v0.5.261 September 2026

Interface

• Hand Wraps look like what they are. The wraps count as unarmed for every discipline, and they used to draw the same mark in the same skin tone as an empty hand, so nothing on the map told you whether you had them on. Both draw the fist now, the wraps in pale linen and bare skin in skin, so the two read apart at a glance.
• Bare hands read as a fist. Fighting unarmed used to draw a curved bracket beside you, borrowed from the Hand Wraps item. It is a small round fist now, which is what a closed hand looks like at this size.
• Facing is no longer something you can switch off. The F key used to hide the facing markers, and hiding them now means hiding the weapon in your hand and every creature's facing at once. That option is gone and the key is free; everything draws, always.
• You can see what you are holding. The character you steer carries their actual equipped weapon, drawn under them and angled toward the way they face: a sword, an axe, a bow, whatever is in your hand, in that item's own colour. It replaces the plain tick that used to mark your facing, and says the same thing while also saying what you are about to swing with. Creatures keep the tick.
• Walking into something no longer uses it. Bumping is for moving and for fighting. Beds and inn rooms, cooking pots, firepits, healing springs, shrines, alchemy benches, trader stalls, standing stones, altars, the hermit and the ranger who teach, herb patches and ore veins, chests, and your pack animal's saddlebags all answer to the interact key now. Walk into one and it tells you what it is and which key opens it, so nothing goes quiet on you. Shopkeepers already worked this way; this is the rest of the game catching up. Herb patches, berry bushes and cave fungus are solid ground now, so you stop beside a node instead of walking over the thing you meant to pick.
• Your companions come back with you when an old save is loaded. Loading a save written before a game update put the character you steer at the entrance to wherever you were, and left the rest of the party standing where they were when you saved, which could be most of a town away and well off the edge of the screen. The party looked like it had vanished. They now arrive together, as they do everywhere else in the game.
• The key that acts on the world now also answers the prompts about it. A crossing into another zone, the pull toward your own corpse and the priest's offer at the altar each ask you one question with one answer, and each used to want the 1 key for it. They take your interact key instead, F unless you have moved it, and they print whatever you have it bound to. Enter still works everywhere it did. A ghost at a well is offered only the descent, so that takes the interact key too. The prompts that genuinely offer a choice, the bump prompt, the cleric's last decision and a living player's well, keep their numbers.
• A hole in the rock no longer offers you a country walk. Every crossing underground used to raise a prompt saying the trail continued into the next stretch of wilderness, painted the same green the open country uses: the drain at the bottom of the Well, the new fissure in the rat colony's floor, and every shaft and passage down the gnome deep from the Underkeep to Cogwarren. They read as what they are now, a passage carrying on into the dark, in the same grey as the prompts on a staircase. The two cities down there, Cogwarren and Thuldarin Underkeep, are still walked into through a gate.
• A shop will not pay you more for something than it charges for it. You could buy a Short Bow for 41 gold and sell it straight back over the same counter for 75, and a handful of other items paid for the walk from one side of the shop to the other. Selling loot the shop does not stock is unchanged, so ordinary dungeon finds are worth what they always were.
• A lantern you pick up is still burning. Plant a light, walk on, come back and lift it, and it now keeps its flame and goes on burning oil in your pack. It used to freeze the moment you touched it: still alight to look at, but the fuel stopped and never started again. One that has already guttered out still comes up dark and still wants oil.
• What a thing is worth now follows from what it is. Every item in the game has a price, not just the ones a shop happens to stock, so loot is worth carrying out. A merchant charges twice what it pays, so nothing can be bought and sold back at a profit. Some shop prices have moved, a few of them a long way.
• Brewing a potion at the alchemy bench can no longer turn a profit. A Grand Health Potion cost 45 gold to brew and sold for 60 to 75 depending on your charisma, so brewing and immediately selling back was free gold with no combat and no cap. Every recipe now costs more than its potion sells for.
• Autoexplore walks around a chest you have already emptied instead of dying on it. It still stops at an unopened one, which is the point of it. An emptied chest used to end the run where it stood, with nothing said and no reason on screen. Where a chest blocks the only way through, the walk stops and says so rather than reporting the level explored.

Creatures

• The restless dead float. Wraiths, banshees, specters and the rest of the ghostly dead drift over a fence and through a window now instead of walking round the long way. Where you will actually notice it today is a corpse run through the Southern Steppes, whose ghosts scatter across fenced ground: a fence no longer shakes off what is following you. Most of the other places the dead are placed have no fence or window to cross, so this is as much groundwork for later zones as something you will feel now. Raised wraiths and spectres, and the Shaman's ancestor spirit, also cross open water without a swim check.
• Three winged serpents can fly.
• Djinni, pixies, phoenixes and the winged demons can fly.

Zones

• Every bard trainer plays music now, and they all look like bards. Only Lyanna in Hollowbrook ever performed. Sylvie in Strathmoor and Herald Aldric Vance in Kingsholm stood silent, because a bard played only if someone had typed their name into a list, and for those two nobody had. Teaching the class is enough now, so all four of them play. They also wear the Bard class colour instead of five different pinks, golds and pale blues, and Sylvie draws as a person rather than as a creature letter.
• Sylvie Reedwhistle is a bard rather than a townsperson wearing the name.
• Strathmoor is not a wall of trees any more. The deep forest has been thinned right back: better than seventeen thousand tiles of trees, ferns, thickets and undergrowth are open ground now, with new paths cut through it and standing stones raised along them. You can see where you are going and fight without a trunk between you and everything else.
• The rat colony goes deeper than the floor you can walk. A fissure has opened in the rock past the rats' camp fire, and it drops to a second level of the warren. The same crack climbs back. There is almost nothing down there yet, which is the point: the court proper is still being built.
• The rat colony under Hollowbrook is starting to look lived in. Its first floor is a nest rather than a city: junk heaped in the chambers, rubbish drifting through the passages, and the beginnings of the hollows the rats actually sleep in. It is meant to be exactly the rat cave you expected, so that what lies further down can take it away from you.
• Kingsholm is lit by torches somebody hung, not by where its doors are. The capital used to derive a sconce beside each building door, and it has seven doors across a map twelve times that many tiles wide, so most of it was dark and the dark had no author. Twenty-seven torches now hang on its walls: one beside every door, three on the gate sentry boxes, nine around the Hall of the Realm and the Herald's College, and eleven down the streets of the eastern district, each in the colour of the wall it hangs on. Every one can be taken off the wall and carried.

Editors

• A developer flag opens the game with a party already made.
• Two people can now edit the same zone without one of them losing the afternoon. A map is stored a row of the map to a line of the file, and every chest, door, spawn, sign, stamp and trap on its own line too, so two authors working on different parts of a town no longer collide. Before this, a whole zone was a single enormous line: any two edits to it, on two machines or two branches, could only be resolved by throwing one of them away wholesale. A map that has been merged badly is now refused with an explanation instead of loading as a plausible, quietly wrong map.
• A stamp you place can be broken apart and edited. A placed tree or building was a single unit that redrew itself from its pattern every time the map opened, so nudging one tile of it never stuck. Press F over a placement and it becomes ordinary tiles you can paint over; Shift+F makes every stamp land that way. Patterns you leave alone still update every copy when you edit them, so the great trees and the town buildings behave as they always did.
• Junk to build a rat warren out of. Six kinds of salvage to heap around (refuse, stacked crockery, broken crates, scrap, rags and scattered coin) and six ready-made arrangements of them: junk drifts, salvage heaps, crockery columns, rat nests, cook fires and lean-to camps. They live in their own "Junk & Salvage" and "Warren" folders.
• The creature editor can see and set whether a creature flies. Flight is a row in a record's Behavior block now, beside its size and its vision, so authoring a bird no longer means remembering that the game decides this somewhere you cannot look.

Rendering

• A torch inside a building no longer shows through the fog over it. A sconce mounted facing into a room drew its flame in that room, and a building you have not been inside is meant to be hidden, so towns after dark were dotted with little fires floating in the dark where the rooms should be. The wall it hangs on still draws, because a building has to keep its outline from the street. Only the flame waits until you can actually see in.
• Taking a torch off a wall gives you a cheap torch. It handed over a quality one, which burns four times as long and throws light half again as far as the sconce you lifted it from. A wall was a better torch than a shop, and stripping a town's brackets was the cheapest light in the game. What you pull off the bracket is now the torch that was burning in it.
• A wall sconce is worth exactly the cheapest torch you can carry. It threw light ten tiles, as far as the best ordinary torch in the game, so a row of sconces lit a room end to end and there was nowhere in a lit town worth striking your own light. A sconce now reaches what a Cheap Torch reaches and no further, which puts it on the bottom rung of the ladder: every torch above the cheapest is a real upgrade on standing next to one, and dark corners are dark again.
• Torchlight flickers like fire instead of rippling like water. Reported as "they just seem to flow too much like water and not like fire", and the old formula agreed: it sent a wave travelling outward from the flame, so light left a torch in expanding rings, and the shimmer was strongest in a ring at half the reach with the flame itself perfectly steady. Nothing travels now. The light is liveliest at the flame, it breaks into a few brighter and darker wedges that swing around the source as though the flame were leaning, and the edge of the pool moves rather than sitting on a fixed circle. It also breathes at half the old rate: an irregular flame has more visible events in it than a smooth one, so the speed the sine ran at read as hurried once the shape changed. Every flame in the game runs on the same timing, so a sconce, a campfire and the torch in your hand all breathe alike.
• A torch on a wall no longer shines through it. A sconce lit the room it hung in and the street on the other side of the wall at the same time, so every house in a town glowed from the outside after dark. It lights the side it faces now, and the wall stops the rest, the same way a wall stops the torch you are carrying. Kingsholm's torches have been pointed at the streets they were placed to light.
• Buildings keep their secrets after dark. From dusk until dawn every building in Hollowbrook stood open to the street: you could read the floor of a shut house from outside it, all of them at once, and daylight put it back. A building hides again now unless somebody is inside it or can actually see in, which is what walking past a lit window is for.

Audio

• A rat no longer howls like a wolf. The dungeon has a cue for something stalking you, and it was a wolf howl whatever was doing the stalking, so a rat on your heels announced itself as a wolf. Whatever is hunting you now makes its own sound, and anything the game has no recording for keeps quiet rather than borrowing another animal's voice. The howl still carries up from the deep floors when nothing is in sight, which is what it was recorded for.

v0.5.2529 August 2026

Zones

• Every town building hides its inside until you go in. Walk past a shop and you see its front, not its floor plan. Look through a window and you see the slice of the room your line of sight reaches, then it goes dark again when you walk on. Any party member inside reveals the room, so sending a companion ahead works. This now covers every settlement in the game, underground ones included, where before it covered ten buildings across two towns.
• Hollowbrook's wall torches actually light the town. All 54 of the hand-placed sconces now cast their radius-10 glow after dark, so the streets and the housefronts around them are lit and the flames themselves burn at full brightness instead of sitting there as dim brown smudges. They stay dark at midday, when there is nothing for them to light.
• Wall torch flames flicker visibly. The flame now breathes on exactly the curve a torch in your hand does, instead of a swing so shallow that a flame three pixels across looked frozen.

Combat

• A spell that cannot happen no longer plays its animation. Cast Life Tap at something out of reach and it says so, without first tearing a ring of blood out of thin air. The same was true of every refusal in the game: no target, no undead in sight, too weak to pay the price.
• Healing falls into the person being healed. A cast drops rings of blue light into whoever was mended, three of them staggered so it reads as a flow rather than a single flash. A group heal drops a set into every party member it reached, so you can see who got it. Covers the Cleric's whole ladder and the Paladin's church-taught heals; the Druid, Ranger and Shaman keep their green nature look.
• Life drain looks like life being taken. Cast a drain and the victim's life is torn out of them in a ring of red motes, which then turn and race back into you. Necromancer lifetap, Vampire blood magic and Dark Paladin drain all shared the look of an ordinary damage bolt before: something flew out, something flashed, and nothing came home.

Audio

• Creatures sound like themselves. Wolves howl, dogs bark, cats yowl, cows low, birds call, bats trill, zombies moan, skeletons rattle, wraiths wail and insects skitter. Thirteen creature families that had no voice at all, and fell back to one generic growl between them, now have their own recordings.
• Bard songs strike up on a real instrument. Starting a song plays a harp, cymbal, cello or flute depending on what the song does: uplifting for the anthems and hymns, martial for the war songs, sombre for the dirges, gentle for the lulls.
• The corpse run has an actual ghost sound, and hits land on armour rather than on a generic thud.
• 157 new sound effects added, from Delusion Drive's free sample pack: animal calls, human and elf voices, zombie and skeleton sounds, footsteps, and a set of brief instrument notes. Most are now in use; the rest are on the shelf for later.
• The credits now name who made the sound effects. Nox_Sound, whose work is most of what you hear underfoot and in every grunt and footstep, is credited by name where the screen previously said only "various royalty-free sources". Music is credited in full instead, a line per track with its composer and licence, including all seven of Tim Kulig's bard pieces.

Party

• Switching between characters no longer drags the rest of the party. Pressing F1, F2 or F3 changes who your keys move and nothing else. It could previously pick the others up and set them down around whoever you switched to, which was most visible when taking over someone who had died.

Saves

• Deleting a save no longer erases it. The file is moved into a deleted folder beside your saves instead, with the slot it came from and the date in its name, so a character lost to a misclick can be put back by hand. A README.txt in that folder explains how. Nothing in there is ever cleaned up automatically, and save files are around 900 KB each, so clear it out yourself if it grows.

Menus

• The title screen has a Credits entry. [C]redits sits between Options and Quit, and opens a screen naming the people whose music and sound the game plays. Scroll it with the arrow keys, Escape to come back.

Rendering

• Torches no longer breathe in unison. Every flame, and every pool of light a flame throws, now flickers on its own clock. Hollowbrook after dark is where you will notice it: 54 sconces used to brighten and dim together, so the whole street pulsed like one lamp on a dimmer rather than like torches.

Fixed

• Cleric Regeneration showed nothing. All four ranks resolved to no target for their visual, so casting one drew no falling light at all.
• Six more spells kept their cast animation on a refusal, including the Holy-smite ladder, Bramble Shot, Sun Burst, Hex and Stone Grasp.
• The credits screen clipped its CC-BY attribution. The line naming Thalon and the source was one column too wide for the box and lost "opengameart.org", which is part of what that licence asks for. The box is wider and a test now holds the two numbers together.
• Healing a pet dropped the light on the healer rather than on the pet.

v0.5.2428 August 2026

Combat

• Healers can heal each other. Target a companion with Tab or the mouse and your heal lands on them. Every healing spell and skill follows whatever you have selected, so a Cleric can mend the Warrior taking the hits instead of only ever patching themselves up. Your AI companions have always done this; now you can too.
• Some heals are delivered by hand. Lay on Hands, Bind Wound, the Monk's Mend and the Druid's Nature's Touch line only reach somebody standing next to you. A cast refused for range costs nothing: no mana, no cooldown, and no once-per-day charge.
• Warriors have learned Bind Wound. A soldier who can bandage a wound is not much of a stretch, and it gives the front line something to do for a friend who is bleeding.
• The Ranger's mending line is finished. Nature's Mending I arrives at level 10, filling a gap that ran from level 3 to level 25, and both Mending spells now leave a small regeneration behind. Nature's Blessing finally does what it always promised: 65 HP and one affliction lifted, rather than the 10 HP and unmentioned regeneration it actually did.
• Fixed: several heals stopped short of your real maximum. Anything that raised your health ceiling, Fortified gear or the Warrior's own toughness, was ignored when a companion healed you or you drank a potion, so you could not be filled up. Healing spells never had this problem, which is why it went unnoticed.
• Fixed: spell descriptions that lied. Minor Heal claimed 25 and restored 20, Nature's Mending II claimed 40 and restored 25. Descriptions now read their numbers from the spell itself, so they cannot drift apart again.

Audio

• Humanoid creatures bark in their own voices. Goblins, kobolds, orcs, gnolls, ogres, trolls, giants, dwarves and the rest each have a voice sized to them, instead of the single growl every creature in the game shared. Every other creature keeps that growl for now, beasts and undead and constructs alike: there is no animal or monster audio in the project yet, and a pitched human shout does not make a rat.

