Update list, 3.698 to 3.722

New places and things

• The Pale Spire castle: a gothic castle west of Sale, with a long approach, gatehouse, courtyard, great halls, kitchens, cloister and dungeons. It has painted art, ghosts, a key hunt, 26 level-100 gear pieces and a castle plan map. The second floor and the Pale Sovereign are not built yet.
• The Crooked Road and the Never-Ending Tower: the road runs through dead woods from the courtyard to the tower. The tower needs party level 100 and has endless floors, each half the old size with clearings, fishing ponds and few dead ends.
• Six roaming giants in the Blighted Lands, each level 100.
• Fishing in the tower, and cloud cover on the maps of the castle and tower until explored.

Changes you’ll notice

• No teleport stones in the Blighted Lands. Lamps and bushes there can be walked through.
• Sale quest gold is higher.
• The world map is more spread out, with bigger titles and a smaller marker for each roaming giant.
• Testing parties now go up to level 100, and each hero’s special power is the strongest one they have.
• Castle signs show just the place name and are easy to read.
• Fights show enemies fully, except the very large ones. Roaming giants are the exception: they are shrunk to fit, so they look smaller than before.

Fixes

• The castle and the whole game were checked by a new tool for things like floating objects, loose doors and arches, props blocking passages, wall pictures with no wall, and loose webs. About 5,900 problems were found and almost all fixed.
• People and soldiers are now normal height.
• A bright strip bug on distant walls is softened.
• The hidden caves no longer lead into Sale’s shops.
• The world map no longer labels Khemetra houses as Hollow Grasslands.

Not done yet: the castle’s second floor, Pale Sovereign and upper floors, and about 90 audit items for review.

Below the Abbey: what's new from 3.650 to 3.698

A lot happened in a few days. The west opened up, the dead got a proper graveyard, goats went fishing (sort of). Here is the tour.

The west is open

Wenlock, the market town. It started as a quiet English market town and got a full glow-up: roofs that reach the walls, proper variety in roofs and doors, lettered signposts, a town wall, painted ground edges, trees you can walk through, a brook with reeds, willows and a small pier with a boat and lantern. The market stalls are now real shops (press a stall and the shopkeeper's shop opens), apple trees drop apples, and the fog is gone from the map. There are five lost goats and five lost llamas to find, plus six market quests and a town full of bells and village noises. Wenlock now sells every gear tier, white to orange, for every weapon type and armour slot.

The Wenlock Graveyard. Open for visitors. Cobbled paths, leafy ivy on the stones, autumn trees, golden soft light, cobwebs between graves, and six walk-in tombs. You can walk up to a crypt door and go in, and each tomb leads to its own tomb. Under the Avenue are the Vaults Beneath the Avenue: eight vaults, an achievement and a title, Vaultbreaker. The four maze entrances are proper built fronts now: a skull arch with an iron gate, a damp stair, a barrow and grassy doors, with statues, lamps and a glow. Stormclouds roll in over the yard with lightning and thunder. Lady Aldith and the Bloated Corpse give shorter speeches (long speech is now paged so it never runs off the screen).

Blackbriar Wood. A dark maze of trees with small bones scattered about, wild caves and ruins, pale dirt paths. The trees and walls got much darker, and if you carry a flame you can burn the trees. Floating signs became wooden signposts you read by walking up to them.

The Maze of Gardens. Sixteen painted hedge kinds, more flowers, bees, butterflies and drifting lights, a golden haze, a real boundary hedge with gates, petals and sunbeams, and five small folk with four quests between them. The garden map fills in as you explore.

The Warden's Seals, Sale and the Blighted Road (new). A new main quest, the Warden's Seals, takes you across a new world map of the west, to the town of Sale, along the Blighted Road (ten places), and into the Vault of Maldrake. The Rookery mere is on the way. The road, Sale and Wenlock got a far wall so the horizon looks finished, and there are no teleport stones anywhere on the Blighted Road.

Fishing, houses and a tidier backpack

Fishing: five rods, 40 fish, baits, a bait seller, fishing spots across the world, a line game and a rod animation.

Houses and real estate: agents in eight towns sell small, medium and large houses, furniture, a home chest and boss trophies.

Inventory: a Store button, a Sort button in chests, and acquisition stamps. Potion shortcut slots now appear in the same order on the game screen as in the inventory.

Infested houses: every town now has houses with cellars that hold something nasty, with painted corpses to set the mood. Thief quests send you past watchmen and cells, and Old Bracken has a den and a book.

Orbs and torches: the new Glow Orb lantern gives a steady, wider blue-white light. Torches and orbs stack, and shift+click splits a stack.

Maps and the Atlas

The world map of the west has places spread out so no icon or name overlaps, and names sit right under their icons. The Atlas of Mazes and Dungeons lists every area with a been-there box and a finished box, sorted by level (low to high or high to low). Names stay scrambled and faint until you reach a place, then they unscramble in bold. Hidden ruins and caves show as "Hidden ruin", and the twenty wild caves of the Pilgrim's Path are listed. Each graveyard maze has its own door picture and its own layout on the map.

Fighting got better to look at and to play

Spell and power animations: every caster spell has its own effect. A fireball charges, flies, bursts and leaves the enemy burning. Frost is a full white-and-blue version with shattering ice. Thief, warrior, ranger, paladin, monk and goat powers have their own animations too.

Wounded enemies flush red as they near death, so you can see who is about to fall.

Priest heals are fixed amounts, like potions, so the first heal gets weaker as you level. There is a new single heal, Restoration, at level 62.

Every class's powers were rebuilt as a ladder: each later power hits harder and costs more, and 23 new powers fill the gaps at higher levels.

Normal creatures are shorter (a height cap), and the graveyard ghouls got shorter so their faces show.

Mercy: a beaten bandit now begs for mercy about one time in eight, and a surrendered bandit you strike fights on.

Flying crows now fly, front on, instead of standing in the air.

The deep places

The Deeper Hollow got four rounds of polish: brighter hubs in the Underlevel, a new shrine and Honey Press, notes with labels you can read from a distance, and a lot fewer odd, floating or identical things. The Underlevel water is dark and wet with soft light glints. The three hives of the book quest are smaller, each with a rescue quest of its own and a different shade of honey. The Well Maze is half the size, with a secret exit and orb lamps. The graveyard maze gates are centred, and one gets a new red gate.

Speed

The game is smoother. A 60 frames-per-second cap stops it racing on fast screens, the CRT glow no longer reads the whole screen back every frame, the well mazes and sign lettering now build only when you reach them, and the nearby-decor cache and the audio unlock got cheaper. Greendale got a pond and the Old Bridge a plate beside the bridge.

Small things

A new game now says "Equip your weapons before fighting!".

Sut stands one level above his area.

The Dig and Fish buttons no longer cover Embark.

Test links to the well maze and graveyard now land where they should.

https://bickering-goat.itch.io/below-the-abbey

The biggest update so far. The Deeper Hollow now has a gate in its north wall, and beyond it a whole new stretch of the west: a hedge maze, a market town, a purple maze under a well, a haunted wood and a graveyard. You can also change your keys and controller buttons, go full screen, and shrink the enemy panel in battle.

If you are playing in the browser, the game now asks for keyboard focus when it loads. If W A S D do nothing, click the game once.

The road west

The Gate in the Atrium Aldous Wend stands at a new gate in the north wall of the great atrium in the Deeper Hollow and gives you the quest "The Gate in the Atrium". The gate leads out of the Hollow Lands.

The Maze of Gardens (level 80) A sunny hedge maze, 91 by 91 squares, with fountains, statues, lamps, peacocks, rabbits, bees and chests. Guards wake as you come close: knights, hounds, gargoyles, lions, briar beasts and snapping plants, and the Hedge Warden. It has its own map with a numbered list of rooms.

Wenlock (level 80) A country market town with a church, a hall, a windmill, a watermill, a well, a green with a pond and a maypole. About 45 people and animals walk about. Every door opens to a room: shops with level 80 stock, an inn, a church where the vicar heals and raises the dead, a school, a library with eight books to read, and homes of fourteen different kinds. The mayor gives a chain of ten quests. The road further west is a shut gate: the Western Kingdoms are not open yet.

The Purple Maze under the well (levels 80 to 83) Four levels of purple brick. Each stair needs its own key, found by solving puzzles: a scale that must read exactly 80, a mirror hall, a bell code, and lanterns to light in the right order. There are levers, hidden pits and secret closets. The boss, the Well-Warden, waits at the top and guards a level 80 sword.

Blackbriar Wood (level 82) A dark, foggy forest north of Wenlock with ten glades, a dried brook and a witch's cottage with three more floors. Eight quests, "Into the Oven", lead to a fight with Grisselda Blackbriar. A gingerbread stall opens in Wenlock afterwards.

The Black Swill (level 80) Cinder in the Deeper Hollow sends you after a level 80 boss on the island in the Underlevel's black sea. Bring a boat, healing, mana and escape potions. It splits into slimes as it is hurt, and it does not come back once dead.

The Wenlock Graveyard (levels 84 to 87) A lane at the end of Churchyard Lane leads through a lych-gate to a graveyard with 55 readable epitaphs, and a crypt below. Four torch-lit mazes, each with its own colour of light and its own boss: The Red Ossuary (Lord Corwin Vane), The Grey Charnel (Digger Grimsby), The Black Barrow (Sir Aldric the Forsworn) and The Pale Catacombs (Prioress Morwenna). Five ghost quests lead to Lady Aldith's ending. This is the hardest content in the game so far.

The world map and the atlas

The western lands are on the world map, with the roads between them. There is a new Atlas button with four pages listing every maze, dungeon and hidden place, with levels and ratings. A gold dot shows where you have been. The 52 desert dungeons and the Sand Road burrows have marks on the map too.

Settings

• Screen: full screen, picture shape (fit the window, fill it, or whole pixels) and smooth or hard-edged pixels.
• Keyboard: every key can be changed. Click a key, then press the new one.
• Controller: buttons can be changed too. Settings, Controller, "Change buttons".
• Enemy panel: a small - button shrinks it to just the fight rating, the rounds to win and the gauge.
• The fonts are now part of the game, so text looks the same on every machine and works offline. Map labels no longer pile up on the Deeper Hollow map.

Other changes

• Better gear in the early shops. Thornwick and Ironhill sell higher tiers, and there is new stock in Fenwick's Goods in Anaea and the Hunter's Pack in Gandrick's Wood. A shop's stock is now saved with your game.
• Trees no longer block the doors of Corvin's Arcana and the Cauldron.
• No teleporting (stones, maze stones, Potion of Escape) while a fight is on.
• Bandits ask for mercy less often, and a bandit you strike after he surrenders fights on.
• Sut, Lord of the Red Desert, is now one level above his area.
• The Go to level "+" button goes up to 88.

