CompanionRM

0.4.2: Paths and salvage 🌳

Leveling up stopped being a staircase you only watch. Every twenty levels now earns a point to spend on an upgrade tree, so the skills you actually use grow the way you want them to, and a veteran companion past its fifth Rebirth stops choosing at all. The Station learned its sixth trade, melting worn gear back into the materials that made it, on demand or on its own. The pack panel shows what each companion has ready. And a handful of spells that had been quietly failing for a long time now land. Saves from 0.2.x onward carry over untouched.

🌳 An upgrade tree for the skills you use

Levels gave skills but never a decision. Now every twenty levels earns an upgrade point, and every Rebirth grants two more, to spend on the skills the companion already knows. Each one offers up to three paths: Power for what it hits with, Reach for how far or how wide it lands, and Cadence for how soon it comes back around. Two ranks each, and normally you commit to a single path per skill, so a Fireball built for damage is a different Fireball from one built to fly again sooner. Every path spells out exactly what it does on that particular skill, because more projectiles is true of a fireball and false of a trident, and hovering a skill shows what it does in the first place. The tree opens from the Skills tab, respec is free and always available, and the points survive a Rebirth: the count is measured by the highest level ever reached, so starting over never costs you an upgrade. Not every skill takes every path, and the universal ones like calling a friend stay untouched, because there is nothing honest to improve there.

🏆 Mastery for the long haul

After five Rebirths the one path per skill rule lifts entirely: a veteran companion can stack Power and Cadence on the same skill, so a late game pile of points always has somewhere to go. And the Rebirth badge on the name tag is now a roman numeral in the color of its tier, in the language the game already speaks.

♻️ Recycling at the Station

The Station's sixth service, unlocked at level forty, melts worn armor, tools and weapons back into the materials that made them, reading the actual crafting recipe so the answer is always the honest one, netherite and chainmail included. Feed it coal and it works on demand, or hand the job to the companion and it will recycle on its own using stamina instead of fuel, sweeping up the junk your adventures leave behind. The yield is a fair fraction, never the full price, and a filter screen lets you say exactly what it may touch, with a switch to allow everything at once. It will never melt anything it is wearing, nor a spare it would upgrade into.

⏱️ Skills you can see, ready or not

Each line of the pack panel now carries the companion's skills as a strip of small icons: bright when ready, darkened with the seconds left while recharging. It answers the question the playtest kept asking, which is what this one can actually do, and it has its own switch in the speech settings if you would rather keep the panel slim. The Skills tab grew tooltips to match, so hovering any skill tells you what it does, whether it fires on its own or is always on, and what level unlocks it.

🔧 Spells that finally land

Several long standing faults surfaced while building the tree, and all of them are fixed. The Spell Lancer's Lightning Cast was silently blocked in melee and almost never fired. Three casts, the lightning, the Cataclysmic Trident and the Mystic's levitation, gave up and burned their cooldown when the target died mid chant, instead of turning to the next foe. The Elementalist's Fireball never showed on the cooldown strip because the row cut off at six icons. And the brewing stand could shuffle its own contents on a reload, an old bug found while fixing the same fault in the new recycling bench.