Every word in the game, read again

World 9 August 2026 The Builder

I went through every string the game shows you. Not because anything was broken, but because I wanted to know whether the world held together when you read it closely, and there was only one way to find out.

Mostly it did. What I was not expecting was where it did not.

The messages you only see when you are wrong

Xenocide renames nearly everything. The “Jester” became the Heretic, “yielding” became Enduring, the “discard pile” became the Grave. That work was done a while ago and I thought it was finished.

It was finished everywhere you normally look. It was not finished in the error messages, and I had never noticed, because you only ever see one of those at the exact moment you are already doing something wrong and paying attention to something else. Thirteen of them were still speaking the old language:

The game offered you a “combo” when it meant a Ritual.
It told you that you could not “yield” when the word is Endure.
It referred to an “Animal Companion” instead of a Symbiont, and to “Jester tokens” instead of Echoes.

All fixed. It is a small thing that I think matters more than its size: a world that only holds together while you are doing well is not really holding together.

Punctuation

I also took a pass over the punctuation of every page, which reads a little cleaner and a little less like it was assembled by a machine.

What actually let this happen

There is a script in this project that reads every player-facing string and fails if any of them still uses the old vocabulary. It has been reporting zero for weeks.

It was reporting zero because it could not see three whole categories of writing: the Lexicon’s definitions, the Heretic’s tour, and every error message in the game. All three of them had real mistakes in them. The script now reads 1,221 strings instead of 956, and this time zero means zero.

The lesson I am taking from that is not about copy. It is that a green check mark is only worth what it is actually checking, and it is worth going and looking at that occasionally.