Every Floor Has a Face Now

I've been describing this hole to you in flat color and glyphs for months, which is a strange way to sell "dangerous." That changes this build. The maze finally looks like something worth losing a hero to, and in fixing the light to match it I found out the dark had been lying to you in a few other ways too. Let's go floor by floor.

Every floor has a face now

The ossuary, the hollows, the sump, the furnace floor — catacombs, caverns, drowned, and emberworks all ship real tile art this build, joining the warren from a few weeks back. That's the full set: GH #289 closes, and the descent's palette now arcs the way it always should have — neutral brown, into cold blue-grey, into wet ochre, into dark teal, into near-black char by the time you're standing in ember light at depth 9. Catacombs gets its bone-heap cover and a proper "column of bones" pillar. Caverns gets the first chasm art — mineral-flecked near-black noise instead of a flat void. Drowned gets four visibly distinct mire variants so a room-spanning silt bog doesn't read as wallpaper, plus a rotted-piling cover that had to be regraded browner just to punch through all that teal. Emberworks gets the first hazard art worth the name: charred plates split by glowing orange-red cracks, and a hand-inked chasm that breaks from every other floor's noise-void recipe on purpose, because a furnace floor should look like it's still burning under you, not just dark.

Alongside it, actors got the plumbing to render as art instead of glyph tokens — per-creature, so a floor with some painted and some not is correct, not broken. No actor art is authored yet, so don't get excited about your hero looking different tomorrow; this is the rig, not the paint. And the ink scene pack — the line-art register you've seen on the endings — is now wired into the title screen, the death screen, and every memory-fragment popup, with a graceful fallback to the old rendering anywhere art hasn't landed.

The dark started obeying its own rules

Scaling walls up to real art surfaced how badly the light had been cheating. Torch and room light poured straight through solid walls into rooms you'd already explored, so a dense floor read as one lit space instead of the maze of discrete pockets it's supposed to be — fixed by giving every sight-blocking wall run an actual shadow caster instead of just the pillars and doors. Worse: the ambient light you carry in memory of an explored room was quietly casting a shadow of its own, from a fixed point at the map's corner, because nobody told it not to — which is a very on-brand bug for this game, honestly, the Labyrinth remembering a shape that was never there. Depth 10 had over a thousand of these phantom casters throwing one uniform diagonal darkness across the whole floor like someone was still standing in every room you'd left. That's dead now, and remembered space reads clean. Smaller, but satisfying: the warm halo bloom threw around the hero while moving no longer bleeds past the edge of the painted floor into the black beyond it.

Sharpened a few blades

Rat-swarm's Splitter has been quietly unreachable since it shipped — the HP gate needed more health than the best possible starting roll could ever produce, so the "swarm" never actually split. It's fixed now, generation-bounded so a lineage caps out instead of running away from you, and rat-swarm got bumped a floor deeper to actually carry the tougher fight it can now put up. The keener's swarm-call had a related problem: its population cap counted every creature of that type on the whole floor, so a caller two rooms from its own kin could summon nothing at all. It now counts its own brood only. Shockwave got its ordering fixed twice over — the burst now lands before the knockback, so killing something with it doesn't shove the corpse out of range before Deathburst can check for it, and a foe standing behind your target still gets slammed even when the burst alone kills what's in front of it. A melee pursuer no longer abandons a near-finished flanking approach just because you turned in place to look at it. Resting now actually respects walls — it was refusing to engage over a hostile you couldn't possibly see, on the same "same room" logic the fog-of-war uses, which was never meant to gate something this literal. And Hide works properly with rest again, and Snare's movement tax can't be laundered through an auto-pickup anymore.

The website looks like the game now

The companion site got its own ink-and-parchment pass this stretch — the homepage's now a full-bleed sinkhole hero under the game's own title art instead of a card grid, real screenshots instead of stock chrome, and a copy pass that cut it down to sounding like someone wrote it on purpose instead of a template generator filling in blanks. Itch.io's page got matched to the same look, so the download doesn't feel like it wandered in from a different project.

The Reports page — where your in-game bug and feature submissions land — is the part worth actually visiting now. It surfaces what's currently open and recently closed on the GitHub tracker, so you can check whether the thing you're about to report already has a number on it, or already shipped, without needing repo access to find out. And every listing gets a real excerpt now instead of just the auto-generated title — no more staring at "[Bug] WindowsPlayer / Windows 11 — 1.0" trying to remember which run that was; you get the actual note you wrote, pulled straight out of the report and scrubbed of anything that shouldn't be public.

Everything else

• A hero step now scoops up every item stacked on a tile in one go, not one per step.
• Numpad players finally get the cardinal keys and wait key that diagonal-only left behind.
• Independent Music and SFX volume sliders, if the drum pulse gets to be too much.
• The Merchant's stock now guarantees a weapon and an armor row instead of occasionally dealing four wands and nothing to swing.
• A hundred memory-fragment pages now exist, ten per depth, so the First Seeker stops repeating themselves run after run.
• Armor's displayed bonus finally agrees between the HUD, inventory, tooltip, and equip bark — inventory was quietly double-counting your enchants.
• Two-wide doorways open on both leaves now, not just one.
• There's a Discord now, if you'd rather yell about any of this in real time.

What's next

The palette arc is done, but the floors are still short on the things that live and sit on them — props and real monster art are the next art frontier, now that every theme has a face to put them against. The usual grind continues underneath that: balance passes on the deep floors and more hours logged by more of you. Go stand in the furnace floor's light and tell me if it earns the name.