Just Another Idle — v0.28: Polish & Fixes

Hey all! v0.28 is a polish and quality-of-life release. No new skills or systems this time — just a handful of fixes that were quietly breaking things, a batch of UI improvements from tester feedback, and a proper credits section for the folks who helped shape the game.

🐛 Bug Fixes

Achievement count was wrong for three achievements. Jack of All Trades, Well Rounded, and the diamond-tier “all skills” achievement were secretly hardcoded to require only 6 skills — the number the game launched with. Since then we’ve grown to 11 skills and those achievements were silently marking themselves complete when only 6 skills met the threshold. They now correctly require all 11 skills to meet the target level. If you had these unlocked early, they’ll behave properly for new runs going forward.

Prestige XP Potions weren’t awarding Skill Tree points. When you used the 500k XP potion from the prestige shop, the skill XP was added but the game forgot to check if you crossed any level-5 thresholds (the ones that grant a Skill Tree point). So if a potion took you from level 3 to level 18, you’d miss out on the points you should have earned at levels 5, 10, and 15. That’s fixed now — potion XP gain properly awards all Skill Tree points for levels crossed.

🎨 UI Improvements

Enchanting tabs now match the rest of the game. The Craft and Enchant Equipment tabs in the Enchanting skill were styled in purple — inconsistent with every other tabbed panel in the game, which uses blue. They’re now blue like Smithing, and the layout matches exactly.

Task cards with a single objective no longer show two progress bars. Tasks with only one condition were displaying both an “Overall Progress” bar and an individual condition bar, and they always showed the same value. The redundant outer bar is gone — single-condition tasks show one bar, multi-condition tasks still show both.

Equipment Familiarity modal no longer scrolls twice. The inner content panel had its own scrollbar inside a modal that already handles scrolling. Now there’s one scrollbar, for the whole modal.

Food/stamina panels in Agility and Combat are now collapsible. These panels are typically a one-time setup — you pick your food, set the threshold, and forget about it. They now start collapsed and can be toggled open when needed, freeing up vertical space in those grids.

Action lists now scroll independently within their skill panel. When a skill has a long list of actions, you can now scroll through them without scrolling the entire page. The info panels above (current action, next rewards, bonuses) stay pinned at the top while the action cards scroll beneath them.

❤️ Tester Credits

Added a Community Testers section to the Credits & Attribution modal (accessible from the Settings menu). A big thank you to the players who’ve been testing and sharing feedback:

• ErMaK
• Stangmouse
• superxoke23
• Kiik
• maxmini0214

Several of the UI improvements in this release came directly from Stangmouse’s feedback. If you want to help shape future updates, join the Discord!

What’s Next

Looking at Agility content — it’s the thinnest skill in terms of action variety and could use an expansion pass. Also considering gem-related achievements since the gem system has been around for a while with no dedicated progression tracking.

Thanks for playing!

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs, share feedback, or just chat about the game!

— VHS

Just Another Idle — v0.30: Notification Center

Hey all! v0.30 is a quality-of-life update centred around two things: making the notification experience actually pleasant especially on mobile, and rounding out the early bronze equipment tier.

💬 Notification Center

The game has always had a lot of notifications — level-ups, mastery milestones, action rewards, task completions, gem drops — and after a while they turn into a constant stream of floating cards all over the screen. On mobile in particular, that becomes a real problem.

Starting with this version, silent mode is on by default. All those floating toasts and action reward cards are gone. Instead, there’s a new chat bubble button in the top bar. When new notifications come in, a red dot appears on it. Click it to open the notification panel and see what happened.

Inside the panel you can:

• Read everything that came in since you last checked
• Dismiss notifications one by one with the × button
• Hit “Clear all” to wipe the slate clean
• Toggle silent mode off if you prefer the old floating behaviour

Action reward notifications behave the same as before in terms of merging — if the same action completes multiple times, they stack into a single entry showing the cumulative XP, resources, and an ×N count. The difference is they just don’t float anymore by default.

The preference (silent or not) is saved, so you only have to choose once.

