Editing Changelog (section)

== v0.55.16 — The Warden's Survey — Spare Dig Maps Buy The Ground You Need ==
* PLAYER REPORT — "I have all of the museum upgrades except the last pack, so I'm 52/57. But I'm at level 89 and I have like 351 digging maps." Both halves of that are the same bug seen from opposite ends. Dig Site Maps drop per cave WIN and are spent per dig SLOT, and every map is locked to one biome — so a cave mints its own ground's maps about two and a half times faster than every slot in the game can burn them, and roughly thirty times faster across an offline night, while the one ground you still owe skeletons trickles in from somewhere else entirely. You end up drowning and starving at once.
* THE WARDEN'S SURVEY opens on the [[Delving]] page, under the dig slots: trade a stack of spare maps for a single map of the ground you actually need. The price is 4 maps for the shallow grounds, 5 for the middle, 7 for Cinder Terraces, Skyfall Scree and The Shattered Bed. You always lose maps on the swap and you can only survey into ground you have already opened, so it is a way to spend dead stock — never a shortcut past running the right cave, which stays several times better.
* '''The museum costs exactly what it always did.''' The survey changes WHERE a dig happens, never how many digs a skeleton takes or how long one runs: the full 57-species hall is still about 386 digs and 381 slot-hours. It also rescues the other end of the ladder — the Sunken Barrow is the most expensive wing in the game and nobody at [[Delving]] 80 goes back to the Sunlit Grotto for its maps.
* '''The fifth dig slot exists now.''' The Echo of the First Warden grants one, and the [[Excavation]] panel has never drawn it — it built exactly four slots no matter what you owned, so the rarest relic in the caves did nothing at all. It appears, and a locked slot no longer invents a [[Delving]] level it cannot reach.
* '''And the panel stopped fibbing.''' A skull you have already found is announced as the spare it is, instead of "the [[Museum]] will want this someday" — which at 52/57 is nine finds in ten. Journal pages for a wing you have finished say so, rather than flashing READY at a Curator's Desk that closed when the wing did. And the headline no longer says "about one dig in twelve": the real rate runs 14% on the shallowest ground down to 8.6% on the deepest, and now it says that.