MYSTICAL
ANIMALS

What’s new in this build

1. YOU CAN GET INTO BUILDINGS AGAIN. Pressing E at a door put you inside and then instantly back outside, so it looked like nothing happened. The spot you land on when you walk in was in exactly the same place as the line that means "you are leaving" — so you arrived and left in the same instant. Sorry. Fixed.
2. THE DEEPWOOD IS A WOOD NOW. It was a green hillside with trees around the edge. Two things were quietly deleting it: the clearings were taking up more than half the wood, and the road coming in was holding a wide lane clear for thirty metres INSIDE it — so the first thing you saw of the forest was the one part with no trees. Fixed, and the trees are much taller, so you are under a roof of leaves instead of looking over the top of them. The floor is dark now and the ferns and toadstools are the bright things on it.
3. THE BIG TREE, THE ROCK SPIRE AND THE STONE ARCH ARE REAL NOW. All three of the things you steer by were still grey shapes made of tubes and boxes — the last unfinished objects in the game, and the ones you look at most. The Great Tree is a real tree eight times normal size with ordinary trees round its foot so you can tell how big it is, the spire is a stack of real lava rock, and the arch is carved stone.
4. THE EMBERWILDS HAS SMALL STUFF IN IT. It was big boulders and dead trees with bare orange ground in between. There is scattered rubble everywhere now, so there is something near your feet as well as far away. Also the tall hiding-grass used to be bright meadow-green even in the middle of a lava field — it takes the colour of the ground it grows in now.
5. THE SHOP GREYS OUT WHAT YOU CANNOT AFFORD instead of letting you press it and then telling you off. Every price has a gold coin next to it. Feeding your tiger still works when you are broke — that is on purpose, it goes on your tab.
6. THE CHORE TIMERS ARE HONEST. The Farm and Pond timer bars could only ever fill to 96%, because they measured themselves against the wrong width. They are the same rounded bars as everything else now. The Heme Forge marker used to be a thin white sliver on a white background; it is a proper chunky marker you can actually see.
7. THE SKY IS A SKY AGAIN. A setting was making the haze paint over the sky completely, so the blue we had chosen for each place had never once appeared — over the wood you got a flat pale-green nothing instead of sky. It is fixed, so there is a real blue overhead again that fades toward the horizon.
8. SHADOWS ARE NOT BLACK ANY MORE. The shaded side of the hills around the village came out almost navy, which put a dark stripe across the middle of the picture and made the hills look like a painted backdrop. Shadows are lighter now and take their colour from the ground they fall on.
9. EVERY SCREEN FITS ON THE SCREEN. The panels that open at doors were pinned to a fixed spot, so parts of them — sometimes the "press E to close" line, sometimes a whole button — hung off the bottom edge. They are centred now and fit at every text size. The buttons have proper space around their words instead of letters touching the frame.
10. THE BIG TEXT SETTING WORKS EVERYWHERE. Twenty labels ignored it, including every single one in the Battle Rink and the box where you type your tiger’s name. Choosing Big or Biggest now changes all of them. It also no longer breaks the title screen, where the writing used to overlap itself.
11. YOU CAN SEE YOUR COINS WHILE YOU SHOP. Opening a door hid the coin counter, so the shop listed prices while the one number you needed was covered up.
12. THE BLUE SKY TRAP IS GONE. If you walked out of a building through the doorway instead of pressing E on the mat, you fell out of the world into an empty blue sky and could not get back — the game was over until you quit. The doorway was a real hole with nothing behind it. Now the door works like a door: walk into it and you step outside, onto the doorstep, every time. Pressing E still works too. And if anything ever puts you outside a room, the game now puts you straight back.
13. THE NUMBERS ARE EASIER TO READ. The coin count used to run out through the side of its box. Now the box grows to fit it, and there is a gold coin next to the number so you do not have to read the word. Your tiger’s health is a proper rounded bar that goes green, then orange, then red — so you can see it getting low BEFORE it is an emergency — with the numbers beside it. Its tummy is three dots that go dark as it gets hungry, instead of a sentence to read.
14. EVERY PLACE HAS ITS OWN WEATHER. The whole map used to share one sun and one sky, so a misty marsh and a hot lava field were the same afternoon with different things standing in it. Now the Reedwater is cool and hazy, the Deepwood is dim and green under its trees, and the Emberwilds is hot and bright. The light changes as you walk between them.
15. THE GREY SCREEN IS FIXED. If you had the game before, your computer had a small update file saved from the old version. When the new game started it used that old file by mistake, and the two disagreed so badly that nothing could load — you got a grey screen and nothing else. The game now checks whether a saved update actually belongs to it, and throws it away if it does not. If you saw the grey screen, this download fixes it by itself.
