# Lodestar changelog

## 2026-10-10: v1.0.1, a loader that rides out server hiccups

- Over a Tailscale link to a local server, a burst of parallel requests came back as 502 Bad Gateway and the loader gave up. It now fetches three files at a time, retries any 5xx or network error up to six times with a growing pause, and keeps a revalidatable copy so the module imports don't download everything again.
- If a module still fails while the game starts, the page reloads once by itself with fresh file addresses before showing an error.
- Error text names 502s plainly and suggests Try again.

## 2026-10-10: v1, The Night Migration

- First playable build. Fly a first-year Swainson's thrush from boreal Manitoba to the Talamanca mountains of Costa Rica, one night at a time, over eleven stopovers and one Gulf of Mexico crossing.
- **Compass steering.** On a phone, the game world is lined up with real north through the magnetometer. To fly south-south-east you turn your body to face it. Look up to see the sky overhead; the horizon stays level as you tilt.
- **Room noise.** Where the browser gives both a magnetic and a gyro-only orientation, the drift between them measures magnetic disturbance near the phone. Bring a magnet close and your bird's magnetic sense shivers. A raw Magnetometer reading in microtesla is used where the browser exposes one.
- **Sonar wings.** The speaker plays a steady tone near 19 kHz, the microphone listens for its Doppler echo off your hand, and each wave of the hand is a wingbeat. It probes 19, 18.5, 18 and 17 kHz and reports plainly if the mic can't hear any of them.
- **A real sky.** Seventy named stars at their true positions for the date, time and place, a generated faint field laid along the real Milky Way, low-precision Sun and Moon with phase, and star patterns on request.
- **The field as a bird might see it.** An IGRF-2025 dipole field gives inclination and declination. A violet veil follows the radical-pair hypothesis: strongest along field lines, unable to tell their two ends apart.
- **Navigation cues that fail.** Stars (hidden by cloud), the sunset (only at dusk), the magnetic sense (shaken by geomagnetic storms and room noise) and the flock (lost if you wander). The inner compass gets less sure as cues drop out.
- **Dusk calibration.** Face the sunset glow and hold to reset the magnetic compass for the night, as radio-tracked thrushes were shown to do.
- **Weather and winds.** Cold fronts bring north-west tailwinds and clear skies; south winds bring headwinds and a cloud deck you can climb above. Wind strengthens and veers with height, so altitude is a choice.
- **Light pollution.** Under low cloud, a city's glow pulls you off course. Cities with Lights Out programs pull less.
- **Stopovers.** Fat reserve, three-night forecast, rest-and-feed days, a season clock, and landing choices at dawn (forest, river woods, a city park with glass windows, a farm shelterbelt). Over water there is no choice: keep going, or find a gas platform.
- **Field kit.** Five short exercises: find north, sonar wings, a magnet in the room, the still point of the sky (after Emlen's planetarium buntings), and seeing the field.
- Portrait, landscape and desktop layouts. Drag, arrow keys and Space stand in for every sensor. Automatic Lite graphics on slow devices. A start-up loader that checks every file and names any that fail.
- Journal with every flown track, saved in localStorage, with JSON export and import.
- Node tests for the field model, sky positions, sunset, geometry, land and water, weather, a full simulated night, the Doppler detector and the orientation math.