Build journal

v0.59The old people's tales

NewPeopleAfter dark, the forest roads are not quite empty. Three spirits from the old people's tales, told the way the old people tell them.

• The pontianak. At night someone weeps in the banana grove by the empty house off Jalan Besut. The old people say a loud cry means she is far away, and a soft one means she is close. Stay on the path and she lets you pass; step off it and she comes, and her shriek takes your breath. No blade or arrow touches her. Pak Leh can forge an iron paku at his anvil.
• Tangisan di Kebun Pisang. Nek Kiah in Hulu Besut tells the tale. Search the empty house, find out whose comb is inside and what happened to her husband's boat (Encik Rahman's old harbour book knows), and give the weeping woman her name back. She stops crying at dawn, and the grove is quiet after that.
• The toyol. Rest by the road or sit by your campfire on a forest road at night and something small may rustle up to your purse. It never takes more than a few ringgit. Kak Yah sells kacang hijau (it stops to count the beans) and marbles (it stops to play). Catch it and you get your money back, and a little more.
• The jembalang tanah. Dig too greedily in Lombong Timah's pit and the earth grumbles, then trembles, then shakes the walls until the seams settle. The miners leave a little of their ore on an old flat stone at the pit's edge, and so can you.

New checks: by day the spirits sleep and cannot be clicked; at night the pontianak lets you pass on the path and notices you off it; blades and arrows do nothing without the paku; her story plays in any order and pays once; the toyol takes at most RM 8 and never more than you have, kacang hijau and marbles work as the old people say, and catching it pays you back; the earth grumbles at six, trembles at nine and shakes the walls at twelve, never takes your last hit point and never touches Pak Leh's quarry; leaving ore calms it; no shaking with reduced motion.

v0.58Night falls

NewLookA day and a night that every player shares: thirty minutes of day, a gold dusk (senja), ten minutes of night (malam), and a grey dawn.

• The lamps are lit. Street lamps, lanterns, fires and the forge glow after dark, the moon takes the sun's place, and a moon in the compass tells you how long until dawn.
• The night sounds. The birds go quiet, crickets take over from the cicadas, an owl calls now and then, and a new song, Malam, plays on the forest roads at night. Fireflies come out along the Hulu river.
• Squid bite better at night, as every Terengganu fisherman knows. Nothing else changes: shops and people are there at any hour.
• Nights: Dark or Bright in the menu, if you would rather see more.

New checks: dusk, night and dawn come at the same time for everyone; the sky, the light, the water and the lamps change with them and the panels never darken; Bright nights are brighter; a night frame costs about the same as a day one; a tab left in the background catches up gently.

v0.57Lombong Timah

NewWorldPeoplePast Pak Long Dollah's kiln on Jalan Pesisir, under a new arch, the old tin workings are open again: an open pit, a sluice, a washing pool, and Ah Seng's furnace.

• First Tin. Mak Bidah lends you her dulang and shows you how to pan the pool for tin ore, with now and then a few flakes of gold. Buy a sack of charcoal from Pak Long Dollah and smelt your ore into a tin bar at Ah Seng's relau.
• Dig the seams. With your own pickaxe, the tin seams in the pit's walls want Mining 8 and the rich faces Mining 15 (and give two ore at a time).
• Sell it. Tauke Lim in Kuala Terengganu pays RM 12 a tin bar and RM 30 for gold flakes; Kak Yah pays half.
• The Tin mine page in your camp and workshop book, with a Walk to button for every seam and the pool, and the work bar now shows how much faster a better pickaxe is.

New checks: the mine stands clear of the bear and the tiger and every part of it can be reached; panning needs the dulang, the seams the right level, and the furnace only works at the mine; the gold roll and the furnace are checked both ways; tin earns well under what tuna does; the whole of First Tin, from the pan to Tauke Lim, and a reload.

v0.56Life in the forest

NewWorldPeopleThe roads between the towns were trees and a path. Now each one has somewhere to stop and someone to meet.

• Jalan Besut. Mak Bedah keeps the wakaf, a little rest hut, at the junction south of Kuala Besut, and hears every bit of news on the road. Petai trees grow east of the river path. North of the junction an old house has stood empty for years, though somebody seems to sweep its steps.
• Denai Hulu. Pak Ghani's rattan cutters camp in the forest north of the path. Further east, Tok Kadir takes honey from two tualang trees, taller than anything else in the forest.
• Jalan Pesisir. Pak Long Dollah burns charcoal in an earth kiln beside the old tin workings, which the forest has taken back.
• Honey, petai and bananas. Pull petai pods down with a pole, cut bananas with a machete, and take wild honey (Woodwork 15, a machete) under smoke: light your own campfire beside the tree, or give Tok Kadir a piece of timber or coconut fibre and he smokes the bees for you.
• Kereta Rotan. Pak Ghani's bullock took fright on the Besut road and his rattan cart never came home. Find it, mend it with three rattan and two timber, and tell him.
• Work on the roads. Mak Bedah, Tok Kadir and Pak Long Dollah have kerja kampung jobs, and Pak Ghani does once his cart is home. Budi you earn on a road counts for its town. Treasure maps can now send you digging in the forest, and Pak Long Dollah wants the sun bear or the tiger driven off.

New checks: every new place stands where it should, off the road and reachable, at least 13 tiles from every animal's den, and no new path comes within reach of one; the predators' dens are exactly where they were; the forest folk each talk for themselves and never open a shop; honey needs smoke and comes once the bees are smoked; the cart quest plays in any order and pays once; the forest jobs credit the right town; a predator hunt needs one; treasure maps in the forest dig up; existing villagers' offers are unchanged; every new model is built and drawn within its budget.

v0.55Peta Harta

NewWorldTreasure maps. They turn up on raiders and creatures, in a beaten man's things, after a hunt, or from an old fisherman, and each one sends you digging somewhere along the coast.

• A map is a place and a red X, drawn in ink from the ground itself: the coast, the paths, the trees. It is kept in the Quests tab, three at most. The X is always somewhere you can walk to, on sand or grass near the water, out of everyone's way, and never at Kubu Kuala.
• Dig with a hoe. A cangkul is RM 12 from Pak Leh. Dig on the X and you find a box of ringgit, sometimes a valuable and now and then another map; dig anywhere else in that place and the map tells you which way to go. The same map always holds the same box.
• Where maps come from: about one raider in forty and one creature in a hundred, every named man the first time he is beaten (his stash), a third of hunts, and Pak Deris and Tauke Lim, who pay you to dig one up.
• Tauke Lim the goldsmith in Kuala Terengganu buys valuables (a silver ring, a gold bangle, old dollars, a porcelain bowl, a silver brooch) for twice what Kak Yah gives.

New checks: 300 seeds in each place give a dig spot you can walk to, away from people, roads and camps, and none at Kubu Kuala; Pak Deris's map shows in the Quests tab with its red X; without a hoe you are told where to buy one; digging off the X points the way, digging on it pays, and the same map holds the same box; Tauke Lim pays double for a bangle and turns a fish away; Jali leaves a map the first time he is beaten; maps survive a reload, and a broken maps field loads clean.

v0.54Pemburu, and life up and down the coast

NewWorldPeopleThe places past Kuala Besut are no longer only the story's. There is fishing and cooking in every one, creatures in the forest, a hunter upriver, and work for anyone who can swing a staff.

• Life in every town. Hulu Besut has a fire by the surau, prawns in the river, and macaques and monitor lizards over the footbridge on the far bank. Kampung Setiu has a fire by the landing, mackerel and prawns in the lagoon, and creatures in the forest west of the road. Kuala Terengganu has a grill beside Pasar Payang, tuna off the jetty heads and crabs on the beach.
• Pak Belang, the hunter of Hulu Besut, at the south end of the kampung.
• Hunts. A new kind of job: thin out the macaques, the monitor lizards or the crabs, or the men of a raiders' camp. Pak Belang, Tok Ali, Encik Rahman, Pak Jusoh at Kuala Terengganu's gate and Tok Penghulu all have them. Only the right creature in the right place counts, and a named man never does: he belongs to the story.
• Hideouts. Once the story clears Pangkalan Terbiar or Kem Bakau, their men come back only while somebody wants them thinned out, and only while you are away.
• Mak Som buys your catch at Pasar Payang: any seafood, raw or cooked, for a quarter more than Kak Yah gives. Prawn traps now go on any prawn spot, upriver or in the lagoon.
• Budi up to 60. When a town trusts you (30), its shops take 5% off; when you are one of them (60, Anak kampung), 10%. Their work pays a quarter more, and there is a third gift.

New checks: each town's fire, fishing spots and creatures are within reach and block nobody's way; Pak Belang's hunt counts only creatures killed upriver, and pays once; at Sekatan Jalan, Jali counts for nothing and his men do, and once the roadblock is cleared nobody offers a hunt there; Pangkalan Terbiar's men return for a hunt and are gone again once it is reported; Mak Som takes a mackerel and turns a coconut away; Budi prices fall 5% and 10%; a trap set upriver survives a reload.

v0.53Arus Gelap, in any order

NewPeopleThe story of the raiders no longer waits its turn. Start it anywhere on the coast, follow its four leads in whatever order you find them, and go after Bakar when you choose.