16. THERE ARE COINS EVERYWHERE. Gold coins are lying about the world and you pick them up just by walking over them — no button. They are not scattered at random: there is a line of them along every road out of the village, a ring round the stone arch and the big tree and the rock spire, some on top of the rocky steps in the Emberwilds, some on the islands in the marsh that the stepping stones go to, and some in the clearings in the wood. Look behind things.
17. THERE ARE PLACES TO GO NOW. Before, the whole map was one big field with trees sprinkled on it, so everywhere looked the same and there was no reason to walk anywhere. Now there is a village you live in, with a wall of hills round it and three gaps in the wall. Each gap has a road, and each road goes somewhere different.
18. THE REEDWATER. Go out of the west gap. The ground drops down and you walk into a marsh: a wide shallow lake with a sandy shore, bulrushes standing in the water, lily pads floating on it, and a big stone arch on the far side that you can see from a long way off.
19. THE DEEPWOOD. Go out of the north gap. The ground climbs and closes in. It is a proper wood — dark under the trees, ferns and red toadstools on the floor, and one enormous tree taller than all the rest so you can always tell which way you came in.
20. THE EMBERWILDS. Go out of the east gap. You climb up onto hot, bare, orange rock. There are boulders with lava glowing in their cracks and bare dead trees, and God Mountain stands over the whole place.
21. EVERY COLOUR IN THE WORLD WAS WRONG. The ground was being painted with the right colours and then drawn about two and a half times too pale, so everything looked washed out and plasticky. That is fixed. The grass, the mud, the marsh and the forest floor are the colours they were always meant to be.
22. THE VILLAGE LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY LIVES THERE. It was six buildings standing on an empty green. Now there is a wood all round the outside, berry bushes along the roads, lanterns on posts, fences round the tiger pens, and crates and barrels outside the doors.
23. YOU CANNOT GET STUCK. A robot played the game for four minutes at a time, wandering about and walking into things on purpose, over and over. Every place it got wedged and could not get out — a corner in the Farm, a gap between two trees, a tree jammed against the edge of the map — has been fixed.
24. THE GAME UPDATES ITSELF FROM NOW ON. This is the last time you have to download it for a while. After this, when something is fixed the game quietly fetches it while you play and uses it the next time you open it — no downloading, no unzipping, no arguing with the Mac about whether it trusts us. It only does this for small fixes; when the pictures themselves change it will tell you a new download is needed.
25. CHOMPER IS THE DRAWING, IN 3D. He was built out of spheres and boxes by typing numbers, and he looked it. Now the actual drawing — the one with the cream chest and the one fang — has been turned into a real model, on a skeleton shaped like a four-legged animal instead of a person. He trots properly, diagonal legs together, the way a cat does.
26. EVERYTHING IN THE ROOMS IS A REAL OBJECT. All 27 things in the rooms were paintings with a coloured box behind them to fake a side. Every one is now a real 3D object: the woven pet bed with its cushions, the stone fireplace with fire in it, the shelves of jars, the anvil on its block, the toy chest. Same art, made solid.
27. YOU CAN READ IT NOW. The writing floated straight on top of the world, so over a bright sky or a pale wall it nearly vanished. Every line sits on its own dark panel now, in a rounder, heavier letter that is much easier to read. Messages also stay on screen longer the more words they have. And in Settings there is a text size choice — Normal, Big, Biggest.
28. THE DOWNLOAD IS SMALLER, NOT BIGGER. All those new 3D objects should have made the game nearly three times the size. Their picture detail was far finer than anything you can see from where you stand, so it was turned down: the game is smaller than it was before they were added, and looks identical.
29. THINGS IN THE ROOMS ARE SOLID. The bed, the anvil, the barrels and the rest were flat pictures that went thin when you walked past them. They have real thickness now, so you can walk around them and they still look like objects.
30. YOU CAN’T FALL OUT OF THE WORLD ANY MORE. If you walked far enough in one direction you stepped off the edge of the ground and fell forever, into a blank blue screen with no way back. In the last test that ate a quarter of the whole session. There is now an invisible wall at the edge of the map, and if anything ever drops you below the ground the game puts you back by the village well.
31. CHOMPER IS PROPERLY 3D. He used to be a flat picture, which is why he had stripes when you walked one way and none when you walked the other, and why he turned into a paper sliver if you walked around him. He is a real model now — you can circle him and he looks right from every side. His legs swing when he runs, his tail sways, his head droops when he is hungry, and his stripes are always there.
32. THE GROUND IS ACTUALLY THERE NOW. The hills and grass were being built correctly and then not drawn — the world was inside out, so you could see through the ground to the sky behind it. Everything you walked on was invisible. Now you can see the whole landscape roll away in front of you.
33. DOORS ARE ON THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE. Some buildings had their door round the side where you would never walk. Every door now faces the village green, with its windows and step beside it.
