- The Particle Auto Merger SFX volume knob in audio settings now drives all auto-merge hooks: dust merge start, dust merge, and particle-auto-merger playback now all use that same single slider.
- Gameplay HUD can now be hidden and shown with a remappable F2 shortcut in the slide-out keyboard shortcut UI; while hidden, raw dust and credit HUD reward feedback (visual and audio) is fully suppressed until shown again.
- The Title Save Slot menu edge tracer now supports a third, manually authored orange glow route on the existing `WindowEdgeTracerOverlay`, with a preset loop around the Dust Rush Challenge button and tracer rendering placed behind other menu elements.
- The rare rock miner has been moved to the same visual depth layer as other 3D ambient objects so ambient meteors now render above it instead of behind it.
- The main mining station's Dust Processor lights now switch off and remain stationary while idle, then rotate at a deliberate speed tied to each processor's live processing rate, including upgrades.
- Cargo Pods now undock from their exact visible position without a correction jump, accelerate south for a full second before taking a larger outward bend, and use the same lower route in reverse so Spaceport arrivals aim safely below the main mining station before docking.
- The main mining station now appears completely dark and dormant when it is first revealed in the opening sequence, before lighting up in the following beat.
- The Force Field installation tutorial now opens Inventory without preselecting the Force Field, leaving the player to click and install it; its mouse guidance also uses an animated click mark to distinguish the intended click-click action from dragging.
- Space Pirate borrowing is now consistently shown in coral orange and repayment in cyan, while the Borrow button uses a short unclipped label instead of repeating the loan amount.
- The Space Dust Stringer can now merge every eligible dust tier simultaneously, preventing a lower-tier merge from blocking large completed strings farther along the production chain.
- Newly purchased Friendly Alien Trader ships now begin Auto Mining immediately, while ships whose Auto Mining was deliberately disabled remain idle as intended.
- The Dust Push Tractor now releases carried particles at twice its previous drop-off distance, giving their momentum more room to carry them into the target instead of pushing them past it.
- The Black Hole Sink's large outer ring now imports at twice its previous maximum texture size, producing a sharper, less pixelated result.
- Cargo Pod transitions into the ambient black hole now include a 0.7-second visual suck-in scale-down and pop-back scale-up, plus a dedicated configurable `Black Hole Pod Enter` audio hook in ZovekaGameAudio for the hook cue.
- Save-file integrity can now be disabled as a leaderboard blocker via new `enableSaveIntegrityLeaderboard` config toggle under core settings; when unticked, integrity-related invalidation no longer blocks leaderboard submission.
- Added a new ship force-field active-loop audio hook in gameplay audio config: looped ambience can now play continuously while the force field is actively held in range, and be assigned independently from existing force-field one-shot effects.
- The ship force-field active-loop now ignores off-screen visibility for playback gating so it remains audible whenever the field is actively engaged and in range, even if the force-field antenna is outside the camera.
- Playable-demo-rule research generation now starts with four guaranteed first prospects in Area 2 (`warehouse_height_l1`, `unlock_production_level_2`, `sun_dust_vapor_harvesting_module`, `unlock_superdust_buying_office`) for the first seeding, with remaining slots still filled randomly; re-planning rerolls remain fully random.
- Fixed startup `DemoDevelopmentNoticeWindow` initialization to avoid localization lookups during `OnValidate`, removing repeated Unity validation-time warnings while preserving runtime locale application.