Monday Report, 27 July: Stonecutting, Graphics Controls & Chat That Speaks Your Language
A quick Monday report for 27 July. This one is almost entirely about the two things that decide whether a game is pleasant to leave running all day: how hard it works your phone, and whether you can read what everyone else is saying.
You decide how hard the game works
Settings now has a Graphics screen.
Four presets do the deciding for you — Ultra Low, Low, Balanced and High — and underneath them is everything the presets touch, in case you want to be particular about it: a frame-rate cap, render quality, and individual control over particles, weather, shadows, lighting, screen shake, object density and more.
Nothing in that screen changes gameplay. It changes only how much work your phone does to draw the same world. Drop the lot to Ultra Low and you are still mining the same rocks, fighting the same monsters and earning the same XP as somebody running High on a desk-bound machine.
For anyone who does not want to tune sliders, there is Low-Power Mode: one switch that cuts effects, battery use, heat and graphical workload in a single tap. It is the right first move if your phone runs hot, and you can still fine-tune everything afterwards.
The game eases off when you're not looking
Wanderer is a game you leave running. So when it is minimised or in the background, it now drops to a trickle of frames instead of quietly drawing a full-speed world at a screen nobody is looking at.
Your idle progress is untouched — the world keeps ticking, your character keeps travelling, gathering and fighting exactly as before. The only thing that stops is the pointless drawing, and your battery notices.
Quest arrows that lead you back out
If a quest step lives inside a cave or a dungeon, the arrow now points at the entrance whenever you are outside it.
That sounds small until you have died to a boss, respawned in a town a long way off, and found yourself squinting at the map trying to remember which hole in which cliff you came out of. The arrow now takes you back to the door, and picks up the objective again once you are inside.
While we were in there: tapping the quest tracker — the little objective box on screen — now opens the full objective and its hint. The × still just dismisses it, as before.
Chat that actually speaks your language
Three separate problems, all fixed.
Switching language now re-translates what you're looking at. Previously, changing your language left the chat sitting there in the language you had just left, and only new messages arrived translated.
Every language is delivered, not just Spanish. This is the embarrassing one. Spanish was working; French, German and the rest were silently timing out behind the scenes and quietly giving up. If you had tried chat translation in anything but Spanish and concluded it was broken — you were right, and it is fixed.
Chinese messages translate properly. Short Chinese lines were being mistaken for Korean and coming out as gibberish, or staying in Chinese while insisting they had been translated. Both cases are sorted.
Since then: Stonecutting, and a house you can extend
The Tuesday batch is live too, and it starts with a new skill.
Stonecutting
Every boulder, rock pile and loose rock scattered along the road can now be worked with a pickaxe for Stone — a bulk building material.
It is built as mining's twin rather than foraging's. Your pickaxe's tier drives both rolls: the chance the swing lands, and the chance you get a double swing out of it. A worked rock never runs out, so you can settle in at one and keep going, exactly as you would at an ore rock. And there is a Stonecutting travel mode that finds the nearest rock you can work and keeps at it while you get on with your day.
Ordinary rocks open at level 1, rock piles at 5, boulders at 10, and great boulders at 20 — so the world gets more workable as the skill grows. Stone stacks a thousand to a slot, because you are going to want it by the thousand. Which brings us to:
Your house can now be extended
A finished house can be extended twice.
Level 2 costs 1,000 Stone, 1,000 Logs and 1,000,000 gold, and takes your storage cabinet from 10 items to 20. Level 3 costs 3,000 Stone, 2,000 Logs and 3,000,000 gold, and takes it to 30.
There is no build timer on either — what you are buying is space rather than a structure, so it takes effect the moment you pay. You can buy it from the house line in the store or at the building site itself, and the store always shows you which step you are on.
And the rest
Four more things landed alongside them.
The pack expansion ladder runs to 125 slots. It used to stop at 100. The price keeps doubling with every purchase, so the new rungs are deep end-game money rather than something you buy on a whim — but the ceiling is no longer in your way.
Offline travel now caps at 17 hours, up from 12. Same doubling ladder at the store, and any banked ad-boost time still stacks on top of it.
Your house is on the shop counter. The whole build — level the land, build the house, extend it — is now a single line in the store that always shows you the next step, what it costs and how long it takes. The building site still works exactly as it did; this just means you can see where you are in the project without walking over to look at it.
Raw Fish spoils after 24 hours. A catch keeps for a day and is then thrown away — in your pack or in your house cabinet, because a wardrobe is not a cold store. Every stack carries its own countdown, which turns amber in the last hour, and a stack is as old as its oldest fish: topping it up with a fresh catch does not reset the clock. Cook it, eat it, or lose it. (Fish you are already carrying gets a full fresh day, so nobody loses yesterday's haul to this.)
The storage cabinet catches the light like every other usable thing in the world, and the Inventory, Character and Shop screens are about half as tall per row as they were. Use, Eat, Lock and Sell now sit on the item's own line, pushed to the right, at the same text size the Skills screen uses. Six items fit on a phone screen where two and a half did before, and shop names no longer get cut off mid-word.
The full running history of every update lives on the changelog. See you on the road.