Party

• Your party no longer wades across deep water behind you. Swim a channel and the members following you would step into the water one after another, in single file, without one of them ever rolling to make the crossing. They now wait on the bank, and each has to make the crossing themselves once you take control of them. Pets are unaffected: they still roll their own check to come across after you.

Interface

• You can no longer bury a quest item. The long-dead man in the Hollow Rest cellar carries the signet that is the whole of the first stage of the main quest, and "Bury the remains" sat right beside "Loot" on the menu over him. Taking it destroyed the ring and stranded the questline. Burial is now simply not offered over a body holding a scripted quest item, in the interact menu and in the loot window alike, and it comes back the moment you have picked the item up. The same guard covers the dead delver and the sealed dead in Thuldarin Underkeep, and the list in the well.
• The loot window's "Bury the remains" row is visible again. It has been painted underneath the footer, and so invisible, for any corpse that had anything in it, while still being reachable with the cursor and still burying when you confirmed on it.
• The give prompt confirms on the same key as everything else in your pack. Hand an item to another member and the "give to whom?" list now takes the use key rather than Enter, matching equip, unequip and use in the panel it opens from.

Zones

• Every way out of a dungeon now leads where it looks like it leads. Leave the Catacombs by the stair you came down and you come up at the grave; leave by the passage into the city and you come up in the city. Until now both exits put you wherever you first went in, so entering by the sealed rock and climbing the grave stair still spat you out at the rock.
• Rattius has lost its one-step shortcut to the town square. A leftover staircase on the rat city's floor used to lift you straight up into Hollowbrook, skipping the well entirely. It is gone. The way out of Rattius is the way in: back up the drain into the Well of Hollowbrook, and up the well from there.
• Taking a staircase now puts you on the staircase at the other end, not beside it. Every interior stair in Grimstone, the Steppes Cistern and the Catacombs lands you standing on its opposite number, so the way back is always under your feet. The cost is one extra step if you want to turn straight around: step off the stair, then step back onto it, where a single bump used to do it.
• The staircase at the bottom of a dungeon that went nowhere is gone. Switch to a party member standing on the lowest floor of Grimstone, the Steppes Cistern or the Catacombs and the map used to draw a way further down. There was nothing under it, and stepping onto it did nothing.
• The Well of Hollowbrook drains into Rattius, and the drain runs both ways. Two grates sit in the floor of the well's lower chamber. Step onto one and you drop into the rat city; step onto the grate you land on and you climb back into the well. It is the first place in the game where one underground floor opens straight onto another instead of sending you back to the surface first, and it works whether you are alive or walking it as a ghost.
• The place name underground reads like a place. Standing anywhere below ground, the line at the top of the screen used to read "Grimstone Caverns - Floor 2". It now reads "Grimstone Caverns, Floor 2". The three dungeons with only one floor stop claiming to have more than one: the Well of Hollowbrook, the Hollow Rest Cellar and Rattius of Hollowbrook each used to trail a meaningless "Floor 1", and now simply give their name.
• The altar tells you where your body is when you died on the surface, and it names the dungeon when you died underground. Die anywhere above ground and the church altar used to answer "Your body's location is unknown", which was never true: the game knew. It names the place now. Die underground and it used to say "dungeon floor 3" without saying which dungeon, so a ghost with bodies behind them in two different places got the same sentence for both; it reads "Grimstone Caverns, Floor 3" now.
• The priest agrees with the altar. The church elder was asking a stricter question than the altar standing in the same room, so a corpse on the surface got a place name from the altar and "I sense no mortal tether upon you" from the priest. Both now answer about the same corpse the same way. The priest still gives you the floor when there is one, and no longer invents one for a body lying in a field.
• Every place in the game loads the same way. Underground and above ground have stopped being two different kinds of thing to the game. Nothing about a dungeon should look or play differently for it; this is the last of the plumbing behind the two changes above.
• The title screen's cave is a real place. The floor drawn behind the menu is the authored first floor of Grimstone Caverns rather than a fresh cave generated at each launch. It looks the same, because the authored map was frozen from exactly that generator, and the chests, doors and statues down there are now the real ones you will find when you walk in.

Editors

• The Catacombs can be hand-edited now. All three floors used to be drawn in Rust code, which meant the map editor could not open them and every change to their layout was a code change. They are ordinary authored maps now, so they appear in the editor's file list beside every other zone and can be redrawn like any of them.

Classes

• Gate and Evacuate bring you out of the dungeon you are actually standing in. Both used to surface wherever the last dungeon anyone in the party went into was entered from, and switching characters never cleared that. Send one character down Hollowbrook's well, switch to another and walk them into Grimstone through the cave mouth, and casting either spell deep in Grimstone dropped you in Hollowbrook's town square, a world away.
• Divine Grace comes back when you climb, not only when you descend. It is once per floor and says so, but going back up a staircase left it spent on a floor you were no longer standing on. It now refreshes on any floor change, which is what "once per floor" always meant.

Main Quest

• Peanut has a real questline now, and the first two stages of it can be played. He has been asking people for a long time and keeping a list. Getting it back, and then earning the good opinion of something that has every reason not to give it, is as far as the road goes in this build. The door under the Well is authored and will not open yet.
• The old Rat King bounty is gone, folded into the questline that replaces it. It asked you to kill him. That turns out to be the wrong idea.
• Peanut waits in Hollowbrook, and only in Hollowbrook. He used to stand in two places at once: out in the open in Hollowbrook, and a second time behind the Hideout's locked trapdoor. The second one is gone, so there is exactly one Peanut now, and the quest log points at the one who was always out in the open.

v0.5.2324 August 2026

Notes for testers

• Known: "The Rat King of Rattius" cannot be finished, so please do not hunt for him. The Hideout's only quest asks you to kill a Rat King. He exists now, where before he did not exist at all, but he has not been placed anywhere in the world yet, so the quest cannot be completed in this build.
• The Ranger's Evasion Mastery changed and we would like to hear how it feels to play. It is a real change to how survivable a Ranger is rather than a fix, and it reads worse on paper than the old version. Whether that is true in play is the thing we cannot work out without you.

Classes

• The Ranger's Evasion Mastery finally does what it says. It promised +15% dodge at all times and quietly granted +5 defense instead, so a level 44 skill point bought something other than what you read. It grants the dodge now. Rangers, this will feel different: tell us how.
• The character sheet's Dodge line agrees with what a swing actually rolls. A Monk holding both evasion skills read 55% on the sheet while the game rolled 35%, and the sheet applied no cap at all.
• Three abilities have their own names now. The Bard's speed song is Presto, the Druid's slow heal is Sapflow, and the Dark Paladin's drain is the Blighting Hand, which also fixes a ladder that used to run Harm Touch, Greater Harm Touch, Harm Touch III. Same abilities, same numbers.
• Thirteen classes, and every one of them is a class. The Magician and the Enchanter are retired. Between them they granted almost nothing across the whole level range: the Magician taught you seven things in sixty levels and the Enchanter eight, where a finished class teaches around fifty. What each was actually for now lives somewhere it fits. The Wizard summons and conjures gear and holds a charm; the Vampire and the Bard do the mind work, which their own stories already had room for.
• What survived, and where it went. Fire Rain and Stone Grasp give the Wizard a whole-room burn and a snare it had to wait until level 28 for. Mez gives it a hold that actually lasts. Haste keeps your feet quick. Insight goes to the Rogue, who reads a room before walking into it. Forgetfulness goes to the Vampire, who tampers with minds for a living.
• The two guilds went with them, along with the four trainers who taught there. Nothing belonged to either guild any more, and the reputation panel would have gone on telling you there were two more out there to find.
• A mez now breaks when you hit it. Holding an enemy still and then beating on it used to work indefinitely: nothing in the game ever broke a mez on damage, so every ability that claimed to was quietly lying. Hit a held enemy now and it snaps out of it and comes straight for you, whether you hit it with a sword, a spell, or a poison it was already carrying. This changes the Vampire's Transfix, the Bard's Mezmerize, and Mez.
• Charm Victim is called Transfix, because that is what it does. It holds a living target still; it does not turn one against its friends.
• The Vampire learns to dominate at 30 and masters it at 48. Dominate used to arrive at 48 and the thirties had nothing in them. It now takes a living target of your own level or lower, and Greater Dominate at 48 holds longer and does not care how strong the target is.
• The Wizard can charm, at range, for as long as they concentrate. A target you can see fights for you until you let it go, and holding it costs one of your five focus pips. The Vampire's charm is the opposite bargain: it reaches only what it can touch and fades on its own, but it costs nothing to keep.
• The Bard's Mezmerize is a real hold. It froze its target with a stun that no amount of damage would break. Now it breaks like any other mez, and the song will not simply grab the same creature again on the next beat.
• The Wizard holds spells open, and can only hold five. Arcane Light, Clarity, Invisibility and Sight Beyond Sight no longer run down on a timer. They stay until you let them go, and each one takes a pip of focus. Five pips is the whole pool, so a Wizard chooses what to keep going rather than keeping everything. Recast a spell to release it and take the pip back. Boons & Banes shows the count and what is spending it.
• Conjured Torch and Summon Shield make things you can hold. Both are the Wizard's now, and both put a real object in your pack instead of a number on your character sheet. The torch can be handed to whoever is walking in front, and it lights them while you keep it burning. The shield can go to whoever has no shield at all. Let the spell go and the object goes with it, wherever it is. Neither burns down or wears out: your attention is the only fuel.

Interface

• The title screen takes the mouse. Click a character card to load it, or to start a new character in an empty one, and click Options or Quit. The keyboard still does everything it did, and the highlight follows your click so you can switch between the two mid-menu.
• The options screen takes the mouse too. Click a tab to open it, a row to select it, and the value itself to change it: the ON and OFF words flip, the little arrows step a setting along, and a volume bar fills to the cell you point at. The paused screen inside a game works the same way, where Resume and Quit to Title are clickable as well. Every keyboard shortcut still does what it did.
• Space toggles a setting on the paused options screen. The footer had advertised it since the screen was written and nothing handled it, so Sound, Footsteps and Auto-pickup could be nudged with the arrow keys but never flipped. The title screen's copy always could.
• The menus light up under the pointer. Whatever a click would act on brightens as you point at it: a character card, a tab, a row, the ON and OFF words, an arrow, a volume bar. It is a separate thing from the selection, so the highlighted row stays where you put it while you sweep the mouse around, and moving the mouse never changes which character is armed.
• A volume bar's right-hand bracket fills it, answering the left-hand one, which mutes.
• Clicks stay on whatever screen is open. With the inventory, a shop, the quest log, the journal or any other panel up, a click used to reach the map behind it and describe a tile you could not see. It stops at the panel now.
• Clicks on the paused options box stay on it. They used to fall through to the map behind: a left click described whatever tile sat under the box, and a right click sent the party walking there while you were still reading the screen.

Zones

• Hollowbrook's torches are the ones someone put there. The town used to hang a light beside every door it had, two dozen of them, so its lighting was decided by where the doors fell rather than by anyone. Those are gone. A torch in Hollowbrook is now a torch on the wall: placed by hand, lighting its own corner, and still there to be taken down and carried.
• Kingsholm's east gate is a gatehouse, not a gap. The twenty-one-tile opening in the city wall is now a three-tile gate, with the wall carried across the rest of the eastern approach.

Saves

• Sustained spells, a carried light and the gear in a follower's pack now survive a save. Previously a reload quietly ended three of the Wizard's four sustains, reset a lit torch's remaining fuel, and moved everything in a companion's pack into the leader's.

Shaman

• A shaman learns from the world, and a little from the bones. Levelling now teaches a Shaman seven things on its own: Cannibalize, Bloodlust and Spirit Lantern from the first level, Spirit Sight to see a little further, and three deepening passives at 10, 32 and 45. Everything else still comes from the four elders, which is the point of the class. Three of the seven were bought off a list before; the other four are new.
• Ancestral Resilience and Fortitude of the Ancestors raise a Shaman's health. +20 and +35 maximum health, at levels 10 and 32. Bloodlust II at 45 raises Bloodlust to +10 attack for eight turns.
• Spirit Sight lets a Shaman see further in the dark. The dead are easier to see by. A Shaman sees two tiles further from the first level, in the light and in the dark alike.
• An elder with nothing to teach says so. The Ancient's knowledge is not in the game yet, and walking to the far end of Smolderdeep used to open an empty list with no explanation. He acknowledges you now, and the visit still counts.
• Archdruid Fenwick and Grindle Ashcog turn you away in their own words. Both are class-gated trainers who had no line of their own, so anyone of the wrong class got a flat refusal from nobody in particular.
• Three shaman abilities were taught by the wrong elder. Endure and Venom were behind the Stone Elder, who wants you at level 15, while the abilities themselves are learnable at 4 and 5. They sat in your list for ten levels with nobody willing to teach them and nothing saying why. Both are the Marsh Elder's now, who turns nobody away. Plague was the worst of the three and in the other direction: a level 18 spell kept by the Ancient, who will not speak to you before 50, so it sat unlearnable for thirty-two levels. The Stone Elder teaches it now.
• Shaman training comes from elders now, not a generic trainer. You find the spirits' teachers out in the world instead of buying every skill and spell off one list. Ashwind in Strathmoor is the first of them, the Stone Elder, and he wants you at level 15 before he'll teach. Whatever an elder teaches costs no gold.
• The other three elders are out in the world. The Marsh Elder waits in the Northern Steppes, a short walk south of Hollowbrook, so a Shaman can find their first teacher early. The Bone Sage sits among the stones of the great graveyard, and the Ancient at the far end of Smolderdeep. The Bone Sage keeps his ground among the risen dead, and is built to survive the company.
• The cave in Everslope no longer teaches. It used to sell a Shaman anything their level allowed, which quietly undercut the whole idea of seeking the elders out. The chant still echoes from it, and now it tells you what it has always meant: the living learn from the living, elder to student.
• The Marsh Elder teaches five more of the marsh's own. Spirit of Wolf moves you first and sharpens your dodge for ten turns. Talisman of the Sage steadies your defense and adds to your health for twelve. Spirit Weapon lends your strikes six points of spirit damage for ten turns. Binding Chains roots a target in place for three turns. Spirit Bolt, learnable at level two, is a straightforward eighteen points of spirit damage to whatever you are facing.
• Fleeting Spirit, the Marsh Elder's sixth lesson, lets you step through what stands in the way. Cast it and the charge waits, however long you take, until you walk into a wall. That step carries you clean through and sets you down on the far side unharmed. If there is nowhere sound to land past it, the step is simply refused and the charge is still yours to spend, and a root still holds you the way it holds anyone.
• The Stone Elder teaches five of the second tier's own. Spirit of Bear adds eight to your attack and twenty to your health for twelve turns. Reinvigorate strips every affliction you are carrying and restores thirty-five health in the same breath. Cannibalize II makes the old trade kinder: ten health instead of fifteen, for the same mana. Malaise, learnable at twenty-two, sickens a target and cuts three points from their defense for eight turns. Spirit Dance, taught at the same level, answers a landed hit with a one-in-five chance to turn part of the damage into healing over the next three turns.
• Spirit Vision sees through stone. The Stone Elder's sixth lesson senses creatures through walls for five turns, anywhere you have already walked. Not only the ones already set against you: wildlife and anything else living shows up too, though townsfolk and traders do not. A sensed enemy shows up dim, the same way a remembered door or corpse does, and nothing more: it cannot be targeted, tab-selected, or attacked while only sensed. It shows you what has moved into ground you know, not what is waiting in rooms you have never opened.
• Totem of Warding plants a spirit on the ground where you stand. Learnable at eighteen, it holds for ten turns and answers anything hostile that comes within two tiles of it with eight points of spirit damage a turn. It knows a vendor from a foe: your own party, townsfolk and anything not already set against you can walk past it unharmed. Only one totem stands at a time, and planting a second retires the one already there.
• Shamanic Trance, the Stone Elder's last lesson, closes out the second tier. Sit still for three turns and the spirits pour fifteen health and eight mana into you, every turn, no matter what is happening to you while you sit. You cannot move, swing, cast, or fire a bow for those three turns, and a landed hit will not cut the channel short: the trance is meant for exactly the fight where you would otherwise be too hurt to keep standing.
• The Bone Sage teaches five of the third tier's own. Spirit of Eagle sharpens your strikes and widens how far to your sides you can see, for ten turns. Torpor slows a target to a crawl and cuts eight points from their attack and six from their defense, for ten turns. Greater Hex curses both a target's attack and defense at once for twelve turns, where Hex itself only ever managed one at random. Cripple does the same trick at level forty, a smaller cut of eight and five for eight turns. Neither Torpor nor Greater Hex retires the spell it improves on: Slow and Hex both stay on your list, cheaper and still worth casting when the fight does not call for the stronger version. Spiritual Mending III, learnable at thirty-eight, restores seventy health in one working.
• Summon Ancestor calls a spirit warrior to your side. Forty mana raises an ancestor spirit to fight beside you for eight turns, the same shape and the same price as a Druid's Spirit Call.
• Totem of Vitality answers Totem of Warding's harm with mending. Also learnable at thirty, it plants a second kind of totem, one that heals instead of striking: five health a turn to your own party and anything you own standing within four tiles, for fifteen turns. It is its own totem, not a replacement, so planting one never disturbs a Totem of Warding already standing, and the two work side by side. Anything hostile in its radius is left untouched: this totem tends only your own side.
• Rotting Flesh and Spiritual Fortitude close out the Bone Sage's teaching. Rotting Flesh sets a necrotic disease into a target for thirty mana: fifteen damage a turn for eight turns, and its maximum health falls by a fifth for as long as the disease holds, recovering the moment it clears. Spiritual Fortitude, the ninth and last lesson, is a standing passive: fifteen percent resistance to every kind of damage, once learned, always on.
• The Ancient teaches four of his own, all at level fifty. Mortal Coil is the harshest curse a Shaman carries: Slow, Cripple and Malaise, cast on one target all at once. Spirit Tempest upgrades Earthquake into sixty points of Nature damage across every enemy in sight, and slows every one of them for two turns, without retiring Earthquake itself. Ancestral Bastion calls on every ancestor who ever stood their ground: fifteen more defense and forty percent less incoming damage, for ten turns. Cannibalize III turns the old trade kinder still, giving back five health with every use on top of whatever Cannibalize II already spared you.
• The Ancient's fifth lesson: Great Plague. Twelve points of disease damage a turn, for eight turns, to every enemy in sight at once. It is not the Stone Elder's own Plague grown larger: that one is a single-target spell taught far earlier, and this new one reaches the whole room, only ever learnable from the Ancient at level fifty.
• The Ancient's sixth lesson: Greater Trance. A standing passive that deepens Shamanic Trance. A Shaman who has learned it may walk during the channel, and the regeneration doubles to thirty health and sixteen mana a turn. Movement is the only freedom it buys: attacking, casting and using an item all still refuse, the same as the base channel. Walking away instead of holding still forgoes that turn's regeneration too, since the channel's healing is priced on stillness and Greater Trance only frees the Shaman to move without it, not to heal while doing so.
• The Ancient's last two lessons finish the Shaman: Ancestral Warding and Avatar of the Ancestors. Ancestral Warding is a standing passive: once per floor, the moment your health falls below a fifth, the ancestors cast Ancestral Guard over you on their own, at no cost, provided you have learned Ancestral Guard yourself. Avatar of the Ancestors calls on every ancestor at once: fifteen more attack, fifteen more defense, fifty percent more spirit damage, and eight health back every turn, for fifteen turns, once per floor. Both close the last stretch of levels the class was missing and complete the Shaman at forty-eight of forty-eight.