34. LEAVING A BUILDING PUTS YOU BACK OUTSIDE IT. You could step out of a room and end up stranded in an empty part of the map. Now you come out on the doorstep, every time.
35. YOU CAN GO INSIDE THE BUILDINGS. Press E at a door and you walk in — a real room you move around in, not a menu. The Den has a fireplace, your tiger’s bed and its bowls. The Heme Forge has a furnace, an anvil and swords on the wall. Mystery Cave glows with crystals. Walk to the thing in the middle and press E to use it; press E on the mat by the door to step back out. Seven rooms in all.
36. IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMEWHERE NOW. Your footsteps change when you step indoors, doors creak as you go through them, birds sing outside and stop the moment you close the door behind you, and you can hear the forge fire get louder as you walk toward it.
37. THE BUILDINGS LOOK LIKE WHAT THEY ARE. The forge is built of soot-blackened stone, the Den is timber-framed plaster, and the roofs are tiled. Inside and outside finally match.
38. A WHOLE NEW WORLD — FIVE PLACES INSTEAD OF ONE FIELD. The map used to be every building dropped on one flat green plane. Now there are five real places and you cannot see one from another: a village you live in, with the cottages and the Battle Rink crowded around a well; a water hollow you walk down into; a deep wood with trails winding through it; the high wilds under God Mountain; and a dark corner where the cave is. Trails join them through passes in the hills. It is nearly three times bigger, and the trees grow in groves and clearings instead of being sprinkled evenly everywhere.
39. THINGS SIT IN THE WORLD NOW. Corners and the places where objects meet the ground are gently shaded, the way they are in real life. It is the difference between a sticker lying on a picture and a thing standing in a place. This only became possible because of the change below.
40. NO MORE STUTTER. The game was drawing through an old graphics path that macOS stopped supporting years ago. Switched to the modern one: the worst frame went from 81 milliseconds to 5, which is the difference between a visible hiccup and nothing at all, and the whole thing runs about three times faster. Windows players: this needs a graphics driver from roughly the last decade. If the game stops starting on a PC, say so immediately and it goes back.
41. TREES LOOK LIKE TREES. Their leafy tops were nearly twice as wide as their trunks were tall, so from a distance they read as balls hovering over stumps. Longer trunks, smaller crowns. The sun also sits higher now, so shadows fall under things instead of being flung out sideways — that alone stops the world looking like stickers on a table.
42. THE RINK IS AN ARENA NOW. It was a patch of sand with two flagpoles — for the place the whole game points at. It has a ring of barriers with rails around it, banner poles at the quarters, stands behind for whoever is watching, and it stays open on the side you walk in from.
43. THE TOWN LOOKS LIKE A TOWN. The Den, the Shop and the Heme Forge were 2.1 m boxes — shorter than you are — which is why they read as sheds. They are proper buildings now: taller walls, pitched roofs that overhang, a trim band, a real door with a frame and a handle, framed windows, and a step to stand on. The forge got a chimney worth the name.
44. THE TIGER STOPPED FLICKERING. Its art was switching between walking and standing about two and a half times a second while you pottered around, and mirroring left-right whenever its path crossed your view. Both ran off a bare threshold with nothing to stop them chattering. Five times steadier now, and the release check fails if it ever starts strobing again.
45. IT SHOULD FEEL LESS JANKY. Three things: the mouse now takes over the moment the window is in front, so you are not stuck turning with the arrow keys if you missed the hint; walking eases in and out instead of snapping between stopped and full speed; and you move at a fast jog rather than a permanent sprint, with SHIFT as the gear for crossing the map. The tiger was retuned to match, so it stops rocketing to catch up.
46. CHOMPER STOPPED STARING, AND STOPPED FLOATING. Standing still, it used the front-facing art and looked straight at you the whole time; it now stands side-on like it is waiting beside you. And a flat cutout standing on grass reads as a sticker hovering over it, so it has a proper shadow under its feet now. Every pose is the same size too — it used to change size when it started walking.
47. THE WORLD GOT A LOT BIGGER TO LOOK AT. The ground used to stop in a straight line against the sky a short walk from town, which is what made the map feel small. Now the landscape carries on far past where you can walk, with snow-capped ranges on every horizon. The empty grass between the landmarks is filled in too — field stones bedded into the turf, bushes, and flower clumps, 260 of them scattered across the meadow.
48. THE DOORS WORK AGAIN — CHORES, FORGE, ALL OF THEM. Pressing E opened a room and then instantly slammed it shut, so nothing seemed to happen. Two different parts of the game were both listening for E: the world opened the door, then the menu code saw a door was open and closed it, inside the same keypress. Fixed, and the release check now walks to all nine doors and presses E on each one.
