Blight grew up. The story runs four acts and actually ends: down through the catacombs to the Crack, three bosses, and a King with a box of medals and a loose grip on everyone's names. Everyone in it looks like who they are, the gold arrow knows the way, and pixies patch you up between fights. Horde became the siege of Old Gnarl, with a second one out in the desert at the Last Drop. Bring a game pad or play alone with no internet, and the music finally plays what was written, drums and all. Blight is on its way to iPhone, iPad and the Mac App Store too, as soon as Apple has had a look at it. The chickens were offered medals. They ate them.

  • The story ends with a celebration worth the walk. Seal the Crack and the party is brought to the front steps of Thornwall castle, red carpet and all, where King Aldric III thanks and decorates every hero by name (mostly; he's been up for three days), and everyone you met along the way turns out to cheer: Elder Grumbald, Mabel, Red Martha, Sergeant Brynn, the Philosopher, the original Gerald (what's left of him), and a goat the goats sent (#257).
  • The post-credits scene plays as written. Back in the rebuilt Mudbury Arms, medals on and drinks in hand, a chicken walks in and clucks perfectly normally. Then it turns round. Then Mr. Whiskers, alive and entirely himself, does what cats do to mugs, and the credits roll for everyone who made it (#157).
  • The ending is something you watch: the bars come in, the HUD steps aside and the camera does the work. Seen it before? Press Space (or tap) twice to skip to the credits. The host's skip skips it for everyone; anyone else's just for them.
  • Behind the scenes: quest scripts can stage scenes of their own now, walking people to their marks, turning them, giving lines, medals, cheers, camera moves, fades, title cards and the credits, and the host plays them the same on every screen. The dev console's skip() skips one, as Space twice does (#257).
  • Behind the scenes: the test of a farmer flattening his scarecrow no longer fails one time in a few hundred. Its chicken could land on his patch and lure him off mid-fight; it now comes in, and the player waits, well away.
  • Act 3 really does go below. North of the cathedral a stair goes down through the castle's foundations into a dungeon that keeps going: torchlit catacombs with the dead filed in the walls, a card table where a skeleton plays rummy with himself, and Dave (you'll know him, he has his name on); then a cave of glowing mushrooms whose spores make you see things, chickens included; then the hall the King barricaded himself into, whose walls do scream (that's Harold); and last the Crack, a broken platform over a void of stars with bits of Mudbury, the tavern and the sea drifting past. Each step down is darker and stranger than the last (#134).
  • Zoomed out, walls, roads and props near the edges of the screen no longer go missing.
  • Act 1 tells the story it was written to tell. Something really is wrong with Gerald: after thirty-one silent years behind the bar he won't stop talking, confesses to watering the ale, and turns out to know exactly where the trouble is. The elder beatboxes through his speech, a villager runs screaming that the goats have organised, the regulars and the party sit on their chairs, and the livestock come in from the village instead of appearing among the drinkers. Out on the farms Old Hodge flattens scarecrows with a rake, one of which doesn't even want to do this (they all fall over a lot). In the Whispering Wood, never turn your back on the trees (#153).
  • You can see which crows belong to which scarecrow. Each crow circles its scarecrow on a faint green thread and dives at anyone who comes close; knock the scarecrow down for good and its crows scatter and fly off (#18).
  • Your party is people now, not bots. In the story, the three seats nobody's taken go to Dunstan, Mudbury's gravedigger (he's already measured you); Prudence Fettle, who packed a spare spoon; and Barnaby Pipe, a bard with a damp lute and no rhyme for Mudbury. Horde brings Nan Ottery, Ferris (has anyone seen his goose?), Mildred Brine and Sir Reginald Puddle along too. Each introduces themselves and talks in character, never over the story: they wait until it's had its say. When a friend joins, a companion makes room; when a friend leaves, one takes their seat, so the party stays full. In the tavern the party now sits one to a chair along the middle of the room, so each hero and their name is plain to see, and stays seated through the elder's speech instead of shuffling off (#160).
  • Blight's store pages now point to the Resinhead Games Discord, so there's somewhere to report a bug, brag about a run or grieve the goat. Google Play's listing comes from the repo through a new workflow that checks it reads back exactly as written (#109, #121).
  • Blight builds for iPhone as well as iPad, in landscape, with the on-screen controls kept clear of the notch, the Dynamic Island and the rounded corners.
  • Phones: the "Now Playing" line no longer sits on top of the second weapon button.
  • Studio testers can get Blight on iPhone and iPad through TestFlight, built and uploaded by the forge.
  • iPhone and iPad report crashes like the other platforms (tagged as iOS), with the same off switch in the cog menu.
  • A new release no longer locks out everyone who hasn't updated yet. Online play now checks whether two builds can actually talk to each other, not whether their version numbers match. So if your store is still waiting on the update, you keep playing with everyone else (#104).
  • The game browser marks games you can't join ("update Blight to join", "older version") instead of letting you try and fail. When an update really is needed, Blight says where to get it: the App Store, Google Play, itch.io or the desktop updater.
  • Behind the scenes: a release now shrugs off a momentary hiccup on the studio's build server instead of falling over halfway through (#111).
  • Behind the scenes: a release that fails partway no longer puts a build on Google Play. Play now goes last, once the desktop update and itch.io have shipped, so a failed release can simply be run again (#105).
  • Behind the scenes: each release now sends the iPhone and iPad build to Apple for review on its own, "What's New" included, ready to go live with one approval once Apple says yes (#108).
