-bound spiked palisade, a heavy domed rampart. You can tell the tier from the outline alone.
Each rung of the smith's weapon ladder wears its own mark — one heavy blade, two slimmer, three keener — instead of all three borrowing the attack order's sword.
The orc hall's turf roof reads as a roof: thatch laid in courses above the grass, graded from a lit ridge to a shadowed eave, with the team hides hanging like cloth on the Warhold's platform.
The orc town centre is a stronghold at all three rungs: an earth rampart with a stockade, a great gate tower with the passage cut through its foot and a fire in it, and the turf hall rising behind.
The Spooky Guys town centre grows INTO the building you liked: the stepped tomb with the bone galleries is the top of the ladder now, and the two below it are the same ziggurat with fewer terraces.
The Spooky Guys standard is attached to its building again: it flies from a bone staff instead of an iron mast that vanished against grass, leaving a blue rectangle floating beside the tomb.
The miners hold their picks the right way up. Every pickaxe was drawn as a bowl with both points to the sky, which is a hoe; the head now hangs with both points sweeping down and out.
Every town centre is redrawn, and each rung is visibly bigger than the last — 56 to 60 pixels tall at rung one, 68 to 70 at rung two, 80 to 81 at rung three, across all three races.
The Spooky Guys menus lost the pale lines running through them. A bone string course belongs once in a wall; in a repeating tile it arrived every sixteen pixels and ruled straight through the text.
The Spooky Guys menus are built out of the same megalithic slabs their buildings are: one slab to a course, fourteen wide, with a deep joint, instead of the human panel's brickwork in another colour.
Rock stacks have height, and you can walk behind one. Cairns, slabs and split boulders are drawn in with everything else, so they stand on the shoulder of an outcrop instead of being painted flat.
Your town centre grows, twice: Keep to Castle to Citadel, Stronghold to Fortress to Warhold, Necropolis to Catacomb to Great Barrow. The rung you are on is the building you see.
Timber, leather straps, steel and plastered walls no longer share a colour with the ground they sit on — the bark is darker than the dirt, and a limewashed wall reads against snow.
The icon you get when you install the game to a home screen is the brand mark again. It was baked before the timber colours moved, so it still wore the old bark.
The Hammerwing's mount has a head at three-quarter view too: a rounded skull, a brow, both eyes and a beak hooking down past the chin, instead of a cream rectangle laid over its own chest.
Rock stops looking like it has writing on it. Its repeated marks lined up into rows of little hooks marching across every outcrop; they are small chips at odd sizes now.
Rock is stone again: weathered granite that gets its shape from light, turning from a sunlit shoulder into deep shade across a dozen tiles, instead of facets on a grid that read as wicker.
The standing stones on an outcrop are stones now — three sunlit stacked blocks, a leaning slab, a split boulder cracked down its shade side — instead of little wicker baskets.
The Hammerwing has a head when you see it from the side: out in front on a neck rising from the withers, with a brow, an eye and a hooked beak that clears the chin.
The knight is a big unit now: six rows taller and four columns broader, with legs under the warhorse and, head-on, a steel chamfron down its face and the caparison across its chest.
The dragon is no longer the smallest thing on the board. It has a reared neck in profile, a wingspan half again as wide and hind legs hanging under it in flight; it used to read as a moth.
A felled tree leaves a stump instead of a bread roll: a cut face with the grain cracking across it, bark grooves, an overhanging top and a splintered bite where the last swing went in.
A patch of bare earth stops looking like polka dots. One dirt tile in eight carried a pale sandy blob at the same spot, so a worn path came out as a grid of bright dots.
The Spooky Guys menu is built out of the same stone the Spooky Guys build with: coarse ashlar with a pale bone string course, instead of the grave linen their units wear.
The Aerie's banner is back on the roof. It was flying three pixels clear of the building, hanging in the grass with nothing under it.
The Spooky Guys tombs have doorways instead of holes: a shadow under the lintel, a wall at the back of it, and corpse-light burning somewhere deep inside.
The Bone Mill's derrick has its rope tied on. A line ran nine pixels into the sky holding nothing; it is a stay now, from the frame's head down to the end of the beam.
