Combat

• Enemy melee hit arc widened from 120 to 240 degrees. Sidestepping alone is no longer enough to dodge a swing — you need to get behind the enemy or break distance.
• Enemy melee swings now reach roughly twice as far as the enemy's approach range. Walking backward during a swing no longer trivially escapes it.

Overkill Splash

• Reworked. Leftover damage from a kill now goes to the single closest enemy instead of every enemy in the splash radius. Was a crash and a chain-reaction nightmare. Now it consumes the overflow once, as intended.

Drop Rates

• Standard enemy drop rate lowered from 2% to 1%.
• Elite enemy drop rate normalized to 2% across all enemy types (previously varied per enemy).

Performance

• Enemy AI now throttles its update frequency based on distance to you. Distant enemies use less CPU per frame so big waves stay responsive. Close enemies still update every frame.
• After 500 kills in a run, projectile disintegrate VFX stop spawning to keep particle counts in check.
• After 500 kills in a run, enemy death particle counts are halved. Plenty of dust either way.

Chaos Upgrades Rebalanced

• Chaos upgrades now stack additively instead of multiplicatively. Each pickup adds a fixed bonus rather than compounding, so 5 stacks no longer feel like 4x the effect of 1 stack. At 20 stacks: buff types reach +100%, reduction types reach 50%. More predictable, no longer breaks the game past a few pickups.

Pacing Caps

• Spawners now sit at a minimum of 0.5 seconds between spawns. Previously some spawners could fire faster, which combined with multiple spawners produced unfair burst pressure.
• Player fire rate is now capped at 10 shots per second. With many fire rate bonuses stacked you no longer hit absurd attack speeds that hurt readability and performance without adding meaningful damage.

Combo Tier Cap

• Combo stat bonuses now cap at tier 20 (default = 200 combo). Combo can still grow higher for HUD and quest purposes but stat scaling stops. Combo upgrades are still very much worth taking — they boost the per-tier amount so the cap pays out harder when invested into.

Before: combo bonuses scaled forever. At tier 50 with no upgrades, attack damage was +50. At tier 50 with 5 Combo Attack Damage upgrades, +300. Late runs effectively broke the game.

After at the new cap (tier 20):

Numbers assume each Combo upgrade adds the default per-tier amount. Actual values match the current Combo upgrade tuning.

Character Visual Effects

• Fixed visual effects on alternate characters. Deflect cooldown rim, combo rim light, and combo outline now correctly appear on whichever character you have selected, not just the first one. Switching characters mid-game also triggers a clean re-cache so the effects move with you.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a long-standing bug where movement speed could end up unexpectedly low after picking up an upgrade during a stun or root. The game no longer captures and restores movement around stuns in a way that overwrites changes made in between.
• Added safeguards so the game cannot get stuck in slowmo. If the source of a slowmo effect disappears mid-effect, or a scene loads with slowmo still active, the game now resets to normal speed immediately instead of waiting for the safety timeout. Logs include the source name so we can trace any future culprits.
• Fixed a crash when rerolling a quest reward right after the quest finished. The reroll now spawns a fresh loot pool if the original was already cleaned up, instead of crashing on a destroyed reference.
• Fixed flying enemies freezing in place after the AI throttling change. Flying enemies now always update every frame so they actually move toward you.
• Center HUD messages no longer overlap menus. They now always render behind UI panels like the vendor, reward popup, and pause menu.