0.7.1 was "the save file was lying to me." This one's a step further back: turns out some of it was never telling the truth in the first place, save file or not.
Your Difficulty Choice Was a Suggestion Nobody Read
This is the one that stung a little. Every time you picked Easy, Hard, or Nightmare in the menu — and every time you carefully tuned daysToSurvive or populationGoal on the GameManager component, thinking you were setting up a specific kind of run — none of it mattered. A leftover bootstrap object was quietly spinning up its own GameManager the instant the game launched, winning the race against the one actually sitting in the scene, and the real one just got destroyed on the spot. Every single game you've ever played ran on plain C# defaults, full stop.
It existed for a reasonable reason — something needs to hold onto your menu selections while you're still in the menu, before the game scene exists to catch them — but it was solving that by being way too persistent about it. Replaced it with a small static that just holds the handoff data (nothing more, no GameObject, no lifecycle to manage) and let the scene's own GameManager finally be the one that runs. Inspector settings now actually apply. It only took every build up to this point not doing that.
"Endless" Was Doing a Lot of Lying Too
Related discovery, same session: the Last Stand scenario — the one billed as endless, survive-forever mode — was not endless. At all. Nothing about picking it ever told the victory-check logic "hey, don't end this one." It would happily declare Victory at the exact same day-30/population-50 goalposts as a normal game, scenario be damned.
Turned out difficulty and scenario selection had never been wired to the actual numbers that decide when a game ends — they were just vibes. Added proper guards (day/population checks now skip entirely when their target is zero) and wired scenarios to push their real victory config through. Then, because it's 2026 and things always come in pairs, discovered the fix didn't survive a save/load — reloading an endless run un-endless'd it and I got a Victory screen one day into a 105-survivor cheat-tested colony. Fixed that too, by having the scenario re-declare its own rules on load instead of trying to save a raw number that can't tell "genuinely zero" from "field didn't exist yet."
The Invisible Survivor Who Was Extremely Visible
Survivors are supposed to vanish when they go inside a building to work or sleep — nobody wants to see someone doing paperwork through a solid wall. Except sometimes they didn't vanish. Sometimes you'd get a survivor standing fully rendered inside a house, still wearing their backpack and vest, very obviously not tucked away where the game thought they were.
The character rig is an asset-store purchase built out of a dozen separate mesh pieces — vest, boots, cap, backpack, a whole separate hand-and-arm setup for first-person gear — and the hide logic only ever asked "what renderers exist" once, right at spawn. Any piece that happened to be switched off at that exact moment (equipment that gets toggled on later, basically) never made it onto the list of things allowed to be hidden. So it stayed stubbornly visible forever, smiling through your walls. Now it re-checks what's actually there every time someone goes in or out, instead of trusting a list it wrote down once and never looked at again.
The Haunted Quarry
Last one's my favourite bug of the whole cycle. Found a survivor assigned to a Quarry, technically "Idle," and when I tried to screenshot their status it kept refusing to hold still — Idle, Moving, Idle, Moving, dozens of times a second, while the poor guy stood in the exact same spot the entire time, visibly not going anywhere.
He'd found a stone quarry with no stone in reach, tried to walk to a work node, failed, correctly decided to back off and try again later — and then something re-sent him to go work immediately anyway, every single frame, forever. A backoff timer existed. Nothing was checking it. So instead of calmly waiting five seconds and retrying, he just vibrated in place indefinitely, a tiny monument to a Forest biome that apparently forgot to put any rocks near its own quarry.
Fixed the backoff, added an actual status message so the debug view tells you why someone's idle instead of just leaving you to guess, and — bonus round — found the exact same bug lurking on the "can't even reach the workplace" path, which the first fix wouldn't have caught on its own. Both are closed now. The Quarry worker can rest, in the normal sense this time.
Where Things Stand
None of this shipped a single new feature. What it did was quietly remove a stack of things that looked like they worked and just… didn't, some of them since long before I took the last break. Difficulty, endless mode, indoor visibility, and one very persistent stone quarry ghost — all fixed, all verified in actual play rather than just "compiles, ship it."
Open City's still simmering in the background. More soon. Probably — though at this rate "soon" increasingly means "after I've found the next thing that's been quietly broken since March."