• Four leads. The old landing up the Besut river, the Setiu road and its lagoon, the harbour at Kuala Terengganu, and Kubu Kuala. Each one starts when you get there or meet its people. Nobody needs Encik Rahman's say-so any more, and the story doesn't wait for Landfall to be finished.
• Evidence. Four things name Nakhoda Bakar: the supply boat's manifest, Jali's toll ledger, the word of Setiu's freed crews, and Saudagar Hamid's own ledger. With any two, Encik Rahman or Encik Kamal calls the watch to Kubu Kuala. Mariam brings Setiu's boats if they are home; if they aren't, the watch closes the inlet with its own.
• Or go alone. Kubu Kuala is on every boat's list from the start, marked hostile. Lift the inner gate's bar yourself and face Bakar with nobody behind you.
• An ending that fits. Encik Rahman tells it from what you actually did: who you freed, who stands before the magistrate, whether the crossing carries carts again. Then he says what is still open on the coast. Leads you haven't finished stay open afterwards.
• People who know where you've been. Tok Penghulu knows whether you came by the road or by the ferry, Din knows if you have found the papers already, Pak Leh knows if Jali is beaten. Encik Rahman shows a red mark whenever he has news, and food you are given never goes to waste: if your pack is full, it comes as ringgit instead.
• The quest log shows Arus Gelap lead by lead, with the evidence you hold, and the goal line follows the lead for the place you are in.

Saves from before carry on where they were: every step a save had reached becomes something you know. New checks: every old step loads back to the same place; five thousand random orders, played on the real maps with the gates and people as the story leaves them, all reach Encik Rahman's letter, including players who never free the crews, never clear the road, never visit Kuala Terengganu, or go for Bakar first; and three players in the browser take three different routes through real dialogue and boats, with reloads on the way. The story suites from before pass both in the old order and in any order.

v0.52Kerja kampung

NewPeopleThe villagers have work for you, a different job each time, and every job builds your standing in their town.

• Ask about work. Talk to the people who are always about, or right-click one and choose Ask for work. Kak Yah, Pak Leh and Encik Rahman in Kuala Besut, Pak Salleh, Mak Yam and Pak Deris upriver, Mariam and Tok Penghulu in Kampung Setiu, and Mak Som, Pak Abu, Awi and Encik Kamal in Kuala Terengganu all have something. So do the island's teachers, once they have taught you.
• Three kinds of job. Bring something you caught, cut, cooked or made: never shop goods, so you have to go and get it. Carry a parcel to someone in another town, who pays you when it arrives. Or go and look at a place, the old landing, Jali's roadblock from the trees, the mangroves at Kem Bakau, the harbour at Kuala Terengganu, and come back and tell what you saw. What they ask for fits your skills, and a job you take stays the same until you finish it, even after a reload.
• Budi. Every job you finish raises your Budi, your standing in that town; giving one up lowers it. At 10 a town knows you: they give you a small gift, and will look for something else if you don't fancy a job. At 30 they trust you: a better gift, and their work pays a tenth more. The Quests tab shows your jobs, with Track to put one on the goal line and Give up, and your Budi in each town.
• Up to three jobs at a time, one from each person, who then rests a few minutes before the next. A brass question mark hangs over anyone with a job ready to hand in, or a parcel to receive.

New checks: an offer comes back the same after a reload; a bring job, a parcel and a look at the old landing each pay exactly once; giving up costs Budi; three jobs at most; reaching Budi 10 gives the gift and "Anything else?"; Mak Jah gives work only after her lesson; and a story conversation never carries job buttons. A save with a broken jobs record loads clean. The tests from earlier versions still pass.

v0.51The open coast

NewWorldPeopleOnce you leave the island, the whole coast is open. Walk or sail anywhere: the game tells you where the raiders are, but never stops you.

Until now each place after Kuala Besut opened at one moment in the story: the road south when Pak Leh saw the bridge iron, the coast road when Mariam's boats came home, Kubu Kuala only on Mariam's boat. Now the roads are open from the day you land, and boats run along the coast.

• Every road is open. The road south to Setiu and the coast road to Kuala Terengganu no longer wait for the story. Where raiders hold a road, the signpost, the walk card and the log say who they are and how strong, and you can go on anyway.
• Boats along the coast. Your perahu, at the Kuala Besut jetty or by the boatyard on Perhentian, now sails anywhere on the chart: Pulau Perhentian, Kampung Setiu and Kuala Terengganu. At the other landings a tekong sails you on for five ringgit a leg, or for what you have if it is less: Pak Usop at the end of the long landing in Kampung Setiu, and Abang Lah on the harbour jetty in Kuala Terengganu. The boat list says what waits at each landing, and the sailing chart now shows the whole coast.
• Round Jali's roadblock. Pak Seman's ferry crosses the Setiu river west of the broken bridge, for two ringgit. A forest track leaves the road before the roadblock and goes round it to the ferry, and walking takes that way by itself: if you click somewhere beyond a raiders' camp, you go round the camp, not through it.
• Kubu Kuala is never one-way. Mat Kilat keeps his perahu on the beach below the stockade. Two saves that could leave you stranded, in Kuala Terengganu waiting for Mariam or at Kubu after the fight, now get you moving again. Once the story has taken you to Kubu, it is on your perahu's list.
• The story itself is unchanged for now. It still runs in order and still starts after Landfall, but it no longer keeps the roads shut, and the lines about the monsoon washing out the coast road are gone. Doing the story in any order comes in a later version.

New checks start from a save fresh off the island. They sail your perahu to Kampung Setiu and take Pak Usop on to Kuala Terengganu. Then they walk the coast road back, cross on Pak Seman's ferry, and walk to Kuala Besut round Jali's roadblock without being seen. The road south shows its warning, Kubu Kuala can always be left, and the two stranded saves recover. The tests from earlier versions still pass.

v0.49Perhentian, together

NewPeoplePerhentian is shared now: castaways learning on the island see each other and can talk, as in Kuala Besut.

Since v0.40 the island had been yours alone, and you met other players only once you sailed to the town. Now you join the island's own world when you arrive. Other castaways walk the beach with their names over their heads. They wave and sit, and anything they say appears above them and in the Public tab of the chat. The player list in Settings shows who is on the island with you.

• Two places to meet. Perhentian and Kuala Besut each have their own worlds. Sail to the town and you leave the island's world for the town's; sail back and you are with the castaways again. Upriver, Setiu, Kuala Terengganu and Kubu Kuala are still your own adventure.
• Your own crabs, your own trees. The world server walks players and nothing else so far. On the island, each player fights their own crabs, monitor lizards and macaques and chops their own trees. When someone goes after a crab you see them walk over to it, but the crab is theirs alone. In Kuala Besut the trees stay shared, as before.
• The arrival comes first. A newcomer meets the others once the arrival with Guru is done and the character has been made. Until then the player list says so. A guest picks a name in the chat to join, or chooses Not now and plays on alone.
• A steadier line. When the page itself stalls for a moment, say on a slow device drawing the island for the first time, the game no longer takes that pause for the server going quiet. It used to hang up just after joining.

New checks run two real browsers against a local copy of the world server. Two players on the island see each other. One of them walks to a crab while online and beats it, and chops a tree, while the other's crab and tree are left alone. Sailing to Kuala Besut moves the player from the island's world to the town's. A newcomer still on the arrival joins nobody until the character exists. The tests from earlier versions still pass.

v0.48Arus Gelap

NewWorldPeopleLookThe whole of chapter three, from the old landing to Kubu Kuala and home again. Raiders who see you and raise the alarm, Kuala Terengganu, buildings you can walk into, and bark, ground and stones that look like what they are.

