Version 0.38.1 BETA — and everything since 0.36.0
Two things changed since the last post, and they pull against each other on purpose. The run got a shape: five nights a week, Monday to Friday, a boss on Friday, and a weekend the week's score pays for. And the dead got smarter about it. They resist what you throw. They bring a healer. They stand in a line and make you choose who dies first. A month is fifteen nights before the moon now — a third shorter than it was — and every one of them knows what day it is.
New
THE WORKING WEEK — five nights, Monday to Friday, with the week's boss walking in on Friday. Wednesday's fight earns a small stall of brews and thread on the way home; the full market waits for the weekend. The invasion keeps its seven nights and loses the weekend — but the stall still opens, even at the end of the world.
THE WEEKEND DELIVERY — fell Friday's boss and the week's score picks your booster. Fifteen pack tiers, from a single common up to five guaranteed Legendaries, packs that lean toward the family you actually play, and very rarely a card that arrives fully forged. No cap: the bigger the week, the richer the courier. A SAT tag rides the score pill all week so you can see what Saturday is worth — click it for the manifest. The parcel opens like a pack now: cut the twine, it fights the knife, and the cards spill out face-down and turn over one by one.
THE COURIER'S FAVOUR — score past 500,000 in a week and the manifest may be swapped for the Sage's Own Luggage: five Legendaries, one of which can arrive fully forged. Past two million it can bring the Impossible Freight itself. The top rung opens by favour, not by grinding an unreachable number.
A PERFECT NIGHT TRIPLES — end a night without taking a hit and the whole night's score triples. It used to pay a flat 500. The tally shows the arithmetic: 2,420 × 3 = 7,260.
THE DEAD RESIST — from week 3, certain creatures shrug their own affliction: poison things take half poison, stone takes half bleed, fire takes half burn. Never bosses. The ½ badge under the creature says so before you spend the card, and the log tells you exactly what was shrugged.
THE INVASION BRINGS A LINE — in week 4, and only week 4, the dead can bring company. A HEALER that mends the body in front of it. A CASTER that stacks its own affliction on you — a Toxicomancer poisons, a Pyromancer burns, a Hemomancer opens a bleed, each with its own colour and its own line in the log. On the Pale Hunt, a FREEZER that draws the cold a full turn before it lands: kill it inside that turn and nothing happens; leave it and you lose a turn of casting. Any two can stand with a front-liner — two healers, two casters, one of each — so a line never plays the same way twice. The support is soft: two or three ordinary cards drop one. The question the fight asks is whether killing the healer is worth the turn.
THE LINE FIGHTS LIKE IT MEANS IT — a healer whose front-liner is unhurt doesn't waste the turn: it weaves regen onto the body in front of it. A caster whose poison, burn or bleed you already carry at ten stops stacking and SPITS a direct hit in its element. Every move is announced on the creature's plate a turn ahead, the way it always has been.
A FELLED LINE PAYS — each support you kill scores 30 × night on top of its crystal, and bringing down the front-liner after every body that stood with it has already fallen pays LINE BROKEN: 50 × night per support, with its own chip and its own ledger line. Burst the front and leave the healer standing, and you keep only what you actually took.
CARDS THAT SWEEP — seventeen cards carry a CLEAVE mark. With more than one creature on the field they strike every one of them, and their animations open up to match: Kaelen's ray runs the whole line, the Bone Cleaver's overhead chop becomes a flat side sweep, Frozen Grave Pick raises a spike under every body, Ignite lights a fire under each one. Every one of them says "Hits all enemies" on its face. A few others carry a SPLASH mark instead — full damage to the body you aimed at, half to everything else. On a single creature all of them look and behave exactly as they always have.
THE RUSTED AXE FINDS THE WOUND — at its top rank, a creature already bleeding 20 or more takes 20 more on the spot. On a sweep every body is judged on its own wound.
AIM WITH THE PAD — while a line stands, LB and RB pick which body your card hits and the D-pad walks the hand. A toast tells you the moment the line forms. With a mouse, click the body.
THE SPIRITCALL BELL IS A LEGENDARY — it used to turn any blow aside for a single essence, which quietly got stronger every time the dead did. It costs 2 now, drops half as often as any other Legendary, and grows a ladder worth climbing: the summoned spirit stops the blow AND sends a quarter of it back, then half, then three quarters. Ascend it and the attack is turned entirely on its owner and the bell's song mends half your body — but a spirit that generous answers only once a night.
THE MASTERS' TREE, FORGED — the talent screen has lost its circuit-board look. The neon diamonds are forged-iron medallions with brass rims that glow in their branch's colour once claimed; the struts are brass rails; candle-light pools at the Founder's Reliquary. Every Masters' Tree node you own also hardens the dead by 1.5% — and elites pay half again more score for it. Power is answered, and answering it pays.
THE LEDGER LIES ON A DESK — oak and baize, stacked page edges, a stitched spine, a ribbon marker, an inkwell and quill. Every boon on the gold page wears its own glyph; a signed debt is a red wax seal pressed beside it. The book opens at HALF the tree now — six of the twelve talents — so it is something you will actually reach. And Second Opinion and the Holding Drawer, which were for sale with no way to use them, finally have controls: two iron plates above END TURN (L3 and R3 on a controller).
