The Chronicle

Two small things, both filed under "you'd notice if they weren't there."

The claim modal vertically centers now

It used to drift up against the nav strip on regular pages, and to the top of the play frame in-game. The fix is one of those CSS quirks — the navigation bar applies a backdrop blur, which (per the spec) makes everything inside it the new "reference frame" for position: fixed. The modal thought it was centring on the nav, not the screen.

The modal now mounts directly onto the page body, escaping the nav's blur frame entirely. Wherever you open it from — the top-right pill, the in-game pause menu — it lands centred.

Mage's fireball aims at the closest enemy

When a mage triggered the active ability, the fireball flew in one of four cardinal directions — whichever way the hero was facing. If the closest enemy was diagonally above-left, the fireball would fly straight left and miss. Same problem for the archer's volley spread.

Both now use the same auto-aim the regular ranged shot does. On mouse-and-keyboard, the cursor's exact angle wins. On a phone or with no aim input, the closest enemy in range is the target. The hero still faces in 4-way cardinals (sprite limitation), but the projectile flies at the actual angle.

The warrior's shield bash still uses the cardinal angle — that's a melee-range AOE in front of the sprite, and the cone visual reads cleaner aligned to the facing.

Last release lifted the claim form into the game pause menu. The nav bar pill on the rest of the site still bounced unclaimed users out to the dashboard — same chore, different page.

The pill is now consistent with the pause menu. If you've claimed a username, clicking your name jumps to your public profile. If you haven't, clicking it opens the same modal you'd see in-game. Type, claim, modal closes, the pill flips into your profile link without a page reload. Works on every page the nav appears on — landing, lore, changelog, leaderboard, even on someone else's profile page.

And: WASD no longer eats your typing

Pressing W, S, A, or D to type a username (or anything else into a modal in-game) used to move the hero in the world behind the modal — and worse, sometimes the keystroke never reached the input at all. The game's keyboard listener was helpfully intercepting your keystrokes regardless of where focus was.

Now the game pauses its keyboard whenever you're typing into a text field, and re-arms it the moment focus leaves. You can name yourself "Aaaaaa" without sprinting halfway across the meadow.

Last week the pause menu got a "Claim a username" button. It worked. It also kicked you out of the game and into the dashboard, which felt like getting up to fill out paperwork in the middle of a fight.

Now the button opens a small modal right where you are. Type a name, watch the live availability check (Checking… → Available or Taken), hit Claim, the modal closes, the pause menu link flips to "View your profile". The run never left the screen.

If you're already paused, the modal takes over the pause for as long as you need it. Cancel or hit Escape and you're right back where you were. Rename and visibility settings still live on the dashboard — those are once-in-a-while account knobs, not in-game decisions.

You could share aot-game.com/u/<you> with your friends. You just had no quick way to get there yourself, short of typing the URL by hand or hunting through the leaderboard for your own row. The site never told you "click your name to see your profile," so most people probably never did.

The username pill in the top-right of the nav bar is now a link. Click it and you land on your public profile. If you haven't claimed a username yet, the same pill takes you to Settings where the claim form lives.

The pause menu inside a run got a matching entry — "View your profile" opens in a new tab so your run keeps ticking while you peek at your stats. Same fallback: unclaimed users get pointed at the claim form instead.

Small thing. Should have been there from the start.

The cookie banner at the bottom of the page used to lie. Click "Decline" and it would close itself, save your choice, and then go right on tracking you anyway. Not great.

This week the button does what it says. Decline now means the analytics SDK never wakes up. Accept means it does. There's no secret third option where it pretends to listen. If you've already clicked Accept on a previous visit, nothing changes — your call sticks. If you've never decided, the banner shows up and you actually get a vote.

Apologies to anyone who declined and was tracked anyway. That's fixed now.

The shop used to be a free money laundromat. Pick up a 100g sword, walk to the shopkeeper, sell it back for 100g. Drop a hundred items, sell them all, get rich. The shopkeeper would nod, hand over the gold, and apparently re-shelve the rusted swords next to the legendary ones.

