The Deep Floors, Rebuilt

Fifteen RulesVersion bumps this week (152 → 167), almost all of them aimed at the same target: depths 7 through 10. A playtester put the problem exactly — deep enemies "are often times reduced to simply having more health and more damage rather than offering a unique or varied challenge" — and the bestiary agreed with them. From depth 1 to depth 10, mean HP rose 4.5× and mean damage 2.7× while the mean ability count stayed flat. That's the whole programme (GH #521) and most of this release.

If you're certifying runs: anything recorded against last week's build will not replay clean against this one. Expected, not a bug.

Priority this week

• Depths 7–10, end to end. Almost everything below only exists past floor 6. --start-depth 7 gets you there in a minute instead of an hour, but at least one full descent is worth more than five jumps, because the spawn and loot changes compound across floors.
• Does deep combat now ask different questions, or just louder ones? That is the whole point of the week. If floor 9 still feels like floor 4 with bigger numbers, that is the report I want most.
• "Felt unfair" vs. "felt hard." Seven deep creatures got new abilities and eight abilities now scale with depth. Every one of those was paid for with a stat trim on the same creature, so the math says it should be a wash — but math is not the same as how it plays.

Added / changed

Seven deep creatures got new abilities instead of more HP (GH #521). The gloom (d7) now carries Miasma, the troll (d8) Quake, the draugr (d8) Vengeful, the revenant (d8) trades Regenerate for Bloodscent, the gorgon (d9) Gaze, the hydra (d9) Miasma, the behemoth (d10) Quake. Gaze, Quake and Miasma had never appeared outside a boss fight before. HP was deliberately left alone on all seven — the deep floors can afford to be a little tougher. Test: fight each one and notice what it makes you do differently. The troll and behemoth throw you off the doorway you were holding (one tile, not three); killing one draugr hardens the others, so kill order matters; the revenant closes fastest when you are wounded; the gorgon punishes standing in its line of sight; the hydra makes adjacent trading a losing race. Watch for: the two auras are radius 1, not the bosses' 2 — one pace back should be clean air. If you are taking aura damage from two tiles out, that is a bug.

Eight abilities now sharpen with depth (GH #525–#531, #534). Previously a depth-9 reaper's Backstab multiplier was identical to a depth-3 skulker's. Now Backstab, Sunder, Pounce, Pack, Guard, Frenzy and Splitter all ramp with the floor a creature first appears on, and the deep pouncer chooses where it lands instead of taking whichever cardinal tile enumerated first — it picks your back. Concretely: the bottom two Sunder carriers strip two armor points at a stroke; the deep pack hunts in pairs rather than needing three; the behemoth's Guard strike is half again its melee; the threshold demon's Pounce clears a two-deep front line. Test: deliberately do the thing each ability punishes — disengage from a behemoth, turn your back on a reaper, hold a doorway against a rabisu, fight a wendigo alone and then with another of its kind nearby. Watch for: every ramp was paid for with a stat trim (usually speed or HP) on the same creature. If a ramped creature feels strictly worse than its shallow cousin rather than differently dangerous, the trim overshot.

Deep floors draw from the deep bestiary now (GH #516). This was measurably broken: at depth 10, 72.8% of bodies came from creatures that unlock at depth 6 or above, but 12.2% were still depth-1 creatures, and only 3.1% were depth-10-gated. Cheap old bodies stayed affordable as each room's budget drained while the elites priced out. Three fixes: spawn weights now decay as a creature's home depth falls behind the floor; a room seats at most one "straggler" (a creature whose weight has bottomed out) and leaves the leftover budget unspent; and a floor may seat one rare visitor from up to two floors deeper, dormant and visible on the map, never a pack carrier. Test: walk a depth 9 or 10 floor and read the roster. Watch for: you should still see the occasional shallow creature — a floor with zero goblinoids is not the goal, and families with no deep members (Goblinoid, Beast, Humanoid) are deliberately exempt from the straggler cap. The visitor from below should be something you can see and walk around, not something that wakes on you.

Deeper floors hold bigger rooms, and terrain is a feature now (GH #518, GH #524). Rooms used to average 6.7×6.7 — 45 tiles — at every depth; only the map got bigger. A ten-body encounter with a three-tile spawn cluster was landing in that. Now d5–6 rooms run 5–12, d7–8 run 6–14, and d9–10 run 7–16, with the map growing to match so room count stays roughly flat (~36 from depth 6 down). Separately, themed terrain covered only 3–5% of room tiles as isolated single cells; it is now placed as shaped features sized to the room — blobs (a sinkhole, a pool of fire) and bands (a crossing, which always leaves a 1–2 cell bridge). Measured coverage by theme: warren ~3%, catacombs ~5%, caverns ~8%, emberworks ~11%, drowned ~13%. Test: depth 7+, and pay attention to whether you now have room to actually use movement abilities and flanking. Watch for: a sealed-off floor pocket, or a blocking band with no gap through it. Both are guarded against, but generation guards are exactly the thing worth trying to break.

