**Commanders, another update has landed for the Demo.**
Two things drove this patch: making the step from the tutorial into your first real journey seamless, and fixing several combat checks where hits that clearly should have landed did not.
### Tutorial & Main Menu
- **Straight into the journey**: The tutorial completion panel now has "Start Journey" as its primary button, which launches your first real journey right away. "Back to Menu" becomes the secondary button. The completion text is now tutorial-specific and no longer shows the full game's three-stage victory message.
- **Main menu guidance**: After finishing the tutorial, the pulsing highlight in the main menu moves from "Tutorial" to "Single Player" until you have completed your first real journey.
### Deployment Phase
- **Double-click to inspect**: During pre-battle deployment, double-click a creature with the left mouse button to open or close its detailed info panel.
- **Right-click hold for a quick look**: Hold the right mouse button on a creature to peek at its info; release to close. Right-clicking empty ground clears the current selection and closes all panels.
- The tail hex of a large creature can also be clicked to select its owner.
### Combat Rules
- **Large creatures take damage on their tail hex**: Two-hex creatures (the Bear, for example) are now hit by area spells, cone breath, line attacks, multi-strike attacks and ground traps whenever either their head or tail hex is inside the area. If both hexes are hit in the same resolution, damage is applied only once.
- **Adjacency**: A ranged unit standing next to a large creature's tail hex now counts as engaged in melee, consistent with the creature being able to attack from its tail.
- **Ground traps**: When a large creature steps into Wall of Fire, mines or similar traps, each body segment is resolved, but the same trap type triggers only once per move. Standing with both hexes inside a Wall of Fire burns only once per turn.
### Graphics
- **First-battle quality calibration**: On devices that were auto-detected as "Low" or "Medium" quality at first launch, the game re-checks actual performance after your first complete battle. If there is plenty of headroom, quality is raised one step (Low→Medium / Medium→High) with a notification when you return to the lobby. This happens only once and never overrides a manually chosen quality preset.
### Spells & Cards
- **Lightning Bolt** and **Rockfall**, both low-level spells, no longer leave electric / mud marks on the ground. **Chain Lightning** keeps its electric mark.
- **Careful Selection I / III / IV / V** are now available, so at every level from 1 to 5 you can draw a Careful Selection card that reveals 3 random elemental spell cards of that level and lets you pick 1 for your hand.
- **Deploy Mines** description trimmed to the essentials: mine count, damage, and the fact that your own creatures never trigger them.
### Fixes & Other
- Fixed face deformation on the "Twinblade Templar" during some animations.
- Closing the game no longer pauses briefly: the 1.5-second wait for statistics upload on exit has been removed. Unsent anonymous play statistics are uploaded on the next launch instead, and uploads after a scene change are delayed a few seconds to stay clear of loading frames.
- Text updates across all nine interface languages.
> Tip: During deployment, use double-click and right-click hold to check enemy creatures' specialties and abilities before deciding who holds your front line.
Share your thoughts in the Steam Community or on Discord. Every piece of feedback helps shape the Demo.
---