LootShrine — News & Patch Notes

BUILT FOR iPAD, ECHOES IN THE ETERNAL CLIMB, AND THREE TIMES THE SOULS

Hey, it’s Tim. 1.7.2 was four heroes and a balance pass. This one changes how the game feels in your hands: every screen now has its own iPad layout, the Eternal Climb gets Echoes — another player’s hero climbing at your side — and runs pay three times the souls. That last one came straight from your reviews. — Tim (solo developer)

BUILT FOR iPAD

Every screen has its own iPad layout, in portrait and landscape — all 21 screens and every overlay, not a stretched phone.
A bigger battlefield with your hero and bag right beside it, the camp in full screen, and room to breathe in the shop, the Forge and the Soul Forge.
Your iPhone progress carries over through iCloud, and the one purchase covers both devices.
In Slide Over or a narrow Split View window you get the phone layout — on purpose, it fits better there.

ECHOES — NOBODY CLIMBS ALONE

In the Eternal Climb, another player’s hero climbs at your side. Pick one from the Hall of the Fallen, a friend’s build code, your saved builds or the Wanderers.
Long-press your class skill to call your Echo’s skill. Every class’s Echo has its own signature move.
Once per run it takes a killing blow for you. After every boss, keep it or call another.
A short lesson now explains Echoes the first time you pick one, before the climb starts.
Your fallen heroes can join other players’ climbs as Echoes. Don’t want that? Settings → Hall of the Fallen → Share My Heroes.

THE ETERNAL CLIMB, REWORKED

Floors hold 2–4 battles, and enemies drop loot as you go.
Every Warden leaves three free chests: Divine, Word and Coin.
Six Word Fragments are found only in the Eternal Climb.
The curse draft’s ACTIVE MODIFIERS grid no longer cuts off its third row.

SOULS — THREE TIMES THE PAYOUT

Adventure, Beyond the Origin and Kalzania runs pay three times the souls.
Surpassing a fallen hero in the Hall pays double.
Every boss in those modes leaves a Soul Chest.
Achievement points now pay souls under Point Rewards — and the points you already have count.
Out-of-potions tips now point you to the Soul Forge, where more potions live.

WORDS, ACHIEVEMENTS, CUSTOMIZATION

Mythic, Cosmic and Heavenly Glyphs and Clauses — rare finds in any Word Chest, in any mode.
The Word Chest now drops from the first Adventure boss, on floor 10, instead of the fourth.
19 new achievements, 12 of them hidden, each with its own avatar.
Customization gets filter tabs — Portraits, Frames, Nameplates and Titles — and a compact layout on the SE and the minis.
The Hall of the Fallen and friend challenges now cover every mode.
Every hero carries 4 health and 4 mana potions.

FIXES

The skill book in battle opens again on iOS 27.
Death’s Door now unlocks for a win at 5% of Max HP or less.
Music and sounds no longer stall the screen.
Large perk prices — 100,000 souls and up — fit their buttons.
Boss screens read BOSS REWARDS, and skill-tree trait icons fill their tiles.

KEEP CLIMBING

If you play on iPad, tell me which screen feels wrong first — I tested 21 of them, and you’ll find the twenty-second.
And tell me about your Echo: whose hero you climbed with, and how far you got. Find me on Discord.

A BIGGER SCREEN. MORE SOULS. NOBODY CLIMBS ALONE. — TIM

FOUR HEROES WHO DON’T FIGHT FAIR — A STASH, A NEW CAMP, AND THE BIGGEST BALANCE PASS SINCE LAUNCH

Hey, it’s Tim. 1.7.1 was one feature and a long tail of fixes. This one is content again: four heroes, a stash for the loot you can’t carry, a new camp in the Tower, a stack of new perks, new leaderboards and four new languages. It is also the biggest balance pass since launch — mana, potions, late floors, poison — and I’d rather you read about it here than meet it mid-run and decide it’s a bug. — Tim (solo developer)

FOUR NEW HEROES

The Almoner and the Apparitor join Kalzania. Own the expansion and they’re already yours — no floor to reach.
The Almoner. Maerin pays the dead their debts. Every item burned at the shrine puts 5 Alms in her dish, every kill 1 more; a full dish of 50 is +40% Attack. The Last Rite spends up to 5 — 25% of her Attack per Alm to every enemy, and a third of it heals her.
The Apparitor. Orrick decides who stands where. Any enemy that changes row is Called and takes +20% damage — even when the front row falls or a foe teleports. The Roll Is Called swaps the ranks and hits the back row it drags forward for 90% Attack.
The Puppeteer and the Unwriter unlock in the full game, at floors 100 and 110.
The Puppeteer. Vesh fights with your enemies, not against them. Every hit banks a String, up to 5, kept all run. Take the Crown spends 3 to turn one enemy to your side for 2 turns — and it walks home with every wound.
The Unwriter. Alenn targets the back row as freely as the front. Reaching the rear rank or landing a kill writes a Blank; Strike the Line spends it to remove one enemy outright. No roll, no threshold. Bosses can’t be erased — they take a heavy cut instead.
Each brings a 60-node skill tree, two sets, a class item, a mastery track and their own story, start to ending.

THE ARMORY, THE CAMP, THE WORD

The Armory gets a STASH tab: 7 cells, up to 28 with the new Stash perk in the Soul Forge. The cells are yours for good; what’s in them lasts one run, like the bag. Stash cards have EQUIP, SELL and the favourite star, same as the bag’s.
Chest loot that won’t fit in the bag now waits in the Armory’s envelope.
A new camp in the Tower — new art, animated. Miss the old cave? Settings → Visuals → Shrine Style.
The Author’s Word saves four builds on tabs. The one you carry into a run is locked until the run ends.

PERKS

Soul Forge: Extra Attack, Floor Ward, Thorns, Potent Brew and Stash. More levels for Soul Rebirth, Healer’s Cache, Arcane Reserve, Soul Power, Splash Damage and Deeper Inkwell.
Shop Mastery now actually applies. It didn’t before, and the Soul Forge now shows the values it applies instead of the ones it meant to.
Devotion: more levels for Blood Tithe, Critical Sacrifice, Gold Offering and Golden Sacrifice, plus a Sixth to Eighth Offering.
Class mastery tiers now pay 2,500 / 7,000 / 15,000 souls.
The Forge’s Empower, Enhance and Reforge live in one panel. The merchant has three new merge contracts: Twin Stock, Familiar Faces and Fortune’s Anvil.

LEADERBOARDS, LANGUAGES, CODEX

New leaderboards: Elite Slayer, Divine Collector, a Merchant tab (Big Spender, Deal Maker), Pray Stone (Blessing Seeker), Offerings (Great Benefactor, Tithe Master) — and a board for each new hero. Scores set offline reach the boards once you’re back online.
Thai, Vietnamese, Ukrainian and Indonesian — seventeen languages now. Thai and Vietnamese get their own pixel fonts, because the original one couldn’t draw them.
The Codex Compendium covers every hero, debuff and stat, including the new Poison and Fire Resist.
Every achievement shows an in-game toast when it unlocks (there’s a switch in Settings), and floor achievements unlock the moment you arrive, not when the run ends.

BALANCE — READ THIS BEFORE YOU CALL IT A BUG

A new floor restores half your MP and one of each potion. A boss win refills both completely.
Casting the same skill again in a battle costs +1 MP each time, and MP refunds cap at 2.
Past floor 50, enemies hit softer, and floors 61–100 have been rebased. Multi-hit enemies’ later swings fall off: 100%, 80%, 60%.
Poison and other damage over time can tick for at most 10% of your max HP, down from 25%.
Spell Damage is gone. Casters scale on Attack now.
Phoenix Rebirth revives once, then the set shatters.
Empower and merges stop compounding percentages. Set-piece modifiers grant what they say they grant. Pray-stone crit blessings are cut to the size they show. Kalzania’s signature skills cost 1 MP. Slow and Exhaustion are retired.
Helmets, armor, gloves and boots can roll Poison or Fire Resist.
The boss Divine Chest always gives 4–6 Legendary+, plus a Divine on a hit.

FIXES

Two crashes: Save & Exit at the camp, and Defend into the enemy’s turn.
A memory leak that grew with every floor.
A quick second tap on an event no longer applies a second outcome. Event result titles are translated, and the Gambling Goblin has his own lines for when you walk away.
Known issue: on iOS 27 the skill book in battle won’t open — only its border takes the tap. It has been that way since 1.7.0, and only on iOS 27. The fix is done and ships in 1.7.3.
And the castle on the main menu has a thunderstorm now. Not a fix. I just wanted it.

KEEP CLIMBING

Tell me who you climb with first. Four heroes is the most I’ve ever shipped at once, and I want to know which one people actually pick.
And if the new mana pace feels wrong, tell me on which floor and with which hero — that’s the change in this update I most want to hear about. Find me on Discord.

FOUR NEW WAYS TO CHEAT THE TOWER. IT HAS NOTICED. — TIM

BUILDS YOU CAN HAND TO SOMEONE ELSE — AND A GAME THAT FINALLY SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE ALL THE WAY DOWN

Hey, it’s Tim. 1.7.0 added a place. This one adds a thing you can hand to someone else: the loadout you just died with, as a link, or on a shelf of your own. And then it spends the rest of its length on a bug I’d been shipping for the better part of a year without noticing — if you play LootShrine in anything other than English, your item names have been in English this whole time. So have your skills, your set bonuses and your relics. That’s fixed, and I’m not pleased about how long it took me to see it. — Tim (solo developer)

BUILDS: KEEP THEM, OR SHARE THEM

Every run summary now has a builds icon in the top corner. Publish the loadout you just played and you get a short link — anyone can open it, no account, no app required.
Or save it to your own shelf, up to 30 builds, under RIVALS → SAVED BUILDS. Saving works offline and publishes nothing. These are two deliberately separate actions: sharing doesn’t save, and saving doesn’t share.
A shared build opens in the game’s own components, not a screenshot — EQUIPMENT with the full stat column, the SKILLS tree as you spent it, the WORDS you had socketed, and the PERKS behind all of it.
Hall of the Fallen has a MINE tab. Tap one of your own runs and you see the build you fell with. Every fallen run carries its build now, including other people’s.
The combat log moved to the summary’s other top corner, so it’s still reachable after the fight instead of only during it.

THE LANGUAGE BUG, AND WHY IT LASTED SO LONG

Switching language now changes the whole game, without a restart. Item names, skills, sets and set bonuses, Divine relics, merchant artifacts and contracts, skill-tree nodes, world lore, cosmetics and event dialogue all follow the switch.
Here is the honest version of what happened. The language switcher always worked. What didn’t was everything built once at launch — Swift resolves that kind of list a single time per process, so it kept serving whatever language the app started in. It looked perfect in English, which is the language I test in, and it was wrong in the other twelve.
Nine battle words — BLOCKED, DODGED, CRITICAL, DOUBLE STRIKE and the rest — were hardcoded English on every device. They’re translated now.
If you play in German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Turkish, Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese: this is the update where the game stops half-speaking to you. Sorry it took this long.

FIXES

Buffs from events wear real art instead of a system glyph — six of them had been drawing a generic droplet or pawprint.
Donation buffs show their milestone art on every screen, not just some of them.
Bat Swarm no longer promises a dodge bonus it never actually applied. The buff was never there; the text was. Both are gone.
Kills from a damage-over-time skill pay their rewards. They were being counted as nobody’s kill.
Cloud sync says when it fails instead of quietly reporting a refusal as a success.
The run summary fits on small screens again. It had grown a button at a time until it didn’t.

KEEP CLIMBING

The thing I most want to see is a build I wouldn’t have made. That’s the entire reason sharing exists — not to rank loadouts, but to find out what the merge bench and the Word look like in somebody else’s hands. Post one.
And if you play in a language other than English: tell me what’s still wrong. I’ve fixed the mechanism, but a mechanism that works can still carry a bad translation, and that one I genuinely can’t see from here. Find me on Discord.

