16 Aug 2026Developer post

Combat and Stability Patch

Dungeons Five dungeons fight back again. The spawners in the three Sky Citadel levels / Ancient Caverns / the Crucible had lost the list of enemies they were meant to emit. 63 spawners sat there doing nothing while the objective still asked you to destroy them. Every spawner in t

Dungeons

Five dungeons fight back again. The spawners in the three Sky Citadel levels / Ancient Caverns / the Crucible had lost the list of enemies they were meant to emit. 63 spawners sat there doing nothing while the objective still asked you to destroy them. Every spawner in the game emits again.
Enemies now appear on the floor beside a spawner instead of inside it. A skeleton could previously turn up part-way up the statue and walk around inside it.
Removed a grey robot standing inside the Wraith Idol and Cursed Totem spawners. It came bundled inside a visual effect from an asset pack and was never meant to be in the game. The green slime effect on those spawners is unchanged.

Enemies

Five enemies that could never animate now move. The Broodmother / Darkness Spider / Evil Watcher / Giant Worm / Widow Spinner were each built with a movement setup that could not select the one animation it had been given. The game ran their animation and threw away every frame of it. They stood in place while chasing you and hitting you.
Ranged enemies no longer pace forward and backward on the spot. At roughly the range they like to keep they flipped between backing away and standing to attack every single frame. They now hold a proper standoff distance and commit to it.

Combat

Melee swings start the instant you click. They used to wait for you to let go of the button first. That quietly added your own click time to every attack. Holding the button still winds up a heavy attack.
Sword hits land where they look like they land. Damage was resolving a beat before the blade actually reached the target so solid hits felt like they passed through.
Connecting with a melee hit now hits back. There is a brief freeze on impact and a camera kick that scales up on a combo finisher. Whiffs stay clean.
The Wizard and Necromancer react the moment you click instead of waiting for the release. The staff comes up on the press and holding still charges a bigger spell exactly as before. The Druid already worked this way.
Spells make a sound when they miss. A bolt into a wall or the floor used to land in complete silence.
The Ent's claw swipe no longer does its impact freeze when it hits nothing.

Balance

The Wizard's ice bolt now has a short cooldown between casts. It was the only caster with no limit at all beyond mana so its fire rate was really just however long its cast animation happened to run. It is still the fastest of the three casters and the cooldown now shows on the attack slot like everyone else's.
The Necromancer and Druid attack noticeably faster. Their cooldown only started once the cast animation had finished. That made the real wait between shots roughly double what it was meant to be. Shadow bolt in particular was sitting above a second and a half.

Interface

Buffs and debuffs now tell you what they are. When an effect lands on you its name and what it does flash up next to the icon for a couple of seconds. Effects that never had a written description now generate one from their actual numbers such as "+8% damage and 15% less damage taken" and that same line shows in the hover tooltip.
The buff and debuff bar has been redressed to match the rest of the interface. Icons sit in the same ornate frames used on class select and results and the timers use the game's proper lettering instead of plain white text.
Fixed the debuff row sliding off the bottom of the screen on some HUD layouts.
Fixed two icons that showed as an empty box. The delete button in the Class Forge and the under-attack warning on the Defend HUD.
The performance readout on the tilde key works everywhere now. It only ever appeared if you had come through the main menu. It also shows more: CPU and GPU time separately plus live enemy count and your real render resolution and your ping in co-op. The Low figure is now the worst frame in the last few seconds instead of the worst since launch.

Crashes and Performance

Fixed a crash that could end a run outright. One of the character models was carrying a leftover movement system from the asset pack it came from. It fought with the game's own movement until it threw an error it could not recover from. That system is now stripped from every character as it spawns.
Fixed a crash in the Class Forge. Building or previewing a custom class could throw an error every single frame until the game fell over.
Fixed a crash when entering a dungeon that came from leftover code on one of the character models.
Big framerate win in longer sessions. That same leftover system was failing on every single physics step. One reported hour-long session racked up over 27000 of them.
Fixed a second per-frame error caused by collision settings inherited from the source character art.
The Dark Wizard now uses a proper first-party character body. The old one carried two hidden cameras that rendered every frame for a portrait the game never shows.
Three character classes were each carrying a spare hidden camera and a duplicate audio listener from the moment they spawned. Both are gone.
Removed the STP upscaling option from video settings. It threw an error on every frame the moment it kicked in. That broke post-processing and cost framerate for exactly the players who had turned an upscaler on because they needed one. Anyone using it moves to FSR 1.0 automatically. It comes back once it works.

Known Issues

Some enemies still stand frozen instead of walking and attacking. Most visibly the three Crusaders / Fallen Knight / Cinder Knight / Skeleton Mage / Demon Guard / Demon Mage / Gorehound. This is an animation wiring problem in the enemy art and not the AI. They still chase you and hit you and take damage normally. An automated check now measures every enemy in every dungeon for exactly this so the remaining cases are tracked rather than found by accident.
There is no host migration. If the hosting player crashes or drops the session ends for everyone else. Guests now get a clear "Lost connection to the host" message instead of a silent bounce to the menu.
The new co-op flow has had targeted fixes for the issues a recent two-player test surfaced. It still needs a fresh two-player live test before it can be called solid.
Some environment surfaces look simpler than intended. The mass pink-material fix flattened a batch of vendor shaders such as animated foliage sway and flowing lava and translucent ice. Texture and normals and shininess carry over. The motion and translucency effects return once those packs get proper modern-pipeline variants.
A few specialty effects can still appear pink. Certain water VFX and some castle foliage and wall surfaces cannot be auto-converted without losing their effect and are being handled individually.
Colorblind Mode currently corrects the 3D world only. HUD elements are not recolored by it yet and that needs a larger rendering change.
The Paladin's two-handed sword grip is still being fine-tuned and may sit slightly off in the hand.

Thank you to everyone who sent a crash report or a session log. The crash fixes above came straight out of them. Keep them coming.

Original post

12 Aug 2026Developer post

Patch 1.0.129: Crashes, Combat Feel, and Performance

Update 5 fixed the dungeons that could not be finished. This one is the follow-up: three crashes that got reported since, a batch of errors that were costing frames without showing up as anything obvious, and the combat timing work that missed the last build by a few hours. Crash

Update 5 fixed the dungeons that could not be finished. This one is the follow-up: three crashes that got reported since, a batch of errors that were costing frames without showing up as anything obvious, and the combat timing work that missed the last build by a few hours.

Crashes

Fixed a crash when building or previewing a custom class in the Class Forge.
Fixed a crash on entering a dungeon.
Fixed a crash that could end a run outright, hit on different machines and in different areas.

All three traced back to leftover systems on a couple of character models, still running alongside the game's own. Those are now stripped from every character as it spawns.

Performance

Longer sessions hold their framerate better. That leftover code was failing on every physics step, tens of thousands of times in a single sitting, and that costs real frame time.
Fixed a second per-frame error from collision settings inherited from the source character art.
Three classes were each carrying a spare hidden camera and a duplicate audio listener from the moment they spawned. Both are gone.
Removed the STP upscaling option from Video. It errored every frame once it actually engaged, which broke post-processing for the people who had turned an upscaler on because they needed one. If you were using it you have been moved to FSR 1.0. It comes back when it works.

Combat

Melee swings start the instant you click. They used to wait for you to release the button, which added your own click time to every attack and was most of why sword combat felt sluggish. Holding still winds up a heavy, it just does it from inside the swing now.
Sword hits land where they look like they land. Damage was resolving slightly before the blade arrived, which made solid hits feel like they passed through.
Hits hit back. Brief freeze on impact and a camera kick, bigger on a combo finisher. Whiffs stay clean, so a hit and a miss finally feel different.
The Wizard and Necromancer react the moment you click, instead of waiting for the release. The Druid already worked this way.
The Necromancer and Druid attack noticeably faster. Their cooldown only started once the cast animation finished, so the real gap between shots was about double what it was meant to be.
The Wizard's ice bolt now has a short cooldown, shown on the attack slot like the others. It was the only caster with no cap beyond mana, so its fire rate was really just the length of its cast animation.
Spells make a sound when they miss. A bolt hitting a wall or the floor used to land in silence.
The Ent's claw swipe no longer does its impact freeze on a whiff.

Interface

Buffs and debuffs say what they are. When an effect lands, its name and what it does flash up next to the icon for a couple of seconds. Effects with no written description now generate one from their actual numbers, and that shows in the tooltip too.
Fixed the debuff row sliding off the bottom of the screen on some layouts.
The performance readout (tilde key) works everywhere now, not just if you came through the main menu. It shows CPU and GPU time separately, live enemy count, your real render resolution, and your ping in co-op. The Low figure is now the worst frame in the last few seconds instead of the worst since launch.
Fixed two icons that rendered as empty boxes: the delete button in the Class Forge and the "under attack" warning on the Defend HUD.

Other

The Dark Wizard has its own character body now. Update 5 noted it was still borrowing its base class's model.
Enemy spawn points in the Ancient Caverns were stacked on top of each other in several places, so groups arrived as one pile instead of spread through the level.

Most of this came out of the automatic crash reports. They are on by default and you can turn them off any time in Settings under Diagnostics, but if you leave them on they genuinely help: every crash in this patch was found that way rather than from a bug report.

Original post

04 Aug 2026Developer post

Cryptr Update #5: Frame Rate, Finishable Dungeons, and Co-op

Update 5 Someone refunded Cryptr with the note "frame rate too low." I went looking for the heavy content that was costing the frames and did not find any. What I found instead were three configuration bugs, and one of them meant the game was very likely putting your PC on the hi

Update 5

Someone refunded Cryptr with the note "frame rate too low." I went looking for the heavy content that was costing the frames and did not find any. What I found instead were three configuration bugs, and one of them meant the game was very likely putting your PC on the highest settings it owns whether or not your PC could run them. That is not your hardware. That was me.

So this update is mostly repair work, and I would rather say that plainly than dress it up. The other half came out of finally sitting down and playing every shipped dungeon end to end, with a test harness and then by hand, which turned up levels that literally could not be completed.

The short version

The game now reads your actual graphics card instead of guessing, and the Windows build is compiled properly for the first time. If it ran badly out of the box, try it again.
Several dungeons could not be finished at all. They can now.
Co-op got its first real two-process test pass, and it found a bug that was kicking guests out of live dungeons.

Performance

The game was reading your graphics card wrong, and could put your PC on a preset it cannot run. It was guessing your card's speed from how much memory it reported, which is a bad signal in two separate ways: an old 8 GB card looked identical to a modern one, and a laptop with built-in graphics reports a slice of your system RAM as graphics memory, so an ordinary laptop could look like a high-end desktop and get put on Ultra. It now identifies the actual card. If you were hit by this, Options has an Auto-Detect button that will re-pick for you and tell you what it found.
The Windows build was compiled the slow way. Cryptr was shipping on the older of Unity's two compilers, which leaves a large amount of CPU performance on the table. It now ships on the faster one. Nothing about the game changes, it just gets more frames out of the same PC, and the gain is biggest exactly where you want it: crowded fights with a lot going on.
Dynamic resolution, for when a fight gets heavy. New toggle in Video. With it on, Cryptr quietly drops the internal resolution a little when the frame rate starts to slip, and puts it back the moment the pressure is off. It only ever moves between 60% and whatever Render Scale you set, so it can never go sharper than you asked for or blurrier than the picture can carry. A horde spawning should cost you a bit of crispness for a few seconds instead of costing you the frame rate right when you need it. On by default on lower-end systems, off on machines that do not need it.
Cryptr sets itself up for your PC on the first launch. It works out what you are running and picks a matching preset: quality, frame rate, resolution scaling and the heavier effects, all together, before you ever open the menu. Swap a graphics card or a monitor later and it notices and re-tunes, unless you have already set things by hand, in which case it leaves your choices alone.
Low and Medium actually ask less of your GPU now. Both skip shadows cast by small local lights, and Low also drops the expensive shadow softening. Sunlight and the main shadows are untouched, so nothing goes flat.
Texture memory scales with the preset. Every preset used the same texture budget regardless of your hardware. Low now uses less (and half-resolution textures), which is what the weakest machines actually need, and High and Ultra get a much larger budget: on a card with plenty of memory the old limit was forcing textures to blur out and pop in for no reason.
Changing Quality no longer overrides your V-Sync or frame cap. Switching preset was quietly resetting both. In the worst case it turned V-Sync back on, which made a frame cap you had set stop working entirely.
Levels load faster. Collision data for scenery is now prepared when I build the game instead of every single time you load in.
A big download saving. Navigation data across the game went from just over 1 GB to about 60 MB with no change to how anything plays. Several levels were storing pathfinding for an entire kilometre of terrain the fight never visits: the farmstead alone carried 631 MB of it, and the Infernal Deep finale shipped a 192 MB navigation mesh that is now 1 MB.