THE SAGE'S STUDY — Collectibles is a room now. A candlelit shelf in the Sage's own study: six books spine to spine with titles running down them, the card binder at the left end with rarity tabs along its top, the trophy skull holding the far end as the bookend. Open any of them and it lays itself out as facing pages.
HE REMEMBERS — fourteen ways the Sage used to fight, coming back to him. Build one at the table — eight Veil casts on an open Veil, a 24-damage Overexert, three Blood Pacts while healthy, an echoed nuke — and the game holds a memory ceremony: the set's cards stand up and light in sequence, then one line says what the machine does. Every memory is kept in the Study under MEMORIES, with its recipe.
BOSS POSTERS — every week boss walks in under a card: the creature big and still, his name struck on forged iron, an epithet, and what he does to you in plain words. The month masters got theirs too — THE SPEAR COMES HIMSELF for the Dragonlord, IT WAS NEVER ASLEEP for the Sleeper. The Demon Slime gets the exact same billing as everyone else, at a quarter the size.
THE GAME EXPLAINS ITSELF — nineteen hints, each fired once, ever, the first time its system appears — the line and how to aim, sweep cards, resistances, the market, the tree, the Ledger — and each one placed in the empty part of the screen it describes, never over the thing it is pointing at. Every hint lives in TUTORIAL, the ? beside the story book on the main menu: a bound book read a chapter at a time, with a figure cut from the game itself. A page you haven't met in play is sealed with wax, so the book never spoils what the game hasn't shown you.
THE IRON CONSOLE — the combat log, reforged. Filter tabs cut it by strikes, wards and omens; every hit draws a little health bar with the lost chunk still lit; combos and burns hang under the card that caused them; kills flare gold; and a sweep writes one line per creature it reached, with its own name and its own number.
The honest wall
A tester beat the game with a deck that never ran out, and another finished a run with 488 health. Neither will happen again, and the fixes are rules now, not patches:
THE PILE RISES ONCE — the mid-turn reshuffle hands the discard back once a turn, not forever. A card that draws may never pay back more Essence than it cost, at any rank. Elder Moss's well cannot be siphoned for free. The reward pool stops offering your sixth copy of a card as readily as your second.
A GUARD CANNOT OUTGROW THE MAN — Block caps at your maximum HP. It rises as you do, and the log says when a guard spills.
THE BODY HAS A LIMIT — cards can raise your max HP by +60 in one run. Past that they still heal the same amount; they simply stop raising the ceiling, and the card says so.
THE DEAD STOP GETTING WEAKER — two week multipliers were set low enough to cancel the difficulty ramp outright; the creatures' own afflictions now grow with them; Last Rites no longer heals the wound that powers it; a copy (Echo Chamber, Ring of Copy) pays the copied card's price; Aldric's Resilience is priced by use.
Fixed
- CONTINUE refunds nothing any more: the max-HP allowance, the run's one-off doors, the Ledger's debts and the Masters' Marks were all being handed back by a quit-and-reload — Marks could be farmed off a single master. The Founder's Pack can no longer be lost to a quit between a master's fall and the reliquary.
- The weekend is reachable. The delivery, the market, the Standing Appointment and the pity counter were all walled behind Friday's boss door; week 3's weekend opens too, and the market and stall now always open.
- Blade Dance and Fan of Knives actually crit. Their 50% was written on the card and never reached the roll.
- The killing blow prints its number again — it was the one number the game was swallowing.
- The boss posters actually appear. The Coroner's welcome was being torn down the same frame it was built, every time.
- The Embalming Table works (it did nothing for 5 crystals). RECEIVING puts the felled boss on your table. SIGNED OUT signs in week one. NO RELIEF refuses everything it says it refuses.
- Poison Drain's fifth star and nine Epics' sixth star now do something — each was an exact copy of the rank below.
- A wound breaks your streak once, not on every tick.
- On a sweep, every body's bar, number and death wait for the weapon to land; a blow aimed at a support shows on the support; and nobody on the field moves when a body falls.
- Week-4 card text is readable again, and seven older card texts that clipped at every size were trimmed without changing what they do.
- The Cryomancer stops pretending to heal, and a support's plate says what it will actually do — ✚ MENDS, not a sword it was never going to swing.
- Three of the dead faced the door instead of Aldric. Tooltips no longer stop mid-sentence. The Grave Curse names who cursed you.
- A crash from playing cards very fast. Demo progress carries over properly — and the demo now says so.
- The Study, the Ledger and the tree read cleanly on widescreen and ultrawide alike — no clipped names, no rectangle focus, no price tag you cannot read.
- The Keeper's Trophy on the morgue wall is the Veil Tyrant's own head now, mounted on oak with a brass plate — not two bone shapes and a grey ball.
Every number above was measured through the game's own doors, not guessed at. If something on your screen says otherwise, the BUG button is in the corner of every fight — it reaches me.