# Apple Man Sam - Alpha 2.5.0 Patch Notes

## Combat & Abilities

- Shuriken Cone and Dash Strike secondary abilities now properly roll critical hits, scaling from your current weapon's crit chance and multiplier.
- Katana and Nunchuck swipe visuals no longer stutter or desync when physics interpolation is active.
- Enemy melee attacks now use direct distance checks instead of relying on hitbox overlap signals. This makes enemy contact damage far more consistent, especially after enemies are recycled from the pool between waves.
- Pooled enemies no longer occasionally fail to deal contact damage after being reactivated. The melee contact system has been rebuilt to re-track the player reliably on every reuse cycle.
- Explosion radius and screen shake bonuses from items now stack additively instead of only using the highest value.
- Explosive Shell splash damage no longer double-dips on crit multipliers. The splash now receives a reduced share of the crit bonus.

## Balance

- Endless mode scaling reworked with a two-tier system: enemies gain a small stat increase per stage (1%) and a larger bump per wave (5%), with a damage cap to prevent one-shot spikes in deep runs.
- Stage 2 and Stage 3 enemy stats retuned with adjusted HP values and rarity weights for a smoother difficulty curve.
- Global powerup spawn rate reduced by 50% (including pity-drop timing) to make powerup pickups feel more meaningful.
- ATM no longer guarantees a rare drop. Breakable gold payouts reduced to 80 total. Gold Boost duration shortened to 15 seconds.
- Rocket Launcher reload speed scaling from weapon upgrades reduced.
- Prestige upgrade costs now scale with your current prestige level.
- Enemies now always spawn at full HP. Duplicate boss spawns within the same wave are prevented.

## Quality of Life

- Camera movement smoothing added as an option in Settings (off by default).
- Run timer now correctly persists across stage transitions instead of resetting.
- Player input is now blocked during the loading screen. Previously you could move and shoot behind the loading overlay.
- Game over camera zoom-in now works reliably. Fixed an issue where the camera would fail to find the player's camera rig, resulting in no zoom effect on death.
- New item sprites for improved visual clarity.

## Performance

Under the hood, this update includes a major performance overhaul targeting combat-heavy scenarios with large enemy counts:

- Projectile hit detection now runs on background threads when 32+ projectiles are active, keeping the main thread free for gameplay logic.
- The explosion damage system has been completely reworked. Player explosions use a spatial grid for efficient area queries, while boss explosions use a simple distance check against the player — eliminating expensive physics queries entirely.
- Enemies now use a LOD (level-of-detail) system that reduces processing for off-screen enemies and scales down visual fidelity at distance.
- Collision pair count has been significantly reduced by removing redundant hitbox components from all regular enemies.
- Enemy separation calculations are now threaded and frame-budgeted.
- Boss scenes are preloaded during the loading screen instead of on-demand.
- Internal event system optimized to eliminate per-event memory allocations.
- Enemy pool prewarm runs 4x faster during loading (hidden behind the loading overlay).
- Adaptive frame budgeting across combat, VFX, and enemy systems prevents frame spikes during intense moments.

## Stability

- Comprehensive crash hardening pass across combat, explosion, and pooling systems. Dozens of potential crash vectors from freed node references have been guarded.
- Scene transition reliability improvements to prevent hangs during death, game over, and stage completion sequences.