Party

• Each character wears their own colour on the map. Your people used to be one shared yellow, bright for whoever you were steering and dim for the rest, so a glance told you where the party was but never who was who. Every member now draws in their class's colour, the same one the UI frames their panels with, and the one you are steering is still the bright one. The colours are levelled against each other on purpose: a Vampire's crimson and a Druid's green are worlds apart in how bright the eye reads them, and left alone a Vampire player would have spent the game hunting for their own glyph.
• The class colours themselves were retuned to tell each other apart. They had been chosen one at a time, and six of them had drifted into the same narrow band of orange and gold: the Shaman's amber and the Magician's orange differed by a single step in a single channel, and the Paladin's gold and the Cleric's were near enough to the same. It never showed while they were only borders on screens you look at one at a time, and it showed immediately with two characters standing side by side on the map. Every class is now its own colour, spread around the wheel, and the closest pair is now more than two and a half times further apart than the closest pair used to be. Nothing changed but the shades, and each class kept the colour it was always described by.
• A ghost is washed out rather than blue. The old ghost blue was an ordinary mid blue, which was fine until the classes beside it were given colours of their own and one of them was a steel-blue Warrior. A ghost is now pale and barely tinted, and washed out beside the living, so a live Warrior can never be mistaken for a dead one.
• F1 to F3 switch characters from the quest log. The log's racial tab shows the arc belonging to whoever you are steering, so reading what the other two are up to meant closing it, switching, and opening it again. The keys now work there, the way they already did on the character sheet, and the log stays open on the tab you were reading.
• Switching characters puts the cursor back where it belongs. Flipping members on the character sheet used to leave the selection wherever it had been in the last person's pack, spell list, skill list or bestiary. On a shorter list that is a cursor pointing at nothing, with the arrow keys dead in one direction and no highlight anywhere on screen. Switching from someone with a spellbook to someone without could also leave the panel on a tab that person does not have. Your place in the quest list and the party's books is left alone, since those are the same for everybody.

Combat/Loot

• Your target flashes instead of sitting in brackets. The [ ] that used to frame a selected creature are gone; the target marks itself by pulsing bright yellow, then red, then back to its own colour. It now does that everywhere it should. Outdoors, in every town and zone, there had never been a flash at all, so the brackets were the only thing marking a target in Hollowbrook. Townsfolk are selectable but were drawn on a path the flash never reached, so a shopkeeper you had targeted looked exactly like one you had not. Targeting yourself lit no marker either. All three flash now, and the flash is painted after the light is, so a target reads the same in a black corridor as in a street at noon.

v0.5.2219 August 2026

Party

• Your companions go to the fight instead of waiting to be hit. They used to swing only at whatever had already walked into them, so the party marched past a fight in your footsteps while one enemy chewed on you. A companion now leaves the line to close on what the party is fighting, preferring whatever is already in reach of one of you, so three swords land on one throat rather than three separate ones. They will not wander off: nothing more than five tiles from the character you are steering is their business, and they close ranks when the fighting stops.
• The back line stays out of melee. A cleric, druid, shaman, wizard, magician, necromancer or ranger with something in its face steps away rather than casting from inside the fight, and throws from the room it just bought. Cornered it casts from where it stands, and only with nothing left to throw does it resort to swinging. Hold still means hold, and Flee still means nobody turns round for one more swing.
• The party stops jamming in corridors. Walk out along a one-wide passage and turn around and the whole train used to stop dead, permanently, while you walked off alone. Who follows whom is now decided by where everyone is standing rather than by a fixed order, so turning round simply reverses the line.
• Nobody is teleported. Who travels with you is now the members actually walking with you, in the area you are leaving and within eight tiles, so standing across town no longer drags somebody down a trapdoor. Arrivals are set down on the free tiles around you rather than stacked on top of you.
• Everyone heals, and everyone learns from a kill. Companions never recovered health, stamina or mana, walking or resting, and a companion bard's songs never ticked. Kill experience went only to whoever you were holding, so the rest of the party stayed at the level they were recruited at. Every conscious member present now earns the full amount, so a party levels together instead of at a third the rate.

Locks

• Lockpicking is a lock, felt out pin by pin. A side view with a hidden order: press the right pin and it seats, press a wrong one and the whole stack drops and a pick snaps. Run out of picks and the lock wins. You get one pick per pin, which is what makes a seven pin lock hard by having seven pins.
• The lock's failure message stays inside its own box. It used to write out through the right border and over whatever the interface had behind it.
• Locked doors now hand you the lock, not the answer. Carrying a lockpick used to open a locked door outright and quietly spend the pick. Walking into one now sets you in front of the lock itself, and you pick it. Beat it and the door opens and the pick stays in your bag. Lose it and the pick is gone and the door is still shut, though nothing stops you walking back and trying again. Keys are unchanged: the right key turns and there is no lock to feel out.
• Locks come in sizes, and the door tells you nothing. Every lock is authored with its own pin count, so a back room and a guild's front door are not the same problem. The front door of the Thieves' Guild in Hollowbrook is the hardest in town at seven pins, which is a way in for anyone who would rather burgle the Guild than join it.
• The bank in Hollowbrook keeps its vault shut. All five chests behind the counter are locked now.
• Chests can be locked at all, which they could not be before.

Quests

• A Goblin Scout counts as a goblin. Kill objectives matched a creature's exact name or a "<something> <name>" subtype, so "Giant Rat" counted toward "Rat" but none of the eight Goblin variants counted toward "Goblin". That left "kill 3 Goblins" waiting on the one variant carrying the bare name. A kill now also counts by the creature's race. Objectives that name a specific variant still mean that variant, and a named boss is still not one of the rank and file.
• A quest reward reaches whoever the job was for, however it was finished. Killing for a quest already paid the right character; fetching for one paid whoever you happened to be steering, so a warrior could pocket the rogue's guild fee, key and contract skill.
• A class quest is filed under Class. The Thieves' Guild chain, starting with "A Word in the Dark", was sitting in the General tab with everyone else's work. The quest log now files each quest under whoever owns it, so General is the party's own business, Class holds a rogue's guild contracts, and a quest appears in exactly one place. A category tab lists its quests above its chronicle, so the Class tab is worth opening even before class chronicles exist.

Interface

• An empty corpse only offers to be buried. It used to offer looting too, and taking that opened an empty window: a keypress spent to be told there was nothing there.
• Resting counts every pool, not just health. A caster at full health with an empty mana pool was told they were already at full health and refused the rest, even though resting would have restored the pool perfectly well. Health, mana and stamina all count now, both for whether a rest is worth starting and for when it stops.
• The bottom key strip no longer advertises eating or saving. Both keys still work; the row is for what there is to do, and it was crowded enough that the hints at the end of it were being dropped for width.
• The way out of the Hideout is out in the room. The hatch was set into the east wall itself, in a one-tile dead end with masonry on three sides, and painted timber brown a couple of shades off that masonry. It now sits on open floor two tiles in, in iron like the other grates that share its symbol, and you arrive beside it rather than hunting for it.
• The Hideout Key is a key, not junk. It was filed as junk, described in your pack as serving no purpose, and the only thing stopping you selling the sole way into the Thieves' Guild to Hollowbrook's junk dealer was a separate no-selling flag. Keys are their own sort of thing now. No shop pays for one and the junk dealer will not take it.
• The Hideout Key looks like a key, and the Warden's Charm like a charm. Both were drawn as blank rectangles: their symbols were missing from the font each one gets looked up in.
• Combat effects are drawn on the thing they happened to. Hit flashes, spell casts, projectiles, damage-over-time flickers and the barkskin ring were all landing a full panel width to the left of their target, over the Party column, ever since the map moved between two side columns. The map renderer knew where the viewport started and the effects layer did not. The blink targeting cursor was drawn the same distance off, which matters more: it aims a teleport.
• The top bar is not cut off by the Party panel any more. The weather, the date and the time sat behind it, because the side columns started a row above the map instead of level with it. They now begin where the map does and the bar has its left end back.
• Rain and snow fall on the map. They were falling over the Party column instead, and the rightmost stretch of the map stayed dry in any weather.
• A poisoned creature off the bottom of the screen no longer flickers into the log box. Its damage-over-time pulse was drawn wherever it landed, even outside the map.
• Every key hint names the key you actually bound. Character creation, the save select screen, the give prompt, the options footer and the minigames all wrote key names by hand, so a rebound keymap was cheerfully told to press Enter and Escape whichever keys it really used.
• Lists wrap instead of stopping dead. The inventory wrapped and thirteen other lists did not, so the same key felt different depending on which menu was open. Brewing, church, corpse looting, interact, journal, quest, shop, stable and trainer lists all wrap at both ends now. Pickers whose ends mean something still stop.
• The pack scrolls to the row you have selected. A high strength character carries 35 slots against about ten visible rows, so a long pack could put the selection past the last drawn row and highlight nothing at all.

Classes

• The Human Cleric is signed off as ready to play. Every other race's Cleric still warns before you commit to it.

Saves

• A failed save says so, and says where. Autosave used to fail in complete silence, so an unwritable save folder could cost a whole session without one word about it, while the save key answered only "Save failed!". Both now name the file they could not write, which turns "it didn't save" into something you can act on.
• The game says if your saves are going somewhere unexpected. If your user data folder cannot be found, saves fall back to sitting beside the game, and a session that starts that way now tells you so rather than letting you discover it when you go looking for a character that was never written.

The manual

• The manual has been rewritten for the game as it is, and it is on the website now, linked from a Manual tab beside News and Support. The old one described a lone adventurer, put the level cap at 20 rather than 60, listed an attribute the game does not have, and named a class that no longer exists. It now covers the party, factions and standing, the real formulas, and a keybinding chapter that matches the keys the game actually ships.

Under the hood

• Em-dashes are gone from everything you read, in quest text, item and book flavour, skill descriptions, the manual and these notes, rewritten as sentences rather than swapped for another dash.

v0.5.2117 August 2026

Classes

• You start with a weapon. Every character now walks out of creation holding something appropriate to their class, already equipped, rather than punching their first rat. A ranger gets arrows with the bow. A monk gets nothing, on purpose: bare hands are the point.
• Everyone in the party gets their own starting notes. Only the leader used to receive them, and they were the leader's race and class, so a rogue riding along never got the note that says where the guild is.
• Your companions' gear is really theirs. Several parts of the game asked the world for "the equipped weapon" and got whichever one it found first, which was usually the leader's. So a companion swung with the leader's dice, arming a companion quietly disarmed the leader, and walking into a dungeon handed the whole party's kit to whoever was in front. Gear now stays with the character who owns it, and one member's potions no longer disappear into another's pack.
• Your companions' gear stops buffing you, too. A dozen things that ask what you are wearing were reading the whole party's kit: a Fortified piece on each of three characters gave every one of them the full +45 max HP, anybody's vampiric weapon drained for everybody, and a warrior's plate made the wizard beside them count as heavily armoured. Each of those now answers for the one character it is about.
• The shop's sell list is your own pack. It used to show every member's bag at once, so you could sell something you could not see yourself carrying.
• A buff belongs to the character who cast it. Every timed buff was stored in two halves: how long it lasts was kept per character, but how strong it is was kept once for the whole party. So a warrior's +15 War Cry silently became +3 the moment a companion buffed themselves, and switching characters could hand you somebody else's numbers. Both halves now live with the character, so two of you can run your own buffs at once and they keep running when you switch away.
• What you pick up is yours. Picking a potion off the floor as a companion quietly folded it into the leader's stack and it never reached you. Quest gear had the same slip: it is cut to the class of whoever turns the stage in, but it landed in the leader's pack.
• Two bards keep their own repertoires. A bard's songs and whatever they were performing were held once for the party while everything else about them was held per character, so one bard learning a song taught it to the other and either could cut the other's performance short.
• Arrows, lockpicks and keys belong to whoever is carrying them. A ranger draws from their own quiver, the character at the door spends their own pick, and the rogue who earned the guild key is the one it opens for. And what you buy or pull off a body now lands in your pack rather than the leader's, which is what made a companion unable to stock their own arrows.

