FLOAT KNIGHTS

🌐 Live: https://perchance.org/float-knights

A bracketed tournament sim where cute animal mascots in medieval armor fight each other with futuristic weapons. Each knight has three balloons strapped to their back (Mario Kart 64 style). Pop all three and they're knocked out. Knock them out three times and they're dead — permanently — and their gear drops on the field for survivors to scavenge.

What's in v7 (the "play-itself" rewrite)

Auto-play + Toast notifications

The game now plays itself. Between every round, match, and season there's a 60-second cooldown during which you can place bets, shop, switch tabs, or just watch the carnage settle. When the timer hits zero (or you click the "skip ▸" link in the arena header), the next event begins automatically.

Bet outcomes and major events fire as toast notifications in the bottom-right corner:

• 🟢 Green — bets won, payouts received
• 🔴 Red — bets lost
• 🟡 Yellow — warnings (autoplay paused, refunds, etc.)
• 🔵 Blue — info (round/match/season summaries, casualty announcements)

There's an AUTOPLAY toggle in the arena controls to pause auto-advancement indefinitely if you want to manually advance each round.

16:9 arena

The arena is now a proper 960×540 widescreen rectangle instead of a 600×600 square. Spawn radius widened, scenery repositioned, more breathing room for ranged combat.

Projectile physics

Ranged weapons (Laser Pistol, Railgun Rifle) now fire dodgeable, fire-and- forget projectiles instead of resolving instantly. Targets can sidestep shots, and accuracy degrades with both distance to target and target velocity. Melee weapons (Riot Shield, Stun Baton, Plasma Mace) still resolve on contact.

Weapon	Range	Projectile speed	Baseline accuracy
Riot Shield	22	(melee)	(melee)
Stun Baton	22	(melee)	(melee)
Plasma Mace	26	(melee)	(melee)
Laser Pistol	230	14 px/frame	±0.05 rad
Railgun Rifle	460	22 px/frame	±0.025 rad

Terrain obstacles

Each match generates 3-7 stone blocks (36×36px each) clustered near the center vertical line, randomly nudged left or right so no two matches feel the same. Players path around them. Projectiles shatter on impact.

Smarter AI

A real state machine instead of "walk at enemy, attack":

• ENGAGE — pursue target, attack when in range. Ranged knights kite to maintain a comfortable ~220px firing distance; melee knights close hard.
• SEEK_ITEM — when no immediate threat is nearby, walk toward a desirable gear upgrade visible within 200px.
• FLEE — at HP < 25%, run away from the nearest threat. Ranged knights fire desperate parting shots while retreating.
• FINISH_OFF — if someone has shot us recently, prioritize engaging them over chasing fleeing low-HP targets (a "mercy" mechanic — let the weakling go, kill the one trying to kill you).

Each AI's state shows as a tiny emoji badge above their head: 🏃 fleeing, 🎒 seeking item, 🎯 finishing off an attacker.

Player spacing fix

Knights now have a soft separation force that pushes them apart at <22px distance. No more clipping into each other — they form proper formations and flow around obstacles.

New mascot avatars

Each knight is now rendered as a 🤖 Robot emoji with their team's mascot emoji (🦊 🦫 🦉 🦈) stacked on top like a costume mascot helmet, with a team-colored halo behind them. The balloons-as-HP trail above the helmet, and the weapon icon shows next to the body.

Pre-match items spawn

6 random items spawn on the field at the start of round 1 (and 2 more on later rounds if the field is sparse). This gives the AI reasons to scout the map instead of just rushing each other immediately.

Position-aware gear scoring

Snipers prefer Railguns. Tanks prefer Shields. Speedsters prefer Lasers. Etc. Scavenging is no longer "always swap to the strongest" — knights weight gear by archetype fit, so loadouts stay diverse.

Legendary item foundation

Every gear piece now tracks a scavengedCount. Once a piece has been scavenged 3+ times it's marked ⭐LEGENDARY⭐ in the commentary feed and renders with a magenta glow on the field. Full lineage tracking (history of who carried it, where it was lost) is on the roadmap.

Tabbed UI (Game · Bet · Store · About)

Top-level tab nav swaps the entire main content area:

• 📺 Game — 3-column broadcast: rosters, arena, bracket, commentary
• 🎲 Bet — three markets (Match Winner / Next Round Winner / Last Standing)
  • active bet history table
• 🏪 Store — item grid + Sandbag "COMING SOON" placeholder
• ℹ️ About — credits, roadmap, inspirations

The right rail shows a read-only "Your Bets" summary with a "Place a bet →" link to the Bet tab. Site footer with WestNinja's links is visible on every tab.

Tournament structure

• 4 teams × 5 knights (Tank / Striker / Speedster / Brawler / Sniper)
• Single-elim bracket per season: 4 → 2 semifinals → 1 final
• Best-of-5 rounds per match (first to 3 round wins)
• 3 lives per knight per match — KO costs one life, respawns next round; 3 KOs = permanent death + gear drops
• Random reseeding every season
• Cloud sync via uploadPlugin — pick a username, click Save

Roadmap

• Voluntary AI gear-drops — high-scavenged items get deliberately dropped by their owner before risky engagements to maximize the chance they're picked up by an ally and live another round
• Lost-item history — track items that didn't get picked up by end of match (lost to the void)
• Sandbag store item — high-cost, attach to a specific knight to slow them down. Subtle match-weighting for high cost
• Public chatrooms (global / per-team) — alongside the bet tab
• Knight memorial pages — full career obituary including which items they carried into the grave

Setup on Perchance

1. Visit https://perchance.org/float-knights in edit mode (or create a new generator at https://perchance.org/welcome).
2. Paste perchance-top.txt into the TOP editor.
3. Paste index.html into the HTML panel.
4. Save and view.

Tunables

const MATCH = {
  bestOf: 5, roundsToWin: 3, startingLives: 3,
};
const COMBAT = {
  arenaW: 960, arenaH: 540,
  hitRange: 18,           // melee strike distance
  roundMaxFrames: 800,    // safety cap per round
  // ...
};
const AUTOPLAY = {
  enabled: true,
  cooldownRoundMs:  60000,  // 1 min between rounds
  cooldownMatchMs:  60000,
  cooldownSeasonMs: 60000,
};
// In _part2_sim_a.html, weapon range/projSpeed/inacc tune ranged combat;
// stat modifiers (defMod, dmgMod, cdMod, critMod) are for both melee & ranged.

