Dragonscale and Dead Rooms

Two of this week's changes came out of testers telling me something felt wrong, and in both cases they were right about the feeling and wrong about the cause. That's the useful kind of report. The Labyrinth doesn't lie to you often, but it's very good at letting you draw the wrong conclusion.

The armor ladder had a boring top

The complaint was that black plate and great plate were "very similar in terms of item buffs and are acquired at similar levels" — a polite way of saying the last three rungs were the same rung painted three colors. They're gone. In their place: iron carapace (+5, depth 6), bloodforged cuirass (+6, depth 7), and dragonscale (+7, depth 9).

Names alone wouldn't fix anything, so two of them do something new. Dragonscale carries a block floor of 3 — the armor roll can come up low, but never lower than that, and nothing takes the floor away from you: not a flank, not a rear attack, not a sunder. Elven chain gets a floor of 2 and a flat +1 speed folded into your base before Mire, potions and Berserk multiply it, which makes the sunderproof rarity worth hunting rather than worth admiring. And scale hauberk now outranks chain hauberk, +4 to +3, because it always should have and I have no defense for the previous ordering.

Wiring the floor in turned up a hit reduced to exactly zero falling through to a flat "for 0 damage." It has its own line now. Armor that stops something cold should say so.

Four dead rooms in a row

A tester reported that occupied and empty rooms come in streaks — a run of fights, then a run of nothing — and suspected a clustering bug in generation. There wasn't one. Five hundred seeds put corridor-connected rooms at 0.562 agreement against 0.571 for unconnected pairs: statistically identical, exactly what independent coin flips predict.

But a maze that's supposed to be herding you downward has no business handing out four dead rooms in a row, and over a dozen rooms genuinely independent flips do that far more often than your gut expects. So instead of closing it as working-as-designed, the generator now actively de-clusters: each room's quiet roll leans against whatever its already-decided neighbours turned out to be. The entrance is seeded quiet, since that's what it is — so the rooms around it lean toward holding something.

Same number of empty rooms, spread differently. Rooms inside a same-status blob of three or more fell from 54% to 34%, and a paired probe sweep moved no floor's death rate past seed-band noise. It isn't easier. It just stops reading like the dice got stuck.

The thing that was never going to chase you

Sentinels are rooted. That's the whole design — a gibbet-warden holds its tile and nothing moves it. Correct, intentional, and reported as broken AI twice now, because the only places that rule surfaced were a hover tooltip and a one-time novice hint that the veterans most likely to meet one will never see again. Behaviour that repeatedly reads as a crash is a presentation defect, so it got a presentation fix: an immobile creature now wears a broken iron ring on its cell boundary — permanent, and visible without a mouse. It will never leave that tile, and now you can see that from across the room.

The storefront, which is not the game

None of this changes a fight, but it's where a lot of the week went and it's moving, so: Valve approved the store page, and Labyrinth: The Descent is live on Steam as Coming Soon. Capsules, the trailer, seven screenshots, the content survey, the AI-asset disclosure, fifteen tags and a Q1 2027 window — all of it public now instead of sitting in a draft nobody could see. There's a wishlist button on the name-entry screen, on this site, and on the itch page, each tagged so I can actually tell which one people use. The game also has a real address now — hello@labyrinththedescent.com — rather than a form and a hope.

If you've been playing these builds and haven't wishlisted it, that one click is worth more to this project than anything else you could do for free. Valve's algorithm counts them; I can't make it care any other way.

Everything else

• The Merchant's Buy button was being swallowed by the Trainer panel drawn invisibly on top of it, so a player standing between both stalls and buying a mace learned Grapple instead. One shop panel at a time now. Sorry about the Grapple.
• A battered piece shows its pristine grade beside its live protection — "+4 of +6" — so you can tell how far a sunder ground it down.
• Every scrap of text now draws through one measured surface, with a guard that fails the build if anything skips it. Fourteen slots were clipping a few pixels of Cardo's line box.
• Chest gold reports the Magpie ring's actual cut instead of the base amount, so the ring visibly works: "18 gold (+6 from a ring)."
• Scroll of Identify reveals an unidentified ring you're holding. It had been skipping them.
• Click-to-travel plans through creatures instead of treating an unseen body as a wall; "Enemy sighted." is the only thing that halts the walk.
• Reactions — Riposte, Opportunist, a Guard's free strike — play on the beat that provoked them instead of a beat late, and Opportunist narrates. Enemies no longer step into a square and die for reasons only the log knows.
• The inventory scroll region reaches its true last row, and its rows dropped the leading class glyph the tab strip and the colour were already saying twice.

What's next

The next real piece of work is the demo, and I'd rather argue about it with you now than ship the wrong one in February. The current plan is depths 1 through 4, ending on a cliff rather than a wall — the run's boss gets dealt, you fell it, and then the stairs are barred because the Labyrinth wants you deeper and isn't going to let you go cheap. Mood visible, one full identification arc so you get to learn what a potion is the hard way, graves working inside the demo the way they work in the real thing. Thirty to sixty minutes a run, meant to be replayed rather than finished. The weekly challenge would keep running against the demo floors, so the leaderboard stays open to everybody.

What I don't know is whether that's the right shape. Is four floors enough to make the Mood track mean something, or does it need to reach Angry before anyone feels the point? Should the demo hero carry into a bought copy, or is a clean first descent part of what you're paying for? Should the graves you leave in the demo persist into the full game, or should the dead stay behind the door? And is the cliff ending honest, or does it read as a paywall wearing a costume? Tell me in Discord or through the in-game report — I'd rather cut the demo to the shape you'd actually recommend to someone than to the shape that flatters the store page.

Beyond that: the deep floors still owe a real balance pass, and the armor question isn't fully closed — elven chain's drop rate and a tier past depth 9 are both still open. Below depth 10 there isn't much ladder left anyway. There's the Hollow, and it doesn't care what you're wearing.