v0.57.11 - Recruitment, Crit Rebalance, Companion Skills

Six shipsets. Two feature reworks (NPC recruitment, crit chance balance) plus four bug fixes from in-game reports.

New: NPC Recruitment Redesign

NPC recruitment at the Team Corner has been rebuilt around the social system. Relationships actually matter now.

Price depends on how the NPC feels about you.

• Friends (Friendship / Trust / Respect levels) give you a discount up to 25% off.
• Strangers charge the baseline price.
• Rivals (Suspicious / Angry) charge a 15-40% surcharge.
• Enemies and people who hate you refuse to join at any price.

Lovers, spouses, friends-with-benefits, and ex-partners no longer appear in the recruitment list. They're in your life, not on your payroll. If you search for your spouse by name, they respond with flavor text instead of a "no match" error.

Hate-tier enemies appear in the list tagged "(won't join)" so you can see they exist and why. Clicking one produces one of five random insult-refusal lines.

Paginated list sorted by relationship. Friends first (cheapest), then strangers, then rivals. 12 entries per page with [N]ext /

rev / [S]earch / [F]ilter / [Q]uit

navigation.

Search by name. Press S to open a search prompt. Partial matches work. Multiple matches show a short pick-list.

Role filter. Press F to filter to Tanks, Damage, Healers, Utility, or Debuff. Filter persists while you browse.

Price breakdown on confirmation. Before you pay, a confirm screen shows base cost, the relationship multiplier, and the final price, with a Hire X for Y gold? (Y/N) prompt. No more accidental expensive hires.

Two latent bugs fixed as side effects: scripted NPCs like Seth Able were previously recruitable (they shouldn't be), and NPCs currently in prison were also recruitable. Both now filtered out.

Crit Chance Rebalance

From in-game gossip feedback. Two problems with the old system: DEX-primary classes plateaued at 50% crit well before their stat investment was "done," and the Creator's Eye artifact was so strong that the moment a player earned it, every other crit investment became pointless.

Crit chance cap now scales with Dexterity. Instead of a flat 50% for everyone, the cap rises by 1% for every 30 DEX, up to 75% at DEX 750. A Warrior with moderate DEX still caps around 50% (unchanged experience). A max-DEX Abysswarden, Jester, Ranger, or Assassin can earn their way to 75% through stat investment. DEX matters all the way up now.

Creator's Eye artifact rebalanced. Previously a 1.5x pre-cap multiplier that instantly pinned any build at the cap. Now a flat +10 crit chance (+20 during the Manwe battle with the Void Key). Strong, but no longer a substitute for actually building crit. A low-DEX build with the Eye gets a solid bump. A high-DEX build stacks it under the new raised cap.

Nothing else changed. Guaranteed-crit abilities (Backstab, Hidden, Umbral Step, Temporal Feint, Vanish) still force a crit on the next single hit, separate from percentage stacking. Wavecaller Ocean's Voice still gives a backup roll when the main roll fails. Crit damage multiplier still caps at 3.0x. The game still prevents 100% crit walkthroughs.

Endgame numbers:

• Level 100 Warrior with Creator's Eye: ~45% crit
• Level 100 Cleric with Creator's Eye: ~35% crit
• Level 100 Assassin with Creator's Eye: ~60% crit
• Level 100 Jester with Creator's Eye: 75% crit
• Level 100 Abysswarden at DEX 750: 75% crit (hits cap even without the Eye)

Companion Spell Management

Player report: a Cleric companion was casting Mass Cure every combat even after every ability was manually disabled at the Inn, and unequipping her items didn't stop it.

The Inn "Combat Skills" screen only managed class abilities. Spells were a parallel system that the UI never exposed, so healing and damage spells always fired regardless of player preference. Fixed:

• Companions now have a separate disabled-spells list alongside their disabled-abilities list.
• The Inn Combat Skills screen shows a new SPELLS section below the abilities, with the same [N] [ON]/[OFF] toggle pattern.
• Combat AI filters spells the same way it filters abilities.
• Existing saves load with all spells enabled by default (current behavior preserved).

Bug Fixes

The Royal Guard defense teleport works again. v0.57.10 fixed the underlying routing (the old code tried to send responders through a navigation table that has no entry for the Castle), but the new teleport signal was being caught and swallowed by a defensive try/catch wrapping the whole alert method. When a royal guard accepted the defense prompt, the server logged "King system guard check failed: Exiting to Castle" and the player stayed put. Now the teleport signal propagates correctly and guards actually get transported.

NPCs imprisoned via Castle action no longer join dungeon parties. Player report: a specific NPC was showing up simultaneously on the Castle prison roster and in another player's active dungeon party. The restore-party logic on dungeon entry checked for "alive" but not "imprisoned." An NPC arrested between sessions silently rejoined the player's party on next entry. Fixed: imprisoned teammates are now skipped with a yellow "X was arrested while you were away and can't rejoin the party" notice. The fix covers the main candidate list, the spouse branch, and the lovers branch all at once. Your spouse getting arrested no longer grants jailbreak privileges.

Your character now shows up in your own team roster. Team Status, Team Info, and Team Rankings screens were showing your team minus you, and the total-members count was off by one. A database-level exclusion meant to prevent duplication on "other members" queries was leaking into the viewer's self-view. Fixed at the display layer.

Sacking dead teammates no longer silently reverts. The sack action was using fire-and-forget to persist the cleared team field. If another online session triggered a world state reload before the save task completed, the NPC's team field came back with the stale snapshot and only the news post survived. Changed to a proper awaited save, matching the pattern used everywhere else in Team Corner. Same fix applied to the team-password change path.

627 of 627 tests passing. No save format change. Pre-v0.57.11 saves load cleanly, self-heal the affected team / relationship / spell-disable state on next login.