The Sleep button that took a sixteen-day nap

It was Spring 3, Year 1. I held down Enter for about a second. It was Spring 19.

Sixteen days, gone. More than half a season. If I’d planted anything, it would have grown up and moved out while I was still lifting my finger.

How a button sleeps sixteen times

The game has a Sleep button. It ends the day, runs everything that happens overnight, and wakes you at 6:00 am the next morning. In a farming game it’s the most important button there is, and it has exactly one job.

The trouble is the keyboard. When a button has focus, pressing Enter clicks it. Holding Enter doesn’t press it once, though. After a short pause, the computer starts repeating the key over and over, which is how you end up with “aaaaaaaa” when you lean on a keyboard. To my Sleep button, every one of those repeats was a fresh, polite request to go to bed. It said yes to every single one.

A double-click had the same problem on a smaller scale. Two clicks, two nights.

One press, one night

The button now ignores repeated key presses entirely, and after each sleep it takes a half-second breather before it’ll accept another. That also takes care of the double-click, and anyone who clicks Sleep the way they’d press a lift button.

To be sure it was really fixed, I swapped the old button back in, held Enter, and watched the calendar fly from Spring 3 to Spring 19 all over again. Then I put the new button back and did exactly the same thing. Spring 4. I’ve rarely been so pleased to see a calendar move by one.

Nothing was lost, because right now there’s nothing to lose. The game is a date, a clock and a single green tile. The only casualty was my sense of time, and given my estimates, that was never very reliable anyway.

Somewhere in here is a lesson about buttons that are a little too eager to help. I’ve written it down. I’ll probably have forgotten it by Spring 19.