Usurper Reborn news & patch notes

v0.65.6 Patch Notes: Renewable Lives, Death's Door, and Smarter NPCs

Two major passes in one release. The headline: we did a full end-to-end analysis of the online player experience, from live combat telemetry down to the math of the resurrection economy, and fixed what it found. The second pass makes the NPC population meaningfully smarter about staying alive and spending its time. Full technical details live in the repo release notes; here is what changes for you.

The level-40 problem

The numbers said something interesting: combat was never too hard. Win rates are 97 to 99 percent in every level band. But almost nobody was getting past level 40, and the reason was math, not skill. Online characters had 3 lifetime resurrections that never regenerated, and the journey from level 20 to 40 is roughly 900 fights at about a 1 percent death risk per fight. Expected deaths over that journey: 6 to 10. Lives available: 3. Every character was mathematically guaranteed to run out, and the deaths themselves were almost all one-round damage spikes with no counterplay. This release fixes the economy, the spikes, and the visibility.

Lives now regenerate (online mode)

• One life back at every 10th level. Reaching level 10, 20, 30, and so on restores one lost resurrection, up to your maximum (normally 3). Push forward and the climb itself pays you back.
• The Rite of Return. The Temple offers a new Rite of Return service (press U at the Temple): restore one lost life for steep, level-scaled gold (about 50,000 at level 20, 100,000 at level 30, 170,000 at level 40). One rite per 20 real-world hours. The option only appears when you are missing a life. Death now costs something you can earn back instead of something irreplaceable.
• The death screen tells you about both recovery paths, so losing a life reads as a setback instead of a countdown to deletion.

Permadeath is still real: run out of lives and die, and your character is gone. But careful players can now stay ahead of the reaper indefinitely, and a bad night is a gold problem, not a funeral. Single-player is unchanged. It never used the resurrection counter and keeps its own death system.

Death's Door: no more one-shot deletions

Telemetry showed that real player deaths were almost never a slow grind down. They were single-round bursts of 100 to 140 percent of max HP, usually from a boss right after its opening restraint wears off. The existing Last Stand rule (start a round above half health and no single round can kill you) expired at exactly the wrong moment, because attrition had already pulled players below half before the burst landed. New rule: once per combat, a killing blow against a player who started the round above 25 percent max HP leaves them at 1 HP instead, and the fight ends with them alive. You stagger out, heal up, and decide your own next move. The guarantee is spent for that combat, so it is a second chance, not immunity. Fighting on from below 25 percent is still the calculated risk it always was, and attrition difficulty is completely unchanged. Death's Door does not apply on Nightmare difficulty, in PvP, or in exhibition combat like the Gauntlet and the Tournament of Honor, where the arena stakes are the whole point.

See the danger before it sees you

• Lives in the status bar. Online characters now see Lives: N/M on the standard status line everywhere, color coded: green when healthy, yellow at one life, bright red at zero. Your most important number is no longer hidden on death screens.
• Floor danger ratings. Entering a dungeon floor above your level now prints a warning on the floor banner: Caution for 1 to 2 levels above you, Dangerous for 3 to 5, DEADLY for 6 or more. A compact tag like DEADLY +8 also rides the in-dungeon status bar in every room, so a deep push never sneaks up on you.
• Boss burst telegraph. Bosses hold back for the first three rounds of a fight (this has always been true). The round that restraint ends, the fight now announces it. That exact moment is when most deaths happened. Now it arrives announced instead of as a surprise.

Smarter, more believable NPCs

The second pass came from a deep dive into roughly 331,000 logged NPC decisions over two weeks. Highlights:

• NPCs stopped dying stupidly. Around 1,100 NPCs were dying in the dungeon every two weeks, mostly by fighting until one swing from death before even thinking about running. NPC combat now estimates the enemy's next hit with the same damage math combat actually uses, and an NPC that cannot survive the next round panic-flees at 95 percent regardless of how brave they are. Self-preservation beats courage at the brink.
• NPCs learn from near death. Dying or barely escaping a fight now writes a memory that makes the NPC avoid combat for the next few hours. A mauled NPC spends the afternoon healing, shopping, and socializing instead of marching straight back down the stairs. Near-death experiences also register as fear in their emotional state.
• No more eternal window shopping. 98 percent of NPC shop visits bought nothing, because every mid-level NPC was permanently flagged as under-geared and sent to stores whose stock could never satisfy them. Shops can now say "come back later," shopping trips check both the weapon and armor shop, and higher-level NPCs correctly gear from dungeon loot instead. Same fix for the gym: NPCs only go when they can actually afford a session.
• The whole population thinks now. The last slice of NPCs still on the old random-weighted behavior picker has been promoted to the goal-driven brain. Every NPC in the world now heals when hurt, levels when ready, pursues long-arc goals, and physically seeks out the people those goals name.

If you play with the world simulation running, expect the town to feel less suicidal and more purposeful: fewer news-feed strings of NPC dungeon deaths, more NPCs actually progressing.

Localization

All new text in this release (Death's Door, the Rite of Return, danger ratings, the lives display, and the rest) ships in all five languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian.

What we are watching

Over the next few weeks we will be tracking level-40+ crossings, involuntary character deletions, and how many players are sitting at low lives. If you have been hovering near zero resurrections and playing scared, this release is for you: level up or visit the Temple, get your lives back, and go push a floor you have been avoiding. As always, report bugs in-game with the ! command, and come argue about balance on Discord.

v0.65.5 - Countdown

The road to 1.0 continues. We just ran a full audit of every system in the game ahead of leaving Beta, and this release fixes everything serious it found. No new content this time: this is a correctness and stability release, and some of these fixes matter a lot.

Boss Fights Fixed

Area-of-effect damage was skipping the Old Gods' defenses entirely. Single-target attacks correctly respected a boss's phase immunity and divine armor, but AoE spells and abilities (Fireball, Chain Lightning, Maelstrom of the Faithful) hit the health bar directly, so a caster could burn a god down during a phase that was supposed to be immune. AoE now runs through the same defenses as every other attack. The Old God fights play the way they were designed again.

Save Protection

We closed the bug behind a long-standing and nasty rare issue: under specific conditions on the online server, a save could overwrite a character's collected seals, worshipped god, companions, and family data with empty state. Earlier builds could only detect and log it. Now the bad save is refused outright and your data on disk is left untouched. Normal play, including the save on logout, is completely unaffected.

Death Means Something Now

The world simulation had a ghost problem. When an NPC died "permanently" in a background brawl, gang war, or dungeon run, the game sent out the mourning notices, widowed the spouse, and orphaned the children... and then quietly respawned the NPC a few minutes later. You could be told your spouse died and then bump into them at the inn. Fixed in both directions:

• A rolled permanent death is now genuinely permanent. The realm mourns, and it means it. These deaths are rare and carefully limited, and can never push a race toward extinction.
• When a lover or romantic partner dies permanently, your relationship state now properly lets them go. Previously only marriages were cleaned up, and only when you were present for the death; lovers lost to the wider world stayed on your roster forever.
• The common, ordinary NPC death still respawns exactly as before.

Your Marriage Bonus Actually Works Now

The 10 percent XP bonus for being married, and the XP bonus from an active divine blessing, were wired into a piece of combat code that stopped being used a long time ago. Married and blessed players have been silently receiving neither. Both now apply on every kill and show on the victory screen. If you got married for love, congratulations, it now also pays.

Translation Fixes

Players in Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian were seeing raw placeholder text instead of the "a monster appears" and "boss blocks your path" lines, on every single encounter. Fixed, along with a handful of missing translations and a Hungarian training-screen line.

Linux: No More White Screen

A Linux player found the game launching as an unreadable white window. If the bundled terminal failed to start on your system, the launcher fell back to xterm with its default black-on-white colors, which washes out the game's palette completely. Three fixes:

• The launcher now recovers properly when the bundled terminal cannot start, tells you exactly why (usually a missing libfuse2 package), and falls back to a correctly-colored terminal.
• The game itself now paints its own dark background on Linux and macOS terminals and politely restores your colors when you quit. It is readable in any terminal now, whatever your theme.
• All the Linux launch scripts force readable colors on xterm as a last resort.

Smaller Fixes

• Royal orphans no longer vanish. An orphan coming of age while the world was at its population cap was silently deleted instead of graduating. They now wait for a free slot like everyone else.
• The Church stopped making up numbers. The "this month" community figures on the Church records screen rerolled randomly every time you looked at them. They now hold steady and roll over monthly.
• Save failures are no longer silent. Several save operations swallowed their errors with no trace; they now log properly so a real problem is visible instead of quietly losing progress.
• Long-term save health. NPC teammate bags and shop stock lists are now capped in save files, closing the last uncapped slow-growth path.
• The website tells the truth. The game has 12 classes and 5 companions; the site said 11 and 4. Mystic Shaman and Melodia, you exist, we are sorry.

Thank you for all the bug reports that drove this release. Every one of them made the game better. See you in the dungeon.

v0.65.4 - Countdown

A player-experience update focused on the early game and on making character progression something you can actually see coming. Plus the biggest companion-writing addition in a long while: every companion now has a story that starts early and builds the whole way down.

Your First Fight

New characters used to get plenty of guidance in town, then walk into the dungeon and find an empty entrance room with four unlabeled exits and no idea where to go. That gap is closed.

• The dungeon points you at your first fight. A fresh character now gets a single in-world line showing which way the nearest monster is, until the first kill lands.
• Your first kill always makes level 2. Kill number one now tops you up to the next level, so the whole loop (fight, level, unlock) demonstrates itself immediately.
• Level-ups announce what you gained and what is next. New abilities used to appear silently. Now every level-up tells you the ability you just unlocked and names the next one and its level.

The Path Ahead

The mid-game could feel like a long wait for nothing, especially for martial classes that go many levels between new abilities. Progression is now visible so every wait becomes a countdown.

• New "The Path Ahead" screen via /path, /roadmap, or

  Path

  at the Level Master: your level, XP to next level, your next three ability or spell unlocks, and the next story milestone (Old God or seal floor).
• Live XP in the dungeon status line so every fight visibly moves the bar.
• A next-step reminder at login so returning players are not dropped into the news feed with no idea what they were doing.

Player Specializations

Companion NPCs have had class specializations for a while. Now your own character can specialize too. From level 25, Specialize at the Level Master lets you commit to one of your class's two paths (Arms or Protection, Retribution or Holy, and so on). A specialization adds extra stat growth on future level-ups and turns on that path's combat bonuses, such as extra damage reduction and shield-scaling for tank paths or increased healing output for healer paths. Your first pick is free; changing it later costs gold. Landing the choice at level 25, right after the first Old God, is meant to ask: you survived the first god, so who are you now?

Companion Quest Chains: The Long Road

This is the big one, and it comes straight from player feedback that the companions felt hollow between recruitment and their one late quest. Now every companion (Aldric, Vex, Lyris, Mira, Melodia) has a three-part personal story: two new earlier chapters that play out in the dungeon and lead into their existing final quest. Each chapter is a real scene. Some open with a fight. All of them peel back another layer: the name Aldric refuses to say, the truth about Vex's illness and the list he has kept since childhood, what really drained Lyris's forest, the doctrine that turned Mira's old order into something monstrous, and the fact that Melodia's lost song was never lost, only unfinished. Every chapter ends with a choice in how you respond, and your answer shapes their loyalty and where their story goes.

• The story travels with them. Between chapters, companions drop idle lines that reference what happened, hint when the next chapter is near, and post a town notice so you know their arc moved even if they are waiting for you.
• You cannot miss it. Chapters fire in order on any floor at or past their point, so out-leveling never skips them, and only one plays per companion per dungeon run.
• Vex's final quest is fixed. His bucket-list quest now opens the moment his second chapter finishes, instead of forcing you deep into the dungeon or waiting on a timer. Most players will finally see it.
• Real rewards. Loyalty, plus small one-time gifts (a gold trick from Vex, herbs from Lyris, a full heal from Mira, a battle song from Melodia) and modest companion stat gains.

Progression Tuning

• Barbarian gets a level-1 ability, Wild Swing. It was the only class with nothing to do at level 1, and it died the most. Wild Swing pairs with the heal-on-kill it gained last patch.
• Two new Warrior abilities fill its worst ability droughts: Crushing Blow at level 34 and Bulwark, a defensive stance, at level 62.
• Bard's Song of Rest moves from level 12 to 18 so Bard is not fully stocked before other classes have found their feet.
• Honest training screen. Training now shows what a point actually buys, the effect multiplier, hit bonus, and fizzle chance, for your current and next tier, so investing in abilities versus auto-attack is a clear choice instead of a guess.

Smaller Wins

• Combat ability info. Type ?3 in combat to read what quickbar slot 3 does without spending your turn.
• The Outskirts explains itself. The settlement now tells you, on your first visit, what it is and that donations unlock services you can use, plus a line showing exactly what the building you are funding will give you.
• Onboarding on all terminals. The next-step guidance now shows for BBS and compact-mode players too, not just the full graphical view.
• One fewer wall in the opening for new characters: the generic intro screen no longer stacks in front of the tutorial quest screen.

As always, thank you for playing and for the feedback that drives these updates. See you in the dungeon.

Usurper Reborn v0.65.3 - "Countdown"

A big maintenance and balance update on the road to 1.0: two Power Strike fixes, a high-severity economy exploit closed, a data-driven early-game survivability pass, and a stack of quality-of-life improvements pulled straight from player feedback.

Combat and Classes

• Power Strike (class ability) fixed for two-handed weapons. While wielding a two-hander, the trained Power Strike ability could deal less damage than a plain auto-attack. The two-handed damage bonus that normal swings get was not being applied to the ability. It now is, so Power Strike (and other physical melee/ranged abilities) reliably beats a basic swing for two-handed builds, at every level.
• Power Attack now triggers your weapon enchantments. The tactical Power Attack was silently skipping every on-hit effect (life steal, elemental procs, holy bonus vs undead/demons, poison coating, and more), which is why it could feel weaker than a free swing. It now runs the full on-hit pipeline on both the main hit and the off-hand follow-up.
• Early-game survivability pass. Based on a full month of live death data, two targeted fixes (no global nerf, no blanket difficulty change):
  • Early dungeon floors now ramp up in difficulty (floors 1-3 at 50%, 65%, 80% monster strength) instead of jumping straight to full strength on floor 2.
  • Barbarian gains a small innate heal-on-kill before its level-36 Bloodlust unlocks, giving the class real sustain early instead of being completely dependent on a healer companion.
• Combat round counter and active-buff line. Combat now shows the current round number and a compact list of your active buffs (Inspiring Tune, songs, Well-Rested, food buffs, Bloodlust, status immunity) with how many rounds or combats remain. Added to standard, compact/BBS, and screen-reader displays.

Fixes and Exploits

• Reforge gold/power exploit closed (issue #112). Unequipping reforged gear was resetting its quality, which let players re-collect the reforge upgrade bonus over and over and compound weapon power and gold into the billions. Items now keep their quality through unequip/re-equip, save/load, the home chest, trades, and companion handoffs, so the loop is shut. The same fix also stops unequipping from dropping stats (a shield losing its block, items losing agility/stamina, and so on). Note: items already inflated by this exploit are not retroactively reduced; the fix stops further inflation.
• Party XP no longer stranded on a dead teammate's slot. With a custom XP split, a teammate's death could leave a chunk of every kill's XP allocated to an empty slot and silently lost. Redistribution now works correctly and honors the auto-redistribute-on-death toggle, and the Party Management screen self-heals an orphaned slot the moment you open it.
• Inn arm-wrestling daily limit resets on sleep (single-player). The 3-per-day cap was not clearing when you slept to the next day; it now resets like every other daily activity.
• Shields keep their block value across every equip path, and reforged quality now survives equipping from inventory, the home screen, and the magic shop.

Quality of Life

• Quest list scrolls, and merc contracts are readable. The active quest list now paginates (ext /

  rev / ack) instead of cutting off at eight, /contracts is now an alias for the quest list, and Sellsword Hall contracts are tagged so they stand out.

• Resting heals your whole party. Sleeping at the Inn or resting at Home now restores your companions and team NPCs to full HP and mana, not just you. No more dungeon trips purely to hand-feed them potions.
• Black Market: inspect before you buy. You can now inspect any rotating-gear slot ( then the slot number) to see its full stats, attribute bonuses, enchantments, level requirement, and price. The market also stays open after an inspect or purchase so you can browse and buy several items in one visit.
• Dungeon features are rarer and worth more. Examining interactable features () on nearly every room had become autopilot busywork. They are now much less frequent (roughly a two-thirds cut) and their gold/xp/heal rewards are doubled to compensate, so the ones you find feel worth stopping for.
• Clearer home bed upgrade. The bed renovation row now names what it does (fertility), instead of an unexplained "No penalty".

Under the Hood

• Combat telemetry fix. Our internal death tracking was being crowded out by the much larger volume of victories, making it look like deaths were far rarer than they actually were. Death records are now retained properly, so balance decisions are made on real numbers.
• Broad consolidation of item-conversion code so stats and enchantments stop quietly going missing one at a time, plus restoration of two world-boss item perks that had drifted out of the loot equip path.
• All new text localized across English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian.

Thanks as always for the detailed bug reports and feedback. Keep them coming.

Usurper Reborn v0.65.2 (Countdown)

Another round of the Beta to 1.0 "Countdown" cycle. This update bundles a batch of co-op (leader/follower) play fixes, five GitHub-reported bug fixes, seven in-game bug-report fixes, and a server stability and log-cleanup pass. Details below.

Co-op (Group Dungeon) Fixes

• Echoes recruit again after taking a family surname. A recent regression made any character with a family surname unable to be recruited as an "echo" at Team Corner ("save data cannot be found"). Echoes now load correctly regardless of surname, and any echoes that got stuck from earlier sessions heal themselves on the next dungeon entry.
• Follower combat HUD shows the whole party's HP. A follower healer can now see the leader's health (and every teammate's) on a compact, color-coded party line every turn, instead of only catching it on a small line after each round.
• Character names instead of account logins. Several public spots that showed your account login name now show your character name: the follower's in-dungeon footer, the realm logout broadcast, and the dungeon-leave notices.
• Follower loot claims are reliable. Claiming an offered drop as a follower used to fail intermittently ("not recognized") and pass the loot on. Stale input is now cleared before each follower combat read, so your keypress always matches the prompt you are looking at.
• End-of-fight text renders in order. Follower action lines could appear below the boss-kill summary, out of sequence. The leader now flushes co-op messages before the summary, and followers now see the kill summary too.
• Group loot ownership is clearer. When a drop belongs to a follower, the leader now sees a "first claim" note and the rest of the party sees a labeled "" line, so a co-op drop is no longer mistaken for shared or duplicated loot. (There was never any real duplication; this was a display-only confusion, now clarified.)

