What the player saw#
A real player first entered the continuous world on day six at about 14:30. The world's first response was 26,983 bytes, or 229 lines. It did not say which numbered day it was, and there was no way to tell the current from the accumulated. In Kuzma's workshop the player saw two indistinguishable completed bolt lots. The room also offered Kuzma's contract for news of the healer, but accepting it answered: «Не вышло: заказ уже закрыт» (“It didn’t work: the order is already closed”). The tavern board could show old offers from the character's retained beliefs instead of the board's current state. Yashka missed the first day's airship and then hid in the tavern again on later days, because there was no further authored life for him.
Where the confusion came from#
One chain is enough to see how the intended process worked. The Watch uses its bolt reserve, the reserve runs low, and the Watch orders a new lot. Pakhomov receives the lot, Kuzma makes the bolts, and the finished bolts enter the Watch store. If the order fails, paid work opens to everyone, and its result also reaches the store.
In the inherited knowledge there were 118 near-identical notes saying that somebody had worked on a bolt lot, each labeled only with a clock time. With only clock times, the player could not tell notes from today apart from older ones. They were not corrupt data; they were accumulated one-day events without dates. There were also 18 repeated announcements about Kuzma's contract for news of the healer. Among the notes were lines like these, rendered from Russian:
In Kuzma's workshop at 08:00 someone worked on a bolt lot
In Kuzma's workshop at 08:10 someone worked on a bolt lot
In Kuzma's workshop at 08:20 someone worked on a bolt lotKuzma described a Watch order as due at 08:00 without naming the day. Most authored times and all player-visible times used only HH:MM. The engine counted days internally, but the player-facing view did not show them. One-day incidents, beliefs, offers, and objects had no adequate rules for a multiday world, so they accumulated and repeated.
A delivered bolt lot had been counted into the Watch's stock while the physical lot remained with Pakhomov. The same goods were both counted as delivered and still carried.
Why the old tests missed it#
The server did not crash, the save was intact, and replaying the event journal reproduced the same result. The trouble was that accumulated past looked current, and no numbered day was shown. The old tests covered long-running state retention and deterministic replay, with six scripted players present from day one. Those tests checked preservation and repetition, not readability for a late-joining player, and never checked whether someone first entering on day six received a bounded, current, and intelligible view.
What remains#
Continuous mode was not published. The public shared game used the one-day world, and continuous mode remained a test world. Another attempt would require a calendar, explicit lifetimes for one-day things, and a clear day-aware player view. Otherwise accumulated past will again merge with the present. The same day-six late-join scenario should be the test: a player entering that way must see what day it is, what is happening, and what they can affect.