The achievement nobody could ever earn

A while ago I wrote about codex entries that were being counted in your completion total while having no door to open from. I fixed those and felt good about it. It turns out they had cousins.

The game has a completionist achievement for collecting the whole codex. This week I sat down and actually did the arithmetic on it, and the arithmetic said: impossible. Not hard. Impossible. Nine entries existed that nothing in the game ever awarded, on any route, under any sequence of choices. The best any human could reach was 149 of 158. The achievement had been sitting there since launch like a carrot on a string attached to nothing, and the worst part is that a completionist, the exact person that achievement exists for, is the person the game was quietly lying to.

Every entry is now either wired to a real moment in a real story or retired outright, the count is honest, and there is a new check that stops a new version going out if any entry is ever unearnable again. That last part is the actual lesson. The bug was invisible because awarding codex entries and counting codex entries were two systems that never talked to each other. They talk now, loudly, every release.

If you were sitting at 149 wondering what you had missed: nothing. You had missed nothing. I am sorry, and it is fixed.