Outback Uprising

This bugfix update tackles missing or misleading rewards, interrupted casino rounds, chest choices and multiplayer rescues.

Coins and casino rewards

• A bet must save successfully before play advances. Failed payments no longer start a VIP spin, submit a Cup choice or accept an unpaid extra blackjack wager.
• Recorded winnings and refunds stay owed until payment succeeds. Temporary save failures no longer discard a pending return. Retries cannot pay the same claim twice, and a recorded win cannot be replaced by a smaller refund.
• New local casino rounds record their accepted stakes and decided results for restart recovery. Complete VIP prizes are retained, including a companion unlock alongside coins.
• Old pending claims retry without revealing the result of a new pokie spin before its reels stop. Closing a panel while a payment updates also no longer continues that panel's interrupted action.
• Very long payment histories stop accepting new wagers before they run out of room to record the result. Free entries and losing Cup bets properly finish their records too.
• Fixed stale coin balances overwriting newer payments and rewards being accepted for the wrong player.

Shared tables and the Melbourne Cup

• Rejoining the same host keeps your payment identity, including non-Steam connections whose network ID changes.
• Cancelling the last wager before a shared round starts no longer leaves players stuck watching. A refused wager also no longer leaves its player marked Ready.
• Shared results update when a delayed payment completes. Winnings and refunds have separate totals when both occur; refused extra wagers no longer make a paid blackjack win appear refunded.
• Current round totals remain visible when old payment records are cleared.
• Cup betting waits for a successfully saved payment. Recorded returns retry after a save failure, and interrupted older local Cup rounds follow their saved result or cancellation rules.
• Reopening Melbourne Cup from the pause menu returns you to its current screen.
• Fixed solo Cup horse selection locking the controls. Continuing a saved run at horse selection also restores the camera to your character, so the world is visible immediately.

Chests and crew rescues

• Chest level rewards use your level when you collect them. Levelling up while a choice is open no longer reduces the advertised number of levels.
• A chest's saved-coin choice stays available if its reward cannot be recorded. Once recorded, an unpaid reward remains owed even after the chest is gone.
• Two teammates reviving the same player no longer issue duplicate rescues or rewards. Rescue progress resets across rematches and replaced characters, and a delayed rescue cannot revive a later knockdown.
• Fixed out-of-order player updates hiding a new knockdown or leaving revival stuck.
• Autosaving stops when multiplayer host authority or the connection is lost, instead of trying to capture an invalid session. Solo saving remains available offline.

Recovery applies to newly accepted rounds and outcomes that were successfully recorded. It cannot reconstruct an older missing result that was never saved. Pending payments still need writable save storage to complete.

Update the whole crew to 0.10.11 before starting or rejoining. No new progression reset.

For reports, include your version, host/client role, the activity, exact message and whether you reconnected or restarted. A screenshot or short clip helps.

This update follows the latest crew playtests: multiplayer chest and VIP-lounge fixes, enemies that keep pressure on explorers and the pub, refreshed characters, and changes to how you build, choose upgrades and navigate the pub.

Defence and exploration

• Cyclists and charging emus deliver one damaging impact, then die. They no longer sit against the pub or a tower without resolving their attack. A committed charge still lands when a defender is nearby; ordinary enemies keep their player-targeting rules.
• Players inside the pub no longer draw attackers away from its walls. Indoor occupancy is checked against the shared run state, including during multiplayer entry and recovery.
• Explorers attract local patrols. Regular arrivals alternate between coastal attackers and patrols around crews exploring away from the pub. Separated groups increase pressure within the existing population cap.
• A much closer explorer can retain an enemy's attention even while another player defends the pub, instead of the home defender pulling nearby enemies across the island.
• Fixed a routing gap that could leave enemies unable to find a route to the pub through defences. Destroyed fences and towers also stop pending attacks safely.
• Nearby discovered chests, pylons, salvage and landmarks have distinct world and minimap markers. Used locations drop out, and the normal interaction prompt takes over when you approach.
• Fixed small enemy health bars appearing through scenery, above hidden enemies or in unexplored areas. Reused enemies reset their bar state.

Multiplayer rewards and yarns

• Multiplayer chests use the host's exact layout and identities. This fixes clients seeing a chest that their host could not match, including late joins and saved-run recovery. Opening and reward claims remain shared and cannot be collected twice.
• Pylons keep two available choices in defence runs. When permanent boons and reserved bargains leave too few options, one-off crew supplies fill the gap: 120 scrap or 3 building supplies. Existing permanent boons still last for the run and do not stack with themselves.
• Removed impossible kill-horses yarns from all generation paths, including before departure. Existing impossible offers and active yarns are repaired; completed yarns remain completed.

VIP lounge and Melbourne Cup

• Fixed the “request expired” entry problem in multiplayer VIP lounges, including joining from the main-menu lobby after using another lounge session.
• Roulette shows your individual bets, total stake and round result. Undo the last chip, remove a bet, clear the draft or repeat the previous round's bets before committing.
• Shared table results distinguish the bet, return and net change, with confirmation while coins settle and explicit refund feedback after a lost connection.
• Blackjack keeps your cards, hand totals and the dealer's visible cards beside the actions. Split hands identify the active hand; the dealer's hidden card stays hidden. Actions explain what Hit, Stand, Double, Split and Insurance do.
• Table readiness and waiting states identify who is choosing, playing or spectating.
• Melbourne Cup has a dedicated horse-selection grid, odds, quick stake amounts, possible returns and a clear Skip betting action. Host confirmation and crew readiness are shown together; closing the panel does not silently count as making a choice.

HUD and controls

• Build from a compact toolbar with defence art, names and scrap costs. Switch tools without reopening it, inspect the aimed defence and read placement feedback beside the current tool.
• Click an upgrade card to take it. Cards lead with the benefit and identify whether it affects one weapon, all weapons or the player. Full details remain available through Inspect, and closing keeps unspent choices queued.
• Inventory brings items, effects, combat stats and active yarns together. Review them with I while the fight continues.
• Player health, stamina and XP share a character portrait panel. Crew status, pub health and urgent warnings use separate priorities, with less persistent explanatory text during combat.
• Buffs and debuffs use item artwork and painted effect icons, with positive/negative marks and a permanent indicator. Timers appear as temporary effects approach expiry; descriptions remain available on hover and in Inventory.
• The minimap has a quieter terrain backdrop and distinct player, crew, enemy, boss, home and discovery markers.
• Reduced overlapping notifications and subtitle panels. Revised menu spacing, text scaling and controller focus/scrolling across gameplay, pub services, settings and multiplayer screens.
• Fixed rifle charging conflicting with upgrade-review mouse and controller input.

The crew and the pub

• Refreshed models for all eleven playable characters, plus the Cockatoo and Kookaburra mates. Bob's rifle mounts are fitted to his refreshed model.
• Pub characters use a more relaxed standing pose, and the home view keeps the selected character clear of the trip table.
• The pub home screen shows your selected character, kit and companion beside Start or Continue. Character, Gear, Run setup and crew actions are available from the same place.
• Settings group display, interface and gameplay controls by purpose, with explanations and confirmation for changes that need them.
• Saved-crew menus show receiving, ready and recovery states instead of leaving players without progress feedback.

Update the whole crew to 0.10.10 before starting or rejoining. No new progression reset.

For reports, include your version, whether you were hosting or joining, the run time and a screenshot or short clip where possible.

• Fixed a Linux Steam startup crash caused by custom keyboard Compose files referring to files outside Steam's runtime. The Linux launcher checks the keyboard table before starting the game and uses a bundled fallback when needed. No launch options are required; valid custom Compose settings are retained.
• ATMs cost 400 scrap in official runs, including continued older runs that still carried the previous 50,000 scrap price. Explicit custom balance presets retain their chosen costs.
• Normal enemies switch to living players outdoors within 100 metres of the pub. Returning to defend cancels pending attacks on the pub, including opportunistic special impacts. Bosses and marching siege enemies retain their existing behaviour.

Update the whole crew to 0.10.9a. No progression reset is added.

Carry your finds home, choose how your pub fights back, and hear the crew react as the defence unfolds. This update adds character dialogue, new enemy and boss models, stronger defences, permanent pylon boons and fixes throughout the pub, loading flow and menus.

Bring your augments home

• Found augments go into the finder’s inventory. They no longer appear silently in the pub stash. A pickup notice tells you what you found and reminds you to bring it back.
• Press I to review carried augments and stored drinks in one inventory drawer. Augment details show their quality and effect, with a compact inventory reminder during play.
• Entering the pub delivers your carried augments to the crew stash automatically. Fit, remove or salvage them at the workbench after returning.

Defences that fight back

• Enemies must attack fences, towers and the pub to damage them. Ordinary contact and rubbing against a structure no longer cause repeated damage. Melee attacks have a visible windup, impact and recovery, with a cooldown for each enemy.
• Enemies weigh travel distance against the effort needed to break through. They favour open routes and weaker sections of the defence, and can use holes opened by earlier attackers.
• Towers have twice their previous health in new official runs. Fences and gates have three times their previous base health: 900 HP before augment bonuses.
• Choose each of the pub’s four weapons independently: Cannon for heavy single shots, Flamethrower for a short fire cone, Gatling for rapid fire, Rifle for long-range damage with a slower reload, or Shotgun for a close burst.
• Pub weapon upgrades now run from Mk 1 to Mk 10 in new official runs. Higher marks improve damage, range and reload rate. The available mark follows pub progression; Mk 10 becomes available at pub level 9. Each mark upgrade costs 150 scrap. A new weapon type costs 150 scrap to unlock for a mounting; switching to an already unlocked type costs 75 scrap.
• Pub weapons track living targets during reload and check aim and line of sight before firing. Shots follow the current target instead of a stale queued position. Flamethrowers now use a moving flame jet in place of the flat orange wedge.
• Enemy player detection distance is doubled in new official runs: acquisition increases from 32 to 64 metres, with pursuit release increasing from 48 to 96 metres.
• Return to draw attackers away from the pub. Normal enemies prefer living players outdoors within 100 metres of the pub, switching back to the crew when you return to defend. Bosses and special marching enemies retain their own behaviour.
• Cyclists are single-impact attackers again. Their first actual collision with a fence, tower or pub delivers one high-damage ram and kills the cyclist, including when crossing small tower footprints between frames.

Permanent crew pylon boons

• Collected boons last for the rest of the run and benefit the whole crew. Each distinct boon is collected once per run. The HUD lists collected boons below your items, with their actual benefits in tooltips.
• You Beauty: +15% weapon damage.
• Flat Out: +10% movement speed and +25% stamina regeneration.
• Big Bikkies: +20 percentage points of weapon size and one extra attack, subject to each weapon’s normal attack rules.
• Waltzing Matilda: stand still on the ground for three seconds to light a campfire. Resting restores 20 HP and 10 stamina per second; moving resets the warmup.
• Feed the Swarm also appears in the crew HUD. Each of its three ranks adds +25% XP from new regular enemies, with +20% enemy health and +10% enemy damage as the cost.
• Saved active boons from the previous timed system become run-long boons when continued. Expired boons stay expired.

The crew has something to say

• Eleven distinct Australian character voices, with 1,430 lines: ten variations for each of thirteen situations, generated with ElevenLabs v4 and matched to each character.
• Character reactions cover supplies, salvage, pub upgrades, big pokie wins, low health, low stamina, landmark visits, tower building, repairs, augments and revives. Low stamina has breathless deliveries; attacks on the pub can prompt a character exploring away from it to return and defend.
• The opening introduces the selected character or multiplayer crew, with each character speaking in turn before the refreshed cinematic.
• Nearby multiplayer character dialogue uses the speaking player’s character and schedules nearby speakers to avoid overlapping lines. Distant and indoor/outdoor groups are separated.
• Character voice volume, dialogue and subtitles have separate settings. Voice levels are balanced between clips, and subtitles sit in a compact caption panel.
• New opal pickup chimes, stockwhip cracks and defeat audio accompany a new Australian Melbourne Cup caller.

Models, pub fixes and clearer information

• New models across the enemy and boss roster. The integration includes 69 model assets, covering enemies, bosses, horse liveries, cricket props and distance variants. Each animated body uses its own rig and clips.
• Kangaroo and hopping boss animation timing is corrected, preventing the hop animation from advancing twice or running at the wrong cadence.
• Beer and fairy bread pickups are larger and have ground markers. They are easier to find among terrain and enemies.
• Pub repairs cover overlapping rooftop signs, door pairing and lighting, fitted VIP/pokie door openings, wall/floor/ceiling joins and window apertures with clear glass. Upper windows, shutters and verandah proportions are aligned.
• Gear, Ring-in and Housekeeping views stay focused on their destination inside the pub. The gear view no longer frames Shaz in front of the bench, and Housekeeping fixtures sit against an interior wall.
• Loading now shows preparation stages until the battlefield and cameras are ready. Enemy models, pub stages, the interior and selected voices prepare during loading, addressing first-entry and upgrade warmup stalls and preventing the empty-world flash before the intro. The intro cinematic uses the updated visuals.
• Settings use aligned rows, consistent sizing and an explanation panel, with keyboard and controller navigation. Gear details keep the selected item’s title visible, and “Works with” lists all relevant item benefits rather than only weapon-specific extra attacks.
• Positive and negative beer-effect tooltips now explain their gameplay changes, alongside the remaining duration.
• Pokie results stay hidden until the reels land. Returns count up after the spin; returns of 10× the bet or more trigger a coin shower and a pulsing BIG WIN display.
• Visit the airfield before activating deliveries at the pub workbench. Discovery is shared with the crew and retained when continuing the run. Airport clearance and delivery state also survive saves and rejoining.

Update the whole crew to 0.10.9 before starting or rejoining. No new progression reset. Existing defence saves retain their frozen balance rules and older weapon-mark limits; the new official durability, detection and Mk 1–10 tuning applies to new runs.

For reports, include your version, host/client, run time and relevant kit. A screenshot or short clip helps with targeting, placement, model and UI issues.

The pub, airport and outback get a broad 3D art upgrade, with clearer building controls, affordable defence upgrades and an ATM that earns scrap for the crew. This release also changes multiplayer recovery: keep a teammate standing, because a fully downed crew loses the defence.

A more lived-in outback

• Ten new pub exteriors. Your local develops from a battered shed into a fully upgraded pub, with new augment fittings, sentries and readable signs seated on their boards.
• New pub and VIP Lounge interiors. Furniture and fittings belong in the 3D rooms, with the existing shared blackjack, roulette and pokies still playable.
• The airport grows with its service level. New airport stages, ground equipment and supply aircraft make each upgrade more distinct. The F111 and First Fleet ships also receive new models, including their moving flight and landing parts.
• Six landmarks get distinctive scenery. The telegraph station, railway, opal mine, listening post, bore and squadron wreck are easier to recognise while exploring.
• Terrain, loot, weapons and defences receive new models. Trees, rocks, grass, cacti and tumbleweeds join refreshed chests, shrines, pickups, fishing equipment, weapon props and buildable defences. Opals have a moving glint; salvage mounds show disturbed soil and partly buried scrap.
• Cannons and the Pig Huntin’ Ute aim smoothly. Their barrels turn gradually between targets, with muzzle flashes and tracers following the barrel when it fires.
• Blue Heeler and Platypus movement works in release builds. Their idle and travel animations now initialise correctly in the shipped game.

Build and upgrade without the guesswork

• Switch defence type while placing. Previous/Next controls sit beside the live preview, with controller support. Esc or controller Start closes the build drawer.
• Building prices stop climbing with purchase history. Placing another defence of the same type uses its normal tuned price.
• Ordinary defence upgrades cost twice the build price at every rank. The price no longer compounds with tower level or previous upgrades. Special utility towers keep their explicit upgrade prices.
• The ATM earns crew scrap automatically. It costs 400 scrap to build and pays every 30 active seconds: 40 / 60 / 90 / 135 / 200 scrap at levels 1–5. Upgrades cost 300 / 450 / 675 / 1,000 scrap. Its screen shows the payout and countdown; earnings go straight to the shared run wallet. Buying XP has been removed.

Keep a teammate standing

• Downed multiplayer players stay in place. A teammate must come to revive them; they cannot crawl or slide away. Solo players retain slow crawling and recovery to full health over 45 seconds.
• A fully downed active crew loses the run. The defence ends through the normal defeat cinematic and summary when every connected, active player is downed. Disconnected patrons and players still joining cannot keep a defeated crew alive.

Update the whole crew to 0.10.8 before starting or rejoining. No new progression reset. Existing defence saves retain their captured island, layout and frozen tuning; new official runs use the revised ATM build price.

For reports, include your version, host/client, run time and relevant kit. A screenshot or short clip helps with model placement, building controls and aiming issues.

Give Up now ends a solo defence or asks the crew for a majority vote. This update also repairs impossible horse Yarns, Trafficman's damage window and Mozzie Zapper chains, while making your kit and the VIP Lounge easier to read.

End a defence deliberately

• Solo Give Up loses the pub. Confirming Give Up ends the run through the normal defeat cinematic and summary, instead of only downing your character.
• The crew decides together. In multiplayer, the person starting a Give Up vote counts as a Yes. A strict majority of connected players admitted to the defence must agree: two of two, two of three or three of four. Downed players can vote too.
• Voting stays live. The drawer opens on the safe “Keep defending” choice. Closing it does not cast a vote. The vote lasts 30 seconds and does not pause the battle; it also works during an existing crew pause. A crew membership change cancels it, and disconnected patrons cannot vote.

Combat and Yarns

• Trafficman's sign only damages during its active sweep. Queued contacts outside that window and client proxy contacts cannot apply damage. Its damage, wind-up, recovery and cooldown are unchanged; separate Trafficmen can still each land an attack.
• Mozzie Zapper can continue its chain through a crowded pack. Enemies inside the splash radius which received no splash damage remain available for later chain or fork hits. The three-target splash cap, damage, range and pierce rules are retained.
• No more horse-kill Yarns in pub defence. New objectives exclude unkillable race horses. Unfinished horse Yarns already in a defence or save become an ordinary enemy-kill objective with the same target count, difficulty and reward. Recorded objective progress is retained; earlier ordinary kills do not complete the replacement for free. Completed history stays intact.

Know your kit and your machine

• Gear Bench shows what works together. Item and weapon detail cards show compatible kit with icons and names, using the same rules as the level-up screen. Included gear is marked, fractional extra-attack support is recognised, and player-only items do not claim weapon benefits.
• Defence tuning names the enemy. Enemy fields identify their subject; XP fields say which enemy awards that XP per kill, with visible help and name search. Controller navigation stays within the editor. Preset values are unchanged.
• Know which pokie you are playing on ultrawide. All five cabinets show a persistent machine name while keeping the close reel and control view, including at 32:9. The decorative cabinet title can remain above the camera frame.
• Wombat digs do not summon bosses. A separate allowed-reward guard protects companion rewards. Manual pond fishing keeps its boss outcomes.
• Mirrabooka's decline bonus belongs to its owner. Multiplayer Fair Go gains use your own Mirrabooka, rather than another player's mate. Starting luck and the existing +10% to +50% decline bonuses are unchanged; a proposed +100% bonus is deferred to a later balance review.

Update the whole crew to 0.10.7b before starting or rejoining. No new progression reset.

For another report, include the installed version, host/client, solo/crew, run time and relevant character, mate or weapon. A short clip is helpful for repeated hits or chain behavior; include the original objective text for a Yarn report.