A note on Ultra, because I think you should have the numbers I have. I benchmarked the shipped build on an RTX 5090 at 1080p in the Sky Citadel: Low 110 fps, Medium 96, High 66, Ultra 54. Ultra costs roughly twice what Low does, and it is the setting the old detection code was handing to cards a fraction of that speed. Ultra is not broken, it is just genuinely expensive, and now the game only recommends it to hardware that can pay for it.

Dungeons that could not be finished

I built a harness that plays every shipped dungeon, and then played them myself. This is what it found. None of these are subtle, and all of them are fixed.

Every boss dungeon was impossible to finish. The game was counting things that were not even in the level toward "defeat the boss", so the objective wanted 96 kills in a room containing one boss. It could never tick over no matter how many times you killed the actual boss. Boss objectives now count only the boss.
Several dungeons were eerily quiet, and it was a bug. In the Sky Citadel (floors 1 and 3), the Ice Dragon arena and the Infernal Deep finale, you could walk the whole level and nothing would ever come for you. The spot you spawned at was cut off from the rest of the map as far as the monsters' pathfinding was concerned, so they could not reach you and you could not reach the objective. The Infernal Deep finale was the worst of them: the Broodmother was sitting half a kilometre from where you spawned, which made that boss simply unbeatable. It is a real fight now.
Three dungeons had objectives nobody could walk to. The deep crypt's ritual altars, the soul relay's receiver, and both dragons in the Ice Dragon arena were sitting in rooms with no way in. You could clear everything else and the objective would never move. Every objective in every dungeon is now verified reachable from where you spawn.
Monsters stood still in four levels. Overgrown Ruins 1, the Catacombs ritual floor, the catacombs boss arena and the desert town had no navigation data at all, so enemies could not chase, allies could not follow, and pets just stood there. All four are rebuilt.
Overgrown Ruins 1 was missing most of its fight. Fifteen of its nineteen spawn fountains were cut off from the rest of the level, so the horde they were meant to send never arrived and the level could not be cleared. All nineteen are in play.
The farmstead defence barely showed up. Two of the five spawn points the horde attacks from were stranded, so most waves never walked onto the field. The same problem hid three of four spawn points on Sky Citadel floor 4.
Finishing Ancient Caverns did not count. Clearing it recorded the wrong dungeon, so the Infernal Deep sector never advanced and the next node stayed locked however many times you beat it.
Two Crucible objective totems sat below the arena floor and could not be attacked. Raised.
No more fake victories. A dungeon whose objective was wired up wrong used to show you the green DUNGEON CLEARED card and send you home having fought nothing. It now reports the problem and returns you to the Tower instead of pretending you won.
A failed spawn returns you to the Tower instead of soft-locking. If a hero could not be placed in a dungeon, you used to be left with no body and no way out.
Carrying the cursed idol is survivable again. The idol pulls every enemy in the level onto whoever is holding it, and constant incoming damage kept restarting the stagger, which pinned the carrier in place. Since carrying also stops you fighting back, a swarmed carrier could neither move nor swing: one run sat in one spot for 89 seconds and took 13,000 damage. A carrier still staggers, but keeps their feet.

Combat

Attacks no longer miss enemies standing right in front of you. When a swing went out the game asked the physics system what was inside the arc, and got back a list with a hard size limit. It was asking about everything: walls, floors, crates, doorway triggers, scenery. In a bare test room that is fine, because there is nothing else to find. In a properly decorated room the list could fill up with scenery before it ever reached an actual enemy, and those enemies silently fell off the end. The result was a swing that clearly connected and did nothing, seemingly at random, and always worst in the busiest rooms. The game now only asks about things it can actually hit. If you have ever sworn at a whiffed hit in a crowded room, that was this.
Ranged enemies have stopped getting in each other's way. A caster checked whether anything was between it and you before committing a spell, and counted its own allies as an obstacle, so a pack of archers or mages standing shoulder to shoulder would mostly stand there while whoever had a clean lane did the shooting. They see past each other now and all of them fire. Grouped ranged enemies are noticeably more dangerous than they were, which is how they were always meant to read. I am watching this one and will tune it if packed caster groups turn out to be too much.
Bosses no longer notice you through walls. The Ice Dragon would wake while you were on the far side of the arena and charge in a straight line, clipping through the wall and down the spiral to reach you. Bosses now have to actually see you before the fight starts, and they stay in their own arena instead of chasing you out of it. The boss health bar stops appearing before you have met the boss.
The Broodmother fight could stall out. Getting close enough to swing at a boss that large did not register, so you could stand inside her taking damage without ever landing a hit. Reach is now measured to a creature's body rather than its centre, so big bosses can be fought at the range they look like.
Your summons no longer take damage from your own attacks. Elemental minions were being caught by their summoner's swings and spells. Only enemies can hurt them now.
Two classes could not be played at all. The Dwarf Berserker and the Dark Wizard were selectable but had no body wired to them, so picking either dropped you straight back to the hub. Both work, though they currently share their base class's model.

Talents

I put every node in all ten talent trees through the real game: buy it at max rank, respec, buy it again, and measure what actually changed. 1,920 checks across 13 classes.

Talents you refund now actually come back off. A handful of talents that boost stamina recovery (Resolve, Evasion, Endurance) were stuck on once bought: refunding left the bonus in place, and it quietly grew again every time you levelled up or changed your build. Eight nodes were leaving residue behind. Now none are, and the whole set is checked on and off automatically every build so it cannot come back.
Two Knight talents were secretly the same talent. "Bastion" and "Last Bastion" shared an internal id, so buying either silently applied both and lit both frames. They are separate nodes again.
The Berserker's Maim now does something. It was firing an effect the game had no handler for, which made it a dead point next to Rend. It leaves the target taking more damage now.

Co-op

Co-op had no automated coverage at all, for a structural reason: the networking layer can only be host or guest in one process, so a single test can never watch replication happen. I built a harness that drives two real game processes instead, which is also the truer test, and ran it a few dozen times.

Guests were being kicked out of live dungeons. Some enemies could spawn in a state where the networking layer choked on the first update about them, and it responds to that by dropping the connection. So a guest would get thrown out mid-run and the game would blame the host's connection, while the host was perfectly fine. It was happening in roughly one run in four. Seventeen consecutive clean runs since the fix.
Nobody ends up staring at a black screen. A guest who had not picked a class before the host travelled could arrive in a dungeon with no camera at all: nothing rendering, with the HUD and leftover hub menus floating over the top. It now always gives you a view.
Joining a run in progress no longer drops you into an empty world. A friend who joined after the host had already descended into a procedurally generated dungeon would land in a void with enemies floating in it, because the layout was built once and never rebuilt for latecomers. The host now replays the run to you when you arrive.
Drop-in guests no longer pilot a random hero. Joining mid-scene used to hand you a generic bodiless placeholder with a live camera until you picked a class.
Classes you build in the Class Forge are playable in co-op. A guest picking a custom class was silently rejected and bounced back to the picker forever, because the host had no copy of your recipe to spawn from. Your class now travels with you.
The tutorial is solo only. Hosting a co-op game and entering the Trial Grounds pulled the whole party in, and a lagging or dropped guest could stall the host through a series of 30 second waits and leave rooms sealed. Hosts reported not being able to finish the tutorial at all. The Trial Grounds are now a solo space.
Wiping twice in one sitting works properly. After a party wipe, hosting a second session in the same launch left a later wipe with no retreat, so the party stayed stuck on the floor.
The results card credits casters and archers. With AI allies in the party, which is the default, the end-of-run scoreboard showed Damage 0 for spell and bow classes. It was failing to tell you apart from your bots.

The Tower, menus and the Level Editor

Coming home no longer makes you pick your class again. Returning to the Tower opened the class picker and did not re-spawn your hero, so every dungeon-to-town trip meant choosing all over again.
Pressing Enter on the main menu no longer eats your keyboard. It was opening the in-game chat box over the title art, after which every keystroke went into the chat line instead of the menu, which looks exactly like a frozen game.
Playing on a controller no longer breaks aiming. With no mouse plugged in, the game threw an error every single frame the moment you aimed.
Menus in two levels would not respond to the mouse. The Sky Citadel third floor and the desert town were on an old input handler, so on-screen buttons there could not be hovered or clicked at all.
Sound was being mixed from the wrong place. Two listeners could be active at once, so positional audio was computed from an arbitrary one of them.
A stray "Open E" prompt is gone, along with the broken script behind it that was failing every frame in about a dozen levels.
The farm's building list reads like a place now. The panel used to list buildings by their raw asset names ("SM MF House 03"). It says Farmhouse, Barn, Shed, Chicken Coop, Windmill, Water Mill and Well now, numbered where there is more than one, and the header matches the level's actual name.
Spell effects across the game were rendering as flat cards. Magic orbs, impacts, weapon trails and auras were being drawn with a solid surface material instead of a particle one, so an effect that should have been a soft glow came out as one big opaque texture. 65 effect materials fixed.
The Necromancer's aiming marker was a placeholder. It was a ring drawn in code. It now uses the same authored spell art as the bolt you fire and the rain you channel.
Bonus levels can be added to and removed from your own level list. Levels that ship with the game, like Helm's Deep, could only be opened as a starting point. There is an Install button now, after which you can rename, play, publish or delete it like anything you built yourself, and delete keeps it deleted.
The level browser no longer offers buttons that do nothing. Levels supplied by mods showed Delete and Rename, which quietly had no effect. They are marked "(mod)" now and offer Duplicate, which makes an editable copy that is yours.
Saving a level cannot overwrite a different one whose name happens to reduce to the same folder, and a level with a missing or outdated environment block no longer loads as a pitch-black, unplayable room.
Sharing two classes with the same name from the Class Forge no longer overwrites one with the other.

Telling me when something goes wrong

Almost everything above was found by me, late, by playing. That is a bad way to find out. So Cryptr can now tell me directly, and all of it is one switch you can turn off.

Report a problem without leaving the game. Hit Escape and there is a "Report a Problem" section in the pause menu. Pick what went wrong (stuck in the level, combat not landing, something looks wrong, bad performance, a co-op problem, or something else) and press Send. No typing, no email, no alt-tabbing. The game attaches its own log and a snapshot of what was happening at that moment, so I get the detail without you having to describe it. If you have ever been wedged in a wall and just quit instead of writing it up, this is for you.
Crash reports reach me automatically. If the game hits an error it sends an anonymous report, instead of the crash file sitting on your PC where I will never see it. It is deliberately restrained: the same fault is only ever sent once from your machine, it is capped at three a day, and it uploads a few kilobytes rather than your whole log. Your Windows user name is stripped out first.
The game can tell me when it dies badly. If Cryptr closes the way it should, nothing happens. If it vanishes outright (a driver fault, a crash the game cannot catch), it leaves a note behind and sends a short anonymous summary next launch: how long the session ran, how far you got, and how well it performed. That is the difference between me guessing at a crash and being able to fix it.
All three are the same toggle, under Options then Diagnostics, and there is a button there to open the crash folder on your own PC if you would rather send things yourself. No personal details, no chat, no save data.

