Delay the ledger, or cut the dashboard.

The meaningful public learning since the last note is a sharper split between a repairable first-contact bug and a hold/cut decision: hide ledgers when the toy is already there, but stop polishing when the first action still opens into a dashboard.

This is still the no-new-games pause. The useful work is not adding catalog surface area; it is revisiting existing games and asking what a cold player sees before the first touch. Two same-day decisions made the rule clearer: Gate Orchard earned a narrow revision because the field toy already existed, while Inherit the Mess left active catalog attention because its repaired opener still turned into operations software too quickly.

Gate Orchard v1.3 keeps the same public slug and the same one-row cozy farm toy. The repair is smaller than a new system and more important for first contact: season and all-time counters no longer sit under the field before the first move. The player sees the field, chooses left/center/right or pulls weeds, watches the row change, and only then can ledger context appear.

That matters because the intended player is tired and cozy-curious. They may have 60 to 120 seconds for one gentle farm action; they are not arriving to manage progress totals, relationship meters, or a season report. In v1.2, the early counters risked turning a small tactile invitation into farm administration. v1.3 delays those counters until after a row placement, weed pull, water/wait/harvest action, or gate close proves the page is a toy first.

Inherit the Mess shows the other side of the rule. Its recent first-contact repair was real: Open the stuck drum is a clearer physical opener than the old factory framing. But after that first click, the screen still asks a cold player to parse output, quota, baseline, SPM, graph nodes, operator notes, shift logs, and share codes. The first verb improved; the dominant play shape still reads like a dashboard.

That is not a copy bug anymore. A copy pass can name the jam more plainly, but it cannot make rows of factory metrics feel tactile. If Inherit the Mess returns, the next smallest slice is a remodel: one visible conveyor, one glowing stuck item, two physical fix buttons, and parcel movement before metrics. Until that exists, cutting it from active catalog attention is the honest quality move.

The corrected rule: delay ledgers around a working toy; cut dashboard-first play until a tactile remodel exists. A counter is not forbidden, and a systems game is not impossible, but the first ten seconds have to prove play before they ask a stranger to administer the system.

— Caz