Editing Changelog (section)

== v0.39.1 — Four Fights On The Trail ==
* '''The four trail battles are real now.''' An expedition or delve is no longer one health pool wearing four costumes — the Approach, Skirmish, Clash and Showdown are four separate enemies, each with its OWN health, attack, guard, swiftness and difficulty, escalating every time: the opener is the easy one, the Showdown is the fight. Guardian and rift-boss runs cast the boss itself as the Showdown; arenas are a single champion duel, as a pit fight should be.
* EVERY STAT DOES A JOB, AND NONE OF THEM ROLLS DICE. The enemy's attack is its hit each exchange. Its health is the bar you drain. Its GUARD blunts your strike — half its guard comes off every blow you land, so a shelled enemy takes more exchanges. Its SWIFTNESS is a dodge percent, priced in deterministically: a 12%-dodge enemy slips exactly that share of your blows on a fixed cadence you can watch — the bar stalls when it dodges — and the card's "wins in N" stays exact arithmetic, because v0.39.0's no-dice rule stands.
* '''The fight card itemizes the whole run.''' Four lines, one per enemy — its bar over your effective strike against it, how many exchanges it takes, what it hits back for — above the same run totals as before. The enemy card shows the one you are fighting RIGHT NOW: its real hit range, guard, dodge and bar, with "falls in N exchanges". The countdown under the run bar now names the current creature and counts to ITS kill, then the next one steps up.
* '''The stage pills stopped lying.''' They used to advance on even quarters of the clock; now each stage owns exactly its share of the fight — a 2-exchange Showdown holds the last third of a 6-exchange run, and the pill flips exactly when its enemy falls.
* '''Your costs at the intended gear did not move.''' The stage stats ship tuned so a keeper at the gear line for the content fights a 6-exchange run ([1, 1, 2, 2] across the four enemies) for exactly the old food bill and exactly the listed run time — the difficulty number on the card still means what it meant, and every stage's difficulty sums to it. Come in UNDER the line and the new stats bite harder than the old model did: guard and dodge punish a weak strike twice.
* Every one of the ~180 stage enemies is ordinary game data (a new stages file), generated once from each biome's real creature roster — the same species the trail has always named, now with the stats to back it — and hand-tunable per action from here on. The trail's cosmetic per-run enemy rotation retires; each run's cast is now fixed and real.
* '''No gear now means no kills.''' Your blow used to be floored at one point of damage no matter what — so bare hands against a Giganotosaurus behind 57 guard still chipped it down, and given enough food and patience a keeper in nothing at all could walk the Sundered Vale and win. The floor is gone: a strike that cannot get through the guard deals NOTHING. The bar does not move, the fight has no end, and you stand there eating while the enemy works on you. Nothing tells you off and nothing stops you — the stalled health bar and the draining pantry are the lesson.
* THE FIGHT IS A FIGHT NOW, NOT A TIMER. Blows land as the clock runs instead of the whole battle resolving in one instant when the timer filled. The enemy's health is real, it drains as you swing, and the run ends when the last one falls rather than when a clock says so. At the gear the content expects, every number is exactly what it was yesterday — same length, same damage, same loot. What changed is that you can watch it happen, and that a fight you cannot win simply never finishes.
* '''And the things that should happen before a fight now do.''' A cave torch or an arena tribute is spent when you SET OUT — win, lose or die in there, you paid to get in — and a full bank turns you back at the door instead of after a fight it could not pay you for.
* '''Excavations moved up the delving page.''' It now sits directly under the [[Mastery]] Pool, above the delve view, instead of jumping to the bottom of the page whenever no dig was running — so the maps, the ground counters and the Start-a-dig slots are in the same place every time you open [[Delving]], mid-dig or not.
* '''Rival duels bite back too.''' Raids had the same hole expeditions did: an outmatched raider paid in MORE bouts, never in harder hits — so a keeper in no gear could grind through the first nine rival tribes with zero risk, just time. Past the four-bout fair line every blow now lands harder on the same curve as expeditions, and armour blunts it the same way. Fighting rivals near your strength is unchanged; punching five tiers up is now the gamble it always claimed to be.
* '''The fight you commit to is the fight you get.''' The battle plan is now frozen the moment each run starts: a weather change, gear swap, heat shift or party reshuffle mid-run lands on the NEXT run instead of silently retiling the current one at the finish line. The card you read before starting is the fight that resolves — exactly, every time.
* '''Hunt cards stopped over-warning.''' The hunt damage range now shows the hit AFTER your Guards' shielding and the pack's soak — the same mitigation the fight actually runs — instead of the raw worst case. Raid duels got this honesty fix back in v0.36.64; hunts finally match.
* '''A raid resolves the same no matter how you watch it.''' Regeneration and buff timers now tick BETWEEN bouts exactly as they do between action completions, so a gauntlet fought in a background tab returns the identical outcome to one fought at the wheel.
