# Zankoi's Chronicles V1.1 Patch Notes (English)
**Last Updated**: August 11, 2026
## 1. Summary
This is the final major update before launch. The core change is a rework of the Poise–Time-Stop–Combo loop, accompanied by experience improvements to hit detection, SFX, and visuals, along with multiple mechanic adjustments and bug fixes.
Building on V1.1, this update also incorporates a series of follow-up refinements: a new Remaining Help (exit-state) system, reworked Parry and Small Shield mechanics, unified extra-battle rewards, improved level-flow generation, and numerous UI / timing / save-data fixes.
## 2. Charge Mechanic
The Poise Gauge has been changed from "depleting" to "charging".
- Poise is accumulated during combat through playing cards, landing hits, and other actions.
- When fully charged, Time-Stop is triggered, allowing you to freely arrange your combo card sequence in the Combo Assignment Panel (CAP).
- After the combo finishes playing, Time-Stop ends automatically and real-time combat resumes.
- Along with this mechanic change, the Poise Gauge UI no longer displays segment lines, and its length no longer adjusts with MaxValue changes.
- Core elements are preserved: Poise attribute, fill animation, parry system, Palm of Fortitude, Avalanche, and other non-segment logic remain unchanged.
## 3. Experience Improvements
Improved hit detection, SFX, and visual feedback.
- **Hit Detection**: Adjusted trigger rules and strength scaling for finisher-hit visuals; KMI (blade glow) brightness now scales dynamically with the number of cards assigned.
- **SFX**: Added an error SFX when attempting to assign a card with insufficient Qi in the combo panel.
- **Visuals**: During Time-Stop combos, the initiator swaps to an exclusive material and plays animations at accelerated speed; camera push-in and hit-stop duration scale dynamically based on trigger conditions.
- **Intro Transition**: After the intro video, a cross-fade transition now reveals the main menu, eliminating the black screen and stutter previously seen after the video; the skip input now has a 0.8s anti-misclick gate.
- **Shop Refresh**: Cards now appear all at once when refreshing the shop, no longer popping in one by one, with no scroll-area size jitter.
- **Encyclopedia Panel**: After switching tabs or weapon filters, content size refreshes immediately and scroll position resets.
- **Settings Dropdowns**: Dropdowns in the Map-scene settings panel can now be closed by clicking outside; ESC no longer leaves dropdown lists lingering when closing the panel.
- **GameOver Visuals**: The GameOver path now uses a frame-by-frame Hand animation + curtain fade-in, replacing the previous player fade-out.
- **Transition Visuals**: The transition system is reworked into a unified orchestrator; helper/settlement/showcase visuals migrated to CanvasGroup, with render mode unified to ScreenSpace-Camera.
## 4. Other Mechanic Adjustments
- **Bleed & Armor**: Bleed damage is now absorbed by Armor first; once Armor is depleted, it penetrates to Health. The Corrosion Blessing has been redesigned accordingly.
- **Bruise Settlement**: Bruise (fixed damage) is now settled independently, unaffected by percentage modifiers. It can be absorbed by Armor, can be lethal, and is counted in damage statistics.
- **Curse System**: Changed from "card + Buff dual form" to "pure Buff with instant effect".
- **Damage Reduction & Parry**: Reworked damage calculation pipeline. Parry now blocks all damage; the Qi refunded by parry is now based on the card's attack value.
- **Armor System**: Reworked Armor logic and settlement.
- **New Blessings**: 8 Archery, 9 Sword & Shield, and 10 Spear, for a total of 27 new Blessings.
- **Remaining Help System**: A new "Remaining Help" system replaces the "resources exhausted" exit condition with a help stack — defeating a Boss pushes onto the stack, losing a non-extra node pops from it, and an empty stack means failure. After the 3rd Boss, the stack is settled and rewards are granted; a help-consumption animation plays before the defeat sequence.
