Two of the game's oldest screens finally got the treatment the rest of the game grew into.
The character sheet is now an illuminated ledger, with your character's name in gold across the top, a live portrait of your actual geared body, and the four attributes as big readable medallions. When you have points to spend, the allocation buttons are right on the medallions. Below, offense and defense sit in proper cards, and the four resistances draw as bars filling toward their cap, so "how close am I to safe" is a glance instead of arithmetic. Every number still explains its full derivation on hover. The ledger inherited that part and kept it.
The character select became a vigil. Your characters line up as a rail of cards showing the name, the calling and how far into the dark each one got. The selected one stands in a breathing candle-glow wearing their actual gear, since that screen has always shown the character itself rather than a painting. Fallen hardcore characters rest as dimmed red memorials. One gold button at the bottom says what it has always meant: ENTER THE DARK.
The other half of the round is invisible, and that's on purpose. A long, adversarial pass went hunting for every way a clever player could cheat the economy with the tricks every game in this genre has been burned by. It turned up ways to duplicate an item by dragging it in two directions at once, and ways to split one item between the stash and a back pocket. Vendors restocked their shelves if you walked out and back in. Crafting results could be un-happened by killing the game at the right moment, and backup files could resurrect a dead hardcore hero behind the game's back.
There were dozens of these doors, and they're now closed. Moves commit atomically, the shared stash keeps a ledger that notices tampering, shelves stay bought, crafts stay crafted, and permadeath means dead. If two copies of the game open the same character, the second one is politely told it's a spectator. When all of this works, you'll never see any of it.
Your gear is yours. You earn it once and own it once, and you can only lose it the fair way.