01 Changelog
Development history grouped by date. Most recent changes first.
- The overworld plays its own music. Overworld zones now use their biome’s soundtrack instead of the warehouse loop, so the world no longer sounds like one warehouse. The jungle is new this round: four original tracks, listed in Rackamp under JUNGLE. Tunnels, boss fights and incursions keep their own music.
- The Station: Offsite-1. A new zone, a sealed facility that does not appear on any floor plan, with its own world map entry once you have found your way there. It has a ring corridor, a core housing, a teleporter room and a medical wing, all lit by someone who clearly never met the ones who work there. There are no rifts and no enemies, and sliding security doors decide who goes where.
- Sliding doors with clearance. Station doors open, lock or seal depending on who you are. If your badge does not cover a door you get an AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED notice and a buzz, not a way through. Doors slide, light up and chime on approval. HR describes this as “role-based access”.
- Security Drone SD-9. It patrols the ring corridor and takes an interest in anyone standing where their clearance does not reach. It will warn you first, and if you stay it returns you home. It moves slower than you do, which Security says was a budget decision and not a courtesy.
- The medic lab is a proper destination. Once the station is open to you, a death reboots you there instead of at the usual pad. You come back lying on a treatment bed while a medic bot scans you, works on you and reads out a status. A wall monitor tracks your vitals with a beeping trace that gets less relaxed as things get worse. After a few seconds you sit up. The lab is a safe area, so nothing follows you in. Locked-out technicians still get the regular reboot, and a short, unsettling glimpse of the place.
- Pattern degradation (in testing). A crash that ends in the medic lab can leave you with a fault, named by what killed you: Pattern Misalignment (less max HP), Thermal Drift (slower stamina), Bit Rot (weaker healing) or Packet Loss (longer gadget cooldowns). Severity follows how hard the killing blow was, from SEV-3 Minor up to SEV-1 Critical, and every fault wears off by itself. A HUD tag shows what you have and how long is left.
- Medic implant and treatments (in testing). Technicians can fit a Medical job implant at an implant terminal and treat other players on the lab beds. Treatments are held channels with trade-offs: Chassis Realignment, Coolant Flush, Checksum Scrub, Link Resync, Hot Patch and Full Re-image, each with a cost paid by the patient and a pay-out for the medic. A treated patient is Well-patched for five minutes (+10% max HP) with a scan beam, a bot assist and a burst of light to prove it. The medic bot RA-1 tops people up and will say so out loud.
- Prestige cosmetics are back. The glow floor ring, @ colour, auras, trails and death effects from the prestige shop draw again, so what you bought is visible on your character. They went missing in the renderer move, and Facilities had assumed you were just being modest.
- Rackamp Radio shows what is playing. The internet stations now display the current song title in the player, so you no longer have to guess which of the six stations is the one that is not the hold music.
- Deaths now come with a crash report. The reboot screen names the sector your pattern was recalled to, and a short report on arrival lists what took you down, the damage type and where it happened. Root cause analysis remains pending, as it has since the building opened.
- Sector standing is on your laptop. The OPERATOR status page lists your standing in every sector you have repaired for, from Unlisted up through Known and Trusted to Essential. The form has no box for “Indispensable”, which HR says is deliberate.
- Dr. Ling has picked up a signal. A new four-step job for level 30 technicians starts at Windbreak Station in the Frozen Peaks. It covers a dead uplink on the Glacial Ridge approach that is still transmitting, three repairs, and whatever is guarding the old archive pad. Policy said the archive tapes went offsite, but it never said where.
- Biome pressure now follows the headcount. Pressure builds faster with more technicians online. With two or fewer on shift, any biome above 60 slowly settles, and no incursion can start with fewer than four online. During an incursion, vendors at that sector’s camp charge 25 percent more. The PA now announces falling pressure as well as rising, and Facilities calls this load balancing.
- Applications are open. New technicians can choose a permanent callsign and report to the break room now. The game remains free in the browser, and existing crew keep every character, relic and point of sector reputation. HR has marked the requisition “filled” in advance to save time.
- F8 now files an incident report. Reports include a screenshot and the last 60 seconds of game activity, but never chat or passwords. Confirmed fixes can award account credits, leave a resolution notice at your next login and add to the Incidents Escalated board, because even the warehouse has paperwork.
- F12 files an IT ticket too. While the game has focus, F12 opens the same report dialog as F8. The menu now lists it as “File an IT ticket”, which is what the help desk wanted to call it all along.
- Change your password in-game. Menu → Change password takes your current password and a new one of eight characters or more, and you stay logged in. The form never appears in incident reports.
- Rackamp is installed on every Headnode. The factory music player lists the soundtrack by sector, with auto-follow, shuffle, a boss-music override and a tray widget. Sectors your character has not reached stay classified. A Radio group adds six internet stations and any HTTPS stream you paste in. Facilities did not approve this, but the firmware was already flashed.
- Root Access gear is dropping in the Server Farm. A three-piece level 50 set: the Superuser Headset, Hot-Aisle Bracers and Admin Keyring Belt. Two pieces: gadget cooldowns −25% and +15% gadget damage. Three pieces: every fifth gadget use costs no stamina and no cooldown, and stunned enemies take double gadget damage.
- More tunnel layouts. Tunnels in four sectors now draw from six baked layouts each, so the same route is less likely to come up twice in a shift.
- Warehouse and tunnel bosses have stopped moving one tile at a time. They now glide while chasing or wandering, including the larger tunnel bosses that require more than one square of personal space. Facilities has declined their request for wheels.
- Cryo Containment gear now controls the room. A two-piece set chills enemies for two seconds; all three pieces can shatter a frozen non-boss below 20 percent health and extend Cryo Nova and Cryo Cannon range.
- The Dock has three arena bosses. The Harbor Foreman, Dock Rat King and Smuggler Captain now patrol separate arenas across the district. The escalation chain ends with whoever is still standing.
- The Dock opened its first two tunnel layouts. Cargo passages and work rooms have joined the tunnel rotation beneath the district. Cable management remains outside the approved scope.
- Field Tech dispatch is live. UptimeWatcher sends repair calls through a new DISPATCH tab, marks the route on your cuff, compass and world map, and pays sector standing at repair stations across six sectors. The earned GPS and scanner modules are installed at the Headnode, which remains the only workstation authorised to improve itself.
- The Server Farm has three arena bosses. The Last Sysadmin, Data Hound and The Blue Screen now hold separate rooms among the racks. Their maintenance windows are unscheduled and heavily armed.
- Two more Server Farm tunnels joined the rotation. The new passages mix machine rooms, rack aisles and the sort of cabling that becomes permanent when nobody remembers the original ticket.
- Combat now works between the floor tiles. Sharks and anglerfish move smoothly through the Abyss, while melee weapons hit by distance instead of requiring everyone to stand on matching squares. The combat report no longer accepts "the target was between cells" as a resolution.
- Cryo Containment gear is dropping in Frozen. The Frost Hound, Long Shift and Cold Storage Warden can now award a three-piece level 40 set: the Coolant Line Whip, No Parka Budget and Defrost Gauntlets. Wearing multiple pieces adds maximum health, because Facilities has approved layering.
- Hale has opened File 88-C/05. Frozen now has a four-part level 35 story chain about a failed containment audit, one very long shift and the protective equipment that Procurement declined to buy.
- Zone bosses learned how to fight. Eight bosses across the floor now charge, lunge, fire bolts or drop danger under your feet, with a warning before every attack. The old stand-there-and-trade-hits procedure has been retired without ceremony.
- Two bosses moved into the Flood arenas. The Drowned Diver occupies the Sunken Temple and the Pump Station Operator has taken the Drowned Cathedral. Neither appears to recognise the escalation policy.
- A company-wide job now crosses six zones. Follow The Trusted Route from the Warehouse to the Server Farm, completing story assignments in the Jungle, Cave, Magma and Maintenance along the way. Thirty repeatable support calls keep those areas useful after the main job is done, because the ticket queue is the one thing that survived the apocalypse.
- Maintenance finally looks maintained. Two hundred pumps, cabinets, drums, vents and pieces of floor equipment now turn the empty service corridors into a working industrial space. You can walk around every new machine; Facilities has caused enough obstructions already.
- Three more zones received designed tunnel expeditions. Tunnel runs in Magma, Flood and Maintenance can now choose from six purpose-built maps per zone instead of relying only on randomly generated passages. Flood's versions include visible pools of water, which the incident form describes as "within expected parameters."
- The Server Farm is open. The new data-centre zone replaces the greybox with painted floors, towering rack aisles and hardware that blocks where it stands. Facilities has finally aligned the floor plan with physical reality.
- The Server Farm now looks like a data centre. Four hundred floor vents, cable runs, cooling units, power cabinets and crash carts fill out the zone's once-bare rooms. The equipment is scenery rather than an obstacle, so the cables are tidier than the company's records.
- The Magma Titan clocked in. This new kaiju boss joins Molten Core with a telegraphed fire-breath lane and a tail sweep for anyone who treats personal space as optional.
- The Living Abyss has a final destination. A drowned server-rack chamber now waits in the deep, complete with the relic that justified this entire underwater support ticket.
- Cave and Frozen expeditions gained designed maps. Tunnel runs in both zones can now choose from six purpose-built layouts, each with its own hazards, locked gates and final boss room. Randomly generated passages remain in service for employees who consider getting lost a benefit.
- Two new bosses clocked in for the Frozen zone. Face the Cold Storage Warden in Glacial Ridge or the Frost Hound in Frostbite Hollow. They join the Long Shift as major fights found across the area's tunnel expeditions, and neither has completed the cold-weather safety module.
- The warehouse walls joined the renovation. Flat tile walls gave way to painted concrete, office partitions and loading-dock structure fitted to the rebuilt floor. The starting map now reads as one workplace instead of two maintenance requests stapled together.
- Thin ice finally has a warning label. The Frozen Peaks lake now darkens toward its dangerous interior, so the surface tells you where it may give way. Facilities maintains that the lake was always clearly documented.
- The floor is closed to new hires until release. — Open beta is over. New callsigns and the walk-in demo are both shut off while we finish the last of the pre-release work. Existing crew clock in exactly as before — every character, every hoarded relic, every point of sector reputation stays where you left it, and nothing is being wiped for launch. The doors reopen on release day. We are close.
- The Long Shift stopped being a circle. — The boss waiting on the Ice Throne at the top of the Frozen Peaks had been fighting you as a plain coloured disc since spring. Its art turned out to have been finished and sitting on the shelf the whole time, along with sixteen others. It has a body now, and the arena reads as a fight instead of a diagram.
- The warehouse got its ground. — The map every technician starts in came off the tile grid and onto painted concrete — seams, wear, traffic marks and all. The office block behind it stopped being one surface repeated: the gym, the parking lot, the server room, the kitchen and the rest each stand on their own material now. The whole floor reads at a single brightness, so no room is a dark patch you have to squint into.
- The Server Farm is being rebuilt into rack canyons (in testing). — The sector’s aisles were seven metres deep and read more like caves than a data hall. They are being regenerated as actual server rows you walk between. Test floor only for now — the collision is still being fitted to the new art.
- The Maintenance Tunnels got their ground. — Painted rock and poured floor end to end. The walls carry their weight through relief rather than clutter, which is the difference between a corridor that looks cut out of something and a corridor that looks drawn on.
- The Frozen Peaks got their ground. — Snowfield painted end to end: wind-scoured drift, blue lake ice, and crevasses that finally read as holes in the ground rather than a pattern printed on it. Fourth zone off the tile grid and onto real terrain.
- The floor travels lighter. — Every enemy sheet in the game was rebuilt to a leaner format. Same monsters, same art, a quarter of the graphics memory — which matters a great deal if you are clocking in on the kind of laptop this company actually issues.
- 106 enemies stopped dissolving. — Every legacy monster in the game now has a real death animation — a collapse that plays through and settles into a body on the floor, instead of a full-colour sprite fading politely out of existence.
- You can read the fight now. — Enemies broadcast what they are actually doing: the wind-up, the committed lunge, the charge, and the wide-open window right after all of it goes wrong for them. What the animation shows is what the server believes, so the punish window you can see is the punish window that exists.
- Two more zones got their ground. — The Cave Network and the Flooded Ruins now stand on painted terrain.
- Bosses move like everything else. — Zone bosses run on smooth movement instead of stepping square to square. They were the last things on land still doing it.
