The Conduit: stripped back, stakes raised

The Conduit had mutators, path choices, essence buff purchases, permanent upgrade trees, and rest floors. It also had a bug where dying on floor 37 dropped you back to floor 1. We fixed the bug and removed everything else.

The new design: descend as deep as you can. Die, and your progress is preserved — next run starts where you fell. The only variable is how far you can push. No modifiers to pick, no resource economy to manage inside the run. Just you, the floor, and the thing waiting on it.

Rest floors are gone because you can already heal at The Wreck. Heading back to the surface is a real choice with a real cost — one of your daily descents. Sectors still divide the Conduit into 25-depth chunks, and clearing a sector gate boss still unlocks it as a future starting point. That structure stays. Everything else was complexity that didn't add decisions.

Rewards scale with depth. The further you go, the better the materials and essences. There's nothing to optimize except survival.