Scarecrow

Change history — every improvement and housekeeping night since release, logged by the AI agents that did the work. Originally created by Claude Opus 4.8.

▶ Play Scarecrow
9 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5

Two new Nights join the campaign, each bringing a foe that changes how you fight — a bell-ringer who makes everything around it faster, and a burrower you cannot touch until it surfaces.

  • The campaign is now fourteen Nights instead of twelve, with the Blight King still waiting at the end. Two new fields to hold: the sour verdigris chapel meadow of The Tolling, and the wet, turned-over ground of The Fallow.
  • Meet the bell-ringer on Night 9. It never comes at you — it hangs back and rings, and every foe caught in the circle it draws gets faster, hits harder and glows gold. It is the first enemy in the game worth chasing past the ones already on top of you.
  • Meet the burrower on Night 12. It dives, and while it is under the soil nothing you own can hurt it — all you get is a mound racing toward your feet and a red ring warning where it will come up. Step off it, then punish what surfaces.
  • Every late foe now gets a line in How to Play, and the page fits better on a phone than it did before.
  • The opening and ending narration no longer counts the Nights aloud, so the story stays right however far the campaign grows.
26 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5

Two brand-new enemies and three new Nights take the campaign from nine nights to twelve — and the narrator finally counts them right.

  • Three new Nights join the campaign, each with its own field: the Hexrow's bruised violet boundary strip, the Gleaning's bare pre-dawn dirt full of blowing chaff, and Crowfall's pitch-black last stand before the King.
  • Meet the hex-post: a rotted witch-stake that never chases you. It plants itself, then grows a creeping fence of thorns around the ground it stands on. Dash the fence for free, or fell the post — but ignore it and it takes the field a circle at a time.
  • Meet the winnower: a hunched thing behind a huge nailed shield. Hit the shield and almost nothing gets through; hit its back and it hurts far more. You cannot kill it by backing away — you have to get around it, or bait the shield-charge it cannot steer and punish it while it recovers.
  • Crowfall is the campaign's one rhythm night. It goes quiet, warns you, and then the murder closes in from every direction at once instead of rolling in from one side.
  • The opening and ending narration were re-recorded on the same voice: the narrator now says twelve nights, and names the Harrow among the things you broke.
  • Nothing in the early campaign changed. Every new night sits in the back half, and no existing night's difficulty was retuned.
  • If you had a run saved on one of the last two nights, the new nights sit in front of them, so Continue will put you back a night or two with your build intact — you have more field to hold than you did yesterday.
19 August 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5

Sharper art on every screen and a sickle aura you can actually read, with the game's memory use cut to about a sixth.

  • All 19 large sprites are now prepared at the size they are actually drawn, which sharpens them and drops the memory they hold from roughly 65 MB to about 10 MB.
  • The ground is built at your display's true pixel density, so it no longer looks soft on high-DPI screens.
  • Particles draw as tapering streaks that follow their own motion instead of round dots.
  • The sickle aura gets a rotating crescent and a flare at the start of the swing — drawn strictly inside the ring that has always been the real reach, so what you see is what hits.
  • No balance or hitbox change of any kind.
5 August 2026ImprovementClaude Sonnet 5

A third boss and two new foe types join the campaign — the field now holds nine Nights instead of eight.

  • A new mid-boss, the Harrow — a colossal iron farm-machine — now stands between Thornfall and the Blight King, summoning fragile bombers and burning a scar across the field with its charge.
  • Two new enemies debut alongside it: the Strawjack, a fragile straw bomb that roots and detonates if you let it get close, and the Gravewisp, a ghost that blinks straight toward you instead of just walking.
  • The campaign is now nine Nights long, with three real bosses to fell along the way.
  • The How to Play screen and the victory summary now reflect the longer campaign and the new boss.
  • Fixed a rare exploit where a Strawjack's harmless touch could accidentally shield you from its own explosion.
26 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5

Scarecrow now plays on a phone — a thumb stick, a DASH button, tappable menus and boon cards, and menu screens that finally fit a landscape phone.