- The whole bestiary got re-cut. — Every monster was rebuilt from a much higher-resolution source and then crushed back down into the floor’s own pixel-art style. Fifteen enemies came back on new bodies, and six weapon-carrying bosses now hold their weapons like they intend to use them.
- The dead stay put. — Kill something on land and it leaves a body. Corpses hold for five minutes before the floor quietly takes them back. The room remembers what you did to it.
- The Magma Depths got their ground. — Painted basalt, with the molten fissures burned into the terrain itself rather than laid on top of it.
- New on the roster. — The Tundra Howler joins the Frozen Peaks. The ember drake was re-rendered at its proper scale, and it is considerably larger than you remember.
- You can hear the weather. — Ambience now follows the weather state instead of running on its own schedule. And lava bombs in the Magma Depths land with proper directional audio, so you can hear roughly where the next one is coming down before it arrives.
- Monsters got specialists. — Two more brains joined the roster: zoners, which keep their distance and make you come to them, and elites, which read the fight instead of simply running at it. They also leave things behind — the ground itself is now something a monster can turn against you.
- Weather moved into every biome. — Eruption ash over the Magma Depths, squalls blowing in off the dock, steam venting through Maintenance, and a halon haze in the Server Room. It is anchored to the world, not to your screen, so a squall stays where it is while you walk out of it.
- The Cave Network got content. — A full Deep Survey gear set, three arena bosses, and three storyline chains, all of it underground.
- Big attacks have a pulse. — Boss wind-ups now carry an audible heartbeat through the telegraph. If the drum starts, you are already late.
- Whiteout. — The Frozen Peaks get blizzards. Visibility closes down, the wind picks a direction and commits to it, and you discover exactly how well you know the valley.
- The loading bar does actual work. — The client now renders real frames behind the loading screen instead of counting to a hundred for show. You arrive on the floor already warmed up, which the first ten seconds of a shift will thank you for.
- The dock’s north beach got dressed. — The empty basin above the harbor is now a proper tide-scoured foreshore.
- The flood pulls. — The Flooded Ruins run a real surface current now. Step into a channel and the water has its own opinion about where you are going. Cross it; don’t follow it.
- Facilities housekeeping. — A dead link now returns a proper TICKET NOT FOUND notice instead of the server’s default shrug, the site has a real favicon, and pasting a link into a chat window finally produces a preview card rather than a ransom note.
- Bridges over the lava. Three basalt spans cross the Magma Depths’ tide channels, and all three arrive raised for restoration. The Headnode now marks outstanding bridge work. Facilities calls this backlog visibility.
- The tide announces itself. — Before the lava moves, the ground grumbles. The rumble builds through the warning window, peaks at high tide, and drains out with the ebb. If the floor is talking, get to a causeway.
- Thin ice. — The frozen lake is exactly as trustworthy as it looks. Stand in one place and the ice cracks under you; keep standing and you go through, and the cold shock is not a rounding error. Keep moving — or bring the cryo cannon, which patches the ice right back over.
- The harbor breathes. — The Dock District foreshore runs on a real tide now: every few minutes the sea walks up the flats and takes the low ground back. Seawater doesn’t burn — it just drags at your knees. Time the crossing or wade it slow.
- Required reading. — Two new pages on this very wiki: a New Hire Orientation packet for your first shift, and a recovered field notebook out of locker 44 that Facilities would probably rather you didn’t read.
- The Magma Depths run on a tide. — The zone floor was recomposed into a lava maze — nearly half of it molten — and the lava moves: a rising tide floods the low basalt pixel by pixel, holds at high water, then ebbs back out. Amber ground-glow telegraphs every tile the front will reach in the next fifteen seconds, and the raised causeway arteries never flood. The edge you can see is the edge that burns. Trust the amber.
- Deep snow is deep. — The drift fields in the Frozen Peaks now slow you to a wade while you push through them. Monsters won’t follow you in. They’ll wait.
- The wind picked up. — Frozen ridgelines now gust hard enough to shove you off your line, with downdrafts pouring off the high ground. And you can see the weather working everywhere: wind ribbons and blown debris stream through every outdoor zone.
- The field offices got built. — Every outdoor zone’s field office is now an actual building in that biome’s own architecture — five zones, five distinct shells, doors where the doors really are, entrances widened so you can find them.
- Maintenance conveyors. — Two opposing belts now run near the Pump Station. Ride with the belt and you move half again as fast; walk against it and you’ll get there, eventually. The floor moves now. Adjust.
- Cascade events. — Let three biomes redline at once and the grid doesn’t just leak — it fails in sequence. A Major breach ignites and starts crawling the Great Road, infecting sector after sector, until somebody dives the origin and puts down its Breach Core — or it burns itself out and leaves the map worse for it. There’s a klaxon. You’ll know.
- The warehouse has an outside. — Seen from the jungle, the warehouse is finally a real building: four-bay shipping dock on the east wall, receiving doors on the west, plain corporate siding everywhere else. The jungle, for its part, has started creeping up onto the apron like it wants the lot back.
- The seismic hammer lands like it means it. — Full swing rebuild: raise, hang, slam — and the ground doesn’t crack until the hammer actually arrives. The upheaval ring now matches the true damage radius, ember fissures radiate out and cool over seconds, and every impact leaves a cooling crater underfoot.
- The arc welder escalates. — Hold the beam and it builds: the filament thickens, a second filament joins, and on spread fights the arc chains into a crackling web between targets. Electrified ground lingers where the beam swept, and Reclamation-fitted welders visibly siphon life back up the arc.
- The jungle got its mountains. — The mountain treatment reached the last holdout: the jungle’s edges rose into vegetated karst ranges, with sparse overgrown ridges threading the interior. Look up on the ridgelines — some of them carry ruin shrines nobody has filed a ticket about.
- The mountain treatment went on tour. — The Frozen Peaks rebuild was just the pilot. The Magma Depths, the Cave Network, and the Flooded Ruins all got the same real-topography pass: solid rock ranges you route around instead of flat wall mazes, and each zone dressed in its own rock walls, wreckage, and ground cover.
- The Magma Depths flow now. — Lava rivers wind downhill across the basalt and pool where the ground lets them. They burn exactly as much as you think — but a cryo cannon can freeze a crust over the surface if you need to cross. The crust does not last. Walk faster.
- Water found the Cave Network. — Underground streams cut through the caverns now, draining off into the dark toward wherever underground streams go. Nobody has followed one to the end and reported back.
- The Flooded Ruins were rebuilt around the ferry. — New terrain, same commute: the boat channel and landing pier survived the regeneration, and the ferry still runs on schedule.
- The Frozen Peaks are real mountains now. — The zone was rebuilt as actual topography: solid mountain ranges you route around instead of a maze of flat walls, wide walkable valleys threading between them, glacial ice, frozen lakes, and open snowfield. Same spot on the map — entirely new ground.
- A forest grew in the valleys. — Just over a thousand conifers now stand in belts, thickets, and the occasional lone sentinel on the high ground, with a couple thousand pieces of scattered ground cover beneath them — so the valley floor reads like backcountry, not a parking lot with snow on it.
- The monsters got brains. — Enemy AI was rebuilt around distinct personalities: rushers sprint straight at you, pack hunters spread out to cut off your escape before closing in — and pour out of nests — skirmishers hold range and keep firing even while backing away, ambushers lie hidden and burst out as you pass, and brutes telegraph a straight-line charge that stuns them cold when they crash into a wall. Sidestep accordingly.
- They see and hear you now. — Aggro is no longer a light switch. A perception ladder runs sight and sound through suspicion into full alert, with an indicator over each enemy’s head so you can read exactly how much trouble you’re about to be in — and fewer of them dogpile you at once.
- Everywhere, not just outdoors. — The same brains run the warehouse floor and the biome tunnels. The Tape Spiders have coordinated flanking routes. Sleep well.
- Rifts tear open across the overworld. — When a biome’s pressure builds, it vents: a glowing rift opens in the zone, guarded by that biome’s monsters and leaking more of them out around it. Ignore one and it grows, migrates toward new ground, and corrupts the sector around it.
- Dive in. — Walk onto any rift and you drop through into the breach on the other side. Major rifts hide a Breach Core — find it and put it down. Minor rifts can be cleared from the inside, or sealed at the source with a hold-E channel while the hazard traps around them argue otherwise.
- The Field Scanner. A new Headnode module that clicks like a Geiger counter as a rift gets close. Locating unstable infrastructure is now an officially supported workflow.
- The Abyss has a food chain. — Four new hunters patrol the Living Abyss, each keeping to its own depth band: Razorfin shoals near the surface, Abyssal Viperfish below them, Volt Eels in the dark middle water, and the Deepmaw Fangtooth down near the floor. They cruise, stalk, wind up, and lunge like the Leviathan’s smaller cousins — and the deeper the band, the worse the resident.
- The Anglerfish Lurker. — A soft light now hangs in the dark of the Living Abyss. It is attached to something buried beneath it, and that something cannot be hurt while it hides — bait it out of the silt and settle the matter in open water.
- Everyone else moves the way you do. — Remote players and enemies now glide on smoothly buffered motion instead of snapping from tile to tile. Your coworkers have stopped teleporting. Regrettably, so have the monsters.
- You carry a laptop now. — Pop open the UptimeWatcher — a draggable, resizable window that stays out of your way while you keep playing. Click the world to drop focus and move; click the laptop to drive it again. Its tabs run the real tools: MAP is the full world map, WORK ORDERS is your live ticket board, and OPERATOR shows your vitals and your installed Headnode modules. Press
Mfor the map,Tfor work orders. - Headnode minimap. — A live local minimap now sits in the corner of your HUD — nearby terrain, blips, your heading, and your current GPS waypoint — with a resizable frame and zoom controls.
- Every biome has its own ambience now. — A full environmental audio pass gives each environment its own soundscape. Cave, magma, ice, the server room, the datastream, and the flooded ruins each hum, drip, and groan with their own character, stitched into long seamless loops underneath the music.
- Survival you can hear. — Running low on air now warns you faster the worse it gets, and the cold has its own audio tell. You can feel the deep closing in without staring at the meter.
- More of the world makes noise. — The Seismic Hammer and Sonic Pulse picked up sound effects, the Abyssal Leviathan rumbles while it stalks and groans when it dies, and menus, equipping gear, critical hits, and explosions all got their own audio.
- Outdoor walls are real rock now. — The jungle’s flat, square tile walls were replaced with organic 3D rock — raised boulder ridges with shaded faces that you walk behind, instead of geometric blocks. Trees stand up off the ground the same way, so the outdoors finally reads with real depth.
- The Abyssal Leviathan. Something major is waiting in the Living Abyss. The dark has teeth now, and Facilities has declined to issue a larger flashlight.
- There’s a thief on the dock. — A seagull now wheels over the harbor, and if you leave loot lying on the ground too long it lands, waddles over, snatches it, and stashes it somewhere else. Mind your drops.
- Blood in the water. — Land or take a hit while submerged and the blood billows out as a drifting cloud that curls through the current — and gets pushed around as you and the wildlife swim through it — instead of a flat stain on the seabed.
- “Reach the Bottom” — a guided dive to the seabed. — The dock’s scuba outfitter has a job: ride a charter down and make it all the way to the floor of the Living Abyss, then back. GPS breadcrumbs lead you down the shaft to the seabed, then turn around and route you home to collect. First completion pays a unique reward; run it again any time for experience. The charter costs gold — the deep isn’t a free trip.
- Catch the ferry to the Flooded Ruins. — A scheduled boat now runs between the Dock District and the Flooded Ruins on a fixed timetable. Walk aboard while it’s docked, take a seat, and ride it across the water — it announces its departures, carries you through the zone change mid-voyage, and lets you off on the far pier.
- Enemies wade now. — Creatures that chase you into water wade through it and slow down instead of skating across the surface, and they sink into it the way you do. Frozen ice bridges still carry them at full speed.
- The jungle river bends like a real one. — The jungle’s main river was re-cut to wander naturally through the terrain instead of following an obvious hand-drawn curve, with the old channel healed back into jungle.
- The Flooded Ruins are properly flooded. — The standing water across the flooded district is now water you actually interact with — wade the shallows, swim the deeper stretches, and your gadgets take on their underwater behavior. It’s lit and calmed so it reads as still floodwater, enemies will follow you in, and you can still freeze a path across it.
