System mechanic

Nightfall

Difficulty and income system tied to the day/night cycle · never active in a town, your home, or any interior

Nightfall doesn't announce itself beyond a brief on-screen banner the first moment night falls, and nothing explains the stat change or the bonus money it brings. This page covers both.

What actually happens at night

The moment night falls while you're out in the wilderness, any enemy that spawns fresh from that point on is hardened:

HP: +45%
DAMAGE: +30%
SCALE: +12%

There's a visible tell so you can recognise one on sight: tinted toward blood-red and scaled up about 12% compared to its daytime self — meant to look meaner, not just hit harder.

This only applies to enemies that spawn during the hardened window — it doesn't retroactively harden something already alive when night fell. Switched off entirely in safe zones: home, any interior, and inside a town or city never get more dangerous at night.

The payoff

An immediate cash bonus: 60% of the enemy's normal money reward, on top of the normal payout.
A dawn bounty: 14 coin per night-hardened kill, banked and paid out at sunrise rather than immediately, tracked toward a running lifetime total. A small HUD tally (a crescent-moon icon with a running count) appears once night falls.

Version history

Written early, alongside four sibling systems, as one of five plain-script layers the game originally shipped with. All five were broken from the start by an old script-loading order bug that meant none of them ever actually ran.
The other four revived later — but Nightfall was deliberately left switched off. The developer's own note at the time explained why: unlike the other four, Nightfall isn't cosmetic — a real, permanent difficulty and economy change — and it asked for explicit approval before flipping it on for every existing character at once.
Switched on, after that approval was given in plain terms: "Nightfall yea do that." Nightfall had existed, fully written, since essentially the very beginning, and had never affected a single player's game for nearly 500 versions before it was finally turned on.

Trivia

"Night-stalker" isn't a distinct creature type — it's simply what the game calls any regular hostile that happened to spawn during a hardened night window. Anything in the bestiary can become one.
The numbers were deliberately kept modest — the developer's own comment describes them as "gentle so it never wrecks balance" — likely why Nightfall reads as a real but not overwhelming shift rather than a sudden spike in difficulty after dark.
Because it was dormant so long, Nightfall is one of the rare cases where a whole system's entire player-facing history begins at a single version, despite the code itself being some of the oldest in the file.
Seeing what looks like two suns low on the horizon at dawn isn't a bug — the Moon's disc (over seven times the Sun's own visible radius) briefly sits near the Sun in the sky at that exact time of day, genuinely close enough together to read as a second sun for a few minutes before they separate.