Devlog: Elemental Runes, Pets, and Combat Fluidity

This build is the first time the elemental rune system exists end to end. Runes drop dormant: an Ash Rune is just a warm stone until you carry it to an Elemental Altar and spend an Elemental Core to awaken it. From there the chain climbs: Ash, Ember, Flame, Magma, Solar, and finally Inferno. Each step raises the elemental damage the socketed weapon deals and changes the visual signature of your attacks, so a Flame-tier greatsword reads very differently from a Solar one at a glance. We wanted awakening to feel like a small ceremony rather than a menu click, so altars are physical places in the world and the awakening itself is interruptible if the area is contested.

Pets landed alongside them. Right now a pet is a persistent companion entity owned by the server, not a client-side decoration. It has its own navigation, its own follow distance, and it survives zone transitions without being respawned. That last part sounds trivial and absolutely was not, since handing an entity between two zone processes while keeping its state authoritative took most of a week. The first pets are utility-focused (loot pickup, small out-of-combat regeneration), with combat pets planned once the aggro table refactor lands.

Finally, combat fluidity. We added an input buffer window at the tail of every attack animation, so queued inputs no longer get eaten when you press slightly early. Animation cancelling on dodge is now consistent across all weapon types, and we shaved roughly 60 ms off the perceived delay between click and swing by starting the hit-detection window on the animation's commit frame instead of on the server acknowledgement. Combat should feel noticeably less sticky. Tell us in Discord if any weapon still feels heavy in the wrong way.