  • Blight builds for the Mac App Store: one app for Apple silicon and Intel Macs on macOS 14 or later, kept in Apple's sandbox, updated by the store rather than by itself (#82).
  • Behind the scenes: code changes now need tests. CI fails a change when less than 80% of its new or changed lines in tested code are covered (#38).
  • Behind the scenes: the last of sentry.io is gone. Crash reports have gone to the studio's own server since 1.4.10; the release no longer carries the old sentry.io symbol-upload job, and the crash-reporting docs describe what is actually collected and kept (#64).
  • Behind the scenes: every build of a given commit now uses exactly the same packages, on every machine and in CI, so a build can't quietly change between restores; the game builds on one pinned .NET SDK. Package versions live in one file, lock files record the full set, CI refuses a restore that doesn't match, and each package comes from exactly one feed (#120).
  • Behind the scenes: the multiplayer matchmaking server no longer writes players' IP addresses or lobby names to its logs, so what it keeps matches the privacy policy: no connection data outlives the session (#122).
  • Behind the scenes: one malformed message can no longer knock the matchmaking server over and take online play down for everyone until it restarts.
  • Crash reports no longer carry your computer's account name. On Windows, Blight installs inside your user folder, so the file paths in a crash report used to include your Windows username; now every home folder is blanked out before a report leaves your machine (#122).
  • Android crash reports carry less: no more notes about your network (signal strength, VPN, bandwidth) or battery, no record of taps, and no check for whether your phone is rooted. What's left is what it takes to fix the crash (#122).
  • The story has an ending. Beating the Crack used to replay the closing narration forever while the bots wandered off into the dark. Now the closing lines play once, "The End" says you've finished, and you can head back to the main menu, or, if you're hosting, play the story again (#126).
  • The tavern no longer sounds like a massacre when the party leaves it. NPCs whose scene is over now simply leave, instead of each dying noisily on the way out, and both of the King's Royal Guards go home at the end of his last stand rather than one of them standing guard over nothing for the rest of the game (#143).
  • Every enemy now wears its proper name. The Whispering Wood is no longer an ambush by sixteen "Entity"s but by bandits, brutes, archers and cutthroats, and the fire mages' name tags have dropped the "Orc" (#140).
  • Behind the scenes: the dev console's cheats work on the quest. god(true) now actually stops you dying rather than just hiding the bad news, hp() sets your real health, and kill("enemies") finally reaches the bandits, the blighted and the bosses while kill("animals") stops taking the King with the chickens (#150).
  • You can read what people are saying, even in the dark. Names, health bars and speech bubbles no longer fade into the night with everything else (the Crack used to swallow them whole), stay one readable size however far you zoom, and keep themselves on screen. On big desktop screens the HUD and chat grow to match (#129).
  • Name tags in a crowd stack neatly instead of printing over each other, so the tavern regulars are Tobias Stout and Wilma Tipps again, not "Tobias Stoilma Tipps" (#139).
  • You can see in the dark. The final battle in the Crack is no longer fought on a black screen: the Crack has its own violet pulse, and once night falls every player carries a warm light, so the Grove, the Cathedral and the depths are moody rather than invisible. Daylight finally looks like daylight instead of a grey-blue dusk, and the time of day shifts along the road and eases in rather than snapping when you arrive somewhere (#127, #146).
  • A host on a computer set to a comma-decimal language (German, French and friends) no longer plunges every dusk and night scene into total darkness for everyone in the game (#146).
  • The developers have tidied up after themselves. Your map coordinates, the red dots on every punch and the "Players: 4" that counted the bots as friends are gone; weapons have their proper names ("Holy Hand Grenade", not "HolyHandGrenade"); and the song title now says hello when a new tune starts, then leaves you in peace (#131).
  • Fights now tell you what's left: the HUD counts the enemies still standing (and which wave you're on), and red arrows at the edge of the screen point at any that have wandered out of view, so nobody spends a quiet evening searching the woods for one bandit with a knife and somewhere else to be. Slimelings count too; killing a slime no longer wins the wave while its offspring are still bouncing about (#142).
  • You always know where you are and what you're doing. Each act opens with its title card ("Act 1: Something's Wrong With Gerald" finally appears somewhere), the HUD names the place and, under it, the job at hand ("The Bridge at Gorton", then "Hold the bridge"), the road tells you where you're heading, and winning an encounter gets a proper "cleared" banner instead of an awkward pause (#135).
  • Joining a quest that's already under way puts you with the party, wherever they've got to, instead of back in Mudbury with a very long walk ahead and no idea which way. The narrator tells you which act and place you've turned up in, and doesn't mention that you're late more than once (#145).
  • The weapon slots stop pretending. Pressing 1 or 2, or tapping a slot, used to move a highlight and change nothing; now 1 (or the top slot) swings your main hand like SPACE, and 2 (or the bottom slot) swings your offhand like Ctrl. The gold border follows whichever hand is actually swinging, a raised shield glows, and an offhand with nothing to do (empty, or both hands busy with a halberd) is greyed out rather than looking ready (#147).
  • Behind the scenes: the dev console's bot.remove() now actually removes bots (one by id, or all of them) and says who went, instead of hunting for them among the chickens; and the console keeps what startup scripts print for whenever it's first opened, rather than just the last line (#173, #174).