📱 Mobile Layout

Small improvement: the skill panel and action grid now sit side by side starting at 768px (tablet width), instead of waiting until 1024px. Previously tablets were getting a long single-column scroll that didn’t make good use of the screen space.

🦺 Bronze Platebody

The bronze equipment tier was missing a body slot piece, which made the “Wear Bronze” achievement a bit confusing. That’s fixed — the Bronze Platebody is now craftable at Smithing level 18 using 4 bronze bars. It grants +5% XP gain on all skills while equipped.

With all 5 bronze pieces (pickaxe, hatchet, helmet, platelegs, platebody), the full set bonus now also gives +5% mastery XP in addition to the existing speed and action bonuses.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• The “Wear Bronze” achievement was bugged and required 50 items instead of 1 — it now correctly triggers the moment you equip any single bronze piece.
• Play time statistics were not actually accumulating during play sessions. That tracking is now fixed.

What’s Next

Still working through the platform checklist and general QoL improvements. Longer-term, more Agility actions and some gem-focused achievements are on the list.

Thanks for playing!

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs, leave suggestions, or just hang out!

— VHS

Just Another Idle — v0.36: UI Polish & Rare Fix

v0.36 is a focused polish pass — two bug fixes and four small UI improvements that clean up some rough edges left over from the enchanting and area systems.

★ Rare Item Visuals — Now Consistent Everywhere

When you apply a Star Scroll to an enchanted item, it amplifies one property to legendary (5× value, amber glow, ★ marker). That visual was already showing up correctly in the Enchanting skill panel — but the Equipment modal, equipment slot tooltips, and the equipment inventory grid were all missing it.

v0.36 brings the amber pattern everywhere:

• Equipment slot cards now show amber borders and ★ on star-scrolled items
• Equipment slot tooltips now display the amber tier label and ★ suffix on rare properties
• The equipment inventory list now highlights rare items with a golden name and glowing border

Bug Fix: Star Scroll Wasn’t Marking Items as Rare

Related to the above: there was a bug where applying a Star Scroll didn’t actually set the item’s isRare flag. The logic required all properties to be rare before flipping the flag — but a scroll only amplifies one property at a time. It now correctly marks the item as rare as soon as any single property has been star-scrolled.

If you applied scrolls before v0.36, the visual should now appear correctly on reload.

🗺️ Area Name on Topbar

The topbar area button previously always said “Areas”. It now shows your current location — for example, “Mountain Pass” or “Arcane Sanctum”. Small change, but it makes your active area visible at a glance without opening the area panel.

Action Limit — Moved Inline

The action limit control (which lets you cap how many times an action runs before stopping) has been moved from a separate card in the left column to the right side of the action grid header. It’s now a compact +/− button pair that cycles through the presets (∞ → 1 → 5 → 10 → 15 → 25 → 50 → 100 → ∞). Less visual clutter, same functionality.

Gem Modal Improvements

Two small tweaks to the Gem modal:

• “About Gems” is now collapsed by default. If you want the explainer text, click the toggle to expand it. Players who already know how gems work don’t have to scroll past it every time.
• Double scroll fixed. The gem grid was wrapped in its own scroll container inside the modal’s scroll, creating a nested scroll on smaller screens. The inner scroll has been removed — the modal itself handles the overflow now.

Additionally, if you open the Gem modal from the Equipment panel, there’s now a “← Back to Equipment” button at the top so you can navigate back without closing and reopening.

What’s Next

More content and pacing improvements — deeper progression goals and more area-specific incentives.

Thanks for playing!

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs or share suggestions!

— VHS

Just Another Idle — v0.36.1: Bug Fixes & Polish

Hey all! This one is a pure bug-fix patch. No new content, just a bunch of things that were quietly broken getting cleaned up. A few of these were player-reported — thanks for the reports!

⏱️ Timer Crash Fix (Critical)

There was a bug where stacking enough speed bonuses — specifically high-tier enchanted gear combined with gem bonuses — could drive an action’s interval all the way to zero or below. When that happened, the action would lock up or behave unpredictably.

