Two weeks ago the Wilds became somewhere you can actually hunt: thirteen creature types, a level roll that happens per encounter, and weighted tables deciding who you run into based on how deep you've pushed. Early, Mid, Deep. The Drag shuffles at you in your first few fights; further out, things get less friendly and considerably less legible. That part went fine. This post is about the part that didn't — which I only found because I finally went to use something I'd written a week earlier.
LOUD: Hollow-Face
When I built the creature roster I gave every one of the thirteen a bands key — a short list saying which stretches of the Wilds that creature turns up in. ["early", "mid"], and so on. Thirteen rows, one sitting, done. The catch is that nothing read it. Not that day, not that week: the system that would eventually consume that key hadn't been built yet, so the data just sat there being whatever I'd typed, with nothing in the game asking it a single question.
When I did build the reader and point it at those rows, four of the thirteen were wrong. Hollow-Face and Pale Cord were both missing "mid". The Stumbler and Jaw-Behind were both missing "deep". Left alone, the Mid and Deep bands would have drawn from three creature types instead of five — a thinner, loopier hunt in exactly the stretch where you most need variety. And here's the bit I keep chewing on: it had never failed. No crash, no error, nothing odd in testing, not once. There was nothing to fail. A wrong value nobody reads isn't a bug yet — it's a bug in waiting, sitting perfectly quiet until something finally depends on it.
LOUD: Pale Cord
The obvious repair is to fix four rows and get on with your afternoon. I didn't, and thinking about why is what made this worth writing up. The weight tables — the things that actually decide who you meet, band by band — already contained everything that bands key was trying to say. So it wasn't merely wrong in four places; it was a second copy of something the game already knew, living in a different file, with nothing keeping the two honest with each other. Correcting those rows would have left me holding two sources of truth that happened to agree on a Tuesday. So I deleted it. All thirteen, gone. The weight tables are now the only place that answers "where does this thing show up," and there's nothing left to quietly drift out of step.
I've made this mistake enough times to recognize its shape. When I was thirteen, running a BBS out of Montgomery, Alabama, a sixteen-year-old sysop I'd met through the boards sat me down and showed me how to code rooms for TinyMUD. That was the first thing I ever built — a world written out as a list of entries, each one saying what it was and what it connected to. Thirty-odd years later I'm still writing rows that describe creatures and where they live, and I still managed to get four of them wrong and not notice, because I wrote them before anything needed them. Some lessons take more than one pass.
What's next: giving the Wilds something to do besides fight you — the events layer, so the world can interrupt your plans instead of just standing in the way of them.