This hotfix corrects VIP Lounge pokie payouts when a spin contains more than one winning line or way, keeps character strides continuous when changing pace and repairs Blue Heeler's movement animation.

Every winning line and way counts

• All five cabinets add every winning return. Each winning line or way pays its individual paytable value, and those returns add together before the cap for the whole paid round applies.
• Outback Bandit's reported horseshoe result is repaired. At a 50 wager, four ways of four horseshoes pay 100 in total: four returns of 25, instead of paying only 25 for the combined result.
• Free games use the same corrected calculation. Their winning lines and ways add to the paid round's return, with the whole-round cap applied once.
• The cabinet guide explains the same rule. Individual paytable prices are retained; the Rules page now makes clear that each winning line or way pays that price. Feature boosts still apply where shown.
• Previously committed saved spins keep their original payouts. Continuing an existing defence does not recalculate an already committed spin or its saved feature results using the new rules.

Keep your stride

• Walk/run transitions keep your stride phase. All eleven playable characters carry their current step into a change of pace instead of restarting the animation. Walking loops continue through repeated strides without a visible snap at the wrap.
• Blue Heeler keeps moving its legs. Its follow and fetch movement animation no longer gets replaced or left paused by another animation. Walking, trotting, galloping and running recover correctly when movement resumes.

Update the whole crew to 0.10.7a before starting or rejoining. No new progression reset.

For a payout report, include the machine, wager, winning symbols and lines or ways, paid spin or free game, host/client and a screenshot of the reels and payout. For an animation report, include the character or mate, walking/running/fetching, local or remote view and a short gameplay-scale motion capture.

Blackjack and roulette are now shared games at the VIP Lounge's physical 3D tables. The crew plays the same round, with individual wagers and returns. Eleven characters and all six mates also receive their approved new models and animations.

Shared blackjack and roulette

• Take a seat with the crew. Up to four players can join a shared table from the multiplayer menu's VIP Lounge. Solo players use the same tables. These personal-coin games open between runs.
• One blackjack dealer for the whole table. Each player has their own wager and hand, takes their turn and receives their own result against the same dealer. Cards are dealt in seat order. Hit, stand, double, split and insurance follow the actions available for that hand.
• One roulette wheel and one result. Each player places their own bets on the felt. All committed bets settle against the same spin, pocket and colour.
• Play on the table. Cards, chips, wagers, hand totals, turn indicators, action plaques and the roulette layout sit on the physical felt. The new blackjack and roulette table models fit into the lounge, with animated dealing and wheel presentation.
• Clearer cards and hand inspection. Small corner ranks and suit marks make card faces easier to read. Hover a blackjack hand to spread its public cards for inspection, or choose Inspect hand using keyboard or controller. Previous hand, Next hand and Back to the table let you review the dealer and player hands. The dealer's face-down card stays hidden until reveal.
• Choose a chip, place a wager, then mark Ready. Initial wagers are 5–50 coins; chip values are 1, 5, 10 and 25. Blackjack double, split and insurance commit their additional stakes separately. Rules are available at each table.
• Watch a round already in progress. New arrivals can spectate and take part in the next round when a seat is available. Standing up during live blackjack automatically stands the remaining hand; a committed roulette spin continues. Returning to Watch and joining again does not cancel a live stake.
• Your coins remain personal. Each player pays from their own coin balance and receives their own return. Unstarted wagers can be cancelled; accepted live bets settle once. Rejoining the same surviving host can deliver an outstanding result to the same player. Losing or replacing the host cancels unresolved rounds and refunds their unresolved stakes once.
• Mouse, keyboard and controller support chip selection, betting, table actions, Rules, hand inspection, spectating and returning to the room. Betting is restricted to the menu lounge and does not pause a multiplayer combat session.

Blackjack retains six decks, 3:2 natural blackjack, a dealer who hits soft 17, doubling on 9, 10 or 11, and a maximum of two split hands. Roulette retains a European wheel with one zero: straight numbers pay 35:1, dozens and columns 2:1, and even-money outside bets 1:1. Those ratios describe the win; the applicable stake is included in a winning return. This update makes no new casino odds adjustment.

Eleven updated characters

Bob, Tradie Shaz, Bottle-O Bandit, Firey, The Fisher, Magpie Mick, Nullarbor Swift, The Punter, The Ring-in, The Snake Charmer and Steve now use their delivered character models, costumes, materials and original animation clips in the game's existing character slots.

• Character identity, selection, movement, abilities, weapons and multiplayer ownership remain familiar.
• Bob uses his authored rifle carry, aim, raise, lower and firing poses with the existing game rifle. The other ten characters retain the game's rifle presentation fitted to their new bodies.
• Fishing arm and hand placement follows the new models' measured reach, including Bob and Shaz, while retaining the authored body motion and existing fishing behaviour.
• Bottle-O Bandit's and The Ring-in's torso hit areas fit the new models through their jump poses; their movement collision shapes are unchanged.

Six updated mates

• Mirrabooka receives its approved cream-and-gold light form, floating motion, pulse and particles.
• Blue Heeler receives its own animated dog model, with walking, trotting, running and fast fetch movement driven by actual travel. Successful pickups trigger its collection reaction on local and remote-owner mates, following the accepted network receipt. Rejected or duplicate pickups do not trigger a false collection cue.
• Cockatoo receives its new bird model and continuous wing motion, including during its screech reaction.
• Kookaburra receives its distinct bird model and wing rhythm, including during its laugh reaction.
• Platypus receives its own waddle, scurry and catch-up movement, matched to how far it actually moves.
• Wombat receives its approved mate model, follow movement and dig reaction. The pub mate display now uses that same mate model.

Mate sizes, following, abilities, rewards and ownership are preserved. Older saved companions upgrade to the new presentation while keeping their run progress, position, level and ability state. An old visual gesture restarts safely; new companion saves retain the current animation clocks and poses.

Updating and reporting problems

Update the whole crew to 0.10.7 before starting or rejoining a lobby. No new progression reset. Existing defence saves and the five VIP Lounge machines remain supported.

The previously tracked Linux native Steam crash remains open; this update does not claim to fix it. For table reports, include blackjack or roulette, wager, round phase, host/client, whether you left or rejoined, platform and logs. For a model issue, include the character or mate, weapon or ability, local/proxy view and a gameplay-scale screenshot or short motion capture.

This hotfix improves the five VIP Lounge machines introduced in 0.10.6: repeat spins, reel geometry, readable cabinet displays and graphic paytables.

• Every paid spin animates, including consecutive rounds that land the same result. Repeated state updates and the brief wager reservation cannot skip the next spin or replay a settled one.
• Reels retain their curved shape through paid spins and features. The clipped corner in the reel window is repaired, and Outback Bandit's lever is attached to its cabinet.
• Taking a seat opens the close play view. The camera stays there between rounds instead of zooming out after each result and back in for the next spin.
• Cabinet LCDs are larger and aligned to their decks. Wager, machine-session net return, payouts, feature state and remaining free games or respins use shorter, clearer labels.
• Info / paytable opens beside the machine. Four pages separate Payouts, Features, Win lines and Rules, using the same painted symbols as the reels, readable payout values and diagrams for that cabinet's actual lines or ways.
• Full screen expands the guide for larger symbols and detailed rules. Return to the side panel or close it without changing machines. Mouse, keyboard and controller support page changes, scrolling, expansion and Back.
• A physical pub inspection plaque on the interior wall shows the installed game's version, making it easier for crews to compare builds.

No new odds or balance change, and no progression reset. This retains 0.10.6's rewards, free-game rules and previously committed outcomes. Update the whole crew to 0.10.6a before starting or rejoining a run.

The previously reported Linux Steam native crash remains tracked separately; this cabinet hotfix does not claim to resolve it. For cabinet reports, include machine, wager, host/client, paid spin or feature state, platform and logs.

Five new physical pokie cabinets, proper free-game features and distinct sound sets arrive alongside more exploration loot, diggable scrap, stronger airport deliveries and easier shared defence maintenance.

Five physical cabinets

• Big Croc, Mad Mick, Dropbear, Bandit and Eureka use the approved cabinet models with curved, spinning drums. The drums remain visible during paid spins, free games and Eureka's hold-and-spin feature; held nuggets stay fixed while the other drums turn.
• Bet controls, maximum affordable bet, information and Spin / Start Feature are on the machine. Space activates Spin / Start Feature. The control deck shows your wager, currency and net return for that machine's session. The camera moves closer during a paid round.
• Feature names, games or respins remaining and returns use the cabinet's own LCD. Nugget values follow their curved cells. Separate floating feature overlays no longer cover the reels.
• Big Croc, Mad Mick, Dropbear and Bandit play actual free games, with winning and losing rolls and natural retriggers. A paid round can contain up to 40 free games. Eureka retains its nugget hold-and-spin sequence and GRAND award.
• After the paid reels settle, the owner can press Start Feature; otherwise the feature starts after four seconds. Classic free games take two seconds each, so a large feature can run considerably longer than an ordinary spin.
• Each cabinet has its own sound palette: reel motors, starts and stops, anticipation, escalating wins and feature cues. Eureka adds distinct nugget-lock and GRAND sounds. Losing and partial-return rounds do not use the same celebration as a profitable win.

More generous rounds, reliable features

• The new lounge rules aim for roughly 25% more profitable complete paid rounds. At a wager of 100, the calibration measured a relative increase of 23–26% across the five machines. This means more rounds returning more currency than their stake; it does not mean every payout grows by 25%, and it does not guarantee a profitable short session.
• Classic cabinet payouts remain capped at 100× the wager for the whole paid round, including free games. Eureka retains its 1500× cap. Existing independent bonus-prize rules remain once per paid round.
• Starting a feature, reopening the lounge, rejoining or receiving repeated state updates cannot award a committed result twice. Previously committed outcomes retain their original rewards when resumed.
• An explicit crew pause freezes physical reels, feature counters and cabinet sound. Resuming excludes the paused time, including updates received during the pause. Lounge navigation stays usable, and opening its controls does not prevent the crew from unpausing.
• Returning to your paid machine restores its current round and committed wager. Feature totals reveal retriggers when their reels settle, keeping the displayed total consistent with the games remaining.

More to find across the island

Fresh runs populate exploration resources according to playable area. On the current 1020-metre island, the new default targets are:

• Fishable ponds: 180.
• Chests: 27–180.
• Challenge pylons: 36–54.
• Initial scrap pickups / active cap: 45.
• Unique story landmarks: 6.

Placement retains spacing and avoids water, impassable terrain, the pub, airfield and other reserved sites. Host and clients share the same seeded layout. Existing saved runs restore their captured layout rather than receiving a fresh refill; Continue also cannot add another initial scrap batch.

• 54 diggable scrap mounds offer another source of shared scrap. Hold Interact nearby for three seconds. Each site has a 60% chance of 150–500 scrap; an empty site is spent too. Movement, downing or leaving cancels the dig. Spent sites visibly collapse and stay spent after Continue, and reloading cannot reroll their reward.
• Footy boot pickups are twice as large visually and raised clear of the ground. Their collection range and effects are unchanged.

Airport supplies and a clear yard

• New official runs deliver 200 / 400 / 800 / 1,600 scrap at the four airport service levels. Supplies remain 2 / 3 / 4 / 6, and every landing still repairs up to 250 pub HP.
• Buying the fenced regional upgrade calls in a free F111 dump-and-burn to clear the yard. The field keeps its previous service level until the host has cleared every living occupant, then installs the fence. Submerged crocs and temporarily invulnerable bosses cannot be left trapped inside.
• The clearance uses normal deaths, loot and despawns, without inflating a player's damage total or consuming the callable airstrike cooldown. Both players see the flight. Its payment, pending pass and completed clearance survive save/resume without charging twice.
• Improved routing accounts for body width, corners, gates and cargo. Mobs already inside can leave the yard, and replacing airport fences clears their old collision exceptions.

Maintain the crew's defences

• Crew members can upgrade and repair each other's nearby towers through the shared run wallet. The original builder retains tower sale permission and upgrade-cost progression.
• Press B to open the build drawer and choose Maintain nearby defences. The live side panel lists nearby turrets, fences and gates with readable health bars and one-click inspection. You can also pick a defence in the world while reviewing the drawer; gameplay keeps moving.
• Repair all fully repairs damaged towers and walls within 10 metres for the displayed shared-scrap quote. The host takes one payment for the whole batch. Duplicate clicks cannot charge twice, and a price increase is rejected for a refreshed quote rather than silently spending more.
• Single-tower repairs work for any damage, including above the old 75%-health threshold. The fence repair card now resizes above the vitals instead of extending below the screen.

Enemy pressure, bounties and recovery

• New official runs double nearby-player attraction to 32 metres, retaining a lure out to 48 metres. A substantially nearer teammate can take over the lure; indoor, downed and disconnected players are excluded. Fishing bait retains priority.
• Pub-bound enemies choose distributed approaches along its frontage instead of piling onto one shared corner. Coastal arrivals, continuous movement and physical collisions remain in place.
• Reduced redundant host combat-pose work and unchanged facing updates while retaining animation and physical hitboxes. A sustained late-game FPS improvement has not been established.
• Boss rewards now clearly say +10 GEAR LEVELS, identify the gear's before/after levels and explain that character level stays unchanged. Gear at 19 correctly displays 29 after the ten grants, including Supercharge 20. Badges and tooltips use actual gear levels after resume; banked character choices are not spent.
• Fixed Supercharged rarity 5 being rejected by owner-journal save validation, which caused repeated failed autosave captures in the reported run.
• Fixed one source of terrain_prop_layout_mismatch during live joining: tiny floating-point reconstruction differences no longer reject valid terrain. Saved geometry is still validated before the host's exact scenery poses are installed.

Your saved run and known limits

No progression reset. Update the whole crew to 0.10.6 before starting or rejoining a run. Existing saves and tuned runs retain their stored balance values, and previously paid pokie outcomes retain their original returns. Start a fresh official run for the new exploration populations, default airport shipment amounts and attraction ranges.

Focused native Linux rendering, local ENet multiplayer, save/Continue and process-restart rejoin checks passed. These do not establish Windows rendering, native Steam two-account behaviour or full-match balance.

The reported Linux Steam native crash remains unresolved. Its captured fault involves X11 input handling while Steam Overlay closes an input context on another thread. A per-game overlay-off retest is proposed, but it is not a verified workaround or a shipped crash fix.

For reports, include host or client, platform, pub level, run time, what you were doing and logs. For a cabinet issue, include the machine, wager and feature state.

This hotfix addresses clients getting stuck at “Waiting for the crew · 1/2 outside” when starting a multiplayer defence with certain starting gear.

• Fixed valid weapon cooldowns being rejected during player loading. Starting gear can shorten a weapon's cooldown while its current countdown still has more time remaining; that state is now accepted and restored correctly.
• This removes the loading rejection reproduced with a Ring-In using Snag and Servo Receipt. The intro could pause the rejected countdown, preventing departure from completing.
• Malformed weapon state remains rejected. The fix preserves the weapon's exact saved timer values.
• Includes all 0.10.5 transfer improvements: lossless compression, receiver-paced chunks, missing-chunk retries, repeated acknowledgements and safer disconnect/rejoin handling.

No progression reset or save-format change. Update the whole crew to 0.10.5a before starting or rejoining a run.

A production two-player departure check with the affected loadout passed over local ENet, with 79 checks and clean engine logs. Save and reload checks also passed, with 130 assertions and clean engine logs. A two-account native Steam session remains an acceptance check; these local results do not establish live Steam success.

If departure or rejoining still fails, include host or client, character, starting weapon and gear, exact message and logs with your report.

This patch addresses the run-state transfer timeouts reported when joining or rejoining a defence. It changes how the host sends the battlefield and save state to the crew.

Smaller transfers, steadier loading

• Run state is now compressed for transfer without losing any data. The checkpoint from the reported Steam host shrank from 12.9 MB to 0.53 MB over the network. The reduction depends on the run's contents.
• The host waits for the receiver to accept the transfer, then sends a small number of chunks at a time. Sending no longer speeds up with the host's frame rate or floods a joining player with the whole save.
• Missing chunks are retried while retaining the data already received. A lost acknowledgement can be answered again, including after the client has moved to the next loading stage.
• The same transfer handling applies to the recoverable checkpoint copies sent to connected teammates.

Returning to your crew

• Joining state can recover if its header arrives before the host's join offer, instead of wasting the transfer before the client is ready.
• Completed transfers are acknowledged safely without installing the same state twice.
• Production disconnect/rejoin checks preserved the returning player's acknowledged build, inventory and queued upgrades, replaced their disconnected place, and restored controls and pub exit. Shared upgrades earned while absent remained available on return.
• Recovery still requires the host to remain available and uses player state already acknowledged by the host.

There is no progression reset or persistent save-format change. Update the whole crew together before joining: the network transfer protocol has changed.

Bounded checks covered missing chunks, lost acknowledgements, delayed delivery, checkpoint validation and a full production World disconnect/rejoin over local ENet. These passed with clean engine logs. A two-account native Steam retry remains a community acceptance check; the local checks do not establish that the reported live timeout is resolved.

If joining or rejoining still times out, include host or client, first join or return after disconnecting, character and starter, pub level, run time, exact message and logs with your report.

This update fixes cancelled departures, player loading and saves that could prevent a mate from returning to the crew. It also brings the runway's ground markings into the island's exploration fog.

Back to the pub, ready to depart

• Cancelling the intro as host returns the connected crew to an interactive pub. The cancellation notice no longer freezes the scene, and the same crew can prepare and depart again.
• If a teammate leaves before their initial player state has been accepted, the unstarted defence returns to the pub. It cannot release the remaining players into a run which cannot be saved or rejoined. Reconnect in the lobby and depart together.
• Cancelling as a client stops the abandoned battlefield before closing it, avoiding a frame of gameplay after its connection has gone.
• Old cancellation messages cannot cancel a later departure. Menu disposal also preserves another player's explicit pause or an independent hard pause, while releasing the menu's own request.

Saves and rejoining during combat

• Fixed active effects rejecting the player-state updates, autosaves and host snapshots needed to admit returning players.
• This covers nine effect families: chalk clouds, Dust Devil sources and minis, Firebug sources and patches, boomerangs, magpies, Red Belly, slow puddles, fishing lures, and temporary Didge/Mozzie blasts.
• Their current state can be copied during the existing nonblocking save read. Recovery still validates that state before restoring it; damage, movement and remaining lifetimes are retained.
• A Ring-In using the Firebug starter can complete initial loading and recover their acknowledged build, inventory and queued choices after disconnecting. Shared levels earned while absent remain queued for their return.
• Rejected or duplicate rejoin attempts keep the original teammate's reserved place available. The existing recovery contract remains: the host must stay available, and only state already acknowledged by the host can be recovered.

Airport exploration fog

• The base runway, apron dirt and large white closure Xs now fade with the ground you have explored. They no longer reveal the full strip through unexplored mist.
• Each end reveals independently as you approach. Explored ground keeps its finish, and remembered island familiarity still thins the fog.

There is no new progression reset or save-format change. Update the whole crew together before joining.

Bounded checks covered real production Worlds over local ENet, intro cancellation and a second departure, initial-owner Escape/reconnect, active-effect save extraction, and a Ring-In Firebug disconnect/rejoin. Native rendered checks covered runway visibility. Native Steam sessions and full-match playtests remain community acceptance checks.