Known rough edges

• The Western Kingdoms themselves are not open.
• Some graveyard art is rough: the Bone Hound looks like a thin man, and the yews look plum in the mist.
• The new shop gear uses recoloured plain icons, not painted art.
• A save made in the middle of the Black Swill fight loses the boss's health.
• The iPad and the itch.io browser build have not been tested with the graveyard.

Thank you to the player who sent feedback about full screen, keys and map text. It shaped this update. If you find something that looks wrong, tell me the area name and your screen size.

Ok i've implemented your suggestions.  Thank you!

3.625

• The priest's Heal costs 3 mana (it had grown to 9).
• The Gravewarden's Mace is stronger: damage 6 to 11 (was 4 to 8), a little easier to hit with, and the double blow comes 16 percent of the time (was 12).
• A very slow mana trickle is back: every fifth step the party walks gives each living hero one point of mana or stamina. Only walking gives it.
• Mana potions now lie only in areas that have creatures (80 of 207 areas): none in shops, houses or towns.
• Every area map shows quest givers: a gold ! over anyone with a quest to take and a green ? over anyone a finished quest can be handed to, with their name beside it.
• New: Under the Well. A well stands in Thornwick, seven squares west of Goodwife Edda (29,17), clear of every door. It asks "You look into the well and hear scratching sounds far below. Do you descend?" (Descend or Not), whether tapped or stepped on.
• Below it is a small windy maze of grey-blue brick with the eight Rat Catcher rats (levels 8, 9 and 10). A chest waits at the dead end that is the longest walk from the stair, and one potion lies in another dead end. It has its own hand-inked map and is in the Go to area list. Start link: ?town=thornwickwell&lvl=34.
• Edda now tells the party to go down the well because the rats like water, and the quest text says the same.
• Power Move: a character with no mana or stamina for their power now passes the turn to the next character who hasn't acted.

3.626

• Battle buttons: Camp is now the top small window right of the power move, with Wait under it. The weapon swap windows that stood there are gone, so weapons change in the inventory.
• The second and third potion shortcuts are on the right-hand side where Wait and Camp were (keys 6 and 7). The first stays below them (key 5).
• Food can go into the three shortcut slots as well as potions ("Put in shortcut" in the bag).
• Arriving by a door or cave mouth can no longer leave the party walled in by trees or rocks. If it's in a small pocket, the shortest line of scenery out is opened. Nothing is regenerated.

3.627

• No two creatures can stand on one square, and none can stand on a person. A move onto an occupied square is undone, and creatures that spawn or load on one are moved to the nearest free square.
• Power Move skips any character the game says lacks the mana or stamina, whatever kind of power they have.
• House doors keep away from shops and exits. In Oldhaven and Yarrim, any house door within 4 steps of a shop, inn, hall, chapel or exit is closed up into plain wall (6 houses in Oldhaven, 5 in Yarrim). Thornwick, Ironhill and Anaea were already fine. Khemetra was not checked.
• The Ruby Maze back door in Ironhill moved from 20,24 to 33,24, 6 squares from every other door. The STAY OUT sign and map label moved with it.

3.628

• The world map icons are bigger (2 times their old size, from 1.2). The layout re-places every name so nothing overlaps.

Thank you! I will look at your suggestions- the more the merrier.

Below the Abbey: update log since 3.599

At a glance

• The world map was redrawn by hand: painted places, scenery, dirt paths and winding painted rivers (3.601 to 3.604). The old pen-drawn map is gone.
• The wild dungeons in the woods and deserts are hills and rock piles with a door in them (3.601).
• Mana does not come back by itself any more (3.610). It comes back from rings and gear (3.611, 3.613), from mana potions (stronger since 3.615) and now from mana potions lying in every area (3.624).
• Combat balance: creatures stand 1 below, at or 1 above their place (3.614); experience is capped and stepped (3.616 to 3.620); the Black Sea and Hollow creatures are sized like everyone else's (3.621, 3.622).
• iPad: the canvas memory problem that blanked the maps is fixed (3.605); the itch.io page was given safer downloads and a clearer error (3.607).
• Windows: the app now updates its own game files from GitHub Pages (3.606).
• Party screen: type your own hero name (3.623). When the party dies there are now four choices, and every area start is saved (3.624).

3.600

• The ruby portal: a glowing red rune stone in the maze garden, just south of Wren. Step on it, or tap it and choose Step through, and the party is carried out to Ironhill's back lane.
• The Bogeyman no longer comes on a timer. He is one creature that wanders the Underlevel corridors, drifting toward places the party has walked. He never shows on the mini map and is only a dark shape in 3D. When he is close (behind, beside or ahead) he jumps out with the full-screen scare and the fight starts at the party's level. He cannot scare in the party's first 20 seconds in the level or for 30 seconds after a scare, and waits while the party fights, talks or is in a menu. About 7 squares away behind or beside the party a line says something is breathing and a faint heartbeat plays. If the party gets away he comes back 40 to 90 seconds later, at least 25 squares away. If killed he stays gone until the next entry to the Underlevel.

3.601: the hand-painted world map and the wild places

• Every town, castle, abbey, cave, mine, graveyard, crypt, maze, pyramid, tower, island and ruin on the world map is a painted picture, and so are the trees, pines, mountains, hills, dunes, palms, ships and sea creatures, over a washed, hatched land. Nothing overlaps: no picture, name, title or road stands on another. Pictures are no longer faded when unvisited.
• Roads are dirt paths laid from separate painted patches of trodden earth, faint, each different and turned to follow the road.
• Ironhill Moor and the places inside it are level 31. The Burial Ground, the Golden Crypt and the Ruby Maze stand close round Ironhill with no roads drawn to them.
• The wild places (caves and old ruins in the woods) are no longer big wall boxes. Each is a small painted hill with a door set in it (wooden, stone or a dark cave mouth); in the deserts it is a pile of rocks with a stone door. More trees grow round every hill; the dead trees across the door still have to be burned. The two sides of the hill are closed.

3.602

• The old pen-drawn world map and its Old look button are removed, with the pen drawings of towns, castles, trees and the rest. The painted map is the only world map.

3.603: rivers, names, the Hollow Lands pit

• Painted rivers (made over several steps): long winding rivers with side streams, in watercolour water between hand-inked banks, wooden dams across the narrow stretches, little rowing boats and a sailing boat on the wide ones, groves of trees on the banks, a plank bridge wherever a road crosses. No round lakes, nothing repeated, nothing cut off. Where a side stream meets a bigger river the bank ink no longer runs across the other river's water, and a side stream never crosses a river.
• River colour: greyer and a little darker to match the sea; lighter, thinner ink banks; fainter ripples; the pale wash where a river meets the sea draws.
• Names and levels on the world map are smaller and stand right against their pictures; a name may stand over the faded ground under a picture.
• The Hollow Lands (Deeper Hollow, Hollow Grasslands, Orange Spire and the title) sit in a shadowed pit with a dark rim, to show they are under the ground. "Below the Abbey" stands in small writing under the title.
• All small subtitles under place names are gone, except "the golden city" under Khemetra. The faint oval blotches behind the map are gone.
• The manual PDF with the new cover was pushed to itch.io at this version.

3.604

• The dark coast line no longer runs across a river mouth: the river water carries on a short way into the sea and fades.

3.605: the iPad and the Ironhill map

• iPad (and Safari generally): after a few minutes the screen redrew, pictures disappeared and flashed and the maps went black. The game kept making new copies of its lit pictures and left the old canvases for Safari to clear later, so it passed the canvas memory limit. The cache of lit pictures now has a fixed size in pixels, and a picture that leaves it is reused or freed at once. Only the three newest area maps are kept, and when the page comes back to the front every cached copy is made again. On the desktop, canvas memory stays near 140 MB instead of growing past 230 MB.
• The Ironhill map shows a ruby diamond on the back wall of Dorn's store, named "A strange door", with a key entry.

3.606: the Windows app updates itself

• Five seconds after it starts, the Windows app reads win-manifest.json from GitHub Pages. If the version is newer it downloads only the game files whose checksum changed, keeps them, and uses them from the next start (a note on screen says when one is ready). Nothing is half applied; a failed or corrupt download leaves the old files in use; an installed app as new as the download drops the download. Only the game's files update this way; a change to the app itself needs a new build. Players on versions before this have to download this first updater build once. itch.io app users still get butler patches.
• For the owner: tools/stamp.py now writes win-manifest.json; commit and push it with every release; desktop/prepare.js refuses to build if it is for another version. Notes are in desktop/README.md and CLAUDE.md.

3.607: the itch.io page on the iPad

• The itch.io browser build asked for all of its picture packs at once. It now takes five at a time, retries a pack that fails, and names the pack if one cannot be opened. The loading error screen also shows the file, line and first lines of the trace in small writing. This is for an iPad Pro that showed "Something went wrong while loading: Type error" on the itch.io page while the GitHub Pages version loaded. The cause was not reproduced; the next step is a photo of the new error text if it still happens.

3.608

• Every creature in the Ruby Maze is level 30. The Undying Pharaoh has 160 health (was 100) and the Pharaoh's Servants 50 (was 30).

3.609

• The mini map's + and - zoom buttons hide while the inventory, menu, map or loot window is open.

3.610: no regenerating mana

• Mana no longer comes back by itself: the one point per step and per round is gone, and mpRegen does nothing at first. Resting and potions are what refill it.

3.611: mana from gear only

• Four dear rings bring mana back: Ring of the Spring (1,400 gold), Ring of the Tide (2,000, adds 10 maximum mana), Ring of the Deep Well (3,000, adds 16 maximum mana), Ring of the Archmage (4,400, adds 3 Intelligence). The Voidglass (level 60) and Godforged (level 100) armour sets give some mana back each round.

3.612

• Nothing solid may stand on the door square of a rock or hill wild dungeon. A pillar had blocked one in the Golden Erg even after the thicket was burned.