  • Play on a phone: hold it sideways, drag anywhere on the left to move, and tap DASH to dodge. The game asks you to rotate if you're upright.
  • Menus and the Choose Your Boon cards are tapped directly — no fiddly cursor, just press the card you want.
  • On-screen hints now match whatever you're holding: keyboard, controller, or thumbs.
  • Fixed two menu screens that didn't fit a short screen: "How to Play" was previously drawn off the bottom of the main menu and couldn't be opened at all, and the How to Play panel itself ran off the screen.
23 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Added quiet, privacy-safe gameplay analytics (run starts, progress milestones, deaths, and wins) so the studio can see how players actually experience the game.

  • The game now quietly reports how each run goes (nights cleared, wins, and where runs end) so the studio can see how players actually do — no change to how it plays.
17 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Quick Hands now doubles down — plus every boon card finally shows what stacking actually gets you, and fewer shotgun farmers roam the late Nights.

  • Quick Hands is twice the boon it was: each stack now gives +10% attack speed instead of +5%. A maxed Quick Hands takes your scythe from a 0.9 second swing down to 0.53 seconds, and the Rot-Mother dies about 10% faster for it.
  • Every boon card now tells you where you stand: untaken boons are marked NEW, and a boon you already hold shows RANK 1 to 2, 2 to 3, and so on as you deepen it.
  • Rotpod Bombs and Straw Shuriken now say what each extra rank buys you. They always did stack — bombs land twice as often and hit far harder by rank 5, shuriken go from one blade to four — but the cards never said so, so the stack was invisible. It is visible now.
  • A quarter fewer shotgun farmers roam the Long Dark, Thornfall, the Withering and the Blight King's field. The farmers themselves are as dangerous as ever; there are simply fewer of them to walk into.
16 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Weapons now evolve — six two-boon fusions give maxed builds somewhere new to go, and give deliberate builds a real answer to the bosses.

  • Every weapon now has an evolution. Max a weapon and pair it with the right passive boon, and it fuses into something new.
  • The six fusions: your scythes throw a full ring in every direction, your wards fuse into a halo that pulses a nova, your bombs become a three-pod barrage that scatters bomblets, your shuriken pierce everything, your rot trail becomes a choking fog that slows what walks into it, and your graves swallow three foes instead of one.
  • Evolutions are a real build goal, not a lucky roll. Once you have earned one, its card always appears at the next level-up — you can never miss it to a bad draw. It arrives gold and crimson, and names the two boons that made it.
  • The game now tells you what to chase. Max out a weapon and it names the evolution waiting for it and exactly which boon it still wants.
  • Boss fights reward building on purpose. A build that deliberately chases its fusion now cuts a boss down markedly faster, while a thrown-together build still has to work for it. No boss got weaker.
  • Evolutions stick with you. A fused weapon is kept when you continue a saved run.
  • Fixed: an evolved grave that had already swallowed one or two foes could be closed early during heavy waves, quietly robbing it of its remaining bites.
16 July 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5

Boss fights now escalate and fight back — more enemies pour in as a boss fight drags on, the Rot-Mother's spores actually chase you, the after-boss treasure chest can't be snatched away by bad timing, and the farmer's shotgun blasts are bri

  • Boss fights ramp up: regular enemies now pour in faster and faster the longer a boss fight runs, so the Rot-Mother is no longer a slow grind against an empty field
  • The Rot-Mother's spore burst is now fired at you and keeps flying — dodge it or dash through it, but you can't ignore it anymore
  • Fixed: the treasure chest a fallen boss drops can no longer be lost — levelling up right after the kill used to end the night before you could grab it
  • The undead farmer's shotgun pellets are now bright red glowing tracers, clearly visible on every field
15 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Beating the Blight King now pays off with a real cinematic sunrise ending, and falling gets a genuine animated game-over sequence — both narrated.

  • Winning the eight-Night campaign now plays a full cinematic: dawn rising over the last field in gold, the scarecrow standing as the fallen King's feathers scatter, with narrated voiceover, before the results screen.
  • Dying now plays an animated game-over sequence — the scarecrow slumping as the crows descend and the dark closes in — with its own narration, instead of a plain text card.
  • Both new sequences are fully skippable and work on keyboard, mouse, and controller, and respect your mute settings; the results buttons (Try Again / Menu / Return) are unchanged.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Night 1 is now almost entirely crows — the opening night reads as a bird swarm with only the occasional rat, on the owner's live-test call.

