The Chronicle

The hub was built out of the same 32-pixel tiles as the dungeons, and it showed. Grass repeated on a visible grid, the river had the same two banks copied end to end, and the cliffs walling off the north and west edges were one cracked rock face stamped over and over — the same crack, every three tiles, along the entire border. Once you spotted it you couldn't unsee it.

The whole surface is now painted as one continuous landscape instead of assembled from stamps. Grass drifts between shades the way real ground does, the shoreline dissolves into sand and then into surf, and the river cuts its own banks rather than laying down a repeating pattern. No two patches of the hub look alike, because there's no longer a patch to repeat.

What landed

• The border cliffs are a mountain now — layered rock stepping up in terraces, lit from the north-west like everything else in the world, with a shadowed undercut where the wall meets the ground.
• Scree at the base — loose stone spills a few metres onto the grass, so the cliff stands in the world rather than being pasted over it.
• The river stopped climbing the cliff. It used to run straight up the western rock face, which was impressive, and wrong.
• Beaches, not edges — sand widens and narrows along the coast instead of switching on at a fixed distance from the water.

Nothing about how the hub plays has changed: the same walls block you, the same paths are open. It just no longer looks like a floor you'd find three levels underground. 🏔️

Boss fights on a phone had one problem you couldn't miss: the boss health banner ate eighty percent of the screen width and sat on top of the action buttons in the bottom-right corner. Instead of tension you got a curtain.

What was happening

The banner is drawn at a fixed 720×48 and only shrank on screens narrower than 640px. But Adventure of Trials is played in landscape — a phone reports roughly 850px wide there, so the small-screen rule never fired. The bar rendered at full size on the one device it was never designed for.

What changed

The banner now scales as a whole, and it keys off how short the screen is rather than only how narrow — in landscape, height is the bottleneck. On a typical handset the bar drops from 682px to 432px wide and from 70px to 42px tall. The action buttons get their corner back, and the boss takes up about half the room it used to.

A nastier bug went with it: the old approach squeezed the frame itself, but the red health fill carried its own hard-coded coordinates — squeeze the frame and the fill could spill outside the chrome. Chrome, fill and phase pip now scale together, so the bar holds together at any width.

Desktop and tablet are unchanged — the banner is still a full 720px there.

Until now the arena was a world apart: entering minted a throwaway level-one character, and the floor was bare. Your hero — the one with the levels and the gear — never made it through the gate. That ends here.

Bring your own hero

Arena entry now goes through character select, exactly like heading into a dungeon. You step into the ring with your level, your attributes, your unlocked skills and your equipped gear. Your sword is your sword. The build you've been working on finally counts here.

Everyone starts round one at full health, even if your save caught the hero mid-fight on a deep floor. Nobody carries last night's bad run into the ring.

Your save is untouchable

What happens in the arena stays in the arena. Deaths, drained potions, lost health, everything you scooped off the floor — none of it follows you out. Leave the ring and your save looks exactly as it did when you walked in.

There's a more important flip side: the arena is not a farm. Gear you find here is power for this match, not a shortcut into your campaign loadout.

Loot on the floor

Nine pickups now sit on the ring, placed in four-fold symmetry about the centre — the same rule the cover walls follow, so no corner gets a better opening. Every spawn sees an identical picture:

• Four potions behind the cover beside each spawn. A safe top-up nobody has to contest.
• Four pieces of gear halfway to the middle. Real power, but you cross open ground for it.
• One prize — rare or better — dead centre. The closing zone herds everyone onto it anyway, so the best item in the arena is also the one you can least afford to stand still for.

The floor restocks at the start of every round, so rounds two and three aren't fought over an empty pitch. Arena drops come pre-identified — there's no shop in the ring, so a veiled epic would be a box that never opens.

The bots keep up

Since you can gear up between rounds, the AI fighters rescale at every round start against your current form. Bran, Sylas and Nerys stay the same opponents with the same personalities — a good haul just doesn't turn round three into a walkover.

Under the hood

The host places the loot and the rest of the room receives it over the existing sync path — zero new netcode. Placement is deterministic, so every client renders an identical arena. Campaign and co-op are untouched.

The arena is finally part of the game instead of a sparring room beside it. ⚔️

The Arena launched with one catch: it needed a friend on the other end of a room code. Not anymore. Step into the ring alone and three AI fighters take the empty spawns — full contestants in Last Hero Standing, not sparring dummies.

Meet the roster

• Bran — warrior. Closes the gap, soaks hits, and makes you fight for every step of ground.
• Sylas — archer. Kites relentlessly, holds his range and punishes the approach.
• Nerys — mage. Glass cannon: hits like a truck, folds like paper.

Their health, damage and speed scale off your own hero, so the fight stays honest whether you walk in at level three or level thirty. No free wins, no brick walls.

