Everything here is a local draft build. The numbers and names are working values and have not been settled.
Tithe, and a stain where you died
Tithe is a new earned currency, separate from gold and from the XP bar. Death still keeps all items, gold and keys. Tithe comes from kills, chambers, guardians, Mega Bosses and Levels beaten, is carried through the run and is banked when a Level ends.
If the Keeper dies, everything carried turns into one stain where he fell. It waits there the next time that Level is played. Walking onto it returns the Tithe, and dying again before then loses it. A small "Tithe" line sits at the bottom right of the screen, and the stain is a ring with a pillar of light and its amount written above it.
In a headless bot run the Keeper earned Tithe, died, left a stain of 3 at the exact spot, got it back on Rise Again by walking onto it, banked 183 at a Level clear and bought a wing from the real screen.
Restoring the Cathedral
A Restorations screen, reached from the title, the Level map and the Level tally, spends banked Tithe on seven wings of the Cathedral hall, 2,470 Tithe in all. Each wing appears in the hall at once, and the title's nave shows it too. Each also unlocks one small real thing, never a plain stat boost:
- a new relic in the draft
- a fourth relic card
- a spare vial draught
- a third moonbeam
- shorter confessional rest
- a common relic at the start of every vigil
All seven wings were bought in a test and every unlock read back correctly: four relic cards in 300 of 300 drafts, the vial's 2.5 s then 24 s, three moonbeams, 45 s confessionals and a starting relic. An old save with none of the new fields loads untouched. The Watch AI plays through all of it without opening a screen and writes nothing to the save.
Showdown
Showdown is a last-Keeper-standing mode. Up to four Keepers drop into one arena while the horde hunts the nearest one, and the floor closes in six rings. Anyone outside the ring takes damage, and the last ring closes to nothing, so a match lasts about 3.4 minutes at most. The last Keeper alive is crowned on the existing ranking screen with confetti. Solo play is one Keeper against three AI.
Three Watch-AI runs played 10 finished matches: exactly one winner each, lasting 1:38 to 2:45, with 0 game errors and 0 page errors. The AI dies by ring 4 or 5, so the holds between rings may need to be longer. No human has played it yet.
Fewer, stronger drops
Drops now follow a simple idea: fewer of them, and each one matters. Ordinary drop chances were cut to a third, items per wave are capped at 5 (it was 12), and the rarer tiers hit harder. A guardian drops 4 items with a 35 percent chance of a Profane (unique) one. A Mega Boss drops 6, including a Profane item the Keeper does not own yet. Over 4,000 rolls, 3.5 percent came up Profane and 11 percent Sainted.
The drop system is ready for named items with their own powers. The items themselves are not written.
Six classes get their own icons
The Archer, Butcher, Ninja, Monk, Bounty Hunter and Tank now have 48 new skill icons, one per skill, in place of borrowing the Witch's. They were checked on a contact sheet and live in the game as the Archer and the Monk. The Wizard and Barbarian still borrow the Witch's.
Balance, measured
The first guardian was beating the level 1 Knight in 6 of 20 fights, mostly through the crowd left over from the fight rather than through the boss. The crowd during the guardian phase is now halved for the first two chambers. Two Watch runs on the new build gave 6 fights with the first guardian, 6 won, 0 Knight deaths. Six wins in a row would have had about a 12 percent chance at the old rate, and the Watch AI cleared Level 1 for the first time. That is a good sign, not proof.
The frame-rate figures from that day's runs are not valid (5 to 13 fps against 36 the day before), because the machine was under load, so two runs were thin. One thing the numbers did show is a gap in difficulty against hero level. Level 2 guardians fell almost at once to a level 20 hero (4 s, 8 s and 0.3 s), while the Level 2 Mega Boss killed the Knight in 30 s.
Smaller fixes
The relic draft in Survival now says "after Wave N" instead of "after Chamber N". The legendary debt is capped at 5 per wave, because Survival wave 100 would have owed 20. Survival also loads the boss voice lines of every band, not just the Cathedral's.