Deliverable #40 · 2026-10-24

Dying — lava burns, your bag spills, and you wake at home

epic: mvp-definition-of-done delivered

A player wading into lava, flames rising round her legs — Into the lava — flames come up round you

A player lying dead at the lava's edge, her chest set down on the grass and her bag spilled round it — The chest set down, the bag spilled round you

Kris, 24 October, by voice: “if your health bar gets down to zero then you can now die.” The MVP’s “ability to die” had been one line; his spoken spec that evening is the whole of it, and it is written into issue #27.

What a player meets. Lava hurts everywhere, whatever an Area’s own rules — “between four and eight cells of lava would kill you”: a step onto it costs four of your twenty, standing in it four more every half second, so the fifth cell kills. Flames come up round you while you are in it. When you die you lie down (a burst of flames if it was the lava). What you carry drops on the cell in front of you, or the next one round, or — nowhere will take it, or this is a mini-game — “it just kind of breaks apart”, with whatever was in it. Your bag spills on your cell and the cells round you, three things to a cell, further out if it needs room: anyone may pick it up, you too if you get back in time — and what lands on lava burns, “not retrievable by anyone”. Then the screen goes black, and you get up off the ground at home. Health heals one every thirty seconds (potions and food come later); only dying fills it, and a door no longer does. Golem Hollow and Cinder Hollow keep playing when you die there. The fire hounds bite three times as hard, on you and on the Moon Well, and take three times the beating. And the Area setting “a player who was last here comes back…” is gone: you always come back where you were, unless nobody may stand there now, and then you are sent home.

On Kris’s phone, the same evening: “the dying is excellent!” — and the second death went black and stayed black. The server had hung up on the phone a moment too soon after telling it to go home (a cleanup meant for connections that never said hello swept a departing one), so the phone never heard where to go. Fixed on both ends and proved by a test.

Live on spellgrove.com and in the Android build v58, and sent to both stores as 0.2.2.

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