  • The story now waits for you to finish reading. Every line stays up long enough to read at a comfortable pace, the narrator finishes one thought before starting the next, and narration lands in the chat too, marked as such. Missed something? Press Enter (or, on a phone, tap "Tap to read back") to go back over what was just said. Dying no longer drops a "YOU DIED" over the narrator, and a villager who started talking before you walked up still gets their bubble (#130).
  • Creatures talk and die like themselves. Every enemy has its own lines in its own voice: the Blighted apologise mid-swing, the Smile is delighted to meet you, skeletons are bored, mushrooms want to talk philosophy and bandits have forgotten why they're robbing you. The crow has stopped saying "MOOO!", the orcs keep "WAAGH!" to themselves and nothing goes out with a slime's splat unless it's actually a slime (#144).
  • The menus do what they look like they do. The facilitator field answers a click (on a phone, a tap brings up the keyboard); Enter starts a game straight from the name field; every game gets its own name instead of "My Game" (type over it if "Soggy Turnip" isn't you); and starting a game no longer freezes the menu while Blight phones the matchmaking server, or waits forever on one that never answers. On desktop, Join Game's Refresh and Back labels no longer run into each other's buttons. Quit, Leave game and Escape on the main menu now ask first, so one stray keypress can't send the whole party home (#148).
  • Pressing ~ while hosting no longer opens a Lua console with god mode, monster summoning and the run of your computer. That was a developer tool left lying about in the shipped game; it now stays in development builds, and a released Blight only offers it when launched with --dev-console on purpose (#152).
  • Every match starts clean. Leave a quest for a round of horde and the quest's travel arrow, its music, its potions, boomerangs, chimney smoke and building floors no longer tag along. The end screen says what actually happened: "Local server started" is not a final score, and when the host leaves a quest it says the story has stopped instead of showing a horde loss and a wave count (#149).
  • Behind the scenes: a dev build can now be driven from outside over MCP: run console Lua and read what it said, jump to any encounter, check the game's state and take a screenshot, each answered on the spot. Reviewing the quest no longer means writing a timed tour and guessing when the cathedral will be in shot. The console's encounter() also owns up to an index that doesn't exist, or a game that isn't a quest, instead of cheerfully jumping nowhere (#167).
  • Strolling past a Beer Mug no longer costs you your Halberd. Walking over a weapon only picks it up when you have a hand free; otherwise it says what you'd swap ("E: swap Halberd for Beer Mug") and waits for you to press E, or tap it. Whatever you swap out stays on the floor, in case the Beer Mug was a mistake. Join a game hosted on an older Blight and it's the old rules until the host updates (#162).
  • Creatures still never shut up, but Blight now forgets each insult once it's been said. Every taunt's babble used to hang about long after the line ended, so over a long session the orc opinions piled up. And --no-sound now means no sound: the creatures used to keep babbling through it (#195).
  • Shields hold steady. A shield in your offhand now guards on its own whenever you're not swinging, on every platform, and stays down through a flurry of back-to-back swings instead of blinking up between them like a nervous semaphore operator. Ctrl no longer does anything with a shield (#187).
  • Only the story speaks as the narrator, and only the game as "System". A tampered-with client that joins as "Narrator", "nArRaToR", "N4rr4t0r" or "System" now goes by "Not The Narrator" or "Not The System", and its chat shows as its own rather than in the narrator's box or as a "who joined" line. The parts are taken. The host also tidies every joiner's name into something everyone's screen can show, 24 characters at most (#189).
  • Your hero only goes where you send them. Clicks and scrolls made in other windows no longer reach the game, even on a taskbar or notification sitting on top of it; the click that brings Blight back to the front doesn't count as an order; and a key held as you tab away is let go rather than walking the hero into the sunset without you. A walk planned before a scene change is forgotten, a walk that bumps into a friend ends beside them instead of marching on the spot, and two heroes standing still stay put, so nobody slides out of their tavern seat (#181).
  • The story has a soundtrack at last. Every place now plays its own song when the party arrives (a pub brawl in Mudbury, a gothic organ in Thornwall Cathedral), where before whatever song greeted you at launch looped from the first chicken to the Crack. The Outskirts got a song too: a sunny pastoral number, which the scarecrows ignore. Muting and unmuting brings back the scene's song rather than a random one (#128).
  • Odd text can no longer crash the game. An emoji in a script's line, a strange character in a system message, or whatever a tampered-with copy of Blight decides to send now shows up as a "?" where the font has nothing to draw, instead of taking down everyone who looks at it. Invisible characters and stray line breaks are quietly tidied away. The "?" is not a comment on the message (#200).
  • On desktop, the hotbar's weapon names no longer sit on top of the slot below, so a Ball and Chain reads as one and the offhand is still visible underneath it (#212).
  • Phones and tablets are properly touch-friendly: the menus are thumb-sized on dense screens and stay out from under the camera cutout, a tap skips the splash and cancels a join, a long Join list pages, and the phone's keyboard comes up to chat, name your game or change the server. Android's Back button now backs out one thing at a time and asks before leaving a match, instead of throwing you onto the home screen mid-sentence (#132).
  • Behind the scenes: an Android build has to get into a quest before it ships. Every PR now builds the Android client and boots it in an emulator, hosting a quest and waiting for its first frame, and every release does the same with the exact APK it's about to send to Google Play and itch.io. Until now nothing checked Android until a player opened it (#214).
  • Speech bubbles turn up with their words already in them. Every line used to open as a blank white box for a moment, as if the speaker had lost their train of thought, and then the words arrived a size too big for it. Now the bubble and its words pop in together, and a line with nothing in it doesn't get a bubble at all; nor does pressing Enter on a chat line of only spaces send it (#211).
