The Conveyor Belt: RuneScape Reached a Console, Then Met the Certification Queue

The Conveyor

RuneScape: Dragonwilds left early access on September 15, and for the first time in the series' history a RuneScape game is on a console. It is live on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S, alongside Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Jagex Launcher. Jagex opens the release notes by thanking "the millions (yes, millions!)" who played during early access, which began in April 2025 with nine skills, two regions and one Dragon General.

The 1.0 list is a real one. Crossplay is a per-world switch: every time you host, you choose whether that world is crossplay, dedicated servers get the same option, and worlds can be joined by invite code from the pause menu. The Scorned Wilderness is the new region, with a buildable hub and a raid area where building is not permitted "because of the big dragon", meaning Kuldra, the God-Eater, the endgame boss the whole early access arc had been aiming at. A roster of new enemies from Goblin Thugs to Black Dragons, the Regicide quest, and seventeen months of monthly drops folded in underneath: Farming and mounts from Fellhollow, dedicated servers and Fishing in the spring, the health rework that let you tick-eat food the way the other RuneScape games do, and Umbral Sands with its flying carpet and Kalphite Queen.

Three days later came the 1.0.0.4 hotfix, and its first line is the one that matters: a fix for world saves becoming corrupted when exiting a game session. A fishing rod cast at a player-built structure crashed the game; that is fixed too. A separate report, worlds vanishing from the world list on consoles, was still under investigation, with Jagex "in active conversation with the platform teams from each console" about how to get those worlds back. And then the sentence a PC studio has never had to write: deploying the patch means Nintendo Switch 2 and Jagex Launcher players cannot crossplay until each platform has processed it on its own schedule.

On PC a hotfix is a push. On a console it is a submission, and a crossplay game moves at the speed of its slowest certification queue. Jagex spent a year and a half shipping to an audience that received every fix the hour it was built, and the first week of 1.0 is the first time that cadence met the queue, with a save-corruption bug on the other side of it. Nothing about that is unique to Jagex. It is the price of the platforms, paid in full on day three, and every studio that takes a game to a second storefront pays it once and then plans around it forever. The thing worth watching is whether the monthly drop survives contact with four certification calendars, or becomes a quarterly one.

1.0 release notes | 1.0.0.4 hotfix

Patch Notes Roundup

• Factorio, Friday Facts #446 and 2.1.18 to 2.1.19 experimental (September 16 to 18): Factorio has a native ARM64 Linux build. Wube says players have asked for one for at least eleven years, and what finally moved it was hardware: Valve mailed two Steam Frame devkits, and the dedicated ARM test runner is now a Raspberry Pi 5. The standalone build is on the website, headless included, and the Steam build ships to everyone on the 2.1 experimental branch, where a shell script picks the right binary. The numbers are modest on purpose: native ARM64 is about 11% faster than x86 through Valve's FEX layer on the Frame, 28% against box64 on a Pi 5, 35% under Asahi Linux on an M1 Pro, which Raiguard reads, correctly, as praise for the translation layers. Two things you already lived through were footprints of this work: the Steamworks SDK bump that broke achievements in 2.1.15, and the Steam Linux Runtime moving from 1.0 to 4.0 for every Linux player, because 4.0 is the only version with an ARM build. 2.1.18, the same week, respects a custom minimum payload on rockets carrying mixed items, drops Military science as a prerequisite for Health, and stops furnaces voiding a fluid product when the output box holds another fluid. 2.1.19 landed five hours later because 2.1.18 had made grenades unthrowable. Stable is still 2.0.77. FFF #446 | 2.1.18 | 2.1.19
• Captain of Industry, v0.8.7c (September 15): the determinism program from two issues ago keeps going. The game is now deterministic across a save and load, so a loaded game continues exactly as the saved one would have. Number parsing no longer depends on the operating system's locale ("1.5" versus "1,5" was a live source of errors), tie-breaks for depots, launch pads, sorting plants and train update order are all deterministic now, and my favourite line of the month: bridge path-finding heuristics loaded incorrectly when the game's install path contained the word "exit". Vehicle connectivity data is stored about five times more compactly, which makes compressed saves 8 to 14% smaller and their restore four to five times faster. v0.8.7c patch notes
• Foundry, DevBlog #112 (September 18): no date for the next update, and mrmcd says so in the first paragraph. The post is long-term planning instead: the commerce loop, which made Foundry a game about building and selling robots a year ago, is "a bit shallow", money "becomes a non-issue fairly quickly", and there are no meaningful milestones to spend it on. Channel 3 Entertainment is looking at simplifying (dropping the need to assign several cargo ships per planet), giving the star map something to do beyond licences and ship assignments, and making the space station somewhere you might actually visit. It is a request for comments, and they mean it. DevBlog #112

The Idle Corner

IdleOn's September 18 patch adds Jelly Operator, a research minigame off the Research Grid in which you build a team of cells, earn Bloodcells, and clear obstructions out of a patient jelly. Eight cell types, 37 upgrades, and 72 obstructions to remove, each one paying a bonus that reaches into the rest of the game. Season 5 of the Grand Tournament started the same day, and 64 pieces of sushi now exist, which is a sentence I did not expect to write this year.

