Contracts

• A contract board in camp. Three contracts hang on it every day: one easy, one middling, one hard. Take one. Only the contract you accepted tracks progress, claiming it frees the slot, and walking away from it drops what you had.

• Twenty four kinds of contract. Damage with a sword, damage with fire, kills with a bow, and so on through every weapon and element. A finished contract you have not collected yet survives the day change; an unfinished one does not.

• The board shows the reset. A countdown under the title and in the prompt so you know how long the offer stands.

• It works in co-op. The host keeps the tally and every player gets credit for their own hits.

Two new rooms

• The Crucible. No monsters. The floor fires beam volleys in four patterns, rails, a rotating star, a travelling sweeper, and the beams drift while they burn so a gap you found does not stay a gap. You are healed to full when you step in and you have three hits to spend, shown as pips in the banner. Main path from stage 6.

• Greed. Clear a wave and a chest drops locked and the doors open. Walk out and everything unlocks. Charge the seal again and you get another wave and another chest on the pile. Lose a wave and the whole bank is destroyed. Five waves at most. Side rooms from stage 4, with an elite version from stage 9.

• Rooms open with a wave. Most of the room's monsters come at once when you charge the seal and the rest trickle in, arriving from the far wall, the flanks, the corners, a crescent, or the doors, instead of anywhere at all.

• Monsters arrive through a rift. A pentagram traces itself on the floor, a portal opens in the middle of it, and the monster materialises through it. This is the spawn everywhere now.

• Every combat room runs a clock. The countdown sits in the objective banner and turns red under ten seconds. Run out and the room is spent: no reward, doors stay open, no second try. Goal rooms are the exception and re-arm, so a floor can never trap you.

• Nothing vanishes. Monsters left alive when a room ends, won or lost, stay alive, stay hostile, and still drop loot. They just stop counting.

• Speed room shards scale with the floor like every other shard payout.

Combat

• Attacks plant your feet. Every swing, shot, special and channel holds you in place until it finishes. A dash breaks out of it. Sword swings animate the whole body now, legs included.

• The sword finisher got its weight. A wind-up before the backspin, a hitstop and shake on connect, sparks, a dust ring at your feet, spin afterimages, a longer lunge into the third swing, and the pitch of each swing climbing through the chain.

• The bow and the staff swing combos too. A shot, a double shot, then a power shot: a wind-up, a bigger piercing bolt, and a blade wave around you. Anything you hit in the next moment lands heavy. The basic staff's finisher is a wider, harder pushback ring. Spellbooks wind up a sigil and loose a five bolt volley.

• Auto-aim, not auto-attack. The toggle now only turns you to face the nearest enemy on screen. You still swing yourself. Swings no longer fly off toward the cursor when a monster is close but not quite in reach.

• Clicks are never lost. A click during the cooldown fires the moment the cooldown ends instead of being dropped.

• Vases shatter into pieces of their own art.

• The freeze cage is a crystal. Ice prison grows over the monster facet by facet, cracks as the freeze runs out, and shatters.

Monsters

• Packs make sense. Rooms and hordes draw from nine encounter groups, a swarm backbone plus one featured role, with caps per floor on the rare types. Same number of bodies, no more every-monster-at-once soup on the upper floors.

• Nothing outruns you. Regular monsters are capped below your walking speed. Bats and Leha keep theirs.

• Armor is much thinner. Now that attacking holds you in place, plate takes a fraction of what it took to break: early floors a fifth of the damage, late floors half, elites a bit more than half.

• The shard champion is killable. Half the health, no plate before stage 6 and a smaller plate after, and cold stacks on it now so brittle plate works. It still cannot be frozen. Its field is a crystal ward, and the monsters it armors flash a plate-up burst.

• The first boss is a glass cannon. A third less health, half again the damage, halves that attack twice as often, and its projectiles only hit your feet, so a hop clears them.

• Leha waits until stage 3. The first two floors are skeletons, zombies and Skuleroz.

• Fire obelisks grow faster and warn first. A new pillar every third of a sweep, so an arm fills in twelve seconds rather than thirty six, and every pillar scorches the ground for a moment before it erupts. The loose embers on the obelisk itself are gone. Nova obelisks rest longer between rings, and the wind obelisk's pull is smaller.

Fixes

• Continue no longer leaves you with a weapon that fires nothing until you re-equip it.

• Running through a dungeon no longer bleeds frames: a pack that could not reach you was re-running its whole path search every tick.

• Ice shard storms, hit effects and damage numbers are cheaper, and a monster's first step no longer sprints off the map.

• The bubble shield's rim is half as thick.