Dev Log Roundup: August 23, 2026

It was a busy day in the workshop, with fixes ranging from the dramatic (characters losing all their gear) to the subtle (fountains stealing sound channels from speech). Here's what the team at Catnip Games tackled on August 23rd.

Server and Stability

The chaos shard had a rough night after Friday's login-gate update refused every server start. It's back up this morning, and the deploy process has been fixed so new server settings carry over automatically going forward.

Clients were also freezing for up to 288 seconds before the title screen. Three boot catalogs were dragging their entire reference graph onto the main thread, and every player—regardless of language—was parsing 16 MB of CJK font data at startup. Expect snappier launches in the next build.

Bug Fixes Worth Celebrating

Build 143 had a nasty one: it stripped the gear off every character on login. The team caught it in client logs minutes after the first report and fixed it for the next build.

Sixteen memorial gravestones were disabling themselves the first time anyone mourned, and siege catapults had been using the wrong collider since the code was written. Both were fixed at the root cause after two earlier attempts only treated the symptoms.

Decorations stacked on resized items now stay put. All 555 of 855 decoration models had their origin off their own base, causing drift when the item underneath grew. That's a lot of wobbly furniture now properly seated.

Gameplay Improvements

Elf Mages now buff their elven allies, and creature nameplates show what buff is active underneath—so you can tell at a glance who's been helped. Kobold Mages went live on chaos today, with elves coming next.

Torpor now actually applies the slowdown its description always promised: 30% slower attacks, casting, card draw, movement, and cooldown recovery. Earth Magic Specialization cuts that to 20% at skill 100.

Vendors can now be pinned with a star on zone listings and in the vendor window. Your per-character favorites list persists, with a Favorites checkbox to filter. Requested by Sethanon—thanks for the suggestion!

Quality of Life

Decoration undo now keeps a 50-change history per plot, parked while you're away, instead of forgetting everything the moment you step off the lot.

Chaos updates announced themselves in-game: heads-up when the nightly build starts, a warning during deployment, and a final notice before restart.

Catchphrases that mysteriously died for two players in one town are now diagnosable—the client reports which of fifteen refusals it hit, and spoken lines no longer lose their sound channel to a nearby fountain.

Finally, resident texture art in a player town dropped 28% (from 5,799 MB to 4,164 MB) while loading 905 more textures. Render targets are now the biggest memory block, which is a much healthier balance.

Summarized from Chris "Atos" Spears' work log at Catnip Games.