• The story, to its end. At the old landing in Hulu Besut the raiders have made camp. On their crates you find the supply boat's manifest and an iron bracket, and Abang Din, a boatman from the boat, is tied to a post. Encik Rahman reads a name in the manifest, Bakar, and Pak Leh knows the bracket as iron for the bridge at Setiu. That opens the road south as far as Sekatan Jalan, where Jali takes a toll at a barricade before the river crossing. His ledger names Nakhoda Bakar. In Kampung Setiu the boats are gone. Mariam's brother Ismail is held with the other crews at Kem Bakau, out on plank walks among the mangroves, where Awang Sura guards the narrow planks with a long spear. When the boats come home, the coast road to Kuala Terengganu opens. There, Saudagar Hamid helps every village in public, and his locked warehouse is full of crates with the raiders' mark. His clerk Zainal keeps two books, and Hamid's guards take him to Gudang Muara. At the end, Mariam sails you down the coast to Nakhoda Bakar's stockade. Encik Rahman's watch comes in behind you, and Bakar makes his stand on his own jetty. Home in Kuala Besut, Encik Rahman gives you a letter of recommendation.
• Raiders. The camps are held by people, not animals: raiders with parang, lookouts who beat a gong or blow a conch, spearmen who strike from two paces, archers who keep their distance and shoot real arrows, and hired guards. Each one watches the way he faces. A "?" over his head means he glimpsed you and is coming to look; a "!" means he has seen you and will fight. A lookout's alarm brings the men near him running. Hired guards kneel with their hands up when they are beaten, and some raiders run. Each camp warns you as you step into it. Once the story is done with a camp, nobody comes back to it.
• Four of them have names. Jali lifts his golok high before a heavy blow, and the ground under you turns red: step off it. After his rush of three blows he staggers, and that is your moment. Awang Sura holds the walkways of Kem Bakau. The captain of Hamid's guards fights much as Jali does. Nakhoda Bakar is the last of them. While you fight one, his name and health show at the top of the screen, and once he is beaten he stays beaten.
• Kuala Terengganu. The second town of the chapter, at the mouth of the Terengganu river, with Seberang Takir across the water. Pasar Payang, the market hall on the river, is full of stalls of fish, greens and fruit. Next to it stand two of Saudagar Hamid's warehouses, with tarred planks and a hoist beam over the river. A big two-masted boat lies at the harbour. Facing the waterfront road is a row of eight shophouses in Kampung Cina, each a different trade and colour: coffee, cloth, gold, sundries, medicine, iron, tailoring and photographs. Then come the mosque, the clerk's office and Hamid's grand house on tall stilts. A palisade with a named gateway closes the town on the west, and outside it is Gudang Muara, a guarded compound on the river. Eight townspeople each have their own things to say.
• Kubu Kuala. Nakhoda Bakar's stockade stands on an inlet down the coast. Inside its palisade are a courtyard with barracks huts, two watchtowers and a little brass swivel gun. An inner wall with a barred gate shuts off the boatyard, where the crews he holds are kept in a pen and his boat waits at the end of a long jetty.
• Walking into buildings. Five buildings now open their doors: Encik Rahman's harbour office in Kuala Besut, the surau and Yusof's house in Hulu Besut, and Pak Abu's coffee shop and Zainal's office in Kuala Terengganu. Step through the door and the roof fades away so you can see inside. The walls on your side drop to knee height, and they stand again when you leave. In the office are Rahman's counter with the registry open and a chart of the coast on the wall. In the surau, prayer mats lie in rows facing the mihrab, with the carved mimbar beside it and the drum inside the door, and Pak Salleh is waiting. Yusof lies on his mat with his mother beside him. Pak Abu stands behind his counter among marble-topped tables, and Zainal sits at his desk with the shipping books. If a building stands between you and the camera, its walls drop and its roof turns see-through so you never lose sight of yourself. "Always show interiors" in Settings keeps every roof off. Walls are solid now in every sense: nobody can hit or talk to you through one.
• Bark, ground and stones. Every tree has bark that runs up the trunk and along each limb, and leaves with texture to them. Meranti and cengal have been rebuilt as proper forest trees. The ground used to be a grey checkerboard. Now grass grows in tufts, sand shows ripples, paths look trodden and rock is cracked granite, and the patterns blend where one kind of ground meets another. Stones lie scattered everywhere: pebbles, mossy half-buried stones under the trees, river stones and wet stones at the water's edge. Perhentian has gained a stone well, a rack of drying fish, short coconut palms, Mak Jah's pot of gulai by the fire, and a cat on the verandah that sometimes wakes up to wash.

New checks run in the game. The whole story is played through in four stretches. Each one starts from a saved game, talks to every person in turn, takes each camp, and reloads to check that the story stays where you left it and that a beaten boss stays beaten. Every camp was also fought many times at the levels a player brings to it. The old landing falls every time from level 6. Jali's roadblock falls seven times in eight at level 8, if you step out from under his heavy blow. Kem Bakau falls seven in eight at level 12, and Bakar's stockade every time at 12. A second set of checks covers walking into buildings: you go in by the door and never through a wall, in the game and on the server alike, and the roof and walls behave as described. The stones are checked to keep off the paths and away from the fishing spots and people. A creature that gets stuck on its way home now gets back there anyway. The tests from earlier versions still pass.

v0.47Upriver

NewWorldPeopleYou can walk out of Kuala Besut now. The river path leads upstream to Hulu Besut, and the first part of a new quest, Arus Gelap, goes with it.

• Arus Gelap. Once you have finished Landfall, Encik Rahman at the river mouth has a job for you. A supply boat from Kuala Terengganu was due two days ago, carrying rice, iron fittings and timber to mend the crossing on the road south. Every crew that comes in has lost something lately: nets, a catch, once a whole boat. He asks you to walk upriver and ask along the bank. In Hulu Besut, Pak Salleh at the surau sends you to Yusof. Yusof was a boatman on that boat. He tells you about the strangers who came alongside offering help and then drew their parang, and about the mark on their crates: three black strokes under a line like a river. Pak Salleh then gives you the way to the old landing south along the bank, where nobody ties up any more. Someone has camped there. The story goes on from there in the next update.
• Hulu Besut. A new place up the river from Kuala Besut, in the forest. A brown stream winds through it from north to south, with a footbridge across it. The kampung sits on the east bank: five houses on stilts with steps and potted plants at their doors, bamboo along the water and tall trees all round. A path follows the bank south past the last house to Pangkalan Terbiar, the old landing, whose planks have half fallen into the river.
• The surau. The kampung's surau is built of timber and raised on stilts, under three tiers of green roof with a crown on top. It has louvred windows, a veranda with a rail, and wooden steps with the shoes of the people inside left at the bottom. There is a shoe rack, a beduk drum that calls people to prayer, and a tempayan water jar for washing before you go up.
• The people upriver. Pak Salleh keeps the surau, a white-bearded man in a white kopiah. Yusof is back at his mother's house, cut about and still shaken. His mother, Mak Yam, offers you tea and thanks you for coming. Pak Deris fishes from the path south of the kampung and has stopped going any further. Each of them says something different as the story moves on.
• Walking between places. Until now the only way to a new place was by boat. Now some paths lead off the edge of a place on foot. A signpost stands where each one leaves, naming where it goes. Step onto the path and a card shows the walk, then you arrive at that place's own entrance, facing in. Walking back down the river path brings you out on the edge of Kuala Besut where you left it. The road south out of Kuala Besut has a signpost too, but it is still under water past the bend.
• Your place is kept. The game remembers that you are in Hulu Besut and how far the story has gone, so a reload or your next visit puts you back where you were. When you come back down, other players in Kuala Besut see you arrive at the river path. The quest log has an Arus Gelap card, and Hulu Besut goes on your map of Malaysia the first time you arrive.

New checks run in the game. They play Arus Gelap from a saved game that has just finished Landfall. They check that the road south stays shut and that Encik Rahman gives the job. Walking the river path must bring you into Hulu Besut at its entrance, and each conversation must move the story on. Reaching the old landing must find the camp, and walking back must bring you into Kuala Besut where the path comes out. After a reload you must still be upriver with the story where you left it. The game and the server must build Hulu Besut tile for tile the same. The tests from earlier versions still pass.

v0.46Under the trees

LookWorldA rainforest of real trees, ground that grows underfoot, a shoreline that curves, footprints in the sand, and chips flying when you chop.