A BUILD NOBODY ELSE HAS SEEN IS JUST A RUN THAT ENDED. SEND IT SOMEWHERE. — TIM

KALZANIA — A SEALED KINGDOM, TWO NEW HEROES, AND A TOWER THAT FINALLY TALKS BACK

Hey, it’s Tim. This one adds a place rather than replacing a system. Deep in the tower there’s a sealed teleporter, and on the far side of it is Kalzania — fifty floors that are not more tower, but a kingdom with its own rules, its own bestiary and its own reason for being the way it is. It’s a separate purchase on top of the full game, and I’d rather say that here than have you find a paywall. And running underneath it, the part I’m less pleased about — two Chandler skill nodes have been charging players more gold for less damage, and two achievements have been unearnable since the day they shipped. — Tim (solo developer)

KALZANIA: THE UNSPENT YEAR

50 floors across 10 regions, each with a region master at the bottom of it. 110 new enemies, none of them recoloured tower stock.
Kalzania is its own mode with its own ladder. Your tower progress isn’t spent here and your Kalzania depth doesn’t overwrite it.
New loot down there: items, 4 class sets, and Divine relics of its own.
18 achievements, 6 avatars, 5 titles and 2 nameplates, all Kalzanian.
It needs the full game. It is not a way to skip the $2.99 unlock, and the game will say so rather than selling you the wrong thing.

THE CURSE IS THE POINT

A kingdom once asked the Vigil to hold a single year open until some business was finished. It never was. That year is still open, and descending presses it onto you.
Every floor deeper costs you. Killing a region master gives some of it back. It’s a sawtooth, not a slope — you claw ground back at every master and then start losing it again immediately.
At floor 50 you’re carrying about −39%. That number is the real one, measured off the actual curve rather than off the clamp in the code — the clamp sits at 60% and nothing in a real run ever reaches it. If you see a guide quoting −60%, it’s reading the ceiling, not the climb.

TWO NEW HEROES, BOTH PAYING UP FRONT

The Mason lays Courses at the merge bench and then drops them on the room. Two items that are secretly one item, joined properly, are worth more than the sum of what went in — that’s the whole class.
The Chandler keeps a Ledger of every coin you spend and then calls in the debt. She throws your purse at the room and the damage is what you threw. She is the first class where being rich is a combat stat.
Both are playable in every mode, not just Kalzania. A Mason in a normal tower run is a perfectly good Mason.
Each has a full 60-node skill tree, the same size as everyone else’s. And since it comes up: you can’t fill one. The cap is level 35 and that pays out 41 points. That’s deliberate — the tree is a fork, not a checklist.

THE TOWER TALKS BACK

111 story scenes, written per hero, across Adventure, Beyond the Origin and Kalzania. The tower has always had lore in the Codex and nothing to say while you were actually in it.
75 of those are free in the base game. The rest are Kalzania’s, or are written specifically for the Mason and the Chandler.
Scenes are per-run, not one-and-done, and they’re skippable — the switch is on the character-select screen, next to where you pick your mode.
New in this build: the intro and ending cinematics have their own switch, right beside it. It’s separate from the dialogue toggle on purpose. Silencing the in-battle chatter on your ninth run shouldn’t also take away the ending you climbed a hundred floors to see.

COMBAT SHOWS ITS WORK

Every hit that moves an enemy’s health now prints its number. A long list of them never did — boss mechanics, delayed impacts, damage resolved outside your own turn. They moved the bar and drew nothing, which reads as the game being wrong even when the maths was right.
The combat log is fully translated. It used to be roughly half English in every non-English build, which is a strange thing to discover forty floors into a run in Japanese.

THREE MORE LANGUAGES

Polish, Turkish and Traditional Chinese. That takes LootShrine to 13 languages, and everything in this build — Kalzania’s 110 enemies, both heroes’ 120 skill nodes, all 111 story scenes — ships in all thirteen on day one.

THE CHANDLER’S TWO BROKEN NODES

This is the section I’d rather write than have you find.
Two nodes on her tree read as upgrades: “carries 25 more gold per floor.” They added that number to both halves of the damage ratio — the gold you can spend and the gold the damage divides by.
The result is worse than doing nothing. A rich Chandler with both nodes paid 1.8× the gold for identical damage. A poor one lost 44% of it. And past a certain point the button stopped working at all, because the minimum spend had climbed above what she could carry.
Two nodes that charged you for getting worse. They’re fixed, and while I was in there the Coin Toss stakes went up — the whole gold-spend loop was cheaper than it read.

TWO ACHIEVEMENTS NOBODY COULD EARN

Also just bugs. Both live since Kalzania’s achievements were written.
One wanted the curse deeper than the curse goes — it asked for a reduction the sawtooth never reaches.
The other wanted floor 30 without felling a region master, in a mode where the master is the only thing standing between you and the next region.
Both requirements now describe something a person can actually do.

THE FLOOR-100 CLOCK WAS COUNTING THE CUTSCENE

Worth flagging, because it moves a leaderboard.
Clearing Floor 100 doesn’t end an Adventure run — it converts into Beyond the Origin and plays on. Which meant nothing stopped the play clock while the ending cinematic ran, so forty to sixty seconds of slides went into the speedrun time.
The clock now stops for the ending. Floor-100 times are 40–60 seconds faster from this build on, identically whether you watch the cinematic or skip it. Existing board entries stand; they were just all carrying the same dead weight.

FIXES

The Mason’s merge payout fired once per battle instead of once per turn, and the nodes didn’t say so. The text now states the limit, and kills from a merge explosion pay out properly — gold, XP and death VFX, which a chain kill could previously skip entirely.
Enemies could replay their death animation after already being dead.
Boss aura stacking was multiplying attack where it should have been splitting it, and “phases out” described the inverse of what it did.
Damage-over-time didn’t scale with enemy health, so late-floor DOTs were rounding errors.
A shield from the Mason’s Course and Mortar showed a system glyph instead of the skill that cast it. So did buffs granted by merchant contracts, which have had their own artwork all along and were never asked for it.
A DLC hero could be left in a run after a refund. The entitlement check only covered the Kalzania mode, not the heroes — who are legal in every mode.
The Add-ons page now has a privacy link, and its restore button matches the other two store screens.

LOCALIZATION

Everything above ships day one in all 13 supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

KEEP CLIMBING

The thing I most want to hear about is the curse. Kalzania’s difficulty comes almost entirely from a number that only goes one way until you kill something, and that’s a very different feeling from the tower’s. Fifty floors is long enough for a pacing mistake to be genuinely unpleasant, and pacing is the thing I can’t test alone.
Also: the two new heroes both spend a resource you used to just accumulate. If gold or merges stop feeling like yours, that’s worth saying out loud. Find me on Discord.

A KINGDOM THAT NEVER FINISHED ANYTHING IS A STRANGE PLACE TO GO LOOKING FOR AN ENDING. GO ANYWAY. — TIM

THE MERCHANT DEALS — THE SKILL TREE IS GONE, 105 CONTRACTS TAKE ITS PLACE

Hey, it’s Tim. This one replaces a system rather than adding one. Levelling the merchant used to mean spending a point on a small permanent bonus. It worked, and it was boring, because there was never a wrong answer — you took the discount, then the other discount, and the screen asked you nothing. From this build on, levelling him deals you three contracts and you sign one. And running underneath it, the part I’m less pleased about — while I had the merchant in pieces I found three places where the economy had no ceiling, and one Soul Forge upgrade that has never once done the thing its name says. — Tim (solo developer)

THE LEVEL-UP REWARD IS NOW A CONTRACT

Every time the merchant levels, he deals you three contracts and you sign one. There are 105 of them.
A contract is not a stat. It rewrites a rule for as long as it runs: what the shop stocks, what it charges, whether rerolls cost anything, whether you can sell at all, what shows up on a boss floor, what you’re allowed to pay with. Some are straightforwardly good with a price attached. Some are a genuine trade where the right answer depends on the run you’re actually having.
Your first three land at the start of the run. He’s level 1 too, and it always felt strange that the man following you down the tower had nothing to say until floor 6 or so. Now the first decision happens before the first fight.

ONE SIGNING PER FLOOR

You can sign one contract per floor, no exceptions.
He can absolutely level three or four times on a good floor, and when he does, the extra offers wait for you rather than evaporating — you’ll see the pending count, and you’ll get them on the floors that follow.
The reasoning: a single great floor was handing over four rule changes at once, and four simultaneous rewrites don’t read as four decisions. They read as noise, and then as a build you didn’t design so much as receive. Spread out, each contract gets a few floors to actually be true before the next one lands on top of it.
This is the change I’m least sure about, and it’s the one I’d most like to hear about.

CONTRACTS EXPIRE — AND SHORTER MEANS STRONGER

Most contracts run 5 to 20 floors and then lapse.
Shorter terms are deliberately stronger. A five-floor contract will do things a twenty-floor one is never allowed to do — the Full Catalogue’s whole stock, opened up, for five floors. Duration is a balance lever, which means a contract can be tuned by changing how long it lasts rather than by weakening what it does.
Seventeen are permanent, and each one has a reason rather than a mood. The rule, stated once: a contract has to outlive the moment it settles. Anything you paid for up front, anything that pays out at a boss floor, at a shrine awakening, or at the run-end soul count, and anything that deliberately pivots at a certain depth — none of those can be given a term, because a term could end before the payoff ever arrives. A contract that took your gold on floor 8 and lapsed on floor 20 without delivering isn’t a hard bargain, it’s a bug with flavour text.
In battle, signed contracts sit in the buff strip with the number of floors they have left on them. Tap one for the full text.

FOUR THINGS TO PAY WITH

Gold is no longer the only way to buy something.
Blood — 1 HP per 10 gold. It converts from the discounted price, so every discount you’ve earned still counts, and it can never kill you: a purchase that would leave you at zero is refused rather than allowed through as a dramatic mistake.
Souls — 1 soul essence per 5 gold. The souls you’d otherwise be spending in the Soul Forge, spent here instead.
Mana — a flat 1 MP for any item in the shop, whatever it costs. Regardless of rarity. It is exactly as strong as it sounds and the contracts that grant it are priced accordingly.

WHAT A CONTRACT CAN ACTUALLY DO

A sample rather than a list, because most of the fun is finding out:
- Stock that runs several floors deeper than you are, so a floor-20 shop sells floor-35 goods.
- A shop that stocks nothing but set pieces, or nothing but one item at a time.
- Free rerolls — or rerolls that get cheaper the longer you keep pulling.
- A free Legendary handed over every floor, or a Divine on every boss floor.
- Selling switched off entirely, in exchange for something worth more than selling.
- Theft: the merchant taking a cut, or taking an item, in exchange for prices no honest trader would offer.
22 are class-exclusive. Your Necromancer and your Knight do not see the same table, which is the point — a contract that rewrites how Soul Drain works has no business being offered to a Paladin.

NOTHING WAS TAKEN OFF YOU

Every merchant skill you have already unlocked still works exactly as it did. The tree is gone as the level-up reward; the things you bought with it are not gone.

THE SHOP HAD NO CEILING

This is a nerf, and I’d rather explain it than let you find it.
Shop prices were being discounted by seven different things at once — Haggler skills, the bulk discount, the loyalty discount that grows every floor, a merchant artifact, your relationship with him, a quest reward, and a skill-tree node. Each of those was written at a different time, and nothing anywhere added them up and checked the total.
They sum past 100%. Not in some exotic edge case — with an ordinary mid-run build. Past 100% every item in the shop costs one gold, which means gold stops being a constraint somewhere around the middle of a run, which means every shop visit for the rest of that run has the same answer: buy all of it.
Three things changed:
- One function computes the discount now, and it is capped at 80%. Every one of those seven terms still applies and still lands its full effect on its own. Only the pile-up is cut.
- There’s a floor as well as a ceiling. Contracts whose cost is a price surcharge could stack the other way to 2.3× — a Heavenly item at three and a half times list, which no contract ever printed. Surcharges now cap at double list price.
- A hostile merchant can now actually charge you more. The relationship modifier was being read inside out: “hostile, +15% prices” was applied as a multiplier on your discount, so the worst possible relationship could only ever erode a discount you already had. It could never once raise a price above list. The comment said one thing and the code did another for a long time.
Sellback got the same treatment — three sell-price contracts could stack to 275% of list against an 80% purchase discount, which is not a build, it’s a printing press. Sellback is capped at 90%.