- **Retry Confirm Panel**: When retrying after a defeat, a confirmation panel appears if a difficulty threshold is met — confirming grants 1 random Curse card before retrying; below the threshold, retry proceeds directly with no penalty.
- **Small Shield Rework**: The Small Shield effect changes from "enhance parry damage-reduction ratio" to "convert a percentage of blocked damage into Armor".
- **Card Upgrades**: Card level effects are centralized, fixing an issue where Poise damage UI did not update after upgrade; the L2 Poise damage multiplier is now 2.0x, consistent with secondary-affix doubling.
- **Extra-Battle Rewards Unified**: EA/EN/ET extra battles now uniformly grant double basic rewards; EG extra bosses uniformly grant attribute upgrade + extra battle opportunity.
- **Level-Flow Generation**: Rewrote level-node generation logic — the first 3 chapters (5-node chapters) use a fixed pattern guaranteeing the first battle rewards a Blessing, while remaining chapters are randomly generated with cross-chapter node-spacing constraints.
- **Card Unlock System**: Unlock state is now determined solely by experience level, with normal cards unlocked by default; the card-face cover now semantically means "not yet acquired"; old saves auto-migrate.
- **Difficulty Setting Saves**: The difficulty slider position now correctly syncs to save data and persists across restarts; the slider correctly resets to zero after resetting tutorials.
- **Settlement Reward Adjustment**: The post-3rd-Boss settlement reward is now 3 coins + 20 leaves per item (leaves are delivered via the map-scene leaf-fly animation).
- **Endless Challenge Mode**: A continuous post-completion battle challenge with independent enemy/Boss/scene pools, driven by Steam leaderboards.
- **Extra-Battle Special Stages**: Adds 5 special stage types to extra battles.
## 5. Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where movement cards interfered with combo counting and Palm of Fortitude conditions.
- Fixed an issue where Unchained Strike was incorrectly triggered during parry.
- Fixed an issue where Avalanche's Qi Gauge UI refreshed abnormally during parry.
- Fixed an issue where dragging a card back from combo zones did not sync the play queue.
- Fixed a dirty-state issue from pooled card reuse in combo zones (first card not entering queue, combo summary misaligned).
- Fixed an issue where enemy AI could freeze during Stun.
- Fixed an issue where HUD data did not refresh after retrying the Leaf-Catching minigame.
- Fixed cross-restart consistency issues with the settings panel (fullscreen/resolution/VSync/frame rate).
- Fixed an issue where Blessing card hover scaling did not take effect.
- Fixed an issue where the lock state of owned cards displayed incorrectly.
- Fixed an issue where Qi cost icon detection was inaccurate during Time-Stop.
- Fixed a NullReferenceException when clicking the shop refresh button a second time.
- Fixed an issue where residual tokens during Time-Stop parry caused player and enemy parries to incorrectly terminate each other.
- Fixed a soft-lock in the transition scene on the GameOver path.
- Fixed an issue where the transition background image was not set on the help-change path.
- Fixed an issue where the chapter field contained a difficulty offset, causing Bosses to enter the next chapter's strength prematurely.
- Fixed an issue where help-change did not trigger the transition animation after a Boss victory.
- Fixed an issue where the 3rd-Boss settlement path was missing the help-push animation.
- Fixed an issue where the pre-battle Boss image showed the just-defeated Boss instead of the upcoming one.
**New**: A confirmation panel now appears when selecting "Retry" in the Archery and Leaf-Catching minigames, warning that 1 random Curse will be obtained.
## 6. What's Next
We are currently working on the following:
- **Battle Replay System Upgrade**: Restarting and upgrading the battle replay system to the current architecture.
- **Steam Leaderboard Seasonal Reset**: Implementing seasonal soft-reset via leaderboard key versioning.
- Difficulty adaptation
- Gamepad support
- More language supports
Thank you for your support and feedback! If you encounter any issues, please let us know in the community.
— Zankoi's Chronicles Development Team