Every find below is in the files you can download today, checked against both clients — StS1's final build and StS2 v0.107.1.
StS1 (frozen 2022) — five cards that never registered
The card library marks exactly 5 of 375 cards as unregistered:
- Calm and Wrath — COMMON/COLORLESS rows for what became Watcher stances, not cards. The mechanic's prototype shipped as dead card rows.
- Discipline (RARE/PURPLE) and
Unraveling (RARE/PURPLE) — Watcher-era designs cut before release;
Discipline's row is even named
DEPRECATED Disciplineinternally. - Impulse (UNCOMMON/BLUE) — a Defect card that never shipped.
Plus two more ghosts: the Apology Slime (an Exordium monster row with no moves and no localized name in any of the 25 locales) and the achievement "Energy is Overrated" — printed in every locale's achievement grid, yet the build contains no unlock path for it at all (42 literal + 4 dynamic call sites cover exactly the other 46). A button in the UI that nothing in the game can press.
A second cut layer: art finished, card cancelled
The jar ships oldCards/ — a complete superseded card atlas (5 PNGs +
cards.atlas, 14.4 MB) alongside the live one. Region-diffing old vs new
atlas isolates 11 regions with no counterpart in the shipped atlas, which
classify cleanly against the other layers:
- 4 are renames, not cuts:
back_stab,choke,well_laid_plans,path_to_victory— the cards ship (Backstab, Choke, Well Laid Plans, Pressure Points) under different region keys. Path To Victory is the instructive one: it is a live Watcher card whose art region was renamed topressure_points. - 6 are cards cut after their art was done: Causality, Adaptation,
Metaphysics, Step And Strike (
StepAndStrike), Cleanse Evil (CleanseEvil), Flow State (FlowState). Each has a loc key in the English card strings and an entry inCARD_REF.txt— Mega Crit's own Watcher-era art-direction notes, shipped in the same jar. Five of the six even ship as full deprecated classes, so the build preserves all four layers: art, strings, code, and the art-direction memo. Adaptation alone lacks a class: a true three-layer ghost (loc + art only). - Plus one status swap: old
status/enfeeblewas replaced bystatus/beta(Enfeeble has no loc key at all; Beta ships).
So the Watcher's development graveyard holds more than the two unregistered purple classes above: six fully-illustrated designs never shipped, and the jar preserves their art, their strings, their (deprecated) code where one exists, and their art-direction memos side by side.
StS2 (EA) — a character waiting in the wings
The five playable kits have company: Deprived is a concrete, non-abstract
character class, localized in 13 languages, with a placeholder 1000 HP, an
empty starting deck and no relics. A fully scaffolded unreleased character
riding in the EA client. Alongside it: an empty deprecated-character kit, the
RANDOM character picker row, VAKUU_CARD_SELECTOR (the one relic with no
localized name), and deprecated relic/potion placeholder rows.
The Spine census adds a broken asset the game itself ships:
test_subject_burn_vfx_front.skel fails to render because its atlas region
burnzap1 is missing — a defect in the pck, not in our tooling.
The mirror image: content we hold that the wiki lacks
The reverse check matters too: Discerning Monocle is a real StS1 relic in our extraction with no page on the community wiki, and the wiki's StS2 bestiary is missing ~29 of our 121 monsters (raiders, Bowlbug state variants, The Adversary Mk 1–3, The Forgotten, The Lost). Cut content cuts both ways — some of what looks "missing" from a wiki is live in the client.
The pattern: every layer ships ghosts
The finds above stop being anecdotes when you line them up — every layer of the StS1 jar carries finished work that no code path reaches:
| Layer | Ghost |
|---|---|
| Achievements | "Energy is Overrated" — printed in every locale, no unlock path exists |
| Tutorial text | Energy Tip table — localized in all 26 locale dirs, never fetched |
| Credits roll | LOC_CAT (Catalan) section — empty names, never called, language not even shipped |
| Card art + code | six Watcher-era cards cut after illustration (five with full deprecated classes) |
| Shaders | 8 of 10 GLSL programs compiled by nothing; one phantom enum value with no files at all |
Two readings, not mutually exclusive. The mundane one: a small studio iterating fast leaves strata — content frozen out at different stages (idea → strings → art → code) survives whatever layers were finished before the cut. The interesting one: the shipped client is itself an archive. Mega Crit didn't strip their dead layers before pressing the build; they shipped them with the localization pipeline that produced them, the art-direction memos that motivated them (CARD_REF.txt), and the changelogs that dated them (UPDATES.txt). For deconstruction purposes this is a gift: every ghost row is verifiable against three or four independent layers instead of one.