Enemy Bestiary - UQcsse3200/2026-studio-3 GitHub Wiki
For architecture, unlock rules, persistence and integration details, see the Bestiary System page.
The game currently has six enemies across three tiers: three normal enemies, two elites and one boss.
Every enemy follows its own fixed routine. During battle an intent icon appears above each enemy, telling you in advance what it will do on its next turn — attack, defend, or inflict a status effect on you. Read the icon, learn the routine, and you can decide whether to spend cards on burst damage this turn or hold back and block.
Some enemies also watch how you play — if you spend several turns attacking without defending, or dump a hand in one turn, they will change what they do about it.
Stats: ❤️ Health ｜ ⚔️ Attack ｜ 🛡️ Armour
❤️ 24 ｜ ⚔️ 6 ｜ 🛡️ 0
Lesser Shades once carried messages between the halls of the sanctum. The corruption scattered the words they carried, and now they cannot tell which order is true. One moment they attack, the next they hide.
The most basic minion. Every turn it flips a coin between attacking and defending, with attacks slightly more likely.
No armour and a small health pool make it the easiest enemy to deal with. The only nuisance is that it is unpredictable — you line up a burst and it happens to defend, you play it safe and it swings at you.
❤️ 30 ｜ ⚔️ 5 ｜ 🛡️ 2
Bone Crawlers were set to tend the sanctum's ossuary and keep the bones of the faithful safe. Fallen, they wear those bones as armour and guard them from everyone. A Bone Crawler stays behind its plates for as long as it can, and strikes only when the shell is thick enough.
A four-turn cycle: defend, attack, defend, defend.
It spends most of its time defending, gaining 5 armour each time on top of the 2 armour it starts with. At 5 attack it is barely a threat to your health, but the armour stacks up layer by layer and becomes very hard to punch through if the fight drags on.
❤️ 34 ｜ ⚔️ 7 ｜ 🛡️ 1
The acolytes kept the sanctum's rites. This one still reads the old hymns from its book, but every word now feeds the corruption. It watches you closely, and each ward it raises is stored and poured into its next spell.
A two-turn cycle: banks armour on odd turns, attacks on even turns.
The catch is that its attack deals base attack plus its current armour, and the armour is not spent when it attacks. So the thicker its armour, the harder it hits, and the armour stays to keep growing.
Left alone it opens at 7 damage and climbs into the twenties within a few cycles.
It also studies your deck. If you commit to attacking — four or more attack cards, and more than twice as many attacks as skills — it stops trading and banks armour instead, which makes its next hit land even harder.
❤️ 40 ｜ ⚔️ 16 ｜ 🛡️ 0
Once a knight of the god's host, sworn to bring wars to an end. The corruption turned that oath inside out: now the fight is all it wants, and it has cast off its armour to have more of it. Its plate is riven with cracks it will not mend, and the light in them turns red when it is badly wounded — that is when it is most dangerous.
Enrages at low health. Once its health drops below half it enters an enraged state, and from then on every attack deals double damage — 16 becomes 32. The enrage never wears off; once it triggers it lasts until the knight dies.
No armour and not much health, but 16 base attack is the highest in the roster, and a single 32-damage hit after the enrage takes a large chunk out of you at once. A textbook glass cannon.
It also punishes a careless opening. Go three turns without gaining any block and it enrages immediately, at full health — you do not get to race it down before the double damage starts.
❤️ 72 ｜ ⚔️ 10 ｜ 🛡️ 5
The Tomb Guardian swore an oath to keep vigil over the sealed tombs. It still keeps that oath, long after it has forgotten why. It draws every attack towards itself, and when its shield breaks, it answers in kind.
Breaks and retaliates. A three-stage cycle:
- While it has armour: a normal attack for 10
- The moment its armour is depleted: it retaliates for double damage, 20, and prepares to restore its shield
- The following turn: it defends, recovering 5 armour
Then it returns to normal attacks and repeats indefinitely.
Taunt. After every two ordinary attacks it taunts for 2 turns. While the taunt is up, your single-target attacks can only be aimed at the Guardian — area cards and anything you play on yourself still work normally, and the taunt lifts the moment it dies.
The toughest non-boss enemy in the game. It turns breaking its shield from a reward into a trap — you strip the armour, feel like you are finally hitting the enemy itself, and instead eat a double-damage hit while it puts the shield straight back up next turn.
❤️ 150 ｜ ⚔️ 14 ｜ 🛡️ 8
The god's last champion stands at the summit of the sanctum. It was told to let no one pass, and it is still following that order, still certain it is doing right. The corruption settled in it longest, and the sanctum came to call it by the corruption's name: Vitium. It fights in phases — steel, then walls of stone, then magic that silences your hand — and it never steps back. Breaking it is the only way to set it free. The name was never its own. It was only the first to be given it.
The only enemy that does not follow a fixed routine. Its behaviour is driven by two layers, phase and pressure, and each turn it picks one action from a weighted random draw.
Three phases, advancing by remaining health and never going backwards — healing the boss will not return it to an earlier phase:
| Phase | Trigger | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Phase One | ❤️ above 65% | Defensive; only attacks and defends |
| Phase Two | ❤️ below 65% | Turns aggressive; starts inflicting status effects on you |
| Enraged | ❤️ below 30% | Attacks frequently, and its status effects get nastier |
It counts your cards. Dump four or more in a single turn and it will reach for Silence on its next move — the usual three-turn cooldown still applies, so emptying your hand two turns in a row is not punished twice.
When an enemy is about to inflict one, its intent icon shows which effect is coming and for how many turns. Once it lands, the same icon appears under your health and energy with the turns remaining.
- Silence — you cannot play cards
- Taunt — your single-target attacks must be aimed at the taunting enemy
- Damage on card play — every card you play costs you health