Main Quest

• Every race in your party has its own chronicle. A mixed party used to run only the leader's, so a dwarf riding along with a human had no story of their own. Each race now carries its arc at the same time, you read whichever belongs to the character you are playing, and a chronicle opens the first time you take control of them. Only your own people's giver will deal with you: the work is yours to take and yours to finish, and the reward is yours too.
• Every race has a chronicle, even the ones not yet written. The nine peoples whose stories are still to come now carry a placeholder chronicle that says so plainly, rather than showing you nothing or, worse, showing you a companion's. It sits quietly in the quest log until their real story is written.
• The Thieves' Guild has a front door. Their handler used to wait inside the hideout that his own job is the way into, so you had to find the place before anyone would offer you work there. He waits outside it now, and the trapdoor behind the bank is locked. Finish his job and the key is yours.
• The guild only takes rogues. Anyone else who talks to the handler gets told to move along. The hideout itself is still a door like any other, so a lockpick or a strong shoulder will get you in whatever you are.
• The way into the bank's back room is hidden. It is a blank stretch of wall until you find it, and the trapdoor to the guild is behind it. A rogue's starting note says where to look; it used to point the wrong way across town.
• Trapdoors are drawn as grates. The old arrow pointed down, which read oddly on the hatch you climb up through, and the Hideout's own exit is now a matching grate rather than a door.

v0.5.2017 August 2026

Creatures

• Your blood counts, not just your guild. Every creature in the game treated a Human Warrior and an Ogre Warrior as the same person. Race now feeds faction standing, so greenskins take an Ogre or a Troll for kin, at least for their Shaman, Dark Paladin and Vampire. The race bonus is not enough to save their Warrior: an Ogre or Troll Warrior still gets attacked by the greenskins on sight, and Warrior is the only one of those three classes a playtest party can actually field. The human towns turn one away in three of their four classes. Their Shaman is welcome everywhere; only 13 race and class pairings are ever barred from a settlement at all. A Human, Dark Elf or Gnome loses only Strathmoor, and only by taking up the Dark Brotherhood or the vampire's curse, which is a guild's grudge rather than their blood.
• The wilderness fights back again. Bears, boars, sabertooths, panthers, griffins, rocs, hawks and every elemental in the game had stopped attacking anyone at all. They would fight once struck, but nothing in the wild ever opened on you. 712 creature/class pairings start fights again, and the whole bestiary now has someone it objects to.
• A Rogue is no longer the class the world ignores. Rats, ratmen, bandits, kobolds, gnolls, wolves, snakes, giants, ogres and trolls all walked past a Rogue while attacking a Warrior in the same party. The first rat in the game was one of them. 290 pairings closed, the largest share of the fix.
• The drow are their own people. Lolth and her houses shared a faction with the playable dark elf race, so they inherited its warmth toward the shadowy guilds: Lolth scored +20 toward a Necromancer and a Dark Paladin, +15 toward a Rogue, and the entire drow line attacked nobody but a Vampire. They are a separate faction now, hostile to every class, and the dark elf race is untouched.
• Orcs mind a Necromancer as much as goblins always did. Eight goblins and a hill troll were authored as a special case that made them angrier than the rest of their own faction. The greenskins agree with each other now, so orcs, ridge trolls and hobgoblins turn on a Necromancer or Dark Paladin too.
• The wood around Strathmoor is its own power. Treants, living brambles and thorn beasts wore the town's colours, so the wood inherited the town's friends: a treant attacked a Rogue and let a Warrior with an axe walk past, a Paladin was never challenged at all, and a living bramble was as harmless as the innkeeper. The Grove answers to its wardens now, Elder Mosswhisper and Grove Keeper Sylara, and it turns on anyone who walks in armed.

Combat

• Town guilds watch a thief instead of executing one. The Fighters' Guild master, the High Priest and the Order's commander killed a Rogue on sight in Thuldarin Underkeep, and the Thieves' Guild fence returned the favour to a Warrior, Cleric or Paladin. Rival guilds dislike each other; they no longer murder each other in town.
• It takes real hostility to draw steel now. Anything a faction disliked even slightly used to be a kill-on-sight offence, which is why a Rogue was attacked in every town, along with Necromancers and Dark Paladins. A faction has to actively want you dead before it attacks; short of that it watches you, and you can still walk up and talk to it. The standing panel gained a "wary" row for exactly that state.
• Your party is judged one member at a time. A town's opinion of you came from whichever character you happened to be steering and flipped the moment you switched. Each member is judged on their own now, and a creature moves on the member it objects to rather than the one standing nearest. Once a fight starts, it is the whole party's fight.
• The world remembers what the party did. Reputation was kept per character, so killing a guard and then switching characters wiped the slate. There is one ledger for the party now, and every member's guild knows you from the start.
• People in the combat log are called by their names. A companion's swing read as "The Kaelen hits the Rat", and a named NPC turning on you read as "The Brother Aldeen turns hostile". Creature kinds still take the article they should ("the Cave Troll"); people no longer do. Which names are people is authored on the creature record, so a new named NPC gets it right from the start.
• A companion's attack is coloured as your side's. Follower swings were drawn in the neutral white used for fights you are not part of.
• A spell thrown at a suspicious chest will find the mimic. Area spells could always hurt a disguised mimic, and briefly could not. They can again, and now the mimic gives itself away when it is hit rather than quietly taking damage as a chest.

Interface

• Character creation shows the party you are building. The screens list the members made so far, so you can see the team while choosing the next one, and each member carries a note of the towns their race and class combination is shut out of the moment both are picked. The class screen, where the pairing is known, names it exactly and says which towns. The race and subrace screens come first, before a class is chosen, so they say only that some of the race's classes are turned away and which towns are at stake, since naming one class there would be wrong about the others.

Rendering

• The save-select screen says how to confirm a delete on a broken save. Pressing D on an invalid save armed the delete but kept showing the old hint, so there was nothing to say D again would go through with it.

v0.5.1915 August 2026

Combat

• Hiding covers the person doing it, not the whole party. Stealth, invisibility, feign death and a Druid's camouflage were read off whichever member you were steering and applied to everyone, so slipping one character out of sight made all three unattackable while they fought on. Each member is now hidden or not on their own account, and a creature goes for the nearest one it can actually see.
• Your own pets and summons are no longer caught in your own area spells or skills. Nothing in the spell code checked who an entity belonged to, so a Necromancer's Locust Swarm or a Paladin's aura damaged their own wolf. The same was true of forty area skills, Cleave and Volley and Chi Burst and Smoke Bomb among them. Bystanders are still hit: casting into a crowded street has consequences, but never for your own.
• Holy magic now recognises demons. Turn Undead, Holy Presence, Sanctuary, Searing Light and every smite bonus tested for the undead and quietly passed over all seventeen demons in the game, from the Lesser Demon to the Demon God. A Balrog is no longer immune to a Paladin.
• The Bard's songs no longer reach through walls. Song of Charm, Symphony of Ruin, Lull and Mezmerize were finding targets in rooms lit by statues that the Bard could not actually see. So was the Necromancer's Absorb Spirit.
• Smoke Bomb blinds the whole three-tile square its description promises. The four corners were quietly outside its reach.
• Void Burst says 80 damage. That is what it has always dealt; its description said 50.
• Ensnaring Vines does what it says. It promised to root one target for 3 turns and weaken their attacks, and instead rooted every enemy in sight for 5 turns with no penalty at all. It now roots the enemy you aimed at, for the three turns it names, with the attack penalty it names.
• Provoke and Enrage taunt properly. Both said enemies focus on you for a few turns. Neither had a duration, and the moment you moved, the enemies you goaded walked to the spot you had left rather than coming after you. They now follow you, and the taunt wears off.
• Seven more skills say plainly that they reach what you can see. Static Nova, Magnum Opus, Bull Rush, Unstoppable Charge, Multi-Shot, Arrow Volley and Barrage have always done it and never said so.
• Chain Lightning's arc is local now. It jumped to the two nearest enemies anywhere on the level, through walls and into rooms you had never entered, so it reliably hit three targets wherever you cast it. The jumps now have to be near the enemy they came from.

Classes

• The Cleric can heal the party. Three new group prayers: Circle of Healing at 20, Circle of Restoration at 38, and Communion of the Divine at 54, which restores 150 HP and lifts every affliction from everyone standing close enough. Every heal in the game until now landed on whoever cast it, so a Cleric was a healer who could not heal anyone.
• Champion's Shout heals your party. It has always said it heals your companions and only ever healed your pets, never the characters beside you. Nearby party members now recover a quarter of their health, and your companions still recover all of theirs.
• Champion's Shout and Pack Bond have a range again. Both promised a six-tile reach and measured nothing at all, so a companion halfway across the floor still answered. They now reach as far as they claim to.
• A Cleric in your party mends as well as its level says it should. A companion Cleric healed a flat 25 HP whatever its level, so a level 60 one was no better than a level 1 one while its own book went up to 170. It now casts from its real ladder, and prays a circle instead when two of you are hurt.
• Necromancers learn Plague of Locusts at 52. The greater swarm answers once per floor and does not need to see anything: 35 damage to every enemy on the level, through walls and into rooms you have not opened. Locust Swarm keeps its own reach and its description now says so plainly.
• Aura of Protection guards the ground around the Paladin holding it. Its text has always read "adjacent enemies suffer -2 ATK", but the penalty landed on every enemy attacking anyone, anywhere on the floor. It now applies only to enemies standing next to the character projecting it. Aura of Dread reads the same and works the same way. This makes both weaker than they have been, and matches what they always claimed.
• An aura works for the character holding it, not the one you are steering. A Paladin who was not your active character contributed nothing: Wrath did not burn, Devotion did not sear, Holy Power did not smite undead and Courage did not rout, and switching away from a Paladin turned their aura off for the whole party including themselves. The same held for a Dark Paladin's three and a Cleric's Holy Presence. Each now works from whoever holds it, still only around them, and a follower's aura is named after them in the log.
• The Rogue is signed off. Picking one no longer warns you that it is untested, and it reads as a normal choice in character creation beside the Warrior.

Party

• A third party mode: Flee. The mode key now cycles Follow, Hold and Flee. On Flee your companions walk after you and never swing, so a retreat is a retreat instead of three people each deciding to take one more swing at the thing you are running from. Healers still heal, since mending the person you are running with is not starting a fight. Your pets are not covered and keep fighting, which makes them a rearguard. The mode is shown in the party panel, so you can see at a glance that nobody of yours is fighting.

Under the hood

• Skills and spells now agree with their own descriptions.

v0.5.1814 August 2026

Interface

• Escape is the only key that closes a screen. q used to close most screens as well, which put it one shift-key away from "quit to the game" on the pause menu, and it had to be ignored on the map because q is a diagonal move. Both cases of q now mean quit to title on the pause menu, and nothing else anywhere.
• Escape opens a pause menu. It used to save and drop you at the title screen without asking. It now opens a menu over your game, laid out like the title screen, with Resume and Quit to Title as visible entries and your HUD still showing behind it. It only offers what it can actually do: the settings that need the window rebuilt, and key rebinding, stay at the title screen, and the key list you might have wanted is already on ?.
• Font size changes apply as you make them. Scrolling through the sizes now resizes the game immediately, and from the in-game screen you can watch your own HUD grow and shrink, which is the only way to judge which size you want. Changing resolution or aspect ratio still needs the restart, and rebinding keys is still done from the title screen; the in-game list is for looking up a key you have forgotten.
• Options tells you what a size costs. Some combinations leave the character sheet cut short. That is a fair trade to make, so the screen now says so rather than quietly trimming the bottom off the panel.
• Panels stay inside their own borders. Seventeen screens were drawing over the hotbar and the key hints at smaller window sizes, because dialogs were centred in the whole window rather than in the space above them. The map, the quest log, shops, trainers, the journal, storage and the rest all sit properly now.
• Ultrawide monitors are supported. 21:9 and 32:9 join the aspect ratio options, with the usual presets under each: 2560x1080 up to 5120x2160, and 3840x1080 up to 7680x2160. The extra width goes to the map, since the side columns are a fixed size, which is the reason to own one.
• F1, F2 and F3 take you straight to that party member. One key per member replaces cycling with a single key, where reaching the third member meant two presses and nothing told you which way it would wrap. They are fixed keys, so P is free again.
• Constitution now appears everywhere the other attributes do. It was added to the game but not to the race and class creation screens, the character sheet, or the admin Stat Editor, so a class preview showed health moving with no visible stat behind it.
• The character sheet is taller and no longer writes over the message log. Its left column had no bottom bound, so on a small window a Warrior's weapon mastery list ran out through the panel border and into the log below it. The panel now uses the space down to the hotbar, which fits the whole sheet even on the smallest window. It covers the health bar while it is open, so close it to see your health.
• The help screen has caught up with the game. It was still telling you to bump NPCs to talk and bump corpses to loot, both of which moved onto the interact key, and it described a permadeath mode the game does not have. It now has a Party tab covering how the party works and every way to get a fallen member back on their feet, and it explains Constitution and mid-fight recovery. Press ? as before.
• The admin panel has moved from F2 to F12, out of reach of the keys you actually play with.

Characters

• Constitution is a new attribute, split out of Stamina. Stamina used to decide both how much punishment you could take and how many skills you could use, so there was no way to build a character who was tough without also making them tireless. Constitution now carries your health and Stamina keeps your wind. Every existing character comes out exactly as they were.
• Warriors are built sturdier than everyone else. A Warrior's Constitution climbs faster with every level, so where a level-60 Wizard once had 99% of a Warrior's health, a Warrior now has half again as much. Their stamina is unchanged: this is toughness, not endurance.

Combat

• Creatures recover too. They mend at the same slow rate you do, in a fight as much as out of it, so neither side gets the trickle for free.
• You catch your breath mid-fight now. Health, stamina and magic all recover slowly during a fight instead of stopping the moment something hostile is near. It is a trickle, not a lifeline: a short fight gives back almost nothing, a long one about a sixth of your reserves. Enough that a drawn-out fight sometimes hands you one last skill you thought you had spent.

Classes

• Rogues run on sneak pips. Every turn you go unseen fills a pip, and every turn you are in the open empties one. Holding them sharpens you: each pip widens the range you land a critical hit on, so a Rogue who has been patient strikes far harder than one who walked in. Shown beside your health, the way a Vampire's blood is.
• Sneak pips are for knife work. They sharpen what you do up close and do nothing for a bow, which stays the Ranger's ground.
• Five new Rogue skills fill out the long climb to 60. The class used to get seven things at level 30, six at 45, and almost nothing across the thirty levels between and after. The new ones all deepen the sneak pips: hold your edge longer once you are spotted, charge twice as fast in the dark, spend the whole pool on a single decisive blow, open a fight without losing anything for it, and finally carry more shadow than the eye can use.
• Death Strike finally lands the critical it promises. It has always said "guaranteed critical" and always rolled for one like any other swing.

Party

• A pet at heel steps out of the doorway rather than corking it, now that a shut door is a real barrier to everyone.
• Pets respect doors. A hound no longer walks through a shut one, and could no longer leave a room the party was closed into. A companion with hands opens it from the threshold instead, the way everything else in the game does; one without routes around, and a locked door stops all of them.
• Companions walk in your footsteps. A companion standing north of you used to keep station there when you walked east, sliding along beside you. Now they drop in behind, into the tile you just left, and the line bends round a corner instead of everyone cutting across it.

v0.5.1713 August 2026

The party

• A new game makes three characters. Full creation for each in turn, and then a choice of which one's homeland the party starts in.
• All three stand on the map, and one key switches which of them your keys move. The one you are steering is the bright one.
• They follow you, walking real ground rather than teleporting, opening doors they can open and stopping at ones they cannot. One key toggles between Follow and Hold, so you can post them somewhere and go on alone.
• They fight for themselves. A Cleric mends the hurt and gets the fallen up, a Ranger looses arrows if they have a bow and closes to melee if they do not, and casters throw their class's bolt. Otherwise they swing at whatever is in reach, and they never start a fight with a townsperson.
• The party sees as one. Everybody's field of view is folded together, so a companion round a corner shows you what is round the corner. A companion carrying a light lights the room for everyone, and keeps lighting it when you switch away from them.
• Enemies come for whoever is nearest, and hurt the person they actually reached rather than whoever you happened to be steering.
• The log names people. "Brea heals Aldo for 23 HP", not "The Cleric heals the Warrior".

Death, and coming back

• A fallen companion drops where they stood and control passes to somebody still standing.
• Pour a potion into them. Stand over somebody who is down, reach for a healing draught, and pour it in the way you pour oil into a lamp. Drinking one yourself is still the eat key; pouring is for somebody who cannot lift the flask.
• Or carry them out. Lift a fallen companion and they ride on your back. Your hands are full while you do: you can walk, but you cannot swing or cast. Nothing can strike a body you are carrying.
• Switch to a fallen companion and you take up their spirit, standing where they are bound, with their body left exactly where it dropped. Walk them back to it. Their living friends carry on without them, waiting wherever you left them until you switch across again.
• A companion standing over the body can fetch them home, pouring a draught into it and pulling the spirit back from wherever it had wandered. You always come back over your own body.
• Carrying a body shortens the walk home. Haul it out of a dungeon and the spirit has less ground to cover; leave it and they have more.
• A whole party falling no longer strands anyone. Everyone gets their own body and their own spirit, and every one of them can be brought back.

