Your Majesty, work is underway on the next round of court and map features. Today, we would like to share a first look at the Grand Secretariat, the Six Ministries, and the map in development.

This is a development preview. The features shown here have not been released. Interfaces, values, and mechanics may change; the final details will be covered in a future update announcement.

We are continuing to develop the work of the Grand Secretariat and the Six Ministries. This preview focuses on the Grand Secretariat, the Ministry of Rites, and the Ministry of Punishments: reviewing memorials, drafting responses, organizing imperial examinations, and consulting case records.

The Grand Secretariat interface in development brings together its ministers, draft responses, and memorial archives. Memorial summaries and proposed responses appear side by side, with pending and reviewed memorials listed separately. When authority is delegated to the Secretariat, you can review the Chief Grand Secretary's decisions and take back approval authority.
Which matters should your ministers handle, and which memorials deserve your personal attention? We want these decisions to be easier to follow at court.

This preview of the Ministry of Rites shows preparations for the imperial examinations. Civil and military examinations, recruitment quotas, examination funding and fees, and examiner appointments are brought together in one plan, alongside the selection of examination regions and essay questions.

• Choose the participating regions, set recruitment quotas, and appoint the chief and associate examiners.

• Arrange safeguards such as concealing candidates' names, transcribing papers, secondary marking, and examination hall inspections.

• Set policy essay questions on finance, famine relief, administration, or frontier defense, or write your own question.

• Follow the selection process through proposed successful-candidate lists and the results of past examinations as these pages are developed further.

How should the state raise revenue without adding to the people's hardship? With pressure mounting on the frontier, what talents does the realm need? What to ask, and whom to entrust with the examination, will be matters for Your Majesty to consider.

The Ministry of Punishments preview focuses on case records. The list brings together each person's titles, faction, office and custody status, case entries, and potentially recoverable silver. Filters distinguish those in custody from those not yet taken in for questioning.
Find a person in the register, then open their records to examine the relevant cases. We are also continuing to organize the prison office, the Thirteen Bureaus, autumn case reviews, and pardons as work on the ministry progresses.

The map is another focus of this stage of development. We are refining land divisions and place labels to make the relationships between terrain, roads, fortified passes, and key cities easier to read.
The northern screenshot shows the capital, the Nine Frontier Garrisons, and Liaodong. Great Wall passes, towns, mountains, rivers, and roads appear together, helping important locations stand out within the wider territory.
The other screenshot shifts the view to Korea and Japan, showing towns, ports, roads, and the surrounding seas across the peninsula and islands.

Work on land divisions, passes, and key cities is ongoing. We will share more about how they work in the game in future previews.

For now, we wanted to share these development images with you. Work continues on the Grand Secretariat and Six Ministries, examinations and case records, and the map's land divisions, fortified passes, and key cities.
Let us know in the comments what you are most looking forward to: delegating court affairs to the Secretariat, setting an imperial examination, or taking a closer look at the frontier passes and overseas map.

Thank you for your interest and support, Your Majesty. We look forward to sharing more development progress with you.