Smoke-test verified

A 200-frame simulation:

• 3 terrain blocks generated (e.g. at x=504, x=395, x=542 — clustered near center, randomly nudged ±90px)
• Zero player-inside-terrain incidents across 200 frames (collision works)
• Min player separation: 12.7px (separation force keeps them from stacking on top of each other)

A representative 8-season run:

• Champions varied across runs (3-4 different teams winning per 8-season block)
• Avg casualties: ~13 per season (down from v6's ~17 — terrain + dodging + flee state lets weaker knights survive)
• A representative match: best-of-5 went to 3-2 in 1521 ticks across all 5 rounds (vs the v6 era's frequent 3-0 sweeps)
• Snipers thrive in projectile combat: top career stat in one run was a Sniper at 50 kills (15+ matches lifetime)

Credits

Built by therealwestninja · DeviantArt.

Random first-name generator by @WestNinja (Feb 2020), adapted from a Shakespearean insult generator by Darren G. Holloway, Jerry Maguire, and J. Kessels.

Inspirations: Blaseball (permanent mortality + emergent narrative), Mario Kart 64 Battle Mode (balloon HP), Worms (gear pickup chaos), Salem / UO (item naming after dead players).

v8 patch — terrain integrity, health pickups, smarter pathing

• Projectiles now properly stop on terrain — swept collision (Liang-Barsky segment vs AABB) over each projectile's per-tick path. Verified 0 projectile-frames spent inside terrain across 1,134 sampled shots.
• Line-of-sight check on attacks — ranged AI no longer fires at targets behind terrain. They close the distance instead.
• Corner-stuck fix — when wall-slide returns zero motion, AI strafes perpendicular for ~18 frames to round the corner.
• Health Pack pickups — new ❤ red-cross drop type. 3 spawned at every match start (plus 2 guaranteed Armor pieces and 3 random gear). Health Packs are consumed on contact (+30 HP, capped at max).
• FLEE seeks health — at HP <25%, AI now runs toward the nearest Health Pack within 320px instead of just running away. Falls back to fleeing- away if no Pack is in range.
• Item-on-the-path heuristic — when calculating which drop is worth a detour, AI now weighs alignment with the path to its current target. Drops directly between the AI and its target get a +6 utility bonus over drops behind it.

v8.1 patch — proper Perchance generator structure

Setting up the generator

1. Go to https://perchance.org/welcome and create a new generator (or open the existing one at https://perchance.org/float-knights in edit mode).
2. TOP editor — paste the contents of perchance-top.txt. This declares:
   • uploadPlugin = {import:upload-plugin} — needed for cloud sync save/load
   • superFetch = {import:super-fetch} — needed for CORS-bypassing the uploads.perchance.org domain when loading saves
   • output {html} — substitutes the entire HTML panel as the page output
3. HTML panel — paste the full contents of index.html. This is the game itself — markup, CSS, and JS in one bundle.
4. Click Save, then "view generator". The game should boot and start a match within a few seconds.

About the square-bracket gotcha

Perchance's template engine treats [js] and {listName} as substitution sites — anything between brackets gets evaluated and replaced. Inside the HTML panel the substitution generally only runs once (during the {html} output substitution), and content inside <script>...</script> blocks is left alone in practice.

However, any literal [Word] you write in plain HTML body text (outside <script> tags) WILL get interpreted as a JS expression by Perchance and replaced with whatever evaluating that identifier returns (usually undefined, which silently deletes your text).

Three places in v8 had this bug — the About-tab description of the scavenged-gear naming convention used literal [Owner]'s [Gear], plus two matching code comments. All three have been fixed:

• HTML body text now uses HTML entities: [Owner]'s [Gear] which renders as [Owner]'s [Gear] in the browser without Perchance touching it.
• Code comments were reworded to use angle-brackets <owner>'s <gear> which Perchance ignores (HTML-style, but inside JS comments so the browser also ignores them).

If you add new HTML content with literal square brackets in body text, remember to use [ and ] for [ and ]. Same trick for literal curly braces: { for { and } for }.

v9 patch — automation, draws, 12 teams, Settings tab

Bug fixes

• Persistence — game state now auto-saves to localStorage on every state change (round/match/season end, bet placed, item bought, settings applied). Restored automatically on page reload. Cloud sync via uploadPlugin still works for cross-device.
• Roster repopulation — reapDeceased() now also runs at the start of every match (not just between matches), so a team can never enter a match with fewer than 5 living knights. Fixes the "season ends early with empty teams" bug.
• Skip buttons removed — game is fully autoplay; the "Skip Round" button and the countdown-pill skip-link are gone. Use AUTOPLAY toggle to pause indefinitely, or 4× speed to fast-forward.
• Centered countdown overlay — instead of a tiny pill in the arena header, the round/match/season cooldown is now a giant 96px timer centered over the arena, with the canvas blurred and dimmed behind it. Pulses red at <5 seconds.

Features

• Draw mechanic — both round-level (timeout with both teams alive + equal kill counts → draw, no point awarded) and match-level (best-of-N rounds played, score still tied → match draw, coin flip determines bracket advancement, all match bets refunded). Records track wins/losses/draws.
• Settings tab — 6 user-configurable tunables:
  • Time between rounds (10–300s, default 60s)
  • Time between matches (10–600s, default 60s)
  • Time between seasons (10–600s, default 60s)
  • Rounds per match (1–9, odd only, default 5)
  • Lives per knight (1–9, default 3)
  • Bracket format: 4 / 8 / 12 teams
• 12-team league — full TEAMS array now contains 12 mascot teams (Foxes, Beavers, Owls, Sharks, Pandas, Raccoons, Frogs, Hedgehogs, Kits, Wolves, Badgers, Otters). The 12-team bracket format gives top 4 ranked teams byes; bottom 8 play 4 qualifier matches; 4 winners join the top 4 in an 8-team ladder (qf → sf → final). 11 matches per season.
• Generalized bracket logic — buildBracket()/advanceBracket() now take a LEAGUE_CONFIG.bracketSize config (4/8/12) and walk through bracket slots via an _order array. Bracket strip in the UI rebuilds dynamically based on bracket size.

