Open world, zone borders, pack spawns, and Hunter XP

The wilderness is now one continuous world. The 12 zones — Sporeveld through Genesis Laboratory — sit edge-to-edge on a single global grid. Walk off the east side of Sporeveld and you step into Miasma Flats. The camera follows you in a fixed 5×5 viewport so the visible map stays the same physical size no matter where you stand. Conduit Gate portals still exist for fast travel between distant zones, but you can also walk the whole planet on foot if you want.

Each zone has visible borders. Tiles render in their own zone's color palette, so the edge of a neighboring zone reads instantly as a different place — no more "my zone looks bigger than it actually is." A thin neighbor-tinted line marks where two zones meet, and the actual walkable crossing tile gets a thicker border plus a directional arrow pointing into the new zone. You always know where the gate is.

Zone crossings are now gated. Each border has a single 1-tile entrance — a chokepoint you have to find. The rest of every zone seam is impassable terrain. Mountains, glacier walls, lava trenches, crystal pillars, antenna spires, bio-vats — every zone has 5–6 themed obstacle clusters scattered through its interior plus a sealed outer ring. Maps feel like real terrain to navigate, not 4×5 rectangles.

Monsters now spawn in packs. A spawn event has a 70% chance of one monster, 25% chance of two, 5% chance of three. Each pack member rolls independently, so you can stumble into a mixed-rarity group. The 8 tiles around you also have a chance to spawn monsters when you move — the world feels alive instead of static, with creatures appearing in your peripheral vision as you walk.

Hunter XP is now contract-only. Off-task kills give zero Hunter XP — Hunter is a dedicated contract skill, not a passive trickle. On-task kills pay 30% of the monster's max HP as Hunter XP (up from 15%). The result: you stay on-pace with your combat level instead of outgrowing every contract within an hour.

Balance pass: 8 zone bosses had their HP almost doubled (HEALTH_BASE 25→80, per-level 3.5→8.0). They were softer than the uber monsters you killed for fragment access — now they out-tank them properly. 20 broken loot table entries in zones 1–4 (legendary_gem, full_heal_potion, etc.) silently dropped nothing for years; they've been replaced with scaled scrap drops. The Pale Reaches L32 damage cliff was smoothed (45→68 base damage on commons) and the HP regression at zones 7–12 (`levelMultiplier: 2 → 3`) was fixed so player progression doesn't soft-reset entering the late game.

Lifeskill tuning: cooking is roughly 2× faster (closer to Melvor's ~150h target), uber Hunt Mark completion bonus bumped 1,800→2,500, and Hunter cancel fees now scale with tier index — canceling a T1 Recon contract costs 30 HM, canceling a T8 Apex contract costs 240 HM. One free cancel per day, plus a 5-minute cooldown on the same tier+type after a cancel.