The Outer Loop Update

Following the engine improvements in the last update, this one focuses on gameplay. The biggest change is the addition of an outer progression loop. Players now purify a small fraction of the orgone they collect. After ending a run, players will be able to visit Limbo to spend this currency on persistent upgrades and to add challenges to their runs that increase the rate of orgone purification.

While these changes mainly focus on between-run progression, they do come with some changes to the runs themselves. I've scaled up the difficulty of the base run to make progression meaningful, and I've added a formal game over to replace the previous text based message that the player had lost. If you lose, you'll now have to reload your last save from that run or end the run, deleting all saves from that run.

There are a number of other changes, as well. Two additional characters have been added. Lumina, an angel, is a new bounty option, and Victoria, another orgone collector, is a new level 2 random encounter. Additionally, you'll now have access to only 3 bounties per run, with the available bounties randomized each new game.

There are also several balance changes: the Body family of spells has been made more expensive, but also provides a stamina buff. The price of Enter Dream has also been increased.

Finally, I've added more guidance for the LLM. Command R+ often ignores the system prompt, but generally will not contradict its chat history, so I've moved many guidance messages from the system prompt into hardcoded narration describing travel, rest, random encounters, etc. This should also provide more clarity for the player, ensuring that it is impossible for the game to fail to describe key events.