Brimir Update (v1212)

Brimir Update (v1212)

A player with 30 hours and three runs to Grade 7 sent us a long letter. The heart of it was this — "Thirty hours in, and I still have no idea how companions join after Finn."

What we thought was the pleasure of figuring things out was, for most people, confusion and frustration. Discovery comes from the solution, not from the goal. Meeting a Doppelganger for the first time and beating it — that is discovery. Hiding the fact that beating it is what brings Brin to you was never discovery. And that concealment taxed exactly one group: the people playing alone, outside the community.

This update is about opening what we had hidden and filling in what was unexplained or explained wrongly.

🔍 Opening what we had hidden

• Companion join conditions are now written down. Read them in the Hideout notice and the Chronicle «Companions» tab. You see the requirement and your current number side by side — not a poetic hint, but how much is left
• Companions already with you keep a «How We Met» record. The way you found them stays, in past tense
• Runes engraved into your body show every passive. Names and numbers, all of it — you no longer spend currency to learn the specs of a rune you are already wearing. Only Chronicle registration still goes through research
• 23 runes that could not be researched at all are now 0. The 19 entry-grade runes without passives were missing from the list entirely, which permanently excluded them from the drop-rate bonus research grants
• Runes sealed in a Soul Vial can be researched too — by player request

📐 Where the text was lying

An unverified description is worse than no description. We swept all of them, and added checks so the same kind of lie cannot leak back in.

• Debuffs with a 15% chance were written as if they were guaranteed — 14 passives, 18 runes
• Skills that inflict a status effect and never said so — 65 of 132 went unmentioned, and 9 named an entirely different effect
• Rune drop rates are now listed per source. Showing only the highest single value was misleading

📖 Fewer windows in your way, more text where you need it

• Blocking pop-ups: 44 → 9. The rest moved into facility panels as intros, into ⓘ markers, and into tooltips
• Every notice is now two lines or shorter
• Pilgrim's Guide «Notices Received» tab — read anything you passed by again, sorted into cards
• Buttons say why you can't use them, on the label itself. A tooltip is a bonus, not the only delivery route
• Guard assignment (V) — every piece existed, but the key was never wired to the skill. It is connected now, and the conditions for using it are written down

🚪 The way up — if it's locked, it now says so

The Portal Stele for a floor you hadn't unlocked simply wasn't placed. With no locked door, you couldn't learn the condition — you couldn't even learn the road existed. The entrance to Floor 6 sits where every single Floor 5 traveler walks past, and it was bare ground.

• Locked steles now stand as darkened sigil circles. Press F to read the condition — which altar, which rite, which Soulstones and how many, and how many you have so far
• The text is derived from the Offering data itself. Nothing is hand-written, so it changes when the balance does. These four gates previously had zero lines of in-game explanation
• Marked on the minimap as a dim grey dot — the road is there, you just can't pass yet
• When a seal breaks, you're told on the spot. The Coral Isle defense opened its portal on the Frost Isle, clear across the map — you could win and still not know what had opened
• The river in the Land of Darkness could be crossed on foot — water touching the trees along the bank was read as "shoreline," so the collision was skipped. A gate meant to be crossed only by ship was quietly doing nothing. Player report

💀 The death screen — what you lose and what remains

An answer to the report: "I can't tell who killed me, or what my build even looked like at the time."

• The summary splits into three columns — «This Life» / «Us, at the Fall» (Combat Rating, Pilgrim Grade, Sigil, runes and relics carried, companions, wealth left behind) / «What Remains» (knowledge found, achievements, carried favor)
• Carried favor shows not your current rank but the rank that actually crosses over into the next life
• Closing «Provisions for the Next Pilgrimage» without spending them no longer loses them. They come back the next time you start — the budget scales with how deep you died, so the deeper the death, the worse that loss was

🎬 First encounters

• Floor rulers get an entrance. The screen takes a breath, and the name lands
• Companions who join mid-labyrinth get a cut. Lagertha and Alba are the first companions most people meet, and they used to attach through a single quiet pop-up line. Now it's an event

🏟️ The Training Ground — from practice to the real thing

• Live rehearsal is officially open. Test your current party with nothing on the line
• Two Live Challenges — Grade 4 Ocean Serpent, Grade 3 Abyssal Colossus. Measure the wall before you actually stand in front of it
• Course rework — "Reading and Dodging Telegraphs." This is not a place to memorize keys, but to see what's coming and answer it
• Single-use Numeros were permanently destroyed by deaths in practice and rehearsal. Practice should cost you nothing

📊 What you can see mid-fight

• Gauges for stacking passives. Passives that build up over a fight now show how full they are, right on the HUD, instead of firing out of nowhere
• The log says who triggered a passive. The whole party was mixed together with no way to tell whose it was
• Support contribution appears in the battle results — Eir's healing and Baldr's shielding, in the same grammar as the damage meter
• Baldr's Barrier of Light was missing from the tally entirely — the damage it absorbed was counted as zero
• The target panel now shows buffs and debuffs. See what's on the boss and how long it lasts
• Monster markers show grade as an absolute number. The color shifted with your own grade, so the same monster looked different from floor to floor. Pilgrim Grade is not power
• tag on rune actives. Only the exceptions are labeled — most are melee, so that's the default, and only the few you can use from a distance say so
• The Reusable Camp Kit shows charges remaining — nothing on the item told you how many uses were left

🏛️ Town · Promotion

• Grade 6 promotion now requires a Sigil. once, what was already put in your hands
• The button on the victory screen wasn't appearing at all
• now shows how many Soul Vials you have left.
• Rune delivery contracts show your readiness.

The pilgrimage to the Heart continues.