• The jungle. The trees of Perhentian's forest were a trunk under a handful of green balls. Now there are four kinds. The tall canopy tree has a pale lichened trunk, often plank buttresses at its foot, and heavy forked limbs under a crown of rounded clumps; some carry a liana looped between the limbs or a bird's-nest fern in a fork. The ara, the strangler fig, stands on a lattice of twisted roots with aerial roots hanging from a broad dark crown. The pulai is tall and grey with level tiers of leaf. The kelat is small and round with coppery new leaves on top. Every crown is darker underneath and lighter on top. The trees behind them, in the walls of the forest and on the far shore, are simpler versions of the same, and a tree you cut leaves a stump with rings on its face and chips at its foot.
• The ground. The grass grows in clumps of bent blades now, in lawn, lush, dry and sedge greens, with lalang in flower along the edges, thinning toward the sand and where people walk. Among it grow Singapore daisy, the little lilac puffs of semalu, white tridax, lantana and the mauve senduduk. Under the trees the grass gives way to ferns (pakis) and fallen leaves. The earth is worn bare round the teachers, the fire and the landing, with faint paths between them, and in the village from the bridge to the doors.
• The beach. Beach morning glory (tapak kuda) creeps down over the sand with purple flowers. Coconuts lie under the palms, brown, green or sprouting, with old fronds, and there is bleached driftwood, cowries and other shells, ghost-crab holes with their spoil heaps, and a wrack line of weed and twigs along the top of the wet sand.
• The shore. The foam along the beaches used to go round the islands in square steps, a tile at a time. Now it follows the waterline itself: a soft white band that swells and shrinks as the waves come in along the coast, lacy at its outer edge, with the wash running up the sand in a curving line and sliding back. Further out, the sandy shelf fades into the deep water instead of stepping off it tile by tile, and the ripples of sunlight on the sea floor fade with it. Far shallows no longer glare white in the haze.
• Footprints. Walking on sand leaves the prints of your sandals behind you, left and right a stride apart. They darken in the shade as the sand does, and fade over twenty seconds.
• Chopping. Each time your blade lands, chips of wood fly out toward you and fall, and the tree jolts.
• Kayaks. The children's kayaks are proper sit-on-tops now, with a hull pointed at both ends, a domed deck, a seat well and backrest, a bow hatch, bungee cords on the stern and carry toggles. Their paddles have feathered blades and drip rings.
• Hornbills. A pair of oriental pied hornbills (enggang kelingking) go round the tops of the forest's tallest trees, one behind the other. They perch a while on the highest point of a crown, leaning forward with their long tails hanging, then fly on to the next tree with a few slow beats and a long glide. They are black with a white belly, and have a long ivory bill under a casque with a black patch at its front. Their tails are tipped white and their wings have a white trailing edge.
• Koleks under sail. Out beyond the reef, two painted koleks sail round both islands, half a round apart, so one passes the beach where you start and the village every couple of minutes. Each has its lug sail full, heels a little and pitches on the swell, and leaves a bow wave and a spreading wake. A fisherman in a terendak sits aft. Dolphins keep one of them company, rolling up through the surface to breathe, and now and then one leaps clear.
• Eagles. The sea eagles over Perhentian soar on a shallow V of wings with black fingered tips. They are grey and white with a short white tail. Over Kuala Besut the Brahminy kites are chestnut with white heads.
• Coconuts. A coconut drops from the crown when you really pick one, rather than at every pull of the galah, and the log says you reach up with the pole rather than climb.

New checks run in the game: the ground cover is counted on both shores, nothing in it stands more than a hand's breadth into anything you can click, only the lalang's plumes grow above the knee, and none of it casts a shadow; the swash lies along the waterline itself and never up a river; the hornbills perch on the tops of the crowns and fly high over them; and the koleks' way round the islands is all open water. The tests from earlier versions still pass.

v0.45Boats and the sea

LookWorldPeoplePainted koleks with carved herons on their sterns, your perahu under a lug sail, and a sea that deepens from turquoise to blue.

• The kolek. The fishing boats of the east coast are rebuilt from the hull up. Each is a slim hull, pointed at both ends, that sweeps up into a raked stem and sternpost, planked inside and out, with thwarts, floorboards and a small deck at each end. Along its side runs a painted band of pucuk rebung triangles, with lozenges, a flower between two leaves at each end, and painted panels. On the stern stands the carved bangau, a heron's head on a scrolled neck, with the lowered mast and furled sail resting under its beak. On the bow is the carved okok with an anchor bar across it.
• Boats on Perhentian's shores. A kolek is drawn up on log rollers on the sand spit off the first island. Two more have their bows on the beach at the village, and two lie moored in the channel, each on a rope to a red buoy, bobbing and swinging slowly. A net is strung between floats with a flag at each end. Kuala Besut's painted boats are koleks now too, each moved just enough to sit clear of the banks and the river bridge.
• Your perahu. The boat Pak Mat helps you build is plainer, oiled timber with red, yellow and green bands, but it has a lug sail on a yard and boom and a steering oar. It is tied to its post by a line.
• The sea. The water is coloured by its depth now. It is clear pale turquoise over the sand, with the coral and the ripples of light showing through, then teal where the reef drops away, then deep blue in the channel and out to sea. Its surface is a skin of small facets that tilt as the swell passes, with streaks that come and go, faint wave crests rolling in toward the beaches, and glints that twinkle where the sun catches it. Off Kuala Besut the sea is murkier and greener, and the river runs out of its mouth tea-brown. With reduced motion on, the glints stop and the water moves slowly.
• Hand-lining. When you jig for squid or fish for tuna you hold a kili-kili, a wooden reel with the line wound on it. The line runs from your hand down into the water with a ring where it goes in, and under the surface an orange jig jerks up at every pull.
• Picking coconuts. You pick coconuts with a galah now: a long bamboo pole held in both hands, up into the crown, with a sickle lashed to its tip. At each pull the tip tugs, and a coconut drops, bounces and rolls toward you. Your bow goes on your back while you work.
• Arrows. Every arrow, in flight or stuck in a target, has a round bamboo shaft with a node, a leaf-shaped iron head on a binding, three fletchings with a red cock feather, and a nock.
• The boat you came on. Guru says the tide left you on Perhentian, and now you can see what it left of your boat. In the shallows east of the beach where you wake lie its keel and broken ribs, a few planks still nailed on, and the mast across them with its torn sail trailing in the sea. Up the beach the tide has left a barrel, two planks and a coil of rope, and your footprints come up out of the water to where you woke.

New checks run in the game for the hand-line and the galah: the reel is in your hand, the line runs into the fishing spot and the jig is under the water; the pole reaches the crown, both hands are free for it, and a coconut drops. The tests from earlier versions still pass, and the quest test now waits for the crossing to end, however slow the frames, instead of a fixed three and a half seconds.

v0.44Perhentian, alive

LookWorldPeopleA reef under the water with turtles over it, coconut palms that look like coconut palms, a camp that works, and a village at home.

After the ten things in v0.43 we kept going round Perhentian: the sea, the shore, the camp and the village.

• The reef. The blobs of coloured coral are gone. Out at the edge of the shallows now there is staghorn and table coral, brain coral, sea fans and soft corals, in the ochres, olives, mauves and rusts of a real reef with only a few bright tips. Nearer the beach lie seagrass beds and sand, with starfish, long-spined urchins, giant clams (kima) and sea cucumbers (gamat). The floor is darker under the reef and the seagrass, so you can see it through the water, and sunlight ripples over it.
• Turtles and a shark. Green turtles cruise along the reef and come up to breathe every half-minute or so: the head comes out, a ring spreads on the water, the front flippers row. Offshore the black-tipped fin of a reef shark cuts the surface with a wake behind it, and now and then it dives out of sight. Schools of reef fish turn over the coral, and blue-spotted rays glide over the sand.
• Coconut palms. Every nyiur is rebuilt. It has a slender curved trunk ringed with leaf scars and a swollen foot. Its fronds each have a curved midrib with leaflets all along both sides, young ones rising and old ones arching over and down, with the odd one going yellow. A dead brown frond hangs down the trunk, and coconuts cluster under the crown. Palms on the beach lean out over the nearest water, as they do, and a palm you have picked droops, bare of nuts.
• The trees of the shore. Where the jungle or the rocks meet the sea, four new trees stand at the water's edge, leaning out: rhu (casuarina) with skirts of drooping needles, ketapang (sea almond) in flat tiers with a few leaves turned red, pandan (screwpine) up on its stilt roots with spiky tufts and an orange fruit, and the low, spreading bebaru (sea hibiscus) with yellow flowers. None of them stands where you walk. A line of rhu now runs along the top of Kuala Besut's beach too.
• The camp. Mak Jah's fire sits in a ring of blackened stones. Four logs cross over it with their ends glowing, a sooty pot (periuk) hangs from a tripod of three poles, and a fish grills on a stick. The flames lick and the smoke drifts. Beside her lies a tikar mengkuang with a winnowing tray of chillies, a stone mortar, a basket of fish and a clay pot, and there is a woodpile. Pak Mat's boatyard has a perahu taking shape on blocks: the keel, the stem and stern posts, seven ribs and the first planks. Around it are a sawhorse with a saw, a stack of planks with a mallet, an adze stuck in a chopping block, and shavings everywhere. Mak Long Esah's cast net hangs to dry on a frame of poles, salted fish (ikan masin) dry on a rack, and two bubu fish traps soak in the shallows. Tok Ali keeps his spare bows on a rack. The targets are straw bosses with painted cloth faces and arrows in them, and Abang Zul's post is padded with sacking and coconut fibre bound in rattan.
• The village at home. Banana trees grow behind the houses. Bougainvillea stands in pots by the stairs, one trained up a verandah post, with frangipani and hedges of croton. There is a well with a pulley and bucket. Batik sarongs, a baju and a towel sway on the washing line, and a checked pelikat hangs over a hut's rail. Firewood is stacked under the house, a hatchet stands in its chopping block beside a heap of coconut husks, and a net is drying. There are an old bicycle, water jars, and slippers at the foot of the stairs. A pelita flickers on the verandah. A rooster, a hen and her chicks wander and peck about the yards, and the rooster crows. A ginger cat sleeps on the verandah, breathing, the tip of its tail twitching.
• Rock pools. On the rocks by the sea there are pools of still water with an anemone or a starfish in them, and barnacles and weed at the tide line on the boulders.
• Kuala Besut. The masjid is rebuilt in the old Terengganu way: a roof in three tiers crowned by the mustaka, a colonnade of arches along the front, carved bands under the eaves, a minaret with a balcony and a little dome, and the beduk drum on its stand by the steps. At the fish market the catch is laid out on ice, mackerel and tuna, under hanging scales and a corrugated zinc roof.