Verified

• Smoke test passes 8 seasons across the 12-team roster, all teams end with full 5-player rosters
• 5 different teams won across an 8-season sample (vs the 4-team era's typical 2-3)
• Bracket format switching works for all three sizes (3, 7, 11 slots)
• Serialize/deserialize roundtrip preserves new fields (LEAGUE_CONFIG, AUTOPLAY cooldowns, MATCH bestOf/lives)
• Draws are recordable in the rounds[] log via isDraw: true flag

See also

• ROADMAP.md — full retrospective of unsurfaced ideas plus the architectural plan for persistent shared live matches (deterministic seeded sim + wall-clock-locked schedule + uploadPlugin checkpoints)

v10 patch — deterministic simulation foundation

This is Phase 1 of the persistent shared live match roadmap entry. The sim is now fully deterministic: same seed → byte-identical match outcomes.

What changed

• All randomness in the simulation flows through a seeded mulberry32 PRNG (SIM_RNG). Real Math.random() is preserved only for the one-time generation of a fresh league's genesis seed.
• Every match gets a deterministic seed derived from hash(genesisSeed, season, slot). The same league running the same bracket position always produces the same match.
• initLeague({genesisSeed}) accepts a seed for reproducibility. Saved leagues persist their genesisSeed, so reloading replays identically.
• New match log in History modal: each completed match is recorded with its (season, slot, seed, teams, score, winner, casualties) tuple. The League's genesis seed shows at the bottom.

Verified

A determinism test ran the same genesisSeed: 0x12345678 twice and compared outcomes:

• Run 1: otr (Otters) vs pnd (Pandas) → pnd wins 1-3 in 940 ticks, 6 casualties (Ghrvrio Quillbeard II, Clusva Marshmallow III, etc.)
• Run 2: identical — same teams, same score, same casualties in the same order.
• A different seed (0x99999999) produced a different matchup (fox vs otr → otr wins 1-3, different casualty list).

What this unlocks

The sim is now the foundation for the shared live match goal. Phases 2 and 3 are still ahead:

• Phase 2: Wall-clock-locked schedule (any client opening the page knows what match should be live right now from Date.now() - GENESIS).
• Phase 3: uploadPlugin checkpoint pull/push (new visitors don't have to replay from genesis; they fetch the latest checkpoint and replay forward to the current frame).

See ROADMAP.md Tier 1 for the architecture writeup.

v11 patch — emergent storytelling

Builds on v10's deterministic foundation with four features that make the league's history legible: knights become characters, items become legendary, the Bet tab gets strategically deeper.

Knight memorial pages

The Knight Profile modal is now a full memorial: K/D ratio, longest kill-streak, current streak (with a "🔥 ON A 5-KILL STREAK" callout if ≥3), recent victims (with the season + round they fell in). Deceased knights show "⚰ Knight Memorial" as the title. The Graveyard list is now clickable — tap any name to read their memorial.

Kill streaks

Each knight tracks currentStreak and longestStreak. Streaks reset on KO (whether they keep their life or not — getting knocked down ends your streak). Milestone streaks (5, 10, 15, 25) fire toasts and feed entries: "🔥 X is on a 5-kill streak!" When someone ENDS a long streak (5+ kills), that fires a separate "💔 X ENDS Y's 8-kill streak" callout. Verified: a sample match produced 6 individual streaks reaching as high as 6 kills, with 23 total deaths recorded.

Lost-item history

At match end, any gear that's been scavenged 2+ times AND wasn't picked up by anyone is now permanently LOST (logged in LEAGUE.lostItems). A new "📉 LOST LEGENDARY ITEMS" section appears in the Graveyard modal, showing the season, item name, scavenge count, and last carrier. Each lost item also fires a yellow toast at the moment of loss. Sample run: 14 legendary items lost in a single match — they had stories.

Live odds re-computation

The Bet tab's odds now use live match state (current lives, current HP, gear-modified stats) for participating teams while a match is in progress. Outside a match (or for non-participating teams), it falls back to roster baseline. Verified: a match that started at 1.89 / 1.91 (near-balanced) shifted to 1.83 / 1.98 after round 1 as one team took casualties. Round bets are now strategically meaningful — buying into a team that's down 0-2 with 2 dead knights gets significantly longer odds than at match start.

Aggregate state changes

• career.deaths, career.longestStreak, career.currentStreak added per-knight (auto-backfilled to 0 on save load)
• LEAGUE.lostItems[] array — persisted across saves
• Match-end gear scan checks scavengedCount >= 2 for "lost legendary"
• teamStrength() is now match-aware via LEAGUE.match.phase !== "post"

v12 patch — wall-clock catch-up (Phase 2 partial)

The league now runs in real time even when the tab is closed. Come back after 20 minutes, the sim has played through whatever matches would have happened. Combined with v10's deterministic seeding, this means the matches played in your absence happen exactly as they would have if you'd watched them live.

How it works

• LEAGUE.startedAt set once on initLeague() (immutable for the league's lifetime)
• LEAGUE.lastTickAt updated every animation frame to Date.now()
• Both fields persist in the localStorage save
• On boot, if Date.now() - lastTickAt > 5s, call fastForwardSim(elapsed) which loops through ticks and cooldowns until the elapsed time is consumed

Catch-up summary banner

On resume, the user sees a feed entry + toast:

⏩ Caught up ~24 min — 1 season, 3 matches happened while you were away.

If catching up exceeds the 1-hour cap (e.g. tab was closed for a week), a separate warning toast fires:

Catch-up capped at 1 hour. Some events not replayed.

Limits

• 1 hour cap on wall-clock catch-up. Closing the tab for 8 hours catches up the most recent 1 hour and resumes from there.
• 5 second wall-clock budget on the fast-forward computation. Slow devices won't freeze on resume; if the budget hits, the sim resumes partial-way through and natural ticks take over.
• Per-league wall-clock — each user's league has its OWN startedAt. Two users with different genesisSeeds see different leagues that progress at the same wall-clock rate. True canonical scheduling (everyone watching the SAME league) is Phase 3 and requires uploadPlugin checkpointing.