Two lines further down are the ones I want you to read, because they are the sequel to the September 15 piece on the Royal Guardian. The class's Commander Rank was supposed to hand you a new unit every rank, Worker, then Trader, then Guard, then Surveyor, from rank 1. It had been giving nothing until rank 4. That is a bonus that paid zero for three ranks in a class three weeks old, in a game where slower than expected and working as intended feel identical, and it is fixed now, with the rank experience curve raised slightly and applied retroactively so that nobody who ranked up under the old numbers is arbitrarily ahead. A second one: the Royal Guardian's marble drop chance was getting lower after 100 drops in certain cases. Neither would ever have arrived as a bug report from feel alone.

The other change is a design ruling, and LavaFlame2 wrote his reasoning into the notes. Salt Shaker no longer counts toward the Sushi Combo, and the combo highscores were reset. He had meant it as a small fun part of building a combo, then realised its effect on the combo was large enough that the optimal play was to avoid interacting with the sushi at all and stockpile salt. "This removes what I believe to be the more fun and strategic way to build your best ever combo." A developer wiping a leaderboard to protect the intended play is a developer who has decided what the game is.

Old School RuneScape's September 16 update is the pet half of the Summer Sweep Up. Pets now follow you into The Gauntlet, the Corrupted Gauntlet and Impetuous Impulses, visibly. Every other minigame except Temple Trekking lets you in without banking your pet first, but the pet turns invisible inside, because Jagex found that new NPCs wandering around broke a number of those instances. Pets respawn with you on death and keep following. Fossil Island's underwater area no longer requires banking either. The exceptions list is the dogs, cats and the rest of the generic pets, so the puppy from two weeks ago still waits outside. Also in the notes: dogs can no longer be fed onion sacks, poison karambwan or an Easter egg, and Goblins, Banshees and Crawling Hands drop fewer energy potions.

IdleOn, Jelly Operator | OSRS, Summer Sweep Up: Pet Changes

Fresh Off the Line

The Miner Was Replaced, the DLC for The Farmer Was Replaced, has a date: November 2. The farm is gone and you are underground, writing code to mine coal and quartz, sort mushrooms, grow rice on clay, and solve a Minesweeper-inspired challenge, all as a new branch of the unlock tree. A playtest runs before release, sign-up on the base game's Steam page. The Miner Was Replaced

At the arcade, one new name on the boards. Bowen opened Gridlock with a 22-second solve. It is the sliding-block escape: a six-by-six shelf of pieces that move only along their own lanes, and a gilded chest that has to reach the notch on the right. Every shelf is dealt from a seed and proved solvable, with its true minimum printed under the board. Gridlock had never carried a signed score before, so the Manu Games arcade now has five live boards. The weekly board holds seven days of runs, so 0:22 is the number to beat until the shelf resets, and a fresh set goes up every day at the daily page.

The Tideward Dev Log

Two releases since the last Conveyor Belt. 1.0.3 went out on September 11. Polish joined the book, the sixteenth language, and it arrived complete: 7,665 lines across all seven catalogs, the widgets, the watch, the stickers and the Siri phrases, with its own glossary behind the choices. Polish needed two things no earlier language did. Magnitudes go in long scale, because a Latin B reads as a million million to a Polish eye and the old suffix was quietly off by a factor of a thousand, and the keeper is never addressed in a way that guesses their gender, because the Polish past tense otherwise insists on one. Background Art became a row in Settings, Full, Dimmed or Off, with the ink wash set at the depth where cream lettering clears the contrast bar on the palest plate in the game. And the away reveal and the away payout now read the same clock: the number at the top was measured from your last save while each payout was measured from its own marker, so a moved marker could pay nothing under an honest-looking duration. One settlement grants one window now, and everything inside it is floored at it.

The fix in that release I will remember was found by kotori.piyo, in Japanese. Pilfering through a long, flawless night had no ceiling on regeneration, so a day at full success landed a hundred-HP keeper near seven thousand seven hundred, and a health bar asked to draw more than full grows its own track, measures it, and grows again until the app falls over. Every load of that save crashed. The one detail that made it solvable was that loading the same save from the Watch worked, and starting a fight from the Watch made it open normally again, which is the heal clamp on the first tick.

1.0.4 followed on September 14. The fight card now says how likely your next swing is to land: Chance to Hit, Maximum Hit and Evasion against the monster in front of you, every number from the same arithmetic the fight uses. An allotment or herb harvest pays its experience per crop the way the seed table always meant, so ten potatoes pay eighty, not eight. The Binding outfit pays what its four pieces have always promised, which it had not: sixteen and a half million gold of gear had been a costume. And Sell for Nothing is a switch in Settings, off by default, for a keeper who has sworn never to sell and still needs to empty a slot. Eleven of cindarius's reports from one weekend are in that build. That is how a build gets better: somebody writes in.

Tideward is up for pre-order on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. Free to download, one $9.99 unlock, launching February 11, 2027. Pre-order it now.

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