  • The main menu says what's on it. Play the Story comes first and does what it says: the quest from the start, with friends welcome to join. Horde and Join a Friend's Game follow, each with a line saying what it is, so nobody has to guess that "Create Game" was the story or go hunting for a "Quest: [x]" box. The server addresses and the developers' local-server button are gone from the menus too; you never needed them, and now you'll never wonder what a facilitator is (#136).
  • Behind the scenes: a weapon given from the dev console is really held now. The host hands it over and tells everyone, as if it had been picked up, so it hits and blocks as it looks; before, it was a very convincing prop. Only the host can give, so nobody's copy of Blight can arm itself (#206).
  • Blight finally tells you how to play it. Before your first match, a Controls card shows every control your screen has, keys and mouse on a computer, taps and a pinch on a phone or tablet: moving, fighting, weapons and potions, chat, zoom and the menu. Any key, click or tap puts it away and the match begins, so the story's opening isn't spent hiding behind a card. It won't nag you again, but it lives in the in-game menu under Controls for when you forget which key was the offhand. (It's Ctrl. Shields hold themselves up.) The menu squeezes up a little on small phones to make room for it (#137).
  • A shield on the ground looks like a shield. It used to be a faint orange square that could have been anything, including nothing at all. Now it's a blue heater shield with a gold cross, as plain as a dropped sword, and it's the same shield in your hand and on the hotbar instead of a yellow box. Its rim turns gold while it's up and blocking (#199).
  • The quest's gold arrow gets out of the way. When the next place lay straight across to the right, the arrow sat right on top of your weapon slot, on phones and desktop alike. Now it slides along the edge of the screen past the hotbar, the cog, the chat buttons and the writing in the corners, still pointing the way you need to walk. The little orange pointers to enemies off screen do the same, and keep off the gold arrow and each other too, so a straggler off to the east no longer parks itself on your sword (#215).
  • No more teleporting cheats online. The host used to take every player's word for where they were standing, so a tampered-with copy of Blight could pop up beside any weapon, any enemy or the far side of any wall. Now the host only believes what you could really have walked since it last heard from you; claim otherwise and you're put back where you belong. Honest players on a wobbly connection won't notice a thing: even a few seconds' stall is forgiven, as long as you walked it rather than flew it (#198).
  • On a computer, the click that leaves the game-over screen or the story's end no longer carries on to the main menu and presses whatever button happened to be under the pointer. Dying and then finding yourself setting up a new story you never asked for was a bit much, even for Blight. A click now counts when you let go, and only on the screen it began on, so one held from the fight can't sneak through either; a click also skips the splash now, as a tap does on a phone (#216).
  • The band no longer brings the house down. Now and then the game could crash mid-match, most often on a tablet or phone the first time it ran after an update, because the music and the game tripped over each other queueing up the next few bars. The music now hands its bars to the game rather than pushing them in itself, so starting, stopping, muting and skipping songs is safe whenever and however often you do it; and if a song ever goes wrong, you lose the song, not the match. Songs also loop without a gap now, and the music rides out a moment's stall in the game instead of hiccupping along with it (#236).
  • A player with an accent in their name, thrown about by a grenade, no longer has that name sent as written to older copies of Blight that can't draw it. It's folded to plain letters for them, as every other message already did (#233).
  • A killing blow reports the hero's health as 0, not as less than nothing. Dead is dead; there's no need to rub it in (#234).
  • Each act's title card can be read over any scene. It used to be gold letters straight on whatever was behind them, which over the tavern's floorboards meant gold on brown; now it sits on its own dark, gold-framed panel, with the act's name bigger, and higher up so the opening scene stays in view (#256).
  • On a computer, the movement keys take the hero back the moment you press one, even halfway through a walk you clicked for. Changing your mind no longer means standing there mashing WASD while the hero finishes the errand; the walk, or the chase after the enemy you clicked, is simply dropped (#226).
  • The Music line (now in Settings) tells the truth: it says "Music: On" only while music is actually playing. Started without music, muted, or stopped from the console, it says "Off", and pressing it (or M) turns the music on, even in a game that started without any (#227).
  • The quest text in the top left (where you are, what you're there to do, HP and score) is always readable now. The name tags and health bars over people's heads used to print straight over it on phones; now they stay off the HUD's text and buttons on every screen, so Wilma Tipps can lurk in the corner without blotting out your objective. The HUD's text has a soft shadow so it reads over bright ground and speech too, and the crowd no longer shows through the cog menu's lines (#237).
  • Speech bubbles step out of the way of the quest text too, usually just below it, so neither what's said nor what you're meant to be doing gets covered up. The villagers still have plenty to say about their livestock.
  • Two people talking at once no longer print their speech bubbles over each other: the later one moves up or aside, still pointing at whoever said it. Everyone in the tavern can now panic legibly.
  • Start on the set-up screen says "Starting..." the moment you tap it. Building the story's world takes a few seconds on a phone, and with nothing to show for it the first tap looked like it had missed.
  • Name tags hang just above people's heads instead of on them. Skeletons, bandits, blighted villagers and everything else their size had been wearing their own names like hats.
  • Android: Blight is ready for Android 17 (it targets it, as Google Play will require). Tablets and foldables keep the game in landscape, turning the tablet mid-match no longer leaves it drawn in a box with a black strip down the side, and the first time you start or join a game, Android asks to let Blight reach the local network, so a friend on the same Wi-Fi can connect to you directly. Say no and online play still works; it just takes the long way round (#100).
