This patch introduces Mastery. What's Mastery, you ask? Wow that's crazy I was just about to talk about it.

PATCH MASTERY

Your patches learn now.

You gain mastery while a patch is equipped and enemies are killed. Tougher enemies grant more progress.

Darrell uses the patch, the patch learns from Darrell and mutates, making it stronger. You will not lose mastery if you refund patches and build a new loadout.

HOW IT WORKS

• Every patch has a mastery bar and five pips. Fill the bar, earn a pip. Five pips and you've mastered it.
• Each pip makes the patch a little stronger, and the card shows you exactly what the next one buys, like 20% → 24% gold enemy. You always know what you're training toward.
• The bars live on your run HUD, your loadout, and every patch card in town. Watch them fill while Darrell works. Earning a pip makes the patch flash, and a mastered patch glows.
• Hit [M] in town (next to the Kennel) to see every patch that learns and how far along each one is.
• Refunding a patch keeps its mastery. Experiment all you want.
• Mastery resets with a corruption, along with the patches themselves. Every climb, they learn Darrell all over again.
• Every patch can be mastered. Even New Floor, New Me: mastered, it stacks an overheal shield on top of your full HP every floor.

UI GLOW-UP

• Your loadout, redone. The patch slots on the run HUD and in town now show the patch art edge to edge, with mastery underneath.
• XP bars got the HP bar treatment. Chunky, pixel-textured, properly BBS. No more corporate progress bars.
• Scanlines only live on the dungeon now. The HUD, DMs, radio and town read clean and crisp instead of getting shredded by CRT lines. (The Scanline FX toggle in Options still turns them off entirely.)
• Damage numbers have a dark outline, so they pop no matter what's behind them.
• No more Windows pop-ups. Abandon Run, Wipe Save and Exit Game now ask in the game's own style. Wipe Save defaults to Cancel for obvious reasons.
• Small text and faded labels across the HUD are easier to read.

FIXES & TWEAKS

• The fork timer (and other timer bars) no longer have a background that crawls along with the bar.
• The Berserk track has a new, tighter cut.

On a personal note, I've been going pretty hard since launch. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving this shit. Darrell has grown so much in the last few days that he skipped four grades and got banned from dodgeball. But I'm also getting tired. I need a day off, so I'm taking one.

I know what you're thinking: FA, you don't owe us anything! I do, though. A lot of you bought the game and showed support. Some of you even wrote reviews (thanks, those help a lot). I won't say I couldn't do this without you, because that's bullshit. I absolutely could. That's why it's on Steam. But I wouldn't want to. That's the important part. Darrell might pass algebra but there's no shot he's getting into U.S. Math History without you guys sorry honestly I didn't pay a lot of attention in school.

Anyways, I'm crying really hard right now obviously, so I'm gonna call it there. Look for more patches later this week. I'm still cooking. I'm just gonna let the roast sit in the slow cooker for 24 hours before giving everyone food poisoning because I'm pretty sure you shouldn't cook meat that long before serving. Anyways, tired. Bye.

Darrell's Proud Stepdad,
Fun Adjacent