v0.62.0 -- Light and Dark

Both poles of alignment finally feel worth committing to. A complete redesign of dungeon discoveries. Hungarian localization completed, with Spanish, French, and Italian following along. Plus a stack of online quality-of-life polish.

The Headline: Light and Dark

You told us being Evil was all cost and no reward. You told us you could not leave the Evil faction once you joined. You told us you wanted to play as a freelance Mercenary without swearing loyalty to anybody. You told us the Dark Alley was thin and the Light pole was thinner. We listened, and then we built seven layered systems to fix it.

1. Your alignment finally tells you what it does

The Character Status screen now spells out exactly what your alignment is doing for you, right now: combat modifiers, shop discounts, NPC reactions, holy-ground access, faction and rank. All six named alignment "powers" are real combat effects now, not flavor text. Dark gets Soul Drain (heal on melee hits), Terror Incarnate (rout foes on hit), and Shadow Strike (crit bonus). Light gets the mirror: Blessed Aura (regen per round), Holy Smite (extra damage to undead and demons), and Righteous Fury (crit bonus). You can also renounce a faction now. The button always should have existed; we wired it up.

2. Dread and Renown ladders

Two mirrored notoriety tracks. Climb Darkness and you become a Cutthroat, then a Marauder, then a Terror, then a Nightmare. Climb Chivalry and you become a Defender, then a Paragon, then a Hero, then a Legend. Higher standing deepens the discount you already get at your matching shops. And the world starts to notice you: at Terror or above, weak townsfolk flee at the sight of you before you can even speak. At Paragon or above, ordinary people cheer when you pass, and at Legend they bow.

3. New ways to spend your standing

• Demand Tribute (Dark). Shake an ordinary townsfolk down for gold. Daily-capped, gold scales to NPC level so you cannot turn it into an infinite printer.
• Bounty hunters worth killing (Dark, Marauder and above). Named hunters start coming for you in the streets. Champion-tier fights, but each one drops a guaranteed gold purse plus a real loot item on top of the regular combat reward. The hunt becomes worth it.
• NPC gifts (Light, Hero and above). Strangers express their gratitude with class-appropriate gear, not just a coin and a thank-you.
• Free temple blessing (Light, Paragon and above). A pure-hearted player who used to be turned away at the Church with "your soul is already pure" now gets one free Divine Blessing per day instead.

4. The Sellsword Hall (live as a Mercenary)

A new [M] Sellsword Hall posting station at Anchor Road. Take freelance contracts from the Crown, the Shadows, or the Faith with no oath required. Six contracts at first tier, two per faction, with thematic objectives -- bandit purges, fence runs, undead cleansing. Your completions feed faction reputation through the existing cascade so your career drifts you naturally toward whoever you work for most, but the freelance path itself is its own named career. Five-rank ladder: Recruit, Sellsword, Veteran (+5% pay), Ironbound (+10% pay), Legend (+15% pay). The lifetime contracts counter survives New Game Plus.

5. Dark Alley depth

Black Market overhauled. Instead of three static items, it now rotates daily with real gear in slots that grow as your Dread climbs. Feared Dark players without Shadows membership can also shop there now (10% surcharge, so loyalty to the Shadows still pays better).

Spot the Mark replaces the old Loaded Dice coin flip. A three-round read-the-bias game: the dealer secretly biases the dice high or low, 70% of rolls fall on the biased side, and you have to decide each round whether to commit early for a huge payout but a harder skill check, or wait for more information and a smaller payout but better odds. Wisdom-keyed, so for the first time INT/WIS builds have a real reason to visit the Dark Alley.

6. The Sanctum (live as a paragon)

A new top-level location off Main Street, marked with [+]. The Light pole now has its own structured home, mirroring the Dark Alley. Inverted resource flow, by design: gold flows out, Renown and Faith standing flow back. You spend your wealth to be seen as the kind of person who spends their wealth that way.

Three Acts of Mercy at launch, each daily-capped, each scaling cost on your level rather than your wallet so you cannot snowball into infinity: Alms to the poor (3 per day), Fund the Orphanage (1 per day), Hospice tithe (1 per day). Faith faction members get a 10% discount on charity, mirror of the Shadows-rank discount at the Black Market.

A Hall of Heroes read-only wall tracks your lifetime contributions, your current Renown standing, your Faith standing, and today's contributions. The "the world remembers you" payoff in tangible form.

Holy, Good, Neutral, and Balanced players are welcomed. Dark players are admitted with a cold-welcome line. Evil players are wards-barred at the door, just like the Church and Temple.