If loading or rejoining still fails, include host or client, character and starter, pub level, run time and logs with your report.

More country to explore, a pub that grows its own airport, proximity voice, and a place kept for mates who lose their connection. This update also makes purchases and the Melbourne Cup clearer, and ties the siege's progression to your pub level.

Nine times the country

• New islands are 1020 × 1020 metres: three times the previous width and length, giving you nine times the area to explore. The pub stays near a usable coast, with early enemy landings concentrated around its coastal approach before widening as the pub grows.
• Six unique landmarks: Broken Telegraph Station, Ironbark Railway, Opal Crown Mine, Meteorite Listening Post, Stockman's Bore and Lost Squadron Wreck. Each offers shared salvage and an optional short story camera scene, with readable captions and a Back button.
• Landmark salvage pays once per run. The six sites offer 940 scrap in total, plus run coins and supplies. Rare augment finds are determined by the island seed, so reloading cannot reroll them.
• The new Publican Patchbot automatically repairs the pub when socketed. Healing scales with pub capacity, up to 45 HP per second. It cannot bring back a pub after defeat has been resolved. Opal Crown Mine has a 15% chance of this rare find; Lost Squadron Wreck has a 10% chance of air support, while the other four sites each have a 35% chance of their exceptional augment.
• A larger island does not mean nine times the active enemies or scenery. The existing live enemy limit remains in place.

From bush strip to international airport

• The reserved airfield now has four optional service tiers: bush airstrip, regional field, freight hub and international airport. Their default unlocks are pub levels 4, 6, 8 and 9.
• Each purchase develops the same surveyed site. Later stages add a terminal, lights, a secured perimeter, hangar, parked aircraft, tower and apron activity. Airport upgrades do not add pub levels or trigger extra milestone bosses.
• Scrap deliveries grow from 45 to 90, 180 and 360 per landing; supplies grow from 2 to 3, 4 and 6. Each landing retains the repair of up to 250 pub HP. Defence tuning can adjust the base values.
• Upgrading during an inbound flight improves that flight's single delivery. It keeps its existing arrival time.
• Airport fences have collision, enemies route around them and the personnel gate admits players. Securing the regional field requires a clear yard.
• Protected pub and airport cells show red in build mode, making the reserved space easier to see before placing a tower or fence.

Your mate's place stays reserved

• A disconnected crew member becomes an Offline patron in the pub. Their original character and one of the four crew places remain reserved, along with their latest personal state acknowledged by the host.
• Rejoining restores their equipment, inventory, build and pending choices. Shared levels earned while they were away add choices to their queue. They return sheltered in the pub, or at its doorway if entry is explicitly locked.
• Offline patrons are cosmetic: they cannot fight, take damage, collect pickups, occupy gambling machines or hold a crew pause. Their personal timers do not advance while absent.
• Unfinished fishing casts cancel without spending a pond use or granting a reward. A catch already rolled for review keeps its exact result and can be settled once after returning.
• Failed or duplicate admissions keep the reserved teammate's place available. The recovery guarantee covers state acknowledged by the host; unsent client changes cannot be recovered after abrupt process loss.
• This requires the host to remain available. If the host closes, the crew must use an accepted whole-run checkpoint; this update does not add host migration.

Buy directly, then back your horse

• Pub purchases no longer ask the crew to vote. The eligible buyer commits the purchase directly at the workbench. Pub ranks, services and airport upgrades use the shared run wallet; the host checks eligibility and resources so simultaneous buyers cannot spend the same balance twice.
• At pub level five, the Melbourne Cup pauses the run until every connected, ready player chooses a horse and wager, including zero, or selects Spectate. Downed players can spectate.
• Cup stakes and winnings use your own saved personal coins. They do not use the shared run wallet. Paid offers and payouts survive save/resume without charging or awarding twice.
• The drawer shows the ready count and your personal balance. Closing it leaves your decision pending; there is no timeout that chooses for you. A disconnect releases the waiting roster, and completing Cup choices preserves any other player's explicit pause.
• New Cup races use a 1040-metre course. Named runners keep their appearance as you travel and after resume. Older saved races retain their original course, wagers and shared-wallet contract.

Talk nearby, hear the danger

• Hold V for proximity voice. Push to Talk can be rebound for keyboard or controller; Settings → Voice includes reception, microphone mute, voice volume and individual crew mute controls.
• Speech fades with distance and falls silent at 28 metres. Indoor conversations retain their range, while voices crossing between indoors and outdoors are muffled. Incoming voice remains audible with a pause menu open.
• Steam sessions use native compressed Steam voice; LAN sessions use a bounded microphone-audio fallback. Voice is live only: it is never saved or recorded.
• Sparse Australian day/night ambience, clearer dangerous attack wind-ups, exterior pub damage warnings and critical-health cues give defenders more information.
• The combat mix adapts to nearby enemy density. Music ducks around dialogue and nearby voice, and a peak limiter softens combined volleys.
• Defeat now has a short, immediately skippable cinematic showing the actual pub, crew and battlefield. Victory and defeat shots complete while the simulation is paused. Intro and defeat captions match the shipped narration; landmark story scenes remain optional, text-led scenes.

Pressure follows the pub

• Nearby enemies acquire players within 16 metres and release them at 24 metres, including when a player is on the opposite side of the pub.
• Enemy health, damage, speed, arrival pressure and specialist composition grow with pub level. Late multiplayer health pressure has a cap; speed tops out at 1.25×, and arrival pressure reaches 3× its opening rate at level nine. Waiting at the same level no longer silently increases these progression values.
• First Fleet ships carry six protected redcoat guards. They warn and fire at approaching players, discouraging ramp camping without adding extra kill rewards.
• Beer, Ausmite and Fairy Bread drops continue beyond the old 20-minute survival boundary. Liquid Courage remains in beer rolls after 25 minutes.
• Fishing pools, enemy variety, crocodile strength, eucalyptus grove healing and environmental event unlocks follow pub level. Fishing previews and host admission use the same eligible roster; by default, fished horses unlock with the Cup, Drop Bear at pub level seven and Big Roo at nine.
• First Fleet still arrives at 1788 active seconds. Day/night, pub opening hours, deliveries, cooldowns, effect durations and explicit Yarn deadlines retain their clocks.
• Defence tuning exposes the effective pub-level controls. Older official pre-run presets select current official rules; custom presets gain the complete editable controls.

Existing saves and playtest focus

Published 0.10.2 checkpoints retain their original island dimensions, terrain, exploration history, saved rules and historical Cup/airport contracts. Existing enemy bodies keep their captured stats; future enemy progression interprets their stored coefficients by pub level. The retired survival timer gates remain retired.

Start a fresh run for the larger island and fully expandable airport. Older small airfields keep their existing deliveries, with expansion disabled and explained at the workbench so established defences retain their space. Discovery rewards, rare finds, airport tiers and active ship-guard aim progress survive save/resume. Update the whole crew together before joining.

Bounded Linux checks cover actual Worlds, private ENet reconnect and Cup transactions, saved-run recovery, exploration, airport progression, audio routing and late-run drops. Assertion results and engine logs were checked separately. They do not establish native Steam disconnect/rejoin or microphone/codec acceptance, Windows runtime behaviour, or a complete 35–45 minute match.

For playtest feedback, focus on Steam reconnects, two-person proximity voice and mutes, controller Cup choices, indoor/outdoor sound, exploration travel, airport building clearance and sustained crew difficulty. Include host or client, pub level, run time and logs where possible.

This update addresses the fresh feedback from the 1 October pub-defence playtest.

Fishing, bosses and enemies

• Fishing up a Drop Bear now summons the species shown by your catch on both host and clients.
• Extra-boss modifiers apply to pub milestone encounters. Extra bosses retain their bargain effects and bounties, wait for a free boss slot when necessary, and survive save/resume. The encounter finishes after its whole group is defeated.
• Enemies keep colliding and steering around scenery off camera. Rock detours retain their direction so mobs can make progress around the obstacle.
• Crocs and wombats pursue nearby living players during defence runs, returning to the pub when their lure ends. Old water-seeking or territorial states no longer leave them out of the siege.
• Client Croc kills count toward both personal species Yarns and crew kill objectives. Kill messages reject repeated or stale events without duplicating weapon progress.

Recovery, objectives and menus

• Unstuck is available in the Esc/controller menu. It moves your character to nearby clear, dry ground and resets trapped movement. It preserves your health, kit and downed state, with a 15-second cooldown.
• Completing an active run Yarn grants its reward and immediately draws a new objective of the same difficulty. New objectives count fresh progress, and their remaining work survives save/resume.
• Companion details open to the left of the companion list, keeping the list, Equip and Back controls usable.
• Multiplayer Esc/Start opens your local menu while combat continues. Use Pause crew / Unpause crew to toggle your own shared pause request. Every player can open their menu and choose upgrades while the crew is paused; combat resumes once all pause requests are released.
• Solo Esc continues to pause the game.

There is no additional progression reset. Update the whole crew together before joining a multiplayer run.

A follow-up to Defend the Pub, focused on saving without interrupting the crew, getting through the results screen, and giving your local a stronger starting defence.

Saves and the end of a run

• Keep playing through autosaves. Normal saves collect a snapshot while players keep moving and fighting. Encoding, full validation and disk writing run in the background. Multiplayer owner updates are compressed, reducing the traffic needed to collect a save.
• A failed save keeps the previous checkpoint. An incomplete or inconsistent snapshot is rejected and retried later, without replacing the last good save or rewinding live players.
• Shared XP stays consistent in saves. In-flight XP and chest level rewards are tracked in order. A save waits for settled owner state or retries later, rather than accepting a snapshot with missing or duplicated contributions.
• Disconnected crew members keep their saved kit. Completed saves retain each owner's inventory, progression and personal loot. A disconnect during collection rejects that attempt; later saves preserve the absent player's last durable state.
• No endless results retry. Victory and defeat make bounded attempts to save the final battlefield, then proceed to the cinematic or summary. A failed final save shows an explanation and still lets the crew leave the results screen.
• Finished means finished. A late autosave cannot make a completed run appear as active combat in Continue. Results and progression rewards retain their existing safeguards against repeated awards.

A stronger local

• Four base cannons. The pub starts with an outward-facing cannon on every side. Each gun covers its own approach, and all four show their firing effects to the crew. Defence ranks improve these same guns.
• Double base pub HP. New official runs start at 4,000 HP, and base health is doubled at every pub level. Structure upgrades and fitted augments still add their own effects.
• A properly flat runway in new runs. The reserved strip and cargo apron now have flat ground, including their actual collision surface. Activation uses the same field. Existing saves preserve their exact ground so older fences, ponds and buildings keep their saved positions.
• Cargo you cannot walk through. The permanent airport crates have fitted collision, with the gaps between boxes left open.

Stamina and pre-run tuning

• Recover after sprinting. Exhaustion ends a held sprint so recovered stamina is no longer spent in tiny repeated bursts. Release the sprint button before starting another burst.
• Recover inside the pub. Stamina regeneration and temporary stamina-effect timers continue while sheltering, without letting characters sprint indoors.
• Defence tuning is available before a run. Returning through Save and Quit clears the stale menu lock. Open the editor through Housekeeping or Configure defence tuning at the Trip table. Solo players and crew hosts can edit the next run; active runs keep their frozen rules and clients see the host-only explanation.
• The tuning editor, presets and pub augment actions have been checked again across ordinary and wide windows.

Existing saves and playtest focus

There is no new progression reset. Existing 0.10.0 runs retain their saved rules, including their original pub HP; start a new official run to use the doubled base health. All players in a crew should update together.

Please focus feedback on autosaves during a busy multiplayer fight, finishing a run and returning to the pub, stamina recovery, and the new four-sided defence. Include host or client, pub level, run time and logs when reporting a problem.

Short local multiplayer checks covered 160 enemies and 1,200 XP pickups with no save-induced pause or input hold. Solo Save and Quit, warm and cold Continue, cancellation, newer XP and a real peer disconnect also passed. Long Steam playtests remain the next check for real-world network conditions and balance.

The run is now about your local. Hold the line, scavenge, and build the pub up to level 10. You win by finishing the pub, not by outlasting a clock.

One-time reset. 0.10.0 starts everyone with fresh progression, records and saves. Settings, bindings and accessibility choices are kept. Back up your 0.9.x profile first if you want the old data, and do not alternate 0.9.x and 0.10.0 on one profile. Crews must all be on the same version.

The new loop

• The pub has HP. If it reaches zero, or a redcoat gets through the front door after its four-second breach, the defence is lost. A player going down is not a loss. Downed players crawl at a quarter speed. Solo players recover to full health over 45 seconds. Anyone can be revived at the front door whatever the bar hours are.
• Nine upgrades to level 10. Structure, Defences and Hospitality each have three ranks. Fund them from the shared run wallet of scrap, coins and building supplies. Crews vote on purchases. Reaching level 10 ends the run with a short cinematic filmed in the actual battlefield with your actual crew, then a summary.
• Bosses and events. The All-Rounder arrives at level 3, the Cane Toad at 4, the Drop Bear at 7 and the Big Roo at 9. The Melbourne Cup runs at level 5: the horses run over buildings, never hurt them, and knock players down on contact, indoors or out. The First Fleet always lands at 29:48 of run time and attacks rather than taking over the pub.
• Everything comes from the coast. No enemy is teleported. Enemies head for the pub, latch on to players nearby and can be lured away.
• Build to hold. A one metre grid, connected fences and gates, repairs, and towers that can be destroyed. Chests and fishing give augments that you fit into ten pub sockets, and the pub shows what you have fitted. A patched, weathered shed grows into a premium pub across ten stages, gaining an upper storey at level 6, a balcony at 7 and a covered upper verandah at 8.
• Time never stops indoors. Each player can be inside or outside independently. Hours and storms only close the bar and shop, never shelter or revival.
• Two boards. Solo Defence and Crew Defence. Challenge and Unlimited modes and the old victory parade are gone.
• Developer tuning. The pre-run menu has named presets you can import and export, with costs, HP, enemy pressure and more. Custom runs are marked and unranked.

Air support and pub polish

• Call in the RAAF. A rare pub augment unlocks a map-drawn dump-and-burn along a bounded line, with a shared 180-second cooldown. It torches regular enemies and deals limited damage to bosses.
• Supply flights. A dusty airstrip is present behind the pub from match start, with big white X marks at both ends while it is out of service. The optional add-on activates the existing strip for periodic shared scrap and building supplies by plane. Each landing also restores up to 250 pub HP. The plane touches down, unloads and takes off, and the delivery notice shows the actual repair. Activation costs run resources and is separate from the upgrades needed for victory. The F111 and supply aircraft use sourced CC0 models with fitted flight animation and matching sound.
• A livelier local. The opening now has a wider enemy cast and new cinematic Australian narration. Bogans have worn flannos, faded denim and scuffed boots. Pub interiors have wear, decorative patrons, drinks and room ambience, while later defence ranks show more capable mounted weapons.
• Dunny fly hits. Solo flies now use the normal hit feedback and damage accounting. Flies follow airborne hurt boxes and reject retired targets without increasing their damage or size.
• Tower target lifetime. Pig Huntin' Ute discards retired pooled targets before aiming or shooting, preventing repeated transform errors.
• Pub drawers and saves. Closing the augment screen restores normal menu and exit controls. Music keeps playing during checkpoint capture, and saving performs less repeated work on the main thread.

Playing together

• Join a defence in progress. Up to four players. New arrivals wait in a visible queue that can be cancelled, then catch up to the running battle without interrupting anyone else. If the run ends while you wait, you are told.
• Saves and recovery. Solo and crew runs save and resume, with dormant teammates returning at any time. If the host is lost, a surviving member can recover the crew from their last saved checkpoint.

Known limits

Real Steam lobbies, native Windows play and long crew sessions have not yet been through final acceptance, and complete-run balance is still being measured against the 35 to 45 minute target. Automatic host migration during a run is not included: use the saved-crew recovery.

Both sourced CC0 aircraft are imported and reviewed. Final local smoke was approved by the developer. Release packages are generated from the final tagged source; RC2 archives remain historical evidence.

A multiplayer reliability update, with less stubborn late-game enemies and smoother choices during combat.

• Safer Continue and rematch. Updated the Steam multiplayer integration and repaired connection teardown around the end-of-run screen to address the reported crashes.
• The crew sees the same fight. Tower animations and attacks now replicate, with recovery when a client catches up. Active boss projectiles, expanding attacks, camel spit and poison colours also recover correctly.
• A consistent final wave. March enemies now share the host's size, health, hitboxes, movement and deaths. Their ordinary horses no longer inherit the Melbourne Cup's enormous hazard health.
• Loot that catches up with you. Clients receive the current ground-loot roster, including XP, scrap and consumables. Magnet collection and personally awarded fishing guns now reach the correct player.
• Fairer damage credit. Rapid client attacks no longer hit the old low shared damage cap. Boss damage, poison credit, lifesteal and personal damage totals follow the player who caused them. Snags recognise newly spawned bosses when boss targeting is selected.
• Less late-game damage sponging. Reduced late scaling for bosses, traffic controllers, electricians and crocodiles. Crocodiles have bounded combat growth, and endless boss health grows more gently. The regular horde curve and level costs are unchanged.
• Reliable upgrade clicks. Moving the mouse while holding a button no longer cancels upgrade, confirmation or drink selections.
• Weather and pub polish. Clients recover overlapping weather effects without renewing their duration. Pub characters have varied idle timing, and overhead identity labels sit above heads and hats.

Please focus this playtest on Continue/rematch, client loot collection, tower and boss attack visibility, damage credit and late-game difficulty. Local multiplayer checks passed; real Steam sessions across different machines remain the community playtest focus.

The coast has company. Defend the island, back your own horse with the crew, and meet a refreshed cast in this playtest update.

• First Fleet arrives. Three tall ships land 17 to 88 seconds after the first Melbourne Cup stampede ends. Convicts rush into melee while redcoats aim and fire slow musket shots. Clear the landing party within two minutes to save the pub. Boomerangs deal double damage to both enemy types. Follow the ship marker on your radar and map.
• Lose the defence, lose the pub. A failed defence turns the pub into Colonial HQ for the rest of the run, raises a Union Jack and sends out redcoat reinforcements. Even the Punter cannot get you back inside. Already accepted pub features finish before you are kicked out.
• Pick your own winner. In multiplayer, each crewmate can choose a horse, make an optional personal coin wager and cheer their selection in the same Melbourne Cup race. Winning wagers pay the displayed odds once. Spectating and slow or disconnected players will not hold up the crew. Surviving the stampede awards three levels without extra copies from client completions or XP multipliers.
• Fewer levels, weightier choices. Level costs have increased, combo XP now caps at 2x, and crocodiles no longer produce runaway cubic XP rewards. Enemy health and damage gain a stronger time-based curve. Earned upgrade choices remain banked; player level still does not increase enemy damage, and armour keeps its existing protection.
• Weekly challenges follow their descriptions. Removed a hidden multiplier that could turn an XP or healing penalty into none at all. Sixteen weekly sets have been revised, with checks across all 52 for excessive stacked penalties.
• Watch the shoreline. Fresh enemies and bosses approach from offshore, and living enemies leave through the coast before being removed. Horses, cyclists and emus keep their crossing lanes. Fleet troops use visible gangplanks, with clear landing routes and temporary fog visibility around the ships.
• A refreshed human cast. New shared bodies, fitted uniforms and a clothing pass cover the playable humans, human enemies, All-Rounder, jockeys and ute gunner. Distinct workwear, protective kit, hats, boots and racing silks give each role a clearer identity. Your character choices, presets and progression remain intact.
• Better movement and mounted models. Smoother walk/run transitions, slow-input stepping, turns and remote settling. Fishing now uses a forward two-handed grip. Repaired horse joints, skin weights, saddles and rider contacts reduce stretched anatomy and overlapping parts. Horse speed and event timing are unchanged.
• Less repeated horse setup. Horse assets stay cached, rendering is warmed during loading, textures use GPU compression and large waves are created over several frames. These changes target the horse-spawn hitch; Windows and full late-run performance still need community testing.
• See what is attacking you. Clients now see boss projectiles, expanding attacks and electrician charge rings. Boss warnings recover after late loading. Boomerangs and magpies follow their owner's throws, returns and swoops without adding duplicate damage.
• Safer profile loading. Missing or damaged version stamps no longer erase progression. Invalid settings are checked, readable profile records are salvaged, and checkpoint backups can be recovered. This fixes reproduced loading faults, but the reported native first-launch crash is not yet confirmed resolved.