Action timers are now clamped to a minimum of 100ms. You can still go extremely fast, but the floor is there to keep things stable.

🏆 Achievement Fixes

Two achievement bugs got fixed:

Enchanted equipment not detected — Achievements that require equipping or owning specific gear (e.g. “Bronze Knight”, “Iron Knight”) were failing to fire when the item was enchanted. Enchanted items use unique IDs internally, and the achievement check wasn’t resolving those back to the base item. That’s fixed now.

Duplicate “Master Smith” cards — Players were seeing the same achievement card appear twice in the Achievements panel. This was caused by two different achievements sharing the same internal ID. The cross-skill variant (Smithing 99 + Mining 99) has been renamed to “Master Smith & Miner”. Existing saves are automatically migrated on load.

🔱 Prestige Tier Regression

Your prestige tier could actually go down under certain conditions — for example, if your first prestige was at Tier 3 and a later prestige only qualified for Tier 1. That made no sense.

Tier now only ever increases. Once you’ve earned a tier, it’s yours permanently, even across weaker subsequent prestiges.

🛒 Prestige Shop Display Fix

The “Next Purchase Bonus” label on Timeless Efficiency (and similar multiplier items) was showing an inflated number that didn’t match what you actually received when you bought it. Each purchase adds a flat bonus — the display now shows the correct flat value.

📊 UI Polish

• The Statistics, Achievements, and Completion Log tabs in the Statistics modal now each have their own contained scroll region. No more double scrollbars.
• The Completion Log no longer shows impossible counts like “208/196” — the displayed number is now capped at the current total.
• The How to Play section now correctly describes prestige tier requirements (3, 6, and 10 skills at 99 — not the old outdated numbers).

What’s Next

Back to content. The backlog has a few directions worth exploring — tool requirements, a new equipment tier, or more late-game actions. No promises on what ships next, but the foundation is solid.

Thanks for the continued bug reports!

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs or share suggestions!

— VHS

Just Another Idle — v0.45: World Expansion, Combat Overhaul & Inventory Rework

Nine updates in one post — this is a catch-up devlog covering everything since v0.36.1. The short version: the game world got significantly bigger, combat is now a real system with depth, your inventory got reworked from the ground up, and a lot of rough edges got smoothed out for new players. Here’s the rundown.

🗺️ World Expansion — 37 New Actions

The biggest content drop since launch. Forty-four new actions were added across 8 skills, filling every level gap and giving all 7 areas a proper reason to visit.

New content by skill:

• Woodcutting: Birch Tree (lv15, Coastal), Teak Tree (lv35, Forest), Redwood Tree (lv50, Mountain), Spirit Tree (lv65, Desert), Crystal Tree (lv92, Arcane)
• Mining: Limestone Rock (lv15), Sandstone Rock (lv35, Desert), Obsidian Seam (lv60, Caverns), Crystal Formation (lv92, Arcane)
• Fishing: Crab Spot (lv15, Coastal), Pike Spot (lv35, Forest), Anglerfish Depths (lv50, Mountain), Sea Turtle Shallows (lv65, Desert), Manta Ray Trench (lv90, Arcane)
• Cooking: matching fish recipes at levels 15, 35, 50, 65, and 90
• Combat: Skeleton (lv15), Giant Spider (lv35, Forest), Desert Scorpion (lv38, Desert), Shade (lv65, Caverns), Lich (lv90, Arcane)
• Fletching: Birch Shortbow (lv15), Teak Longbow (lv30), Redwood Shortbow (lv48), Elder Longbow (lv62)
• Enchanting: Enchant Helmet (lv8), Enchant Gauntlets (lv32), Enchant Boots (lv48)
• Exploration: six new locations spread across Coastal, Forest, Desert, Mountain, Caverns, and Arcane areas

Thirty-one new resources were added alongside these — new logs, ores, fish, cooked food, combat drops, bows, and enchanted items.