Everything belongs to somebody

• Packs, gear and coin are per-character. Each member carries their own things, wears their own armour and keeps their own purse.
• Hand things over with a key, choosing who gets it.
• The inventory says whose it is, and switches between members without closing.
• Quests, faction standing and the bestiary travel with the character who earned them.

One key for the world

• A single interact key replaces walking into things. Press it and a list appears of what you can do from where you stand: loot or bury remains, pull a door shut, lift a fallen companion, talk to, trade with or train under whoever is beside you, take a torch off the wall. It reads your own tile first, then the one you are facing, then the rest, and every row says where its subject is.
• Bumping means move or attack again, and nothing else. Walking into a shopkeeper no longer opens their counter, and remains no longer stop you: you step over them.

Doors

• Doors open when you walk into them, for anybody with hands. Creatures without them are stopped, and so is anyone at a locked door.
• They stay open until closed, which is now something you choose from the interact list rather than something that happens on its own.

Look and feel

• Two side panels instead of one. The party is on the left, quests and boons on the right, and the map runs between them with room for everyone's name.
• The party panel lists all three, by name, with their health and whether they are down or being carried.
• Corpses tell themselves apart. A creature's remains sit still, ones still holding loot blink, a fallen companion pulses red, and your own body cycles through every colour. Standing on a body no longer hides you under it.
• The character-select screen shows the whole party and its combined purse.

Elsewhere

• Admin-only minigame prototypes, behind the debug menu.
• Builds go to itch.io on release, and the website rebuilds and deploys itself.

v0.5.1611 August 2026

Ghosts & death

• The ghost realm is yours alone now. Dying used to leave you wandering a world still full of living townsfolk, shopkeepers and wildlife, none of which you could touch, and which fought each other in front of you. As a ghost you now see only the dead. The altar still stands where it always did, so the way back is never hidden.
• You can fight back as a ghost. Shades could always attack you, and until now the only thing you could do about it was run, unless you happened to be carrying a bow. A ghost strikes the dead the same way the living strike the living, by walking into them. The living are still beneath your notice, and you pass straight through them.
• The ghost's own skill finally works. Locate Earthly Vessel sits in the first hotbar slot the moment you die, and pressing it answered "Ghosts cannot use skills" every single time. It casts now, and points the way to your corpse.
• Your hotbars survive dying. The living and the dead keep separate bars, and both are saved. Arrange your ghost bar however you like: it is waiting exactly as you left it the next time you die, and your living bar comes back untouched when you recover your corpse.

Creatures

• Some things cannot be stunned, poisoned or frightened, and now the game knows it. A golem does not stagger and has nothing to poison; the undead have nothing to poison and nothing to frighten; an elemental has no anatomy to stun. Every construct, every undead and every elemental in the game is now immune to the things that should never have worked on them, and the log says so instead of your skill quietly doing nothing. This makes those three families harder: a shield bash, a stunning blow and every poison you own do nothing to them, and the undead will not rout.

Classes

• A Ranger's top Favored Enemy is worth taking. It promised bonus damage against "boss-tier enemies", a category nothing in the game belonged to, so the level 55 capstone did nothing at all. It is Favored Enemy: Greater Foes now, and applies to any creature at or above your own level, so it keeps meaning something as you climb rather than expiring the moment you outgrow the world.
• Every Favored Enemy tier now says what it actually gives you. They were written as percentages, "+10% damage vs humanoids" and so on, and have always given a flat +5 per matching tier.
• A Ranger's Shadowmeld does what it always said it did. It promised to make you hard to hit and instead granted a single bonus-damage strike, once, ever: it was handed out at level 59 and nothing gave it back. Now the first blow to land halves the damage you take for five turns, and it returns twenty turns later.

Controls

• The key hints along the bottom now name the keys you actually have bound. They were written out by hand, so they had drifted: the row offered "q" for your quest log and "c" for your character sheet, which on the WASD scheme are the two diagonal move keys, and "." to wait, which was never a key at all. Rebind anything and the row follows it.
• Saving is a key you can rebind. It is still F5 unless you change it, and it now sits with everything else on the Keys screen.
• The bottom row also lost what did not belong there and gained what did. Your race and class were printed there despite sitting in the sidebar two lines up, and in Hollowbrook the whole row was replaced by a note about the inn and the shops, which pushed out the movement and inventory hints and named two map symbols rather than any key you could press. Gone. The journal, world map, rest and eat keys are listed now, none of which the game mentioned anywhere.
• WASD is now the default control scheme. New installs start on W/A/S/D with Q/E/Z/C diagonals and Space to wait, rather than on the numpad. Nothing changes for an existing install: your saved keybindings are read as before. The numpad scheme is still one keypress away, on the Options screen under Keys, and it is still the reset that gets you out of a bad rebind.

Rendering / UI

• The title screen shows the build version. It sits at the bottom of the menu pane, so a bug report can name the build without loading a character first.

Fixes

• Dying no longer deletes every door and chest in town. A new character's home town was recorded before its doors and chests were placed, and dying rebuilt the town from that record, so a corpse run left Hollowbrook with 44 doorways standing open to the sky and six chests gone for good. Doors and other fixtures are now read back from the map itself, so the worst a bad record can do is leave a door shut.
• A bow shot no longer credits your next melee kill to the bow. Firing at something without killing it left the game thinking every kill after it was a ranged one, so a Warrior's weapon mastery trained the wrong weapon. Only Warriors could see it, and it did it quietly, in the character record.
• You can drink water when you're not hurt. A Flask of Water carries a small heal, and the game refused any drink that could not move your bars, so an uninjured character could not slake thirst at all.

v0.5.1511 August 2026

Combat/Loot

• Weapon quality now reads as a material, not a grab-bag of adjectives. A weapon's tier used to mix a condition, a heat treatment, a craft quality and an enchantment into one ladder, so "Rusty", "Tempered", "Masterwork" and "Runic" all meant different kinds of thing. Every weapon tier is now a single material, ascending Copper, plain iron, Bronze, Steel, Darksteel, Mithril and Wyrmsteel for metal, and Green, plain wood, Ash, Oak, Dragonbone, Ironwood and Worldroot for wood. Nothing about what any of your gear does has changed, only what it is called.
• The weapon ladder finally reaches the level cap. Two-handed weapons used to run out of upgrades at level 30 and one-handed weapons at level 21, so roughly half the level range had nothing new to find. Four new material tiers, metal's Adamantine, Starsteel, Voidsteel and Aetherium and wood's Wyrdwood, Wraithwood, Godbough and Worldheart, now carry every major weapon type up through level 60, with the best two-handed weapons roughly doubling their old damage ceiling and the best one-handed weapons close behind, since a one-hander still leaves a hand free for a shield. The strongest creatures in the world now carry them, and a creature drops the weapon it was actually fighting with, so King Halvard swings the Aetherium Greatsword you can take off him. Expect to earn one rather than find one: the rarest drop at three percent.
• A one-handed weapon now gets credit for the hand it leaves free. A one-hander used to carry the same advisory level as a two-hander doing the same raw damage, even though only the one-hander lets you also carry a shield. Its listed level now runs higher for the same damage, so the label finally matches what it is worth to a character who fights with a shield up. And carrying that shield really does pay off: measured across the whole level range, a one-hander-and-shield build never loses a fight more often than a two-hander does, at any level we tested.
• Charisma finally does something after character creation: it haggles. A charming character now buys for less and sells for more in every shop in the game, and the more charisma you have the better the rate, up to a cap of a quarter off or on. At the charisma most characters actually carry it is a modest few percent, and a Bard's songs get a matching lift on top of it, since charisma is the one stat a Bard's music itself listens to. That is why a Bard's own headline stat is finally worth building up, not just its class skills.
• How hard you are to hit is now about your armour, full stop. Strength and agility used to sit quietly inside every to-hit roll, on top of your armour, so two characters in identical gear could be hit at different rates for reasons nothing on the character sheet explained. That is gone. Put on better armour and monsters miss you more; no stat moves the number behind your back any more, though stances, auras, class passives and your race's natural armour still can, the same way they always could. Agility still matters, but it works the way it should: agile characters and creatures can now slip a blow that already landed, a real dodge chance you can see happen, instead of quietly raising a hidden number that made them harder to touch in the first place. Every class reads the same way in the same armour, since strength and agility are no longer doing anything to your defense behind the scenes. This lands hardest from the low twenties on: fights from about level 20 to 60 get noticeably harder on both sides of the exchange, roughly five points less likely to land a hit either way through most of that range, so bring your best armour and expect fewer trades to go your way without it. The first several levels get a little easier instead, since low-level gear was never carrying much armour to matter and the change mostly removed whiffs rather than adding them.
• Armour means something on both sides now, so a monster of your own level can really hurt you. The last change made the to-hit die matter again, but it left the contest lopsided: you could be hit, in principle, and in practice a monster of your own level still only landed about one swing in five. It does not any more. Against something your own level it now lands closer to three swings in five, which is about what you land against it. Two things had to change together. Every creature now carries armour worked out from what it is and how old it is, so a thing that ought to be hard to cut really is, and the baseline the whole game rolls against came down a long way, which is what lets a point of armour on either side change the outcome instead of being lost in the noise. The fights themselves are not longer. Most are the same length as before, and the ones close to your own level, which are the ones you actually notice, mostly get a little shorter, because a monster that connects finishes sooner. Four creatures that could previously grind on forever without either side getting anywhere (the Blood God, the Sporeling Swarm, the Void Behemoth, and Yeenoghu now and then) no longer do.
• This is a further difficulty increase on top of the last one, and trash mobs are the part you will feel. Ordinary monsters of about your own level are meaningfully more dangerous than they were, on purpose, because a fight you cannot lose is not a fight. Measured on whether you win or lose, it is a smaller change than the last one, roughly a quarter the size, and it lands hardest early: around one match-up in twenty got markedly harder, one in fifty swung by half the win scale, and at level 60 almost nothing shifted far enough to change a result. How the fight feels changes at every level including 60, though, and that is the part to expect: a monster your own level goes from landing about one swing in five to landing about three in five, at level 60 the same as at level 15. Around level 10 is the sharpest step, and it is worth knowing before you get there. That is where a monster's armour has finished growing while your own kit has not caught up, so a same-level monster lands closer to seven swings in ten, and a fight you would previously have won without thinking becomes roughly even. Getting your armour up matters more in the early teens than anywhere else in the game. A handful of level 5 creatures actually got easier, since your own accuracy climbs faster than their armour does that early. The first few levels changed character most. Almost nothing misses down there now, in either direction, so an early fight is quick and swingy rather than a long exchange of whiffs. At levels 1 to 3 a fight against something a level or two above you has gone from a win you could count on to close to a coin flip, while something at exactly your own level is still a fight you win. The answer to all of it is armour and tools. A single point of armour is worth real percentage points now, and every class is expected to bring more than a bump attack to a hard fight, which is exactly why the numbers above are a floor rather than a forecast.
• The die matters again, at every level, and it cuts both ways. From about level 15 your attack roll had quietly stopped meaning anything: against a monster of your own level you landed every single blow you swung. The other half of the contest was not merely uneven, it was incoherent. Whether a monster of your own level could touch you depended on how far into the game you were rather than on anything about the monster. In the middle of the game your armour shut an even-level monster out almost completely, and late on the same match-up connected with every swing it took, because a monster's accuracy climbed with its level for all sixty levels while your armour class ran out of gear to climb with somewhere around level 30. Both halves are fixed by the same change: the contest now turns on the gap between you and what you are fighting, and not on your absolute level. Against something your own level you now land a little over half your swings, and very nearly the same share at level 5 as at level 45. It lands about one swing in five from the midgame on, and nearer one in three at level 5 where your own kit is thinner. So expect to whiff, expect to bleed, and expect a fair fight to take longer: an even match-up that used to end in thirteen rounds now runs about twenty, and nearer thirty at level 45.
• This is a difficulty increase, and it is meant to be one. Being honest about the size: nothing in the game got easier by any margin worth the word, and roughly one fight in six got markedly harder. The change is not even across the level range, and it flips somewhere around level 35. Below that, monsters of your own level hit you more often than they used to, and in the middle of the game far more often, because your armour had been enough to shut them out almost entirely. Above it they hit you a good deal less often than before, because a high-level monster used to connect with every swing it took, which was not a fight so much as an arithmetic problem. Either way the fights are longer. Several named encounters change character rather than just difficulty: Serjeant Wystan Holt, Commander Durgan Oathkeeper, the Orc Throne God and Yeenoghu are all longer and more dangerous, and Yeenoghu in particular is no longer a formality.
• Armour numbers are much smaller, and worth several times more each. A best-in-slot kit used to total 52 armour and the best chestpiece alone read 11. The same kit now totals 11 and the best chestpiece reads 3. Nothing was nerfed: a point of armour used to be worth almost nothing against a high-level attacker, and a single point now takes roughly three to five percentage points off an even-level monster's chance to hit you. The consequence for collecting is that a material tier no longer announces itself in the armour number. Celestial, Adamantine and Starweave gauntlets all read 1, and what separates them is the name, the level they are found at and what else they carry. One thing to know before you sell: because a shop pays for armour by its armour value, looted plate fetches roughly a third of what it used to.
• Your off-hand fights on its own, and the log finally says so. The off-hand swing was always a whole attack, with its own to-hit roll, its own weapon dice and its own critical hits, but it read as a footnote on the main hand: the log said "Off-hand! +2 damage.", and it printed above the very swing it looked like it was modifying. It now reads like what it is, "You hit the Rat with your off-hand Dirk for 2 damage.", and it comes after the main hand's line instead of before it. The bigger change is that the off-hand no longer waits on the main hand to land. Miss with your main weapon and your off-hand still swings, still rolls its own dice, and can be the hand that finishes a fight, with the hit sound and the flash a landed blow has always had. Landing one leaves stealth, so a Rogue cannot whiff a backstab and keep hiding while the off-hand does the work. Off-hand damage is still halved.
• A spear that finds a gap can finish the job. At Pierce mastery Rank III a near miss still slips a point of damage through, but that point was never checked against the target's health, so a creature on its last hit point survived its own death and kept fighting. It dies now, and drops what it was carrying, the same as any other kill.
• The big weapons need both hands, so a shield is a real choice now. Greataxes, greatswords, broadswords, mauls, halberds, glaives, tridents, bo staves, pitchforks and quarterstaves (70 templates across ten weapon lines, every material tier of each) take both hands and cannot be paired with a shield, and five named weapons (the Ogremaul, Shadowrend, Soulreaper, Stonebreaker and Galecleave) join them. A spear stays one-handed on purpose, since a spear and shield is its own way to fight. The shield slot is a general off-hand slot now: a shield there still adds its armor as always, and Rogues, Rangers, Bards and Warriors can learn Dual Wield and put a second one-handed weapon there instead, swinging it once per attack for half its damage. Equipping a two-hander clears whatever was in the off-hand automatically, though a cursed or bound off-hand item holds on and refuses the swap rather than leaving you empty-handed. Thirty-seven creatures that were carrying a two-hander and a shield at once have been corrected. Two of them, Serjeant Wystan Holt and Thordak Ironfist, traded a Broadsword for a Longsword so they could keep the shields their fights are built around. A Ranger's Dual Strike and Blade Flurry used to fire regardless of whether Dual Wield was learned; they now ask for the training first, the same way a Rogue's paired-blade skills always have.
• Weapons say how many hands they take, and you can pick which hand one goes in. Every weapon detail pane, in your pack and in a shop, now reads "One-handed" or "Two-handed", so a weapon that will make you put your shield away says so before you equip it. For a dual wielder the comparison bars finally compare against the right hand: they show the hand the equip key would actually change, and name it. Pressing shift with the equip key sends a weapon to your main hand instead, which is the only way to replace the main weapon while both hands are full. The inventory shows both options on the weapon itself whenever the two keys would do different things. Nothing about the override skips a rule: a cursed or bound weapon still refuses to come off.
• A sheathed melee weapon was quietly boosting your bow's critical hits, and that is fixed. Critical damage on a bow shot was reading whatever weapon type sat in your main hand, so an axe worn for its mastery bonus handed its crit multiplier to arrows that never touched it. Bow crits now use the bow's own weapon type. Archers who were benefiting from a sheathed melee weapon's mastery will see their critical shots hit for less; this is the fix, not a new nerf to archery itself.
• A critical hit is a natural 20 on the attack roll now, and every class can land one. Landing a crit used to depend on a hidden chance that only Warriors had, so a Rogue, Ranger or Bard could roll all day and never once trigger one. Weapon mastery still matters, but instead of granting a secret chance on top of the roll, it widens which rolls count as a crit: a Warrior at Axe mastery 3 now crits on 15 through 20, the same 30% chance as before, since one face of a twenty-sided die is exactly 5%. No existing Warrior number changed. A natural 20 always lands, even against a target you would otherwise miss.
• Enemies can land a critical hit too, on a natural 20, for double damage. This lands on every creature in the game and is a real increase in danger. If you suddenly take a much bigger hit than usual, this is why. Heavy armor no longer buys immunity from being hit, only rarity: a natural 20 lands regardless of your armor, so nothing is unhittable anymore.
• Archery crits again, on its own merits. A sheathed melee weapon used to quietly lend its critical multiplier to your arrows. Fixing that bug removed the only way a bow could ever crit, since archery had no crit chance of its own to fall back on. A bow can now crit on the same natural-20 baseline every attack shares, so a shot crits without borrowing a multiplier from anything sheathed.
• Your off-hand is a real attack now. It rolls to hit on its own die, so it can miss independently of your main hand, it crits from its own weapon, and it takes the same positional and target-state bonuses your main hand does, still at half damage. A mace in your off-hand can now stun a target even while your main hand swings a sword, and a killing blow from the off-hand trains that weapon's mastery instead of your main hand's.
• Enemies can suffer several conditions at once. A stun no longer wipes out a disarm, or the other way around; each condition now runs its own course. This also fixes a real bug: a snared enemy used to lose speed permanently if it kept getting re-snared, or if it left the area while still slowed, and it now recovers as it should.
• Every stat grows as you level, and your class's own stat grows fastest. A Warrior gets stronger, a Rogue gets harder to pin down, a Bard's songs get louder, all just from levelling up rather than only from gear. Monsters level up the same way, so they finally hit harder as they level too instead of a level 60 horror swinging like a rat. That makes high-level fights shorter and more dangerous on both sides: a fight against something your own level used to be one you could not lose from partway through the game onward, and now it is a real fight you can lose. If a monster your own level suddenly feels properly threatening again, that is by design, not a bug. Early levels are barely touched. Bring your kit to a hard fight, since a bump attack alone is the weakest way to fight from here on.
• Armour is now named for what it's made of. Its tier prefixes used to mix conditions, craft qualities and enchantments, the same grab-bag weapon tiers used to be, and a few flatly contradicted the piece they sat on, like a Dragonhide Straw Hat, hide worn as a sun hat. Every armour tier is now a material, drawn from the same four ladders (metal, wood, leather, cloth), so the same word means the same thing whether it's on a sword or a breastplate. Nothing about what any piece does has changed, only what it's called.
• Light-armour classes can finally carry a buckler, and armour now improves at more points on the way up. Every shield used to require heavy armor training, so nine of the game's fifteen classes could never carry one, buckler included, no matter how light it is. A light-armour class can equip a buckler now, right alongside the caps and robes it already wears; the larger Shield, Kite Shield and Tower Shield remain heavy-only, so heavy classes keep the biggest shields to themselves. Twelve leg and helmet pieces that used to sit still for years and then all jump together at level 15 now improve earlier too, at level 9 and level 12, so the climb has three smaller steps instead of one big leap. Nothing about any other piece changed.

