Playtest 0.3.0 Patch Notes

Playtest 0.3.0 rebuilds battle presentation across the Kingdom, fills waves with larger enemy formations, and adds clearer tactical control from Draft through Combat.

A living new title screen

• Replaced the static title backdrop with a live siege assembled from the same terrain, Draft, enemy, tower, weather, progression, and lighting systems used in a run.
• The showcase builds a route tile by tile, reveals Draft cards, places and upgrades a changing tower lineup, fights increasingly dangerous waves, and begins a new battle when the Campfire falls.
• The battlefield rotates through maps made available by the active profile, with varied camera angles, terrain, tower orders, and enemy cards.
• Refreshed the title logo, menu layout, focus treatment, and multiplayer icon while retaining a safe painted fallback if the live scene cannot start.

Denser battles and new Draft strategy

• Regular enemy cards now produce much larger groups of smaller, weaker, slower units instead of a short single-file line.
• Enemies advance in deterministic three-wide formations that rotate cleanly through route bends and close toward the Campfire.
• Very large count bonuses are capped at a safe number of live bodies; excess pressure becomes additional enemy health instead of being discarded.
• Rebalanced Overdraft around tougher waves rather than runaway body counts. The Draft preview now separates HP, enemy-count, and payout multipliers, while higher tiers arrive faster.
• Added authored enemy-family identities and family combos. Grasslands now features Goblin War Host: each distinct Goblin type increases Goblin numbers and the whole wave's payout.
• Family combos can stack with the existing Stampede and Warband synergies.
• Every enemy that reaches the Campfire now deals its full effective threat, including several formation members arriving together.

Battlefields rebuilt across the Kingdom

• Rebuilt Grasslands maps as painted floating islands with deep soil-and-stone faces, grass-covered rims, roots, ledges, hanging moss, waterfalls, a layered cloud sea, and a distant world below.
• Added biome-authored surrounding worlds: snowy Mountains shelves and peaks, Dungeon galleries and bridges, Marsh blackwater and drowned ruins, Graveyard terraces and spectral lights, Caldera lava and basalt, and enclosing Wilds trunks and canopies.
• Refined Beach banks, shore cuts, tidal pools, and open-ocean presentation so the playable sand reads as one continuous surface.
• Added background haze and distance fog that preserve world labels and combat callouts while making terrain depth easier to read.
• Expanded deterministic ground clusters with biome-specific flowers, weeds, stones, wreckage, crystals, debris, and supplies. Routes and tower pads suppress the details and restore them when vacated.
• Added larger permanent obstacle formations with biome-appropriate cliffs, pools, wreckage, roots, and other silhouettes while preserving route connectivity.
• Added cloud shadows, drifting cloud layers, grass and moss sway, smoke, embers, pollen, leaves, and occasional ambient flybys. Rain now quiets light airborne motion and shadow contrast.
• Environmental shaders now respond consistently to authored lighting, weather, title grading, and battle conditions.
• Added a staged level entrance in which terrain settles into place, landmarks and foliage pop in, portals arrive, and the camera hands off to the rider. It can be skipped with Confirm or disabled in Options.
• Ordinary river cells can now be used for tower construction. A successful purchase permanently converts that cell to land; failed or unaffordable attempts leave the water untouched.

Clearer combat and tower control

• Added a 1× / 2× Combat speed control to the HUD.
• Added Any / Weakness type priority to tower sheets. Weakness mode first prefers enemies that take the most damage from that tower, then applies the chosen First, Last, Strong, or Weak targeting rule.
• Reworked battlefield framing so active routes and landmarks fit around the HUD, phase tracker, tower shop, and changing window size.
• Placement previews now use cyan outlines and hatching for valid cells, orange cross-hatching for invalid cells, a clearer range display, and exact text for blocked terrain or missing Gold.
• Upgrades and Ascensions purchased in a tower sheet now save their world-space celebration until the sheet closes, keeping the new form, rune sweep, particles, sound, and scale punch visible.
• Reduced the Flail tower's base damage from 50 to 30. Active Flails now update damage and spin speed correctly when upgrades, Attunement, or temporary modifiers change.
• Refreshed Arrow tower attacks and cleaned up the lower Lightning tower artwork.

HUD and options

• Tightened the Gold and Campfire status block and refined the current, complete, next, and upcoming phase treatments.
• The Combat phase card now communicates its Start Wave action more explicitly during Build.
• Wave Events and Contracts use a compact right-edge stack in Combat and can be expanded independently for details.
• Added persistent Show Damage Numbers and Skip Level Intro options.
• Added separate Graphics toggles for path details, environmental scenery, ambient motion, and cloud shadows. They apply immediately and do not change gameplay rules.
• Improved controller and keyboard focus, live binding prompts, tower-sheet flow, placement feedback, and layout behavior at smaller window sizes.

Performance and stability

• Introduced a lighter-weight runtime for eligible regular enemies, including batched rendering, physics-free route simulation, and cached scene profiles.
• Added spatial enemy queries and shared targeting selection so towers and abilities avoid repeatedly scanning every live enemy.
• Added presentation budgets for damage feedback and attack effects during large waves.
• Added a safety governor that pauses ordinary spawning at 750 live enemies on desktop or 350 on Web, then resumes in schedule order as capacity opens. Every scheduled enemy and reward is preserved.
• Improved route snapshots, spawn scheduling, formation grounding, status handling, and tower/ability compatibility for dense battles.
• Multiplayer retains the scene-based enemy path while authoritative mass-enemy ownership remains out of scope.

Fixes and polish

• Improved formation routing around corners so enemies are less likely to cut across nearby terrain.
• Improved enemy facing, grounding, collision queries, death/status presentation, and targeting under the scaled presentation.
• Improved scenery behavior during terrain expansion, path changes, tower placement, selling, weather, and lighting changes.
• Fixed additional small focus, placement, phase-transition, map-intro, title-screen, and presentation edge cases.

Bug reports

Include Playtest 0.3.0, the map and wave, mode, input method, graphics settings, and reproduction steps when submitting a bug report. Feedback on formation readability, performance in large waves, the environmental options, water-cell building, Weakness targeting, and Campfire damage is especially helpful.