Patch Notes

Preparation Town has been completely reworked, the hunting forest has been expanded, and failing your quota twice now has much worse consequences.

Preparation Town Overhaul

Preparation Town has received a major visual, gameplay, and immersion pass.

Expanded the overall size of Preparation Town.
Added a larger central town square and improved truck staging area.
Added a proper parking lot beside the Bar with parked vehicles.
Reworked roads, sidewalks, curbs, shoulders, paths, and environmental transitions.
Improved building exteriors and made each major location more visually distinct.
Added significantly more environmental props, clutter, signage, lighting, vegetation, and environmental detail.
Improved both daytime and nighttime lighting.
Improved town boundaries and surrounding scenery so the map feels like part of a larger world.
Improved navigation and open space for larger multiplayer groups.
Living Town NPCs

Preparation Town is no longer quite so empty.

Added a moving Furrier NPC.
The Furrier works around the shop while it is empty and returns to the counter when players enter.
Added a moving Hunting Shopkeeper.
The Shopkeeper performs activities around the store and returns to assist players when they enter.
Added ambient patrons throughout the Bar.
Added a dedicated Blackjack dealer.
NPC behavior is synchronized across multiplayer.
Improved NPC pathfinding, animations, obstacle recovery, and multiplayer state replication.
Furrier Shop
Completely upgraded the Furrier interior.
Added significantly more workshop detail, hides, tools, crates, trophy displays, and environmental clutter.
Added a large persistent tanning board.
Turning in animal trophies now gradually fills the board with species-specific trophy displays.
Tanning-board progression is saved independently in each save slot.
Returning to an existing save restores the board exactly as it was.
Hunting Shop
Completely upgraded the Hunting Shop interior.
Added shelves, ammunition displays, hunting supplies, traps, equipment, storage areas, and environmental clutter.
Added Shopkeeper work animations and item-inspection behavior.
The Shopkeeper can occasionally perform a harmless trap demonstration inside the store.
Store purchasing remains fully multiplayer-authoritative.
Firing Range Overhaul

The Firing Range is now a functional practice area.

Reworked the range environment, lanes, targets, lighting, signage, and safety areas.
Added a weapon display wall.
Available weapons automatically appear based on current weapon unlocks.
Added temporary practice weapons.
Added unlimited temporary practice ammunition through the range ammo crate.
Practice weapons use their normal firing, recoil, reload, audio, and first-person presentation.
Added reactive multiplayer targets.
Added temporary hit and accuracy tracking.
Range equipment is completely separate from real hunting equipment.
Practice weapons and ammo cannot be stored, sold, saved, or taken into hunts.
Leaving the range automatically removes all temporary equipment and restores the player's real inventory.
Bar Overhaul

The Bar has been rebuilt into a much more active multiplayer social area.

Completely redesigned and decorated the Bar interior.
Added additional furniture, lighting, decorations, trophy displays, tables, seating, and environmental detail.
Added ambient Bar patrons with synchronized behaviors.
Added playable multiplayer darts.
Added playable multiplayer Blackjack.
Darts
Supports solo practice and multiplayer matches.
Up to four active players can participate.
Three darts per turn.
Three rounds per player.
Full standard dartboard scoring including doubles, triples, outer bull, and bullseye.
Authoritative multiplayer scoring and dart placement.
Spectators can watch matches.
No persistent rewards or money are involved.
Blackjack
Added a fully playable multiplayer Blackjack table.
Added a dedicated dealer NPC.
Uses a six-deck authoritative shoe.
Supports:
Hit
Stand
Double Down
Dealer stands on soft 17.
Blackjack pays 3:2.
Added temporary Bar chips.
Each player receives 100 temporary chips when joining.
Bets range from 5 to 25 chips.
Bar chips have absolutely no effect on your real hunting-party money.
Chips, bets, cards, and table progress are never saved.
Added multiplayer turn timers, disconnect recovery, spectators, and late-join synchronization.
Road Traffic

Preparation Town now has actual traffic.

Cars periodically travel at high speed along the main road.
Added multiple low-poly traffic vehicle variants.
Added headlights at night.
Added spatial engine and pass-by audio.
Traffic is synchronized between host and guests.
Vehicles use high-speed collision detection to prevent players from simply being tunneled through.

