Something Is Looking Back

Last week I told you the floors finally had faces, and that real monster art was the next frontier. I meant that as a promise for sometime next month. Instead it's done. Every creature in this hole is painted — the whole spawnable bestiary, all twenty-one bosses, your hero, and both of the people down here still willing to trade with you. Ninety-eight sprites. The glyphs are gone.

The bestiary looks back

Undead came first, nineteen of them, because this place has had more practice at that than at anything else. Then beasts, humanoids, demons, aberrations, giants, dragonkin, and finally the boss pool — minotaur through chimera, every one of the twenty-one that can be dealt as the wall at the bottom of your run. The only glyphs left in the whole game are the two training dummies in the combat harness, which have never deserved better.

The part that matters tactically, and I didn't fully appreciate it until I was standing in a fight looking at it: a sprite faces the way the creature is facing. Eight ways, updated every turn. You've been playing a game where flanking is decided by attack arcs and the only way to know which way something was turned was to work it out from its last move. Now you can just look. Size reads off the sprite too — the large things are visibly large, bosses larger still and sitting under their own red glow. Everything keeps its threat ring, so the color grammar you've already learned still holds; allies still ring azure.

They behave more like a pack now

Almost everything in this section came out of one playtester filing careful, specific reports with the run attached, which is a humbling way to find out how many of your systems are politely not working. Every one of these was real.

A spider was reported "stuck in a movement decision loop," and it was: patrollers had no commitment to a heading, so a dormant roamer could stand there re-deciding forever. Patrol headings now stick, and disengaging has hysteresis so nothing oscillates on the edge of noticing you. Enemies carrying "faster in a pack" were spawning alone — the speed bonus they're built around could never fire. That took three passes to fix properly: encounters now guarantee a minimum group where a pack-carrier is present, dormant packs bias their wandering toward their own kin, and as of this build an encounter's members spawn clustered rather than scattered uniformly across the room. You stumble into a pack now instead of into a rumor of one. Fair warning: that last change touches every family on every floor, not just the pack carriers. Fights are tighter than they were last week.

Sentinels — the ones that hold their ground — were being placed wherever, which meant you could frequently just walk around the thing whose entire purpose is to be in your way. They're now posted at the room's descent threshold. Summoners could call from across the floor with no line of sight and no room in common; they're room-gated now, the same rule their swarm-calling cousins already followed. And swarm-callers actually deliver a second add instead of running out of cadence before the fight matters.

Two things I'd rather you hadn't found

The Merchant was selling infinity. Consumable rows restocked without limit and never recorded the sale, so gold was the only cap — and since stock rows show true names, no identification needed. Six scrolls of weapon enchantment, 144 gold, +6 on a weapon in one stall. Organic enchant accumulation across a whole run averages +0.75. The uncapped enchant design leans entirely on scarcity being real, and I'd quietly voided that premise myself. Rows are now bounded — three potions, two scrolls.

The other one went the other way. A report called the wand of delving's application "limited," which was generous: the wall skin down here is exactly one tile thick, so a dig was a peephole into a room you could already walk into, or a hole into solid nothing. It bores a proper passage now, up to twenty tiles along the aimed cardinal, and it carries its own wall skin and shadows with it so you're cutting a corridor, not a stripe of floor in the void. Half the time you break into something that was buried down there. Go make your own chokepoints.

Everything else

• Every scroll, potion, and wand now narrates an outcome — no more reading Whimsy and guessing. Whimsy, Chaos, and Caprice name the effect they borrowed, without identifying it for you.
• Your inventory separates identified from unidentified, and sorts within each.
• Enchant scrolls can target gear you're carrying, not just what you're wearing.
• Sleep breaks on damage only, and things that are incapacitated stop reacting to you.
• The keyboard is live from the first frame — it needed a click first, for two separate reasons.
• Pillar shadows point away from your torch instead of away from wherever the engine felt like.
• The status panel shows gear condition, so you can see a weapon going battered before it fails you.
• Turn boundaries are smoother; a lot of per-turn objects that were being destroyed and rebuilt are pooled now.

Off the floor

The site picked up a few things worth knowing about. There's a Playtest Notes page now — a plain-language rundown of what changed and what's worth hammering on, written for the build you just downloaded rather than for me six months from now. And if you'd rather not check the Download page on a hunch, you can sign up to be told when a build drops. Reports filed from inside the game now ask you for a title, which spares us both another page of issues all named "[Bug] WindowsPlayer / Windows 11."

What's next

Props are the last piece of the picture. The sprites are drawn — doors, chests, graves, stairs, the fragment page, loot markers by class — but none of them are wired in yet, so this build still draws that furniture the old way. Getting them onto the floor with proper state swaps (a door that looks open when it's open, a grave that looks spent once you've taken its blessing) is next, and then the picture is finished. After that it's the hard part: the deep floors are still where balance goes to argue with itself, and the only way through that is more runs by more of you.

Go and get eaten, and tell me what looked wrong while it was happening.