As before, all of it is in how things are drawn. Nothing moved: every tree, rock, creature and teacher is where it was, the server builds the same world from the game, and saves are untouched.

New checks run in the game, and the tests from earlier versions still pass. They check that:

• the shallows are reef, seagrass and sand, and sunlight ripples over them;
• the turtles, the shark and the rays are there and keep to the water, never crossing land or the planks;
• the palms have their fronds and coconuts, and none of the trees of the shore stands where you walk;
• the fire has its pot and its light, and the village's yards have what they should, the cat included;
• the masjid has its roofs and minaret, the market its fish, and Kuala Besut's river mouth stays murky.

v0.43The craftsman's pass

LookWorldPeopleThe ten things on Perhentian that looked least like what they are, each one rebuilt.

We went round the island looking hard at everything you walk over, hold or watch, picked the ten that let it down most, and remade them one at a time, each checked from several sides before moving on to the next.

• The bridge. It was a raft of loose boards with the planks running different ways. Now it is built the way a kampung carpenter builds one: pairs of piles with a cap beam and a cross-brace under each, two beams along the way you walk, and planks laid across them with a finger's gap, each nailed down at both ends. It has handrails on both sides and three boards stepping down to the sand at each end. A board or two has gone grey, and the piles are dark and weedy where the tide wets them. Kuala Besut's jetty gets the same work, with bollards and coils of rope at its corners, and the footbridge over the river gets rails.
• The kite. The girl on the beach now flies a real wau bulan: a pointed head, broad wings swept up to sharp tips, a narrow waist, and the crescent moon that gives the kite its name, in layers of cut paper. It has red wing panels with green leaves, a flower at the waist, tassels at every tip, and the busur, the bamboo bow over its head that hums in the wind.
• The bows. The bamboo bow is smooth now, with its nodes, a rattan-wrapped grip, and a string tied to its tips. The horn bow is its own thing: dark, short and recurved, with cream tips and a red and gold grip. Both bend: each limb is jointed, so the tips come back as the string is drawn.
• Shooting. An archer used to hold one frozen pose and flick a hand. Now you stand side-on to the target with the bow arm straight and the head turned along the arrow. At each shot the string snaps forward and the hand flies back. Then you reach over your shoulder to the quiver now on your back, bring an arrow round, nock it, and draw the string back to your shoulder, the string following your hand and the arrow lying from it over your bow hand, and hold until the next shot. Tok Ali does the same now and then at the range, and his arrows go into the boss.
• The parang and the tools. The parang has a real blade: a straight spine, a belly that widens toward a swept tip, and a bright ground edge. It has a brass ferrule and a hooked wooden handle. The hatchets have forged heads that flare to a curved bit. Pak Mat's adze is a proper patil, its blade lashed with rattan across a knee-bent haft. The staff is bound in rattan where the hands go, and Mak Jah fans the coals with a woven bamboo kipas.
• Fish. Fish were a lump with a box for a tail. Now they have a dark back over a silver belly, a narrow wrist, a forked tail, fins and eyes. The kembung is blue-green with yellow fins, and the tongkol is bigger and darker with a sickle tail. The grilled fish on the skewer is one of them too, browned, and its tail is no longer floating beside it. There is a squid and a giant river prawn for their spots.
• Fishing spots. One blob going round in a circle has become a school of five mackerel swimming nose first just under the surface, their tails beating. Every few seconds one of them leaps out in an arc and drops back with a ring of foam and a burst of spray. Tuna circle wider with their fins cutting the surface. The squid pulses and jets, and the prawn flicks backwards.
• Rocks. The grey dice are gone. Rounded granite boulders lie on the rocky ground instead, mottled, lichened on top and dark where they are wet. The ones you walk over stay low, and big ones, half drowned, run on into the sea beside the rocks. Piles of boulders now stand on headlands along the far coast.
• The houses. The Malay house now has a roof of Singgora clay tiles laid in courses, cream bargeboards (pemeleh) down its gables, and the rising sun (sinar matahari) carved on each gable end. The finial (tunjuk langit) points to the sky at each peak, where crossed sticks used to be. Its walls are panelled, its windows have turned bars with a carved vent over each, and its stairs have handrails. The beach huts have walls of plank and woven bamboo, a bench on the porch, and a thick attap thatch laid in bundled courses, each with a ragged fringe of palm leaf.
• The cast net. When you fish with the jala now, you hold it gathered at your chest, twist back, and sweep it out. It leaves your hands, opens into a circle in the air, and lands on the water with its lead weights round the hem. Then you haul it back hand over hand, and it closes as it comes until it is a bundle in your hand again.

And a few things more, while we were at it:

• The shore. Waves wash up the beach and slide back all round both islands, rolling along the coast, and the sand is darker where they reach.
• A gateway. The village sign now hangs from a proper gerbang: squared posts on stone plinths, carved brackets, and a little roof of clay tiles with a finial at each end. Kuala Besut's jetty has one too.
• Birds and butterflies. A pair of white-bellied sea eagles circles high over Perhentian, their shadows crossing the sand; over Kuala Besut it is a pair of Brahminy kites. Little egrets wade in the shallows and stab at fish, and butterflies drift over the grass.
• Monitor lizards. The biawak are dark now, with rows of ochre spots like the real water monitor, broader bodies, deep swimmer's tails, clawed feet and forked tongues.
• Kuala Besut. The houses in town are painted timber on stilts now, with weatherboard walls, louvred windows, a carved vent over the door under a zinc awning, wooden stairs with a rail, and roofs of clay tile or ribbed zinc. Kak Yah's shop is a proper timber kedai, its folding shutters stacked open, with sacks of rice, baskets of fruit and a bench outside and bananas hanging under the awning. The harbour office flies the Jalur Gemilang.

All of it is in how things are drawn. Nothing moved: every tree, rock, creature and teacher is where it was, the server builds the same world from the game, and saves are untouched.

New checks run in the game for all ten, and the tests from earlier versions still pass. They check that:

• the bridge's planks lie across the way you walk and are nailed, on piles, with handrails, and that you can still walk onto it; that the jetty has its bollards;
• the kite is a two-sided wau bulan, about two metres across, flying four metres up;
• both bows bend at full draw and differ in shape;
• at the range, the string comes to the hand with an arrow on it, the arrow leaves at the loose, and a new one is carried from the quiver;
• the blades, tools and net are modelled, not boxes;
• the school stays at its spot, swims nose first, leaps and splashes;
• the boulders you walk over stay below the knee, and the big ones are in the sea;
• the house has its finials and the huts their fringed thatch;
• the net lands on the fishing spot and the bundle is back in your hand once it is hauled in;
• the waves wash every sea shore, the gateway has its roof, and the eagles, egrets and butterflies are about.

v0.42Kampung Pasir Hantu

NewWorldPeopleA plank bridge opens the east island: a Malay house, beach huts, kayaks, and children at play.

Perhentian has always had two islands on the map, but you could only walk on one; the other was scenery across the channel. Now a plank bridge, two boards wide, crosses to it under a sign for Kampung Pasir Hantu, named after the village on the real Perhentian Kecil. The ground you can walk on is nearly twice what it was.

• A Malay house. A rumah kampung on tall stilts. Up a short flight of stairs, its verandah (serambi) faces the bridge. It has plank walls in two tones, tall windows with the shutters swung open, carved teeth along the eaves, and a stepped gable with crossed boards above the ridge. A jar of water stands at the foot of the stairs, to wash your feet before you go in.
• Beach huts. Four pondok of plank and woven bamboo stand along the shore, each under a thick attap thatch and facing the sea.
• Kayaks. Three are pulled up on the sand by the huts and three bob in the shallows. One goes round and round, with a child paddling it.
• Children at play. Two chase each other round a ring (kejar-kejar), and two keep a rattan ball in the air with their feet (sepak raga). One flies a wau bulan, the moon kite of the east coast, out over the water. Another builds a sandcastle with three towers and a flag. They are smaller than the grown-ups, with bigger heads. Point at any of them to see what they are doing.
• Jungle to cut. The rest of the east island is forest and beach: 46 trees and 9 palms, with the same timber and coconuts as the first island.

Everything was added after the island's seeded layout and placed by the shape of the land, not by chance. Every tree, creature and teacher on the first island is exactly where it was, and the server still builds the same world from the game.

Eighteen new checks ran, and the tests from earlier versions still pass. They cover:

• that the first island has not moved: the same objects, creatures and spawn;
• that the bridge crosses the channel, and that you can walk from the beach where you wake to the door of the house;
• that the house faces the bridge and each hut is a few steps from the sea;
• that nothing in the village walls any ground off;
• that the kayaks keep to the water, and the paddled one never runs aground;
• that the children play on open ground and keep moving, and that pointing at one names their game;
• that the server can still build the world from the game.

v0.41Hardwood and the forge

NewWorldPeopleMeranti and cengal want a better hatchet, bamboo and rattan want a machete, and a blacksmith opens a forge by the bridge.