7. The Tournament of Honor

The Light-pole answer to the Gauntlet, accessible at [T] on the Sanctum's "Other" menu, hidden below Defender Renown so you have to earn the right to see it. Deliberately shorter and more ceremonial: where the Gauntlet is ten waves of escalating monsters, the Tournament is a focused three-fight ritual against named foes a Light hero would specifically be called to confront:

• Sir Aedric the Lapsed. Once a knight of Aurelion. His sister was lost to Noctura, and he turned away from the light. The lantern-mark on his armor has been scratched out.
• Marrowking Vex. An undead lord raised through forbidden rite. Once a magistrate who sentenced a hundred to die. They came back with him.
• The Anonymous Champion. The reigning ritual winner. Never speaks. No colors. Always wins.

Same entry fee as the Gauntlet, same death-roll model, full clear earns bonus rewards plus tier-title upgrade plus the matching tier achievement (you can earn arena tier achievements from the Tournament without ever touching the Gauntlet). Tournament and Gauntlet share the same daily run counter, so it is one ritual per day, not both.

Dungeon Discoveries

The old "Examine Features" system rolled one of eight generic outcomes regardless of what you were actually looking at. A demonic altar, a burial urn, and a crystal cluster all played out identically. Floors 66 through 100 shared a pool of just three generic features.

Replaced. The thing you examine is the encounter now.

96 hand-authored discoveries across all eight dungeon themes, eleven to thirteen per theme, depth-gated so floor 3 and floor 95 rooms feel nothing alike. Each is one of:

• A choice with real stakes. Pry the reliquary open for gold and risk the finger-bone trap, or whisper the old rite and take the relic freely. Take the demon altar's power at a cost to your soul, or spit on it and walk away cleaner.
• A skill test that fits the object. Force a frozen door with Strength. Slip coins from an ice reliquary with Dexterity. Reason out an ancient mechanism with Intelligence. Attune to a singing crystal with Wisdom. Endure the crushing pressure of the deep with Constitution.
• A risk gamble. Reach into the flooded grate where there is coin, and also teeth.
• A trap with character. A breath of stasis that freezes your blood. A vent that exhales furnace-heat.
• A narrative reveal. Lore, a half-remembered past life, an Ocean-philosophy insight.

About eleven one-time set-pieces fire only once per character so they stay memorable. The oldest grave in the catacombs, which you may have dug yourself in another life. A master smith's hammer left "for whoever the Cycle sends next." The moment in the void where you stop being a wave fighting the sea and remember you are the sea. These grant permanent stat lifts, deep lore, or an awakening, and your character remembers them across the cycle.

The floors 66 to 100 gap is closed. Frozen Depths, Volcanic Pit, and Abyssal Void now have full theme-appropriate content instead of three generic features.

Every word of the new content is translated into Hungarian, Spanish, French, and Italian.

Localization

A player working through a Hungarian session reported a dozen surfaces still rendering in English. All twelve translated, into Hungarian and into Spanish, French, and Italian for symmetry. The big one is monster combat-ability messages: every ability flavor line ("breathes a cone of fire", "delivers a CRUSHING BLOW", "drains your life force", and roughly 120 more) was hardcoded English. Now resolved through the localization system, and split into "vs you" and "vs an ally" variants so each language phrases the player case and the companion case naturally.

Also localized: stranger encounter names, the home upgrade menu, the town settlement (the Outskirts), the logout forecast, dungeon party-roster lines, dungeon feature reward notifications, location headers on every screen, and the permadeath disconnect line (reworded from "*** You have been permadied. ***" to "You have permanently died.").

Online quality of life

• Auto-look (opt-in). Single-player redraws the location screen after every action. Online mode deliberately streams continuously and waits for you to type look. If you came from single-player and miss the auto-refresh, the new Auto-look setting (default OFF) makes online mode redraw single-player style. Toggle in Preferences or with /autolook. New online characters are prompted to enable it at creation.
• Fatigue on the Character Status sheet. No more guessing why your damage feels off. Single-player only (online does not use fatigue).
• "Also here" hidden in the Dungeons. Two players both "in the Dungeons" are not actually together (each has their own floor), so the co-presence line was misleading. Town locations still show co-presence, because there it is real.
• Self-hoster fix. Docker container builds were missing the Localization folder, so self-hosted servers were seeing raw localization keys everywhere. Fixed.

Coming next

A handful of items are deliberately deferred to a future release:

• A rally ally for celebrated heroes (the Renown mirror of the bounty hunters): a friendly NPC who fights alongside you for a single dungeon delve.
• Higher-tier merc contracts (the Mercenary career currently has six first-tier contracts).
• More Sanctum verbs (sponsor a pilgrim, bail a debtor) and Hall of Heroes NPC enrichment.
• Crown Commissions, reframed as a high-Renown filter on the existing Sellsword Hall.

If a player report led to a fix in this release, your name was probably attached to the issue inside our notes. Thank you. Keep reporting them.

Find us on Discord, the in-game /bug reporter, or the Steam discussion forums.