A site that arrives in a hundred and fifty years
Production was telling players a site came to market in 5,720 days. Just over a hundred and fifty years.
The land release schedule writes its dates through a conversion that falls back to real days unless the game is in wall-clock mode — and it ran before the settings that would have told it otherwise were loaded from the database. So the schedule was converted against the deploy baseline and read back against the override. Forty game days came out as 1,920.
The part that stings: the comment directly above that settings call already explained this exact hazard. It said a request arriving in that window gets the wrong one. It simply had not occurred to anyone that a seed is in that window too — the warning was written about requests, and seeding was not a request, so nobody connected the two.
Settings are applied first now, before anything is seeded.
There was a second bug on the same screen, and it is a nicer kind of mistake. The release schedule skips a site somebody has already claimed — but only at the moment it writes the date. Nothing ever cleared a date on a site claimed afterwards, so an owner was fenced out of ground they had already built on.
The rule now holds where it is read rather than where it is written: land you hold a plot on is never release-locked, and the claim refusal agrees. So the screen cannot offer a button that only fails when you tap it.
Both of these are the same shape, which is why they are in one post. A rule enforced at write time is a rule about history. A rule enforced at read time is a rule about now.