Inside the world, the Favor Letter was born. It lets you summon a servant NPC to work in your house using the real materials in your chests and the stations you actually built. The servant does not create resources, hand out free XP, or fake production: it moves, fetches materials, works, and returns the result. It was a way to connect housing, crafting, and progression without turning everything into an offline menu. Outside the world, development stages started controlling who can play. Invites, cohorts, and permissions became part of the real access flow, and the Hub was standardized so I could operate all of it without every screen inventing its own interface. This release sums up the direction pretty well: automation can exist, but it has to happen inside the rules of the world; access can exist, but it has to be manageable without operational hacks.
Your house got some help and alpha got a front door
Two very different problems met in this release: houses still felt too passive, and access to the game needed to become more than “whoever found the link can get in.