Combat mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Panic and Morale

Kill the biggest thing in a pack and the rest scatter for a few seconds. That one line is the whole design

Every creature within 20 units of another when it dies loses a slice of its own morale — and how big that slice is depends on how much of the pack's total combined HP the kill actually removed. Killing the largest, toughest member of a group costs the survivors the most morale; picking off a straggler barely registers. Once a creature's morale drops below the break point, it turns and runs.

The numbers

PACK RADIUS

20 units

BREAKS AT

morale below 0.55

RALLIES AT

morale restored to 0.75

FLEE DURATION

3–6 seconds (random)

FLEE SPEED

0.85x normal

A creature's morale share lost is calculated as the dead creature's own max HP divided by the pack's total max HP (including the one that just died) — so the exact same kill can register as devastating to a pack of weak creatures and barely noticeable to a pack anchored by something huge.

They rally — a pack that ran forever wouldn't be fun

Fleeing isn't permanent. After the random 3-to-6-second flee window ends, morale is restored — not to full, but specifically to 0.75, deliberately above the 0.55 break threshold so a creature doesn't immediately flip straight back into fleeing the instant it stops. The design reasoning is direct: a pack that scatters forever is one a player can never actually finish, and the intended fun is in the moment of the break itself, not in a chase that never ends.

What never breaks

Bosses never flee, and neither does anything explicitly flagged as unable to — a small, deliberate exception list that exists specifically so the creatures that do break read as genuinely reacting rather than everything in the game sharing one uniform behaviour.

History

• Panic and Morale added, as the very first feature built from a broader combat-depth pass — deliberately built first and kept small, since it's the one change in the whole pass that touches literally every group fight in the game at once, on top of the game's existing 500-plus creatures rather than adding anything new.

Trivia

• Whether a pack has broken is only ever calculated the instant something dies — not checked every frame — specifically because a death is a rare event and a frame isn't; scanning every creature's neighbours every single frame would have been the expensive way to build this.
• The Hoarder elite reuses this exact system rather than building its own fleeing behaviour — its morale is simply set low enough from the moment it spawns that it breaks and runs at the very first death anywhere near it.