Controls
NEW: ARCADE is now the default control preset. Right stick aims, RT fires, A jumps. TWIN STICK scheme kept as alternate.
NEW: The crosshair renders on gamepad now. It orbits your character off your last aim at a fixed distance.
FIXED: System Config is fully controller-navigable. Every dropdown in the settings menu was unreachable on a pad. They're now [<] VALUE [>] steppers — d-pad left/right on a focused row, ordinary click targets for mouse.
NEW: 'Z-target' lock-on (R3 / middle mouse). Click MMB on PC or L3 on controller to lock DSCO's aim onto the nearest target to the crosshair. The drone's controller problem: a support gun you can't aim precisely on a stick used to be solved by a setting you had to opt into. Without a lock, it fires along your aim, same as before.
Auto-retarget setting in menu (off by default): when your mark dies, the drone takes the next hostile near the corpse, not near your reticle. It finishes the cluster it was working instead of snapping across the screen to wherever you happened to be looking.
The lock marker moved off the crosshair and onto the target, anchored to the exact point the drone is shooting at — so it can never disagree with the drone.
Lock-on is now a gating lesson in the Induction. Room 1's exit stays shut until you've actually marked something; clear it without marking and another contact drips in rather than the door opening. An unmarked DSCO is a support weapon that only duplicates your own line of fire, which is the exact thing this version stopped papering over.
Fixes
The pause leak. Pressing Start/Esc over the settings overlay resumed the run while the menu stayed on screen — a tester died believing he was paused. Pause is now modal-aware and backs out one overlay level instead. It also correctly reports an overlay closed earlier in the same frame.
Ladders. "Sometimes you can't get off the top" was exact — the oscillation escaped only above 1.176× speed. The design was sound; the arithmetic wasn't. Killed a double integration that voided the ladder's own top clamp, ended generated ladders flush to the platforms they serve, added a re-grab lockout and a direction-aware mount, and unified the mount/retention windows. Climb speed rebased to preserve what the double integration was actually delivering. Leaping off a ladder no longer spends both jumps.
Napalm teleporting onto platforms overhead. The landing surface took the globally highest platform in the drop's X-span with no reference to the drop's own Y. The old fall-gate only delayed the bad landing until apex, which is why it presented as a mid-air teleport.
Balance
Field-weapon drops capped at four per room (SimVersion 419). Drop chance rolls per kill, so an endless encounter — Last Stand above all — carpeted the floor in guns and let the squad shop the entire weapon sandbox out of one room. Four is one per operative in a full party: you can still re-kit every DSCO anywhere, but nobody browses.
Explosive props throw more burning debris (SimVersion 414). Napalm spray ×2 on barrels, ×3 on cars; blast radii a flat ×1.5.
Wraith's tap-shotgun fires off any short volley (SimVersion 416). The tap window widened from 0.22 s to 1.0 s.
TWEAK: Money For Nothing pays out on pickup. Felt wrong that this one does nothing on pickup, and making it do something won't affect balance too much.
Menu and shell
There is a way out of the game now. SIGN OFF — RELEASE TERMINAL sits under the community link, and the WARDEN shell answers quit (also exit, logout, signoff) instead of refusing.
Chromatic aberration now defaults off: Every profile written since 2026-07-09 carries an explicit true that nobody chose, so this clears once behind a migration rather than wiping your other settings. Turn it back on and it sticks.