Patch Notes: 0.1.7 and 0.1.8

Playtest 0.1.7 and 0.1.8 make riding through battle more rewarding and make drafting, upgrades, progression, and campaign navigation much easier to read.

Draft and Overdraft

• Rebuilt the Draft footer as a compact command dock with a live pick ratio, projected Gold payout, and Confirm action.
• Added a persistent Safe / Medium / High / Max risk gauge so every Overdraft tier is visible before committing.
• Hovering or focusing an extra card now previews its enemy and payout multipliers.
• Added clearer card-edge glow, risk accents, Veil motes, selection impacts, and confirmation effects as Overdraft rises.
• Mandatory cards are visually separated from optional picks so the safe allowance and player-chosen risk are easier to understand.
• Wave Events now present their two tradeoffs in a compact parchment dossier over the battlefield.

Attunement Relay and rider feedback

• Added Attunement Relay: stay near a turret for 1.5 seconds to store the rider's full attunement bonus on it for three seconds.
• An overcharged turret keeps firing with the bonus while the rider moves to another turret and begins charging it.
• Added a one-time explanation when Attunement Overcharge is first triggered.
• Added charge bars, orbiting rings, particles, tether transitions, a gold-red treatment, and spatial chimes.
• Added hoof sounds, dust, movement lean, and smoother attunement transitions to the mounted rider.

Gold and combat feedback

• Nearby Gold Pickups now attract to the rider.
• Uncollected coins fly to the rider at wave end, so moving around never reduces the wave's authored payout.
• The first three coin piles collected manually each wave now trigger escalating trails, bursts, and chimes.
• Nearby coin drops group into readable visual piles during crowded waves.
• Added stronger audio and visual confirmation for upgrades, selling, placement, cancellation, and starting a wave.

Turret upgrades

• Rebuilt the Turret Upgrade panel with clearer current-versus-next stats, attack interval, level progress, Gold requirements, Ascension state, and maximum-level messaging.
• Upgrading while the panel is open now changes the turret portrait and triggers a tier-colored flash, ring, particle burst, and scale punch.
• Updated turret-shop damage values to include active War Table and run modifiers.
• Improved selling and upgrade focus flow for mouse, keyboard, and controller.
• Corrected Arrow turret projectiles so they launch from the turret's authored firing point.

Campaign, tutorial, and The Path

• Added an optional Skip the Tutorial choice when creating a new profile. It opens Trailhead and grants Binding Presence without awarding skipped battle rewards.
• Expanded campaign onboarding to teach movement, camera rotation, panning, and zoom.
• Streamlined the battle tutorial and prevented guidance messages from lingering into later phases.
• Expanded the post-tutorial guide to lead players to The Path and through the purchase of Binding Presence.
• Cleared campaign portals now crumble and display the highest completed difficulty while remaining available for replay.
• Added visible road inlets between connected routes, Veil portals, and the Campfire.
• Reworked The Path as a pannable, zoomable star chart with clearer focus navigation and an explicit ability-slot picker.
• Hero ability icons now refill clockwise during cooldown and pulse when ready.

Presentation, interface, and fixes

• Improved enemy grounding across camera angles while preserving intentional flight height for flying enemies.
• Adjusted turret and build-pad heights to sit more naturally on raised terrain.
• Added movement-speed-aware enemy animation playback.
• Limited dense Ice Flurry and coin effects to preserve route and enemy readability.
• Reworked the leaderboard into one scrolling surface with expandable Enemies, Turrets, and Damage Taken details.
• Moved campaign achievement and reward notifications to a bottom-left queue so they no longer cover movement controls.
• Added a custom open-and-closed hand cursor and live input prompts to path building.
• Improved options-panel sizing, main-menu focus restoration, campaign control prompts, and smaller-screen layout behavior.
• Refined turret, Ascension, and landmark sprites for cleaner presentation and reduced asset size.

Bug reports

Include Playtest 0.1.8, the map and wave, input method, and reproduction steps when submitting a bug report.