Known issues

Co-op still needs a two-machine test. Everything above was proven with two game processes on one PC, which covers the networking, spawning, replication and scene changes. What it cannot cover is the Steam lobby and invite plumbing, because both processes share one Steam client. That is the next thing I am doing.
There is no host migration. If the hosting player's game crashes or their connection drops, the session ends for everyone. Guests at least get a clear "Lost connection to the host" message now instead of a silent bounce to the menu.
Some environment surfaces look simpler than intended. A mass fix for magenta materials flattened a batch of custom effects (animated grass sway, flowing lava, translucent ice, snow-blended rock) down to a plain lit surface. Texture and shape carry over, the motion does not. Being restored pack by pack.
Colorblind Mode corrects the 3D world only. HUD elements are not recoloured by it yet. That needs a larger change and is planned rather than patched.
The Paladin's two-handed grip is still being fine-tuned and can sit slightly off in the hand.

Thank you

This patch exists because of three things: one refund note that said the frame rate was too low, one long review that took the trouble to describe what was wrong instead of just leaving, and a run of my own where a dungeon would not finish and I finally stopped assuming it was me. The first two are the hard ones to leave, and they are the most useful thing anyone can give me.

If something feels off, use Report a Problem in the pause menu. It takes two clicks and it lands on my desk with everything I need.

Original post

28 Jul 2026Developer post

Fix Patch: Combat Accuracy, UI Polish, and the Old Combat Toolkit Removed

A refund note said the combat "animations don't even hit where they show they hit... you just have to keep running and spamming hoping something would hit." Blunt, and correct. It was a real bug, and it took an audit of the whole combat layer to find. Thanks for leaving it. Hit r

A refund note said the combat "animations don't even hit where they show they hit... you just have to keep running and spamming hoping something would hit." Blunt, and correct. It was a real bug, and it took an audit of the whole combat layer to find. Thanks for leaving it.

Hit registration

Enemies hit you when their weapon reaches you. Every monster's damage landed on a fixed stopwatch that had nothing to do with the swing you were watching. On roughly a third of the bestiary the blow landed in the first third of the animation, and the goblins you meet first were connecting a fifth of the way in, while the axe was still going up. Damage now fires off the attack that is actually playing, on 123 of the game's 128 enemies. The wind-up you see is the wind-up you get.
Swinging into a crowd no longer eats your hits. A melee swing could only register so many things at once, and scenery counted toward the limit, so in a prop-heavy room a swing could fill up on crates and land on nothing. That is why fighting a pack felt like flailing: the more crowded the fight, the more hits vanished. The limit is four times higher on every melee class.
The Knight's sword hits where the swing shows it hitting. Its contact point was on a stopwatch, so anything that sped your attacks up (a level, a talent, a haste buff) slid the damage off the swing. And starting a new swing before the last one landed threw the old hit away entirely. Both fixed.
Headshots work on big monsters. The headshot zone was one fixed size tuned around a human body, so real headshots on dragons and ogres registered as ordinary body hits. It scales with the creature now.
Enemy spellcasters fire from their hands. Bolts spawned at a fixed height regardless of caster size, so big ones fired out of their chest and small ones out of thin air above their head. The projectile, the effect and the line of sight now all come from the same point on the actual creature, and casters aim at your body.
Fewer monsters underground, fewer walls you can walk through. Spawn points that dropped a pack on unchecked ground now refuse the spawn instead, hero collision was under spec and let you push into geometry, and the Level Editor was building colliders smaller than the pieces they belonged to.

Menus

Every button in the game lights up. Main menu, settings, pause screen, shops and pickers: a warm gold glow when you point at one, brighter while you hold it. On a controller, whatever the stick is on gets a softer version, so you can always see where you are.
The Feedback, Steam Community and Store Page links are findable now. They were crammed into the last few pixels of the menu panel, jammed against the status line and each other, and most people never saw them. They now sit in their own row along the bottom of the screen as proper framed buttons matching the rest of the menu, and they fill in and glow when you point at one.

Under the hood

The old combat toolkit is fully out of the game. Its leftovers were still supplying weapon models, attack animations, impact effects and a large slice of combat audio. All replaced. Along the way I found the Warden firing its bow with literal pistol animations: it draws and releases a bow now. The impact effects that rendered as hard-edged white cards are gone too.
The Barbarian runs on the same combat code as every other class. It was the last one still on the old stack. New kit: a four-hit chain into a two-handed cleave, an overhead smash, and a Rage roar that staggers everything around you and speeds up your swings.

Same ask as always: if something feels off, say so in the Steam discussions or the Discord. This patch exists because one person did.

Original post

24 Jul 2026Developer post

Feedback Patch: Brighter Levels, Better Combat, and a Crash Fixed

Feedback Patch A player left a long, thoughtful review of the game, and almost everything in this patch comes straight from it: levels that were too dark to navigate, a crash on the Brawler, blocking that did nothing, arrows that missed, and getting wedged in the scenery with no

Feedback Patch

A player left a long, thoughtful review of the game, and almost everything in this patch comes straight from it: levels that were too dark to navigate, a crash on the Brawler, blocking that did nothing, arrows that missed, and getting wedged in the scenery with no way out. Thank you for taking the time to write all of it down. Here is what changed.

Lighting and visibility

The campaign levels are much brighter, and they stay that way. Three separate things were making levels dark. They opened at the exact darkest moment of the day cycle (moon just set, sun barely up), so "levels always start at dusk" was literally true. A full day only lasted eight minutes, so nightfall was always a few minutes off. And the clock never reset so a while spent in the Tower meant walking into the next level at midnight. Levels now open in usable mid-morning light every time, a full day lasts twenty four minutes, and there is a hard floor on how dark the world can get so even deep night stays readable. A separate bug where one effect was cancelling out the intended exposure in every scene is fixed too. Measured against the old build, the light you spawn into is about three and a half times brighter.
The Brightness slider is a real gamma slider now. It was only turning the whole picture up, which blows out torches and sky long before you can see into the shadows. It now lifts the dark and mid tones and mostly leaves bright things where they were. You will find it at the top of Video settings, and it still lives under Accessibility too.
A glowing class no longer makes the room darker. Lights that ride on your hero (the Wizard's staff glow, talent auras) were casting your own body as a shadow across everything in front of you, so a glowing class read darker than a plain one, which is exactly backwards. Cosmetic lights on a hero no longer cast shadows, whatever they come from. It is a little kinder on frame rate as well.

Combat

Fixed a crash on the Dwarf Brawler. With both Quake Kick and Static Fists unlocked, attacking an enemy could kill the game outright: Static Fists arcs lightning between foes, and the arc's own damage kept re-triggering the arc until the game ran out of room. The same fault could be reached through any talent that chains or arcs, including the Druid's Static Grove. Fixed at the source, so those talents are safe again.
The Berserker is no longer rooted to the spot by his own attacks. Every swing planted him in place for the whole chain, which is brutal for a class with no shield and no damage reduction: staying mobile is his defence. Now only the big spin finisher fully commits, and the ordinary swings let him keep his feet and reposition mid-combo.
Melee attacks connect when they look like they should. Swings faced wherever the camera pointed and then checked a narrow arc a moment later, so a strike that visually landed could pass through nothing, especially against something that stepped aside mid-swing. Swings now settle onto a foe you were already aiming at. Affects the Knight, the Berserker and the Brawler, and the Brawler's short reach benefits most.
Blocking is worth doing now. Before, a block just ate the hit and the enemy swung again, so there was no reason to raise the shield over stepping back. Now any block braces you (25% less damage taken for a few seconds), and a well-timed block, caught just after you raise the guard, is a parry: it staggers the attacker and your next few seconds of attacks hit 50% harder. Time the guard, open them up, punish.
The Ranger's arrows go where you are aiming. Arrows leave the hand while your crosshair comes from the camera, and the two only lined up at long range, so close shots drifted right. Shooting downhill was worse: the game quietly flattened those shots level, so arrows sailed over anything below you. Both are fixed, and the bow now gets the same gentle aim assist the casters have.

Getting around

Stuck in the scenery? You can free yourself. Getting wedged in a wall used to mean abandoning the run and losing everything you earned in it. Pause and use FREE ME under STUCK?, or press U (rebindable), and you will be set back down where you last stood safely. It only acts if you are genuinely stuck: press it when you are fine and it tells you so and leaves you where you are. It moves you only a few metres and has a short cooldown, so it is a rescue, not a shortcut.
Your weapon loadout is reachable. The Loadout key (L by default) was listed in the controls but did nothing: the only way in was to find the table in the hub. The key now opens the loadout directly anywhere in the hub, and in a dungeon it tells you loadouts are set before a run rather than silently doing nothing.

The Crucible and Defend maps

The farm's attackers actually attack the farm. On Defend maps, enemies could get stuck milling around the edge of the level while the buildings burned, because they could not work out a route in and simply gave up. They now find their way to the target and press toward it even where there is no clean path. This also fixes enemies stalling out and standing around in other maps.
Crucible enemies can reach the whole arena now. The raised plaza platforms and their stairs were missing from the arena's movement map, so enemies could not climb up to them, and standing on the high ground let you fight a horde that could never reach you. Fixed, so the whole fortress is contested ground again.
Crucible waves are the size they are meant to be. Waves built around certain enemy families (ogres, drakes, spiders, mimics) were quietly spawning short, because the wave tried to fill some slots with ranged versions of a family that has none and then skipped them. A wave planned for seven could arrive as four. Those slots are now filled from the same family, so every wave arrives at full strength.

Thanks for the feedback!

Original post

21 Jul 2026Developer post

Stability Patch #2 - Controller Support and Camera Fixes

Patch #1 was the first launch-stability pass. This one continue controller work and fixes a camera problem that a refund report put me onto. Thanks to whoever left that note, it described something real and I would not have found it as quickly otherwise. Controller Full Controlle

Patch #1 was the first launch-stability pass. This one continue controller work and fixes a camera problem that a refund report put me onto. Thanks to whoever left that note, it described something real and I would not have found it as quickly otherwise.

Controller

Full Controller Support now shows on the store page. Someone asked in the discussions why the written description said the game had controller support while the store page carried no controller tag. They were right, and the game was not the problem. I had completed Steam's controller wizard but never published the store page afterward, so the declaration sat saved but private. It is published now and the tag is live. The game itself has played fully on a pad for a while; the store page just was not saying so.
You can type with a controller. Anywhere the game asks for text (party chat, naming a class in the Forge, naming or searching a level in the Editor), pressing the button on the field opens an on-screen keyboard you drive entirely with the pad: stick or d-pad to move, A to type, X to backspace, Y for capitals, RB for space, LB for symbols, Start when you are done. Before this, those fields simply did nothing without a keyboard plugged in. The Class Forge is fully navigable on a pad now too, and B backs you out. If you have a keyboard, nothing changes.
The Level Editor plays on a controller. The whole editor works with a pad and nothing else. Left stick moves a cursor you use like a mouse: A selects, places, drags a gizmo handle, or holds to slide the view. Right stick swings the camera or scrolls whatever list you are pointing at. Triggers zoom. B backs out, X deletes, Y cycles move, rotate and scale, LB undoes (hold to add to a selection or drag a selection box), RB redoes, the d-pad nudges one grid step, Start saves. Press Back for a card listing all of it. Plug a mouse back in and it takes over the moment you move it.