Creatures

• Creatures have real anatomy now, not just a hands-or-not flag. A Ratman fighting bare-fisted next to a plain rat, or a Hydra found swinging a club it has no hands to hold, both came from the same gap: one race could only be handed or not, for every creature sharing it. Hands, legs and a head are now tracked per creature, and every authored weapon, shield, boot and helmet in the game has been checked against what its wearer can actually use. Several fixes fell out of that sweep: the six Ratman variants now carry real weapons, and armor on the fighters among them, instead of fighting bare-fisted; the Scarecrow's pitchfork finally has hands holding it; and three dozen monstrosities (Hydra, Chimera, Flesh Golem, several Fungus and undead colossi among them) lost a generic club they were never able to hold in the first place. The armored Ratmen are a little harder to put down for it, since leather and a wooden shield turn real blows aside. Expect the steppe rats to defend about as well as the goblins they share the grass with.
• A creature only benefits from the gear it is actually wearing. Twenty-seven armoured NPCs were quietly getting the protection of two chest pieces at once, and one of them was doubling up on shields as well. They wear one of each now. For most of them that is a point or two of difference. For three it is the protection of an entire second suit of armour: Thordak Ironfist, King Halvard Deepstone and Coldren the Stormcrow are all high-level named fights, and all three are now distinctly easier to land a blow on than they were.
• A Barrow Ghoul cannot hold a maul, so it no longer swings one. Ghouls have claws where hands would go, but one was carrying a two-handed maul into every fight it happened to spawn with, and hitting for the weapon instead of for its own claws. It fights with its claws now, for roughly half the damage, on the third or so of barrow ghouls that used to find the maul. The maul is still there to loot off the corpse, so nothing was taken away from you. It is a level 50 enemy, and if you have been farming them you will notice.

v0.5.143 August 2026

Classes

• A Monk keeps their Tranquility through a save, and so does any healing you are under. Saving and loading used to throw away whatever regeneration was working on you, along with the boosted mana Clarity gives. For a Monk it was worse than an interruption: Tranquility is a permanent regeneration, granted once at the level it is learned and never handed out again, so a single save and load stripped it for the rest of that character's life. Both survive now, and a Monk who already lost theirs has it back the next time they load.
• A Vampire rises in the graveyard again. The graveyard moved to the fenced plot on the east side of town a while back, and the Vampire's opening never followed it, so a new Vampire clawed out of a patch of empty farmland in the far southwest with no grave anywhere in sight. They now rise beside the same grave the Catacombs open beneath.
• Every pool now grows from your stats, and your stats now grow with you. Stamina, Wisdom and Intelligence rise as you level, so a Wizard's mana pool grows because their Intelligence does, the same way it reads on a character sheet. Health, stamina and mana are all now derived purely from stats, with no hidden per-level bonus layered on top. Health itself hasn't changed at any level for any class; only the growth of stamina and mana pools is new.
• Warriors, Monks, Rogues and Beasts no longer carry a mana bar they never spend. Those four run entirely on stamina, and nothing they do has ever cost mana, but they used to show an empty second bar anyway, left over from before stamina had a pool of its own. It's gone now; stamina is the only resource bar a martial character sees, on the character sheet and in creation.
• Stamina now regenerates outside combat. It used to refill only at an inn, a bed, a shrine, or a revive. It now climbs back on its own between fights, the same slow trickle health and mana already had, and getting jumped stops it cold the same way it stops health regen.

Main Quest

• Quest cards read like a journal entry, not a command. Three cards used to tell you what to do in the imperative, sitting right under quoted dialogue, which read as a character barking an order. They now describe where the thread picks up instead of instructing you.
• Serjeant Holt stops saying the road is still dangerous once it isn't. After Garrek the Ashblade falls but before you have shown your ring to Herald Aldous Penn, Holt used to keep repeating that Ashblades still block the road. He now tells you the road is clear and points you at the herald.

Creatures

• Enemies have stamina of their own, and you can see it. A melee monster's power attacks and buffs used to draw on a placeholder pool borrowed from mana; every creature now carries real stamina sized off its own stats the same way yours is, so a martial monster tires out slower than a frail spellcaster of the same level. Select a target and its stamina shows right under its health, mirroring your own two-row display. Its mana never appears there. You can watch an opponent tire, but you can't read how much magic it has left.
• Scarecrows visibly wield the pitchfork they carry. The combat log now names the pitchfork every Scarecrow fights with, instead of only mentioning one on the roughly one in three that happened to drop it as loot. This does not change how hard they hit: the pitchfork's 1d6 ties the Automaton's bare fists exactly, so a Scarecrow that rolls one deals the same damage it always did, just with a name on it in the log.

Combat/Loot

• Three spells cost a little less, so every caster can cast at level one. Snare, Conjure Bolt and Blood Bolt were each priced just above what a new Druid, Magician or Vampire could pay on some of their races, which meant starting a character who could not use their own first spell. Each now costs exactly what that character has.
• The potions say what they do, and rank the way they read. Every potion in both lines now names its resource, so Strong Potion is Strong Health Potion, Grand Potion is Grand Health Potion, and Strong Mana is Strong Mana Potion. Greater and Strong have also swapped places, because a Greater potion ought to beat a Strong one. Both lines climb the same way: Health, Strong, Greater, Superior, Grand.
• The mana potions are a ladder too. Two of them restored exactly the same amount, forty, so one was a different name for the other. Mana now climbs 20, 35, 50, 70, matching the healing line, and the tiers are priced for what they give.
• The healing potions are a ladder again. There are two lines of them, one from the general stores and one from the alchemist, and they had drifted into each other. A Greater Health Potion healed 25 for 50g while a Strong Potion healed 50 for 30g, so the general store's middle tier cost nearly twice as much to heal half as much. Every step now buys a real improvement, and nothing on sale is beaten by something cheaper: 20, then 35, then 50, then 70, then 100. Prices follow, so the bigger potions cost more than they used to and the Greater Health Potion costs a good deal less.
• A Health Potion heals 20, wherever you got it. It used to heal 20 from the alchemist, the alchemy bench and your starting chest, but only 10 from the provisioner and the herbalist, who charged 25g for the weaker one against the alchemist's 15g. Buying from the general stores was strictly worse and dearer, and because the two versions shared a name and a glyph but not their strength, they refused to stack, so a trip to both vendors left you carrying two identical looking piles. Every Health Potion in the game is now the same potion. The alchemist is still the cheapest place to buy one.
• Shops stop offering to buy things they will not pay a copper for. Junk, books, spellbooks, trinkets, and weak potions used to clutter a vendor's sell list even at shops that pay 0 gold for them. They now only show up where someone will actually buy them, such as the junk dealer or the trapper.
• Only one carried light burns at a time. Lighting a torch, then lighting a lantern from the inventory screen, used to leave both burning at once. Lighting a second light now douses whatever you already had lit, the same rule the map's light key already followed.

Items

• A tea you are still drinking survives a save. Saving and loading used to throw away whatever tea was working on you, so thirty turns of restoration bought for 15 gold vanished with no message and no refund. The remaining turns now come back with the save, along with the rate they were pouring at.
• Herbal teas, the first drinks that work slowly. The herbalist now sells two, at 15g each. Herbal Tea knits a wound at a point a turn for thirty turns, and Bracing Tea does the same for stamina, the resource every class actually spends on its skills. A Health Potion is still the thing you reach for mid-fight; a tea is what you drink before opening the door, and it pays out while you walk. It keeps working with something standing next to you, which the body's own slow recovery does not, and it sits in Boons and Banes with everything else. A tea stands beside your other blessings rather than replacing them, so a Cleric drinking one mid-Regeneration gets both.
• Stamina has its own potions now: Stamina, Strong Stamina, Greater Stamina, and Superior Stamina. They round out the potion shelf the way Health and Mana Potions already did, sold at the Crown Provisioner, the Herbalist, and the Alchemist. Superior is found rather than sold, same as its Health and Mana counterparts.
• A third tea: Mindful Tea. The herbalist now pours mana's own slow restorative alongside Herbal Tea and Bracing Tea, 15g for the same thirty turns of steady recovery. It took splitting stamina and mana into separate pools to make this one possible.

Rendering

• Wall torches now hang on the wall instead of replacing it, and actually light the room. A lit corridor used to break its wall outline around every torch bracket; a torch mounted on stone or timber now keeps the wall's own connecting line unbroken, with a small flame drawn on the side facing the room. A spent bracket keeps its wall and just lets the flame go dark, and taking a torch down no longer bends the wall run around the gap it left. Shipped lit but dark: the first pass drew the flame without actually casting light, so a corridor full of them looked right and stayed black.
• The map editor shows which way a wall torch faces while you rotate it. Authoring one is paint the tile, then rotate it toward the room, and the editor drew no flame at all, so the facing was invisible until you tested it in game. It also spun the wall's own masonry glyph instead of the flame, so rotating a torch turned the wall rather than moving where the fire points.

v0.5.1330 July 2026

Main Quest

• New humans wake in an inn room. You start in a rented guest room in the Hollowbrook inn, the one with the storage chest in the corner, instead of standing at your trainer's elbow. Finding your trainer is now the first thing you do rather than something already done for you. Vampires are the exception: they still rise in the graveyard, which was never a trainer's elbow to begin with.

Rendering

• A shut door blocks sight, both ways. You cannot see through a closed door, and nothing can see you through one. Town buildings are dark inside until you open the door, and shutting one behind you genuinely breaks a pursuer's line of sight, which makes doors a tool rather than decoration. An open door blocks nothing.
• A new character starts with the map dark. Roughly a quarter of Hollowbrook was revealed the instant you created a character, including the arcane trainers' corner clear across town from where you wake. Fog of war now starts where you do.

Combat/Loot

• An empty chest looks empty. The inn's storage chest is authored with nothing in it, but was drawn in the bright unlooted colour until the first time you opened it. Any chest that spawns with no gold and nothing inside now reads as already emptied, and starts looking full again the moment you put something in.
• Distant fights stop narrating themselves at you. Two creatures scrapping on the far side of the map, or something you set alight that then fled, used to report every blow. Ambient combat is now only logged within twelve tiles. Anything involving you is untouched: being hit, hitting something, your pet fighting or dying, and any kill and its rewards all still land whatever the distance.

v0.5.1230 July 2026

Combat/Loot

• Fire damage says it is fire. A burning enemy used to report that it was writhing from poison whenever the burn hit for less than 20. Sunstrike always has, so that spell has been describing its own fire as poison since it was written.

Items

• Douse something, then set it alight. Tab a creature you are standing next to, empty a flask of bourbon or lamp oil over it, then touch a lit torch to it and it burns. Two deliberate steps, and the weather can ruin the setup, since a downpour washes the bourbon off before you get a light to it.
• Water puts the fire out before it starts. A flask of well water pours over a creature, or over yourself, and washes off whatever flammable thing was already there. It still will not fill a lantern; a lamp burns oil, not water.
• Rain soaks everything standing in it. Drizzle, rain, and thunderstorms wet every creature outdoors, and you. Snow does not; it is frozen until it melts. Nothing rains underground.
• Heavy rain puts your torch out. Rain and thunderstorms gutter a naked flame outdoors. The lantern does not care: it is a hooded lamp, and a hood is exactly what keeps rain off a fire.
• Tab reaches you, too. Yourself is the last stop on the target cycle, after every creature, so you can empty a flask over your own head, or hold a torch to yourself if you are foolish enough to have soaked yourself in lamp oil. Setting yourself alight takes a second, confirming choice.
• The inventory footer only offers the light key when the selected item is actually a light. It used to advertise it over bread.
• You can see how wet you are. Boons & Banes shows what you are soaked in and for how long. It is green when it is rainwater, since nothing can set you alight, and red when it is lamp oil, because something can.

v0.5.1130 July 2026

Combat/Loot

• Eating and drinking moved to their own key: press V. The use key (E, or F on WASD) no longer eats or drinks. Try it on a potion and it will simply remark that the thing is a drink. One key now covers everything you can put in your mouth: potions, food, water, bourbon. The inventory footer lists it.
• Food is eaten and drink is drunk. Every consumable was described as a drink, so a loaf of bread announced "You drink the Bread." Items now say which they are, and the inventory footer lists the new eat/drink key alongside the others.
• A flask of fuel now asks which light to pour it into instead of picking for you, and shows how much room each has left.
• Bourbon is drinkable at last. It was pourable-only, so the one thing you would obviously try to do with a flask of bourbon was the one thing you could not.
• The lantern. A refillable light, 200g from the blacksmith, burns clean white with a wider forward reach and a tighter halo than a torch, and outlasts one many times over. It is sold dry, so budget for a flask of Lantern Oil from the alchemist (36g) in the same trip: the lamp is the vessel, the oil is the light, and a new one stays dark until you fill it. A whole flask is spent whatever the tank held, so pour when it is low. Pouring oil with no lantern carried leaves the flask untouched.
• Torches are authored data now, not hardcoded constants. All three tiers (Cheap, standard, Quality) are authored in data files alongside every other item, and their light, such as reach, halo, and colour, is editable field by field in the item editor.

