Methodology
This page describes how information gets onto this site. It is written as a commitment, not a marketing statement — if we fail to follow it, that is a bug worth reporting.
1. First-hand testing where it matters
Some questions cannot be answered reliably without playing: whether a strategy actually works, how a mechanic behaves in practice, whether a build survives contact with the game. Those pages are written after doing the thing, and we keep our own screenshots as evidence. Where a claim rests on our own testing, the page says so.
Not every fact requires this. Release dates, version numbers, platform support and patch contents are matters of record, and for those the standard is different — see below.
2. Official-confirmed vs community-reported, always labelled
Facts of record — release dates, player counts, versions, platform support, patch notes — are verified against a first-party source: the developer, the publisher, or the official store or patch notes.
Community findings — datamined values, unofficial techniques, mods, "this seems to work" knowledge — are useful and we publish them, but they are labelled as community-reported wherever they appear. The two are never blended into one confident-sounding sentence. A community tip presented as an official specification is how sites lose the right to be trusted.
3. We give you an answer
When sources disagree, working out which one is right is our job, not yours. You will not find pages here that lay two contradictory figures side by side and leave you to pick, or that hedge a number with a warning label. A page that cannot commit to an answer is not finished, and we would rather hold it back than publish it wearing a disclaimer.
A worked example: the official wiki appears to give two different sand-to-gold ratios. They turn out not to be in conflict at all — one counts the shaker step, the other counts the full chain through the press and the flowers, and chaining the per-step figures reproduces both exactly. That is the standard: chase the discrepancy until it closes, then state the result plainly.
Two labels do appear at the top of some pages, and they are not exceptions to this. One says where the page's answer came from — the developer, the player community, or our own testing. The other says which game version the page was written against, and whether the game has patched since. Neither of those is a doubt about the answer; they are facts about it, and for a game shipping a patch a week they are the difference between an answer you can act on and one you have to guess the age of. What you will not find is a page that gives you two answers, or a number wearing a warning label because we could not settle it.
4. What we will not do
- No invented numbers. Committing to an answer is not the same as guessing one. Every figure here traces back to an official source, to arithmetic on official figures, or to our own testing. When we cannot get to a number we would stand behind, the claim does not ship at all — it does not ship with an asterisk.
- No piracy-related content. No cracks, no key resellers, no "free download" search bait, whatever the traffic would be worth.
- No copying competitors. Pages here are written from our own testing and our own reading of first-party sources. Where another site is genuinely the source of a claim, it gets cited as the source rather than quietly absorbed.
5. Images and other assets
Diagrams and page furniture are made for this site. Game imagery comes either from our own captures or from the publisher's own store and press materials, which exist to be used in coverage.
A screenshot inside an article carries its credit in the caption beside it. Cover art on cards and section pages comes from the same material, and is credited here rather than on every card: Hooded Horse and Lantto Games for Sandustry,TEAM HORAY for Sephiria, Hovgaard Games for Big Ambitions. Either way the image has a rights record behind the scenes — source, owner, licence status and which pages use it — so a credit cannot quietly drift away from the actual owner, and so we can tell you exactly what we are using if you ask.
What we do not do is take images from other fan sites or guide sites, or present anyone else's screenshot as our own. Where an image shows a specific setup we are describing, it is our capture of that setup, not a stock shot of something similar.
6. Video
Where a video helps, it is embedded through YouTube's standard embed — no re-hosting, no re-uploading someone else's footage. Embeds load only their thumbnail until you click, so they do not slow the page down.
7. Dates: updated vs verified
Two different dates appear on pages, and they mean different things:
- Updated — the page's content actually changed in a substantive way. This is the date search engines are told about.
- Verified — we re-checked the page and confirmed it is still accurate, without changing anything.
We deliberately do not refresh the "updated" date for routine re-checks, and we never stamp pages with today's date to look fresh. A date that means nothing is worse than no date, and search engines stop trusting a site's dates entirely once they have been inaccurate.
Pages tied to a specific game version are marked as patch-sensitive internally and get re-checked when that game updates.
8. Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it bluntly than not at all. Send it to the address on the contact page.
Factual errors get fixed as soon as they are confirmed. When a correction changes what a page actually says — as opposed to fixing a typo — the page's updated date moves with it, so the change is visible rather than silent.
