Reading the calendar
Earfh now reads the date when a run starts and applies a shift that changes the rules. Black Friday started as an extra 20% on pack size and ended at double the packs, on the owner's say-so. A memo board adds clauses you sign for the whole run.
Written up later from the repo's history and dated to the days it describes.
Two systems landed in Earfh on October 14 that change a run before the first enemy appears. One reads the date. The other lets you sign memos.
Calendar Shifts
When a run begins, the game reads the date once and picks a shift, and a Settings toggle turns the whole thing off. There are ten shifts, and the spec holds every number inside plus or minus 30.
The owner's first comment was that a feature tied to the real calendar could be an implementation nightmare. The spec's answer was to read the date a single time at run start, through a pure function, with a --shift=<id> override so every shift can be tested on any day of the year.
Black Friday is the one that got argued with. The first clause made packs larger by 20%, and the owner's note was "more like double the mob pack size... but it's a pass!" The same day the clause changed from larger packs to more of them, at plus 100% pack count, bounded by the alive cap and a hard limit of 60 enemies. The changelog admits this exceeds the plus or minus 30 rule on purpose and calls it a first guess.
Directive Cards
The lobby has a Memo Board now. A memo has a Perk and a Clause, and you sign it for the whole run. There are ten of them. You sign two to start, a third after any act boss and a fourth after the Pen Pal. Cost Cutting is the example in the spec. It raises your bank rate by 20% and stops powerups from dropping.
Every Perk comes with a Clause that costs you something.
What is next
The numbers are first guesses, and Black Friday is the likeliest to move. Calendar Shifts need a real run on a real holiday before anyone knows what they feel like.