Bug Fixes (GitHub Issues)

• Loot can no longer be handed to a player echo. Echoes are read-only snapshots, so gear placed on one was silently lost. Echoes are now excluded from both the automatic ally pick-up and the loot-screen recipient cycler. Companions, Team Corner NPCs, spouses/lovers, and live grouped players remain eligible exactly as before. (Issue #109)
• Dungeon Reset Scroll reliably respawns monsters. Using the scroll, leaving to the Magic Shop, and coming back could show an empty floor (and a relog could even lose the reset for good). The floor now rebuilds correctly on re-entry, and the scroll saves immediately so the reset cannot be overwritten. (Issue #108)
• "Press any key" accepts any key in BBS Standard I/O (stdio) mode. These prompts (starting at the splash screen) used to require Enter. They now advance on the first key. Local play on a real terminal benefits too; MUD, SSH, and web clients are unchanged. (Issue #103)
• World boss deaths from burn/poison no longer cost a resurrection. A world boss fight is non-lethal: dropping to 0 HP pulls you to safety with no resurrection lost. A death from a damage-over-time tick used to slip past that protection and trigger a real death. All ways of reaching 0 HP in a world boss fight are now handled the same. (Issue #110)
• Player-to-player trades send items exactly as they are. Sent items used to lose stats, enchantments, and cursed effects (a cursed item kept its name but lost its penalties, and quality looked downgraded). Trades now carry every field, including the full effect list, across accept, cancel, decline, and expiry. (Issue #111)

Bug Fixes (In-Game Reports)

• Dungeon moral-choice events are now translated. The dungeon moral dilemmas (the dying creature, the orphans' stolen gold, the armed magical trap, and the fallen adventurer's spirit) were English-only in non-English sessions. They are now fully localized in Hungarian, Spanish, French, and Italian.
• Giving potions to a companion's stash adds instead of replacing. Issuing potions to a companion in the dungeon used to overwrite their count (give 4 to a companion holding 11, end up with 4). It now correctly adds to the existing stash (11 + 4 = 15).
• Life steal no longer triggers on an evaded attack. When a swing passes harmlessly through an evasive (Incorporeal/Phase-type) enemy, life steal and other on-hit effects no longer fire as if the hit had landed.
• Auto-level-up "off" is respected for followers in groups. Turning auto-level-up off had no effect for a multiplayer follower. Followers now bank XP and level up manually at the Level Master, exactly like a solo player.
• Dungeon rest spots heal the whole party. The rest-spot event (safe haven / meditation chamber) only healed other human players in a group. It now restores 33% HP/MP/stamina and cures poison for every living party member, companions and NPC teammates included, matching the make-camp action.
• Off-hand strike damage is consistent. An off-hand swing that came from a skill used to hit for less than a normal off-hand swing because it skipped proficiency, scaling, crits, and buffs. Both now use the same full off-hand formula.
• Shop staves are two-handed. Staves found as loot were two-handed while staves bought from a shop were one-handed. Shop staves now match (genuine one-handed weapons are unaffected).

Server Stability and Log Cleanup

• Inventory slot crash fixed. Typing a backpack item number that was not on screen could end a session. An out-of-range entry now just shows "invalid choice."
• Clean logouts no longer flash an error screen or get logged as a crash.
• Follower disconnects (a normal connection drop) are no longer logged as errors.
• Duplicate-name registration now gives a clear "that name is already taken" message instead of a generic failure.
• A harmless shutdown-time database race is no longer logged as an error.

Thanks to everyone filing bug reports in-game and on GitHub. Keep them coming.

Usurper Reborn v0.65.1 (Countdown)

Another step on the road to 1.0: two new features, co-op healer fixes, a batch of quality-of-life upgrades, and a large localization pass across the shops and the Music Shop.

New Features

• Take a family name when you marry. At the wedding you can now keep your own name, adopt your spouse's surname, or choose a brand-new family name. It shows up everywhere (your status sheet, /who, the website leaderboard, NPC dialogue), and your children inherit it.
• Set combat skills for your whole party. You could already switch off a companion's wasteful moves at the Inn. Now you can do the same for recruited Team Corner NPCs, a spouse you bring adventuring, and recruited player echoes, right from the Dungeon Entrance party menu and the in-dungeon party menu. Toggle off the skills you do not want them using and they fall back to whatever is left (or a basic attack), so they stop wasting turns.

Co-op Multiplayer

• Follower healers can finally heal their teammates. If you joined a friend's dungeon run as a healer, your heal spells used to only ever hit yourself. Now you get a numbered target list every turn (yourself, the leader, and each ally with their current HP percentage), so you can heal whoever needs it most. The shortcut keys work as the help screen describes, and party-wide heals now reach the leader too.
• Live party HP panel. /party now shows everyone in the fight: the leader, every grouped player, and all NPC, companion, and pet allies, each with HP and MP, so a healer can see at a glance who is hurt.
• No more stuck combat screen. After a battle, a follower's screen now refreshes right away instead of waiting until they walk to a new room.

Quality of Life

• See a weapon's class before you equip it. Loot drops, the comparison screen, and your inventory now label each weapon as One-Handed, Two-Handed, Shield, Buckler, or Tower Shield, so you no longer have to equip something just to find out what it is. Even an unusual off-hand item like a buckler is now correctly tagged as a shield.
• Heal menus show ally HP percentage everywhere. The stamina and ability heal picker now lists each ally's HP percentage, matching the spell heal picker, so you can read at a glance who needs the heal.
• Guild Officers can withdraw far more gold. The Officer per-transaction limit at the guild bank has gone from 50,000 to 10,000,000, so a trusted Officer can reclaim a large stash without needing the Leader online. (You still cannot withdraw more than the guild actually holds.)

Localization

• "Yes" now works in your own language at every confirm prompt. Confirm prompts displayed a localized accept key (S for Spanish and Italian, O for French, I for Hungarian), but only the English Y actually did anything. This is now fixed game-wide: shops, bank, temple, church, castle, healer, inn, and many more, hundreds of prompts in total. Every language keeps its natural display, and the key you are shown now does what it says.
• Shop hotkeys match what is shown. A handful of Spanish and Italian shop menus displayed letters the game did not accept (in one case the "buy" key actually triggered "skip"). All corrected.
• Music Shop performances are now translated. The song lyrics you hear when you hire a performance, along with the seven Old God lore ballads, are now fully localized in all five languages, with the comedic songs kept funny and the ballads kept solemn.
• More shop text translated. The Magic Shop sell flow and the wandering town merchant's wares now appear in your chosen language.

Under the Hood

• Fixed an analytics attribution gap so new-player connection types are recorded correctly, which helps us see how people are finding and starting the game during the Beta.

Thank you for playing Usurper Reborn during the Beta. Your feedback and bug reports are exactly what shape these updates, so keep them coming.

Usurper Reborn v0.65.0 - "Countdown"

The first patch on the road to 1.0. The focus this time: get new players into the game fast, make the deep dungeon dangerous again, fix a big stack of player-reported bugs, and translate a lot more of the world into Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian. (The game is still in beta, so the title screen banner stays for now.)

New Player Experience

• Quick Start character creation. Right after you choose a name you now get a Quick Start option: pick one of three ready-made heroes (Human Warrior, Elf Magician, or Dwarf Cleric) and your gender, and you are adventuring in under a minute. Everything else is set to sensible defaults that you can change any time under Preferences. Quick Start also lets you back out at any step and tells you clearly if you mistype, instead of guessing for you. Prefer the deep dive? Full Custom creation is unchanged.
• Next-step hints on Main Street. A short one-line pointer now shows your next objective right on the town screen, so you always know where to go next.
• The Adventurer's Journal (/journal). A single command that summarizes where you are in the story, your active quests, what is in progress, and a recommended next step.

Combat and Balance

• Late-game monsters are dangerous again. Past floor 30, well-geared characters had become nearly impossible to hit, so the deepest fights ran on autopilot. Monster accuracy is now bounded so an at-level monster always has a real chance to land blows. Early game is untouched, and tank builds still take far less damage, they just are not invincible anymore.
• Gang War and PvP fixes. Your dual-wield second attack and your life-stealing weapons now work in Gang Wars, the Arena, and faction ambushes. Previously those only fired in normal dungeon combat.
• Monster reinforcements. Enemy "summon" abilities now actually call in reinforcements instead of just printing a line of text, including several boss summon moves. Summoned minions give experience but no gold, so there is nothing to farm.
• Clearer combat readout. The to-hit line in combat now reads "vs DC" with the value monsters actually need to roll against you, so the number matches what is happening.

New Features

• Bank wire transfers. You can now send gold to another player straight from the bank. Choose a player, enter an amount from your bank balance, and it is deposited into their account on their next login. The bank keeps a small 2 percent fee. (Online play.)
• More mercenary work. The Sellsword Hall job board gained a second tier of higher-paying contracts that unlock as you climb the Sellsword ranks, so the board stays fresh as you level.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a crash when starting an intimate encounter while playing in Hungarian, Spanish, or Italian.
• Permadeath now fully erases a character. Creating a new character with the same name no longer inherits the previous one's quests, arena wins, worship, relationships, or children. Characters affected before this patch are cleaned up automatically on their next login.
• Antidotes and the Healer's cure now recognize and clear poison inflicted by dungeon gas traps and feature discoveries (previously you could be poisoned but unable to cure it).
• At Home, the option to resurrect a fallen companion or lover no longer charges you for someone who has already returned on their own.
• Fixed the ">" key not cycling to the next party member when comparing dropped equipment on some terminals.

Translations (Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian)

• Scripted Stranger encounters are now translated, including the encounter that finds you after your first death and the other story-milestone meetings.
• Dungeon lore found by examining features is now translated: epitaphs, scratched-wall inscriptions, waterlogged journals, and visions.
• These join the ongoing translation effort across menus, combat, dialogue, and the rest of the world.

Stability, Security, and Maintenance

• No more lost actions in online play. Closed a rare timing bug where a change you just made, recruiting an NPC, equipping a teammate, getting married, could be silently undone if the world simulation saved at the same instant.
• Fixed the Linux BBS auto-updater so it actually applies updates instead of silently failing.
• Hardened login against password guessing, plus a number of smaller server and stability fixes.

Found a bug? Report it in-game with the ! command, or drop into our Discord. Thanks for playing, and see you in the dungeon.

Usurper Reborn v0.64.1 - The Brain, Part 2

The NPCs of the realm just got a lot more alive. This update builds on v0.64.0's Brain v2 AI overhaul with a full slate of living-world behavior: NPCs that hunt their enemies, ask you for help, comment on the news, make the first move, and beg for their lives. Plus a major early-game progression boost and a stack of bug fixes.

NPCs Now Act On Their Goals

• Target pursuit. NPCs with a grudge, a rivalry, or a romance in mind now physically travel to wherever their target is. An NPC whose goal is to crush a rival will show up at the Inn where that rival drinks, with hostile intent written all over them.
• You can see it coming. When an NPC at your location is targeting YOU, you get a warning line on entry, keyed to their intent: open hostility, watchful calculation, a friendly approach, or a quiet careful eye.
• They speak first. Once you have talked to an NPC who has business with you, they will call out to you on later encounters. Their opening lines are generated in their own voice, shaped by their goal and your history.
• NPCs hunt bounties. NPCs now visit the Quest Hall and work the bounty board just like players do. Watch the news feed: bounty completions now come from NPCs and players alike.

NPCs Ask You For Help

The first time the game flips the quest relationship around. An NPC with a vendetta against another NPC may now ask YOU to settle it. Talk to them, hear their in-character plea, and accept a real bounty quest against their enemy. Kill the target and the NPC's goal resolves: their anger clears, the news carries the story, and you were the hand of someone else's vengeance.

Richer Conversations

• Personal topics get personal answers. Ask an NPC about their life goals, their origins, their family, their friends, or their views on romance, and the reply is generated from that specific NPC's actual goals, personality, and relationship with you. A stranger gets a guarded evasion; a confidant gets the truth.
• Reactions in their own voice. Compliments, provocations, and flirt responses (success, awkward miss, or a married NPC turning you down flat) are now spoken in each NPC's individual voice instead of shared templates.
• NPCs comment on the news. After a king falls, a world boss dies, or a scandal breaks, NPCs will bring it up in conversation, each with their own take.
• NPCs flirt first. A single, attracted, romantically-inclined NPC who has grown close to you may finally make the first move. A shy one ventures softly; a bold one swings.
• Bigger decisions feel personal. Confessions of love and asking an affair partner to leave their spouse are now weighed by the NPC's actual personality and history with you, not a flat dice roll.

Note: the AI-generated dialogue features run on the official online server. Single-player and BBS sessions use the classic template system for all of the above.

Mercy in PvP

When you bring a fighting-fit NPC to the brink of death in PvP, they may now drop to their knees and beg for their life, depending on their courage and temperament. Spare them and you gain Chivalry, mend the relationship, and the realm hears of your mercy. Finish them and you take the kill as before. Brave opponents still die on their feet, weapon raised. Staged fights (pit fights, gang wars, throne challenges, bounty hunts) are always to the finish.

Early Game Progression Boost

Telemetry showed new characters winning 95 to 100 percent of their fights but quitting anyway: the climb was simply too slow, with level 10 taking around 200 combats. Experience gains are now multiplied at low levels:

• Levels 1 to 5: triple XP
• Levels 6 to 10: double XP
• Levels 11 to 15: 1.5x XP
• Levels 16 to 20: 1.2x XP
• Level 21 and up: unchanged

Gold rewards are untouched. Post-release data confirms new characters now reach the early teens in roughly half the combats.

Bug Fixes and Balance

• Spouse no longer dies mysteriously in your dungeon party. Three interlocking protection holes let the world simulator kill a spouse who was walking right beside you (showing full health the whole time, then dead when you got home). All three are closed.
• Spouse death notifications. If your spouse legitimately dies while you are away (killed in the world, or old age), you now receive a direct notice with who, how, where, and when, instead of discovering it at the resurrection screen.
• NPC behavior rebalance. NPCs were spending 42 percent of their time at the gym. Training weights were tuned down; towns now show a believable mix of drinking, shopping, scheming, and the occasional workout.
• Repeating revenge news fixed. Some NPCs were celebrating the same long-settled vendetta dozens of times in the news feed. Each revenge is now celebrated exactly once.
• Pre-release audit. The full update was reviewed by a multi-pass audit before shipping, fixing roughly 25 additional issues: thread-safety in the new dialogue systems, quest-claim edge cases, localization gaps, a mercy-farming exploit (the alignment reward from sparing is now capped at 3 per day), and a long list of smaller consistency fixes.

Localization

All new player-facing text ships in all five supported languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian. As always: report bugs in-game with the ! command, or join us on Discord. Good hunting.

v0.64.0 - The Brain

The biggest NPC overhaul in the game's history. The simulated population around you finally has agency, real combat, persistent grudges, distinct voices, and long-arc goals that drive their behavior for weeks at a time.

What's new

• NPCs finally have agency. The weighted-random number generator that has been picking NPC actions since the BBS port is gone. Replaced by a goal-driven system that looks at the NPC's personality, current goals, gear, recent memories, and what happened to them last time they tried this exact thing, then picks the next action based on all of it.
• The world stops being a meat grinder. Two weeks of telemetry showed NPCs were dying at 70 times the rate they were progressing. The whole economy is reworked: NPCs spawn with starting gear, dungeon difficulty is sized to the team, the inn no longer bankrupts them, the healer no longer drains them, and the Dark Alley actually pays out. The Lv 14 fighter you saw last week is Lv 16 now.
• Real combat for NPCs who matter. Kings, your teammates, court members, and anyone Level 30 or higher now cast spells, drink potions, use AoE abilities, taunt monsters, and apply status effects in combat. They win fights instead of trading damage until somebody runs out of HP.
• Persistent grudges and rivalries. When an NPC's parent dies, they remember who killed them. They refuse to talk to that killer. They refuse to join their team. If they're dark-aligned, they hunt them. When the revenge resolves, a cinematic news flash announces it to the realm.
• NPCs gossip in their own voices. Every line of NPC dialogue now gets contextual flavor wrapped around it. A scowling NPC sounds different from a beaming one. An NPC who witnessed you do something terrible alludes to it sideways. An NPC who owes you a favor mentions they haven't forgotten. A spouse doesn't open with hostile faction tension; an enemy from the opposing faction does. None of it is canned.
• Examine a notable NPC and you get a first-impression paragraph. At Team Corner, when you Examine a teammate or notable NPC for the first time, a short paragraph reads like what a stranger would say after spending five minutes with them. Cached after first view.
• Dramatic moments are real choices. When you propose marriage, the NPC's answer is no longer a die roll. It's a decision read off their personality, your relationship history, your charisma, and the specifics of the proposal. Sometimes they surprise you.
• A live world-state dashboard. Visit usurper-reborn.net/balance.html to watch what the simulated NPCs are actually doing in real time: action distributions, level-up rates, death causes, gold flow, and the new LLM Moments tab showing every personalized line of NPC flavor being generated as it happens.

What it means at the table

For a long time the world simulator has been a beautifully detailed Rube Goldberg machine that mostly produced nothing. NPCs had personalities, relationships, memory systems, emotional states, a goal stack. They had jobs to do. They had places to go. And then, every tick, a random number generator picked one of seventeen verbs and the NPC did that thing regardless of anything else. They spawned naked, fought monsters they couldn't damage, got drained by inn tabs they couldn't afford, and died. Walk into the dungeon now and the NPCs you bump into are actually advancing. The Lv 14 fighter you saw last week is Lv 16 now because she's been winning her team dungeons instead of dying in them. Her wounds heal at the healer for a sane price. Her share of the gambling pot at the Dark Alley pays off two times out of three because she has the Wisdom for it. She bought a sword. She's saving for armor. Walk past the Inn and a sociable Bard is running a forty-gold tab instead of going bankrupt at a hundred. Three tables over a brawl is breaking out because two NPCs with bad blood between them ended up at the same bar. Tomorrow the news feed will mention it. Engage one of them in conversation and the line they greet you with is colored by their current mood. Scowling, they say... if they're angry. Eyes alight, they say... if they're proud. If you bailed them out of trouble last week the line that follows mentions you haven't forgotten what you did for them. If you killed their cousin in a back alley and they witnessed it, the line that follows alludes to it sideways. None of it spells out the event. The NPC just sounds like someone who remembers. Propose to them and the response isn't a die roll against personality stats. It's a decision, made by an actor that read your full relationship history, your charisma modifier, the heuristic acceptance chance, and their own personality, then picked accept or hesitate or refuse on character grounds. Sometimes they'll surprise you. Examine a notable NPC at Team Corner and the first-impression paragraph at the top reads like something a stranger would say after spending five minutes with them. Korr Stonewarden carries himself like a man who has counted out coin in every shop in the city and is still not done counting. His hands are merchant's hands; his eyes are not. Die in the dungeon while pursuing an Old God and the news feed will sometimes carry a eulogy that talks about who you were, what you were doing, and who put the blade in. Not for every commoner. But for named characters and people who mattered. None of this is the game's narrative spine. The game still plays the same way. But the world around you is noisier, more specific, more alive.

Under the hood

This release rolls together two bodies of work. The first is a focused NPC economy rebalance driven by 14 days of live telemetry: 283,117 decisions across 196 unique NPCs, 9,635 deaths against 138 level-ups, an entire population stuck at Level 50 because the math literally did not allow them to progress. The second is the full Brain v2 architectural overhaul: a utility scorer that picks actions like a person would, real combat for high-stakes NPCs, persistent goal stacks that learn from world events, dialogue flavor that adapts to personality and history, and optional LLM-rendered moments for online servers running on the live game host. The combat engine players use is completely untouched. The 830 unit tests all pass. The deploy is rollback-safe. The full technical writeup is on the website and in the repo's release notes file.

