Season 0 · Patch 1 (0.1)

First report's in, Architect. Adjustments follow.

⚖️ BALANCE

WANE
Its max-HP drain had no real cap — a single tower could strip nearly a target's entire health pool, trivializing tanks and bosses. It's now rank-capped, and stacking multiple WANEs is bounded.

• Per-tower drain cap: 99% (flat) ⇒ 12% / 15% / 18% / 21% / 24% / 27% (D → SS)
• Level 5 — Soul Siphon cap bonus: none ⇒ ×1.5
• Stacking multiple WANEs: shared 99% cap (effectively unlimited) ⇒ cumulative with diminishing returns (×0.6 each extra WANE), hard 50% ceiling
• Per-hit drain rate: 0.5%–1.5% by rank (unchanged)

HOWL
Its fear knockback fired on every hit — with HOWL's high fire rate (and stacked HOWLs) that shoved enemies backward almost non-stop, hard-locking lanes. The knockback now has a short per-enemy cooldown. Fear and slow are untouched.

• Fear knockback: every hit ⇒ at most once per 0.7s per enemy (shared across all HOWLs)
• Fear chance / slow / duration (unchanged)

🐛 BUG FIXES

• Chronicle — replaying a quest for a better star rating now correctly saves your new record. Previously an improved rating (e.g. 1★ → 3★) could revert after a reboot.
• Contracts — a run now counts toward the "100 Contracts" goal even when you lose early (any genuine run that ended, win or death).
• Achievements — several in-game milestones that weren't tracking are fixed: 100 Contracts, 30-day login streak, Apex Climber (weekly Top 100), and the unit collectors.
• Leaderboards — your true Contracts kill count now shows on the weekly board, uncapped (extreme scores were previously capped).
• Leaderboard — inspect a rival — click any player on the Contracts board to see the towers + talents they ran, and jump straight to their Steam profile. Your build is public by default; a one-click toggle keeps it private.
• Contracts — runs record reliably — a timing hiccup could make a genuine run pay 0 Stellar Marks and drop off the leaderboard entirely. That path now retries and self-heals, so your score and rewards land ; if it truly can't reach the server you're told clearly instead of shown a silent "+0". The run-reward screen also shows your real kill count.
• Upgrades keep your card — upgrading a tower or unit no longer consumes your LAST copy and makes the card vanish from your collection. An upgrade now keeps at least one copy (it needs one spare beyond the cost — the button shows "keeps 1").
• Progress reliably in sync — your collection now always reflects the server's latest state at launch. Fixes a rare boot race where an out-of-date local/cloud copy could win over fresh server progress.

✨ QUALITY OF LIFE

• Buying Void Shards now asks for confirmation before spending your Stellar Cores.
• Placed towers now glow with a soft outline when you hover them.
• Chronicle — a tower you can afford to upgrade now pulses with a gold halo, so your next upgrade is easy to spot at a glance.
• At the tower cap, your loadout keys still open a placed tower's info panel instantly — with the ◀ ▶ selector to cycle duplicates — for quick inspecting and upgrading, and no dead "build" cursor with nowhere to place.
• Story dialogue now fades in and out cleanly instead of typing out line by line.
• Damage-type tags in the tower panel (Physical, Kinetic, …) are now larger and sharper.
• The Quit button in Settings carries a power icon so it clearly reads as "close the game."
• Hold R to instantly restart your run (Chronicle & Contracts).
• Smoother gameplay and reduced input latency.

A bug, an idea? We're listening. — Sentinel-7