The Discord channel where people pick up Tideward was called #get-the-alpha until today. It is #get-the-beta now. The rename is the signage catching up with September 22, when we said out loud that Tideward is in beta. So this is a good moment to look back at the alpha with real numbers, and at the first eleven days of beta.

The alpha, by the numbers

The first TestFlight builds went out in April, back when the game was still called Manu Idle. It became Tideward on May 2 with 0.80, “First Voyage”. In late May the alpha opened to anyone with the link, on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV first, with Vision Pro following once it cleared review. Apple Watch came along with the iPhone install.

From that rename to the last alpha build, 1.0.4 on September 14, the changelog records 29 releases and 356 separate changes. A few of them moved the game more than the rest.

June 9, 0.90. Spanish, the first language after English. Four days later the game read in fourteen.
July 7, 0.94. Every trade complete. On July 31 the four Tidal Trades arrived, Beachcombing, Scrimshaw, Chartwork and Shipwrighting, and the count settled at twenty-eight.
August 6, 0.98. The watch became a place to play rather than a readout, widgets reached the home screen, and the report form landed in Settings, so a bug could go straight from the game to a public Discord thread.
August 28. The App Store pre-order opened, with a date: February 11, 2027.
September 6, 1.0.1. The version number started with a 1.
September 11, 1.0.3. Polish arrived complete, the sixteenth language.

Not all of it went smoothly. Getting the public TestFlight link to work at all took a month of fighting Apple’s build processing.

What testers did

The #bug-reports forum opened on June 4. Between then and the beta call, testers filed 74 bug reports there. Today 65 of them are marked fixed, six turned out not to be bugs, and two are still open.

Seven people opened all 74 of those threads. Nine players are on the Crew roll inside the game, counting reports that came in other ways. One weekend of reports from a single player produced eleven fixes that shipped together in 1.0.4. One crash got solved because the tester who reported it, writing in Japanese, mentioned that the same save loaded fine from the watch. That detail pointed straight at the cause.

A useful report says what you did, what you expected, what happened instead, and which device you were on. You do not need to be technical to write one, and you can send it from Settings without leaving the game.

The beta so far

The beta is eleven days old. In that time:

Four releases on the changelog, 1.0.5 through 1.0.8, with 86 changes between them.
24 new bug reports, a third of the alpha’s whole total. 13 are fixed, 3 are confirmed and in progress, and 8 are open.
11 suggestions, against 5 in the entire alpha.

Part of that jump is the offer that started on September 29: during the beta, any one bug report or suggestion earns a code for the full unlock at launch. In the seven beta days before the offer, testers opened 12 bug reports and 4 suggestions. In the days since, 12 more reports and 7 suggestions.

Here is what the beta builds changed, briefly.

1.0.5, September 22. Four new familiars, one for each Tidal Trade, and three food slots on the phone’s combat bar.
1.0.6, September 24. A Provisions panel on the Gear screen, so food and potions can be managed outside a fight, plus four new potions.
1.0.7, September 28. When this device and iCloud hold different saves, Tideward now asks which one to keep instead of quietly overwriting the newer one. You can also collect your away haul from a widget, Control Center, the Lock Screen or Siri.
1.0.8, October 1. On Apple Watch, complications open the page they describe and Continue on iPhone works through Handoff. Passive cooking had been running about five times faster than intended after time away, and now keeps its proper pace.

If you read one line from those notes, make it the 1.0.7 save change. A save conflict used to be decided for you. Now it is decided by you, with the iCloud copy’s date on screen.

Nothing gets wiped

This has not changed since the beta post. Your keeper lives in your own iCloud, and the App Store build reads the same save your TestFlight build does. At launch, keepers made before 1.0 stop posting to the Game Center leaderboards and wear a small brass Legacy mark. Everything else about them keeps working.

What is left before February 11

The roadmap has the full list. In short, it is finishing work, not new features: more accessibility options, the score, an audit of every icon, bug fixing, a full run from a blank save at a new player’s pace, the legal and region work, native proofreading of the translations, and finding the people who would love this game. After that comes the feature freeze, and then 1.0.

Get the beta

Install the beta at tideward.app/install/. It is free on TestFlight, one invite covers every Apple device you own, and the unlock stays free while testing runs. The walkthrough is pinned in #get-the-beta on our Discord, and if you would rather wait for the finished game, the App Store pre-order installs it on February 11.

If you have filed a report, any report, thank you. Most of what changed this year started in one of those threads.