Foundation – Quality of Life Update 1: A Fresh Start in Greenshire

So, despite recently diving back into EVE and getting that old familiar itch for Caldari steel and space pirates, I still wanted to make room over the weekend for something a little calmer. A little greener. A little less likely to pod me. And that meant heading back into Foundation, a city-builder I’ve already sunk just over 50 hours into (so far), and one I keep finding myself returning to when I want that meditative “one more tile” flow. I've still got a long wait to go to push pass the 518+ hours spent/sunk/wasted/enjoyed in Cities Skylines though!

And the timing couldn’t have been better, because the first Quality of Life Update 1 just dropped (last Wednesday, November 26th) and honestly? It’s a nice little upgrade pass that fixes a bunch of those small frictions you don’t notice until the game quietly removes them. The devs even call it their "more freedom, less friction" update. That's exactly what you'd call it!

I actually hit pause on my current village, Brackenwood (above screenshot), right as the update landed.

Something about the new tools and cleaner systems made me want a real fresh start, so I wiped the mud off my boots and founded a brand-new settlement: Greenshire. New land, new plans, new opportunities. You know the drill.

Here’s what the update brings us...

Back through the wormhole: rediscovering New Eden after all these years

A funny thing happened when I started cleaning up my blog a few weeks back. I was just “archiving” old EVE Online posts, fixing dead links, swapping in updated YouTube videos… totally innocent stuff. Right... And then, somehow, I found myself dropped straight into the deep end of the nostalgia pool. One minute I’m fixing a broken link or looking for a working link to an EVE Fanfest video, the next I’m getting bombarded with “Come back to EVE!” ads like Hilmar had personally noticed my footsteps into my EVE archived content.

And honestly? The pull was too strong. 

Mix in that "Making of EVE Online" documentary, and the full-on marketing push for Catalyst, CCP’s latest expansion, and resisting New Eden became a losing battle. So I took a peek. Just a tiny one. And, well, you can guess where this is going.

I’ve only been back in the game for, what, the better part of a week now? But it already feels like that surreal combination of coming home and discovering someone completely renovated the place. Sort of like driving by your childhood home. The neighborhood layout is the same… everything else has been upgraded.

The Creator, AGI, and that weird feeling we’re living in a prologue

There’s been a lot of fiction built around the eventual arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), what some folks still call the singularity(*). That mythical moment when the lights flip on, the machine looks back at us, and suddenly we’re not the only conscious thing in the room. Hollywood has had a field day with it: The Terminator, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell, Westworld, and now The Creator.

And this last one hits different. It dropped right as chatbots landed in our daily lives. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Suddenly these tools weren’t some far-off sci-fi fever dream. They were… well, they were right here, answering our emails(**) and helping us plan vacations and occasionally confabulating(***) nonsense like an overconfident toddler.

That overlap of fiction colliding with reality has always fascinated me. It’s the moment where the stories we’ve told ourselves for decades start brushing up against the world we’re building, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident.