Critical fixes:
🌱 Game crashing before the menu (black screen, then back to desktop). Found it: on first boot the engine was pre-compiling thousands of graphics pipelines all at once, using every CPU core at the same time. The more cores your machine has, the more memory it ate, until Windows killed the game. This is what was maxing out CPUs and pushing RAM usage through the roof in your reports (thank you for the Task Manager numbers, they cracked it). That pre-compilation is now switched off completely. The automatic hardware benchmark has also been removed, since it was hammering the GPU behind a black screen on first boot. The game now starts on the Low graphics preset the first time you run it; turn the quality up in Settings once you're in. If you still have trouble launching, adding -dx11 in the game's Steam Launch Options is a known-good workaround.
🌱 Stuck on the loading screen. After loading a save, then saving and exiting, the loading screen could stay up forever. It now always clears, with a proper smooth fade, and has a built-in fail-safe so no pause or menu state can ever freeze it. Loading a save slot now shows a real loading screen too, instead of a hard cut.
🌱 Lost items. Items could end up resting inside the floor, invisible, where only the magnet could get them back. The 30-second rescue sweep now catches anything that ends up below the floor surface, so a lost item teleports back to its home spot within half a minute, every time.
Controller:
🌱 Menus now fully work on controller. This was the real problem behind "no controller support": the pad worked in-game, but the menus only listened to the mouse, so you couldn't even press CONTINUE. Every screen (main menu, pause, save slots, settings, shift records, end of shift) is now navigable with the D-pad or left stick, A to select, B to go back.
🌱 Right-stick camera feel overhauled. Stick look is now the same speed at any framerate, with a proper deadzone (drifting sticks stay still, worn sticks still reach full speed) and a precision curve so small movements aim finely while full deflection turns fast. The controller sensitivity slider still scales it on top.
Settings:
🌱 New: key bindings page. Settings → Controls now lists every action with both its keyboard/mouse and controller binding, alongside the sensitivity and invert-Y options.
Fixes:
🌱 CONTINUE sometimes needed two clicks. One click now.
🌱 Carry tiers 5 and 6 now show their lock state and price properly at the upgrade PC.
🌱 Ability upgrades were tangled: Locate and Match were accidentally reading the Magnet tier for their cooldowns and capacity. Every ability now scales with its own tier. If your upgrades felt like they weren't doing anything, this was why.
🌱 Sharper, more responsive crosshair: whatever is exactly under the dot always wins, with a small assist for tiny items, and it costs less per frame than before.
🌱 Fridge and chiller glow lights no longer cast shadows: less glare on nearby labels and a small performance win.