3.613: mage gear

• Eight cloth sets for the magic users, one every ten levels from 10 to 80: Apprentice, Hedge Mage, Magus, Warlock, Sage, Enchanter, Wizard and Archmage, each with a hat, a robe, cuffs and leggings in its own colours. Cloth gives little armour; every piece adds spell damage, hats and robes add healing too, and from level 50 the hats and robes give back a little mana each round (0.1 at 50, 0.15 at 60, 0.2 at 70, 0.3 at 80). Any class may wear them. They are sold in the armouries (sets up to ten levels above the party) and found in chests. The pictures are the Abbot's cloth pieces from the Pilgrim's Path, cleaned and recoloured until they have paintings of their own.
• The mage and sorcerer perks work. A few creatures (about one in nine) stand 1 or 2 levels above their place. Desert wild dungeons have no dead trees.

3.614: levels within an area

• In an automatic-scaling world, ordinary creatures stand 1 below, at or 1 above the level of their place (a level 40 area has 39, 40 and 41); in the Underlevel they stand at it or up to 5 above. The pick is made from the creature's own number and the place, so it is the same every time the area loads. Bosses and the great creatures are never moved. A fixed world keeps the general rule.
• The gate from the Oakwood back to Oldhaven works again (a gap in the map edge had been blocked).

3.615: mana potions

• Mana Draught restores 40 (was 20), Greater Mana Draught 70 (was 45), Superior Mana Draught fills the whole bar (was 80).

3.616 to 3.620: experience

• 3.616: an ordinary creature gives at most 150 base XP (times its level; the Mummy, the richest, was worth 6,000 at level 40 and several Hollow, sea and marsh creatures were worth many times more). A boss, mini-boss or great creature gives at most one level of XP (what the party's average level needs to go up once). Quest and story rewards are untouched.
• 3.617: tough but ordinary creatures (crocodiles, Royal Guard, the Madman and others that stand a level or more above the party) count as ordinary for the cap.
• 3.618: a creature above the party gives 6 percent more XP for each level above (at most 50 percent more), the same step as below (6 percent less per level, never below 30 percent).
• 3.619 and 3.620: the Rat King, the first boss, gave a whole level or more; he first gave about 150 XP, then was set so that a party that reaches him around level 5 gets one full level (450 XP), a party below level 5 also a full level and a party above level 5 a bit less.
• Notes: XP_AT_LEVEL_40.md (XP for every creature to a level 40 party) and DAMAGE_AT_LEVEL_40.md (damage per hit for every creature and the test party).

3.621 and 3.622: creature sizes

• 3.621: the ten Black Sea creatures (Toothed Leviathan, Lure Angler, Kraken Horror and the rest) had 520 to 1,500 health and bit for 24 to 48, so one bite killed a hero. They now have 40 to 100 health, damage 12 to 26 and 80 to 150 base XP, and the balance code sizes their health like any ordinary creature.
• 3.622: the ordinary creatures of the Hollow lands (the Hollow Land, the Grasslands, the Deeper Hollow and its marsh, the Underlevel, the lakes) had 5 to 20 times the health and 2 to 4 times the damage of an ordinary creature of their level. Their health now comes from the balance code and their damage is capped at an average of 13 on the base scale. The crocodiles follow the 1 below, at or 1 above rule. Bosses, mini-bosses, demons and great creatures are not touched.

3.623: your own hero name

• On the party screen the name box (top right) is drawn as a box with a small pencil. Click or tap it and type the hero's name, twelve letters at most. Enter or clicking away keeps it, Escape drops the change, and a keyboard comes up on a tablet. This replaces a pop-up question that did nothing in the Windows app.

3.624

Mana potions in every area

• Every area now has a few mana draughts lying on the floor: one in a small den, two in a small place, three to six in the rest, by size. They lie on ground that can be walked to from the start, never by a door and never on scenery or a creature's post. The kind goes with the area's level: Mana Draught in the early places, Greater in the middle ones, and in the high places mostly Greater with now and then a Superior. Shops, houses and the open sea get none. The places are the same on every visit and in every save, and a save made before this change keeps everything it knew.

When the party dies

• The screen offers four choices: Start of this area again, Last quicksave, Load another game, and Go to menu. Enter takes the start of the area.
• The start of every area is saved (together with the autosave), and so is the start of a new game. "Start of this area again" returns to that save with the party as it came in. If a game is loaded in the middle of an area, that load counts as the start of the area. Quicksave (F5) is unchanged.

Starting weapons

• The weapons the party finds first are a bit stronger: Old Dagger 3 to 5 (was 2 to 4), Rusty Sword 4 to 7 (3 to 5), Battered Mace 4 to 8 (3 to 6), Short Bow 3 to 6 (2 to 5), Hand Axe 5 to 9 (4 to 7), Gnarled Staff 2 to 4 (1 to 3) and it adds 3 to spell power (was 2).

The Queen's Hive: a map and a rescue

• The Queen's Hive has its own handcrafted map: a honeycomb of solid wax, the chambers and tunnels floored in pale wax with small hexagon tiles and a pool of light in each, smooth hand-inked walls, the eggs, chests, jars and barrels where they stand, the lectern in the Queen's Cell under a gold crown, the way out, a key and a compass.
• New quest, Freed from the Honey: eight villagers of the frogfolk (Pibb, Granny Slomp, Thrup, Little Wibble, Mama Gloop, Old Dreb, Blep and Auntie Quibb) are tied up in honey and rope, one in each of eight chambers of the hive. Walk into one (or tap it, or press attack in front of it) to free it; it thanks the party and goes. The quest comes with the Queen's Dictionary quest from Aldous Wend (taking one takes the other, and the party is also told at the hive's door). When the eighth is free the villagers give the Amberthorn Spear (level 70, damage 88 to 120, one hit in eight stuns, a quarter of the hits bleed), 1,500 gold and 20,000 XP (doubled, as every quest reward is). The pictures are the village frogs coated in honey and roped by tools/make_bound_frogs.py; the spear's icon is the Barbed Chitin Spear's, recoloured (tools/make_frogspear_icon.py). They can be replaced by painted pictures.
• The creatures of the Hollow Grasslands and the hives are slower: the fast ones (the swarms) take one step instead of two, and every step, blow and shot waits a little longer.
• The Hollow Grasslands have thirty small rock nooks (rock on three sides, open on one) set about the open ground, away from villages and hive doors: stand in one and only one creature at a time can reach you in melee.
• In all four hives the language book now lies on its lectern, which glows gold so that it can be seen down the tunnels. The lectern can be walked onto and the book is taken from it.

Potion slots

• The two backup potion slots under the frequent use potion (in the inventory) work: clicking one drinks that potion on the chosen hero, and the potion stays in the slot. Before, a click emptied the slot and sent the potion back to the bag. A slot whose potion has run out clears itself, and a potion dragged onto a slot replaces what was there.
• The three potion slots have keys: 5 drinks the frequent use potion (as H and P do), 6 and 7 drink the first and second backup. In play the chosen hero (keys 1 to 4) drinks; with the inventory open it is the hero whose page is open. The keys show on the slots, in the help page and in the hover tip.
• Choosing a potion in the bag shows "Put in shortcut: 1 2 3": shortcut 1 is the frequent use potion, 2 and 3 the backups (an old shortcut 1 potion moves to a backup slot).

Gifts are announced

• Whatever the party is handed (by a person in a talk, in a scene, or by a quest) is printed on the screen: "Received: Antidote x2.", "Received: Ring of Vigor.", "Received: 40 gold." A quest taken also shows what it pays and any item it gives ("It pays: 160 gold, 400 XP, Hand Axe."). A thing that a line already names (a quest's Reward line, "She gives you a Cleansing Salve.") is not said twice. Things picked up off the floor, taken from a chest or bought are left as they were.

Potions

• Every potion now stacks in the bag. Nine did not (the Antidote, Cleansing Salve, Holy Water, Sleeping Tea, the Potions of Red, Blue, Green and Yellow, and the Potion of Escape) and each took a slot of its own. Singles already in a bag stay as they are; new ones join a stack.

Portraits

• The over-long chins on seven elf portraits are shortened (the blond elf with the circlet, the grey elf with the jutting chin, the dark elf, the elf with the leaf crown, the old grey elf, the hooded archer, and a little on the pale elf). The originals are kept in ART-HOLD/portrait_chin_orig; tools/fix_chins.py redoes it.

Thank you!  It's really nice to have people trying the game. It's being updated every day. It now has a proper windows version that you can download and that updates itself when you start it.

Changes since the 3.565 update.

The Underlevel

• The black water now moves. It rolls in slow waves with pale crests, painted, not drawn in code.
• The walls are jagged dark rock, sharp cracked facets lit on one side and in shadow on the other, instead of plain brick.
• About once a minute a line of text appears: the dark, the heavy air, the snarling of demonic creatures all round, or how your heroes feel about it (it uses their names). There are about 50 lines, each shown once, in a random order.
• About 60 stone statues stand in the dead ends and the middle of the rooms: demons and sea horrors turned to grey stone on plinths.
• The Bogeyman haunts the Underlevel. Every two to six minutes a quiet line warns you about the dark behind you, then he springs from directly behind with a full-screen jump scare, and you fight him at your own level. Never while another monster is close.
• New: the Potion of Escape. Drink it in the Underlevel and the whole party is carried up to the surface of the maze, at the foot of the nearest ladder down. Anywhere else it does nothing and is not used up. The potion sellers of the maze sell it, and about 20 lie in the dead ends of the Underlevel, one near each ladder.

The Deeper Hollow maze

• Vermin circles: the dashed red circles on the map are now challenges, 27 on the surface and 14 in the Underlevel. Walk into one and a counter shows how many creatures are left. Clear it for a "free of vermin" banner, a green circle on the map, a reward (a strong potion, a weapon, a gem and gold), thanks from the people nearby and an achievement. Clear every circle for a final reward: a high grade piece of armour and 2000 gold on the surface, 4000 in the Underlevel.
• The four quarters have names: The Lantern Reaches (north-west), The Gilded Heights (north-east), The Cairn Warrens (south-west) and The Hedgefoot Approaches (south-east). The name shows on the map and as a banner when you open a quarter.
• Shops are easy to find. Each of the 40 shopkeepers and 8 inns of the eight maze towns has a painted stall behind them that shows what they sell, and a gold $ floats over every shopkeeper. On the map, shops show as a gold $ when you zoom in a little, with the kind of shop written under it when you zoom in further.
• Every maze town has a church near its shops: a painted chapel and a frog priest who heals the party for a small gift (4 gold per level plus 10), raises a fallen hero (40 gold per level), lifts curses and hauntings, and cures sicknesses for 30 gold each. Churches show on the map as a white cross.
• High level gear: the weapon shops of the maze towns sell every weapon of level 50 and over (14 of them), and the armour shops every piece of armour of level 50 and over (32 pieces, up to the Godforged set).
• The nine weapons of level 60 and over (the Stinger Blade, the Mandible Axe, the Sunfire Blade and the six level 70 fire weapons) cost 8000 to 9000 gold.
• The six level 70 fire weapons and the Sunfire Blade have painted flaming icons, each burning in its own colour.
• The Drowned Maze is finished: a thicker green murk, moss and long hanging algae everywhere, about 1,400 more underwater plants, and 62 more freshwater creatures, so all ten kinds live there. A chest that blocked the passage out of the first stairs has moved, and no chest can cut the maze in two.
• The Swamp Crocodile is a painted crocodile seen head on, with its jaws opening when it attacks, and it is smaller, so it no longer clips into the walls of narrow channels.
• A more natural floor: the open books and melted candles are gone, small props and floor items are 15 percent smaller and lie to one side of the square, never in the middle, and passages vary from bare to holding a few things.