  • Behind the scenes: every PR's Android check now boots Android 17, the version the game targets, with the emulator kept to the memory the build machine can spare (#100).
  • Everyone in the story looks like who they are. Until now every villager, king and talking mushroom was the hero in a different coloured jumper, and the name tag did all the work. Now the King wears a crown and an ermine robe, the Flower Girl is child-sized with a fistful of flowers, soldiers have helmets and spears, merchants lug their packs, the elders have beards you could lose a spoon in, shamans wear masks and feathers, and the friendly skeletons and mushroom folk are bones and caps rather than blokes in hoods. Mudbury's regulars each have their own face (and mostly a tankard). The leads stand out: Elder Grumbald's lantern (and nose), Vex's late cat Mr Whiskers haunting a shoulder, King Aldric's sword and cape, Red Martha's eyepatch and feathered hat. Gerald is still recognisably Gerald when you meet him again in the catacombs, moustache and all. Bandits wear masks and bandanas instead of the hero's hood, carry the sword, axe, bow or knives they fight with, swing them when they attack, and now stand as tall as the orcs instead of coming up to your knees (#158).
  • Play alone, even with no internet. Setting up the story or Horde now asks who's playing: Just Me (the default) or With Friends. Just Me keeps the game to yourself; it isn't listed for anyone to find, nobody can join, and it doesn't touch the internet at all, so it starts on a plane, in a tunnel or when the studio's server is having a lie-down, without a red complaint about servers along the bottom. Before, every game was put up in the public list, so strangers could wander into your story. With Friends works as it always did, and Play Again keeps whichever you picked. A friend who tries to join a game that's full or private is told so, instead of seeing a match that ended before it began; and a private game no longer shows a match code with nobody to give it to. A game you leave or close now comes off friends' lists that moment, rather than haunting them for a minute after you've gone; one whose host crashed or lost signal goes within half a minute. And nobody can put their game up under yours: a game that asks for a code already in use is told so and picks another (#166).
  • The host only believes attacks you could really make. A Holy Hand Grenade used to land wherever a player's copy of Blight said, so a tampered-with copy could lob one from the tavern into the next village; now it goes no further than a real throw from where the host has you. And a tampered-with copy could swing or shoot as fast as it liked; now each hand attacks no faster than its weapon allows. Honest players won't notice either: a throw lands exactly where it always did, and even flat out on a wobbly connection no blow is turned away. Count to three, not to three thousand (#231).
  • Nobody hits through a wall any more. Swords, axes, fists and the beer mug used to land on anyone in reach, wall or no wall, for players, bots and monsters alike, and arrows, spears, molotovs, boomerangs and fireballs flew straight through. Now a swing only lands when nothing solid stands between you, and anything thrown or fired stops at the wall: an arrow or spear sticks there, a molotov smashes on it without its flames getting through, a fireball bursts on it, and a boomerang turns for home. Grenades are still lobbed over. Fights in the open play just as before, and tap-to-fight walks you round the wall instead of swinging at the bricks (#232).
  • Only the story speaks as its characters. A player who turns up calling themselves Gregor or Elder Grumbald is renamed (Not The Gregor, say) the way would-be narrators already were, and a character's lines never pop up in a bubble over a player who happens to share the name (#207).
  • Behind the scenes: the README and the quest docs describe the game as it is. The README lists the controls (a test keeps them in step with the in-game card) and every command-line option, and links every doc; the quest docs no longer promise building templates, per-player experience or scripted roads that the engine doesn't have, and the Mudbury tagline doc is finally spelt like Mudbury (#151).
  • Behind the scenes: a typo in a dev console after() callback prints its error in the console instead of taking the whole game down, and the other scheduled callbacks still run, in the order they were set (#220).
  • Join a game and everyone's holding what they're really holding. A friend joining used to see the rest of the party empty-handed until someone happened to pick something up, anyone standing still parked in the middle of nowhere until they took a step, and the host saw the newcomer without their Beer Mug. Now you arrive to the party as it is: everyone where they stand, both hands, shields up or down, the hurt looking hurt and the dead looking suitably dead. And a shield raised on a joined game now actually blocks: the host never got the message before, so it was purely decorative, and the bandits knew (#221).
  • Behind the scenes: a copy of Blight joined straight to a host's address (as the studio's test scripts do) now hears from the host what it's playing and builds that world, instead of standing in a featureless field. Jumping the story to another scene from the dev console takes the whole party along, joined players and bots alike, rather than leaving everyone but the host behind in the last one. And bots added from the dev console stay exactly as they were left when the fight starts, rather than being stood up with the party's own (#221).
  • Behind the scenes: a weapon given to a bot from the dev console shows in its hand on every screen, offhand included, just as if it had picked it up; before, it fought with a shield nobody else could see (#222).
  • Behind the scenes: a bot moved from the dev console stays where it's put, for everyone, and carries on from there. The same fix stops bots springing back after a knockback or wandering back to where they died once they respawn (#235).
  • Strangers can be blocked and reported. The cog menu's new Players page lists everyone else in the match: Block hides their chat, speech bubbles and name for as long as Blight is running (and, if they're hosting, their games in the Join list); Report sends their name, what they said lately, your name and the match code to the studio, even with crash reports off, and nothing else about you. Contact us, also in the cog menu, has the studio's email and Discord. The swear filter got sharper too: it now covers player names and game names as well as chat, sees through "sh1t", "f u c k" and friends, and leaves Scunthorpe alone. A game with a rude name is listed under a made-up one instead, and the set-up screen asks for a name your nan could read out (#123).