Known gaps

• Settlement is still about 10% of NPC time with limited outcomes. A larger settlement-system pass is queued.
• The Level-50 immigrant cluster (the players who joined the world at the default starting level and never advanced) should start dispersing over the coming weeks as NPCs above it begin actually leveling up. If it doesn't, the next pass forces redistribution.
• The next round of LLM dramatic forks (combat flee, affair partner selection, royal challenges, spare or kill on defeated NPC) is the immediate follow-up. The pattern is established; wiring each one is a small change.

As always, thanks for playing. The Discord is open at discord.gg/EZhwgDT6Ta if you want to compare notes, report bugs, or just heckle the design choices.

v0.63.1 -- Bloodlines hotfix

A follow-up to the v0.63.0 ship. One menu-visibility bug, two half-shipped features that turned out to have no downstream consumers, and the explanation for one design-by-omission that read as a bug.

Bloodlines of the Realm was invisible from the Castle menu

The Bloodlines of the Realm action shipped with v0.63.0 worked correctly when pressed, but it was never actually rendered in any of the Castle menu displays. So even though the case handler existed and the family-tree screen was fully functional, no one could tell the option was there. Now fixed across all four Castle display variants: the visual exterior screen commoners see, the visual interior screen the king sees, the BBS-compact exterior, and the BBS-compact interior. The commoner hotkey, which had landed on F while the king's was on Z, is now Z in both flows so muscle memory is consistent regardless of whether you're on the throne. The king's Sponsor Heir to Court action was also missing from the BBS-compact king display while present in the visual one. That row now shows both Sponsor Heir and Bloodlines together. New localized menu label: "Bloodlines of the Realm" across English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, and Italian.

Dynasty standing now does something

The v0.63.0 release notes promised each Dynasty tier grants a reaction bonus (+5% Founder, +10% Patriarch / Matriarch, +15% Bloodline, +20% Dynasty). The function that computes the bonus was implemented and the standing tier shows up correctly on the Status display, but it turned out the function had zero callers anywhere in the codebase. The bonus existed on paper and nowhere else. Now wired into the canonical reaction-modifier pipeline. The Dynasty bonus stacks multiplicatively alongside Veloura shrine attunement and Cave Spider pet penalties, applied on top of the alignment-compatibility base modifier. A Patriarch / Matriarch interacting with an aligned good NPC now sees a 65% reaction bonus instead of 50%; a Dynasty-tier player sees 80%.

Family-grudge NPCs now actually react to you

The v0.63.0 release notes promised that an NPC whose parent, sibling, or child the player killed would refuse to talk, refuse to join the player's team, and attack on sight if dark-aligned. The memory was being written into every relative's memory store on the death cascade, and the killer's name was going into their Enemies list, but a code-wide search for downstream consumers of either signal returned zero hits. The "multi-generational rivalries" feature was a write-only pipeline. Now wired with three consumers: Refuses to talk. When you press Talk on an NPC who has lost a family member to you, the conversation refuses to open: "{name}'s eyes go hard at the sight of you. They turn their back and walk away." followed by "Some blood debts do not forget." This runs after the adult-child recognition check (so your own kids don't refuse you, even if they nominally have grudges) and before the Dread flee check. Story NPCs and the king are exempt to keep quest flow unblocked. Refuses to join your team. The Team Corner recruit list now sends any grudge-bearing NPC straight into the Refused band regardless of their friendship score, so they show up in the candidate list with a "won't join" tag instead of an unrealistic recruitable cost. Attacks on sight if dark-aligned. Street encounters now scan the living NPC roster for any dark-aligned grudge-bearer in your level range, and route them in as the hostile NPC encounter ahead of the random-evil-thug pool. When they appear, their hostile phrase is replaced with a family-revenge line:

• "You killed my blood. Now I take yours."
• "I have waited a long time for this. Now we settle it."
• "Do you even remember the name of who you took from me?"
• "My family does not forget. Neither do I."
• "You walk past my door like a free soul. That ends today."

The fight uses normal combat, so if you kill the avenger you've permadied them like any other NPC, and their relatives now hate you too. A new helper does the grudge check by reading the new family-tie memory types directly rather than the Enemies list, which sidesteps an inconsistency where everything else in the codebase stores NPC IDs while the family-death writes were storing display names. Five new revenge-phrase loc keys per language plus two grudge-refusal lines, all translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, and Italian.

Dynasty standing is empty until you actually have a grown child

Not a bug, but worth calling out because someone asked: the Dynasty standing line on Status only appears once you have at least one living adult child. If you haven't raised a kid to 18 yet, the line correctly does not render. This matches the Sellsword Hall standing, which also only appears once you've completed at least one mercenary contract. The release notes called this out, but it's easy to read as a bug when the line you expected to see is missing. For context: a child is born at intimacy scenes (Home, Love Corner, etc.), grows up over in-game time, and graduates at 18 to become an adult NPC. Once that happens, the Dynasty line appears and the reaction bonus starts applying.

v0.63.0 -- Bloodlines

For years (in-game), the game has tracked your children from cradle to adulthood. You watched them learn to walk. You taught them right from wrong. You fought their custody battles after divorce. You shaped their souls with every parenting choice you made. Then at 18 they graduated into the adult NPC roster and the game quietly forgot who their parents were. Your grown-up daughter walked off into the world with no idea you raised her. You could not recognize her on the street if you tried. The family roster at home stopped showing her the day she turned 18. And worst of all, the game would happily let you walk her down the aisle at the Church and have a baby with her. This release closes that gap. Adult children now remember who their parents are. The game labels them "(your daughter)" / "(your son)" when you talk to them. Your home shows a "Grown Children" roster of every adult you raised. They recognize you when you cross paths for the first time, with a one-time reunion scene that is warm, bittersweet, or cold depending on how you raised them. They have their own conversation topics. They show up at Team Corner as the cheapest recruits in the list, because blood ties beat friendship ties. When you finally permadie, the eldest passes into your estate before the world forgets you exist. If you reach the throne, you can elevate them to your court. And NPC children remember when you kill their parents, with consequences that ripple for the rest of their lives. Every marriage, intimacy, and pregnancy path now refuses incest, with refusal flavor instead of stony silence. Every loophole that was bypassing the existing guards is closed.

The reunion moment

The first time you walk into Talk with one of your grown children, a one-time cinematic plays before the normal conversation begins. The scene is keyed to the child's Soul at graduation, a snapshot taken the moment they turned 18, so it reflects the parenting choices you actually made.

• Virtuous: "You see them across the street and the years collapse. The little hand you used to hold became this hand." They speak first: "Father... mother... you came back."
• Neutral: "It takes a moment. They have grown into a stranger's face, and then the eyes settle on you, and you know each other again." They speak: "It has been a long time. You look older. We both do."
• Evil: "You recognize them a half-beat before they recognize you. Whatever you taught them about the world, they learned it well. Their eyes are colder than you remembered." They speak: "So. You are still alive. I wondered if I would ever see you again."

The cinematic plays exactly once per child per cycle. After it ends, the relationship seeds at a parental band so the next time you talk it is not stranger-grade. Family overrides Dread: a dark-aligned player at Nightmare-tier reputation that makes lesser NPCs flee on sight will not make their own kid flee. Family wins.

Adult-child conversation

When you talk to one of your grown children, the Chat slot swaps to a parent-flavored topic pool. You can ask:

• "Remember when you were small?"
• "How is your mother / father?"
• "What's your trade now? How do you fill your days?"
• "Are you well? Truly well?"
• "Do you need anything? Coin, a word in the right ear?"

Each topic has three tone-keyed responses and two variants per tone, so you cycle through plenty of unique answers before any repeat. A virtuously-raised daughter might say: "I remember everything. Even the things you do not think I do. The lullabies. The way you used to read by candlelight when you thought I was asleep." A child raised toward evil might give a short laugh with no warmth in it: "Oh, I remember. Don't worry about that." The flirt, intimate, proposition, propose, and confess menu options are hidden entirely when you are talking to an adult child. Not just refused if you press them: removed from the menu so they are not an option at all.

Dynasty standing

A new reputation tier appears on your Status display, alongside Dread / Renown / Sellsword Hall. It is derived live from your adult-children set:

• Founder (1+ living adult children): +5% reaction bonus
• Patriarch / Matriarch (3+ living adult children, gendered by player sex): +10%
• Bloodline (5+ adult children, all raised to the same alignment band): +15%
• Dynasty (5+ adult children + Bloodline purity + at least one grandchild): +20%

The Bloodline and Dynasty tiers reward consistency: a player who consistently raised their kids the same way preserves the moral arc of their parenting as a real standing, instead of averaging it out to mush with one outlier.

Inheritance on permadeath

When your character runs out of resurrections and the soft-mode revival does not save you, the death cinematic now includes an inheritance beat before the Veil closes:

• 50% of your current gold passes to the eldest living adult child.
• +500 XP as a determination buff for the heir.
• News entry: "The estate of {player} passes to {heir}. ({gold} inherited.)"

You see one last cinematic line: "Your estate passes to {heir}. ({gold} gold delivered.)" Then: "Whatever {heir} becomes, a piece of you walks the world in them." If you have no living adult children at the time of death, the inheritance step silently short-circuits. The regular permadeath cinematic runs unchanged.

Adult children at Team Corner

The Recruit NPC flow now treats adult children as their own band. They sort to the top of the recruit list above your friends, render in bright magenta, get a family tag, and cost half the base recruit fee:

• Family (adult child): 50%
• Friend (Friendship / Trust / Respect): 75% / 85% / 95%
• Neutral: 100%
• Rival (Suspicious / Anger): 115% / 140%
• Refused (Enemy / Hate): cannot recruit

Blood ties beat friendship ties. An adult child you are temporarily estranged from still gets the Family band.

NPCs reflect on you

Adult children you raised who reach public milestone levels (10, 20, 30, 50, 75) now spawn a follow-up news entry tying their accomplishment back to you as their parent. The tone splits on how you raised them:

• Virtuous: "Rumors reach the city: {child}, child of {parent}, has earned a name at level {N} for honest work and a steady hand. The parent's craft, carried forward."
• Neutral: "Word spreads: {child}, child of {parent}, has reached level {N}. The world remembers their parent at the sound of it."
• Evil: "Rumors reach the city: {child}, child of {parent}, is whispered of in darker rooms at level {N}. Whatever the parent taught, it took root."

NG+ Charisma bonus

A new lifetime counter tracks how many adult children you have raised to level 20 across your entire playthrough history. Each completed family arc grants +5 starting Charisma in your next cycle's character, capped at +25. Carryover survives NG+ via the same pattern that already preserves your Sellsword contracts and lifetime charity donations. Your last life's dynasty makes your next life's character a more compelling presence.

Royal sponsorship

If you have taken the throne, a new royal action Sponsor Heir to Court lets you elevate one of your grown children into a court position. The track is decided by the child's alignment:

• Virtuous (Chivalry > 200): Faith ordination. The child joins the Faith faction and takes the Royal Chaplain court seat.
• Evil (Darkness > 200): Shadow Spymaster. The child joins the Shadows faction and takes the Royal Spymaster seat.
• Neither: Crown Advisor. The child joins the Crown faction and takes the Royal Advisor seat.

Costs 50 Fame. Only eligible adult children (level 20 or higher, not already in court, not already faction-aligned) appear in the picker.

Bloodlines of the Realm

A new Bloodlines of the Realm action at the Castle shows the top 10 family lines in the world by descendant count. Read-only display, mirroring the existing Hall of Heroes and Pantheon screens. Visible to royalty and commoners alike.

When your kids kill their parent's killer

NPCs now remember who killed their parent. When an NPC dies, every other NPC whose lineage points at the deceased (parent, child, sibling) records a "lost family member" memory; if there was a killer, every relative also records who that killer was, and the killer goes into each relative's Enemies list. Downstream consequences fire through the existing memory and enemy systems:

• The relative refuses to talk to the killer.
• The relative refuses to join the killer's team.
• If the relative is dark-aligned, they attack on sight.

A player who builds an empire by killing the dynasty heads of a long-running rival family is now going to face a wave of children with grudges in the next generation. The simulated world has a memory now.

The incest gate

A new helper computes the family relationship between any two characters: None, Self, Parent, Child, Sibling, Half-Sibling, Grandparent, Grandchild, Adoptive Parent, Adoptive Child, Adoptive Sibling. Anything except None blocks marriage, intimacy, and pregnancy. The gate is wired into eight code paths:

• The Church marriage flow.
• The Castle royal marriage flow (was bypassing every guard before).
• The Castle royal candidate filter.
• The Love Corner marriage flow.
• The Visual Novel dialogue marriage proposal.
• The pregnancy check (defense in depth against legacy spouse/lover records from before lineage data existed).
• The NPC-to-NPC marriage compatibility check.
• The NPC affair partner picker.

Each refusal is localized with a relation-specific flavor line, keeping the tone solemn instead of preachy. Adoption is treated as blood for the gate. Sibling marriage is a hard block.

Polish folded in from v0.62.1

The 0.62.1 release was tagged but never shipped. Its five fixes ride along here: "A Ooze" / "A Imp" article bug. Encounter messages were emitting "A Ooze attacks!", "A Imp guards the boss room", "A Orc traveler arrived". A new helper picks the right article with the standard English exception lists (silent-h "honest" / "hour" / "heir" take "an", yu-sound "user" / "unicorn" / "European" take "a"). Eleven message sites fixed. Also picked up a related double-determiner bug: "A The Crown sympathizer" now reads "The Crown sympathizer". Equipment comparison stats showed up in random order. A loot drop could list current and new stats in non-matching orders, with Constitution / Intelligence appearing at random spots depending on the code path. Every stat-bonus list now sorts alphabetically before rendering. Twelve display sites fixed in one sweep. Team Corner showed options that did nothing. Apply to join a team stayed in the menu after you joined a team and just bounced. Now removed. The rest of the menu now gates by team state: Create / Join only show when you are not in a team; team-management options only show when you are. Team Corner showed online-only features in single-player.

Password

and Send Message were appearing in single-player. Now gated so they only appear online. Dev debug screens were shipping to players. Two visible debug surfaces had escaped to production: an inline Relationship Stats: block at the top of every NPC conversation showing raw integers, and a (DEBUG) View personality traits menu entry that dumped raw floats. Both removed. The useful information (orientation, relationship band, romance status, abstracted personality) now surfaces through the Level Master's Crystal Ball as an in-fiction oracle reading: "They count you a friend" instead of "Relation Level: 40"; "Brave to the point of recklessness" instead of "Courage: 0.82".

Bug-fix pass against the romance and family backlog

The relationship system and NPC pipeline both had a long backlog of small bugs that had been accumulating across several releases. This release closes 27 of them. The full list:

Romance, marriage, and intimacy

• Permadied lovers stayed in your Current Lovers list forever, and jealousy entries kept ticking against dead NPCs. Now all spouse / lover / friend-with-benefits / jealousy / affair records clean up immediately when an NPC permadies.
• Spouse death did not clear jealousy entries. The jealousy loop could keep ticking against a dead spouse and emit phantom divorce news.
• Player-NPC marriages were being triple-registered. Copy-paste cruft from a fix two years ago. Collapsed to a single dispatch.
• Player-side pregnancy was not recording the father. A v0.54 invariant that protects affair pregnancies during divorce was silently broken because the father field was never being set in the first place.
• The jealousy loop could trigger divorce news against a dead NPC. Defense-in-depth null and IsDead guards added.
• Castle divorce could leave the marriage half-finished if the spouse NPC reference had drifted. Now resolves the NPC by ID first, with name fallback.
• You could end up with an unlimited number of lovers. Now capped at five, with a player-facing refusal: "{name} would be yours, but your heart already carries too many lovers. The bond falters before it begins."
• Affairs that ended in marriage were silently aborting because the old marriage record was still in the way. The affair-to-marriage flow now divorces the old spouse before trying to marry the new partner.
• Faction-tension dialogue flavor was firing against your spouse in non-online contexts. Fixed.
• Flirt success count could double-bump in a single flirt action depending on which success branch fired.
• The dialogue layer could operate against a permadied NPC if a menu render raced the death cascade. Guarded.
• Love Corner divorce had the same NPC-resolution bug as Castle divorce. Same fix.
• Love Corner marriage could deduct gold before checking whether you were already married. Now refuses up-front.
• Reading your spouse's name was secretly mutating relation records to clean up dead-spouse state. This fired side-effects from places that should have been pure reads (BBS status line, /who list, dialogue render hooks). Now a pure read; cleanup runs at login.
• The "you accepted my confession" state could get overwritten by a subsequent state-write pass.
• Affair-to-marriage did not clear the jilted spouse's jealousy. Fixed.

NPC, family, and graduation

• When an NPC permadied in combat, spouse bereavement was not firing. The check was gated on a flag that had been permanently disabled per a v0.53.11 cleanup, so the bereavement code path had been unreachable.
• Child custody after divorce was not recomputing the parent's child count correctly. Both parents were reporting 100% of shared kids post-divorce. Now honors the custody-access flags: each parent reports only the kids who live with them.
• Two newborns named at the exact same tick could collapse into one record if both had empty parent IDs. The dedup key now includes parent names too.
• The online dashboard summary showed "Unknown" for children at Kidnapped or Away status. Now distinguishes Home, Orphanage, Kidnapped, and Away.
• Newborns did not get a surname until a deserialization migration caught them on next load. Now the surname is set when the child is named.
• Late-pickup orphans were spawning as Human regardless of parental race. Now uses the parental-race determination the rest of the pipeline already had.
• NG+ disown was not immediately persisting to the shared world state, so a concurrent world-sim tick could re-attach the disowned children.
• NPC aging could push a race to extinction if the population was already at the permadeath floor. Now consults the race floor and extends the lifespan by a week if the race is on the brink.
• Widow cleanup was not clearing the legacy Married flag, leaving the player in a half-married state some quest and dialogue paths consult.
• Family-tie memory wiring extended. Earlier work only wired parent death to children. Now every relative (parent, child, sibling) records the loss, and the killer goes into every relative's Enemies list. Birth events also write a positive memory in every living parent and sibling.
• Castle royal marriage was filtering out the player's own teammate even though Church and Love Corner allowed it. Castle now allows your own teammate while still filtering rival-team-loyal NPCs.

Graduation pipeline fixes (the bugs we caught in passing)

Three pre-existing bugs in the child-to-NPC graduation pipeline were caught while building the lineage system, and fixed inline: Graduated adults were spawning with secretly-zeroed stats. The graduation code set the live stat values but never set the underlying Base values. The first time anything recalculated stats, the Base values reset to zero and zeroed everything else. Result: a graduated adult NPC had real stats at the moment of graduation and 0-stat husk values forever after. Graduated Magicians had 0 mana. Graduated Clerics had 0 wisdom. The graduation code was skipping Constitution, Wisdom, Dexterity, and Max Mana entirely. A graduated Magician had zero mana to cast spells with; a graduated Cleric had zero wisdom so their heals scaled catastrophically. Now both methods populate all nine core stats plus Max HP and class-appropriate Max Mana. Orphan graduates were not getting orientation reconciliation or faction assignment. A female orphan who rolled the same-sex orientation band stayed mislabeled "Gay" instead of being reconciled to "Lesbian" (the v0.61.7 fix never reached this code path). And orphan graduates never got a faction assignment at all, while immigrant NPCs did. Both now run.

