Mitts 0.1.2248

A big one — a major fix to puck pickups feeling unreliable online, a full refinement pass on the new Hit button system, and a wide spread of smaller fixes.

⚠️ Netcode: fixed "grab it, then lose it" pickups

• Fixed puck pickups, pokes, and stick-lifts being wrongly rejected online — measured as high as 82–95% in real games. The host was reconstructing where your blade was from a lossy snapshot of your movement to judge whether your grab was legitimate, and that reconstruction frequently disagreed with where your blade actually was. Your blade's exact position now rides along with the claim itself (the same approach competitive shooters use for aim vs. body authority), so a legitimate reach for the puck is validated against where you truly reached, not a host guess. This should be one of the most noticeable online feel improvements yet.

Hit button: a full refinement pass

Follow-up to last patch's body-check redesign — the initial numbers barely fired, and a few pieces of the new system weren't finished.

• Stagger and knockdown thresholds were re-tuned — the original numbers sat far above what a real check ever produced, so they almost never triggered. Checks now actually stagger and knock down players at forces that make sense.
• A knocked-down player now visibly crumples — sinking toward the ice with a loose stride and a hard reel in the direction of the hit — instead of just locking in place.
• Bracing moved from Brake to the Hit button. Holding Hit now does both sides of a collision: deliver more when you connect, and take less when you're on the receiving end. Brake is back to being purely a hard stop.
• New: a visible commit stance. Holding the Hit button now visibly loads your skater up for a check — a forward lean, dropped shoulder, and a slight crouch — so you can actually see an opponent winding up to hit you.
• An uncommitted bump no longer strips the puck or counts as a hit — only a genuine, committed check (holding the Hit button) registers as a real hit now, on both the stat line and whether it can actually knock the puck loose.
• Bots now properly hold the Hit button when they commit to a check, so their hits land at the strength they're supposed to instead of a weak, uncommitted bump.

Goalies & bot shooting

• Fixed goalies squaring to the shooter's chest instead of the puck during a slapshot wind-up — since the puck sits off to the side of the body during a slap wind-up, this let a shooter rip one past the goalie through the gap the mis-square opened.
• Fixed bot one-timers occasionally missing wide even when the initial aim looked correct — bots now lock their aim from where they'll actually be standing at the moment of release, not where they started settling onto the feed line.

Steam

• Fixed friends-only lobbies being unjoinable by friends. A friends-only lobby never showed the green "Join Game" option in the Steam friends list, so there was effectively no way in — that's fixed.

Practice drills

• Added a Skip button to practice drills so a wedged rep can't hold up the whole session.
• Fixed the Passing drill occasionally softlocking when the teammate puppet ended up holding the puck before you'd thrown a pass.
• Fixed a Passing drill scenario routing the receiver straight through your own drive lane.
• Fixed Penalty Shots incorrectly failing an attempt for "losing momentum" while you were still actively deking or after you'd already released the shot — the rule now tracks your own movement instead of the puck's, and stops mattering entirely once the shot is away.

Presentation

• Post and pad-save sounds now broadcast to everyone in the game, not just whoever's own client happened to predict the contact — a hard clang off the iron rings out for the whole arena, with pitch and volume that scale with how hard the puck was going.
• Fixed a puck knocked loose while pinned against the boards squirting unnaturally into the middle of the ice — it now comes free along the boards, the way a real board battle actually spills.
• Fixed other players' legs freezing mid-stride (while their body kept gliding) for the rest of the match after the first goal replay.

New achievements

• Brick Wall lowered from 5 to 3 blocked shots in a game — shot-blocking is genuinely difficult in Mitts, and 5 was a grind.
• New: Student of the Game (complete the whole tutorial course), Make It Yours (customize your player build), One-Timer, Redirect (tip a teammate's shot in), Overtime Hero (score the OT winner), and Pickpocket (5 takeaways in a game).
• Faceoff Boss renamed to Master of the Dot (same requirement: win 5 draws in a game).

Compatibility

• Network protocol updated several times this patch (hit-commit sync, new achievement stats, client-authoritative pickup claims) — everyone needs this build to play together.