They actually fight

These aren't waypoint-walkers. Each fighter picks the nearest living rival and re-reads the field on a reaction timer. Melee closes; ranged kites. They orbit and strafe around their target instead of charging in a straight line, so duels read as duels. Drop one low enough and it disengages rather than trading to the death — and every one of them will abandon a fight outright to sprint back inside the closing safe zone.

Cover matters against them too. A fighter only swings or shoots with clear line of sight, so the arena's pillars, L-walls and edge barriers are as useful for breaking an AI's aim as a human's.

Full contestants

The bots take zone damage, take your hits, land their own, and count toward round wins and the match score. Win the best-of-five against them and you've won it properly. Nametags and health bars over each fighter keep the read clear.

The moment a human joins your room, the bots step out and the ring is yours — pure PvP, exactly as before.

Under the hood

Arena AI is a purely local simulation with zero netcode — it adds nothing to the multiplayer wire and touches neither the campaign nor co-op. Steering with wall-sliding rather than pathfinding keeps the whole roster running at a fraction of the cost, and no fighter ever gets stuck on a pillar.

The Arena is now a single-player mode too. Go get some practice in. ⚔️

This is it. After seventy-plus sprints of dungeons, biomes, bosses, desktop builds and a full co-op stack, Adventure of Trials leaves early access. Version 1.0 — and it arrives swinging, with the first player-versus-player mode in the game's history.

Arena — Last Hero Standing

A free-for-all deathmatch for 2–4 players. Spawn in the corners of a symmetric arena, fight until one hero stands, take the round. First to three round wins takes the match (best-of-five). Between rounds you spectate the survivors while the next fight loads.

• Shrinking safe zone. The ring closes in from the edges — stall too long and the void bleeds you out. Nowhere to hide forever; the fight always comes to a head.
• Class-tuned combat. Warrior tanks, archer kites, mage glass-cannons — PvP damage is scaled per class so every hero has a lane. Time-to-kill sits around four to six clean hits, not a one-shot lottery.
• Host-authoritative hit validation. The same anti-cheat referee that guards co-op judges every arena blow, so hits are honest.

An arena worth fighting in

The pit isn't an empty box. It's laid out with symmetric cover — L-walls by every spawn to peek and retreat around, mid-field pillar blocks, a central pillar cluster for the endgame, and edge barriers that cut the long sightlines. Walls block movement, projectiles and line of sight, so cover is real tactics, not decoration. Torches light the whole floor — full brightness, no fog — so you always read the field and every rival.

How to play

From the menu, pick Arena (PvP), then create or join with a room code — same flow as co-op. Grab a friend (or three), share the code, and drop in.

Under the hood

Arena rides entirely on the existing multiplayer stack — every new system is gated so the campaign, the endless dungeons and co-op are byte-for-byte untouched. Same game you know; a whole new way to play it.

Thanks for climbing the tower with us. Onwards to the next hundred sprints. ⚔️

The map just grew. Four new gates stand in the hub, each leading somewhere the realm pretended didn't exist — and the dungeons behind the old gates got a structural rework to match.

Runs are 5 floors now, everywhere

Every themed dungeon is capped at 5 floors. The Crypt's 10, the Void's 15, and the Hellpit's 20-floor marathon are gone — difficulty now comes from the bestiary and the tier, not from run length. Deep diving belongs to the endless dungeons (see below). Bosses still wait on the final floor; loot biases are unchanged.

The Ancient City — tier 3

Streets older than the realm's memory. Every door stands open; nothing that opens them is alive. Sandstone paving, broken pillars, weathered statues — and the city's last inhabitants: knights, cultists, harpies. Gold-rich (+30%) with a rare-drop bonus. Unlocked from the start.

The Ice Castle — tier 4

A palace frozen mid-feast. The court still waits at the table for a king who froze on his throne. Polished ice-marble halls, frozen heraldic banners — and the frozen king himself on the final floor. +25% epic drops. Unlocked from the start.

Hell & Heaven — tier 5

One staircase, two verdicts. The first dungeon that alternates its world every floor: floors of fire give way to floors of blinding white marble, and neither side wants you. Gated behind a Hellpit clear — it's that dungeon's epilogue.

The Endless Abyss — tier 6, endless

The stairs go down. That is everything anyone has ever learned about the Abyss. The second endless dungeon after the Hidden Tower — boss every 10 floors, mini-bosses between, scaling that never stops. No key required: clear the Void Rift and the hole at the edge of the world opens. New leaderboard category: Abyss Depth.

Also in this release

• Each new dungeon has its own tile set, props, and animated hub gate
• New achievements: Archaeologist, Court Dismissed, Judged and Acquitted
• Phones now ask you to rotate to landscape instead of breaking the layout
• Fixed: leaving the in-dungeon shop now resumes your dungeon's music instead of the generic rotation track

Some gear belongs in some hands more than others. Until now, every class wore everything with no penalty — heavy plate looked the same on a Mage as on a Warrior. That changes today.