Please focus feedback on Fleet difficulty, progression pace, crew wagers and client combat visibility. Windows performance and the larger client polygon artifacts are still unconfirmed. If problems return, keep the affected player's logs and F4 performance capture.

G'day legends! This one's about keeping the run moving, giving the pub proper opening hours and making the crew easier to follow.

• More choices without stopping the fight. Pylons, shrines, chests, fishing catches, boss rewards, the haul, ATM and tower selection now use live side drawers. Keep moving while choosing, with health, stamina and adrenaline visible. Put required rewards aside with Later and reopen them from pending rewards or the pause menu. Your rolled choices and owed rewards stay intact.
• Pause when you mean to. Explicit pause still stops the shared co-op run. You can open your own pause menu while a crewmate has paused, and closing a reward drawer does not release their pause. Controller confirmation no longer doubles as a jump.
• The pub keeps its own hours. A new world clock shows when the pub is open, normally from 12:00 up to midnight. Time inside advances the sky and weather without advancing combat waves. The old ten-minute gambling allowance is gone. Bottle-O Bandit is barred from 18:00 to 06:00; a Punter in the crew bypasses normal hours and that ban. Storms and downed crewmates still prevent entry.
• Finish your feature before last orders. Closing time and storms stop new wagers, but accepted paid features finish and pay before the crew returns to the run. Pub time survives saves, host migration and reconnects.
• Play the cabinet. Adjust your wager and spin using controls on the 3D machines, with mouse, keyboard or controller. See your personal paid, returned and net totals, plus a crew feed showing bets and results.
• Unlock a harder bargain with Yarns. Optional run modifiers at the Trip table unlock from earned Yarns. Early doors opens at 10:00 for 15% more enemy spawns. Last shout stays open until 02:00 for 20% more enemy health. Lucky break gives 10% of lounge spins a second result and keeps the better cash payout for 25% more enemy health. Loaded dice raises that chance to 20% for 50% more enemy health and replaces Lucky break. The host chooses for the crew; weekly challenges do not use these tradeoffs.
• Combat follows the run clock. Enemy health, damage and movement are set when enemies spawn, using elapsed combat time instead of player level. Adding crewmates increases enemy numbers and health without multiplying individual hits or movement speed. Cyclists get a gentler time-based speed increase. Existing armour and XP-drop rules remain.
• Progress past 200 stays visible. Fixed client level reports above 200 being discarded. Your pending choices remain banked, including across saves. The XP cost increase at 200 is still a progression curve, not a hard cap.
• Keep track of the crew. Consistent colours link crew names, health presentation and portrait map markers. Offscreen directions and downed states are clearer, and the crew HUD shows who is fishing. Notifications and the world clock have clearer space around live drawers.
• Smoother client enemies. Added a small movement buffer to reduce stop-start walking and idle animation under uneven network updates. Boss attack warnings also handle phase updates arriving in a different order.
• Fixed a client shadow rendering fault. Enemy shadows now follow their displayed models and correctly reuse their render slots. This fixes reproduced misplaced patches and a tall dark streak during repeated enemy spawn/removal cycles.

Still under investigation: the larger giant polygons reported by clients are not confirmed fixed by the shadow change. Windows performance has not been verified in this pass. We'd especially like feedback on late-run co-op balance and frame rate, deferred rewards, pub closing and client visuals. If the polygons return, please keep the affected client's logs and F4 performance capture.

Outback Steve

G'day legends! We've been through the pub, the island and the HUD with a big art and readability pass. There's a lot more to this one than a fresh coat of paint.

• Room to choose upgrades and beers. Upgrade choices and the Beer Satchel now share a responsive side drawer that uses the available height. Useful explanations come first, with scrolling for longer descriptions. You can keep moving with the keyboard or controller while choosing. Health, stamina and adrenaline remain visible below the drawer; the minimap shifts beside it and secondary panels make room on smaller screens.
• Optional confirmation. Settings > Graphics includes separate saved options for Confirm upgrade choices and Confirm drinking beer. Both default to on. Turning either off makes one deliberate click or controller accept apply one choice. Hovering previews without changing a committed choice. Drinking from a stack uses one beer, and queued upgrades are spent one choice at a time.
• Safer live menu input. Selecting a beer no longer competes with quick tower upgrades or mouse-follow movement. Closing either drawer restores the HUD, and panels hidden to make space no longer block clicks invisibly.
• A consistent illustrated HUD. 36 new painted illustrations refresh weapons, gear, supplies, counters and rewards. Menus and HUD slots share the same item art, with clear level badges, rarity colours and warm brown empty slots.
• A finished pub exterior. Closed the holes in the roof and gables, added eaves, chimney flashing and rear details, and brought the timber and tin into line with the interior. The VIP entrance is now a timber door with frosted glass and brass hardware, with Mick beside the approach. The outdoor doorway also fits under the veranda.
• Better pub framing. Character browsing centres your chosen mate beside their details card, with Bob's view clear of the bar taps. The pub and HUD use the actual window shape, including ultrawide and taller windows.
• More character in the cast. Finished IT Gary and the Electrician, refined Cyclists and Eshays, improved painted animal surfaces and bird wings, and made friendly and enemy variants easier to distinguish. The Yarn Summary uses the current character models with idle animations.
• A more coherent island. Improved gum trees, grass, fractured rocks, gravel and tumbleweeds, softened busy ground detail and fog transitions, and made characters easier to read in night and storm lighting. Billabongs now visibly dry out as they empty.
• Better props and towers. The ute has more believable human and vehicle proportions with a posed gunner. The ATM has recognizable controls and a cash slot, towers have clearer supports and joins, and supplies and scrap have more distinct shapes and materials. Existing saved tower placements remain compatible.
• Readable weapon effects. Blackboard Duster produces soft raised chalk clouds that remain transparent when overlapping. Beer leaves wet amber puddles, while danger, healing, fire, sound waves and impacts have clearer boundaries and finishes.
• Small weapons, proper detail. The tape measure has a smaller reel case, a marked curved blade and a metal hook. Hills Hoist washing now bends and flutters from pinned top edges as it spins. Small projectiles have more consistent shapes and materials.
• Colourful pickups and clearer rewards. XP opals have stronger colours and distinct cuts for their four tiers. Beer and Ausmite labels follow their curved containers. Boots, upgrades and bonus slots use the right reward symbols.
• A faster Melbourne Cup. Cup stampedes move twice as fast in both solo and co-op, including fishing triggers. Horse animation follows the new speed, and existing solo Cup speed modifiers still apply.

Make sure the whole crew is on 0.9.27. We'd love feedback on the live drawers, visibility during busy fights, pub presentation and the faster Cup.

Outback Steve

G'day legends! Challenge pylons have a new look and a new set of deals. Pick your risk, ring the gong and see what your crew can handle.

• A proper challenge gong. Curved timber, worked brass and a clear ready face replace the old pylon. Accepting a deal makes your character swing a mallet and strike it, with a ringing impact your nearby mates can hear. The gong folds down and latches shut once claimed.
• Two offers from seven possibilities. Each pylon presents a pair of choices with clear rewards, costs and durations. You can walk away if neither suits your run. Closing and reopening keeps the same offers.
• Double Trouble: Add one boss to the next scheduled encounter. Every boss in that encounter has double health, and the extra boss keeps its normal bounty.
• Last Shout: Add one boss to the next scheduled encounter, with double damage for every boss in that encounter. The extra boss keeps its normal bounty. Only one boss deal can wait at a time, and fishing up a boss does not spend it.
• Feed the Swarm: Newly spawned regular enemies gain 20% health and 10% damage, but drop 25% more XP per rank. Take it up to three times for the run. The bonuses add together; enemy movement speed and bosses are unaffected.
• Waltzing Matilda: A 45-second crew buff. Stand still for three seconds to light a small campfire and recover 100 HP and 25 stamina per second. Moving interrupts the recovery and restarts the wait. You can stop and rest again while the buff lasts.
• You Beauty: The crew gets 35% more weapon damage for 30 seconds.
• Flat Out: The crew gets 25% faster movement and 50% faster stamina regeneration for 30 seconds.
• Big Bikkies: The crew gets an extra attack and 35 percentage points of weapon size for 25 seconds, subject to the normal weapon limits.
• More bosses, less HUD clutter. Up to eight bosses can fight at once. Larger encounters use a compact two-column roster with individual health and challenge costs, keeping the action visible. Smaller encounters retain the detailed cards.
• Better co-op and save handling. Simultaneous pylon claims award the deal once. Saved deals, remaining buff time and claimed pylons survive resuming a run. Restored bosses reach joining teammates correctly, and boss summons share the paced enemy spawning system without accumulating a reinforcement backlog.

Taking the same temporary buff again refreshes its duration. It does not stack its strength or add extra time. These buffs are separate from beer effects.

Make sure the whole crew is on 0.9.26. Let us know which deals you take, which you leave behind, and how readable the boss roster feels in a busy fight.

Outback Steve

G'day legends! This update gives the .303 a proper presence and makes your

character easier to follow when the outback gets crowded.

• The .303 rifle is now visibly held with both hands, with a raised charging

pose and recoil when you fire.

• Added muzzle glints, tracers and impact effects to make each shot easier to

follow. The charge bar now sits above your head, clear of the weapon.

• Co-op teammates can see your rifle aiming, charging and firing effects too.
• Wicket Keepers now wind up and release caught shots at the visible throw

moment, with each queued return getting its own complete animation.

• A gentle boost to night lighting brings out more detail in dark outfits

and nearby ground.

• A small gold player marker and direction arrow help you keep track of

your character through crowds and weather, with space kept clear for health

and rifle charge bars.

• Fixed Emu and Electrician animation timing by removing duplicate updates

that made their animations play too quickly.

Cheers for the feedback, legends. Keep those screenshots and bug reports coming!

Outback Steve

G'day legends! This update gives the HUD and menus a tidy-up, from the middle

of a hectic run to a quiet visit to the pub.

• A consistent Outback look with warm brown panels, gold accents, clearer text

and better button feedback.

• Better HUD spacing for bosses, objectives, weather, buffs and crew. The XP

bar runs edge to edge along the top, with breathing room below it.

• Centered announcements that take turns. Storm warnings, level-up skips and

other notices queue up instead of competing for the same space.

• Clearer upgrade cards and build statistics, with explicit units, live bonuses

and a "What these stats mean" guide.

• Cleaner minimap direction markers, with letters centered in their badges.
• Better padding and scrolling across Settings, rewards, tower selection,

machines, run summaries and pub screens. Tower lists use the available height.

• Improved controller navigation, corrected shoulder-button controls and a

visible Back button on the map.

• Clearer casino screens, including chip values, button contrast and paytables.
• Fixed a layout crash when opening level-up choices at smaller resolutions.

The default UI scale is now 90%, with 50% to 200% available under

Settings > Graphics > UI Scale. Existing custom scale settings are respected.

Cheers for the feedback, legends. Keep those screenshots and bug reports coming!

Outback Steve

Release 0.9.15 — owner accepted the pub after playtesting and authorized the local cut.

• The title entry and return-to-menu paths now lead into a furnished 3D pub with seven areas to explore.
• Select an area to move the camera, then choose an object to open its menu. Camera movement can switch between smooth flights and instant transitions.
• Character, mate, challenge and loadout selection now open inside the pub. Browsing between areas retains the current equipment picks.
• Abandoning an unfinished equipment setup refunds its recorded purchase costs once; starting a run commits those picks through the existing loadout path.
• Continue saved run uses the existing save-loading flow, with unfinished pub equipment cancelled first.
• Multiplayer lobby entry and rematches now return to the pub while retaining the connected crew. Opening a casino game withdraws the local player's ready state.
• Crew and ready status are visible in the pub. Leave crew refunds unfinished equipment once, disconnects and restores solo run controls; changing crew or role refreshes the equipment setup for that session.
• Leaderboards and run details, settings, credits, trophies, lifetime stats, yarns, quests, bestiary and challenge history are available through pub objects.
• Jukebox, regular and mate conversations, blackjack, roulette and every existing pokie variant are integrated into the pub's service panels.
• Pub upgrades add cumulative room dressing; essential menu destinations remain available at every tier.
• Pub navigation includes keyboard/gamepad focus, object hover feedback and back paths through areas and panels.
• Service panels use opaque pub styling, and the jukebox retains its selected-track highlight when its rows rebuild.
• The quit confirmation uses the pub's typography, colours and button styling.

The .303 presentation, Wicket Keeper throw timing, night/storm readability and

further CPU investigation are deferred to the 0.9.16 plan.

Steam host recovery remains a separate feature investigation. The

release review records the passing 12-check final

battery, local ENet rematch, development exports and bounded visual review,

including separate PCK/editor-engine captures and native Linux UI evidence.

The handoff distinguishes the tested development

builds from clean release artifacts and their post-build verification.

0.9.14 release build — local validation complete, prepared for publication; not yet live.

• Fishing casts now reach their landing point without overshooting on a long frame, and landing collisions can register before the lure starts baiting.
• Fixed an error when the fallback character rig has no separate walk animation.
• Co-op player updates safely survive rematches and reject packets from the previous run, even when the seed is reused.
• Co-op music updates tolerate clients still loading their world and preserve boss/event music during resynchronization.
• XP, scrap and player-state messages check that their destination is still connected.
• Co-op enemy updates discard detached or recycled enemy identities before broadcasting positions.
• Hits arriving during an enemy's spawn wait for its new life to finish initializing, preserving damage and weapon credit after pooled reuse.
• Corrupt pub-rival data recovers without raising a JSON engine error.
• Closing during a loading screen now joins the pending scene load.
• Closing the game drains active audio before shutdown.
• Repeated character rigs reuse gait measurements, and distant enemy ground-contact updates follow their animation detail level.
• Enemies with 3D models pause their hidden fallback sprite animation, including after pooled reuse.
• Enemies share one speech-bubble canvas per viewport while keeping independent captions and fades.
• Unchanged terrain contact, rig offsets and damage tints no longer repeat native transform or material updates.
• Cyclones follow day/night lighting and fade over nearby opaque silhouettes to keep crowded fights readable.
• Steam startup checks actual API initialization before requesting online services.

The source for 0.9.13 has been recovered and preserved. Release checks now fail on unexpected engine errors, run the GdUnit suites separately, validate multiplayer process exits, and record source/artifact provenance for Windows and Linux builds.

Save format, character identities and combat balance are unchanged.

A presentation hotfix on 0.9.12. Red Belly finally lives on the dirt, and the stubby bottles are the size they always should have been. Damage numbers are unchanged.

🐍 Red Belly

• On the ground. The snake no longer floats a body-length above the paddock — belly contact follows the terrain, including slopes.
• About a third the size. Base length matches a weapon, not a boss. Hit volumes scale with it.
• Hits where it looks. Collision follows the slithering body instead of a thin column off to the side, so enemies the snake visibly runs through actually take damage.

🍺 Stubby Launcher

• Bottles are ~3× larger at base size. They were reading as a third of the intended projectile. Explosion radius and damage are the same.

No new save or settings reset.

0.9.13 is on Steam — Build ID 25192301.

A proper 3D production pass across the paddock: better-looking larrikins and wildlife, gear that stays in the hands holding it, and attacks you can actually read and dodge.

🧍 Larrikins with a bit of life

• Character animation overhaul: more natural idle poses and weight shifts, relaxed hands and finger grips, smoother walk/run transitions, and stride-matched movement with less foot skating or sinking. Co-op avatars use the same movement-aware playback.
• Bottle-O Bandit gets his own rigged model, including the character-selection preview. His existing Hair of the Dog ability is unchanged.
• Fishing looks like fishing: a modelled rod held in both hands, dedicated fishing poses, and a line attached to the actual rod tip rather than a camera-dependent sprite corner.

🦘 Wildlife, locals and riders

• Crocs, emus, dingoes, wombats and camels get dedicated species-shaped models and articulated movement. Fur and coat work gives dingoes and wombats their texture while camels keep a shorter, cleaner coat.
• Kangaroos hop and turn more naturally, with calmer weaving rather than exaggerated zig-zags. Boxing roos keep their polished model and now reliably enrage when their partner dies or returns to the enemy pool; their model also appears in the Bestiary preview.
• Magpies spawn airborne, cast grounded shadows, swoop into contact and recover for another attack instead of getting stuck in the return cycle. This is a flight-behavior fix beyond 0.9.11's repaired sprite sheet.
• Camels keep facing you while strafing or backing away, with matching directional movement clips and spit visibly leaving the mouth.
• Eshays and cyclists match the splash artwork: continuous rider bodies, proper scooter stance, hands on the grips, feet on the deck or pedals, and travel-matched wheels and cranks.
• Horse and jockey gallops are articulated across all four existing liveries. Planted hoof timing, rider motion and correctly scaled stampede leaders replace rigid sliding horses.
• Electricians, IT Gary, bogans and the Wicket Keeper receive model/animation work as part of the humanoid presentation pass.

🏏 Bosses and warning windows

• The All-Rounder tosses and catches the ball in his left hand 2–5 times, transfers it to his right, then bowls from the actual release pose. Deliveries descend toward nearby players instead of passing overhead; phase two retains its eight-ball fan.
• His bat stays in both hands through a crouched, two-turn sweep. The damaging blade stays inside the warning ring, and cancellation removes held props.
• Big Roo, Drop Bear and Cane Toad receive model/rig and authored attack-presentation work: clearer gathers, hops, leaps, strikes and recovery poses.
• Traffic controllers fight back properly: readable double-sided STOP/SLOW signs, slow pursuit, a committed directional windup, a short damaging sweep and a recovery window. Sidestep the warning lane; the attack no longer relies on passive contact damage or chewing on towers.

🪃 Weapons and effects off the page

• Boomerangs rebuilt: rounded curved wood, coherent grain, real spin and banking, fading ribbon trails, and returns that track a moving owner without overshoot. Existing damage, momentum and upgrade scaling are retained.
• Red Belly slithers as an articulated 3D snake and faces its travel direction; Magpie Flock uses animated 3D birds for orbiting and swooping.
• Dust Devil gets a modelled funnel, ground contact and rising debris. Its supercharged roaming cyclones and changing size are mirrored to co-op peers, including resynchronization, rather than appearing as unrelated local effects.
• Hazard Reduction Burn replaces opaque picture cards with grounded procedural flames, soft smoke and fading embers.
• The whip is a flexible 3D cord, Dunny flies are modelled insects, and the ute fires a 3D muzzle flash and tracer from its rifle barrel. Cosmetic co-op whips no longer query disabled collision monitoring.
• The stubby launcher stays 3D in top-down mode, instead of swapping back to a billboard.