- A scuba outfitter opened on the dock. — A diver named Moray set up on the Scuba Supply Dock selling air tanks and wetsuits — bigger tanks for more bottom time, warmer suits to hold off the cold at depth — and he’ll charter a dive down toward the Living Abyss. Gear matters down there: it’s cold, dark, and short on air.
- The Dock District is a real harbor now. — The old dock maze was rebuilt from scratch into a working harbor: open sea to the east with a wavering coastline, three docks reaching out over the water, a dry-dock basin, a dockside town, and a fishing camp. The exits were moved to match the geography — overland north to the Frozen Peaks, and a boat east to the Flooded Ruins.
- Diving goes side-scrolling — a new way to play (in testing). — Dive beneath the surface and the camera flips to a side-scroller so depth reads top-to-bottom. A full survival layer is coming together down there: an air supply that runs out, water that gets colder and bites harder the deeper you go, and a depth gauge — plus a “Living Abyss” zone taking shape with a hand-held lamp that lights the water around you, drifting marine snow, swaying kelp, and creatures that swim past in the dark. It’s being tuned in dev test zones for now — not yet wired into the live world, but it’s coming.
- Gadgets fight differently underwater. — Submerge a fight and your loadout changes character. Electric arcs conduct through the water and hit everything in range (mind your own footing). The flamethrower becomes a bubble-blast that encases an enemy and floats it helplessly upward. Cryo grants a protective ice-shell and longer freezes. All six modifier gadgets got reworked underwater behavior too, including a new gravity whirlpool that drags enemies into the eye and holds them under.
- Elemental bridges and burning lava. — Fire the cryo cannon at water from dry land and it freezes into a walkable ice bridge; aim at lava and the surface hardens into crust you can cross. The flamethrower melts ice faster than it naturally thaws. Fire cryo while submerged and it crystallizes an impassable ice wall right in front of you. Lava tiles now burn anything standing in them over time — so freezing or hardening a path is suddenly worth doing. Enemies will happily use your bridges, too.
- The jungle has weather now. — The jungle cycles through conditions on a shared timer: fog that drifts and stays anchored to the map, timed rain with splash effects, and lighting that shifts between bright sun and grey overcast. Everyone in the zone sees the same sky.
- Atmosphere, restored. — Per-biome ambient particles are back — embers, motes, and drifting debris suited to each environment — and the warehouse picked up slow dust motes drifting through the light.
- Big zones run smooth again. — A rendering fix cleared up the stutter that had crept into the largest cave-walled maps — the magma caverns especially, where having the whole zone on screen could drag the framerate to a near-slideshow. They render smoothly again, whether you’re moving or standing still.
- Quest-givers actually talk to you. — Walk up to a zone quest NPC — Kira, Maya, or Thornwell — and instead of a one-line chat bubble you get a proper dialogue panel: a greeting, a “Tell me more” option that fills in the lore, and a clean Accept or Maybe Later. They remember whether you’ve met before, too.
- Enemies scale to your level. — Zone enemies and the named arena bosses now scale up to match your character, so a high-level player no longer strolls in and one-shots a boss that’s meant to be a fight. Tough zones stay tough as you grow.
- The Reclamation Protocol set comes alive. — The jungle’s three-piece Reclamation Protocol set traded its placeholder stats for a real kit. Two pieces: your hits apply Overgrowth poison and return health to you. Three pieces: bonus health and damage, a poison aura that ticks nearby afflicted enemies, and extra lifesteal against anything already poisoned.
- The 3D version of Server Floor is coming together. — A lot of the energy this month went into the 3D Unity build, and it’s shaping up to be the most ambitious version of Server Floor yet: the warehouse fully remastered with HDRP lighting and mesh-based furniture/props, animated NPCs and vendors, mining and the flamethrower ported from 2D, and multiplayer — connect to a dev server and spawn into the warehouse together. An account layer (login, saved characters, sign-up, server-side persistence) is in and being readied for the first live multiplayer test. The 2D web version stays live and playable — and it’s still getting new tech (see below).
- Swim & wade, version two. — Swimming got a real survival layer: an air meter that drains while you’re under the surface and refills when you come up, plus buoyancy that bobs you in deep water instead of treating it like a flat floor. Wading into a river finally feels like wading into a river. (A zone-cache fix landed alongside it so river zones load cleanly.)
- Rivers that bend and meander. — The jungle’s north–south spine river was widened about 30% and given meander turns so it snakes through the trees instead of running ruler-straight. Decoration placement is now footprint-aware — trees, ferns, and props no longer spawn standing in the middle of the water.
- Curved rivers flow correctly. — The flowing-surface system gained a curved-river flow map so the water visibly flows along a bend in the right direction instead of sliding sideways through it, plus corner rounding so river turns read as smooth curves rather than blocky steps. Shipped live to /play/.
- Bent-river test bed + promotion to live. — Added dead-end river handling and a dedicated
fxtest-bendtuning zone for dialing in curved flow, then promoted the flowing-surface sprites and plumbing from the dev server to the live /play/. The river tech players see is now the same one being tuned in dev.
- Flowing surface rebuilt on a mesh; first spine river. — Bent rivers now render correctly, and the flowing-surface renderer was rebuilt on a Mesh + Shader approach — dropping the old filter-based pipeline for something that scales to long, winding waterways. The first full north–south spine river was carved through the jungle on the new mesh system, the backbone the meandering rivers above build on.
- Active dev focus shifts to a 3D Unity build. — The next-generation Server Floor is being rebuilt from the ground up in Unity. Same DNA — same warehouse, same IT-roguelike core — in an entirely 3D world: full-voxel terrain at 10 cm per voxel, mineable walls, breakable floors, and the option to dig straight down out of one zone and emerge into the one below it. Mining tools, explosives, and world-modifying gadgets are part of the design from day one. Render pipeline is HDRP with hardware ray tracing on the table. The full announcement is on the news page.
- The 2D web version stays live. — serverfloor.com/play/ is not going anywhere. It’s where the design got proven and where the lore was written, and it stays online and playable for as long as anyone wants to play it. Active feature development moves to the Unity build; the 2D version will keep getting maintenance and the occasional polish pass when something obvious comes up.
- What’s already in the prototype. — A web prototype written in Babylon.js + TypeScript validated the architecture before the Unity move. Working in that prototype: full voxel terrain (10 cm voxel grid, greedy-mesher chunking, 50 m × 50 m zone tiles), the 2D player ported to a 3D mesh with rigged motion-capture animations from Adobe Mixamo (idle / walk / run / hook punch / sword slash / hit reaction), parametric warehouse content authoring including the shipping-line conveyor, FPS player controller with AABB collision against voxels, dynamic lighting, post-FX, and a 50×50 m jungle stress test. The web prototype isn’t public — its job was to de-risk the move to Unity, which it did.
- Where the Unity port is right now. — Unity Personal license activated on the cloud build server, end-to-end Linux → Windows .exe pipeline live. Foundation tier shipped: greedy mesher ported to C#, voxel storage, FPS player controller, HDRP rendering with sun + sky + fog + exposure dialed in. Warehouse content port live: 50×50 m concrete floor with one shipping-line conveyor moving cardboard packages end-to-end, first-person mouse-look, WASD-relative-to-facing. Mixamo character port, jungle biome port, and the full mechanic port from the 2D codebase are next.
- Water and lava are alive now. — Both fluids share a new flowing-surface renderer running on a custom WGSL/GLSL shader: directional flow, surface displacement, animated highlights, simulated caustics on the floor underneath, glowing edges where the fluid meets a bank, and an emissive pulse for lava. Water reads through to the floor underneath in shallow patches, deepens to opaque toward the middle, and ripples when something hits the surface (with a continuous low-amplitude idle wave on top). Lava shares the entire pipeline with a hotter parameter set — future magma zones get the rendering for free.
- Wading and underwater items. — Walk into water and your sprite partially sinks below the waterline as you approach a bank, with a soft drop-shadow on the bottom and a depth-based blue tint. Items dropped into water render through the surface with the same depth treatment so you can still see what’s down there to fish out.
- Storyline progression goes live. The jungle now carries a connected set of field assignments. A new hold-E to channel verb powers objectives that require someone to remain near the problem instead of forwarding the ticket.
- Flame, Acid, and Cryo cannons rebuilt. — The three spray gadgets got a top-to-bottom visual rework on a shared pipeline. Each cone is now a fourteen-blob soft-dot chain along the firing axis, sin-wobbling for organic flow, tapering at the nozzle. Particles burst out of the wobble path with forward-180° velocities, weighted toward the cone terminus — with chunky tip-of-the-spray embers landing where the cone actually does its work. Cardinal and diagonal firing have equal visual length now. Origin halos and per-tile floor glow pulled in too. Reads deliberate in a way it never quite did before.
- Jump. — Press Space to jump. Costs 25 stamina, regens at 5/s. Other players see your sprite scale up with a ground shadow lock under you so it reads as airtime rather than a teleport. Walking into water now puts you in a swimming state with a blue tint overlay, bubble particles, and a ripple ring at your feet — slow flag stays on while you wade.
- Seven new office buildings. — Cave, magma, frozen, dock, flood, maint, and server zones now each have at least one office building. Cave / magma / frozen / flood get full 80×55 stamps you can walk into; dock / maint / server get a door punched into existing wall. Either way, approaching the door pulses warm office light out into the surrounding tiles. The corporate footprint expands.
- Magma biome character pass. — Magma got a visual personality of its own. Lava
^tiles are now real light sources, pulsing red into the surrounding stone. New ambient wall decoration — drips, cracks, condensation, the kind of detail you scan past until you don’t — pulled in for every dim biome via a shared decoration system. A per-biome darken pass adds contrast: magma at 50%, cave and flood at 55%, maint at 60%; warehouse, jungle, and office buildings stay full-bright. The magma zone reads like a magma zone now instead of recolored hallway tiles.
- Warehouse opens onto the jungle. — The outdoor zone is gone. The warehouse exterior and parking lot now sit directly on the south end of the jungle map — walk out the south doors and you’re in the trees, no portal, no zone transition. The jungle map grew from 500×800 to 500×1130 to fit. The warehouse roof now renders around the outer perimeter so you read the building from above. The shortest commute you’ve ever had to a primeval death zone.
- HP bar damage trail. — When you take a hit, a white ghost bar now lingers behind the red HP fill for a quarter-second before draining down, so you can see how much you just lost at a glance. Snaps instantly on heal. Underneath: every HUD bar (HP, stamina, XP, forklift fuel, tutorial progress) was animating its width on the CPU and is now on the GPU, freeing roughly a quarter of the main-thread budget for the rest of the frame.
- Smoother movement on weaker hardware. — The tile renderer was rebaking a ~50×50 patch of floor every twenty tiles of camera scroll — fine on a desktop, a hitch every ~800ms on a corporate laptop while running through a zone. It now shifts the existing canvas by the scroll delta and only redraws the new strip of tiles that scrolled in. Per-rebake cost dropped from ~40ms to ~3-8ms; the periodic stutter while moving is gone.
- The new renderer is finished. — A week of non-stop work on the PixiJS + WebGPU renderer crosses the finish line today. The old Canvas2D renderer literally couldn’t run the jungle — thousands of decoration sprites hitched hard on entry on integrated-GPU laptops. The new renderer now holds a steady frame rate in the densest zones we’ve built, with room to keep adding. This is the foundation the next phase of content stands on.
- Jungle feels instantly smoother. — Corporate-laptop hardware with a heavy CPU slowdown can now walk around the jungle canopy at a playable frame rate. The zone that was previously the worst-case benchmark now runs cleanly, which means every zone still to come — Cave, Magma, Flood, Sunken City — starts from a known-good place. 2,033 decorations visible at once in the jungle, no stalls.
- Frame rate behaves on strong hardware. — Fast GPUs were previously running the engine far harder than necessary — firing renders faster than any monitor could display them, which overloaded integrated graphics when gadgets like the flamethrower got dense. The engine now paces itself sensibly, so dedicated and integrated GPUs both stay within their happy range.
- Renderer pipelining work. — Deep instrumentation pass on the main thread ↔ Worker ↔ GPU handoff. Added per-segment timing for everything the main thread does each frame, isolated the hand-off gap between render completion and the next dispatch, and experimented with two pipelining approaches (eager resend, then build-ahead stash) to eliminate wasted time. Main-thread idle on our “IT-still-hasn’t-upgraded-you” laptop simulator dropped to 0ms.
