Combat mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Traps

Five devices, each an arming delay and a trigger radius, built to turn any player into a defender without building a town

According to the development log, Traps were built to answer a specific design brief: let a player set up a defended position anywhere, without needing a Charter Stake or a town to fall back on. Five devices exist, each combining an arming delay, a trigger radius, and one effect — and four of the five simply apply one of the game's existing status effects rather than doing anything bespoke, which is exactly the kind of reuse the status system was built to make cheap.

The five traps

The Snare is the odd one out: it deals no damage whatsoever, and exists purely to hold a target still — a genuine root rather than a fourth flavor of damage, measured taking a creature's speed straight to 0 from a base of 6.

The arming delay is the whole point

A trap that fired the instant it landed would just be a grenade with extra steps. Instead, every trap needs its own arming window — as short as half a second for Caltrops, as long as 1.5 seconds for the Bear Trap — before it can trigger at all, and stays completely inert the whole time. That delay is what turns placing a trap into a real decision about where you expect to be standing a couple of seconds later, rather than an instant reaction. Placing more than eight traps at once doesn't refuse the newest one — the oldest trap is simply retired to make room, so the cap manages itself without ever blocking a placement.

A trap at your own feet won't catch anything that fights up close

Every trigger radius in the table above is smaller than an ordinary melee creature's own attack range — a Knight's is 4, wider than any trap's radius — which means a trap dropped directly underneath you will never actually catch a melee attacker: it stops and fights at a distance the trap can't reach. This isn't written in the original design brief anywhere; it only showed up once someone actually placed a few and watched them sit there, armed and working correctly, while a creature attacked from just outside the trigger zone. A trap set several units out along an approach path catches things immediately by comparison. It's a real constraint on how the feature plays, not a bug — nothing about the trap's own detection is wrong, the geometry just doesn't overlap with melee range at zero distance.

Built, measured, and not reachable by an ordinary player yet

As of this writing, Traps exist entirely as backend machinery: every trap in the table above has been placed and triggered successfully through the game's own internal testing seam, but there is no in-game way for a player to actually place one. The plan is for traps to be crafted items placed with a key press, the same as most other tools in the game — but according to the development log, every single key in the game is already bound to something else, discovered the hard way after an earlier attempt shipped Traps' sibling feature, Special Attacks, bound to a key that turned out to already be in use. Rather than take a key a player already relies on without asking, both features shipped with their mechanism complete and their trigger deliberately left unbound, waiting on a decision about which existing key a player would be willing to give up.

History

• Traps added — all five devices, their arming delays, trigger radii and effects, verified working end to end through the internal seam. Shipped with no in-world way to place one, the same limitation Special Attacks shipped with in the same stretch of development, for the same reason: no free key exists to bind the placement action to.

Trivia

• Four of the five traps are implemented as nothing more than a single call into the game's shared status-effect function — the same one every status combo already runs through — rather than any trap-specific damage code. Only the Bear Trap (plain damage, no status) and the Snare (a root, not a status at all) work differently.
• An early test run reported a trap failing to apply poison at all — a false result. The test was comparing against a running total that already had one poison application counted from an earlier test in the same session, so the loop it was using to detect a fresh application never actually ran.