Runic Races

[1.6.0] — 2026-07-06 — Every Ability Reads

A full VFX overhaul: every active plays out in staged beats, every passive with a real moment shows it, and every severe weakness warns you the instant it starts biting. No network protocol change — protocol stays 2; 1.6.0 clients and servers pair freely with 1.5.0's packets.

Added

• Staged signature presentation. Sfx/Vfx specs take .delayed(n) beats (anticipation → impact → settle), run by a server-side scheduler that tracks the caster's live position — a strafing caster keeps their effect, and Sprite's re-appear pop lands at the blink destination. Two new emission shapes: CONE (aimed along the live look vector) and BURST_UP (fountain column).
• Five new identity particles — mirror_shard, moon_sliver, rock_chip, pollen_mote, gale_streak — and six curated sound events (pounce.strike, mirror.shatter, moon.veil, breath.inhale, sizzle.sunlight, warn.kindling), all vanilla-curated and resource-pack swappable.
• Passive proc cues: Primian's adaptation glint on learning a new place, Valen's shoulder-check thuds with iron dust along the impact line, Zombie's deathless flesh shrugs off poison/hunger in a puff of grave-ash, Arachnid's web trembles when the sense-pulse marks prey, and drake hides shimmer while their element immunity is actively working.
• Weakness onset cues (bannerless — the notification system keeps the words): grave-kin sear when the sun finds them while Deep One/Skeleton get a silent glare instead; Dryad's Kindling flares embers, panicked leaves, and heat-shimmer the moment they ignite; frost-kin thaw hiss; Feline's underwater yowl; Volt Drake's short-circuit; dry-land crack for Sea Serpen/Nymph; cold-iron quench for Faerie.
• vfx.signatureParticleDensity server config (0–2) scales signature particles with per-shape floors so a turned-down ring still reads as a ring.
• Tests: SignatureTierTest (every recipe in its Minor/Major/Mythic band, delays clamped, instant feedback guaranteed), BeatQueueTest (scheduler core), and WeaknessCueCoverageTest (cue registry integrity, bannerless enforcement).

Changed

• All 37 actives restaged. Highlights: Blood Elf's frenzy beats twice (blood drawn in, then erupting); Ice Elf gathers inward before the nova bursts; Deep One's tremor and Canine's howl roll out as expanding wavefronts; Changeling forms an orbiting mirror that shatters on the shift; Feline Pounce is now a bespoke Major with claw streaks raking down the lunge line.
• Fire Drake's breath is actual fire — flame and embers replace the purple vanilla dragon_breath in both the signature and the cone; Terra Drake's breath spits real stone chips instead of crit sparks; every breath now opens with an inhale layer and carries an element-matched screen cue (volt gets a white lightning strobe).
• Faerie and Sprite wing flaps de-duplicated — faerie flaps shed fae dust, sprite keeps the end-rod shimmer.
• Fragility procs moved from hand-rolled handler code into bannerless signature-registry entries behind a shared debounce channel (same sounds and sparks, one source of truth).

Fixed

• Kitsune's foxfire renders as actual foxfire — a dedicated flicker-and-flare behavior replaces the soul-wisp alias that made it look like generic undead ambience.
• venom_drip and bone_chip identity particles finally appear in signature recipes (Serpen's shed skin, Skeleton's conscription) instead of existing only as proc dust.
• Dead state runes removed: BEAST_SURGE and REGROWTH_SUPPRESSED had textures and HUD definitions but no server-side setter — they could never light.

[1.5.0] — 2026-07-05 — Full-Audit Remediation

A deep audit of the codebase, datapack, integrations, balance, docs, and tests — and the fixes that came out of it. Network protocol bumps to 2: update client and server together.

