⚠️ Everyone must update

The network version went 24 → 25. As before, an out-of-date client cannot see or join your lobby — but this time the server checks it during the join itself and refuses by name, so a mismatched player now gets a clear refusal instead of connecting and quietly corrupting the session. Restart Steam and update before you organise a session.

⌨️ Two keys moved — read this before you play

• X now clears your clones. It used to be C.
• 6 now toggles first/third person. It used to be X.

Both clone keys now sit under your left hand on a single HUD button, and C is deliberately left free.

Decoys can be shot — and that is the whole point

A clone now takes a bullet exactly like a real hider: the same hit detection, the same aim forgiveness, the same hitmarker, and a paint splash in your colours rather than a giveaway grey. Then it vanishes, silently, and nobody scores.
The tell is what does not happen: there is no kill feed entry. A hunter who shoots a decoy learns the truth only from the absence of a kill — which is a full second of doubt you can spend running. Clones still have no collision; you walk straight through them.

Clones are now a burst of two

Both clones are available at once with no wait between them — planting a pair simultaneously is the trick the ability exists for. The 10-second cooldown is a single shared timer, and it only starts when you place the clone that empties the pool. Spend just one and you are never on a timer at all.

Getting caught no longer feels like losing everything

Two changes, from the same piece of feedback.

• Dying late in the hunt now pays. Survival used to be all-or-nothing: being caught at second 170 of a 180-second hunt paid exactly the same as being caught instantly. You now bank a share of the survival bonus proportional to how much of the hunt you lasted. (Being caught during the hide phase still pays nothing — you have not survived any of the hunt yet.)
• Your points are now on screen, permanently, under the round timer — and they keep counting after you are caught. For the record: getting caught never actually wiped your points. The only place to see the number was the Tab scoreboard, so an eliminated player stared at a screen with no number and reasonably assumed the worst.

We also switched off a set of scoring options that the tuning panel advertised but nothing ever paid out — they promised income that did not exist.

The lobby deals the right number of hunters now

The hunter count scales with how many people are actually connected: 2-5 players → 1 hunter, 6-9 → 2, 10+ → 3 (Ticket mode starts at 2). The host can still set it by hand and that pick always wins.
This never worked before, in two separate ways at once: the scaling rule was unreachable, and the player count it needed was never fed to the lobby by anything.

"Why did I randomly become a Hunter?"

Because the game will conscript a hider mid-hunt if the round is left without one — that is deliberate and it stays. What was missing was anyone telling you. You now get a banner: YOU'RE A HUNTER NOW! — including a note that you may have been moved, since a promoted hider whose hiding spot is too small for the hunter's body gets relocated, and that teleport was half the confusion.

The end-of-match gallery actually shows the creations

At a full lobby, not one creation was visible — the scoreboard and the gallery shared a single scrolling column with no scrollbar, so from about five players the gallery was folded entirely out of sight. They are now two separate scrolling areas, sized so the first full row of creations is always on screen at any lobby size.
Cards are also much bigger (five across instead of a cramped grid), and clicking one opens it full-size with its own ★ LIKE button. Hunters: your gun no longer photographs itself stuck to the camera.

The loading screen was letting the game show through it

Two real bugs, both at every resolution:

• Nothing opaque sat behind the slideshow, so the menu or the half-loaded world composited into the background. There is a solid backing plate now.
• The crossfade faded both images at once, so screen coverage dropped to 75% at the midpoint of every swap — a visible flash of the scene behind, on every single transition.

Separately, the whole screen was scaling by height only, so on any non-16:9 monitor (16:10, 5:4, ultrawide) the frame got narrower while everything kept its size — the map title ran nearly edge to edge. Rebuilt from the design artwork and verified at 13 resolutions. There is a new tip line, too.

Chat opens with Enter again

In-game chat did not open with Enter, at all, for the entire match — the chat panel was being switched off the moment the round assigned your role. Fixed in code and in all three maps.

Reconnecting after a crash works

Rejoining a match you dropped out of was failing in real sessions. Two causes: two different timers raced and the wrong one won (your client gave up while the server was still preparing to let you in), and a single transient "match in progress" answer permanently destroyed the rejoin offer instead of letting you retry.
Also: if you rejoin more than 25 seconds after dropping, you come back as a spectator until the next round. That is by design — but it used to happen in complete silence, which read as "reconnect is broken". You now get a YOU'RE BACK! banner explaining it.

Spectator and scouting fixes

• Cycling between players moved to the ← and → arrow keys. A/D were doing double duty as both the free-camera strafe and the player cycle, so a freshly caught hider tapping A got yanked six metres by a camera move they never asked for.
• A scouting hider is no longer ejected from scout mode by the whistle at the start of the hunt.
• Throwables: the HUD used to charge you cubes for throws the server silently threw away. A refused throw now costs nothing and visibly refuses. Throw rate is slower and the economy is calmer.
• Banana peels can no longer lock a hunter down. Two spectators focusing one hunter could keep them stunned 57% of the time; the victim cooldown is doubled, bringing that to 28%.

Audio

• The proximity warning is audible again. It had been cut to the point of sitting 9-16 dB under the round timer's tick — effectively inaudible. Measured and restored, with the danger tier clearly above the warning tier.
• "FORCED TAUNT" is renamed "WHISTLE INTERVAL" in Match Settings. It only ever controlled the automatic whistle, and hosts reasonably expected turning taunts off to silence it.
• The fart taunt was pointing at a retired, shorter clip in all three maps, and several taunt cards were wired to the wrong slot. All repointed.

Also in this build

• Traditional Chinese is now supported — eight languages.
• The hunter's own paint splash no longer covers most of your screen on a point-blank hit. What other players see is unchanged.
• The volunteer pad in the lobby stops advertising an E key that did nothing, stops going silent whenever you stood near a cube, and now shows live counts: how many are on the pad, and how many hunter seats there are.
• Plaster Gallery was missing the round-start cover and the whole updated Build panel — it had been copied from an older version of the HUD. Restored.
• A save file written by a newer build is now set aside instead of being half-read and then overwritten with the truncated version.

Known issues — please don't file these

• Candy's collision is still incomplete and needs an art pass rather than a code fix — the candy props are built from a piece that carries no collision at all, so it is not a case of a few missing boxes.
• There is no notice yet if you stand on the volunteer pad and are not picked as hunter.
• Crouch is still not wired. C is now free, which is a step toward it, but it does nothing yet.
• Everything in this build is freshly fixed and none of it has been through a full playtest yet. That is what this session is for.

What we most want to know

• Shoot a decoy, and get shot at while decoying. Does the absence of a kill feed actually read as doubt? Hiders: does planting two at once do what you want?
• Get caught mid-hunt and look at your points. Does the number stay, and does surviving longer visibly pay more?
• Grow the lobby past 6 and past 10 without touching the hunter setting. Does the hunter count follow?
• Finish a match with a full lobby and check the gallery — can you see everyone's creation, and does clicking one open it?
• Play on a non-16:9 monitor if you have one, and watch the loading screen. Any flash of the scene behind it?
• Kill your game mid-round and rejoin, both quickly and after 30+ seconds.
• Press Enter in a match. Does chat open?

If something looks wrong, press F12 the moment it happens — it marks that exact instant in your log — then run Collect-Logs.bat and send us the folder.