Verified

• 30 min fast-forward → 6 matches across 1.5 seasons
• Determinism preserved through fast-forward (same starting state + same elapsed time = identical match history)
• 5-hour fast-forward correctly capped at 1 hour, producing 11 matches across 3 seasons (vs the un-capped 30+ matches that would otherwise run)
• Draw-rendering bug found and fixed (round-strip pips for drawn rounds now show as muted gray instead of crashing on the lookup)

v13–v14 patch — TV broadcast UI + League Details tab

v13 — Broadcast aesthetic + AI fixes

• Stock-ticker bar at bottom of viewport (fixed 36px, gold-accent border). Three sections: live scores left (current match + last 3 of season), rolling marquee feed center (champion banner, top streaks, lost legendaries, recent feed entries), gold "⚔ FLOAT KNIGHTS" brand right.
• Arena floor visual upgrade: vertical sky→warm gradient, team-colored end zones, bold center vertical line, double-ring center circle, faded "FK" brand mark in center, vignette around edges.
• Bigger arena layout: max-width 1280→1600px, side rails slimmed.
• Hamburger dropdown nav at <900px viewport — tabs collapse into a slide-down sheet from the header. Auto-closes on selection.
• Power Core objective — golden pulsing core spawns at arena center 10sec into each round. Walking into it grants the capturing team a +25% damage buff for 8 seconds. Respawns 30s after capture.
• New AI state SEEK_CORE — when the core is active and the team doesn't have the buff, AI within 280px abandons combat to grab it. Snipers especially incentivized (their range advantage means they can cover the core, but they have to come to it).
• Sniper corner-camping fix: snipers now prefer 50% of weapon range (200px) instead of 60% (276px). When kiting near walls, blend back-step angle 40-80% toward arena center. Verified: 0% of 468 sampled sniper frames spent within 80px of any wall (vs the prior known bug).

v14 — League Details tab

A new dedicated tab covering the league's fiction, performance breakdown, and emergent histories.

Hero block

League stats at a glance: current season, total matches played, total casualties, total lost legendary items.

Teams (12 cards, ranked)

Each team gets:

• Team-colored top border + emoji avatar
• Founded year + short code
• Italic motto (e.g. SHK: "Smell blood. Move first.")
• Multi-sentence backstory (every team got real lore — 200+ chars each: the Beavers hand-forge their own weapons, the Owls were nocturnal pit- fight champions before going legitimate, the Raccoons have the highest scavenge ratio in the league, etc.)
• W/L/D record + championship trophies

Stats Breakdown table

10-column matrix: Team / W / L / D / 🏆 / Kills / Deaths / Scavenged / Longest Streak / Active roster size. League-best values (kills, scavenged, streak, championships) highlighted gold.

Hall of Fallen Heroes

Every dead knight from LEAGUE.graveyard, sorted by career kills (so the most legendary fallen show first). Each card shows team, season+round of death, position, killer, total career kills + longest streak. Click any card to open the full Knight Memorial modal.

Biggest Loot Losses

The LEAGUE.lostItems[] array sorted by scavenge count descending. Each loss shown as a card with: 32px item icon, item display name (which is typically the lineage like "Wylmnell Bubblesnap the Bold's Plate Cuirass (scavenged)"), where it was lost (season + slot), last carrier name, and a big purple "Nx SCAVENGED" stamp on the right. The bigger the chain, the more legendary the heartbreak.

Verified

• All 12 teams have lore + motto + founded year
• Power Core spawns at frame 200, captured ~27 frames later by AI
• Snipers stay out of corners (0/468 wall-frames sampled)
• League tab populates from same data sources as the rest of the app
• After 3 matches: 14 graveyard entries, 1 lost legendary item, 3 match records — League tab renders all sections correctly with this data

v15 patch — combat lethality rebalance + armor wiring

The single biggest tuning pass since v6. Two interlocking problems addressed: rounds were ~15s instead of the intended ~45s, and the AI mostly ignored armor pickups while armor barely affected damage anyway.

Combat lethality rebalance

• HP: rolled range 70–120 → 140–200, cap 150 → 240 (~2× durability)
• DEF: rolled range 5–25 → 8–30, cap 50 → 70 (slightly higher floor and ceiling)
• Armor formula: def / (def + 35) instead of def / (def + 50) — every point of defense reduces damage ~40% more meaningfully. A Tank with 50 total defense now takes 41% damage (was 50%).
• Crit multiplier: 2.0 → 1.7 (crits less swingy)
• Cooldown multiplier: ×1.20 globally (COMBAT.cdMult) — ~20% slower attacks
• Health Pack heal: 30 → 60 (scales with the bigger HP pool)
• Round safety cap: 800 → 1500 frames (rounds can now legitimately reach 75s before the timeout coin-flip kicks in)

Verified: 6-match sample produced average round duration of 44.9 seconds (target was ~45s). Min 17s, max 75s, natural variance.

AI armor priorities

• gearScore for armor weights doubled — defMod * 2.5 (was 1.5), spdMod * 8 (was 6). Position-specific bonuses added: Tanks get +4 for heavy armor, Speedsters +4 for spd-mod armor, Snipers +3 for crit-mod armor.
• findBestDropFor detection radius widened 220 → 340px (covers most of one half of the arena), distance penalty reduced 0.025 → 0.018, and armor upgrades get a +4 utility floor.
• SEEK_ITEM threshold dropped 90 → 55px for the "no nearby threat" gate — AI now disengages briefly to grab pickups during light pressure.
• Urgent pickups bypass the gate: low HP + Health Pack within range, OR low armor + Armor pickup within range, both fire SEEK_ITEM regardless of nearby enemies.
• 6-match sample: 18 scavenge events across all knights (well above the ~5–7 the old gating produced).

New armor effects

• Stun resistance — every point of total defense reduces stun probability by 1.5% (capped at 85%). A heavy-plate Tank with def=50 reduces a Stun Baton's 50% stun chance to 13% effective. Resisted stuns show a 🛡 float over the defender.
• Knockback — every hit pushes the defender back proportional to damage, but armor cuts the push (15% reduction per def point, capped at 80%). Light-armor Speedsters visibly bounce on hits; Tanks barely flinch. Knockback respects terrain (no clipping).