  • The story's later places have something in them. The King's Road has a house and a barn, the Bridge at Gorton its watchtowers and walls, Thornwall its city walls and houses, the cathedral and the Crack a ring of standing stones round a sanded pit, and the catacombs a cave mouth. Each act's places are joined by a road now, so the way on is easier to find. Act 1 looks and plays exactly as before: same pub, same pumpkins, same walls to walk into. Behind the scenes, every place is built from what its quest script lists, so moving a place in its script moves everything that belongs to it, and a script asking for a building that doesn't exist is caught when it loads (#138).
  • Blight can be played with a game pad. Plug one in and the whole game is yours from the sofa: the left stick walks (gently, if you're sneaking), the right stick aims and swings, A or RT swings your main hand, X or LT the offhand, Y takes the weapon on offer, LB and RB zoom and Start opens the menu. Every menu, from the main menu to "The End", gets a green highlight to steer with the d-pad and press with A, and B backs out of things, though not out of a fight. The controls card, the prompts and the small print switch to the pad's buttons while it's in your hands, and back the moment you touch the mouse. Phones and tablets take a pad too, and there the d-pad's down brings up the keyboard to chat (#163).
  • The story's lines now turn up when they belong. Vex no longer warns you about the floor two waves before the Smile has bothered to arrive, and in the Crack the King and Vex take a wave each instead of shouting over one another. An act's closing narration plays where the act ends, rather than after the walk, crammed in front of the next act's opening while the catacombs wait. Victory speeches finish before the arrow points you down the road, and the Crack's ominous pulse comes after its introduction, just before it all kicks off (#141).
  • Settings, at last, from the main menu as well as mid-match: music on or off (and it stays off next time), music and sound volume, full screen on a desktop (F11 too, rather than the 70% window it always opened in), crash reports, and the controls. Everything is remembered between launches. And a game played alone now pauses while its menu is open, so a phone call no longer costs you the village (#164).
  • Pick the name everyone sees over your head, in Settings, and keep it from one session to the next instead of being a fresh "Player" and four random letters every match. It's tidied exactly as the host tidies every name, so what you see is what they see, and the narrator's name is still taken (#159).
  • Behind the scenes: a test now plays the whole story start to finish on a real host, once as a player with three companions and once as four friends, and fails if any fight can't be won or ends with the whole party lying dead at once. It reports every fight's time, deaths and kit, so a change that makes the quest impossible says where (#243).
  • The quest stays hard but winnable all the way to the end. The later fights used to turn into a loop of dying, getting up with bare fists and dying again; the King's Last Stand alone cost a player and companions about 24 deaths. Now each act lays out better weapons than the last, and Act 3 brings three new, thoroughly destructive ones: the Crossbow, whose bolt hits like a runaway cart; the Very Big Hammer, two hands and one swing for everything in front of you; and the Powder Keg, a barrel marked XXX that is not beer and goes off bigger than the Holy Hand Grenade. The scythe and the ball and chain sweep through everything in reach too. Armed enemies drop what they carried, so a hero who died can arm themselves again mid-fight; and every fifth enemy down leaves a potion. Each enemy hits as hard as it should rather than as hard as its weapon: chickens no longer punch like orcs, and demons and the bosses swing slow and heavy, so you can see them coming. Bosses can't be shoved about any more either: a party used to beat The Thing back across the Crack and clean off the edge of the world, where nobody could finish it. Explosions and thrown spears no longer catch the story's cast, so the King survives your help (#243).
  • Horde still gets you in the end. It shares the armoury, so its heroes hit harder too, and its demons swing slower and stand their ground. To keep the climb a climb, each wave's horde now has a twentieth more health than the one before (wave 11's half as much again as wave 1's), so a player and seven companions still fall around wave 12, where they always did, rather than strolling on. A test plays Horde to the bitter end to keep it so (#243).
  • Mudbury's livestock no longer turn up shut inside a shed. Now that nothing hits through walls, a chicken that spawned in the back corner of one couldn't find the door and your companions couldn't reach it, so the village's fight sat on "1 left" for good (#243).
  • Act 2 happens where the story says it does. The King's Road has a cart turned over across it, its cabbages everywhere, and a farm alongside; Roderick has set up shop by the wreck, shouting offers all through the fight and putting out fresh stock when the orcs turn up (pay him later, or, statistically, never), while the blighted merchants apologise over their own heads as they swing. Gorton is a stone bridge over a river you can't swim, a gatehouse at each end and ramparts down both banks. Thornwall's outer wall has a hole in it where the road meets it, and behind it half the city has fallen in and the rest has blight growing up it and a grin daubed on it. The cathedral is wrong in all the ways the narrator says: stairs go sideways, up into walls and upside down, doors open onto more wall, a pillar stands on its head and the Smile's grin is set in the floor. The Smile's glow creeps up the horizon as you get nearer, and Vex walks with you the whole way, insisting he isn't following you. Enemies no longer turn up in a river or inside a tower they can't get out of, and no blow, blast or jostle can knock anyone through a wall, so nobody ends up swimming at Gorton for good, and nobody in the story is ever left standing half inside one. The cathedral has one door that actually goes somewhere, behind the throne, which is how the king got out. And the collision overlay now draws over everything, so nothing hides what's solid (#133).
