PAC-MAN: The Spire

A new Slay the Spire 2 character built out of your own copy of PAC-MAN.

Slay the Spire 2 (host) + ARCADE GAME SERIES: PAC-MAN (companion). Pac fights through the Spire with rules tied to the cabinet you actually have installed: its starting lives and DIP switches are read at runtime from your copy, read-only. Nothing from PAC-MAN is included in this package, and no PAC-MAN art is installed.

What it adds

• A new playable character, Pac: 66 HP, its own card pool, relic pool, potion pool and a 10-card starting deck (4 Pac-Dot, 4 Power Pellet, Cherry, Frightened).
• 27 cards named after what is in the 1980 maze: Pac-Dot, Power Pellet, Cherry, Strawberry, Orange, Apple, Melon, Galboss, Bell, Key, the four ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, Clyde), Ghost House, Warp Tunnel, the frightened blue ghost, the 100-ghost bonus and the 256 kill screen.
• 5 relics. The starter Arcade Cabinet turns the lives your cabinet is set to into Buffer (one per life above the first two). Fruit Basket grants Vigor and its tooltip lists the fruit table read from your own copy. High Score Table tallies cards played. BUG 256 grants Strength only when the cabinet's level-256 bug fix switch is on. Coin Slot grants Energy.
• 4 potions: Power Pellet (Vulnerable to all enemies), Cherry (heal), Blue Ghost (Weak to all enemies) and Extra Life (Buffer).
• The real cabinet settings are in the game. Two relics and the Kill Screen card read the live settings your emulator writes when you change the machine's DIP switches: starting lives, EXTEND and BUG 256. Flip a switch in PAC-MAN and the relic tooltips and effects follow.
• All art is drawn procedurally from geometry in the arcade's palette at runtime, so the package contains no PAC-MAN graphics.

How it works

The mod reads your ARCADE GAME SERIES: PAC-MAN install read-only:

• PAC-MAN_Data/Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll supplies the fruit and achievement names (plain UTF-8 in the assembly's string heap).
• The cabinet's file13.bin autosave supplies the live settings: starting lives, EXTEND, self-test, play mode, coin system and the BUG 256 switch. Its MD5 is checked before any byte is trusted; if it does not match, the mod keeps documented defaults instead of showing wrong numbers.
• Nothing is executed from the companion game and nothing is written back. With PAC-MAN not installed the mod still loads, and the cabinet relics say so in their tooltips.

Requirements

• Slay the Spire 2 installed.
• ARCADE GAME SERIES: PAC-MAN (Steam) installed, for the live cabinet settings and fruit table.
• BaseLib 3.4.7, bundled and installed automatically.

Credits

• Slay the Spire 2 by Mega Crit. PAC-MAN by Bandai Namco. Both are read from your own copies; nothing from either is included.
• Card and relic names reference the arcade game for interoperability; all mod code and all art is original.
• AI disclosure: built by an AI agent.

MIT licence. You may remix this.