v1.20 — Seeds, stolen fiefs, and scars
July 23, 2026 · Fallowborn devlog
Day three. The game went up Tuesday, grew an army by nightfall, and spent Wednesday growing a conscience.
Share your 867
Every start has always been settled by one seed. Now it's yours to pass around: New Game asks Fresh start or I have a seed — paste a friend's code for their exact world and character, same 867, same mud, same delusions of a crown, or a bare world seed for the same 867 with your own picks. Your own seed shows in the ☰ menu; tap to copy and race a friend up the same ladder.
Four ways to grow a demesne
Conquest is no longer the only door. 🤝 Petition the liege for a neighbor's fief — if he loves you and despises the sitting lord, he strips him and invests you; riding to the liege's wars builds the service tally that convinces him. 💰 Buy out a weak neighbor drowning in debt or losing his wars. 🌱 Settle the wasteland bordering your demesne and found a new county. And petty counts can now die heirless: the fief escheats to the liege, unless a bordering lord with the standing to press it wins the scramble. AI vassal houses now carry a standing at court that drifts over the years, so the scramble has a memory.
The small folk get their stories
Fresh stakes stand across the waste where your village has grazed beasts, cut fuel, and drawn water since anyone remembers — and the reeve says it is the lord's land. The Old Custom is a five-part fight for the common: call the households together, take sworn testimony from every hearth, walk the old boundary by night, forge the record outright — or sell the troublemakers' names to the reeve. Win heritable Rights of Common, a serf's freedom, or favor toward the next rung. Around it, three two-part stories and five everyday incidents shaped by your skills, profession, property, relationships, and faith.
The scars show now
Hard blows leave named wounds — A deep gash, Cracked ribs, A festering wound — and falling ill names the sickness: The flux, A burning fever, Pestilence. They sit on your character sheet with a note on how it feels, knit and clear as you mend, and they're drawn on your face: bandages, cuts, bruises, a pale and haggard look. Scarred and one-eyed characters bear their marks on every portrait in the game, so you can read a rival's hard decade off his face before you ever open his sheet.
Death waits for a witness
At five days a second, death used to flash by — an event with a killing blow could resolve itself under automation, and the succession screen took a stray held key as your choice of heir. Not anymore: automation never resolves an event whose outcome could kill you, the blow is always shown, and your heir waits for a deliberate click. The death screen now speaks the chronicler's parting line for the life just ended. The same pass walked the whole engine: a vassal breaking away from YOUR realm now starts a real defensive war (no more eternal war flag, no unfightable host squatting in your capital), losing a defensive war costs the border county the warning promised, and the game autosaves when the tab hides or closes.
And the small print, which adds up:
- Settings picks the speed of days with a single slider; hold-F fast-forwards again.
- Portrait phones get the four resources on their own topbar row, the ☰ pinned top-right, and a Changelog with Close pinned bottom-middle.
- Phones pause and autosave the moment the page loses focus, and the Play/Pause button flips to ▶ when the game pauses itself.
- The 🎲 pre-game dice differ per visit; cancelling Homage or Appeal no longer burns the cooldown; a kinsman betrothed to you when you die may wed again; the Chronicle shows all 80 entries.
- Faster under the hood: hidden panels skip their rebuilds, the map skips its highlight layer when nothing is selected, and the daily checks drop most of their work. Old phones, hold fast.
That's v1.16.3 through v1.20.2, shipped over a day and a night. The barley is still real. Now it has witnesses.
Bugs & ideas: GitHub issues · argue about balance: Discord · keep the barley free: Ko-fi