v0.9.9 — Dying in the Delve is free
The Endless Delve stops punishing you for playing it the only way it can be played — and leveling across the whole game speeds up.
Highlights
Dying in the Delve is free
The Delve is designed to end in death: you descend until the enemy outscales you, and then you fall. Until now the game charged the standard death penalty anyway — 10% of your gold and 10% of every equipped item’s durability — which stung all the more because the Delve pays no gold at all, only Echoing Crystals. Every run was gold-negative by design. From this version, a delve death costs nothing:
| Before | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Gold | −10% of your purse | nothing |
| Durability | −10% of max, every slot | nothing |
| Mediumcore | full wealth wipe | nothing |
| Hardcore | permanent save lockout | nothing |
The run itself is still the wager — you lose the depth you climbed and return to the area you entered from, and buying back to the frontier still costs crystals through the skip fee. Waiving the mediumcore wipe and hardcore lockout is what makes the Delve exist at all for those modes: content built around dying can’t also permanently kill your character. Ordinary areas, dungeons and echoed tiles are untouched — die out there and your mode means exactly what it always did. Offline progression follows the same rule, and the recap no longer reports a large negative gold figure for a run that cost nothing.
+20% XP, everywhere
Leveling was pacing a little slowly across the whole game, so every XP reward now pays 20% more. It applies identically at every level, in every area, to kill XP and tile-completion XP alike, and the shape of the curve is unchanged. (Camp quest rewards are unaffected — they’re priced as a percentage of your current level’s requirement, so they already track the curve.) In practice that’s about 17% less time per level, from your first kill to the 113-million-XP final step.