The Blacksmith's second chimney is a chimney again: coursed stone the whole way, three rows taller, landing on the ridge instead of a brick cap hovering over the roof on nothing.
The Blacksmith has an anvil you can see. The charcoal store hangs off the wall on a bracket now, and the anvil sits on the grass below it on its own oak stump with its own shadow.
The Lumber Mill's loft door has an inside, with a lintel shadow and a back wall, and the hoist beam beside it is a real beam with a pulley block hanging at the outboard end.
The Aerie is a stone tower with a timber loft cantilevered past the wall and an open wicker crown with a bite out of the front — a Watchtower closes at the top and this one opens.
The Dragon Pen has no roof: a burnt black crag with a fire in the cleft at its foot, ringed by leaning posts with iron chain slung between them. The orcs do not house the dragon.
The Wailing Arch is a free-standing arch of fused bone with nothing behind it — the ground shows through, the uprights lean in, and the inner faces are worn smooth by whatever keeps coming out.
The Spooky Guys menu backdrop is a violet-black night with corpse-light pooling over the necropolis. The old teal multiply left the green, so the drained faction had the greenest air of the three.
The orc menus and HUD are stacked logs rather than sawn boards — three logs lying on their sides, none quite like the other two. The orcs fell whole trees and use them whole.
Units throw a shadow of their own shape, thrown by the same sun the buildings have: the legs walk in it, and a raised weapon reaches across the grass.
Units coast into a stop instead of parking on the spot, finishing the stride they were in. Setting off on a click is as immediate as it ever was.
The portrait in the info panel breathes, taking the same slow breath the sprite does. Reduced motion holds it on one frame.
The zombie that has rotted open still looks rotted open with its arms full: the load rides at the waist now instead of directly over the hole in its belly.
Workers carry their tools. The hammer, the maul and the mallet ride on the shoulder the whole time, so you can pick your workers out of a crowd by their shape rather than by where they stand.
Select a building and you can hear it working — a smithy hammers, a mill saws, a barracks drills — in the material its banner builds with. Houses, chapels and towers stay quiet on purpose.
The Watchtower's corners are built like a tower's: alternate courses run a dressed pale block up each flank, long-and-short quoin work, the only human building that has it.
The Watchtower is coursed masonry again at the same value as every other human wall, with the corbel turning like a course and both arrow loops lit from inside.
The human Barracks is built out of stones again: coursed masonry with a bright string course under the eaves and another at the floor line, so it reads as two storeys rather than one grey slab.
The human House is built out of stones again — five-pixel coursed stones with a dark joint and a lit top, a bright string course under the eaves — and it has two lit windows either side of the door.
The human Barracks has a porch rather than three holes punched in its wall: each bay has a shadowed lintel over a stone back wall that catches the light on its way down.
The orc Lumber Camp is no longer the human Lumber Mill: a woodpile of logs stacked end-on on a rammed-earth berm, with lashed sheer legs holding a trunk on a rope and the clan's standard on it.
Knights, wolves and siege engines stop standing on their own private floor. The wide shadow was the footman's depth at half again the width, which is the same shadow seen from a lower camera.
Every building stands on the ground. Half the roster was drawn with empty rows underneath — a Stronghold eleven pixels in the air — and the shadow floated with it, so it read as a sticker.
The orcs stopped building log cabins: the Hovel is a lashed A-frame, the War Pit an actual pit with fire at the bottom, the Stronghold a bermed enclosure, the Forge a clay furnace.
You can tell the three town centres apart from across the map. A Keep, a Stronghold and a Necropolis used to be the same black shape at a glance.
Every Spooky Guys building is made of something else: big dry-stacked blocks with black joints, and bone doing the work as lintels, piers and racked bays. Flat-capped, stepped, sunk into the ground.
The Necropolis is three terraces with a stair up the front instead of a wide box with a tower at each corner, which was the Keep's outline exactly.
The Charnel House is a long low shed with bone racks across the front and a black mouth at ground level; the Ossuary is a rack tower with a skull in the head of each bay.
The Blightworks vat runs green. It was the same cold blue as every window in the faction, which made the one vat on the map look like a light.
