Changelog

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.45. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last - or stay on and make the moor your own.

The one where the moor fights back, and stops stuttering while it does.

Fights that bite back

• Hitting something means facing it. A swing lands in front of you, a little closer in than before, and on touch or a pad you turn to the nearest thing in front.
• A blow no longer stops every bite. Only every second hit staggers, and a bite already coming still lands.
• The axe is a tool, not a weapon: slower and heavier, but it cracks a shardback's plates. The sword is quick and knocks a bite off, but glances off them.
• Mashing the button no longer cuts things down in a second. Every weapon swings at its own pace however fast you press.
• The bow fires where the crosshair points over the shoulder and in first person. In the flat view and on touch it still helps you aim, out to a shorter range, and an arrow loses its bite past a few tiles.
• Something already after you follows you into torchlight. Lampers walk up and put out the torch you're hiding by.
• The fire doesn't mend you mid-fight.
• Spikes are worth going round, and a shardback flattens them.

Creatures that move like animals

• Everything speeds up, slows down and turns like an animal rather than a machine, and the boggart darts instead of flickering.
• They slide round the edge of the firelight instead of bouncing off it.
• Being knocked back is a shove, not a jump. The barghest's spring is a dash you can step out of.
• Bites and blows wind up where you can see them. Lampers draw back before they strike.
• On hills they lean with the ground.
• Playing together, guests see creatures move smoothly over patchy Wi-Fi.

Smarter fights

• The shardback lowers its head, its shards glow, and it charges. Step aside: it smashes walls, spikes and torches in its way, and if it runs into rock it's dazed and open.
• Lampers throw stones from the dark and keep their distance. Keep moving and they miss.
• From the second week of December, sieges come from two sides at once, and one boggart in each wave makes for the log store and the fire.
• Barghests hunt in pairs: one holds you in front while the other works round behind.
• Boggarts press the attack. A blow knocks one back but it comes straight in again, the pack circles close and nips a turned back, and only a badly hurt boggart bolts. A wave breaks when its shardback falls.
• The more of you there are, the bigger the horde.
• Creatures stop getting tougher in the second week of December, so a late fight is quick and dangerous rather than long.

Around camp

• A bush is picked with a tap and pulled up with a hold, from either button. A bare one says so.
• No tree stands where it would hide the chopping block when a world opens.
• Bushcraft only shows on the new world screen once you've seen the year 2000 in.

Smoother

• The random stutters on phones are mostly gone: people's looks, saves, the first sight of new ground and the fire growing are spread over many frames instead of freezing one.
• Much less garbage for the phone to clear up, so fewer hitches from that too.
• A world opens without the long freeze after the opening cards.
• When a phone can't keep up, Auto graphics settles at a steady thirty frames a second instead of stuttering between sixty and thirty, and keeps the picture sharp.
• If the graphics card resets, the game comes back by itself in the view you were in.
• The cloud save after each save no longer catches a frame.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.44. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last - or stay on and make the moor your own.

The one where the winter bites, the menus make sense and playing together holds up.

A harder winter

• The fire wants more keeping. A full bar burns down faster at the bigger levels, hard frost draws on it a fifth faster and snow two fifths.
• A first-frost night out in the open costs health now, and hard frost is colder by day and by night. The shepherd's coat still helps, but it no longer cancels the frost on its own.
• Food is scarcer. Berries fill half what they did, a picked bush takes six minutes to fruit again, and the hedgerow gives out with the first frost.
• An ordinary night costs something. The boggarts a lamp stand brings go for whatever of the camp is left at the rim of the light with nobody near it.
• The biggest fire holds half as many logs again.

Going down

• Going down with nobody left standing no longer loses the world. Everyone comes round by the fire at first light with half of what they carried left where they fell, and the fire falls back a level.

In your hands

• You swing whatever is picked on the bar. Nothing takes the axe out for you. A tree by hand takes four times the blows and comes down as one log, a small rock can be worked loose, and a boulder or coal wants the axe.
• Boggarts only take small things somebody put down, never a log and never what was lying on the moor. One that bites may get into your bag instead and run off with a handful.
• The folded map is traced at the map table from three sheets of paper and a bit of coal. Every chest holds a sheet, and abandoned camps often have one.
• The Hollow leaves three lumps of coal when it goes down.
• A built hut stops the light and throws a shadow like the moor's other buildings.

The first ten minutes

• For the first three days the top of What next sits under the clock (Accessibility > Show the next objective), and a new world's first leads point the way.
• The journal opens on What next the first time, and on whichever tab you left it on after.

Menus

• Settings are one set of pages, the same from the title and the pause menu: Display, Camera, Sound, Controls, and Interface & accessibility.
• Every page has a way back in its heading, and backing out lands where you were rather than at the top.
• Multiplayer is now Play together, on the title and in the pause menu: host on LAN or online first, then the fires found on the network, join by address or with a code.

Playing together

• A phone that sleeps comes back to its seat. A LAN guest who drops is held twenty seconds like an online one.
• Guests face where they look, a bench a guest opens stays open, and turning the camera on a fast screen no longer gets a guest thrown out.
• Guests see the bothy, the far pitch and the cache on the map, hear the payphone ring and hear when a lamp stand is coming.
• Joining is quicker: the world is sent a quarter of the size, and a guest is only sent what changed for them.
• A phone a store release behind can still join. The game says whether the host or the guest needs to update.

On a phone

• A phone, a tablet or a machine with little memory starts on Modern at sixty frames a second rather than Beautiful, which ran some phones hot. A setting you've saved is left alone.
• On touch, a label shows the button that does it, and tapping the thing itself does it too. Eat sits by your right thumb and only shows with food picked.
• A touch stick that lost its finger no longer stays held down.

Smoother

• People are a quarter of the faces they were, with every haircut and face kept, so the camp with everyone in it runs faster.
• No hitch on every axe blow, and looking at the trader, a friend or a camper no longer drags the frame rate down.
• Auto graphics gives up shadows and relief before it makes the picture smaller.

Safer saves

• The world is saved when the game goes out of sight or a phone sends it to the background.
• A world none of whose saves can be read is shown as damaged and never started over. One whose last save won't open offers the newest save kept before it.
• If the game fails to start, a Something went wrong panel offers Reload and a report to copy.
• Send crash reports is in Settings, on unless you turn it off.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.43. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last - or stay on and make the moor your own.

The one where the creatures fight back and you always know where you are.

