v0.8.0 — Corrupted Items, Auto-Explore & Progression Rebalance
What’s New
Auto-Explore (Y key)
Hold Y to automatically navigate the Backrooms. Your character will path toward unexplored areas, stopping when enemies appear, you take damage, your HP or sanity drops low, or you spot items and stairs. Press any key to cancel. Vending machines and items you’ve already passed on won’t interrupt you again.
Corrupted Items
As corruption rises in the deeper levels, you’ll start finding glitched-out items with visible distortion effects. These corrupted items carry debuffs — stat drains, HP/sanity decay per turn, damage penalties, or increased mana costs. The tradeoff: they still give their normal bonuses too. You can toggle them off if the cost gets too high. Combining two corrupted items merges their debuffs, so stacking gets risky. Debuffs scale with both item level and world corruption, meaning that innocent-looking item you picked up early gets nastier as you go deeper.
Smoother Movement
Movement between tiles now uses smooth tweening instead of instant teleportation. The game still plays turn-by-turn — it just looks better.
Progression Rebalance
- More generous level-up curve and XP rewards — you’ll feel progression sooner
- Corruption now scales item spawn levels (higher corruption = higher level items appearing)
- Sanity drain rate decreases with corruption, giving a small mercy as things get harder
Quality of Life
- Stats panel updates in real-time when your stats change (no more stale numbers)
- Vending machines reset properly on game restart
- New tutorial items: Meat, Vegetables, and Mustard replace the old debug item
- Settings panel no longer causes a pause bug when closed
Performance
- Auto-explore stays smooth even after discovering vending machines (BFS caching fix)
Play in browser or download for Windows/Linux at aebrer.itch.io/deep-yellow