Footfall dust trails behind a walker in all eight directions. Four of the eight left no trail at all, and one trailed the wrong way.
The Spooky Guys build out of something that is not the human's wall: dry-stacked barrow-stone, near-black and coarse, with bone piers at the corners, a bone lintel and skulls along the roofline.
The repeat button looks like repeating something: two arcs turning clockwise with an arrowhead on each, half a turn apart, instead of a closed loop that read as a bag.
Each unit has its own voice rather than one throat at a different pitch: the peasant mumbles, the footman recites, the knight is unhurried inside a helm, the Spooky Guys are flat and slow on purpose.
The voices have stopped reciting: lines finish rather than stop, a comma lifts the voice for the second half, and consonants are placed against the vowel that follows them.
Units say so when they cannot do what you asked: whoever you were ordering answers out loud, once for each distinct reason, instead of a buzz and a line of text.
Poke a unit until it snaps at you and it actually snaps. The counter was spent when the line was chosen rather than said, so on a machine that could not play it the joke could never land.
An order no unit had a line for used to chirp twice, a twentieth of a second apart — one sound or two, depending on how you heard it. One chirp per click now.
The skeleton carries its club raised in its fist, head up, instead of hanging it from the hip.
Weapons no longer lie across their owner's back: turned away from you, a weapon passes behind the body and shows only what clears the silhouette.
The Repeat button on a building is a loop again. It was a circle with its whole right side missing, which at the size the card draws it is the letter C.
Nine sprites stood off the middle of their own legs — the peasant, footman and archer overhung their boots by two columns, and the warhound and plague cart sat a column left of their own axles.
The peasant, the archer and the priest are three different men. All three wore one face, byte for byte, with shading under it that read as a beard nobody had drawn.
The zombie has arms. They were drawn in the same cloth as the coat and touching it, so the bake fused all three into one slab and head-on it read as a rectangle with a team band.
The necromancer's staff shows the BACK of its skull when he turns his back. It was showing the face — sockets, teeth and all — from behind.
The skeleton carries its femur canted away from the hip. Side on, the club and the arm are the same bone with no line between them, so the two read as one long shape ending in a knob.
Turn an archer around and the arrows are on his back. The quiver, and the orc spearthrower's javelins, were drawn under the body in the one view where the camera stands behind the man.
The peasant, the archer and the priest have a face in profile: a brow, an eye set back under it, a lit nose and a jaw in shadow, instead of a slab of skin with one eye pixel in it.
The food readout is a wicker basket, not a second brown sack beside the wood. Cover the colour and the three resource marks are still three different things.
The Corpsedog is visibly a smaller dog than the Warhound — four columns shorter in the loin, and no longer wider than the elite when the two meet head on.
The Dragon is oxblood rather than ash grey, its tail sweeps back to a spiked point, and its wings carry visible arm and finger bones instead of rows of feather-like stripes.
The Dragon's fireball leaves its mouth. It used to launch from a point in mid-air behind the head, badly on the diagonals and not much better in profile.
The Spooky Guys Gravehound is the Corpsedog, and is built like a dog.
The orc shaman's bolt leaves the head of its staff rather than its stomach.
The skeleton carries its femur club head-down, gripped at the handle.
Every map has a season — Temperate, Autumn, Badlands or Boreal, from the seed — and they are four places, not four filters: the ground cracks or drifts, the woods change shape, the clutter follows.
The meadow stopped being a mosaic. Its two greens were two different materials by the game's own measure; they are a hue apart at the same brightness now, and orc skin reads against all of it.
The snowfield stopped showing its own grid: three tiles in eight lacked the fine speckle their neighbours had, so an open field came out as blocks you could pick out from across the screen.
The autumn lake stopped being the temperate lake: a moor pool is peat and reads like it. Add ?biome=autumn to the address to see a season other than the one your seed rolled.
The scenery stopped repeating itself. The noise deciding where clutter clumps was seeded from two corner tiles, which are always water, so it was nearly the same field on every map ever made.
The human buildings stop being seven grey boxes under one blue roof: a limewashed town with timber framing and clay tile, and stone kept for the Keep and the Barracks. These people defend in stone.
