Last night two characters nobody controls walked out of the Pilgrims' Camp and into the graveyard. Today they stopped dying like fools.
When the self-playing pilgrims first hit the real game, they died in loops — marching back into the same monster pack the instant they respawned, feeding the same killers over and over until the run was a treadmill. Watching that (in the logs, and over our shoulder) taught us exactly where a fresh, under-geared hero gets ground down. So we taught the pilgrims the things an experienced player does without thinking.
They learned to quit a losing fight — when health is low and the healing flask is dry, break off and run, dodge-rolling through the monsters in the way instead of trading blows to the death. They learned to come home smart: open a town portal and take it, rather than jogging all the way across the map to the camp gate — and when a portal is already standing, always step through it. They learned to read the ground: a witch's lingering gas, a miniboss holed up in a ruin with tight corridors that spawn more enemies the deeper you push. Now, faced with a cramped ruin, a pilgrim backs off and pulls the pack out toward open, already-cleared ground — your side of the fight — before committing. Inside the cathedral, it holds near the door and lets the horde come to it instead of charging in and waking the whole room.
The point of all this isn't the bots — it's what they find. Every death now records exactly what killed it, and a clear picture is emerging: in the early game, witches (and the clouds they leave behind) and the roaming minibosses account for the lion's share of a low-level pilgrim's deaths. That's real, measured data about where the demo's difficulty spikes — the kind of thing that used to take a week of our own playtesting to feel out, now accumulating overnight for us to tune against.
They found a bug we'd have missed, too. There's a small flight of stairs up to a plateau where the last miniboss waits before the cathedral — and the pilgrims simply couldn't climb it, stalling at the base every single lap. Digging in, the steps turned out to be too tall to walk up at all. A hero, human or otherwise, was never getting up there the intended way. That's now top of the fix list — exactly the sort of quiet, run-ending snag a tireless tester surfaces and a busy designer walks right past.
The pilgrims are still grinding, camp to graveyard to cathedral, getting a little wiser each build. The goal is unchanged: the day beating the Dark Lord unattended becomes routine, and every night ends with a report on everything they found.