Boss Death Animations Are Back: Bosses once again play their full themed death animation instead of vanishing the instant they die — the regular bosses' send-off, the Core Architect's dramatic five-second finale, and the Corrupted Glitch Hopper's detonation. The kill itself always worked correctly; only the visual had gone missing.
Broken Icons on the End-of-Run Damage Screen: Weapon damage rows no longer show a missing-image error for shard, acid flask, or shrapnel damage sources — those now show their parent weapon's icon, or cleanly no icon at all where no single weapon honestly owns that damage type.
The Damage Numbers Toggle Is Itself Again: Turning damage numbers off no longer also hides power-up pickup labels, Dodge/Block/Heal popups, or boss and arena event announcements — it now suppresses exactly what it says.
Less Hidden HUD Work Every Frame: Boss health bars, the XP bar, and the off-screen indicator arrows no longer waste frame time re-rendering when nothing has changed — the radar in particular was redrawing its entire canvas and rescanning every loot drop several times per frame. Smoother boss fights and late-round loot piles, especially on lower-end hardware.
Explosion Spike Protection: Very large chains of explosions now cap their particles, so massive boss loot showers and chain detonations can't pile up thousands of effects into a frame-rate death spiral at the exact moment the game is busiest.
Steam Deck: Hardware Acceleration Enforced (and Verified): The game now explicitly forces Chromium's GPU rendering path on Linux instead of letting it silently fall back to slow software rendering — a fallback that makes everything draw 10-50x slower with no visible sign anything changed. If that fallback ever happens anyway, it's now detected and logged at startup, so "runs terrible on Deck" reports can carry the real cause instead of just symptoms.
Calmer Controller Polling: Controller input no longer floods the engine with identical background messages 60 times a second — state is only sent when it actually changes, and connecting or disconnecting a controller is announced exactly once. Input responsiveness is unchanged.
Codebase Cleanup Pass: Dead files removed, core engine code consolidated into proper modules, entity code moved next to its siblings, and clearer file organization throughout. No gameplay changes.