  • The First Frost (Night 1) now spawns almost only crows: the mix shifts from roughly 83% crows to about 90% crows, with rats dropped to a rare straggler.
  • The opening night now visibly reads as a swarm of birds rather than a mixed crowd, matching how the first night is meant to feel.
  • Night 1's overall enemy count and pacing are unchanged — it's still the same beginner-friendly on-ramp, just with a different creature mix.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Farmers softened after live-test feedback — smaller shotgun blasts and far fewer of them.

  • Farmer shotgun now fires 3 pellets per blast instead of 5, so its telegraphed shot is easier to sidestep and hits for less burst.
  • Farmers spawn about two-thirds less often on every night they appear (Nights 4, 6, 7, and the finale), so they no longer swarm you in overwhelming numbers.
  • Every other enemy, and the farmer's damage, range, and aim, are unchanged — the rest of the difficulty curve is exactly as before.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Sonnet 5

Fixed the Farmer's shotgun sprite, which was rendering rotated 90 degrees off its actual aim direction.

  • The Farmer enemy now visibly faces and aims the way it's actually shooting, instead of appearing turned sideways.
  • No changes to how the Farmer behaves, its difficulty, or any other enemy — this was a pure visual fix.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Three new late-game enemies and two new weapons join the harvest — shotgun farmers, ground-quaking brutes, chainsaw reapers, a poison trail and graves that swallow foes whole.

  • Three new foes stalk the back half of the campaign: slow shotgun farmers that punish standing still, hulking brutes that leap and slam the ground (dodge the red ring!), and fast chainsaw reapers that shred you up close — introduced one at a time from Night 4 on, and all three at the Night 8 finale.
  • New weapon Blightwake: leave a trail of rot behind you that withers any enemy foolish enough to follow through it.
  • New weapon Gravemaw: open graves beneath the horde that swallow enemies whole and drag them under — and it opens more graves the more you upgrade it.
  • The new foes never appear in the early Nights, so the opening still eases you in; the late Nights hit noticeably harder.
  • Every new enemy attack is telegraphed (a shotgun aim-cone, a red landing reticle) so a sharp player can always dodge it.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

The blight bomb and treasure chest now turn up a bit less often on the field, making them a rarer treat.

  • Blight bombs (the screen-clearing blast pickup) now drop about 25% less often from ordinary kills.
  • Treasure chests found in the field now drop about 25% less often, so a chest feels more like a real find.
  • The grain lodestone pickup and healing hearts are unchanged — they appear exactly as often as before.
  • Guaranteed chests dropped by defeated bosses are unaffected.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

The Rot-Mother and the Blight King hit far harder and take much longer to bring down — both boss fights are now real wars of attrition.

  • Both bosses now have four times as much health, turning each boss night into a genuine, drawn-out showdown instead of a quick burst.
  • The Rot-Mother unleashes her expanding spore-nova bursts noticeably more often, so you have to keep moving throughout the whole fight.
  • The Blight King fans out his feather volleys and launches his telegraphed dive-charge far more frequently, at every stage of the fight, not just when enraged.
  • Both bosses open aggressively now, attacking early instead of stalling for several seconds after they appear.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Owner-tuned combat balance — more enemies every night, far bigger boss swarms that surround you, and slower, more meaningful leveling.

  • About 25% more enemies pour in on every Night, starting right from Night 1 — the whole campaign runs denser.
  • Both bosses now summon much larger broods, and their minions appear all across the field instead of only creeping in from the edges.
  • Leveling up ramps up steeply now: reaching high levels takes noticeably longer, so late-run power is earned, not handed out.
  • The tougher rats and wraiths hit a real trade-off — they take more to kill but drop more grain when they fall.
  • The Sharper Blades upgrade now adds a steady +10% scythe damage per pick.
  • The attack-speed upgrade is toned down to +5% per pick, and the pickup-range upgrade to +25% per pick.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

A behind-the-scenes fairness fix so the field plays the same on every machine, whether it runs slow or fast.

  • Fallen enemies now fade and clear from the field at a steady rate on any hardware, instead of clearing faster or slower depending on your frame rate.
  • On lower-end machines and high-refresh (120Hz+) displays, enemy pressure now matches exactly what 60fps players always experienced, so difficulty is consistent everywhere.
  • No change to the tuned difficulty of any Night — the campaign plays exactly as designed; this only removed a hidden dependence on how fast your screen draws.
14 July 2026HousekeepingClaude Sonnet 5

Fixed a background CPU leak where the game's ambient music generator kept quietly working even after being muted, and made sure a test's temporary file can never accidentally get tracked by git.

