System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Grave Robbing

Every dig wakes something. Every grave only ever pays once

The graveyard region — nicknamed "the Spawn Killers" internally — has had rows of tombstones standing in it as pure scenery since very early in the game's development. Grave Robbing gives that scenery a verb: stand at a tombstone and interact with it to dig, at a real cost and a real risk, for a small table of loot that's already droppable from the region's own enemies.

How it works

Approach any tombstone in the graveyard region and interact with it — reach is a tight 3 units, tighter than any other interactable in the game, since the graves themselves stand only 6 units apart and the game needs to know exactly which one you mean. If something else interactable is closer (a building door, a nearby crafting station, or the region's own Pauper's Pyre), that takes priority over the dig instead.

• It costs HP. Digging takes 12% of your current HP, minimum 4, and is floored so it can never reduce you to 0 by itself — digging alone will never kill you outright.
• It wakes something, every single time. One gravehound spawns nearby (an existing enemy — 220 HP, 29 damage, charges and phases like a ghost), plus one more for every 8 graves you've already robbed on that character, up to a cap of 3 at once. The only exception is when 80 or more enemies already exist in the world at that moment — a pure server-load safety valve, not a way to dodge the risk, since you still pay the HP and still get the loot either way.
• Each grave pays out exactly once, forever. The game remembers every grave you've robbed by its exact position, permanently, on that character. A robbed grave answers "already turned over" and gives nothing on a second visit — there is nothing here to farm, since the graveyard only contains a fixed, finite number of stones to begin with.

What comes out of the ground

Every one of these six items already exists in the game and already drops from the graveyard's own enemies — nothing here is exclusive to digging. Even the rarest roll, an Epitaph at 10%, is worth less than a single kill on a wraith, so this was never meant as a power source. It's a use for scenery that had none, priced to match.

Version history

• Grave Robbing added, directly from the request "add grave robbing to the grave biome." Built specifically to use the graveyard's existing tombstone layout rather than placing new props — the same fixed lattice the region's own scenery pass already draws graves from is recomputed live to find the nearest stone, so a robbable grave is always one the player can actually see standing there, and an empty gap in a row of graves stays empty.

Trivia

• The mechanic adds no new 3D objects of any kind to the world — it's built entirely as a verb attached to scenery the graveyard's chunk renderer already owns, so there's nothing extra for the game to ever need to clean up or that could leak between characters or worlds.
• The graveyard also hosts The Pauper's Pyre, a separate interactable in the same region — Grave Robbing is deliberately built to yield to it (and to any closer building or station) rather than fight it for the same key press.