The cool silver rank on FGR1 Week 0!
Greetings, Hard Chip players!
Round two of competitive circuit crafting is here! 🎉 The Foundry Gauntlet returns with Revision 1, bringing fresh challenges and refined mechanics. I've also added an experimental Mosaic Mode for large-scale building, improved the Community Stage Editor with schematic support, made all campaign chip maps accessible from the Bonus screen, and polished another batch of UX details. Let's explore what's new from 0.1.7.122 to 0.1.7.127.
1. NEW Foundry Gauntlet Revision 1 (FGR1)
The experimental competitive arena reopened! Foundry Gauntlet Revision 1 launched with new weekly challenges designed to push your optimization skills even further. Building on the feedback and experience from FGR0, this event features a revisited scoring system and a now more automated system. It uses the Community Stage Editor (CSE) (which was greatly improved to bring that experimental feature closer to a release state) heavily. Also, this gauntlet explores some experimental gameplay and features. This will influence how HC presents big-sized stages and challenges.
The gauntlet leaderboard website, updated every 5 minutes, will show all the rankings and leaderboards.
The Foundry Gauntlet already started, but you can still join in Week 1 as Week 0 was "just" a warm-up week, which doesn't count toward the event total points!
Also, 2 video tutorials are available to build simple, naïve implementations for the first 2 weeks. If you are looking for head-scratchers, making the fastest solution ever, or maybe you just want to play with memory cells? Join us on this gauntlet, open now till 28 November!
🏆 **Changelog:**
- NEW Foundry Gauntlet Rev1 access in game with Week0
- NEW FRG1-Week1 level
- MI Finalizing Foundry Gauntlet Revision 1 (FGR1) event launch
- FIX FGR1 Week1 can't submit + deactivate image edit for CSE temporary
- FIX Missing schematics in built-in levels
2. NEW Experimental Mosaic Mode - Large Scale Building Made Easy
Mosaic Mode is well advanced to make tiling pattern designs a new, fun challenge. Perfect the base template and then copy its blocks onto a larger grid with X/Y/radial mirroring, rotate mirrored sections, and use overlap settings to fine-tune placement. Perfect for creating balanced circuits without tedious manual duplication. This feature is experimental, and it's now ready for broader public testing!
Mosaic Mode in action
And you can go crazy large if you start pattern-patterning your stuff!
🪞 **Changelog:**
- NEW-EXP Mosaic mode final pass for draft now with rotate and improved UI
- NEW-EXP Mosaic mode flip
- NEW-EXP Mosaic mode (copy/mirrorX/Y/radial)
- NEW-EXP Overlap settings for the Mosaic mode
- NEW-EXP MosaicMode, PreventDieOperations, and DistinctPoweringUpPhase are activable in the CSE
- SX Mosaic mode UI ++
- UX-EXP Community Stage Editor UI improvement
3. Community Stage Editor Enhancements
The CSE keeps getting closer and closer to a release (thanks to the gauntlet)! Schematic editing now supports multiple image pages, validation handles disconnected multi-bit inputs/outputs, activatable/deactivatable modes (including some experimental ones), and precision indicators show when values exceed bit limits. These improvements make creating complex custom challenges much more flexible and robust.
Community Stage Editor importing a schematic image into a challenge.
🔧 **Changelog:**
- NEW-EXP Schematics editable from CSE, multipages supported
- NEW-EXP CSE handles now disconnected multibit input/outputs
- UI-EXP CSE shows an '!' on values too big for a given precision
- MI-EXP CSE has Unsigned vs Signed values for validations
- FIX-EXP Validation support expected not connected outputs
- FIX-EXP CSE not disposing old truthtables
- FIX-EXP settings in double in the CSE
- SRV Endpoints for CSE boiler plating
- INF Script for CSEAPI
- INF Api router
4. NEW Chip Maps Access from Bonus Screen
No more hunting through campaign levels to find your unlocked chip maps! All previously unlocked chip maps from the campaign are now accessible directly from the Bonus screen. This makes it much easier to revisit and optimize your favorite challenges without loading the campaign to get in front of the workstation.
Bonus screen showing all unlocked chip maps in one convenient location
🗺️ **Changelog:**
- NEW Chip maps from the Bonus screen to see all previously unlocked campaign chip maps
- UX Deeplink for coming from and back chip maps
- FIX Chipmap doesn't always show all unlocked chip maps for older players
5. Quality of Life & Polish
Dark mode issues resolved, tutorial levels can be reset, concurrent horizontal scrolling is limited for better control, and external links can now open in your default browser with Ctrl+Click. Plus server-side improvements for better validation handling and performance.
✨ **Changelog:**
- NEW Reset tutorial levels option
- UX Camera animation
- UX Color fade zooming into a level respects the dark mode setting
- UX Ctrl+Click to open links outside Steam web overlay (default browser)
- UX Limiting concurrent horizontal scrolling when moving the camera around withthe middle mouse button
- UX Validation steps were showing an arrow after an input's value was changed
- UX keeps the ticks step count in manual step mode
- FIX Dark mode not working
- FIX demo build
- TLS Localization keys for tutorial powerplanes
- TLS \\n in labels
- TLS wrong label for FreeCam
- SRV Concurrent validation and failed retry saved
- SRV Deploy worldscore to a bigger machine
- MI typo
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The Foundry Gauntlet is back, and with Mosaic Mode landing, building complex circuits just got more accessible! Continuing on the road to make HC the best version it can be.
Ready to test your skills in FGR1? The competition is heating up, and the community is already sharing some brilliant solutions on Discord! Try your DLatch designs now! See you on the leaderboard!
Thanks for playing Hard Chip 🙏 May your pattern building be symmetrical and your transistor count minimal!