- Jungle decoration performance work. — Audited the jungle’s decoration-layer hot path. Per-frame spatial-bucket subset cache added so the ~2,000 decoration sprites on screen don’t all re-evaluate visibility each frame. Canopy render-texture bake pass mirrored from an earlier trunk bake. Incremental under-the-hood progress toward keeping the engine comfortable on weaker hardware.
- New renderer is now the default at
/play/— The PixiJS + WebGPU engine we’ve been running at/devplay/for a while is now the default at/play/. Nothing looks different on purpose — this is the engine swap under the hood. It frees up a lot of GPU headroom the old path couldn’t use, which is what we’ve been building toward. - Last visual systems brought across — The bits that hadn’t been carried over from the old engine yet came across today: biome weather (rain in flood, fog in cave and maintenance, heat shimmer in magma, scan lines in server, snow in ice and cold), the death fade and “YOU DIED” reveal, the red low-HP vignette, the boss intro overlay, and wall/floor contact shadows. Same behaviors the old engine had — the new one just didn’t draw them yet.
- Receiving and shipping crew brought across — Carried the busiest corners of the warehouse over to the new renderer: Eddie and Marco at the receiving dock with their pallet routine, the shipping conveyor with boxes in the right draw order, driveable warehouse forklifts, NPC name labels and quest markers, smoke/fire on damaged forklifts, and the L-look cursor naming NPCs. Things the old engine already did — the new one needed them wired up before we could flip it on.
- New Rendering Engine Hits a Major Milestone — Most of the core visual systems are now running in the new renderer (2D Canvas → PixiJS v8 with a WebGPU backend): tiles, walls, sprites, particles, gadget VFX, 3D gadget auras, lighting, shadows, post-processing, and fog of war now draw through the GPU in batched passes instead of per-frame Canvas operations on the CPU. You can try it at
devplay/?pixi=1. Once it ships to/play/, it opens up effects the old renderer couldn’t afford on weaker hardware: animated flowing water and lava, more dynamic lights at once, full-quality bloom on integrated GPUs, and a particle budget that doesn’t have to auto-downgrade. Still more systems left to port and QA to do, but the hardest build work is behind us. - Jungle Biome Performance Breakthrough — The jungle’s 2,000+ scattered trees, palms, bushes, and ground-cover sprites were the single biggest bottleneck for the Canvas renderer — large-frame stalls on integrated-GPU laptops were almost entirely caused by it. Under PixiJS the entire decoration layer renders in one batched GPU pass per frame instead of thousands of individual canvas operations, and the per-frame allocation churn that was rebuilding the decoration registry every tick is gone. The jungle now holds a steady framerate on hardware that previously hitched on entry. This is the proof that the new engine handles the dense, art-heavy zones still being built without compromise.
- Rendering Engine Phase 1 Build Wave — A big build day on the new PixiJS + WebGPU renderer: four parallel waves landed the core layers at once — tile layer (floors, autotiled walls, biome textures), entity layer (players, enemies, NPCs, items), decoration layer (trees, props, ground cover with animated canopies), wall depth layer (3D cube walls), lighting layer (dynamic lights and fog of war), and post-processing layer (bloom, vignette, color grading, death fade). Mini-systems like the microwave, shredder, shipping line, and receiving dock automation were brought over in parallel. Previous days were foundational (atlases, tooling) — this is when most of the visible layers came together.
- Per-Zone Loading Screens — Each zone now loads with its own themed loading screen instead of a single generic progress bar — biome-tinted background, zone name, and a phased breakdown of what’s being loaded (assets, atlases, GPU upload). Available in the new renderer at
devplay/?pixi=1.
- Jungle Zone Environmental Pass — The jungle’s visual pass is in. Tens of thousands of trees, palms, bushes, ground cover, and landmarks scatter across the map, with the density ramping up into dense canopy rings that frame each boss arena. Ten hand-picked landmarks anchor future ticket destinations across the four corners of the zone so quests won’t retrace the same corridor twice. Mossy floor with scattered fern patches renders underneath the trees. Vines hang down from south-facing cave walls. Tall trees sort their canopies above the player so you walk under the leaves, the same way you already do with the animated trees in the warehouse. Quests, NPC wiring, zone-specific loot and gear sets, and boss encounters are still in development — the zone isn’t open to the public yet. This is the quality bar the other seven zones will clear when their sprite art lands.
- Equipped Item Protection — You can no longer accidentally sell or salvage gear you’re currently wearing. Dragging an equipped piece to the vendor, the context-menu sell option, and the shredder feed path are all guarded at the source. The equipped slot stays locked until you unequip it yourself.
- Smooth Slow Effect — Slow status effects now gradually dampen your movement on the client instead of rubber-banding you back half a tile every server tick. Getting slowed feels like wading through mud rather than twitching in place.
- Tile Effects on Ice Slide Landings — Landing on a button, trap, or hazard at the end of an ice slide now triggers the tile effect like any other step. Previously you could ride a slide straight over a pressure plate without activating it.
- Cleaner Status Combat Log — Stun and slow messages no longer flood the combat log when you’re getting chain-CC’d — repeat hits collapse into a single throttled line. "Resisted" renamed to "impeded" for the partial resistance you get when fighting enemies far above your level.
- Low HP Feedback System — When you drop to critical HP, the screen edges pulse red, the audio mix goes muffled through a lowpass filter, and a heartbeat thump plays in time with your vitals. You no longer have to be watching your HP bar to realize you’re one hit from dying — the whole game tells you.
- Boss Telegraph Flash — Boss sprites now visibly flash during the telegraph window right before a big attack, layered on top of the existing floor markers. You can read a boss’s windup even when you’re not staring at the ground.
- Combo Counter — Stack consecutive kills within three seconds of each other and a stylized combo counter pops next to the player — "3x", "5x", "8x", climbing as you keep the chain alive. Miss the window and it resets. Adds rhythm to grinding waves and gives a visible read on how well a fight is going.
- Critical Hits — Crits now roll on every gadget and melee swing. When one lands, the damage number floats up bigger, brighter, and yellow so you can feel it across the screen. Crit chance scales with gear, so building toward it is a real progression lever.
- Status Effect Sprite Tints — Burning enemies now tint orange, frozen ones tint cyan, poisoned green, corroded brown, stunned white. Status effects are no longer something you have to read off a tiny icon — you can tell at a glance what's going on with every mob in a chaotic fight, even through walls and ceilings.
- Directional Damage Indicator — When you take a hit from off-screen or behind you, a red half-arc curls up from the ground in the direction of the attacker, brightest at the source point and fading as it arches over your head. Multiple hits within a half-second blend into one weighted arc instead of strobing. Closes the "where did that come from" question every time you die.
- 27 Zone Encampment NPCs — All seven overworld zones — cave, magma, frozen, dock, flood, maint, server — now have unique encampment characters: combat trainers, gatherers, delivery quest givers, and vendors. Twenty-seven hand-crafted pixel characters in one drop, each with eight-direction walking and idle animations. Outposts feel populated instead of empty.
- New Login Page — Atmospheric warehouse hero background and an oversized Server Floor title. The login screen now sets the tone for the game before you click Launch.
- Smarter Defaults for New Accounts — Fresh accounts now start at Ultra VFX quality (most modern hardware can handle it — the previous "High" default was over-cautious), cooldown bars show in both the action bar AND under the player, and the camera zoom defaults to a tighter 2.625x for a more immediate gameplay view. Existing players keep whatever they had set.
- Five New Jungle Enemies — The jungle now has actual unique inhabitants instead of recycled warehouse sprites. Overgrown Technician — an IT worker the jungle slowly ate, mossy gray skin and a hardhat covered in patches of green. Protocol Warden — dark-armored sentinel of corrupted protocols. Root Stalker — used to be a bear, mostly roots now. Worm Process and Telnet Zombie. Hand-crafted pixel sprites with full eight-direction walking and attack animations.
- Forge Master — Magma Vendor — A burly molten-metal blacksmith vendor character now tends the magma encampment, joining Roots over in the jungle outpost. Two zones with vendors of their own — five more on the way.
- Sprite Generation Pipeline — Internal pipeline for batch-generating new pixel characters with full eight-direction animations. What used to be a one-by-one workflow is now a scalable batch process. Sets up the next several days of zone NPC and enemy content drops.
- Animated Canopy Trees — Trees in the jungle now have living, swaying leaves. Each big tree is a trunk anchored to the ground plus a canopy that pivots gently in a sin-wave wind pattern overhead. You walk under the canopy at 70% opacity so your character is still visible through the leaves — the jungle feels like an actual forest with weather and wind, not a static backdrop.
- 164 Decoration Sprites Curated — A library of hand-curated zone scenery sprites is now ready for placement: tents, crystals, workbenches, chests, antennas, signage, ground details, vegetation. Tagged by zone, by size, and by walkable-vs-blocking. They'll go into the world once ticket and quest points of interest are planned out.
- Zone Decoration Editor — New visual tool for placing, sizing, and layering decoration sprites in any zone. Walkable vs blocking flags per sprite so players can stroll through grass tufts but stop at workbenches. The tool that will dress every encampment once the quest layouts are nailed down.
- Tutorial Rebuilt: 5-Act Guided Tour — A full 21-step guided tour for new players. Five acts — Welcome, Combat, Progression, Tunnels, Endgame — with center title cards on act transitions, a live combat VFX showcase in a clean test arena, and multi-room camera pans that drift through cave, ice, magma, datastream, and boss rooms. Auto-runs for new accounts. Replayable any time via the
/tutorialchat command from a safe zone. - Pre-Warm Loading Pipeline — The "loading map" bar now actually waits for the entire game world to be GPU-uploaded before letting you in. No more half-loaded floor tiles fading in for twenty seconds after the bar finishes. Login → warehouse drops from a noticeable stutter-fade to a clean cut-in.
- Zone Art Lazy-Loads — Entering a zone used to stall the client for five-to-ten seconds while the browser downloaded every biome's floor tiles, autotile atlases, and overlay textures at once. Each zone's art is now fetched only on first entry, so the warehouse login is fast and zones appear in under a second on most connections.
- Better VFX Timing for Server-Pushed Effects — Effects that originate on the server (EMP pulses, cryo nova, sonic pulse, BSOD blasts) used to lose the first few hundred milliseconds of their animation to network latency — the early flash and particle burst windows would already be over by the time the client could draw the first frame. The client now normalizes their timestamps on arrival, so every effect plays its full animation regardless of network conditions.
- The Game Has a Name: Server Floor — The dungeon crawler now lives at serverfloor.com. After months of "the encoro game" or "the IT roguelike," there's finally a real name on the door. The IT pun lives on — "Server Floor" reads as both the data center floor where you grind tickets AND a dungeon level you crawl through. Full site rebranded across the homepage, wiki, login pages, and in-game UI. Old links to encoro.thundercon.net continue to work and automatically redirect.
- Global CDN — Server Floor is now served through a global content delivery network with edge nodes at 250+ locations worldwide. Players in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America will see noticeably faster page loads, sprite downloads, and music streaming as static assets are cached at the nearest edge POP. Real-time game traffic still routes directly to the origin server for zero added latency on combat and movement — only the static assets get the CDN treatment.
- Mobile Site Overhaul — The site nav now collapses into a hamburger menu on phones and tablets. The 14 wiki nav links no longer wrap to multiple rows on small screens — they fold into a tap-to-expand drawer. The changelog date sidebar — previously a 30+ entry list eating the entire mobile screen — now collapses into a compact "Jump to date" button. Tap a date and the menu auto-closes so the changelog content is immediately visible.
- Wider Encampment Safe Zones — Zone encampment NPCs are now spread out further around the campfire, and the safe zone radius has been increased so the camp feels like an actual outpost instead of a tight cluster. Enemies also no longer pile up at the safe zone perimeter when chasing players inside it — they correctly disengage and wander instead of crowding the boundary like a polite mob with a velvet rope.
- Edge Security — Vulnerability scanners probing for credentials, admin paths, and CMS exploits are now blocked at the edge before they reach the game server. AI training crawlers are also blocked — they consume significant bandwidth scraping wikis without sending real players in return. Combined with the CDN, this means the origin server only handles real players and real game traffic.
- Wiki Maintenance Improvements — Behind-the-scenes upgrade to how wiki pages share their navigation, footer, and structure. Future wiki updates — new pages, menu items, theme tweaks — now propagate everywhere instantly instead of requiring 13 separate file edits. Translates to faster, more frequent wiki updates going forward.
