Season 0 · Patch 0.2.0

Your rivals just became readable, Architect.

🏆 LEADERBOARD — INSPECT A RIVAL'S FULL BUILD

• Their talents, as the actual talent tree — inspecting a player on the Contracts board now shows their build as the real tree: the three lane backdrops, the full node hierarchy, and the connectors lit along the exact path they took. You read a rival's spec the same way you read your own. Hover any node for its name and rank.
• Their towers, as ornate cards — rarity-coloured frames, rank and level badges, animated tower art. The whole loadout reads at a glance.
• …and the board now tells you it's clickable — rows light up as you pass over them, and a line under the tabs spells it out. If you'd never realised you could inspect a rival's build, that's why.

📖 AUGMENT CARDS NOW TELL THE TRUTH
We audited all 40 Contracts augments against what the code actually does. Four cards were lying. Twelve more were hiding their cap. Here's the honest version.

• MIRROR PROTOCOL said the clone dealt "+50% damage" — it deals 50% OF the tower's damage. And the "at ×4" it promised was unreachable (3 stacks is the max; the clone overtakes the tower at 150%).
• SENTINEL PROTOCOL said its cap was +100% — the cap actually GROWS with each stack (+200% at two), and the bonus is damage. It never said either.
• The shared damage ceiling — PULSE OVERCHARGE, CORE RESONANCE and OVERWATCH all draw from ONE +500% budget. If you were already at the ceiling from one of them, the other two were doing literally nothing. All three now say so.
• Twelve caps that were never written down — STEADY AIM, EXTENDED REACH, PIERCING SHOT, CHAIN REACTION, MARK OF THE HUNT, REGENERATIVE PLATING, AEGIS BARRIER and the three damage-over-time augments now state their ceiling on the card.
• Two effects that were never mentioned — VOID BURST's blast deals 60% of the projectile's damage (the card only gave its radius), and RIFT SPLINTER's fork only finds a target within 200px (with nothing in range, nothing happens).
• Flying enemies — FROZEN VEINS never slowed them, and never said so. It now does, and points at AETHER, the tower built to bypass that immunity. TERROR PULSE is clearer too: flyers ARE pushed back, they're just not slowed.
• EMBER FORGE — its bonus belongs to the TOWER that earned it, not to your run: sell that tower and the stacked damage goes with it. And extra copies make it ramp faster, not higher — unlike SENTINEL PROTOCOL, whose ceiling does grow.
• HEART OF THE RIFT — its exclusion list was wrong (APEX EMPOWER is not amplified at all), and it compounds per stack rather than adding a flat +25%.
• TERRAFORM PROTOCOL — "up to 4 tiles, one per quadrant", since a quadrant with no free ground near the path simply doesn't get one.

⚖️ BALANCE

• BOUNTY MARK legendary now actually gives +200% XP — a hidden ceiling was clipping it to +150%, so the rarest version of the card paid out barely more than the epic one. The ceiling was raised to match what the card promises.

🐛 FIXES

• Chronicle — beating your own star record now sticks — replaying a quest you'd cleared with 1 star and earning 3 could silently revert to 1 the next time you launched the game. Your new record is now recorded properly. (Already fixed server-side — no update needed for this one.)
• Runs no longer go missing — the PLAY AGAIN bug — this is the big one. Starting a run from the PLAY AGAIN button (rather than going back to the menu first) meant that run was never registered with the server: no rewards, no leaderboard score, no warning. Chronicle replays could lose their first-clear rewards the same way. Fixed, and the server also recovers runs that slip through for other reasons.
• Claimed rewards no longer appear to vanish — a claimed mission could credit your account correctly while the menu kept showing your old total, which looks exactly like losing the reward. Your currency display now re-checks itself against the server on every refresh.
• Buff icons no longer sit on the level bar — placing a PARAGON next to a tower put its damage/fire-rate icons right on top of that tower's level gauge.
• DPS meter — buffed towers no longer break the layout — a buffed tower printed its raw number ("1300000 +45000") and overflowed the panel. Buffed rows now use the same compact format as everything else ("1.30M +45k dps").

✨ QUALITY OF LIFE

• Update notice — faster and more reliable — the game now checks for a new patch at the moments that matter (arriving at the menu, finishing a run) instead of waiting on a background timer. If a patch ships while you play, you'll know as soon as your run ends — never in the middle of it.

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