Action grids now also filter by area by default: current-area actions appear first, and actions locked to other areas are collapsed into a tidy “Available Elsewhere” section at the bottom. A Settings toggle lets you turn this off if you prefer the old flat view.

⚔️ Combat Overhaul — Styles, Weaknesses & Drop Tables

Combat now has a real triangle system.

Three combat styles exist: Melee (sword/axe), Ranged (bow/crossbow), and Magic (staff). Your style is determined by whatever you have equipped in your main hand. Every one of the 14 enemies has a weakness and a resistance — being advantaged deals 1.5× damage (50% faster kills), being disadvantaged deals 0.5× (50% slower). Your combat stats panel now shows which style you’re currently running.

Four magic staves are craftable via Crafting: Apprentice (lv20), Mystic (lv45), Arcane (lv70), and Elder (lv90, requires Arcane area). If you want to take magic into late-game, there’s a full progression path for it.

Drop tables were also completely redone. Previously combat enemies used simple min/max resource rolls. Now every enemy has a weighted drop table with independent per-entry probabilities — each drop has its own % chance and rolls separately. Rare drops (equipment, special items) are listed on enemy cards with the exact % chance shown in the tooltip, so there are no more mystery grinds.

🎒 Bank & Inventory Rework

Resources no longer go straight to the bank. You now have a 28-slot quick-access Inventory that fills first when you gain resources. When all 28 slots are full, overflow goes to the Bank as before.

The left panel shows your inventory as a 4×7 grid. Right-clicking any slot gives you deposit options (deposit 1 or deposit all of that item). A “Deposit All” button sends your entire inventory to the Bank in one click.

The Bank also gained a “Withdraw to Inventory” button per item and a “Withdraw All” footer button.

Auto-sell still works the same from a player-facing perspective — items on auto-sell are sold immediately on pickup and never appear in your inventory at all.

This lays the groundwork for more inventory-based mechanics going forward, and makes it much clearer where your resources actually are at a glance.

🔧 Tool Requirements & Better Onboarding

Four skills now require the matching tool equipped to run:

• Woodcutting → Hatchet
• Mining → Pickaxe
• Fishing → Fishing Rod
• Combat → any Weapon

If the right tool isn’t equipped, you’ll see a 🔧 badge on the action card with a clear message. Actions auto-pause when you swap to the wrong tool and auto-resume the moment you equip the right one back.

To go with this, four starter tools were added to the Shop at 50g each: Bronze Hatchet, Bronze Pickaxe, Fishing Rod, and Iron Sword. New characters also start with a Bronze Hatchet already equipped and 500 gold in their pocket — enough to buy tools for the other skills straight away.

The intent: new players should know exactly what to do next instead of staring at locked actions wondering why nothing works.

✨ Enchanting & Gem Depth

Four new enchantment properties were added, bringing the full pool to 10:

• Preserve Input — chance to get all crafting input costs refunded on completion. Very valuable on expensive late-game processing chains.
• Combat Damage Bonus — reduces your combat action interval (more actions per minute = more effective damage and faster drops).
• Combat Defense — reduces incoming damage. Stacks with the Combat skill tree defense node.
• Agility Efficiency — reduces stamina cost per agility course action.

Two new gem attributes also arrived: Enchanting Potency (scales up your enchantment property values — great for builds that lean on enchanting) and Stamina Regen (passive stamina trickle per second, scales up significantly at T4).

💰 Late-Game Cost Scaling

A handful of systems that were previously free or flat-cost now scale up as you use them:

• Gem merges now cost gold based on tier (T1: 500g, T2: 2,000g, T3: 8,000g, T4: 32,000g).
• Gem reroll cost escalates ×1.3 per reroll on the same gem instance on top of tier scaling.
• Star Scrolls cost an extra scroll per application on the same item (1 → 2 → 3).
• Reset Scroll applications cost escalating gold: 1,000g on first use, ×1.5 for each subsequent global use.

This is mostly a late-game and endgame concern. Early and mid-game play is unaffected.

🔨 Quality of Life

A few other changes worth calling out:

Save compression. Saves are now compressed using LZ-string, reducing localStorage usage by roughly 60–80%. Players who were approaching the 5MB browser limit now have breathing room.