Fights

• Monsters hit far more often. Armour used to make creatures miss nearly two times in three: any party in decent armour sat on the lowest hit chance from about level 10, and the armoured goblins of the Orange Spire missed constantly. Armour now protects much less, and is judged against what is normal at the creature's level. A creature of your level now hits a front-line hero about 70 percent of the time, and the back line a little more often. Dodge from gear, powers and spells still helps, a hit chance never goes below 35 percent, and nothing hits more than 95 percent of the time.
• Creatures hit harder than before.
• From level 28 up, creatures take longer to kill. Their health is set by how many hits they take: about 13 hits for an average party at their level, about 10 for creatures below it and about 20 for creatures above it, each kind a little different. A party with better gear kills them faster, as a reward. Bosses and great creatures are unchanged, and so are levels 1 to 27.
• Weapons of level 16 to 29 grow stronger on a smooth curve, so your damage no longer jumps all at once at level 30.
• Mana runs out faster: every power, spell and special costs half as much again (Fire 6 instead of 4, Power Strike 6 instead of 4). Mana also comes back half as fast: 1 point every second round in a fight, and the mana regeneration of armour and powers is halved. Resting and mana potions are unchanged.
• Food heals: each food now heals a share of the hero's maximum health (water 3 percent, bread 6, pottage 12, meat pie 20, roast mutton 25) as well as filling hunger. The item card shows the percentage.
• Skeletons hit more often, and the Tomb of Sut has four more skeletons and two more mummies in the Hall of Eternity, the big hall in the middle, spread out so they do not all attack at once.
• The 52 desert dungeons are now the level of their desert (the Sand Road 36, the Red Dunes 41, the other deserts 45), and the Golden Pyramid is level 45. Saint Elen's Monastery and everything in it is level 55, like the Pilgrim's Path around it.
• On the abbey grounds, the skeletons stand farther from the wolves, so their two scenes no longer play one straight after the other.

The party

• 21 new faces on the party screen, 91 in all: a frog-folk man and woman of the Hollow Land, a yellow toad, a green frog, a proud black goat, a goat in spectacles, a goat in a turban, a goat in a wizard's cowl, a white llama, a brown llama, a lobster creature, a crocodile, a man with a goatee, a young man with brown hair, a young woman with short black hair and big blue eyes, an older woman with silver hair, a pale girl with big curly hair, a slim white Khao Manee cat with one blue eye and one gold eye, a slim grey cat with a white neck, a young Russian Blue, and a feisty young woman with fierce blue eyes and peroxide blonde hair.
• A new ready-made party: Sigrid the Warrior, Gruff the Thief (a goat), Sorcha the Mage and Wulfric the Priest. A party you made yourself is not changed.

Sound

• The short rising tune for a level up, a waking teleporter, a shrine and a few other moments is now a gentle arpeggio of soft notes. Before, a party built at a high level (for example when starting at the Orange Spire) played one copy for every level gained, all at once, which came out as a loud, distorted blast.

Fixes

• Hitting a creature at the left edge of the picture could stop the screen from drawing for a moment. Fixed.
• The letters of the Messenger of Death are counted per level. Letters seen in one place (such as the Orange Spire) no longer show as found in the Underlevel.
• Some creatures had a fraction of their proper health and died in one hit. Fixed.
• The camera no longer dips up and down when walking over hills and dunes.
• Opening a hero's inventory no longer prints a line about their afflictions.

The trailer

• There is a new trailer: https://deepspace000.github.io/Below-the-Abbey/trailer/

Below the Abbey: update 3.549 (changes since 3.534, the update on itch.io before this one, including the last Hollow Grasslands quests and the way down to the Deeper Hollow)

The Hollow Grasslands: the last quests, and the way down to the Deeper Hollow

• Once the party has found all four books and the grassland language can be understood, Aldous Wend, the wizard in Exsce, has something more to tell it. 
• This starts a chain of three main quests, shown with the other main quests, and each one starts by itself when the last is handed in.
• The Corruption in the Deep (first quest): find Old Lilac in Glorm. She hangs from the roof of the plaza, silent, until the party comes with the wizard's errand. Speaking to her hands the quest in. Reward: 200 gold and 900 experience. Aldous reminds the party where to find her if it asks again ("Be polite to her. She is very old, and she is not well.").
• Jelly for the Moth (second quest): Old Lilac is weak, for the corruption is in the air she breathes, and she cannot fly so far. She asks for 6 jars of royal jelly from the hives, taken from the bag when they are handed in. Reward: 400 gold, 1,400 experience and a potion. In return she tells the party that the gate lies under the bell tower of Nibb, in the north, sealed since the first king, and that Bulb can find it from above and is strong enough to carry the party down.
• The Whale's Errand (third quest): Bulb, a great pale whale on a bulb of warm light, will not speak until the party comes from Old Lilac. The hive creatures round the gate are too thick for her to fly through, so the party must kill 8 creatures of the hives (any grubs, wasps, golems, swarms or bosses of the hives count, and the count starts from when the quest is taken). Reward: 600 gold, 2,200 experience and two potions.
• When the third quest is handed in, Bulb gives the party a coil of silver thread: a magic map. From then on the map of the maze draws a thin, glowing, dashed line of everywhere the party has walked. The party is told of it the first time it enters the maze.
• Ask Bulb to carry the party down ("Climb on, little ones. Hold the fin and do not look down.") and she lifts it higher than the towers and flies north to the old gate under the bell tower of Nibb, which swings open on its own. The party arrives at the bottom of the Deeper Hollow, at the door in the south of the maze, and the message reads: "The air is thick and sweet here, and the walls are black with something that moves." The party can go back up through the same door at any time.
• What waits below is no longer a short stretch of cavern that ends at a plaque. The Deeper Hollow is now a huge maze of two hundred by two hundred squares, with eight towns, danger zones, secret doors, coloured keys and gem doors, a quest for every town, the Underlevel under it, and (since this update) thieves, burning spheres and shops. The Hollowed Warden sits in the great atrium at the top of the maze, in the Black Hall, and the last of the twelve town quests is to kill it ("The Warden in the Dark"), so the maze can breathe. A plaque beside the Black Hall still marks the end of the road for now.

The thieves of the maze

• Four thieves wander the Deeper Hollow, one in each quarter of the maze. They keep out of the towns and the danger zones. Each shows on the mini map as a red mark with a dark hood, so he can be seen and avoided.
• When the party is near and carrying gold, a thief creeps up behind it along the passages, one square at a time, taking the shortest way through the corridors. He only starts creeping when the party is within about fourteen squares.
• If he reaches the square behind the party, the party gets about a second and a half to turn round. Face him in time and he is caught: he draws a knife and a real fight begins. Fail to face him and he takes up to 500 gold from the party's purse, then runs off with it. After running he is out of sight for a good while and then goes home.
• A thief in front of you does not creep. If the party turns to face one that is within three squares in a clear line, the fight starts at once.
• Kill a thief that is carrying the party's gold and the gold falls and goes straight back to the party ("The thief drops 500 gold. It is yours again.").
• A Thief, Ranger or Assassin in the party hears a thief coming and says so, once, when he is about eight squares away: "A thief is near, be on guard."
• Each thief lives in a lone house in a clearing of his own quarter. Four houses in all, each a different picture, clear of the towns and the danger zones. Whenever the party comes near a house, its thief is at home, standing at the door. When the party goes away he wanders again.
• Knock on a thief's door and talk, and he tries to talk the party out of accusing him: three different excuses for each of the four thieves. Keep to the accusation all three times and he gives back every coin he stole from the party. Waver ("Maybe I was wrong") and he sends the party away, and they can try again. A thief with nothing of yours just chats, and treats an accusation as a rumour. Or draw a knife on him: he grabs a knife and the fight is on.
• If the party has killed a thief, his house is empty and a chest stands by the door, holding some of his own gold plus anything of the party's he still had.
• The people of the maze mention the thieves in their gossip.

The burning spheres and the Sunfire Blade

• Six huge burning spheres roam the Deeper Hollow, painted pictures of balls of roaring fire: molten orange, white-hot yellow, crimson, blue, green and one with a dark cracked core. They never enter a town, and they stay within about forty-five squares of where they began.
• They show on the mini map from far off as big orange rings, so they can be seen coming and avoided.
• A sphere that notices the party (within five squares, in sight) chases it, but it misses a step one round in three, so it is slower than the party walks. If the party gets about nine squares away it loses them and goes back to wandering. Close enough to touch, it attacks.
• Cinder, the ember warden of Gildmere, asks the party to kill all six. The quest counts spheres killed before it was taken. The reward is the Sunfire Blade, 12,000 gold and 60,000 experience.
• The Sunfire Blade is a level 65 sword: 234 to 342 damage, bosses take 30% more from it, and it costs 8,000 gold.
• Each sphere drops a level 70 weapon the first time it is killed. See below.

Weapons

• A new level 70 tier of six weapons, one from each sphere, each with a long description and stronger effects than anything before: Molten Greatblade (sword: a foe under 40% health takes four times the blow, bosses take 60% more, wounds bleed), Whitefire Warhammer (mace: four blows in ten stun the foe, the ground shudders), Crimson Cleaver (axe: each blow carries on to the foe behind, half the hits leave a bleeding wound), Bluefire Longbow (bow: shoots seven squares, arrows pass through, half the time a second arrow follows), Verdant Flame Staff (adds 90 to spell power, bosses take 60% more, foes reel dazed) and Cinder Dagger (a foe under half health takes four times the blow, most wounds bleed). Each needs level 70 and costs 10,000 gold.
• Their damage is 265 to 370 (staff 125 to 175).
• The weapon curve was reworked. The four level 28 boss weapons (Hollow Scepter, Veilpiercer, Crownbreaker, The Duke's Gavel) keep their full damage and now cost 2,500 gold each. Every ordinary weapon from level 30 to 64 hits harder than them: about 3.4 times the old damage at level 30, easing down to 2.6 times at level 50, 2.9 times for the odd ones above. Then 10% was taken off the damage of every weapon of level 30 and above.