- WebP Asset Overhaul — Every sprite, tile, icon, and scene background the game ships to your browser is now WebP instead of PNG. Total game asset footprint dropped from about 4.3 GB to 840 MB — an 81% reduction — with zero visible quality loss on sprites (lossless encoding preserves every pixel) and near-imperceptible loss on the large scene backgrounds (visually-lossless q=90). First-load time is cut dramatically, mobile data usage collapses, and the CDN caches the whole game in far less space. If you're on a phone tethered to spotty LTE, the difference is night and day.
- Player-Data Storage Rebuild — The save system has been rebuilt on top of a proper database instead of one JSON file per player. Logins are instant regardless of how many players have accounts, leaderboards are computed from an indexed query rather than a directory scan, and save writes are ACID-atomic so a crash mid-save can never corrupt your character. Completely transparent upgrade — your existing account and inventory carry over exactly as they were.
- Passwords Are Hashed Now — Use a Real One — Your account password is now run through a one-way hash (scrypt, with a unique salt per account) before it touches disk. The server literally cannot read your password back out — not even the admin, not even the owner with root access to the database file. Old plaintext passwords were scrubbed during the save migration. Short version: it is now safe to set a password you actually care about. Please do.
- Automated Off-Site Backups — Every day the server snapshots its full state (player DB, admin credentials, configs, biome incursion state, everything) and pushes it to encrypted cloud storage off-site. If the VPS caught fire tonight, the entire game — including every player's character, level, gear, and gold — would be restorable to a fresh host within about ten minutes. Your save is safer than most indie games will ever bother to make it. Also the wall art.
- Zone Enemies Come Alive — The 260+ enemies populating each overworld zone now actively tick: they patrol, aggro on sight, chase, attack, and respawn. Each zone enemy scales to the zone’s level range (or higher if a stronger player is present), so zones act as natural gates — a level 20 player walking into the frozen peaks will be promptly reminded why they shouldn’t. Bosses respawn on a 5 minute timer; normals on 30 seconds.
- Fast Zone Loading — Entering an overworld zone used to stall the client for 5–10 seconds while the browser downloaded every biome’s floor tiles, autotile atlases, and overlay textures at once. The asset pipeline is now lazy-per-biome — only the warehouse loads at login, and each zone’s art is fetched on first entry. Zones now load in under a second on most connections.
- Safer Zone Login — Players who logged out inside a zone (e.g. at the jungle encampment) were sometimes landing inside a wall on their next login, because the game was checking warehouse map data against zone coordinates. Login now correctly validates the player’s last position against the zone they actually logged out in, with fallback to the zone encampment if anything is wrong.
- World Map Art Fix — The cross-section world map illustration now displays correctly in the World Map window (M key). Previously it was either missing or scaled incorrectly on certain resolutions.
- OffscreenCanvas Web Worker — The entire renderer and VFX engine now run in a dedicated Web Worker thread via OffscreenCanvas. Main thread only handles WebSocket messages, input, and HUD — render times (25–57ms) no longer block gameplay. Zero edits to renderer.js; all Worker compatibility via shim layer. Automatic fallback for older browsers via
?noworkerURL parameter. - Zone Encampment System — Each overworld zone now has a named encampment with a central campfire, animated fire glow, rising ember particles, and a “Safe Zone” designation. Encampments block combat and allow resting, just like the warehouse safe zone. Camp name and status rendered as floating labels above the campfire.
- Zone Encampment NPCs — 32 named NPCs across all 8 biome zones — each encampment has a combat quest giver, gather quest giver, delivery quest giver, and a vendor. NPCs have unique names, personalities, and role-colored indicators. Press E to interact: vendors open the shop, quest NPCs offer dialogue. Four jungle NPCs have full animated spritesheets (Ranger Maya, Old Thornwell, Scout Kira, and camp vendor Roots).
- Encampment Scene Sprites — AI-generated top-down camp scene artwork via FLUX.1 pipeline for each biome encampment. Jungle, cave, magma, frozen, dock, flood, maintenance, and server camp scenes with tents, workbenches, crates, and biome-specific props.
- World Map Art — New cross-section world map artwork generated via FLUX.1 img2img pipeline, showing the full elevation profile from surface jungle through underground caves, magma depths, frozen peaks, dock coastline, and ocean depths.
- Portal Fast-Travel System — Diablo-style waypoint portals placed at each zone encampment and in the warehouse. Walk onto a portal to discover it permanently, then open the World Map (M key) to teleport between any discovered portals. Three visual states: stone platform (undiscovered), blue flame braziers (discovered), and white energy column (standing on it). AI-generated portal sprites with full particle VFX.
- World Map Window — Resizable floating window (M key) showing a cross-section elevation view of the entire game world — surface zones, underground caves, magma depths, frozen peaks, coastline, and ocean. Discovered zones are clickable for portal teleport. Pan and zoom with mouse. FLUX.1 AI art pipeline generating the final illustrated map.
- 8 Overworld Zones — Eight new explorable biome zones beyond the warehouse: Jungle, Cave Network, Magma Depths, Frozen Peaks, Dock District, Flooded Ruins, Maintenance Tunnels, and Server Farm. Each zone has procedurally generated terrain (cellular automata for organic biomes, room scatter for industrial), pathfinding roads, encampments, boss arenas, and unique enemies. Zones are connected in a linear chain with a side branch. Content is still being built — zones are currently closed off while encounters, quests, and NPCs are added.
- Zone Map Generation — New procedural zone generator with two terrain algorithms: cellular automata (large organic chambers for jungle, cave, magma, frozen, flood) and room scatter with winding corridors (for dock, maintenance, server). A* pathfinding creates roads through natural cave openings. Floor obstacles scatter wall pillars inside open chambers for visual variety.
- Zone Enemies — All 8 biome zones populated with unique enemy types (37 enemy variants + 8 zone bosses). Each zone has 4–5 themed enemies with level scaling based on zone level range.
- Context Action Hints — A new reusable hint system renders contextual prompts below the player sprite when conditions are met. Standing on a portal shows “M — World Map Teleport” in a styled pill. The system supports any future context-sensitive hints.
- WebSocket Desync Fix — Major networking overhaul: state messages reduced from 398KB to 21KB through inventory delta compression. Server now uses periodic 66ms flush (~15 updates/sec) instead of event-driven broadcasting. Playable on integrated GPUs that were previously choking on large messages.
- Plasma Whirl — The Plasma gadget has been converted from a one-shot sweep into a held 360° whirlwind. Seven chaotic energy orbs orbit the player on tilted ellipses, trailing dense white and purple particles. Damages all enemies within range in every direction while held. Same DPS as other held gadgets — the value is full-circle coverage while moving.
- Incursion Shutdown Cascade — Biome pressure now triggers escalating consequences across the warehouse. At 80% pressure, all shipping NPCs evacuate to the break room — Rick, Jen, Dave, Mr. Patterson, Eddie, and Marco all flee the shipping zone and huddle in the kitchen with panicked dialogue. At 90%, vendor prices spike 25% due to supply chain disruption. During an active incursion, ticket XP drops 30%. Sealing or clearing an incursion triggers a 10-minute Recovery Boom: 2x shipping rep, +25% ticket XP, and a vendor discount.
- EMP Pulse VFX Overhaul — EMP blast now expands tile-by-tile in staggered wavefronts with cyan-blue energy wash, glitch flicker, and jagged electric arcs between affected tiles. Replaces the old circular ring effect.
- Gravity Well VFX Overhaul — Gravity Well now shows tile-by-tile dark distortion spreading outward, a pulsing purple-white singularity core, 10 orbiting debris particles with glow halos, and dense inward-spiraling particle effects.
- Arc Welder VFX Overhaul — Lightning bolts now render with 4 layers (wide haze, blue glow, bright core, white-hot center). Chain-jumping fixed to properly hop between nearby enemies. Idle crackle shows short ground scatter instead of erratic wiggle.
- Seismic Hammer Particles — Seismic slam now spawns 12 wavefront dust particles, 8 upward debris chunks, and 4 lingering smoke clouds on impact. Previously had zero particle effects.
- Particle Density Slider — New slider in Settings > VFX tab lets you scale particle effects from 10% to 200%. Below 100% probabilistically culls particles for performance. Above 100% spawns bonus particles for visual richness.
- Biome Pressure System — Every biome now builds pressure over time (0–100%). Neglected biomes build faster. Completing a tunnel run relieves pressure by 15%. The biome picker at the tunnel gate shows live pressure percentages with color coding so you can prioritize the biomes that need attention.
- Biome Incursion — When a biome hits 100% pressure, it breaches into the warehouse. Biome-specific tiles, hazards, and enemies physically expand outward from the tunnel gate in a growing zone. Up to 8 incursion enemies spawn (20% elite chance, mini-boss after 5 minutes) scaled to playerLevel+5. Kill incursion enemies to relieve pressure, or channel-seal the breach at the gate with E key (30 seconds, interruptible by damage). The incursion auto-ends when pressure drops below 50% from kills. Only one biome can breach at a time.
- Source Runs. Crews can now attack an incursion at its origin. Facilities has reclassified this as proactive maintenance.
- Seismic Hammer — New melee-enhancing gadget (3 tiers: Lv20/40/65). Equip in a gadget slot and every melee hit triggers a ground-slam AoE that damages all nearby enemies. Dark crack VFX with forking branches radiates from the impact point. Can also be activated directly with the gadget key.
- Sonic Pulse — New cone knockback gadget (3 tiers: Lv18/38/62). Fires a directional blast that pushes enemies backward 3–5 tiles, stuns them, and deals bonus damage if they slam into a wall. Blue-white expanding arc VFX with screen shake.
- Cryo Nova Overhaul — Cryo Nova now features tile-by-tile freeze spread, ice pillar eruptions, and crystal VFX. Screen shake on activation (was broken since launch). Visual overhaul across all three tiers.
- Shredder Material Eject — The industrial shredder now physically ejects crafting materials as ground pickups on the east side instead of silently adding them to inventory. Gray debris spray during the grind, arc animation on eject.
- Login Error Display — Wrong password now shows “Incorrect password” on the loading screen and redirects to login after 3 seconds. Per-username rate limiting prevents brute force attempts.
- Pallet Rework — Station pallets now track box counts (3 per pallet). On foot, pull individual boxes off with C key. On forklift, pick up the entire pallet. Delivery quests reworked to full 3-step flow: forklift pickup → drive to packing station → unload, pack & ship all boxes.
- Industrial Shredder — New 6×6 shredder station at the receiving dock. Feed enemies, boxes, or pallets into it with C key. Watch the enemy sprite wobble and sink into the grinding gears before being shredded into crafting materials.
- Blood Splatter VFX — All enemy combat damage now sprays blood. Droplets launch outward in arcs and land as persistent ground splatters that last 5 minutes. The shredder produces extra-gory blood spray. Fight your way through the warehouse and leave a trail of evidence behind you.
- Receiving Dock Automation — Two new NPC workers bring the receiving dock to life. Forklift Eddie unloads pallets from the delivery truck and drives them to staging tables. Marco picks them up and stocks warehouse racks across the entire floor. Watch the full cycle play out in real time.
- NPC Break Room Dialogue — After finishing a delivery cycle, Eddie and Marco park their forklifts and walk to the break room. If you’re nearby, you’ll overhear them complaining about management, warehouse creatures, and a certain microwave that makes the prestige vendor very angry. Walk close enough and they’ll talk to you too.
- PA Loudspeaker Announcements — Warehouse-wide dispatch announcements now appear as a top-of-screen banner with a speaker icon when trucks arrive and depart the receiving dock.
- Ghost VFX — Defeated enemies now produce a ghost death effect — a palette-tinted humanoid silhouette that rises and fades, matching the enemy’s colors.
- Shipping Line — A fully operational shipping line in the warehouse. Conveyor rollers carry boxes east along the main line, with four vertical feeders connecting packing stations to the line. Boxes auto-ship at the end terminal for gold and reputation.
- Packing Stations — Four stations with pallet stacks nearby. Pull a box from a pallet, carry it to a station, and load it up. Four-slot combiner interface lets you pack items, materials, and... other things. Pick a destination from the dropdown and hit PACKAGE to seal the deal.
- Shipping NPC Crew — Four animated workers patrol the shipping zone. Two pickers retrieve boxes from warehouse racks and deliver them to the line worker, who carries each one to the conveyor. A shipping manager supervises the area and has opinions about your work ethic. They all have things to say if you get close enough.
