v0.61 26 October 2026

The Drake Matriarch, and lairs that hang together

• Enemies & bosses

• The breath stays on the jaws. A dragon's fire no longer hangs in the air where it started after the dragon moves on:
  • The cause: when a breath ran out on its own timer, the flame emitters were never switched off and stopped following the head. They kept pouring fire from the spot where the breath had been.
  • The fix: the breath now shuts off when it ends. The stream and its smoke are drawn in the jaws' own space, so the whole jet goes wherever the dragon goes. The last flames keep following the jaws until they die out.
• The Drake Matriarch (new boss). In some Cursed Forests (about 2 in 5; the Broodmother's lair is in every one), a clearing far from the spider lair holds her nest.
  • The fight: she waits by her eggs and wakes when you come within 17 m, with a roar and the boss bar. She's bigger than an Elder Drake, deep crimson and ember-lit, and bites, claws, lashes her tail and breathes a long fire.
  • Flight: she flies like the other drakes, but never takes the fight more than about 26 m from her nest. Lead her further and she gives up and flies home.
  • Below half health: she shrieks and the two eggs nearest her hatch into drakelings. After that she fights faster and takes to the air again sooner.
  • Rewards: her own loot table (gold, three rolls, good odds of a vault key), plus drake scales, ember hearts and ember ash. She counts as a guardian and a drake for contracts.
  • Recognition: "MATRIARCH SLAIN", a dragon's head on the trophy wall, and a Steam achievement, "Egg Thief".
  • Maps: the nest is marked on the map and minimap with a bowl of eggs.
• The nest:
  • The bowl: branches and logs laid round and across each other layer on layer, many burnt black, around a bed of ash.
  • The eggs: four or five scaled eggs with ember light breathing through hairline cracks, lying in glowing coals. Usually one has already hatched, its cap lying beside it.
  • Around it: smoke rising off the nest, sparks, a few small fires still burning in the branches, the ground scorched black and burnt clean of grass, burnt-out snags, fallen burnt logs, a burnt wagon, the ribcage of something big, bones, and her hoard: a chest with gold spilled round it.
• The Broodmother's lair, rebuilt. No more webs floating in mid-air: every thread is tied to something real.
  • Trees: a ring of dead snags stands round the clearing, kept clear of the paths in.
  • Orb webs fill the gaps between trees, each with a proper structure: a frame tied off to the trunks, a limb above and the ground below, spokes out from the hub, and a sticky spiral wound in from the edge. Some are torn, with broken spokes dangling.
  • Guy lines sag from trunk to trunk, high across the clearing and down to the ground.
  • Sheet silk: a sheet hangs like a low ceiling between three trees. Skirts of silk drape from the trunks to the ground, and the lower trunks are wrapped.
  • Her retreat: at the back, a funnel of silk narrows into a hole in the earth. She waits in front of it.
  • Cocoons are body-shaped, wound in yellowed silk. They hang on drop lines from the limbs, or stand bound against the trunks.
  • Egg sacs are glued to the trunks and huddled in clutches by her door, with something stirring inside.
• How the silk is drawn:
  • Threads are ribbons that always face the camera and never get thinner than a pixel and a half. Far threads fade instead of flickering.
  • Sheets are a random tangle of strands over a torn veil.
  • Cocoons use.
• Network protocol 26 (new enemy kind 28): v0.60 players can't share a run.

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