SOUL HARVEST HAS BEEN FEEDING THE WRONG STAT

This one is just a bug, and an embarrassing one.
Soul Harvest — the Soul Forge upgrade that costs 800 souls at the first level and escalates hard across five — says it increases the Soul Essence you earn. It has never done that. It was writing to hero XP instead. Every soul anyone has ever spent on it bought a stat it does not advertise, and the stat it does advertise never moved.
It grants Soul Essence now, as it always said. And because I had to go and look:
- Soul Gain has its own row on the hero screen, so you can see the multiplier rather than trusting it.
- The merchant’s XP bonus has its own row too, next to it.
- If you actually wanted the hero XP, there’s now an upgrade that honestly does that — see below.

ELITE MAGIC FIND NOW DRAINS

Also a nerf, also originally a bug.
Killing an elite grants a one-time Magic Find bonus for the next shop — +12% per elite modifier, and the description has always said one-time. The line that cleared it was unreachable, so it never cleared. The bonus accumulated for the entire run.
The shop’s item-upgrade chance saturates at 40%, so four elite modifiers pinned every shop and every reroll at the ceiling for the rest of the climb. Deep runs were quietly running with permanently maxed shop luck.
It now drains once per floor, which is what “one-time use per shop generation” said all along. Read it as a real deep-run loot nerf, because that’s what it is.

AUTO-SELL

Pick a rarity and everything below it turns straight into gold instead of filling your bag.
Settings → LOOT FILTER. Switch on AUTO-SELL LOOT, then choose what to KEEP FROM. It’s off by default and nothing sells until you turn it on, and favourited items are never touched.

LEGENDARY QUESTS PAY SOULS

Legendary quests now pay Soul Essence on top of their gold and XP, scaled to the size of the quest. They were the longest commitments on the board and the only reward they offered was more of the currency you were already drowning in by the time you finished one.
The souls icon sits alongside gold and XP on the quest card, in the same style.

THREE NEW LEADERBOARDS

Speedrun: Floor 30 — the short board. Not everyone wants to prove something over four hours.
Speedrun: Floor 120 — the long one. Beyond the Origin, start to finish.
Essence Drinker — items absorbed, lifetime. Absorbing has never been counted anywhere, and some of you play almost entirely that way.
Global and per class, like everything else on the boards. And the main menu’s leaderboard line now shows your Tower Climber rank rather than your Highest Floor — the lifetime board is the one that describes most players better.

21 ACHIEVEMENTS, 20 AVATARS

Covering full rarity sets, quests turned in, Word Fragments collected, and floors climbed — each with a portrait to go with it.

TWO NEW SOUL FORGE UPGRADES

Veteran’s Insight (Fortune) — more hero XP out of every fight. The honest version of what Soul Harvest was accidentally doing.
Deeper Inkwell (Words) — doubled from six levels to twelve. The Author’s Word was capped low enough that composing a long sentence meant giving up on ever having a spare glyph. There’s a lot more Ink available now.

THE FIGHT READS BETTER

A killing blow lands on screen before the run ends. The game used to cut to the summary the instant your HP hit zero, so the hit that actually killed you was never drawn. The battle now holds for a beat — the blow lands, the screen reacts, then the run ends.
Damage-over-time gets its own beat. Burn and bleed ticks were resolving underneath the attack that triggered them, so the number flashed inside another number and read as noise. They take their own moment now.
Quest progress is readable mid-battle, on the merchant’s Progress tab, drawn as pinned notes rather than rows. Claimable quests sort to the top instead of falling to the bottom, which was making a finished quest look like a missing one.

FIXES

The tutorial’s ATTACK button did nothing. On a fresh install, on the very first fight. It’s hard to overstate how bad a first impression that is, and it’s fixed.
A first-launch soft-lock. Skipping through the intro slides fast enough could land you on an empty battlefield with no enemies and no skip button and no way out. The cause was cloud sync writing back a snapshot of your progress taken before two round trips finished, which quietly reverted the tutorial to “not running” while the tutorial was, in fact, running. It only ever happened on a first launch, which is exactly the wrong audience for it.
A completed legendary quest could vanish instead of waiting to be claimed. You’d finish the hundredth boss and the quest would delete itself rather than sitting at the shrine with a reward on it. Claimed quest IDs are shared across all your devices while the quest list itself is per-device, so a reinstall could leave a live quest sitting next to a ledger entry saying it had already been paid.
Quest reward numbers wrapped onto two lines — “+4500” rendering as “+450” above “0”, which is a worse number in every direction.
Contracts that promised things they didn’t deliver. A long tail of these, caught before release: costs written as gains, effects with nothing reading them, negative modifiers whose only job was to fail a check. Every implemented contract’s text now matches an effect that something actually consumes.
Item detail buttons now grey out when a contract forbids the action — EQUIP under a rarity cap, and SACRIFICE (including the bulk options) under a contract that has taken sacrificing away from you. They used to look available and silently do nothing.

LOCALIZATION

Everything above — 105 contract names with their gain and cost lines, the new upgrades, the leaderboards, the achievements, the loot filter, and every new label and alert — ships day one in all 10 supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

KEEP CLIMBING

Three things in this build are changes I’m genuinely unsure about, and you’ll meet all three long before I do: the one-contract-per-floor limit, the 80% discount ceiling, and elite Magic Find no longer stacking all run. Tell me how they land — especially the first one, because it’s a pacing call rather than a maths one and pacing is the thing I can’t test alone. Find me on Discord.

A DEAL THAT COSTS YOU NOTHING IS NOT A DEAL. SEVERAL OF MINE WEREN’T, AND THEY ARE ALL NAMED ABOVE. KEEP CLIMBING. — TIM

THE LONG CLIMB — TITLES, LIFETIME LEADERBOARDS, SIX DEATH ANIMATIONS & TWO REBALANCES

Hey, it’s Tim. This one is mostly about the part of the game that outlives a single run. A name people can see on the board. A leaderboard that counts every floor you have ever climbed rather than your one best night. Enemies that die as the thing they actually were. And running underneath it, a theme I’m rather less proud of — several numbers in this game were not the numbers I thought they were. They are all in here, named. — Tim (solo developer)

TITLES

Thirty titles, worn under your name on the leaderboards and on Rivals cards.
They sit below your nickname wherever other players can see you, and they pair with the nameplate you already own — the whole line reads as one piece of identity rather than two settings. Set yours in Avatar Customization, in the new Titles section beside Nameplates.
Supporter-pack exclusive, on the same ladder as nameplates:
- First pack — 5 titles
- Second pack — 10 (the first five included)
- Third pack — 15 (all twenty-five before it included)

TOWER CLIMBER — TWO NEW LEADERBOARDS

Not your best run. Every floor you have ever climbed, added up.
Highest Floor rewards the one night everything went right. This one rewards the hundred nights it didn’t, and it is the board most of you have quietly been topping for months without anywhere to show it.
- Tower Climber — lifetime floors across all Adventure runs
- Eternal Climb: Tower Climber — the same, kept entirely separate
The two never mix. Infinite runs can’t flood the campaign rankings, and a campaign climb can’t be padded by an endless one. Both are split by class, like everything else on the boards.

SIX WAYS TO FALL APART

Every enemy in the game used to disintegrate identically — sliced into a grid and blown outward. It reads well once. It reads well the four-hundredth time too, which is the problem.
Enemies now come apart according to what they are made of:
- Shatter — stone, steel, crystal, armour, mimics. Chunks blow outward and fall.
- Crumble — vermin, insects, plants, unarmoured beasts. Fine fragments drop straight down into a low cloud of dust.
- Ash — fire, bone, spores, paper. Dissolves from the top down and drifts, swaying, tinted to its own biome.
- Vapour — wraiths, shades, wisps, divine light. Stretches upward, narrows, thins into nothing.
- Splatter — slimes, jellies, oozes, blooms. Blobs arc sideways, land, squash flat, and stay a moment before they sink.
- Implode — the Cosmic Abyss and the Shadow Realm’s rifts. A brief outward hitch, then everything falls inward to a pinpoint of light.
The differences are directional on purpose — outward, straight down, drifting down, upward, sideways, inward. That is what the eye actually reads at a glance; six variations on “outward burst, different colour” would have looked like one effect.
Nothing here rolls dice. A shade will never explode into rubble. 153 of the 175 enemy types are assigned by hand; the rest crumble, which suits anything small and organic.
Bosses don’t get a seventh animation. They get their own style, played bigger and slower, with a flash and a shockwave on top — a Forge Titan still shatters, the Primordial still implodes.

THE OFFERING, REBALANCED

This is a nerf, and a large one. The whole ladder moved up six to ten times.

TIER	WAS	NOW
I	1,000	10,000
II	5,000	50,000
III	10,000	150,000
IV	50,000	450,000
V	100,000	900,000
VI	250,000	1,500,000
VII	500,000	3,000,000
VIII	1,000,000	6,000,000

The rewards are untouched. The price moved, not the goods — every tier still gives exactly what it gave before.
The reasoning: the track was hitting its ceiling far too easily and had stopped being a decision. A thing you complete by default is not a choice, it is a checklist. Now the eighth tier is a genuine target, and there is an achievement waiting for anyone who reaches it in a single run.
Runs already in progress keep every tier they have claimed. The next unclaimed one simply costs the new amount.

THE DIVINE MERCHANT

Also a nerf — but mostly it was a bug, and I’d rather say so plainly.
The perk was rolling for a divine item on every reroll. It was never meant to. That roll belongs to the moment a shop is generated, once. Rerolls are cheap and unbounded, so every press of the button was another ticket, and with deep-floor gold you could hold reroll and finish the entire divine collection inside one run.
Two changes:
- Rerolling now carries zero divine chance. Not lower — zero.
- The roll that was always meant to be there is halved, 2% → 1%.
In practice, a full climb from floor 1 to 100 passes roughly 230 battle shops — most floors have two to four battles, not one — so expect around two divine sightings a run, and about a 90% chance of at least one.
Boss chests are untouched, and I deliberately did not raise them. They didn’t get better; the shortcut got closed. Chests after bosses were always meant to be the real home for divines, with the merchant as a rare lucky sighting rather than the supply line. That is the shape the game is back to.
Every divine item is exactly as strong as it was. The perk still exists and still does what its text says. Only the frequency moved.

THE WORD ARTIFACT GOES DEEPER

Clauses now begin dropping at floor 50, and verbs at floor 60 — both rare, and both scaling with depth.
Past floor 60 a single run can turn up glyphs, clauses or verbs, which is the first point in the game where all three are on the table at once.

FOUR NEW ACHIEVEMENTS, FOUR NEW AVATARS

All four live at the Shrine.
- First Light — claim your first Blessing at the Prayer Stone → The Pilgrim
- Faith Rewarded — ten Blessings → The Devotee
- Voice of the Stone — one hundred Blessings → The Stone Saint
- The Eighth Offering — carry the Offering to its final tier in a single run → The Golden Tithe
The Blessing counter is lifetime and starts from this update, so existing prayers don’t count backwards. Sorry — there was nothing to count them with before now.

QUALITY OF LIFE

Leaderboards — a refresh button in the header, and long scores now read on two lines so names and titles stop getting clipped by a seven-figure gold total.
Main menu — illustrated icons for New Adventure, the Shrine, Rivals, Leaderboards and the Word Artifact.
Tooltips — elite modifiers explain themselves the first time you meet one, and the game now tells you when two items can be merged. Every tip can be switched off in Settings.
Beastmaster — the pack picker is findable, and free pet slots fill properly.
Battle shop — prices no longer overflow their cells at four figures. The gold icon is gone, replaced by a “G” after the number, and gold reads identically everywhere in battle.
Fallen runs — surpassing a fallen climber now awards soul essence that scales with the floor you did it on, instead of a flat figure.

