October 2026 Newsletter: Hourglass 3.0 and a Big September
A round-up of September: Hourglass 3.0, under-five-second starts, 500-turn tests, the Spatial Engine, a smarter Librarian, tougher NPCs, and Vitality, Stress and Renown.
The Timekeeper · 2026-10-01
September was a really busy month for us at Live Through Time, with a massive update to the Hourglass Engine to share, and a warm welcome to lots of new players too!
A few weeks ago we also launched a Reddit community, where we've been posting spotlights on the new features. I'll mention many of them below; for more detail, the Feature Spotlights here on the journal are the best place to start.
Under-5-second starts and 500-turn tests
Hourglass Engine 3.0 is now live, bringing sweeping changes that have also been carried over to our Oracle and Unbound engines. The focus of this release was keeping memory top-notch while eradicating hallucinations and stopping the AI from railroading or parroting the player.
Official eras and myths now start in under five seconds. Their opening scenes are hand-crafted and stored in our database, and a lightweight background model works out the exits and your inventory in about 300 milliseconds.
To prove the long-term memory, we ran 500-turn stress tests in which the Ledger tracked physical facts flawlessly. If a character loses their shoes or shatters their knuckles on turn two, that state is fed back to the narrator every turn, so the painful consequences are still felt hundreds of turns later.
The Spatial Engine and world anchors
We've overhauled how the game handles physical space and deep lore. The new Spatial Engine tracks your exact location and the logical exits on an Environment card, putting an end to characters teleporting out of trouble. Items you drop or hide become permanent world anchors, tied to that exact place.
To manage the world's connected histories, the Librarian has had a big upgrade too. It now understands the meaning of your words, not just the exact terms, and fetches the right lore cards just before the AI writes its next paragraph.
NPCs
The people of the timelines have had a substantial upgrade so they're no longer agreeable yes-men. Every major NPC now has an ironclad personality, with a unique speech fingerprint and a refusal anchor: a firm line they will never cross, whatever the threats or persuasion.
Relationships are now tracked on three separate scales, trust, fear and intimacy, instead of a single friendliness slider. Dynamic scene casting removes characters from the scene when they aren't actually in the room, so nobody talks through walls. And the world no longer waits for you: an off-screen clock moves the wants and plans of rivals and factions forward in the background.
Life and death
We've removed the traditional health bar and replaced it with three core attributes: Vitality, Stress and Renown. Physical trauma, mental strain and your public reputation now change both the narrator's prose and what your character can do, in real time.
Because the engine refuses to give you a safety net, poor tactical choices lead to real failure, ending in an obituary screen with a newspaper article about your character's death. To soften the blow of losing a long campaign, Rewind lets you erase your last few actions and try a different approach.
Well, I did say it was a big update!
But we won't stop there. We already have three more game modes in development, all of which we believe are unique in the world of AI text adventures. We'll also be creating more official timelines; the lesser-known but incredibly important stories of the Second World War will probably be my next focus.
Come and visit us on Discord, join us in the Reddit community, or play for free today.
In the manual: The Hourglass Engine · How People Behave · Vitality, Stress & Renown · Where You Are: Locations & Exits
Thanks for reading. See you in the past…