Creatures fight back

• Every creature draws back with its mouth open before it bites. Step away in time and it misses.
• Swinging as fast as you can no longer keeps a creature off. A knockback can't be chained, so it will reach you.
• Boggarts dart off when you hit them and come back. Barghests spring at you, then back off before trying again.
• A shardback's stone front turns a blow for a quarter of the damage. Get round its side.
• They all take more killing: a boggart and a barghest about twice the blows they used to, Peg Powler a third more.

Finding your way

• A folded map from the log bench puts the moor round you in the corner of the screen. It fills in as you walk and turns the way the screen does. The map table is on the log bench now too.
• The compass shows north, and a little fire on its rim pointing to the camp fire, but only while the fire burns. Let it go out and you're finding your own way home. Carry the map as well and the compass becomes the map's rim.
• A sundial from the log bench, set down in camp, is what the picture of the sun and moon in the corner is read off. Without one there's no picture. It tells you the hour, too.

In your hands

• Whatever you pick on the bar is in your hand: berries, meat, stone, a build. Wood is hugged to your chest. Friends playing with you see it too.
• A lantern or torch can go in your other hand (G, or Other hand in the bag). It stays lit and warm while your right hand works, and has its own slot at the left of the bar. The bow and a log need both hands, so it isn't held with them.

The journal

• Places join Discoveries: Hollow Beck station, the signal box, the bog, the bothy, the abbey and more, found by going there and drawn as a scrap of the map.
• Anything new in the journal comes up as a small badge down the left of the screen.

Reading and banners

• Signs, the ticket, the signalman's card and the count are held up in the middle of the screen until you put them down (E, R, Esc or a tap), or walk away.
• The banner that says what night it is sits over your head, fades by itself, and waits for the opening to finish before it starts.

For the last fire

• A stoker from the forge, once the fire is as big as it goes. Stood beside the fire, it has the log store keep the fire above half.

Smaller things

• On a phone, Eat and Map on the top bar match the other buttons.
• The title's name fits on a folding phone's inner screen.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.42. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last - or stay on and make the moor your own.

The one where everyone gets a new look, the moor gets its folklore, and you can live off the land.

A new look for everyone

• You, your friends, guests, the trader and the lampers are all rebuilt in a softer, rounder style at twice the detail, in relaxed, loose clothes: a boxy rugby top with broad hoops, an open plaid over a crop top, wide jeans, baggy cargos and chunky trainers.
• What you wear under the plaid takes a colour of its own (Top > Underneath).
• Long hair falls as one shape from the crown to the ends, lying on your back and parting over your shoulders. The parted cut sweeps down from a middle parting, the messy cut is tight curls on top of a fresh skin fade, and hair bobbles come in colours.
• Rounder chins all round.
• The friends are Chris, Dan, Gemma and Claire, and it's Chris's car now.

Living off the land

• Rabbits on the grass, red grouse on the heather and roe deer at the edge of the trees. Stand still and they come close, walk and they get up, run and they scatter.
• Take them with a thrown stone - you'll see it arc and land - with the bow, or with a close swing. Your axe will do for a rabbit if you can run it down. A deer only falls to the bow.
• If a swing can't reach, it tells you why: no stones left, the stone not in your hand, no arrows, or a deer only the bow will take.
• Snares from the bench are checked first thing in the morning.
• A rabbit is a meat, a grouse a meat and two feathers for fletched arrows, a deer three meat.
• Cooked fish is its own item now: a proper meal, and worth more at the market and the mess.
• Three new stickers for the Wildlife page.

The journal

• One book in the pause menu with tabs: the Story as it was told, What next, Discoveries, your Stickers and, once you've stayed on, the Visitors' book.
• Discoveries: the moor's plants, mushrooms and wildlife, and what comes out of the dark. Each one is a stranger until you've cleared it, eaten it or seen it up close. Until then its label reads *Unknown plant* and the journal shows only its silhouette and how to find it.
• Eat a mushroom and you'll find out whether that kind is good to eat or poisonous. The label over it says so from then on.

The story, told

• What matters is said rather than flashed: your friends home and what they say, the trader, what the stands kept, the mornings, the count, the 18:10, midnight and the car. Each line comes with the speaker's face and is typed out.
• It waits until nothing is on you, steps aside if something comes, and picks up again afterwards.
• R, the pad's Back button or a tap moves a line on; hold to skip. Controls > Story can have it wait for you, or go back to brief notes.
• What your friends got done while you were away is told at dawn.

The folklore

• The Hollow drags itself on two long arms and stalks you from cover. It keeps away until you've held off your first siege.
• Boggarts are small shaggy thieves - leave something out of the light and it's gone. Barghests are the lampers' black dogs, dragging their chains.
• Peg Powler waits in the bog pools, and hob-lanterns lead you to them.
• The floating eyes in the dark are gone. Now the creatures that the firelight keeps out stop at the edge of the dark and stare in at you.
• A moon crosses the night with the real 1999 phases: full on 23 November, the big one on 22 December, and a coppery eclipse in the small hours of 21 January 2000. A full moon lifts the night.

Point at what you mean

• Mouse and keyboard, flat view: what's under the cursor is what you work on. Left click swings or clears, E uses.
• 3D over the shoulder (mouse or controller): it's whatever is under the crosshair.
• A controller on the flat view, the centred 3D camera and touch still take the nearest thing in front of you.
• Point at something out of reach and it's named, with *too far* under it.

Smaller things

• Undergrowth, branches and mushrooms are cleared with the attack button. E is kept for handling things.
• E opens the chest, bench or whatever you're facing before it eats what's in your hand.
• Facing a storage box, the drop key puts what's in your hand in it.
• In the bag, double-click or shift-click sends a stack straight between the bag and the bar, and Store all in bag clears the bar except for what's in your hand.
• The bench shows what the chosen recipe needs and how many of each you have.
• An empty-handed hit is one punch rather than both fists.
• A darker title and menus, redrawn item and interface icons, and a new app icon.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.41. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last - or stay on and make the moor your own.

The one where you clear the moor and look more like yourself.

Clearing the moor

• Bracken, scrub, dry grass, fern, gorse and fallen branches clear off into kindling: one a bit, 32 to a sack. A whole sack goes on the fire at once - a full one is about two logs - and it lights a cold fire too. When you've no logs, coal or fuel, the kindling goes on whatever you're holding.
• Click to clear, or hold the button and work your way through a patch. What you're about to pick lights up.
• An axe knocks a bush down for kindling and its berries.
• Brown caps and penny buns are mushrooms to eat. The red toadstools are best left alone.
• Everything you clear grows back half a year later, camp included, so a long-running camp needs keeping tidy.