- Creature Capture — Stun or freeze any enemy, then pick them up with the new Grab command. Carry them around the warehouse and watch them squirm. Drop them at a packing station to load them into a box. What happens when the box ships to a specific biome? Enter that biome within 5 minutes and find out.
- Shipping Reputation — A new reputation track for the shipping zone. Package boxes, complete deliveries, and impress Mr. Patterson to rank up from New Hire to Legend. Higher tiers unlock new dialogue and delivery contracts.
- Delivery Quests — Talk to Mr. Patterson to volunteer for shipping duty. He'll assign you boxes to pack and ship within a time limit. Rewards scale with your reputation tier.
- Grab Action — New keybind (C) and action bar button for picking up, carrying, and dropping objects in the world. Works with shipping boxes, pallet boxes, and incapacitated creatures.
- Reputation Decay — Zone reputation now decays at a slower rate across all zones, keeping your vendor discounts and unlocks relevant for longer play sessions.
- Break Room Microwave — Interactive cooking station in the safe zone. Drag items into 2 slots and press COOK. 30+ recipes including single items, 2-item combos, and wildcard patterns. 10-second cook timer visible to all players. Produces new consumables (Suspicious Soup, Hyperdrive, Ghost Mode, Attack Drone) and crafting materials (Overclocked Circuit, Purified Shard). Cursed items can be purified, weapons and armor broken down into Residue for reforging. Cooking non-recipe items triggers an explosion with fire VFX and percentage-based damage. The Prestige Vendor goes aggro when you blow up the microwave — chases the culprit with homing fireballs, then walks over to fix it. 32 new pixel art item icons for all microwave outputs. Full drag-drop support for microwave slots.
- V2 Floor Tiles — 73 single-square floor tiles (128×128 PNG each) with per-zone mapping. Context-aware selection for office rooms, warehouse zones, outdoor areas, and tunnel biomes. Early render pass draws floor textures before entities.
- Biome Floor Overlays — 11 transparent overlay textures composited over floor tiles for depth effects. Multi-tile 3×3 clusters with contiguous sampling. Includes magma cracks, cave moss, cold frost, ice cracks, flood puddles, and warehouse markings.
- Inventory Layout Overhaul — Stats and equipment paperdoll now in a left sidebar column with the item grid filling the full right side. All icons enlarged to 64px cells with 48px item images. Resizable inventory window with drag handles on all edges and corners. PNG item icons on drag ghosts.
- Action Bar Item Icons — Gadget, weapon, consumable, and relic slots now display PNG item icons instead of unicode emoji. Quick-swap picker rows also show PNG icons.
- Mobile Inventory Performance — Touch interactions (tap, long-press) no longer trigger full inventory re-renders. Selection highlight is CSS-only. Eliminates icon flash on tap.
- HUD Action Bar — Floating bottom-center panel with 7 gear slots (weapon, gadgets, consumable, relic, rest, interact) and 7 utility buttons. Radial cooldown overlays, drag-drop from inventory, quick-swap picker for gadgets with right-click or long-press. Zoom +/− buttons. Touch mode combat toggles on gear slots.
- Steel-Blue Gunmetal Theme — Full UI theme overhaul. Green accents replaced with steel-blue (#4488bb). Panel backgrounds, borders, titlebars, settings, tooltips, and context menus all updated. Rounded corners on all panels.
- Pre-Warm Loading Screen — Steel-blue progress bar on first login with phase labels (Connecting, Loading State, Warming Caches, Uploading GPU, Ready). Eliminates first-frame rendering stutter by pre-computing caches before gameplay starts.
- Login Spawn Protection — 7 seconds of invulnerability on login that covers the loading screen. White-cyan radial glow VFX while active. Cancelled immediately when the player attacks or fires a gadget.
- Companion Screen Upgrades — New Action Bar tab showing equipped gear with live cooldown indicators. Interactive Tickets tab with full ACCEPT/ABANDON buttons that trigger GPS breadcrumbs in the game window via cross-tab BroadcastChannel commands.
- Tile Sprites — 17 AI-generated pixel art sprites replace ASCII symbols for gameplay tiles: locked doors, keycards, spike traps, barriers, relic shrines, oil spills, gaps, conveyors, planks, water, ice, lasers, alarms, electric hazards, crumble tiles, pressure plates, and surveillance cameras (rotatable). All with magenta chroma-key transparency.
- Relic Quick-Swap — Right-click the Z (relic) action bar slot to swap between owned relics with active abilities, similar to gadget quick-swap on G/V slots.
- Gadget Quick-Swap Tier Fix — Quick-swap picker now correctly shows only the highest tier of each gadget family (MK3 over MK2 over MK1), sorted by damage.
- Vendor & Prestige Spacing — Shop vendor and prestige vendor evenly spaced along the safe zone wall. Both auto-open when walking within 1 tile. Gate and tunnel exit also interact from 1 tile away.
- Forklift Combat Overhaul — Forklift ram damage tripled. Enemies now block forklift movement so you can ram them repeatedly (and they can hit back). Reduced idle glow to keep the forklift sprite visible.
- Chat History — Chat window now preserves full session history (5,000 lines) instead of resetting on state updates. All tabs (All, Quest, Party, World) retain their messages. Only clears on disconnect.
- Look Mode Expansion — UHJK snap targeting now includes all hazard tiles (spikes, oil, water, ice, conveyors, lasers, alarms, pressure plates, crumble tiles). Tile descriptions shown for all targetable objects.
- Office Building Scaling — Office biome enemies now scale to tunnel-level HP and damage formulas, matching the difficulty of regular tunnel biomes.
- Quest Item Icons — Generated 6 missing pixel art icons for quest requirement items and the action bar Rest button.
- NPC Dialogue System — Bosses now taunt players with AI-generated lines via local LLM (Ollama). Bosses respond to nearby allchat, and swap meet vendors eavesdrop on conversations with dry IT humor. Enemy death quips added for 47 enemy types.
- NPC Text-to-Speech — Boss taunts, chat responses, and vendor quips are spoken aloud via browser speechSynthesis with 5 distinct voice profiles (boss, system, human, digital, vendor). Toggle and volume controls in Settings.
- Chat Bubbles — When players or NPCs talk in allchat, their words appear as floating speech bubbles above their heads for 5 seconds. White text with black outline, word-wrapped, with a subtle rise animation and fade-out.
- Companion Screen — Second monitor support via BroadcastChannel. Open from Settings > Layout to get a companion window with live inventory grid, zoomed-out minimap, party HP bars, scoreboard, and active tickets. Updates at 4fps.
- Renderer Performance — 3D wall fillRect calls reduced ~65% via step-2/3 column iteration and mid-range LOD tier. Light lookup cache eliminates string allocation and redundant lookups. Contour outline range reduced.
- Per-Biome Autotile Atlases — All tunnel biomes now have dedicated wall atlas textures. Cave biomes (cave, magma, ice, cold, flood) use transparent void borders for organic edges. Sci-Fi Panel style for server, rack, datastream, dock. Stone blocks for maint.
- Ceiling Overhang Depth — Transparent ceiling overhangs on north-side edge walls create 2.5D depth illusion. Entities visible through the translucent layer.
- Screen Wake Lock — Screen stays awake during gameplay via the Wake Lock API. Re-acquires automatically when switching back to the game tab.
- Duplicate Tab Prevention — Web Locks API prevents the same account from connecting in multiple tabs simultaneously. Second tab shows a clear warning message instead of creating a ghost player.
- CPU Pressure Monitoring — Compute Pressure API monitors CPU stress and caps LOD recovery under heavy load. Pressure readout shown in Settings panel. Ultra quality bypasses all LOD throttling.
- WebSocket Compression — perMessageDeflate (RFC 7692) enabled on WebSocket connections. Fastest compression level with 200-byte threshold to skip tiny packets like fast position updates.
- Progressive Web App — PWA manifest, service worker, and offline fallback page. Installable from the browser with themed icons and standalone display mode.
- Autotile Wall System — Procedural Sci-Fi Panel wall textures for the warehouse with automatic edge detection and seamless transitions between wall configurations.
- 3D Contour Wall Faces — South, east, and west wall faces now follow the atlas tile's panel contour shape instead of flat rectangles, giving walls a more detailed and organic look.
- Smooth Player Movement — Player movement is now smooth and continuous instead of tile-by-tile. Diagonal movement normalized so all directions feel the same speed. Wall-sliding lets you glide along walls instead of stopping dead.
- Transparent Wall Depth — Edge walls now have a semi-transparent top face rendered above entities, giving walls a sense of height. Walk behind walls and see your character through the transparent layer.
- Server Performance Overhaul — Major server-side optimizations: spatial culling removes off-screen entities from updates, delta compression only sends entities that changed, and static data is cached per zone. Significantly lower bandwidth and CPU usage.
- Textured Floor Tiles — All floor surfaces now use AI-generated pixel art textures instead of flat colors with dots. 49 unique floor textures across warehouse zones, outdoor areas, office building rooms, and all tunnel biomes. Each zone has 2-3 tile variants that mix for natural variation.
- Zone-Specific Floors — Every area of the game now has a distinct floor type. Warehouse zones (concrete, carpet, rubber gym mats, hospital safe zone, server panels), outdoor (asphalt parking lot, jungle dirt), office building rooms (cubicle carpet, conference wood, bathroom tile, manager carpet, hallway VCT), and all 12 tunnel biomes each with unique textures.
- Warehouse Furniture Sprites — Furniture sprites now render on top of floor textures with proper z-ordering. Multi-tile sprites no longer clip or leave black gaps on textured floors.
- Website Redesign — Homepage rebuilt with new layout. Wiki pages consolidated under cleaner navigation.
- Square Tiles — Map rendering converted from rectangular to square tiles. All maps regenerated at correct proportions for a cleaner look.
- 3D Cube Walls — Walls now render as extruded 3D cubes with shaded faces and thin base shadows, replacing flat colored blocks.
- Sprite Feet Anchoring — All entity sprites (enemies, bosses, NPCs, vendors, players) now anchor at the feet, placing them firmly on the ground instead of floating at tile center.
- 3D Wall Depth Sorting — Sprites properly render in front of or behind walls depending on position, creating natural visual depth.
- Projectile Sprites — 5 projectile types now have unique visuals: spam, corrupt, BSOD, and malware use pixel art sprites with rotation. Firewall uses procedural animated fire orbs.
- POI Ground Labels — Warehouse points of interest now display drawn text labels on the floor instead of single ASCII letters.
- Warehouse Rack Sprites — Warehouse pallet racks now render as tiled sprites with loaded/empty bay variants and steel frame overlays.
- Zone Gate Improvements — Building entrances and tunnel exits now use larger trigger zones. Office exit spawns further out to prevent accidental re-entry.
- Jungle Zone Enemies — 6 new enemy types roam the jungle paths outside the warehouse. They scale to your level on contact and respawn when you leave the area.
- Jungle Building Entrances — All 5 buildings in the jungle now have animated portal entrances with glowing particle effects and building name labels on the rooftops.
- GPS Quest Pathfinding — Accept a ticket and cyan breadcrumb dots appear on the ground, guiding you along the shortest walkable path to your destination. Works across the warehouse, outdoor, and office zones. Persists through zone transitions, death, and reconnect.
- Outdoor Zone Open to All — The warehouse exit doors no longer require admin access. All players can explore the jungle.
- Parking Lot Details — Fire hydrants, dumpsters, manholes, benches, puddles, and other parking lot objects now render as detailed procedural drawings.
- 8 New Enemy Sprites — Jungle Raider, Vine Stalker, Mutant Scout, Pack Hunter, Security Guard, Rogue Sysadmin, Lab Subject, and IT Director all have custom pixel art spritesheets.
- Office Ticket System — Jungle building tickets are fully playable: GPS breadcrumbs guide you to furniture objectives inside office buildings, target furniture glows green/gold, and pressing E spawns a boss and advances the ticket. A yellow objective hint in the ticket panel describes the current target.
- Door Light Beams — Warm light beams fan out from warehouse exit doors, making them easy to spot.
- Office Building Interiors — Jungle buildings now have full procedural interiors with conference rooms, cubicle farms, server closets, break rooms, copy rooms, bathrooms, and a warehouse section. Rooms are furnished with AI-generated furniture sprites in a post-apocalyptic aesthetic.
