This is the one I've been building towards all week. Every confirmed bug from the V1.0.9 known-issues list is fixed here, plus two more I found while going back through the game with a fine comb. Thank you to everyone who reported these — almost every fix below started as somebody's review or comment.
🌱 Your settings now actually load. This was the big one. When you loaded a save, the game read your saved volumes correctly and showed them on the sliders — but never told the audio about them, so music and effects kept playing at the default levels until you nudged a slider. Loading a save now re-applies your audio settings properly.
🌱 Starting a New Game no longer wipes your preferences. Choosing NEW GAME was overwriting your saved settings with the defaults, so your volumes, FOV and sensitivity quietly reset. Your preferences are now preserved and applied when you start a fresh run.
🌱 Resolution scale sticks. If you'd lowered the resolution scale to help performance, loading a save silently pushed it back to 100% every single time. It's now restored with the rest of your settings — this one especially matters on Steam Deck and lower-end machines.
🌱 The crouch camera no longer sinks into the floor. Jumping and crouching at the same time was nudging the camera down a little each time, and it added up until you were looking out from under the shop. The camera height is now set to an exact position rather than a running total, so it can't drift no matter how much you spam it.
🌱 Items you were holding are saved. If you saved (or autosaved) while carrying items, those items weren't written to the save at all — they'd be sitting back on the floor where you first found them, and you'd come back short. This is what was behind the "I'm missing items after loading" reports. Anything in your hands when you save is now put straight back into your hands when you load.
🌱 The "what... sea?" achievement can be unlocked. It was asking for a drink that doesn't exist anywhere in the shop, so nobody could ever get it — it's now tied to a bottle you can actually find. While I was in there I checked all twenty-one achievements against the real contents of the shop, one by one, and the rest are all reachable.
🌱 The music player plays through the album. Tracks were looping forever instead of moving on, which also meant shuffle appeared to do nothing at all. Music now advances to the next track when one finishes, and shuffle genuinely shuffles. Pausing the music pauses the changeover too.
Known issues still being worked on:
🟠 Some players unable to launch the game (black screen, then back to desktop). If that's you, try verifying the game files in Steam, updating your graphics drivers, and adding -dx11 to the game's Launch Options.
🟠 Small text on Steam Deck, and a few interface panels running off the edge of the screen at 1280x800. I know exactly what's causing it and it's next on my list.
🟠 Telling items apart — several of you have said the boxes are hard to read at a glance, and that you'd like to see what you're looking at before you pick it up. I agree, and it's the main thing I want to tackle next.