Camera

The pulled-back arcade view now tells you what it is doing. Scroll all the way out and the camera still swings to the steep overhead angle, and aiming still hands over to your mouse: the cursor is freed to range across the floor and your hero turns to face wherever you point. That is unchanged, and it is staying. The problem was that it happened silently. Nothing on screen said your controls had just changed, so anyone who scrolled out without meaning to saw a cursor stuck over the game, a camera that would not turn, and swings hitting nothing, and reasonably read the whole thing as a broken game. Now a ring marks the ground where you are aiming, and the first time you reach the mode a one-time note explains that the cursor is your crosshair and that scrolling back in returns you to the normal camera. If you would rather keep mouse-look at full zoom-out, there is a new Overhead Aim (max zoom-out) switch in Settings.
Several heroes no longer slide sideways in the pulled-back view. Only a couple of classes have the side-step and back-step animations that top-down aiming needs. Everyone else (the Assassin, Berserker, Forest Huntress, Necromancer, Paladin, Warden, Dwarf Brawler and both Ravagers) was being forced to face the cursor while running in another direction, so they played a forward run while gliding sideways. Those heroes now turn to face the way they are actually moving, and only their aim follows the cursor.

Co-op

Joining a run already in progress builds the level properly. A guest who joined mid-run could arrive in a dungeon whose generated geometry had never been built on their machine. The host now replays the party's current travel to a late joiner so the level assembles correctly on arrival.
Custom classes from the Forge work in co-op. A class you built in the Forge was only playable by the person who made it. Those class recipes are now distributed to everyone in the session, so a friend can pick your creation.

Level Editor

Saving can no longer overwrite a different level. A save could land on top of an unrelated level under the wrong name. The editor now refuses that save instead of destroying your other work.
Older levels no longer load black. A level saved before a format change could open as an empty black scene. Those levels load correctly again.

Performance

Quieter networked sessions. Multiplayer games were re-registering the same prefabs repeatedly and flooding the log with warnings. That is skipped now.

One note on the reviews on this page: they are all from 2022 and 2023. The combat system they describe is gone. I tore it out and rebuilt it from scratch this year, and since then every class has had its full kit built out and tuned one at a time: left click, right click, dodge, sprint, walk, and ultimate. If you played Cryptr a few years ago, it is not the same game.

That is also why I would rather hear from you than guess. I am one person building this around a full-time job, and most of what shipped this year exists because somebody said something. A surprising number of requests are quick for me once I know they matter to someone. The catch is that I cannot tell what matters from my side of the screen: I have well over a thousand hours in this game, which means I am the worst possible judge of how the first ten minutes feel to somebody new.

The mod tools and the level and class editors let you build your own content. But the game itself can move too, and it moves faster when I know which direction people actually want it to go. If something feels off, or there is something you want to see in it, say so in the Steam discussions or the Discord. I read all of it.

Original post

21 Jul 2026Developer post

Stability Patch #1 - 2026.20.07

Launch Stability Patch A focused patch built straight off your feedback. A couple of reviews called out the tutorial breaking in co-op and the game feeling buggy at launch, so I spent the day hunting down the worst offenders. Here is what changed. Fixes - The tutorial is solo onl

Launch Stability Patch

A focused patch built straight off your feedback. A couple of reviews called out the tutorial breaking in co-op and the game feeling buggy at launch, so I spent the day hunting down the worst offenders. Here is what changed.

Fixes

- The tutorial is solo only now. Running the Trial Grounds as a co-op party could leave the host stuck between lessons if a teammate desynced or wandered off. The tutorial now always runs as a clean solo session, so you can finish it start to end without a networking hitch. Jump straight into co-op for the real dungeons once you know the ropes.
- Smoother framerate during teleports and cinematic moments. Any time the game briefly took control of your hero (a teleport dissolve, the tutorial's gate-reveal camera pan, a fall or stuck recovery) it could quietly flood the log every frame and drag your framerate down until control returned. One shipped session logged over 80,000 of these. That is fixed, so those moments stay smooth.
- Coming back to the Tower keeps your class. Returning to the hub could force you to re-pick your hero at the table every single time. Your selected class now spawns you back in directly.
- No more instant fake "Dungeon Cleared." A misconfigured dungeon with nothing to fight could pop a false victory the moment you entered. A dungeon like that now just returns you safely to the hub instead of handing you a bogus clear.
- Casters and archers score properly in solo runs. Run scoring was counting bot allies in a way that shortchanged ranged and spellcasting classes. Solo runs now score your own performance cleanly.
- The objective tracker no longer shows a broken box on completion. Finishing an objective tried to draw a checkmark in a font that does not carry that symbol, so it came out as an empty square. The title now simply turns green when complete (red if it fails), which reads clearly. The same stray box on the Workshop browser's "Subscribed" button is gone too.
- A failed hero spawn recovers gracefully. If your character failed to spawn on entering a level, it could soft-lock you. The game now recovers you to the hub instead of leaving you stuck.

Co-op

- Camera following. After a teammate joined or someone swapped classes, your view could occasionally snap to follow a teammate instead of your own hero. Fixed.
- Class co-op pick stability. Claiming a class no longer writes to a body that is being torn down mid-swap, which could leave your pick in a bad state.
- Party-wipe state resets between runs. A leftover wipe flag from a previous run could carry into the next one; it now clears when the session starts.
- Cleaner menu audio. The class-select screen could end up with two audio listeners fighting each other. Now there is one, as intended.

Mods

- Two mods that add same-named classes no longer overwrite each other. Class exports are now keyed uniquely, so a "Paladin" from one mod and a "Paladin" from another can both exist without one clobbering the other.

Classes

- All classes but wizard lose their elemental summon talent.
- The Ranger's bow has a subtle shimmer. I removed the orbiting glow auras from a few Ranger talents (they read as a distracting orb) and replaced them with a soft blue emissive shine on her bow, her signature look.

Original post

19 Jul 2026Developer post

Cryptr Update 4: Boss Fights, the Delve, Mod Support, and Deep Polish

What's new in Update 4 Since the last update I have been building out the endgame and everything around it. There are real boss fights now. A new generator writes a fresh dungeon story every run, and the Crucible wave arena is finally live. Mods arrived with full Steam Workshop s

What's new in Update 4

Since the last update I have been building out the endgame and everything around it. There are real boss fights now. A new generator writes a fresh dungeon story every run, and the Crucible wave arena is finally live. Mods arrived with full Steam Workshop support. A merchant sells enchants and supplies for your gold. The whole game got a pass on audio and accessibility. Thank you for the feedback that shaped it!

Boss Fights

The final boss is the Demon Lord. He opens as a towering Colossus. Break every crystal to cut him down to size. He hides behind an infernal shield, raises the dead in waves, and rains hellfire that heals him. Burning rocks drop from above for you to dash clear of, and a raking beam drives you behind cover that shatters after a few hits, so your hiding spots keep shrinking. He booms threats and commands his skeletons the whole way through; your hero answers back. Every line is captioned.
The Broodmother rules an alien waste. She is a giant spider matriarch, and the fight plays out beneath an aurora. Up close she trades blows. Push her and she retreats onto a web, safe up there while a brood of spiderlings spills out to swarm you. Clear the brood or torch the web to drag her back down. Each retreat births a larger wave, and webbing seals the arena the moment you engage.
Two dragons reward the right element. The Volcano Dragon in the Old Cliffs fights on the ground, then takes wing to rake you with fire. Kill it and its molten bones rise again as the Cinder Bone Dragon. Its frost cousin is the mirror image. The Ice Dragon breathes a freezing cone that can chill you to a crawl or lock you solid, then returns as the Frost Bone Dragon. Frost tears through the fire forms and fire melts the frost ones, so pack the opposite school. Both scale hard with your level, your party size, and the difficulty.
Bosses lock you in. Pick a fight and the arena seals behind you: webbing for the Broodmother, a glowing elemental barrier for the rest. There is no kiting a boss across the map anymore. The barrier only drops when it dies. Down in the Old Cliffs, burrowing Giant Worms surface to bite and then vanish underground between strikes for as long as the boss lives.

The Delve: Dungeons With a Story

Every delve starts from a theme. It might be a heretic knight's sepulcher, a ratkin undermine, a drowned cistern, a burning foundry, a pharaoh's tomb, or a silent chantry. That theme decides who lives there, how the halls look, what the run asks of you, even the boss's name. The shapes vary just as much, from winding crawls and grand rotundas to cramped warrens, mirrored cloisters, and chasm-split halls you cross on bridges.
Each run reads like a small campaign. It moves through a three-act arc with breathers, named set pieces, hidden side loops, a horde moment, and a boss that only wakes once you have earned the fight. The whole thing is tuned to a 15 to 20 minute descent. The game also remembers your last ten delves and steers the next one clear of them.
The dungeon fights back. A director watches how the party is doing. Coast along and it springs an ambush from the walls. Take a beating and it eases off, so a breather actually breathes. Twice a run the dungeon shifts outright and breaches fresh enemies into the halls, and every so often a named horror is announced the instant it starts hunting you. Now and then a grunt hoists an explosive barrel overhead and walks it straight to your feet.
You always know where to go. A quest marker follows your current objective. Up close it pins to the target and shows its name and range. When the goal is far off or around a corner, it slides to the screen edge as an arrow with the distance left.
Supplies are scattered through the run. Look for health, mana fruit, and flasks in the rooms, with the richest stashes tucked into quiet larder chambers. On a Famine run those shelves come up bare.

The Crucible

The Crucible is a survival colosseum. A new marker on the map table leads you in. You hold against ten escalating waves. Between them you pick a class boon, scrounge the health and mana fruit that drops mid-fight, and brace for the next surge. A boss caps the run. The whole map is live ground: enemies climb the ramps to contest the heights, and some waves erupt from the bastion tops and pour down into the pit. Throw the gate lever and an oil trench ignites across the incoming wave. One objective, Charge the Beacons, scatters braziers you have to light all at once.
The arena got a full visual overhaul. It sits on a real frozen plateau now instead of floating in a white void, framed by ice cliffs rather than looming walls. Its heart is a proper monument: a man-high dragon altar, rune-carved standing stones, a snow-worn griffin idol, and a broken archway behind them all. The courtyard tells the story of the garrison that died here, from a collapsed breach and abandoned scaffolds to a barricade of tipped wagons and beast skulls, watch posts, and supply caches. The fighting ground is a grand colosseum built around a raised stone dais, ringed in fire and climbed by ramps. Red rifts tear open at the gates and the horde spills through.

More Dungeons and Objectives

There are new places to crawl. A walled desert town ends at the sealed Alcazaba and the Chimera guarding it. A spiralling ice road climbs to the Ice Dragon's summit past a wolf den and a court of yeti and ice golems. The Troll Village pit raid drops you into five rounds of pit fighting, then turns you loose to torch the village while hunters keep raining in. Two Sky Citadel dungeons round it out, including an eight-wave sanctum defense.
The Tempering is a multi-floor deep run. Built on the Delve, it sends you down floor after floor, each one harder than the last, to find out how far you can push before it ends you.
The Lordenfel Depths load into their own scene now. The endless descent no longer bleeds into the Tower keep the way it used to.
Traps and barrels fill the halls. Spinning blades, spikes, bumpers, and sweeping gates carve up players and enemies without prejudice, and most can be shut off at a lever hidden inside a breakable box. A wall of blades can seal a corridor outright until you find it. Explosive barrels sit around the cleared rooms too. Strike one to light the fuse, hit it again to set it off, and watch it chain into its neighbours.
Eight new objectives put tools in your hero's hands. (Beta) You might mine buried relics with a pickaxe, kneel to cleanse a defiled altar (take a hit and the prayer breaks), or race a clock to loot every chest. Other runs have you ring alarm bells to summon the horde, plant war standards and defend the raise, crank a winch to haul a boss gate open, carry a powder keg across the map to blow a sealed door, or pick the locks on soul cages to free captives. A few add an escort leg, where a payload cart has to survive the push to the next chamber.

