Patch notes · August 1.

One bite is all it takes. This is the biggest system we have shipped since the playtest opened, and it touches combat, the trader, the map, your deck and the game over screen. On top of it: a compendium, a new Den minigame and a pile of fixes.

🧟 Infection

A new common enemy shambles through every region: the Biter. Its Festering Bite does more than damage.

• Infected survivors are on a clock. 15 rounds, ticking every combat round, and it does not reset between fights. Walk out with 4 rounds left and you walk into the next fight with 4 rounds left. Resting does not cure it.
• The infection eats your strength. Every infected round stacks another -5% damage, up to -90%. Ignore it and your best fighter swings like a wet towel.
• If the timer hits zero, they turn. Every hero has been redrawn as their zombified self. A turned survivor sits at 1 HP, cannot be killed, cannot be targeted and cannot act, and each round has a chance to claw at a random ally for chip damage · with a chance to pass the infection on.
• They are not dead. No ✕ over the portrait, just a ZOMBIFIED tag and a problem you carry from fight to fight. If the last one standing is the turned one, the run is over.
• Biters start in your face. They enter the fight already in the melee lane, so the bite can land on turn one. They are fragile · anything can reach them from there, including you.
• Block stops the infection. The bite only infects if it actually gets through to your health. Absorb it fully with block and the wound never opens · so every source of block in the game is now an answer to infection, not just the cures.
• Biters scale with the region. They show up from The Streets act 2 onward, and get denser the deeper you push. The Horde now calls one in during its fury phase.

💉 Fighting back

• Suppressant Shot · card, 2 energy. Buy yourself or an ally 3 more rounds. It delays, it does not cure, and the weakness keeps stacking while you stall.
• Purge Serum · card, 4 energy, Support. The real cure, mid-fight. Exhausts.
• Antiviral Dose · item, 50g. Cures an infected survivor from the map.
• Antidote · item, 110g, always in stock. The only thing that brings back a survivor who has already turned.
• First bite explainer. The first time anyone in your party gets infected, the game stops and tells you exactly what is about to happen. Once per player.
• Learn by doing. In The Streets and The Hospital, clear a fight against Biters where somebody actually got infected and a Suppressant Shot is guaranteed in the reward. The cure only ever shows up right after the disease, so it is obvious what it is for. Kill the Biter first, or block its bite, and you keep your normal reward.

🎒 The trader rebuilt · supplies and satchel

• The shop no longer sells cards. You already get cards from rewards. The trader now stocks supplies: Field Medkit, Combat Stims, Scrap Plating, Defibrillator, Antiviral Dose, and the Antidote always in stock.
• New Satchel on the map. Carry your supplies, use them between fights, and read your party's infection status at a glance. Damage and block boosts burn down over your next 3 battles.
• Your gold and items now persist. Death does not empty your pockets. The wasteland takes your run, not your savings.
• Gold rewards trimmed across normal, elite and boss fights to match the new economy.

📖 Compendium · glossary and bestiary

A new Compendium screen, reachable from Area Select and from the map.

• Basics explained properly: energy as one shared pool, front and back rows, enemy bands and advancing, card range and targeting, deck flow, downed heroes.
• Statuses and traits with real descriptions, not just icons.
• Bestiary that fills itself in as you meet things. HP, energy, speed, spawn band and known moves · scaled for the region you are in and your hero level. Anything you have not faced yet stays ? ? ?.
• Progress counter so you know how much of the horde you have catalogued.

⚡ Spoils Den

• New minigame · DEAD CIRCUIT. The den's generator died with its cables across the floor. Haul each one to its breaker, but the panel only accepts a plug on the circuit the dial has armed, and the schematic dictates the order. Short it and you lose time.
• One game per day. The Den now rotates a single minigame daily instead of showing them all at once.

⚔️ Combat

• New enemy · Charger. Bull Rush slams your front-line hero into the back row. Rooted heroes hold their ground.
• Taunt is now front-row only. A taunting hero in the back does nothing, which is what the tooltip always said.
• New card mechanic · escalating damage. Sharpened Rebar (0 cost) deals 1 damage, and 1 more every time you play it for the rest of the fight. It is the new reward for The Streets secret area.
• Curse reveals are paced now. Boss curses announce themselves, show you who they are hitting, and wait for a click instead of firing in the middle of your turn.
• Deck cap lowered from 30 to 15. Tighter decks cycle their best cards more often and every slot has to fight for its life.
• New enemy barks. A lot more of the horde has something to say when it acts.

📅 Daily Challenge

• Replayable. Your best score for the day is what stands, so a bad first attempt no longer locks you out.
• Score counts gold earned, not gold left over. Spending at the trader no longer costs you points.
• Practice mode removed. One clear button, one run.

🔧 Fixes

• Fixed the secret area miniboss showing a phase marker on its health bar for a phase it does not have, and it now gets a proper boss bar.
• Enemy stacks now scale to fit their lane instead of overlapping, and the lane zone is taller.
• Game over now returns you to Area Select instead of the main menu, so you can start the next run immediately.
• Abandoning a challenge run properly ends it, so mutators no longer leak into your next normal run.
• Zombified heroes are correctly excluded from resting, reviving and ally-targeted cards.
• Hero full-body art redrawn, including a rifle whose scope is actually mounted on the receiver.