Light away from the camp

• A lit stake torch holds a little ring of safety round it.
• Build a campfire anywhere from the bench. Fed and lit, it keeps the dark off, warms you and cooks, then burns down. It never grows or pushes the mist back.
• Hold your axe on anything you've built - a torch, a fence, a chest, a campfire - to take it back up and put it somewhere else.

More room

• Nine slots on the bar, nine more in the backpack and eighteen in the bigger one. The storage box holds eighteen.

Looking like yourself

• Five new cuts: a ponytail, a bob, plaits, long and wavy, and long with a middle parting. Every longer cut is now built strand by strand, with no more flat slabs.
• Four ombré colours fade from the crown to the ends, and there are glasses - round, square, cat-eye, shades, or shades pushed up on your head - in clear, dark, tortoiseshell or gold.
• Colours for your clothes: ten for trousers, ten colourways for trainers and boots, sixteen for shirts, and seven eye colours.
• Everyone is rounder: a rounded chin, and softened corners on the body, clothes and shoes.
• On Modern and Beautiful people are drawn in finer detail: eyes with colour and a glint, a smile and blush, laces, pockets and collars.
• A daisy tucked above the ear now shows over long hair.

The camera

• 3D camera on the Video page: over the shoulder with a crosshair, or centred behind you as a controller game does it. Auto picks over the shoulder on a keyboard and mouse and centred on a controller or touch, and keeps whatever you choose.

Smaller things

• Bushcraft opens once you've seen in the year 2000. Until then a new world goes straight into the story.
• By day the campfire warms the logs round it and lightens their shadows. On Beautiful its shadows are softer.
• The game pauses and goes quiet when you switch to another window, unless you're playing with friends.
• You can no longer get stuck: somewhere with no way out, such as a scrap of shore with water all round, you scramble to firm ground.
• Crows and grouse have two legs again, boot prints look like boot prints, and the friend by the fire sits on a log.
• A new app icon.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.40. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last - or stay on and make the moor your own.

The one with a second way to play. Bushcraft is the year after the millennium: quiet nights, the seasons turning all the way round, a farm to live off and, come the summer, a camp for the kids who come up the moor.

Bushcraft

• A new world asks: Story or Bushcraft. Name your camp and it opens on the 1st of April 2000, the friends home and the road open. See the dawn of 2000 in a story world and you can stay and keep the fire instead of driving home.
• Nights are quiet - a few gloomlings in the dark, the Hollow rarely - and going down just wakes you by the fire. Want the danger back? Wild nights is on the pause menu.
• The year turns: the thaw, spring, summer, the heather in flower, harvest, then back into the frost and the snow.
• Farming by the month. Onions, broad beans and strawberries join the plots, and each crop goes in only in its months. Frost stops all but the hardy ones. A watering can and a water butt keep the soil damp; rabbits and a fox get at anything not fenced right round.
• Living off the land. Hens, bees, apple trees that fruit in September, the hedgerow in its season. Put jam and pickled onions by for the winter, and cook for a crowd in a camp kitchen: shepherd's pie, fish and chips, crumble, a fry-up.
• Money. Leave what you grow on a farm-gate stall and the honesty box fills overnight. One thing a week is wanted at double. A market stall comes up the track on Wednesdays and Saturdays with seed, tools, stock and things for the camp.
• The summer camp. From April the letters come: scouts, a school, a Duke of Edinburgh group, the youth club. They arrive by minibus, sleep in patrol tents, do archery, orienteering, night walks and ghost stories round the fire, spend their pocket money in the tuck shop and sit down to a feast on their last night. They pay by how it went and write in the visitors' book - and word gets round.
• Build and furnish. Plank huts a wall at a time, with doorways, windows, floorboards and a roof; bunk beds, a portable telly, a lava lamp, a bean bag and a dartboard to fill them.
• A farm diary always has the next thing to aim for, and pays into the tin when you get there. Easter, Bonfire Night and Christmas each bring something of their own.
• Sit down on the logs by the fire, and in Bushcraft put down a sleeping bag to sleep through the night.

The opening

• Three scenes tell the weekend before the story starts: the five of you on the M1 north, the car pulling onto the moor road past the Hollow Moors sign, and the first night round the fire.
• The last page goes straight in with Continue, and Next, Skip and Continue stay put on every page.
• The Hollow Moors sign stands in the lay-by as it does in the opening, with a lantern on a post that somebody keeps lit.

The abbey

• Rebuilt round one stair up through the crossing, turning at each landing all the way to the roof of the tower, where the count is now chalked on the parapet.
• The doorways are big enough to walk through, the stairs upstairs are solid stone, and furniture in every building faces the room.
• In the isometric view the floors above ease out of the way as you go in and settle back as you come out, instead of popping. One guard to each room at the top, noticing you when you come in.

Looks and speed

• On Beautiful the campfire throws real shadows, and walking into the mist you vanish in it again.
• Auto 3D resolution is the new default: as sharp as your card can hold at sixty frames a second.
• Smoother frames on slower cards, and no more stalls the first time dawn or a creature's eyes are drawn.

Handy

• The touch buttons along the top are labelled - View, Zoom, Eat, Bag, Map, Menu - and Run sits beside Jump.
• A sheep tells you where shears come from.
• Linux laptops with an NVIDIA card stay on the right card.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.39. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where the run gets a shape. From November somebody else is out on the moor with lamps, the fire wants more than logs, and when 2000 comes there is a road out of here - or a reason to stay.

Lamps on the moor

• From the fog night, stands of lamps go up out on the moor, each a little nearer the camp than the last, watched by gravelhides and gloomlings. Every stand left standing sends more to your fire at night and puts out your lights near it. Pull one down and it pays: paraffin that burns in your fire as well as theirs, coal, and something somebody left there.
• Lamps walk the moor far off from the fog night on. Each week says at dawn what it brings, and a line under the clock keeps it in front of you.
• In December the people who carry the lamps come themselves: for your lights, your log store and, if nobody is at the fire, your friends. Catch one in your beam and see what happens.
• The abbey tower keeps a count. Find it.

The fire, the camp and your friends

• The fire's stone pit wants the shepherd's fire basket from the bothy, and the barbecue wants fire bars off an engine on the sidings.
• Friends at camp pitch in: they stack logs, bring stone and mend things at dawn, and Alex keeps watch.
• The pelt trader keeps coming every six days after his trades are done, with something to say each time.
• The map table pins the lamps, the fire's next part and the car, and a new What next page in the pause menu lists every lead in the wanderer's own words.