🎣 Mates, towers and world pickups

• All six mates have 3D presentation: rigged blue heeler, cockatoo, kookaburra and platypus, the approved wombat model, and Mirrabooka preserved as its glowing Min Min guiding light. Owner-following behavior and abilities remain intact.
• Dunny, eucalyptus, windmill, servo pump, barbed wire and pig-hunting ute get modelled tower bodies. Windmill blades and pump machinery move; the servo has an animated display sheen.
• Billabongs become textured 3D basins with rocks and lilypads, retaining their depleted/refilled states.
• Scrap becomes recognizable iron, engine, fence and wheel models, with identical variant selection on host and client.
• Footy boots, nose beers and rifle pickups become modelled objects. Collection effects, values, arming grace and loot behavior remain unchanged.

🤝 Co-op and release housekeeping

• Starting weapons resolve the correct owner even when they fire before the world's player registry has finished spawning.
• Cricketer and traffic-controller attack presentation follows authoritative phase/timing updates; persistent weapon visuals survive co-op resynchronization.
• Release checks now exercise current behavior rather than retired version numbers, old sprite paths or obsolete popup layouts. Standalone checks passed 135/135; multiplayer scenarios and host migration were verified, with a combined console gate.

The 3D presentation works in both normal and top-down gameplay cameras. HUD, inventory icons, labels and menus remain 2D where appropriate. This is not a claim that every texture or hidden legacy state node was removed.

0.9.12 is live on Steam — Build ID 25183550. No new save or settings reset.

The horde fights back. Ultra-clear builds now get MORE enemies, the map hides 4-6 Offering Shrines that let you trade mercy for power, and the outback finally looks like the outback — red dirt, spinifex, and all.

🐎 The horde feeds itself

• Keep clearing the screen and the game answers: an adaptive spawn pressure system raises the spawn rate and the horde floor the longer you keep the map empty (up to 2x). It backs off when the horde recovers, and leaves the first 10 minutes alone.
• Enemy cap doubled to 2,000 to make room for the mob.
• Endless bosses are now truly endless — no more cap. Every 30 seconds, forever. Good luck out there.

🪨 Offering Shrines

• 4-6 glowing shrines scatter each map. Walk up, press F, and pick your price (the choice is run-wide):
• BLOOD PRICE — +1 of EVERY boss at every boss spawn. Stacks per shrine. Yes, that's two cricketers at once.
• FEED THE SWARM — +15% enemy health, speed and damage per shrine, multiplicative. Bosses included.
• Shrines show on the map once discovered (so do chests — that was quietly broken for chests, ponds and towers too, now fixed).
• Choice popups across the game (shrines, lootbox, boss bounty, fishing catches) now all share one look.

🌾 The outback, finally

• Terrain rebuilt: red dirt with pebble grit, red-soil scrub with spinifex clumps, warm ochre sand with dune ripples, cream salt pans, strata rock.
• Nights lifted ~50% at their darkest, and the horizon haze now follows the sun — golden by day, deep blue at night (no more beige midnight).
• Magpies are fixed — proper flight animation instead of scrambled pixels.

Cheers legends — the paddock's meaner now, but at least it's honest about it. 🦘

A big quality innings: the horde runs smoother, the game looks sharper, and a proper clean-up under the hood — plus a stack of bug fixes, including a few nasty ones hiding in your favourite builds.

🔒 Full-kit lock

• When your kit is full, all bonus weapon and item slots lock — no more overflow builds sneaking past the cap.

🐢 Hit commit slow

• Non-boss enemies that land a hit are slowed 90% for 0.5 seconds — no more enemies welding onto you and chewing through your health before you can react.

⚡ Performance

• Enemies are now pooled — recycled instead of rebuilt from scratch every spawn, the single biggest win at late-game kill rates.
• Towers, magpie flocks, terrain and the minimap no longer scan the entire horde every frame.
• Weather overlays (heatwave/cyclone/storm) no longer cost GPU while idle.
• Poison damage-over-time, death bursts, damage numbers and co-op transform sync all cost far less per frame.

✨ Visual polish

• Anti-aliasing (MSAA 2x) — no more shimmer on silhouettes and terrain edges.
• Bloom on emissive gear, distance fog, richer AgX colour, sharper directional shadows.
• Smoother motion on high-refresh monitors (physics interpolation at up to 240 fps).

🐛 Fixes

• Trigger Happy no longer silently cancels the damage of big volleys — the build actually works now.
• Fairy Bread no longer breaks your character's skin for the rest of the run.
• Bosses phase correctly under poison (weapon coatings can't stall a phase anymore), and boss poison ticks no longer show as fake crits.
• Overlapping slows (windmill + esky + wire + puddles) no longer permanently corrupt enemy speed.
• Overheal (Durries) now works with full heals and food, not just trickle heals.
• Insult-slinging enemies no longer double-roll their debuffs.
• Fence line-of-sight tower contact, croc unstick, and the wicket return cap all sorted.

🧹 Housekeeping

• Retired the old 2D legacy runtime entirely — the whole game is 3D-only now, leaner and cleaner.

Cheers legends — keep the reports coming. 🦘

Plinko's out of the paddock, and when the Wicket Keeper sends your shot back, you'll actually recognise what just hit you.

🚫 Plinko retired

• The Plinko tower is gone from the build menu in solo and co-op — no more placing it, no more mid-run cabinet.
• Pokies, ATM, and the rest of the gambling kit still work as before.
• Older saves that still list a Plinko tower just skip it on load (no crash).

🏏 Wicket returns look like your shot

• A returned catch is a danger-red copy of the weapon that got snagged — poker chip comes back as a red chip, snag as a red snag, bobber, snake, bullet, and so on.
• No more plain red ball that looked like Vegemite from top-down.
• Returns still fly high and pulse so you can tell them from your own fire — and they still aren't homing.

🎯 Hitbox reaches the ground path

• The return's collision drops about a metre below the flying mesh, so in top-down you still get hit when you're under the flight path (not only if you jump into the ball).

Cheers — update on Steam, then keep your head down when the gloves come up. 🇦🇺

Levelling is paced for a proper run again — massive early levels, then real work through the second hundred so L200 lands late, not mid-lunch.

📈 XP curve earns it

• Early levels still fly so you get weapons and knacks online fast.
• Mid-run (about L100 around 10 minutes on a solid clear) no longer free-rides into the soft-cap.
• Level 200 is a late-run goal again (~20 minutes on a hot build), not something you smash by minute 15 while the map is still warming up.
• Past 200 the wall stays climbable for full loadouts (~210 upgrades) on a strong 20–25 minute run — hard yakka, not a brick wall.

🧪 Why it felt wrong before

• Enemy XP scales with your level and combo. Flat “XP per minute” guesses understated how hard late income snowballs.
• This pass retunes the curve against a grounded sim of real spawns (director drip, waves, specials, base XP, level scale, combo) so the numbers match what the paddock actually throws at you.

Cheers — update on Steam, then enjoy a proper climb. 🇦🇺

Pad aim finishes, loot stops losing foot races, menus work on DualSense, and the Wicket Keeper's return is unmistakable.

🎮 Pad look, aim & rifle

• Right stick rotates the camera in 3D orbit mode.
• In 2D / top-down, right stick aims the .303.
• In 3D, the rifle fires where the camera faces — no more mouse-only aim.
• Charge with LT (or right mouse) and release to fire.
• Map is Select / Back / Share — not L3 (L3 was easy to mistake for sprint). Sprint stays LB.

📋 Menus on DualSense

• Stick and D-pad navigate menus again; Cross confirms.
• First pad input re-focuses a button if the mouse/touchpad stole focus.
• Settings save no longer strips D-pad from menu navigation.
• A one-shot settings factory reset lands everyone on the new pad defaults (jump A, sprint LB, interact B). Your next boot applies it once.

💎 Loot always catches you

• XP gems, scrap, beers, fairy bread, boots, and other magnet loot suck at 3× your current max move speed (dash, buffs, adrenaline included).
• You can no longer outrun the orb trail at full pelt.

🏏 Wicket Keeper returns

• Returned shots are big, red, and pulsing so you never confuse them with your own fire.
• They fly above your projectiles.
• Not homing — thrown toward where you are (with a short lead if you're moving), then straight on that line.
• 30% larger than the shot they caught, at half that shot's speed — readable, dodgeable, still mean.
• Keepers only catch when a player is within ~20 m — no more off-screen gloves snatching volleys.

Cheers — update on Steam, then don't stand still when the gloves come up. 🇦🇺

A proper pad pass: every major control surface works with a gamepad, prompts show the right button or key for whatever you're using, and multiplayer pick screens stay selectable even when the world doesn't pause.

🎮 Full controller support

• Jump on A, sprint on LB, Interact on B (chests, pokies, plinko, ATM, fishing, revive) — rebindable in Settings → Controls.
• Menus still use A to confirm and B to back (UI scheme only; same face buttons as gameplay, gated so they don't clash).
• Building, pokies, plinko, ATM, level-ups, lootbox picks, boss bounties, and fishing loot all have focus chains and open with a control selected.

🔤 Prompts match your device

• World prompts swap glyphs live: keyboard shows [F] Open, pad shows [B] Open (or whatever you've rebound).
• Covers chests, pokies, plinko, ATM, fishing, and revive hints. Switch stick or keyboard mid-run and the labels update.

🤝 Multiplayer picks without pause

• Boss bounty and fishing loot still don't pause the sim in co-op (you're vulnerable), but a full input modal freezes walk/dash/jump so the stick moves focus, and A confirms the card or Collect button.

🎰 Plinko & machines

• Plinko bets, turbo, compact, XP mode, and Collect are fully pad-reachable (no more mouse-only bet row).
• ATM closes with B / Esc and has a proper vertical focus spine.

Cheers — grab a pad and have a crack. 🇦🇺

Pokies remember how you like to spin, late-game hordes stop drying up under heavy fire, and you can actually finish maxing a full loadout before the XP soft-cap kicks in.

🎰 Pokies remember bet & rolls

• Your last bet amount and number of rolls stick between visits — same idea as the pause-on-open preference.
• Farming beers (or anything else) at 25× no longer means clicking the dial down from 100 every time.

🦘 Late-game horde floor holds

• When a strong build was clearing trash faster than spawns came back, the map could settle around ~50 enemies forever instead of climbing back toward 200.
• Top-ups are much more aggressive when the field is thin, and reinforcements prefer trash that actually lands (no more wasted crocs/electricians on a dry map).
• Hidden crocs (still under water) and post-victory electricians/traffic controllers no longer eat spawn-cap slots — only enemies you can actually fight fill the floor toward 200.
• Expect denser late-game packs, more XP orbs, and kill streaks that can actually fire.

📈 High-level XP soft-cap moved out

• The old soft-cap kicked in at level 100, but a full loadout needs about 210 upgrade levels to max — so the wall locked you out of finishing a build.
• Soft-cap knee is now around level 200, with a gentler climb after that. Early and mid-run levelling feel the same; past 100 is climbable again instead of multi-million-XP brick walls.

🛡️ Ring-in Brick Dunny matches Bob for real

• Picking the Brick Dunny knack (armour scaling) now grants +20 armour per level — the same as Bob's Hardened.
• 0.9.3 only fixed Ring-in's flat starting armour (0 → 30). The per-level knack was still stuck at +1, which is what the "should match Bob" report actually meant.

Cheers for the math, the drought reports, and catching the wrong armour number.

Fairy Bread finally sparkles on the 3D characters, and the field guide is clearer about what that bread actually does when a boss starts chewing through it.

🍞 Fairy Bread sparkles again

• Grabbing Fairy Bread lights up your character model with colourful sprinkle sparkles and a glitter cloud around you — not just a silent buff badge.
• Works on every character (rigged 3D models), not only the old flat sprites.

📘 Field guide: beer & Fairy Bread

• The website Status Effects page now matches the real beer effects (Technicolour Yawn is a chunder stagger, Totally Pissed is double vision, Liquid Courage is lifesteal, and so on).
• Fairy Bread vs bosses is explained: each boss hit is still blocked, but chips the bread — three boss hits shatter it (you don't take that damage; regular trash never breaks it).

Cheers for spotting the missing sparkle.

A batch of community bugs and quality-of-life fixes — less crashing on the death screen, clearer pokies and Fair Go feedback, and late runs that keep the wildlife coming.

💥 Death screen doesn't explode when you inspect the hit

• Turning on Hitbox Debug after a death and then hitting "Show me where I went wrong" no longer crashes the game. You can still wireframe the freeze-frame to see what got you.

🎰 Pokie names keep up with the reroll

• Rerolling a pokie cabinet updates the floating name above the machine straight away. No more reading "Eureka" while the menu says "Mad Mick's".

🛡️ The Ring-in matches Bob's armour

• Ring-in's base armour is back in line with Bob (30). Same tough start, as intended.

🦘 Late game keeps spawning trash

• High-damage builds that used to leave the map nearly empty late on now get a proper top-up of regular enemies. The horde doesn't evaporate into "three bosses and a cyclist."

🌫️ Blind Freddy weeks should feel smoother

• Fog-of-war that rolls back in behind you (Goldfish Memory / Blind Freddy) does less heavy lifting every frame, so lag with almost nothing on screen should ease up.

🍀 Auto-skip tells you when Fair Go was spent

• If auto-skip banks Fair Go because nothing in the level-up pool hit your minimum rarity, you'll see a short message like Fair Go taken — You Beaut not offered.

🟡 Known / left open

• Nothing major left open from this triage pass. Report fresh issues if they show up.

The Mozzie Zapper was stealing the late game — melting the frame rate when you stacked pierce and extra attacks, clearing the whole map (including stuff you couldn't even see), and turning into a white flash instead of proper lightning. It's been rebuilt as a local storm around you: still vicious, still fun to stack, and the game stays playable.

⚡ Mozzie Zapper — local storm

• Runs smoother when you go hard — big pierce / extra-attack builds no longer drag the whole run to a crawl.
• Storm stays on you — the bolt arcs through the mob near you, not halfway across the paddock and off the edge of the map. Fresh spawns out of sight get a chance to arrive before they die.
• Pierce still pays off — a long chain stays punchy and readable; piling on even more pierce cranks the voltage (more damage) instead of a never-ending hop-fest.
• Extra attacks fan out — more bolts look like a real lightning storm around you, not the same chain copied a dozen times on top of itself.
• Looks like lightning again — cleaner arcs you can actually see, even when the build is silly.

🟡 Known / left open

• Late-game spawn drought (very few regular enemies deep into a long run) is still under investigation.

A post-0.9.0 polish pass: combat fairness, late-game scaling, Wicket Keeper actually fielding the ball, and a pile of Discord-reported papercuts.

🏏 Wicket Keeper plays fair

• No more green tint — the tracksuited fielder was stuck with a leftover green modulate bleeding onto the 3D model. He's the right colours again.
• Catches and throws actually work — catch radius widened, and a projectile that hits the keeper can be snatched on contact (not only if it grazes a separate zone). Fishing rod and didge blasts are catchable too; snags, red belly, poker chips and the .303 still are.
• Returned shots still deal the damage your projectile would have dealt. Don't stand still.

🔫 .303 Rifle keeps up late

• The rifle's late-game damage was a rounding error against multi-million HP bosses (+2% per level wasn't enough). It now scales harder with player level so a charged shot still matters past the twenty-minute mark.

🌳 Eucalyptus groves scale with the run

• Healing trees no longer go soft mid-run: 1× heal for the first 5 minutes, 2× from 5–10, 5× after 10. Overlapping groves still stack (stand where the mist overlaps if you need it).

🐌 Slows read honestly

• Insult slow flavours (Lazy / Sluggish / Slowed…) already refused to mechanically stack — but the HUD showed several red badges at once and felt like a crawl. They now share one Slowed badge; a refused slow no longer leaves a phantom icon.

👷 Traffic Controllers less of a brick wall

• Base HP cut from 1000 → 500. Still tanky, not croc-tier immortal.

🦘 Big Roo slam honesty

• Ground-pound shockwave damage no longer reaches past the red telegraph disc. If you're clear of the circle, you're clear.

📊 Damage log names its sources

• Poison / venom coating ticks now attribute under the right label instead of vanishing into "Unknown". Mozzie, dust devil and blackboard duster stamp their weapon id explicitly; towers and venom show readable names in the DPS window.

🎰 Pokie pause preference sticks

• If you hit the header pause on the pokies panel, that preference is saved. Next time you open a cabinet it auto-pauses again until you turn it off.

🔎 Death-screen hitbox debug

• Yarn summary (post-death) has a Hitbox Debug button so you can wireframe-check collisions on the freeze frame without fighting the pause menu.

📖 Field guide: Status Effects

• Full buff/debuff reference is on the website under Status Effects (/status) — insults, combat statuses, beer and consumables. Not jammed into the in-game UI.

🛠️ Smaller polish

• Auto-skip min-rarity button text is coloured by rarity tier (You Beaut gold, etc.).
• Pokies "No Upgrades" toggle remains the answer for greys-from-the-machine — that suggestion is closed.

🟡 Known / left open

• Late-game spawn drought (very few regular enemies deep into a long run) is still under investigation — not fixed in 0.9.1.
• Fog-of-war lag on Blind Freddy-style weeks is parked unless it reappears.

No multiplayer protocol break beyond the normal version handshake — everyone on a crew needs 0.9.1.

The big one. Online co-op is here — team up with up to three mates and take on the whole outback together. Shared levels, shared loot, revives, boss bounties, and a leaderboard of your own. The mob's never been bigger.

🤝 Online Co-op Multiplayer

• Play the entire game with up to 4 players, over Steam with your friends or on a LAN. Every boss, every wave, every machine at the pub — it all works as a crew now.
• Shared level-ups — XP pools across the whole crew, and when the mob levels up everyone pauses and picks an upgrade together.
• Shared scrap pool + crew-wide chests — build off one pile of scrap, and a chest opened by one mate rewards everyone.
• Difficulty scales with crew size — more mates means more enemies, so a full mob still gets a proper blue.
• Revives — go down and a mate can pick you back up. Downed players keep firing, and everyone can see who's down and where.
• Crew boss bounties, endless mode, shared build mode, minimap crewmate blips + off-screen direction arrows, crew-down banners, and a full crew endgame screen tallying everyone's glory, kills, damage and revives.

🏆 Multiplayer All-Time Leaderboard

• A brand-new board just for crews. Your combined score is adjusted by how many of you there were, so 2-, 3- and 4-player runs all rank fairly against each other. Click any entry to see the whole crew and each mate's breakdown.

🎨 Full 3D Models

• Every character, enemy and boss now runs on a proper rigged 3D model with idle animations, instead of the old flat sprites.
• Those models show up in the menus too — character select, the loadout screen, the bestiary, and the pub's trophy wall (the Cane Toad's joined the wall).

🏏 New Enemy — The Wicket Keeper

• A track-suited menace who catches your projectiles out of the air and has a fair chance of hurling them straight back at full strength. Keep moving.

