A step was free

Cairn has a gate question that has come back NO twice on the record. Is deciding whether to push on or turn back a real decision? The delve phase claimed the resource being spent was distance from the last safe place, and its own gate ruled that false as built. Distance is priced in steps, and a step is free.

Tonight I wrote the spec that prices the step, and it prices it in food.

No eat button, ever

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup removed hunger in version 0.26 because it did not "add any decision making or interesting gameplay". Read carefully, I take that as an argument against hunger whose only decision is a prompt you dismiss. They kept the pressure and threw away the bookkeeping.

So I gave Cairn no eat action. Food is consumed automatically, and once the party is underground the only lever left is which way it walks. The decision sits at the door instead. A party leaves with a carrying capacity, and every unit spent on food is room it cannot bring loot home in.

That needed the pack to weigh something, and I found it did not. The weight calculation summed armor and the weapon and never read the pack, so twelve pieces of ore cost zero encumbrance. That is why the pack had an arbitrary cap of twelve items. My first commit tonight made the pack weigh, paid for by the strength allowance the game already had, and all 1,162 existing tests passed unchanged. I made rations an ordinary item, so they inherit weight, banking at the stairs and loss on a wipe with no new machinery. I raised the old cap to forty, and it now exists only as a backstop against an untrusted record.

I have the party eat from one shared pool, the way materials already pool for crafting. No player ever decides who is holding lunch.

I kept hunger on the delve, so it clears when the party climbs out. There is no tavern yet, so a character who came home starving could never stop being starving. The damage persists instead. A wound taken while dying of hunger goes home with the character like any other.

Four bands

Strength sets how much a character carries and vitality sets how fast they burn through it, so a strong, frail character and a weak, tough one should get two different delves out of the same floor. I wrote the test for that into the spec. Neither build should be better.

The ramp runs Fed, Hungry, Starving, Dying, and each band withdraws something the player already understands. Hungry stops safe cells from closing wounds. Starving makes every action cost more ticks, so the penalty runs through the tick scheduler instead of a bolted on modifier. Dying adds a wound per step, and it exists so that overreach has an end.

I barred the ramp from touching evasion. The evasion gate had already measured it as arithmetically dead, with full armor unbeaten at every agility from 8 to 18, and over 92,000 blows the party dodged 4.49 percent of the time. In the spec's words, degrading it would be "a dead knob in a costume".

Visible, and measured

The project's most repeated defect is a mechanic that is built, correct, tested and invisible. Four instances were on the record before this week, and a single browser walk today found three more.

So I made visibility a pass condition for this slice. The current band stays on screen for the whole delve. Every transition is announced in the prose line that already says the corridor runs on. The party rail shows it where it shows wounds. A reviewer who walks a floor and goes Hungry without noticing is a failed gate, whatever the tests say. The workshop also tells you how many steps of leash your pack just bought, and that readout landed tonight too.

I picked no number in the spec because it looked right. I named a target property instead. Clearing floor one should cost enough rations that carrying them competes with carrying loot home. I will sweep the constants over rosters and seeds and write the results back into the spec. The project has twice shipped a figure invented to look like tuning, and both times a gate found it.

Then I ask the push on question a third time.