Icon system. Skills, woodcutting trees, and tools now use proper image icons throughout the UI instead of emoji placeholders.

Assistant upkeep. Assistants now cost 10g per minute each while active. They go inactive automatically if gold runs out and reactivate when gold is restored. The Assistants modal shows your current gold, upkeep rate, and estimated time remaining.

8 new achievements. Six gem achievements (Gem Hoarder, Master Merger, Reroll Addict, Perfect Gem, Triple Threat, Gem Merchant) and two cross-skill achievements (Self-Sufficient, Grand Artisan).

What’s Next

The game is in a good spot right now — the world is fuller, combat has depth, and the onboarding is much cleaner for new players. Next I want to look at the mid-to-late progression experience more carefully, especially around the Arcane area and endgame choices.

If something feels off or you’ve found a bug, the Discord is the fastest way to get it fixed.

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs, share feedback, or just hang out!

— VHS

Just Another Idle — v0.46.0: Unified Item System, Mobile UX & Bank Expansion

v0.46.0 finishes the job started in the Bank & Inventory Rework — enchanted items can now live directly in your quick-access Inventory, you can manage them from there with a right-click or long-press, and the Bank gets a dedicated Enchanted tab for everything that doesn’t fit.

🗃️ Enchanted Items in Your Inventory

Previously, all enchanted items went straight to the Bank the moment they were created. Now they land in your player Inventory first — just like any other item. If your Inventory is full, they overflow to the Bank as before.

Having an enchanted item in a slot gives you a lot more control. Right-click it (or long-press on mobile) to open the action menu:

• Equip — put it on directly from your Inventory
• Move to Bank — send it to Bank storage when you don’t need it handy
• Lock / Unlock — the 🔒 lock badge protects the item from being accidentally discarded
• Discard — remove it permanently (won’t fire on locked items)

✨ Bank → Enchanted Tab

The Bank now has a dedicated ✨ Enchanted tab listing all unequipped enchanted items you have in Bank storage. From there you can equip, discard, or reset any item the same way you could from the old Enchanting panel — which has been removed since the Bank tab covers that use case cleanly.

📱 Long-Press for Mobile Players

Inventory slots and Bank item cards now respond to a 500ms long-press. The same context menu that appears on right-click on desktop opens on long-press for touch users. No more needing a mouse to manage your gear.

🏦 Bank Expansion — One Repeatable Upgrade

The old Bank Expansion I through V shop items have been replaced by a single repeatable upgrade. It costs 500g for the first purchase and scales up sharply from there, up to a maximum of 10 purchases (+10 slots per purchase). The first few expansions are much cheaper than before; later ones cost more. Existing players keep all the slots they already purchased.

Shop cards for tiered upgrades now show the next tier cost as a hint below the description so you always know what’s coming.

What’s Next

Storage and item management is in a solid place now. Next focus will likely be on more content — late-game actions, new events, or expanding the Exploration system.

Thanks for playing!

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs or share suggestions!

— VHS

Just Another Idle — v0.46.1: Performance Optimizations

v0.46.1 is a performance patch focused on late-game smoothness. No new content — just less CPU churn per tick so the game runs cleaner when you have a lot going on.

Why this patch?

Late-game players running 2–3 concurrent skills with a maxed Completion Log were generating a lot of redundant work every 100ms tick: the discovery bonus aggregation (which scans all your discovered resources, actions, equipment, and gems) was running once per active skill instead of once total. For a fully maxed player that’s roughly 1,290 extra object-key iterations every tick — tiny in isolation, but it adds up over hours.

What changed

Discovery bonus caching. The Completion Log passive bonus calculation now caches its result against the log’s object reference. Since the log only changes when you make a new discovery (rare), the cached result is returned on every normal tick. The cache invalidates automatically the moment anything new is discovered.

Hoisted tick-invariant bonuses. Global bonuses that don’t vary per skill — equipment, prestige, agility passive, shop speed, enchantments, global skill tree speed — are now computed once at the start of each tick instead of once per active skill. Same result, less work.

