We rebalanced every foe, and the one you meet got none of it

Run 25, one of our long test runs, lasted two hours and was over in one. The player outscaled every dungeon within about twenty minutes, and after that nothing was a fight.

The final boss dropped a legendary sword at power 11 to a level-33 player: the same sword the first village sells, spelled more grandly. Every ordinary dungeon in the run was statted at level 6, so one cleared at level 25 was identical to one cleared at level 5. Floor 50 of the tower, the deepest thing in the world, sat at level 27. Every dungeon quest paid exactly 47 gold. And the player found seven pieces of equipment in 119 minutes, the first weapon at minute 114.

One curve for everything

So on 10 September we put the whole game on one level curve. It follows the player’s progress but ignores any XP multiplier, so a level-400 run built that way still walks a normal-sized world.

Gear gained level as a third axis beside tier and rarity. At level 1 the term is zero by construction, and a test pins the entire level-1 item table by hand, so nothing early moved. At level 40 a tier-3 legendary is power 32.

Enemy armour grows on the same curve, then enemy offence too, because the player’s armour had grown and a foe’s attack had not. In between those two changes, a tier-2 foe was landing one damage a hit on a level-40 player and needed 249 hits to win.

A dungeon now freezes at one level above the curve when you arrive. The Demon King’s seat stays three above, never below 15. The tower’s floors climb on a steepening curve, and floor 50 moved from level 27 to 46. The tower is built once when a run begins and stays fixed, so this only changes towers in runs started after it.

The player also stopped starting with nothing. Nothing had ever put an item in the opening inventory; you swung bare fists until a drop happened to land. A new run now opens with a blade and a jerkin, equipped. Dungeon quest gold scales with level, and a quest’s XP is fixed at what it was worth when offered, rather than growing the longer you leave it open.

None of the enemy half ever reached a fight

That afternoon we found that the day’s enemy work had never reached a fight.

A foe is not used the moment it is built. It is written down when a fight is set up, and read back when the fight starts: an overworld encounter, a dungeon room, a tower floor, the Demon King. Every real fight goes through that round trip, and the record only carried the fields it named. The four new armour and offence fields were not on the list. Every foe that reached a player had zero for all four.

That was older than the curve. Enemy armour had been zero in play since foes were first written down this way, and the tier armour constant had never once been subtracted from anything. Our new tests passed because they built foes directly and never wrote one down. Meanwhile the player half was live, so the day’s work had made a level-40 player nearly unkillable.

The fix derives the four values from the tier, level and boss flag the record already stores. That repairs every existing save the moment it loads, with no migration. The test that should have existed all along writes every foe down and reads it back before it fights.

It has a real cost. At level 1 a tier-2 foe now takes four hits instead of three, because its armour counts for the first time. From level 20 up, fights are shorter than before and incoming damage is a number again rather than one. The tutorial’s three foes keep their hand-measured stats.