Items

• Doors are made of something. A door's colour now tells you what it is built from rather than whether it is locked. Every door in the world is timber today and looks exactly as it always has; iron and stone are ready for the places that will want them.
• The notes in your pack are real objects now. The race and class notes you wake up carrying were the only things in the game outside the item system, so they had no material at all, just a sheet of paper that would not take a flame. They burn now, like every other page. Three of them do not, and their own titles say why: a warning scratched in stone will not catch, while bark and a large leaf will.
• Fire does what you would expect. Use a lit torch on something flammable, such as a book, a note, or spare clothing, and it burns. A lit lantern will not do it: it is a hooded lamp, and the hood is rather the point.
• Lighting a torch in the pack is its own key: press L. The same key that lights a torch out on the map now lights or douses whichever light you have selected in the inventory, so the use key is free to mean one thing. Use this on something. The picker it opens is now purely "burn what?"; the row that offered to douse the torch instead is gone, because that is L's job.
• A lantern burns anything that pours and catches. Lamp oil is no longer a special kind of object the game recognises by name. A flask fills a lantern because it is a liquid that burns, so the bourbon behind the food vendor's counter works just as well as the alchemist's oil. A flask fills a lantern completely, whatever was left in it.
• Well water is a real item. Filling a flask at a well now produces an authored item with a description, rather than one the code invents on the spot, and the thirst cooldown follows from the water being water instead of from a name the code checks for.
• Ten consumables, four potions (Strong Potion, Grand Potion, Strong Mana, Arcane Salve), three foods (Bread, Cheese, Dried Meat), the food vendor's plain mushroom, the alchemy bench's brewed Mushroom Tea, and the sewer vault's Filthy Health Potion, gained proper item descriptions, viewable in the inventory like any other item.

Rendering

• Carried and cast light share one colour model. A torch's warm glow and a spell's light now blend the same way outdoors as they always did indoors, instead of two separate code paths that could disagree.

Steam/Marketing

• The website has an updates page. tomesandtactics.com/news/ lists every release, newest first, and the front page now carries the latest one, so there's somewhere to send players between builds instead of nothing at all.

v0.5.1029 July 2026

Windows

• No more stray black console window. Launching the game on Windows used to open an empty command prompt behind it, which sat in the taskbar for the whole session. The game now launches as a plain windowed application.

Saves

• Your characters now live with your other game files, not inside the install. Saves and keybindings move to ~/.local/share/tomes-and-tactics/ on Linux and %APPDATA%\TomesAndTactics\ on Windows. Two people using the same computer no longer share one set of characters, and verifying or reinstalling the game can't wipe them. Existing saves move themselves across the first time you launch, and nothing is ever overwritten.

Steam/Marketing

• Builds can go to Steam. SteamPipe build scripts and an upload driver for the playtest app, so a tagged release can be staged and pushed to Steam in one command, with the game checked for a runnable binary and a complete assets/ tree before anything uploads. Builds never go live on their own. Promoting one to testers stays a deliberate click in Steamworks.
• Setting up a second dev machine is one command.
• Downloads are back on the release page.

Creatures

• A pack is called what it actually is. Now that a companion is its creature record, the summon picker, the cast message and the party readout all read that record's name instead of a hand-written label. Call of the Wild offers Timber Wolf, Giant Wasp, Black Bear and Crow, and the log says "2 Timber Wolves answer your call!". Nothing can drift out of step with what arrives, because there is no second name to drift.

Rendering

• The party line in the sidebar has room for a full creature name, and keeps the pack count visible when a name is too long to fit.

Controls

• The arrow keys navigate everywhere. They already moved you on the map by the help bar's account; now they also drive every menu, list and picker, whichever movement scheme you play with.

v0.5.928 July 2026

Main Quest

• Your first task now comes from the person who gives it. A new character still wakes wearing their family's ring or oath-stone and reading an opening card, but the work itself is no longer sitting in the quest log before anyone has spoken to you. The card points you to Captain Aldric in Hollowbrook, or Commander Durgan Oathkeeper in the Thuldarin Underkeep, and they hand the job over in their own words, whether that's the cellars under the Hollow Rest or the failing low galleries. Until you go, the tracker reads "Speak with…", and clearing the room early doesn't count toward a task nobody has set you.
• The race quest window remembers the whole story. The Race tab used to be one long scroll beside a list with a single entry on it. It now lists the stages you have reached down the left, your ring first since you were carrying it before any of this started, and shows one stage at a time on the right: its opening, what the giver actually said when they handed it to you, the objectives, what they said when you came back, and how it ended. Nothing is listed before you reach it, so the log never tells you what is coming. It opens on the stage you are on.
• Conversations you clicked past are no longer lost. A giver's words used to exist only in the moment. The scene played, you dismissed it, and it was gone. The same went for the scene when you lift the dead man's ring out of the nest. Both are now in the quest log, under the stage they belong to, for as long as the character lives.

Zones

• The Crown muster keeps a guard tower now. Serjeant Holt and Herald Aldous Penn have moved out of the open clearing at the south end of the steppe road and into a walled tower, Holt a few paces inside its only door, Penn across the room by the hearth.
• Nothing wanders into the muster camp any more. The Central Steppes' roaming creatures and restless dead could previously appear anywhere on the map, including inside the tower itself. They now keep to the open steppe north of the camp, so the road's south end is somewhere to catch your breath.

Movement

• Roads and paths speed everything that walks them, not just you. A maintained road was already worth two steps of pace and a footpath one, but only to the player, which meant your pack animal plodded along at a third of your speed on the very ground meant to help you. Now the same rule reaches every creature: your donkey keeps up, and so does whatever is chasing you. Taking the road is no longer a way to break pursuit; it is simply faster going, for both of you.
• A creature is slow because it is slow, not because of its name. Golems, treants, oozes and the shambling dead still lumber, and now gain the full benefit of a road like anything else, so a golem on the king's highway is no longer a joke. You will still outwalk it.

Creatures

• A companion is the creature it is named after. A druid's wolf was a hand-written stat block that happened to be called one; it is now a wolf, with a wolf's body and a wolf's numbers. The same goes for every pet in the game. Necromancers feel this most: each rank of the raise-undead spells now calls up a real creature rather than a scaled invention. Zombie, then zombie brute, then dread revenant; ghoul, then ghoul ravener. Pets are broadly stronger for it, and a raised zombie now lumbers exactly as a wild one does.
• Swimming has changed hands. A companion's endurance now comes from the body it actually has, which reshuffles who crosses water well: bear cubs are the strongest swimmers, the risen dead are unexpectedly good at it, and ravens are hopeless. Horses and donkeys are no longer the best in the game. That is a reversal of what the v0.5.8 notes promised, and a consequence of pack animals being real animals rather than authored ones.
• The crown's quest-givers can defend themselves. Holt and Penn were townsfolk in all but name, level 4, unarmed and unarmoured, posted in country that fields orcs, hill trolls and the occasional ogre. They died to it often enough to strand the letter you were carrying, since a fallen giver stays down for a long while. Both are veterans now: Holt with a broadsword, breastplate and kite shield, Penn with a bastard sword and dragonhide leather.

v0.5.827 July 2026

Classes

• Character creation now steers testers toward the supported build. The first tester release is balanced and bug-hunted for Human Warrior; every other race and class now renders greyed, the info panel says so in prose, and the first time you deviate a confirmation names the untested pick before you continue. Nothing is blocked. Every race and class is still reachable, and the warning appears exactly once per run through creation.

Creatures

• Companions have stats now. Every pet, summon and pack animal carries the same five-stat block ordinary creatures do, so a raven is genuinely nimble and a bone knight genuinely isn't. Two things follow immediately: how hard a pet is to hit varies by its AGI instead of every companion sharing one flat value, and swimming is decided by CON. Wolves cross a river almost at once; armoured undead straggle. Fliers simply fly over. A companion that fails keeps trying each turn, so nothing is ever permanently stranded. It just arrives late.

Zones

• Hollowbrook's stable is open for business. Stabler Orrin rents a donkey (80g, 16 slots) or a horse (250g, 10 slots, but far hardier). The animal follows you everywhere, including through portals and down into dungeons; bump it to open its saddlebags and move items either way. Walk it back to Orrin for part of the fee. It never fights, but it can be killed, and if it is, its load spills into its corpse where it fell, so nothing is destroyed that you can fight your way back to.
• Deep water is now a real crossing, anywhere it appears. How far you can leap comes from AGI; anything wider you swim, on STA, one check per tile. The swim target never rises with distance. A wide river is won by attrition, not by a single roll, so no width is flatly impossible, just increasingly ill-advised. Miss a leap and you go in. While swimming you cannot attack or cast and you are far easier to hit, so water is a commitment rather than a road. Your pack animal makes its own attempt when you reach the far side; if it balks it waits on the bank with your cargo safe.
• Strathmoor's stream is deep water now. The three-tile channel that runs the length of the zone is no longer something you wade through. You leap it at AGI 18 or better, swim it, or walk to one of the two log bridges, which are suddenly worth knowing about. Nothing is blocked either way; the bridges are always dry.

v0.5.724 July 2026

Classes

• Shield Bash now stuns 2 turns (was 1), making the opener a real tempo swing. Stun duration is per-skill data, so the Shield line still scales cleanly (Slam 2, Crush 3).
• Juggernaut stance is now actually immune to stun and slow, as its tooltip always claimed. Creature crowd-control that would stun or slow the player is shrugged off while the stance is active (root still lands). Previously the immunity was described but never implemented.
• Ogres can no longer be stunned from the front. The race trait is now mechanical: a stun from an attacker in the Ogre's frontal arc (relative to facing) is ignored; flank and rear attacks still stun. Previously flavor text only.
• Level-up stat points persist now. The attribute point granted at each milestone level (10/20/30/40/50/60) was silently lost on save/reload, because stats were recomputed from race+class on load with nothing stored. A new saved stat-bonus field carries manual stat changes across reloads, so those points finally stick. Save format is now v52.

Editors

• Debug menu: Set Level and Stat Editor. The admin panel's Player tab can now set the character to any level 1–60. The character is fully kitted for testing, receiving every class skill, spell, and (for bards) song its level unlocks, including the trainer-only abilities normal leveling never auto-grants. Lowering rebuilds from a fresh baseline first, and milestone stat points auto-assign to the class's primary stat. A new Stat Editor adjusts each attribute up or down live (floored at 1). Manual stat changes persist across save/reload.

Rendering

• Every class's spells have their own look now. Spell visuals used to be derived from a spell's damage type, so every fire spell in the game looked alike regardless of who cast it. All ten spellcasting classes are now authored line by line: Wizard, Cleric, Necromancer, Ranger, Shaman, DarkPaladin, Paladin, Vampire, Magician, Enchanter, each with palettes and glyphs matched to its theme. Spells still on the old generic effect dropped from 255 to 25, and those 25 are monster/NPC spells that deliberately keep it. Palettes and glyphs are placeholders pending a visual tuning pass; class skills have no bespoke visuals yet.
• Rooted foes grow real roots. The Root line's leaf-green writhing vines are replaced by a bark-brown root patch that erupts from under the foe and holds for the duration. Roots are drawn as pixels (not font glyphs), so they taper, fork, and tile seamlessly across the 3×3 around the target. The renderer intercepts a dedicated glyph range the way it already does box-drawing walls. Every class that roots (Druid, Ranger, Necromancer, Shaman) gets the new look.

Combat/Loot

• Directional facing system. Creatures and the player now have an 8-way facing, marked by a small bar on the facing edge of the tile. Attacking a creature from its flank or rear grants a to-hit bonus (+2 / +4) and a damage multiplier (×1.2 / ×1.5); a struck creature wheels to face you afterward (unless stunned). Un-alerted enemies have a rear blind spot. Approach from behind to open with a free backstab. The markers can be hidden with F (rebindable as "Facing Markers"); the choice persists to config.
• DarkPaladin life-drains need a real target. LifeTap, LifeDrain, SoulSunder and Leech now require an adjacent tab-target instead of auto-picking whatever enemy happened to be next to you. Four single-target nukes (Immolation, Holy Radiance, Shadow Lance, Consuming Void) were also missing their target requirement, which left you refunded but out a turn.
• Spells with no target always go off. An area or self-cast spell used to refund its mana when it happened to catch nothing. Casting Entangle with no one adjacent, or Wrath of Nature with nothing visible, cost you nothing. Those casts now resolve normally and spend their mana, hitting an empty set.

Steam & marketing

• Added a 920×430 main_alt store capsule, center-cropped from the original.

v0.5.622 July 2026

Classes

• Root duration now scales with level. Root holds a target for your level + 5 − the target's level turns (minimum 1), so it lasts much longer against weaker foes and only briefly against much stronger ones. Also fixes an off-by-one where Root lasted 4 turns despite its tooltip promising 5.
• The Druid's bark wards are a sustained line now. Bark Skin (+3 DEF), Bramblecoat (+4 DEF + thorns), and Skin Like Wood last 300 turns as an always-on mitigation rather than a short buff, and the bark line is spell-only (the redundant Barkskin skill was dropped from the Druid; the Ranger keeps its cooldown version). Skin Like Wood was retuned to a modest +6 DEF / 20% damage reduction (down from +12 / 45%) so it complements rather than obsoletes the Earthen Armor burst, and its train level was corrected from 1 to 18.

Editors

• Stamp files are ~5× smaller and diff-friendly. Stamps now serialize each cell as a one-line inline table (rotation omitted when zero), cutting the Great Tree stamp from ~2,100 lines to ~400 with no change to how stamps load.

Zones

• Hollowbrook received a large layout update, and its ocean now rolls south toward the shore.

Rendering

• Water moves. Oceans roll with a stair-step swell that scrolls in the direction of the tile's authored rotation (Aureth unchanged; Hollowbrook flows south), streams ripple like shallow water via an animation-only tag with no movement-cost penalty, and indoor water is unified on one animated look.
• Leaves move with the breeze. Tree canopies rustle per-leaf (hashed phase and period jitter, sampled every frame) so foliage reads as wind moving through the canopy instead of a synchronized once-a-second pulse.
• Bark-hardening has a cast animation. Casting a bark ward (Bark Skin or Skin Like Wood) draws a ring of brown bark that tightens inward around you and hardens (░→▒→▓) before fading.
• Rooted foes are wrapped in writhing vines. Any enemy held by a Druid root (Snare, Root, Entangle, Greater Snare, Entangling Grove, Thornwake, and any future rooter) now grows a living green tangle of vines on the cells around it for as long as the root lasts, then clears when it expires. It doubles as an at-a-glance "who's rooted" indicator. The vines radiate outward with per-foe variance so a rooted pack writhes independently, and only draw on foes the player can actually see (no revealing hidden enemies through walls). Purely visual; component-driven, so it covers the whole root family with no per-spell wiring.
• Nature bursts ripple outward. Wrath of Nature and Creeping Doom now throw an expanding ring of energy from the caster that reaches as far as the farthest foe they hit, then fades: bright green for Wrath, a sickly decay green for Creeping Doom. Purely visual.

Steam / Marketing

• Discord release posts now list every change. The auto-posted announcement no longer caps each area at three highlights with an "…and N more" tail. It shows a one-line highlight for every item, while still dropping the code and programmer-facing detail so it stays a player summary.

v0.5.522 July 2026

Rendering

• Leaves sway in the wind. The Great Tree's leaf tiles now gently rotate back and forth (a subtle wind wiggle, always alive, stronger during wind) as a render-time angle offset on top of their authored rotation, sharing its position+time phase with the existing leaf color shimmer. The renderer gained arbitrary-angle glyph rotation (put_t_rot_deg, 5° granularity, up from the prior 45°-step-only rotation) and a new AnimatedSway tile tag to drive it; purely visual, no FOV/collision/storage change.