Loot, Shop, and Enchants

You can never lose a drop again. Your weapon reward is granted and saved the instant you win, before the results screen even appears. Skip the results, close the game, or drop offline right after the kill, and the loot is still yours. In co-op a disconnect at the moment of victory just holds your reward until you reconnect. A win will never hand you the same drop twice, and the Necromancer now finds its own staves alongside every other class.
The merchant runs a shop. (Beta) Walk up for a Press E to Shop prompt and browse his stock. He sells health and mana potions to carry into your next run, weapon-drop reroll tokens, armor dyes you can unlock outright, and permanent Max Health upgrades that stay with your hero for good. The shop opens in real time, so the hub keeps breathing around you while you browse, and in co-op each player spends their own gold.
He also enchants your weapon. (Beta) A fresh enchant, tuned to your class, rolls in every hour. Each one is assembled from layered parts (a primary boost, a secondary boost, an on-combat effect, and an element) for thousands of possible combinations. Elemental enchants wrap your weapon in a matching glow that brightens with rarity. Anything you buy is saved to your collection and can be re-equipped at no cost, so you are free to swap between favorites once you own them. Your enchants are yours alone, one collection per class.

Mods and Creation Tools

Mods have arrived. A new Mods page lists everything installed and toggles each one on the spot, no restart required. Most mods are just folders of text files. With them you can rebalance an enemy, retune a class or a weapon, recolor a dye, add whole new weapons and dyes to the loot pool, redub a voiceline, replace a sound, or drop in your own music. A single global tuning mod can reshape the game at once, from enemy health and damage to horde density, gold and XP rates, and camera zoom. Example mods and templates ship in the box, standard Unity code-modding through BepInEx works out of the gate, and nothing a mod does will disable achievements or touch your save.
Steam Workshop is wired in. Subscribe to a mod and it appears on your Mods page on its own. Every class you forge and every level you build carries a Share button that wraps it into a mod, and every mod carries a Publish button that sends it to the Workshop. Press Publish again later to push an update.
The Class Forge lets you build a hero of your own. (Beta) Open it from the main menu and assemble a class from hand-picked parts: a base fighter, a name, a description and icon, a weapon, a voice, and a pool of points to spread across its stats. Your creation stands on a pedestal in full 3D as you work. When it is done, a new Custom Classes button on the class-select screen has it ready to play.
The Level Editor grew a great deal. (Beta) New tools include Mirror, Drop-to-floor, Select Similar, Replace, Hide, Lock, Isolate, an Outliner, reusable Stamps, favourites, a top-down view, a measure tool, a scatter brush, and WASD camera flight. Start from a built-in template, from a freshly generated dungeon, or from an empty stage. The Logic tab handles the gameplay: drop your spawns, horde perches, and idol runs, then choose the objective, with full Wave and Boon settings for building your own arena. Share a finished level by one-click code, or publish it and browse the Workshop without ever leaving the game.

Audio Overhaul

The audio got a real overhaul. Everything routes through a proper mixer now, capped by a master limiter, so a chaotic fight no longer turns to crackling mush when a horde, a boss roar, and the music all land at once. When a character says something that matters, the music ducks for a beat so the words come through, then swells back on its own. As your health falls toward death the world goes muffled around you, and it clears again when you heal. Distant and off-angle sounds roll off more naturally, and a bigger pool of voices keeps the important cues (a block, a kill, a boss telegraph) from being drowned out by a big pack.
A sound polish pass went in alongside it. Every world effect plays in true mono now, which sharpens where each one comes from and trims the memory it uses. Ambient loops in the levels, like those glowing portal stones, finally obey the Ambience slider. And a scene can no longer end up with no listener in it, the bug that used to leave a few places dead silent. When a track changes, a small Now Playing card credits it and its artist.

Accessibility

Accessibility got another broad pass. New rebindable keys turn and tilt the camera, mapped to the arrow keys by default. Alongside them sit a Look Sensitivity slider, Invert Look on the Y axis, and a Block: Toggle option. There is a gentle, optional Aim Assist, a Brightness slider, and a Reduced Flashing setting that opens with a one-time photosensitivity notice. Sound Captions spell out incoming boss attacks at an adjustable size, Mono Audio folds everything to one channel for single-sided hearing, and Damage School Labels tag each number with its element so colour is never the only cue. Screen Shake, Motion Blur, and Toggle-or-Hold options for Sprint and Crouch round it out. Every line your hero speaks now carries a subtitle as well, down to the offhand mutters between fights and the boss's own dialogue. Wordless grunts and roars stay silent.

Combat and Enemies

A new breed of enemy hunts the party. Each one telegraphs its trick. Grimfang pounces to pin you momentarily. The Widow Spinner binds you in webbing. The Troll Hurler grabs you and throws you across the room. The Mourner keens quietly and turns vicious the moment you provoke it. The Pyre Acolyte breathes a stream of flame, the Rime Adept freezes you at range, and the Plague Bloat always bursts into a caustic pool when it dies. Seven in all.
Being pinned is a setback but not a sentence. Every pin, snare, grab, and knockdown wears off on its own after a few seconds. A teammate can free you faster by holding interact, and more hands make it quicker still. Kill or stagger whatever holds you and you break loose at once. Harder difficulties keep their grip longer, but the last hero standing is never left helpless.
Some armored enemies have a genuine weak point in the head. Armored Ogres, Crusaders, Golems, Demon Guards, Bone Legionnaires, and the Skeleton Warlord shrug off nearly everything until you strike it. A bow or a spell lands the headshot outright. In melee your heaviest blow does the same: a finished combo, a whirlwind, a quake kick, or a stomp. An ultimate always breaks through. Poke at them and you will barely scratch the paint.
The Powderkeg Ogre carries the bomb to you. It lumbers out cradling a lit barrel and comes straight on while the fuse burns down. Put it down before it reaches you, though it drops the live barrel where it falls. Let it arrive and the blast takes everything nearby, its own kind included.
Set up elemental combos, then trigger them. A magic hit leaves a mark on the target: a chill, a burn, a shock, or a curse. Land a heavy blow on that mark and it detonates in a staggering burst, and a chilled enemy shatters and freezes solid. Strike it with a different element instead and you get a reaction rather than a blast. It pays off a party that coordinates, and a lone caster can chain it alone by switching schools.
Enemies read more clearly in a fight. Any hit flashes an enemy white. One winding up a blow at you holds a red outline. Elites wear a steady purple, and a poisoned or burning foe is outlined in that effect's colour. The new Enemy Visuals settings let you turn any of it off or recolour it, and an elite badge adds a shape cue for colourblind players.
Heroes and allies wear an outline of their own. A soft rim glow keeps them legible against a busy background. Switch it off in the pause menu or recolour it, with separate colours for you and for your allies. Cyan and gold are the defaults.
Objectives glow so they are easy to find. An unused shrine, the soul-relay idol, and its altar all carry the same soft outline the heroes do. A shrine reads as active from across the room, and the idol stands out on the floor. The glow fades once you pray at the shrine or deliver the idol.

Talents

Improved and extended talent trees. Each class tree is rebuilt into linked clusters: travel nodes feed into damage nodes, an anchoring notable, the support nodes around it, and the major nodes near each finisher. There is much more to invest in and many more builds worth trying. The screen pans and scrolls now so the larger tree still fits.
New signature abilities. A talent can grant a self-shield that soaks a hit and bursts into a shockwave, with party-wide versions too. Others call down a standing Blizzard or a Lightning Storm that leaps from foe to foe. Each is themed to its class, and every one behaves correctly in co-op.
The Wizard can lock down a battlefield. Spec into frost and his ice bolts leave a lasting chill that drags down enemy footwork and swings. A Deep Chill node sharpens the bite and adds damage against anything already chilled. The Frostfire Beam freezes and ignites everything it sweeps across.

Co-op

Co-op has voice chat now. (Beta) It runs on Steam voice, with a Voice Chat page to set it up. Switch between Push-to-Talk, rebindable and set to V by default, and Open Mic. From there you set Mic Sensitivity and Voice Receive Volume, and mute anyone you like. A small indicator shows who is talking.
Your save copies to Steam Cloud. (Beta) It backs up there on top of the local file, once Cloud is turned on for the app.
Co-op took another hardening pass. (Beta) It closed several ways a tampered client could grief a shared game, and it cleaned up glitches on the guest side: a join that could stall mid-countdown, a razed building that stood back up for late arrivals, doubled death sounds, and health bars that came in stale. A mismatched build is now turned away before it can corrupt a session. A guest who leaves mid-run is backfilled with an ally at once. A dropped host tells everyone "Lost connection to the host," and a join that cannot reach the host times out with a clear message instead of a silent freeze.

Look, Feel, and Quality of Life

The Cryptrography Table anchors the hub. The old War Table has a new name, and the keep is a single circular wall now. Every destination lives on the map itself: the dungeon portals, the Crucible, the Delves, the Depths, and your own custom levels. Study the table and you can see and choose any run from one spot. Hover a marker for a tooltip on what it is, and each dungeon shows its level.
Portals tell you what waits on the other side. Walk up to one and a card rises over the Press E to Enter prompt, describing the place, its objective, and the rewards you can expect from it.
Two new video settings trade sharpness for frames. Render Scale renders the game below your monitor's resolution and scales the picture back up. Then you choose how it rebuilds: Off, FSR 1.0 on any GPU, or STP, Unity's newer temporal upscaler. Your pick carries across every scene.
New Steam achievements cover the big moments. There is one for each named boss (the Skeleton Warlord, the Broodmother, the two dragons, and the Demon Lord), plus more for chaining an elemental Break, clearing the Troll Village pit, finishing a full Tempering run, surviving the Crucible, and clearing the Depths. Anything you already earned unlocks the moment you load in.
You can send feedback without leaving the game. The main-menu Feedback button opens a panel. Type what happened, press Send, and it reaches me with your game log attached. An email fallback is there if you prefer it.
Two smaller comforts round things out. Repeated emotes now cool down instead of spamming the squad, and a new Corpses section in the pause menu adds a Body Linger Time slider and a Max Bodies cap to keep busy rooms tidy on slower machines.

A Few of the Many Fixes

The Crucible sends you home with your loot when you clear it, and its entrance no longer strands you invisible in the Tower. Several dungeons that could not be completed are fixed, and one with nothing left to fight can no longer hand out a false clear. The campaign runs end to end again.
Enemy attacks have to reach you now. A ranged caster fires a real bolt you can dodge or block behind a wall, and a melee swing only connects when it actually lands. Skeleton Mages finally cast, lobbing shadow orbs that arc over cover, and the Wizard's fire beam lights the room instead of glowing alone in the dark.
A round of animation and boss fixes went in. The catacombs skeletons and the Bone Warlord animate in full, and the Warlord charges into a real second phase. Mimics sit on the floor rather than half-buried in it, and an enemy with no death animation topples over instead of freezing on its feet.
Defend maps mark their attackers. Every foe carries a marker, a skull for the ones you can see and an edge arrow for those you cannot, and anything striking a building flags red under a siege icon. The building list and the name plates read in the game font now instead of garbled symbols.

Known Issues

Co-op has no host migration yet. If the host's game crashes or their connection drops outright, the session ends for everyone. Guests at least get a clear "Lost connection to the host" now rather than a silent bounce.
A few specialty vendor surfaces still look plainer than intended, or can flash pink. Animated foliage, flowing lava, translucent ice, and some realistic water are the usual suspects, and each is being rebuilt one pack at a time.
Colorblind Mode corrects the 3D world for now, but not the HUD. The orbs, buff bar, tooltips, and menus are not recoloured by it yet.
The Paladin's two-handed grip is still being tuned and can sit a little off in the hand.

More dungeons, more of the merchant's stock, and more multiplayer hardening come next. Thank you for playing, and for the feedback.

Original post

27 Jun 2026Developer post

Two New Heroes, AI Allies, Difficulty and Loot

Cryptr Update Since the last build I added two new heroes, gave solo runs a full party, put difficulty and loot in your hands, and named the four regions you have been crawling. Multiplayer is still in active testing, so this remains a good time to bring friends. Thank you for th

Cryptr Update

Since the last build I added two new heroes, gave solo runs a full party, put difficulty and loot in your hands, and named the four regions you have been crawling. Multiplayer is still in active testing, so this remains a good time to bring friends. Thank you for the feedback that shaped all of it.