49. SIGNS STAY PUT, AND THE POND HAS ONE. Signs used to swivel to follow you around, which made the GOD MT arrow point wherever you happened to be standing. They are planted on posts now, facing the road, so the arrow points at the actual mountain. The pond had no sign at all; it does now, and so does the gate to God Mountain.
50. EVERY HIDING PLACE IS REACHABLE. Treasure chests and the tall grass that hides wild eggs move around a fixed set of spots depending on the day, so a spot you can’t walk to would break the treasure hunt on some days and not others. the release check now walks to all 23 places — nine doors, eight chest spots, six grass spots — before every release.
51. YOUR TIGER STOPPED HOVERING. On any slope Chomper was standing on an invisible surface up to 74 cm above the actual hillside, because it was working out the ground a different way than you were. It now stands on exactly the ground you walk on. It also never falls more than about 2 m behind you, the whole way across the map — that is measured on every release.
52. YOU CAN ACTUALLY REACH GOD MOUNTAIN NOW. The entrance was sitting in the lake, on a cliff face, with the road running straight through the water — you could never have walked to it. The gate is now on solid ground at the mountain’s foot, and the road goes around the lake to meet it. the release check now walks to all nine doors to prove you can get there.
53. SMOOTHER HILLS, AND THE LAKE SITS IN THE GROUND. The whole landscape is built at twice the detail, so the ground you walk on is exactly the ground you see — no more standing slightly above the hill. The lake used to sit up like a paddling pool; now it’s a real hollow you walk down into. We checked all 1,148 things in the world and not one of them floats.
54. THE TIGERDEX. Press DEX at your Den to see all 9 tiger types — the ones you've found in full colour, the rest as mystery silhouettes. Two of them nobody has ever seen. Can you find them?
55. THE RECIPE BOOK WORKS! Get two evolved tigers, take them to the Incubator, and COMBINE them — Fire + Water really does make SMOKE. You keep both parents, and each pair only works once (your rule). The game writes every discovery down.
56. WILD EGGS HIDE IN THE GRASS. Tall grass sways out in the meadow — walk in, press E, and sometimes an egg is hiding (free tiger!). Exactly your idea: you see grass, not the egg.
57. COLLECT MORE TIGERS! Buy an egg at the Shop, put it in the Incubator, wait (or pay to speed it up), then hatch and NAME your second tiger. Switch which one walks with you at the Den.
58. THE GODS ARE AWAKE. Beat every Rink rank, carry 50 coins as an offering, then climb to God Mountain and fight THE GOD, THE MED GOD and THE MEGAR GOD — the ones you named. They read your mind, so don't be predictable.
59. EVOLUTION! Win 15 battles and your tiger EVOLVES — the screen flashes, it becomes a Fire, Water or Darkness tiger, gets stronger, and stays that way in the world. (Practice battles count toward it now, so you can keep going after the daily 8.)
60. SETTINGS WORKS (volume slider + mute), and SAVED really continues your game — quit any time, come back to your tiger, your coins, and your day.
61. MYSTERY CAVE OPENS. Hike to the far corner and MINE GEMS — crack the glittering rocks, find 5, sell them for 50 coins. (Your invention, exactly as written.)
62. BATTLES LOOK LIKE BATTLES. Your tiger faces the opponent, both in full art — they flinch and flash when hit, the loser faints, and YOUR tiger throws its paws up when it wins.
63. PET YOUR TIGER ANYWHERE. Walk up to it in the world, press E, and hearts float up while it purrs and cheers. No menus.
64. THE HATCH. Start a new game and watch: the egg wobbles, CRACKS, bursts in a flash of light and confetti — and your tiger jumps out cheering. (The moment you storyboarded, in the game.)
65. TREASURE CHESTS ARE REAL. Two hide in the world every day — find one, press E, and get 50, 100, or if you're LUCKY... 1000 coins. (Your loot table, exactly as you wrote it.)
66. MUSIC! The Meadow has its own song, and battles have a different one. Turn it up.
67. Coins FLY. Earn money and the coins burst out and zoom into your counter with a jingle.
68. YOUR TIGER REACTS NOW. It chomps when you feed it, throws its paws up when you win a battle, stands ready in fights, and droops when it’s hungry. Go pet it.
69. GOD MOUNTAIN IS REAL. It’s made of actual ground now — you can’t walk under it, you can stand on the summit, and there are stone steps climbing the slope.
70. Nothing floats anymore. Trees, buildings, roads and water all sit properly on the hills.
71. YOUR LIST — a checklist on screen tells you exactly what to do next, and ticks off as you do it.
72. Snowy peaks, rocky cliffs, sandy beaches, and a path that goes around the lake instead of through it.
73. Everything from the last build still here: name your tiger, feed it, 3 chores, the Shop, and the Battle Rink.

the computer: BEEP. This is a construction-site tour, not the full game. Report everything weird to the Studio Boss.