More than 100 core characters now carry fully rendered art, sprites and backstories — and the supporting cast keeps growing on top. The trick to the pace: NPCs are drawn without the final rendering layer, which gets them done in about 40% of the time of a fully fledged piece like Fel or Kira.

Behind it sits a new Timeline tool bolted onto the in-game dev tracker (the purple button, top right of the title screen). It maps every major event, branch and character beat so the whole game can be planned at a high level — "the lore is as deep as a 40-year running sci-fi epic," and now there's a chart to prove it.

Current board: Nyrissa 80% · Marta's Passion 80% · hostage-rescue cutscene 80% · Amu's Cave 70% · Albion's Anchor 65% · Daria's first meeting 10% · FNS Ember 10%.

The 1 August post put it plainly: lots of lore, but the TLDR is you vote on a new (extra) costume for her. 137 likes later, the answer is the Evening Grove dress — red silk, gold rings, a braids-down variant that followed on 23 August.

It matters because of who wears it. Rexalia is a warrior of the Aetherialis, the Honnehari's answer to the Vanguard. When her leaders prepared to leave the galaxy, she was the one ordered to shut down the Veyr — the invariant beacons that read and shaped reality across the sector. She called the departure a betrayal. Then she did it anyway, beacon by beacon, until the galaxy read as though her people had never existed.

She wakes now with fragmented memories and unfinished feelings, and one question above the war, above Straker, above everything: what became of her people? The dress is a night off from that. She's earned one.