## Vending Machines
Playtesters keep trying to break chests and don't like paying to open them. In order to address this, we're adding vending machines and changing how chests work.
- **Chests are no longer interactable** and instead drop 1 random item when you break them. Chests are also a lot more rare.
- **Vending machines** were added to replace the old chests. They act like shops with 3 items in stock.
## Characters
- **Bureaucrat** — removed and replaced with **Beef** (new character).
- **Cowboy** — lost his chest-reroll perk and now gets **20% off shop items**.
- **Professor** — max health 100 → **150**.
- **Witch** — burn and poison damage bonus 30% → **20%**.
- **Spelunker** — no longer drops 1 emerald and 1 ruby from chests; instead the Flashlight is now built into the character.
## Guns
- **Rocket Launcher** — damage 600% → **500**, magazine size 2 → **3**, projectile speed 16 → **20**.
- **Flamethrower** — fire rate 0.1 → **0.09375**, range 6.25 → **6.5**.
## Artifacts
- **Hard Hat** (new) — reduce impact damage taken by 90%.
- **Gas Mask** (new) — reduce gas cloud damage taken by 90%.
- **House Key** (reworked) — was "first common chest each stage is free," now **chests have a 25% chance to drop an extra item**.
**Removed:** Cluster Bomb, Berserker Chain, Command Orb, and Flashlight.
## Item balance
- **Toaster** — bomb radius 15% → **20%** per stack.
- **Blast Shield** — now only gives **90% explosive damage reduction** instead of complete immunity. Armor was buffed from 10 → **15**
- **Cash Stack** — enemies drop **15% more gold** (was 20%), and damage is **+1% per 5 gold**, but now capped at **+100% per stack** instead of being uncapped.
- **Cheesecake** — still 100 armor at full health for the first stack, but extra stacks give **50** instead of 100.
- **Rubber Boots** — knockback resistance +100% → **+400%** (should be much more noticeable).
- **Emerald Scanner** and **Ruby Scanner** — now drop **25% more** of their gem on top of making ore glow.
- **Credit Card** — retargeted from chests to **10% off shop items** per stack.
## Enemies, hazards, and difficulty
- **Per-stage difficulty bonus raised from 80 to 100** — a 25% steeper ramp between stages.
- **Base explosion radius reduced 4.5 → 4** for TnT crates, TnT Jellies, and the player's Bomb Radius stat. TnT Jelly fuse shortened 1.25s → **1s**.
- **Tesla Coil** attack radius 3.5 → **3**.
- **Anvils are now indestructible** (as are all interactable terrain entities).
- **Rabbit Shrine** damage now bypasses both shield and armor, so the offer costs exactly what it advertises.
- **Fox Shrine** now shows its cost as a normalized "+1" that doubles each round, rather than a raw difficulty number. The raw difficulty value is no longer shown in the HUD.
## Visuals and UI
- **Gas cloud fog** reworked with a hard border drawn exactly at the height where damage starts.
- **Interactable outlines**: anvils, furnaces, gun pedestals, shrines, teleporters, and vending machines glow when you're nearby.
- **TnT crates and jellies now show a dashed blast-radius circle** like bombs do.
- **Live run score shows in the HUD**
- **Inventory now scrolls**
- Fixed HUD elements (ammo icon, objective labels) that were blocking mouse clicks.
## Controls
- **Xbox controller support**: button prompts now match the pad you're holding — PlayStation pads show R2/R1/L2/X/L1, while Xbox, Switch Pro, and generic pads show **RT/RB/LT/A/LB**. Detection is based on the most recently used gamepad.
- **Stick deadzones added** on both sticks: inputs below **15%** are ignored, **95%+** registers as full deflection.