That's done. Sell prices now floor at 10% of an item's value and ramp up with your LCK attribute — about 1.5% per point, capped at 40% for the truly lucky. A 100g sword nets you 12 gold by default, 25 gold if you've invested in luck, 40 gold if you're a Mage who put everything into LCK and did the dance.

The Sell tab shows the actual buyback price now, not the inflated shelf price. No more nasty surprises after you click.

Identify toast — fixed mid-burst

If you handed three rare items to the shopkeeper to identify in quick succession, the first reveal popup would block the next two. You'd see what the first sword was, then nothing for six seconds while the queue waited. Now each new identify replaces whatever's on screen and resets the timer. Hand them all over and read along in real time.

The Hellpit is twenty floors deep. Halfway down you might run out of potions, your sword might break, and the only options were dying or descending further into a fight you'd already lost. That's not interesting. That's a chore.

Shopkeepers now sell Scrolls of Teleport for around 80 gold. Buy one, carry it. When the floor stops being fun, open your bag and read the scroll. The room dissolves, the run ends cleanly, and you're back at the hub with everything you'd collected so far still in your pockets.

The depth you reached counts on the leaderboard — a 12-floor scrolled-out Hellpit ranks the same as a 12-floor death. Your gear stays equipped. The scroll is gone. Plan the next descent better.

Scrolls show up on the same shelf as potions, roughly one in ten shop slots at the uncommon tier. They work in any dungeon, including the tower. Hardcore characters survive the exit — the scroll ends the run, not the hero.

The bag has been a static grid since launch. Open inventory, stare at sixteen tiles, hunt for the ring you wanted to swap in. Fine for the first few drops; tedious by the time you've cleared three floors and the bag is full of mystery items.

This release teaches the bag a few small tricks.

Click an empty equipment slot — your unequipped Ring slot, say — and the bag dims everything that's not a ring. The matches get a soft green glow. You spot your candidate, double-click, done. The same trick works the other way: click an item and every other item that fits the same slot lights up alongside it.

A small ↕ Sort button next to the bag header cycles through default order, rarity (legendary first), type (groups weapons, armor, potions), and name. Five filter pills underneath — All / Weapons / Gear / Potions / Keys — narrow the bag down to whatever you're hunting for.

Click an item once to see its details. Click it again to clear the selection. Same for empty slots, same for equipped slots. The bag scrolls cleanly on phone screens too — the details column never gets pushed off.

The tower had a major boss every ten floors and a regular swarm on every other floor. Floors five, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty- five — they were just slightly harder versions of floor four. That's a lot of empty road between landmarks.

Now every fifth floor (skipping the every-tenth boss floors) spawns a mini-boss: a regular tower enemy promoted to elite. Twice the HP, fifty percent more damage, a violet tint that reads from across the room, and a sprite about a third larger than the rabble around it. The mini-boss takes the biggest monster room on the floor — sharing a small chamber with a swarm and a bigger threat made for unfair geometry.

The death screen also got tweaked for tower runs. If you fall on floor twenty-three, the modal now reads "Fell at Floor 23" in violet pixel type instead of the generic "Game Over" kicker. The depth meant something, the screen says so.

Save and quit works mid-tower too — close the game on floor seventeen, come back tomorrow, hit Continue, and the tower picks up where you left it.

Last week the Hidden Tower opened with five floors and the Lich at the top. We always meant for it to be the endless one. This week it actually is.

The tower no longer has a final floor. Stairs down keep going. Every tenth floor — ten, twenty, thirty — pins a boss in your path: the Stone Golem first, then the Trialmaster, then the Lich. Past floor thirty the rotation cycles, but each round gets harder. Echoes of the same three with fifty percent more HP and damage, then another fifty on the next loop, until you either die or admit you've gone deep enough and pause out.

Enemies get tougher every floor too. Five percent more HP per floor, four percent more damage. By floor twenty-five you'll notice your usual rotation taking longer. By floor forty you'll be playing a different game.

The Forfeit button in the pause menu (tower runs only) lets you bow out gracefully. The depth you reached lands on a new Tower Depth leaderboard, splitting tower runs out from the regular dungeon list so deep tower runs don't crowd out fast Forest clears.

Three new achievements come along: find your first key, reach floor 25, reach floor 50. The Lich is reading patch notes about all this.