Combat mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Weak Points

Six rules a player can actually hold in their head, not 178 that technically satisfy the brief

Every creature that isn't Wild carries a small, brightly-lit weak spot somewhere on its body. Land a ranged hit there — a bullet, an arrow, a spell — and it deals 2.5x damage and staggers the creature for 0.6 seconds, the exact same interrupt clock the game's status-effect layer already uses for shock. It rewards actually aiming rather than just landing hits anywhere on a large hitbox.

Placed by kin, not by creature type

The location is deliberately tied to a creature's kin rather than its individual type. With 178 distinct creature types in the game, giving each its own unique weak spot would be 178 things to memorise — which the design notes call "not learning, it is a wiki." Six kin-based rules are something a player can genuinely carry in their head instead:

Each spot also sits within a specific vertical band on the creature's body rather than being one fixed point — different for each kin, roughly matching where the description above would actually be. Wild creatures have no weak point at all, on the same reasoning that keeps them out of the kin hate matrix: a creature the keyword rules couldn't confidently place shouldn't suddenly gain a new rule either.

Doesn't stack with a headshot

A true headshot is left completely untouched by this system — the head is already its own reward for aiming high, and adding a second multiplier on top of it would make every other weak spot in the game pointless by comparison. Weak point damage only ever applies to a ranged hit that isn't already a headshot.

Ranged only, for now

This first pass covers ranged weapons exclusively — guns, bows, and spells. Melee weak points are explicitly held for a second pass, and the reason given is refreshingly direct: melee swings are driven by the mouse in a way this project's own automated verification tooling cannot reliably simulate, which has already produced at least one false bug report in the game's history. Rather than risk shipping a melee weak point nobody could actually verify was working, that half was deliberately deferred. Destructible Props are ranged-only for exactly the same reason.

History

• Weak Points added (cycle 1 of a planned two), covering ranged weapons for all six non-Wild kin. Built as a genuinely small addition specifically because most of the underlying machinery — hit-segment resolution, true impact height, and a single hook every projectile already calls through on collision — already existed for other purposes.

Trivia

• A weak point hit composes with whatever ammunition is loaded — the ammo's own damage multiplier is applied first, and the weak point multiplier on top of that, rather than either one overriding the other.
• The visible marker is a small, brightly-coloured unlit sphere rather than a glowing emissive material — every creature in the game renders with materials that have no emissive channel at all, a fact established directly by measurement in an earlier pass, so a plain bright colour was used instead, which reads correctly anyway since the whole scene is rendered unlit.
• The marker is a child object of the creature's own mesh, so it follows every animation and movement automatically without needing any per-frame positioning work of its own.