† DEVOUR

One creature consumes another — or a Devour item — and takes what was worth keeping. The fodder's XP always transfers in full. Grade and mutant status transfer too, but only within the same line. The fodder is destroyed permanently: its uid is burned and nothing recovers it.

Where it lives

• Soul bag: open a creature's sheet — † DEVOUR sits beside DISMANTLE. That creature is the consumer.
• Equipment window: click an equipped creature's slot — † DEVOUR sits under ATTEMPT UPGRADE. The equipped creature is the consumer, and its gains (level, grade → QM, mutant) re-derive the party immediately.
• Soul-socket picker: open a gear slot's soul picker while the socket holds a creature — † DEVOUR is offered there too (D 2026-08-06). The creature socketed as that soul is the consumer, resolved live from soulOv[gi].src, so a socketed soul can be levelled without unsocketing it. An empty socket or a class soul has no source creature, and the button is not shown.
• The panel shows the consumer on the left with the arrow pointing at it, and the fodder slot on the right. Clicking the slot opens the picker.
• The main view fits without scrolling; only the fodder PICKER scrolls, because that one is a list of every eligible creature in the bag and no layout fits 100+ rows. Sized from measurement: the two cards are min-height:276px with 11px padding, the body has 16px 24px padding and a 12px gap, and the preview line is 15px/1.35. Body content is 359–380px against a panel that caps at 593px on a phone, so there is real room before a scrollbar can return. LIVE on release since 2026-08-05 (0.32).
• Why the phone scrolled and the desktop did not. The overlay is position:fixed, which escapes the stage’s CSS zoom, so its max-height:88% resolves against the REAL viewport rather than the 1080-tall stage: 88% of 674px = 593px on a phone against 792px on a 900px desktop. Every other size in this panel is a stage unit. Any fixed-position overlay in this build has the same asymmetry — measure it at a phone viewport, not just at desktop.
• Devour only opens on the floor or in the boss room. During a battle (select through flash) it refuses with NOT DURING A BATTLE. While the panel is open the floor simulation is frozen, like every other window.

What can be consumed

The fodder picker lists the soul bag's visible pool only: creatures and Devour consumables. By construction this means anything equipped, penned or socketed can never be fodder — those are not in the visible pool. Eggs and class souls are never fodder. The consumer is excluded from its own pool; a creature cannot devour itself. Consumables sort to the top of the picker, then creatures in soul-bag order.

Devouring a creature

“Same” means the same LINE (D ruling 2026-08-02). Identity for grade and mutant is Line_ID from creatures.csv, so an S1 and the S3 it advances into ARE the same for this rule: feed a Stage-1 Rare mutant into its own Stage-3 Common and the Stage-3 comes out Rare and mutant. Across different lines only XP moves.

The comparison falls back to the creature row when creatures.csv has no row for a record, so an unknown or forged creature with a blank Line_ID can never read as “same line” as everything else. dvSpeciesId still exists and is still exact-creature identity — it answers a different question and the picker labels off it.

The Devour consumables

Three item types live in the soul bag under the new Consumable category. None of them can be obtained anywhere yet (D ruling) — no drop, no craft, no purchase mints them (still true at 0.93); mkDevourItem is the single mint and nothing calls it in play. A refused consumable is never spent.

Order of operations

• One judgement function (dvJudge) computes the outcome for both the preview line and the execution, so what the panel promises is exactly what commits.
• The commit is one atomic state update: fodder removed (or its stack decremented) and consumer rewritten in the same write. If the world moved underneath — the fodder left the bag, the slot changed occupants — the updater bails and nothing is paid.
• The consumer is resolved live on every read: a bag consumer must still be in the bag, a slot consumer is whatever the slot holds now.
• Each successful devour is saved at once. The panel stays open so the player can keep feeding the same creature. (It also wrote an adventure-log line until that log was retired on 2026-10-22.)

Edge cases and consequences

• Advancement is not triggered from the panel. Devoured XP can carry a creature past its advancement level, but the advancement scene plays where it always does: a party creature advances on its next victory; a bag creature advances once it is equipped and wins. The XP is banked either way.
• A grade raise on an equipped consumer changes its quality multiplier at once — the party re-derives and the power number moves.
• Devour only ever removes from the bag, so the inventory guard is not in play — no path here returns an item.
• Stacked consumables decrement quantity; the last one leaves the bag.