Batched progress updates. Action progress for all running skills is now flushed to the store in a single state update per tick instead of one update per skill. This cuts Zustand notifications (and React re-renders) by up to 3× when running concurrent skills.

Debounced localStorage writes. compressToUTF16 is expensive. Store writes to localStorage are now debounced and flushed reliably at the 30-second auto-save interval and on page close, instead of synchronously on every state change.

Anything to worry about?

No save format changes. No store migration. Your save loads exactly as before — this patch only touches internal timing and caching logic.

What’s Next

Back to content. Late-game actions and deeper prestige options are next on the list.

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs, share feedback, or just hang out!

— VHS

Just Another Idle — v0.48.0: Music Player

v0.48.0 brings an in-game music player with 57 original background tracks — plus a couple of smaller quality-of-life updates that snuck in since the last devlog.

🎵 In-Game Music Player

The game now has a built-in music player, accessible right from the sidebar. No need to tab out or run a separate playlist — just hit play and let the music roll while you grind.

What’s included:

• 57 background tracks from two Brazilian composers: Composiia and Guilherme Bernardes, both licensed via Pixabay. The music fits the game perfectly — think medieval taverns, ancient ruins, open wilderness, and the occasional epic battle theme.
• Play/pause, previous, and next track controls
• Shuffle mode — the next track is picked randomly instead of playing through the list in order
• A “Now Playing” notification that pops up in the bottom-right corner for a few seconds whenever a new track starts
• A full track library browser (click the list icon in the player) so you can jump to any specific track by name or artist
• Music volume is independent from the SFX master volume, so you can set each to whatever mix you prefer
• Player state persists across page refresh — current track, shuffle setting, and volume are all remembered

Full artist credits are in the Credits modal (accessible from Settings), including links to each artist’s Pixabay profile, YouTube, and SoundCloud pages.

The audio files were converted to OGG Vorbis before shipping, bringing the total asset size down from ~212 MB (MP3) to ~87 MB — a bit heavy for a browser game, but the quality and variety justified keeping all 57 tracks.

🗺️ QoL: Travel & Prestige (v0.47.0)

A few notable changes from the v0.47.0 update:

Loyal Companions — a new Tier 2 prestige shop item (100 PP) that keeps your Assistants’ unlock status when you prestige. Previously, both Assistants would lock again on every prestige, forcing you to re-unlock them from scratch each cycle. With Loyal Companions active, they stay unlocked; only the upkeep timer resets.

Prestige redistribution — you can now refund purchased multiplier and stackable prestige shop items to get your PP back, at a cost of 5,000g + 25 star fragments. Useful if you regret a purchase or want to try a different build path. A small “↩ Refund” button appears on eligible owned items.

Symmetric travel — returning home from a distant area now takes the same amount of time as the outbound trip. Previously, the return journey was instant, which felt inconsistent (and slightly cheaty for resetting travel costs). Now both directions cost the same travel time.

Inventory resource display — the “Costs” panel in an active action now shows your player inventory count instead of your bank count. This matches the actual order in which resources are consumed, so you’re no longer second-guessing whether you actually have enough on hand.

🔧 Under the Hood (v0.47.1)

The internal store architecture got a significant refactor this cycle. Three more domain slices were extracted from the main store file (completionLog, skillTree, tutorial), and three existing slices (combat, area, prestige) were updated to use explicit dependency injection instead of implicit cross-slice calls. This makes the code much easier to test in isolation — 125 new per-slice unit tests were added as a result.

Also added: PNG and SVG icons for all combat enemies, agility courses, and fishing resources that were missing artwork.

None of this affects gameplay, but it pays off in long-term stability and makes future features easier to add safely.

What’s Next

Music is in, architecture is clean, the QoL debt is paid down. Next up: more content. Late-game actions, deeper prestige options, and possibly a new area or two are on the list.

Discord

Join the Discord to report bugs, request tracks, or just hang out!

— VHS