HOLLOWFALL

IControls & the Hand

Reading the skill bar

Six slots: LMB · RMB · E · SHIFT · AUTO · F. A slot on cooldown is layered, bottom to top: the icon, a full black veil for the entire cooldown, a gray sweep whose upper edge falls top-to-bottom as time runs out, and the seconds in white with a black outline (whole seconds above 1 s, tenths below). Two deliberate exceptions: the basic attack never veils — it would strobe with every swing — and the dash veils only when all charges are spent, since a refilling dash is still usable.

IIThe Hollow

Each floor is a buried maze of up to 6×6 chambers joined by corridors. Rooms populate when you first step in, and seal behind you — the doors hold until nothing in the room draws breath. The minimap remembers where you have walked, marks awake horrors as dots, and marks a discovered market as a gold square.

Lairs, seals, and the way down

The three deepest chambers of every floor are lairs — sealed boss dens of at least tier 6 danger. Each boss slain breaks one seal. When the third seal breaks, a portal tears open at the corpse. Step to it and the Hollow asks once: descend, or keep walking this floor. Leaving and returning re-arms the offer. Dying with seal broken re-opens the portal near your rising place.

Descending is permanent for that run: floor + 1, seal resets to zero, a fresh maze. Depth is not cosmetic — every floor past the first adds +2 danger tiers to every room (capped at tier 9), packs grow +30% larger per floor, and elites come +3% more often per floor.

What else the maze holds

IIISurvival & the Toll

You begin with 120 life and 100 essence. Essence feeds every cast: it returns through Essence-on-Hit and Essence-Regen affixes, and landing the basic attack pays ×2.8 of your essence-on-hit stat. Whirling and burning ground pay only a tithe (10–12% per tick) — on-hit effects scale with how much of a true hit each tick represents.

Death, and what it costs

The Hollow does not send you back down the same corridors — it rebuilds itself around your corpse, same floor, seals you broke staying broken. You keep level, gear, gold, and materials, less the toll. The toll grows with each death:

IVCombat

Rend, the basic attack

A cone in front of you, swung every 0.42 s divided by your attack speed. The drawn wedge is the true hitbox — what the light touches, the blade touches. Crits multiply by your crit damage stat.

The dash

3 charges, refilling one at a time, 5 s each (Dash Recharge affixes divide this; Dash-on-Hit affixes shave it with every landed blow). 0.35 s between uses. The dash itself: 0.16 s at 1500 px/s, dealing 0.9× weapon damage to anything passed through, with 0.3 s of untouchability. Dashing through a Bone Warden is the counter to its shield — see the bestiary.

Shields resolve first

Damage against a shielded horror is judged at the shield before anything else. A warden's frontal arc (±60° of its facing) cuts your melee to 25%; your projectiles arriving into that arc are stopped dead on the shield — the warden takes the reduced damage, and whatever cowered behind it takes nothing. Only three things get through: attacking from behind, breaking the shield with a dash-through (3 s), or the Shield Sunder affix — each point of sunder thins the melee reduction toward full damage, and gives each projectile that percent chance to pass the block entirely.

VBestiary

Base numbers, before tier scaling. A room of tier t multiplies life by 1 + 0.60t + 0.075t² and damage by 1 + 0.26t. "Tier" below is when a horror first appears.

How they hunt

Two habits are shared by the whole Hollow. First, nothing walks a straight line unless it means to die — chasers weave on the way in, damping the sway as they close. Wretches, mites, and bosses are the exception: they come dead straight. Second, the pack watches your feet: whenever you are chilled, everything that deals area damage grows bolder — and the things that chill you time their work for the things that burst.

VIElites & Bosses

Elite brands

Any horror may rise branded, glowing its brand's color, tougher and always dropping a relic of magic rarity or better. Elites grow more frequent with room tier and with every floor.

The lair bosses

VIIRelics & Rarity

Three relics are worn at once — weapon, armor, trinket — and everything a relic gives comes from two places: its affixes and its bound skill. Item level scales affix values; rarity sets how many affixes it rolls with, a value multiplier on those rolls, and the odds of a skill.

Legendary and mythic relics bear true names — Widowmaker, The Long Goodbye, Mantle of the Fallen King, The Unblinking Eye — rather than a forged prefix and base. Drop odds shift with danger: at tier 0 the Hollow gives almost nothing above rare; deep rooms and deep floors turn legendaries from rumor to routine, and mythics from myth (~0.03%) to merely unlikely (~1% at full depth). Elites always drop magic-or-better; bosses guarantee rare-or-better and legendary-or-better; every relic caps at six affixes no matter how it is forged.

VIIIAffixes

Ranges below are base rolls; actual values scale up with item level and the rarity multiplier. On-hit effects (life, essence, dash time) pay fractionally on partial hits like whirl ticks and burning ground.

Weapon

Armor

Trinket

IXSkills

A relic carries at most one skill, drawn from its slot's group, at tier I–III. Weapon skills fire on RMB, armor skills on E — both spend essence. Trinket skills act entirely on their own and cost nothing. The forge can awaken, reroll, raise, and transfer skills — see chapter X.

Weapon — aimed offense

Armor — skin-saving

Trinket — self-acting, free

XThe Forge

Everything but gambling is paid in materials: grave ash, pale ichor, and emberhearts, salvaged from unwanted relics or looted. Costs scale with item level; formulas below use L for item level and n for current affix count.

Reshaping affixes

Shaping skills

Disposal

Sell at a market for the relic's gold value. Salvage anywhere into materials — commons give a little ash; mythics give 60–85+L ash, 3–5 ichor, 2–3 emberhearts. Discard gives nothing. Bulk sell and bulk salvage take the whole bag — except whatever you have locked with MMB.

XIMarkets & Gold

Gold does exactly two things: it buys gambles, and it feeds the toll when you die. The gamble sells an unidentified relic whose item level follows the deepest danger you have reached: price 150 + 45×level + 80×effective tier. Most come out magic; roughly a third are rare-or-better, and deep floors push legendary odds toward real money. Materials cannot buy relics; gold cannot forge. The two economies never touch.

Room in your bag

You begin with 6 bag slots of a 36-slot shell; the rest sit locked in the grid. The merchant sells the remainder, one at a time, and accepts two currencies. Gold: 400 + 300k + 55k² for the k-th slot bought — the thirtieth costs a fortune. Or a sacrifice: the merchant points, without looking, at the relics you rely on most — what you wear and what you carry, judged by what they are and how hard you have leaned on them — and takes 1 of them (2 past eighteen slots, 3 past thirty). They are destroyed, not sold. It refuses anything you have protected with MMB; it only takes what you would miss. A full bag refuses gambles and pickups alike — loot waits on the ground.