  • Muting the music now actually stops the ambience generator instead of just silencing it — it no longer keeps creating and discarding audio nodes in the background every fraction of a second while muted.
  • Cleaned up a loose end in the test setup so a crashed test run can no longer leave a stray temporary file lying around; gameplay and audio output are completely unchanged either way.
14 July 2026HousekeepingClaude Opus 4.8

Housekeeping night: a stranded-at-Dawn bug fixed, dev cheat shortcuts locked out of the public build, and the code put in order — with gameplay proved untouched.

  • Fixed a bug that could strand you at Dawn: if your browser was blocking or had run out of storage, the "Face Night" button silently did nothing and your run was over. It now carries you into the next Night regardless.
  • Debug shortcuts that let anyone jump to the final Night with a maxed-out scarecrow no longer work on the public site — they are now limited to the developers own machines.
  • Tidied away a stray tab-icon error the game was throwing on every load.
  • Rebuilt the game code into clear, separate pieces and quadrupled its automated test coverage, so future changes to the Nights, bosses and boons are far harder to break by accident.
  • No gameplay changes whatsoever: every enemy, Night, boss, boon and drop rate is byte-for-byte identical, verified by replaying all eight Nights and both bosses frame-by-frame against the previous build.
14 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Nights 6-8 now bring genuinely huge waves, both bosses fight back with real attacks, every Night has its own field, and the narrator finally pauses for effect.

  • The late campaign is far harder without touching the early Nights: Nights 6 and 7 now throw around four times as many enemies at you, arriving as telegraphed waves that roll in from one side of the field.
  • Elites appear from Night 4 - rare, bigger, much tougher versions of ordinary foes, marked by a smouldering red ring and worth triple grain.
  • Both bosses hit far harder and now have real attacks to dodge: the Rot-Mother bursts rings of toxic spores, the Blight King throws volleys of feathers and dive-bombs you after winding up. Below 40% health they enrage, speed up and come at you relentlessly.
  • Boss attacks can be dashed through - your dodge now has a real defensive use.
  • All eight Nights are fought on their own field, from frost-bitten stubble to fungal rot, bramble red, ashen grey and scorched black earth.
  • The opening narration has been re-cut with real dramatic pauses, and each line now lands before the next begins.
13 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Scarecrow wakes to a proper cinematic opening, illustrated boon cards, and three new relics that turn a good night into a great one.

  • The intro is now a fully voiced, camera-directed cinematic over the field at twilight — crows wheeling, embers drifting — instead of static text. Press any key to begin, and skip any time.
  • Every "Choose Your Boon" card now has its own hand-styled icon, so you can read your options at a glance.
  • New rare find: a golden lodestone that yanks every scattered grain on the field straight into you in one satisfying sweep.
  • New rare find: a blight bomb that detonates the whole screen of enemies at once — bosses are the only thing left standing.
  • New treasure chests holding 1 to 5 boons back to back; bosses always cough one up, and they turn up in the field now and then too.
10 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Scarecrow's harvest siege gets meaner and longer — eight Nights, a new mid-boss, three new weapons, and a boss health bar you can finally read.

  • The campaign is now eight Nights instead of five, with a brand-new mid-boss, the Rot-Mother, on Night 5 before the Blight King's Night 8 finale.
  • Roughly 25% more enemies pour in each Night, so holding the field takes real work.
  • Three new boons to find: spinning Warding Orbits, bouncing Rotpod Bombs that explode, and lightning-fast Straw Shuriken.
  • The boss health bar is fixed — a clear, always-visible bar at the top that drains as you land hits, with the boss's name and remaining percent.
  • Your unlocked weapons and upgrades now carry over through each Dawn, so a saved run keeps its full arsenal.
6 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8

Scarecrow now plays end to end on a game controller, keyboard and pad side by side.

  • Full controller support: move with the left stick or d-pad, dash with X, confirm with A, back with B, pause with Start, and mute everything with Select
  • The controller drives every screen, including the mid-fight Choose Your Boon pick - highlight a card with the d-pad or stick and press A to take it
  • On-screen button hints now switch between controller and keyboard automatically based on whatever you last touched, so the prompts always match your hands
  • Plug a controller in or out any time: you get a little in-world notice, and unplugging during a Night pauses the game so nothing wanders off on its own