New features new fixes!

Come and join me in the new features and fixes :)

This one has been focused on your feedback, and as always, my very own tweaks and ideas that came up while I play the game :)

I got a question: what is the goal of the game? Pretty good question by the way.

The thing is, the game has no goal. It is just you slaughtering the never-ending hordes of monsters.

(view from backstage of what is probably happening while you are waiting for monsters to respawn :D)

My personal goal is to create the best build possible with unique items of the best rolls possible on the highest upgrade possible (+15, which can destroy the item during the upgrading process, now DOUBLES the unique effects)

And what then? Well... The heroes must be remembered, I want to "store" my heroes and their glorious and fabulous high-tier gear in some nice place and get benefit from that, this is why we have the hall of ancestors, the Valhalla :). I am now playing a pretty powerful ancestral mage. He is on his way to legacy 10, and then I will most probably try to achieve a legacy 20. But regardless of whether I achieve it or not, the fate of that hero is already written. Once he is ready, he will ascend and stand among the other great heroes in the hall of ancestors. As you can see, my inventory, which is relatively empty ... the process of building such gear is pretty costly, I have destroyed many items during my tries of getting them up to +15, so among the XP grind, one of the goals is also a gear grind, of course.

I will definitely be adding something else to do, like new achievements or challenges, but so far, the goal should be forging a legend who will stand in the hall of ancestors, and you will be proud of that legend.

Full list of changes here

NEW

• New achievement (account milestones, destroy-on-upgrade, gear XP, ascension counts)

IMPROVED

Saves / Steam Cloud / character select

• Hero load picks the better of .dat + .dat.bak by progress and content; recovery from .bak when primary looks clobbered but backup is richer (I had to recover my old version of saves due to this development :( :D)
• Steam Cloud: quieter startup; .bak not uploaded; read_cloud_file / store behavior; merge by progress score, not only file time
• Character select: loading skeleton during merge, 60s timeout, steam_cloud_sync_finished
• account_progress no longer appears as a fake hero

Multiplayer – performance & sync (this one finally fixed the fps drops on windows PCs during multiplayer)

• Mass kills: batched death notifications instead of hundreds of RPCs; clients spread death handling across frames; aggregated XP/gold floaters
• Damage HP: sparse chunked RPCs instead of per-mob; AOI/position use squared distance; cache player group for mob AI; hidden client mobs skip visual physics
• Volley of the Fallen, Tar Jar / ignited tar, Winter’s Grasp: single batch damage path instead of N hits; tar one scan per tick; ignited tar mastery once per tick
• Reality Tear: queued chaos shadow spawns across frames; batched spawn/remove; lighter client VFX; textures preloaded; tick walks EnemyManager.enemies ; repeated casts keep only the latest tear per caster
• Remote poison cloud: lightweight_render
• Rift Link: shorter name/tooltip (UI overflow)

Combat / targeting / arena

• OOC regen after 2s without a hit (was 4s)
• Targeting: nearest + lowest HP % (not raw HP) for auto-attack, cleave, spells, Charge, Hunter’s Mark, Chain Lightning
• Mage autocast: manual lock on clicked mob; T/RMB no longer clear target; hotbar cast uses cursor
• Arena: intensity dialog; Massacre denser waves, faster mobs, higher HP/damage/XP, refill tuning
• Spot Convergence: cached world_map ; mastery XP over time while shifted spot is active (not only per cast)

UI / UX

• Character create: Ancestral Mage tooltip like Warrior/Archer; rebirth hint without “Mage unavailable”
• Hall of Ancestors: blessing summary green;
• Welcome / Help: current Discord link vs. removed from help footer
• Gameplay settings: damage cap dropdown removed from panel (H unchanged)
• Spell book: utility -Mana, INT/Dmg/Lv/Progress layout; removed overlapping Spell Dmg row for damage spells
• Divine Vault: same slot visuals as inventory (rarity, glow, quality, +upgrade)
• World event banners: no emoji
• DoT floaters: summed per mob per batch with flush interval
• Inventory: Sort center, Autosell right; merge into partial stacks; XP Bonus column
• Windows: WindowLayer above HUD; focus / bring-to-front / topmost X; sheets vs minimap ( MOUSE_FILTER ); drag from header in one gesture; no artificial root z_index inflation
• Hotbar labels show real keybinds from settings
• ErrorLogger: buffered writes, flush every 2s

Content / balance / uniques

• Warrior starter chest + shield match trader tier-1 crude formulas
• Unique +15: night and numeric passives doubled; tooltip scaling (spell dmg, life steal, vs undead, crit, block stacks, …); staff JSON overwrites fixed; INT/STR no longer drop at +15
• Vengeance / Fortress: per-stack bonuses double at +15 in combat/UI
• Legacy aura: smoother radial glow; no faint rectangular frame
• Reality Tear: smaller crack mask (VRAM); void rim at zone edge
• Winter’s Grasp: batched VFX; per-tick floater cap; remote overlays at half physics rate

Other

• Chaos Shadow spawn queue capped at 50
• Reality Tear / Spell Echo: no echo while tear active; delayed echo cancelled if tear is up

FIXED

Saves / cloud

• .bak no longer beats a much richer .dat on rebirth/legacy alone
• Steam skip-download uses the same guard; merge/upload follow progress score
• Cloud saves not removed just because missing locally; delete only after cloud confirms; Hall recall aborts without cloud confirm

Multiplayer

• queue_free before removing from tracking (no invisible 0-HP zombies / desync)
• Clients always run death cleanup at 0 HP; ignore spawns with hp <= 0
• HP batch: clients don’t call _die() on every 0-HP row unnecessarily
• Rift Link: late join sees portals
• PlayerSync: sprite via get() without error spam

Localization / map

• CSV: Czech boss string with comma (formatting crash)
• Minimap in arena: not world terrain; refresh on arena start

Character / stats / inventory

• Effective STR/AGI/VIT/INT in panel; Jade Harmony shield passive restore; _tr_stat_with_int for stale translations
• Ancestral Affinity after load / MP
• Sheet stacking, clicks, quest board under map
• Closing inventory X also closes Autosell if open

Spells / combat

• Hotbar: SpellCaster correct type; dmg-cap locals as explicit float (strict typing)
• Echo Strike / double damage on uniques; spell echo staff + Arcane Troll Ring only
• Warrior/Archer autocast vs rage interval
• Mage autocast: double cast / cursor targeting
• Speed Boost / Attack Haste: no bogus Damage line in tooltip

Uniques / blacksmith

• Tooltip +15 scaling (various stats); UniqueItem.get() single-arg fix
• Blacksmith _get_player parse error
• Steam ACH_GEAR_XP_BONUS_100 matches inventory XP line

Engine / project

• enemy_killed slot handlers without default Array = [] (stack underflow)
• Backups removal + broken global_script_class_cache.cfg
• player.gd : damage_dealt fourth argument on all emits

REMOVED

• Character select: Ascend button from slot row (flow remains in Hall)
• Legacy aura procedural lightning overlay (file deleted)