Outback Uprising

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.

Posted to announcements (1477539393513455708) matching the existing release style.

Do not mid-sentence length-split.

@here Outback Uprising 0.9.4 — "Hundreds & Thousands" is live! 🍞✨

Fairy Bread finally looks the part on the 3D characters, and the field guide tells you what happens when a boss tries to eat it.

🍞 Fairy Bread sparkles again

• Your character model lights up with colourful sprinkle sparkles and a glitter cloud — not just a quiet buff icon

• Works on every character, not only the old flat sprites

📘 Status Effects guide

• Beer effect descriptions on the website match what the game actually does (Technicolour Yawn, Liquid Courage, Totally Pissed, and the rest)

• Bosses vs Fairy Bread: each boss hit is still blocked, but chips the bread — three boss hits shatter it (you stay unhurt on that hit; trash never breaks it)

Cheers — update is on Steam. 🇦🇺🍺

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.

Posted to announcements (1477539393513455708) matching the existing release style (@here + emoji sections + cheers).

Do not mid-sentence length-split — keep each Discord message complete at section boundaries.

Message ID: 1524988725061226668

@here Outback Uprising 0.9.3 — "Fair Dinkum Papercuts" is live! 🛠️🦘

A round of community bugs and QoL — death screen stays up, pokies tell the truth, late game keeps the wildlife coming.

💥 Death screen hitbox inspect

Hitbox Debug + "Show me where I went wrong" no longer crashes the game after you die. Wireframe the freeze-frame safely.

🎰 Pokie reroll names

The floating name above the cabinet updates when you reroll — no more stale Eureka while the menu says Mad Mick's.

🛡️ Ring-in armour

Ring-in's base armour matches Bob again (30).

🦘 Late-game horde top-up

Strong builds that wiped the map of trash should see regular enemies keep showing up late, not a near-empty field.

🌫️ Blind Freddy lag

Fog that rolls back in behind you does less per-frame work — smoother on foggy challenge weeks.

🍀 Auto-skip Fair Go toast

When auto-skip spends Fair Go because your min rarity wasn't in the pool, you'll see something like: Fair Go taken — You Beaut not offered.

Cheers for the reports — update is on Steam. 🇦🇺🍺

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.

Posted to announcements (1477539393513455708) matching the existing release style (@here + emoji sections + cheers).

Do not mid-sentence length-split — keep each Discord message complete at section boundaries.

Message ID: 1524929499676934186 (edited for end-user friendly wording)

@here Outback Uprising 0.9.2 — "Local Storm" is live! ⚡🦘

The Mozzie Zapper was the late-game villain: stack enough pierce and extra attacks and the game crawled, the whole map (even off-screen) got wiped, and the "lightning" looked like a white flash. It's been rebuilt as a local storm around you — still nasty, still worth stacking, and the run stays playable.

⚡ Mozzie Zapper

• Big pierce / extra-attack builds should feel smooth again — no more slideshow late game

• Lightning stays around you, not farming the far edge of the map the second something spawns

• Extra pierce still pays off as voltage (more damage) instead of an endless chain into the void

• Extra attacks fan out into a proper storm instead of the same bolt stacked on itself

• Arcs look like lightning again — cleaner, readable, even when the build is silly

⚠️ Known / still open: late-game spawn drought (very few trash mobs deep into a long run) — still hunting that one.

Cheers for the reports — update is on Steam. 🇦🇺🍺

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.

Copy-paste ready for #announcements / #patch-notes.

Outback Uprising 0.9.1 — Fair Dinkum Fixes 🏏

Steam build is going up. Full notes on the site soon; highlights:

Wicket Keeper

• Green tint gone — proper kit again

• Actually catches projectiles and flings them back (wider glove + catch-on-hit)

• Fishing rod & didge can get snatched too

.303 Rifle — late-game scaling fixed so charged shots matter vs fat bosses again

Eucalyptus trees — heal ramps with run time (1× → 2× at 5 min → 5× at 10 min). Overlap still stacks.

Slows — Lazy/Sluggish/Slowed share one badge (no more multi-slow HUD panic)

Traffic Controllers — base HP 1000 → 500

Big Roo slam — damage matches the red telegraph (no hit outside the circle)

Damage log — less "Unknown"; poison/venom/towers named properly

Pokies — pause-before-play preference now sticks

Death screen — Hitbox Debug button on the yarn summary

Website — new Status Effects page (buff/debuff table): https://outbackuprising.com/status

⚠️ Known: late-game spawn drought (very few trash mobs deep into a long run) is still open. Fog lag on fog weeks parked for now.

⚠️ MP: whole crew needs 0.9.1 (version handshake).

Thanks for the Discord reports — specialunit, otsonick, and the rest of the mob. 🍺

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! 🦘