0.3.20 Twelve Patches, One Free Key Drop

Alpha 0.3.20 — Onboarding, Two Emberforge Bugs, and a Download a Third Smaller

Thirteen patches rolled into one Playtest build. The short version: new players are told how the game works before it kills them, Emberforge is no longer a black room, your friends can see what you're doing, and the whole game got 33 MB lighter.

★ 100 free Playtest keys

There are 100 free Playtest keys waiting on the website — first come, first served. The Playtest is free either way (you can request access straight from the store page), but a key skips the queue.

Grab one on gradanix.com/play

Emberforge was broken, and nobody could prove it

It always felt too dark. Measured against the rest of the game, it was ten times darker than the next-darkest dungeon, with 83% of the screen crushed to pure black — torches, a lava stream and a HUD floating in a void.

The culprit was the wall material: Emberforge's stone was reflecting about a third as much light as every other theme's. It's been lifted in two careful passes and it's still the moodiest place in the game. You can just see the floor now.

…and the other Emberforge bug, the one that followed you out

Walk out of Emberforge into town and the town's colours came out wrong. That's been true for about a year, with a confident and completely incorrect explanation attached to it.

The real cause: the light that shapes a roofed corridor gets swung around to point down the passage — and nothing ever swung it back on the way out. Town was being lit from the dungeon's direction. One line. Towns look like towns again, wherever you came from.

For new players

• A welcome card on first launch. The loop in ten seconds, co-op, and the line that matters most: death ends the RUN, not your character. You keep your level, your talents, your titles, your achievements and everything in the bank. Reopen it any time from Options → How to Play.
• A first-run steer toward a forgiving class. It suggests — every class stays selectable — and it disappears for good once you've finished a run.
• The death screen now teaches instead of just counting. It reads what actually happened: if something took a third of your health in one blow it names it and tells you that hit was telegraphed; if you took six hits in ten seconds it tells you that being surrounded kills more runs than any single monster.

Some dead ends are lies

Nearly half of all combat levels hide a sealed room behind a false wall. In every run recorded so far, not one player had ever found one — including the developer.

The tell was always there and was never explained anywhere: a wall that isn't really there can't hold a torch. Guide Aldwin will now tell you what to look for. He will not tell you where.

Fixes from your reports

• The mouse no longer vanishes on the death screen. Clicking outside the run summary re-captured the cursor, so you couldn't click CONTINUE. Fixed — along with the same bug on the CONNECTION LOST screen.
• The low-health sound is a lower, quieter "woomp" — and it only plays while something is actually hurting you. Standing at 8% health in an empty corridor is tense and silent now.
• Melee forgives a chase. Reported as "you can't hit the bunny from behind". It was never about the side you stand on — a swing lands a moment after you press the button, and the Dire Bunny is the fastest thing in the game short of a boss, so it simply left. Melee now has a small grace that covers that wind-up.
• The bug-report button actually works. It was quietly refusing reports from anyone with a long session, and reports sent from the menu were signed "Player" with a made-up location. Both fixed.

Co-op and Steam

• Your friends can see what you're doing. The Steam friends list now reads "Boss fight - Depth 42 (Warrior)" instead of just the game name — and the in-game friends panel shows it too, next to the join button.
• World-first discoveries say what the item DOES, not just its name — and they now reach everyone playing, in every session, not only the people in the room where it dropped.
• A global notice channel, so announcements reach you wherever you are.

Under the hood

• The download is a third smaller. 57 MB of art previews that nothing in the game refers to had been shipping inside every build for months. Gone — the whole game is now 44.6 MB.
• Controller support across the menus, and the bug-report panel is centred properly at every resolution.
• Who can join on hosting — open, friends only, or closed — enforced when someone knocks, so a refused player never sees your run.

Found something broken? There's a Report a Bug button in Options and on the death screen — it goes straight to the developer, with your version, class, depth and seed attached automatically. The fixes in the middle of these notes came from exactly that.