- Office Enemies — 4 new enemy types patrol office buildings: Corrupted Technician, Security Guard, Lab Subject, and Rogue Sysadmin, plus the IT Director boss.
- Swap Meet Vendor Characters — All 15 bazaar NPCs now have unique AI-generated character sprites with distinct personality-driven designs.
- Animated Tunnel Portals — Tunnel entry and exit gates now display an animated portal sprite instead of a static ASCII character.
- Full Enemy Sprite Coverage — All 40+ enemy types now have pixel art spritesheets with walk and attack animations. 20 spritesheets with color-tint variants cover warehouse, tunnel, biome-specific, and ticket boss enemies. Bosses render at 1.5x size.
- NPC Vendor Sprites — Vendor and prestige vendor NPCs have 8-directional breathing-idle spritesheets. Vendors turn to face you when you interact with them.
- 128 Item Icons — AI-generated pixel art icons for all weapons, armor, gadgets, and consumables. Displayed in inventory grid, paperdoll equip slots, and as ground drop sprites.
- Biome Environment Sprites — 33 procedural canvas sprites for tunnel decoration: mushrooms, crystals, tentacles, trees, tesla coils, server racks, and more. Each biome has unique decorative elements.
- Jungle Overworld — Outdoor map expanded with a post-apocalyptic jungle surrounding the parking lot. Snaking paths connect 5 building clearings. Dark nighttime color palette with fog and atmosphere.
- Jungle Canopy Overlay — Semi-transparent canopy leaves render over entities at path edges with gentle sway animation, creating a layered depth effect.
- Outdoor Position Persistence — Players now spawn back at their outdoor position when logging in.
- Canvas Drawn Tiles — All biome walls, floors, water, ice, oil, and spike tiles now render using native canvas drawing instead of text characters. Sharper edges, consistent sizing, and better performance.
- Canvas Drawn Sprites — 13 biome-themed decorative sprites (mushrooms, tentacles, crystals, pillars, trees) drawn directly on canvas with animation support. Each biome has unique environmental decorations.
- Player Pixel Art Sprite — The player character now renders as a pixel art sprite with 8-direction walk, attack, and hit animations, replacing the yellow @ symbol.
- Enemy Pixel Art Sprites — All 18 warehouse enemies and tunnel enemies now have unique pixel art sprites with walk and attack animations, replacing colored ASCII characters.
- Enemy Smooth Movement — Enemies now interpolate smoothly between tiles instead of snapping.
- Enemy HP Bars — Enemies now display horizontal HP bars above their sprites.
- Split HP/Stamina Arcs — Player HP and stamina shown as separate arcs on the left and right sides, replacing the full-circle ring.
- Zoom Control — Press +/- to zoom in and out (0.5x to 3.0x). Press 0 to reset. Persisted between sessions.
- Swap Meet Vendor Stalls — Outdoor vendor booths now render as canvas-drawn structures with colored awnings.
- Double-Wide Corridors — All tunnel generators now enforce a minimum 2-tile corridor width for less claustrophobic navigation.
- Per-Set Ground Item Glow — Each of the 15 item sets has a unique glow color when dropped on the ground, visible at a glance before picking up.
- Floating Party Window — Draggable floating window with clickable INVITE, ACCEPT, and DECLINE buttons. Persistent draggable party HP bar with panel snapping.
- Floating Ticket Window — Draggable ticket browser with hover details, clickable ACCEPT/ABANDON buttons, and resolution choice buttons for multi-option tickets.
- Floating Scoreboard & Prestige Windows — Leaderboard and prestige cosmetics vendor are now draggable floating windows with clickable actions.
- Window Focus System — All windows share a unified focus system. Only one captures keyboard input at a time. Click outside to defocus and play, Escape closes only the focused window.
- Outdoor Zone — New persistent area outside the warehouse with a parking lot, street, swap meet vendor booths, building-mounted lights with directional cones, sweeping surveillance cameras, and environmental details. Dark, post-apocalyptic atmosphere with drifting fog and flickering lights.
- Zone Isolation — Full combat and state isolation between warehouse, outdoor, and tunnel zones. Players in different zones cannot interact.
- Tunnel Wall Sprites — Biome-themed decorative sprites along tunnel walls: glowing alien mushrooms, tentacles, crystals, and themed trees. Wall-edge flora grows along the base of tunnel walls.
- Swap Meet Vendors — 15 NPC vendors in the parking lot, each representing one item set with their items displayed on the ground around them.
- Mobile Touch Buttons — Added TKT (tickets) and PTY (party) buttons to the mobile touch utility bar.
- T7 Elite & T8 Mythic Gear — Two new gear tiers. T7 Elite items unlock at level 100+ with unique perks, T8 Mythic at level 160+ with stronger perks. Both drop from appropriately-leveled enemies.
- Procedural Gear — At level 225+, gear scales infinitely with new tiers every 75 levels. Procedural items have generated names and roll 1–3 random perks.
- 9 Gear Perks — High-tier gear can roll perks: Lifesteal, Crit Chance, AoE Splash, Stam Efficiency, Cooldown Reduction, XP Boost, Fortify, Scavenger, and Elemental damage.
- Set Keyword Naming — Every set piece now has its set name in the item name (e.g. “Cerberus Core Router”), making set membership instantly recognizable.
- Tier-Scaled Set Bonuses — Equipping higher-tier set pieces scales set bonuses: T7 gives 1.5×, T8 gives 2×, and procedural T9+ scales higher.
- Grid Inventory — Complete web client inventory overhaul. Paper-doll equipment layout with stats panel. Scrollable item grid with tier-colored borders and glow effects. Drag and drop to equip/unequip. Right-click context menus. Hover tooltips with full item details. Per-slot filtering. Touch support with long-press context menus.
- Floating Inventory & Vendor Windows — Inventory and vendor are draggable floating windows. Both can be open simultaneously — drag items between them to buy and sell. Green border indicates which window has keyboard focus.
- Safe Zone Vendor Access — Press E anywhere in the safe zone to open the vendor. Auto-closes when you leave.
- Active Relic Distinction — Active relics display a lightning icon, purple glow, and “Z” badge. Passive relics remain pink. Only active relics can be dragged to the relic equipment slot.
- Floating HUD Panels — The sidebar is now 6 independently draggable panels: Stats, Equipment, Gadgets, Combat Log, Chat, and Menu. Panels snap to each other’s edges. Combat Log and Chat can be resized by dragging edges or corners. Positions and sizes saved between sessions.
- Tunnel Kill XP & Score Buffed — Tunnel kill XP, tunnel exit score, and boss kill score all increased to better balance tunnel vs ticket progression.
- Warehouse Kill XP Buff — Normal enemy XP increased by 29% and boss XP by 27%, closing roughly 43% of the XP gap between warehouse play and tunnel grinding.
- Ticket Completion XP Buff — Ticket quest XP flat bonus increased by 20%, further closing the gap between ticket and tunnel XP rates.
- Race Spectator Page — New page at /race/ with split-screen view and live score overlay for spectating bot races.
- Tunnel Gold Drops — Tunnel enemies now drop gold on kill, scaling with enemy difficulty. Previously, tunnels gave zero gold from kills.
- Tunnel Completion Bonus — Clearing a tunnel now awards a gold bonus on top of existing XP and score rewards. Tunnel exit score also increased.
- Ticket XP Rebalance — Quest ticket XP rewards now scale more aggressively with player level. A level 30 player completing a standard ticket now earns ~114 XP instead of ~27 XP.
- Quest Work Markers — All quest work steps now happen at the POI tile itself instead of randomly scattered nearby.
- Combat Kill Log — All kills now show in the combat log with full reward breakdown: “Killed [name] (+score, +XP, +gold)” regardless of weapon used.
- Held Gadget Stamina Drain — Flamethrower, Arc Welder, Acid Sprayer, and Cryo Cannon now drain stamina while held. Running out mid-spray cuts the gadget off.
- PvP Combat Overhaul — PvP hits and kills now show damage feedback. Kill broadcasts announce PvP kills server-wide with the weapon used. Floating damage numbers on PvP damage.
- Spawn Protection — 6 seconds of invulnerability after respawning with a visible pulsing white-cyan shield glow. Attacking or using a gadget cancels it early.
- Graceful Server Shutdown — All player progress is now saved on server restart.
- Warehouse Boss HP Rebalance — Warehouse bosses now target ~15 second kills instead of ~30 seconds. Ticket bosses slightly faster at ~11 seconds.
- Level-Gap Scaling — Enemies 15+ levels above a player now resist crowd control (up to 80%) and take reduced damage (up to 85%). High-level enemies are genuinely dangerous.
- Gadget DPS Rebalance — Held cone weapons rebalanced for group clearing. Railgun buffed to 1.2x single-target DPS as the boss-killing specialist. Plasma Whip and Spark Pistol also buffed.
- Cryo Cannon Rework — No longer perma-freezes enemies. Freeze must fully expire before reapplying, creating a freeze/thaw cycle. Damage reduced to reflect its crowd control value.
- Look Mode Target Lock — In look mode, moving the cursor onto an enemy locks the view to that target and follows it as it moves.
- Level-Scaled Gear — Gear drops now scale with zone level. Higher-level enemies drop stronger versions of the same items. Enhancement bonuses and affix values also scale with drop level.
- Gear Level Requirements — Scaled gear requires a minimum level to equip, shown in the inventory and craft views.
- Ticket Completion Loot — Completing tickets now rewards gear based on step count. Multi-step tickets guarantee drops, and 5-step tickets give boss-tier loot plus a chance at a gadget.
- Dynamic Ticket Timers — Ticket timers now scale with player level, giving high-level players more time for multi-step tickets.
- Score System — Score gains now scale with player level across all activities. Eight prestige titles earned at thresholds from 10K to 5M, shown as permanent chat prefixes. High scores also unlock permanent shop discounts up to 20%.
- Prestige Terminal — New NPC near the vendor where players spend score on 25 cosmetic items: @ colors, glow effects, body auras, movement trails, name colors, and death effects. Also sells boost consumables.
- Ground Loot Glow — Dropped items glow based on tier and set. High-level drops sparkle with rising particles.
- Enhancement Cost Scaling — Enhancement costs and salvage yields now scale with gear drop level. Higher-level gear costs more to enhance but gains more per level.
- 3D Gadget Aura Effects — Firing any gadget now produces pseudo-3D energy rings that orbit your character. Each of the 9 gadgets has a unique style: flowing fire rings for flamethrower, jagged lightning for arc welder, blobby green drips for acid, hexagonal ice crystals for cryo, and more. Firing both gadgets shows both auras layered together.
- Gadget Lighting — Aura rings emit light that passes over walls, illuminating tiles on both sides. Ground-level gadget lights (flame, acid, cryo cone glow) now properly clip at walls instead of bleeding through.
- Health & Stamina Regen VFX — Green starburst pulse radiates from your character when healing. Blue starburst for stamina regen appears between the green dots, forming a 16-point star when both fire together.
- AI Bot Playtesting — Automated AI bots now run the game 24/7, grinding both tickets and tunnels to generate real gameplay data for balance tuning. Two bots race head-to-head across both content paths to measure XP rates, gold economy, and progression speed.
- Spatial Audio — Sound effects now pan left/right and fade with distance based on world position. Configurable mono mode for players who prefer it.
- Music Toggle — Separate music on/off button, independent from the sound toggle. Disabling music stops all MP3 downloads.
- MP3 Sound Effects — All 9 gadgets now have custom MP3 sound effects with multiple variants and spatial positioning. Held gadgets feature startup, loop, hit, and end clips with crossfade transitions. 12 melee hit variants and 6 player death sounds.
- Cryo Cannon — New held gadget: sustained freeze ray in 3 tiers (Lv16/36/68). Directional cone that freezes enemies with ice damage, stun, and water-to-ice environmental interaction. Works with the Cryo Specialist set bonus.
- Gear Enhancement — Enhance any weapon, armor, or gadget by spending salvage materials. Each level adds +1 DMG or +3 HP. No hard cap — cost scales per level. Enhanced gear shows a +N suffix. Salvaging returns 50% of invested materials.
- Ticket Boss Encounters — Working on tickets now spawns themed bosses at the POI from a pool of 56 IT-horror names (e.g. “PC LOAD LETTER Demon,” “47-Tab Browser Beast”). Multi-step tickets stack multiple bosses.
- Mobile Touch Responsiveness — Improved touch control responsiveness. Rest healing matches desktop speed. Movement acceleration reaches full speed faster.
