Patch Notes: The Abyss Dungeon, Rebuilt

The Rift

• The Rift is now a brass astrolabe standing in a cracked crater, turned to face down its hall's longest line. Its gear ticks forward once a second, and its ring of Roman-numeral hours clicks back an hour on every toll.
• Its iris shows its state. It opens wide while the Hour can be entered, narrows to a pinhole when it can't, and shuts when the Hour closes. Studs round its rim count down the hours the Hollow has left, and during the collapse they go out one by one.
• Through the iris you see the Hour's own sky, with real depth as you move. Gold light drifts in from the rim, and the gear's teeth cast turning spokes of light on the floor.
• The Return is a pale stone arch with silver bands and a window home: the sky over the Hollow's city at the world's real hour, with Masser and Secunda at night.
• A silver hand-plate on every Return's sill lights up when you aim at it.

Stepping through

• Entering the Hour has its own transition: twelve brass blades close over the Rift wherever it is on your screen and lock into a clock face. Its hand sweeps backwards and the broken quarters chime, and if you hold there long enough, the Dragon Break splits the hand and cracks the face. The face then shatters open onto the Threshold.
• Leaving by the way back or the Return, the clock is silver and still cracked. Taking the way home, the crack mends as it shuts. Being thrown out by force shatters the face into falling pieces.
• If your system is set to reduce motion, the face holds still and fades in and out instead.
• When you arrive in the Hour, the way back breathes out a spray of brass sparks and its ring turns once.

The Shattered Hour

• The light has been redone, so floors read as stone and brass instead of one amber glow. The Threshold is paved with the Bay's cobbles around a compass rose.
• The islands hang in the void on jagged rock spires, with half-buried gears and chains swaying on the clock's tick. Distant islands drift slowly below. Far beneath the course, the Works turn: four vast gears, black against the furnace glow, a tooth at a time.
• The sky is hand-painted: dithered bands of void, single-pixel stars, aurorae, a great clock face drawn in stars with its numerals and the six Endings as constellations, and the Bay's cities hanging upside down with their windows lit. Its hands run on the Hour's clock.
• The way back looks into the hall you came from: dark coursed stone lit gold from the front. Its rings turn forward, and it casts the Hour's only cool light.
• The arena tells you the fight through its floor. Eight fissures flood green each time a Mantella Pulse lands. The rim's numerals light one by one through the Reset and the last two burn ember. When the Hour ends, everything turns red. The sky's clock follows along.
• The Stomp's ring now rises as a low wall of brass light you can see to jump. While the fight holds you in the arena, a gold curtain rises at its rim.
• The arena's four pillars are clock-towers now. Their dials' hands follow the Remnant (the Echoes in the Dragon Break, the way home once it falls), and a lantern burns in each cage. A brass mark on the floor shows where the Remnant and each Echo stand, and the arena's lamps dim as the Reset gathers.
• The Brass Remnant has been rebuilt from riveted brass plate. It has a domed helm crowned with seven broken clock hands, bell pauldrons, an open ribcage around a cut soul-gem heart, knee and elbow gears, organ-pipe vents, and a right forearm that is the Hour-Hand itself. Its heart lights the arena in its Ending's colour and beats faster as the next Pulse nears.
• The Remnant shows what it's about to do. The part about to strike heats up: its raised foot before a Stomp, its blade before the Hour-Hand, its fist before a Volley, its ribs before a Pulse, its heart before the Reset.
• A great dial on its back keeps the fight's time: it ticks backwards, runs down a stun, and spins back to twelve on the Reset. In the Dragon Break, the surviving Echo's dial counts down its partner's window. Lamps on its ribs count the Hearts still standing.
• When it falls, its heart tears out and rises before going dark, and the dial breaks free and rolls away.
• Where it falls, the way home assembles inside a column of pale light: the jambs rise out of the floor, the arch swings shut, and the keystone clock drops into place. In the Hour it stands half again as large, with a silver beacon over it, tall for its first ten seconds and then low.

The Unmoored Steps

• Every step shows what it will do next. Beat plates are clock faces whose hand runs down to the moment they vanish, and they dissolve in pixels instead of blinking out. Drift steps hang from pendulums. Risers climb on gear racks.
• Crumble stones crack in stages under your feet, fall in pieces, and fly back together when they return.
• A vane on the last island swings toward the next gust a second before it hits.
• Waystones mark where the void will send you back, and a golden burst plays in reverse when it does. Faint outlines show where vanished steps will return.

The Orrery of Endings

• The six stones are rebuilt: carved shafts with their sign, a dial in a bezel, and a gear on top that turns with the hand. The bezel glows gold while a stone turns and ember when your turn is refused.
• Banners hang from each stone, lecterns hold the plaques' ledgers, and the floor's dial is raised in brass, its lit plates glowing like soul gems. Tabs round the rim count the fray and pulse near the end.
• Six rings turn slowly overhead, shivering as the Hour frays. At the Concord they swing flat, the gem flares, and the bridge lays itself in twelve plates.

Fixes

• Changing weapons or casting on an ally right after a connection blip no longer throws you out of the Hour. Neither does entering the Hour, which a party-status message used to trigger every time.
• Hiding the tab no longer dodges the Pulse, the Reset or the End.
• A fighter whose connection dropped while a fight was lost can rejoin the next fight instead of being stuck.
• You can no longer set a Mark inside an Abyss Dungeon.
• Stepping into the Rift now works on slow machines and across a hitch.
• Pressing near the Rift no longer grabs it when you're aiming at a body or the floor.
• The Return and the landing back from the Hour no longer stand on or next to the Rift in small rooms.
• The Rift is sized to fit its hall and no longer pokes through pillars or ceilings.
• Abyss Dungeons no longer appear on beaches or with their end underwater.
• A refused or failed step through the Rift leaves you in front of the Hollow's door instead of in its middle.
• An open door no longer moves where the Rift stands from one player to the next.
• The Remnant no longer grunts while it's outside time, a Stomp lands as one thud instead of two, and the Hour's distant sounds stop when you leave.
• Coming back to the tab no longer plays every Heart that broke while you were away all at once.
• The Brass of Numidium's powers play the right sounds.
• The fight's title cards only show near the arena. Interrupted lines are repeated. The Hour's messages wait while a window is open, sit above the arrival and damage cards, and no longer wrap to four lines on phones.
• The Remnant's health bar uses the Hour's own colours.
• After the Concord, a stone's plaque says "The Concord holds." instead of offering a turn.
• The large boat no longer shares its textures with the Shattered Hour.
• The Rift's and the Return's textures sit where they belong: the Return's stone and dial were drawing in the Rift's brass, and four of the ring's numerals showed the wrong picture.
• Levitate no longer works in the Shattered Hour. The Steps are walked, not flown.
• You can no longer walk onto the Concord's bridge before it has finished laying.
• The Drift's pendulum rods hang beside its platform instead of through anyone standing at its edge.
• The sky and the arena no longer turn red before a fight has started.
• The way back no longer rings a bell every time you arrive, and its light stays on the island instead of spilling into the void.
• The arrival sparks wait until the step-through animation finishes, and play on every arrival, not only the first.
• The Hollow and the Hour run with less memory churn: the Rift, the sky, the Orrery's hands and the Hour's sounds no longer allocate every frame.

What's Changed

• SD-LOOK, AUDIT SD IV and V: the Abyss Dungeon rebuilt and audited, Levitate warded in the Hour by @Lattymoy in #715

Full Changelog: app-v0.1.7186...app-v0.1.7296