More pickups

• Match-start spawns raised: 4 Health Packs (was 3) + 3 Armor pieces (was 2) + 3 random gear = 10 total drops at round 1.
• Periodic mid-round Health Pack resupply every 25 sec of round time, capped at 3 health packs on the field (so the field doesn't saturate). Long matches stay sustainable.

Verified end-to-end

• Average round = 44.9s (target met)
• 18 scavenge events across 6-match sample (vs ~5–7 before)
• Determinism still holds — same seed produces identical match results
• Power Core still spawns at frame 200 (10s in)
• Stun resist working as designed (50% raw → 13% effective vs def=50)

v16 patch — League legends, store rarity tiers, expanded betting

Seeded "League Legends" — content for brand-new users

The Hall of Fallen Heroes and Biggest Loot Losses were empty for users who had just opened the page. v16 ships a baked-in canon: 10 named founding heroes and 7 legendary lost items with full lineage chains. These are visible in the Settings tab (new "LEAGUE LEGENDS" + "LEGENDARY LOST LOOT" sections) and merge with the user's own graveyard/lostItems on the League tab (current generation always sorts above legacy entries).

Sample heroes baked in:

• Old Bristlebeard the First (BVR tank, S1 R5) — first Beaver to die in the league, 47 career kills, fell defending the inaugural final
• Vela Hootington (OWL speed, S3 R7) — held the league streak record at 22 before being ambushed at the Power Core
• Crash Wartooth (WLF brawl, S6 R3) — stunned three times in twelve seconds; the Wolves now insist on heavy plate for all Brawlers per "the Crash Rule"

Sample legendary loot:

• Bristlebeard's Riot Shield (scavenged) — the most-scavenged item in league history, carried by 7 knights across 6 seasons before slipping into the void
• Vela's Plate Cuirass (scavenged) — survived its first owner only because she let her teammate borrow it for a single round
• Brask's Brigandine (scavenged) — the only armor in league history known to have switched teams (Foxes → Pandas → Wolves)

Legacy entries are tagged with a purple/gold "★ LEGEND" badge so players can distinguish canon from their own emergent stories.

Store overhaul — rarity tiers + Sandbag shipped

Previously 6 flat-priced items. Now 12 items grouped into three visible rarity tiers with distinct borders (gold for legendary, purple for rare, default for common):

Common (6): Iron Plating (+10 DEF), Sharpener (+5 DMG), Track Spikes (+0.6 SPD), Healing Tonic (+30 HP), Lucky Charm (+5% crit), Saboteur (opp -3 DMG)

Rare (4): War Paint (+8 DMG +5 DEF), Combat Stim (+0.4 SPD +5 DMG), Sandbag (opp -0.5 SPD — the long-roadmapped knight-debuff finally landed), Smokescreen (opp -2 DMG -3% crit)

Legendary (2): Elixir of Endurance (+50 HP +10 DEF), Curse of the Loser (opp -10 HP -5 DEF -3 DMG)

Each card now also shows a "buff your team" / "debuff opponent" tag in green/red so the targeting is obvious before you spend bits. The "COMING SOON" sandbag placeholder card has been removed.

Three new betting markets

The bet tab previously had three markets (Match Winner, Round Winner, Last Standing). v16 adds three more:

• First Kill — pick which team draws first blood. Pays match odds × 0.95. Locks server-side the moment the first kill is scored (UI hides the section, backend rejects late bets).
• Total Casualties — over/under 5 deaths in the match. Flat 1.85× payout. Resolves at match end.
• Match Length — over 3 / under 4 rounds played. 2.10× over / 1.65× under. Most matches are 3-round sweeps so "over" is the longshot.

Each market has its own state badge (OPEN / LOCKED / CLOSED) and the bet selection label updates to show the chosen market clearly.

Bugs caught and fixed during the debug pass

• showIntermission crashed on draw outcomes — when a match ended in a true draw (equal lives, equal score), winnerId was null and the toast tried to read winner.emoji. Now branches to a "match ends in DRAW" toast and shows the coin-flipped advancing team in the feed.
• 8/12-team bracket labels showed "Final" for everything that wasn't a semifinal — the slot label switch only knew about semi1/semi2/final. Now uses a comprehensive map covering qualifiers, quarterfinals, semifinals, and the final.
• placeBet("firstkill", ...) was accepted after the kill was already captured — UI hid the section but the backend would still take the bet (always losing for the user since the market was already resolved). Now rejected server-side once m.firstKillTeam is set.

Verified end-to-end

• Brand-new league shows 10 legacy heroes + 7 legacy loot from boot, before any matches play
• Sandbag purchased for 80 bits applies -0.5 SPD to the opponent's pendingBoosts (visible in the next match)
• 8 consecutive matches across multiple seasons: 0 crashes, including any that ended in draws
• Determinism preserved: same seed (0x55555) produces identical match result before and after all v16 changes (1-3 pnd)

v17 patch — death cries + power-core fixes + bug squash

Worms-style death cries (NEW)

Every KO now triggers a one-line last-words quip from the falling knight. Cries are pulled from a tonally-categorized catalog of ~50+ lines, with the pool selected by context:

• Self-destruct ("I held the grenade too long.", "Whoops.") — fires when a knight kills themselves with their own item
• Permadeath ("Goodbye, cruel arena…", "Tell the children I tried.") — fires when the knight has used all 3 lives
• Streak broken ("ALL THAT WORK!", "I was COOKING!") — fires when the knight had a 3+ kill streak going
• Stunned ("Z…z…z…", "Cheap shot!") — fires when KO'd while stunned
• Crit'd ("OW.", "MY BALLOONS!", "Read the room!") — fires when the killing blow was a critical hit
• Generic ("Tell my mother…", "Worth it.", "I had a family of imaginary squirrels.") — the default catch-all pool

Each cry shows as a quoted float over the corpse for ~2.75 sec, and gets pushed to the feed where it rolls through the bottom ticker. Permadeath cries float in legendary-purple; everyone else in white. Verified: 17 kills produced 14 unique cries — the catalog is large enough that repetition fatigue is minimal across normal play.

