v0.16.0 MAJOR UPDATE — Ashes Remade: Save Your Run, 56 New Cards, etc.

ASHES REMADE — MAJOR UPDATE 0.16.0

The kingdom has been rebuilt from the sprite up. This is everything since the Day & Night DLC in one patch: a run you can walk away from, 56 new cards, twenty heroes whose traits finally do what the card text promised, and a top-to-bottom art and effects rework.

💾 Save Your Run — Quit Anywhere, Come Back

Runs no longer die when you close the game.

• One auto slot, written continuously as you play, and one manual slot you can save from the map screen. A crash, a reboot, or a Steam restart no longer costs you a run.

• Continue rows on the title screen — hover one for hero, mastery and ascension tier, floor and map row, current node, HP, gold, deck and relic counts, and how long ago it was written.

• Saves ride Steam Cloud for free, so a run started on one machine finishes on another.

• A save whose DLC you no longer have enabled says exactly which one is missing instead of failing quietly.

Also for your hands: press 1 – 9 to play the matching card in hand, with a number badge on every card. How to Play now opens itself once on your first visit. The hero panel shows a one-line playstyle archetype and a Signature Cards row before you commit.

🃏 56 New Cards

36 new base-game cards across all eight elements — every one with its own art, an upgrade path and full localization.

• Fire — Cinder Volley · Backfire · Wildfire · Immolation Pact · Firestorm · Overkill

• Ice — Frost Nip · Rimeguard · Deep Freeze · Glacial Wall · Winter's Grasp

• Lightning — Arc Cascade · Conduit · Tempest Crown · Echo Strike

• Nature — Regrowth · Toxic Bloom · Bramble Armor · Heart of the Wild

• Blood — Nick · Crimson Draw · Bloodrush · Sanguine Ward · Crimson Apotheosis

• Holy — Reckoning · Martyr

• Shadow — Fade · Cheap Shot · Bloodhunt · Death's Shadow · Mirror Step

• Neutral — Steady Hand · Whetstone · Second Wind · Gambit · Time Slip

Five of those carry a mechanic nothing else in the game does:

• Overkill — banks the lethal overflow of its killing blow and carries it onto the next enemy. Built for army and multi-wave nodes. New ExcessDamage keyword.

• Echo Strike — replays the last card you played this turn, for free.

• Martyr — the next enemy attack heals you instead of hitting you.

• Mirror Step — the next enemy attack is reflected straight back; you take none.

• Time Slip — +1 energy next turn only.

Plus 20 Day & Night cards — 6 shared, 7 locked to Dawnbringer Sol, 7 to Duskblade Vesper. Every hero's Day & Night pool goes 30 → 43. Vesper had no Light source of her own and Sol had exactly one Dark source, which meant the Eclipse bridge both heroes were designed around barely existed; each now has four. Three new keywords replace prose with icons: each turn start, next turn, Echo. Steam post image

⚔️ Every Hero Trait Now Fires

This is the big one. Most heroes' Pro/Con mechanics were printed on the hero card but weren't actually running — you were picking between twenty stat sticks. All 20 heroes have their trait back:

• Knight and Inquisitor's shield bonus · Pyromancer's Backdraft · Cryomancer's ice shielding and halved healing · Stormcaller's Storm Chase · Nightblade's lifesteal and Voidsick · Bloodseer's low-HP Blood surge · Paladin's heal-smite and the extra damage he takes · Druid's carried Thorns · Runecaster's poly-mana · Stormpriest's Unjudged Wrath · Bloodsworn's blood pact · Voidpriest's weave.

• Sol and Vesper had no live trait at all — not even the clamps that define them. Sol's Light→Protection conversion and reflect wall, Vesper's discounted opener and Cull scaling, both restored.

• Mastery Lv12 / Lv14 perks apply again on every hero.

Five heroes traded a flat off-element tax for a real drawback:

• Mireh — Withering Hunger. A rolling two-turn window; go dry and she burns, escalating 2 / 4 / 6. Ships with her printed 30% Fire/Shadow lifesteal restored.