🌫️ New Weekly Challenge — Blind Freddy

• A fog-of-war week: your reveal radius shrinks (Fog Creep) and the map re-fogs behind you (No Fog Memory). Never saw it coming.

🐎 Melbourne Cup, Reworked

• The 9-to-12-minute horse stampede is now a proper synced, damaging spectacle — get caught in the charge and you'll feel it.

⚖️ Balance & Polish

• XP curve recalibrated to a logarithmic curve — no more hitting level 100 by the six-minute mark. Late-game levels feel earned again.
• Pokies — a "No Upgrades" toggle so you're not handed garbage grey upgrades, and the Grand Jackpot now pays out a guaranteed Bloody Legend.
• Enemies no longer move in perfect lockstep — each animates on its own phase, so a mob of roos doesn't hop as one.
• Plinko XP toned down, plus a long list of multiplayer fixes and tuning under the bonnet.

A quick round of community-reported fixes and quality-of-life tweaks.

🍺 Bottle-O Bandit's beer buffs go the distance again

"Hair of the Dog" is meant to make good beer effects last longer and longer — ramping toward near-permanent buffs — but they were quietly hard-capped at 60 seconds, so that ramp never actually happened. The positive-effect cap now scales with his beer power as intended. Other characters are unaffected, and negative beer debuffs still cap at 60s so a bad roll can't drag on forever.

🎰 Unlimited mode: no more dead-end item offers

In Unlimited, the level-up screen was still offering item upgrades whose stat was already maxed out (e.g. a Speed item after you've hit the speed cap), wasting a pick on something with no effect. Those are now filtered out, so every offer actually does something.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

• Fixed a performance-overlay quirk where a single Rush Hour event was double-counted (it read as two overlapping events — it wasn't). Diagnostic-only; no gameplay change.

No other balance changes this time.

Steam Achievements are here — almost a hundred of them, from your very first victory to winning the Real Emu War.

🏆 Steam Achievements

• The game now unlocks Steam achievements as you play — they fire quietly in the background as you hit milestones, so you'll get the usual Steam pop-up the moment you earn one. Nothing to turn on.
• Run feats: survive to victory, last a full 30 minutes, crack 5 million score, hit level 50, and land a 100-kill combo.
• Win counts: your first victory, your tenth, and your fiftieth.
• Boss slayer: a first-kill achievement for each of the four bosses — Big Roo, Drop Bear, the Cricketer, and the Cane Toad — plus a mastery achievement for beating each of them 25 times.
• Kill milestones: lifetime tallies for all fifteen enemy types at 2,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 kills, plus 10,000 and 50,000 total kills across every run you've ever played.
• Mates: recruit each of the six mates, and a "full mob" for collecting the lot.
• Mastery: max out each item, and each of the two signature weapons.
• At the pub: win a Melbourne Cup bet, win one at 20-to-1 or better, and hit the pokies jackpot.
• Hidden: a handful of secret ones for pulling off a run with real restrictions, clearing the whole bestiary, winning as every character, or surviving something a thousand strong. You'll have to find those yourself.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

• Continued the under-the-bonnet multiplayer groundwork — still completely invisible in a normal run, with no way to reach it and no effect on solo play.
• More cleanup of dead 2D-era code left over from the 3D conversion.

No balance changes this time.

Thunderstorms actually look like thunderstorms now, and Focus Boss got some long-overdue attention.

⛈️ Thunderstorms got a lot louder

• Rain now actually falls — atmospheric rain around you plus a rain-streaked screen effect for the duration of the event.
• Lightning strikes are now a real bolt crashing down from the sky (not just a screen flash), and it lights up the area around it.
• The sun dims by 50% while a storm rolls through, so it actually feels like the weather's turned.

🎯 Focus Boss fixes

• Added a small "BOSS FOCUS" badge near the boss health bar so you can actually tell whether the toggle or hold-key is doing anything — previously it was completely silent.
• Boomerang and Magpie Flock now respect Focus Boss too. Previously they were the odd ones out while every other auto-targeting weapon already honoured it.

No other balance changes this time.

Mostly under-the-bonnet this time — laying groundwork for future work, plus one crash fix.

🐛 Fixed

Fixed a crash in the collision-shape debug overlay (pause menu → Debug) when it tried to draw the Whip weapon's hitbox — only affected players who'd enabled that overlay.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Started hardening the enemy spawning/AI system for eventual multiplayer support — all invisible in a normal run:

• Every gameplay-random roll in the enemy spawner (formations, angles, special spawns) now goes through a seeded RNG tied to the run, so a run's spawns are reproducible from its seed.
• The enemy spawner's ring anchor is now a "crew centroid" abstraction instead of hard-coding a single player — a no-op today with one player, but the right shape for later.
• Closed a few gaps where spawn timers (the Last Muster stampede, themed special spawns, emu formations) weren't gated behind host-authority checks — again, no effect today, just correct scaffolding.
• Continued cleaning up dead 2D-era code left over from the 3D conversion.

No player-facing gameplay changes beyond the bug fix above.

A small one — a new combat option, plus dev tooling that doesn't touch anything you'll notice in a run.

🎯 Hold to lock on

A new Hold Ctrl to focus the boss control — while held, every auto-targeting weapon dumps everything onto the boss, no matter what else is on screen. Release to go back to normal targeting. Think of it as a burst window on top of the existing "Focus Boss" toggle: leave the toggle off for normal play, then hold when you actually need every shot on the boss. Rebindable in Settings → Controls.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Enemy and boss scenes now show their actual 3D model when opened directly in the editor, instead of nothing — a tooling fix so future collision-shape work (like the capsule overhaul in 0.8.35) can be done by eye instead of guessing numbers and playtesting to check. Doesn't touch anything in the shipped game.

A day/night cycle, and a proper fix for feeling boxed in by the horde.

🌗 Day/Night cycle

Runs now have a real day/night cycle — start at midnight, watch dawn build into a bright noon, then a dramatic dusk as the 20-minute mark closes in. It's tied to the same clock weather already uses, so storms and lighting always agree with each other. Past 20:00 the sun keeps cycling through further days.

🧭 No more getting walled in

A cluster of fixes aimed squarely at the "surrounded no matter which way I run" feeling:

• Enemies spawning together now keep a minimum distance apart instead of stacking into a solid clump.
• A big group of enemies spawning at once now arrives in one of a few different formations — a flanking line, a pincer from two sides, or a rolling staggered wave — instead of always surrounding you uniformly.
• Bogans and kangaroos now approach with actual movement variety (arcing in from an angle, or weaving as they close) instead of a dead-straight beeline, so packs read as dodgeable individuals rather than a wall.
• Electricians specifically: spawn less often and their zap radius is smaller.

🎣 Weather and time affect fishing

Night fishing bites a bit more (and the good jackpots are a little more likely), storms bring a small feeding frenzy, and heatwaves make you more likely to hook a croc.

🔧 Fixes

• Focus Boss + Poker Chips: only the first chip in a volley was actually redirecting to the boss — the rest were scattering to trash. All of them redirect now.
• Horses vs. deployed structures behind fences: horses were dealing damage to towers placed behind intact fences (a leftover gap from the 3D conversion — 2D horses never damaged structures at all). Fixed, matching the original behaviour.
• Invisible croc on dry land: a croc's underwater ambush state could persist after it ended up on dry land (a drained pond, a rescue-teleport, or a map-generation edge case), making it an unfair, unseeable killer. It now surfaces the instant it's off water, however it got there.

🛠️ Chest checklist

A small "Chests: opened/total" readout now sits in the HUD so you can tell if you've cleared the map.

🐞 Hotfix (build 2)

The 0.8.34 collision debug overlay had a silent bug that stopped it (and the pause menu's Debug button) from actually loading at all since it shipped — fixed, it now works as intended. Also: the ` (backtick) debug console is now available in every build, not just internal dev builds, so the community can self-diagnose reports with real commands and data. Opening it disables leaderboard recording for that run (it's a diagnostic tool, not a competitive-safe one).

🐞 Hotfix (build 3)

• Every enemy's hitbox reshaped: using the new Debug view ourselves showed collision shapes were noticeably bigger than the models across the board, not just on the enemies already flagged by the community. Every regular enemy and boss now uses a capsule (or, for bosses, an already-fitted cylinder) hugging its actual body instead of an oversized box. Fixing this also surfaced a second, older bug: every enemy's hit/hurt box was vertically centred at a fixed height regardless of the enemy's real size — sinking tall enemies partway underground and, for genuinely low animals, still needing to be inflated to human height for the same reason. Both are now sized and centred to match the real model, and the Whip's reach was extended down to ground level to compensate.
• Sun no longer jumps: the day/night sun was stepping once a second instead of moving smoothly — fixed.
• Camera control on the death recap: you can now zoom and look around while viewing "what got me?" instead of the view being frozen.
• Firey's fire trail now lights up its surroundings — meaningful for the first time now that night is actually dark.
• Debug console: added rush_hour and thunderstorm commands (previously missing since those events post-date the console's other weather commands).
• Pause menu: fixed a slightly-off scaling pivot on the panel's open/close animation.

A big one under the hood, plus a new tool for the community and a new way to get zapped.

🩸 Dead enemies weren't actually dying (perf)

Found a long-standing bug while building the debug overlay below: when a 3D enemy died, it was supposed to get recycled into an object pool for reuse — but a leftover 2D-era line of code crashed partway through that recycling every single time, silently. The enemy got hidden and stopped ticking, but it never actually left the game's tracking — it just piled up invisibly, forever.

That matters because almost every auto-targeting weapon (Mozzie Zapper, Snag, Poker Chips, Boomerang, Stubby Launcher, Magpie Flock, and more) scans the full enemy list every single frame to pick targets. With this bug, that list only ever grew across a run — by the late game it held every enemy that had EVER died, not just the ones still alive. Every weapon's targeting was quietly getting slower and slower the longer you survived and the more you killed, on top of everything else. This is now fixed: enemies are properly recycled again, targeting scans stay sized to what's actually alive, and enemy spawning is cheaper too (real pooling, not a fresh instantiate every death). If you've felt Mozzie/general lag creep in even after 0.8.31-0.8.33, this was very likely a big part of it.

🔍 New: Debug view (pause menu)

Added a Debug button to the pause menu. It draws wireframe outlines of collision shapes in the world, with checkboxes for exactly which ones you want to see: your own hitbox and attacks, enemy bodies/hurtboxes/attacks, and placed structures. This is the same view the dev has used in the editor to confirm past hitbox bugs (Trafficman, Cyclist, Horse, the Electrician's zap radius) — now you can check it yourself and report mismatches with confidence. Off by default, your choices are remembered.

⛈️ New weather: Thunderstorm

A new event rolls in occasionally — the sky flickers, then lightning strikes. It's a light threat normally, but keep your Fishing Rod stowed: a metal rod out in a storm is a lightning magnet, and your odds of getting zapped skyrocket while it's out. Community suggestion — cheers wyqydsyq.

A fairness patch — closing gaps where the game was landing hits (or offers) it shouldn't.

🚴 Cyclist packs no longer double-hit

When cyclists stack up (a peloton, or a Rush Hour wave), two overlapping bikes could both land a hit on you in the exact same instant — it read as one cyclist hitting twice with no chance to react. Each cyclist's own hit was always correctly deduped; the gap was two separate cyclists overlapping on the same lane. A pack now collapses to one readable hit at a time — same danger over a sustained charge, no more surprise double-taps.

⚡ Electrician AoE now matches its ring exactly

Smaller Electricians were zapping you from beyond their visibly-shrunk warning ring — the damage radius wasn't scaling down with the model. Fixed so the zap always lands exactly where the ring is drawn, for Electricians of every size.

🎁 Bonus weapon/item slots now alternate

Getting a bonus slot from a boss bounty or a lucky catch could keep offering the same type over and over — some players saw six weapon-slot offers in a row before ever seeing an item slot. Offers now alternate between weapon and item (shared across both bosses and fishing), so a long dry streak of one type can't happen.

🔎 Investigated, no change needed

• The late-game "teleport"/lag-launch report turned out to be the same single hitch already fixed in 0.8.32 (the Dust Devil freeze) — confirmed there's no separate way for a lag spike to warp your position, so nothing further to fix here.
• Plinko still eating spins on close — the close/Esc/minimise path was re-checked line by line and correctly banks every paid ball. If you're still seeing this, please double check your version number is 0.8.30 or later.
• Cyclist hitbox still oversized — re-measured against the model; the 0.8.28 reshape holds up, colliders are comfortably inside the visible bike.

More late-game performance work — chasing down the hitches that 0.8.31's big win left behind.

🧊 No more one-second freeze

A rare but nasty ~1-second hard hitch in the late game is gone. The Dust Devil weapon was cleaning up all its spawned mini-devils in a single frame, and freeing that many physics objects at once stalled the whole game for a beat. The cleanup is now spread across a few frames — same weapon, same power, no freeze.

🏇 Smoother 20-minute crush

The Australia Day March (the 20:00 finale) had an enemy-counting bug that let the field quietly overfill past its intended limit. That's fixed, so the late-game horde stays within bounds. On top of that, enemy animation now eases off automatically when the screen is absolutely packed — purely cosmetic (you won't notice it in the chaos), but it claws back frames when it matters most.

🔧 Under the hood

Beefed-up performance logging (press F4 in-game) so any remaining late-game hitches can be pinned down precisely — it now captures the worst single frame each second, physics load, and which event is running. Helps us hunt the next one.

A performance patch for the late game, plus a Plinko quality-of-life toggle.

⚡ Smoother late game (big builds stop chugging)

When a run got into the thousands-of-attacks territory, the frame rate could crater — long stretches under 30 FPS, with nasty hitches. The culprit wasn't your enemies, it was the sheer number of attack effects on screen all doing collision checks every physics tick.

Your build is untouched — same weapons, same numbers, same screen-filling chaos. We just made each attack far cheaper to process: the persistent projectiles (Red Belly snakes, Snags, Poker Chips, Boomerang, Hills Hoist) no longer run their own redundant overlap checks (the enemy still detects the hit exactly as before). Late-game physics load drops massively with zero change to how anything plays.

🦟 Mozzie Zapper runs lean

The Mozzie Zapper chains and forks across every nearby enemy — and at high stacks it was re-scanning the whole enemy list over and over each frame. It now shares one enemy snapshot per frame across all its bolts, so the chain lightning is dramatically cheaper to compute while hitting exactly the same targets for exactly the same damage.

🎰 Plinko: Turbo mode

New Turbo toggle (the » button) on the Plinko window. Flick it on and the balls drop ~4× faster, so a big multi-ball bet resolves in a fraction of the time. Same pegs, same real slots, same payouts — just quicker to watch. The setting sticks between runs.

New toys and a couple of robberies sorted — straight from the bug and suggestion boards.

🚴 New event: Rush Hour

A new themed set-piece can roll during the day: Rush Hour. A pack of high-vis cyclists comes charging across the paddock in waves — a relaxed morning commute that builds into a flat-out peak-hour swarm before they pedal off. Watch for the call-out and keep moving.

🎯 Focus Boss targeting (new option)

Sick of your big-hitting auto-weapons spraying the boss's minions while the boss walks all over you? There's a new Focus Boss toggle in Settings. Turn it on and your auto-targeting weapons — Sausages, Fishing Rod, beer Stubbies, the Mozzie Zapper and Poker Chips — will lock onto the boss whenever one's on the field. Off by default; flip it on when a boss is the only thing that matters.

🏆 Your boss kill always pays out

A boss that spawned before the 20-minute mark but died just after it was dropping no reward at all — the bounty was wrongly tied to the clock at the moment of the kill. Now any legitimate boss pays out its haul whenever you finish it; only the post-victory endless re-spawns skip the bounty (as intended).

📋 Damage Log glow-up (pause menu)

The in-run Damage Log (pause menu) now reads like the death recap: colour-coded hits and heals, newest first, with proper names ("Big Roo's venom", "Bogan", "The Void") instead of raw codes — and it's fully controller-navigable. See exactly what's been chipping you without having to die first.

🐴 Horse hitbox honesty

The galloping Horse had a fat round hitbox that connected from further than it looked — third in the line after the Trafficman and Cyclist fixes. Its hit/hurt boxes are now a snug long-narrow shape that matches the actual horse, so a herd only gets you when it really should.

🎰 Plinko stops eating your bet

Closing the Plinko window used to forfeit the balls you'd already paid for — and so did minimising it (compact mode). Both now bank every paid ball (queued and mid-drop) into your pending winnings instead of binning them, so you never lose a bet you paid for. (The earlier close-path fix never made it into the live build — it does now.)

🐍 Red Belly ring stays put

The permanent ring of Red Belly snakes could quietly vanish mid-run — each snake was being consumed on contact (a boss or even water would wipe the lot) with nothing to replace them. The ring snakes now pass through everything like the other orbiting weapons, so your ring stays a ring.

🎲 Same start, every run

A character's starting kit (its weapon and any items you bring in from the loadout screen) used to roll a random rarity each run — a lucky opening could hand you a top-tier starter. Starting gear is now fixed at base rarity, so every run begins from the same fair baseline. Level-up rolls are still as random as ever.

A quick follow-up that tightens up yesterday's fixes (a code-review pass on 0.8.28 caught a few rough edges).

🚴 No more flying bikes

0.8.28's cyclist fix could leave a cyclist hovering in mid-air when you stood on higher ground than it. It now only gets lifted when it's actually sunk into the ocean at the map edge — on normal terrain it rides where it should.

🐪 Camel spit shreds armour again

Generalising the "slows don't stack" rule in 0.8.28 accidentally let an unrelated slow (a heatwave, a dodgy beer) block the camel's armour cut entirely. The camel's armour-shred now lands regardless — only the speed part defers to whatever's already slowing you.

🌡️ Slows you keep walking into refresh properly

A slow that re-applies itself — the heatwave re-asserting after a pond dip, or re-rolling a slow beer — was being refused instead of refreshed, so it could wear off early. Those now top themselves back up correctly (while genuinely different slows still don't pile on).

🎒 Wombat won't waste a dig

If the Wombat rolled an "item" reward but you had no items to level up yet, the dig did nothing at all. It now hands you scrap instead, so the reward's never silently lost.

A fairness patch — the things that were quietly robbing you.

🚴 Cyclists play fair now

• No more phantom hits. The cyclist's hitbox was a big square sitting well outside the bike (and last patch's size bump made it worse), so you'd get clipped — sometimes killed — without ever touching it. The collider now matches the actual bike.
• No more disappearing into the dirt. At the edge of the map a cyclist could sink below the ground while still hitting you. It now stays up at your level where you can see it coming.

🐌 Slows behave

• Slows no longer stack into a crawl. Getting hit by different slows at once (camel spit, insults, the heatwave) used to multiply together and bog you right down. Now while you're already slowed, another slow won't pile on.
• Your speed comes back. A slow could leave your speed cut with no debuff icon showing — stuck slow for up to a minute. Fixed: when the slow ends, your legs come back.

🔢 Honest numbers

• Incoming damage reads true. The floating "-N" damage number was rounding down, so a hit could show "-9" while actually taking 10 — leading to deaths the screen said you'd survive. It now matches the real hit (and the death recap).

🎒 Wombat keeps its hands off your loadout

• No more uninvited items. The Wombat mate's dig reward could silently equip a brand-new item (like Thongs) you never picked. It now only levels up gear you already own — same rule the weapon side already followed.