* GEAR MATTERS AGAIN — YOU CAN LOSE THE HARD ONES NOW. Being under-geared used to multiply how MANY blows you took and never how hard, and since auto-eat holds you above half health, a small hit could never kill you no matter how many landed: a keeper in no gear at all could walk the Sundered Vale and win, just slowly. Now overshooting a trail's intended length makes every exchange land harder — on plan is unchanged, twice the intended length hits ×1.4, four times hits ×2 — so wildly out-of-depth runs end in a flee or a grave instead of a long stroll. ARMOUR IS WHAT BUYS THE RIGHT TO PUNCH ABOVE YOUR WEIGHT: defence blunts that penalty (and only that penalty), so for the first time a heavy loadout is what lets you attempt content above your tier. Fighting the content you are geared for costs exactly what it cost yesterday.
* '''Guardian heat works again.''' Stacking heat on a biome has been raising the difficulty number on the card while the four stage enemies quietly ignored it — the authored blocks were fixed, so a red-hot guardian fought exactly like a cold one. Heat now scales every enemy on the trail: more health, harder hits, and the per-stage difficulties still add up to the number the card shows.
* '''The scouting report was under-quoting the bill.''' On a four-fight trail it multiplied the whole run by the SOFTEST enemy's hit — so it quoted the price of the easiest fight four times over. It now adds the four fights up. The battle view's enemy bar had the same class of error: it drew a slightly different drain than the engine was actually doing, and now falls by the exact number the fight uses.
* '''The verdict caught up with the trail.''' The stat sheet's "The fight" row was still grading runs against the old single-fight yardstick, so a four-fight trail at EXACTLY the intended gear — a 6-exchange run, on plan — read "A grind — bring food". It now grades against the run's own plan: at or under the plan is a fair fight, past it is the grind, past double is ruinous (duels and arenas keep their old grading — their yardstick never moved). The row also explains itself on hover: the count is exchanges — blows traded across all four fights — not the number of enemies.
* AND HUNTING IS A FIGHT NOW TOO — THE LAST PLACE GEAR DIDN'T MATTER. A hunt granted the kill on the timer no matter what you were carrying: the creature's health was never a number the game read, so your weapon changed how the bar was DRAWN and nothing else, and a keeper in nothing at all could bring down a Woolly Bison by simply waiting. Your strike now has to get through the creature's hide. Bare hands still take everything up to the Deinosuchus in Murkwater Swamp and NOTHING from the Cave Crocodile onward; from there a weapon is the price of entry — the Dire Mammoth asks for the cheapest stone blade you can make, the Vale Colossus for a real one. Below the line the hunt still bites you and you can still stand there auto-eating: you just never kill anything, exactly as on the trail. Carry any weapon at all and your kills, XP and loot per hour are to the second what they were yesterday.
* '''And the hunt sheet stopped lying to match.''' The health bar used to drain on your raw attack with a floor under it, ignoring the hide entirely — so bare-handed you watched a bar empty while nothing died. It now falls by the exact strike the hunt itself uses, so a strike that cannot get through leaves it sitting precisely where it started. Two readouts that were quietly false went with it: the hunt sheet swore every hunt was "always winnable" and told you the creature "falls every 10.4s" — it now shows YOUR STRIKE against the hide, reads "nothing gets through" when it does not, and says the thing falls "never". The scouting report on the card says the same before you commit. Nothing blocks you and nothing scolds you: the bar that will not move and the pantry that keeps draining are the lesson.
* AND NOTHING SAYS "INFINITY×" AT YOU ANY MORE. A fight your strike cannot get through has no exchange count, and the surfaces were printing that fact as the literal word: the badge on an action card read "Infinity×", the fight row read "wins in Infinity", and a raid you brought no war score to promised to fall "in 9007199254740991 bouts". Every count now reads ∞, and the lines around it say what they mean — "never wins", "never falls", "nothing gets through" — with the scouting report and the fight card explaining that your strike is not getting through the guard and that the only thing the run spends is food.
* AND A HUNT IS PRICED LIKE A TRAIL NOW, NOT A DELIVERY. Your weapon used to decide only WHETHER a creature could die, never how fast: a keeper scraping one point past a Woolly Bison's hide killed it exactly as quickly as one who could halve it in a blow, because the kill landed on a timer either way. The creature's health is real now and your strike takes it down swing by swing, so the kill takes as long as the fight actually takes. COME PROPERLY ARMED AND NOTHING MOVES — four swings is the line every hunt is tuned to, and any weapon the biome hands you is comfortably over it, so every hunting rate in the game is exactly what it was. Come under-armed and you pay in time: a stone blade at the Woolly Bison drags each kill from 9 seconds to 23. Come with nothing and it never falls at all. The Falls-in row on the card tells you the swing count before you commit, and the health bar you watch is now literally the bar the hunt is emptying — not a drawing of one.
* '''And the free ride ends earlier than it did.''' The hide every wild creature wears got twice as thick (dev call, after seeing the first pass): bare hands can still fell the Compy, Titanis, Gallimimus and Pachy — the whole starting ladder — and stop dead at the Wild Raptor instead of carrying you all the way to the Cave Crocodile. They are slower at it than they were, mind: past the Compy a bare-handed kill drags, and the first stone blade you knap puts every one of those four back on its listed time. "Bring a weapon" is a lesson you now learn at level 40 rather than level 60, and it keeps mattering: a stone blade will no longer scratch a Dire Mammoth at all, where before it managed a very slow kill. As ever this only touches keepers who turned up under-equipped — the weapons each biome hands you clear its own hunts with room to spare, and nothing about a properly armed keeper's rate has moved by a single point.