Something on every human building breaks its roofline — a real chimney, a second stack, a hoist gable, dormers over a drill yard, a timber hoarding, crenellations, buttresses.
The Blacksmith is the darkest building in the human row, because the wall around a forge is dark on purpose: a smith reads the temperature of iron by its colour and wants no daylight on it.
The lobby's human panel is cut from two stones instead of one, so it reads as masonry rather than as a grid of identical blocks.

Online

A match no longer starts without you. Everybody says when their battlefield is ready and the loading screen names whoever it is waiting for; nobody is given away for being slow to load.
Your orders reach the battle at once again. A client that opened a match slightly behind the room could sit on an order for over three seconds before anything acted on it.
You are told by name when your opponent leaves a one-on-one, and told again if they come back. In a team game you hear it once every opponent you have left is a computer.
An ally the room has not heard from is dimmed in the seat list with an ellipsis, so an army standing still reads as a bad line rather than as a decision.
Rejoining a match in progress says it is catching up and fills a bar with the turns left, instead of saying your peasants await orders for the whole replay.
Switching away from an online match no longer drops a pause menu over it. The room keeps its own clock, so the menu stopped nothing and swallowed every click until you closed it.
Automatic replay capture includes short solo matches ending in resignation, and new online replays preserve computer opponents' original strategies.
A shared replay no longer carries anybody's name. The summary showed Player 1 and Player 2, but the match itself still had the names the players typed; both halves are stripped now.
Lend a hand when a teammate drops: you can select the computer-held seat's units and give them orders, spending their gold at their prices. A unit you are only holding wears a broken selection ring.
A room's lobby draws the map: every seat sees the same world before start, with the seed, the name and the real dimensions under it. The host picks, and NEW MAP rolls a world for everybody.
Your record can move to another device, and STATS is where it lives: this device shows a twelve-character code, and typing one from elsewhere adds the two records together. It is not an account.
A match you share no longer carries anybody's name — the seats are labelled by number. Your own saved games still show the names on the resume line; those never leave your device.
A replay you share keeps working. Shared matches used to be deleted a year after they were uploaded; that expiry is gone.
A shared MAP LINK rebuilds the match it came from. It only ever worked for a duel: a 2v2 or free-for-all link landed your friend in a one-on-one on a differently shaped map, with nothing to say so.
After an online match the screen no longer offers REMATCH or SAME MAP, and a room's pause menu drops RESTART BATTLE: all three could only walk you out, losing the match and the room.
Joining an online room looks like joining: the screen shows the code to share and says it is connecting, and says so again if it takes more than a few seconds.
A shared replay link keeps working for a year; after that the match is cleared out, and the page that used to blame a mistyped link now says so.
Four friends on one internet connection can all join the same room. The relay was counting how many times an address knocked rather than how many rooms it opened.
If the game ever cannot open new rooms it says so in a sentence instead of failing quietly, and joining a room a friend already opened still works.
REMATCH and SAME MAP are no longer offered after an online match, and RESTART BATTLE is gone from a room's pause menu — all three only ever quit to the menu.
Hosting no longer asks for an invite code unless one is actually needed.
A player joining an online room on an older build is told to reload, instead of being seated and desynced at the first turn.

Fixes

Units walking past a rock corner slide along it and carry on, instead of stopping dead and asking for a new route.
Groups no longer freeze shoulder to shoulder. A body queued behind a neighbour that has already stepped aside goes round it, and your workers stop jogging on the spot at a mine they are digging.
A Ground Stamp cast near a wall no longer crushes the men it throws into each other: everybody behind a man who has stopped now stops too.
Raising a building on top of your own units puts them down on separate ground instead of dropping two of them on the same pixel.
A unit standing idle where you raise a building is moved out from under it, so the next building you put beside it cannot seal it in for the rest of the match.
A worker sent to a mine or a tree no longer picks a doorstep it cannot reach and then stands beside the node all match, mining nothing.
Units filing into a narrow dead end no longer wedge at its entrance with the back tile empty; the whole pocket fills and everyone settles.