  • Horde is the siege of Old Gnarl. Old Gnarl is the ancient oak in Mudbury's square, older than the village and its only attraction, and the blight comes back for it every night. The narrator sets the scene, and the night runs from dusk to dawn in fifteen named waves of the story's own creatures: the farm's livestock first (the goats have organised, and the chickens have come along for the violence), then bandits out of the Whispering Wood, the blighted off the King's Road, the feral dead and the philosophical mushrooms, with a boss every fifth wave: something with horns, The Smile in person, and The Thing Behind the Blight just before sunrise. It gets properly dark, the square's lanterns and Old Gnarl's own glow light the fight, and the music follows the night. Hold till dawn and the night's worst come round again, bigger, until Old Gnarl falls (#165, #21).
  • A night of Horde is worth chasing. The party earns titles as it holds on (Goat Botherers, Wiped the Smile Off, Held Till Dawn and a few more), scores for every creature felled (the tougher, the more) and every wave held, and your best run is remembered and shown on the Horde screen. The end screen says which wave got Old Gnarl, the title you earned and whether you beat your best. With friends, the host's night is everyone's, and each of you keeps your own best (#165).
  • Old Gnarl looks the part. The lollipop in the middle of the square is now a towering, knotted old oak with great limbs and a broad canopy, and it looks steadily worse the more it's hurt: its leaves turn and drop, its bark greys, the blight's violet veins climb up from the roots, and it shudders when something gets to it. The HUD, the world and the store page all call it Old Gnarl, where they used to say Base, DEFEND and the village tree. Heroes now arrive in front of it rather than inside its trunk, and the canopy goes see-through while you're under it, so nobody fights blind (#20, #165).
  • Behind the scenes: the dev console's siege(wave, hp) brings any wave of Horde at once and sets Old Gnarl's health, for looking at a boss or a badly hurt tree without playing the whole night (#165).
  • The story's fights are about something now. Doris, Wilf and Bert are stuck out in Mudbury with the livestock and need getting to the pub; the Outskirts end at the forest edge, not at the last crow; the Whispering Wood's ambush is followed by finding the way out; Gorton's garrison holds the bridge alongside you, and can fall; Thornwall is fought at the breach before you go in; and the King is set upon behind his barricade while he has a sit down. The people you're helping can be hurt and let down, and a wiped-out party or a let-down King loses the fight: it costs you half its score, the story says what it would have meant, and the narrator, who isn't having it, makes you do it again. The death screen says so too, rather than counting down to a respawn that isn't coming (#155).
  • The words fit the picture. The elder no longer calls four strangers in the pub heroes before they've done anything, Red Martha stops apologising for a fight she's standing out of, the King asks you to hold them off rather than to help him fight, Vex saves his best line for when the Smile is dead, Act 3 no longer gives its ending away as it opens, and the skeleton Gerald admits the barman was named after him (#154).
  • You can find your way. The gold arrow now says where it's pointing and follows the road there: back down to Mudbury's crossroads and along the King's Road (which now actually starts somewhere), out of the cathedral's back door, down the stair and through the tunnels, instead of straight through hedges, walls and a great deal of rock. As soon as a place is won the HUD names the next one and why you'd go ("The soldiers at the bridge might help"), and the next scene waits until the whole party has turned up, so whoever sprints ahead (or a keen companion) stands about looking heroic until the rest arrive (#161).
  • On a narrow desktop window the controls reminder along the top no longer prints over the name of where you are; it moves along past it, or bows out if there's no room (#161).
  • Behind the scenes: the host no longer mistakes a way it has found for no way at all when that way smooths down to a straight line, which now and then turned away a good spot for an enemy and failed a test; and games running side by side in one process (the tests do) no longer share a dice that scrambles when two roll at once (#161).
  • Each act ends in a proper boss fight. A boss now arrives with a card bearing its name, fights with its health across the top of the screen, and marks the ground where it's about to hit, so you can get out of the way (your companions will); it drops a couple of potions each time it changes, and a lost fight brings it back from the start. The Hollow tries on three bodies at the Shaman's Grove: its own, Vex's (beat it out of him; he'll thank you eventually) and Mr. Whiskers', who is back from the dead and the size of a barn. The Smile breaks up into the cathedral floor and comes back smaller, faster and no longer smiling, and the music has the sense to leave. The Thing Behind the Blight is never quite seen, takes heroes one at a time to the other side of the Crack, and has to be sealed in by everyone at once, the King shouting at reality included. The demon goes back to being Horde's problem instead of everyone's filler, and Horde's bosses get the health bar too (#156).
  • Nobody gets ambushed by the spawn. Enemies no longer arrive on top of the people you're protecting, nor walk right into whoever they're after and stand where neither of you can land a blow, and the King stays behind his barricade instead of being jostled out of it by whatever's trying to eat him (#156).
  • Behind the scenes: this release is 2.0.0, not 1.7.0; four acts, bosses, a siege and an ending felt like more than a minor version.
  • Pixies mend you between fights. Winning a fight no longer tops everyone up for free: a pixie waits just off the road to every place, shouting until you notice it, and mends each of you once, companions included, with opinions about your bleeding. Below the castle they're cave pixies, who glow, brighten as you get close and only whisper, because down there things listen. Puddle, by the bridge, would like you to know that wasn't all dew (#17).
