Outback Uprising

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! 🦘