The test player and the alehouse
Watch Mode is the AI that plays the game for you, which also makes it a way to test a long route without a person at the keyboard. Right after meeting the first villager it got stuck in a loop: it believed the blacksmith lived in the alehouse, found the alehouse shut in the morning, waited, walked back to the village and asked again, forever.
The cause was in how it looked up where people are. The alehouse's seating list includes every villager and shopkeeper who might sit there in the evening, and the AI read a seat as a home. It now works out where everyone is from the village clock, the same way the game does.
After the fix a fresh run goes through the first five villagers, the fields, back to the first one and on to the blacksmith's jobs in about two minutes of play. Before, it never got past nine in the morning. A new test locks the behaviour in, and the opening-run test passes in 206 seconds.
Conversation speed was the other easy win. The AI now finishes each line's typing at once and reads a line in about a fifth of a second plus a short beat. The cap per line fell from 4.5 seconds to 1.1.
A second stall turned up in the same run. The hero stayed at level 1 and kept dying to wild boars, because it would only walk to a Monument within 40 units, and the village Monument is more than 50 units from where it hunts. A rule written against a small test map had quietly stopped working on the real one.
The balloon valley was not grey
The view of the crashed-balloon valley from the cliff path had gone grey-blue and hazy, with faint grid lines, as if something was laid over it. The culprit was the valley's own soft-focus shader. It worked out its blur size from the wrong number, so it smeared in the edges of the picture and let the dark sky behind show through. It now reads the picture's real size, and the balloons, tents, rivers and pines are vivid again under the light drifting mist that was designed for them.
The lesson is in how it was found. The old test forced noon and clear weather, which hid the problem completely. It only showed up when the view was photographed in a normal game, and then the layers were switched off one at a time until the haze went.