The Weekly Shift (v0.41)

Version 0.41.0 BETA — and everything since 0.38.1.

Eleven days, twenty-three builds, 62 new things and 188 fixes, most of them from the notes you sent through the ! BUG button. The big one is a new way to play the month: every Monday the yard posts one contract for everyone, and a board to go with it. Under it, the intake got smaller and sharper, the leaderboard learned to show what a run was actually made of, the Ledger's debts stopped biting for a lifetime, and a long list of things that used to hang, lie or vanish now don't.

New

• THE WEEKLY SHIFT — every Monday, one contract for the whole world: one debt carried all month, two boons lent by the house, one seed. It's the full month, all twenty-two nights, on the house profile — no Morgue, no talents, no Ledger but those two boons, every card in the pool — so the board measures the player and nothing else. Play it as often as you like inside the week; your best score is the one that posts, and Monday's bell is the deadline. The first eight weeks are written by hand, and the pool behind them holds 23 debts and 34 boons, many of them found nowhere else.
• THE FINEST SHIFTS — the title's board has three pages now: THE CLEAN MONTH for runs that signed no debts, THE ASH PAGE for runs that did (every entry wears its multiplier), and WEEKLY for this week's contract, its terms explained under the mouse. Every score already posted stays exactly where it was.
• EVERY NAME IS A DOOR — click a name on any board and their shift opens: the deck as it stood, the real cards with their ranks, what they cast most, damage dealt and taken, the lowest they fell, kills, combos, crystals, time on the shift — and pages for the Morgue upgrades, the talents or the contract terms they stood on. Every post files it through Steam Cloud.
• FOUR RITES — the intake is four choices now, on every corpse, every night, and they never change: Burial, Embalm, Dissection and Full Release, cheapest at the top. EMBALM is the build rite — a 1-Essence pick that names a family, deals five of its cards out of the drawer and preserves one at rank 1. DISSECTION takes the body apart into four Veil cards and a Mystery. And every card you bury banks a duplicate toward a kept card of its own family: thinning the deck is rank progress now.
• THE SCORE YOU WATCH IS THE SCORE YOU POST — with debts signed or Overtime paying, the HUD shows what the run is worth, every kill pops for its full worth, and the dawn opens with the posted score and its receipt: what you earned, what the Ledger multiplied, what Overtime paid.
• THE CHAIN HOLDS — a score streak carries from one night into the next for as long as nothing out there lands on you. Blood you spend on your own cards is a price, not a hit. And a crash no longer costs you the chain: the multiplier rides the save every turn and comes back the moment CONTINUE reopens the night.
• THE MASTERS' TREE HANGS IN THE STUDY — finish a run and a plaque appears under the shelf: the whole lattice, every claimed talent lit, and Marks can be spent right there. Two new gold boons on the Ledger: THE AMENDED RECORD forgives one streak-breaking hit a week, and THE CLEAN RECORD carries the unspent charge forward, week after untouched week.
• THE CARD DESK AND THE RANK LEDGER — every card-select screen rebuilt on one shape with a right-click quick menu. Right-click any offered card and it flips over in place, every rank it can reach printed on its back. The Study's binder opens a card's full ladder beside the book and searches every card by name, rule or keyword.
• THE PACK RIP, THE STEADY HAND, THE SPLITS — boosters turn over one card at a time, worst first, and never force their cards on you. Casts land once a beat, so speed-players get a readable cascade instead of a blur. The run clock in the top bar opens a speedrun board with a delta for every night against your best finished run.
• THE GRAVEYARD SPEAKS — the Veil's price names what it did and why; every omen says its rule wherever it appears; the combat log shouts what changes a run; a lapsed contract and the death rattle wear the blood banner. The Tutorial book is a second edition: all 22 pictures re-shot, a keyword field manual, and every page says when the game first shows it.
• THE CRASH COURIER — after a crash the title asks before anything is sent and says exactly what goes; the report carries the whole bundle. The death page has REPORT A BUG beside TRY AGAIN, the game writes a session log now, and the download dropped from about 700 MB to under 200 MB.
• CONTROLLER AND STEAM DECK — a pad reads the title's board (walk the names, open a shift, turn its pages on the bumpers), the left stick walks your hand, the Masters' Tree in the Study plays fully on a pad, small text no longer loses the tops of its letters on the Deck, all 93 symbols ship with the game, and Options fits an 800-line screen.

The honest wall

• A card that draws no longer hands back the Essence it cost. The Essence Well, Blood Pact and a dozen draw cards were engines that dug the whole deck for free; every one now pays what it is worth, and Blood Pact's price climbs with its ranks — 5, 10, 15 HP — because a pact can kill you.
• There is a ceiling on the Essence you can hold. An ordinary turn never meets it; anything past it banks as a crystal instead of buying a hand of free Legendaries.
• THE FAMILY FOCUS is a pity, not a tax: commit to a family and the yard makes sure it is never unseen more than two offers running, without starving you of everything else.
• The Ledger's gold page is halved and re-ordered by what each boon is worth, and a signed debt bites ONE run — the book is blank for the next. THE COLD ROOM halves healing instead of refusing it; THE INCINERATOR deals three a turn to a hand of six instead of a pile that never refilled.
• Elites no longer take flesh from a variant, Total Recall is a rare sight at every door, Devil's Bargain costs 3, Iron Blood pours +10 a dose, and Corvane the Hollow eats cards of any family.

Fixed

• The run-ender: opening your DECK while a body sank threw away your next turn. It is owed now, and paid the moment the table is yours again.
• A week 3–4 freeze around a possessed corpse, the final boss vanishing mid-fight, a table that stopped dealing — a watchdog frees any stalled table after eight seconds and says so.
• THE UNATTENDED killed the enemy's nameplate for a whole run, and a debt signed by browsing the ash page rode every run after it, in silence.
• Six mobs skipped their death entirely. Every body gets its full three-second exit now, the possessed included, before any reward screen rises.
• Quitting through EXIT GAME was reported as a crash on the next launch.
• THE LONG SHIFT counted every weekly boss as a finished month, so a profile that never finished the game could sit at tier 10. The ramp is OVERTIME now, moved by true victories only.
• Card text ran out of the parchment on the longest cards; thirteen of them are reworded shorter with every number kept.
• Three upgraded Bone Cleavers showed as one tile, a duplicate Legendary died for a crystal, and three auto-reforges played on top of each other.
• Poison never wrote itself into the Grudge Ledger, and poison cards printed the number on the card rather than the number that landed.
• The pack rip's face-down pile lay across the cards it had dealt, and filled its row 1, 2, 3, 5, 4.
• The shop's refresh handed back a whole new shelf after you had bought three of five.
• The title's boards read "no one yet" beside a real rank — Steam answers one leaderboard read at a time and the title asked for six at once.
• The demo revealed ten still-locked cards after the Coroner.
• The main menu animated at half your monitor's rate.
• The in-run menu ran off the right edge, the options column ran off a Deck's screen, and the binder sat on a third of the desk.

Every number above was measured through the game's own doors, not guessed at. If something in the yard still looks wrong, the ! BUG button on any screen — and now the death page — reaches me with the frame and the run's state attached.