SMALL SCREENS

If you play on an SE or a mini, a good part of this build is quietly for you.
Equipment, bag and shop cells now share one width contract, so the columns line up and the reroll button lands where it should at any slot count. The merchant’s level badge no longer wraps “Lv10” onto two lines.
On boss floors, the crown and the phase pips sat a full 15pt off the health bar on an SE while sitting flush against it on a Pro Max — they scale together now, and so does the gap under the ATK/DEF chip. The back row’s ATK/DEF numbers were the last two enemy numbers in the game still drawing in the system font instead of the pixel one.
One that only ever appeared in Russian and French: a four-figure shop price rendered as “1 000”, because the digit-grouping character in those locales is a no-break space and the pixel font paints it as a full square block.

FIXES

Two of these came from you.
Broken Banner (Ronin) — the set bonus reported as “not working” was a text error. The set always did exactly what its code said; two of its tiers simply described the wrong effect. The descriptions now match the set.
Trapper’s Vestments — the mark really does slow enemies now, as it always claimed to.
Hemorrhage — a health potion no longer clears the bleed the instant you drink it.
Speedrun leaderboards — the in-app board was rendering times as hundredths of a second while every run submits whole seconds, so a 35-minute climb showed as “0:21.00”. It now agrees with the pause menu, both run summaries, and Game Center. Separately, the floor-100 board was accepting runs from Beyond the Origin — which starts at floor 101 — on a board that means “cleared floors 1 through 100”. It doesn’t any more.
Skill trees — several perks listed effects that did nothing at all, and a handful of nodes shared a name with another node in the same class. Audited across all fourteen.
Boss mechanics — the mechanic banner could get stranded across the arena until the next floor.
Phoenix Rebirth — once per floor. It always was; the text just never said so.
Purchases — clearer errors when the App Store is unreachable, a purchase is awaiting approval, or a restore finds nothing to restore. Game Center sign-in and score submission are more reliable.
Localization — text that could be clipped or misaligned in languages other than English, across all ten.

KEEP CLIMBING

The two rebalances are the changes I’m least certain about, and you will run into both of them long before I do. Tell me how they feel — the Offering especially. The Discord is the fastest way to reach me.

SEVERAL NUMBERS IN THIS GAME WERE NOT THE NUMBERS I THOUGHT THEY WERE. THEY ARE ALL NAMED ABOVE. KEEP CLIMBING. — TIM

THE BOARD FILLS UP — 40 QUESTS, 20 DIVINE ITEMS, 6 EVENTS, AND SOME BROKEN PROMISES KEPT

Hey, it’s Tim. This one is mostly about things that ask you a question. Forty new quests, twenty new divine items, six new events. And running underneath all of it, a smaller and slightly more embarrassing theme — several things in this game were promising you something they didn’t deliver. Backstab advertised a guaranteed dodge and gave you a coin flip. Merchant skills said “this run” and lasted forever. Those are fixed too. — Tim (solo developer)

THE QUEST BOARD IS A PROPER SYSTEM NOW

The board was the weakest screen in the camp. Three quests, and once you cleared them the tab was dead for the rest of the run. Worse, rewards were locked in the moment you accepted — so taking a quest early, when your Magic Find and gold multipliers were low, permanently gave you a worse payout than taking the same quest later.
Forty new quests, spread across daily and rare. The board now refills as you clear it instead of draining toward empty, so there’s always something live on it.
Six new kinds of objective, covering the loops the board never touched: selling back to the shop, picking up loot, earning gold, gearing up, elite fights, and using your class skill. Combined with the camp objectives — sacrificing, merging, forging, donating, claiming blessings, activating set bonuses — nearly everything you actually do now counts toward something.
Legendary quests climb their own ladder. Clear one and a harder version takes its place, with a bigger payout. Clear that, and it steps up again. The legendary tab doesn’t run dry; it just gets steeper.
Two details worth knowing:
- Rewards are calculated when you claim, not when you accept. Take a quest on floor 5 and cash it in on floor 40 and you’re paid at floor-40 rates. Accepting early is no longer a quiet mistake.
- It looks the part now. Parchment notices pinned to wood, instead of a list of rows. Small thing. It reads like a board you’d actually walk up to.

TWENTY NEW DIVINE ITEMS — THE COLLECTION DOUBLES

Divine items went from 21 to 41. They still drop the same way: from bosses and divine chests, rare and run-defining.
What changed is the design brief. Each new one carries its own rule rather than a larger number. A few of them:
- The Unwriting Edge — “It does not cut armour. It cuts the sentence that said there was armour.”
- Verdict Everlasting — “The Judge does not strike. It simply continues to be right, loudly.”
- The Hungering Coil — “It does not want the world. It wants the next thing, forever.”
- Wyrmscale Grips — “Three scales thick. The fourth blow is the one that counts.”
- Crown of the Repeated Hour — “You have already worn this. You will wear it again in a moment.”
- Warden’s Last Refusal — “The Warden’s post has one rule: not through here. Not yet.”
I’d rather you found out what they do by finding them, so that’s all you get here.

SIX NEW EVENTS

The descent gets six new encounters, and most of them are trades rather than gifts.
The Vaultkeeper — a ledger-keeper in grey, pen already uncapped. “Everyone needs something sooner than they can afford it.” He lends now. He collects later.
The Mask Merchant — three masks on a pole, facing outward. “They are not jewellery. Whichever you take, you take to the end.” She deals in scars you keep.
The Mirror That Lies — a sheet of silvered glass, taller than you, and your reflection is already holding its weapon differently to yours. You fight yourself.
The Stray — something large lying against a wall, breathing badly. It’s been in a fight and it didn’t win. It watches you approach without getting up.
The Two Doors — the corridor forks. One door is scratched over with tally marks; the other has handprints on it, and they aren’t all the same size. Your choice changes the battle ahead before you walk into it.
The Hollow Choir — five robed shapes, hoods empty, holding a note that was already here. They’ll trade two unspent skill points for a glyph from the Author’s Word, up to three times a run. And they always hand one over — even if you already own every glyph, because a duplicate is still worth salvaging. No dead trades.

THE STRAY, AND THE PACK THAT HAD NO DOOR

Adopting the Stray costs you nothing to keep. It fights alongside your chosen companions rather than pushing one out of the pack — it’s a bonus ally, not a trade.
The pack picker is findable now. It existed. You could not reasonably discover it.
A newly unlocked beast fills a free slot on its own, instead of unlocking into nothing and waiting for you to notice.

YOU CAN PROTECT AN ITEM NOW

This one came straight from bug reports, and every one of them was the same story: I had the piece I was building around, I hit Sacrifice All, and it was gone.
Star an item and every bulk operation skips it. Sell All, Sacrifice All, sell by rarity, sacrifice by rarity — all of them step over a favourited piece. The one thing you were saving cannot be swept away by a mistimed tap.
The star shows up where you need to see it, too: the altar, the forge and the empower cells all display it, alongside the upgrade arrow.

TWO NEW LEGENDARY MERCHANT ARTIFACTS

The Golden Horseshoe — “Nailed above every honest trader’s door. The cutpurses of the lower floors have learned to walk the other way.” Nothing can be taken from you. Not from your bag, not off your back. It also pays 10% more hero XP and gold.
Message in a Bottle — “The letter inside is never the same twice, and it is never signed. Whoever is sending these knows exactly how deep you have gone.” A parcel waits for you on every new floor, and your Magic Find decides what’s inside.

TWO PROMISES, NOW KEPT

The Rogue’s Backstab. It advertised a guaranteed dodge and delivered a coin flip. That’s not a tuning problem, that’s the description being wrong. Now it arms Vanish — a real buff, visible in the strip — and the next enemy attack misses outright. It waits until it’s spent. No timer, no roll.
Merchant skills. They now appear as buff pips in battle, with their own art, so you can actually see what you bought. And they last one run rather than forever — which is what the description always said they did.

WORD FRAGMENTS CAN NO LONGER BE LOST

A few of you reported glyphs disappearing between sessions. You were right, and there wasn’t one cause — there were three:
- a rewrite racing cloud sync, where whichever finished last won
- a merge that could bring already-spent copies back and then lose the live ones
- a save arriving from the cloud emptier than the one already on your device, and being trusted anyway
All three are closed. The device’s copy is never overwritten by a thinner one, spent fragments stay spent, and rewrites can’t collide with a sync any more.
And because this is exactly the kind of bug that comes back the next time someone adds a field: there’s now an audit that fails loudly if new save data is ever added without merge rules attached. It’s the fix for the class of bug, not just these three.

SMALLER THINGS

Eighteen new prestige avatars, for achievements that never had one.
A launch screen with proper credit — the people who helped build this get their names on it.
A force-refresh button on the leaderboards, for when you know your score landed and the board hasn’t caught up.
Surpassing a fallen run pays souls that scale with how deep that run went. Beating a ghost from floor 80 is worth more than beating one from floor 12, which it always should have been.

FIXES

A battle could stall when an enemy died to a lingering effect. If the killing blow came from something already on the field — a burn tick, a delayed effect — rather than a direct hit, the turn could fail to hand back to you. Resolved.
Stun wore the wrong icon. It was showing frost. It’s lightning now.
Enemy status badges overflowed their row when an enemy carried enough effects at once. They fit now.
Layout on iPhone SE and 17e. A batch of small-screen problems: cut-off borders, a quest banner sitting off-screen, and a pause button overlapping the EXP bar. All fixed on both.

LOCALIZATION

Everything above — forty quest descriptions, twenty divine items with their lore, six events with every branch and outcome, two artifacts, and every new label and alert — ships day one in all 10 supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

THE DISCORD

The server’s still the fastest way to reach me — patch talk, build chat, and a bug-reports channel I genuinely read. Several fixes in this update came from there, including the word-fragment loss and the Sacrifice All complaint that became the favourite star: discord.gg/McptmPeddx

A GAME THAT LIES TO YOU IN SMALL WAYS IS TIRING TO PLAY, EVEN WHEN YOU CAN’T NAME WHY. KEEP CLIMBING. — TIM

THE STONE WAKES — PRAY STONE & DONATION ALTAR REBUILT AROUND REAL DECISIONS

Hey, it’s Tim. The whole game runs on one idea: every item is a decision — equip it, absorb it, or sacrifice it forever. This update is about the one place that idea didn’t apply: the shrine. The pray stone handed out blessings you stacked without thinking, and the donation altar took a capped trickle of gold you dumped without noticing. Neither asked you anything. Both got rebuilt. — Tim (solo developer)

THE PRAY STONE SLEEPS — AND WAKES

Praying used to be a button you pressed a few times every floor. Each blessing stacked on the last, so a run quietly accumulated a pile of buffs nobody could remember choosing.
Now the stone sleeps. It wakes after floor 1, then every tenth floor — 20, 30, 40 — all the way to 110. Each waking offers you two blessings drawn from a pool of twenty-four, art and all. Tap one to read exactly what it does before you commit. Take one.
The rule that makes it interesting: only one blessing is active at a time. Choose a new one and the old one goes. So every waking is a real question — keep building around what you have, or trade it for what’s on offer? Blessings you take don’t return that run, which means the pool thins as you climb and the late wakings ask harder questions than the early ones.
Three details worth knowing:
- The offer waits for you. Leave the camp without choosing and the two blessings stay on the stone — on the next floor, and the one after — until the stone’s next waking rolls a fresh pair. Forgetting doesn’t cost you the gift.
- Walking away isn’t free. Your current blessing burns out when the stone wakes again, whether you choose a new one or not. Declining used to be the quietly optimal move; now the choice is real in both directions.
- You can see what’s guiding you. Your active blessing shows as its own icon in the battle buff strip — tap it for the full detail. Blessings with an armed state (Second Dawn’s revive, Stonewill’s first-hit shield) show separately while they’re primed.