Fixed

• Wings render again for all winged races (Avian, Sprite, Faerie, Wind Wyrm, and the four drakes). Since the two-layer selection, RaceHelper could resolve the family origin (family_bestial etc.) instead of the race — origin-map iteration order is undefined — which silently disabled everything race-keyed: wings, Pehkui scale, ambience, HUD icons, and integrations. Race resolution now reads the runic_races:race layer explicitly.
• Magi's Arcane Overflow works on standalone installs. Under the default fail-closed resource gating, the 30-mana activation gate read 0 mana without Iron's Spellbooks — the signature active was permanently dead, silently. A new runic_races:resource_available condition lets the shipped powers apply resource gates only when the backing mod is actually present; a refused cast now shows a red banner and no longer consumes the cooldown.
• Flap packets are rejected unless actually gliding. The old guard accepted flaps from any airborne moment, letting a modified client chain free vertical boosts without wings deployed. The legit client only flaps mid-glide; the server now enforces it.
• Breath weapons and offensive AoE spare allies and pets. A drake's cone hit teammates and owned wolves; the shared hostility heuristic also debuffed your own pet while it defended you. New util/Hostility is the single source of truth: teams, PvP-protected players, and owned/ally-owned tamed animals are never hit; the aggro clause narrows to mobs targeting the caster. Breath still hits neutral and passive mobs — aim is the counterplay.
• Feather's max-stamina resets when a player no longer has a race (all other integrations already restored their baselines). Guarded by a persisted marker so packs that customize feather maxima are never stomped.
• Datapack-stacked powers no longer overwrite each other's attribute modifiers — scaling_attribute and biome_affinity derive modifier UUIDs from their config instead of sharing fixed constants.

Added

• "< Back" button on the race selection screen (top-left). Players who confirmed a heritage can return to the family screen and pick a different one; the server un-chooses the family layer and Origins re-prompts from the top. Guarded server-side so a finished character can't replay it to reset.
• Wing flaps cost feathers when Feather's Mod is present (1 for small wings, 2 for the Wind Wyrm; flight.flapStaminaCost to disable). Exhausted wings refuse with a red banner and the deny sound — never a burned cooldown. Standalone flight is unchanged.
• Foreign-origins warning: when clean two-layer mode hides origins registered by other Origins add-ons or datapacks, the server log now names every hidden origin and the exact config remedy at startup.
• Learning-mode hints: show_banner gains an optional learning_hint — one explanatory chat line per player (e.g. the first time a Magi is mana-blocked), gated by notifications.learningMode.
• CI: GitHub Actions workflow compiles and runs the full test suite on every push; ci/fetch-deps.sh bootstraps the compile-only jars from Modrinth (Apoli/Calio extracted from the Origins all-jar).

Balance

• Sprite: speed +30% → +20%, attack speed +15% → +10% (flight, tiny hitbox, and Phase Shift untouched).
• Faerie: ground speed +20% → +15%.
• Feline: Nine Lives cadence 10 → 15 minutes, and a spent life leaves 5s of Weakness II.
• Fire Drake: breath 7 → 6 damage; cold/wet vulnerability +30% → +35% (fire immunity stays — the sharpened opposite element is the counterplay).
• Changeling: Mirror Shift 40s → 25s; attack penalty −10% → −5%.
• Canine: hunger drain +40% → +25%; taigas now count as pack home ground.
• Zombie: healing penalty −25% → −15% (sun decay unchanged — it's the identity).
• Valen: the twin slow softens to −8% speed / −8% attack speed.
• Iron One: integration penalties only — Iron's spell power −15% → −10%, Ars cost +15% → +10%; the standalone kit is untouched.
• Kitsune: weakness re-shaped from a High Elf twin (flat physical vulnerability) to +20% damage taken under the open daytime sky — a night-predator pattern.
• Volt Drake: new storm-charged rider — an extra +10% attack speed while in the rain, so the lightning identity has a moment.
• Dead damage_penalty: 0.0 no-op fields removed from seven biome-affinity powers.

Diagnostics & tests

• Five new regression suites: resource-gate lint (no active may dead-gate on an integration-backed condition), network append-only + protocol fixture, flap-guard scan, hostility-heuristic consolidation, version-consistency (docs must name the built version), plus a zero-value no-op lint in the power JSON linter.