The Underlevel

• The Underlevel is far darker. The walls are old black-brown brickwork covered in claw scratches and dried blood, in two different brick patterns. The floor is near-black stone. The air is close and almost no light carries: torches and lanterns now help only a little,.
• Twenty new painted creatures live there, replacing the old insects and grubs. Ten black slime monsters (a tall dripping humanoid, a puddle of many eyes, a tentacled ooze, a slime spider, a slime serpent, a screaming-maw blob, a slime hound, a slime holding a screaming skull, a many-armed horror and a great mass with dozens of eyes) and ten demonic horrors (a maggot demon with many mouths, a headless crawler with eyes in its chest, a skinned hound, a centipede with a human face, a split-jawed ghoul, a horned spider demon, a tentacled eye horror, a leather-winged imp, a pile of fused skulls and a spined bone beast). Every one has red glowing eyes. The bodies are darkened to near black and the eyes glow, so in the dark most of what you see is red eyes.
• Ten demon-insect bosses wander the corridors, far apart from each other: a mantis, scorpion, beetle, wasp, centipede, spider, moth, locust, fly and cicada demon, painted as a cross between a demon and an insect. They show on the mini map as orange rings and move like the spheres: they chase slower than the party can walk and lose it if it gets away.
• The ladders between the maze and the Underlevel are now a single ladder with plain stone above it, instead of two ladders stacked one on top of the other.
• The bites of the new creatures leave poison, bleeding, fever and stings, plus the old shaken and grave rot.

Shops in the maze

• Every kind of shop the rest of the game has now works in each of the eight maze towns: a weaponsmith, an armourer, a magic seller, a general trader and an inn, forty more people in all, on top of the shops that were already there. Each is a named person from that town (such as Brand, the weaponsmith of Hedgefoot).
• The weaponsmith sells the basic weapons and a rotating selection of better ones from level 15 to level 50. The armourer sells the basic armour, two full sets of the iron, ember or void armour (a different pair in each town) and a few better single pieces. The magic seller sells scrolls, rings, staves and draughts of mana. The trader sells torches, lanterns, food, herbs, potions and lockpicks. The inn rents a bed for 60 gold: it heals the party and feeds it. It also sells food.

The maps

• The Deeper Hollow map is redrawn as a hand-inked medieval map, painted at five times the old sharpness. Soft watercolour washes colour each biome and run into each other, passages are inked in wobbly rounded pen lines instead of a grid of squares, the walls are hatched with short pen strokes, clearings have tufts of grass, flowers and pebbles, atriums have ferns, rooms have scattered flagstones and ponds have ripples and lily pads.
• Trees on the map are now painted: an oak, a yew and a bell-shaped tree with golden blossoms, and a fountain, instead of green dots. Painted pictures also mark the thieves' houses, the dock and steps of the water passages and the huts of the towns.
• The thieves' houses are on the map, each with its name.
• The water passages are on the map. A dashed blue line joins the two docks of each canal, with reeds at the docks, and a pond marks each flight of steps down into the Drowned Maze. Three new buttons show the watery passages in full: Vine (the Vine Canal), Croc (the Croc Canals) and Drowned (the Drowned Maze), each drawn in water-blue with pools and reeds. They also work while you are standing in those levels.
• Standing on a woken teleport stone and opening the map, every other woken stone is ringed in blue on the whole map and on each quarter. Tap a ringed stone to travel to it.
• The Underlevel map is far more sinister: near-black and blood-red parchment, blood pools and spatters, claw scratches, crossed bones, skulls and watching eyes, a dripping red title and a bloody frame, with the ladders glowing so they can still be found.
• The key on the map lists the thieves' houses, canal docks, steps into the water and the water routes.

The mini map

• A plus and a minus button beside the mini map zoom it in and out. The minus can zoom out a long way (about four times).
• Burning spheres, demon bosses and thieves show on it in the maze and the Underlevel as described above.

Music

• The Underlevel plays Dark Cavern Ambient (CC0, Paul Wortmann).
• The Deeper Hollow maze and its boat canals play Paranoid Truth (CC0, Tsorthan Grove).
• The Hollow Land and the Hollow Grasslands play Searching (CC0, yd) when you are outdoors.

Areas and gates

• Go to area now lists the Hollow Grasslands, its four beehive dungeons (the Hush, Droning, Amber and Queen's Hives) and the Drowned Maze, the Vine Canal and the Croc Canals.
• The gate between the Hollow Land and the Hollow Grasslands now goes both ways. A spiked gate on the ledge of the Hollow Land leads down into the Grasslands, as the southern gate of the Grasslands leads back out onto the ledge.

Other

• Discarding an item in the inventory now asks first: "Discard (item)? It will be gone for good." with Discard and Keep it buttons.
• The little pet creatures wandering the maze and the clouds drifting through it were not moving at all. They move now, slowly, and the clouds only ever drift over open floor, never through a wall.

Thanks for the details, and sorry the game is so hard to play right now. Three quick questions so I can find the cause:

1. Which browser and device are you on (for example, Chrome on Windows)?
2. Does the tab start out using lots of memory, or does it grow the longer you play? Roughly how many minutes in does it start to freeze, and which stage or screen are you on?
3. Have you changed any settings, such as ship zoom, object size or screen shape? Does it freeze the same way in a private window?

Also, which screenshot looked like a running game with a menu? Where did you see it, and what did you expect to happen when you clicked it?

Below the Abbey: update 3.514 (changes since 3.482, the update on itch.io this morning)

The Hollow Grasslands: language and the four cities

• All the dialogue in the grasslands is gibberish until the party has found the four books from the wizard. Hollow words now follow the style of the city names.
• A fixed hollow vocabulary: common words such as I, city, house and work always get the same hollow word. 536 words in all, found by reading every line of dialogue in the grasslands.
• A word you meet twice can be asked about. Ask the folk, and the word is solved, added to the new Grassland Tongue glossary in the menu, and always understood from then on.
• When you learn a word, it now shows at once in the message that taught it. You can only learn words from what people say, and buying an item teaches you its name.
• The folk now talk at length. Vendors tell you about their wares, and philosophers walk the streets saying interesting things. The long speeches make the books worth finding.
• Market stalls in the four cities now sell fruit and vegetables (six ranges across the markets). More townsfolk shop and tend the stalls.
• Each city has a pet shop. The sellers have eighteen little companions from the grasslands, and small versions of the giants. Up to three follow the party, and each gives a small gift: more armour, a better chance to hit, gold from fights, a bigger bag, or a little healing each round.
• Townsfolk and small creatures walk more slowly with a gentler bounce, and a seated person no longer turns to face a new way.
• The big creatures of Exsce are kept apart, in a large middle section where they live. The peacock no longer vanishes when you walk near it, and the giants no longer flash. Each city has two mazes instead of four.
• The Bell Tower of Lanterns has a chest at the top and a teleport stone at the top and at the base.
• The Hollow Grasslands map shows the painted frog-whale picture. The Spindle Tyrant's stray claw is gone, and the stilt-walker ostrich has its face on the front of its head. Planets lift over buildings instead of passing through them.

The Orange Spire

• The spire was rebuilt. It has 1 room on the first floor, one more on each floor up to 10 on the tenth, then back down to 1 on the nineteenth. The twentieth floor has 2 rooms with a small labyrinth between them. More tall pointed windows with a dark view outside.
• Floor 20 is a deathtrap labyrinth. Hidden plates in the floor send slow fireballs down the passages, spike tiles wait in the corridors, and figures jump out in the dark. Little alcoves in the side walls give you a place to step out of the way.
• The fireballs fly at half the old speed, and the plates and spike tiles are armed again every time you enter the floor.
• Before you enter the labyrinth the heroes talk about the death trap. One of them has read a book about a place like it, and the others know the book.
• The thief has a new power, Sense Traps, which shows the traps nearby.
• The Messenger of Death now waits on floors 18 and 19, not 17. His letters are hidden in... well, that would be telling, wouldn't it.
• The Orange Spire vampire no longer heals itself.
• The plaque at the foot of the Violet Tower now has a portal to the Hollow Grasslands instead of a dead end.
• Floor 19 is now in the Go to area list on the title screen.

Fighting, healing and difficulty

• Hero health grows with level as fast as enemy health does, so a level 70 hero is as tough as a level 70 place expects. Older saves are brought up to the new rule when they load.
• Heals now restore a share of the patient's own health: 28 percent plus 0.9 percent per power level for one patient, and 12 percent plus 0.6 percent per level for a party. The listed amount is the minimum.
• Healing powers now cost about 30 percent more mana, so a healer runs dry in a long fight and needs a mana potion.
• The potion message shows the health actually gained.
• A new difficulty selector in the Gameplay menu. It moves in steps of 10 percent, from 80 percent easier to 200 percent harder. Enemies hit harder, take a little more to kill, hit more often and are hit less often. Gold and XP move with it.
• The difficulty page shows a worked example for a real creature nearby: its damage, hit chances, hits to kill, and the XP and gold a kill gives, now against Normal.
• The fight rating can read Hard for a creature below the party's level.

Controls and the screen

• Right-drag looks left and right as well as up and down, further and faster. Look up and down works everywhere: right-drag, V for mouse look, the right stick, two fingers on a touch screen and a look slider. Left and right are inverted by default, with a switch in the Gameplay menu.
• Hover your mouse over a button or icon to see its shortcut key.
• The controller pointer and its gold frame are drawn in front of the stone buttons.
• The butterfly catch button is at the bottom right of the screen, is off during battle, and there are 40 percent fewer butterflies.
• The quest log lists the newest quest first, with a box of the main quests at the top.
• The inventory torch looks like a normal hand torch. The big A in the title logo is larger and sits a little lower and to the right.

Fixes

• The cutscene of leaving the abbey now plays once, not after every wild dungeon.
• Herbs picked from the ground now count for every quest that asks for herbs, so the Cave Witch no longer says you have none.
• The Oldhaven quay opens to the sea on the west. Bubble helms cost 800 gold, and a party can dive with fewer than four helms, but a hero without one drowns.