Editors

• Stamps. A multi-tile map object placed and deleted as one unit. A stamp is stored as a single .map record ({kind, at}) that expands to its tiles at load, so the runtime tile grid is unchanged. Placeable via the editor's OBJECTS palette (or the y tool); the Great Tree is now authored as two stamps instead of ~37 baked tiles. Backed by a shared Footprint primitive intended to also carry future multi-tile creatures.
• Stamps are now authorable. A new F4 Stamp editor paints existing tiles onto a 15×15 canvas (anchor at centre) and saves named stamps to assets/stamps/stamps.toml; the Great Tree is an editable data stamp instead of a hardcoded generator. The map editor gained a Stamps sidebar folder listing every authored stamp, so picking a row selects which kind the Stamp tool places.
• Rotate tool. Any tile can now be rotated to one of 8 facings (45° steps) with the map editor's Rotate tool (q; left-click +45°, right-click −45°) or the stamp editor's rotate mode (r); rotation is stored per-cell in both maps and stamps instead of baked into per-direction tile variants. The Great Tree is now one leaf tile rotated per-cell rather than eight separate great_leaf_r0..r7 tiles.
• A starter library of tree stamps. Beyond the redesigned Great Tree, the stamp palette now ships a Round Tree, a Large Tree, and six more top-down tree shapes: a pine, a shrub, a bare dead tree, a broad oak, an aspen, and a sapling, varying canopy size, outline, foliage glyph, and bole color. Each canopy's leaves carry naturally varied per-cell rotations so no two point the same way, ready to place in the map editor.

Steam / Marketing

• Discord release posts are now a player summary. The auto-posted release announcement is a concise summary, the intro plus a few one-line highlights per area, instead of the full changelog with all its developer detail and code.

v0.5.420 July 2026

Combat / Loot

• Item tiers are now literal items (Authored Loot, Phase 1). Every base × tier gear variant ("Studded Longsword") is a concrete item; the runtime tier-generation system was removed. Loot stats are unchanged.
• Item "Level" now means "appropriate player level." The old loot-band fields (level + max_level) collapsed to a single advisory level, estimated from each item's own stats by a guess_level heuristic (uniques get a small enchant premium) and seeded across every item. It is purely informational, shown on item examine and editable in the item editor (g re-guesses from stats), and gates nothing. The dead max_level band field was removed.
• Hand-authored chest loot (Phases 2–3a). Chests carry a hand-picked loot list (gold range, per-item chance/quantity, optional mimic) instead of a random roll. The Southern Steppes chests, and all loot/props in the Well and Catacombs dungeons (chests, doors, traps, statues), are now authored data. The Catacombs gained doors they previously lacked.
• All dungeons are now authored (Authored Loot, Phase 3b). The last procedurally-generated dungeons, Grimstone Caverns (4 floors), the Steppes Well cistern (2 floors), and the Hollow Rest Cellar, were frozen into authored .map files, and the procedural loot/generation code (spawn_dungeon_objects, spawn_items, random pool rolls, procedural chest placement) was removed. Loot is now hand-placed everywhere; ghost/corpse-run and cistern entries load the same fixed floor as normal descent.
• Items (and uniques) are now authored in TOML (Authored Loot, Phase 4 Stage A+B). All 706 item templates and 16 uniques moved from a Rust code array to assets/items/*.toml, loaded into a runtime registry at startup (mirrors the creature TOML pattern); the 706-entry array was deleted.
• Books (33 in-game titles) are now authored in TOML (Authored Loot, Phase 4 Stage C). The 33 book titles, pages, and descriptive content moved from a hardcoded 33-arm book_data match in Rust code to assets/books/books.toml, loaded into a runtime BOOK_REGISTRY at startup (mirrors the creature and item TOML patterns); the hardcoded book table was deleted.
• The merchant Sell tab now lists stack quantity and the whole-stack price.

Zones / Movement

• Doors are real, openable entities everywhere. Every door, whether town, zone, or dungeon, is now one kind of authored door (brown, optionally locked) instead of a wall tile. Bumping a closed door opens it, a second step walks through, and it closes again behind you. Locked doors are picked or bashed by the classes that always could. The rare door-shaped zone transitions (e.g. the Hideout's east exit) became lockable portal-doors. The legacy door/locked_door tiles were removed entirely.
• Roads are faster than footpaths. A road tile grants +2 speed tiers, a path +1 (previously the "path" tile carried the bonus and "road" gave none).
• Weapons-shop signs render as a sword glyph.
• Hollowbrook's graveyard moved to a fenced plot on the east side of town, and the Catacombs entrance moved with it.

Editors

• Dungeon floors are now authorable. They load from assets/maps/<slug>.map when present (else build/generate as before), and are editable in --editor like zones. --export-dungeon <kind> <floor> freezes a floor to an editable .map. The Well ships from well_1.map.
• New editor placement tools: Stair, Door, Trap, Statue (joining Chest).
• One unified Door object (brown, with a locked toggle) replaces the old separate door tiles; it draws with the in-game braille door glyph, and walls auto-tile toward it. Painting a non-walkable tile over a floor prop (door/chest/trap/statue) now clears the orphaned prop, so the tile wins.
• Object placement is unified into the sidebar palette. Chests, signs, portals, spawns, stairs, doors, traps, and statues are picked from an "Objects" section of the sidebar instead of the Tools menu.
• Authored signs take an optional glyph (the flag remains the default).
• Item editor in --editor (F3) mirroring the creature editor. Browse/filter items, edit common + kind-specific fields, add/duplicate/delete, save changes to assets/items/*.toml.
• Item tags are now editable as chips. Select with arrow keys, add with N, remove with Del.
• Item materials are authored as tags now. An item carries material tags (e.g. a shield is wood + metal, a potion is glass, a claw is bone) instead of a single fixed material field; edit them via the item's Tags field.
• Editor text fields accept spaces. Sign text, creature/item names, descriptions, tags, and the filter boxes previously dropped the spacebar. Now a space types a space.

Rendering / UI

• Animated braille doors. Doors render as braille glyphs that reflect state (closed / open / locked) and wall orientation. A closed door reads as a bar along the wall, an open one swung 90°. Adjacent walls curve toward a door just as they curve toward another wall.
• Procedural box-drawing walls. Wall and UI-border corners are drawn as center-to-edge stubs so segments tile seamlessly, fixing a long-standing corner misalignment.
• The HUD Log panels no longer scroll into blank space (the shared scroll offset is now clamped per panel).
• Examining an item now shows its authored flavor description, word-wrapped in the examine view.

Saves

• SAVE_VERSION 49 → 50: loading an older save drops stale per-area state so authored dungeon content appears. Characters, inventory, and quests are unaffected.

v0.5.318 July 2026

Quest tracking

• Curatable HUD quest bar. The quest bar now shows only what you've tracked, not every active quest. In the Quest Log, the action key toggles the selected item onto/off the bar (★ marks tracked rows), whether a side quest on the General tab, or the main-quest arc on a chronicle tab. Newly accepted side quests are auto-tracked, and the bar shows +N more when tracked quests overflow the panel.

Playtest fixes

• Guards (and other authored NPCs) now wield their weapons. Equipment issue was gated behind the random-loot flag, so loot:false town/city guards spawned unarmed and hit for ~2-3; authored gear is now always issued (conjured summons still carry nothing).
• Creatures regenerate HP out of combat like the player (STA-based, every 5 turns; a hunting creature doesn't heal).
• Warrior Charge dashes to the target (all charge variants), range-limited to 6 tiles.
• Attacking a neutral creature flips your stance to Aggressive, so you're not re-prompted on the next one.
• Autosave on dungeon floor descent/ascent (previously only zone crossings).
• Rest (Shift+Z) now waits for HP and your resource pool to fill, and wakes you when anything damages you, including attackers you can't see (previously only a visible enemy interrupted a rest).
• Inn beds confirm before charging 10g.
• No-quest NPC dialogs close with the action key, not just Esc.
• Hints: sound options show the spacebar toggle; the save-slot screen shows the configured movement keys.
• Journal folded into the Quest window as a "Journal" tab. j opens the Quest window focused on the Journal tab, q on the quest list. Same window, toggling like inventory/spells.
• Quest Log redesigned as master-detail: every tab is now a left sidebar of names + a right main pane of the selected item's data. ↑/↓ pick, ←/→ scroll the main pane. Books render inline in the Journal tab (no separate Book popup). (Quest tracking is being reworked separately. The action key is reserved for it.)

Combat/Loot

• Weapon buy/equip preview now shows a resting-damage breakdown (STR, affinity, and always-on passives like Body Hardening) instead of an opaque "Effective" number. The 1d6+1-looks-like-a-bug case now reads as STR +3 / Affinity −2. Preview and combat share one passive-damage source (weapon_passive_mods) so they can't drift.
• Ranged damage now scales with the equipped bow's own dice (+ STR, bow affinity, ranged passives, arrow tier). Previously it reused the melee weapon's roll and ignored the bow entirely. A better bow did nothing.
• Finesse: damage scales off the better of STR or AGI for every weapon (mirrors to-hit). AGI-built classes (Rogue/Ranger/Monk) finally get damage from their primary stat; the preview labels the winning stat (AGI +4).
• Rangers now prefer bows (+1 affinity instead of −2 not-preferred).
• Archer rebalance. Bows roughly doubled in dice (they fire on a 2-turn cooldown, so they hit ~twice as hard) and new high-tier bows added: Recurve Bow (3d8), War Bow (3d10), Great Bow (3d12). A DPS harness pins archer single-target damage to ~melee parity at L1/10/30/60.
• Ranger passives now match their tooltips. Predator's Instinct deals its promised +25% damage to targets below 40% HP (was a flat +3); One With Nature grants its full +5 ATK / +5 DEF / +3 HP-per-turn while in the wild (was a flat +4 ATK with no outdoors gate). Both are conditional now, so they no longer show as always-on bonuses in the damage preview.

Rendering / Zones

• Unified "outdoors" check. A single AreaId::is_open_air() (open sky = outdoor lighting AND not a settlement) now gates all outdoor bonuses, derived purely from a zone's lighting + settlement labels. Replaces the ad-hoc is_wilderness() (removed) with its hand-maintained exclusion list.
• Druid outdoor bonuses no longer apply in caves. They now require open sky like their tooltips say: OutdoorAttunement regen, the nature-damage multiplier, AncientBark DR, and Wildfire's bonus are inactive underground (previously indoor caves counted as "wilderness").

v0.5.217 July 2026

Creatures / Loot

• Animal material drops. Beasts drop what you'd harvest from them: meat (edible food that heals), plus species hides, furs, pelts, skins, and trophies (Venison, Bear Hide, Snake Skin, Ivory Tusk, …).
• Authored weapons & armor for every handed creature. Goblinoids, undead, and the humanoid NPCs/demons/giants/aberrations/fae now carry level-appropriate weapons and armor as data. They wield it in combat and drop it on death. Replaces the old spawn-time "default weapon" and abstract worn-armor systems, which are removed.
• Named bosses get signature uniques (Vashk→Galecleave, Gruumsh→Ogremaul, Yeenoghu→Thornwhip, Orc Throne-God→Eclipse).
• Undead carry poorer, decayed gear than the living; ghouls are now feral and rend with their claws instead of wielding scavenged weapons.
• Beast monstrosities (hydras, krakens, colossi, behemoths, myconids) get an authored natural-armor value instead of nonsensical worn gear.
• Handless creatures can author their natural attack. A damage = { dice, sides } field overrides a creature's race bite/claw/slam, so a god-tier wolf can hit for 2d8 while a timber wolf keeps the 1d6 default. That's the way to scale damage for creatures that can't hold a weapon.
• Civilian townsfolk wear cloth clothing (not armor) and carry improvised tools: a baker swings a Rolling Pin, a miner a Pickaxe.
• Unique weapons no longer spawn randomly on dungeon floors. They only enter the world through deliberate placement (boss drops, quests, the editor).
• Valuables. New Valuable item kind (gems, treasure) that sells for real gold at any non-junk shop. A Gem is worth 40g. The miner drops one.

Combat / Loot

• Unarmed fists hit for 1d2 (down from 1d4) for all humanoid races and the player. A bare fist is now weaker than a forged dagger. Monks and Unarmed Mastery scale separately and are unaffected.

Editors

• Creature editor shows a read-only "Hands" note (whether a creature can wield/wear its equips) and editable Armor and Dmg Dice / Dmg Sides natural-combat fields.

v0.5.116 July 2026

Fixes

• Packaged builds now load every authored map. Map files moved under assets/maps/, which the system launcher already symlinks into the runtime directory. The old top-level maps/ was never shipped, so a packaged v0.5.0 crashed on entering Aureth and silently fell back to the generator for other towns. Verified loading in-game.

Editors

• "Menu" dropdown at the top-left of both the map and creature editors. Switch between the two editors or exit, by mouse.
• Keyboard navigation: Alt+M opens/toggles the menu on either screen; arrows move the highlight (all four, wrapping), Enter runs the item, Esc/Alt+M close; an open menu is modal.
• Exit now works from a mouse click, and the save/discard prompt draws on the creature screen too.

Repo & tooling

• Repository reorganized: runtime data under assets/, all docs under docs/, release/marketing (launcher, capsules, trailer, website) under packaging/; stale experiment/config files removed.
• Published releases announce to Discord; CI actions/checkout bumped to v5.

Steam & marketing

• Store copy and the landing site reframed as single-player (dropped MMO framing).

v0.5.016 July 2026

Classes & abilities

• New class: Dark Paladin. Full 30-skill, 14-spell kit.
• Cleric build-out through the Veteran tier (Lv 1–52): healing core, Expert and Veteran abilities, Divine Gift auto-unlock.
• Paladin build-out: Divine Gift tiers, the aura system, and a church trainer with tithe tiers.
• Necromancer build-out: vampiric DoT stacking and dark-trainer capstones (through Lv 56).
• Warrior skills & spells pass.
• Stamina resource for melee classes: a green SP bar with tiered skill costs.
• Per-class creature ability kits (mana, chants, crowd control, summons).

Main quest

• Per-race main quest engine with accept/redirect routing and Chronicle recaps.
• Human main questline, Stages 1–6, A Road Begins through The Gathering Storm, with authored zones for each stage.
• Quest log gains Quests / Chronicle tabs and a city list.

Creatures: data-driven rebuild

• Central creature catalog with full stat blocks, then unification of every family to (Race, Class, Level) with derived level & XP.
• Symmetric combat foundation and a faction relationship ledger.
• Migration to editable TOML: creatures now load from assets/creatures/*.toml at runtime; the compiled catalog is retired.
• Creature equipment via loot tables (gear is named in the combat log).

Editors & tooling

• In-game map/tile editor (--editor): paint tools, tool menus, palette folders, zone dropdown, live resize reflow.
• Map file format (RLE .map), export-all-zones, and maps as the source of truth for every zone.
• Signs as tiles and authored map signs.
• Creature editor: browse, edit, and create creatures with a loot sub-editor, authoring canonical TOML.
• Spawn tooling: visual placement, drag-to-move, race filter, per-spawn leash (wander radius), and NPC schedules.
• Portal system: a portal registry plus editor portal tools, entry picker, and return-on-pick with a glyph chooser.

World & zones

• Aureth hand-authored in the editor: docks, enclosures, clean building corners.
• Cogwarren / gnome deep-cave city (hub-and-spokes).
• New zones: The Reach, Harrowmarch, Kingsholm (the capital), Peak / Valley / Cliffs / Great Plains, Caldmere + the Huge Graveyard, and the Thuldarin Underkeep with random bounty quests.
• NPC schedules & ambient citizens; town guards now fight hostile monsters and constructs.

Combat, loot & items

• Level-based loot and armor tiers.
• New equipment slots: footwear, gloves, legs.
• Chest storage window for stashing gear.
• Movement speed system with instant held-direction movement.
• Combat-log polish: perspective-coloured log, spell damage routed to the Combat panel.

Audio

• Asset-backed SFX replacing procedural stand-ins.
• Ambient fire loops and weather ambient beds.
• Combat music variety and diegetic-music integration.

Rendering

• Indoor/outdoor render unification.
• Chebyshev (8-direction) vision.
• Headless --screenshots PNG capture for tooling.

Steam & marketing

• Full Steam store capsule art at every required size, plus library hero, logo, and capsules.
• A self-contained landing website (website/index.html).