Gameplay

• Heat now scales enemy spawn delays. Spawners ramp faster as heat climbs and breathe more on calm starts. Heat 10 spawns 50% quicker than heat 0; heat 0 is 50% slower than baseline.
• All spawners share base rate. Beetle, Orc, and the rest now run on a shared 14s baseline, so late-starting spawners auto-sync to the same global cadence regardless of when they joined. Removes the subtle "Orc spawns slightly faster than Beetle" drift.
• Walking into a portal no longer teleports. The step-through-to-warp mechanic is disabled. Portals still fire / explode / pull / aura according to the upgrade picked, and projectiles fired into one portal still come out of the linked one. All 9 portal upgrades keep their effects.

Combat

• Counter camera idiot-proofed across modals. On top of the previous root-cause fix: any modal popping during a counter-zoom now proactively resets the camera. Casino reward HUD also force-restores timescale on close, fixing the rare "game stuck paused after casino reward" race.

UI

• Death screen overhaul. Rewritten and re-localized across all 9 languages. Clearer per-stat run summary, consistent tone.
• GameBreak end sequence reworked. PlayFeedbacks → accelerating enemy pop → white flash → in-game cinematic video → seamless load into Demo End Scene. Music cuts at the right beat, the cinematic plays full-length without early cutoff.
• Cooldown HUD icon tints. Blink, Deflect and Ultimate row icons are now color-coded (cyan-blue / yellow / red), matching the bar HUD and Deflect rim.
• Minimap player-trail. A breadcrumb trail of blue dots appears behind you on the minimap as you move. Whole-session, hides at edge of map. Configurable color / size / sprite. Fullscreen map mirrors the same trail.
• Stat descriptions: Luck + Focus. Luck now mentions "higher chance of higher-rarity drops." Focus now mentions "Ultimate charges faster." Both updated across all 9 languages.
• Cooldown tutorial no longer auto-pauses. The cooldown HUD lesson narrates over live gameplay instead of freezing it.

Graphics

• Mobile / laptop autodetect tightened. Tier defaults rebalanced (Toaster grass 5%→0%, Low grass 25%→0%). New hard laptop clamp: when a laptop GPU is detected, grass and foliage are both capped at 20% regardless of tier. Autodetect re-runs once on first launch after this patch.

Audio

• Grandpa narrator mixer routing. Grandfather narration now has its own AudioMixerGroup so it can be ducked independently of SFX / UI / music. New 2D + 3D SFXHelper variants.

Localization

• "Foliage" renamed "Terrain Details" in the Graphics options across all 9 languages. The slider controls overall ground detail (grass + foliage + decor), not just plants.
• Portal upgrade tooltips cleaned. The 9 portal upgrades (Rift Sentry, Stable Rift, Elemental Rift, Rift Detonation, Void Pull, Arcane Tether, Rift Barrage, Prismatic Rift, Rift Summoning) now describe only their unique added effect.