Two New Heroes

Two heroes join the roster: the Dwarf Brawler and the Druid.

The Dwarf throws down his weapon and fights bare-knuckle. Hammer out a punch combo on the left mouse button, then plant a heavy front kick on the right that boots foes back across the room. He runs on raw stamina and soaks hits like a wall. His ultimate (R) is the Haymaker, a charging ability that drives him through the pack, flattening and knocking back everything in front of him. His talents can make every punch stun, or turn his kick into a ground-splitting quake. The Druid keeps his distance with a green thorn bolt on the left mouse button and snares packs with Bramble Snare on the right, a thorn field that roots enemies in place and poisons them. His ultimate is Wild Shape: he transforms into a towering Oak Tree Ent for a couple of minutes. The change erupts in a shockwave that flattens nearby foes, and as the ent he fights with a new moveset: raking claws on the left mouse button, a feet-stomp on the right that quakes the ground and slows enemies caught around his feet, and a boulder ultimate he can tear from the earth and hurl down a lane to bowl through a whole line of foes. The ent is rooted and heavy but can still lurch into a sidestep when you dodge, and tapping Jump bursts you out of the form early to leap clear as the Druid. Both classes have deep, distinct talent trees, and they bring the first crowd control in Cryptr, so enemies can finally be frozen in place. The Druid can heal the party. Spec into his Restoration talents and his nature magic mends the whole party, not just himself: Renewal siphons life back to you and nearby allies with every strike, Harvest mends the squad on each kill, and Grovekeeper blooms a living grove that heals everyone around you. The healing peaks in Wild Shape, where he radiates a standing grove and all his heals land harder.

Never Adventure Alone

Empty party slots now fill with AI ally heroes when you head into a dungeon, so a solo run feels like a full Gauntlet-style party. Your allies are real heroes of other classes: they follow you, fight with their own kit (knights wade in, rangers and wizards hang back and fire), and go after whatever is hitting you. They level with you, cheer your kills, call out when hurt, and banter with the rest of the squad. In co-op the party fills the same way. The moment a real player joins, an ally steps aside to give them the slot. The new AI Allies picker on the main menu lets you choose 0 to 3, right under the difficulty selector. In co-op the host sets it for the party.

Your party talks between the fights. When the killing stops a hero will sometimes pipe up. What they say tracks how the run is going: a fired-up bark on entering a fresh dungeon, a quiet mutter through the grind, a "victory's in sight" cheer near the objective or player leveling up.

Choose Your Challenge

Before a dungeon (or in co-op when the host sets up the run) you now pick a difficulty: Relaxed, Normal, Hard, or Nightmare. It is not just thicker health bars. Crank it up and the crypts fill with denser packs, more Elites, and heavily armored shield brutes you have to flank or break. Enemies hit harder and the rarest finds and biggest gold and experience payouts come from the toughest runs. On Hard and Nightmare each run also rolls one or two modifiers that change how it plays: Frenzied (enemies move and strike faster), Bulwark (armored shield brutes everywhere), Feral (Elites in numbers), Swarm (far more bodies per room), or Famine (health and mana pickups run scarce). The whole dungeon scales to your party size. A full squad faces more bodies without each enemy turning into a sponge. In co-op the host picks once for everyone.

Loot and Loadout

Win weapons at the end of a run. Clear a dungeon and once the gold finishes pouring in, you are awarded a weapon: a new look for your class that also carries a small stat boost. Rarity is color-coded, grey for common up to orange for the rare legendary. Each class only finds weapons it can use and in co-op every player gets their own reward. Back in the Tower press L to open your Weapon Loadout and pick which to carry into your next run. You can only change it in town, so choose before you head out.

Dye your armor. Dungeons also drop armor dyes: color swaps any class can wear, from plain iron and bone up to deep violet and a glowing molten orange for the rarest. Open the same Loadout menu and flip to the Armor tab to recolor on the spot. Same rarity colors as weapons. In co-op everyone gets their own.

Outfit your hero at the merchant's table. The Weapon Loadout now lives at the hub merchant. Walk up and a "Press E to open Loadout" prompt appears. It no longer freezes the world when you open it so the hub keeps living around you while you browse.

See who got the kill. A kill feed now stacks down the right side of the screen: each kill prints "your name killed the enemy". Your name appears in your color and the enemy in red (gold for an Elite), then fades. In co-op each player gets their own color so you can tell who is racking up the kills. Every line shows on everyone's screen.

New Ways to Crawl

Carry the soul relay to the altar. One of the Catacombs dungeons is now a hands-on escort. Walk up to the cursed idol on its pedestal for a "Press E to Pick Up" prompt. Lift it and your hero cradles it in both arms as you run. You cannot swing a weapon while your hands are full, every enemy in the ruin turns to hunt the carrier, and the idol slowly drains your soul; move fast or pass it to a friend. Press the left mouse button any time to set it down and fight, then pick it back up. Carry it to the soul altar and place it to clear the dungeon.

The four regions have proper names now. Each side of the Tower leads to its own named biome, shown overhead as you arrive: the Ruins of Lordenfel to the north, the Frostspire Citadel to the east, the Drowned Coast to the west, and the Blighted Sands to the south.

Command Your Hero

Top-down view improved. Zoom all the way out into the overhead view and your aim changes to match. The mouse becomes a free cursor that ranges across the floor instead of being pinned to the center. Your hero turns to face wherever you point, and sword swings, arrows, and spells all aim at the cursor across the field. Works for every class. Zoom back in and it returns to the normal over-the-shoulder aim. Your heroes show up in 3D on the results screen. When a run ends, each player's class now stands in the lineup as a full 3D character, idling and breathing in place above their score card. In co-op the whole party lines up side by side. Access first person view using P.

Look and Feel

The Ranger's talent aura got a glow-up. The flat blue sparkle that used to hang over Ranger talents is gone. In its place a green hunter's circle wheels around your feet. It is no longer always on: it stays dim until you start landing hits, brightens as you build a charge with every arrow that connects, blazes to full when it tops out, then cools off and has to recharge. Stop fighting and it fades back down on its own.

Original post

24 Jun 2026Developer post

Cryptr Update 2: Ultimates, Talents, Controllers, and Deeper Co-op

This is the first big build on top of it, and it is a large one. Every class now has a signature ultimate, the talent trees have been torn down and rebuilt so every node actually does something, the whole game plays end to end on a controller, co-op grew up with revives and chat

This is the first big build on top of it, and it is a large one. Every class now has a signature ultimate, the talent trees have been torn down and rebuilt so every node actually does something, the whole game plays end to end on a controller, co-op grew up with revives and chat and a public lobby browser, and there is a fresh stack of dungeon modes and monsters to crawl through. Multiplayer is still in active testing, so this is a great time to bring friends. Thank you for the feedback that shaped all of it.

Unleash your ultimate. Every class now has a signature ultimate, charged by a new meter beside your skill icons. It fills as you fight, faster the more damage you deal, and at 100% press R to let it rip: the dual-wielder's spinning Bladestorm, the archer's Rain of Arrows, the knight's healing Aegis Burst shockwave, the Wizard's Frostfire Cataclysm, the Paladin's Consecration, the Necromancer's lingering Grave Tide. It starts empty each dungeon, so spend it well.
The Wizard rains fire and ice. The Wizard's ultimate is now Frostfire Cataclysm: a storm of fire and frost shards screams out of the sky and hammers the ground ahead of you for several seconds, biting as fire and then ice in turn so armored and warded foes alike get torn up.
The Paladin calls down Consecration. A golden sigil of holy light blazes into the floor and lingers. Stand in it and you and your allies are steadily healed, while enemies caught in the light burn for holy damage. The Paladin pauses only for the brief cast, then is free to keep fighting while the ground does its work.
Practice your ultimate in the Tower. Your ultimate now charges and fires in the hub so you can try it between runs. The meter resets the moment you cast it or head into a dungeon.
Every ultimate floods the screen with its own color, and a new Screen-Space FX toggle under Video turns those full-screen flashes off (it also covers the poison and fire tints from hazards) if you prefer a clean view.
Talent trees Press N for a hand-painted talent screen. Every class now has three themed paths that climb from small stackable boosts up through a pick-one fork, a rule-bending keystone, and a build-defining capstone that visibly transforms you. You earn 2 points a level, and refunds cost gold that scales with your level, so respeccing is always possible but never free.
Talents do what they say now. Every tree is live end to end. Passives trigger off the fight (heal as you strike, ignite on hit, frenzy on a kill, reflect blows, execute the wounded, drain life and mana), and the marquee talents enhance the abilities you already use: arrows that pierce or fan into a volley, spellbolts that split or splash, the Knight's riposte and shield slam, the Berserker's leaping slam, the Necromancer's tougher minions and rotting bone rain.
See your talents fire. When a passive procs in a fight its icon flashes up in a row along the bottom of the screen and lingers a moment before fading. No more guessing whether it went off.
Each class's talent tree has its own crest, a carved-stone emblem behind the nodes themed to your hero and washed in the class color.
The Necromancer's dark magic hits with weight. Shadow bolts now burst on impact, a flare snaps from the caster's hand on each cast, and the kit recolors to match your talents: toxic green for rot, bone white for the spear path, blood red for life drain, deep violet otherwise.
Rebind your ultimate and comms wheel alongside the rest of your controls.

Command Your Hero

Play the whole game on a controller. Cryptr now plays end to end with a gamepad, not just the menus. Left stick moves, right stick aims, triggers attack and block, face buttons jump, dodge, interact, and fire your ultimate, and the D-pad opens emotes and talents. Keyboard and mouse stay fully live at the same time.
See and remap every control. The Controls page now shows a Keyboard and a Gamepad column side by side for each action. Click either to rebind it, and Reset to Defaults restores both sets at once.
Play the menus without a mouse. Every menu now responds to keyboard and gamepad: Tab or the d-pad to move, Enter or A to choose, across the pause menu, class select, the talent screen, the death screen, and the results screen.
Say it with the comms wheel. Hold T (or middle-click) to open a radial menu and call out lines like "I need healing", "Follow me", "Attack", or fire off a Taunt, Laugh, or Cheer. Every class talks in its own voice and attitude, and the line floats over your hero for the party to read.
Know your abilities at a glance. A clean panel above your skill icons lists every ability your hero has, numbered, with its key, a short description, and its mana cost where one applies.
Your hero talks back in the heat of battle. Each class reacts in its own voice to how a fight is going: a triumphant bark on a kill, a real cry of distress when you are beaten into the danger zone.

Co-op, Deeper

Nobody dies alone. Drop to zero in co-op and you go down rather than out. A teammate can hold Interact to haul you back up at half health, the classic rescue. Bleed out and you ride along watching your friends until the next area, where the party comes back fresh. If everyone goes down at once the squad retreats to the Tower together. The host going down never ends the game, only the host actually leaving does.
Your squad talks to each other. Heroes of different classes banter: an ally cheers your kills, answers your cries for help, mourns the fallen, and grouses when you grab the pickup they needed. Every line is spoken and captioned, drawn from each class's own voice, and it stays occasional on purpose.
Talk to your squad with the chat box. Press Enter in a co-op run to pop a clean chat panel in the corner, type, and send. Scroll back with the wheel. Every line shows who said it as their class and Steam name with a timestamp in your own local time.
Browse and join public games. The Multiplayer screen lists open public games with the host's name, level, class, and how full the lobby is. Refresh to update, Join to drop in. Only games on your version show up.
Choose who can join. Pick Public or Steam Friends Only when you open your game. Every join still waits for your Yes or No approval.
Host controls to keep your game friendly. The host gets Kick and Ban buttons on each player's party frame, with a Banned list you can undo from. Anyone you have blocked on Steam is turned away automatically, and removed players get a clear message.
Steam co-op now hosts from the menu. Picking Host or Join from the main menu spins up co-op directly, no more silent nothing-happens.
Your squad sees and hears each other. Emotes from the comms wheel now play on everyone's screen, ultimates let out your class battle cry, and your level-up bark carries across the party, each from the right hero.
Co-op enemies are fully networked now, so guests see the same monsters the host does instead of empty dungeons. (Freshly wired and still being live-tested.)

