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Try moving the formation around.  Potential has no hidden effects.  You *can* brute force your way forward as you're doing, but it isn't required.

...what.
How big is your screen?

Ack.  Fixed now.

Odd.  I've changed a lot about how the game handles new rounds in the most recent update.  Please let me know if it keeps freezing.

Hey, thanks for playing!  The amount of time for a forge to complete is whatever the stated time is, with a multiplier coming off of the Patience skill.  I like the way that the time ticks down faster than expected, but am thinking of adding an option in the settings for the "real" time.  What size screen are you playing on?  I'm trying to make the UI dynamic, which is a bigger undertaking than I expected.

It's now pinned to the bottom right.

Bug squashed.  There's still some funky behavior, but the dropped storage is fixed now.

Thanks for playing my little buggy alpha.  It'll be bigger and better later on, so feel free to come back a while from now!

Thanks for playing!  Right now, I'm in the "add all the mechanics" phase, so things are going to be messy for a while.  The arrange rounders/reset buttons options are mostly just to help people who somehow lost things offscreen.  There'll be a better implementation when I come back to polish things.  There's more to do with screen sizing as well.  It's apparently pretty bad on high resolution screens, so there's UI scaling to get into.  That'll be an absolute bear, because I have things crawling over the UI whose sizes affect things.  

As for your storage concerns, there are plans in the works!  You've definitely hit endgame, but that'll change in the next few updates.

Alright, I got to the bottom of it.  There was a bug with how very fast tasks were being timed, which is now fixed.  The issue you were seeing above wasn't related, it's a math thing.  

The speed a task is done at isn't linear, it's exponential based on the skill level.  That means that the first 10/25/50% of the task takes a lot longer than the last 10/25/50%, because your level went up while doing it.  

Taking off 10% of the work to be done can be thought of as taking it off of the end, when the task is being done the fastest.  That explains why there isn't a 1:1 conversion of work required:time taken.

Either way, it's still worth it to build keystones.  Thanks for pointing it out, I got to bust out the old Excel sheets!

I got some unexpected free time today; I'm looking at this next.  Also: new update!  :)

Yes.  A couple people brought it up, so I've changed the tooltip.

Thank you for playing my game, and the in-depth bug report!

The timing isn't exact, it relies on system clocks.  I'll look into moving to a tick-based system at a later point.

There is an "end run" button in the menu, which can be accessed with either the "esc" or "del" keys.

Very funny bug fixed.  Thanks for the report.

Odd.  There's a bit more content planned before I tackle UI again.  An option to auto-sort all items is in the works.  Thank you for playing!

Thank you for playing!  Those issues are fixed now.

Thanks for playing!  Good point on the playtime.  There is a way to move skills now, it was added with the last update.

The rounders that can be militarized are the ones that have the same title in the Greek and NATO alphabet.

Background management is planned, it's an absolute bear.

I'm not happy with how the asteroid is handled yet.

The "merge with nothing" bug is fixed now.  It was a result of the dragged item attempting to merge with the faded shadow where it used to be.

How did you use the rounder, and what browser were you using?  It's possible for things to end up offscreen, I'm still working on that.

That was meant to be the case.  Fixed in next update.  Thank you for playing!

I'll add it to the list, but it will probably be a while.  UI is not my specialty, so maintaining functionality while adding scaling will be tricky.

I'm divided on this one.  Those two clues plus the demonstrated cycles might be enough to clue the player in on the rest of the cycle, but that might be more obtuse than fun to figure out.

An update changed the way forge recipes worked, and wiped out the Rose contact item.  If you refresh the page, it should be available under Ramos' Branch.  Thank you for playing.

Wow, good work getting that far.  There's a lot of early-game stuff it seems like I need to get squared away before working on the next features.  Thank you for playing!

Thanks for the in-depth review!  A lot of your UI bits are spot-on, and are on my list.  We've got to get right-click hover icons and things like that in.  There's so much that we've come to expect in an interface that all has to be put in manually!  I tried out like 5 different ways of doing drag-and-drop before settling on this one.  UI developers have my respect.

I have some thoughts on the cost scaling, but adjusting that is further down on the list than needed QoL changes.

The different NPC contact items will have more uses later on.

The military parts aren't very flushed-out right now.  That update should come in the next few days (2025-09-05).  The costs on those are meant to scale up, but there's another item coming in later to help with that.  I may disable the scaling until that update is in.

The bug with the formation smasher has been fixed for the next update, it should work with any formation you put rounders into, so that you can see how it works with different rounders.

I appreciate your time, thank you so much for playing!  There's more to come and I'm working to make the experience less frustrating while still keeping the puzzling aspects.

You can brute force it, but it will take some time.  You can also sacrifice something dear and achieve success immediately.

...you're right about that.  Putting it on the list!

Yeah, I'm pretty colorblind.  That may be part of a cleanup pass later on.  Thank you for playing!

Totally agree.  Working on a hover icon for things that can be clicked/right-clicked now!

Progress sometimes requires sacrifice.

It feels broken because you've hit the edge of what's there for now.  (2025-09-03)  Yeah, those bits are broken atm, there should be a fix out in a day or two, depending on my class schedule.  Thank you for playing up to this point!

Ack!  This specific bug is my nemesis.

I appreciate the review!  I'm pulling a ton of great advice from people, and stuff like "I felt frustrated at x point" is really helpful for time tuning.  There's a lot more content planned, and balancing tends to get lost as the scope increases.

Yeah, that could be a lot more clear.  I plan on adding a tip system that pops up after a player is at a progression gate for a while.  Thank you for playing, and the comment!