There's a rule in the brand manual that I can recite from memory today, and that I broke without noticing at least four times in one month: every term has to come from field science or institutional bureaucracy. Never from fantasy. If it sounds like a magic stone, a gym, a badge, or a master, it's wrong. If it sounds like something a lab or an archive would say, it's right.
Written down like that, it sounds simple. In practice, it's the easiest rule to break in the whole project, because the brain that spent years playing this genre of game wants, by reflex, the word "potion" or "badge" or "master". I write those words into the draft and only afterward ask whether they pass the test.
Mistake 1: I flipped the most important item in the game backwards
At some point I wrote, with total conviction, that FRASCO ZERO was the starter item — the equivalent of your first Pokémon. That's wrong from start to finish. FRASCO ZERO is the equivalent of the Master Ball: zero margin for error, holds any rule set without needing calibration, and is never sold at the Loja da Ordem because, in the lore, selling method is the one kind of profit the Ordem refuses to make. The actual starter item is something else entirely — the Primeiro Registro, which is permanent, tied to your history, and can never become a desvio. I swapped the two roles in a document that stood as reference for weeks before someone (me, on a second read) noticed the inversion.
Mistake 2: I invented an item that never existed
"Frasco Absoluto" shows up in at least one old version of my notes. It doesn't exist, never existed, and I can't reconstruct where I got the name — I probably confused it with Frasco Zero itself in a draft passage and then treated the confusion as if it were a real item. It's logged now as a corrected mistake specifically so I don't repeat it.
Mistake 3: I split apart two things the manual had already merged
At some point I created a distinction between "Caderno de Campo" and "the hunt analyzer" — as if they were two different screens in the game. The manual had already settled this: they're the same thing. The UI and the lore are a single piece, not a system with two names. I reread the manual, found the line, and deleted the distinction I'd invented for no reason.
Mistake 4: I invented "Escolas" where the manual said keep "clã"
This one stung more because I had a reasonable-sounding argument in my head: "clã" is a word that already exists in other games, so maybe it deserved something more its own. But the manual, in the paragraph about what not to rename, is clear: game mechanics aren't anyone's property, and every new word is a learning cost charged to the player at the front door. IV, raid, prestígio, market, escrow, guild, clã, XP, level, dungeon, VIP — stay as they are. Inventing "Escolas" didn't make the game more ESVA. It made it harder to learn, out of my own vanity.
In the same batch of mistakes: I went as far as proposing "dungeon", "raid", "Varredura" and "Dossiê" as new terms, exactly where the rule says not to invent. And I proposed "Selo" for a concept that collides, directly, with "frasco selado" — which already exists. That never got past the proposal stage, but it's logged as a corrected mistake so it doesn't come back disguised as a new idea three months from now.
What survived the review
"Caso Aberto" — the term for legendary/mythic, the case the Ordem never closed — actually got ratified. I'd been suspicious of it because of a possible collision with another term, but the collision didn't hold up once I went and checked every section that had already been using "Caso Aberto" as if it had been canon for a while. Sometimes the instinct to fix something is also wrong, and the right fix is to leave it alone.
What still doesn't have a name
There are five concepts left genuinely without a settled term, and I'd rather admit that in public than invent a bad name just to fill the gap. Crédito replaces the basic currency and has medium confidence — it's a cognate in all three languages (crédito/credit/crédito), which is exactly the rule the manual uses for clãs, so I think it'll stick. Aval replaces the premium currency and has low confidence, because it isn't a cognate in English — "aval" means nothing to someone who only speaks English, and that breaks the logic that made "Crédito" work. Excedente replaces the concept of a specimen that exceeds the catalog's parameters, medium confidence. And the names for two gathering professions are still open — I've already scrapped two earlier proposals ("Sondagem" and "Horto") because the mechanic they described got removed from the game, so the name was left with nothing left to name.
This isn't indecision out of laziness. It's the same rule that made me cut "Escolas": a bad name, published early, is more expensive to fix later than a blank space marked pending. ESVA's closed lexicon today has fewer invented words than its first version did — and it's better because of that, not in spite of it.