What to Test in the August 15 Build

This build jumps from Rules v125 to v138 — thirteen versions, most of them from reports you filed. Six content tables moved (enemies, encounter, merchant, wands, combat, tuning), so this is not a cosmetic release: fights are laid out differently, the economy is bounded differently, and one wand does something it couldn't do before. Grab the new build from the Download page before testing anything below — older builds can't submit runs against the current rules anyway.

Priority this week

The things I most want eyes on, in order:

• Spawn clustering (GH #399). Every encounter's members now spawn as a block instead of scattered across the room. This touches every family on every floor, not just the pack carriers — it's the widest-blast-radius change in the build. Tell me whether fights read as harder or as unfair; that distinction is the whole signal.
• The delving wand (GH #402). It bores real tunnels now. I want to know what breaks when you start editing the map mid-fight.
• Merchant stock limits (GH #404). A real nerf. Check I didn't overshoot into "the Merchant isn't worth visiting."
• Sprite readability in a live fight. 98 new sprites. On a busy floor, can you actually read facing, size, and threat at a glance — or does it turn to mush?
• The lower floors, still. Depths 7–10 remain the least-played part of the game and that hasn't changed. Please don't grind down to them: launch with --start-depth N (N = 1–10) and you start there with a depth-appropriate loadout. On Windows, make a shortcut to Labyrinth.exe and append it to the Target field, e.g. "...\Labyrinth-Game\Labyrinth.exe" --start-depth 8. Deaths on those runs pool separately and never seed graves in your normal runs.

Fixed

Enemies spawn as groups now (GH #399, GH #385). Two related problems. First, creatures with "faster in a pack" could spawn without enough allies nearby for the bonus to ever fire — an ability that was effectively decorative. Encounters now guarantee a minimum group size when a pack carrier is present, and dormant patrollers bias their wandering toward their own kin. Second, and bigger: encounter members were being placed independently and uniformly at random across a room's floor, so a six-member group could spawn spread across the whole space. They now cluster at spawn. Test: fight several rooms on any floor, then specifically hunt the eight pack carriers — lemures (from depth 1), jackals (2), gnawers (3), gnolls (4), sluagh and hounds (5), zoanthrops and wendigos (7). Sluagh are worth double attention: they carry both Pack and swarm-call, so they exercise two of this build's changes at once. Watch for: a cluster so tight it spawns on top of you or blocks its own approach lane; rooms that now feel impossible rather than dangerous; or the opposite — a "pack" that still arrives one at a time.

Sentinels are posted where they matter (GH #392, Rules v132). Enemies that hold their ground were placed anywhere in their room, so you could often just walk around the creature whose entire purpose is to be in your way. They're now posted at the room's descent threshold. Test: find a floor with a stationary guard and try to reach the stairs past it. Watch for: a sentinel wedged somewhere that makes a room impossible to leave rather than expensive to leave.

Patrollers stop dithering (GH #393). A reported spider "stuck in a movement decision loop" was exactly that — dormant roamers had no commitment to a heading, so one could stand in place re-deciding indefinitely. Headings now persist, and disengaging has hysteresis so nothing oscillates right at the edge of noticing you. Test: watch an unaware patroller from just outside its notice range and step in and out of it. Watch for: any creature visibly vibrating between two tiles, or one that notices you and then immediately forgets in a loop.

Summoners and swarm-callers actually work (GH #398, GH #389). Summoning had no room gate — a summoner could call from across the floor with no line of sight, unlike its swarm-calling cousins which were already gated that way. Both are now room-gated. Separately, swarm-call's cadence was retuned so a caller reliably delivers a second add instead of running out of clock before the fight matters. Test: engage a summoner and retreat through a door into another room. Watch for: adds appearing when you and the caller are nowhere near each other — or a caller that now never gets a second summon off at all.

The Merchant no longer sells infinity (GH #404, Rules v137). 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 was needed. Six scrolls of weapon enchantment for 144 gold was +6 on a weapon in a single stall, against an organic run-long average of about +0.75. Rows now carry a stock count: three for potions, two for scrolls. Gear rows are one-off as before. Test: find a Merchant (roughly a third of floors from depth 3) and try to buy a fourth potion or third scroll from one row. Watch for: a sold-out row that still looks buyable, a purchase that silently does nothing, or a stall so thin it's not worth the detour.

The delving wand bores tunnels (GH #402, Rules v138). The wall skin is exactly one tile thick, so the old single-tile dig was a peephole — it opened either a room you could already walk into or a hole into solid nothing. It now carves along the aimed cardinal for up to twenty tiles, stopping the moment it hits anything that isn't stone, and the new passage gets its own wall skin and shadows instead of rendering as a floor stripe in blackness. Each successful bore has a 50% chance of uncovering a buried cache. Test: zap it at a wall from a room's interior and again from a corridor; try boring toward a room you haven't explored, and try cutting yourself a fresh chokepoint mid-fight. Watch for: tunnels that break fog-of-war (revealing more than they should), enemies that can't path into or along a bore, a bore that dead-ends oddly, or lighting/shadows that don't follow the new walls.