2000

• Alex's car keys have been by the tent since the first morning, and the car has stood frosted over in the lay-by past the phone box all along. See the dawn of 2000 and you may find a way home - with whoever you kept by the fire.
• Or stay on. The bench will put up a log cabin where the tent was, warm to stand by, with smoke from the chimney, a porch lamp, a wider camp and kale to grow through the winter.
• New kits for your next run: a flask of tea, a shepherd's crook, an OS map, and two that only an ending gives you.

How it looks

• Video > Graphics is three levels now: Classic, Modern and Beautiful. Beautiful takes everything Maxed out had, and adds ground that stands up off its face: clods of earth, tussocks, leaf drifts, pebbles and laid stone catch the light at their edges. If you were on Maxed out you are on Beautiful.
• Classic draws the world in bigger blocks, the way the game first looked: chunky props, the ground in bold quarter tiles and trees on straight trunks.
• The moor's ground is built of lumps - clods of earth and tussocks of turf - with leaves lying in drifts rather than scattered, and the field walls are gathered stone like the camp's own.
• The log cabin, the lampers' cold lamp and the kale are built from the same stone, log and colours as the rest of the moor.
• 3D resolution goes above 100% to Native, for a sharper picture on a fast card.
• The sign-in screen shows the five of them on the M1 north, drawn by the game, and the app has a new icon: the camp's first fire.

Handy

• F3 shows your frame rate, where you are, your resolution, stutters and which graphics card is drawing the game.
• On a Linux laptop with an NVIDIA or AMD card beside the built-in one, the desktop app now draws on the fast card.
• The opening's pages have a Next button.

Fixed

• The pelt trader is a he everywhere now; some of what he said, and what was said about him, called him she.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.38. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

A small one, for one thing that was wrong at a shared fire.

Fixed

• A guest's world no longer shakes for the rest of the night. Getting bitten, or a tree coming down nearby, shoves the camera for a moment and it settles again. For a guest it never settled: their screen rumbled constantly until they left the world. Whoever hosts needs this build for the fix.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.37. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where the moor rolls, fills up and gets its light right. There are hills to walk, an autumn to walk through, things living in it, and a sun that crosses the sky and throws real shadows.

A rolling moor

• The moor is hills now rather than flat ground and terraces. Uphill is slower and downhill quicker, steep ground is walked down and hopped up, and rock outcrops break out where the ground drops away. The camp, the railway, the buildings and the water are kept level.
• Out on the moor there are places to find: abandoned camps, dens under mossy boulders, fallen trees with toadstools along them, woodcutter's clearings, rings of standing stones and stepping stones across the bog.
• A log dropped on a steep hillside rolls down it.

Autumn

• The moor is late October: bracken, red shrubs and tall grass gone gold, tree crowns in orange, red and gold, and fallen leaves lying in drifts. As the nights go on it goes over into a bare November, then frost, then snow, and the leaves go with it.
• Hard fern grows green in the shade under the trees, long after the bracken has gone brown.
• The seats round the fire are old logs gone mossy, and the fallen trees out on the moor match them.
• Toadstools, brown caps and fallen branches lie thickest at the roots of trees.

Life on the moor

• Crows and grouse land and scatter, rabbits sit out on the grass, red squirrels run up the trunks and moths come to the lamps.
• The fire smokes, torches throw off embers and leaves come down off the trees.

Light and shadow

• By day the sun crosses the sky: low and gold in the morning, higher at noon, down the other side by evening. Everything standing in it throws a shadow that turns and lengthens with it.
• After dark the fire, the lamps and whatever you carry throw shadows too: people, creatures, the seat logs, what the camp builds and the stone of a building, each as long as its height against the flame. Under a big moon the trees and tents throw moon shadows.
• A cloud's shadow deepens toward its middle rather than lying flat, and the fire lights the shade near it.

Graphics

• Video > Graphics has four levels: Classic (the pixel look), Modern, Beautiful and Maxed out. Beautiful adds soft shadows that are sharp where a thing meets the ground and soften as they stretch away, and shading in the creases where things meet. Maxed out spends the most on both. New players start on Beautiful.
• VSync can be switched off in the desktop app, and the frame rate capped or left to run. The title and menus run at 60 at most whatever you pick, so they no longer spin the fans.
• CRT mode costs much less than it did: the glass is bowed by the renderer's last pass rather than a filter over the whole screen.
• The Video page stands in two columns on a wide screen.

Controls and accessibility

• Every key and pad button can be rebound, and every prompt draws the key you actually use.
• A new Accessibility page: text size, high-contrast outlines round what you are looking at, colour-blind palettes, reduced flashing, and holds as toggles.
• Keys are drawn as keycaps: WASD as a cluster, Enter as a proper return key, the mouse as a mouse with its button lit. The hints on the title, pause and game-over screens sit in even rows with the words under their keys.

The camp

• The camp starts bare and you build it up. The lamps on crates and the washing line are made at the bench.
• The fire starts as crossed sticks with three seat logs round it. The log store shows every log in it, stacked in crossed layers.
• The tent is canvas on two poles with its guy ropes pegged out.
• The stone wall is laid from rough stones of every size with a ragged coping, and carrying one shows a short length of it.
• A woodpile out on the moor gives up its logs one at a time.

Survival

• A bandage in your hand binds your own wounds for forty health. Going down no longer spends one for you; only a friend gets you back up.
• Gloomlings leave a cut of meat to cook about two times in five.
• Nothing falls before the first dawn, so a first night is never lost to a downpour before you know to keep wood in, and there is no thunder over it either.

People

• The wanderer and friends are built stockier, with bigger heads, shorter legs and broader bodies.
• The backpack rides between the shoulder blades, and long hair parts round it.

Playing together

• A guest going down no longer ends the world while the host is still standing, and a guest's bandage can bring the host back up.
• Guests see the ground change when the hills are levelled for a build.
• A save made while guests are connected keeps what they carry, and closing the app saves them first.
• A guest is known by an id of their own rather than their name, so two players with the same name keep two characters.

Odds and ends

• The abbey's ceilings are limewash on beams, not the floor above turned over, and the third-person camera stays out of the walls indoors.
• Stone floors are cobbles, loose and uneven.
• Nothing can be built over empty air on an upper floor.
• Worlds are saved with the three saves before them as backups, and a damaged save opens the one before it.
• Closing the window quits the app on a Mac too.
• The ikigai logo no longer stutters for its first second.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.36. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where the abbey becomes somewhere you can actually go. The moor is half again as wide, the floors above the ground work, and a wanderer walks instead of gliding.