The second part of the tools work. The forest south of Kuala Besut now has more in it than jungle trees, and some of it won't take a cut from just any hatchet.

• Hard woods. About one forest tree in five south of the main road is a meranti, tall and straight with red heartwood. It wants an iron hatchet and Woodwork 10. The three trees furthest south are cengal, the giants of the forest. Only a steel hatchet bites them, at Woodwork 20. Point at one with the wrong hatchet and the label says which you need.
• A machete for bamboo and rattan. Bamboo grows on the grass by the river, and a few clumps at the edge of the Perhentian jungle. Rattan climbs beside the big trees. Both want a machete (parang), which is also a weapon: wield it with Attack 5 for a harder hit than the staff, and it still cuts.
• Pak Leh's forge. A blacksmith works on the main road, beside the bridge over the Besut river. He sells an iron hatchet for RM 40, five less than Kak Yah, and a machete for RM 25. Bring him a meranti handle and RM 90, and he forges a steel hatchet onto it. He buys nothing: “I make things, I don't buy them.”
• New work at the boatyard. Two meranti make a hatchet handle at Woodwork 12. Bamboo and rope make a prawn trap or a bamboo bow.

So the steel hatchet is earned, not bought: an iron hatchet, then meranti cut with it, then a handle made back on the island, then the forge. Everything new was added after the town's layout, so nothing already there has moved. The new trees are chosen by where they stand, not by chance, so every player and the server see the same forest.

Twenty-seven new checks ran, and the tests from earlier versions still pass. They cover:

• that the server builds the same trees, bamboo, rattan and forge as the browser, and that nobody walks through them;
• that meranti and cengal refuse a hatchet that is too soft, then a level that is too low, and give their timber after that;
• that bamboo and rattan want a machete on the belt, in the pack or in your hand;
• that the machete needs Attack 5 to wield, and adds to your hit;
• that the right tool is in your hand while you cut;
• that Pak Leh sells, won't buy, refuses to forge without a handle, and turns a handle and RM 90 into a steel hatchet;
• that the boatyard makes handles, traps and bows.

v0.40Kuala Besut, together

NewWorldPeopleOther players walk the town with you, and you can talk to them.

Kuala Besut is no longer yours alone. When you land at the jetty the game asks what to call you, and you join a world shared with everyone else in the town. Other players walk about with their names over their heads. Anything they say appears above them and in a new Public tab in the chat, with a box to say something back.

• The server keeps everyone honest. It decides where each player stands. A click asks to walk somewhere; the server checks the way, refuses water and walls, and steps everyone one tile a tick, two when running, just as the game does on its own.
• Eight worlds. Each holds about 150 players, and when one is full you are pointed to the next.
• Chat is plain words, up to 80 characters, and slowed down if anyone floods it.
• If the server can't be reached, the town works as before, on your own, and the game keeps trying to reconnect.

Perhentian Island stays single-player for now, and nothing is saved on the server yet: your progress still lives in your browser. Signing in comes next, so your character, its name and its pack can follow you to any device.

Thirty-five new checks run two browsers against a local copy of the server. They cover a walk into the water being refused, world 2 never seeing world 1, chat staying plain text, Kak Yah's shop opening from where the server put you, and the game carrying on alone when the server stops. After publishing, two guests on the live server saw and heard each other.

v0.39Drop it, look at it, hear it

NewPeopleLookDropping and picking up, item art with real detail, and a portrait that talks.

Until now your pack only ever filled up. Now you can empty it. Right-click an item, or press and hold it on a phone, and you can eat or wear it, drop it, or examine it. Shift-click drops it at once, and so does Delete on an item that has focus.

• What you drop stays on the ground. It lies where you stood for three minutes, as a small picture of itself with a shadow under it, and you can walk back and take it. The boat is the one thing you can't drop.
• A full pack no longer wastes a kill. When there is no room, a crab's meat or a macaque's bananas fall to the ground instead of vanishing.
• Every item is redrawn. The coconut has its husk, its three eyes and a cracked half with the white flesh inside. Timber is two logs with bark and end grain, coir is a tied hank of fibre, rope is a twisted coil, and the hatchets have proper heads. Cooked fish have grill marks, and the grilled squid comes on its bamboo skewer. Each item also has a line that says what it is, in its tooltip and when you examine it. The book has a new page, the visual directory, with every icon shown large.
• Friendlier faces. Everyone on the islands has a new head: bigger, with soft dark eyes and a smile that opens when they talk. Guru and Tok Ali have rounded beards now, so you can see them speak, and the tall hats are trimmed to fit.
• The person you talk to is live. The portrait is half as big again, and it is the islander's own 3D figure, head and shoulders, not a still picture. While a line types out they say it: the jaw keeps time with the words, the hands move with them, and they look at you. Press once to finish a line, and again for the next.

New checks cover dropping by menu, by shift-click and by the Delete key; picking an item up from your feet and from a few tiles away; an item being gone after 300 ticks; the boat refusing to be dropped; pointing at an item on the ground; every icon being valid SVG with a description; the line typing out while the jaw moves, closing when it ends, and one press finishing a line without skipping it; and the portrait fitting on a phone.

v0.38Tools of the trade

NewPeopleA hatchet for trees, a net for mackerel, and the right gear for every other catch. The first ones are free.

Until now you could fell a tree with your bare hands and pull fish out of the sea with nothing at all. Now every way of gathering needs its tool: a hatchet for trees, a cast net (jala) for mackerel, a jig (candat) for squid, a prawn trap (bubu) for the river and a hand-line (tali pancing) for tuna. Palms are the exception: you climb them.

• The first tools are free. Pak Mat gives you his old hatchet the first time you talk to him, and Mak Long Esah her old net. If you ever have none you can use, they hand over another. Guru sends you to both, and Castaway's Training has a step for each. Finish Esah's lesson and she adds a squid jig.
• Kak Yah sells the rest: an iron hatchet for RM 45, a jig for RM 8, a prawn trap for RM 15 and a hand-line for RM 20. She won't buy back the old hatchet or the old net. “That's Pak Mat's old hatchet. He'd know.”
• Tools hang on a belt. The Pack tab has a belt of four slots above the pack, so tools don't use up pack space. Click a tool to move it between belt and pack. It works from either.
• Better tools work better. You never choose a tool: the game uses the best one you carry that you have the level for. The iron hatchet needs Woodwork 5, and adds 8% to the chance of every swing.
• You can see what you need. Point at a tree without a hatchet and the label says so in red. Try anyway and the game tells you where to get one. While you chop, the hatchet in your hand is the one you are using, and when you fish, the net is in your hands.

Older saves find the old hatchet and the old net on the belt, with a line in the chat. If Esah's lesson is already done, the jig is there too. The island is laid out exactly as before.

This is the first of three parts. The next two bring hardwoods, a blacksmith's forge, bamboo, and prawn traps that fill while you are away. All three are designed in the Pendekar Book, a new wiki of how every part of the game works. Its numbers are read straight from the game's code.

Fifty-five new checks ran, and the tests from earlier versions still pass. They cover:

• that every tree and fishing spot refuses you without its tool, with the right message for the island or the town, and works with it;
• that the wrong tool, such as a net at a squid spot, is refused;
• that the iron hatchet takes over at Woodwork 5, in the code and in your hand;
• that the teachers' tools go on the belt, or in the pack when the belt is full, and come back if you lose them;
• that an old save gets its tools once;
• that the ring by the action text fills in exactly the time a swing or a cast takes, for every tool;
• that a new game can still finish Castaway's Training without spending a ringgit.

One gap turned up along the way. Someone who bought an iron hatchet before Woodwork 5 could not cut at all, and Pak Mat would not help, because they had a hatchet. Now he gives an old one to anyone without a hatchet they can use.

v0.37Music for every place

NewSoundSeven songs made in code, a fight layer, Kak Yah's radio, and a Muzik tab to choose what plays.

It began as a page of seven sketches: one for each place on the route so far, and one for the dungeon ahead. Each borrows its instruments and rhythms from music of this coast. These include the Malay gamelan long kept at the Terengganu court, the oboe and drums that play for silat, joget, keroncong, and the rebab that leads Mak Yong theatre. Every melody is new.

Pendekar has sound now, and like everything else in the game it is made in code, with no audio files. The synthesiser and all seven songs add about 32 KB to the game file. The gongs and the saron are a few sine waves each. The serunai, the rebab and the violin are filtered saw waves with a little vibrato. The gambus, the cuk and the cello are plucked strings, worked out a sample at a time.