New Ways to Crawl

First 5 dungeons all now have a goal, and several new ones to chase. Beyond Clear and Destroy-the-spawners, the crypt now runs Survive-the-onslaught holds, Defend objectives, Escort runs and ritual-interrupts (both in progress), each with its own on-screen tracker, a run clock, and a wave indicator where it fits.
Hold the line in the Overgrown Ruins. The catacombs' second dungeon is a survival gauntlet: eight waves of skeletons drop in from the walls above, building from a trickle of warriors to archers, elites, and a champion, with a short breather between waves to reposition. Scales up in co-op.
Defend the farm. A new run drops you into a farmstead under siege by ratkin and skeletons that ignore you and make straight for the buildings. Each building shows a health bar once it comes under attack, chars and smokes as it is battered, then collapses for good. Hit the raiders to pull them off, outlast the assault to win, lose the whole farm and the run is over.
The Catacombs have a final boss. The sector's last portal drops you into the Bone Warlord's vault. Bring him down and a results screen tallies your run before returning you to the Tower. Clearing him completes the sector.
The world opens up as you conquer it. The four sectors now unlock in sequence, each gated behind the boss of the one before it, and dungeons within a sector unlock one at a time.
Learn the ropes in the Trial Grounds. A new training dungeon sits beside the class pedestal and teaches by doing: movement, your basic attack, your class's signature move, dodging, headshots, smashing a fountain, surviving waves, defending a sanctum. Each room seals until you clear its lesson. Hold Interact to skip a step, and replay it any time. It runs in co-op too.
Build your own levels. A new Level Editor on the main menu lets you lay out scenes from the game's own art: place, move, rotate, scale, copy, group, and undo, with sky and weather presets, autosave, and a Load list of your levels. Coming soon: you will be able to launch your levels into the game directly to play. Later: possibly end to end integration with the Steam workshop.

New Horrors

Heavy Shield enemies turtle up. Some shield foes now spawn as a tougher steely-blue variant that hides behind its guard and only lunges in for the odd swing. Every block drains its stamina, so keep up the pressure until its guard breaks, or flank it. Ordinary shield enemies feel meatier too, and blocking now costs both sides stamina.
Watch your purse: the Gold Thief is loose. A fast ghostly cutpurse makes a beeline for you, snatches a fistful of gold on contact, then bolts for the dark. Run it down and kill it before it escapes and it drops every coin back to you. One thief prowls every crypt (boss lairs are spared).
New catacombs skeletons. The Cinder Knight and Dark Acolyte join the undead roster, fully animated.
Enemies fight back smarter. Shielded foes now sometimes catch a frontal blow on their shield and recoil, and quick lightly-armored foes sidestep out of the way entirely. Catch them mid-swing or strike from the flank and their guard will not save them.
Enemy attacks are physical now, with real projectiles and melee overlaps rather than guaranteed hits, so positioning and dodging matter.
Aim for the head. A clean shot to an enemy's head hits for double with a bold "HEADSHOT" popup. It rewards precise aim with arrows and single bolts, and it cuts both ways: enemy casters who nail you in the head hit harder too.

Atmosphere and Sound

The Tower and the crypts have their own music now. The Tower hums a warm restful theme, and each dungeon biome has its own score. The music breathes with the run instead of droning on, stepping back into silence for a stretch before drifting in again. Battle music swells when a fight breaks out, tougher elites raise a darker layer, and boss arenas stay scored start to finish.
A living sky over the Tower. Look up from the hub and the heavens are awake: a wheeling cosmos, a great hero sun, twinkling stars, streaking meteors and showers, solar flares, gliding comets, and aurora-like swells that settle and begin again, never the same way twice.
The cinematic look now follows you everywhere. The cool cosmic color grade no longer stops at the Tower door. It carries through every dungeon and is live from the moment the game opens.
Mind your footing. The crypts now run with hazards underfoot: pools of fire and acid that scald anyone who walks through them. And standing in a campfire sets you alight until you step clear.
Doors open for you. Heavy castle doors swing wide as you approach, with a creak of old timber, and ease shut behind you once you have passed.
The bear has a voice. The Warden's pet bear roars when a fight kicks off and snarls with every bite, kept soft so it adds menace without drowning out the battle.
New loading screens rotate through moody hand-painted medieval landscapes, dimmed just enough to keep the loading bar readable.
The gold pile sounds as good as it looks, with a soft clink of coins as your hoard stacks on the results screen.

Look and Feel

A redesigned combat HUD. Your vitals live in a clean panel in the bottom-left corner: class portrait, health and mana or stamina, experience bar, level and class name, with your ability icons and ultimate charge just beneath.
Pick your HUD style. Under Interface, choose the default bottom-left panel or the classic centered look with a health orb left, a resource orb right, and your abilities in the middle. Your pick is remembered.
Hide the combat HUD with a Player HUD toggle, great for screenshots, and turn off enemy nameplates for a cleaner battlefield. Both choices stick between sessions.
Your heroes line up for the curtain call. The end-of-dungeon scoreboard now spotlights the party in full 3D, each class posed in a stance that suits it, with names, gold, experience, and combat tallies over the top.
Set your own camera distance with a Max Camera Zoom slider in Video, from a tight over-the-shoulder view all the way out to the classic overhead.
Pickups catch your eye now. Health and mana restoratives glow with a colored outline when you are near and light up a small marker on your screen, brighter the closer you get.
Arrows stick where they land, burying themselves in whatever they hit and riding the body's movement until it dies.

Quality of Life

Share one copy, keep your own save. Cryptr now asks "Who's Playing?" first. Pick your profile or make a new one, and everyone on the same PC keeps their own heroes, levels, talents, gold, and achievements. A "change" link on the main menu switches who is playing at any time.
A performance overlay at your fingertips. Press the tilde key any time for a tidy stats panel: live FPS, frame time, recent low, memory, and resolution.
Better bug reports, automatically. The game writes a sectioned diagnostic summary into its log (hardware, frame rate, memory, current area, co-op status, and a health check), updated as you play, and you can press F9 to drop a fresh snapshot. An Open Log button in the pause menu and main-menu options opens it for you.
Good settings out of the box. On first launch Cryptr sizes up your PC and starts you on a recommended quality and frame rate, then remembers any change you make.
Mute voicelines without losing the words. A Voiceline Audio toggle turns off all spoken lines while their on-screen text still appears, and the Creature Voices slider now properly controls voiceline volume.

Balance

Classes have clearer identities and real scaling. A rebalance pass across all eight blueprints gave each class a coherent defensive identity and meaningful per-level growth, so leveling feels like it matters the whole way up.
Enemies hit a sharper tier curve, with elites and bosses landing the occasional crit, so the gap between a regular foe and a real threat reads clearly.
Later biomes stay threatening. Enemy levels now scale with biome and depth, so deeper zones do not fall behind your hero.
Deeper kills pay more. XP and gold now scale with depth, rewarding you for pushing further in.

A Few of the Many Fixes

Music now plays correctly in the Tower hub and in scene-based dungeons (a couple of pre-existing trigger gaps).
Opening the pause menu no longer fires a stray attack, and a co-op guest's pause no longer leaves their input live.
Players can no longer get wedged inside farm buildings: a guard now nudges you back out a doorway if you ever stick.
The ultimate charge readout now reads correctly at 100% instead of getting stuck.
Quit-to-Hub works again, and your ability and resource HUD no longer disappears after a Restart or a return to the hub.
The Archer and Ranger dodge is now a proper roll.
Several vendor surfaces that had gone pink or blocky were corrected.

Known Issues

The newly networked co-op enemies, the downed-and-revive flow, public lobbies, and host moderation are freshly wired and still need full multi-player live testing. This is exactly where your testing helps most.
The Paladin's two-handed grip is still being fine-tuned and may sit slightly off in the hand.
A few specialty vendor surfaces (some animated foliage, flowing lava, translucent ice, certain realistic water) still look simpler or can read pink while their proper shader variants are rebuilt one at a time.
An experimental stacked multistory dungeon builder is in the codebase but not yet wired into the live dungeon rotation.

More dungeons, the shopkeeper's wares, and continued multiplayer hardening are next. Thank you for playing and for the feedback. It is shaping the game.

Original post

19 Jun 2026Developer post

Full Makeover and Testable Multiplayer

Cryptr has been quiet since the last update on November 17, 2023. This update is the result of improvements based on bug reports, the playtest notes, and the feedback you left me, and rather than patch around the old prototype I finally built a combat system from scratch. You wil

Cryptr has been quiet since the last update on November 17, 2023.

This update is the result of improvements based on bug reports, the playtest notes, and the feedback you left me, and rather than patch around the old prototype I finally built a combat system from scratch. You will find a new first-party combat and animation system, a clean render pipeline, a real hub, sixteen dungeons (currently 1 available, more to come soon), a new assortment of enemies, and online Steam co-op you can play with 4 friends right now. Multiplayer is in active development and ready to test. There is a lot here, and a lot more on the way.

Everything below has landed since that last Steam push.

The Makeover

New combat and animation backbone. Every class now runs on a hand-built first-party system instead of the prototype kit. Smoother crossfades, snappier response, no more placeholder poses. Expect more optimizations to be made with combat and movement animations in future patches.
New locomotion across the roster. Walking, running, sprinting and jumping were rebuilt on a cleaner animation set, and heroes now pivot in place to face a new direction instead of sliding on the spot.
Hack-and-slash combos that build to a finisher. Melee chains escalate, each hit landing harder than the last, capped by a wider-arcing finisher that cleaves the front rank. Running attacks let you lunge into a pack instead of stopping to swing.
A cinematic look you control. A cold steel-blue grade, vignette, and film grain settle over the dungeon, with torches and magic glowing warm against the gloom. Every piece is tunable from the Video tab, or switch it off for the classic render.
The pink is gone. A project-wide pass converted hundreds of materials left magenta by the render-pipeline switch back to their proper textures across enemies, environments, and props.

Multiplayer, Ready to Test

Bring up to four friends into the crypt. Online co-op hosts a full party of four, joining straight through Steam. Everyone moves, fights, and animates in sync as you descend together.
You decide who joins. When a friend asks in, a prompt names them and you press Y to allow or N to decline. Joining friends drop in right beside you, even mid-run.
One of each class. No two players run the same hero. Whoever locks a class first keeps it, and it shows as taken for everyone else.
Gather the party. Stepping into a dungeon starts a shared countdown so no one is left behind, and the whole party backs out together when the host leaves.
See your party at a glance. Each friend gets an ornate character frame showing their class, level, and live health and resource bars.

Rich Steam Presence

Your friends can see what you are actually doing. Cryptr now shows rich status in your Steam friends list: choosing a hero at the Tower gate, cutting through a named zone with your class and Mastery level, facing a zone warden, clearing a zone, or falling in it. It updates live as you play.

Heroes and Ascension

Four classes, each with an Ascended form. Knight into Paladin, Ranger into Warden, Wizard into Necromancer, Berserker into Ravager. Take a base class to level 50 to unlock its Ascended form.
Level to 100 and feel every level. Kills feed XP, and each level makes your hero stronger automatically, Gauntlet-style, with the curve tuned to stay rewarding the whole way up.
Talent trees, press N. Each class has its own six-tier tree of stat boosts, passives, and signature powers, with deeper tiers gated behind earlier picks. Respec for free anytime.
Spells and weapons look the part. The Wizard throws a real ice ball and channels a fire beam, the Necromancer drops a true bone-shard storm and raises the dead, the Ranger looses a proper bow shot, and the Knight bashes with his shield mid-block.