Save compatibility

Pre-v0.63.0 saves heal themselves on next login. The lineage fields on existing NPCs are filled in by walking the Child registry on load: for each graduated child record, the corresponding adult NPC's lineage fields get populated from the child's parent records. The backfill is idempotent (safe to run every login) and logs a per-run summary.

v0.62.0 -- Light and Dark

Both poles of alignment finally feel worth committing to. A complete redesign of dungeon discoveries. Hungarian localization completed, with Spanish, French, and Italian following along. Plus a stack of online quality-of-life polish.

The Headline: Light and Dark

You told us being Evil was all cost and no reward. You told us you could not leave the Evil faction once you joined. You told us you wanted to play as a freelance Mercenary without swearing loyalty to anybody. You told us the Dark Alley was thin and the Light pole was thinner. We listened, and then we built seven layered systems to fix it.

1. Your alignment finally tells you what it does

The Character Status screen now spells out exactly what your alignment is doing for you, right now: combat modifiers, shop discounts, NPC reactions, holy-ground access, faction and rank. All six named alignment "powers" are real combat effects now, not flavor text. Dark gets Soul Drain (heal on melee hits), Terror Incarnate (rout foes on hit), and Shadow Strike (crit bonus). Light gets the mirror: Blessed Aura (regen per round), Holy Smite (extra damage to undead and demons), and Righteous Fury (crit bonus). You can also renounce a faction now. The button always should have existed; we wired it up.

2. Dread and Renown ladders

Two mirrored notoriety tracks. Climb Darkness and you become a Cutthroat, then a Marauder, then a Terror, then a Nightmare. Climb Chivalry and you become a Defender, then a Paragon, then a Hero, then a Legend. Higher standing deepens the discount you already get at your matching shops. And the world starts to notice you: at Terror or above, weak townsfolk flee at the sight of you before you can even speak. At Paragon or above, ordinary people cheer when you pass, and at Legend they bow.

3. New ways to spend your standing

• Demand Tribute (Dark). Shake an ordinary townsfolk down for gold. Daily-capped, gold scales to NPC level so you cannot turn it into an infinite printer.
• Bounty hunters worth killing (Dark, Marauder and above). Named hunters start coming for you in the streets. Champion-tier fights, but each one drops a guaranteed gold purse plus a real loot item on top of the regular combat reward. The hunt becomes worth it.
• NPC gifts (Light, Hero and above). Strangers express their gratitude with class-appropriate gear, not just a coin and a thank-you.
• Free temple blessing (Light, Paragon and above). A pure-hearted player who used to be turned away at the Church with "your soul is already pure" now gets one free Divine Blessing per day instead.

4. The Sellsword Hall (live as a Mercenary)

A new Sellsword Hall posting station at Anchor Road. Take freelance contracts from the Crown, the Shadows, or the Faith with no oath required. Six contracts at first tier, two per faction, with thematic objectives -- bandit purges, fence runs, undead cleansing. Your completions feed faction reputation through the existing cascade so your career drifts you naturally toward whoever you work for most, but the freelance path itself is its own named career. Five-rank ladder: Recruit, Sellsword, Veteran (+5% pay), Ironbound (+10% pay), Legend (+15% pay). The lifetime contracts counter survives New Game Plus.

5. Dark Alley depth

Black Market overhauled. Instead of three static items, it now rotates daily with real gear in slots that grow as your Dread climbs. Feared Dark players without Shadows membership can also shop there now (10% surcharge, so loyalty to the Shadows still pays better). Spot the Mark replaces the old Loaded Dice coin flip. A three-round read-the-bias game: the dealer secretly biases the dice high or low, 70% of rolls fall on the biased side, and you have to decide each round whether to commit early for a huge payout but a harder skill check, or wait for more information and a smaller payout but better odds. Wisdom-keyed, so for the first time INT/WIS builds have a real reason to visit the Dark Alley.

6. The Sanctum (live as a paragon)

A new top-level location off Main Street, marked with . The Light pole now has its own structured home, mirroring the Dark Alley. Inverted resource flow, by design: gold flows out, Renown and Faith standing flow back. You spend your wealth to be seen as the kind of person who spends their wealth that way. Three Acts of Mercy at launch, each daily-capped, each scaling cost on your level rather than your wallet so you cannot snowball into infinity: Alms to the poor (3 per day), Fund the Orphanage (1 per day), Hospice tithe (1 per day). Faith faction members get a 10% discount on charity, mirror of the Shadows-rank discount at the Black Market. A Hall of Heroes read-only wall tracks your lifetime contributions, your current Renown standing, your Faith standing, and today's contributions. The "the world remembers you" payoff in tangible form. Holy, Good, Neutral, and Balanced players are welcomed. Dark players are admitted with a cold-welcome line. Evil players are wards-barred at the door, just like the Church and Temple.

7. The Tournament of Honor

The Light-pole answer to the Gauntlet, accessible at on the Sanctum's "Other" menu, hidden below Defender Renown so you have to earn the right to see it. Deliberately shorter and more ceremonial: where the Gauntlet is ten waves of escalating monsters, the Tournament is a focused three-fight ritual against named foes a Light hero would specifically be called to confront:

• Sir Aedric the Lapsed. Once a knight of Aurelion. His sister was lost to Noctura, and he turned away from the light. The lantern-mark on his armor has been scratched out.
• Marrowking Vex. An undead lord raised through forbidden rite. Once a magistrate who sentenced a hundred to die. They came back with him.
• The Anonymous Champion. The reigning ritual winner. Never speaks. No colors. Always wins.

Same entry fee as the Gauntlet, same death-roll model, full clear earns bonus rewards plus tier-title upgrade plus the matching tier achievement (you can earn arena tier achievements from the Tournament without ever touching the Gauntlet). Tournament and Gauntlet share the same daily run counter, so it is one ritual per day, not both.

Dungeon Discoveries

The old "Examine Features" system rolled one of eight generic outcomes regardless of what you were actually looking at. A demonic altar, a burial urn, and a crystal cluster all played out identically. Floors 66 through 100 shared a pool of just three generic features. Replaced. The thing you examine is the encounter now. 96 hand-authored discoveries across all eight dungeon themes, eleven to thirteen per theme, depth-gated so floor 3 and floor 95 rooms feel nothing alike. Each is one of:

• A choice with real stakes. Pry the reliquary open for gold and risk the finger-bone trap, or whisper the old rite and take the relic freely. Take the demon altar's power at a cost to your soul, or spit on it and walk away cleaner.
• A skill test that fits the object. Force a frozen door with Strength. Slip coins from an ice reliquary with Dexterity. Reason out an ancient mechanism with Intelligence. Attune to a singing crystal with Wisdom. Endure the crushing pressure of the deep with Constitution.
• A risk gamble. Reach into the flooded grate where there is coin, and also teeth.
• A trap with character. A breath of stasis that freezes your blood. A vent that exhales furnace-heat.
• A narrative reveal. Lore, a half-remembered past life, an Ocean-philosophy insight.

About eleven one-time set-pieces fire only once per character so they stay memorable. The oldest grave in the catacombs, which you may have dug yourself in another life. A master smith's hammer left "for whoever the Cycle sends next." The moment in the void where you stop being a wave fighting the sea and remember you are the sea. These grant permanent stat lifts, deep lore, or an awakening, and your character remembers them across the cycle. The floors 66 to 100 gap is closed. Frozen Depths, Volcanic Pit, and Abyssal Void now have full theme-appropriate content instead of three generic features. Every word of the new content is translated into Hungarian, Spanish, French, and Italian.

Localization

A player working through a Hungarian session reported a dozen surfaces still rendering in English. All twelve translated, into Hungarian and into Spanish, French, and Italian for symmetry. The big one is monster combat-ability messages: every ability flavor line ("breathes a cone of fire", "delivers a CRUSHING BLOW", "drains your life force", and roughly 120 more) was hardcoded English. Now resolved through the localization system, and split into "vs you" and "vs an ally" variants so each language phrases the player case and the companion case naturally. Also localized: stranger encounter names, the home upgrade menu, the town settlement (the Outskirts), the logout forecast, dungeon party-roster lines, dungeon feature reward notifications, location headers on every screen, and the permadeath disconnect line (reworded from "*** You have been permadied. ***" to "You have permanently died.").

Online quality of life

• Auto-look (opt-in). Single-player redraws the location screen after every action. Online mode deliberately streams continuously and waits for you to type look. If you came from single-player and miss the auto-refresh, the new Auto-look setting (default OFF) makes online mode redraw single-player style. Toggle in Preferences or with /autolook. New online characters are prompted to enable it at creation.
• Fatigue on the Character Status sheet. No more guessing why your damage feels off. Single-player only (online does not use fatigue).
• "Also here" hidden in the Dungeons. Two players both "in the Dungeons" are not actually together (each has their own floor), so the co-presence line was misleading. Town locations still show co-presence, because there it is real.
• Self-hoster fix. Docker container builds were missing the Localization folder, so self-hosted servers were seeing raw localization keys everywhere. Fixed.

Coming next

A handful of items are deliberately deferred to a future release:

• A rally ally for celebrated heroes (the Renown mirror of the bounty hunters): a friendly NPC who fights alongside you for a single dungeon delve.
• Higher-tier merc contracts (the Mercenary career currently has six first-tier contracts).
• More Sanctum verbs (sponsor a pilgrim, bail a debtor) and Hall of Heroes NPC enrichment.
• Crown Commissions, reframed as a high-Renown filter on the existing Sellsword Hall.

If a player report led to a fix in this release, your name was probably attached to the issue inside our notes. Thank you. Keep reporting them. Find us on Discord, the in-game /bug reporter, or the Steam discussion forums.

Usurper Reborn v0.61.7 (Beta)

This update is a major localization pass plus a batch of bug, balance, and exploit fixes. Most of the game's remaining English-only flavor text is now fully translated into Hungarian, Spanish, French, and Italian, and several issues raised by players are resolved.

Localization

A large amount of text that was previously English-only now displays in your selected language:

• Boss dialogue: the seven Old Gods (and the hidden Noctura betrayal fight), the eight world bosses, and the four secret lore bosses now speak in your language from start to finish.
• Dungeon riddles: all 51 riddles are translated, and you can now type your answer in your own language (the original English answers still work too). Wordplay and letter riddles were adapted so they stay solvable.
• Beast taming and wilderness: the taming text and the foraging, ruins, and traveler encounters out in the wild.
• Rest dreams and dungeon visions: the dreams you have while resting and the visions the dungeon shows you.
• Companion banter: your companions' idle remarks, navigation suggestions, and backtracking comments while you explore.
• Magic shop owner: Ravanella's full conversation, including her race-based greeting.
• And more: herb names, the party XP-split screen, equipment slot names when gearing up teammates, the weekly-rank login message, the companion mana-siphon message, and the Anchor Road graphical menu labels.

World boss fights now also play their spawn and defeat narration (this text existed in the data but was never shown), so the fights open and close with proper drama. Fixed: in Hungarian and French, the wounded-traveler dungeon event displayed its gold reward on the "chivalry gained" line, so it looked like you gained thousands of chivalry. The reward you actually received was always correct; only the message text was wrong.

Gameplay and Bug Fixes

• Spouse interaction restored (online): some married players could not talk to, re-equip, or take their spouse into the dungeon. The link between the marriage and the live character could go stale and break every spouse menu at once. The game now reconnects it by name on login, so the spouse works everywhere again. Lovers are covered by the same fix.
• NPC diversity: a bug caused lesbian townsfolk to be mislabeled and slowly vanish from the world over time. They now generate correctly, existing mislabeled NPCs self-correct on world load, and overall representation was rebalanced.
• Conversations: leaving a townsperson conversation now takes a single, predictable press instead of sometimes two or three. This is a screen-reader friendliness fix.

Balance and Exploit Fixes

• Monster stuns: seven monster stun abilities (the Wild Boar's Crushing Blow, plus Boulder, Lightning, Earthquake, Engulf, Tentacle Grab, and Whirlpool) were lasting zero effective rounds and did nothing. They now correctly skip one of your turns, matching the stuns that already worked.
• Lifedrinker and Siphon enchants: a previous fix accidentally stopped these life-steal and mana-steal enchants from working when placed on armor, rings, or other non-weapon gear. They once again add up across all your equipment, while still keeping the dual-wield rule that each weapon's leech only triggers on its own swing.
• Druid's Shrine: the pilgrimage could be repeated with no cooldown, letting players farm shrine favor (and its permanent rewards) far faster than intended. You can now only attune once per attunement period, and the menu shows how long remains before you can attune again.

Thanks to everyone reporting bugs and translation gaps in the Beta. Keep them coming.

Usurper Reborn v0.61.5 -- Beta Update

A targeted balance and quality-of-life patch driven by your reports. Two new features, a six-point NPC AI tune-up, and a sweeping localization pass that closes 15 untranslated surfaces in Hungarian, Spanish, French, and Italian.

New Features

Examine Team Members

• Team Corner Examine now shows a full read on any teammate: identity (class, race, sex, age, level, specialization), alignment and faith, current mood and impression of you, top personality traits, marriage status and children, plus their combat stat block.
• The Team Corner is where you decide who to recruit, sack, or promote. The examine view now actually helps you make that decision.

Fallen-Comrade Inheritance

• When a teammate NPC dies of old age, their equipment and gold now transfer to the player team leader instead of vanishing.
• On your next login you'll see a FALLEN COMRADE'S BEQUEST section listing what each fallen teammate left you, grouped by name. Items go to your inventory (overflow stays queued for next login when slots free up); gold gets added to your purse.
• Online mode only.

Combat Balance

We pulled 965 combats of production telemetry to drive these. Global picture: 97.6% win rate, 12% of fights end in a single round, late-game players take basically zero damage. So no global difficulty drop. Two specific items did need fixing: Abysswarden Constitution Buff

• Abysswarden gets +3 Constitution per level (was +2), matching Cyclebreaker.
• Telemetry showed Abysswardens taking 4x more damage per fight than Warriors or Sages, despite running a stamina-hungry ability kit. The lowest CON growth of any prestige melee was making it feel squishy even though death rate stayed low thanks to lifesteal.
• Damage output untouched (still 2nd highest in the game). Existing characters benefit on future level-ups.

Giant Spider WebTrap Nerf

• WebTrap stun chance reduced from 45% to 30%.
• Floor 8 Giant Spiders had a 60% kill rate (3 deaths in 5 encounters) versus 0% on Floor 5. The 45% stun chance plus 2-round duration gave the spider two free hits against players who weren't yet ready to absorb them.
• Stun mechanic preserved; just less frequent. Floor 8 should now feel comparable to Floor 5.

NPC AI Overhaul

A 174,535-decision telemetry pull from production NPCs revealed two compounding problems: low-level NPC teams were getting wiped at 76-100% death rates in team dungeon runs, and the survivors weren't training or leveling up enough to break the loop. Team Dungeon Safety

• NPCs below Level 5 no longer attempt team dungeon runs (they were 100% dying).
• Sub-Level-20 teams target safer dungeon floors and skip the "brave / ambitious leader pushes one floor higher" bonus that was costing them their lives.
• Wounded team leaders now retreat at 80% HP (was 70%) to give themselves a real buffer.

Progression Loop Unblocked

• NPCs train at the gym roughly twice as often.
• Gold barrier for gym training lowered from 50g to 20g so early-career NPCs can afford it.
• NPCs who have enough XP to level up will now almost always do it instead of wandering to the inn.

Expected effect over the next few weeks: low-level NPC teams should survive their dungeon runs at rates similar to the 40+ level band, NPCs should accumulate gear and stats more naturally, and you'll see more variety in NPC behavior overall.

Localization

A player ran captures in a Hungarian session and flagged 15 distinct surfaces that were still rendering English. All fixed in this release, with matching translations into Hungarian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Combat:

• Monster death flavor pool ("falls in combat!" and 3 variants)
• Victory and multi-kill banners ("Victory!", "Double kill!", up to "PENTA KILL!" and the {N} MONSTERS SLAIN! fallback)
• Online player-fallen broadcasts and the carried-back-to-the-Inn news event
• Equipment slot names in the loot comparison window

Class names displayed everywhere:

• 20 separate sites were passing the raw English enum name into translated templates ("Hungarian-template Assassin" instead of "Hungarian-template Orgyilkos"). All now use the localized class name helper.
• This covers grudge confrontations, arena opponents, crystal ball scrying, mercenary lists, castle siege displays, ending screens, and more.

Dialogue and Romance:

• All 28 deep-talk player questions ("Where are you from originally?" and the rest of the first slot)
• Compliment, confession, kiss, and proposition NPC reactions
• Marriage proposal accepted / not-ready / rejected responses
• Wedding ceremony messages and the "kingdom celebrates your union" news
• The Hungarian pronoun bleed in intimate scenes ("She feléd fordul" no longer happens; Hungarian now correctly drops the subject pronoun since the verb conjugation carries it)

Other surfaces:

• Equip messages ("Moved X to inventory" and the validation errors)
• Child interaction menu ("Spend time" / "Rename")
• Home rest status ("today" -> "ma" in Hungarian)
• Location names in the MUD streaming prompt (Mudlet, TinTin++, etc.)

141 new English keys, with full translations into all four supported languages. Format-arg placeholders verified to match across all five languages.

Reporting Bugs

In-game: press ! from any location, or type /bug. You can cancel by pressing Enter on a blank line. See you in the dungeon.

Usurper Reborn v0.61.4 -- Dynamic NPC Dialogue + Hungarian + 30 New Steam Achievements

NPCs in this city used to recite their lines. They are starting to talk to you. v0.61.4 is the next step of the dynamic-dialogue plan, the second wave of Hungarian translation, a Steam achievement coverage pass, and a stack of player-reported fixes.

NPCs that notice you

Greetings, farewells, and chat replies now layer contextual flavor on top of the base templates based on what the NPC actually knows about you:

• Mood prefix keyed to the NPC's dominant emotion (Joy, Anger, Sadness, Confidence, Greed, Gratitude, Hope, Peace, Fear, Pride, Envy, Loneliness). A grateful NPC opens warmly. A scowling one does not.
• Memory beat if the NPC has a recent interaction with you. "I haven't forgotten what you did earlier today" reads differently than "you and I have unfinished business, after a while ago." The phrasing matches the emotional impact and avoids contradicting the mood.
• Witness beat when the NPC actually saw you do something noteworthy. Murder somebody in front of them, the next conversation gets oblique ("I saw what you did, don't think no one noticed").
• Player-state cues. Walk into a chat below 30% HP and you will get a "you look terrible, are you alright?" line from a friendly NPC, or a mocking "should have thought about that before bleeding at me" from a hostile one. Walk in with 100,000+ gold and merchant-personality NPCs notice the purse.
• Grief. NPCs who recently witnessed a death and are still sad will trail off mid-conversation. Non-specific by design, no spouse-name leak.
• Personality aside. Greedy NPCs talk about coin. Trustworthy NPCs cut to the chase. Cautious NPCs lower their voice. Lines drawn from the most-deviated trait so quiet personalities stay quiet.
• Faction tension. Faith-aligned and Shadows-aligned NPCs surface tension when speaking to the opposite faction, but suppress it entirely for romance partners (your spouse no longer opens with "don't tell your priests we spoke").

A coherence pipeline ties these layers together: the mood layer classifies the tone, and downstream layers consult that tone so you do not get a beaming NPC bringing up unfinished business. A per-NPC recent-line cache prevents the same line firing twice in a row.

