Combat

Combat happens through encounters — random battles triggered by walking through the world.

Most of what follows is about fighting monsters. Fights against other people run on these same turns and the same rolls, but how one starts is a subject of its own — see Fighting Other Players.

Triggering Encounters

Walking is what finds you a fight. Every step carries a chance of one — roughly one fight every fifteen to twenty steps — so a long journey is a risk in itself and a short errand rarely costs you anything. When it happens you are told, and the encounter panel takes over the window.

That is an average, not a schedule. Two fights back to back is ordinary luck, and so is a quiet thirty tiles.

Encounters only start while your stamina is above 0. Walk yourself to exhaustion and nothing will jump you — which sounds like safety, but it means you are stranded somewhere with no way to make progress until you rest, and resting only happens in a Meditation Sanctum.

You can still walk at zero stamina. Nothing stops you moving; you simply stop attracting trouble.

Fighting itself costs no stamina. Attacking spends reflex debt, which is a separate number, and a heavy physical technique is what runs it up.

The Encounter Screen

The combat UI is split into three panels:

Left — Monsters

A list of hostile creatures you're fighting. Each shows:

Monster name
Health bar with current/max HP
A sprite image

Click a monster to select it as your target. Dead monsters (HP at 0) are greyed out.

Center — Actions

The main action panel with:

Turn timer — Counts down from 10 seconds. When it hits 0, the turn resolves.
Your vitals — HP and Mana bars
Four action buttons:

Attack

Select a physical technique from your list, then click a monster to confirm. Physical attacks:

Use your Strength for damage
Have a chance to miss (based on your Reflex vs the target's Reflex)
Can critical hit for 1.5x damage
Cost no mana
Build up reflex debt — heavier techniques slow you on future turns

Magic

Select a magic technique from your list, then click a monster to confirm. Magic attacks:

Use your Intelligence for damage
Always hit (no miss chance)
Cost mana based on the technique's weight
If you lack mana, the spell fizzles

Item

Use a consumable item from your inventory during combat — a healing vial, most often.

Reaching for something costs you the turn order. You act last that turn, after every monster and every other player, however fast you normally are. You took your eyes off the fight, and everything else lands before your vial does.

That makes it a question of timing rather than of price. Drinking at half health is nearly free; drinking at 5 HP can still kill you, because the blow you were trying to survive resolves first. If you are that low, running is usually the better move.

The item is spent the moment you submit, not when the turn resolves. A submission that arrives too late to count for this turn still costs you the item.

Anything you can use out of combat you can use in it — in practice that means a Minor Recovery Vial, which restores health. It is the only healing you can carry, and the only one that works mid-fight: a Meditation Sanctum and a grave both need you to be standing somewhere in particular and not fighting. So what you are really deciding is whether to spend your one way out of trouble now or save it.

Using an item is the only thing your inventory will do for you in a fight. Equipping, unequipping and socketing are all refused until it is over. What you wore in is what you fight in, so the loadout decision belongs to the moment before the encounter, not the middle of it.

Run

Attempt to escape. Your Reflex (rolled with a D12) is compared against the highest Reflex roll among alive enemies. If you roll higher, you escape. If not, you stay in the fight — a tie is not good enough.

Against something faster than you that is a bad bet, so keep trying and it gets easier: every failed attempt in a row adds to your next roll, up to a limit. Do anything else in between — attack, use an item, or let the timer run out — and you have changed your mind, and start again from nothing.

That extra push is bought with stamina, one point per point of bonus, and it is spent whether or not you get away. You can only be as desperate as you can afford: down to your last few points, the bonus is only worth those few points. Thrashing your way out of a fight you walked into is not free, and going in tired means you may not be able to buy your way back out.

Getting away leaves you one tile from where the fight was, in a direction you do not choose. If you were standing somewhere that mattered — a Meditation Sanctum, most of all — you will have to walk back to it.

Monsters can run too, and they play by the same rules. One that cannot lay a hand on you will eventually give up and try to leave, and you are still paid for the work you did on it — though it takes anything it was carrying with it. A badly wounded one has a much harder time getting away than a healthy one.

Right — Battle Log

A scrolling log of everything that happened in combat, color-coded:

Red — Defeats (someone died)
Yellow — Misses, failed escapes
Blue/Accent — Successful hits, casts, item uses
Grey — Status messages, idle actions

Each entry shows details like hit chance, damage dealt, and reflex debt changes.

Action Order

All actors (players and monsters) act each turn. Actions are resolved in order of effective Reflex (Reflex minus reflex debt). Faster actors go first. If tied, the one who submitted first acts first.

If you don't submit an action before the timer expires, you idle — you do nothing that turn.

Death

When your HP reaches 0:

A Death screen appears with a red border
Your cause of death is displayed
A Disconnect button returns you to the login screen
Your character is marked as DEAD permanently

There is no respawn. Death is final.

XP and Rewards

After all monsters are defeated, surviving players receive XP based on:

Total enemy levels killed — or driven off; a monster that gives up and escapes still pays for the work you did on it
How far from the starting sector you are (further = more XP)
How fast you won (fewer turns = bonus XP)
Your damage contribution (proportional share)
Last-hit bonus (5% extra for the killing blow)

Running away pays nothing. Leave a fight and you are paid none of it, whatever you did while you were in it — and the share you gave up is not destroyed, it goes to the players who stayed, split by the damage they did. The pool itself is sized on everyone who fought, so somebody leaving cannot make the fight worth more or less to the people still in it.

What is not in it

A monster's HP does not pay. It is not a term in the reward at all — it appears only as the divisor of your own damage share, which is the whole thing when you fight alone. Two monsters of the same level pay the same whether one has 70 HP and the other 100.

That inverts the obvious instinct. A big, tanky, low-level monster is bad value: you are paid the same as for a small one, and the extra turns it takes eat into the speed bonus. What is worth taking is a high-level monster you can kill quickly.

Two things that quietly halve your income

Your own level divides the payout. The same monster pays a level 2 character half what it paid at level 1. Levelling up does not make your old hunting ground pay less per fight because the fights got easier — it is arithmetic, and it is why you have to move outward.
The speed bonus runs out at 20 turns. It is max(20, 40 - turns), so a one-turn kill is worth nearly double a twenty-turn one, and past twenty turns there is no further penalty — but no way back either. A fight that has gone twenty turns is paying its floor.

The arithmetic, if you want it

base   = (120 x enemy levels x sector multiplier x speed bonus) / (your level x 20)
share  = base x your damage / the enemies' total HP at the start
payout = share + (base x 5%, if you landed the killing blow)

The sector multiplier is max(1, max(|sector x|, |sector y|)), so sectors 0:0 and 1:1 both count as 1 — distance only starts paying at two sectors out along one axis.

XP notifications appear as toasts: "+120 XP. Level 2 -> 3."

When you have enough XP to level up, a Level Up button appears on your XP bar in the character sheet. See Character for details.