Hextale

Hextech against chemtech: the quick, cheap and dirty road against the slow, clean one.

Added

• Chem Boiler (worked out at the Lab Bench, made at the Awakened Workbench): a riveted pressure tank that sits on a Chem Burner and cracks mixtures of essence - piped in, poured from a bottle, or drawn by itself out of plain jars of mixture nearby. Each time the pressure is up the safety valve knocks and a batch splits into all its essences at once, each running into a jar nearby that wears its sticker. Quick and needing no choice, but crude: part of every batch goes up as fumes that wear the land thin, part burns down into murk that drips into the burner and feeds its flame. Hextech lamps near it flicker in the fumes. Takes runes in the Rune Circle: Steam, Thrift, Purification and Purifying Fire.
• Warding Lamppost (researched at the Research Table, made at the Awakened Workbench): a two-block street lamp with a gemstone in its head that burns light essence from a jar nearby. In its light a third of everything that wears the land thin - boiling, brewing, cracking, spilling - burns away before it reaches the ground, drawn into the gem as a thread of dark; the land around never creeps into its own chunk, and the haze clears in its light. Standing lit costs nothing, only burning does. Takes runes in the Rune Circle: Reach, Purification, Thrift, Healing and Insight.
• Shimmer in the veins: every vial of refined shimmer leaves a violet vein on the drinker (five at most), and while the body is fed the veins give - a heart, a little more damage and a little more size each, eyes that see in the dark from three veins, tireless hands at five. The feeding wears off after a while, sooner the more veins there are; then the gifts are only withheld until the next vial, nothing is taken. A bottle of light essence washes one vein out. The veins show on the player, glowing and pulsing while fed. Two new diary steps.
• Decorative blocks for chemtech: Chem Tubes (glass tubes of glowing green chemistry in iron bands, from chem glass, iron and a vial of glow mix) and the Rusted Grate (cut from rusted plating).
• The Rune Circle, a carved stone circle in the floor made at the Awakened Workbench and learned together with the altar. Rune steles stand round it now: lay a tool, a device or a blank scroll in the middle and the steles' runes are burned in, or one is copied onto the scroll, the way the altar used to do it.
• Shimmer veins show beside the other effects: "Shimmer in the Veins" with their number as its level and the time the feeding lasts, "Fading Veins" once it runs out.

Changed

• Runes are written in a new script: each element is a flowing sign of a brush - a flame, waves, a crescent, a bolt - and a rune joins its two elements in one stroke with a swash beneath. On screens they are drawn smooth and glowing instead of on a pixel grid; on the steles, in the circle and in the air they write themselves the same way.
• Fewer things carry "Hex" in their name: the Awakened Workbench and Awakened Furnace, the Ritual Altar, the Lapidary, the Foundry, the Whirl Sawmill, the Arc Spire, the Crystal Lamp, the Warding Lamppost, the Crystal Purifier, the Skypack, the Tuning Fork, and the Runed Pickaxe, Axe, Shovel and Sword (Refined and Radiant Pickaxe). Hextech itself - its dust, crystals, gemstones - keeps the name. Nothing in existing worlds changes but the names.
• Runes with plain workshop names took older ones: Reach (was Shift), Pulse (Motor), Thrift (Dam), Levity (Lift), Wavewalk (Pump), Updraft (Windmill), Thirst (Sponge), Silence (Insulator), Lodestone (Magnet), Delving (Drill), Cutting Wind (Blades), Kindling (Bellows), Beacon (Signal), Hoard (Cache), Gilding (Photosynthesis).
• Runes that no device takes yet are out of the world: they no longer lie in chests, their scrolls cannot be read, and their names read "???". The codex counts only the runes there are to find.
• Looking at the Research Table in goggles no longer sends streams of motes from the jars into it; the goggles' plate still lists the ink.
• The Crystal Purifier and the Void Anchors also take a Synthetic Crystal: it holds less than a cut crystal and, spent, crumbles to a pinch of dust instead of clouding over.
• Chemtech starts to look like the other road: rusted iron, copper and a toxic green glow instead of walnut and brass. The Disintegrator is now a riveted iron vat with a copper rim, a pool of acid glowing inside, a porthole and a vent stack.
• The Axolotl Tank is a riveted iron frame round stained chem glass, with a copper feeding hatch, a little tap at the bottom and greener water.
• The Chem Burner wears the same riveted iron with a copper band and a copper-rimmed firebox.
• Rusted plating looks like rusted iron now (dark plates, rust patches, rivets) instead of brown dirt; the Miasma Vent, chem glass and the Chem Still follow it, and the still's pot is rusty copper over an iron tub.
• The Pink Brazier's cage is iron with a copper band instead of hextech steel and brass.
• The Lab Bench stands on a riveted iron frame under its tiled top.
• The Experience Condenser is a hextech vessel now: an eight-sided glass column in a brass frame on a walnut foot, and the experience flows into a small crystal on its lid.
• Chem vials have an iron cap, and the glow mix, acid and raw shimmer brews are a little softer in colour.
• The Ritual Altar (the Hextech Altar until now) only makes things; burning runes in and copying them moved to the Rune Circle, so making a tool and inscribing it happen in two different places.
• Rune steles turn to face the middle of their Rune Circle, at any angle, so a ring of them set diagonally looks in.
• Hextech grades sit where they belong: the best grade, the gemstone, goes only into the best devices (Hexcore, World Anchor, Skypack, the refined and radiant pickaxes). The Crystal Purifier is made with a cut crystal (the grade it holds), the Lamppost takes its crystal from its lamp and nullstone instead of a gemstone, and the pylons show the crystal they are made with.
• The Awakened Workbench and the Crystal Battery run on raw hextech only - unstable orbs and crystals grown in shimmer; cut crystals and gemstones are no longer burned as charge. Rift Gates are linked with a raw orb instead of a cut crystal.

Fixed

• With shader packs that draw soft translucent light as solid (BLISS), the glow behind the essence signs over a crucible and other hextale lights no longer turns into a blob of light; with a pack on, the pack's own glow is used.
• With such shader packs a crucible's water and the essence signs over it are no longer blown out to white: hextale's liquids and signs stop counting as light sources while a pack is on.
• The ink vials on the Research Table's desk sit in their frames whatever the number of inks.