• Sylven — Frozen Ground. Hand limit 7 → 6, paid for by the full Dormancy kit: cards held at end of turn gain stacks that Ice, Nature and Neutral cards each spend differently.

• Maris — Sunless Depths. Aqua reservoir cap 13 → 18. Bigger Floods, fewer of them.

• Tephra — Brittle Ground. Lose 1 HP per 4 Lava still held at end of turn. Hoarding for one giant Erupt now costs something.

• Yara — Divided Current. Reservoirs more than 2 apart both drain. Costs no HP; costs the convergence she's built around.

Card offers follow your hero again. Draft and reward picks now weight by your hero's own element affinity. Measured over 20,000 simulated drafts: single-element heroes went from ~3 on-element cards out of 10 picks to ~6; dual-element from ~5 to ~9. The chance of drafting zero on-element cards is now zero. Rune Chain exists. Runecaster's signature mechanic — element diversity tiers instead of same-type Resonance — was fully built and unreachable. Her starting core is rebuilt around three elements out of the gate, and she moves to 75 HP / 4 mana, because four distinct types in one turn simply cannot happen on three.

⟡ Essence Just For Playing

30 Essence every 20 minutes the game is open — any screen, title and menus included, even minimized. A running total and countdown sit top-left on every screen; hover for the exact time to the next grant and today's counted minutes. Capped at 6 credited hours a day. Essence unlocks legendary cards in the Card Sanctum, so the meta-progression grind no longer demands you keep clearing runs.

🩸 Breaking a Curse Now Pays

Cleansing a curse grants a boon that mirrors what that curse stole from you. Greed took gold, so breaking Greed pays gold back. Hex ate 6 HP, so breaking Hex adds max HP. All 19 curses have one, and the boon is shown before you pay — on the shop tile, in its tooltip, and in the Codex. Cleanse price is now tiered: 40 gold common, 60 rare.

🔥 Ten Elements, Ten Different Impacts

Every element's impact effect was one of four shared placeholder styles. All ten are now hand-authored, 36 frames at 256px, each with its own motion language:

• Fire rises and vanishes — layered flame lobes, flicker tongues, ember spray. Its projectile is a comet now.

• Lava is heavy — a sagging molten mound, globs on ballistic arcs that cool white → orange → dark crust in flight.

• Blood is a ragged splat with ligaments that thin and snap, and drips that run down off it.

• Ice stabs 12 faceted spikes outward, holds, then breaks into tumbling fragments.

• Shadow genuinely occludes the enemy instead of glowing over it — that's what darkness needed all along.

• Holy is ordered and vertical — a shaft falling from above, halo rings spreading across the impact plane, motes drifting up.

• Nature grows instead of exploding — seven thorned vines uncoil and wrap the target, a bloom opens and withers.

• Aqua is a splash crown off a water rim, with a rebound column that pinches off a bead.

• Lightning strobes rather than fades — forked arcs creeping and branching frame to frame.

• Neutral sells force: impact star, nine racing cracks, ballistic debris, dust that hangs after everything else has gone.

Cast and impact were also running on two different clocks — neutral's hit, burst and damage number all fired a full second before the projectile landed. They're the same number by construction now. The shield barrier was rebuilt as a curved hex lattice with a sweeping energy band, and the enemy claw strike was pulled back so it stops covering your screen in blood. Steam post image

🎨 Redrawn

• 225 card faces regenerated at a uniform 512×512 — the whole base-game pool plus the Scorching, Overflow and Day & Night sets.

• All 58 enemy sprites redrawn. The tone moved from horror to villainy — evil, not scary. Gore is gone; the menace isn't. Skeletons keep their skulls and beasts keep their teeth.

• All 20 hero portraits regenerated.

