A wonderful player provided data on some performance issues where they couldn't fight hundreds of enemies and destroy them all with prejudice.
We worked on worked on a fix, dry text below. Essential we made some things smarter displayed and rendered. Should did it the first time, am I right?
## [1.0.3] - 2026-08-31
### The performance patch
This patch fixes a major rendering problem that was dragging performance down across every map.
The ground alone accounted for **97 percent of everything the game was drawing**. We have rebuilt
how it is sent to the graphics card, without removing any detail, and the result is a substantial
improvement from early runs through to full late-run swarms.
We found it because a player wrote to us three days after launch with a screenshot from our own
FPS counter: 21 frames per second on a machine that should never have struggled. Thank you. It
was the most useful report anyone has sent us since release.
We reproduced the problem within an hour on the fastest computer we own: the same 21 frames, at
the same moment in the same fight. This was never your hardware. It was ours to fix.
### Fixed
- **The ground was costing more to draw than the battle was.** Every mark on every floor - the
soil mottle, fine grain, pebbles, leaf litter, broad soft tint, wind ripples on the coast,
shingle in the grotto and lattice on The System - was being sent to your graphics card as a
separate instruction. That meant several hundred instructions per screen, every frame, for a
floor that had not changed since it was drawn.
Measured, that was **97 percent of everything the game was drawing**. On a machine already
working hard, there was almost nothing left for the fight on top of it.
The floor now takes a handful of instructions instead of hundreds. We have not removed marks,
simplified the ground or quietly forced a lower setting. These are the same marks, in the same
places and colours, sent far more efficiently. We made the same change across every map.
On the same runs and the same machine, we measured:
- Early and mid run, where most of a session is spent: **28 frames per second to 60**, with the
drawing load down from 3,140 instructions per frame to 828.
- Across all seven maps, the ground's drawing cost fell by **51 percent**, and by as much as 88
percent on Ciara's mountains.
- In a full late-run swarm at the enemy cap: **16 frames per second to 25**.
### Added
- **A Ground Detail setting, in Display.** You can choose Off, Low, Medium or High. It ships on
High, which is exactly the ground the game has always drawn, so nothing changes unless you
choose it. Lower settings thin the fine floor scatter and leave more time for the fight. They
do not change where you can walk, what you can hit or what drops. A new setting applies to the
ground under your feet as you travel, then to the whole map on your next run.
### Still honest about
That last number is the one we are not satisfied with. **25 frames per second in a full swarm is
better, and it is not good enough.** Now that the ground is fixed, the remaining cost sits with
the creatures themselves: how their sprites are sent to the graphics card, and how much thinking
each one does every tick. Those are the next three pieces of work. They are already scoped, and
they are what the next patch is for. We would rather release the two thirds that are finished
today than hold them back while we complete the rest.
If you are on a slower machine and want more frames now, turn Ground Detail down and leave damage
numbers off in Settings. Damage numbers alone cost around 6 frames per second even in a light
fight, which is why they ship off.
Please keep the reports coming. The FPS counter is in Settings, and a screenshot of it gives us
something concrete to reproduce, measure and fix. This patch exists because one player sent
exactly that.