Editing Changelog (section)

== v0.39.0 — Attrition — The Coin Flip Is Gone ==
* '''The coin flip is gone.''' A fight is no longer a hidden dice roll dressed up as a battle — it is attrition. The enemy has a real health bar (difficulty × 6), your gear and party land a real strike each exchange, and the fight takes exactly as many exchanges as the arithmetic says: bar ÷ strike, rounded up. Whether you win was decided by your stats when the run began; watching a fight go badly and losing anyway to a dice roll cannot happen any more, because there is no dice roll.
* '''The card tells you the whole fight before you start.''' "wins in 4 exchanges · take ~62". Strike vs bar, the exchange count, the expected damage bill, and the food math — all computed by the same function the fight itself runs, so the preview and the outcome cannot disagree. The old win% is gone from every card, sheet and scout view; a fight has a SIZE now, not odds.
* UNDER-POWERED RUNS STILL WIN — they just cost more. Come in below the intended gear and the fight runs long: more exchanges, more damage, more food, and the run itself takes proportionally longer on the clock (a 8-exchange grind takes twice the listed time). Master the content and the fight shortens to a single exchange — the run then takes its listed time, never less. Losing a run outright no longer exists.
* '''The only ways out early are the pack or the grave.''' If the pantry runs dry mid-fight and the next exchange would end you, your party tries to drag you clear — the swiftness escape roll, now the one deliberate roll left in a run, because surviving your own provisioning should not be a certainty. No party, no food, no luck: the death rules from v0.38.29 apply unchanged.
* '''Getting hurt moved to where the hurt is.''' Party injuries no longer ride lost runs (there are none) — they ride STRUGGLING wins: grind a fight out past the 4-exchange anchor and every member risks the same injury the old losses carried. Win inside the anchor and the pack walks out clean. Cave wounds still fester at double time, and Stalker's Greaves still stop that.
* '''Hunts show the real kill.''' The creature's actual health — the same number its ecology card has always listed — now drains in strikes sized by your attack, so a better weapon visibly lands fewer, bigger hits. The hunt's pace, loot and XP are untouched: the interval is still the clock, and your rates are byte-identical to before.
* '''Rival duels and sieges count bouts now.''' A rival fighter or outpost defender falls after a fixed number of bouts — at the anchor score one bout, at parity two, at half strength four — and the [[Rivals]] page and outpost picker print exactly that ("falls in 3 bouts") instead of a percentage. Every bout a defender still stands costs siege blood, so a weak war party still routs; a strong one sweeps.
* '''Dispatch missions never fail any more.''' An under-strength squad comes back LATE — up to three times the printed clock — and hurt, with the weakest members carrying the injuries, but they always bring the full haul home. The picker prices all of it before you send: the real return time, the lateness multiplier, and exactly how many will come home hurt.
* The Pearlscale Vest's old "half damage on cave losses" now halves the bill in cave fights that run past the anchor — the fights that replaced losses. The Riftbound Trinket's +6% win chance is now +6% strike, worth the same push. The battle log's third number is the fight's length in exchanges instead of odds that no longer exist.
* If a run turns hopeless mid-fight with no food and no escape, the protective stop still catches you exactly as it always has (with death rules active, death is death — v0.38.29 stands).
* The line under the run bar now says what actually ends the run: "Terror Bird falls in 12s", counting down live to the killing blow, instead of "run resolves in 12s" — the run was always over when the creature died; now the clock says so.