DONATIONS — THE CAP IS GONE, THE ROAD IS LONG

The old altar accepted a couple of donations per floor and paid out a random stat bump. Telemetry was blunt about it: almost nobody used it, and I don’t blame you.
Now every coin counts, with no cap — the altar always takes your gold. And instead of random crumbs, donations feed one long road with eight named milestones, from 1,000 gold all the way to 1,000,000. Each milestone pays permanent rewards for the rest of the run: extra sacrifice and absorb capacity, flat Attack, Defense and HP, crit. Tap any milestone on the track to see exactly what it pays before you save toward it.
The little things that make it feel right:
- A slider, not buttons. Donate any amount from 100 gold up to everything you’re carrying — one drag, then MAX when you’re feeling devout. The number on screen is exactly the number spent.
- Devotion makes coins heavier. Shrine devotion perks and the Shrine Favor upgrade in the Soul Forge make each donated coin count for more on the track — late-game builds can genuinely chase the 1M stone.
- Your progress is visible in battle. Milestone rewards that stay armed — the Kindled Altar’s bonus sacrifices, the shop’s Rare guarantee — show as pips in the buff strip, same as everything else that’s live in a fight.
Between the stone and the altar, the camp is now a place where you make decisions, not a place where you press buttons on the way to the next floor.

MORE OPTIMIZATION

1.6.1 was the big performance pass; this update keeps going. The camp, the menus and the skill tree now sit completely still when you do — zero background work on idle screens — and each hit in combat costs less to process, which adds up fast in splash-damage fights. Cooler device, longer battery, especially on long sessions and older hardware.
One follow-up on a 1.6.1 feature: the mid-battle pop-up that offered Reduced Effects when your device ran hot is gone. It meant well, but it interrupted fights at exactly the wrong moment. The Reduced Effects switch is still in Settings, one tap away, whenever you want it — the game just won’t tap you on the shoulder about it mid-swing.

FIXES

Splitting elites could end the battle early. If the last enemy of a floor’s last battle had the split-on-death modifier and died quickly, the battle could count itself as won while the split was still happening — sending you to the shrine past two newly-spawned halves. The victory check now waits for the whole death to resolve, spawns included.
The Continue alert was living in the past. Leaving the shrine could warn you about “remaining prayers” — a thing that no longer exists. It now tells you what’s actually true: whether a waking is still unclaimed at the stone.
Translation pass. A batch of strings that showed in English regardless of your language — including several shrine and battle labels — now translate properly. Found four, audited the rest of the game, fixed thirty-plus.

LOCALIZATION

Everything above — twenty-four blessing names and descriptions, eight milestone cards, every new label and alert — ships day one in all 10 supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

THE DISCORD IS OPEN

This build adds a Discord button on the main menu — the official LootShrine server is live. Patch notes, dev updates, build talk, and a bug-reports channel I actually read. If you’ve ever wanted to tell me which blessing is overpowered, that’s the place: discord.gg/McptmPeddx

NO CONTENT GATED, NOTHING REMOVED, NO PURCHASE INVOLVED. SAME TOWER, BETTER DECISIONS. KEEP CLIMBING. — TIM

COOLER, SMOOTHER, SHARPER — WHOLE-GAME PERFORMANCE PASS & NEW SHATTER DEATH VFX

Hey, it’s Tim. This one is almost entirely under the hood — and it’s the update I’m happiest about in a while. LootShrine got a top-to-bottom performance pass: battles run smoother, your phone runs cooler, and the battery lasts noticeably longer on a long session. Along the way defeated enemies got a new death effect, and four bugs got squashed — including one that could genuinely stall the tutorial. — Tim (solo developer)

THE BIG ONE — THE WHOLE GAME IS LIGHTER

If you’ve ever finished a long session and noticed your phone was warm, that was real, and it was my fault. A game screen only needs to redraw when something changes — but LootShrine was redrawing constantly, even when you were standing still in the shrine reading your stats. A few drifting gold motes were enough to keep the whole screen re-rendering every frame, forever. Multiply that across the menu, shrine, skill tree, leaderboards, customization, and battle, and the game was quietly doing a lot of work to show you a still image.
That’s fixed everywhere. All the ambient motion — drifting motes, glowing pulses, breathing icons, shimmering frames, the camp fire — now runs on the system’s own animation engine instead of being redrawn by the game each frame. The animations all look exactly the same. Nothing was removed or slowed down; the game just stopped doing the work by hand.
What you should notice:
- Idle screens are genuinely idle. Sitting in the shrine, menu or skill tree now costs a fraction of what it did.
- Battles are smoother, especially the messy ones — six enemies on screen with splash damage flying was the worst case, and it’s the case that improved most.
- Less heat, longer battery. The difference is biggest on long runs, which is exactly when it mattered least before.
For the curious: on my test device, an idle screen went from a state where the display was being fully re-composited sixty times a second to one where the game does essentially nothing between your taps. Heavy combat moments that used to peg well past a full CPU core now sit comfortably under half of one. Older devices should feel this the most.

NEW — ENEMIES SHATTER INTO PIXELS

Defeated enemies used to simply fade out under the death poof. Now they break apart — the sprite shatters into a burst of pixel chunks that fly outward, tumble, and fall, timed to the exact moment the death effect lands.
It’s a small thing, but kills read much better now, particularly when you wipe several enemies at once: each one bursts in turn instead of the whole row quietly disappearing.

FIXES

Loot flying to your bag. Occasionally an item — usually one out of a multi-drop — would snap instantly into your bag instead of flying there. The animation was being swallowed before it started. Every drop now makes the full arc.
Enemies vanishing early. When one attack killed several enemies, all the corpses disappeared at once while the death effects were still playing out one by one, so later bursts went off over empty ground. Each enemy now stays on the field until its own death effect fires.
Tutorial could stall. If you hit hard enough to destroy the training dummy in a single blow, the tutorial could get stuck waiting for a defeat that had already happened — leaving you with no target and a greyed-out attack button. Fixed on both ends; a one-shot kill now advances the tutorial correctly.
Companions missing after the tutorial. If you had summon Fragments socketed in The Word, your companions weren’t appearing in the run that continues out of the tutorial. They now show up from the first Floor 1 battle, as intended. (Beastmasters were losing their starting pet the same way.)

UPGRADE BADGES NOW ON BY DEFAULT

The little arrow that marks a bag or shop item as better than what you’re wearing has been in Settings since 1.6.0 — but tucked behind a toggle, which meant most people never knew it existed. It’s now on by default for anyone who hasn’t already made a choice about it.
If you’d rather read your own gear, it’s one tap to turn off, and the sensitivity slider is still there — dial it down and only significant upgrades get flagged. If you turned badges off before this update, they stay off.

LOCALIZATION

No new text this time — the whole update is performance, effects and fixes, so every language is already up to date. All 10 supported languages carry the changes: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

NOTHING ABOUT THE GAME CHANGED — SAME TOWER, JUST LIGHTER TO CARRY. CLIMB WELL, AND STAY COOL. — TIM

THE AUTHOR’S WORD — FOUR NEW HEROES, TWENTY NEW FLOORS, AND A TOWER THAT NO LONGER ENDS

Hey, it’s Tim. This is the biggest update LootShrine has ever had — by a wide margin. Four new heroes take the roster to fourteen. Twenty new floors open past the Origin, where the tower stops behaving itself. And a whole new meta layer, The Author’s Word, lets you compose permanent powers out of Fragments you collect up there. Everything below is included in the base game — no new purchase, no season pass, nothing gated behind a paywall. — Tim (solo developer)

NEW — FOUR HEROES (14 TOTAL)

Sylva, The Huntress — the Ranger. “Every target tells you where it will die. You just have to listen.”
- Passive DEADEYE — patience sharpens the shot. The longer you read a target, the more certainly you hit it.
- MARK your quarry, then punish it. Marked enemies take more from every arrow you land.
- Skill HUNTER’S VOLLEY — a rain of arrows across the field.
- Exclusive TRACKER’S SIGIL slot, plus two hunter sets.
Vael, The Timekeeper — the Chronomancer. A hero who plays the turn order itself rather than the enemy.
- Passive FORESIGHT — glimpse what’s coming before it lands.
- Spend Time to bend a battle: skill QUICKEN buys you an extra action in a turn, and REWIND undoes a moment you’d rather hadn’t happened.
- Exclusive FRACTURED HOURGLASS slot, plus two time-woven sets.
Kenzo, The Wandering Blade — the Ronin. “A hundred strikes waste the blade. I need only one.”
- Passive COUNTERSTANCE — defending isn’t passive. Weather a blow and answer it with a riposte.
- Bank Focus through the fight, then spend it on IAIDO — a single drawing cut whose damage scales with everything you saved.
- Exclusive RONIN’S WHETSTONE slot, plus two blade sets.
Zari, The Tempest — the Stormcaller. “I do not fight a man. I fight the room he stands in.”
- Passive CONDUCTOR — the storm builds on itself the longer it rages.
- A four-spell toolkit you swap between as the fight demands: CHAIN LIGHTNING, STATIC SHROUD, THUNDERCLAP and EYE OF THE STORM.
- Exclusive TEMPEST TOTEM slot, plus two storm sets.
Each hero ships with a full skill tree, stat-trait nodes, dedicated pixel-art VFX, Codex lore, per-class leaderboards and mastery achievements — the same depth every existing class has. Unlock them by climbing, same as the rest.

NEW — BEYOND THE ORIGIN (FLOORS 101–120)

The Primordial holds the Origin at Floor 100. Something older is waiting past it. Twenty new floors across two acts — and the climb continues straight through, no menu, no reset.
Beyond isn’t more of the same floors with bigger numbers. Every fight up there is built as a puzzle with a rule you have to read before you can win:
- Enemies that reflect everything except skills.
- Linked wards that must be brought down together or not at all.
- Phase-shifting skins that refuse damage until the moment turns.
- Living glyphs that rewrite the rules of the battle while they breathe.
Two new guardians: THE THRESHOLD WARDEN at 110, and at 120 — THE UNWRITTEN. Both come with escorts, so the final stretch is a fight against a formation, not a single healthbar.
Roughly thirty new named enemies with full Bestiary entries, new music for both acts, story beats on the way up, and an ending sequence for anyone who reaches the top.
Beyond is free. It’s part of the base game, not an expansion.

NEW — THE AUTHOR’S WORD

Past the Origin you start finding Word Fragments, and a new tab opens up where you compose them into your Word — a permanent meta layer that carries across every future run.
37 Fragments in three kinds:
- GLYPHS — raw statlines. Attack, Max HP, crit, defense, gold find, lifesteal, thorns.
- VERBS — triggered rules that fire mid-combat. Silence the first turn, delete an enemy outright, cheat death once per run, auto-win a floor.
- CLAUSES — abilities grafted from other heroes. Run the Monk’s combo on a Knight. Summon a companion as a Mage.
Sockets are limited and every Fragment costs Ink, so your Word is a real build decision, not a checklist. More sockets and a deeper inkwell are earned through the Soul Forge.
Duplicates aren’t dead loot. Merge a spare copy to raise a Fragment’s tier and strengthen its effect, or salvage it for Souls. Rarity runs from Common to Legendary, and rarer Fragments hit considerably harder.
New Soul Forge upgrades on a dedicated WORDS tab: more sockets of each kind, a deeper Ink budget, amplified Glyph statlines, and a fortune upgrade that biases drops toward rarer Fragments.
Fragments drop from Beyond floors and from a new cursed chest that can appear after Adventure bosses — so you can start building your Word before you ever reach 101.

NEW — COMPANIONS FOR EVERY CLASS

Battle pets are no longer Beastmaster-only. Every hero can now field a companion, and the old placeholder strike has been retired in favour of a real one.
Three summon Clauses bring their own companions to the field — a Warden that shields, a Cinder that burns, and a Reaper that hunts. Socket one and it fights beside you regardless of class.
Companions use the same HP bars, revive rules and scaling as the Beastmaster pack, and each has a Codex entry that unlocks when you first meet it.

NEW — ACCURACY & EVASION

A new stat pair that makes the back row and fast enemies feel genuinely different to fight. Accuracy determines whether your blow lands; Evasion is the enemy’s chance to slip it.
Misses show a clear EVADE popup so a bad turn never feels like a bug.
Accuracy comes from your class baseline, item affixes, skill-tree nodes and a new Keen Eye upgrade in the Soul Forge — so if evasive enemies are giving you trouble, there’s a concrete answer.
The full formula, sources and caps are documented in the Codex’s stat card.