Integrity

A creature-on-creature devour is the server’s (since 0.89, 2026-10-23): the game asks the devour door, the server judges the pair from its own records — grade and mutant status pass along the line and only upward, the XP is the fodder’s recorded XP, and a devour that would change nothing is refused — then spends the fodder and rewrites the consumer. The game shows the server’s answer, never its own guess; a refusal or a lost connection consumes nothing and says so, and a retry on the same fodder replays the first answer. A locked creature, or one in a pen, a party slot or a soul socket, is never fodder. The three consumables still resolve on the client, because nothing mints them; the day one becomes obtainable it goes through the same door. Nothing of economic value is created here: a devour only concentrates what the account already holds into fewer creatures.

Engine reference

The fodder picker shows what it cannot take

Creatures that are equipped (a party slot or a soul socket) or breeding (in a pen) appear in the fodder list, greyed, badged EQUIPPED or BREEDING, and cannot be selected. Clicking one says why rather than doing nothing.

• They sit after the selectable creatures. Sorting them in among the rest would push a creature the player can feed below three they cannot, on the one screen whose entire job is picking one.
• They are shallow copies, never the live records. Nothing that reaches this list can be fed, but a copy cannot be fed by accident either.

The report that prompted this was a name collision, and the measurement is worth keeping. It was raised as “it is showing mons currently in breeding as options”. Compared by uid on the reporting save, zero penned, equipped or socketed creatures were in the list — penning and equipping both splice the creature out of the bag, which is exactly why isPennedItem() and isEquippedMon() can honestly return false. The account held three creatures called Tempest and two called Ingot; one of each was penned, and the rest were ordinary bag creatures. What the player could not do was tell them apart.

So the filter that was asked for already existed. Showing the unavailable creatures greyed is what fixes the actual confusion, and it is worth more than the filter: a list that silently omits a creature cannot explain where it went.

Client: dvBlockedRecs(), dvChoices() in play/app.js. Probe: tools/probe_devsel.py — BEFORE 4/4 (asserting the creatures are absent entirely), AFTER 7/7, matching by uid rather than by name.

The fodder picker is ordered, and it offers only fodder that can change the consumer

Build 0.47. Two changes to the same list: it has an order, and it has a usefulness filter.

Ordering — Level > Grade > line > stage > gender > rarity

The usefulness filter

The list now offers only fodder that can actually change the consumer. The predicate is the existing dvJudge, which returns not-ok exactly when xp, grade and mut are ALL absent — the same three payouts the 2026-08-06 refusal is built on.

• It is the same judgement the preview and the execution use, so the list can never offer something the confirm step would then refuse. One function, three surfaces, no second opinion about what a devour pays.
• It is applied only once a consumer exists. With no consumer selected, dvJudge answers “THE CREATURE IS GONE” for every candidate, so filtering on it before that point would empty the window instead of filling it.

Consequence worth recording: the filter made “no rows at all” the wrong empty-state test. The common empty state is now a list holding only blocked cards — the equipped and breeding creatures that exist to explain where a creature went and that can never be picked. A row-count test reads that list as populated and stays silent on a screen the player cannot act on. The empty message now fires on nothing SELECTABLE, not on nothing at all.

What a devour pays — the full set, for completeness

Correction to earlier text on this page. What can be consumed above ends “Consumables sort to the top of the picker, then creatures in soul-bag order.” The soul-bag order half is stale as of 0.47 — creatures are ordered by the comparator above. The sentence is left as written; this page is append-only.

