Cadence

The clock release. Five of the ten items in Joe's 2026-08-22 playtest turned out to be the same piece of code, the battle now plays at a speed you can actually read, and a weapon finally decides how far its owner can reach.

The clock

• The game opens in SPEED order. Starting CT used to be seeded from the unit's id, which made it a fixed per-team handicap — at 3v3 red opened 54 CT ahead of blue, in every match, forever, and the opening turn order was byte-identical every time. Everyone now starts at zero and the fastest unit simply arrives first. Ties are broken by a die roll rather than by roster position.
• Stop no longer stops a corpse's death timer. A KO'd unit's clock was being multiplied by its status effects, and statuses do not tick on the dead — so a Stopped body sat at 237 turns to crystallise instead of 10, and a Slowed one lingered nearly as long. A corpse's clock is its own now.
• The death timer counts three of the body's turns, all three of them. No KO site reset the unit's CT, so a unit that fell with a full bar gave its first tick away instantly and crystallised in two.
• Haste is 1.5x, was 2x. With everyone opening at zero, a doubled clock meant a hasted unit went twice before some units went once — not occasionally, always.
• The turn-order timeline tells the truth about charged spells. The HUD let a charging caster pin its own clock at the current instant, so casts were shown resolving early (in half of a 400-case sample); the engine-side forecast was wrong the other way, one slot late in every case.
• Crystals wear nothing. A crystallised unit kept its bars, status badges, facing cone and cosmetics — including, in Joe's log, a HASTE badge over a shard that no longer has a clock.

Reach and damage

• A weapon says how far its owner can reach. Every physical art the weapon itself carries now takes the weapon's range: a spear knight's Armor Break thrusts two tiles, and an archer holding a mace can no longer snipe from seven. The rule runs both ways — the art is exactly as long as the weapon, not the wider of the two.
• Ranged weapons matter more than they did. The crossbow ladder runs 3..13 and the bow 3..12, so the weakest crossbow you can draw is 61% of the best rather than 75%, and the weakest bow 59% rather than 69%. Which bow the Fates deal you is now worth caring about.
• Concentrate steadies the hand instead of never missing. It adds accuracy — one point per four Brave, so +11 to +22 across the rolled band — rather than deleting the target's evade outright. Dodge classes, Defend and the evade stat all come back to life against a Concentrate carrier, and a Concentrate axe is a real build. Its can't-be-blocked half is unchanged.
• Ultimates fire three times a battle, not once, with the melee-tier ones repriced in MP to match. Ultima costs 30.

Reactions

• Dragonheart is once per battle. It was rolling 30% on every blow it took and handing out a Reraise that never expired, so a unit was insured within a few hits and stayed insured all match — and the very blow that spent a Reraise could re-arm it on the way past. Measured at a real duel's numbers that was a mean of four rezzes, a quarter of fights seeing six or more, and 27 landed hits to put down a unit that dies in 11. One extra life, bought early or not at all. The unit sheet marks it SPENT and the forecast stops warning about it once it has gone.
• A reaction's buff can run out again. Foresight, Speed Save, MA Save, Fury and Regenerate roll on every blow taken, so under sustained fire they re-granted their buff before it could ever expire. A self-buff reaction now declines to re-grant what its bearer already wears. Measured uptime at three blows a round: Haste 92% to 82%, Attack Up 97% to 87%. Hex Recoil is untouched — its poison lands on somebody else.
• "Until cured" now means until cured. Reraise, undeath and an invisibility cloak's veil were quietly counting down from 99, so the promise had a hidden deadline and the log printed Reraise(98) from the second turn on.

The pace of a battle

• The whole battle plays slower, deliberately. Spells, abilities, walks and bot turns were resolving faster than anyone could follow. Turn to turn is roughly twice as long now, measured: a unit takes as long to cross the board as the walk is far (it used to take the same flat moment for one tile or six), each spell in a multi-cast tick reads as its own sentence, and the gap between one unit finishing and the next starting is long enough to notice it happened.
• Every ability announces itself on the board with a painted banner, and the contact beat is real: the knight raises the sword, then the damage number arrives with the blade.

Screens

• A self-cast asks once. Chakra, a dance, a self-buff used to pop CONFIRM ACTION? and then FACE WHICH WAY? back to back. It now asks the facing question only, with CANCEL and Esc backing all the way out of the cast.

• The command card sizes to the kit it is showing, not to the largest kit it has ever shown — a rebuild was measuring the previous card's rows as well as the new ones and sitting at full height over a half-empty panel.

• Missed Fates rolls go black and white so the granted ones stand out.

• The Codex job listings and the STATUSES tab wear their framed icons, the same composite the command card uses, so a spell or a status looks identical everywhere it appears.

• The right-click unit sheet wears its statuses as painted pills, each hovering its exact effect and live clock.

• The Dancer's line no longer pushes a 5v5 muster off the right edge.

• rabble_rouse has a painted emblem — the twentieth ultimate, an ultimate since v1.4.14 and undressed until now.

• Portrait mattes: the last of the white paper is gone, mostly the notches in hair the pocket rule was never large enough to examine.

• Dragonheart is once per battle. The dragoon's Reraise reaction was rolling 30% on every blow it took and handing out a Reraise that never expired — so a knight was insured within a few hits and stayed insured all match, and the very blow that spent a Reraise could re-arm it on the way past. Measured at a real duel's numbers, that was a mean of 4 rezzes, a quarter of fights seeing six or more, and 27 landed hits to put down a unit that dies in 11. It now fires once a battle: one extra life, bought early or not at all. The unit sheet marks it SPENT and the hover forecast stops warning about it once it has gone.

• A reaction's buff can run out again. Foresight, Speed Save, MA Save, Fury and Regenerate roll on every blow taken, so under sustained fire they kept re-granting their buff before it could expire — standing uptime, free. A self-buff reaction now declines to re-grant what its bearer is already wearing, so the buff lapses and the trigger has to be won again. Measured uptime at three blows a round: Haste 92% —> 82%, Attack Up 97% —> 87%. Hex Recoil is untouched: its poison lands on somebody else.

• "Until cured" now means until cured. Reraise, undeath and a Once-cloak's veil were quietly counting down from 99, so the promise had a hidden deadline — and the battle log printed Reraise(98) from the second turn on.