Hextale

The Void seeps in: magic wears the world thin around a researcher's home.

Added

• The Thinning: work with magic wears the edge of the world thin, and the Void starts to seep in. Everyday work wears it a little at a time - boiling essence in an alembic (unknown things double), separating it, drawing research ink, finished rituals, charged crafts at the Hex Workbench, crystals woken by lightning - and carelessness much more: essence poured away (far less where stone drinks it), raw crystals bursting, broken rituals, burst lab flasks, burnt parchments, Miasma Vent fumes. It lives in the chunk, never heals by itself, and the land around catches a share of it ring by ring, so a researcher's home and its surroundings sicken slowly as the research goes on.
• Water in sick land darkens towards a violet murk; the blight never touches water.
• The world takes a good deal before anything shows; past that, haze: a lilac veil low over the ground, dark motes sinking into the earth, grass, leaves, vines and water losing their colour, stone, sand, gravel and earth turning a sick lilac grey, the fog leaning to violet.
• Blight: the land itself sickens in a few spreading foci - grass, dirt and sand turn to Void Soil, stone to Void Rock, the world's plants on them die back and the Void's own growth takes root: Void Coral, Void Roots and glowing Void Bulbs. Void Rock cuts into Void Rock Bricks with stairs, slab and wall.
• Void Mites crawl out of blighted land at night and in the dark. They do not bite: a mite latches onto you and takes a heart of your maximum health for as long as it holds on - more mites, more of your hearts turn dead and infected (never the last one). A potion of healing, drunk, splashed or lingering, makes them all let go. You can see them on you.
• Miasma: the veil thick and knee-high, dark vapours seeping up out of the ground, magenta glints, the fog closing in, the edges of sight darkening, and the land murmuring from somewhere around.
• Breaches of the Void: where the land has gone all the way, the world finally tears - on open ground near a player, never within a thousand blocks of another breach. First the omen: the ground shakes, a drone rises and the world's motes are drawn to one point; then the breach slowly breaks open. It never closes, it keeps sickening the land around it, and whatever touches it is hurt and thrown back.
• Players near a breach as it tears open watch it happen: the camera flies out to it, holds while it opens and the first voidling pushes out, and flies back (skip it with a key, or turn it off in the client config).
• Voidlings: the Void's own spawn, bigger and far worse than mites. The cells of a breach bulge, and one drops out curled up, unfolds and runs at you - it leaps and bites. A breach keeps a few of them around it.
• Hollowbloom: sprinkle hextech dust on a dead bush and it wakes up hungry - the thinner the world around it, the more alive it is. Dry twigs on clean land; it stirs long before the land shows anything, leafs out, blooms around a hollow black heart as the haze comes, and glows in full bloom when the blight is near. Plant one at home and watch it; a comparator beside it reads how thin the world is there. It has its own step in the researcher's guide.
• Void Chitin: voidlings, and now and then a void mite, leave shards of their shell when a player kills them. Kept for what will be made against the Void (a new Void branch of the guide shows where it leads).
• /hextale void get|set|add|stage|breach|clear for operators; config options to turn the Thinning off or change its rate.