A unit boxed in by its own group after a crowded move stops and stands where it is instead of nudging against its friends for the rest of the match.
Units sent into a dead-end pocket that cannot hold them all now settle: the ones that fit go in, the rest park just outside instead of one standing frozen at the entrance.
A squad sent into a dugout or walled alcove fills it back to front instead of crowding the entrance; the group used to seat three bodies in a nine-tile pocket while fifteen stood outside.
Mid-game no longer burns most of its time re-planning routes that had not changed; workers and armies walk the same paths for a fraction of the cost.
Units can approach the Wailing Arch from behind without stopping across an empty patch of ground.
On touch screens, a quick drag or tap stays a drag or tap even when a busy frame delays input processing.
Escorts stop guarding a unit that becomes hostile and continue their queued orders.
Trailing units stay with the shared approach longer before spreading out beyond a gate.
Crossing groups can make room for each other without passing through units.
Groups can finish at their assigned positions after new buildings change the approach route.
Recruits wait for a clear exit, and units recover their route after moving aside in narrow passages.
Groups share routes through bends, settle around occupied rally points, and avoid false return trips around walls.
Builders, repairers and attackers face the building edge they are working against, and keep approaching when a long route needs another pathfinding step.
Matches prepare art for their participating armies, discard unused art from earlier matches, and rebuild construction effects after graphics memory is lost.
Keep developer galleries and experimental sprite sheets out of game installs.
A stale first animation timestamp no longer leaves a newly started match waiting before units begin moving.
Builders make steady progress at the intended rate, including when several workers help, and Spooky Guys buildings start consistently when their first stone is laid.
Tapping a tall building near the tutorial hint selects the building reliably; tapping the hint still dismisses it.
Visible building flags and tall town-centre roofs can be selected with a mouse or touch.
Keep first-time visits from reloading during setup, and show a quiet loading message during a slow start.
Saved match reports retry when you come back to the main menu, and an interrupted upload keeps unsent statistics and feedback.
Heroes can cast while selected with their escort, whatever order you selected them in.
The command card no longer goes stale when a ranged rung, Take Up Arms or Keep the Vigil lands; it was still watching only the smith's three ladders.
The ally tab no longer sits on top of the selection card: it works out where the panels below it actually end instead of assuming a fixed height.
A press at the very left or right edge no longer starts a selection box Android then throws away as a BACK swipe. A press there is still a tap and a pan; the box waits until your thumb is inboard.
A row of buildings you cannot fully afford crosses out the end it actually refuses. The preview struck through the end you pressed while the walls were paid for from the end you released.
The lobby no longer runs off both edges of an iPhone held sideways. Every menu panel measures itself against the part of the screen it is allowed to use, not the whole glass.
Losing no longer leaves a match behind to resume. The game stops saving the moment your own side is out, and stops asking whether you are sure you want to leave.
A tap that wobbles no longer buys two walls: a row needs a real slide, about a finger's width, before it starts — on a phone and with a mouse alike.
The pause menu and the end-of-match screen no longer begin underneath an iPhone's notch or Dynamic Island, which was covering the word DEFEAT.
Holding a finger on your own units no longer deselects them. A press that goes nowhere is cancelled and your selection is left alone, instead of closing a pixel-wide box that caught nothing.
The battlefield paints itself back in when your machine runs short of memory. The ground used to vanish, units float on black and the minimap flash white until you reloaded and lost the match.
An armed order is dropped when you pick up something else. Arming Repair on a peasant and then clicking another unit used to leave Repair lit for a peasant you were no longer holding.
A worker sent at a distant tree or mine goes there and stays there, instead of giving up twelve seconds into the walk and settling for something within sixteen tiles of wherever it had got to.
Right-clicking something you can see aims at it, even when the reason you can see it is your ally's eyes. It used to fall through to a move order, so your army walked up and stood there.
The changelog is back. A bad merge on 2026-08-27 wiped every entry, and three more merges wiped it again; all of it is restored, and a test now fails if it ever goes empty.
Send a worker to gold while its hands are full of wood and it goes to the gold, instead of banking the wood and walking straight back to a tree.

Play Not Enough Lumber

What the game is · The desktop app