A Different Question, Not a Bigger One

A tester put it plainly enough that I couldn't argue: deep enemies "are often times reduced to simply having more health and more damage rather than offering a unique or varied challenge." I went and measured it, expecting to find him half right. From depth 1 to depth 10, mean HP rose 4.5×. Mean damage rose 2.7×. Mean ability count rose from 1.8 to 2.4 — which is to say, not at all. The bottom of the Labyrinth was the top of the Labyrinth with a bigger bill.

That's most of this week.

The bottom four floors ask something now

Seven deep creatures were re-authored, and three fully-built behaviours that had somehow never escaped the boss pool went out to ordinary spawns. The gloom and the hydra carry Miasma now — radius 1, so one pace back is clean air, but trading blows with a hydra is a race you lose. The troll and the behemoth got Quake: they throw you off the doorway you were holding, one tile, and the troll regenerates while you walk back to it. The gorgon has a Gaze that punishes standing in its line. Killing one draugr hardens every draugr still standing, so kill order is suddenly a decision. And the revenant traded its bag of healing for Bloodscent — it closes fastest when you're the one bleeding.

Every one of those was priced into the encounter budget, so a deep room that draws them buys fewer bodies. HP stayed exactly where it was. The floors can afford to be meaner.

Then the abilities the deep roster already had learned to scale, one issue apiece: Sunder takes two points at a stroke from the bottom two carriers, Pounce clears a two-deep front line, Frenzy turns earlier and harder, a Guard's disengage strike runs half again its melee, and Backstab sharpens — the reaper paying a point of reach for the worst rear arc down there. The deep pack hunts in pairs instead of threes, which is worse, not better. A Splitter's protoplasm barely weakens when it tears, so a floor-9 shoggoth no longer collapses into a two-body speed bump against a greatsword.

And the rabisu — the threshold demon — now chooses where it lands. It used to arrive wherever the enumeration order dropped it, frequently the tile directly in front of you, where a leap buys nothing a walk wouldn't. It leaps over you now and lands at your back, with the Backstab it always carried already drawn. The name finally means something.

Rooms you can actually fight in

Deep rooms were measured at 6.7 by 6.7 — at every depth. Only the map got bigger; the rooms never did. A ten-body encounter with a three-tile spawn cluster was landing in 45 tiles, which is how you get a doorway brawl that nothing in your kit can improve. Depths 7–8 now run rooms up to 14 across, 9–10 up to 16, on wider maps that keep roughly the same room count.

Themed terrain got the same treatment. It covered 3–5% of a room as isolated cells — confetti, not structure. A terrain rule now has coverage and a shape: Blob grows one contiguous region (a sinkhole, a pool of fire, a moat), Band draws a crossing with a one- or two-cell gap, exactly one bridge. The drowned quarter now runs about 13% water, the emberworks 11%, and the worst-populated room still keeps 60% of its floor. Cover you can use and chokepoints you didn't build are both terrain features now.

What lives there, and what you find there

The same complaint had a second half: depth 10 was drawing 72.8% of its bodies from creatures that unlocked on depth 6 or above — no, worse, 12.2% of them from depth-1 creatures, with only 3.1% actually gated to depth 10. Eligibility was a pure unlock test with no upper bound, so cheap old trash stayed affordable while the elites priced out of their own floor. Spawns follow the same depth-bias curve loot does now, stragglers are capped, and a deeper visitor turns up rarely rather than a shallower one turning up constantly.

Loot reaches the other way: armor and weapons up to two floors deeper than you are can drop, rarely — a find of deep steel you have no business holding yet. The Trainer deals its newest arts first, too, because a tester finished a full descent having been offered essentially none of the depth-6+ abilities. That wasn't luck; that was one-in-six per slot against a catalog that only grows.

Enchantment is capped at +3. Someone finished a descent standing in the Hollow in a +6 iron carapace with three better cuirasses unworn in the pack, which is the whole armor curve defeated by one scroll stack.

Everything else

• Hook and Impaler reach past the cardinal lane — standing off the diagonal is no longer free.
• A slain thief's death-drop keeps the enchant and sunder on what it stole from you.
• Opportunist fires on every relocation, not only a plain step — a pounce, a shove and a teleport out of a threatened square all provoke it now.
• The HUD's Melee/Armor/Spd line broke into three rows, the action bar stopped naming a foe before the board exists, and the rooted shackle draws along the cell instead of around a circle.
• The up-stairs prop finally reads as stairs. Hold that thought.
• labyrinth report prints the run's final hero state, so a .labreport you send me is a lot more useful than it was.
• The Steam page got its key art — the seeker at the rim of the hole, cropped three ways for the store capsules. Still Coming Soon; the wishlist button still does more for this project than anything else you can click for free.

What's next

The Steam Playtest goes up in October — the same builds you're already playing, but distributed through Steam, with the leaderboard and the weekly challenge running underneath it. The demo follows in December. The demo-shape questions I asked last week are still open and nobody has yet talked me out of the cliff ending, so that's still the plan unless you make the case.

And then there's the thing at the other end of the up-stairs. The town is designed, properly and in full, and it's the next real system after the demo: a depth 0 you reach by climbing out of depth 1, at any time, as often as you can stomach the walk. A boomtown of plank shacks and canvas and mud packed in a ring around the hole that shouldn't be there, seen from straight above as a huddle of sagging rooftops, lit by torch posts. Two buildings are always there and always named — the Training Center and the Trading House — and the Trainer and the Merchant move into them for good. No more shop by the stairs, no more finding a Trainer on depth 8 with an empty purse and no more failing to find one at all. Their stock keys off the deepest floor you've reached, and the gear rack re-rolls when you push past your own record, so the trip pays only if you've earned it. Nothing hunts you up there: no enemies, no Mood, no combat. Which makes town the one place in this game where reading an unidentified scroll is a tactic rather than a gamble, and I'm extremely curious what you all do with that.

At the center is the Pit, several tiles across and genuinely black. It's the only way down, there's no key to press, and there's no confirmation — you walk into it and you're on depth 1. At the town's edge, a boneyard: a row of markers, one for every hero you've lost, name on bump. No blessing there — the blessing is still down where they fell. It's just the roll-call, brought up into the light where a new player has to walk past it before their first descent. The work is phased into three pieces, engine first, and nothing about it lands this month, but the design is settled enough that I'd rather you start arguing with it now.

What I need from this build specifically: go to depth 7 and below and tell me whether the new questions are answerable. Quake on a held doorway, Miasma on a corridor fight, the rabisu at your back — those are all supposed to have a counterplay you can find in the moment. If one of them just reads as "you lose now," I want to hear about it before it's load-bearing in a demo. The rabisu is the one I'd watch. It's carrying three capabilities into a floor-6 room and I gave it the last of them this week.