QUALITY OF LIFE

Sacrifice All and Sacrifice by Rarity at the Shrine — the same bulk controls the camp Armory already had for selling. No more tapping through thirty items one at a time.
The Word tab renders as an open book, with your Fragments laid out across the pages and active effects broken down so you can see exactly what your Word is doing for you.
Your Word’s contribution now shows in the hero detail SOURCES breakdown, alongside gear, sets and skill tree.

GAME CENTER & CODEX

A new WORD COLLECTOR leaderboard tracking every Fragment you’ve ever collected, from any source. Lifetime and cumulative, like Enemy Slayer.
Full per-class leaderboard suites for all four new heroes, plus mastery and deep-run achievements for each.
A new Words achievement category, and Beyond achievements for crossing the threshold and for finishing what waits at 120.
Codex additions throughout: the four new heroes, both Beyond guardians, thirty new enemies, the Word Fragments, and the new companions.

LOCALIZATION

Everything above ships fully translated in all 10 supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Simplified Chinese. Every new hero, Fragment, enemy, boss and Codex entry included.

STILL ONE PURCHASE

The first 10 floors are free. One $2.99 unlock still buys the entire game forever — all 14 heroes, all 120 floors, Beyond the Origin, The Author’s Word, and every update after this one.
No ads. No energy timers. No subscriptions. No loot boxes.
Supporter packs remain cosmetic only — avatars, frames and nameplates, zero gameplay power. Most cosmetics are still earned free by playing.

THE TOWER NEVER ENDED AT THE ORIGIN. GO FIND OUT WHAT’S BEEN WRITING IT. — TIM

SHOW OFF YOUR COLORS — NAMEPLATES NOW VISIBLE TO EVERYONE & LEADERBOARDS FIT SMALL SCREENS

Hey, it’s Tim. Small, focused update this time — but one of these fixes is something a lot of you asked about directly. Supporter nameplates finally do what they were always meant to do, and the leaderboards behave themselves on smaller screens. — Tim (solo developer)

YOUR NAMEPLATE IS NOW VISIBLE TO EVERYONE

When nameplates arrived, they had a quiet flaw: the animated background behind your name — the gradient-and-particle plate that supporters unlock — only showed up on your own device. You’d pick a gorgeous plate, admire it on your own row, and nobody else in the tower could actually see it. Which kind of defeats the point of showing off.
That’s fixed. Your nameplate now travels with you and displays to other players:
- On the global and friends leaderboards, behind your row.
- In the Hall of the Fallen — on your fallen-run cards, so your final stands look the part.
- On friend-challenge cards, when you send a run someone’s way.
Your portrait and frame already crossed over to other players; now your nameplate rides along with them, so your whole look is consistent everywhere the tower sees you — not just in your own reflection.
A couple of practical notes, since a few of you will ask:
- Nameplates are a supporter cosmetic — purely visual, no gameplay power. If you don’t have one set, nothing changes for you.
- Like your avatar and frame, your nameplate propagates to other players the next time you post a score (finish a run). Play a run after updating and the rest of the tower will start seeing it.
- Everyone sees the correct plates once they’re on this version — and portraits and frames are completely unaffected by the change.
For the curious: the reason this was broken is that the nameplate was being matched to you by an identifier that Game Center deliberately scrambles between players for privacy, so the lookup only ever found your own plate. The fix routes the nameplate through the same channel your avatar and frame already use — one that every device can read — so it Just Works now.

LEADERBOARDS FIT YOUR SCREEN AGAIN

With the roster now at ten classes, the class-filter row across the top of the leaderboards had quietly outgrown its space — on smaller iPhones the All + class buttons ran off the right edge, dragging the rest of the board with them and clipping names and scores.
The filter row is now horizontally scrollable: it takes exactly the width it’s given, so nothing spills off-screen. Swipe the row to reach any class, and the leaderboard underneath stays properly aligned.
On larger screens it looks the same as before — this only kicks in when space is tight.

LOCALIZATION

Both changes ship fully translated in all 10 supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

THIS ONE CAME STRAIGHT FROM YOUR REPORTS. CLIMB WELL, AND WEAR YOUR COLORS PROUDLY. — TIM

ENTER THE MONK — TENTH CLASS, LIVE COSMETIC PREVIEWS & BIGGER RIVALRIES

Hey, it’s Tim. This is a big one. LootShrine 1.5.7 adds the tenth playable class, gives supporter cosmetics a way to finally show off to the rest of the world, and folds in a pile of quality-of-life and balance work I’ve wanted to ship for a while. Everything below is free for everyone unless it says otherwise. — Tim (solo developer)

NEW — THE MONK (10TH CLASS, FREE FOR EVERYONE)

Master Jin, “The Unbroken Chain.” LootShrine’s tenth class — and he’s free for everyone. No blade, no armor, no spellbook. Just the fist, and a discipline built on one idea: the chain never breaks.
FLOWING FIST (the Combo). Every landed basic attack builds Combo. Each stack adds attack power, and the chain carries between battles on a floor — but a new floor resets it, and Defending breaks your stance and halves it. At full Combo, strikes can land twice, and deep in the mastery tree every hit crits.
HUNDRED FISTS (the finisher). Unleash a flurry that spends your Combo for a single devastating blow — the more stacks you burn, the harder it hits. The whole class is a rhythm: build the chain, then cash it in at the right moment.
A skill tree built around the chain. Build Combo faster, hit harder at the cap, retain a slice of it through Hundred Fists, and turn a full Combo into guaranteed flurries.
Gear & two new sets. Dedicated weapons, robes, and prayer-bead focus items (a brand-new class slot), plus two combo-native sets:
- Ascetic’s Wrappings (4-piece, aggression) — at full Combo, basic attacks strike twice, and blows send a shockwave that splashes to every enemy.
- Mountain Sage’s Vestments (3-piece, resilience) — each point of Combo also grants Defense. Stand like stone while you move like water.
Fresh pixel-art VFX for the bare-fist strike and the Hundred Fists flurry, with amber-gold ki sparks on every hit.
Monk-specific class leaderboards, plus a floor-30 mastery achievement and a floor-60 deep-run achievement to chase.

NEW — SUPPORTER NAMEPLATES ARE PUBLIC

Supporter nameplates — the animated gradient-and-particle backgrounds behind your name — now display to other players.
They show up on global and friends leaderboards, in the Hall of the Fallen (including your own runs on the Mine tab), and on friend-challenge cards.
If you’re rocking a nameplate, the whole tower sees it now, not just you.

NEW — LIVE PREVIEWS FOR LOCKED COSMETICS

Every locked portrait, frame, and nameplate now shows a live, animated preview under a subtle lock overlay — so you can see exactly what you’d be getting before you decide.
The Supporter Pack page got the same treatment: each tier now shows precisely what’s included — portraits, frames, and nameplates — with live animated previews and an accurate, self-updating count.
As always: supporter packs are cosmetic-only. No power, no pay-to-win — most portraits and frames are still earned free through achievements.

BIGGER RIVALRIES

Competing should be worth it, so the souls rewards for beating a friend’s challenge and for avenging a fallen hero in the Hall have been substantially increased.
Friend-challenge cards now show the souls bounty at stake, so you know what a friend is playing for when you send a run their way.

BALANCE & CLARITY

Honest skill cooldowns. A few skill-tree nodes advertised things like “-15% cooldown,” which was meaningless in a turn-based game — the math collapsed every percentage down to the same -1 turn. Those are now real, stacking “-1 turn” reductions (Monk and Alchemist), so putting more points in actually does more.
Beastmaster pets defend properly. Your beasts already scaled their Attack off your Attack — now they scale their Defense off your Defense too. Armor up, and your pack toughens up with you.

INTERFACE POLISH

Skill tree, redesigned header. Your hero portrait now sits front and center with a level badge (just like the shop merchant), the level/EXP/points numbers use the crisp pixel font, and your EXP shows as real numbers right inside the bar — no more guessing.
Cleaner leaderboards. Ranks of #100 and higher no longer wrap onto two lines, and long nicknames and scores now shrink to fit instead of getting cut off.
Consistent Codex. Every hero’s bio, name, and epithet in the Codex now matches the character-select screen exactly — same story, same title — and the class count is finally correct (ten of them!).

LOCALIZATION

Everything above ships fully translated in all 10 supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

DESCEND, CHAIN YOUR BLOWS, AND PROVE THE CHAIN DOESN’T BREAK. — TIM

THE BEASTMASTER — NEW CLASS, BATTLE PETS, AND THE MY RUNS RIVALRY

A brand-new playable class that never fights alone — the Beastmaster hunts beside a living pack of beasts, calls on a savage Werewolf form, and channels the wild through a carved Beast Totem. Alongside the class: a new My Runs feed that lets you re-challenge friends from any past run, full Korean and Italian localization, a Companions section in the Codex, and a wave of fixes. — Tim (solo developer)

NEW — BEASTMASTER CLASS

Kael, the Pack Leader joins the roster as the game’s most companion-driven class. He swings no blessed steel — his power is the bond between master and beast.
- Class skill WEREWOLF FORM — Kael sheds his human shape and fights as a snarling werewolf, trading control for raw primal fury.
- Passive PACK BOND — forge a bond with the wild beasts that fight at your side, and call on that bond to shift the tide of battle.
- Exclusive BEAST TOTEM equipment slot — a carved totem that channels the strength of the wild pack into Attack and Max HP.
- A full Beastmaster skill tree plus stat-trait nodes for fine-grained build customization.
- Two exclusive Beastmaster set items with pack-themed set bonuses.
Unlock the Beastmaster by climbing higher, the same way you earn the other advanced classes.

NEW — BATTLE PETS

Beastmaster runs revolve around companions that fight on the field with you — a living pack instead of a lone hero.
- DIREWOLF — The First Fang. Your starter companion, revealed the moment the class unlocks. An aggressive front-line attacker.
- BLOODHAWK — The Diving Talon. Unlocks the first time you take the Second Companion node in the skill tree.
- CAVE BEAR — The Living Wall. Unlocks via the Snarling Wall node — a tanky body that soaks hits so the pack survives.
Each pet has its own HP bar, a role, and an ATK/DEF profile (pet Attack scales as a percentage of your own Attack).
Pets can fall in battle — and be revived — so keeping the pack alive is a real part of every turn’s decision-making.
Tap any companion to open a detail overlay showing its role, attack percentage, and defense at a glance.

NEW — MY RUNS, RIVALS & FRIEND CHALLENGES

Ghost Challenges finally get a proper home. The new My Runs feed keeps a rolling history of your recent runs as tappable cards.
Re-challenge a friend from any past run, any time you like — pick the run, share the code, and race them head-to-head instead of only being able to challenge your most recent attempt.
Winners earn bonus souls toward permanent meta progression.
The challenge screen now opens on My Runs by default, followed by Incoming and Outgoing challenges.
Fair play built in — daily caps on challenge sends and soul rewards, plus run-stat sanity checks, keep the rivalry honest and abuse-resistant.

NEW — CODEX: COMPANIONS

A new Companions category in the World Lore Codex, with a lore entry for each beast in the pack — the Direwolf, the Bloodhawk, and the Cave Bear — plus a character entry for Kael himself.
Companion entries display each pet’s actual in-game sprite alongside a stat card showing its role, attack, and defense.
Entries unlock naturally as you meet each companion during a run.

KOREAN & ITALIAN LOCALIZATION

A full translation pass so the entire game reads naturally in Korean (한국어) and Italian (Italiano) — menus, battle, items, skills, Codex, and lore.
Every new Beastmaster string is covered: the Beast Totem unique item and the Pack Bond passive now translate everywhere they appear, including the character-select screen.

FIXES THAT MATTER

Leaderboard suffixes read correctly again. Score suffixes (Floor, Gold, Souls, Bosses, Enemies, Items, Coins, Points) were showing a raw %#@count@ placeholder in German, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese — they now display the properly pluralized word in every language.
Beastmaster names translate on character select. The unique item and passive names no longer fall back to English for non-English players.
Companion Codex art fixed. Companion entries now render each pet’s real monster sprite instead of a generic book icon.
Removed the cosmetic Familiar feature. It didn’t fit the game’s style and philosophy, so it’s been retired from the menu, leaderboards, camp, and battle portrait. Your Beastmaster battle pets are a separate system and are completely unaffected.
Assorted smaller bug fixes and UI polish.