• Five screen backdrops rebuilt at 2560×1440, each on one concrete idea instead of generic ruin: a roofless throne with ash falling upward out of the split seat · hollow armour at attention with one votive candle per plinth · a crucible of melted-down weapons with hilts still standing in the slag · a reliquary prison with one alcove blown open from the inside · faceless ancestor stones ringing a used killing ground.

• Ascension finally has its own backdrop — a basalt stair climbing into a bleeding vortex, braziers dead at the base and roaring at the summit.

• The battle line-up faces itself. Heroes and enemies were all drawn front-facing at the camera. They look at each other now.

• 15 drawn-but-unused icons put on screen — a glyph on every shrine result, the reroll and dice icons on their buttons, XP and ash on the reward rows, and more.

🖥️ Interface

• Title screen art pass — ember and ash fields drift behind the menu, a hearth glow breathes along the bottom edge, and the wordmark reads as lit metal instead of muddy brown. Menus, DLC toggles and save slots all share one dark-iron-and-gold material.

• Ascension relaid out as two columns with the hero portrait centred, and your hero's Pro/Con trait icons now flank their name — the last screen before a run started was showing you nothing about the trait you were about to play.

• Victory and Defeat screens redesigned — a two-column panel with hero art and flavour on the left, run summary, rewards and leaderboard on the right. Rewards read as a payout row instead of dashed lines.

• Abandon Run redesigned, and the cost now scales with how far you got — see Balance below.

• AddedHow to Play rewritten. It was teaching a build that doesn't existit told you to "Gather Mana", a mechanic not in the game, and never documented Mark , which is on the button bar. It now distinguishes Shield from Protection, covers Super Resonance, and gained a whole new Cards & Deck tab for the opening 10-pick draft, Merge, Scriptorium, curse cleansing, Exhaust, relic slots and potions — none of which were documented anywhere.

• Progression screen fixes — three map-node kinds never had a tile, and every denominator counted DLC content you'd switched off (relics read x/43 when only 27 were reachable). Both fixed.

• Relic tooltips are readable. They were rendering at the wrong scale in dark grey-brown on a near-black panel. Relic slots are now tinted by tier and the hover card shows the relic's art, so it reads as an item card.

⚖️ Balance

• Super Resonance (×4) trimmed ~10% across all eight base elements. The engine payouts had drifted above what the resonance panel and card preview showed you; both now tell the truth.

• Abandoning a run is cheaper the further you got — full mastery cost on the first row, up to 60% off at the boss row, shown as a "Depth relief" chip on the dialog.

• Playtime Essence trimmed so idle income doesn't outrun the per-kill drops it was meant to supplement.

• Steamweaver gains ×1.2 on both Aqua and Lava — it was the only hero carrying a penalty element with no affinity element to pay for it.

• Overflow heroes now treat Neutral like every other hero does.

• Several heroes get materially harder in this patch — Nightblade's Voidsick, Paladin's extra damage taken, Cryomancer's halved healing and Druid's turn-1 draw penalty were all printed and inert. This is intended. The card text has been promising it all along.

🐛 Notable Fixes

• Screen backdrops zoomed and cropped themselves on large displays — only 44% of the image was visible at 4K. Framing is now identical at every window size.

• "Save the Kingdom" was pinned to the bottom-right corner of the Ascension screen, 780px from where it belonged.

• The first hero pick of a session cross-faded into an empty screen and sat there for a second before the screen appeared.

• Sprite-sheet impacts could render nothing at all.

• French and Russian showed two Progression tabs with the identical label.

• Japanese and Chinese keyword phrasing had no separator before the following number, which silently broke the keyword icons.

• Aqua and Lava resonances were tracked but never displayed on the mastery chart.

📌 Note on in-progress runs

Save slots are versioned and are not migrated across a patch this size — a run in progress from before 0.16.0 won't load. Nothing in your meta-progression is affected: ash, mastery, ascension, forge and Card Sanctum unlocks all carry over untouched.

Localized in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French, German and Russian. Thank you for playing Kingdom of Ashes.