Books

• Fifteen books lie in rooms, tower tops and hidden corners of the four cities. Pick one up and read it page by page, from 2 to 20 pages. Ten of them raise one stat of each hero by 1, once for good. Five are plain tales. Books can be sold: the ones that raise a stat fetch 400 to 800 gold.

Thanks for letting me know about the crash, and sorry about that! To track it down, could you tell me which browser and device you're using (for example, Chrome on an iPhone), which dialog you closed when it crashed, and how you closed it? Also, does the whole browser quit, or does just the game tab freeze or go blank? And does it happen every time or only sometimes?

Here is the list of big creatures. These are made in 3d and walk/fly around.  The Hollow Lands is a strange place...

Below the Abbey: BIG CREATURES UPDATE changes since update 3.460 

The four cities of the Hollow Grasslands (new)  There will be some bugs as this area gets playtested.  Please be patient, and if you experience weirdness, please let me know.

* Exsce, Ulb, Glorm and Nibb are now four large, strange, shell-like cities with vertical streets, entered through gates in the grassland wall. Each has its own look: Exsce is a spiral of conservatories and fish tanks, Ulb a city of looms and reeds with a long cascade, Glorm a bazaar built around a wide stair, Nibb a bell tower hung with lanterns.

* Towers and stairs to climb, sunken houses and cellars reached by stairs going down, stairs that go nowhere, walk-through tubes, pools you can wade into, and lookouts with views over the roofs. Nothing stands on the narrow stairs.

* Pools are deep water: diving needs Bubble Helms. The way out is always the teleport back to Yarrim.

* More than 100 rooms behind doors in the four cities (Exsce 33 doors, Glorm 52, Nibb 21), each with its own layout, floor and furniture, plus second rooms behind them. Interiors have partitions, windows, inlaid floors and lamps.

* Two mazes in each city (a Grand Maze and a second kind), each with a lit gate and a runner leading in from the street, four tall gold spires round the centre, its own wall style and a reward at the centre. The other mazes were turned into garden courts. HGT_MAZE_ALL=true in hgt_maze.js brings them all back.

* Sphere rooms (a room full of coloured spheres that move when you walk in) and star rooms (dark rooms lit by glowing stars), a Pearl Pool with a vaulted ceiling and chandeliers, a Ball Pit and a Star Stair.

* Large fish tanks with fish swimming in them, including a run of box tanks and a deep tank in Exsce and the Tank Walk fish wall in Ulb.

* Vines grow on the walls of Exsce. New walls with circles, dots and doodles, new floors and inlays, and no visible seams between the textures.

* Round coloured lamps (purple, green, blue, orange, yellow, white) that light up at night and go out at dawn, with wall-mounted lamps, hanging lantern rings, glitter plants and light pools on the stair feet.

* A day look and a night look for each city, a painted far skyline with soft edges, low clouds, and fill lights in dark places.

* Tower tops, balconies and lookouts are furnished with benches, plants, lamps, banners and a roost for a pet.

Life in the cities (new)

* About 100 to 140 people and creatures in each city: people who sweep, garden, read, fish, tend plants and walk the streets, and neutral pet-like creatures (part fish, part insect, part alien) that do not speak. They walk, sit, hover and rest, and never stand on the narrow stairs.

* People and small creatures walk with a bob, a squash, a sway and a mirror swap on each step. The walking and idle animations are slowed to about half speed in the latest version. Small creatures stay readable in the evening.

Giants and the sky (new, 3D)

* A 3D renderer for creatures and objects: tall spindly stilt-walkers, bulk giants as tall as a building with large painted faces and glossy eyes, winged creatures, giant peacocks about five metres tall, dragonflies and moths at eye level, angelfish with trailing fins, and flying leviathans (whale, manta, eel, jellyfish) with painted faces.

* Mini planets and low clouds drift through the cities. A large scorpionfish with ornate fins and leviathans fly across the horizon, visible inside and outside the cities.

* The Hollow Grasslands have their own moon, a vast textured object that comes out at night, comes unnaturally close to the ground and glides very slowly across the grassland. It does not collide with any creature.

* Sleeping giants lie in the plazas with closed eyes, a tilted head and a slow breathing bob.

* The Exsce giant reserve: a large walled lawn south of the spiral (38 by 19 cells) with ponds, terraces with fountains, trees and glowing plants and five wide gateways. Exsce's bulk giants, stilt-walker and peacocks live in it, at least 11 cells apart.

* Look up and down: Page Up and Page Down tilt the view up to about 36 degrees up and 12 down, Home levels it, and the right stick tilts it too. On a lookout the view tilts up a little by itself.

* Peacocks no longer vanish when you walk up to one. Big creatures no longer flash in and out: the hard cut-off distances became smooth fades and the frame-time budget no longer drops whole models.

Orrim's shop and speed shoes (new)

* Orrim, the bubble-seller, stands near the south gate plaza of Exsce. He sells Bubble Helms (big glass bubbles that let you breathe under water for four minutes) and Swift Shoes (+20 percent walking speed in the hollow lands, not cheap).

The grassland tongue (new)

* All dialogue in the Hollow Grasslands and the four cities is gibberish, in the style of the town names (for example "graxc scesx e rcene do xionacn"), until all four of Aldous Wend's book quests are handed in. Villager quests only open once the fourth book is in.

* Common words have fixed hollow words, so "I", "city", "house" and "work" always look the same. 245 words are fixed.

* Ask about a word: once you have met a hollow word twice, people offer "Ask about a word." You pick its meaning from three choices. A learned word is always shown in plain English inside the gibberish from then on.

* A new "Grassland Tongue" page in the menu lists the words you have learned and how many you know.

* The Hollow Grasslands intro text now sends the party to the great shell gate in the wall.

Menu and graphics

* Painted stone menu buttons in 25 styles (sandstone, gold, winged, filigree, ruby, dark green, dark brown, turquoise, rough stone and more) with iron lettering, and 30 medieval fonts. Rough stone is the default.

* The button style and font options moved from the Gameplay page to the Graphics page.

* Water and step messages in the terraced cities are short ("Too deep.", "Too high to climb.", "Too steep to climb down.").

Torches

* The wall torches are now painted, worn and old, in a warm brown, with the flame sitting on the torch head. They replace all the drawn torches. A torch item icon was added. A variant with a long side brace was removed.

Performance and technical

* The terraced floor and wall drawing is 2 to 5 times faster. Sprites narrower than 24 pixels draw with cheaper smoothing, off-screen sprites are skipped before sorting, and meshes that come out empty are not retried every frame. Far floors fade to a coarse copy of their pattern so nothing streaks at the horizon.

* The itch.io browser build packs the pictures into 40 stable packs, so an update only changes the packs it touches (small downloads with butler).

* Windows app (Electron): per-user install with no administrator rights, a first page that explains the Windows protected-your-PC screen, and loading text that shows percent and megabytes.

Below the Abbey: update 3.457

The manual

Below the Abbey now has a printed manual, in the style of the booklets that came in the box of the old rpg games: a 186 page illustrated PDF with a black letter title, a clickable contents page and a black and white screenshot in a heavy black frame on almost every page. If you are a true rpg geek, you know what to do.  Print it out and study it!

Chapter 1 explains the screen, the controls, the menu, the maps and your first ten minutes, with a keyboard and mouse quick reference. Chapter 2 covers your party, the twelve occupations, powers, combat, afflictions, resting and hunger. Chapter 3 covers the inventory, gear, trade, herbs and scrolls.

Chapter 4 tells the history of the land, with a who's who and a timeline (the later parts are marked as spoilers). Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are travel guides to the home lands, the deserts and Khemetra, and the seas, Oldhaven and the east. Chapter 8 is the bestiary and a hint guide with three levels of hint for every place and quest.

The new illuminated area maps fill an atlas at the end of each guide chapter, and the gear catalog (every weapon, armour piece and ring, sorted white, green, blue, red, purple and orange) is the appendix.

In the game, the More page of the menu has a new Game manual (PDF) button that opens the manual in a new tab. It is also on the itch.io page to download.

The Hollow Grasslands

A new land: the Hollow Grasslands, a wide dark grassland inside the earth, under a roof of rock instead of a sky, with the wind always in the grass. A cold, ghostly mist hangs over it, and tall towers and pinnacles stand on the horizon.

The way in is the portal at the top of the sealed Orange Spire. The way out is the spiked gate in the south, onto the ledge of the Hollow Land.

Five little villages of frog-folk, with round white houses behind spiked wooden fences. The folk speak a tongue the party cannot follow until it has found the four books hidden in the four hives. Each book lets you follow more of what they say, and the last one, the Queen's Dictionary, lets you follow it all.

Ten insectivores wait on the hills, from the Mire Tick up to The Great Insectivore, along with biter swarms and moth clouds. Gentle, wise, mossy frog-whales graze in the fields and do no harm.

Four beehive dungeons lie scattered over the grassland, walled in honeycomb, each with a boss, ending with the Hive Queen. The way out of each hive is a door you can walk into.

Twenty-four new quests.

New food (honeycomb, royal jelly, fried hive grubs, pickled kelp, water-lily root and pond water), and new gear: a stinger blade, a mandible axe, a barbed chitin spear, a carapace shield, and a full Chitin Warden armour set that hurts anything that strikes you.

The Hollow Grasslands are level 66 to 70, with gear and rewards raised to match.

The wizard's welcome in the grasslands no longer reopens itself and blocks the menu buttons. A save made in the grasslands or its hives no longer crashes Continue, Load or Go to area.

The Narrow Sea and the Pilgrim's Path map

The Narrow Sea map opens zoomed out to the whole sea, with every island named, plus Yarrim, Oldhaven and the Kraken waters.

The sea beside the Pilgrim's Path is now called the Narrow Sea on its map, and runs south past the edge of the map. A fierce sea serpent and a kraken swim in it.

Oldhaven Quay

The great gate now stands in the line of the wall instead of sticking out into the quay, and the gatehouse is the same height as the wall.

Small flags on long poles stand on either side of the gate and on the towers. Gargoyles look down over and beside the gate.

Every wall, window and the gate itself is the same grimy, soot-streaked stone.

The big flat keep and the nearby towers are no longer drawn when seen from the side or up close, where they looked like a slab standing over the walls.

The quay is less crowded, with fewer people at each stall.

The fish stalls now sell fish: smoked mackerel, pickled sardines, boiled crab, smoked haddock, salt cod, jellied eel, oysters, fried fish in a cone and fish chowder. Each stall has its own catch, and the Fish Hall sells the lot.

