Tetrogue 1.3.0 — Patch Notes

New Features

• Asymmetric Multiplayer has arrived. Play a full run against a second player instead of the AI. One player is the Defender: they play a completely normal single-player run, picking a hero, difficulty, and relics like always. The other is the Attacker: they never touch a real board of their own to fight, but before every battle they spend a budget upgrading the Defender's enemies, and during the fight they spend mana on abilities to make life harder. Play together on the same PC (each player gets their own keyboard/controller) or online through Steam. Not available in the free Demo.
• A Rock-Paper-Scissors draft at the start of a multiplayer run decides who begins as which role.
• The first time you reach your role, a short explainer introduces the Defender and Attacker, the budget, and how role-switching works, with a "Don't show this again" option.
• Prepare the Enemy: before each battle, the Attacker's enemy roster is pre-filled with whatever a normal single-player run would have spawned for that node. The Attacker spends a budget applying upgrade effects to individual enemies: Bonus Health, Bonus Damage, Make Elite, Starting Armor, Poison Resist, Attack Speed, and Regeneration, each stackable and priced by how strong it is. Elite can't be forced onto a plain Regular Slime or onto an enemy that's already Elite.
• The Forge: the Attacker earns mana by playing their own small Tetris board, then spends it on abilities picked from a loadout chosen once at the start of the run: Heal (restores a quarter of the target's max health), Haste (speeds up the Defender's falling pieces for a few seconds), Drought (forces a run of awkward S/Z pieces), Curse Piece (drops a cursed piece into the queue), Instant Attack (forces an enemy to strike immediately instead of waiting out its timer), Shield (grants an enemy armor), Swap Held (yanks the Defender's held piece), and Fog (obscures the board for a few seconds).
• If the Defender falls in battle, the fight doesn't end the run: the roles switch, and the Attacker retries the SAME fight fresh as the new Defender. A "The Roles Switch" screen announces who beat whom and who's now playing which role, and waits for both players to press a button before the next battle starts.
• Losing streak protection: if an Attacker keeps failing to bring down the Defender across several battles in a row, their budget for the next one grows to help them catch up, resetting whenever the roles actually switch.
• Whichever multiplayer player isn't actively driving a screen (the map, Prepare the Enemy, ability selection, narrative events) still sees a live mirror of what's happening, with full audio.
• Boss rewards reworked into hero-tailored upgrade choices. Beating a boss used to always offer the same 3 generic difficulty debuffs (Calm Fall, Weakened Foes, Slow Attacks), regardless of which hero you were playing. Now each of the 7 heroes offers 3 of its own reward options that amplify its actual passive ability, shown at both boss fights in a run. Picking the same option twice stacks its bonus.

Quality of Life

• The Tetrédex now discloses when a relic won't appear in your run because you already own one that conflicts with it (Keepsake, Ctrl-Z, Seven-Piece Randomizer, and Ace Up Your Sleeve have always blocked each other in pairs), even before you've discovered the blocked relic yourself.
• Difficulty tiers renamed to read as a skill ladder rather than a judgment: Training to Novice, Easy to Adept, Normal to Expert, Hard to Master, Hard+ to Grand Master.
• Difficulty selection now defaults to Adept on a fresh install (previously Normal/Expert) and correctly remembers your last choice across a full relaunch, instead of resetting every time you closed the game.

Fixes

• Fixed seed codes not actually reproducing an identical run. Structural rolls (enemy composition, relic and gem rewards, event outcomes) and in-battle piece draws now use two independently-seeded random streams instead of one shared one, so two playthroughs of the same seed code no longer diverge the moment their piece-placement histories differ.
• Fixed controller players occasionally losing their focus highlighting to an accidental touchpad or mouse brush: bare mouse motion now only takes over from a controller once it's moved far enough to be a deliberate cursor move, not a single stray pixel.
• Fixed a rare crash-adjacent bug where quitting mid-battle at exactly the wrong moment (a summoned minion dying in the same instant) could silently fail to save your progress, leaving Continue to drop you on a fully-visited map instead of resuming the fight.
• Fixed the in-battle Controls tutorial overwriting an already-customized Hard Drop or Sonic Drop keybind: if you'd already rebound both before the tutorial first appeared, it now just explains the controls instead of offering a choice that could clobber one of them.
• Reworded the relic-found tutorial message, which used to claim "you can only pick one" even outside the relic reward screen, where that isn't true.
• Enlarged the shoulder-button icons on the Difficulty Select screen's left/right column-switch hint, which were too small to read clearly.