THANKS FOR JOINING THE PACK. TAP THE HEART IN SETTINGS TO LEAVE A REVIEW. — TIM

ACHIEVEMENT SCORE LEADERBOARD, SOUL REBIRTH & SHARPER STAT ICONS

A content + polish update, plus a wave of fixes and a big localization push. New worldwide Achievement Score leaderboard, a permanent Soul Rebirth revive in the Soul Forge, optional cosmetic-only Supporter Packs, and a top-to-bottom redesign of stat icons. — Tim (solo developer)

NEW — ACHIEVEMENT SCORE LEADERBOARD

Every achievement you’ve ever unlocked now adds up into a single Achievement Score, with its own worldwide leaderboard — Global and Friends tabs, just like Highest Floor and Soul Harvester.
It’s a lifetime board, so it only ever climbs: every new unlock nudges you up the rankings.
Posts automatically — the moment an achievement pops, when you finish a run, and whenever you open the leaderboards. Nothing to manage.
Existing players: your prior achievements all count. Your score will appear the moment you launch the update.

NEW — SOUL REBIRTH

A new permanent upgrade in the Soul Forge’s Special tab. Once per run, when you’d otherwise fall, you stand back up with a portion of your health and keep going.
Single-purchase safety net (no stacking, deliberately), priced as a meaningful late-game investment — insurance against that gut-punch moment where a deep run ends to one unlucky hit.
Intentionally a touch weaker than the Phoenix set’s revive, so chasing Phoenix gear still matters. For everyone else, it’s a hard-earned second chance.

NEW — SUPPORTER PACKS (COSMETIC-ONLY)

Three optional Supporter Packs for players who want to support a solo developer. No stats, no power, nothing pay-to-win. Nothing in them affects a single point of damage.
Each pack grants exclusive supporter portraits and frames that show on the leaderboards.
Browse any time from the new star button on the main menu (right next to Settings), or from any locked supporter cosmetic in the Customization screen.
The vast majority of portraits and frames in the game are still earned for free by playing — through achievements and character unlocks. The packs are purely a “thank you” option, never a requirement.

A SHARPER LOOK — REDESIGNED STAT ICONS

Full redesign of stat icons into crisp, readable pixel art, displayed inside stat-colored pixel badges throughout the game.
Visible in item details, the Attack and Defend buttons, the Shrine (forge, offerings, prayer results), enemy stat cards, and the prayer slot strip.
Color code reads at a glance:
- Red — offense and health
- Blue — defense and mana
- Gold — crit and gold-find
- Green — sustain
- Purple — magic
Fixed cosmetic frames with corner gems (Lightbearer, Archon, Eternal Patron) so the gems sit perfectly in each corner.
Added live frame previews inside the Supporter Pack cards.

FIXES THAT MATTER

Achievements now fire when they should. A few were quietly broken:
- Pacifist (clear a floor using only Defend) had no trigger wired. It now works: clear a floor without a single Attack or skill — kills from thorns, damage-over-time, and reflect count.
- Ultimate Offering (sacrifice a Legendary at the Shrine) wasn’t being tracked on the live sacrifice path. Fixed, and it now unlocks the instant you sacrifice instead of on a delay.
- Sacrifice counting bug — each Shrine sacrifice was tallied twice, skewing the Shrine Master leaderboard and sacrifice-count achievements. Corrected.
Consistent look everywhere. Your chosen portrait and frame now display correctly across all leaderboards, not just the ones you’ve recently topped.
Smoother camp Armory. Tapping items to view their details is now fast and smooth, even for items with full stat comparisons.

BIG LOCALIZATION PASS

A large translation sweep so the whole game reads naturally in English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.
This update closes dozens of gaps, including:
- The Customization and Supporter Packs screens, plus every cosmetic portrait and frame name.
- The full Codex — Bestiary, Items, Lore, and the Compendium’s Stats card (every stat description, formula, and cap), cursed-item names, and gameplay tips.
- Quest board titles, Eternal Climb curse names and descriptions, and new battle status effects (Exposed, Bleeding, and others).
- Leaderboard subtitles, the Alchemist achievements, and assorted menu strings.

THIS UPDATE WAS SHAPED HEAVILY BY PLAYER FEEDBACK. KEEP THE SUGGESTIONS COMING — I’LL KEEP BUILDING. — TIM

NEW EVENTS, CAMP UPGRADES, AND IMPORTANT FIXES

A big content + polish update, plus important fixes.

NEW

New events:
- Mirror Pool — duplicate an item
- Blood Pact
- Abandoned Campfire
- The Reliquary — draw set pieces
New camp stations: a Donation altar and the Quest Board.
Camp Armory: Sell All and Sell by Rarity buttons.
Rate & Share buttons added to the main menu.
New Ancient Coins history log for Eternal Climb.
Divine chests can now appear after Adventure bosses.

IMPROVEMENTS

Cleaner merchant screen: clearer active bonuses and a new “this run” stats section.
Tidier curse selection layout in Eternal Climb.
Lots more translations and text fixes across the game — events, settings, feedback, bosses, perks, and more.
UI polish on the main menu, character select, prayer, and challenge screens.

FIXES

Per-class Ancient Coins leaderboards now update correctly.
Fixed stat values being cut off on some devices.
Fixed a crash when selling items in bulk.
Fixed boss skills occasionally skipping their cooldown.
Various smaller bug and layout fixes.

THANKS FOR PLAYING — PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW IF YOU’RE ENJOYING THE CLIMB.

CAMP NOW VISIBLE FOR EVERY PLAYER

Camp view fix — the camp + six stations + Alchemist class now show for every player (were hidden behind a build-flavor gate in v1.5.2).
Minor UI/UX polish and bug fixes.

THANKS FOR PLAYING. TAP THE HEART IN SETTINGS TO LEAVE A REVIEW.

THE ALCHEMIST’S CAMP — NEW CLASS, REDESIGNED SHRINE, ASCENSION PRAYERS

A brand-new playable class, the Shrine fully redesigned as a diegetic camp scene with six interactive stations, a Quest Board overhaul with rewards 2–3× higher, and a new top-tier Ascension prayer outcome.

NEW — ALCHEMIST CLASS

The Alchemist channels absorbed shop items into permanent power.
- Class skill EXPLOSIVE CONCOCTION — consumes every active absorb buff to deal AoE damage that scales with the buff count
- Passive CONCENTRATED ESSENCE — amplifies absorbed stats by +30%
- Exclusive ALEMBIC equipment slot
- Full 28-skill skill tree plus 32 stat traits
- Innate +10% bonus to all shrine sacrifices

NEW — THE CAMP

The Shrine is fully redesigned as a diegetic camp scene. Six interactive stations replace the old tabbed UI — each is a place you can walk up to and tap, with its own animated sprite, ground shadow, and warm radial glow. Drifting gold motes blow across the camp between battles.
Six camp stations:
- SHRINE ALTAR — sacrifice items for permanent stats this run
- PRAY STONE — pray for a divine blessing, now rendered as a slot-machine spin strip
- FORGE — pay gold to Enhance an item with a new affix, or Reforge to reroll every affix on it
- ARMORY — inspect, equip, and swap gear between battles
- MERCHANT TENT — visit the merchant, donate gold, unlock relationship bonuses
- QUEST BOARD — take on Regular, Rare, and Legendary challenges
Camp Armory — full equipment grid with portrait, HP/XP bars, and stat row; 28-slot bag with class slot and merchant artifact. Items merge with the same flying-sprite + rarity glow + impact-flash + pixel-burst landing the battle inventory uses.
Camp Tutorial — new players are walked through every station via a guided spotlight + Continue tour. Existing players who already finished the tutorial skip the tour — their progress is respected.

NEW — QUEST BOARD OVERHAUL

Daily and weekly quests are gone. The new structure is Regular / Rare / Legendary tiers.
12 new Legendary quests added to the catalog.
Rare tier has a manual REFRESH RARES button (gold cost) instead of a 7-day calendar.
Completed quests now require a CLAIM tap — no more silent auto-grants.
Regular and Rare rewards boosted ~3×, Legendary boosted 2×.

NEW — PRAYER SLOT STRIP & ASCENSION TIER

The Pray Stone replaces the old channeling bar with a slot-machine-style spin animation.
Five tiered outcomes — Nothing, Minor Blessing, Blessing, Divine Favor, Miracle, and the brand-new ASCENSION — cycle past with their actual sprite icons, then land on your roll.
Minor Blessing and Blessing tiers can now drop raw GOLD or XP instead of stat lines.
ASCENSION — a new prayer outcome above Miracle. 1% chance to drop a guaranteed Set-rarity item — your fastest in-run path to a Set bonus.

POLISHED

Every camp sheet now sizes to its content — no more empty bands below the prayer strip or the forge selection.
Empower has a fully visual result phase with before/after stat comparison.
Burn-bar timing on the EMPOWER button matches the SACRIFICE flow exactly.
Slot strip lands on a single smooth bezier curve instead of ticking between speeds.
Camp station labels show a notification dot when an action is unfinished at that station.
Settings + Dev tools buttons added next to THE SHRINE header for parity with the battle pause menu.
Continue button from the shrine pause menu now resumes back at the camp, not an empty battle.
Quest reward boosts: Regular/Rare 3× gold + XP, Legendary 2×. Quest XP now goes to player XP instead of merchant XP.

FIXED

Camp Armory now correctly equips and unequips merchant artifacts.
Class-slot items (Knight’s Aegis, Alchemist’s Alembic, etc.) report the right screen position for the merge fly-animation.
Prayer slot landing card icon matches the actual rolled reward.
Completed quests stay claimable when finished mid-battle instead of disappearing into the shrine.
Pixel burst on merge landing fires at the correct destination cell.

THANKS FOR CAMPING OUT. TAP THE HEART IN SETTINGS TO LEAVE A REVIEW.

WARDENS OF THE ENDLESS CYCLE — 10 ETERNAL CLIMB BOSSES, SHUFFLED ORDER, NEW CODEX

Ten new Eternal Climb bosses, each with two phases and a signature mechanic. No two Climb runs share the same boss order. A new codex section catalogs them as you fight your way through.

NEW — 10 ETERNAL CLIMB BOSSES

A brand-new boss roster exclusive to Eternal Climb. Each boss has 2 phases, a unique skill pool, a signature mechanic, and full codex lore:
- Khoros the Ouroboros Warden — Cursed Bind
- Mavros the Veil-Stitcher — Veil Stitch
- Pyrrhion the Curse-Forger — Forge Strike
- Selene the Lantern of Names — Name Drain
- Janus-Khoros the Twin-Crowned — Twin Strike
- Chronara the Hourglass Witch — Time Reverse
- The Choir Without Tongues — Soundless Summon
- Vorthax the Architect — Tower Fortify
- Aurynn the Sun-Devourer — Solar Flare
- The Eye Beyond the Climb — Marked Sight

NEW — RUN-SHUFFLED BOSS ORDER

Each Eternal Climb run shuffles the boss order. Floor 10 picks 1 of 10, floor 20 picks 1 of the remaining 9, and so on — no two runs share the same boss sequence.

NEW — CODEX BESTIARY SECTION

“Wardens of the Endless Cycle” — codex entries unlock as you encounter each boss.

POLISHED

Eternal Climb boss stats now normalize to the current floor for consistent difficulty regardless of which boss the shuffle picks.
Elite modifiers no longer stack on EC bosses — their kit + phase mechanics carry the encounter.
Chest gold costs rebalanced at low floors — early-game chests are finally affordable (a floor-1 Iron chest now costs ~96 gold, down from 324).
Idle breathing animation amplified — enemies clearly breathe on screen instead of being still.
Flying enemies (bats, wisps, dragons, ghosts, eyes) now hover with an organic 2D drift path.
Elite enemies show a threat-tier rim glow — orange for 1 modifier, gold for 2, red-gold for 3+ — replacing the cluttered particle aura.
Phase 2 transition banners fire correctly for all Eternal Climb bosses.