A wider moor

• The moor is 288 tiles across instead of 192. Each ring the fire opens is 36 deep rather than 26, so every fire you build buys a longer walk, and every landmark has moved out to keep the ring it was written for.
• Coal is thinner on the ground — about a third fewer seams. The fuel canisters stay where they were.
• A new fire wants feeding about once a day now, rather than burning for three of them.

The abbey

• Every staircase in the abbey came up against a ceiling: the floor above was laid over the stairwell it had just cut, so there was nothing to fall through and nothing to see down. A stairwell is a hole now, with the steps dropping through it and the lip of it in shadow.
• A landing takes you when you stand on it. It used to take you from a third of the way into every tile beside it, which meant walking about at the head of a flight kept sending you back down — and the tower could not be reached at all.
• A hop carries you a level up or down, so half-height ground is worth walking on and a flight blocked at its foot can be joined from the side.
• Indoors, the floor above you is a ceiling rather than a view up into the storey over your head, and the walls stand rather than coming down to stubs.
• The rooms are furnished out of the building they are in. The abbey has choir stalls, tomb chests, an altar, a font, fallen masonry and grave slabs — what nobody could carry off — instead of the office desk and filing cabinet it had before. The peat cutter's hut has a dresser, a settle and a creel of peats. Furniture stands against the walls and faces the room.
• Things left to be read look like what they are: the visitors' book and the stationmaster's ledger are on lecterns, the notices on the hall door are nailed up, the timetable is under glass, the chalk is on the carriage end, the railway telephone is a black box on a post, and Alex's boot prints are pressed into the mud.

Walking

• A wanderer walks instead of gliding. The stride is opened out, the pace is what legs that long can carry, and the two are tied together, so anything that slows you slows the walk with it rather than sliding your feet over the ground. Creatures walk the same way.
• A footfall kicks up what is actually under it — turf, path dust, grit, leaf litter or snow.
• A planted foot lies flat on the ground, and the knee comes up through a swing and gives under the weight.

The camera

• The third-person camera stops short of whatever is behind you instead of standing inside it, and swings back off the shoulder as it closes in so you stay in frame. Only masonry and trees turn it back.
• Indoors it stays under the ceiling wherever you are standing, rather than climbing out through it the moment the lens cleared the wall.

Creatures

• A gravelhide keeps a ring well outside the firelight and turns out of it the moment it is inside. The camp is yours and the moor is theirs.
• They wait until the fire has been built up once, so nobody meets one on a night they have only ever had a lit fire. Gloomlings are there from the first, as they were.
• The Hollow cannot outrun you at a sprint, and its snow fades in over a second rather than switching on whole.

Sound and menus

• The menus answer the same everywhere: a quiet tick when the highlight moves, by arrow, stick, wheel or mouse, and a shorter click for confirm, back and a page turned. The walkthrough, the view picker, the kit and world cards, the workbench, the trader and the results card all answer now.
• A wanderer grunts when something bites them.
• The music starts as the splash goes instead of waiting to be clicked, and comes through at its own weight. The morning birds sit back under everything else.
• The menus can be heard over a paused world.

The wardrobe

• The clothes are cloth rather than swatches. Every shirt colour is off full saturation and warmed, with a bone white and a washed grey-black among them; the jeans are indigo somebody has worn in, stitched in dull gold; the trackies and the cargos have stopped wearing denim's colour.
• Two more pairs of jeans: a baggy cut too long for whoever bought them, and a ripped pair gone through at one knee.
• A plain tee, for anyone who wants nothing written on them.

Odds and ends

• The walkthrough opens on a drawn plate of the five of them on the M1, the Defender with the weekend strapped to the roof, somewhere short of Sheffield with the sun going.
• The axe fills its slot in the bar instead of sitting tiny in the corner of it, and looks like an axe.
• Picking up a backpack no longer opens it in the middle of a fight.
• The title's slow pans glide instead of stepping.
• The sun moving no longer stops the game for a quarter of a second, and the abbey's floors no longer cost most of a frame each.
• The Halloween things are spread round the camp instead of piled on the tent, and bunting can be strung the other way.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.35. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where winter arrives. Snow falls on the snow, the cold gets into you, and there are things out on the moor worth the walk.

Winter weather

• At the first frosts what would have been rain is sleet, mostly after dark. In the hard frost the nights bring flurries and snow. From the twentieth of December it is flurries and steady snow, and what would have been a storm is a blizzard: the moor closes in until the far trees are shapes in a white wall, with the fire still glowing through it.
• Sleet soaks logs left out in it. Dry snow does not. A blizzard is harder on the fire than rain ever was.
• Snow has a sound: a low wind, gusting in a blizzard, and the rest of the world goes quieter under it.

The cold

• There is no new bar. Out in the cold with nothing to keep it off, your food burns faster, and if you stay out, your health goes. The edges of the screen frost over and you can see your breath.
• Nothing in autumn. The first frosts bite at night, the hard frost by day as well, snow is serious and a blizzard will put you down in a few minutes.
• What keeps it out: the circle of a lit fire, and a bigger fire is warmer; a tent or a roof over you; a stake light, in your hand or standing near you; stew or cooked meat, for a while after you eat it. Nothing can freeze you inside a lit fire's circle.

The coat

• There are sheep out on the moor. They let you walk up to them and bolt if you run, or if anything with teeth comes near, and they lie down by the wall at dusk. Nothing hunts them.
• Hand shears are made at the first bench. Hold to shear; the fleece grows back in a few days.
• Somewhere out past the second fire's reach there is a shepherd's bothy with a loom in it. Nine wool makes a coat, and you wear it from then on: frost stops mattering, snow becomes a nuisance, and a blizzard becomes something you can walk through for a while. Others at your fire can see it on you. The bothy goes on your map once you have been inside. Worlds you already have get a bothy and a flock.

Lights

• The light you carry is a battery torch, and it is lying by your bedroll on the first morning. It is not made at the bench or found in chests any more. It keeps nothing warm. A world you already have gets one by the bedroll if you do not own one.
• The burning branch you stand in the ground is called a stake light now.
• At the far edge of the moor, where only the biggest fire lets you walk, somebody else's pitch has been left as it fell, and a gas lantern is still burning on the pole. It lights all round you, steadily, and creatures treat it as firelight; it warms you in the hand, and wind and snow take far less from it than from a flame on a stick; you can set it down at camp and pick it up again. There is one. Worlds you already have get the pitch too.

