The water comes back to the village. Every well that reaches water brings one place in Kuyuköy back: smoke from the tea house, green rows in the Garden, a full trough on the Rocky Plateau, blossom in the Orchard, the threshing sledge turning. With water in all five, the village fountain runs. The villagers trade. The finds your tools won’t need buy one set for the head of every well: a crocheted cloth, a flag, a plaque with your depth cut in it, a pulley, a chain, an iron lid, flowers, chalk drawings. None of it digs. Where one layer meets the next, the ground holds now, in every well, Old Yard too: twenty-four taps, and then it gives. The bucket digs down to it and waits there for your hand, and the one notification, if you turned it on, says so. Once you have the nail, you can taste the Garden for free, until its first root is cut. In the other four plots the ground puts an old tool back in your hand: the needle for the Garden’s roots, the nail for the Rocky Plateau’s rock, the spoon for the Threshing Floor’s gravel, the pin for the Orchard’s walls. Every plot’s ground has things of its own in it now, and the purchase sheet shows each plot before you buy. And you can pick the game’s language in Settings, on the game’s own page, even if your device has only one language.

The ground answers now. Every tap has two voices: the tool that strikes and the ground that is struck. Topsoil hisses, clay is dull and wet, gravel knocks, bedrock rings. The same sound never plays twice running. The haptics draw the same line: soft in soil, hard on rock. And reaching water can be heard at last: it wells up. The bucket hangs in the well: a rope, an empty tin bucket, a stake at the mouth. It doesn't dig while you're there, it only sways. When you come back, the launch screen shows how far it dug without you; the paler stretch of the hole is its work, with the number beside it. If it broke into a new layer while you were gone, you get that layer's dust and its name on your return. A bug is fixed too, and it had been there since the first version: if you left without fully closing the game and came back, what the bucket dug wasn't counted. It is now. There is something to look at down deep. A light where you're digging, veins in the bedrock; near the water the rock turns damp and drips. The fifteen relics have pictures now. Each one waits in the wall of the well at the depth it comes out; dig it up and it flies out of the hole, and stays beside its name in the book. Small things: a locked tool's slot shows how much of its price you've paid. The first find comes much sooner, around the hundred-and-twentieth tap. If your well is finished, the game opens on the village. The purchase sheet shows what it sells: four plots, four different grounds, each at its own depth. The card you share carries the game's link. When you get the bucket, the game asks once: tell you when it's full? Say yes and iOS asks for permission. Say no and it never asks again. It is still the only notification, and still off until you turn it on. Behind the scenes: there is still not one audio file in the game. All hundred and ninety-six sounds are generated when it starts.

First, find the needle. A new game now opens on a pile of straw. Push it aside with your finger, the needle glints, and a tap sends it flying to the toolbar: the tool the whole well is dug with. There is no timer and nothing to fail, and Skip is there from the first frame. If you have dug before, you won't be asked. You already hold yours. When a purchase doesn't go through, the game now says why in your own language, in its own words. And the buy button goes straight to Apple's sheet instead of waiting on the network first. Behind the scenes: if you bought the rest of Kuyuköy before 1.2, the game now tells RevenueCat about that purchase, once. It is the same record any purchase since 1.2 sends, and nothing else.

The village has come to the well. Finish a well and someone walks over to it: Nazmiye Teyze first, with her crochet, then Muhtar Kemal, Demirci Hüseyin and little Zeynep, four at most. They don't dig and nothing gets faster. Kemal takes the rope, and the bucket keeps working longer while you're away: ten hours instead of eight, up to fourteen. And the village talks now. One line at the top of the dig screen, changing once or twice a day, about the layer you're in, how long this well is taking, what you're holding. Sixty-three of them. None of them notices whether you came back yesterday. Every tool looks like itself. The pin has its clasp, the nail came out of a fence, and the spoon has a bowl, and it brings up a clod the colour of whatever layer you're in. Each one strikes at its own speed and angle. The ground has more to say. Break into clay, gravel or bedrock and dust comes up the shaft and the layer's name crosses the screen, once. The Garden's root lies across the hole until you cut it. On the Threshing Floor you can see the gravel slide back down. A find comes up out of the hole and flies to the slot it will pay for. Keep tapping and the tool starts to ring: after twenty taps in a row the scratch brightens, after forty it brightens again. It isn't faster. It just noticed. Every few hundred taps a speck in the earth glitters for six seconds. Touch it and the next find comes a little sooner, then the one after comes a little later, so the whole well takes exactly as long as before. Miss it and nothing happens. Three days a year Kuyuköy looks different: the grape harvest in late September, the first snow in December, a week of rain in April. The light changes, the village talks about nothing else, and a keepsake goes in the book. Miss one and nothing is lost. The book now has a wall for its ten badges, whether you use Game Center or not. The map has something alive on it too: the well you're digging breathes, finished wells catch the light, and two birds cross the paper. The bucket reminder now says what it means: once, when the bucket stops. Behind the scenes: the one purchase now goes through RevenueCat, which tells us that a purchase happened. The game itself still needs no connection, and the purchase stays unlocked offline.

The game has a voice now. Every tool scratches differently — the needle is thin and quick, the spoon is low and slow — the earth answers when it hands something back, and there is a bed of quiet under the dig. All of it is generated as it plays: the app still carries no audio files. Sound and haptics each have their own switch, and the silent switch still wins. The village's ground is no longer all the same ground. The Rocky Plateau's bedrock gives way at half speed, the Orchard is soft loam the whole way down, the Garden bogs down in clay and the Threshing Floor grinds through packed gravel — and each plot is the colour of its own earth. Your toolbox is unchanged. The ground changes. The ground also keeps things. Three in every plot: seized shears in the Garden, half a sickle on the Threshing Floor, a marble in Old Yard that somebody looked a long time for. Each has its own line, and they are kept in a book on the map. They buy nothing — that is rather the point. Game Center now has ten things to collect, if you are the sort of person who collects them: a first find, each tool, the water, the bedrock, the whole village, the whole book, a hundred thousand taps. The game itself never mentions them. You can also ask the app to tell you when the bucket is full — once, after eight hours, and only if you switch it on yourself. No streaks, no countdowns. New settings sheet: sound, haptics, that reminder, Restore Purchases and the privacy policy. Reaching water now takes you to the rest of the village in one tap instead of three. And the game runs on iPad now: the same well, the same drawing, a column down the middle of the screen. And the well is on your home screen now: a small cross-section, how far down you are, and a line that says when the bucket is full. You can look without opening the app. And the app opens by digging a well now: the whole twelve metres the first time, briefly after that.