Illuminated area maps

Almost every place now has a hand-drawn, illuminated parchment map: the Abbey and the lands down to the Sand Road, the deserts, Yarrim, the islands, Oldhaven, all twenty floors of the Orange Spire, the Hollow Land, the Hollow Grasslands, the Pilgrim's Path and Khemetra.

The maps are drawn at three times the screen size, so their text and lines stay sharp. Zoom and pan are back (buttons, mouse wheel, pinch and drag).

A banner on each map shows the level of the creatures in the area.

Red danger zones show where creatures wait, with their level range and a skull where a boss lives. They appear only where the party has already explored, and can be switched off with the Zones button.

Quest rings show on the map, and the quest you pick in the quest log gets a dotted trail from the party to its place.

A Pin button lets you drop your own pins on a map (flag, skull, chest, camp, star or mark). Tap the map to place one, tap a pin to take it away.

A question mark shows on the area maps, and on the edge of the minimap, for hidden caves and ruins the party has spotted, so you can steer towards them.

The maps carry no notes, hints or descriptions for the player, and the foot line only says who the arrow is.

On the Thornwood map the labelled hollow in the south east is the Witch's Hut, and visited caves and ruins are named where they really are.

World map and fog of war

The world map has a new look, with puffy hand-drawn clouds that drift over it. Drag the map and the clouds move away faster, and new ones arrive. The clouds are smaller now.

The land continues west of the Hollow Lands: forests, mountains, rivers, lakes and new regions (the Western Reaches, the Far West, the Grey Downs and more), and you can pan the map that far.

The Hollow Grasslands sit west of the Orange Spire on the world map.

Outdoor area maps are covered by a solid bank of the same hand-drawn clouds, which clears as the party walks. Greendale, the Pilgrim's Path and a few other places stay clear. The Gameplay screen has a new Fog of war on maps switch if you would rather see everything.

Weather

A small painted weather icon sits in the top strip of the 3D view, toward the middle. It shows clear, night, rain, storm, fog, snow, frost, heat or haze. Tap it to be told what the weather is doing.

Interface

The red injury fill on the portraits now stays when the inventory is open.

Attack has a painted crossed swords icon.

Go to area is never blocked by the sealed Orange Spire, and it loads the city pictures before restoring a save. If a save cannot be restored, it starts a fresh party instead of failing.

The menu buttons no longer carry an asterisk or exclamation mark.

The drunk at the start of Ironhill is now a shady character, with a new painted picture.

Caves and wild dungeons no longer show a message about the way out when you enter.

Painted art

Painted art for the whole Hollow Grasslands: frog-folk, houses, towers, insects, hives, chests and the wizard. Also the weather icons, the Attack icon, the Oldhaven gargoyles and the shady character.

Below the Abbey: update 3.412

Combat you can feel

Hits land with an impact thump, and creatures show damage splats that are smaller, lower and quicker. Portraits show wounds too: the portrait fills with red as a hero is hurt, tinted by any affliction, and a heal turns the healed part from red to ice blue before it drains away.

Critical hits are now x1.5. Weapons crit by price, some crits heal, and crits show in yellow with the multiplier under the number.

Bows have a bow sound and an arrow streak, spells explode, and misses have new sounds.

Powers have animations with painted, ragged effects. Priest heals are stronger.

Controls and menus

A Keyboard Shortcuts page. The keys 1 to 4 pick a hero, and the powers screen lists the heroes. The inventory screen shows key hints.

The Character sheet is named properly, and the journal is now Journal / Abilities.

Backup potion slots take over when your most used potion runs out.

The tabs in the inventory have painted worn icons, and the spell tab is a weathered tome.

Go to area now lists the monastery buildings and the road outside it, and has a search box.

Changing a trade asks you to confirm before it takes 100 gold, and quests raise trade ranks.

Level maps no longer show torches, wall torches in corridors are flat against the wall, outdoor shadows no longer spill, and the shop quantity and price no longer overlap.

The lockpick has an icon of its own.

Herbal remedies

A Herbal Remedies button in the inventory, and the Y key opens it once you have learned herbalism.

Herbalism is taught at the herbarium, with three starter remedies.

The monastery

The monastery has chant and grounds music, with a slower fade-in. The lecterns are half size, and the mausoleum coffin is fixed.

The lane from the Pilgrim's Path to the monastery gate is open, with a great painted statue of Saint Elen at its start, a worn, mossy saint.

Buildings and dungeons are listed separately in achievements.

The woods of the Pilgrim's Path

Thick woods run along the sea, with trails, squirrels, rabbits, deer, bees, bears, slimes and wolves. Weaving paths cross the forest, with a way in every 100 metres. Forest clearings are scattered through it.

Twenty hidden caves and thirty-three wild dungeons lie in the woods, two on each of the first nine stretches of the Path. A mossy stone cross beside the road marks each one, tall and bright green so you can see it from far along the road. A straight, three-square-wide ride runs east from each cross to its door. The doors of caves and ruins stand tall, and show over the trees.

A ? appears on the maps as soon as the party looks towards a cave or ruin. Rangers, scouts, healers and alchemists spot hidden places sooner.

About three in ten places on the Path have burnable thickets that can be burned to reach caves and ruins. A woodsman in Thornwick and a scout in Ironhill talk about it. An old soldier in Oldhaven knows what the crosses mean, and a wondering walker on the path says they mean something.

Many trees can be walked through: half of the oaks and 80 percent of the firs in the thick woods.

Painted mountain ranges rise behind the land at the deep end of the woods, fading at both ends. The east edge is a low strip of forest, so the mountains show with no wall in front.

Six painted pilgrims' shrines stand on the left of the Path every two kilometres, with food to take. Distance signs always stand on the left.

New quests in the woods concerning the bears, the slimes, a witch and an exile.

The whole Pilgrim's Path, its caves and its wild dungeons are level 55, like Oldhaven.

Caves and wild dungeons

Caves and ruins can be entered and left, with no teleporter inside, and the way out glows and is always marked on the map. Floors are easy to see, and exits are set in the same wall as the room.

Caves are bigger, ruins are grim, dark and grimy, with ruined statues, snapped columns and tumbled brickwork green with moss and vines. Wild dungeons have thin pale saplings in the rooms, ferns, bushes, grass through the floor, vines from the roof and sparse wild flowers.

Food in chests in about half of them: mushrooms, moss, figs, potatoes, garlic, berries, chestnuts, cress, rosehips and truffle. Four new herbs, more herbs, and the occasional gem.

Armour in about four of every ten, one mid-tier piece and now and then a powerful one, with at most one piece of armour or weapon in any chest.

No travelling bard or merchant in them. In the woods a proper painted bard, Tamsin Larkwhistle, sings a different song each evening.

Rings and weight

Twenty-one new rings: stats, mana, health, armour, damage, profession rank and carrying. Armourers, scroll sellers, traders and stores now sell rings, and prices are dearer all round.

Weight. Pack weight and slots grow with the party's combined strength, and the gold and Sort window shows weight and slots. An overloaded party walks at half speed, and is back to full speed the moment the load drops under the limit.

Painted art

New painted art throughout, from the worn tab icons and the saint statue to the mountains, the crosses and the pilgrims' shrines.

LOOOOOVE THIS GAME!!!  I would love a sequel.

The download is available just under the browser version.

Implementing some of those changes now. :)

Below the Abbey: update 3.301

Everything new since update 3.280.

Collecting

• A Collection menu (Menu, More, Collection) holds the logs of everything you find: Jewel Hunter, Butterfly Catching, Herb Collecting, Treasure and the Shrine Logbook.
• Gems. Forty cut gems of every colour lie on empty squares in dungeons, a few to a dungeon, the better ones deeper down. Each sells for 40 to 300 gold. They are small and lie on their side on the floor. The Jewel Hunter page shows them front-on and logs every gem found and sold.
• Butterflies. Thirty kinds flutter about the open lands, from the Cabbage White to the glowing Moonwing and the very rare Sunflare Monarch. Buy a Butterfly Cage from a trader (20 gold) and a catch hand appears when a butterfly is near. It lights up when the butterfly is on your square. The best dexterity in the party sets the chance, and the log names who caught it. They sell for 10 to 300 gold.
• Herbs. Twenty-four herbs lie on the ground in the open lands, away from doors and people. Pick them up, log them, and sell them at the usual herb prices.
• Shovels and treasure hunting. Ten shovels, from the Peasant's Shovel (1% chance per dig) to the King's Golden Shovel (10%), are sold by traders as the party grows stronger. Press Dig on an empty square. Finds are coins, gems, old boots, odd things, buried weapons (very rarely a powerful one) and messages in bottles. A bottle starts a quest that leads to a marked square with a greater reward. The Treasure page logs it all.

Herbal remedies

• Sixteen herbal remedies cure most afflictions (fever, poison, bleeding, frostbite, haunting, curses and more) or heal, for far less than the church asks.
• Learn them from the herbalists, healers and potion sellers of Oldhaven, Khemetra and the monastery, or discover them by mixing herbs on the new Herbal Remedies page of the journal.
• Brew them at camp from the herbs you have picked.

The old shrines

• Sixteen beautiful old shrines stand in quiet places, from Thornwood to the far deserts and the Pilgrim's Path. Stand before one to log it in the Shrine Logbook.
• Abbot Anselm at Saint Elen's gives the quest to find them all. Visit every one for an achievement, 1500 gold, and a rise in every hero's intelligence.

The Pilgrim's Path and the monastery

• The Land Path is the Pilgrim's Path. Twenty teleport stones stand beside every fifth signpost and by the cliff above Yarrim. Wake them all and you complete the path: an achievement, 1000 gold and the Abbot's armour set, a powerful set any class can wear.
• The sea is always on your left along the whole path, including the way south to Yarrim.
• Animated waterfalls. Painted single falls with water that runs, clipped to the water and the rocks around it.
• The houses on the path are real rooms with an occupant who lives and works there. The little houses have no roofs, with a shuttered window and climbing roses beside the door.
• The monastery is finished. The church has a grand nave with pews, angels, saints and a rose window, the scriptorium has shelves and lecterns, and the refectory and guest house have painted windows and banners. The Chapel of the Lamps stands beside the church.
• A bug fixed: Khemetra's houses could replace the rooms of Oldhaven, the quay, the path and the monastery. They no longer do.
• Oldhaven's religious folk talk about the Pilgrim's Path.