• Angin Pulau (island wind) plays on Perhentian by day.
• Gelanggang (training ground) plays at Guru's post and while you spar. A fight anywhere switches it to Lawan, its fight layer, with more drums and a busier serunai at the same tempo. The switch waits for its own bar line.
• Jala (cast net), a slow 6/8 on the rebab, plays while you fish.
• Dayung (oar stroke) takes you across the strait and lands with you. The saron and the bass join halfway over.
• Pekan Besut (Besut town) is a joget on violin and accordion.
• Radio Kak Yah plays from the transistor radio on her counter. It gets louder as you walk up to the shop, and the town song ducks under it.
• Gua (cave) waits for chapter 3 and its first dungeon.

Every song runs at 100 beats a minute, one beat for each 600 ms tick. The music keeps its own clock, and the game's tick follows its beat, so your steps and strikes land on it. After a conversation or a crossing, the tick snaps back to the nearest beat. The rest of the time it is nudged a millisecond or two, so the two clocks never drift apart. Songs change on a beat and crossfade over two ticks. Under the music, the waves grow louder near the water, cicadas sing among the trees, and birds call on the island.

The new Muzik tab, key 6, lists the songs. Each one unlocks the first time you hear it, with a note in the chat: Lagu baru, a new song. With Ikut tempat, each place plays its own song. Pick any song you have heard to keep it playing everywhere. The tab has sliders for the music and the ambience, and B turns the sound on or off. Sound starts with your first click, as browsers require, and pauses while the game is in a background tab.

Thirty-three new checks ran, and the tests from earlier versions still pass. They cover:

• that every song renders offline with no clipping, and every melody fills its loop;
• that the beach, the post, a fight, fishing, the boat and the town each pick the right song;
• that the radio rises near Kak Yah's shop and stops away from it;
• that songs unlock, survive a reload and can be picked, with keyboard focus kept on the pick;
• that the game's tick lands within 40 ms of the beat;
• that six panel tabs fit on a 375-pixel phone, each at least 44 pixels wide.

Two problems turned up. The spawn beach is a few steps from Mak Long Esah, so at first the island song never got a turn. Jala now plays only while you fish or stand with her. The screenshots also caught the song count in the Muzik tab lagging one song behind, until the next redraw.

v0.36An atlas of Malaysia

LookWorldEvery state in its own colour, mountains you can see, and a sea full of whales, dolphins and ships.

The map from v0.35 was accurate but plain: parchment land on a flat blue sea. It is now drawn like an old atlas. Each of the 16 states has its own colour, so you can see where Kelantan ends and Terengganu begins. The ground has relief:

• the Titiwangsa range runs down the peninsula;
• the Crocker range lifts towards Kinabalu;
• Sarawak climbs to the ranges along its border.

Light falls from the north-west, contour lines mark every 400 metres, and the coast is inked, with water lines offshore. Ten peaks are marked and named when you zoom in, from Gunung Kinabalu at 4,095 m to Bukit Bendera above Penang.

The heights are modelled, not surveyed. The game file carries no elevation data, so the land is raised along the real ranges and around the real peaks, broken into crests and valleys with noise, and kept flat along the shore. Building it takes about a fifth of a second, the first time you open the map.

The sea has squiggly waves that drift, and a compass rose with sixteen rhumb lines in the South China Sea. It also has traffic:

• whales that spout every few seconds;
• pods of dolphins that leap in turn;
• perahu close to the shore;
• junks, and two-masted sailing ships with a wake behind them.

They are pixel sprites, drawn at a size you can see from any zoom. They keep to open water and turn back from the shore, and new ones appear wherever you are looking. With reduced motion on, they hold still.

Unexplored territory is still there. States you have not reached are pale and flat under parchment. The ground you have explored is in full colour, with a dashed survey line round it.

The map now has thirty checks, four more than before, alongside the 141 others. They cover:

• that six states have six different hues;
• that Kinabalu and Tahan stand high and the shore at Kuala Besut is low;
• that the sea holds whales, dolphins, perahu, junks and ships, all of them on water;
• that they move, and that they stop for reduced motion.

Two problems turned up. Zoomed in on open sea, there was nothing in it. Water more than 14 cells from land carried a "not measured" distance, and the ships' rule read it as too far out. The 3D world also kept drawing behind the full-screen map. It now pauses while the map is open, and the game keeps ticking underneath.

v0.35A map of Malaysia

NewWorldTap the minimap for the whole country: the places you have been in colour, the rest unexplored.

Tapping the minimap, or pressing M, now opens a map of the whole country: Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah, alone in the sea. It is drawn from Natural Earth's real coastlines and state borders, the same data as the map on this page, on a grid of cells about 1.7 km across. Packed as run-length text, the whole country adds 9 KB to the game file.

The first version drew the neighbours in muted green: Thailand, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Brunei, Singapore and a corner of the Philippines. They are gone now, so Malaysia stands alone in the sea. The neighbouring borders are still used while the map is built, to decide which islands are Malaysian. Brunei sits inside Sarawak's coastline, so it now shows as two bays.

Almost all of it is unexplored. Malaysia starts as blank parchment, with only the coastline and faint state borders showing. A place you have been is drawn in colour for 16 km around it, with green land, a sand edge and lit shallows. A new game knows only the sea around Perhentian. Landing at Kuala Besut opens up that stretch of coast and puts a red dot on the minimap until you look. The footer keeps score: by the end of chapter 2 you have seen about a fifth of one percent of the country, in 2 of its 16 states. Kuala Terengganu waits down the coast as a question mark.

Drag to move, and scroll or pinch to zoom. Buttons zoom in and out, jump to where you are, and go back to the whole country. Zoomed far out, only the markers show, so the names do not pile up. The minimap no longer walks you anywhere when you tap it. That moved to the map's second tab, This area, which shows the island or town you are in at full size, with the people named. Click a spot there and you set off.

Twenty-six new checks ran alongside the 141 from earlier versions. They cover:

• that Pahang and Sabah are parchment while the sea around Perhentian is lit;
• that only Malaysia is drawn, with Thailand and Kalimantan left as open sea;
• that landing at Kuala Besut turns its coast green;
• that saves remember what you have seen;
• that a click on This area walks to that exact tile;
• that on a phone the map fills the screen with 44-pixel buttons.

One problem turned up in the game: the zoom keys worked only while the chart itself had focus. Taking screenshots turned up an older one. After chapter 2, the quest card at the top left named a side quest above the main story's goal. It now names the same quest as the goal it shows.

v0.33A carved-teak interface

NewLookThe world fills the window, and the interface floats over it in teak, brass and songket.

Until now the game sat in a box on a web page, with a header, a 16:10 view, a status strip, a large empty chat box and a plain sidebar. Now the world fills the whole window, and the interface floats over its four corners, the way the resizable mode of the old browser MMOs does.

• Top left: a menu behind a carved flower emblem, and a parchment card showing your quest and what you are doing.
• Top right: a round minimap that turns with the camera, ringed in brass, with orbs for health and run energy.
• Bottom left: chat, which folds away to a single line.
• Bottom right: the panels, behind five icon tabs.

The look is carved teak and songket. Panels are dark teak with brass rails and small flowers at the corners. Borders carry pucuk rebung, the bamboo-shoot triangles woven along the edge of songket. Names and selected tabs sit on a red songket lattice. The emblem is a bunga pecah lapan, the eight-petalled flower of Malay woodcarving. Anything you read sits on parchment. Every icon is a 16 by 16 pixel drawing made in code, from the fish beside Fishing to the songkok in the hat slot.

Conversations now show who is talking. Each speaker's portrait is rendered once from their own v0.31 skeleton, head and shoulders, and kept for the rest of the session. The name sits on a songket plate, small diamonds count the pages, and Space turns them. Items in your pack open a card with their English and Malay names, what they do, and what Kak Yah would pay. A level-up raises a ribbon with a burst of petals, and hitsplats have shapes: a burst for a hit, a shield for a miss, a leaf for healing, and rings on the archery target. The sail to the mainland is now drawn on a parchment sea chart.

On a phone the panels become a bottom tab bar with Chat beside them. Each tab opens one sheet at a time, and every target is at least 44 pixels. The keyboard reaches everything: 1 to 5 open the panels, R toggles running, Space turns a page, and Esc closes things in order. A reduced-motion setting, taken from the system or chosen in the menu, stops the ribbon, the petals, the bobbing and the sailing. Because the world now fills the window, the renderer keeps to a pixel budget rather than drawing three times as many pixels.

Eighty-two new checks ran at 1440 by 900, at 1280 by 720 and on a 390-pixel phone, alongside the 59 from earlier versions. They cover:

• overflow, and which parts of the screen take clicks;
• shortcuts and the order Esc closes things in;
• tooltips, every panel and the portraits;
• reduced motion, touch targets and a name on every button;
• the contrast of each colour pair, including chat text on glass over a white worst case;
• that the page does no DOM work while you stand still.

Two problems turned up. The pixel font turned a small C into an O and a small G into a B, so labels moved to Alegreya Sans and Spline Sans Mono, and Pixelify kept the big titles and the numbers. The level-up ribbon also touched the page once more after it had already hidden itself.

v0.31People who move

NewPeopleLookSmooth characters with faces, an animation system, running, and creatures on the same bones.

