v0.65.5 - Countdown

The road to 1.0 continues. We just ran a full audit of every system in the game ahead of leaving Beta, and this release fixes everything serious it found. No new content this time: this is a correctness and stability release, and some of these fixes matter a lot.

Boss Fights Fixed

Area-of-effect damage was skipping the Old Gods' defenses entirely. Single-target attacks correctly respected a boss's phase immunity and divine armor, but AoE spells and abilities (Fireball, Chain Lightning, Maelstrom of the Faithful) hit the health bar directly, so a caster could burn a god down during a phase that was supposed to be immune. AoE now runs through the same defenses as every other attack. The Old God fights play the way they were designed again.

Save Protection

We closed the bug behind a long-standing and nasty rare issue: under specific conditions on the online server, a save could overwrite a character's collected seals, worshipped god, companions, and family data with empty state. Earlier builds could only detect and log it. Now the bad save is refused outright and your data on disk is left untouched. Normal play, including the save on logout, is completely unaffected.

Death Means Something Now

The world simulation had a ghost problem. When an NPC died "permanently" in a background brawl, gang war, or dungeon run, the game sent out the mourning notices, widowed the spouse, and orphaned the children... and then quietly respawned the NPC a few minutes later. You could be told your spouse died and then bump into them at the inn. Fixed in both directions:

• A rolled permanent death is now genuinely permanent. The realm mourns, and it means it. These deaths are rare and carefully limited, and can never push a race toward extinction.
• When a lover or romantic partner dies permanently, your relationship state now properly lets them go. Previously only marriages were cleaned up, and only when you were present for the death; lovers lost to the wider world stayed on your roster forever.
• The common, ordinary NPC death still respawns exactly as before.

Your Marriage Bonus Actually Works Now

The 10 percent XP bonus for being married, and the XP bonus from an active divine blessing, were wired into a piece of combat code that stopped being used a long time ago. Married and blessed players have been silently receiving neither. Both now apply on every kill and show on the victory screen. If you got married for love, congratulations, it now also pays.

Translation Fixes

Players in Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian were seeing raw placeholder text instead of the "a monster appears" and "boss blocks your path" lines, on every single encounter. Fixed, along with a handful of missing translations and a Hungarian training-screen line.

Linux: No More White Screen

A Linux player found the game launching as an unreadable white window. If the bundled terminal failed to start on your system, the launcher fell back to xterm with its default black-on-white colors, which washes out the game's palette completely. Three fixes:

• The launcher now recovers properly when the bundled terminal cannot start, tells you exactly why (usually a missing libfuse2 package), and falls back to a correctly-colored terminal.
• The game itself now paints its own dark background on Linux and macOS terminals and politely restores your colors when you quit. It is readable in any terminal now, whatever your theme.
• All the Linux launch scripts force readable colors on xterm as a last resort.

Smaller Fixes

• Royal orphans no longer vanish. An orphan coming of age while the world was at its population cap was silently deleted instead of graduating. They now wait for a free slot like everyone else.
• The Church stopped making up numbers. The "this month" community figures on the Church records screen rerolled randomly every time you looked at them. They now hold steady and roll over monthly.
• Save failures are no longer silent. Several save operations swallowed their errors with no trace; they now log properly so a real problem is visible instead of quietly losing progress.
• Long-term save health. NPC teammate bags and shop stock lists are now capped in save files, closing the last uncapped slow-growth path.
• The website tells the truth. The game has 12 classes and 5 companions; the site said 11 and 4. Mystic Shaman and Melodia, you exist, we are sorry.

Thank you for all the bug reports that drove this release. Every one of them made the game better. See you in the dungeon.