The Story Director, the prologue and all sixteen scenes of act one, playable start to finish.
Wave 8 put the story into the world as data. The Story Director reads scenes as rows: 21 scenes built from lines, directions, choices that set flags, waits on play and effects. It paces them: never in the middle of a raid, never one tragedy within a day of another, and an unfinished scene waits and comes back. Echo quests are cast from the folk's trades and opinions. There are seven hearth tales, five memories played back as small scenes, nine Codex seals that tell where an old story first came from, and five bounty templates.
The prologue and all sixteen scenes of act one play start to finish with every flag exact. The Tallows, Old Nessa, Corran and Eben, Pell and Bree, the Grey Pair, Ebb and Rook arrive as folk who join the steading, and the story builds what it needs in the world: the shrine ruin, the hut, a grave and the lane lamps. A dialogue panel shows the speaker and the choices as sentences, and the Book of Remembrance keeps what happened. The night look was reworked too: a dimmer moon, much less sky light and thinner fog.
The story so far ends with act one. Some scenes framed the speaker badly; that was fixed in the generations follow-up.
Live on our demo host since live rebuild 25 on 17 October 2026. The demo host is our own test server; since live rebuild 26 a shared world on it can also be joined from a link over the internet.
Every wave closes with a play test on the build machine in the browser: a scripted story test that plays the new loop end to end and reloads the world to check it came back exactly, the older waves' story tests run again on the merged build, the engine's unit tests, and a 15-minute soak that records frame rate, faults and world memory. The numbers above come from those runs, as written in our build tracker.