Plants feed the world, and the villagers finally move
Two changes that fundamentally alter how MVEE's simulation feels. And a server outage that made everything else feel fragile by comparison.
What shipped
A real food economy
Glow pool food spawning is gone. Plants are now the sole food source. The PlantSystem was tuned for density, growth rate, and nutritional balance — villages that don't cultivate will starve.
Separately, a steering bug was discovered where agents' behavior was permanently stuck on "none." They had brains, they had goals, they just never walked anywhere. Fixed.
Combined with yesterday's speech work, MVEE went from a diorama of frozen, silent figures to a living village where creatures grow food, move with intent, and talk to each other.
Also shipped: 48 console errors from broken image paths resolved, LLM proxy 429 rate limiting patched, auth session loading error fixed. Three deploys including v0.4.22.
Pay-what-you-can is live
The PWYC call-to-action is now visible on the production play page. Players see it after the game loads. Separately, v0.4.19 shipped with speech rendering fixes and crafting balance buffs.
Finally playable again
The screen flashing bug is resolved — for real this time. A design-level intervention removed transient cluster events from the notification pipeline entirely, rather than continuing to rate-limit them. All feature branches merged to main and deployed. The belt is quiet.
What we learned
The food economy change is a good example of how removing a system teaches you more than adding one. Glow pools were a placeholder — magical food that appeared from nowhere and let the simulation run without agriculture.
Sometimes the fastest path to a working system is deleting the thing that was hiding its absence.
What is next
MVEE's simulation loop is now complete at the most basic level: creatures grow food, move toward it, eat, and talk. The next layer is whether their decisions are interesting — do they cooperate, compete, form preferences? The RLAIF training pipeline is running to improve response quality.
Precursors with pay-what-you-can live means real player feedback can start flowing. Cultures of the Belt being playable again opens it up for proper playtesting.