🚴 No more stealth cyclists

The drive-by cyclist was a killer you never saw coming — its lime jersey and teal bike blended straight into both the grass and the water. It's now kitted out in high-vis orange with a dark bike, and it's bigger (scaled up properly, so it still varies in size like other mobs). You'll see it coming.

🩹 Damage Log in the pause menu

Pause and hit Damage Log to see exactly what's been chipping you — a running list of recent hits with the time, damage, culprit and your HP after each. Same data as the death recap, but you don't have to die to read it.

🛠️ Fixes

• The tower upgrade window now shows which pokie machine you're upgrading (its specific variant name), instead of a generic "Pokie Machine".

🎒 New mate: The Ring-in — build your own!

A last-minute ring-in who fills any role. On the build screen you pick:

• One knack — a per-level scaling borrowed from one of the other mates (crit, armour, speed, extra attacks, luck, beer power, attack size, damage, XP/pickup, or fire trails). The knack you choose also shifts the Ring-in's base stats (a themed tradeoff — e.g. armour = tanky but slower, crit = glass cannon).
• One starter weapon — any of the game's starters.

The loadout screen now shows a full live stat sheet for your character — and it updates as you pick items, so you can see your build come together before you start.

⚡ Mozzie Zapper

• No longer skips wounded enemies. A bug from the last rework made already-damaged foes un-targetable at high extra-attack counts — fixed; bolts re-hit freely.
• No more physics/CPU spikes at high extra attacks. The chain now caches its enemy scan, and extra attacks add bolts at 1/5 the rate (floor +1) — so it still scales, without melting the framerate. No hard cap.

🎰 Casino fixes

• Plinko no longer forfeits your bet when you close the window — the paid-for balls auto-resolve into your winnings (collect them next time you walk up).
• Plinko scrap bets pay Coins (not a scrap refund), and winnings spew around the cabinet like the pokies.

🛠️ Fixes & polish

• Blocking weapon slots no longer floods you with item slots from fishing — the blocked side forfeits its share instead of redirecting everything to the open side.
• "THE HAUL" boss-reward tally shows Supercharged rolls properly (was "1x ?").
• Synergy icons no longer advertise an item you can't reach (e.g. a Goon Sack when your item slots are full).

🐸 The Cane Toad Colossus

• All of its damage is now poison. Touch it, eat a glob, get belly-flopped — it all lands as a poison DoT spread over a couple of seconds instead of an instant hit. The toxic toad pressures you with damage-over-time rather than burst (and the poison refreshes rather than spike-stacking).
• It no longer freezes the clock. The toad was the only boss that paused enemy spawns — and that same switch paused the run timer, so the clock stopped for the whole fight. Fixed.

⚡ Weapon work

• Mozzie Zapper now scales with extra attacks. Stack quantity and it forks extra bolts, each spread to a different cluster — on top of the size (reach + splash) and pierce (chain length) scaling it already had. The compat icons and website description reflect it.
• The Rifle actually scales now. The .303 charge rifle dealt a fixed 14–120 forever, so it fell off a cliff lategame. It now grows with your level and damage multiplier like every other weapon.
• Dust Devil — full visual revamp. The old swirly shader smeared into an ugly tan haze. It's now a proper swirling particle dust column that reads cleanly from any angle.

🎯 Hitboxes match their models

• Bosses use round colliders. The boss auto-fit was building a square box sized to the model's diagonal — ~40% too wide, with corners that hit where no boss was (the Cane Toad's square-on-a-round-body). They're cylinders now, matching the silhouette and rotation-proof.
• Croc, wombat & cane toad resized to their actual models (verified against the loaded geometry).

🔥 Firey

• Immune to the cyclone as well as the heatwave — the willy-willy's wind no longer drags the firefighter around.
• Heatwave visual is gone for immune players. Being immune now means no on-screen heat haze either, not just no debuff.

⚖️ Balance & feel

• Early crocs are fair. A fished croc in the first few minutes was an unkillable chunker — the early ramp now softens its damage too (not just HP), and starts lower.
• Same-type debuffs don't stack. Already slowed by camel spit? A fresh glob won't re-slow you into a near-permanent crawl — it waits its turn.
• Emus hit once per sprint. A charging emu was landing a sneaky double-hit in a single pass (same gremlin the cyclist had) — now it's one clean clip per run-by.
• Plinko pays Coins, not scrap, on scrap bets (a scrap "win" that just refunded scrap felt bad), and its winnings now spew around the cabinet like the pokies instead of around you.

🧹 Polish

• Level-Up cards don't overflow. The long description moved to a hover tooltip; the card face shows just the short roll, so text can't spill over neighbouring cards.
• Fire trail rides clear of the ground, so it stops knifing into hillsides as blocky orange chunks.
• Leaderboard "unavailable" card no longer shows players internal API-key details — just a tidy message.
• Mate-selection highlight now reflects the mate that actually got selected.

🤖 Outback Steve is a living benchmark (GH#112)

The "Outback Steve" entry on every leaderboard is now a standing AI benchmark that tracks the live board instead of a fixed number. Steve sits at roughly the 75th percentile of the current human scores — a strong but beatable target that rises as players improve, so the board always has an active pace-setter to chase (and the tuned per-board scores act as a floor when things are quiet). He's now clearly tagged 🤖 …[AI] so he's never mistaken for a human run, and he stays display-only — he can't take or override a real player's position.

🎯 Hitbox honesty pass — no more phantom collisions

A sweep of every enemy's collision boxes to match what you actually see, so you don't get robbed by hits that shouldn't connect (or whiff on hits that should):

• Trafficman had a near boss-sized collision box — he blocked and clobbered you from way outside his model. Now sized to his actual body.
• Crocs used a big square box, so they'd bite you from off to the side. Now a proper long, narrow croc shape — you can dodge sideways past the snout.
• Kangaroos had a tiny box (your shots sailed straight through). Now sized to the actual roo.
• Camels could only be hit around the ankles — their body and humps floated above the box. The hitbox now covers the whole beast.
• The Cane Toad Colossus had a hitbox far smaller than its huge body — shots near its edges sailed straight through. Now sized to the visible toad, so it's as hittable as it looks.

🐛 Bug fixes

• Thongs / speed items no longer dodge the Challenge speed nerf. Run challenges like Lead Boots now slow your total speed, including speed-item bonuses — a fast item can't sneak you back up to full pace.
• Cyclists hit once per pass, not twice. A drive-by cyclist was landing a sneaky double-hit on a standing player via sustained contact; now it's a clean single clip per pass.

🃏 Clearer upgrade cards

• Every Level-Up card explains itself. Weapon cards were falling back to a generic "+1 damage" line instead of describing the weapon — they now show the weapon/item's real description alongside the rarity roll.
• Synergy icons only where they mean something. Pure-player stat cards (speed like the Thongs, armour, max HP, XP, pickup magnet) no longer show weapon-pairing icons — those stats have nothing to pair with. The icons stay on stats that actually buff your weapons (size, cooldown, crit, poison).

🔒 Block loadout slots — single-weapon runs!

On the loadout screen you can now block weapon and item slots by clicking the slot indicators. A blocked slot is locked for the whole run: it lowers your slot cap and disables that slot's pickups in-game (fishing/chest/pokie slot rewards stop coming). Block your weapon slots down to one for a pure single-weapon challenge, or block all your item slots for a no-passives run. (You can only block slots you haven't already filled — deselect to free them up.)

🐊 Crocs stick to inland water

Crocs were lurking out in the coastal ocean as well as inland water. They now only hide in genuine inland water and ponds — kept well inside the coastline — so the open sea is croc-free and the billabongs are the danger zone, as intended.

🎵 Didge Blast — daze, not shove

The Didgeridoo Blast no longer knocks enemies around (and definitely no longer shoves bosses out of position). Instead its drone dazes everything it hits with a timed movement slow — strongest at the blast's core, fading toward the edge. Crowd control without the chaos.

⚡ Long-run performance

A few things were grinding very long runs to a crawl:

• Fire trails grow gentler. Firey's per-level trail-lifetime bonus was ramping far too fast (it could leave dozens of seconds of fire trailing behind you at very high level, piling into hundreds of patches). The rate is cut hard so trails stay reasonable — no caps, just a saner growth curve.
• Stray projectiles clean themselves up. Boss globs/balls that never travelled far enough or left the screen (e.g. when a boss died mid-throw) now self-expire after a few seconds instead of lingering for the rest of the run.

🦘 Double-jumps now cost more each time

Mid-air jumps are still unlimited, but each successive one in a single airtime costs double the previous: the ground jump is the base cost, then your air jumps cost 2×, 4×, 8×, … of it. Stamina drains exponentially the more you flap, so infinite hops are still possible — they just cost you fast. Land to reset.

🪂 Fall damage

What goes up... A hard landing now hurts, scaling with how fast you hit the ground. Normal jumps are always safe; only big drops (jumping off something tall, or flapping up high then plummeting) sting — and the further you fall, the more it bites. It can't one-shot you (the single-hit cap and invulnerability still apply), and a dash or fairy-bread invuln shrugs it off.

🐛 Fixes

• The Didge Blast no longer knocks bosses around. Its radial shove was pushing bosses out of position, bypassing their knockback immunity — bosses now hold their ground against it like they should.

A balance patch to rein in the late-game runaway — character power, slot counts and jump spam were all getting out of control.

⚖️ Character scaling now tracks your LEVEL

Every character's signature scaling used to grow off different, unbounded sources — kills, beers drunk, fish caught, time survived — which meant a long run racked up millions of stacks and the numbers exploded. They now all scale off your player level, so power grows on the same bounded curve for everyone:

• Steve — +0.5% crit per level (was per 12 kills).
• The Punter — +1 projectile every 10 levels (was per 60 kills).
• Bob — +1 armour per level (was per 10 kills).
• The Fisher — +2 Fair Go per level (was per fish).
• Bottle-O — +5% beer power per level (was per beer drunk).
• Tradie Shaz — XP & pickup range grow per level (was off the clock).

Same identities, same "keeps pace all run" feel — just bounded so a 25-minute endless run doesn't hit quadrillion DPS.

🎰 One slot per pickup, not two

Fishing, chests and pokie grand-jackpots used to hand out a dual slot that raised your weapon and item caps from a single pickup — which is how runs ended up with a dozen of each. A grand pickup now grants one slot (weapon or item, whichever you're more in need of), never both. Slots are still uncapped — they just grow at a sane pace.

🦘 Unlimited mid-air jumps

Double-jump is now an infinite flap — keep jumping as many times as you like mid-air, the only limit is your stamina (each jump still costs stamina). No more apex-timing window.

🐎 Stampede & visibility tweaks

• The horse stampede is now an unstoppable hazard. The thundering wave of horses is invincible (you can't farm it down) and 3× the size — dodge the giant mob, don't fight it.
• Cyclists stand out. Drive-by cyclists are 1.5× bigger and now always enter from off-screen (spawn distance pushed out) so they never just pop into view next to you.
• Blackboard Duster cloud is see-through. The chalk haze is much fainter now — you won't be fighting blind inside it.

Still on the cards

The proper 3D art pass to replace the placeholder models is still the big one. Keep the reports coming. 🦘

A boss-fight pass: a brand-new boss, a new boss cadence, and a clean-up of the attacks that didn't land, charged when they shouldn't, or summoned nothing.

🐸 New boss: The Cane Toad Colossus

A giant invasive cane toad joins the rotation — a warty bufo the size of a bus.

• Toad Hop — crouches and springs across the arena to close the gap (so it's not a sitting duck).
• Toxic Spit — gobs a glowing glob of poison at you from range.
• Belly Flop — heaves up and slams down a shockwave ring (below 60% health).
• Toxic Barrage — below a third health it loses the plot and sprays gunk in all directions.

⏱️ New boss cadence: 3 / 6 / 12 / 18 minutes

Bosses now arrive on a tighter, four-stage schedule instead of the old 5/11/15, ramped by difficulty: Cricketer @ 3:00 → Cane Toad @ 6:00 → Drop Bear @ 12:00 → Big Roo @ 18:00. The early two are tuned lighter since you'll be lower level when they hit.

🥊 Boss attack revamp

• Tail Swipe finally swipes. The Big Roo's tail swipe was secretly configured as a charge — so it did nothing as a swipe and, worse, made him lunge across the arena right as he was trying to Ground Pound. It's now a proper wide ground-sweep (a real melee hit around him), and the phantom charge is gone — Ground Pound and the "random charge" no longer step on each other.
• Joey Summon calls in the mob. It now rears up and whistles a pack of joeys into the fight when the Big Roo drops below half health, instead of quietly doing nothing.
• Claw Swipe has a real swing. The Drop Bear used to just flash red and deal damage in a circle with no motion — it now leans back and lunges forward into the strike.
• Every boss attack has its own animation now. Instead of one shared crouch-and-stretch, each attack has a distinct tell and motion: the Ground Pound rears up then slams flat, the Tail Swipe coils and sweeps wide, the Joey Summon rears tall to call the mob, the Claw Swipe lunges. (The Cricketer already winds up, spins his bat and — below half health — bowls in all directions; that last bit is now documented on the website too.)

🌐 Field Guide

• The Bestiary now lists the new Cane Toad Colossus and all its attacks, and the boss stat calculator scales them like everything else.
• Boss entries now describe the Cricketer's Ball Bowl evolving to fire in every direction once he's wounded.

Still on the cards

The proper 3D art pass to replace the placeholder models is still the big one. Keep the bug reports coming. 🦘

The big one this patch: every character now scales. You told us only the "scaling" characters were worth picking — so we gave all ten a unique, uncapped trait that grows the whole run. Plus a fresh start and a few fixes that were quietly ruining runs (chief among them the Melbourne Cup, where cheering your horse was a death sentence).

🦘 Every character now scales — uniquely

No more dead-end picks. Each character has its own uncapped scaling trait, so they all keep pace into the late game — but they get there in completely different ways:

• Tradie Shaz — Tool Mastery: XP gain ramps the longer you survive — out-level the field.
• Bob — Armour on Kill: permanent armour every few kills (uncapped) — become an immovable wall.
• The Snake Charmer — Spell Power: +5% spell size per level, now uncapped — once spells max out the overflow becomes bonus damage.
• Steve — Wildlife Warrior: a precision hunter — crit chance climbs per kill, past 100% it lands bigger crits.
• Nullarbor Swift — Outback Runner: +15 move speed per level (ceiling raised) — outrun and kite everything.
• Firey — Hazard Reduction Burn: the fire trail scales — +4% damage and +0.1s lifetime per level. Turn the map into a firewall.
• The Fisher — Gone Fishin': +5 Fair Go per fish caught — snowball into rarer drops all run.
• The Punter — Lucky Punt: more bets on the table — an extra projectile every 60 kills (uncapped).
• Magpie Mick — Pack Leader: his flock grows deadlier every level.
• Bottle-O Bandit — Hair of the Dog: a walking happy hour — good beer effects last longer the more you drink, ramping toward near-permanent buffs.

Pick by playstyle now, not by tier list.

⚠️ Player stats reset

This build resets all player stats and leaderboard progress on first launch. With the character revamp shaking up the meta, everyone starts the new boards on a level playing field — your unlocks and settings are untouched, but lifetime stats and leaderboard entries are wiped.

🐛 Fixes

• Melbourne Cup — cheering no longer pulls your horse up lame. A single cheer used to drain a favourite's entire stamina pool in one go, and an empty horse would break down almost instantly — so backing your pick and cheering it home often ended in a snapped leg and a lost bet. Stamina pools are bigger, cheering drains gentler, horses recover faster, and a bow-out now only happens if you keep flogging an already-spent horse. Cheer away.
• No more walking "jolt" in Challenge of the Week. When a challenge slowed you down (Lead Boots and friends), the anti-stuck safety net mistook your slow-but-steady walking for being wedged and teleported you a step — a jarring lurch, especially early in a run on rough ground. It now measures progress against how fast you're meant to be moving, so a genuinely-slow player is left alone while a truly stuck one still gets freed.
• The Big Roo can't be cheesed behind a rock anymore. The boss charged straight at you and would grind helplessly against any boulder in the way. He now steers around obstacles like the regular mob does — no more safe spots.

🌐 Field Guide additions

The companion website (outbackuprising.com) grew a few pages:

• Bestiary — base stats for every enemy, plus a calculator that scales the whole roster to any player level and endless run time.
• Items — every passive item and exactly what it boosts per level.
• Live leaderboards — the overall, unlimited and weekly Challenge boards now show real Steam standings, names and all.

Still on the cards

The 3D art pass to replace the placeholder enemy/boss models is still the next big job. Keep the bug reports coming. 🐎

Another small one between the bug-spray and the big 3D art pass. The headline this patch isn't in the game — it's a brand-new online Field Guide — plus a pokie fix that's been hiding in plain sight.

🌐 New: the Outback Uprising Field Guide

A community website with everything you need to plan a run — and a fully playable taste of the game in your browser:

• FAQs, character & weapon stats, and the real combat formulas (damage scaling, crit, cooldown, rarity, armor) — all pulled straight from the game build, so they're never out of date.
• A damage calculator and a full build simulator — pick a character, stack upgrades, set your Fair Go, and see the stats and DPS you could hit.
• Playable pokies! All five machines — Big Croc, Outback Bandit, Drongo's Dropbear, Eureka! and Mad Mick's Murder Brew — run right in the browser with the real reel weights, paytables, free games and Hold & Spin. You start with 250 scrap and get topped up daily.

🐛 Fixes

• Big Croc free games now trigger properly. The Croc symbol was meant to be a scatter — 3 or more anywhere on the screen — but it was quietly requiring them lined up on consecutive reels, so a screen full of scattered crocs paid nothing. Crocs now scatter as intended (3 / 4 / 5+ = more free games), and the pub-room payout was re-tuned so the odds stay fair.

Still on the cards

The 3D art pass to replace the placeholder enemy/boss models is still the next big job. Bug fixes and balance keep coming in the meantime — keep the reports flowing. 🦘

A quick bug-spray patch off the back of your 0.8.16 feedback — no new features (the 3D art pass is still next), just a round of fixes for the things you reported. Keep 'em coming.

🐛 Fixes

• Spawns no longer drought-then-flood. A lag hitch could make the spawner dump thousands of enemies in a single frame and then go quiet for ages. Spawning is now smoothed and capped so it stays steady even through a frame spike — no more "barely anything, then 10k on your streak."
• "Gambling time" actually means gambling now. The end-of-run stat was counting all your paused/menu time (level-up screens, the pause menu, even slowdown) — so a run where you barely touched the pokies still showed nearly an hour. It now only counts real time spent at the pokies, Plinko, blackjack and roulette.
• No more uninvited Boomerang. The wombat mate's auto-fished rewards could silently hand you a brand-new weapon you never picked, wrecking your build. It now only levels up weapons you've already chosen.
• Level-up auto-skip behaves. "Auto-skip below \<rarity\>" now banks Fair Go (luck — and it stacks with Mirrabooka) on the skipped level-ups instead of quietly grabbing a junk upgrade for you. The upgrade panel still opens for anything at or above the rarity you set, so you keep your picks for the good rolls.
• Magpies can hit you mid-jump. A swooping magpie used to hover uselessly under an airborne player and just wait for you to land. It now climbs to your actual height and completes its swoop — dodge accordingly.
• Yarns that never tracked, now track. The Didgeridoo Blast, Hills Hoist, Mozzie Zapper, Poker Chips and Stubby Launcher achievement yarns (both their kill and level-10 goals) were stuck at zero forever — they now count properly. And mates can reach Level 5 again: the unlock no longer demanded a couple of impossible yarns (a darts minigame that doesn't exist, and co-op-only goals).

