One coefficient, no riders
Steady is the discipline family’s answer to Ambitious: a single coefficient with nothing attached. Discipline +0.08, full stop. No threat rider, no damper, no second parameter pulling anywhere else. The combat AI weights “do the assigned job, hold the assigned position” slightly higher every round, and in a fight that is the entire trait.
What distinguishes it is purity. Every other discipline trait in the digest is a package deal: Professional bundles +0.15 discipline with recklessness and kill-hunger dampers, Tireless attaches a small threat rider to its +0.12, Vigilant pairs +0.10 with a recklessness trim, Traditional welds +0.06 to a kill-hunger reduction. Steady alone changes one number. That makes it the only formation trait you can add to any hero without asking what else it will do to them. The answer is always “nothing”.
The flip side of purity is modesty. At +0.08, Steady sits fourth of five in raw discipline, and it will not overpower anything. Set against the digest’s discipline-wreckers (Reckless and Hot-Headed at −0.2, Insubordinate at −0.18), it claws back less than half the damage. Steady seasons a hero; it does not reform one.
Behaviour in the delve
Over a short, clean floor, you will struggle to see Steady at all, and that is worth saying plainly: this is the subtlest trait in its family. Its product is the absence of small errors: the melee hero who does not drift two tiles out of formation chasing a better angle, the front-liner still standing where the plan needs a front-liner in round eight. Discipline failures are rarely spectacular; they are quiet leaks in a machine with only four moving parts, where every hero out of position is a quarter of your output doing the wrong job.
Length and pressure surface the value. The longer a delve runs (and flooded halls, darkness and curses all stretch them), the more rounds there are for a neutral hero’s AI to score some freelance option above the assigned one, and the more those slips compound. Reading a season of delve reports side by side, the Steady hero’s line is the boring one, in exactly the way a manager wants boring.
Know also what the trait leaves untouched. Steady is not nerve: courage is unaffected, so when a floor truly collapses this hero folds exactly as readily as their base temperament allows, in perfect formation until the moment they are not. And it is not caution: recklessness is unaffected too. A Steady daredevil still takes the wild option; they just take it from the correct position.
Composition notes
There is no role that Steady hurts, which is a rarer property than it sounds. Every courage-ladder rung taxes the back line with threat, every damper trait shaves something someone valued. Front-liners convert it most directly, since formation is their product. Melee damage dealers, the party’s most enthusiastic drifters, arguably need it most. Healers and supports take it without a single caveat, which no other discipline trait except theirs-by-default Vigilant can quite claim (and Vigilant’s caution trim is at least a mild opinion; Steady has none).
On the same hero, Steady stacks frictionlessly under anything. Alongside courage traits it builds the stay-and-stay-put profile; alongside aggressive traits it acts as a modest counterweight; alongside Professional it is simply more of the same virtue. Across the party, one or two disciplined spines free your kill-hunger carrier to hunt while the formation holds behind them. The full coefficient table at /trait is the quickest way to audit what a multi-trait recruit’s mix nets out to. Steady’s contribution to that arithmetic is always exactly +0.08, no asterisks.
Paying for Steady
You should rarely pay a premium for it, and sellers rarely ask one. A small clean number on the sheet excites nobody, which keeps the trait honestly priced in a way the flashier entries are not. Treat it as a tie-breaker: between two otherwise-equal recruits, take the Steady one every time, on any role, at any age. Behaviour coefficients do not decay, so the discipline is as present in a hero’s final season as their first, one more small reason the veteran market undervalues temperament.
For new managers especially, Steady is close to the ideal first-season trait: cheap, impossible to misuse, and valuable precisely while you are still learning which heroes drift and why. The first season guide leans on exactly this kind of low-downside signing. When to pass is equally simple: never on principle, but never sign a hero for Steady either. It is a +0.08 nudge; a recruit whose best argument is this trait has no argument.
Outside the fight
Steady’s combat entry is a single number, but the 2.1.8 code reads the trait in several other places.
- Follows your retreat order exactly. You set when a party should turn back: after the first knock-down, at half, at most, or never. Bold and fearful traits shift a leader’s order a step either way; a Steady leader (like a Stoic, Cool-Headed, Methodical, Iron-Willed, Unbreakable or Stalwart one) never shifts it, whatever else they carry.
- A careful leader. The game counts Steady among its careful leaders, as long as the hero is neither Reckless nor Hot-Headed. A careful leader scouts both ways at a fork before choosing, which cancels the penalties a Clumsy leader brings to an unscouted side room. When the party is hurt (anyone down, or average health under 60%), a careful leader with no other leanings takes the side room only 10% of the time, against 20% for an ordinary leader; when it is fresh, both take it 60% of the time.
- A small aura bonus. As leader, Steady adds 0.02 to the leader’s aura on every follower (Charismatic adds 0.04).
- Even keel after delves. The morale a hero gains or loses from their delve mark (Heroic, Inspired, Shaken, Unstable) is halved for Steady heroes, in both directions, as it is for Iron-Willed, Cool-Headed and Stalwart ones.
- Council. When a retiring hero joins the Council, Steady adds 3 toward the physician’s post and 2 toward the envoy’s.
- Festivals. +2 in the valour discipline. See Crowd-Pleaser for how festival scores are built.
- Flavour. On pair duty the hero speaks with the “humble” voice.
Steady can never appear with Reckless or Insubordinate.
Six patches on
Season after season of patches, +0.08 has not moved: every datamined build from v1.9.6 through v2.1.8 carries the identical single coefficient. The hooks outside the fight are read from the 2.1.8 code; earlier versions of this page missed them. Steady has lived up to its name in the version history as much as in the delve: a fixed quantity you can price, plan and renew against without hedging.