The Ground, the Flask and the Axe You Start With · Crawling Darkness patch notes 2026.09.18-1544

The Starting Lands

The ground is ground again. It is no longer one flat sheet of grass. Dirt and gravel read as dirt and gravel where the paths and the cart tracks run, and the grass that remains grows in patches with the soil showing through it, in the places where grass actually stands.
The pale shapes in the grass are gone. The grass material had stopped compiling, so every blade was rendering as a grey smear. It renders as grass now.

The flask. In the first five minutes you are told to fill a flask at the fountain, and there was never a flask. There is one now, at the basin.
Five more errands across the act had the same fault: an object named in the dialogue that existed nowhere in the world. All six now have theirs, in the place the text describes.
Trophies that could never drop. Twenty of the act's thirty-five keepsakes had no source at all — the entry existed, the object could not. Every one of them drops now.
A collector in town wants one of each, and the journal tracks the set as a single line rather than a wall of them.
The last chapter has a marker. It was the one chapter that could sit in your journal with nothing on the map to walk towards.

The axe you start with was upside down. The head was below your hand and the haft above it. It is the right way up. The same fault is in three other weapons and they are being fixed next.
The mines' own axe was never worth taking. It was weaker than the axe you already had three levels earlier — a reward you could find, equip, and be worse for. It is now a real step up.
The Broken Fortress paid almost nothing for the descent. Its axe was a three per cent gain over the one you already carried. It is a fortress-sized reward now, and the act's best two-hander, one-hander and chest piece could not drop at all inside the act. They can.
The rites pay like rites. Each of the four was worth about two per cent of a level — a rounding error for the biggest things a berserker does. They are worth about fifteen per cent now.

Weapons tell you what they actually hit for. The card showed damage and a multiplier as two separate numbers, which meant the weapon with the bigger damage number was sometimes the weaker weapon. It now leads with the damage per swing, with the parts after it.
The shop is readable. Its secondary text sat at a contrast ratio below the accessibility minimum — the only text on that screen that did.
New type throughout. The game, the launcher and the site now share one pair of faces.
A skill you have earned but cannot use yet says so when it arrives. It was announced once, in the four seconds after a boss dies, and never again.

Skugarth's fight has its four movements. The score steps as he loses ground; the tracks were there and the game was playing older versions of them.
The descent opens when the story says it does. It was opening a chapter early.
Bodies called up by something else pay nothing. A boss that refills its pack was an endless source of gear and experience; its summons now pay no loot. An elite's own escort still pays in full — those come once.
The bestiary stops lying. Four entries described things the enemy does not do, including one that promised an archer who never misses twice and an enemy that walks on ceilings.

Seven beards did not exist. Pick stubble, a goatee, a chin strap or three others and you got a bare chin. All seven are there.
More hair and brows for both heroes.

Fingers still read wrong on some heroes. The cause is the bracer, which is an open tube that hangs over the hand — a fix is in the build but has not been judged yet, so it is not claimed here.
The pale shapes in the forest are still there. The grass was a real fault and a real fix, and it was not the thing in that photograph; the remaining suspect is the ground litter.
Female heroes read too masculine in the face. The cause is found — the body reshape was run without its feminine setting — and it is the first thing after this patch.
Armour can still show skin through it at some poses, and above level 18 most pieces fall back to a generic set. New armour is being made.
Men's body and face shape sliders are not in yet.
Skugarth has no sitting animation yet; he stands on his throne while his garrison fights.