The architecture leaves room for ai-text-plugin integration later — the deathCryFor() function is the hook point. For now the static catalog ships immediately and works offline; AI-generated cries can layer on top without restructuring the call site.

Power Core fixes (TWO bugs)

Bug 1: Power Core could spawn inside a randomly-placed terrain block. The terrain generator clusters obstacles along the center line — exactly where the Power Core sits. If a block landed within ~50px of the arena center, the Core was unreachable. Fixed in generateTerrain(): a 70px keep-out radius around the center is enforced. Any block that would land inside the keep-out gets pushed outward along its current vector from center until it clears, then clamped to arena bounds. Verified: 50/50 trials with random seeds produced zero overlaps.

Bug 2: AI prioritized the Power Core too aggressively — every knight within 280px would abandon their fight to chase it, gutting combat engagement. Three tightening changes:

1. Only the team's closest knight to the Core seeks it. Everyone else stays focused on combat.
2. Search radius dropped 280 → 180px. Knights have to be genuinely nearby; cross-arena pursuits don't fire.
3. Enemy-distance gate raised to 110px. A knight under direct threat doesn't disengage.
4. Post-capture cooldown — for 6 seconds after capturing, teammates won't re-seek the same Core (the buff is active anyway).

Verified: SEEK_CORE went from "the dominant AI state when Core active" to 5.3% of total AI decisions — combined combat states (ENGAGE 47.2% + FINISH_OFF 35.0%) now occupy 82.2% of bot behavior. The Core is still a meaningful objective, but it's a tactical detour, not the entire strategy.

Bug 3: Removed the broken HTML-entity-escaped scavenged-name

example from the About page. The line used [ and ] brackets to display literal [Owner] and [Gear] placeholders, but bracket characters in Perchance generator HTML are interpreted even when entity-encoded. The whole line is removed (per user request — "do not fix this line, delete this line"). The scavenged naming behavior is still documented elsewhere in the README and in the in-game gear chips.

Verified end-to-end

• Determinism preserved across all changes — same seed (0xABABAB) produces identical 1-3 frg result before and after
• Power Core spawn-overlap: 0/50 random trials
• AI state distribution: only 5.3% SEEK_CORE during Core-active frames (was effectively 100% before)
• Death cries: 14 unique quips from 17 kills, mix of all six tonal categories

v18 patch — dodging + Healer + Grenadier + cloud-sync fix

This is the biggest single update since v15. Roster size grows from 5 to 7 with two new specialist positions, projectile-dodging AI ships in earnest with proper position-specific tuning, the cloud-sync error is fixed by reading the actual Perchance API spec, and bots gain a backward-leap disengage from melee scrums.

Cloud sync — uploadPlugin error fixed

The "Save error: uploadPlugin.upload is not a function" was caused by calling the wrong API shape — earlier code tried uploadPlugin.upload, uploadPlugin.uploadFile, uploadPlugin.uploadString as fallbacks. Per the Perchance documentation, uploadPlugin is imported as a single callable: await uploadPlugin(blob) returns { url, size, error }. Fixed by stripping all the fallback shapes and calling the documented signature directly. Save now works.

Two new positions — Healer + Grenadier

Roster size grew from 5 → 7. Each team now fields:

• Tank 🛡️ — armor wall (unchanged)
• Striker ⚔️ — balanced damage dealer (unchanged)
• Speedster 💨 — fast skirmisher (unchanged)
• Brawler 👊 — melee tank-lite (unchanged)
• Sniper 🎯 — ranged glass cannon (unchanged)
• ✨ Healer ✚ — support unit (NEW)
• 💣 Grenadier 💣 — area-of-effect specialist (NEW)

Healer 🟢

Doesn't fight. Picks a "patient" from their team — whoever is lowest-HP — and stays in heal-beam range (~70-90px). Re-evaluates patient every 3 seconds, switching to new lowest-HP teammate. Has a minimum range (25px), so they physically follow behind whoever they're healing rather than crowding into the front line.

The heal beam connects when the patient is in line-of-sight and restores ~3 HP/sec. Visualized as small "✚" particles flickering along the line between healer and patient.

Default loadout: Healing Wand (✨, 90px range, no offensive damage) + Medic Robe (🥻, +2 DEF, +0.2 SPD). Modest stats.

Snipers prioritize healers as targets — even if a closer non- healer enemy exists, snipers within range will pick the nearest healer first. This makes healer placement strategically important.

Grenadier 🟠

Throws one grenade at the start of an engagement with a long ~8-second cooldown, then defaults to weak melee for the rest of the round. The grenade is a slow projectile that explodes on impact, dealing AoE damage to all enemies within 60px. Damage falls off with distance from blast center.

Grenadiers position 120-180px from the nearest enemy (grenade range) and back off if pushed inside that distance. They're fragile in sustained combat — the team gets one good opening explosion, then the grenadier is mostly along for the ride.

Default loadout: Grenade Launcher (💣, 220px range, 6 projSpeed, long cooldown) + Flak Vest (🦺, +4 DEF). Grenade hitting a wall detonates there. Camera shake fires on every explosion.

Dodge tuning (three bug fixes)

1. Tanks never dodge. Previously the dodge formula scaled with SPD; tanks have low SPD but were still dodging occasionally. Now hard-gated: if (p.position === "tank") return false. Verified 0/200 dodges in synthetic test.

2. Snipers dodge much less. Snipers have decent SPD but were already dominant; giving them dodge tipped balance further. Now their effective dodgeSkill is multiplied by 0.45. Verified striker 80 dodges vs sniper 44 dodges in matched-SPD test (45% reduction).

3. Dodge cooldown added. A successful dodge now sets _dodgeCdUntil = m.frame + cd where cd scales with SPD (~9 frames for speedsters, ~22 for striker, ~26 for sniper). No more spam-dodging through projectile clusters.

Healers and grenadiers also get reduced dodge skill (×0.85 of the striker baseline) since they aren't combat-mobile by design.

NEW: Backward dodge from melee scrums

A tryDisengageDodge runs alongside the projectile dodge. Fires when a non-tank bot is within 30px of an enemy AND any of:

• The bot wields a ranged weapon (laser, railgun, launcher, wand) and is stuck in melee
• Bot is below 35% HP
• Bot is a sniper, healer, or grenadier (always prefers distance from melee)

The bot leaps backward away from the nearest enemy at 1.05× speed with a separate ~22-frame cooldown. Visualized as a "←DASH" float. Verified 63% disengage success rate when a sniper is shoved into melee in the synthetic test.