Every scroll, potion, and wand says what it did (GH #403, Rules v136). Reading Whimsy narrated nothing, and the problem was broader than Whimsy — several effects were silent on their no-op paths, and a wand's crowd-control component landing on a fully warded target produced no line at all. Every read, quaff, and zap now guarantees an outcome line. Whimsy, Chaos, and Caprice name the effect they borrowed — without identifying that type for you. Test: read/quaff/zap everything unidentified you find, especially into a wall, at nothing, or at an immune target. Watch for: any use that still produces silence, or a mimicry line that accidentally identifies the borrowed type in your inventory.

Combat corrections (GH #352, GH #368, GH #370). Grapple drags its target into adjacency and staggers it rather than pulling one tile. Miasma and Quake now require line of sight, so neither fires through a wall. Auto-rest breaks on damage. Sleep breaks on damage only — not on noise or proximity — and incapacitated creatures stop reacting to you at all. Test: grapple from maximum range; cast Miasma/Quake at a target behind a wall; rest next to a sleeping enemy and then hit it. Watch for: a grapple that lands the target somewhere illegal, an ability that still fires through geometry, or a sleeper that wakes from something that isn't damage.

Light and motion (GH #384, GH #391, GH #400, GH #394). Pillar shadows pointed the wrong way relative to your torch — room lights have been replaced with a cookie-mask ambient so shadows fall away from the light you're actually carrying. A reported overlap where a Reaver and the creature behind it briefly occupied the same tile was a real ordering bug and is fixed, as is the hitch the first time a creature is seen (its sprite now loads ahead of time). Turn boundaries are smoother generally: sense markers and FX objects are pooled instead of destroyed and rebuilt every turn. And boss-death effects no longer read as an area-damage burst. Test: stand next to a pillar and circle it; watch a line of enemies advance down a corridor; fight on a busy depth-9 floor and watch for stutter at turn boundaries. Watch for: shadows pointing at your torch instead of away, two actors sharing a tile mid-move, or a frame hitch the first time a new creature type appears.

Input and settings (GH #371, GH #294, GH #366, GH #369). The keyboard was dead until you clicked the window — two separate causes, both fixed, so input is live from the first frame. Audio settings no longer default to 0%, and the Music/SFX mute checkboxes had inverted polarity. "Wipe the Memory" now lives only in Settings, is always visible, and asks twice. Test: launch and immediately press a movement key without clicking. Watch for: any state where the keyboard goes unresponsive again — note what you did right before, that's the part I can't guess.

Added / changed

The whole bestiary is painted (GH #279, GH #278). Every spawnable creature, all 21 bosses, your hero, and both NPCs render as sprites — 98 in total. Sprites rotate to their eight-way facing, are sized by their actual size class, and keep the threat-tinted ring you already know; bosses sit under a red glow. The only glyphs left are the combat harness's training dummies. Test: a full descent, plus a --start-depth 9 or 10 run to see the boss pool. Watch for: a creature you can't identify at a glance, facing that looks wrong relative to how something actually moved or attacked, a sprite too large for its tile, or a creature whose threat tier reads wrong from its ring.

Inventory is grouped and sorted (GH #388, GH #386). Identified and unidentified items are separated, and each group sorts within itself. The Merchant's sell list sorts the same way. Test: accumulate a mixed inventory and identify things mid-run. Watch for: an item that jumps groups without being identified, or sort order that changes under you while you're choosing.

Gear condition is on the HUD (GH #354), and enchant scrolls reach held gear (GH #353). The left status panel shows enchant level and battered condition, so you can see a weapon degrading before it fails you. Enchant scrolls can now target a weapon or armor you're carrying, not only what you're wielding or wearing. Test: fight until something is battered and watch the panel; carry a spare weapon and enchant it without equipping it. Watch for: a panel value that disagrees with the inventory or the tooltip.

The combat harness spawn menu is generated from the bestiary (GH #365). It no longer drifts out of sync with the real creature list, so anything in the game is spawnable there. Test: if you use the harness to reproduce a fight, check the creature you want is actually in the menu.

On the website: there's now a Playtest Notes page (this one) as a permanent section beside the Dev Log; you can sign up to be emailed when a build drops (GH #362); in-game reports ask you for a title, so your report is findable later instead of being one of thirty named "[Bug] WindowsPlayer / Windows 11" (GH #363); and a run can no longer be claimed by both the Hall of Fame and the weekly board at once (GH #364).

Also landed

The Bloodscent hint fires correctly and the inspector states its threshold (GH #372); Merchant buy-row hover shows the item's description instead of the terrain under it (GH #367); the nav menu is reordered (GH #377); the itch.io launcher button is gone from the name-entry screen (GH #347); and venom's refresh-on-hit behavior is documented as intended rather than a bug (GH #373).

Found something? Esc → Report a Bug/Feature, same as always. Reports with a .labreport attached are the ones I can actually replay — please keep sending those.