Halloween

• A few pumpkins grow wild a short walk from camp, behind what is left of a field wall, fat in October, going soft through November and gone by the frosts. One is a poor meal raw and a fair one in the pot.
• A pumpkin and a stake light at the bench make a jack-o'-lantern: a warm flickering light to stand where you like, with one of four faces, that lasts about a fortnight before it slumps. One that lives to see the snow wears a cap of it.
• The camp has a line of home-made bunting, a pumpkin somebody kicked over, a spilled bag of sweets and a rubber mask. They go the way of the pumpkins.
• There is a jack-o'-lantern by the fire on the title screen.

Fixed

• In the 3D view, last season's flowers stayed standing after the season turned, until you walked a few tiles.

Playing together

• Everyone at the fire gets cold on their own account, shears for themselves and wears their own coat. A guest starts with a torch. If somebody leaves while carrying the gas lantern it stays where they stood.
• A world hosted on this version needs everyone on v0.0.35 or newer. An older copy is told so instead of failing to join.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.34. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where it stops looking like a toy. The moor goes from tired green to bracken brown to frost to snow as the nights go by, things sit on the ground instead of in front of it, and what you hold in first person is built like a real thing.

A weekend on the moors

• The opening is three short pages now. Five of you, daring each other to camp for the Halloween weekend. The first night was fine. You woke up alone. It no longer tells you how long this lasts.
• Skip goes straight into the game, by key, pad or mouse.
• The title screen is the camp at night: a slow pan across it, a low turn round the fire, close on the flames, a walk in from the treeline, in both views by turns. On a phone it stays in the flat view.
• See in the year 2000 and the credits roll over the fireworks. Then the world carries on.

The moor through the season

• The land follows the date. Late autumn going over, a bare brown November, first frost at the start of December, a hard frost in the middle of it, and snow from the twentieth that stays into January. Trees turn, thin and catch the snow; the pines keep their needles. Paths stay dark and trodden. A world you already have picks up wherever its date is.
• Everything that stands has a shadow under it that follows the light: strong at noon, gone in the dark, faint inside the fire's glow. A log in the air has a small one beneath it, and so have you when you hop. The foot of every bank is shaded, so high ground sits on the land.
• Build the fire up and the mist walks back over a second or so instead of jumping. Let it die and the mist comes in the same way, with a plume of smoke off the ashes.

In your hands

• The axe is a hatchet: a curved haft with a swell at the butt, grain and knots, a head pinched at the eye that flares to a bearded bit, rust in blooms and a ground edge. It swings exactly as it did.
• The sword, bow, fishing rod, hoe, torch and hand torch are built the same way, and your hand has knuckles, a thumb round the grip and a cuff. The little figure in the flat view carries the same things.
• Logs land with some weight and roll, off to either side of the tree that made them, off anything solid and over a bank if there is one.
• A tree falling towards you shortens and lies down where its logs land, instead of turning sideways and going flat.

How it feels

• Every swing winds up now, not only chopping. A missed arrow thuds into what it hit. Landing a hop kicks up dust. Going down is felt, and so is a tree coming down near you.
• The 3D view shakes when you are bitten, flashes the way the flat view does when something is hurt, shows the health of walls and gates, and dropped tools bob in it.
• The shardback has a bite you can hear. It had none.
• In a siege the friends you have brought home get up and fight where you can see them, axe in hand, facing what they are hitting. Same damage, same beat.
• Taking damage reddens the edges of the screen and leaves the middle clear, so you can see what is biting you.
• The words that float up are smaller, slower and in four quiet colours. A run of pickups counts up on one line. A tree no longer says timber; it falls.

Menus

• Menus tick as you move, confirm and back out with sounds of their own, and the workbench and the trader open with one. Buttons press. Panels and banners ease in, and a notice is no longer hidden behind a banner for most of its life.
• One typeface for everything you read or press and another kept for headings, in the menus and over the world. Headings shout; buttons do not.
• It is called Settings everywhere, and the walkthrough stops sending you there to sign in.
• The results card says how to work it with a pad. A greyed-out row tells you why when you press it.
• Escape closes the trader like every other panel, a click on the world closes whichever panel is up, and Back closes one at a time.
• The chest says Hold to open wherever it says anything. The mixtape, the boombox, the torn ticket, the signalman's card, the stationmaster's key, the lever frame, lost property and the platelayers' trolley have names over them like everything else.
• Reset to defaults puts the sound back as well.

Fixed

• The graphics card being lost again and again, which showed as a stutter every few seconds and the view flipping between 3D and flat. If you had this, this is the fix; tell me if it comes back.
• The 3D view coming back stretched after the card had been lost.
• Going into 3D for the first time froze the game for a second or two. The title screen gets it ready now, and where it cannot, the switch happens behind a quick fade.
• Clicking Skip or Continue in the 3D view captured the mouse instead of pressing the button.
• Leaving a world with the map, the bag or the workbench open could open the next world with it still up.
• A friend at camp could walk off to where a tree stood in the last world you played.
• The title still said December 1999.
• The stutter counter and Copy stutter report have gone from Video. If the game crashes, the stutters that led up to it go with the report.

Playing together

• A guest hears a missed arrow and a friend's blows, sees the friends fight, and sees the smoke when the fire goes out. A guest on the last version can still join; they see the old puff of ash.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.33. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

A small one, for three things that were wrong at a shared fire.

Fixed

• Down is left alone. A creature goes for whoever is still standing and never bites you while you are on the ground. Before, being down was a chew toy until somebody reached you.
• A host down when the last guest leaves loses the world the ordinary way instead of lying there for ever with nobody coming.
• Two minutes down with friends still up and nobody reaching you, and you drag yourself back to the fire and get up on your own, worse for it.
• Wet logs go into the workbench. Stand at the bench with wet logs in your hand and E stores them like dry ones; they already counted for building, they just would not go in.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.32. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one with floors. The hall past the bog is a ruined abbey now, four storeys of it, and every new world starts on Halloween.

Halloween to the millennium

• A new world opens on the story: five of you came out to the hollow on a dare, the first night was fine, and you woke on Halloween morning alone in the fog. It plays a line at a time while the world is built behind it, and you can skip it once the game is ready. A world you come back to gets its date and how many nights you have lasted.
• Every new world starts on Sunday 31 October 1999 and runs sixty-two nights to New Year's Eve. Worlds you already have keep their December start.
• November has its own nights. Bonfire Night on the fifth, with rockets going up from somewhere out on the moor and the fire burning slow all night. The fog coming right in to the firelight on the twelfth. The Leonids on the eighteenth, when one of the shooting stars comes down on the moor with something in it. And a storm on the twenty-sixth that rains from dusk to dawn. December's nights are where they were. The sticker album has a November page.