And yes, the cars can hit you.

Getting Hit by a Car

Every player gets one warning.

The first time a unique player is hit by traffic in a particular save:

The player survives.
They are violently knocked out of the road.
They receive a unique one-time interaction.
Their persistent inventory remains safe.
The event is permanently remembered for that player in that save slot.

Every traffic hit after that:

Immediately kills the player.
Respawns them safely in Preparation Town.
Does not remove equipment, money, trophies, truck storage, or progression.

Look both ways.

Bigger Hunting Forest

The primary hunting forest has also been expanded.

Increased the playable size of the hunting environment.
Added more space between hunting areas and encounters.
Improved exploration opportunities.
Increased environmental variety across the expanded area.
Improved terrain composition and forest density.
Improved environmental transitions and map-edge concealment.
Maintained deterministic multiplayer world generation so host and guests continue seeing the same forest.
Optimized the larger environment for multiplayer performance.
Punishment Hunt Overhaul

Failing the hunting quota now has more consequences.

Fail once and you get a warning.

Fail the quota a second time and the Furrier gets creative.

The Furrier now prepares one animal costume for every active member of the hunting party.
Costumes are lined up across the Furrier counter.
Players choose their own available costume.
Once you enter a costume, you cannot take it off.
Every active player must be wearing a costume before the party can leave.
When everyone is ready, a synchronized departure countdown begins.
The entire party is then transported into the Punishment Hunt.
Animal Costumes
Added multiple handmade low-poly animal costume variants.
Costumes are designed around animals found throughout the game.
Added synchronized third-person costume appearances.
Added matching first-person costume presentation.
Costumes remain locked throughout the Punishment Hunt.
Normal hunting weapons and persistent equipment are preserved underneath the punishment state.
Costumes cannot be stored, sold, traded, dropped, or saved as inventory items.
Punishment Area Overhaul

The Punishment Hunt environment has received a major visual upgrade.

Reworked terrain and environmental composition.
Increased foliage and environmental detail.
Added stronger landmarks and navigation cues.
Improved rocks, trees, ground clutter, and environmental props.
Improved lighting and atmosphere.
Improved environmental ambience.
Improved boundary concealment.
Improved multiplayer spawn and traversal space.
Improved overall visual quality to better match the updated forest and Preparation Town.
Optimized the environment for larger multiplayer groups.
Multiplayer Improvements

A large amount of work has gone into making Preparation Town and its new systems behave consistently for every player.

Improved host/guest state parity.
Improved late-joining player synchronization.
Improved participant identity handling.
Improved scene-transition synchronization.
Improved NPC replication.
Improved traffic replication.
Improved minigame synchronization.
Improved interaction state cleanup.
Improved disconnect and reconnect recovery.
Added stronger protection against stale or duplicated network events.
Improved handling of repeated Town → Hunt → Town transitions.
Reduced cases where guests could remain behind in the wrong scene.
Improved cleanup of temporary UI, audio, items, NPC states, traffic, and minigame state during transitions.
Saving & Persistence
Continued improvements to the three-slot host save system.
Persistent player belts continue to restore based on each player's unique Steam identity.
Truck storage remains persistent.
Furrier tanning-board progression is now persistent.
First-time traffic-hit status is saved individually for each player.
Punishment state cannot be bypassed by simply closing the game.
Temporary systems such as Firing Range gear, darts, Blackjack cards, Bar chips, traffic vehicles, and animal costumes are prevented from contaminating save data.
Improved atomic saving, backup recovery, and save validation.
Performance & Polish
Reduced unnecessary networking traffic throughout Preparation Town.
Improved multiplayer snapshot handling.
Improved NPC animation and navigation performance.
Added bounded pooling for traffic and temporary gameplay objects.
Reduced unnecessary collision on decorative objects.
Improved audio voice limits and cleanup.
Improved light and shadow usage.
Improved scene teardown and repeated-transition cleanup.
Improved interaction prompt priority.
Improved UI cleanup between temporary gameplay modes.
Added additional diagnostics and automated regression coverage.