- VFX Overhaul — Enhanced visual effects across gadgets: Arc Welder flashes and smoke, Acid Sprayer per-tile glow and wall splatter, Plasma Whip 4-layer beam with sweep shadows, Cryo Cannon ice glow with diamond crystals.
- Ambient Glow Effects — Tunnel gate glows with pulsing white-cyan aura. Forklifts emit warm yellow glow. Warehouse bosses emit menacing red glow. All fade with distance and respect fog of war.
- Shadow Improvements — Light raycasting now blocks through diagonal wall corners and locked doors, eliminating light leaking through tight spaces.
- MP3 Soundtrack — 52 original music tracks replace the procedural synthesizer. Every biome has its own soundtrack (3–7 variations each) with shuffle playback and 2-second crossfade transitions between zones. Boss fights have 6 unique battle tracks. Victory and level-up stingers layer on top of the current music.
- Mobile Touch Controls — Full touch control system for phones and tablets. Dual virtual joysticks: left for movement with speed ramp, right for directional combat aiming. Toggle ATK/G1/G2 modes. Utility row for inventory, chat, look mode, relic, and rest. Touch mode works on any device.
- Touch Overlay Navigation — Inventory, shop, and biome picker menus navigable via touch joystick. Biome picker has a tappable confirm button. Close buttons on all overlay panels.
- Procedural Audio Engine — Full WebAudio engine with 30+ synthesized sound effects. Gadget one-shots (Railgun crack, EMP discharge, Gravity vortex), continuous loops (Flamethrower roar, Arc Welder crackle, Cryo hiss), and ambient sounds all generated in real time.
- Sound Toggle — Quick “Sound: ON/OFF” button in the top HUD bar for all audio.
- Directional Attack Aiming — Attack messages now accept an aim direction, so touch players can attack where their combat joystick points.
- SSL/HTTPS — Game server available over HTTPS with a Let’s Encrypt certificate. WebSocket connections upgrade to WSS automatically.
- Death Fade — Dying triggers a fast fade to black followed by a slow reveal at the spawn point, hiding the respawn teleport.
- Entities Visible Through VFX — Enemies and players now render on top of visual effects like flamethrower flames, staying readable during heavy combat.
- Corner Assist & Wall Sliding — The server automatically nudges players around corners when moving near an opening. Moving diagonally into a wall slides along the walkable axis instead of stopping.
- Interactive Tutorial — 10-step guided tour for new players. Auto-starts on first login, also available via
/tutorial. Camera pans to key locations, live VFX demos for gadgets, multi-biome overview grid, and auto-advance between steps. - Screen Flash & Shake — Full-screen color flashes on gadget fire, damage, crits, and kills. Camera shake on explosions and heavy hits, scaling with damage. Both toggleable in Settings.
- Floating Damage Numbers — Damage numbers pop and scale based on amount, drift in the attack direction, stack when multiple hits land together, and wobble with glow on crits.
- Player Animations — Damage flinch on hit. Idle breathing pulse when standing still. Movement bob. Weapon trail arcs on melee swing matching weapon class.
- Light Map System — Per-tile lighting from multiple sources with distance falloff and additive color tinting. Static warehouse lights, per-biome tunnel lights with appropriate colors, and dynamic gadget lights that follow projectiles and cones.
- Dancing Color Noise — Brogue-inspired subtle color shimmer on lit tiles gives the world an organic, living feel.
- Floor Detail & Wall Debris — Subtle crack and dust details on floor tiles. Small debris characters near wall edges with biome-specific sets.
- Weather & Atmosphere — Per-biome atmospheric overlays: falling ash in magma, drifting snow in ice, rain in flood, digital noise in datastream, dust motes in caves.
- Bloom & Glow — Bright light sources and VFX emit soft bloom glow. Toggleable in Settings.
- Shadow Casting — Walls cast directional shadows onto adjacent floor tiles.
- Color Grading — Per-biome color grading as a final render pass: warm tones for magma, cool blue for ice, green for datastream.
- CRT Mode — Optional retro scanline effect with curvature and color fringing. Toggleable in Settings.
- Enemy Animations — Idle bob/sway/pulse per enemy type. Spawn fade-in over 300ms.
- Facing Direction Arrow — Green directional arrow beside the player showing current facing. Fades out 2 seconds after last movement.
- Inventory Equipment View — All 10 equipment slots shown with dedicated rows. Items sorted by stats. Set bonuses show equipped count and descriptions in detail view.
- Auto-LOD — Renderer automatically disables expensive visual features when frame times spike and re-enables them when headroom returns.
- Gadget DPS Balance Pass — All gadgets rebalanced within tiers. Railgun stamina cost halved and cooldowns reduced for burst-damage role. Plasma Whip damage increased.
- Acid Sprayer Rework — Now works like the Flamethrower: hold the button to spray continuously instead of single shots. VFX reworked to splashing cone with wavy streams, splatter blobs, and drip trails.
- Railgun Snap-to-Target — Railgun beam snaps to the nearest enemy within 5 tiles of your click. No more missed shots on off-diagonal targets.
- Spark Pistol Range — Chain range increased from 3 to 5 tiles to match Flamethrower reach.
- Melee Cooldown System — Per-weapon-class cooldowns: Wrench 0.8s, Pipe 1.0s, Taser 1.2s, Nail Gun 1.0s. Prevents melee from out-DPSing gadgets at high levels.
- Bump Attack — Walking into an enemy triggers a melee attack automatically.
- Repair Drone Buff — Heal rate increased from 3% to 5% max HP per tick.
- Smooth Cooldown Timers — Gadget, consumable, and relic cooldown timers now tick down smoothly in the HUD instead of jumping in server-tick intervals.
- Cooldown Bars — Color-coded cooldown bars render below the player character for melee, gadgets, consumable, and relic ability.
- Enemy Collision — Player stops at enemy edges instead of sliding around them. Walk into an enemy to bump attack.
- Consumable VFX — Repair Drone: green orbiting sparkles with rising heal numbers. Smoke Bomb: gray particle cloud anchored at cast position. Stim Pack: yellow speed streaks trailing the player.
- F Key = Melee Attack — F key triggers melee attack. H opens help.
- EMP & Cryo Oval Rendering — EMP and Cryo Nova VFX now render as ovals matching tile-space damage areas instead of screen-space circles.
- Relic Rework — Active relic abilities: Blink teleport, Decoy, Overcharge, and Temporal Anchor auto-revive. Select your active ability with the Z key. Relic evolution after 10 tunnel completions grants +50% stats, −25% cooldown, and upgraded names. 5 relic synergies for owning specific pairs.
- Set Visual Auras — Equipped 2pc sets show a subtle glow. 3pc sets show a bright aura matching the set’s color theme.
- 9 New Item Sets — 6 gadget sets and 3 utility sets with unique 3pc bonuses: burning ground, freeze shatter, EMP chain, rail pierce, gravity pull, glass cannon, scavenger drops, field medic party heal, nimble technician speed.
- Elite Enemy Modifiers — Tunnel enemies can spawn as elite variants: Shielded (damage shield), Enraged (faster, hits harder), Phasing (teleports), or Vampiric (lifesteals). More elites at deeper tunnel levels.
- Weapon Subtypes — Weapons now have distinct classes: wrench (1-tile melee), pipe (3-tile arc), taser (3-tile ranged + stun), nailgun (5-tile ranged).
- Forklift Overhaul — Forklift HP now scales with driver level. Critical HP warning at 30%.
- Web Client Launch — Browser-based client connecting via WebSocket. HTML5 Canvas renderer with full game map, entities, health rings, and HUD overlays. Keyboard and mouse input with simultaneous movement + weapon fire.
- 3D Wall Rendering — Extruded 3D walls with perspective, directional face shading, biome-colored lighting, and light bounce onto adjacent floors.
- Particle VFX Engine — Canvas particle system with additive blending. Real fire, lightning, cryo crystals, gravity vortex, plasma trails, acid clouds, and EMP rings. Particles bounce off walls with spark sub-particles.
- Persistent Fog of War — Explored tiles stay visible as a dim map outline after you move away. Three-zone visibility: bright center, smooth dim ring, and fading fog edge. Undiscovered areas remain black.
- Inventory, Shop & Chat — Full inventory overlay with color coding, detail expansion, filter tabs, and gear stacking. Shop with buy/sell/craft modes. In-browser chat. L-key look mode with cursor movement and tile descriptions.
- Party System — Party overlay with Tab invite, W/S scroll, X to kick/leave. Y/N for invite responses. Persistent party HP bar.
- Settings Panel — Toggles for 3D Walls, Quality, Particles, Screen Effects, Shake, Dynamic Lighting, Damage Numbers, Light Bounce, and Particle Bounce. All settings persist.
- Visual Effects — Death fade to black with “YOU DIED” message. Tunnel entrance warp VFX. Boss telegraph ground cracks. Torch ambient light with flicker. Biome hazard popups on tunnel entry.
- Overlays — Biome picker for tunnel selection. Ticket overlay with table layout and detail expansion. Arrow indicators for party members and tunnel entrance. Help screen and scoreboard.
- Login Page — ASCII art ENCORO IT banner with animated cyan color-wave and sparkle effect.
- Demo Mode — Demo mode connects to the real server with a custom sandbox tunnel. Full VFX and mechanics available.
- Wiki — Complete wiki with 11 pages covering items, combat, tunnels, progression, relics, sets, scoreboard, and changelog.
- Inventory & Shop UI — Table layout with columns for Name, Stats, Slot, Set, and Qty. Gear stacking, item color coding by rarity, filter tabs, and paginated rendering.
- Stamina & Combat Rebalance — Walking is free, sprint costs stamina, melee costs stamina, gadgets cost stamina. Melee retaliation (enemies strike back once on approach). Sprint toggle. Quick-use consumable slot (Q key). Level-scaled shop pricing. Gold drops from warehouse kills.
- Setpiece Rooms — 25 hand-crafted room templates stamped into tunnels with 2–4 loot items per room. Validated to never break path connectivity.
- Pre-Boss Corridor. A final combat set-piece now stands before the arena. Management has added another approval step.
- Relic Shrines. Relic Shrines and permanent relics have shipped. Facilities has approved long-term asset retention for once.
- Salvage & Crafting — Salvage gear for 3 material types. 10 crafting recipes in the vendor Craft tab.
- Equipment Set Bonuses — 6 equipment sets with 2pc/3pc thresholds. Set items render in light blue with equipped/owned indicators.
- Item Affixes — Gear drops can roll prefix/suffix modifiers with tier-based scaling.
- Quest System Overhaul — Ticket chains with branching choices. Zone reputation system with vendor discounts per tier.
- Boss Telegraph Lanes — 1-second warning with pulsing red tiles before boss attacks. Cone and AOE patterns.
- 6 Tunnel Generators — Snake, DFS maze, Hybrid, Cellular Automata, BSP rooms, and Drunkard’s Walk. Each biome has weighted probabilities for algorithm selection.
- Wall Texturing — Unicode block characters replace flat walls with per-biome textures and fog-of-war dim rendering.
- Acid Sprayer — New gadget with corrode debuff (+25–35% damage amplification). 3 tiers. Elemental combo system with flame and cryo interactions.
- Tunnel Hazard Tiles — Spikes, pressure plates, laser tripwires, ice floors, collapsing floors, alarm tiles, water tiles, and conveyors with biome-specific distribution.
- Locked Doors & Keycards — Keycards and locked doors with path-blocking validation. Door reverts if an alternate route exists.
- Look Mode — L key inspection cursor with smart snap to enemies, items, doors, and relics. Detail popup shows stats and descriptions.
- Biome Picker — Overlay for selecting tunnel biome before entry. Biomes unlock by player level.
- Boss Abilities — Improved boss attack patterns, telegraphs, and biome-specific abilities.
- Log Channel Filtering — C key cycles through log channels: All, Combat, Quest, Party, World.
- Ambient Narrative — Atmospheric narrative events triggered by zone and boss encounters. Biome-specific tone.
- Boss Intro Cards — Modal overlay on first boss encounter with name, biome, and tactical hint.
- Biome Color Palettes — Per-biome color profiles for walls, floors, and fog-of-war.
- Tutorial — 9-step interactive tutorial for new players. Auto-starts on first character.
- Initial Release — Warehouse map, combat system, vendor shop, ticket/quest system, tunnel generation with 11 biomes and boss fights, multiplayer server.