tehAon’s Dread – Seven Nights of Halloween (Server and Client)

**First public release - early access, still in development.** Balance and settings will change between updates.
- **A fear meter** from 0 to 100 for every player: nights, buildings, the dark, blood moons and wounds raise it,
faster alone; daylight, home, company, a campfire and a lit jack-o'-lantern lower it. Four tiers, each with
stakes (more loot, less stamina).
- **Seven Nights:** every night is worse than the last - dread rises faster, scares come more often, the night gets
darker and the lowest your dread can fall climbs day by day. Night 7 is Halloween: pumpkin-headed dead, every
jack-o'-lantern out at midnight, no sanctuary at home, and the Stalker for anyone alone. It keeps getting worse
after night 7. Each death brings you back more afraid. `SevenNights off` gives the endless meter.
- **Ambience and startles** from the first night: wind, creaking walls, doors easing open, owls and wolves, knocking
behind you, a crash in the next room, footsteps overhead.
- **Things that are not there:** jump scares, a face inches from yours, the watcher, glimpses - and sometimes they
were real.
- **The Stalker:** hides behind a tree, a wall or a car with only part of it showing, gone after a second's look,
closer every time - then it comes for you.
- **Darker nights, silence before the worst scares, a pounding heart, breathing and a failing flashlight** (on a
game running Dread).
- **Halloween zombies:** Pumpkinheads, Hallowed and Witchlit.
- **Trick-or-treat** in any building, **grave robbing** in cemeteries, coffins whose owners climb out.
- Game V3.1 - V3.4.0 in one build. Server-side - players join with nothing installed and EAC stays on; optional
on players' own games. English, Russian and Simplified Chinese.

Trick-or-treaters.
- From the second night, once a night while you are home, something small in a jack-o'-lantern head comes to your door. You hear it first - rustling in the grass by your walls, a tap at the window and a laugh, a laugh running off - then it knocks and asks for the candy it named at dawn.
- Leave candy in a storage box outside your door. The candy it asked for: it takes one and goes (sometimes leaving something behind) and your dread eases. Other candy: it takes it anyway and plays a small trick. Nothing: it gets mad - smashes the box, waits and kicks your door in when you come near, screams and the dead come, follows you all night, tells the Stalker where you sleep, or slips in through an unlocked door and steals from a box inside.
- Rarer candy from night 5, two kinds from Halloween. It is weak; kill it and the Stalker comes angrier, and your dread jumps.
- No land claim? The 15 m round your bedroll is your base: home for your dread, the trick-or-treaters and the Stalker.
- New console command dread visit <player> [status|want <item>|mad <kind>].
Also in this update (0.6.1, never released on its own):
A run with an end: stronger every night, smarter every time you beat it.
- The Stalker's strength now goes by the night, not by how often you have beaten it - in 0.6.0 it was at full strength (about 2100 health) by night 6. Now: about 600 health on night 5, 750 on night 6, 850 / 1000 / 1250 for Halloween's three phases, about 100 more each night after, with a little more speed and damage each night.
- Beating it makes it smarter instead: from night 6, hurt to half, it goes into smoke and comes at you from another side. Beat it with a gun and next time it does that twice; beat it in melee and next time it comes from behind you as your light dies. It tells you when it remembers.
- Night 14 is the last night: drive it off four times (it calls five Pumpkinheads) and it is over for the rest of the run - and the nights' floor no longer h…

Ten new tricks.
- Opening a container in a building could play four tricks; now it can play fourteen, so a night of looting rarely shows you the same one twice. Each new one has its own line.
- Lost time: the dark comes down, your heart in your ears, and when it lifts you are facing the other way.
- Something grabs your ankle and pulls you down. Something shoves you from behind. Something slaps what you are holding out of your hand (it lands at your feet). "Treat!" - and it is rotting flesh, still warm.
- Knocking from inside the box you just shut, then a giggle - and sometimes what knocked comes out.
- The unlocked doors near you swing open one after another, and there are footsteps in the room with you. A locked door stays shut.
- Knocking, far off; again, nearer; then right behind you - and every door near you slams.
- Another trick-or-treater down the room, watching you from under its pumpkin. Look away and it is gone, giggling behind you.
- One you killed in that building gets back up. It lies again where it fell, as it was (pumpkin head and all), until you see it, come close, or turn your back on it. Sometimes two or three.
- A trick that cannot play where you are is never drawn: nothing rises where nothing died, no doors open where there are none.
Fixed
- The slamming-door scare and the "every door slams" trick really shut doors again on game 3.2 and later - there they swung doors OPEN instead, locked ones too. The creaking door no longer opens a locked door on any version. Doors are now moved only in the building you are in, never your own.