Echo Relics 0.2.1 Playtest Repair Description

This repair remains part of 0.2.1 rather than a separate 0.2.2 release. It addresses issues found during deployed playtesting across exploration, elite events, crafting routes, village density, and cache visibility.

Exploration and Ruins

• Increased natural Echo Ruin discovery pressure so players are less likely to explore for a long time without finding any ruin content.
• Kept Armament Ruins less common than Echo Ruins while making them a reliable natural-generation candidate instead of an almost invisible feature.
• Relaxed small terrain-height requirements and added support blocks under raised ruin platforms, reducing placement failures on uneven surfaces.
• Added nearby-content guarantees: if a player has no Echo content within roughly 200 blocks, the system actively scans loaded chunks for a wilderness cache candidate.
• Added nearby-ruin guarantees: if a player has no ruin within roughly 240 blocks, the system scans a wider loaded area for an Echo or Armament Ruin candidate.
• Kept local density caps so one area does not turn into a dense ruin cluster.

Wilderness Echo Caches

• Increased small wilderness Echo cache visibility as an exploration aid.
• Added brighter surface markers around small caches using Echo Lanterns, purple glass, amethyst, and calcite.
• Added clearer cache hint text so players know to look for violet markers.
• Added glow particles and a louder chime when a cache appears.
• Added a close-range discovery message when players approach a small Echo cache.

Nighttime and Stationary Exploration

• Natural ruin and cache sampling no longer depends only on player movement.
• Added a short timed sampling fallback, so waiting at night, managing inventory, or staying near a combat area can still refresh generation checks and send hints.

Elite Events

• Fixed cases where an elite warning could appear but no visible elite arrived.
• Elite events now retry after the warning if no safe spawn point is found.
• Spawn searching now uses more attempts, a closer event range, a lower spawn guard, and a loose safe-surface fallback before giving up.

Crafting and Progression

• Added missing progression recipes for boss_echo_cache, final_echo_thread, echo_core_fragment, refined_weapon_token, and weapon_cache_token.
• Improved the bridge between Armament materials, weapon cache tokens, boss materials, and later cache progression.

World Exploration Support

• Increased vanilla village structure density by lowering village structure-set spacing while keeping biome-specific village rules unchanged.

Build Evidence

• Repaired 0.2.1 build log: docs/user_qa/results/62_0_2_1_playtest_repair_build.log
• Elite visible-spawn build log: docs/user_qa/results/63_0_2_1_elite_forced_visible_spawn_build.log
• Ruin density-cap build log: docs/user_qa/results/64_0_2_1_ruin_density_cap_build.log
• Ruin/cache density rebalance build log: docs/user_qa/results/65_0_2_1_ruin_cache_density_rebalance_build.log
• Ruin guarantee sweep build log: docs/user_qa/results/66_0_2_1_ruin_guarantee_sweep_build.log
• Night/cache visibility build log: docs/user_qa/results/67_0_2_1_night_cache_visibility_build.log