Hook, Impaler and Charge reach beyond the cardinal lane (GH #519). A playtester noticed a lamia's drag "does not work around corners," and that standing one tile off its row or column switched the ability off entirely. Three abilities were gated on a clean cardinal lane while every other targeted ability already used Chebyshev range plus line of sight — so a player who learned the lane rule could neutralise the whole Hook family. Test: stand diagonally off a lamia or an impaler and see if it still reaches you. It should. Watch for: it still needs line of sight — being dragged through a wall is a bug.

The Trainer deals its newest arts first, and both wanderers get commoner with depth (GH #520). A playtester who finished a full descent reported testing essentially none of the depth-6+ hero abilities, because the Trainer never offered them. That was arithmetic, not luck: the deal was uniform across everything unlocked so far, so a newly-unlocked depth-8 art had roughly an 83% chance of never being offered at all across depths 8–10. The deal is now weighted toward recent unlocks, and both the Trainer and the Merchant appear more often as you go down. Test: get to depth 8+ and see whether Teleport, Executioner and Berserk actually show up. Watch for: the flip side — if the Trainer only ever deals the newest three, the weighting is too sharp.

Armor and weapons reach two floors below (GH #522). All three depth-scaling systems (loot, enemy spawns, the Trainer deal) now run through one shared helper. The one behaviour change: a gear tier up to two floors deeper than you are can now appear, at the same low weight a deep visitor gets — a rare early find of deep steel. It reaches floor scatter, chests, the boss chest and the Merchant's gear rows. Test: note anything you find that is clearly above your depth. Watch for: it should be rare. Finding dragonscale on floor 4 twice in one run means the weight is wrong.

Enchantment is capped at +3 (GH #517). A certified full run finished standing in the Hollow in a +6 iron carapace — base 5, effective 11 — with three unworn base-6 cuirasses in the pack. The entire authored armor curve spans base 1 to base 7, so +6 on one slot exceeded the whole curve and every later gear find stopped being an upgrade. Test: stack enchant scrolls on one piece and confirm it stops at +3. Watch for: what a scroll does when you are already at the cap — it should tell you plainly, not silently consume.

Fixed

Opportunist now fires on every relocation, not just a plain step (GH #505). A Pounce, Blink, Sidestep or Charge into your adjacency slipped past the free strike that a walk-in always provoked — the hook predated all four of those movement types. All five relocation paths now share one tail. Test: take the Opportunist ability and let a rabisu pounce onto you, or a blinker blink in. Watch for: gating is unchanged — entering adjacency provokes, an adjacent shuffle does not, a dormant Patroller never does, and your per-turn cooldown still caps it.

A slain thief's death-drop preserves enchant and sunder (GH #506). The recoverable item only copied type, quantity and charges, so an enchanted or battered weapon silently reverted to pristine base stats when you picked it back up. Test: let a thief steal an enchanted or sundered item, kill it, pick the item up, and check the stats match what was taken.

The rooted shackle is readable now (GH #501). The no-move indicator was drawn as a ring at exactly the gibbet-warden's own silhouette radius — pale on pale, one ring over another, about one pixel wide at the zoom-out cap. It now runs along the cell instead of along a circle, with self-contrast. Test: root a gibbet-warden (all four Sentinels, really) and zoom out.

The action bar waits for the board (GH #508). Opening a door onto a populated room listed the whole roster in the turn-order bar at once, while the sprites were still arriving over the following beats — the bar naming creatures you could not see yet. Test: press b, then open a door onto a full room. Watch for: the bar should fill in as the creatures appear, not before.

HUD and banner text fits its panel (GH #507, GH #498). The Melee/Armor/Spd line is three rows now, so a (+N) bonus suffix cannot push it past the panel width and orphan itself onto its own wrapped line; and the muted-banner and Heart-choice titles measure their actual rect instead of assuming a height Cardo does not fit in. Test: get a stat bonus and read the HUD; reach the Hollow and read the Heart-choice screen.

The up-stairs reads as stairs (GH #499). It had been generated independently of the down-stairs it is supposed to mirror — cool grey against its partner's warm bone, no flagstone frame, and a dark outer edge where the down-stairs' frame is the brightest thing on the tile, so it read as a concentric target rather than anything stepped. It is now derived from its partner, the way the open door derives from the closed one. Test: stand on a floor and look at both stairs.

Also landed

The level-generation harness can preview a floor exactly as the game builds it, population and all, and now takes a run seed so it shows that run's actual boss rather than a stand-in (GH #532, GH #536). labyrinth report prints the run's final hero state — outcome, HP, gold, depth, worn gear with explicit enchant values, rings, bonuses, abilities and pack — which is what the triage bot reads when you file a report with a .labreport attached (GH #523). The challenge-week alarm on the website now reads the deploy's commit rather than the reroll, so it stops crying wolf on every weekly cut (GH #497); a triage run that silently does nothing now fails loudly (GH #535); the Player Guide says plainly that Red Tithe leeches off the aimed blow only (GH #510); and the Steam store key art and capsules went up.

Found something? Esc → Report a Bug/Feature, same as always.