Combat mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Status Effects

Five combos, not twenty — each one a sentence a player can hold in their head

A shared status layer that treats the player and every creature identically — the same single function applies poison, burn, freeze, or shock to either side, with no separate rules for what happens to you versus what happens to something you're fighting. The game's own development notes call this the load-bearing feature of a wider combat pass: ammunition types, weapon mods, traps, and on-hit effects all become content just by calling into this one system rather than each building their own.

The four statuses

Damage ticks every 0.5 game-seconds. Applying the same status again before it expires refreshes how long it lasts, never how hard it hits — a target's status power takes the higher of the old and new values rather than adding together, specifically so a player can't just apply the same status ten times in a row and delete a boss outright.

Freeze and shock's player-facing effects (the movement slow and the interrupt) aren't wired up for the player yet — the state itself is tracked and published identically either way, but actually reaching into the player's own movement and action code was judged a bigger change than the status layer itself, and was deliberately left for later rather than folded in and hidden inside this pass.

Five combos, and order matters

Landing a second status on a target already carrying the right first one triggers a combo instead of just stacking — and every combo resolves through the exact same door every status application already goes through, so ammunition, traps, and on-hit effects get combos for free without ever needing to know combos exist.

Freeze-then-burn and burn-then-freeze are deliberately different moves with different numbers, rather than the same combo either way — collapsing the two into one would have quietly thrown away half the system's actual depth. When a target is carrying more than one status at once, the combo table is checked in a fixed, explicit order and the first match wins, rather than leaving the outcome to chance.

A shock that chains from another shock is marked so it can never chain a second time — without that one guard, triggering Conduct in a large frozen crowd would ricochet forever instead of resolving as one dramatic moment.

History

• The shared status layer added (cycle 1 of a planned three) — poison and burn shipped fully symmetric between player and creatures; freeze and shock shipped creature-side only, with the underlying state already shaped to support the player side once that's built.
• The five combos added (cycle 2), resolving inside the same single application function cycle 1 established, which is exactly what kept this pass small — nothing that already calls into the status layer needed to change at all to gain combos.

Trivia

• How much damage the status layer has actually dealt is tracked completely separately from watching a creature's HP drop — a hostile creature standing near a town can lose well over 100 HP a second to the town's own guards defending it, which has nothing to do with poison or burn and would otherwise be impossible to tell apart from either one just by watching the number fall. Away from a town, an isolated creature loses nothing on its own.
• The water-triples-range shock rule was nearly shipped dead on arrival — an early version's water check silently reported every location as dry land, including points measured 66 units below the actual waterline, because a failed terrain read and a genuinely dry location produced the identical result. Caught only because the terrain itself was independently sampled first to confirm water existed at all before trusting the rule that depended on finding it.