Update 0.65.7 - Painted Faces and Player Choice
This update brings AI-painted character portraits to the online realm, puts your difficulty setting on screen and under your control, overhauls the Online Play client's color rendering, and ships a stack of fixes from a full pre-release audit.
NPC Portraits, Reimagined
- Townsfolk in the online realm now get painted character portraits. Each NPC's portrait is generated once from their race, class, sex, age, and station, then cached and rendered straight into your terminal.
- Portraits adapt to what your connection can display: 24-bit color on the web terminal, 256 colors over SSH, and classic 16-color half-block ANSI art for BBS-style sessions and the game's own Online Play client.
- Royalty gets the royal treatment. When an NPC takes the throne, their portrait is repainted with crown and regalia.
- Screen reader mode, plain-text terminals, and the art-off preference are fully respected. Nothing changes for those setups.
Difficulty: Visible and Changeable
- Your difficulty setting now appears on the character status sheet, the health readout, and the statistics screen in single-player.
- You can now change difficulty mid-game from the Settings menu (the tilde key) in single-player, including custom games. Switching to Nightmare asks for confirmation and spells out the permadeath stakes first.
- Achievement integrity: the Nightmare achievements now measure levels gained while actually playing on Nightmare, so flipping a high-level character over for a moment no longer unlocks them instantly.
Online Play Client Render Overhaul
- The built-in Online Play client now uses native terminal color processing on Windows, fixing the garbled color output some players saw when the server sent modern color codes.
- On systems where native processing is unavailable, the fallback parser now handles extended color sequences correctly instead of misreading them as random colors.
- Session start and disconnect edge cases cleaned up so colors can no longer bleed into the login screen or the disconnect message.
Level Master Improvements
- Menu labels at the Level Master are now written out as full words in all five languages. Thanks to community contributor TestingBytes for kicking this off; they have been added to the in-game credits.
- The Path Ahead and Specialize services are now listed on the screen reader, BBS, and graphical client menus. The keys worked before, but the options were invisible on those displays.
Fixes and Polish
- Fallen townsfolk no longer appear in the talk menu at certain locations.
- Character creation's difficulty descriptions now display in your chosen language.
- Hungarian menu text at the Level Master now fits the 80-column screen.
- Portrait pipeline hardening from the pre-release audit: corrupted cache files self-heal, generation budgeting is exact, interrupted downloads can no longer wedge a portrait, and misconfigured servers fail safe instead of wasting generation calls.
- The difficulty line is hidden on the statistics screen in online play, where difficulty is always Normal.