v0.53.5 - Ancestral Spirits

New Features

Smart Sell Filters (by DJLunacy)

New [F] Filtered Sell option in all three shops. Three filter modes:

• By Level: sell items X+ levels below you
• By Value: sell items worth less than X gold
• By Rarity: sell all Common items only

Preview shows item count and total gold before confirming. Skips cursed and unidentified items.

Companion Auto-Equip Best Gear (by DJLunacy)

New Auto-equip Best Gear on the companion equipment screen at the Inn. Scans your inventory and equips the best item per slot based on weapon power, armor class, and stat bonuses. Displaced items return to your inventory.

King/Queen Title

Players on the throne automatically receive the King or Queen title. Appears in the title selection list and clears when you abdicate or are overthrown.

Soulweaver's Loom Narrative

The lore was contradictory -- the Loom was "hidden on floor 65" but also dropped by Veloura. Rewritten: Veloura found the Loom and was using it. Kill her and take it, or save her and she gives it to you directly. Floor 65 discovery event removed. All saved Old Gods now give their artifact during the save scene.

Balance Changes

Death and Resurrection Overhaul

The Veil Between Worlds has been completely reworked:

• Temple Resurrection: Now costs 50% of your gold on hand. Limited to 3 uses total per character.
• Deal with Death: Requires 10,000 Darkness (was 100) and causes permanent stat loss of 2-5 points.
• Accept Your Fate: No longer ends the game. Lose 5 levels (with full stat decreases), 75% gold, and a random equipped item. Over-leveled gear moves to inventory.

All three options now show detailed summaries of exactly what you lost. Save cheesing prevented -- closing the game during the death screen auto-applies the worst penalty on next login.

Siren's Lament Base Damage

Now deals damage on every cast, not just critical casts. Non-crit base damage scales with CHA and level.

Wave Echo Buff

Base damage increased from 70 to 100. Effective damage of 200 against debuffed targets.

Deluge of Sanctity Cooldown

Now has a 2-round cooldown. Quickbar shows (CD:X) when on cooldown.

Tank Class Passive AoE Absorption

Warrior, Paladin, Barbarian, and Tidesworn now passively absorb boss AoE damage for the party without needing to taunt first.

Hostile NPC Scaling

Street encounter hostile NPCs now scale quadratically with level instead of flat. No longer trivial at mid-to-high levels.

Runed Gear Stat Diversity

"Runed" items (10 templates, levels 65-100) were all classified as caster-themed, making ~75% of high-level loot drop with INT. Reclassified to generic crafted theme (DEF+CON) for more diverse late-game drops.

Bug Fixes

• Loot Stat Transfer - Charisma, Agility, and Stamina from dungeon loot were silently dropped when equipping. All CHA gear since v0.53.4 was affected. Fixed in all 3 conversion paths.
• Player Stun - Boss stun effects (Veloura's Charm, Manwe's Time Freeze) never actually skipped your turn due to an off-by-one in duration processing.
• AoE Spell Healing - Deluge of Sanctity's self-heal never applied. The AoE damage path skipped healing.
• XP Distribution - Setting 100% XP for yourself and 0% for companions was overridden by auto-distribute.
• Dual-Wield Companion Loot - Companions only compared weapon drops against main hand, ignoring off-hand upgrades.
• Combat Tips - "[S] to cast spells" was wrong (spells use [1]-[9] quickbar). "[L] hide to escape" was misleading.
• Cursed Item Purification - Purified items gained a phantom +30 HP bonus and kept their -CON penalty permanently.
• Dungeon Merchant - Removed entirely. Sold items had missing WeaponType, breaking spell requirements for purchased staves.
• Save OOM - Single-player saves could crash with OutOfMemoryException on large worlds. Now uses stream-based serialization.
• Serialization Audit - 20 persistent properties (resurrections, church donations, crime level, children count, disease resistance, etc.) were silently resetting to defaults on save/load. All now properly saved.

Code Health

• 4,777 lines of dead code removed (6 unused system files)
• 13 TODOs resolved (0 remaining in codebase)
• 63 empty catch blocks now log errors instead of silently swallowing them
• 116 thread-unsafe Random instances replaced with Random.Shared for MUD server safety