System mechanic — not covered elsewhere
Elite Variants
A normal bot with a prefix, an aura colour, and one extra rule. Infinite variety from the existing roster
Any ordinary creature can spawn as an elite: the same model, the same animations, the same loot table, the same biome — with its name, its colour, and exactly one rule about how it fights changed. Nothing new is added to the bestiary at all; the game's own reasoning calls this the single biggest-impact change made in one pass, purely because of the arithmetic — over 500 existing creatures each gaining real variety costs nothing close to what 500 new creatures would.
The odds
An elite roll happens on roughly 4% of spawns — high enough to meet one most sessions without it becoming routine — and triples to 12% during a Blood Moon. Every elite kill also pays 3x XP, on top of whatever bonus its own specific rule adds.
The nine types
| Elite | Rule |
|---|---|
| Quick | 1.6x movement speed, no extra HP — the scariest one for the least underlying change. |
| Armoured | 3x HP, 0.7x speed — a wall you have to commit to fighting through. |
| Hoarder | 6x money, an extra 2x XP, but flees rather than fights — its morale breaks almost immediately, so it runs the moment anything nearby dies. |
| Warden | Any other creature within 22 units takes 40% less damage while the Warden is alive — kill it first, or commit to a much longer fight against everything around it. |
| Blink | Teleports roughly 4.5 units toward you every time it's hit, closing distance instead of staggering back. |
| Split | On death, becomes two smaller, weaker copies of itself at about a third HP — the children are flagged so they can never split again, so one kill is at most three total. |
| Bloated | On death it swells for about 0.9 seconds before bursting for roughly half its own damage in a 9-unit radius — the swelling is the warning, deliberately giving you time to move. |
| Leech | Heals for half of whatever damage it deals to you, the moment that damage lands — shipped later than the other eight, once a later combat pass gave every creature blow one shared function to hook into. |
| Quiet | Carries the name prefix but deliberately gets no aura at all — it looks exactly like an ordinary creature until it fights like one that isn't. The rarest of the nine on purpose. |
The aura, and why it can't just tint the shared model
Every elite (except Quiet) gets a coloured tint blended into its body — but the game's own creature meshes share materials between every creature of the same type on the map, so tinting one in place would tint every ordinary instance of that creature too. Each elite's material is cloned specifically so its aura belongs only to it, verified directly by spawning two of the same creature, promoting one to elite, and confirming the other's colour never changed. The tint also only ever touches untextured body parts — a creature's own face art is never washed out by it.
Version history
- Elite Variants, part one, added — the roll, the prefix, the aura, and the four archetypes (Quick, Armoured, Hoarder, Quiet) that needed no new hook into the damage or death code at all. Hoarder specifically reuses an existing morale-break system from the previous cycle rather than building new fleeing behaviour.
- Elite Variants, part two, added — the four archetypes (Warden, Blink, Split,
Bloated) that needed a real hook into the game's two authoritative choke points:
hurtEnemy()for anything that loses HP, andkillEnemy()for anything that dies. Leech was deliberately held back from this pass — its heal would require reworking three separate call sites in the enemy-attacks-player code rather than one, which the design notes flag directly as the exact shape of bug that made an earlier, unrelated creature effectively unstoppable for many versions. - Leech finally activated, once a later cycle routed every one of those three call sites through a single shared function — the exact door Leech had been waiting on since it first shipped inert.
Trivia
- A boss, a training dummy, or a creature that's already an elite can never be rolled a second elite modifier — the check happens before any roll is made at all.
- Split is capped at exactly one generation specifically to prevent a player with area-of-effect damage from turning a single Split elite into an unbounded, uncontrollable cascade of spawns.
- Quiet is the rarest of the nine by design, and specifically for the reason its own name implies — the design notes predict that after meeting one, a player will never fully trust an ordinary-looking creature again.