The abbey

• The hall is a ruined abbey after Rievaulx: pale stone, lancet windows, a flat lead roof behind a parapet with a pinnacle on every corner, and a tower two stages higher through the middle of it. Round it, the footings of the nave, the cloister with its columns still standing, and the chapter house.
• Floors. Stone stairs climb from the nave to the first floor, from there to the top floor, and from there up the tower. The best chests are at the top, and something has been living up there. A creature after you takes the stairs when they lead its way, and nothing bites through a ceiling.
• Both views draw it properly: from the moor the whole building stands; inside, the floor above is your ceiling, the walls between you and the camera come down to a lip so you can see yourself, and the floors below show through the stairwell. Out on the moor, a path up a bank is stepped with sleepers now, and the abbey's stairs are dressed stone.

The night

• The eyes in the dark are fewer, further off and stay longer. They keep away while something real is near you, and a flash of lightning puts them out.
• Fireworks are bigger, and higher in the 3D view.

Fixed

• Two stutters in the 3D view: one the first time a building came into view, one walking up to the abbey. Everything a new world does to start now happens behind the opening story instead of freezing the title.
• If you feel a stutter, turn the FPS counter on (Video) and it counts them; Copy stutter report on the same page puts what the game was doing at the time on your clipboard, so you can send it on.
• The bog's mist stays on the moor instead of climbing every storey with you, and Modern's vignette shades off instead of cutting a ring through whoever stands across it.
• Website links open in the phone's browser on Android instead of over the game.

Playing together

Everything here works at a shared fire. Two people on different floors of the abbey is the same as two people in different rooms. Worlds carry straight over.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.31. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where you live off the land. The workbench has a lot more on it, the map is worth building, and the moor reaches the edge of the world.

New at the workbench

• Storage box. A small crate for camp. Twelve stacks of whatever you would rather not carry, shared by everyone at the fire. Open it and one press moves a stack in or out.
• Log store. Stack logs in it and it feeds the fire by itself when the fire burns low, so a long trip out or a bad night does not end the run because nobody was home. It also dries wet logs.
• Wet logs. A tree that comes down in the rain gives wet logs, and dry logs left lying out in the rain soak through. Wet logs will not burn until a log store has dried them, but they build as well as dry ones, and they keep to their own stack.
• Berry planter. Plant a seed in it and it grows a bush that fruits again and again.
• Hoe and vegetables. Till the ground, in camp or out on the moor, and plant a carrot, a potato or a tomato. One in, several out. Rain waters them; dry soil grows at half the pace. Turning soil sometimes turns up a wild carrot or potato, and there is the odd tomato among the wild berries.
• Stew pot. One meat or fish and two vegetables or berries make two bowls of stew, the best meal there is.
• Fishing rod. Face the water and cast. Something bites after a while and you have a moment to strike. Fish is fine raw, better on the fire, best in a stew.
• Compass. Points back to the fire whenever you are out of sight of it. Takes no room in your bag.
• Pelt jerkin. Three gloomling pelts, stitched. Everything that bites you does a quarter less.

The map

• Read the map table and you draw in wherever you have walked since your last visit. Until then your copy is as good as the last time you stood at it.
• Push pins into the map at the table: red, yellow, blue or green, and the fifth press takes one out. Everyone at the fire sees them.
• Once there is a table you carry a copy. C, up on the d-pad or the map button unfolds it anywhere.

Out on the moor

• The mist now opens all the way to the edge of the map as the fire grows. The rings are wider, and the station, the marsh, the hall and the friends waiting to be found have all moved out with them. Worlds from before keep their friends where they were.
• Trees fall twice as fast, so the logs are in your hands sooner.

Fixed

• The trader's backpack said "room for 15 items". It gives six more slots on top of the six on your bar, and now says so.

Playing together

Everything new works at a shared fire: the storage box, the map and its pins, the log store, the plots and the pot are the same for everyone, and your rewards stay yours. Worlds carry straight over.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.30. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where a graphics card can wander off and the moor is still there when it comes back.

Fixed

• The world no longer vanishes if the graphics card drops out. On some laptops, switching to the 3D view could knock the graphics card over for a moment. When it came back the flat view was a bare green floor with no trees and nothing to pick up, the 3D ground was black, and only quitting and starting again put it right. Now everything is drawn again by itself about half a second later, in whichever view you are in.
• The update and sign in panels keep their padding when they scroll, instead of cutting off at the top and bottom.
• What's new in an update reads as headings and bullets rather than raw markdown, and the buttons sit above the notes where you can reach them.
• The right stick scrolls whichever panel is open.

Playing together

Nothing about the shared fire has changed, so v0.0.29 and v0.0.30 can sit at the same one. Worlds carry straight over.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.29. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one with one Mac download. Nothing in the game itself has changed since v0.0.28.

Better

• One download for every Mac. There used to be one for Apple Silicon and one for Intel, and you had to know which you had. Now there's a single build that runs on both. It's a bigger file, around 250 MB, because it carries both.
• If you already have the game on a Mac, it updates itself to the new build as usual. There's nothing to reinstall.
• A tool that was only ever needed to build the game had been riding along inside the Mac build. It's gone.

Playing together

Nothing about the shared fire has changed, so v0.0.28 and v0.0.29 can sit at the same one. Worlds carry straight over.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.28. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where nothing new happens, on purpose. No new things to find this time: this one is about the game staying up, staying smooth and not losing anything.

Better

• Signing in is easier to find. If nobody is signed in, the game asks once each time it starts, and "Not now" takes you straight to the title. Your worlds, tokens, stickers and tapes only follow you between machines when you're signed in.
• Updates tell you they're there. When you're signed in and a new version is out, a panel on the title says so, shows what's in it and how the download is getting on, and restarts into it when you say. "Later" puts it away until next time.
• Both of those, and the first-run walkthrough, can be worked with a controller.
• Long sessions use a lot less memory. Friends sitting or sleeping by the fire were quietly costing more the longer they stayed there.
• Fewer small hitches: picking things up, carrying a stack around the bag, the music changing mood and creatures finding their way all do less work than they did.
• Sound comes back after a phone call or a trip to the home screen on a phone.
• Links to the website open in your browser rather than in a window inside the game.