How it works

Every item can carry a class affinity tag: classes for which it's preferred and classes for which it's penalised. We apply the rule as a stat multiplier:

• Preferred class: stats scaled +10%
• Penalised class: stats scaled −30%
• Every other class: neutral, item works unchanged

Nothing is hard-blocked. Want to put a Mage in plate? Go ahead — the HP bonus just won't carry as far.

What's tagged so far

This release ships the framework + a representative subset of items. We didn't carpet-tag everything; we tagged what's most legible:

• Heavy plate / chainmail / brigandine — Warrior preferred, Mage penalised
• Cloth tunics, leather padding, light cloaks — Mage and Archer preferred
• Steel broadswords, viking axes — Warrior preferred, Mage penalised
• Daggers, knives, cleavers — Archer preferred
• Scout's Bow (and ranged signature pieces) — Archer preferred

More items will get tagged in follow-up passes. Untagged gear stays neutral — no surprise nerfs to existing builds.

What you'll see in the UI

When you select an item in the inventory, a new badge appears under the description:

• ★ Preferred for Warrior (+10%) — green tag
• ⚠ Penalised for Mage (−30%) — red tag

So you can see at a glance whether the stats on the card are scaled up or down for your character.

Why soft, not hard

Hard "class can't equip this" blocks frustrate the loot loop — finding a great drop you can't use just feels bad. Soft scaling lets you experiment, keep flavorful builds, and accept the tradeoff. Achievement hunters can still aim for "clear hardcore wearing only preferred items" runs in the future.

Melee weapons can now have different attack patterns, and the first new pattern is the spin — instead of swinging forward in a 90° wedge, the player sweeps a full 360° circle and lands a hit on every enemy in range.

Two new spin weapons

• Klinga Wichru / Whirlwind Blade (rare) — +22 ATK, 800ms swing, 220g — the entry-tier rotational sword
• Karuzelowy Glewia / Carousel Glaive (epic) — +32 ATK, knockback +14, 580g — late-game crowd shredder

Tradeoff

Spin weapons deal 70% damage per target to balance the multi-hit coverage. Against a single enemy, a directional sword still beats them. Against a tight pack of three or more, the math flips — 72×3 = 216% effective output vs the directional swing's 100% on the front-line target.

The visual signal is a yellow ring around the player instead of the usual forward wedge — you can read at a glance which type of weapon you're holding.

Framework

Under the hood, items now carry attackPattern: 'directional' | 'aoe' | 'spin'. Future patterns (cleave cones, thrust lines, bouncing chain) drop in by adding to the union and branching the geometry. Same single performAttack codepath — no engine rewrite per pattern.

Three small but very visible changes.

Class-specific projectiles

Until now every player projectile was the same procedural arrow with a class tint slapped on top. Now each class throws its own shape:

• Warrior flings a wrapped-grip throwing knife
• Archer keeps the iconic arrow
• Mage lobs a glowing fire orb (red ring → orange mid → hot core)

Tints from v0.72 still apply, so the colour signature stays — but the silhouettes are distinct now too. Light shots, charged shots, and the archer volley all use the matching class shape.

Mage projectiles + heavy archer pierce the line

Mage's fantasy is "burn through whoever's in the way." So now both the mage's regular ranged shot and the heavy channeled bolt pass through every enemy in their path until the projectile expires by range. The bolt also keeps its end-of-range AoE explosion — pierce

• burst, all in one cast.

The archer's heavy charged shot got the same treatment: it used to stop after two enemies; now it pierces every enemy in line. Charge it up, line up the corridor, watch the row collapse.

Light archer / light + heavy warrior shots stay single-target — the class identity still reads.

Skill tree breathes

The skill tree tab had a card-on-card frame: the tree sat in its own bordered scroll container inside the modal's bordered body. Removed the inner frame, kept the scroll behaviour. Tree now uses the full modal width without the visual nesting.

Three small changes that compound nicely.

Memorial monument actually shows your dead

The memorial in the hub used to draw its list from "hardcore characters who died and weren't deleted yet." Most players don't run hardcore exclusively, so the monument stayed empty even after a long career of dying. It now reads from run_record directly — every fatal run lands on the wall, hardcore or not, even after the character was cleaned up. Forfeits don't count (those are voluntary exits, not falls). Hardcore deaths get a ✝ tag so they still stand out, and each entry shows class, level, floor, and how long ago.

Heavy projectiles burn brighter

Charged shots, channeled bolts, and class active abilities (Volley etc.) now use a brighter shade of the class colour: warrior steel goes pearl white, archer green pops to spring lime, mage red-orange ramps to solar flare. Light shots keep the base shade, so the visual hierarchy reads the moment a heavy lands.

Ten new achievements

• Beneath the Roots — reach floor 30 in any dungeon
• Bat Buster / Bone-Picker / Imp Destroyer — 30 kills of each
• Master Identifier — identify 100 mystery items
• Gold Baron — earn 50,000 gold lifetime
• Legendary Hoarder — find 10 legendaries
• Steady Hand / Iron Constitution — max DEX or VIT (15)
• Daily Climber — run today's Daily Tower seed