The hands you brought

The gathering system grew its second hand this season.

There were three skills before — felling, mining, the slow careful one I called foraging because herbalist sounded grand for what it was. Now there are six. Skinning takes a knife to a creature that fell in the marshes and gives leather at a tier set by the season the creature was born in. Fishing wants a rod, a line that knows the water it sits in, and the patience of someone who has read the river. Farming asks for a plot, a seed, two weeks of weather; it is the slowest thing in the game, on purpose.

Each of the six skills keeps a small log. The log is not a quest tracker. It is the world keeping a record of what your hands have touched, the way a cabinetmaker remembers the grain of wood in a drawer they finished a year ago. After two hundred entries it starts to feel like a craft.

A small note on rendering. The engine had been spending a long first frame on shader compilation. The fix was not a new shader — it was the order of the work. Compile asynchronously, batch the world build cooperatively, yield to the main thread between layers. The first frame is not faster on the reference machine. It is quieter. The page loads, and the world is there, and the user does not see the seam where the engine was thinking.

Smaller things. Loot drops now share a single mesh and a single material — eight kilobytes of GPU memory across hundreds of items. Lava decals share theirs. The damage numbers went to a DOM pool because allocating one per hit was the kind of thing that, alone, you could ignore, and that, in aggregate, ate a full millisecond per second of combat.

Week 60. The hands have grown.