A Monstrous Opponents

A roster that fights back. Skeletons, goblins, orcs, ghouls, ratkin and more, alongside elites, dragons, golems, trolls, ogres, and towering bosses like the Demon Lord, Hydra, and Chimera. Each hunts, pathfinds, telegraphs, flinches, and dies on its own terms.
Real matchups. Armored brutes shrug off blades but melt to spells, casters resist magic and crumble to melee, and frost foes chill you while fire foes burn. Which hero you bring matters.
Surprises in the dark. Mimics that spring from chests, an invisible Orc Assassin, ceiling-dropping lurkers, and the life-draining Reaper that only arcane power can banish.
Bosses that escalate. Named health bars across the top of the screen, fights that build into faster, harder phases, and brief stagger windows that reward a committed heavy swing.

Dungeons and the Tower

A real keep to call home. The Tower hub is now a walled fortress with a central class altar, four sector gateways, guardian statues, braziers, and drifting fog.
Sixteen hand-crafted dungeons, never the same twice. Four sectors, four dungeons each, built fresh on every entry but each with its own designed character, from claustrophobic catacombs to a spire-climbing citadel to flooded temple vaults to branching lava caverns.
Every dungeon has a goal. Clear it, destroy all spawners, survive the onslaught, or defeat the boss, with an on-screen tracker counting your progress and a Gauntlet-style scoreboard at the end.
The dungeons fight back. Spawn fountains pump out monsters until you smash them, ambushes trigger on entry, and the boss gate only opens once the level is cleared.

Sound, Atmosphere, and a Living World

Combat that hits. Weapon impacts, arrow thwips, and a distinct sound for every spell school, answered by monster voices that rasp, snarl, and creak. A Creature Voices slider lets you mix them on their own.
A dungeon that listens. Each wing has its own soundscape and a tension layer that rises under the music when a fight breaks out, then eases back with a long tail. Everything crossfades, nothing cuts.
A living sky and per-sector weather. A full day-night cycle with twinkling stars and shooting stars overhead, and weather that matches each wing you travel into.
Wildlife that acts like itself. Birds scatter, deer bolt, livestock mill about, and the big animals fight back if you pick on them. It all stays in sync in co-op.

Quality of Life

An updated main menu and one settings screen everywhere. Single Player, Multiplayer, Settings and Exit, with Steam Community, Store, and Feedback links that open in the overlay, and the same full options panel from the title screen and in-game.
Pause anytime and make the game yours. Rebind keys, mix Master, Music and Sound-Effects volume, and tune quality, frame cap, V-Sync, and the cinematic look. Auto-Detect picks sensible settings for your machine in one click.
Player profiles and per-character saves. Sharers each keep their own roster, with sturdier background auto-save that flushes on pause and quit and survives a crash mid-save.
Steam achievements have arrived. A mix of milestones and mischief in the Gauntlet Legends spirit, saved per profile.

A Few of the Many Fixes

No falling out of the world: a stray gap now sets you safely back on solid ground.
The Quality setting actually changes the graphics now across resolution scale, anti-aliasing, and shadows.
The view freezes when you pause instead of swinging around behind the menu.
Arrows fly level toward your target instead of angled at the ground.
Your hero turns to face where you aim, so swings, arrows, and spells land where you are looking.
Health regenerates out of combat again, and many class-specific spawn and animation bugs are resolved.

Known Issues

The new co-op flow (host accept and reject, host-only pause, the dungeon-entry countdown, and the party following the host out) is freshly wired and still needs a full multi-player live test. This is exactly where additional testing helps most.
The Paladin's two-handed grip is still being fine-tuned and may sit slightly off in the hand.
The mass pink-material fix flattened some custom vendor shaders, so a few surfaces (animated foliage, flowing lava, translucent ice, snow-blended rock) look simpler than intended for now. Texture and lighting carry over; the motion and translucency return as those packs get proper shader variants.
A few specialty effects can still appear pink, mainly certain realistic-water VFX and some castle foliage. These are being handled one at a time rather than flattened.

This is a foundation, not a finish line. Multiplayer testing is open, more dungeons and the shopkeeper's wares are coming, and I am reading your feedback. Thank you!

Original post

18 Nov 2023Developer post

November 11 patch notes - a new game!

This patch wipes the previous Cryptr builds and starts fresh with a new approach to the game. Many assets now have increased texture resolution. First person can be toggled by pressing P. To revert to third person press P again. The character select screen is streamlined and rest

05 Oct 2023Developer post

October 5 patch notes

Updated swing animation for Warrior and Ravager, both classes no longer have a camera shake when using left mouse button attacks Added foot steps for each class Fixed sound effects not updating when modifying the sound effect pause menu scroller Disabled freefly cameras from side

01 Oct 2023Developer post

Hotfix #2 9/30

Updated the mod config UI diamond confirmation buttons to align with their respective mod Fixed a bug preventing the cursor from being visible while selecting armor from the Saelix armor vendor If anyone has ideas for mods they would like to see added to the game, or a mod interf

30 Sep 2023Developer post

Hotix #1 9/30

Fixed a build error that prevented the latest patch from being uploaded.

29 Sep 2023Developer post

Sept. 29 patch notes

Added new helms for the Necromancer, Warrior, Fighter, Ravager, and Archer. These can be unlocked by completing the first dungeon in the campaign. The items will unlock after defeating all of the enemies in the dungeon. A camera and splotlight will for 3.5 sec show the player whe

Added new helms for the Necromancer, Warrior, Fighter, Ravager, and Archer. These can be unlocked by completing the first dungeon in the campaign. The items will unlock after defeating all of the enemies in the dungeon. A camera and splotlight will for 3.5 sec show the player where they can find their reward, which will be levitating near the exit portal. Currently, the helms are only aesthetic but coming updates might update armor such as helms so that they also give the player stat bonuses or new effects. The Saelix armor vendor will allow you to access these helms or replace them once you complete the first dungeon.
Updated the main menu to use "any key" instead of "spacebar" to continue (default 10 sec timer will still autoadvance if the player doesn't press anything).
Fixed bugs in the first dungeon allowing the player to walk through some of the new wall prefabs and fall off the map.
Fixed a bug in the Saelix armor church where the church windows wouldn't render properly.
Added higher resolution enemy models to the main menu scene.
For the pause menu available in the portal hub and dungeons, players can now select their desired FPS for the application to be limited by.
Fixed a bug in the main menu where pressing escape could cause the UI to be turned off permanently.
Your unlockable dog companion Vincent now has a tooltip in your equiptment after unlocking him.
Added audio for Vincent that is used whenever he is summoned or dismissed.
Vincent's animation script was updated so that he chases the player until he is close enough to lay down next to the player.
Added new "Level Up!" visual effects.
Added a new Garnet Stone Ring reward for defeating the first boss. This ring will give the player some extra armor.
Added a new Steam achievement for unlocking the Garnet Stone Ring.
Watch on YouTube
Added a new main menu UI for configuring "mods". This will allow for one way to help add new mods into the game as they are suggested by players or eventually added by players directly using a more dynamic interface. These can be turned on or off at any time from the main menu. The pre-configured features in the Mod Config are:
1. Death Confetti - Enemies explode confetti when they die (uses festive holiday themed confetti when the month is a holiday month, e.g. Sept/Oct for Halloween, Dec for winter holidays, etc.
2. Big Head Mode - The player, allies, and enemies have a big head.
3. Unlimited Mana (coming soon 9/30)
4. Always Night - Forces the in-game day/night cycle to always be nighttime.
5. Increased Speed - The player, allies, and enemies have increased movement speed.
6. Random Weather Effects (Portal Hub) - Adds random weather to the portal hub.
7. Dance - Friendly NPCs in the portal hub dance. Vincent, currently the only pet you can unlock and summon, will also dance.

Original post

10 Sep 2023Developer post

September and Early Spooktober Update

Added new pause menu UI for the portal hub level and dungeons. This UI will control the player's inventory items purchased from armor, item, and enchantment NPCs. It also displays the new map and quest log. Added new pumpkin helms for the Necromancer, Warrior, Sorcerer, Fighter,

Added new pause menu UI for the portal hub level and dungeons. This UI will control the player's inventory items purchased from armor, item, and enchantment NPCs. It also displays the new map and quest log.
Watch on YouTube
Added new pumpkin helms for the Necromancer, Warrior, Sorcerer, Fighter, Ravager, and Archer. This can be equipped by talking to the Saelix armor vendor and clicking the pumpkin helm icon under the helm menu.
Updated the main menu's UI and fixed bugs related to the stationary characters during load / create character selection.
Added a rotate left or right feature during load / create character. While the player holds the left mouse button, they can control moving their selected character left or right by moving their mouse left or right.
Added more screen resolution options in the new pause menu's UI dropdown selector.
Removed the Tutorial for updates. Currently it uses outdated information and will be added back in coming updates. With the new UI and training dummies available in the portal hub, there is ideally enough information for the player to learn the game quickly in spite of having no specific tutorial level currently.
Updated the Enchanter and Ulfr item vendor UI. The old UI felt low quality while being functional. The new UI is much higher quality work and helps to unify the overal sense of design quality in Cryptr.
Added new UI icons with tooltips to show each player's spellbook with new information. The mana cost, cooldown, and keybinds are now shown as part of the tooltip.
Fixed a bug during load / create character where the Warrior's position malfunctioned.
Added a new 'Skip Current Song' button in the new pause menu. Click on the diamond icon to the left of this text near the buttom under the sound settings, and if there are multiple songs in that scene then it will start to play a non-repeated random song from the list.
Added multiple songs, usually no more than 5 or 7, to each dungeon and the portal hub. Originally there was only 1 song played repeatedly in dungeons. By adding new songs, the hope is to expand the atmosphere of Cryptr while not boring the player with the same music if they choose to listen to it.
Removed the AI Wander option from the with enchanter. This ensures that the player can find her reliably in the scene, and that she won't move away from the player and close the UI while they are reading the enchantment vendor UI.
Optimzied FPS in the splash screen and main menu scene by removing extra game objects and by rebaking camera occlusion. By doing this hopefully the first main menu scene can be loaded quicker and runs with a higher FPS for the player.

Original post

28 Aug 2023Developer post

Updates & announcements

Dungeons

Enemies

Combat

Balance

Interface

Crashes and Performance

Known Issues

Crashes

Performance

Combat

Interface

Other

Update 5

The short version

Performance

Dungeons that could not be finished

Combat

Talents

Co-op

The Tower, menus and the Level Editor

Telling me when something goes wrong

Known issues

Thank you

Hit registration

Menus

Under the hood

Feedback Patch

Lighting and visibility

Combat

Getting around

The Crucible and Defend maps

Controller

Camera

Co-op

Level Editor

Performance

What's new in Update 4

Boss Fights

The Delve: Dungeons With a Story

The Crucible

More Dungeons and Objectives

Loot, Shop, and Enchants

Mods and Creation Tools

Audio Overhaul

Accessibility

Combat and Enemies

Talents

Co-op

Look, Feel, and Quality of Life

A Few of the Many Fixes

Known Issues

Cryptr Update

Two New Heroes

Never Adventure Alone

Choose Your Challenge

Loot and Loadout

New Ways to Crawl

Command Your Hero

Look and Feel

Command Your Hero

Co-op, Deeper

New Ways to Crawl

New Horrors

Atmosphere and Sound

Look and Feel

Quality of Life

Balance

A Few of the Many Fixes

Known Issues

The Makeover

Multiplayer, Ready to Test

Rich Steam Presence

Heroes and Ascension

A Monstrous Opponents

Dungeons and the Tower

Sound, Atmosphere, and a Living World

Quality of Life

A Few of the Many Fixes

Known Issues