  • Behind the scenes: Blight builds on .NET 11 RC2 and Apple's Xcode 27, and the iPhone and iPad app now comes in through the door iOS 27 insists on (a UIScene), so on a new iPad it opens on the main menu instead of a fetching, featureless shade of swamp green (#182).
  • The store pages finally describe the game you'll get. Google Play, the App Store (iPhone, iPad and Mac) and itch.io now talk about four acts, the boss fights, fights you can lose, the gold arrow, the companions and the siege of Old Gnarl, with fresh screenshots from 2.0, instead of "twelve encounters across three acts". They also no longer claim the game ships without a single image file; it ships three, and they know they're outnumbered. The Play and App Store pages now come in 14 more languages, each saying up front that the game itself is in English, so nobody in Lyon downloads it expecting French. The App Store listing, screenshots and age rating now go out with each release instead of being typed into a website (#82, #83, #108, #109, #121).
  • Horde has a second siege: the Last Drop, the only well in the Parch. Pick it on the Horde screen and hold a desert well till sunrise against unionised camels, optimistic vultures (they've brought napkins), scorpions under everything, a sunburnt demon, the Smile in a very big hat and The Thing at the Bottom of the Well. It has its own waves, words, titles and music, a colder night and a shimmering day, and a well that loses its bucket, then its roof, then its nerve. Each map keeps its own best (Old Gnarl's is the one you had), and friends who join get the host's map (#22).
  • Walls finally look like walls up close: their planks, bricks and stones repeat along them instead of one plank being stretched the length of a house, in Mudbury, the desert and the story's villages alike (#22).
  • Behind the scenes: tests, smoke runs and scripted games can keep their settings somewhere else (--settings <path> or BLIGHT_SETTINGS), so a test game never changes a player's own name, choices or Horde bests; and the debug build's MCP click works with the game window in the background again (#22).
  • Nobody's left out with the livestock while you finish your ale. Doris, Wilf and Bert now shout where they are (and what the animals are up to; the cow has a hat), the gold arrow points you at the nearest of them if you dawdle, and if you dawdle longer your companions go and fetch them, instead of loitering in the pub with you while Mudbury waits forever. Each one you get home earns a heroic fanfare, which a trombone then blows a raspberry at (#155).
  • Doris, Wilf and Bert stay where they say they are. While they waited, the livestock used to knock them about and passers-by jostled them, until one could be shouting "by the animal pen!" from halfway to the woods, where nobody thought to look and the companions sometimes never got to them. They flinch now, but hold their ground till someone reaches them (#155).
  • Behind the scenes: Resinhead's shared packages and tools (Shared, Mcp, Analysers, the App Store and Android smoke tools) move to 2.5.0, the latest, and LiteNetLib to 2.1.5.
  • The music plays what was written. The boss's lead now really does scream up a tritone, the bazaar's sitar and the Serpent's Dance oboe slide as far as their composer meant, and the deliberately crooked notes are crooked every time instead of when the mood took them. While we were in there: pedals now lift, swells swell, and the quiet bits are allowed to be quiet, since every song's volume, expression, sustain and vibrato markings are played rather than politely ignored. Even the trombone's raspberry sags lower, which it insists was the plan all along.
  • Fifteen songs found their drummer. The boss fight, Funk Circuit, Tavern Brawl, Volcanic Forge, Sailor Shanty and ten more had drum parts that never made a sound; they all play now, every hit of a beat landing together rather than queueing politely one after another. Drum Circle finally has a drum circle, and Campfire Ballad, which plays as the story ends, has its guitars, flute and percussion instead of three minutes of respectful silence. And the drummers now stay for the whole song: a beat that used to give up a few bars in (Neon Crawl's lasted eight seconds) goes round again to the end, and the few that ran on after everyone else stop with the band.
  • Speech bubbles point at whoever is talking. A bubble nudged out of the way of the HUD or another bubble used to keep its tail pointing straight down at whoever happened to be underneath, so Cheryl's gossip came out of Dunstan and Wilma's retorts out of Tobias. Now the tail leaves whichever side faces the speaker and aims right at them, on a phone, a tablet or a desktop. A speaker off the edge of the screen keeps their bubble on it, pointing their way, and when the tail can't reach (off screen, behind the HUD, round another bubble) the bubble says who's talking at the top, so nobody gets blamed for anybody else's ale (#280).
  • Behind the scenes: the dev console's say(who, text) puts a line over anyone by name, so a script can check where bubbles go (#280).
  • A green arrow points to friends you've lost. Anyone in your party out of sight, players and companions alike, gets a green dart at the edge of the screen pointing their way, with their name behind it (or their initial, when the edge is crowded). It's a notched dart, not the gold way-on arrow or the fight's orange pointers, and it keeps out of the way of the HUD, the bubbles, the act card and the other arrows, in the story and in Horde alike. Dunstan can no longer wander off to look at a hedge without anyone noticing (#281).
  • Medals go on chests, not up noses. At the castle steps every medal now hangs from the collar onto the chest, heroes, companions and the goats' delegate alike, and stays put as they breathe, hop for joy, walk off or sit down to a drink. The camera stands back far enough to take in the King, his guard, every hero and the whole town that turned out, on a monitor, a tablet or a phone, easing in for each medal and back out again; and nobody's name hides under the King's speech bubble any more, or runs into the name beside it. While a scene plays, names only hang over whoever is talking and whoever has just been decorated, so the party no longer stacks theirs into a tower of labels like a very polite totem pole (#282).