Patch Notes — v0.4.2

Forge overhaul, gold tracking, scene polish, and a more cohesive UI flow from the title screen into the core loop.

New

• Forge preview panel — third card to the right of TARGET + SACRIFICE shows the upgraded item before you commit, with its bumped tier, stats, and frame color baked in.
• Forge gold cost — every upgrade costs 100g. FORGE button label now reads FORGE 100g and dims when you can't afford it.
• Hammer-swing animation — clicking FORGE triggers three swings of a hammer onto the + between the panels before the upgrade applies.
• Click-to-place forging — click an inventory item to pick it up (cyan border), click TARGET or SACRIFICE to slot it. Click an already-slotted item (in inventory or in its slot) to deselect.
• Drag-and-drop forging — hold and drag to lift an item; release over a slot to drop. Press-and-release in place falls back to click-to-place.
• Empty-slot placeholder art — forge_card_back.png paints in the TARGET / SACRIFICE / PREVIEW panels before they hold a real card.
• Gold counter — persistent gold-bag badge on the playmat during battle, reward, cycle-choice, and campaign-complete scenes. Hidden on meta-progression screens (title, barracks, settings, etc.).
• Floating +Ng — gold gains from defeating enemies and skipping troop picks pop a rising, fading floater over the counter.
• Shop + forge gold badges — both scenes paint their own scene-anchored gold badge in addition to the global counter.
• PLAY click cue — title menu's PLAY now plays play.mp3, hard-stops the title theme, and fades to black before landing in the barracks.
• Barracks ambience — barracks.mp3 loops while you pick starters.
• Fade-to-black transitions
• Auto-shrinking card names — long equipment names scale down to fit the card width instead of clipping.
• Resolution dropdown — the RESOLUTION setting is now a click-to-expand dropdown with the most common four sizes (1280×720, 1920×1080, 2560×1440, 3840×2160) and disables out of WINDOWED mode.
• Side nav on shop / forge / post-battle reward — DECK / ARMY / TRAINING buttons are clickable in all three so you can review your deck or rearrange the army between fights.

Changes

• Forge layout — inventory pulled into a 2-column scrollable sidebar inside the left edge of the parchment. Preview row pushed to the right side. FORGE and CANCEL centered horizontally on the preview row. CONTINUE moved to the bottom-right corner of the parchment.
• Forge text trimmed — TARGET / SACRIFICE / PREVIEW labels, the top hint line, and the tier-progression text all removed. The + and = operators between panels are kept.
• Inventory backdrop — semi-transparent black rect behind the forge inventory column so cards read against a calm dark base instead of the parchment grain.
• Side nav order — DECK → ARMY → TRAINING (was DECK → TRAINING → ARMY-conditional). ARMY is now available whenever editing is safe (deploy phase, shop, forge, post-battle reward) and hidden mid-combat.
• Hover-highlight consistency — every hover-brightened UI element now routes through a shared primitive.
• Battle log pushed down — top of the log strip moved to make room for the gold counter above it.
• Pause menu draw order — pause overlay now paints over the gold counter (and any other post-scene HUD) so the dim covers everything uniformly.

Fixes

• Forge selection state on return — if you unequip an item in the army view while it was the forge target or sacrifice, the now-invalid index clears on the next forge frame instead of pointing at the wrong item.
• Hover suppressed while paused — the skill / equipment info tooltip no longer dwells or pops up while the pause menu is open. Timer resets on unpause.
• Victory banner z-order — the gold counter no longer punches through the VICTORY / DEFEAT banner. Counter is drawn under the phase HUD now.
• Title theme abrupt stop — clicking PLAY hard-stops the title track instead of letting it crossfade through the chime SFX.