Hungarian: end-to-end

Hungarian players now see the complete dialogue system. 175 base dialogue template strings (greetings, farewells, flirts, compliments, chat topics, personal stories) plus all 114 contextual flavor pool lines are translated to Hungarian. The dynamic-dialogue layering works in Hungarian just as it does in English. Spanish, French, and Italian still see English for the dialogue layer for now; future passes will widen coverage. A separate localization fix: 10 daily-login-streak messages ("Two days in a row, keep it going!", "30 days, you are a Devoted Champion!", "Your N-day login streak has ended!", etc.) were hardcoded English. Now translated in all five supported languages.

Steam achievements: 79 of 79 live, 30 newly registered with custom art

The game has 79 achievements. Until v0.61.4, only 49 of them were registered on the Steam side, which meant 30 in-game achievements would never unlock on Steam even when you earned them. That gap is closed. All 30 missing achievements are now live on Steam with unique custom icon art per achievement, with tier-appropriate frames (rainbow Diamond, polished Platinum, ornate Gold, brushed Silver, weathered Bronze). Some sets read as visual progressions:

• Gauntlet tier series (Arena Hopeful, Veteran, Master, Champion, Grand Champion) escalates from a young fighter with a simple sword up to a crowned gladiator standing over a shattered tyrant crown.
• Login-streak series (Dedicated Adventurer, Devoted Champion, Legendary Devotion) goes from 7 small stars to 30 stars in a banner to 90 candles forming a circle.
• World boss series (World Slayer, Boss Hunter, Legend Killer) reads as a solo victory pose, then 5 mounted trophy heads, then a mountain of skulls forming a throne.
• Hidden achievements (Angel of Death, The Corruption Remembered, Shadow Caster) have spoiler-aware art revealed only post-unlock.

One previously-uncreated trigger was wired up in code: the Magical Patron achievement (100,000 gold spent at the Magic Shop, Gold tier) was defined in the game but never actually fired. It does now. Plus a typo on the Steam side that was blocking the Bounty Hunter achievement for every player has been corrected. Any achievements you already earned in-game but had not been syncing to Steam will back-sync on your next login.

Player-reported fixes

• Stuck player-echo recruitment. Players who recruited a teammate's echo at Team Corner but never saw it appear in their dungeon party could not re-recruit ("echo already in your party"). Fixed: failed echo loads now self-clean from the recruit list, the Team Corner echo menu shows currently-recruited echoes with a tag, and a new un-recruit hotkey lets you manually dismiss an echo without entering the dungeon.
• Dungeon feature gold-split shrank rewards. When examining a dungeon feature that gave gold ("you found 12,000 gold!"), only a fraction actually landed in your pocket -- the rest got distributed to companions and NPC teammates whose gold never returns to you. Fixed: feature gold now goes entirely to you when playing solo or splits only with grouped co-op players. Companions and NPC team members no longer eat the reward.
• Class names not translated. On the character-select screen, Hungarian players were seeing " druidah - 24. szintu Cleric" instead of " druidah - 24. szintu Pap." Same problem on Inn screens, Team Corner, status displays, and dialogue narration. All class names across all ~15 display sites now use the session language.
• NPC dialogue with broken placeholder text. When asked about the dungeons, some NPCs were replying with a literal garbled string instead of actual dialogue. The placeholder text had been in the localization file since the v0.60.0 Babel release without ever being filled in. Restored proper text plus Hungarian translation.
• Bug-report cancel. You can now press Enter on a blank description line to cancel a bug report. The path was always there, just not documented. Hint now appears below the prompt in all five languages.

v0.61.3 Patch Notes

A handful of player-reported follow-ups on top of v0.61.2. Wilderness flavor that finally matches the creature, floor bosses that are actually the toughest thing in the room, and a long-missing path for keeping your party's potion stashes topped up.

Wilderness creatures finally sound right

v0.61.2 fixed wilderness monsters acting like random dungeon families (Feral Cat using Flight, etc.), but missed one thing: the intro flavor line. A Black Bear could still come at you "crackling with raw elemental fury" because the generator's randomly-picked family had set that phrase before the wilderness override ran. Same shape for the Bandit Scout that opened the fight by "breathing a gout of fire." Each wilderness family now gets a sensible default intro line (beasts snarl, humanoids draw steel, undead murmur about joining the dead, etc.) that matches the creature's actual family after the wilderness profile applies. Storm Elementals still crackle with elemental fury, because that's what they are.

Floor bosses are now actually the toughest thing in the room

Player observation: "On the last few levels I've cleared the champions typically have more HP than the floor boss, regular enemies often have equal to the boss." That wasn't the design. Floor bosses are supposed to have 2.8x HP, champions 2.2x, regulars 1.0x. What was actually happening:

• Floor boss: 1.5x HP (should be 2.8x)
• Champion in a boss room: 3.3x HP (should be 2.2x)
• Regular in a boss room: 1.5x HP (should be 1.0x, accidentally buffed to match the boss)

The boss room was applying a flat 1.5x HP boost to everything, then renaming one of the monsters into the boss AFTER stats had already been calculated. So the boss-tier multiplier never landed, while champions and bystanders got an unintended free buff. Fixed by regenerating the lead slot as a proper boss-tier monster (full 2.8x HP, 1.25x damage, 1.2x defense). Bystander monsters lose their accidental 1.5x boost. Net result: the boss is now meaningfully tougher (roughly 87% more HP than before), and the boss room feels boss-focused rather than minion-soup-with-a-renamed-regular.

Your party can actually refill its potion stashes now

Player question: "How do I refill companion healing/mana potion count?" Honest pre-fix answer: you couldn't. Companions and NPC teammates each spawned with a small stash of healing potions (and mana potions for casters) that their AI used to self-heal at low HP mid-fight. Once that stash hit zero it stayed at zero for the rest of the character's life. There was a method in the code that was meant to refill them, but nothing ever called it. Fixed in three places:

• Sleep at the Inn: party potion stashes top up alongside your HP/Mana/Stamina.
• Rest at Home: same.
• Daily reset (the 7 PM ET tick in online mode, the daily flip in single-player): party stashes top up automatically.

Companion potion counts already saved correctly. NPC teammate potion counts did NOT, so any consumption or refill got wiped on the next save or world-sim reload. That round-trip is fixed too, across all four save paths (single-player save / load, online world_state write / read).

New: give potions to a teammate's stash

The dungeon potion menu had two existing options: drink one of your potions to instantly heal a teammate, drink a mana potion to instantly restore a teammate's mana. Both are great for emergencies, but they don't help your teammate's own AI later in the fight. New Issue potions to teammate's stash option. Walks a quick three-step flow: pick healing or mana, pick the target teammate (filtered to casters for mana, and to teammates whose stash has room), pick 1-or-fill. The transferred potions go into the teammate's own stash, so their AI can use them on themselves when things get hairy mid-combat.

Single-player shrine attunement is now in game-time

Player question: "In single player buff from Wilderness pilgrimage lasts for real time 24 hours, not in game time. Is that intentional?" Not intentional. Online mode running the buff in real-time makes sense (the server is up 24/7 regardless of when you log in), but single-player tracks every other timed system in game-time: daily counters reset on sleep, fatigue accumulates per dungeon room, dungeon respawn ticks on actual play time. So a real-time 24-hour shrine buff was the odd one out. Now, in single-player, shrine attunement lasts 1 in-game day. Attune, play through a session, sleep once at the Inn or Home (which advances to the next game day), the buff expires. The shrine remaining-time display also switches units per mode: "12.5h" in online, "1 day" or "2 days" or "expires today" in single-player. Online behavior is unchanged.

Note for players with an active shrine attunement on a single-player save

If you had an active shrine buff on a pre-v0.61.3 single-player save, it shows as expired on first load (the new game-day field defaults to 0 for old saves, which doesn't satisfy the active-buff check). Just pilgrimage again. No gold cost, no penalty. The standard daily pilgrimage cooldown still applies.

v0.61.2 Patch Notes

A larger update this round: a new combat safety net, an NPC progression overhaul, a localization catch-up across five languages, and a long list of UX papercuts squashed.

Combat

Last-Stand Cap. If you start a combat round above 50% HP, no incoming damage will drop you below 1 HP this round. You always get one more turn to react instead of dying to a bad-luck double-crit from a god or a pile-on from three monsters. Excluded for Nightmare difficulty and PvP, where you opted into the harsh experience. Monster Evasion Now Works. When a monster turns Incorporeal, takes Flight, Vanishes, or ducks into an Ink Cloud, your next swings actually have a chance to miss. The flavor text was firing for years but the mechanic was never connected to the damage path. Voidreaver Hungering Strike. Now reliably drains HP every hit, including on kills and when your HP is already full (you will see a "no drain absorbed" line in that case). Damage now scales with crit, Pain Threshold, and marked-target bonuses, so a 200-damage strike heals for 40 instead of 12. Storm Eagle Pets finally do what their description claims: 10% lightning chip damage and a 15% stun chance on melee hits. Boss resist still applies. The eagle is now mechanically distinct from the Dire Wolf instead of a higher-stat clone. Cancel Target Selection. Press Q at any combat target prompt to back out without spending mana, stamina, or your turn.

NPCs and World

NPCs No Longer Suicide-Run Dungeons. Wounded NPCs head to the healer first; cautious NPCs hang around town. The flood of "slain at the Dungeon" entries in the world news feed should drop substantially. Team Dungeon Survival. The NPC team-dungeon path had a 71% death rate. Same self-preservation pattern as solo now applies: leader health and personality gates, smarter floor selection, better flee logic. NPC Progression Loop. Rebalanced action weights so NPCs actually shop, train, and level up instead of wandering between the inn and the dark alley forever. Floor Targets Lowered and Partial XP on Flee. A data-driven follow-up after telemetry showed mid-level NPCs were fighting through 70% HP loss and fleeing with zero reward. NPCs now target floors 3 to 5 levels below their own, and fleeing with at least 30% of monster HP whittled down grants partial XP (capped at half the full reward). Net effect: NPCs you remember actually advance instead of stalling out in their teens forever. Pressure Plates Puzzle now asks you to enter the plate sequence (matching the wear-pattern hints) instead of resolving via a generic Intelligence check. It is a real puzzle now. Wilderness Monsters use abilities appropriate to their species. Feral Cats no longer take flight. Trolls regenerate, zombies count as undead for Turn Undead, krakens grab, sirens charm, wyverns breathe fire. (They were inheriting random dungeon-monster behavior on top of the wilderness name.)

Localization

A large translation pass landed across five languages.

• Quest text (titles, descriptions, objectives) now renders in your active language. Starter quests self-heal; king-issued bounties refresh within roughly 24 hours.
• Intimate encounter narrative fully translated into Hungarian, Spanish, French, and Italian (~145 lines per language).
• Stranger encounters fully translated across all five languages (~168 dialogue lines).
• Location names ("Heading to: Home") now translate across all ~50 game locations.
• Home tier names in renovations and the "you also have" line.
• Temple prophecies and divine whispers now translate.

Town and UI

Honorable Duels. Duel from the street no longer counts as murder. No daily murder-cap trip, no Darkness penalty, and the combat screen uses "HONORABLE DUEL" / "you meet on the field of honor" framing instead of the "COMBAT! You attack..." assault wording. Player-Immortal Worship. Sacrificing gold to a player-immortal at the Temple now moves your Faith faction standing and Chivalry the same way elder-god sacrifices do. The Status screen inside the sacrifice menu also recognizes player-immortal worshippers (it was showing "no god" before). Achievement Timing. Stat-based achievements (Shopaholic, Big Spender, level milestones) unlock at the moment you cross the threshold instead of deferring to your next combat. No more popping a Shopaholic notification mid-fight against a Sprite. NPC Story Choices. Pip the orphan thief (and three other memorable NPC encounters) now use numbered hotkeys // instead of asking you to type the full word like forgive or mentor.

Team Corner

Echo Overflow Warning. If your party is full of companions when you head to the dungeon, recruited player echoes used to silently fail to load. You now get a visible warning at recruit time AND a yellow "X echoes couldn't join" line at dungeon entry, plus a hint on how to make room. Recruit Gold Leak Fixed. A race condition where re-recruiting the same teammate could drain your gold without adding to the team. The recruit reference now re-resolves against live data at the moment of purchase.

MUD Clients (GMCP)

• Char.Combat.End now reports PlayerDied when the player actually died (it used to report PlayerEscaped post-resurrection, which confused trigger scripts).
• Char.Combat.Party now emits an empty frame when the party drops to zero members so clients can clear their party display.

v0.60.11 + v0.61.0 Patch Notes

Two releases bundled together. v0.60.11 (The Gauntlet Patch) reworked the Anchor Road Gauntlet from "ten waves of random monsters" into a proper gladiatorial arena with seven named Old God champions, real stakes on a loss, and a five-tier completion title system. v0.61.0 (Wilderness Reborn) added two entirely new systems to the previously-dim Wilderness: Druid's Shrines for daily 24-hour attunement buffs tied to each Old God, and Beast Taming for permanent wild-creature companions including a brand-new 5th party slot for combat pets. Plus a handful of polish fixes folded in along the way.

v0.60.11: The Gauntlet Patch

The Gauntlet, redesigned as a gladiatorial arena

Before this patch, the Gauntlet was ten waves of random monsters. After: ten waves split into three themed warmup acts (condemned criminals, escaped slaves, drunk old gladiators, dire beasts, hooded foreign sellswords) and seven hand-crafted named champions, one per surviving Old God, fought in canonical difficulty order:

• Wave 4. Vargash the Blade-Bound (Maelketh's berserker)
• Wave 5. Selithea the Heartrender (Veloura's duelist)
• Wave 6. Korr Stonewarden (Thorgrim's stonewall)
• Wave 7. The Black Twin (Noctura's assassin)
• Wave 8. Sir Aedric, the Last Lantern (Aurelion's paladin)
• Wave 9. Grok of the Pack-Stone (Terravok's feral)
• Wave 10. The Nameless Tyrant (Manwe's executioner, multi-phase)

Each champion has a multi-line herald announcement read with timing beats, a one-line god-lore reveal, a crowd reaction, and a themed equipment drop on defeat. Between every fight, a crowd-ambiance line prints from a pool of twelve (vendors shouting bets, slaves raking blood out of the sand, drums starting in the upper tiers, priests praying loudly to nobody). The Gauntlet finally feels like a scene from Spartacus instead of a hallway brawl.

Real stakes on a loss

The Gauntlet used to be the safest combat in the game: a loss cost the entry fee and a daily slot, nothing else. Doesn't match its framing as the city's deadliest arena. Now every loss rolls a 25% chance of being a real death (consumes a resurrection, can trigger permadeath in online mode) or a 75% drag-out (medics restore you to 1 HP, but you forfeit 5% of your current XP, all Fame you'd earned this run, plus an additional Fame penalty). Flee is still the safe exit. The pre-fight disclaimer was rewritten in all five languages so the player sees the 25% death chance BEFORE committing gold.

Fame per wave, plus tier-based completion titles

Surviving any wave now grants Fame (the same currency that gates knighthood). Curve: waves 1-3 give 1 Fame each, waves 4-6 give 2 each, waves 7-9 give 3 each, wave 10 gives 5, plus a 20 Fame bonus on full clear. A full ten-wave clear earns 43 Fame, about a quarter of the way to knighthood (which requires 150). On a full ten-wave clear, the player earns a tier title based on level at moment of completion:

• Levels 5-19. Arena Hopeful (Bronze achievement)
• Levels 20-39. Arena Veteran (Silver)
• Levels 40-59. Arena Master (Gold)
• Levels 60-79. Arena Champion (Platinum)
• Levels 80-100. Grand Champion (Diamond)

A Lv 80 Grand Champion clear earns 120,000 gold, 56,000 XP, and 150 Fame. A Lv 10 Hopeful clear earns 2,000 gold, 1,000 XP, and 30 Fame. Roughly a 60x range top to bottom, so the difficulty payoff scales meaningfully. The stored tier only upgrades, never downgrades. Each tier has its own individually-earnable achievement. Grand Champion completion grants a permanent +3% damage, +3% defense passive. Stacks with knighthood, so a knighted Grand Champion gets +8% / +8% lifetime.

Quadratic entry fee

Pre-fix: 100 gold per level. Lv 100 = 10,000 gold. Trivial endgame. Now: level squared, times 10. Lv 5 = 250 gold, Lv 20 = 4,000, Lv 50 = 25,000, Lv 100 = 100,000. Below level 10 it's actually cheaper than before (encouraging early players to try it); above that the cost climbs sharply.

Configurable arena titles

Player feedback after the initial Gauntlet ship: "the arena master titles should be configurable and not stuck on a player if they beat the arena, just like all the other titles." Fixed. Arena tier titles now flow through the standard NobleTitle field. Visit Preferences > Title to swap to Sir/Dame (if knighted), to a meta-progression title (if earned across cycles), or to "(None)" for no prefix. The Grand Champion combat bonus stays gated on the achievement itself, not the displayed title, so hiding the title doesn't cost the buff.

Daily run cap

The Gauntlet now caps at 1 run per day. Without a cap, even with the rebalanced loot, an endgame player could grind seven champion drops per attempt indefinitely. Matches the daily-limit pattern already used for Love Street, drinking games, and team wars. Runs remaining today now shows on the arena entry screen alongside the entry fee.

Reforge gamble is now permanent

Pre-fix: pay to reforge, see the new stats, accept or revert to the original. So a player could pay, peek at the result, revert if worse, and try again. The gold cost was the only downside. Defeated the whole gamble design. Fixed: once you pay, the reforge sticks. Whatever rolls is what you get. The pre-confirm prompt is the only decision point now, rewritten in all five languages to make commitment explicit.

Stat enchant stacking blocked

Player report: someone put two +6 Dexterity enchants on the same piece of gear. The cap on enchants per item (five) was enforced, but what KIND of enchant filled each of those slots was not. Fixed: each item can carry up to five enchants, but no two of the same kind. Picking the same stat twice (or trying to stack five Divine Blessings on one weapon) is refused before the gold deducts. Pre-fix items with stacked same-kind enchants keep their existing bonuses; they just can't keep stacking that kind.

v0.61.0: Wilderness Reborn

The Wilderness was the dimmest spot on the map. Combat encounters thinner than the dungeon's, foraging that copied home herb-gathering, and one-shot lore fragments with no replay value. This release turns it into a daily-essential destination with two systems that don't exist anywhere else in the game.

Druid's Shrines (5 shrines, one per Old God)

Five ancient shrines stand in the wild lands, each tied to a surviving Old God whose domain bleeds out into the wilderness. Make pilgrimage to one shrine per day and gain a 24-hour passive buff:

• Stone Circle of Terravok (Iron Mountains). +5 HP regen per combat round.
• Broken Blade Altar of Maelketh (Iron Mountains). +8% melee damage.
• Moonwell of Noctura (Blackmire Swamp). +5% crit chance, +10% backstab damage.
• Lantern Shrine of Aurelion (Whispering Forest). +5% holy ability damage, +25% holy enchant proc damage.
• Heart of the Tide (Stormbreak Coast, Veloura). +5 Charisma, +15% NPC reaction modifier.

Manwe and Thorgrim deliberately have no shrine. Manwe is the endgame Creator, Thorgrim's thematic location is the Prison rather than the wild. Visiting a shrine shifts alignment (Aurelion +5 Chivalry, Noctura +3 Darkness, Maelketh +2 Darkness, Terravok and Veloura neutral). One attunement at a time; visiting a new shrine breaks the previous one. Per-shrine favor counter persists across attunements and across NG+ cycles. At 10 visits to the same shrine, that god grants a permanent stat lift themed to their domain:

• Terravok 10 visits: +25 permanent Max HP.
• Maelketh 10 visits: +3 permanent Strength.
• Noctura 10 visits: +3 permanent Dexterity.
• Aurelion 10 visits: +5 permanent Wisdom.
• Veloura 10 visits: +5 permanent Charisma.