Changelog

• 2026-11-03 — codex review (dfmc-client lane codexreview-a; D 2026-11-03 “review the codex, clean it up, update whatever needs updating”). Codex only. The Integrity section still described a client-side devour awaiting a “Phase 2b” gate; it now describes the server door that has judged every creature devour since 0.89 (the 2026-10-01 entry below), with the consumables noted as the one client-side remainder. The Blood Pellet XP binds to economy_params.csv Devour_Pellet_XP rather than naming a client constant that no longer exists. The adventure-log line is gone with the log (retired 2026-10-22). No game code changed.
• 2026-10-23 — hardcode-3: the Blood Pellet XP is economy_params.csv Devour_Pellet_XP (dfmc-client lane hardcode-3; D: “The csvs need to be the source of all truth. Hardcoded NEVER.”). Held for release 0.90. 1,000 XP, still the placeholder (the item is unobtainable). No number changed. A pin that predates the row keeps the old value and names it (never a refusal); it reaches players when DATA_PIN advances and the bake runs. Gate tools/probe_hardcode3.mjs 33/72 → 72/72.
• 2026-10-01 — the devour is the server's, and the item lock blocks it (Rulings board card grades, row lockdevour). LIVE on release since 2026-10-23 (0.89). The devour door: a creature-on-creature devour now asks /api/devour. The server judges the pair from its own ledger rows: grade and mutant pass along the line and only upward, XP is the fodder's ledger XP, and a devour that pays nothing is refused. The server spends the fodder row and writes the consumer row. The client plays the server's answer and never its own. A refusal or a lost connection consumes nothing and says so. A retry on the same fodder replays the first answer. After the wipe (GRADE_FREEZE_EPOCH), a fodder the save door adopted without a grant (unsourced) is refused. Item lock: a locked creature is no longer offered as fodder, the devour step refuses one, and the door refuses a fodder that the stored save marks locked or that sits in a pen, a party slot or a soul socket. The Devour consumables still run on the client, because nothing mints them. Probe: tools/probe_grades.mjs 7/21 → 21/21.
• 2026-09-30 — review fixes F162, F163, F164 (client, lane P). On dev. F162: a fodder that lives in the base bag is taken out before the devour commits; when the commit then failed (the consumer moved or changed underneath), the fodder stayed destroyed and the consumer unchanged, and the next save made it permanent. A devour that does not commit now puts the fodder back (a stack gets its count back) and says THE TARGET MOVED — NOTHING WAS CONSUMED, which is now true. F163: a devour into a socketed soul’s creature now re-derives the party, like every other soul-slot change. F164: the preview said different species — only XP transfers where the rule is the LINE; it says different line, and the lead paragraph above no longer says “same species”. Gate tools/probe_review_lanep.mjs.
• 2026-09-30 — review drift fixes: F166, F167. Codex only. The page caught up with the build; no rule changed. F166: the third entry point, DEVOUR on the soul-socket picker (dvOpenSoul, D 2026-08-06), is now listed under Where it lives and in the engine reference. F167: the 2026-09-25 entry below says the devour theatre still sat after the stage; Q11 (0.87, see Client shell 2026-09-28) has since moved the theatre, the breed toast, the dismantle-done panel and the breed message inside #vxbStage, so the theatre is stage-sized like the window.
• 2026-09-25 — the devour window is one size at every zoom, resolution and aspect ratio (#985, D). Shipped in 0.87. D’s rule: the window must always be the same size, and the same size relative to the rest of the game’s UI, whatever the player’s zoom, resolution or aspect ratio. The client shell is a fixed 1920×1080 stage scaled as one piece to the viewport (system-client-shell), and every window inside it inherits that rule for free. The devour window did not sit inside it: it was built on 2026-07-30, the stage scale arrived on 2026-08-05, and the window was left after the stage in the unscaled wrapper — so its 1020px were screen pixels, its 94% / 88% caps read the real viewport, its arrow was 7% of the viewport width and its fodder page was 3 to 8 rows by viewport. Measured against the stage: 53% of the game’s width at 1920×1080, 84% at 1423×687 and 116% — wider than the whole game — at 1067×487, where it also cut off fodder rows.
  Now the window lives inside the stage, 1020 stage pixels wide with the arrow a fixed 66, so it is the same fraction of the game at every size (0.531 of the stage width, gated at 1920×1080, 1423×687, 1067×487 and the 390×668 floor). The fodder page is a constant seven rows — not eight, because the browser snaps each 1px border to a whole device pixel under scale, which at the phone floor is ~5 stage pixels a border and pushed eight rows plus the pager past the list box; seven never reach the height cap, so the window is the same height everywhere too. The #787 rule stands: the list never scrolls and never clips, and the gate measures the last row inside its box at every size. The devour theatre (the staged sequence above) and a few small overlays still sit after the stage; D has asked for the rule game-wide, and that is a separate decision.
