Added a new run-scoped Heat mechanic: it rises when you fight (more from elites), falls when you visit non-combat nodes, and resets on every boss kill. High Heat boosts gold-round payout and gem rarity, but worsens piece fall speed, enemy attack rate, and enemy attack power. Shown only on the Map screen as a small circular gauge; a first-visit tutorial card explains it.
Heat can be turned off entirely via a new Custom Difficulty slider, "Heat Gain" (setting it to 0 disables Heat and hides the gauge).
Added new relic: Turn up the Heat — damage scales with your current Heat, up to +80% at maximum, and doubles the Heat gained per battle. Not offered while Heat is disabled.
Rotation System
Replaced the old standalone "Arika SRS I-Piece Kicks" checkbox with a full Rotation System selector in Options → Gameplay (existing settings auto-migrate to the equivalent new value). Six selectable systems: SRS (default, unchanged), SRS + Arika I-Kicks, Classic/Original (no wall-kick table at all, bottom-aligned spawn), ARS (real Arika Rotation System kicks), TRS (Techmino Rotation System per-piece kick tables, covering pentominoes and trominoes too), and TRS + Bottom Priority (evaluates every valid kick and keeps whichever leaves the piece lowest). The "What is this?" link now opens the matching reference page for whichever system is selected.
Endless Mode
Added Endless Mode: after beating the Stage 3 boss, a new "Endless Mode" button loops the run back to Stage 1 with your relics, gems, and gold intact, then keeps looping through increasingly difficult stages forever. Enemy stats and piece fall speed keep climbing with every stage transition, including across the loop. Heat and gold rounds/boss rewards are disabled while in Endless Mode. Unlocked via a new Meta-progression node, "Endless Depths."
Challenge Runs
Added two new challenge modifiers: Invisible Board (the already-locked stack is hidden, but the falling piece, ghost, and next queue stay visible) and 20G (every piece drops straight to the floor the instant it spawns, with a brief window to slide or rotate before it locks).
Reworked the Challenge Run selection screen from a 2-column to a 3-column grid to fit the growing list of modifiers (now 11).
Difficulty & Balance
Added a 5th Custom Difficulty slider, "Enem. Atk. Pwr." (1.0–10.0), that scales how many garbage lines enemy attacks send. Fractional values round stochastically (e.g. 2.6 sends 3 lines 60% of the time and 2 lines the other 40%) instead of just flooring or ceiling.
Map & Progression
Reworked map branching so forks actually matter: past the two main branch points, your chosen lane now holds for at least 2 rows before it can reconnect with its neighbor, instead of the choice being moot a row later. Each fork's lanes also lean toward either combat-heavy or combat-light node types, visible ahead of time, so you can aim for a "hot" or "cool" route on purpose.
Quality of Life
Every rebind in Options → Controls now automatically steals its key/button away from whatever other action currently holds it, so two actions can no longer silently end up sharing one input.
Added an independent "Open Gem Bag" control in Options → Controls — previously this shortcut was tied to the Hold Piece binding and couldn't be rebound separately.
Reduced how many tutorial popups a fresh battle throws at you: per-slime intro cards are now folded into their existing on-fire explanation cards, and several always-shown battle-start cards were merged into fewer popups. A first battle against 3 slime types now needs about 4 clicks to get through instead of up to 10.
Audio
Lowered the pitch of the standard UI click/confirm sound used across nearly every menu and screen, so it doesn't stand out as sharply.
Lowered the volume of the piece-rotation whoosh, the hard-drop thud, and the enemy-attack countdown tick/tock (also used by the Speed Trial challenge) — all three were overpowering the rest of the mix.
Fixes
Fixed several pentominoes spawning needlessly tall and narrow instead of in their widest orientation, like the 7 tetrominoes already do.
Fixed the "Enter the Third Dimension" relic's mirror-flip silently doing nothing for 6 of the 18 pentomino types.
Fixed binding Rotate 180 to a key or button already used as another rotation action's default caused the other action to fire instead.
Fixed Healing Gem waiting for the attack animation to finish before restoring rows, instead of restoring them immediately on line-clear.
Fixed the Blindspot event's veil not drawing the ghost/landing-preview piece.
Fixed Plain Stone (an inert placeholder gem) being offered an "UPGRADE" button in The Forge event.
Fixed the battle "Pieces" stats panel showing only 7 tetromino icons during a Pentrogue run instead of the real 18-type pentomino pool.
Fixed the Gem Bag panel sometimes showing both a mouse-hover highlight and a leftover controller-focus highlight on two different slots at once.
Fixed the weapon attack's motion-trail occasionally freezing on screen instead of fading out, most noticeable on the hit that kills the last enemy in a fight.
Fixed challenge events with real board gameplay (Precision, Speed Trial, Blindspot, Perfect Clear) never honoring the Horizontal Next Queue setting.
Fixed the NEXT-piece preview tutorial card pointing at the old sidebar location when Horizontal Next Queue was turned on.
Fixed several tutorial cards overlapping the UI element they were meant to be pointing at, especially at larger accessibility font sizes.