Access is outside the expedition flow. Visiting a shrine doesn't consume one of the four daily expedition slots. Pilgrimage is its own daily ritual. New

Pilgrimage

option on the wilderness main menu. The pilgrimage menu shows all five shrines with their region, passive summary, favor count, and active highlight. Pick one, read the flavor description, confirm, get attuned. Active attunement also shows on /health Active Buffs and on the wilderness main menu so you always know what's running.

Beast Taming (8 tameable wild creatures)

Wandering the wilderness now sometimes turns up wild creatures that can be tamed and added to a permanent pet roster (cap 8). One active pet at a time, switchable at Home via the new Tamed Beasts option:

• Forest Hawk (Whispering Forest, Lv 10+). Passive. Reveals roughly 5% of dungeon floor rooms on entry.
• Mountain Goat (Iron Mountains, Lv 15+). Passive. -1 fatigue per dungeon room explored.
• Marsh Toad (Blackmire Swamp, Lv 12+). Passive. 25% chance to absorb incoming poison applications. Plus one free antidote per day on first dungeon entry.
• Tidepool Sprite (Stormbreak Coast, Lv 20+). Passive. +5% MaxMana regenerated per in-game hour out of combat.
• Dire Wolf (Whispering Forest, Lv 30+). Combat (5th party slot). Joins your party in dungeon combat alongside companions and NPC teammates.
• Cave Spider (Iron Mountains, Lv 35+). Passive. +5% crit chance. -10% NPC reaction (it's creepy).
• Bog Wisp (Blackmire Swamp, Lv 40+). Passive. 12% per-hit shadow damage proc. Also auto-applies Hidden status at combat start so the player gets a free guaranteed crit on the opening swing.
• Storm Eagle (Stormbreak Coast, Lv 50+). Combat (5th party slot). Lightning-themed combat pet.

Encounter chance is about 8% per wilderness expedition AFTER the normal encounter resolves. The pool is filtered by region, player level, and "not already in your roster" so each tame is a new addition. If the pool is empty, no beast appears. If your roster is at cap (8), you see a flavor "you spot one but your hands are full" line. When an encounter fires, you get 3 attempts to tame the creature. Each attempt rolls d20 + (CHA / 4) + (DEX / 8) against the beast's tame difficulty (range 12 for the Mountain Goat, 21 for the Storm Eagle). Charisma matters more than Dexterity, which means a Veloura-attuned bard or jester is far more effective at taming than a pure damage build. Three failures means the beast despawns for this expedition. Try again next time. Combat pets (Dire Wolf, Storm Eagle) cannot permanently die. Their HP restores automatically at the end of every fight, and they earn a small amount of XP toward their own pet level whenever you win.

Smaller fixes folded in

"Your family has grown" notification: pointed at Love Corner instead of Home for newborn children, which is the wrong location. Children live at Home (the Family menu); Love Corner is for dating and marriage. Fixed in English, Spanish, French, Italian. Hungarian was already correct. Street-encounter NPC murder-cap bypass: player report showed a Lv 71 character killing 8 named NPCs in 20 minutes via random street encounters for roughly 30,000 stacked XP. The daily murder cap (3 non-bounty NPC kills per day) was enforced on player-initiated attacks but not on random hostile-NPC encounters. Now both paths share the cap. Going over the cap doesn't block the fight (you can't refuse a random encounter), but it claws back 90% of the XP and gold from the fourth and subsequent named-NPC kills. Throwaway random brawlers (Burly Mercenary, Mugger, Drunk Sailor) don't count. Honor duels and inn brawls also exempt. Localization: all 66 new English keys translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian. Five language files at full key parity (18,445 keys each, JSON valid). Beta is live. Bug reports and feedback always welcome. Press the ! key in-game or type /bug to report. See you in the arena. Or the wilderness. Or both.

v0.60.10 Patch Notes

A hotfix on top of v0.60.9 bundling 17 player-reported bug fixes and one diagnostic addition. Heavy focus on combat polish: status effects no longer leak past the end of a fight, monster abilities address the correct target when hitting a companion, weapon enchant procs attribute the attacker by name, defensive-ability follow-ups now correctly damage companions, and a long-standing audit gap (every monster shipped with MonsterClass.Normal regardless of its family) has been closed -- Turn Undead, Holy enchant scaling, Divine Smite, and ~20 other class-keyed mechanics actually work for the first time. Plus a meaningful Love Street rebalance and several quality-of-life UX fixes.

Combat

• Hidden status auto-crit now fires on basic ttack. Cyclebreaker Temporal Feint / Abysswarden Umbral Step / Assassin shadow / Assassin vanish / Bard Blood Pact / universal ide all set the Hidden status which is supposed to guarantee a crit on the next attack. Power Strike and class abilities consumed it correctly, but a plain ttack follow-up in multi-monster combat silently dropped the auto-crit and let Hidden tick down without firing. Now mirrors the Power Strike pattern: Hidden is consumed and the guaranteed crit lands.
• Action-preventing statuses cleared on combat end (player + teammates). Stunned / Paralyzed / Sleeping / Frozen / Slow were never scrubbed when a fight ended. If a late-fight stun hadn't fully ticked, your teammate carried it into the next fight and lost their first turn to a leak. The end-of-combat cleanup now strips those across the player and every alive teammate, with the same scrub mirrored at combat start as defense in depth. DoT statuses (Poisoned / Bleeding / Burning / Diseased) are deliberately left alone since they have separate persistent fields for out-of-combat tracking.
• Monsters now carry the correct MonsterClass. MonsterGenerator set FamilyName ("Undead", "Demonic", etc.) but never assigned MonsterClass -- every monster shipped with the default Normal. The Turn Undead spell's gate read MonsterClass != Undead, which was always true, so Turn Undead concluded EVERY monster was "non-undead" and printed the unaffected message. Same audit gap silently broke Holy enchant 2x vs undead, Paladin alignment damage bonus, Sunforged Blade, Divine Smite, fire-vulnerability checks, and ~20 other class-keyed mechanics. Monsters now get the right classification at generation time. Turn Undead correctly damages Ghouls / Zombies / Wights / Wraiths / Liches. Existing already-spawned monsters on your current floor stay misclassified (their state was already serialized), but every new spawn from this point forward gets the right class.
• Monster defensive self-buff abilities now correctly fall through to a normal attack against companions. Abilities like Incorporeal / Vanish / Phase / Flight / Invisibility / TreeMeld are self-buffs that don't damage anyone -- the design is that they layer ON TOP of the monster's normal swing. The player-targeted path handled this correctly (phase out, then normal attack hits the player). The companion-targeted path unconditionally returned after the ability resolved, so for every defensive-self-buff ability the monster picked, the companion took zero damage that turn while the player got hit normally. Now matches the player path -- the monster phases out AND swings at the companion.
• Monster ability messages now address the correct target. When a spider's WebTrap landed on a companion, the line read "the spider traps you in sticky webbing!" addressing the player even though the actual target was the companion. Affected ~30 monster abilities total (WebTrap, PetrifyingGaze, Silence, Enfeeble, Devour, Paralyze, Hellfire, Corruption, Burn, Sleep, Charm, RootEntangle, Terror, Nightmare, etc.). The function now derives target pronouns from target is Player and threads them through every ability message. WebTrap on Mira now reads "the spider traps Mira in sticky webbing!"
• Monster status applications on a teammate now surface the resist outcome. WebTrap and similar status abilities print a flavor line up front and only AFTER that roll the chance to actually apply the status. WebTrap is 45%, so over half the time the flavor reads as if the bind landed but the stun didn't -- and the next round the teammate acts normally and you think the engine ignored the stun. The companion-side resist chain also lacked the Cyclebreaker and Paladin class passive resists the player path has. Both fixed: chain now mirrors the player path (immunity, Cyclebreaker, Paladin, Calm Waters, roll), and a new "shrugs off" line prints when the chance roll fails so you see WHY the teammate can still act. Player-side gets the same shrug-off line for symmetry.
• Monster-attack damage display now coherent. Bug report quote: "The angel swings wild! 0 damage vs 143 defense. 1 damage got through." Three layered issues feeding one confusing output. The post-multiplier monsterAttack could truncate to 0 via Earthbind Totem or Easy difficulty multiplier; the tier-flavor message read that as Miss ("swings wildly!"); the defense-calc line printed unconditionally (""); the minimum damage floor still landed 1 damage. Three messages contradicting each other. Fix: clamp monsterAttack to >= 1 after multipliers; gate the defense line to only fire when armor actually reduced damage; add a brief pause between a defensive self-buff ability and the followup basic attack so they read as separate beats.

Weapons, Enchants, and Equip UX

• Two-handed weapons no longer get silently swapped out when picking off-hand for a one-handed item. You could pick a dagger, choose Off-Hand as the slot, and the game silently auto-unequipped your two-handed staff to inventory before slotting the dagger -- with the "Moved Quarterstaff to inventory" line printed in gray and easy to miss. The auto-unequip was originally a sword-and-board convenience (2H weapon + grab a shield = one click). Now shields keep that one-click swap, but one-handed weapons going to off-hand while you're wielding a 2H get a clear refusal naming both weapons. Defense in depth: the equip prompts now annotate the Off-Hand line with (unavailable while wielding two-handed) so you see the constraint before picking the slot.
• Per-weapon enchant procs no longer leak across hands while dual-wielding. Three weapon-source enchant categories were querying equipment incorrectly: Mana Steal and Lifedrinker were summing across ALL slots, so an off-hand Siphoning dagger procced on every main-hand swing too. Elemental enchants (Fire / Frost / Lightning / Poison / Holy / Shadow) were the inverse -- they hardcoded MainHand, so off-hand elemental enchants never procced at all and main-hand enchants procced on off-hand strikes too. Now each strike only proc's the enchants on the weapon that actually swung. Off-hand fire / frost / lightning enchants will proc on off-hand strikes for the first time.
• Frostbite enchant applies real Slow instead of a permanent Defence shave. Magic Shop description was "+20 power + chance to slow enemies." Actual implementation ran target.Defence -= 3 per proc -- a permanent stat mutation that stacked every proc, no slow status applied. Now applies the real Slow status (halves the target's attack count per round). The Shaman Frostbrand totem ability gets the same fix (its proc code was copy-pasted from the broken Frostbite implementation).
• Weapon enchant proc messages now attribute the attacker. Fire and lightning already differentiated player vs teammate ("Flames erupt from {name}'s weapon!"), but frost / poison / holy / shadow didn't. So when a teammate's weapon procced one of those four enchants, the message read with no attribution and you might assume your own enchant was leaking across characters. Now all six enchant types include the attacker's name when a teammate procs: "Frost spreads from Lyris's strike!", "Shadows coil from Aldric's blade!", etc.
• Dual-wield ability follow-up strike no longer prints "Off-hand strike at You!" Pure text bug -- the damage path was unaffected (the enemy took the hit correctly). Affected every melee class ability that triggers an off-hand follow-up while dual-wielding (Holy Shite, Backstab, Power Strike, Riptide Strike, etc).

Companions and Teammates

• Team NPC combat-loot equip didn't persist across relog. When you passed loot to a non-companion team NPC during combat, the gear stayed on a combat-side reference and never propagated to the canonical NPC -- so on next save, the stale equipment was persisted and the equip reverted. Equipping the same NPCs from the Team Corner or the in-dungeon party menu worked fine. The combat-loot path now uses the right sync method based on whether the teammate is a companion (Aldric / Mira / Lyris / Vex / Melodia) or a Team Corner NPC. Equipment now sticks across logout in both cases.
• Cleric / Paladin "examine feature" bonus now heals the whole party. When a Cleric or Paladin examined a class-specific dungeon feature, the reward was a self-heal of MaxHP/4 -- effectively a no-op since Clerics are back-row and rarely need healing. Every other class's reward is high-utility for that class (Magician/Sage mana, Warrior attack buff, Assassin poison vials, Ranger gold + potion, Bard song charges). Cleric/Paladin's feature.divine_presence now radiates MaxHP/4 to every alive teammate. Each ally heals based on their own MaxHP. Solo cleric still gets the same self-heal as before.

Love Street

• Three-layer rebalance. A single visit to the most expensive Love Street partner could roll up to +650 darkness, with paired chivalry penalty knocking another -325 off your alignment -- swinging a balanced character ~975 points toward Dark in one 100,000-gold transaction. Two visits could move a Saint character into Dark Lord territory for 200,000 gold total. Fix: (1) Prices doubled across all Courtesans and Gigolos. The top tier (Loretta / Banco) goes from 100,000 to 200,000 gold. (2) Darkness ranges cut sharply per tier; the top bracket goes from 150-650 to 40-120 darkness per visit. (3) New 2-visit daily cap (Courtesan + Gigolo visits counted together). Combined max alignment shift from Love Street is now ~360 net points per day, comparable to the murder cap's 750+375 ceiling. The new cap appears as "Visits remaining today: X/2" at the top of both menus.

Dungeons

• Crypt rooms no longer appear in non-tomb-themed floors. Bug report quote: "should the epitaphs and stuff from the crypt level seep through to the sewer theme?" The standard room pool had two Crypt rooms hardcoded for every theme, so a Sewers floor (levels 11-20) consistently surfaced two "Flooded Tomb" rooms whose description bridged the theme awkwardly ("the sewers broke through into this ancient crypt long ago"). Crypt rooms now only appear in Catacombs and AncientRuins floors -- the two themes where tomb content lands naturally. Other themes get Chamber/Alcove rooms instead. Existing already-generated Sewer floors stay as-is; new generations from this point forward use the corrected pool.

Music Shop

• Performance buff message and /health line now say what the song actually does. Bug report quote: "The game says +15% for 5 combats but doesn't write what's that 15%. The game should write 15% defense for 5 combats instead." Each song affects a different stat (War March = attack damage, Iron Lullaby = defense, Fortune's Tune = gold from kills, Battle Hymn = both attack and defense), but the post-purchase message and the /health Active Buffs line both just said "+15%" with no context. Now reads "The War March stirs something in you. (+15% attack damage for 5 combats)" at buy time and "War March: +15% attack damage (5 combats)" in /health.

Diagnostic

• Save-seal-audit logging (online mode only). After a player reported all their seals reset post-v0.60.9 deploy, code review ruled out the obvious suspects (the v0.60.9 map-reveal seal-discovery fix; the v0.60.8 Dungeon Reset Scroll). The actual cause is likely upstream -- a save fires without the per-session story state propagated, so the empty process-wide fallback singleton's seal list gets persisted. This release adds runtime audit logging at the save path: every online save now logs a SAVE_SEAL_AUDIT line with username, session context state, cycle, seal count, and seal list. If a save ever fires with SessionContext.Current == null, a loud SUSPICIOUS_FALLBACK_SAVE warning fires. The next time the bug triggers, we'll catch it mid-write. The affected player's seals were manually restored in the live DB before this build. Real fix lands in a follow-up once the audit catches the contamination path.

Beta is live. Bug reports and feedback always welcome. Press the ! key in-game or type /bug to report. See you in there.

v0.60.9 Patch Notes

A grab-bag of bug fixes on top of v0.60.8. Most of these are real player-facing balance / UX issues -- the Marked debuff has been silently broken on every class ability for a while, poison was effectively pinned during long boss fights, and one player got NRE-crashed just for changing language in the menu. Two MUD-client improvements (PR #104 + #105 from Coosh) shipped in v0.60.9 too, with post-merge cleanup folded in here.

Combat: Marked debuff now works on class abilities

Player report: "Shield bash doesn't get the bonus damage from marked. I'm not sure if this is intentional." Not Shield-Bash-specific, and very much not intentional. The Marked debuff (applied by ranger / hunter abilities) is supposed to give +30% damage on every subsequent hit against the marked target. Basic attacks honored it. AoE abilities honored it. But every single-target class ability -- Shield Bash, Backstab, Holy Smite, Power Strike, Riptide Strike, Wave Echo, all of them -- silently dropped the bonus. They were applying damage through a code path that just never checked the Marked flag. After the fix, ALL three damage paths (basic attacks, AoE, single-target abilities) consistently apply the +30% bonus on Marked targets. The existing flavor line shouts the bonus the same way it does on basic attacks, so you'll see the call-out fire on ability hits now too. Real DPS uplift for any party that pairs a marker with an ability-heavy DPS.

Combat: poison now ticks down during combat rounds

Player report: "Shouldn't poison tick down in combat? I was poisoned from a trap, I moved to the boss room and defeated the boss in 5 rounds. When I arrived I had 3 turns left, when I moved away I had 2." The reporter expected six ticks consumed (one for the room movement plus five for the combat rounds), which would have cleared the poison entirely. Actual: one tick. Combat was applying poison damage every round but never decrementing the duration counter, so any time you were in combat the poison was effectively frozen. Long boss fights where poison "should have run out" by now -- they hadn't, and weren't going to. Fixed: combat rounds now decrement poison duration and clear the status when it hits zero, exactly the same way room movement always did. A 5-round boss fight now consumes 5 turns of poison. If your duration was about to expire, long fights will let it expire naturally without needing to burn an antidote / temple visit / dungeon shrine. Damage values unchanged -- only the duration counter actually counts down now.

Dungeon: map-reveal events now find the seal immediately

Player report: "I'm on level 80, looking for the Regret seal. Before I finished exploring, I got a flash of insight showing me all the map. After that, I've explored this floor up and down, not finding the seal." The dungeon's Vision and Wounded-Adventurer mystery events reveal large chunks of the floor map. The seal-discovery system is supposed to find a seal "for free" once you've explored 75%+ of the floor -- but the discovery only ran when you actually walked into a new room, not when an event flipped your exploration percentage to 100%. So the trigger condition was satisfied, but the trigger never fired, and you'd wander a fully-revealed floor unable to find the thing that should have appeared the moment the map opened. Fixed: Vision and Wounded-Adventurer events now check for seal discovery in your current room the instant they reveal the map. The seal lands on the same screen as the "All rooms are now revealed" message. All the existing discovery rules (uncollected-seal flag, seal-room type, exploration progress, room scaling) still apply -- the fix just closes the path where the trigger condition was satisfied but the trigger never ran.

Bug fix: misgendered narration when Seraphina is your Level Master

Player report: "If you want to reset your skills, the message doesn't respect level master gender. I had Seraphina the Radiant and 'he leaned forward', but I suspect it is a she." Confirmed. The Level Master cycles between three NPCs based on your alignment:

• Seraphina the Radiant (Good) -- female
• Zharkon the Grey (Neutral) -- male
• Malachar the Dark (Evil) -- male

Four narration lines in the skill-reset flow had hardcoded masculine pronouns ("He gestures...", "...behind him.", "his thumb...", "He pours..."). Good-aligned players (Seraphina) saw misgendered text. Neutral / evil players never noticed because their masters happen to be male. Fixed: rewrote the four lines to gender-neutral phrasing in English, Spanish, French, and Italian. (Hungarian was already pronoun-neutral and didn't need a change.) The recasts mirror the disembodied imagery already used a few lines later ("Both hands press against your temples") so the style stays consistent throughout the scene.

