The Bestiary Was Lying

This week I did something I should have done months ago. I sat down with the whole engine and read it line by line, the way you'd read a contract from someone you don't trust. Seventy-odd findings came out of it. Most were plumbing nobody will ever feel. A handful were monsters that had quietly been failing to do what the Player Guide said they did.

The uncomfortable part is that the Labyrinth was being nicer than I'd claimed. Some of you have been surviving fights you weren't supposed to survive. That's over.

The monsters read their own entries

Every creature's behaviour is a stack of abilities checked in order, and in a few places the order was wrong. An early ability would grab the turn every time, so a later one never got its chance.

• Thurs and jotun never impaled you. The bestiary says they skewer you from two squares out. In practice they always took the shot instead, because shooting came first in the stack. Every time you stood exactly two tiles from a frost giant and ate a boulder instead, you were getting off lightly. Now the spear comes first.
• Gorgons, ifrits, and the Chimera never used their claws. Put one in a corner and it kept firing at you point-blank, for its ranged damage, which is usually the weaker number. A cornered hybrid now swings at you. The Chimera's bite is seven.
• Manticores, cyclopes, wyrms, and fomorians walked at you when they should have shot. If their charge was ready they spent the turn lining up a lane, even with a clear shot. Now they shoot by default and charge when the lane is already there. That's worse for you in open rooms and better for you at a chokepoint, which is how it was meant to work.
• A charge's slam now carries the charger's poisons. A wyvern's slam envenoms you now, a hound's mires you, and the Minotaur's sunders your armour, just as their ordinary bites always did. I'd forgotten to wire the slam up to any of it. The Minotaur was an armour-breaker who forgot to bring the hammer.

Two fixes go the other way, and one of them takes something away from you. If you carried Combat Awareness with a spear, you could stop a charge coming from behind you. That was never the deal. Combat Awareness denies the flank; it doesn't turn your back into a wall of spearpoints. To stop a charge now you have to actually face it. And when your riposte killed one Guard in a pair, the second Guard sometimes lost its free strike, a bookkeeping slip that dropped the next soldier in line. It doesn't happen any more. Both Guards hit you.

Everything else

• Dying in the Hollow now leaves a grave. A hero who survived ten floors and the boss, then died below to a poison tick or one last unknown potion, was buried nowhere. Of all the bugs in this list, that's the one I'm least proud of. They're buried on depth 10 now, where the next hero can find them.
• The town boneyard is gone. Graves belong in the dark, where crossing one costs something. Rimhold no longer keeps a field of your dead by the Pit.
• The Tavern has its sign, and the Barkeep has a face, their own instead of a borrowed townsperson's. It is not a friendly face.
• When the game refuses something you asked for, like swinging at a target you can't reach, the log now says so. Before, the keypress just vanished.
• Drowned and Emberworks floors no longer quietly lose terrain features because a patch of mire or hazard looked like a wall to the generator.
• Leaving a replay now offers your suspended run again, instead of hiding it until the next launch.
• The leaderboard breaks ties by who submitted first, and a handful of server-side races that could misfile a submission are closed.

What's next

Today's build is up. Download it and go stand two squares from a thurs. Find out what I took from you.

Make the most of it, because this should be the last build you download from this website. The Steam Playtest is due to open this week. From then on the game moves to Steam: updates arrive by themselves, and you won't have to come back here to hunt for a zip every Saturday. You'll need a Steam account and a Steam key to get in, and everyone on the Discord gets one. I'll hand them out there as soon as the door opens. If you've been playing without joining, now is the time.

After that comes balance tuning against these honest monsters, because a few of the numbers were set against cowards. Steam will bring a lot of new faces down the Pit, and the Labyrinth has been told. It's hungry.