Armour, money and levels

• Ten full armour sets for levels 10 to 100, with new skills (ward, life drain, second wind) and set bonuses.
• More money. Gold drops grow with the creature's level. Creatures above your level pay more (+50% one level above, +20% for each level after). Humanoids always drop gold. Quest rewards are doubled. Ironhill has a chest with 1000 gold, and iron ore sells for 50 gold.
• Four quiet chests with 200 to 500 gold in each desert.
• New levels for the later places, and a choice at the start of a new game: Traditional levelling (every place has its own level) or Scaled (creatures grow with your party). Change it any time in Menu, Settings, Gameplay.
• The Orange Spire levels shrink faster, half size by level 10 and tiny at the top.

Menus and the world map

• A loading screen with a progress bar.
• The title screen has Settings and Exit to desktop.
• The save and load screen scrolls, and its text no longer hides behind the buttons.
• The Controller page shows a broader pad with every button on it.
• The world map shows the level beside each name, spreads the places out so nothing is hidden, and keeps the sea road from Oldhaven to Yarrim.
• Creatures fit the window. Tall ones are scaled down, except the truly huge.
• Softer teleport sound and more wall torches in dark places.

I'm thinking of putting it on steam when it's done, but I'm happy with is on itch.io right now. lots of enthusiastic indie games and devs here!

Thanks for your notes. I appreciate it!!  The wait icon is so when you're in the entry to a room, the enemies have spotted you, but you don't want to wade it. press wait a few times, and they'll come to you.  The healing (if you have a healer) happens when you select the power in the power page, and then when you fight, use the second power button which uses equipped powers, healing being one of them.  

yes absolutely.  In fact i thought the html5 version was available to download. i'll check

Thanks to Ian Livingstone for the Messenger of Death idea!

# Below the Abbey: update 3.206

Everything new since 16 October.

**Playing time:** roughly 15 to 20 hours to follow the main story from the first crypt to the top of the tower. Exploring the side quests, the sea and the dungeons takes much longer.

## New places

- **The Land Path.** A new north gate in Oldhaven opens on a 96 km pilgrim road that runs up the coast, over a mountain pass and down to a cliff above Yarrim. About an hour of quiet walking: sea on one side, old oak forest on the other, flowers and lamps, a signpost at every kilometre, pilgrims and monks on the road, knights riding by, travellers resting, houses, inns and churches. Three waterfalls with rope bridges. The road is one way, and the cliff at the end can only be climbed down.

- **Saint Elen's Monastery**, halfway along the path. A church, cloister, refectory, scriptorium, kitchen, guest house, infirmary and gardens, with friendly monks. A cemetery, cellars, old crypts and a mausoleum lie below and beside it, with ten quiet quests.

- **The Hollow Land and the Orange Tower.** Below the Abbey, past the Hollow Abbot, a stair comes out on a high ledge over a great gothic orange castle lit by red and purple torches. Inside, 20 numbered levels climb to a spire, each smaller than the last, with a mystery room on every floor: a riddling wizard, a rope bridge, a chasm, a room of sand, a room of statues, a pit that drops you a level, a monster, a treasure. At the top a wizard asks three questions. Answer with good will and the way to the violet tower opens. Answer with greed and you fall two levels.

- **Oldhaven, rebuilt.** Sunlit streets, a castle ward with gardens and courtyards, painted timber, stone and brick houses, 30 new townsfolk, and a serious quay with a working gatehouse and armoured guards.

- **Oldhaven, Acts 1 to 4.** The ledger and its six names, the siege, the Oakwood with its glades, woodwardens and the Great Oak, the Orrery of Hours, and four new floors below the Abbey. 11 new journal chapters tell the story.

## The haunted castle

- Gaunt painted portraits of dead rulers, candle tables, windows onto darkness, alcoves, chains, banners, mirrors, coffins, cages, a throne, a banquet table, armour, bookshelves, lecterns and pinned notes with dreadful entries.

- A cup of poison and a poisoned apple on tables. Drink or eat at your own risk.

- Clawing hands that reach out of the passage walls and attack as you pass.

- Wailing ghosts. A voice calling for help leads to one that attacks.

- A thin man in a black coat who vanishes when you get close and appears again further along.

- Pressure plates with spikes and poison darts. Stones that put the lights out for a few steps.

- A screaming witch whose room flickers while she attacks.

- A fireplace with a ghostly face that warns the party.

- The party talks to each other about how strange the place is.

- Secret rooms behind walls of a different colour, opened by a lever, with a chest inside.

- The Messenger of Death waits on floors 17 to 19. His five letters are hidden away from the main route, so you only die if you go looking for them all.

- New creatures: armoured goblins, an angry violet slime with faint bones and rib cages, and orc brutes, all in full colour.

## On the Land Path

- Shrines by the road hold food offerings. Choose Take, then eat on the spot. Taking from a shrine costs honour. You can leave food there too.

- Benches offer a seat. The party sits, rests a little, and the music of Greendale Forest plays until you walk on.

- The map screen shows the whole 96 km on one hand-drawn map: every house, inn, church, shrine, waterfall and rope bridge, Saint Elen's Monastery halfway, Yarrim at the end, and where you are now.

- The road is one unbroken walk. No walls, seams or see-through lines between stretches, and no animal messages.

## Yarrim and the sea

- The Yarrim story quests hand you the next quest as each one is finished.

- Underwater quests, island quests and shipwreck logs are circled on their maps.

- The minimap shows the sea, the islands and a clear ship arrow while you sail.

- Tam Salvor wears a painted deep sea diving suit. Yarrim's shanty is now slow and soothing.

## Maps, journal and menus

- Any quest can be shown on the map when you pick it, in the level, on the sea map or on the world map.

- Map names appear by zoom level and importance, and never sit on top of a quest ring.

- A You button centres a local map on the party.

- Hint button on every quest that is more than a plain fetch or kill.

- A Stats page in the menu: gold, steps, time, quests, shops, battle and monsters slain.

- The Oakwood and Below the Abbey are on the world map, with named places on their local maps.

## Fixes

- Faint circles and vertical lines in the sky are gone.

- Seagull cries are longer. Pets stay quiet on the open sea, underwater and on the Land Path.

- The Go to area button is no longer on the title screen of this build.

# Below the Abbey: update 3.206

Everything new since 16 October.

**Playing time:** roughly 15 to 20 hours to follow the main story from the first crypt to the top of the tower. Exploring the side quests, the sea and the dungeons takes much longer.

## New places

- **The Land Path.** A new north gate in Oldhaven opens on a 96 km pilgrim road that runs up the coast, over a mountain pass and down to a cliff above Yarrim. About an hour of quiet walking: sea on one side, old oak forest on the other, flowers and lamps, a signpost at every kilometre, pilgrims and monks on the road, knights riding by, travellers resting, houses, inns and churches. Three waterfalls with rope bridges. The road is one way, and the cliff at the end can only be climbed down.

- **Saint Elen's Monastery**, halfway along the path. A church, cloister, refectory, scriptorium, kitchen, guest house, infirmary and gardens, with friendly monks. A cemetery, cellars, old crypts and a mausoleum lie below and beside it, with ten quiet quests.

- **The Hollow Land and the Orange Tower.** Below the Abbey, past the Hollow Abbot, a stair comes out on a high ledge over a great gothic orange castle lit by red and purple torches. Inside, 20 numbered levels climb to a spire, each smaller than the last, with a mystery room on every floor: a riddling wizard, a rope bridge, a chasm, a room of sand, a room of statues, a pit that drops you a level, a monster, a treasure. At the top a wizard asks three questions. Answer with good will and the way to the violet tower opens. Answer with greed and you fall two levels.

- **Oldhaven, rebuilt.** Sunlit streets, a castle ward with gardens and courtyards, painted timber, stone and brick houses, 30 new townsfolk, and a serious quay with a working gatehouse and armoured guards.

- **Oldhaven, Acts 1 to 4.** The ledger and its six names, the siege, the Oakwood with its glades, woodwardens and the Great Oak, the Orrery of Hours, and four new floors below the Abbey. 11 new journal chapters tell the story.

## The haunted castle

- Gaunt painted portraits of dead rulers, candle tables, windows onto darkness, alcoves, chains, banners, mirrors, coffins, cages, a throne, a banquet table, armour, bookshelves, lecterns and pinned notes with dreadful entries.

- A cup of poison and a poisoned apple on tables. Drink or eat at your own risk.

- Clawing hands that reach out of the passage walls and attack as you pass.

- Wailing ghosts. A voice calling for help leads to one that attacks.

- A thin man in a black coat who vanishes when you get close and appears again further along.

- Pressure plates with spikes and poison darts. Stones that put the lights out for a few steps.

- A screaming witch whose room flickers while she attacks.

- A fireplace with a ghostly face that warns the party.

- The party talks to each other about how strange the place is.

- Secret rooms behind walls of a different colour, opened by a lever, with a chest inside.

- The Messenger of Death waits on floors 17 to 19. His five letters are hidden away from the main route, so you only die if you go looking for them all.

- New creatures: armoured goblins, an angry violet slime with faint bones and rib cages, and orc brutes, all in full colour.

## On the Land Path

- Shrines by the road hold food offerings. Choose Take, then eat on the spot. Taking from a shrine costs honour. You can leave food there too.

- Benches offer a seat. The party sits, rests a little, and the music of Greendale Forest plays until you walk on.

- The map screen shows the whole 96 km on one hand-drawn map: every house, inn, church, shrine, waterfall and rope bridge, Saint Elen's Monastery halfway, Yarrim at the end, and where you are now.

- The road is one unbroken walk. No walls, seams or see-through lines between stretches, and no animal messages.

## Yarrim and the sea

- The Yarrim story quests hand you the next quest as each one is finished.

- Underwater quests, island quests and shipwreck logs are circled on their maps.

- The minimap shows the sea, the islands and a clear ship arrow while you sail.

- Tam Salvor wears a painted deep sea diving suit. Yarrim's shanty is now slow and soothing.

## Maps, journal and menus

- Any quest can be shown on the map when you pick it, in the level, on the sea map or on the world map.

- Map names appear by zoom level and importance, and never sit on top of a quest ring.

- A You button centres a local map on the party.

- Hint button on every quest that is more than a plain fetch or kill.

- A Stats page in the menu: gold, steps, time, quests, shops, battle and monsters slain.

- The Oakwood and Below the Abbey are on the world map, with named places on their local maps.

## Fixes

- Faint circles and vertical lines in the sky are gone.

- Seagull cries are longer. Pets stay quiet on the open sea, underwater and on the Land Path.

- The Go to area button is no longer on the title screen of this build.

I hope you enjoy this. It's very early and there is a lot of work to be done, but it is very playable!  There's a lot of content, and there is a lot more coming.  

Love this!!! Please make more games.