Fixed

• The game could freeze for good, picture stuck and music still playing, after a single error. It now carries on, and if something keeps going wrong it pauses and tells you.
• If your graphics card drops out for a moment (waking a laptop, plugging in a screen), the third-person view used to freeze or fail to come back. The game now carries on in the isometric view and returns to third-person when the card does.
• People and creatures could turn invisible in the isometric view after the same kind of dropout.
• After that kind of dropout, firelight and lantern light in the third-person view no longer go dark.
• A world that couldn't be opened could leave a game running underneath the title screen.
• If a morning save fails, because the device is out of space for instance, the game now says so instead of saying nothing.
• A saved world from your account is checked before it replaces the one on your machine.
• Starting the game while your sign-in was due to renew could sign you out.
• The railway tannoy could stay silent for a night in a second world started without closing the game.
• A controller could work the title menu hidden behind the first-run walkthrough.

Playing together

• When the host's fire went out, guests were left looking at a frozen hollow. They're now told, and sent back to the title.
• If the host's machine sleeps or drops off the network, guests leave after a few seconds instead of waiting for minutes.
• Closing a world to the network and opening it again made everything a guest did happen twice: two crafts, two bites of food.
• A guest getting bitten knocked the host back instead.
• Walls a guest placed by clicking never reached the host, and vanished.
• A guest whose connection has stalled is dropped so they can join again, rather than slowing the host down.

Everyone at a fire should be on v0.0.28. Worlds from v0.0.27 carry straight over.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.27. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where it's December 1999.

New

• Every world is December 1999. The clock shows the date and how many nights are left until 2000. Hold out to the last night of the year: the Millennium Bug puts every torch out at midnight, and if the fire lasts until dawn there are fireworks and a results card for the run. You can keep playing into January afterwards.
• Event nights. A railway telephone rings near camp on the 3rd, the power fails across the moor on the 10th, your pager points you to a cache on the 17th, a huge moon brings out the Hollow on the 22nd, and Christmas Eve is quiet, with a present left by the tent.
• Arcade tokens and kits. Dawns, friends brought home, finds and stickers all pay out tokens, and you keep them between runs. Spend them on a starting kit when you open a new world: a packed lunch, a scout's rucksack, a first aid tin, a BMX and more.
• The sticker album. Seven pages to fill: places, wildlife, friends, finds, mixtapes, December nights and the old railway. Stickers you haven't earned yet say how to get them, and filling a page pays extra tokens.
• Mixtapes. There's a cassette hidden on the moor for every song, and a boombox by the tent plays whichever tapes you've found.
• The Hollow Beck line. A torn platform ticket near camp is the start of a trail up the old railway. Find the pieces of the signalman's card and the stationmaster's keys, pull the levers at the station in the right order, and see what calls at the platform after dark. The lost property office has things worth the walk.
• New music. The music is made by the game as it plays, 90s synths with a lofi feel, and it changes with the time of day, the fire and whatever is nearby.
• Felling trees. A tree now leans back from each blow, then goes over when you cut through it and leaves its logs where it lands.
• A new axe. It's the same axe in first person, in your hand in the other views and in the bar, and it goes from rusty to iron to steel as you upgrade it.
• Sky and clouds. In the third-person view the sky gets lighter above the mist, and on modern graphics you can see the clouds that cast the shadows on the ground.

Better

• Whatever you can use now lights up a little, instead of having a box drawn round the tile. Holding seeds shows a see-through sapling where it would be planted.
• On a keyboard, hold Shift to run and let go to walk. Controllers work as before.
• An axe is swung one-handed, with the handle up out of your fist.
• Footsteps keep time with your stride, an axe hitting a creature thuds instead of ringing, and the boy's voice is lower.
• Logs stack five to a slot.
• The cursor is the same size as your computer's own.
• Menus and panels have a new look: dark frames, with contents that scroll inside them.
• The home screen is tidier, with your account as a small avatar next to the help button.
• Tokens, kits, stickers and tapes sync to your account when you're signed in, and still work offline.
• At a shared fire, everyone earns their own tokens, stickers and tapes.

Fixed

• Walls on the station and the platelayers' hut no longer break into pillars in the 3D view, and doorways are as wide as the gap you can actually walk through.

Playing together

The shared fire has new things to keep in step, including the railway, falling trees and each player's tokens, so everyone at a fire should be on v0.0.27. Worlds from v0.0.26 carry straight over and pick up December, the tapes and the railway the first time they're loaded.

Lantern Hollow alpha v0.0.26. Keep the fire lit and see how long you last.

The one where everybody gets rebuilt.

New

• New people and creatures. Your wanderer, the friends who join you, the trader, and every creature out on the moor are now built from boxes, jointed like puppets. They have proper hands and faces, long hair falls in layers, and they bend at the knee and elbow the way a body should. They look the same in both views, and it leaves plenty of room for new clothes and looks later.
• Sharper figures on modern graphics. In the flat view, people and creatures are drawn at twice the detail of the world around them.
• New finds. The ten things dropped on the moor in 1999 are rebuilt to match. The tape player has spools, the handheld has its cross pad and the phonecard has its chip, whether they're lying in the heather or up close in the finds panel.
• The Android download updates itself. If you installed the game from the website rather than the Play Store, it now fetches the next version in the background and says when it's ready. Tap the line in the corner and Android's install screen opens. The first time, Android will ask you to let Lantern Hollow install apps.

Better

• Faces are one even colour instead of banding in stripes, and light moves smoothly across people as they walk.
• Walking is back to walking pace.
• Male faces are squarer, with a chin and heavier brows, and the messy crop reads as a short crop, with a fade down the sides.
• Creatures fall over properly when they die: a gloomling rolls onto its back, and a hollow collapses in on itself.

Fixed

• The slimmer build no longer draws one leg smaller than the other or cuts a foot in half.
• A belt buckle and cuffs no longer flicker through a top worn over them.
• Knees and elbows no longer poke through trousers and sleeves when sitting.
• The curved pieces of the railway no longer vanish when you walk over them.

The one catch

An Android copy from before this one can't update itself. Install v0.0.26 from the website by hand one last time; after that, updates arrive on their own. If you play from the Play Store, nothing changes, as the store keeps it up to date. You can't install the website download over a Play Store copy, or the other way round, without uninstalling first, and uninstalling removes any worlds that aren't synced to your account.

Mac, Windows and Linux copies on v0.0.25 should update to this one by themselves.

Playing together

Nothing about how a fire is shared changed, so v0.0.25 and v0.0.26 copies can play together, and worlds carry straight over.