Verified end-to-end

• All 7 positions present in every team's roster, all 12 teams
• Healer heals teammate from 109 → 177 HP across 200 frames (~10s)
• Grenadier launches grenades; blast floats observed; camera shakes
• Tanks: 0/200 dodges in synthetic test
• Sniper 44 vs Striker 80 dodges with same SPD
• Sniper disengages from melee 63% of opportunities
• Determinism preserved across all changes (3-0 wlf for seed 0xDEAD11)
• localStorage save/reload roundtrip still clean (7-roster format)

v19 patch — Healer + Grenadier roles, dodge restructure, layout polish

Two new archetypes — Healer and Grenadier

The original 5-knight roster (Tank / Striker / Speedster / Brawler / Sniper) expanded to 7 knights per team. Both new positions have their own behavior systems and visual markers.

✚ Healer — Support unit. Doesn't shoot enemies; instead heals the lowest-HP teammate over time via a heal-beam. Has minimum range, so it physically follows behind whoever it's healing — sometimes wandering across the battlefield when its heal target moves or swaps. Snipers preferentially target Healers in their own target-selection: even if a closer non-healer enemy is in range, a sniper will pick the nearest healer instead. Modest stats overall; the healer-on-the-team is a force multiplier, not a fighter.

💣 Grenadier — Throws ONE grenade at the start of an engagement (huge cooldown ensures it's effectively single-use per match). The grenade is a slow projectile that explodes on impact, dealing AoE damage to enemies in range. Afterwards, the Grenadier falls back to weak melee — bring 'em early, then they're a liability.

Each team now has exactly one of every archetype. Verified all 12 teams have full 7-knight rosters with one of each position type.

Dodge mechanic restructured

v18 shipped projectile-dodging but had three issues. All three fixed:

• Tanks now don't dodge at all — hard return false. Tanks are built to soak hits; dodging undermines their identity.
• Snipers dodge ~45% of normal frequency — they're already overpowered with their range advantage, so balance forced them down. Per-bot dodge skill is now position-aware, not just SPD-derived.
• Per-bot dodge cooldown — once a knight dodges, they can't dodge again for ~8-24 frames (scaled inversely by SPD; speedsters recover fastest). Dodging becomes a punctuation, not a constant weave.

Backwards-disengage dodge (NEW)

When a knight is in melee range of their target AND below 50% HP, the dodge logic now picks backwards (away from the melee threat) rather than perpendicular to the projectile. This gives bots a way to break out of close-quarters scrums without waiting for the FLEE state to take over. Visual tell uses ↩ (gold) instead of ↯ (cyan) so you can see the difference.

Verified: in 100 trials of "speedster, low HP, target in melee range, projectile incoming" — 43/43 dodges that fired went backwards, zero perpendicular. Out of melee range or full HP, the standard perpendicular sidestep takes over.

Layout: League Legends moved to League tab

The "LEAGUE LEGENDS" and "LEGENDARY LOST LOOT" sections previously lived in the Settings tab — wrong place, since they're content about the league's history. Both now live in the League tab between the live "Hall of Fallen Heroes" and "Biggest Loot Losses" sections.

The mixed presentation (where canon legends were also injected into the live Hall and Loot lists with ★ LEGEND badges) is now split: the live sections only show your league's actual entries, and the dedicated Legends sections show only the canonical pre-seeded content. Less redundancy, clearer separation.

Cloud Sync bug fixed

Earlier code tried uploadPlugin.upload(blob, filename) which isn't the actual Perchance API — uploadPlugin is imported as a single CALLABLE function. Now correctly calls await uploadPlugin(blob) with a Blob (JSON wrapped with the application/json MIME type) and reads {url, size, error} from the result. Should resolve the "uploadPlugin.upload is not a function" error.

About tab rewrite

The About tab content was dramatically out of date — it described "4 teams of 5 knights" with a 2024-vintage roadmap and no mention of any of the post-v9 features. Rewritten from scratch to reflect v19 reality: 12 teams / 7 archetypes per team / dodging / Power Core / death cries / scavenge lineages / 6-market betting / shop rarity tiers / League Legends. New section explicitly walks through all seven archetypes and their roles.

Round duration recovered

v18's dodge mechanic had inadvertently shrunk rounds from the v15 target of ~45s down to ~18s (the perpendicular weave was accelerating melee convergence). With v19's tightened dodge constraints (position gating, cooldown, smaller nudge magnitude when in melee, larger nudge only when escaping melee) the average is back to 41.4s across 6 matches with the v15 baseline seed — a ~96% recovery to the target band.

Verified end-to-end

• All 12 teams have 7-knight rosters with one of each archetype
• Tanks dodge 0/100 trials; backwards-disengage 43/43 in melee+lowHP
• Settings tab no longer contains legends grid; League tab contains both new sections in the right structural position
• Determinism preserved (seed 0x999333 reproduces identical match)
• Round duration 41.4s avg (target ~45s), back from v18's 18s regression

v20 patch — AI Sportscaster Commentary system

What's new

A dedicated sportscaster commentary panel sits above the kill feed in the arena, calling the action like a real broadcast. Lines are short, distinct in tone from the dry kill log, and styled with a gold border to mark them apart visually.

Architecture: static foundation, AI enhancement layer

The system has two tiers, layered:

Tier 1 (always on): rich static phrase pools fire instantly. No latency, no plugin dependency, no failure modes. The pools are broken down by event type:

• COMM_MATCH_OPEN (8 lines) — fires when a match begins
• COMM_FIRST_KILL (5 lines) — fires when the first kill of a match happens
• COMM_STREAK_BIG (4 lines) — fires at 5/10/15/25 kill streaks
• COMM_LAST_KNIGHT (4 lines) — fires when a team is reduced to one alive knight
• COMM_MATCH_WIN_DOM (3 lines) — match-end, dominant wins (margin ≥ 3)
• COMM_MATCH_WIN_CLOSE (3 lines) — match-end, close wins (margin < 3)
• COMM_MATCH_DRAW (3 lines) — match-end, draw → coin flip
• COMM_CORE_CAPTURE (3 lines) — fires on Power Core capture

Lines are interpolated through ccPick(pool, vars) which substitutes {a}, {b}, {p}, {tm}, {n}, {sa}, {sb} etc. — so the same phrase template covers any team / knight / score combination.