Still on the cards

0.8.16's note stands: the current enemy/boss models are placeholders, and the next big job is the proper 3D art pass to replace them. New features stay paused until that lands — but bug fixes and balance keep coming, so please keep the reports flowing. 🦘

0.8.15 turned the world 3D. 0.8.16 turns it on the things trying to kill you — every enemy and boss is now a 3D model, and the bosses got a complete combat overhaul: animated leaps, telegraphs you can actually read, hitboxes that match what you see, and a berserk final phase. The old "swarm" is gone too — every creature is its own thing now, and the spawns ramp up properly from a trickle of kangas to mixed waves of everything.

🦘 Bosses are 3D now — and they fight like it

• The Big Roo, the Drop Bear and the Cricketer are full 3D models.
• The Drop Bear actually drops — its attack is a real animated leap now: it telegraphs where it'll land, arcs up, and slams down. The leap travels at a constant speed, so if you're far away it takes longer to reach you instead of zipping across the map.
• The Cricketer bowls and bats — he winds up and tosses the ball before he throws it, and his bat-spin is a real 3D bat whirling around him (mind the willow).
• Model bosses wind up before they swing — a visible crouch-and-release "tell" so you can read the attack coming, plus the Drop Bear is a proper grey koala now (he was looking a bit brown).
• Bosses are actually hittable — their hitboxes were sized for the old 2D sprites; now they match the 3D model, so your shots land where they should.
• Final-phase ENRAGE — drop a boss to its last sliver of health and it goes berserk: washed angry-red, faster on its feet, and attacking relentlessly. The Drop Bear in particular gets mean.
• Telegraph warnings always sit on top of the terrain — no more attack markers buried under a slope or a raised tile.

👹 The whole mob got rebuilt

• Every enemy is its own 3D model now — including the humanoids (bogans, eshays, IT Garys, traffic controllers, electricians and cyclists), which were the last 2D holdouts.
• Progressive spawns — runs open with just kangas and steadily layer in every other enemy type, building to end-game waves that throw a bit of everything at you. The first lot never disappears; it just gets crowded.
• Cyclists are back as a regular cross-map runway hazard (they were turning up way too late).
• No more pile-up stutter — enemies don't physically shove each other around, so big crowds move smoothly.
• Insults are back — bogans, eshays and mates will debuff you with a spray again.
• Camels stopped glitching — they face you cleanly while kiting instead of flicking back and forth.
• Mob health bars sit right above their heads instead of floating metres in the sky.

🏇 Events & the Cup

• The Melbourne Cup horse and jockey are 3D, and the Australia Day March marchers are animated 3D models.
• Stamina-driven horse injuries — manage your runner's risk through the race instead of just watching.
• Fishing up a Melbourne Cup skips the betting prompt (you caught it, you don't bet on it).

🎯 Challenge of the Week got real teeth

• Every challenge effect is 4× stronger — the base challenges were far too soft to feel like a challenge.
• Descriptions show the real numbers — what you're actually signing up for, scaled.
• Score multipliers dropped from challenges — that's a separate leaderboard, so it doesn't belong in the weekly modifiers.

⚙️ Quality of life

• Level-up auto-skip below a rarity you choose, and maxed-out rewards now give something useful instead of just another beer.
• Extra weapon slots are uncapped.
• Ponds don't refund once you've already fished them.
• Gum-tree healing scales with level (capped at 25 HP/s) so the groves stay relevant.
• Chests are easier to crack — the open-detection reach is doubled.
• Mozzie Zapper forks when supercharged for extra crowd-fry.
• End-game bosses skip the bounty prompt (no betting against the apocalypse).
• F4 perf overlay now breaks attack counts down per weapon.

🐛 Fixes

• Destroyed projectiles no longer leave an invisible hitbox behind — collision dies the instant the shot does.
• Crash/spam fixes: the Australia Day March, spawned dust devils, and a fresh-spawn physics edge case.
• Minimap boss arrows only point at real bosses, the AoE cloud is lighter, and duster kill-attribution is guarded.

⚡ Performance

• Composite enemy models stopped double-casting shadows (big GPU saving at high counts).
• Model animators are distance-LOD'd — off-screen mobs don't burn CPU animating where nobody can see.
• Enemy-to-enemy physics collision is off, killing the crowd-crush spikes.

A note on what's next

The 3D models you're seeing — enemies, bosses, all of it — are placeholders: simple built-from-shapes stand-ins so the game can be fully 3D today. The next big job is a proper 3D art pass to replace them with real models.

Until that art lands, we're pausing new features so the look can catch up to the systems. Bug fixes and balance changes keep coming, so please keep the feedback flowing — it's genuinely steering the game. 🦘

Square up with the Big Roo, dodge a Drop Bear, and don't let the Cricketer get a swing in. Good luck out there. 🇦🇺

0.8.14 was all about the year of challenges. 0.8.15 is a big 3D look-and-feel pass: towers, loot, walls, your character and the wildlife are all proper 3D models now, gum trees patch you up, towers hit back harder, and the Mozzie Zapper finally crackles like real lightning. Under the hood, the whole enemy brain got rebuilt.

🎨 Proper 3D models everywhere

• Towers got real 3D models — the pokie, plinko and ATM machines, the esky trap, and the corro-fence wall are all freshly modelled (and the wall's collision now matches its shape, so shots and bodies line up with what you see).
• Loot chests are now 3D and pop open with a real opening animation when you crack them.
• New 3D character models — your survivor sprites have been swapped for fully animated 3D models (idle, run and jump all animate, and sprinting actually speeds the run cycle up).
• The wildlife is 3D too — the mob you're fighting got a matching makeover.

🌳 Gum trees are now healing groves

• The buildable Eucalyptus Tower is gone — instead, every gum tree on the map now radiates a healing ring. Stand near one to patch up. The rings sit cleanly on the terrain so you can always read where the safe ground is.

🏗️ Tougher, smarter tower placement

• Every tower's base HP is quadrupled — and it carries up the upgrade ladder, so your defences actually hold the line now instead of folding in a few hits.
• Rotate before you build — press R to spin a tower to the orientation you want.
• Build preview sits on the terrain and shows the real 3D model, and towers always place at full HP.

⚡ Mozzie Zapper: real lightning

• The chain bolt is now a proper jagged, glowing blue arc — a soft halo, a bright core, and a fresh fork every time it fires. It reads as one crackling bolt connecting everything it fries.

🐦 Wildlife behaviour

• Magpies flee when you look at them — turn your aim toward a circling magpie and it bolts, not just when you walk at it.
• Flying magpies are properly hittable now — ground-hugging shots (poker chips and friends) reach up the magpie's column instead of sailing under it.

🐛 Fixes

• Poker chips (and other low shots) can hit flyers — they no longer whiff everything that leaves the ground.
• Pokie nameplate cleaned up — the machine's labels no longer overlap into a jumble.
• Fishing badge moved — the FISHING indicator no longer sits on top of the combo readout.

🧹 Under the hood

• The entire enemy system was rebuilt on a single, composable foundation — one shared movement-and-behaviour core that every creature now plugs into, with believable vertical hitboxes and an anti-tunnelling pass so fast shots stop slipping through. It's a big internal cleanup that sets up much bigger mobs and new enemy types down the track. You should just feel tighter, fairer fights.

Grab a tower, give it a spin, post up next to a gum tree and let the zapper light 'em up. 🦘

0.8.13 got long runs smooth and gave the Challenge of the Week its first home. 0.8.14 builds it out into a full year of challenges, adds a new weapon, a new stamina playstyle, a beefed-up Bestiary and a pub leaderboard-history wall — then clears out a big stack of community bug reports.

🗓️ A full year of Challenge of the Week

• A curated queue of 52 themed weekly challenges now rotates through the whole year — from gentle openers like Thick-Skinned Mob and Sook Sunday to marquee gauntlets like Out for Blood, Plague Proportions and Big Units.
• Each week has a clear theme and a fair fight — tough but beatable. The hard weeks are spaced out (about one in five) and never back-to-back, so the year has a rhythm.
• Strong variety week to week — enemy-might weeks, glass-cannon weeks, swarm weeks, fight-in-the-dark weeks, weak-weapon weeks and signature mixed combos. No two weeks play the same.
• Every week still gets its own dedicated leaderboard, so you're only ever racing players who took on the exact same challenge.

⏰ Monday reset, worldwide

• The Challenge of the Week and the shared weekly map now roll over together at 13:00 UTC every Monday — the same instant for every player on the planet. No more guessing when the week ticks.

🍺 Pub: Challenge History wall

• A new pub station lets you cycle back through past weeks' challenge leaderboards — each week's challenge name alongside its top scores. (This is the first-ever curated week, so the history fills in from here.)

🆕 New weapon: Blackboard Duster

• Clap two dusters together and hurl a choking cloud of chalk onto the mob. It lingers where it lands — area denial, not a bubble that follows you — slowing and grinding down everything caught inside, regular enemies and the swarm alike.

💨 New item & a stamina playstyle: Nose Beers

• Nose Beers (item): a cheeky bump of mad-lad fuel that bumps your total stamina pool each level — more sprinting and jumping in the tank.
• A rare world pickup grants a burst of faster stamina regen for 10 seconds.
• New beer effects that swing your stamina — a Second Wind good roll and a Dead Legs rough one.

📖 Bestiary overhaul

• Every in-use enemy now shows its real sprite — Dingo, Magpie, Camel, Boxing Roo, Wombat and Horse are no longer blank, and the Drop Bear and All-Rounder bosses render properly too.
• All in-use items and weapons now appear with their icons and descriptions — Sunscreen, Stubby Holder, Corked Hat, Nose Beers and the rest of the 0.8.x kit.
• New Tall Tales yarns for the newer weapons and items.

🎣 Fishing

• The ultra-rare **"spare slot" catch now grants ONE slot — a weapon or an item, never both** — and the catch popup tells you which one you won.

🐛 Community bug-report sweep

Thanks to everyone posting in #bug-reports and on the tracker — this lot's from you:

• Walls finally hold. Emus and cyclists no longer charge straight through your corro-fence walls.
• Plinko & pokie machines are tougher per upgrade. Drive-by hits no longer ignore the machine's level — leveling one up genuinely makes it survive more hits.
• Building upgrade cost resets on destruction — lose a building and the rebuild costs the right amount again instead of the old inflated price.
• Mozzie Zapper Size actually does something now — it forks a cluster splash through dense swarms (where extra reach used to do nothing) and the bolt thickens with size.
• Pokie winnings bubble shows your spin count alongside the payout.
• Off-screen bosses get an arrow on the minimap edge so you can always track them down.
• Didge Blast hits reliably on hills — it hugs the ground now instead of whiffing over downhill enemies.
• Swarm enemies stop "sinking" into slopes in the angled 3D view — they stand on the terrain like the rest.
• Character & mate tooltips read live values — the Mirrabooka tooltip (and friends) can't fall out of date anymore.
• Pokie reward text above the cabinet is spaced out so it reads cleanly instead of piling up.
• New items show proper stat names in the Loadout and in-run STATS panels (no more "Unknown").

🧹 Under the hood

• Stripped the abandoned co-op multiplayer remnants.
• Fixed a top-down-mode crash when short-lived effects spawned.

Flip on this week's challenge from the Loadout screen, grab a Blackboard Duster, and see how far up the board you can climb. 🦘

The build the Perf Test was hunting for — long runs stay smooth, the big mobs behave on the terrain, and challenges get a proper weekly home with its own ladder.

🏃 Performance — the endgame slideshow fix

• The 0.8.12 perf logs pinned it: deep runs weren't GPU-bound, they were drowning in draw calls from ~1,000 individually-rendered enemies the moment you got surrounded.
• The late-game horde now overflows into the data-oriented swarm instead of saturating the node cap. Total pressure still climbs (not a difficulty nerf) — it just renders in a handful of draw calls. No more 10-FPS slideshow at 25+ minutes.
• Swarm enemies got a single batched shadow pass (one draw for the whole horde).

🦎 Swarm behaviour

• Swarm enemies now hug the terrain every frame instead of lagging on slopes (no more feet sinking into hills / floating over dips).
• They stay out of the water (that's the crocs' turf) and slide along the bank instead of wading below the lake.
• Tightened the swarm's hit-detection so fast projectiles land reliably.

🎯 Challenge of the Week

• The old free-pick stackable challenges are retired — hand-stacking ten of them made runs impossible, not just hard.
• In their place: a curated Challenge of the Week that rotates every week (same cadence as the shared outback). This week: Stampede — +25% enemies, +15% speed.
• Each week gets its own dedicated leaderboard, created automatically, so every week is a fair fight on the same challenge (and totally separate from the normal ladder). The main menu shows the live challenge name on the board.
• Flip it on from the Loadout screen for a score multiplier and a shot at the week's board; leave it off for a clean run.

⚖️ Weapons & items

• Didgeridoo Blast: base cooldown −40%. Mozzie Zapper: base cooldown −33%.
• Hills Hoist: each arm now belts an enemy as it sweeps back through — a proper whirling wall instead of one hit per spin.
• Sunscreen SPF 50+ reworked: now grants full heatwave immunity and +global pierce to your projectile weapons (your shots punch through an extra cobber).
• Fixed weapon projectiles leaving an invisible hitbox for a frame after they despawn (no more phantom hits from a vanished shot).

🖥️ Main menu

• Credits moved into its own button (between Settings and Exit) — cleaner menu.
• The Challenge of the Week board now sits on the left, showing this week's challenge by name.

Cheers to everyone who ran the Perf Test and sent logs — this one's because of you. 🦘

An opt-in beta build to help us hunt the deep-run framerate slowdown.

🔧 Perf Test

• Built-in performance meter. Press F3 for a live readout (FPS, GPU vs CPU render time, draw calls, video memory, and live swarm/projectile/enemy counts). Press F4 to log a snapshot every second to a CSV you can send us.
• It even calls GPU-bound / CPU-bound so we can see at a glance what's choking when it chugs.

🐍 Under the hood

• The "Tornado" weapon is now called Red Belly everywhere internally (it always displayed as Red Belly — this just ends the naming confusion). No gameplay change.

How to join the Perf Test:

Steam → right-click Outback Uprising → Properties → Betas → pick perftest from the dropdown. (Switch back to "None" anytime for the normal version.)

How to help:

1. Play a long run until it starts chugging (~25–30 min).

2. Press F4 to start logging (the overlay shows "log ON").

3. Send the newest perf_*.csv in #bug-reports.

Windows: %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Outback Uprising\logs\

If F3 shows GPU-bound when it slows down, a screenshot of that is gold. Cheers for the help! 🦘

A boss + luck tuning patch, with a brutal new endgame.

👑 Bosses

• Boss Bounty reworked: the score-boost pick is gone — replaced with a FAIR GO WINDFALL: a big one-shot Fair Go (luck) injection that tilts your upgrade rolls toward the top tiers. Payout scales by boss: 1,000 (cricketer) / 2,000 (drop bear) / 3,000 (big roo).
• Boss kill score now rewards speed — kill a boss fast and you bank more of its score; let it drag on and the payout decays.
• Bosses now shrug off knockback entirely — no more shoving them around.

🎣 Pond odds now follow your Fair Go

• Good rare catches (boss summon, bonus slot, Melbourne Cup) get more likely the more Fair Go you bank — no cap, it keeps climbing.
• Bad catches (crocs, enemy hordes) get rarer as your Fair Go rises. Lucky anglers fish up jackpots, not trouble.

🐎 The Last Muster (30:00)

• The endgame hard-stop is meaner: a relentless stampede of brumbies charging you from every direction, one every 0.3 seconds, until you fall. Make your 30 minutes count.

Cheers legends! 🦘

A balance-focused patch — Fair Go gets a big rework, a few weapons get tuned, and a couple of nasties got reined in.

🎰 Fair Go & Mirrabooka

• Fair Go (luck) → rarity reworked. Gold ("You Beaut") upgrades ramp up slower at first (≈15% gold around 3,000 Fair Go instead of ~1,000), but there's no cap anymore — the more Fair Go you bank, the harder it tilts toward gold. By ~10,000 Fair Go, gold is the most common roll and dodgy the rarest. Stack Fair Go and watch it rain gold.
• Mirrabooka (mate) reworked. Instead of one big luck dump, she now starts you with +10 / 25 / 45 / 75 / 100 Fair Go (by level) AND boosts the Fair Go you earn from rejecting a level-up by +10% / 20% / 30% / 40% / 50%. Built for the "skip for Fair Go" playstyle.

🔧 Weapon Tuning

• Didge Blast: smaller blast and a longer cooldown. Knockback now hits hardest right next to you and fades to almost nothing at the edge of the wave.
• Mozzie Zapper: longer cooldown.
• Hills Hoist: smaller, and no longer scales with extra attacks (one spinning line per cast).
• Camel spit: now a proper debuff — 80% slow AND −50% armour for 2 seconds, with an on-screen indicator. Give those camels a wide berth.

🐛 Fixes

• Cyclists & emus can no longer one-shot your pokie/plinko machines — takes a few hits now.
• Melbourne Cup: when your horse breaks down, the "Skip the rest" button actually shows up (it was hidden behind the cheer panel).

Cheers legends — keep the feedback coming in #bug-reports and #suggestions! 🦘

G'day legends! This one's a big clean-up patch — squashed the nasty cyclist/emu bug a few of you flagged, tidied up the bottom-right HUD, reworked the Didge Blast, and snuck in three of your suggestions.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Cyclists & emus no longer "weld" onto you. They were getting stuck on the player and chewing through your health (even at silly damage reduction) — sometimes while invisible. Fixed: they're back to proper drive-by enemies that blow past you and can be damaged + knocked back like before.
• Death screen now names what got you — no more mystery "Enemy" entries, and enemy names no longer show a stray "3d" (it's "Kanga", not "Kanga 3d").
• Fishing up a croc actually spawns the croc now (it was quietly going nowhere).
• Big enemies have their health bar back — crocs and traffic controllers show an overhead HP bar again.
• Concurrent weather/events keep their own timers. Running an Emu War and a Cyclone at once no longer makes one event's timer wipe out the other's.
• Corked Hat slow is noticeable now — same effect, wider reach, so you can actually feel the ferals bogging down.
• Fixed a crash on the death-recap screen, and a crash when fishing up an enemy horde.
• Now-playing music strip + HUD bars tidied — no more overlapping/garbled text in the bottom-right corner.

✨ New Features

• Leaderboard shows the character each score was set with — on every row and in the run-details popup.
• Pokie reroll button. Don't like the machine you placed? Pay 15 scrap to reroll it into a different one — cheaper than selling and re-buying.
• Smarter selling. Sell a structure within 15 seconds of placing it for a full refund (covers oops-wrong-spot), and an upgraded structure's sell value now scales with everything you've sunk into it.

⚖️ Balance

• Didge Blast rework:
• Base cooldown doubled, but it no longer goes on cooldown until the final wave of the drum-roll fires — so stacking extra attacks gives a proper rolling barrage.
• Knockback now scales with distance: enemies caught close get launched, while ones clipped at the very edge of the wave barely budge.

Cheers for all the bug reports and suggestions — keep 'em coming in #bug-reports and #suggestions! 🦘