Bug fix: crash when changing language in /prefs while in the dungeon

Player report: "If I change language in /prefs from Hungarian to English while in the dungeon, I get an Object reference not set to an instance of an object error." The language picker invalidated the cached dungeon floor so it would regenerate with the new language strings. But "regenerate on next entry" was the literal implementation, and exiting the preferences menu doesn't re-enter the dungeon -- it just redraws the room you're standing in, immediately accessing the now-null floor. Crash. Fixed: when you change language while you're standing in a dungeon room, the floor now regenerates inline with the new strings baked in. Room progress (explored, cleared, treasure looted, current position) is preserved across the language switch. You'll see room names and descriptions flip to the new language on the next redraw, and nothing else changes.

Bug-report metadata: dungeon floor was wrong

Investigation byproduct from the seal-discovery report above. The bug-report header for any in-dungeon report read "Floor N" where N was your dungeon-entry floor, not your current floor. So if you entered at floor 73 and descended via stairs to floor 80, your bug report still said Floor 73. This delayed root-cause investigation on the seal report (the floor-73 header initially read as "the player is confused about which floor has Regret") until I figured out the metadata bug itself. Fixed: descending stairs and using the floor-select option both now correctly update your "deepest floor reached" stat. Bug-report headers reflect the actual floor you're on. Steam achievements that gate on deepest dungeon floor and the bounty-board floor cap also use this stat, so those are now accurate as well.

MUD clients: live combat updates (Coosh PRs)

Two GMCP improvements landed in v0.60.9 from community PRs by Coosh. If you connect with Mudlet, TinTin++, or another GMCP-aware MUD client:

• Char.Combat.Party (PR #105): per-round party HP / status frame. Render party HP bars, detect teammate deaths, light up status icons (poisoned / stunned / etc.) without text-pattern matching the combat log. Post-merge cleanup folded in: package renamed to fit the Char.Combat.* family so prefix subscriptions catch it; class names display correctly ("Mystic Shaman" not "MysticShaman"); status changes now actually trigger re-emits when nothing else moves.
• Char.Combat.Enemies (PR #104): per-round enemy HP frame. Without it, enemy HP gauges seeded by Char.Combat.Start would freeze at starting HP until the fight ended. Now enemy gauges update live every round. Post-merge cleanup folded in: change-detection wrapper so identical rounds (everyone stunned / fully resisted / heal-only) don't push redundant frames.

If you play in a regular terminal (Steam launcher, web client, SSH, BBS door), nothing changes for you. These frames only fire when the client negotiates GMCP at connect time.

Files Changed

• Scripts/Core/GameConfig.cs (version bump)
• Scripts/Locations/DungeonLocation.cs (seal discovery on map-reveal events; deepest-floor stat updated on descent; language-change regenerates the floor inline instead of crashing)
• Scripts/Server/GmcpBridge.cs (Char.Combat.Party / Char.Combat.Enemies cleanup -- naming, ClassName, status-aware change detection, change-detection helper for the enemies frame)
• Scripts/Server/SessionContext.cs (per-session snapshot for the enemies frame)
• Scripts/Systems/CombatEngine.cs (Marked +30% bonus on single-target abilities; poison duration ticks during combat; comment / call-site updates for the GMCP cleanup)
• Localization/en.json, es.json, fr.json, it.json (gender-neutral skill-reset narration; Hungarian unchanged)

Bug reports and feedback always welcome. Press the ! key in-game or type /bug to report. See you in there.

v0.60.7 Patch Notes

A small but important hotfix on top of v0.60.6. One critical security fix (a non-admin user could delete another player's save file via a hidden command) and one new admin feature (server-wide permadeath / resurrection controls so sysops running their own MUD server can pick the death model their server uses).

SECURITY: cross-player save deletion via hidden Main Street command

Same player who responsibly disclosed the v0.60.5 trusted-AUTH bypass also flagged this one: typing the bare word settings or config from the Main Street prompt (with no leading slash, no menu hint, no documentation) opened a hidden "SETTINGS & SAVE OPTIONS" menu. The menu exposed all-players save management: Load Different Save, Delete Save Files, View Save File Information, Force Daily Reset, Change Daily Cycle Mode. In MUD or online mode, any non-admin user could use this to delete the admin's save file, or any other player's save. The repro was: in MUD mode, register a regular user account. Type settings or config from Main Street as that non-admin user. Pick "Delete Save Files." Pick the admin's save. Gone. The menu was originally a single-player save-management UI from the desktop / standalone build. When MUD mode was added, the bare-word handler for these commands was never gated, so it stayed reachable globally. The visible Settings hotkey on Main Street has always routed to the SAFE per-player preferences menu (combat speed, auto-heal, intimate scenes), which is the only thing players ever needed from "settings." The dangerous all-players menu had no visible entry point at all, only the hidden bare-word command, which functioned as an undocumented backdoor. A v0.60.6 attempt removed the bare-word settings / set cases from one source file but missed a duplicate override in another. The reporter retested on the live server post-deploy and showed the menu still opening via config. The fix: the dangerous menu and all of its helper methods are deleted entirely (594 lines removed). No code path can reach the all-players save-management UI from any context. The visible Settings hotkey continues to work and routes to the safe per-player preferences as before. What this means for you:

• The visible Settings menu (combat speed, auto-heal, intimate scenes, language, font scale, etc.) is unchanged. All your per-character preferences still work exactly the same.
• Single-player save management (Save Game Now, Load Different Save, Delete Save Files, etc.) is no longer reachable from the in-game Main Street menu. If you want to manage saves, use the standalone editor: launch UsurperReborn --editor or pick Game Editor from the title screen. Same functionality, proper UI, single-player only by design.
• Force Daily Reset and Change Daily Cycle Mode are no longer in the in-game menu. Sysops who need them can use the SysOp Console (BBS), the admin dashboard (MUD), or the SysOp Config file.

Thanks again to the reporter for two responsible disclosures in two releases. Persistence and care, exactly the right way to do this.

Admin: server-wide resurrection / permadeath controls

Sysops running their own MUD server now have two new knobs in the Online Admin Console under Resurrection / Permadeath Settings:

Starting Resurrections (default 3, range 0-99): how many free deaths each NEW character gets before permadeath fires. Setting it to 0 means one death equals permadeath. Existing characters keep their current Resurrections counter unchanged. Only new characters use the admin-set starting count.

Online Permadeath ENABLED / DISABLED (default ENABLED): master switch for the whole online death model. Permadeath ENABLED (default): each death consumes one resurrection. At zero, the next death erases the character permanently with a server-wide red broadcast and a news entry. This is the live-server beta default and matches v0.60.6 behaviour exactly. Permadeath DISABLED: online deaths route through the legacy single-player penalty menu (Temple, Deal with Death, Accept Fate). The Resurrections counter is no longer consulted. No character is ever erased regardless of how many times they die. This is "softcore" mode for sysops who want a more forgiving server. Both settings persist in a new SQLite table on the server, are auto-loaded into the game on startup, and survive restart. The admin UI shows the current values, prompts for confirmation on the permadeath toggle (since flipping it changes how every player's next death plays out), and writes an audit log line on every change. This only affects MUD-server admins. Regular players see no UI change. Default behaviour matches v0.60.6 exactly. The new controls only kick in when a sysop explicitly opens the admin console and changes them.

Files Changed

• Scripts/Core/Character.cs (documentation update on MaxResurrections)
• Scripts/Core/GameConfig.cs (version bump, two new admin-tunable statics)
• Scripts/Locations/MainStreetLocation.cs (deleted the dangerous menu and 10 helper methods, -594 lines)
• Scripts/Systems/CharacterCreationSystem.cs (Resurrections initialised from admin setting)
• Scripts/Systems/CombatEngine.cs (permadeath gate ANDs the new admin toggle)
• Scripts/Systems/OnlineAdminConsole.cs (new menu entry + EditResurrectionSettings)
• Scripts/Systems/PermadeathHelper.cs (soft revive when permadeath disabled)
• Scripts/Systems/SqlSaveBackend.cs (new server_config table, GetServerConfig/SetServerConfig, startup load)

The new server_config SQLite table is created via CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS on first MUD-server startup post-deploy. No manual SQL needed. Empty table on first boot means both settings stay at their defaults (3 resurrections, permadeath enabled). Beta is live. Bug reports and feedback always welcome. Press the ! key in-game or type /bug to report. See you in there.

v0.60.6 Patch Notes

A small but important hotfix on top of v0.60.5. Headline item is a critical security fix for an account-impersonation bug a player responsibly disclosed; the rest of the patch carries the consequences of that fix and a quality-of-life addition that lets you connect to friends' servers from the Online Play menu.

SECURITY: account impersonation via direct connection

A player privately reported that anyone who could connect to the public game port could send a specially-crafted login line and immediately log in as any account on the server, with no password verification at all. The bug existed since the original implementation of the BBS / SSH relay system: the server treated all unauthenticated connections as if they came from a trusted local relay, but never actually checked that the connection was, in fact, local. The fix: the server now verifies the connection is from a loopback (127.0.0.1 or ::1) before accepting any unauthenticated login. Every external connection must go through real password verification. All legitimate paths still work (SSH gateway, web terminal, desktop and Steam clients with passwords, MUD-client interactive login). Every blocked attempt is logged with the source IP and the impersonated username for post-incident review. If you ever logged in to play.usurper-reborn.net via SSH or the web terminal or any client that requires you to type a password, your account was always safe. The bug only affected the no-password trusted path, which existed for legitimate local-relay reasons but should never have been reachable from the open internet. Thanks to the reporter for disclosing privately rather than dropping a zero-day. Exactly the right way to do it.

BBS Online Play now uses password auth

The above fix had a knock-on effect: the BBS nline Play menu previously used the same no-password trusted form to log into the public game server, and that path is now blocked at the server. The BBS nline Play menu has been migrated to use the same login / register flow as desktop and Steam clients: pick Login or Register, type a username and password, the server runs real password verification. For BBS players: if you used nline Play before, your previous "BBS-handle-as-username" identity is gone (it was never authenticated anyway). On your next visit you'll be prompted to register or log in. The username prompt is pre-filled with your BBS handle so you can press Enter to accept it as your game-server username. After that, just remember the password. For BBS sysops: update your BBS door binary to v0.60.6 (win-x86 build attached to the GitHub release). The new binary's Online Play menu prompts for username + password instead of the old trusted passthrough. BBSes that only run with the --online flag (giving the BBS its own local SQLite-backed shared world for that BBS's players) need no upgrade and are unaffected; the change only matters if your players actually use nline Play to connect to a remote shared server.

Online Play server picker

The nline Play menu used to drop you straight onto the official server. Now it shows a server picker first: Choose a server: Official server (play.usurper-reborn.net:4000) Connect to a different server (enter host and port) Back to Main Menu is one keystroke for the common case. prompts for hostname then port (defaults to 4000 if blank, validates 1-65535). After picking, the existing auth flow runs unchanged. This is the foundation for community-run servers. The minimum viable shape: if your friend hosts a Usurper Reborn server, you can paste their hostname and play together without needing any central registry. A full automatic server-discovery system (where servers phone home to a master list and the client populates it) was scoped and deferred for later. The picker is the immediate win that requires no infrastructure. Six new localization keys translated for English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian.

Screen reader auto-detect false positives (Steam + BBS)

Two reports of the title screen showing "Screen reader detected. Accessible mode enabled automatically." when no screen reader was actually running:

• Sighted Steam player on a clean launch via the default Play.bat (which wraps the bundled WezTerm).
• BBS player connecting through Synchronet to a sysop's BBS hosting Usurper Reborn as a door.

The Windows API the game uses to detect screen readers turns out to be stickier than Microsoft's docs suggest: browsers, accessibility tools, and apps that crashed without cleaning up can leave the system flag set. Any subsequent launch saw the flag and turned on accessible mode, even when no screen reader was actually running. The BBS case was even worse: the API was reading the BBS sysop's Windows session flag and applying it to every player who connected through the door. Players on remote terminals don't share the BBS host's accessibility state. The fix:

• Skip the auto-detect for any BBS / MUD / relay launch. Door modes always run on a host machine separate from the player, so reading the host's flag is meaningless. Door players who need accessible mode have working paths: their MUD client's TTYPE negotiation, the in-game preferences toggle (saved per character), or launching via Play-Accessible.bat with the explicit flag.
• Skip the auto-detect when running inside WezTerm. The default Steam launcher (Play.bat) wraps WezTerm; screen reader users on Steam are expected to use Play-Accessible.bat which passes the flag explicitly.

The auto-detect still runs for the standard console launch (non-WezTerm desktop console, direct .exe double-click) where it's the only path a screen reader user has to discover the mode without command-line flags. macOS and Linux are unaffected, the underlying API returns false on those platforms anyway.

Files Changed

• Console/Bootstrap/Program.cs (screen reader detection gate)
• Scripts/Core/GameConfig.cs (version bump)
• Scripts/Server/MudServer.cs (loopback gate on trusted-AUTH)
• Scripts/Systems/OnlinePlaySystem.cs (server picker, BBS auth migration)
• Localization/{en,es,fr,hu,it}.json (6 server-picker keys per language)

No SQLite schema changes; v0.60.5 schema carries forward unchanged. Beta is live. Bug reports and feedback always welcome. Press the ! key in-game or type /bug to report. See you in there.

v0.60.5 Patch Notes

A community-driven patch on top of v0.60.4. The headline fix comes from a contributor PR that unbroke late-game leveling, plus a full rewrite of how permadeath cleans up your shared world-state, plus a long-overdue accessibility fix for Steam launches.

Late-game leveling unbroken (Lv.51+)

If your character was past level 50 in v0.60.4 and the trainer was telling you to level up but the auto-level-up never fired, you weren't crazy and the bug is fixed. When the late-game XP curve was steepened in v0.60.4 to make the climb to Lv.100 more meaningful, only one of the twelve copies of the level-threshold formula in the codebase actually got updated. The trainer used the new (correct) curve. The status window, the dungeon eligibility check, the auto-level-up trigger, and every NPC and companion XP calculation all kept using the old (looser) curve. The numbers disagreed with each other. High-level players saw negative XP-to-next-level on their status screen and got soft-locked. The fix: one canonical formula, twelve duplicates removed, all twenty-plus call sites pointed at the single source of truth. Anyone soft-locked on v0.60.4 is unstuck on v0.60.5 the moment they enter a location. No characters get de-leveled, the auto-level-up only ever moves up. This patch was authored by Coosh, a community contributor who diagnosed the bug from his own Lv.73 character, traced it through the codebase, and submitted a clean centralized PR. Merged and deployed within minutes.

Permadeath now properly cleans up

A player reported that after losing all their resurrections and creating a fresh character with the same name, they were still in their old guild and still worshipping their old god. Investigation found nine separate places in the shared world database where the old character's name was sticking around: guild membership, sleeping-player state, mail (in and out), pending trades, active bounties, auction listings, world boss damage records, wizard mute/freeze flags, and the in-memory god-worship and NPC-relationship caches. Now permadeath performs a full purge of every per-character row in shared world tables before archiving the save. Your guild loses a member, your god loses a believer, your bounties drop, your auctions cancel, your mail clears. The next character on that name starts truly fresh. What's not purged (these survive permadeath as historical record):

• PvP combat history
• Wizard audit log
• The in-game newspaper

If a permadeath was a bug, contact an admin within 7 days. Your save is still archived for the existing /restore window, none of that changes.

Screen reader false positive on Steam (WezTerm)

A sighted player reported that on a clean Steam launch via the default Play.bat, the title screen was showing "Screen reader detected. Accessible mode enabled automatically" with no screen reader actually running. The Windows API the game uses to detect screen readers is stickier than Microsoft's docs suggest. Browsers, accessibility tools, and apps that crashed without cleaning up can leave the system flag set, and any subsequent launch sees it as "screen reader is active." The fix: when the game detects it's running inside WezTerm (which is what the default Play.bat wraps), it skips the auto-detection entirely. Screen reader users on Steam are expected to use Play-Accessible.bat which passes the flag explicitly, that path is unaffected. The standard console launch (direct .exe double-click outside WezTerm) also still runs the auto-detection, since that's the only way a screen reader user there can discover the mode without command-line flags. Net effect: Steam players using the normal launcher no longer get bumped into accessible mode against their will, and screen reader users on Steam still have a one-click accessible path via the dedicated launcher.

Ban system rewrite (anti-griefing)

The pre-v0.60.5 ban system was account-name-only, which meant a banned player could (a) keep playing their current session until they disconnected on their own, (b) trivially register a new account with a different name, and (c) connect from any address without restriction. It existed, it discouraged, but it didn't actually ban anyone. Full rewrite into a layered system:

• Active sessions get kicked. When an admin bans an account, the player's TCP connection drops on their end immediately, no waiting for them to disconnect.
• IP bans cascade with account bans. By default, banning an account also bans the IP it last connected from. New accounts can't be created from that address either. Loopback addresses are excluded so local testing isn't affected.
• CIDR range bans for the common ban-evasion pattern of "dynamic IP from same ISP, log in five minutes later." Range bans hit innocent NAT-mates (mobile carriers, shared housing, coffee shops), so the dashboard mentions the trade-off explicitly and only admins with that judgment use them.
• Per-IP registration rate limit of 3 new accounts per address per 24 hours. Generous enough for legit shared homes and dorms, tight enough to bite ban-evaders trying to reregister in a loop.
• Unban lifts the IP ban too in one click from the admin dashboard.

What ban explicitly doesn't do: it doesn't permadeath the character. The save is preserved exactly. Unbanning restores everything as it was.

Beta banner refresh

The main-menu banner still said "BETA LAUNCHES MAY 1, 2026 -- ONLINE SERVER WIPE INCOMING." That was true for about 24 hours. Refreshed across all five languages to a post-launch tone with bug-reporting instructions: BETA - GAME IN ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT Expect bugs. The game is being actively tuned and patched daily. Press ! key in-game or type /bug. Or join our Discord.

Coosh added to credits

Coosh is now listed as a community code contributor on the in-game credits screen, the website, and the Steam landing page. Citation reads: Found and fixed an XP-formula desync regression by tracing his own soft-locked Lv.73 character to 12 duplicated copies of the same function across the codebase, then centralizing them into one canonical implementation. Thanks Coosh. Excellent work. Beta is live. Bug reports and feedback always welcome. Press the ! key in-game or type /bug to report. See you in there.

v0.60.4: Stat-roll fix and bot detection dashboard

Small hotfix release on top of v0.60.3, covering one stat-roll exploit reported by a beta playtester and a long-overdue admin-dashboard surface for the bot detection system.

Stat-roll free reroll on invalid input (fixed)

Player report: "Found a silly bug: when you go to roll your stats, any input besides what is prompted of you re-rolls your stats again. You can do it forever. I dunno if this is actually a big deal since you can just not accept your character after 5 stat rerolls anyway, but I did it on accident then went 'wait a second...' and wound up with like two whole more CON than I had rolled previously after a few tries." Confirmed. The stat-roll prompt re-rolled fresh stats on every invalid keypress without decrementing the 5-reroll cap, so anyone could effectively roll forever by mashing wrong keys. The displayed stats now stay locked until the player picks Accept or Reroll.