FIXED

Splitting elite copies in Eternal Climb now inherit the parent’s stat normalization.
Phase 2 stat transition preserves floor-aware scaling instead of reverting to the boss’s nominal-floor baseline.
Eternal Climb boss sprites correctly mapped to the atlas.

THANKS FOR CLIMBING. TAP THE HEART IN SETTINGS TO LEAVE A REVIEW.

ETERNAL CLIMB — NEW MODE, NEW META, DEEPER BUILDS

Our biggest update yet. A new endless mode unlocked at floor 11+, a permanent Chests perk tab powered by Ancient Coins, skill-tree traits for every class, and a polished UI pass top to bottom.

NEW MODE — ETERNAL CLIMB

Endless ascent unlocked at floor 11+ — how far can you really go?
Draft a new elite curse every 2 floors. Stack the right ones and watch your run transform.
Boss fight every 10 floors with scaling stakes.
Earn Ancient Coins from your Eternal Climb runs to spend in the new Chests perk tab.

NEW META — CHESTS TAB

12 new permanent upgrades powered by Ancient Coins.
Categories include:
- More chests per floor and bigger hauls per chest
- Set-piece hunters — bias drops toward your build
- Divine echoes — rare shrine effects trigger more often
- Eternal-tier perks — reserved for the Climb-or-die crowd

DEEPER CHARACTERS

Level cap raised from 20 → 35.
All 7 classes now have skill-tree trait nodes — 224 new traits in total for fine-grained build customization.

POLISHED UI

Redesigned event screens with hero artwork and multi-select merchant buying.
Refreshed Bestiary tab with region icons and compact entries.
New Challenge panel during ghost battles shows your run vs. the ghost at a glance.
Main menu Continue / Shrine buttons rebuilt with character portraits.

BALANCE & FIXES

Eternal Climb floors 1–9 now ease in new players with a gentler stat curve.
Gold and XP no longer inflate on elite enemies.
Shrine prayers and donations now show real (post-scaling) bonuses instead of the pre-scaling numbers.
Class auto-unlock fix — Rogue, Mage, and other gated classes now unlock correctly on existing saves.
Run summary screen now fits properly on iPhone SE.

THANKS FOR CLIMBING. TAP THE HEART IN SETTINGS TO LEAVE A REVIEW.

FLOOR 10 SAFETY NET, NEW META UPGRADES & FULL MERCHANT LOCALIZATION

A friendlier first boss, two new permanent potion upgrades, smarter class passives, and a massive localization pass — Grimwald finally speaks your language.

FLOOR 10 BOSS BALANCE & SAFETY NET

The Gatekeeper has been retuned: lower HP, attack, and defense in both phases, plus fewer minions in phase two. New players should see a much smoother first encounter.
Added Divine Mercy — a once-per-run revive at 50% HP if you fall to any boss. The Shrine watches over you on your first attempt.
Entering a boss floor (10, 20, 30…) now fully restores your HP. Save your potions for what comes next.

NEW META UPGRADES

Two new permanent upgrades in the Shrine: HP Potion Mastery and MP Potion Mastery. Each level boosts the healing and mana you get from potions for every character class.

CLASS PASSIVES — BERSERKER & NECROMANCER

Death Wish (Berserker) and Soul Harvest (Necromancer) passives now appear in the active-buff bar with proper class artwork.
The stats bar now shows the green up-arrow when these passives push your attack higher, just like any other buff.
Battle Cry now displays its real skill icon instead of a generic fallback.
Fixed a bug where buff icons would revert to a generic icon after the first turn.

QUALITY OF LIFE

Snappier enemy targeting — switching targets is now near-instant instead of fading slowly.
Quest progress bars no longer overflow past their container when you exceed the goal.
Pixel typography is now used consistently for floor markers (F1, F2…) and skill cooldown counters.
Shield visuals on the HP bar have been corrected.

MASSIVE LOCALIZATION PASS

The merchant Grimwald (and his shady cousin, the Shadow Peddler) is now fully translated:
- Greetings, quotes, quest names and descriptions
- Mood-driven reactions to your purchases and rerolls
- Level-up celebrations and artifact reveals
- Across Russian, Simplified Chinese, French, and Spanish
Battle-view merchant chat bubbles (about 95 short reaction lines) are now translated in all supported languages, with a Chinese-friendly pixel font.
Achievement detail screen: “Points”, “Unlocked”, “Locked”, and the unlock date now translate properly.
Item merge screen: the “Upgrade to…” label is no longer stuck in English.
Russian: the merge verb has been polished from “Слить” to the more natural “Объединить”.
A pile of smaller English-only strings throughout the UI now respect the player’s language setting, including quest descriptions that previously didn’t update when you switched language mid-game.

TRIAL PAYWALL FLOW

For players still in the free trial, the run-pause-and-resume flow has been rewritten so your progress is never lost when the paywall appears at the end of floor 10.

THANK YOU FOR PLAYING LOOTSHRINE. USE THE IN-GAME “NEED HELP OR FOUND A BUG?” LINK — REPORTS GO STRAIGHT TO US.

CONTENT + BALANCE + QUALITY OVERHAUL

A major content + balance + quality update. Every system got attention.

NEW ELITE MODIFIERS (8 TOTAL)

Teleporter — swaps rows with a front-row ally via VFX chain
Linked — cannot be damaged while the linked ally lives (same-row targeting enforced)
Phased — randomly becomes invulnerable; telegraph hidden via stealth buff
Adaptive — gains resistance to repeated damage types
Parasitic — drains HP from nearby allies
Splitting — spawns a weaker copy on death
Reflective — returns a portion of damage
Explosive — detonates on death, hitting all enemies in row

BALANCE OVERHAUL

Full enemy scaling rebalance across floors 1–100
Floor 10 Gatekeeper boss tuned for smoother Tier A difficulty
Player defense cap and level multiplier adjusted
Level-up reward scaling improved

SHRINE OVERHAUL

Prayer system completely reworked:
- No more "Nothing" outcomes — every prayer rewards you
- Blessings scale with current floor
- Divine Favor now grants a Sanctuary blessing
- Miracle (5% chance) correctly rolls a Legendary item
New Empower tab — level up Set and Divine items with gold or sacrifice
Devotion perks renamed and reorganized (save-compatible)
Floor-scaled sacrifice rewards
Shrine header shows gold and stat icons for clarity

UI / UX POLISH

Sacrifice and Empower tabs redesigned with stat comparisons and pixel borders
Boss phase indicators converted to pixel font
Combat VFX — linked chain overlays, teleport animations, phased stealth telegraphs
Improved tooltips across shop, shrine, inventory
Item cells now show side-by-side icon + stats in a 4-column grid

LOCALIZATION

Full Russian localization covering all UI, achievements, items, skills, and lore
Fixed language-switching bug — in-game language changes apply instantly
Complete English string catalog rebuild for App Store language listing

PROGRESSION

Enhanced analytics (anonymous, privacy-preserving) to guide future balance patches
Achievement unlock tracking refined

FIXES

Resolved critical save-corruption affecting long runs with certain item combinations
Linked elite hardlock fixed (same-row targeting, button gating)
Miracle legendary drop now uses correct forceRarity
Phased mechanic rewritten from broken per-turn counter to reliable cooldown
Combat button correctly disables for unreachable link-protected targets
Numerous concurrency and animation polish fixes

THANKS FOR PLAYING LOOTSHRINE. KEEP CLIMBING.

BOSS REBALANCE & NEW PLAYER IMPROVEMENTS

Floor 10 boss rebalanced (easier Phase 2)
Extra Attack now shows visible damage numbers
Contextual tooltips for new players
Event encounters redesigned
Minor bug fixes and UI/UX improvements
Localization fixes

LEADERBOARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS LIVE

Added support for Game Center leaderboards and achievements
Minor bugs and UI/UX fixes

NEWS &PATCH NOTES

BUILT FOR iPAD, ECHOES IN THE ETERNAL CLIMB, AND THREE TIMES THE SOULS

BUILT FOR iPAD

ECHOES — NOBODY CLIMBS ALONE

THE ETERNAL CLIMB, REWORKED

SOULS — THREE TIMES THE PAYOUT

WORDS, ACHIEVEMENTS, CUSTOMIZATION

FIXES

KEEP CLIMBING

FOUR HEROES WHO DON’T FIGHT FAIR — A STASH, A NEW CAMP, AND THE BIGGEST BALANCE PASS SINCE LAUNCH

FOUR NEW HEROES

THE ARMORY, THE CAMP, THE WORD

PERKS

LEADERBOARDS, LANGUAGES, CODEX

BALANCE — READ THIS BEFORE YOU CALL IT A BUG

FIXES

KEEP CLIMBING

BUILDS YOU CAN HAND TO SOMEONE ELSE — AND A GAME THAT FINALLY SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE ALL THE WAY DOWN

BUILDS: KEEP THEM, OR SHARE THEM

THE LANGUAGE BUG, AND WHY IT LASTED SO LONG

FIXES

KEEP CLIMBING

KALZANIA — A SEALED KINGDOM, TWO NEW HEROES, AND A TOWER THAT FINALLY TALKS BACK

KALZANIA: THE UNSPENT YEAR

THE CURSE IS THE POINT

TWO NEW HEROES, BOTH PAYING UP FRONT

THE TOWER TALKS BACK

COMBAT SHOWS ITS WORK

THREE MORE LANGUAGES

THE CHANDLER’S TWO BROKEN NODES

TWO ACHIEVEMENTS NOBODY COULD EARN

THE FLOOR-100 CLOCK WAS COUNTING THE CUTSCENE

FIXES

LOCALIZATION

KEEP CLIMBING

THE MERCHANT DEALS — THE SKILL TREE IS GONE, 105 CONTRACTS TAKE ITS PLACE

THE LEVEL-UP REWARD IS NOW A CONTRACT

ONE SIGNING PER FLOOR

CONTRACTS EXPIRE — AND SHORTER MEANS STRONGER

FOUR THINGS TO PAY WITH

WHAT A CONTRACT CAN ACTUALLY DO

NOTHING WAS TAKEN OFF YOU

THE SHOP HAD NO CEILING

SOUL HARVEST HAS BEEN FEEDING THE WRONG STAT

ELITE MAGIC FIND NOW DRAINS

AUTO-SELL

LEGENDARY QUESTS PAY SOULS

THREE NEW LEADERBOARDS

21 ACHIEVEMENTS, 20 AVATARS

TWO NEW SOUL FORGE UPGRADES

THE FIGHT READS BETTER

FIXES

LOCALIZATION

KEEP CLIMBING

THE LONG CLIMB — TITLES, LIFETIME LEADERBOARDS, SIX DEATH ANIMATIONS & TWO REBALANCES

TITLES

TOWER CLIMBER — TWO NEW LEADERBOARDS

SIX WAYS TO FALL APART

THE OFFERING, REBALANCED

THE DIVINE MERCHANT

THE WORD ARTIFACT GOES DEEPER

FOUR NEW ACHIEVEMENTS, FOUR NEW AVATARS

QUALITY OF LIFE

SMALL SCREENS

FIXES

KEEP CLIMBING

THE BOARD FILLS UP — 40 QUESTS, 20 DIVINE ITEMS, 6 EVENTS, AND SOME BROKEN PROMISES KEPT

THE QUEST BOARD IS A PROPER SYSTEM NOW

TWENTY NEW DIVINE ITEMS — THE COLLECTION DOUBLES

SIX NEW EVENTS

THE STRAY, AND THE PACK THAT HAD NO DOOR

YOU CAN PROTECT AN ITEM NOW

TWO NEW LEGENDARY MERCHANT ARTIFACTS

TWO PROMISES, NOW KEPT

WORD FRAGMENTS CAN NO LONGER BE LOST

SMALLER THINGS

FIXES

LOCALIZATION

THE DISCORD

THE STONE WAKES — PRAY STONE & DONATION ALTAR REBUILT AROUND REAL DECISIONS

NEWS &
PATCH NOTES