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[ Latest Cogmind Release Notes: Feb 2026, "Unchained More" ]

Category Archives: Design

Rebalancing Cogmind

A decade of development into a huge project is almost unavoidably going to accumulate some amount of cruft. Mechanics that are never quite worth taking advantage of, items that haven’t lived up to their potential, or were later superseded by other options but remained unchanged, or even long-term experiments that were included at some point […]

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Special Commands Menu Design

For years now I’ve been planning to eventually create a menu for accessing Cogmind’s lesser-used “special commands,” features not only requiring the keyboard, but even all assigned to Shift-Alt key combos. So these rarely needed (but still sometimes useful) features were already pretty clearly grouped together as a unit by their annoying modifier, but ideally […]

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Maps Between Maps, and DSFs

I’ve described a few times (most recently when introducing Cargo Convoys) how Cogmind’s world is divided into two primary types of maps: main areas and branches. There is technically a third category serving special purposes, one that after many years is once again growing as part of Beta 11. This other category is what I […]

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Design Overhaul 4: Fabrication 2.0

The updates to Cogmind’s fabrication system aren’t exactly an “overhaul” to the extent seen with our other Beta 11 modifications in this series, and not like the one back in 2016 when the process was greatly simplified from its original early alpha form. As you’ll see this is more of a rebalancing, though it does […]

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Map Comments and Log Notes

Back in August I was watching the first Tone-MTF combo stream, and listening to them repeatedly strategize aloud so they could collaborate brought more than the usual planning talk to the forefront of the conversation, through which I noticed the occasional potential for manual map comments to be helpful. Very few roguelikes support freely adding […]

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