The overworld is now a branching node graph. Each act is a lattice of forward-only routes — every step is a choice between a battle, an elite, a recruit, a forge or a trainer, with a few rows visible ahead before you commit.
Battles run as waves: the board clears 2-5 times before a single shared payout.
Waves keep the board — props, hazards, dropped loot and your party's statuses all survive the rebuild.
Persistent Wave N/M counter in the battle HUD for multi-wave fights.
Run loadouts: each class opens a run with a pinned core ability and a random roll, and grows from there instead of rerolling every battle. Geomancer always pins Resonant Pillar.
Four guaranteed Trainer / Gem Forge stops per act, both free picks — every route crosses all four.
Party portraits on the overworld roster show their equipped loadout, with names on hover.
Changed
One free hire and one rest per act are now structural — the recruit rift is a single funnel node at the start of every act, and routes converge on one rest node.
More elite nodes per act (roughly 11% to 14% of rolled nodes).
Map reads closer: three visible node rows, four lanes, and POI / monster icons at double size.
No row is ever uniform — pacing rows alternate Trainer and Gem Forge, and no non-monster node repeats within a row.
Skull nodes resolve as the biome's battle with a bumped enemy count.
Items ride shoves — Kubinage, Sink Hole, Gravity Well, Resonant Pull and every other push or pull can now throw items. A thrown item damages whatever it crashes into, and breaks and collects at 1 HP. Walls just stop it.
Shadow Push can move props, matching Kubinage's rules.
Bats are grounded for the round by any damage. Grounded bats take 25% more damage and spend a turn standing back up, and only airborne bats dodge melee.
Chokehold's vulnerability ladder is steeper: 1.5 / 2 / 3 / 5 / 8x per stack.
Goblin Ballista spins its turret on any blow, not just melee and projectiles.
Gems hold at the kill for a moment before flying to the readout, and tutorial spotlights wait for the effects to clear so the drop they point at is visible.
Fixed
Chain links resolve in the order you took them instead of unwinding backwards.
A player already committed to a queued strike now sits out the chain.
Lights release with whatever owns them — charged Rising Pillar and tremor pillars die properly instead of vanishing, poison clouds killed by splash let go of their glow, and prop glows no longer bleed between dungeon rooms.
Dungeons no longer generate with an unreachable boss and treasure (previously about 7.7% of seeds were uncompletable).