Bot detection visible to sysops

The bot detection system has been instrumenting per-player combat-input cadence since v0.60.0 (rolling 30-sample window, mean and standard deviation tracking) but the data was sealed inside the game process and only visible to admins via flagged-session log entries. The full snapshot now lives on the admin dashboard. Sysops running their own server (or admins of the official server) can see every active session's input cadence in real time and watch for suspicious patterns before any thresholds get tripped. Strictly read-only review for now, no automated kicks or throttling. This affects sysops directly. Player experience is unchanged. Beta is currently live. Connect direct via play.usurper-reborn.net:4000 (SSH or raw TCP for MUD clients) or play through the web terminal at usurper-reborn.net.

Beta is here: v0.60.0 through v0.60.2

The alpha is over. Beta has begun.

The Wipe

The online server database was wiped at beta launch. Every alpha-era character, kingdom, gang, marriage, and bounty is gone. Single-player saves are completely unaffected, they live on your machine.

Founder Statues

Eleven alpha-era founders were commemorated in stone before the wipe. Each statue carries unique ASCII art, a personalized inscription, and an achievement tag. You'll find them in three permanent locations:

• Pantheon, Hall of the Ascended (immortal-tier access)
• Castle Courtyard, open to royal and commoner alike
• Temple, Hall of the Ascended (mortals' path mirroring the Pantheon)

You can also visit the hub directly with /founders, /statues, or /hall. Two founders deleted their own characters before the wipe, their statues are visibly cracked with appropriately ironic inscriptions.

GMCP Support: Modern MUD Clients

If you play Usurper Reborn through Mudlet, MUSHclient, TinTin++, or any other modern MUD client, your status panes now actually work. Live HP/MP/SP gauges, room info, character status, chat capture, all delivered as structured data over GMCP instead of plain text scrolling. Connect via play.usurper-reborn.net:4000 from any GMCP-capable client and the negotiation is automatic. SSH, web terminal, BBS, and the Electron client are unaffected, you get the same plain-ANSI experience you always had.

Death System Overhaul (Online Mode)

Online characters now have 3 free resurrections. Each death decrements the counter and full-heals you to 50% MaxHP. When the counter hits zero, the next death is permanent, your character is erased forever, a server-wide announcement goes out, and your name joins the news feed. No menu, no prompts, no save scumming. Single-player still uses the existing penalty options (Temple, Deal with Death, Accept Fate). If you believe a permadeath was a bug, contact an admin within 7 days. Your save is archived and can be restored.

Tank Rebalance: No More Walls of Flesh

Two issues stacked into one big problem with tank parties:

A bug made AoE taunts cast by NPC tank teammates lock monsters onto the tank for the entire fight instead of the configured 3 rounds.

Even when working correctly, a 100% guaranteed taunt + Shield Wall Formation's 30% damage reduction made the rest of the party untouchable. Both fixed in v0.60.2. Class AoE taunts (Thundering Roar, Shield Wall Formation, Divine Mandate, Rage Challenge, Undertow Stance, Abyssal Anchor) are now 75% sticky per round. The tank still draws most of the heat, but about 25% of attacks slip through to the rest of the party. Your healers actually have to heal now. Hard taunts unchanged: the basic action and Eternal Vigil's invulnerability cooldown still 100% lock targets, as designed.

Royal Guards Don't Kill You Anymore

Failed murder attempts used to cause a "phantom arrest", no combat, no consequence, just a debuff and a teleport to prison. Players hated it. Now: the murder happens, and the Royal Guards arrive for the fight. If you win, you escape. If you lose, you're subdued (HP brought to 1) and hauled to prison without dying. Losing to arrest combat no longer consumes a resurrection.

Quality of Life and Bug Fixes

• Multi-word names work everywhere now. /tell Lumina Starbloom hi, /ginvite Xian Maximillion, /gkick Lord Sandoval, all resolve correctly via greedy longest-prefix matching.
• /pardon command for admins to instantly release imprisoned players.
• Vex prison crash fixed. Pressing to talk to Vex no longer disconnects you on a fresh character.
• Prison menu colors no longer bleed red from the murder cinematic.
• Companion equipment slot bug fixed. Vex's Chain Shirt won't end up in his MainHand offering Maces as "1800% upgrade."
• Dungeon level-change math corrected. The "your level + 10" message now matches the actual configured level allowance.
• Wave Echo silently failed on debuffed targets at high level, fixed; "Siren's Lament then Wave Echo" combo properly doubles damage and emits the resonance flavor line again.
• Stun, fear, freeze, and other control effects now properly disable party members as designed (previously only worked on enemies).
• Newborn or renamed children no longer disappear in online mode if another player logs in during the same window.
• Church donation chivalry gain now correctly displays the actual gain (clamped at the 1000 cap) instead of a misleading uncapped number.

Screen Reader and Accessibility

• Auto-detection on Windows. NVDA, JAWS, and Narrator users no longer need to launch via the accessible launcher. The game detects your screen reader at startup and enables accessible mode automatically. Saved characters' explicit setting still wins; this only affects the pre-character-load default.

French Localization Polish

• About 10 genuine translation gaps fixed (Combat, markers, orcs to orques, faction headers, achievement labels, confession and abdication banners).
• UTF-8 defense in depth, French accents now render correctly even on Linux servers without UTF-8 locale set.

Electron Graphical Client (Beta)

The graphical client is still very much in beta, text mode is the supported way to play, but Phase 9.5 polish landed:

• Settings overlay with /settings and /set commands. Adjust language, font scale (0.85x to 1.4x), screen reader toggle, compact mode, art toggle. Settings persist across sessions.
• JS i18n with embedded English baseline and dropped translations for Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian. All overlays (level-up banners, death banners, group invites, spectate prompts, chat panels, settings) now translate.
• Audio infrastructure scaffolding. The plumbing is in for sound effects (level-up, death, achievement unlock, boss phase transitions). Sounds will fill in over coming patches.

Skipping 0.58 and 0.59

The 0.58.x and 0.59.x version numbers were originally reserved for the Electron graphical client roadmap. That work is now folded into beta, and we jumped straight to 0.60. See you in-game. Keep reporting bugs!

Usurper Reborn v0.57.20 - Save Repair Visibility (Hotfix)

Hotfix for v0.57.19. The auto-repair option added in v0.57.19 wasn't actually appearing for some affected players. The repair code worked, but the menu logic that decides when to show the option missed several common error paths, so players never got the chance to use it.

What was wrong

The recovery menu only showed Auto-repair when the load failure error message contained specific phrases like "Not enough memory" or "too large." But three of the most common ways a player ends up at the recovery menu produced different error text:

• Clicking a save tagged in the load list (the most common path for affected players) used a generic "failed to parse during listing" message that didn't trigger detection.
• After picking a recovery file that ALSO failed, the menu re-rendered with the ORIGINAL error message instead of the new failure - so even if the recovery file OOMed, the menu didn't update its option list.
• Pure string matching is fragile - any error path that didn't use the exact magic words slipped through.

What's fixed

Three layers of defense so reliably appears whenever it could possibly help:

• Synthetic short-circuit messages now include OOM-detection keywords so clicking a -tagged save shows on the first menu entry, not after one futile recovery attempt.
• Recovery-file failures now propagate the new error when the menu re-renders. If your backup OOMs after your primary failed for a different reason, now appears.
• File-size fallback - if no error string matches, the menu now also scans the primary save and every recovery candidate file. Anything over 10 MB triggers regardless of the error text. This catches every future case where a new error path doesn't use the exact magic phrasing.

If you tried v0.57.19 and didn't see the repair option

Launch v0.57.20, go to Load Game, click your character. The recovery menu now shows Auto-repair the bloated save file (recommended) right away. Press R and it will walk through your backup, autosaves, and emergency saves, trimming each one down until one loads cleanly.

Tests

All 12 save-repair tests from v0.57.19 still pass. Full project suite: 653 tests, all green. As always, please report any issues with these changes via the in-game Bug Report option or in our Discord.

Usurper Reborn v0.57.19 - Save File Repair (Hotfix)

Hotfix for v0.57.18. Some players whose entire backup chain (primary save, backup, autosaves, and emergency dumps) was already too bloated to load found themselves unable to recover their character. The size caps in v0.57.18 prevent saves from growing further but only kick in on the next save - and you can't trigger a save if you can't load the file first. v0.57.19 adds an automatic repair pass that breaks the chicken-and-egg problem.

If your save still won't load after v0.57.18

Launch v0.57.19, go to Load Game, click your character. When the load fails, the recovery menu now shows a new option: Auto-repair the bloated save file (recommended) Press R and the game will:

Read your save file using a low-memory parser that can handle even very large files

Trim any oversized lists down to safe sizes (NPC memories, royal court records, encounter history, etc.)

Write a repaired version back to disk using the same atomic write pattern as normal saves

If the primary save can't be repaired, walk through your backup, autosaves, and emergency saves automatically

Load the first one that comes back clean Your character, level, gold, inventory, equipment, quests, achievements, companions, and party state are all preserved. Some NPC history (old memories of past events, court members from previous reigns, encounter logs) gets discarded since that's where the bloat lives. Your character is back, and from this point forward the new size caps keep the file from growing out of control again.

How the repair works

The technical reason your save couldn't load: a 71 MB JSON file expands to roughly 700 MB to 1 GB in working memory once the game tries to build C# objects from it. That hit a hard memory limit and the load died. The repair uses a different parser (JsonDocument) that holds the file in a more compact form (around 200 MB for a 71 MB file). It walks through the file and clips the oversized arrays directly in JSON, then writes a smaller file back. Once the file is under the limit, the normal load process works again.

Safety

• The repair only runs when you press R. Nothing happens automatically.
• Repaired files are written via the same atomic temp-and-rename pattern as normal saves. If the repair gets interrupted partway through (Ctrl+C, power loss, etc.), your original file is untouched and you can try again.
• The repair walks every recovery candidate in order. If your primary save can't be repaired for some non-bloat reason, it tries your backup. If that fails too, it tries each of your autosaves. Whichever one repairs and loads successfully becomes your new primary.
• If every candidate fails, the game tells you so explicitly with instructions for reporting the issue. No silent fallback to "create a new character."

Tested

12 new automated tests cover the repair logic across every type of bloated field (NPC memories, royal court collections, romance encounters, conversation states, dialogue tracking, affairs, dictionary fields, deeply-nested per-NPC lists). All 653 tests in the project pass on this build. As always, please report any issues with these changes via the in-game Bug Report option or in our Discord. If your save still won't repair, attach your save folder (C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\UsurperReloaded\saves\ on Windows) so we can investigate.

This is a quick follow-up from the .17 patch solely focused on single player save file updates.

Usurper Reborn v0.57.18 - Single-Player Save Reliability

Critical reliability pass on the single-player save system. Several Steam players reported saves bloating to huge sizes, vanishing from the load menu without warning, or refusing to load at all. This release tracks down the root causes and adds a recovery path for affected players.

If your save vanished from the load menu

Just launch v0.57.18, go to Load Game, and your character should reappear. The slot will be tagged (yellow) or (red). Click it to open the recovery menu, pick the most recent backup or autosave, and the game will restore it as your primary save. The new bloat caps run automatically on the next save and shrink the file back to a reasonable size for future loads.

What was going wrong

Symptom 1: Saves disappeared from the load menu

A single bloated or corrupted save file would silently vanish from the character list. If all of your saves were affected, the menu showed empty and routed you straight to character creation, making it look like your characters had been deleted. The files were always still on disk - the load menu just refused to display them. Fixed: Every save on disk is now visible in the load menu, even ones that fail to deserialize. They show up tagged so you can tell at a glance which slots need attention. Emergency save files (from Ctrl+C dumps) also surface as entries when no normal save exists for that character.

Symptom 2: "Saves run out of memory after I quit"

Several per-NPC fields had no upper bound and grew without limit across long playthroughs. With 130 NPCs each leaking a few KB per session, single-player saves could balloon to 50+ MB after a long run. The next load would then fail with an out-of-memory error, and the save would appear to have "vanished" via Symptom 1. Fixed: Strict caps applied at save time across nine bloat surfaces:

• NPC dialogue history (every conversation line ever delivered)
• NPC relationships and impressions
• NPC social graph (known characters)
• NPC enemy and grudge lists
• Royal Court prisoners, orphans, monarch history
• Royal Court members, heirs, and monster guards
• Per-companion inventory (combat loot pile-up)
• Romance encounter history
• Stranger encounter dialogue and event tracking
• NPC conversation states and topics discussed
• Affair registry entries

In-memory state is unchanged. NPCs still know about every interaction during your session. Only what survives the save and reload boundary is trimmed. Existing bloated saves heal themselves automatically on the next save.

Symptom 3: Cascading failures during the load sequence

The load failure recovery menu (added in v0.57.14) was already comprehensive and showed your backup, the last 3 autosaves, and any emergency saves. The problem was that Symptoms 1 and 2 hid the corrupted slot entirely so players never reached the recovery menu. Fixed: With the listing fixes above, every save is now visible. Clicking a known-bad slot now jumps straight to the recovery menu instead of trying and failing to load it first.

Write-path hardening

The audit also turned up three ways the save file itself could become corrupted on disk:

• Torn files on crash mid-write. If the game process died (Ctrl+C, OS crash, power loss) partway through writing a save, the file was left half-written and unloadable. Now: saves are written to a temporary file first, flushed to disk, then atomically renamed into place. A crash mid-write leaves an orphan temp file (cleaned up on the next save) but your primary save stays intact.
• Concurrent saves stomping each other. Two save operations to the same file could overlap and corrupt each other. Now: a single-writer lock guarantees one save at a time.
• Out-of-memory during serialization. When the save was already bloated, serialization could fail mid-stream, leaving a half-written file. Now: saves are serialized fully into memory first. If that fails, the primary file is never touched and the previous good save is still loadable.

Emergency save improvements

When you press Ctrl+C, the game tries to write an emergency save. Before this version, every Ctrl+C overwrote the same single file - so:

• Different characters clobbered each other's emergency saves
• Repeated Ctrl+Cs during one session all overwrote the same slot
• The recovery menu couldn't tell which character the emergency belonged to

Fixed: Emergency saves are now named per-character and per-timestamp. A new auto-rotation keeps the 3 most recent emergency dumps for each character. The on-screen message also names your character so you know exactly what to look for in the load menu.

Local debug logging

Every save now writes its file size to the local debug log on your machine, with a loud warning entry when a save crosses 5 MB. This is purely a local file (saved to logs/debug.log in your install directory) and is never transmitted anywhere - the game does not contain any external telemetry or analytics (that was removed back in v0.52.12). The log is only useful if you choose to attach it to a bug report so we can see when a save started growing.

Defense-in-depth

• The NPC restore loop is now wrapped in per-NPC error handling. If one NPC entry is corrupted, it gets logged and skipped instead of aborting the whole restore. Your world loses one NPC, not all 130.
• Explicit JSON depth limit raised from 64 to 256, defending against future deeply-nested data structures.

As always, please report any issues with these changes via the in-game Bug Report option or in our Discord. Thanks for playing.

Usurper Reborn v0.57.17 - Bug Fix Pass

A focused round of bug fixes covering combat, alignment, party management, economy exploits, and a few quality-of-life issues from player reports.

New Game Plus and alignment fixes

• Manwe stuck dead after renouncing immortality. Players who beat Manwe, became a god, then renounced from the Pantheon found that Manwe and every other resolved Old God stayed dead forever in their next playthrough. The renounce path now properly resets the entire Old God pantheon for the new cycle.
• Alignment runaway from children. Players reported starting New Game Plus with maxed Darkness even after a Savior ending. Children's moral influence was being applied as a permanent stat bonus on every recalculation, accumulating until it hit the cap. Children no longer drift parent alignment over time. Existing player alignment values are not retroactively healed but the bug stops accumulating from this version onward.
• Online NG+ children not disowned. Players starting a New Game Plus character in online mode found their old children still attached to their new character (since names matched). New characters are now properly disowned from their previous incarnation's children, and minor children with no remaining parent move to the orphanage.

Loot and inventory fixes

• Loot level-mismatch hidden in group combat. In group combat, the Equip option was offered for items that were over your level. Pressing E silently dropped the item to inventory with a hard-to-read rejection. The prompt now greys out when the item is too high level and shows a clear "Requires Level X" warning, just like solo combat.
• Equipping to off-hand replaced main hand. Selecting "Off-hand" for a one-handed weapon in inventory was being routed to main-hand instead, dumping your existing main weapon into your bag. Off-hand selection now correctly equips to off-hand.
• Companions auto-equipping signature weapons over their kit. Vex was grabbing swords and Melodia was swapping her instrument for a dagger because companion auto-pickup didn't know about preferred weapon types. Each companion now has a defined preferred weapon list (Aldric: sword/axe/mace/etc, Melodia: instruments only, Vex: dagger/rapier, Lyris: bow, Mira: mace/hammer/flail) and skips loot that would displace their signature gear. Manual equip from inventory still works as before.
• Ring loot only compared against left finger. A new ring was always compared against your left-finger ring even if your right-finger ring was the weaker one. Ring comparison now picks the appropriate slot, and the comparison header shows which slot it is comparing against.

Combat and ability fixes

• Power Strike doing less damage than basic attack. Power Strike was skipping every multiplier basic attacks stacked: no crit roll, no proficiency bonuses, no buffs, no level scaling. At Level 100 the math worked out to Power Strike costing 15 stamina to do less average damage than a free basic attack. Power Strike now applies the full damage stack, with crit chance halved (since it already gets a flat 1.75x signature multiplier).
• Hidden status wore off before player could use it. Casting Symphony of the Depths set a Hidden status that ticked away before the player's next action could consume it for the auto-crit. Hidden now survives one tick so the next attack actually benefits.
• Spell level thresholds inconsistent across menus. A Lv.18 Wavecaller could see Symphony of the Depths in the spell library, learn it, and cast it in combat, but the training menu refused to show it. Three menus, three different answers. All paths now agree on the same per-class spell level table.
• Noctura betrayal phase transition crashed combat. The Noctura betrayal boss fight (post-Manwe) crashed when she dropped below 50% HP, throwing players back to the main menu with an "Error loading save" message. Phase transitions now work correctly and the fight plays out properly.

Party and group fixes

• Removed party members re-added on dungeon re-entry. Echo characters recruited from Team Corner were re-appearing in your party every time you re-entered the dungeon, even if you had explicitly removed them. The persisted party list now stays in sync with your live party.
• Combat broadcasts spammed followers in town. If a non-leader party member left the dungeon to town, the leader's combat round announcements, loot drops, monster damage, and companion-death notifications kept flowing to the follower's terminal. Combat broadcasts now only go to party members actually in the dungeon.

Economy exploit fixes

• Team Wars free money loop. At higher levels, Team Wars at Anchor Road let you turn a 20,000g wager into 40,000g profit per win, with no daily cap and no cooldown. Capped at 3 wars per day, 6-hour cooldown between wars against the same team, and the win multiplier reduced from 2.0x to 1.5x.
• Trade cancel/accept race duplicated gold. Concurrent cancel and accept on the same trade offer let both resolve and both transfer the gold. The live server log confirmed one alt account had accumulated 1.4 billion gold this way. Trade resolution is now atomic - exactly one of the two operations wins.
• Inn drinking game unlimited XP track. The drinking game at the Inn paid out level x 700 XP per win with no daily limit. At Lv.100 that was 70,000 XP per 30 seconds, repeatable indefinitely. Now capped at 5 wins per day.

As always, please report any issues with these changes via the in-game Bug Report option or in our Discord. Thanks for playing.