NPCs now remember

NPCs now remember the last three encounters they had with you.

The implementation is small. A rolling window of events tagged per-NPC, per-player. Each event has a valence — hostile, neutral, kind — and a context: theft, combat, gift, rescue, trade, the small things that make up an afternoon in a small town. When you approach an NPC, it checks the window before deciding how to greet you.

Steal from a merchant on Tuesday — return Friday, and they will not greet you. Save a hunter in the marshes — return a season later, and they will offer you their fire. Walk past a priest at the altar of Ohlun on a holy day without stopping, and they will remember that, too.

This is a small thing. It changes everything.

The memory decays. After a season, a small deed fades. After a year, most things fade. Only the large things — the ones that shape a life — stay on the NPC forever. I am still deciding what qualifies as large. The current rule of thumb is: if the engineer watching the playtest remembered it the next morning, the NPC should remember it too.

A bug, for the record. A combat dummy in the east field was drifting half a meter east each time you struck it. I thought it was a physics-push miscalculation. It was not. The dummy’s collision root was anchored to a bone that I had authored incorrectly two weeks ago. The dummy was not drifting. It was trying to escape.

It cannot, anymore.

Week 51. Next week, the market reputation system.