• 2026-09-14 — devour is a staged sequence, and this page had never described it (#887 / #787, D). LIVE on release since 2026-09-14 (0.80). The outcomes resolve one at a time in a fixed order — experience, then grade, then mutant — so a devour that pays all three reads as three beats rather than one sentence. The food is drawn in and the consumer reacts; the experience beat streams motes into it and the level line counts up, stopping on a level-up flash only if the level actually changed; the grade beat ignites the frame in the new grade’s colour and the grade word replaces the old one with a hard snap; the mutant beat washes over last and the art swaps to the mutant variant in place. Items reuse the same beats — a pellet plays experience only, a mutagen the mutant only, an essence the grade only — and there is no separate art path for them. A tap skips to the end state; nothing is decided by the theatre, because the judge banks the outcome before the first frame.
  It was specified on 2026-09-08 and shipped on 2026-09-13 with no creature in it. The wiring asked for the consumer’s art through a helper that does not exist, so the url was always empty and all three treatments played as coloured rings around an empty box; the mutant art was passed as the empty string outright, so the swap could never happen. Its gate passed 9/9 the whole time because it read an attribute rather than the paint — that gate now asserts the computed animation and the painted art, and a second gate measures pixels, urls and animations for every beat. This page carried no description of the sequence at all until today, which is the other half of how it went unnoticed: nothing to check the build against.
• 2026-08-10 — the fodder picker is ordered, and it offers only fodder that can change the consumer (shipped in 0.47). Order is Level > Grade > advancement line > stage > gender > rarity, ending on a name compare so it is total: line is alphabetical because it groups a family together rather than ranking one, stage ascends within a line, and rarity is last because it does not affect what a devour pays. This is a different key order from the party equipment picker (Level > Grade > Rarity > Codex # > Gender) and the two are deliberately separate comparators — they must not be unified without the designer's word. The usefulness filter uses the existing dvJudge, which returns not-ok exactly when xp, grade and mut are all absent, and which is the same judgement the preview and the execution use, so the list can never offer something the confirm step would refuse; it is applied only once a consumer exists, because with no consumer dvJudge answers “THE CREATURE IS GONE” for everything and the window would empty instead of fill. Consequence: “no rows at all” is no longer the right empty-state test — the common empty state is a list holding only blocked (equipped/breeding) cards, so the empty message now fires on nothing SELECTABLE. New sections above.
• 2026-08-07 — the fodder picker shows equipped and breeding creatures, greyed and badged (LIVE on release since 2026-08-07 (0.39)). Report #48 said they were being offered as options; measured by uid, they were not — the account simply held three creatures of the same name. They are now shown and labelled so the player can tell which is which, and a click on one says why it cannot be taken. New section above. Verified 7/7.
• 2026-08-06 — a devour that pays nothing is refused. LIVE on release since 2026-08-08 (0.42). There are exactly three payouts: experience, grade and mutant. If none of them moves, the transaction had no content — and until now it went through anyway, destroying the fodder for literally nothing and reporting success. A freshly hatched creature carries zero experience, so feeding one across lines, where grade and the mutant flag cannot transfer at all, was the ordinary way to hit it. The devour is now refused with “THERE IS NOTHING TO BE GAINED HERE” and the fodder survives.
  The refusal is deliberately narrow. Experience alone still pays. A grade rise still pays even when the fodder carries no experience, and so does a mutant passing on. And GRADE HELD is untouched: that is a real devour which paid experience and merely failed to raise the grade, so it still goes through and still says so. The consumables were already correct and are not changed — a mutagen refuses a creature that is already a mutant, an essence refuses unless it outranks, and a pellet's experience falls back to the standard value so it can never be zero.
  Verified: tools/probe_dvworthless.py 8/8, of which six assertions exist to prove the cases that must still work rather than the one that must not.
• 2026-08-05 — the devour window no longer scrolls unnecessarily (D). The fixed-content view needed 442px against 440px available on a phone, so a scrollbar appeared on a panel that plainly had room. Card padding, body padding, the column gap and the preview line were trimmed from measurement, taking the content to 359–380px. The fodder picker still scrolls and should — it is a list. Probe: tools/probe_devourfit.py, which measures all three panel states at desktop AND phone (BEFORE 8/8, AFTER 10/10).
• 2026-08-02 — grade and mutant now ride the LINE, not the creature row (D ruling). Previously dvJudge compared dvSpeciesId (the DFMC image id), so feeding a Stage-1 into its own Stage-3 passed XP and nothing else — which is what a player means by “Devour is bugged”: the grade they fed in vanished. Now compared on Line_ID via dvLineId(). XP behaviour is unchanged, and cross-line devouring is unchanged.
• 2026-07-30 — page created with the system (D spec, same day). Devour ships on dev: creature-into-creature consumption with full XP transfer, same-species-only grade and mutant transfer, the three unobtainable consumables (Blood Pellet, Mutagen, graded Essences of Power), both entry points, the battle-phase gate, the atomic commit and the DEVOUR log event. Blood Pellet XP is a 1,000 placeholder pending D's number.