Update 1.7 may come out sooner, but that's not good news.

To help you understand my current state, I will describe my last few days. First of all, and this is not the main reason, I got sick again. Fortunately, this crap only hit me hard on the first day but it started getting weaker the next day. Nevertheless, for almost three days I ate nothing and slept most of the time, completely weakened. My appetite partially returned only yesterday evening. I ate a little, regained a bit of strength, and went back to work (testing the last piece I added to the game a few days back) until about ~ 4 am.

Now begins the main reason for this post. When I finished work, I had a little snack (yay!) and quite pleased with myself went out to the balcony to satisfy a nasty habit of mine. I live on the top floor of a high-rise and half of the city is visible from my window - all the way to the horizon. There was some strange humming, unclear where it was coming from. Taking a cigarette out of the pack, in my mind was something like that: "okay, losing three days is unpleasant, but I can still make it in time..." Flash on the horizon. Four or five seconds of silence. A shockwave that makes the whole house shake. And then a few more times. Flash. Silence. Shockwave. And then the lights in the whole city go out. Darkness up to the horizon.

"You fucking kidding me." Yeah, I said it out loud at that moment. Well, not in English of course, but that's pretty much close by meaning. There hasn't been a missile strikes on the power system in nearly a year. I'd almost forgotten about them. But here we go again...

The lights come back only around 3:00 p.m. How long it stays like this, I don't know. And I guess you could say I'm lucky. As I write this, it's already dark outside. And only parts of the city have light. But you've just gotten a description of what modern warfare looks like through the eyes of an eyewitness! I also don't know if this was a one-time action, like "today only - two Russian missiles for the price of one" or if the strikes on the energy system will continue.

But grim jokes aside. I've made a decision. The update is ~90-95% complete. Given the circumstances, I'm not sure I can meet the 31 March deadline. Or even if I do, who knows if I'll have the technical ability to post the update by that date. Today I'll bring the small remaining section from the draft into the game, test it, and start the prep work for technical readiness for release (new patrons to credit section, afterword, list of changes, etc.) Yes, it doesn't end up where I want it to. Yes, it's only basically tested (by my standards). And a lot more of those yeses... But I just don't know what to do. If it hadn't taken so long to develop this episode, I might have asked for extra time from you. But not this time.

I don't really believe that I won't have electricity problems in the coming days. And that's at best. Which means I won't be able to work normally. At least on a tight deadline. Of course, if I'm wrong, I'll try to get the episode to its intended point. But if there's another blackout or any kind of light outage - I'll post a prepared version of the update right away, while I have a charge and crappy mobile internet. Otherwise, this all risks dragging on for who knows how long. And I apologize if the episode doesn't end where it logically should. I know... I just can't see a better way.

And, hey, Universe? Veeery funny.

UPD. The trigger event (blackout) happened about 5 minutes after I managed to publish this post yesterday. And the lights were out until... this moment. About ~20 hours? You get the situation.

Yesterday, while I had a charge, I managed to add the last component needed for the update to work, and once again took it through the 2 main routes (Meralion alive/dead) all the way to the end. It's passable to the end. However, some non-critical bugs can't be excluded due to the large variability and combinations of different factors. Alas, testing it as it should is an unallowable luxury right now. Who knows how long all shit this will last? Days, weeks... longer?

So, the emergency update will be here in an hour or two. There's one more thing I need to do that I need the internet for. And since this is will be 1.7 without ~10% of the content, that means its number will be... Huh, I didn't do it intentionally. Okay, let's hope I'll have power in the next two hours.