The Hole Buys It Back

Two weeks ago the town was a pit, two shops, and a boneyard. It was a place you passed through on the way to dying. This week Rimhold grew two more doors, and both of them want your gold before the Labyrinth gets it.

The first time you climb out onto the rim in a run, you'll get a full ink plate of the town at night and one line of text to read before you dismiss it. I spent longer on that line than on either of the buildings, which tells you something about my priorities. It ends: the hole buys all of it back. That's the thesis of the town now.

The Assay Office

Every one of you has drunk an unknown potion at three HP on depth 7 because the alternative was worse. Sometimes it was healing. Usually it wasn't.

The Assayer keeps a counter behind a set of brass scales. Walk into them and you get a list of every unidentified potion, wand, scroll, and ring in your pack, each with a fee. Pay it and that kind is named for the rest of the run, exactly as if you'd used one. A potion or scroll is 15 gold, a wand 40, a ring 50, plus 3 for every floor you've reached past the first. Haggle shaves it.

The fee depends only on the category, never on what the thing turns out to be. A poison and a healing draught cost the same to name, so the quote tells you nothing. The Assayer sells certainty, not hints.

A Scroll of Identification is still the better deal when you're hauling a pile of unknowns. But the Assayer never fizzles, and you never have to read a scroll you can't name to find out what it does.

The Tavern

The Barkeep sells rumours: one a visit, and every one of them true. Each covers the nearest floor below your deepest that's worth the coin, meaning one that holds a boss or a fallen hero's grave. You learn the floor's theme, which boss waits there, and whose grave lies there and what crossing it gives you. The price is 10 gold plus 5 per floor, so 35 for the fifth and 60 for the tenth. You can't keep buying either: one rumour, then back down the Pit and up again before the Barkeep will talk to you.

This changes what a trip to town is for. The boss pool is twenty-one deep, and knowing on depth 4 which of them is waiting on 6 is the difference between a ring choice and a coin flip. Knowing that your last hero's grave is on 8, holding their Shockwave, changes how far you're willing to push with half a health bar.

The Barkeep is rude about all of it. "I'd tell you its weakness, but nobody lived to sell me one." I didn't write anyone in Rimhold to be encouraging. It would have felt dishonest.

Everything else

• The game has a proper studio name now, so the save folder moved. Your profile, your fallen, your settings, and any suspended run are copied across the first time you launch. Nothing is deleted from the old folder. If your boneyard is suddenly empty, tell me before you grieve.
• The Claim and Renounce endings no longer congratulate you on reaching depth 11 of 10. You reached the Hollow. The number was my fault, not the Hollow's.
• End screens at 720p: long leaderboard and Hall of Fame messages are trimmed to two lines, with the full text on hover, and the parchment card now actually reaches the last line instead of dissolving underneath it.
• The website now always rolls over to the new weekly challenge on release day, even when nobody played last week's. Last cut, a quiet week got re-pinned under the old rules, and the people who turned up found themselves running last week's challenge.

What's next

The town has four doors and a boneyard. The Barkeep still has no painted sign and is wearing a townsperson's face for now. That gets fixed next, along with the Steam depot work that'll put this build in front of a much larger crowd of future corpses. Download the new build, buy a round, and ask about the sixth floor. The answer is true. You won't like it.