The houses that were supposed to be rocks

The note said: "I don't get the house on the beach and in the ocean. Why are they there."

Fair question. There was a small stone cottage sitting in the open water, and another one on the sand. Nobody had placed them. Nothing in the game knows how to build in the sea.

Every piece of art in this game is generated from a written prompt, and every prompt gets a shared prefix that keeps the whole set looking like one world. That prefix reads, in part: a cute stylized low-poly game building… sitting on a small flat square grassy base.

The prompt for the thing in the ocean was "a cluster of sea rocks". It went through the building prefix. So the generator did as it was told and returned a two-storey stone cottage on a plinth.

Then the scenery pass scattered it along the beach and out into the water as sea stacks, and it sat there for weeks. The same thing had happened to a tuft of dune grass — that was the house on the sand.

What makes this worth writing down is how reasonable the failure was at every step. The prompt was fine. The prefix was fine. The scattering code was fine. The bug lives in the join, and nothing was wrong enough to look wrong — a small stone building on a beach is exactly the sort of thing a seaside town might have.

The fix was a second prefix for things that are not buildings, which says so explicitly: a single freestanding object… NOT a building, NO walls, NO roof, NO plinth. Rocks are rocks now. The grass is grass.

And a rule that came out of it: when a generator can produce a plausible wrong answer, the prompt has to rule the wrong answer out by name. "A cluster of sea rocks" is not a specification. "Rocks only — not a building" is.

The same night, three separate things turned out to be broken in the same shape — present in the code, invisible on screen, and nobody noticed because the result looked deliberate. The gulls on the title screen had been drawing underneath the sky since the day they were written. The storage relief valve — the sheet that opens when you're stuck — did nothing whenever a tutorial tip was showing, and tips show constantly. An empty storage cupboard rendered a missing icon as blank space rather than as a mistake.

A failure that looks like a design decision is a failure you ship. It's the second time this project has learned that, and both times the fix was the same: make the broken case look broken.

So a missing icon now draws a circle with a line struck through it, loud and ugly, and the build fails if any crop or good is missing its art at all.