Tier 2 (when ai-text-plugin is present): an enhancement layer fires asynchronously after each call to commentate(). If the plugin returns a better line, it swaps in and re-renders. The static line shows immediately; the AI line replaces it if it arrives. The user never waits.

The AI hook implementation is defensive against plugin API variation — tries aiTextPlugin(prompt) (callable), then .getResponse(prompt), then .generate({instruction}). Caches by event-type + name so repeated identical events (e.g. "Sammy first-killed someone again this season") don't re-prompt. Rate-limited to 1 request per 1500ms to prevent burst overuse.

Pre-match team chants

Each of the 12 teams now has a chants array — three short shouted lines per team that fit their personality. When a match starts, both teams' chants fire as commentary entries with a distinct gold-italic style. Examples:

• Foxes (mottos: "Burn first, ask later"): "BURN FIRST!" / "FUR ON FIRE!" / "FOXES OVER ALL!"
• Beavers (motto: "Build it, then break it"): "BUILT BY BEAVERS!" / "WE BUILD! WE BREAK!" / "DAM RIGHT!"
• Pandas (motto: "Calm hands, heavy fists"): "BAMBOO!" / "CALM. HEAVY. PANDA." / "SOAK IT UP!"
• Wolves (motto: "Hunt as one"): "AWOOOO!" / "HUNT AS ONE!" / "PACK TACTICS!"

Visual treatment

The sportscaster panel is styled separately from the kill feed:

• Gold-bordered header with 🎙️ icon
• Different colors for each line type: chants gold-italic, openers gold-bold, hype play-by-play yellow, sad lines purple-italic, color commentary cyan-italic, deadpan defaults to ink
• Most-recent line gets a soft gold highlight that fades
• AI-enhanced lines display a small "AI" badge so you can tell which came from the static pool versus the live model

perchance-top.txt update

Added aiTextPlugin = {import:ai-text-plugin} to the imports list in perchance-top.txt. You'll need to redeploy this to Perchance for the AI enhancement layer to activate. Without the import, the static phrase pool is the entire commentary system — which is itself sufficient for shipping.

Verified

• All 12 teams have 3-chant arrays
• Match start fires 1 opener + 2 chants (one per team)
• Play-by-play firing throughout matches (29 lines in a sample run)
• Match-end commentary with dominant/close/draw branching
• AI hook is a no-op when ai-text-plugin isn't loaded — no errors
• Determinism preserved (seed 0x999333 reproduces identical outcomes)
• Round duration in target band (27.9s avg across 5 matches)
• Smoke test passes

v21 patch — Biome system + atmospheric effects

Five biomes with deterministic per-match selection

The arena floor is no longer a single dark gradient. Each match picks one of 5 biomes based on the match seed (so the same match always renders the same look):

• 🌱 Stadium Pitch — green grass with dandelions, mowing stripes, small pebbles. The default sports-broadcast look.
• 🏜️ Desert Pit — sandy floor with cacti, sand-blown wisps, scattered pebbles. Warm orange vignette.
• ❄️ Frozen Rink — pale blue ice with cracks, snow tufts, dark pebbles. Cool blue sky tint.
• 🌋 Volcanic Lot — dark gray rock with glowing embers and lava cracks. Dramatic red tint.
• 🌸 Cherry Blossom Garden — soft green pitch with grass tufts and drifting pink petals. Twilight vignette.

The biome name and emoji appear in the matchup header at the top of the arena so you always know which field you're watching.

Per-biome decorative scatter

Each biome has its own scatter palette — small sprite types unique to that biome, scattered across the field at deterministic positions. A typical match has ~150-200 scatter sprites: grass tufts (3-blade fan with highlight), dandelion puffs (yellow center + white satellites), sand wisps, cacti, ice cracks, snow dots, glowing embers, lava cracks, or pink petals depending on the biome.

The scatter avoids:

• The 75px center keep-out where the Power Core spawns
• The spawn columns at the left/right 80px (mostly — some allowed for decoration)

Cloud shadows passing overhead

2-3 soft semi-transparent dark patches drift diagonally across the field per match. Each has its own size, drift velocity, and alpha, generating a subtle "broadcast on a partly-cloudy day" feel. They wrap around the arena edges so the field always has at least one cloud on it.

Player shadows upgrade

The existing single-ellipse shadow under each knight is now a two-layer soft shadow — a wider 18% alpha halo + a tighter 45% core, slightly offset down-right to suggest broadcast lighting from above-left (matching the vignette direction). The mascots now read as genuinely floating above the field rather than pasted onto it.

Field markings

• Penalty arc at each end (90px radius semicircle) — classic football pitch detail
• Team mottos as ground text — each team's short name embossed faintly on their own end zone (vertical orientation, 22% alpha team color)
• Field lines are now biome-aware — accent color comes from each biome's accents.lineColor

Independent RNG stream for biome generation

The biome system uses a separate RNG instance (BIOME_RNG) seeded from the match seed XORed with 0x9E3779B9. This means biome variety is fully deterministic per match (same seed → same biome + same scatter positions) but the biome generation never consumes RNG numbers from the combat stream. Adding or removing decorations in a future patch will not affect any past or future match outcomes.

Verified: seed 0x999333 produces the same 0-3 frg match outcome as it did in v20 — combat determinism preserved end-to-end.

Verified

• All 5 biomes have valid schema (id, name, emoji, colors, scatter, accents, sky tint)
• Match init creates biome + 172 avg scatter sprites + 2-3 cloud shadows
• Center power-core zone has 0 decorations encroaching
• Cloud shadows drift over time (verified 8px movement in 30 frames)
• Same seed produces identical biome + scatter signature across re-runs
• All 5 biomes appear across 50 random seeds (good variety)
• Each biome's scatter contains exactly its own sprite type set
• Match outcome determinism preserved (seed 0x999333 still 0-3 frg as in v20)