Element Idle v1.1 — The Balance Update

This is the big one. Two weeks of reports turned into a rebuilt economy, a

rebuilt skill tree, and a long list of bugs that were quietly making the game

worse than it looked.

READ THIS FIRST IF YOU HAVE AN EXISTING SAVE

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Element prices have gone up a lot. Prestige points now come in far faster to

match the roughly 30x more per prestige at mid-game depth.

Your save has been topped up automatically on first load so you keep exactly

the buying power you had. If you could afford fifteen more elements yesterday,

you can afford those same fifteen today. Nothing was taken away.

If the new prices look alarming, do one prestige before you judge them.

BALANCE

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- Prestige points are no longer divided by the prestige threshold. That

threshold grows exponentially, so the deeper you got the more it ate, and

PP per prestige flattened into a constant no matter how many particles you

banked. One player logged twelve hours with zero income growth. The

threshold now only gates WHEN you can prestige, not how much you get.

- The prestige threshold is now weighted by element tier. Buying Hydrogen used

to raise your next prestige requirement by exactly as much as buying

Uranium. Cheap elements now cost proportionally less against it.

- The threshold can no longer decrease when you buy an element.

- Element costs rebuilt from the ground up. The old curve made the first

fifty-two elements cost effectively nothing and the last nineteen cost 96%

of the table.

- Skill tree expanded to 63 nodes, eleven of which are permanent and survive

prestige.

- The fourteen "threshold reduction" elements now grant +3% to all particle

gains each which entails to +42% across the set. Instead of an effect that sometimes made

your threshold worse.

FIXES

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- The periodic table was completely invisible on Hebrew, Arabic and other

right-to-left systems. The interface was being mirrored and the table ended

up off-screen. (poly1poly)

- P/sec dropped every time you relaunched. One player went from 360k/s to

70k/s across a restart. Bonuses were being applied in a way the save couldn't

reconstruct. (frerouche, shpasic)

- Three of the six noble gases did nothing at all. Neon's "+10% all bonuses",

Krypton's click burst and Xenon's "+50% PP" were never actually applied.

All three work now. (badman2002)

- The element discount was stuck at 80% instead of the intended 65% — one

skill node's effect was stacking with itself every prestige.

- Buying something you can't afford now makes a sound and flashes red. It used

to do nothing at all, which read as the button being broken.

- Unaffordable elements were unclickable, so the "can't afford" feedback could

never fire for them.

- Offline earnings were skipping Oganesson's x2 and the +3% element bonuses,

despite both saying "all gains".

- The "full skill tree" achievement fired at 51 nodes when the tree has 63.

- Quasar's P/sec bonus compounded every prestige without limit.

- Auto-Assembler could get stuck repeatedly trying to buy a node it couldn't

quite afford.

- Skill node costs above 999 million displayed as nonsense like "200000.0M".

PERFORMANCE

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- The frame cap now snaps to a divisor of your monitor's actual refresh rate.

A flat 60 cap on a 144Hz display makes frames land on 2 and 3 refresh

intervals alternately and visible judder that still reads as a stable 60 on an

FPS counter. If you have a high-refresh monitor, this is the one.

- The game no longer prevents Windows from sleeping your display, and drops to

a low framerate when it isn't the active window. It's an idle game; it

shouldn't cook your laptop while you're in a browser.

- Resizing the window no longer rebuilds all 118 element tiles on every pixel

of the drag.

- Buying an element no longer restyles the entire periodic table, and no longer

writes the save file synchronously.

- The atom and the Fission Tap button no longer run their animation logic while

you're looking at a different tab.

- Removed a 3D physics engine that was starting a thread pool for a 2D game.

NEW

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- Skill tree redesign. Prices are printed on the nodes instead of hidden in

hover tooltips, there's a new state showing what you can afford right now

(green price and a glow), and permanent nodes have a gold ring. (Kozhy)

- Delete Save Data button in Settings, with confirmation. (Yiaannn)

- V-Sync toggle.

- Frame rate limiter with presets and a custom value. (Dark-Noir)

- Stats tab, including a DISPLAY section showing your refresh rate, frame cap

and render resolution. If the game stutters for you, a screenshot of that

tells me more than any description can.I started a new discussion thread for

this as well.

- Quantum Memory keeps your five cheapest skill nodes through a prestige, and

Auto-Assembler rebuys the tree for you. Both permanent. (Motsoshii, firle)

- Auto-prestige, auto-fission and auto-buy elements, all toggleable.

Thank you to everyone who reported something. Several of the bugs above were

diagnosed by players from the outside with no access to the code — shpasic

worked out that bonuses weren't surviving restarts, poly1poly identified the

right-to-left problem from a single detail about tab placement, and frerouche

logged twelve hours of readings that proved the economy had stopped growing.

This update is mostly your work. So i thank you all for your time and helpful

feedback to make this game better.