Until now every person was a stack of separate boxes, with gaps at the joints and no hands, feet or face. Each one is now a single smooth low-poly mesh bent by a skeleton of 29 bones: hips, spine, chest, neck, head and jaw, eyes and eyelids, shoulders, arms and hands, legs and feet, and two bones for the hem of a sarong or skirt. Each joint blends between its two bones, so elbows and knees bend without cracking open. Clothes, headscarves, hats and beards are part of the same mesh, so a person takes one draw call where it used to take about two dozen. Everyone blinks, and when someone speaks, their jaw moves with the words.

Movement comes from a small animation system written for this game. Walking and running are tied to the distance covered, so feet never slide. Every kind of gathering has its own loop: a parang for chopping, a net thrown wide, a skewer held over the fire. Fighting has a three-strike staff combo, a guard stance, blocks, dodges, a flinch and a fall. Damage now lands when the blow connects, about a fifth of a second into the swing, not on the click. The game logic never waits for an animation. The tick runs as before, and the body catches up.

You can run now. Press R or click the orb under the compass. Running covers two tiles a tick and spends energy; a full bar lasts about a minute and a half. Energy comes back while you walk, faster at a higher Body level, and twice as fast sitting down. Monsters still move one tile a tick, so a crab can be outrun.

The islanders notice you now. Their heads follow you as you pass. They greet you with a salam, a nod or a wave, then go back to work: Pak Mat with his adze, Mak Jah fanning the fire, Abang Zul striking at the air, Tok Ali drawing at his targets. When someone speaks to you they gesture, and you turn to listen. Encik Rahman and Kak Yah wander a step at a time. Right-click yourself to wave, give a salam, cheer or sit down. If you are knocked out, you fall where you stand, lie still for three ticks, then wake at the spawn and get up.

The creatures use the same system. Crabs scuttle sideways on alternating legs. Monitor lizards trot with the spine and tail swinging. The macaques of Kuala Besut walk on all fours and bound when they are angry. Each has its own attack and its own way of dying.

Twenty-nine new checks ran in a headless browser before release, alongside the thirty from earlier versions. They cover run speed and energy, every clip and the prop it holds, blinking and talking, and a soak of 2,000 random frames looking for broken joints. They also set a budget for animation time. On the test machine, all the people and creatures in view animate in under half a millisecond a frame. They caught two snags: cooking never started its loop, and Abang Zul's strikes never made you flinch.

v0.28Teachers, archery, and a better site

NewPeopleSiteFive islanders teach five skills, the bow arrives, and this page gets a redesign and a real map.

Perhentian Island now has five teachers besides Guru, each standing by the thing they know. Tok Ali keeps an archery range in a clearing near the beach. Mak Long Esah mends nets by the reef, Pak Mat works at the boatyard, Mak Jah cooks at the fire, and Abang Zul waits by the training post with a rattan stick. Each one sets a single task. Finishing it teaches a lesson that stays with you: faster fishing, faster chopping, less burnt food, a point of armour, and for Tok Ali, archery itself.

Archery is the eighth skill, Memanah. Tok Ali teaches it the way traditional archery is taught in Malaysia today: nock the arrow, draw the string to the chin, look at the target, release softly. Target practice is free. Shooting a crab costs an arrow, works from six paces, and needs a clear line of sight past the trees. Arrows come from the boatyard (one timber and one coconut fibre make ten) or from Kak Yah, who also sells a horn bow for Archery 10.

The site was redesigned after looking at how game landing pages and changelogs are put together. A game page wants a strong hero, one clear way to play, features you can scan, real screenshots and the people in it. A changelog wants a summary line on every entry, newest first, and older entries folded away. The map is now drawn from Natural Earth's real coastline, rendered in the game's own minimap palette. The route follows the rules of a subway map: one line, stations as nodes, only 45° and 90° turns, and a legend for every symbol.

Fifteen checks from v0.25 and fifteen new ones ran in a headless browser before release. They caught one real snag: Abang Zul kept on sparring when you came back to report, so you could never finish his lesson.

v0.25Landfall at Kuala Besut

NewWorldChapter 2: sailing, a second map, a shop, coins and clothes.

The boat from the end of the tutorial now sails: the view fades to night sea, a small perahu crosses a dotted line, and you tie up at the end of a jetty in Kuala Besut, where the Besut river meets the sea.

The town is a second map: a beach, a river lined with painted east-coast fishing boats, a bridge, stilt houses, a mosque with the tiered roof of old Terengganu mosques, and a fish market. Encik Rahman is the harbourmaster, a post once called syahbandar. Kak Yah runs the sundry shop.

Coins came with her: ringgit, earned by selling what you catch and cut. The garment slots from v0.15 finally paid off. A terendak (straw hat), a baju Melayu, a kain pelikat (checked sarong) and capal (sandals) each change how the character looks the moment you put them on.

Underneath, the world was rebuilt as zones so the game can hold more than one map, and saves from v0.18 carry straight over. Merging the mainland scenery into chunks the camera can skip took it from 317,000 triangles a frame to about 37,000. A headless playthrough caught a fish market built half in the sea and a jetty sign that read backwards from the boat.

SiteA place to tell the story

SiteThis website and its build journal.

This page. The screenshots on it are taken from the real build in a headless browser, and the journal grows with every version.

v0.18A journal for quests

NewA Quests tab with live counters.

A Quests tab joined Pack, Skills, Craft and Gear. The tutorial became a named quest, Castaway's Training, with eight steps that tick off as you go and counters that update live. A dot on the tab shows when something changed, and the chat log announces quests starting and finishing. Testing the tab turned up a bug: Guru's dialogue box stayed on screen after you closed it. Fixed in the same version.

v0.16Smoother steps

LookEased walking, bending knees, no sliding feet.

Characters used to snap from tile to tile with straight legs. Now the drawn body glides toward its tile with a damped follower, which rounds corners and eases every start and stop. The stride is tied to distance travelled, so feet never slide. Knees and elbows bend, hips sway, and the torso twists against the hips.

v0.15People with necks

PeopleLookA better character rig, and garment slots for future gear.

The character rig was rebuilt: a neck, shoulders, a slimmer waist, a jaw, ears, a nose and a mouth. More important for later, every visible garment became a slot: hat, top, belt or sarong, trousers, shoes, vest, weapon. Guru wears a tanjak, a folded headcloth; the player a songkok.

v0.13Bigger islands, fewer trees

WorldA larger map with more open ground, fish and monsters.

The world grew from 60 by 40 to 90 by 60 tiles, about 2.2 times the land. Cuttable trees dropped from around 100 to 29, palms to 9, with more open grass between them. To keep the bigger island busy, fishing spots went up to 18 and the monsters to 21: fourteen crabs on the beaches and seven monitor lizards in the jungle.

v0.11English first

LookEnglish names lead; Malay sits beside them.

The first builds led with Malay: Tukang Kayu, Nelayan, unggun, bengkel. Reading them cold was work. The names were flipped so English leads and the Malay sits beside it, in the Skills tab and in every item tooltip. Guru still says toya and perahu, and explains them the first time.

v0.10Low-poly 3D

Lookthree.js, a heightfield, a sea, and a camera that orbits freely.

The 2D tiles went. In their place, a three.js renderer in the low-poly style: the tile map becomes a heightfield that rises gently inland, the sea is a translucent plane with foam along every shore, a sun casts soft shadows, and fog settles over the far water. The game logic did not change at all; the renderer was swapped underneath it. On top came right-click menus, hover labels, hitsplats, XP drops and a minimap.

v0.05Pendekar, the whole game in 2D

NewSeeded islands, seven skills, Guru's tutorial, saves.

The first real build. A 60 by 40 world with two islands grown from seeded noise, so every player gets the same map. Eight-direction pathfinding that refuses to squeeze through diagonal gaps. The RuneScape XP table. Seven skills, a 20-slot pack, crafting at the boatyard, two monsters with their own tempers, Guru's tutorial quest, and a save in the browser. It was checked before it was looked at: counts and reachability were tested in a headless run.

v0.01Brinefall, a throwaway island

WorldA flat 2D test island to prove the tick loop.

Before any of the Malaysian world existed, a small test island on a flat 2D canvas: 44 by 30 tiles, a tick loop, click-to-walk pathfinding, trees to cut, fish to net, a fire to cook at and crabs to avoid. It proved the loop worked and was then set aside.

v0.00It started with a question

PrologueWhy RuneScape caught on, and a game set in Malaysia.

It began as a question: why did RuneScape catch on? It ran in a browser, it was free, the skills rewarded time, and the world felt shared. That led straight to a plan: make a game with the same mechanics, but change the theme, the weapons and the map, and start with a small one. The setting came quickly: Malaysia, with silat for the weapons and skills. Then a better idea for the start: the Perhentian Islands as a training ground, and a boat to the mainland.