Major Update 1.3: Halloween, Claw Machine, Boombox & 20% FPS Boost!

Major Update 1.3: Halloween, Claw Machine, Boombox & a Big FPS Boost!

The spooky season has arrived in The House Always Wins! Update 1.3 brings our first seasonal event with a zombie outbreak on your casino floor, a Claw Machine full of prizes, a Boombox to set the mood, four new troublemaker events, and Halloween weapons, hats and decor. On top of that, a major performance pass makes the game run over 20% faster on its own, and the new DLSS and FSR support can push your frame rate even higher.

Halloween Event: The Zombie Outbreak

Halloween is the first event in our new Seasonal Event system. From October 22 to November 15 it switches on by itself, and your casino dresses up for the occasion with pumpkins, cobwebs, candles, eerie lights and plenty of small details to discover.

• An Unexpected Guest: Every so often the lights go down, night falls, and a zombie shuffles in through the entrance, looking for the nearest unlucky visitor.
• The Horde Grows: Anyone bitten won't stay down for long. After a moment they crawl back up from the floor and join the undead.
• Fight Back: Your Security Guards rush in as soon as a zombie attacks a guest, and risen zombies become targets on sight. You're welcome to grab a bat and help.
• Scary, Not Crushing: The number of guests who can be turned in one outbreak is capped, and every zombie takes the place of a regular visitor, so your casino stays lively and your frame rate stays steady.
• Not a Fan of Zombies? Turn the event off anytime with the new Event option in the gameplay settings. You can also pick the season by hand. In co-op the host decides, and everyone sees the same decorations.

Halloween Shop, Weapons & Hats

• New Themed Shop: Seasonal items now have their own shop, which opens with the Halloween collection.
• Halloween Decor: Candles with real flickering flames, lanterns, ghosts, a wind-blown inflatable figure, cobwebs and the creepy Hanging Wraith wall decoration.
• Halloween Weapons: A Toy Sword, Knight Sword, Sickle, Hatchet and Machete are now on display at the Gun Shop. And one of them hides a little surprise...
• Spooky Headwear: A Witch Hat and two Pumpkin Hats are waiting at the customization station.

Claw Machine

• A New Casino Machine: Sit down, pay for an attempt, steer the claw with the joystick and drop it at just the right moment.
• Visitors Love It Too: Your guests play the Claw Machine as well and bring in income, just like your other machines.
• 18 Collectible Toys: Every toy you win goes straight into your inventory. Each one has its own icon and name, so similar toys are easy to tell apart.
• Unlocked via Upgrade: The Claw Machine arrives with its own upgrade.

Boombox

• Bring the Party: Pick up the Boombox and play music anywhere in your casino.
• New Tracks: A whole new set of Electronic and Hip-Hop tracks to pick from.
• Upgrades & Quests: The Boombox has its own upgrades and joins the quest line.

New Troublemaker Events

Your casino just got a lot more interesting to protect.

• Safe Thief: A thief goes after your money safe. Catch them before they get away.
• Toilet Bomber: Someone has planted a bomb in the restroom. The fuse now burns for a random 20–30 seconds, so you never know exactly how long you have.
• Bar Thief: A visitor sneaks behind the bar and loots your shelves.
• Pawnshop Thief: Someone tries to rob your pawnshop.
• Event Rate on the Fly: You can now change how often events happen in the settings during a game session, without restarting.

Security Guard Improvements

• Faster Guards: Security Guards now move faster around the floor.
• Punch on the Run: Guards no longer stop in front of a fleeing thief before every swing. They keep chasing and punch while running, so a guard who catches up actually lands the hit.

Graphics & Performance

• A Big FPS Boost: This update is a major performance pass. In our tests the game runs over 20% faster on average across every graphics preset, with fewer stutters in busy moments. That is the pure gain from the optimizations alone, measured without any upscaler. Turn on DLSS or FSR and you can get even more, especially if your graphics card is the bottleneck. Hosting co-op for your friends with a full casino gets the biggest win, since a lot of the work went into handling crowds of visitors. (Measured at 1080p and 1440p, Low to Epic presets, with 60 visitors, on a Ryzen 5 5600X paired with an RTX 3080 Ti and with an RTX 2080.)
• NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR: Both upscalers are now available in the graphics settings, right under VSync. On supported NVIDIA cards the game picks a sensible DLSS setting on first launch.
• Smoother Crowds: Busy casinos full of visitors now run noticeably better.
• Lighter Shadows & Effects: Shadows, fog and the sun's movement were tuned to cost less while looking the same, and the sun now moves smoothly across the sky.

Quality of Life

• Free Tools With Upgrades: Buying the Neon Light upgrade now gives you an LED reel, and the Money Cleaner upgrade gives you a vacuum, so you no longer have to walk to the shop to buy the tool you just unlocked.
• New Tutorials in the Tablet: The new tutorial windows now appear in the tutorials menu.
• Hide Croupiers: A new setting lets you hide table croupiers on your own screen. It only affects your view, not other players.
• Everyone Keeps Their Look: Visitors and your staff now keep their appearance after you save and load.
• Safer Saves: Save files are now protected against corruption. If a save is damaged, the game restores it from a backup automatically.
• Paused Means Paused: The game now stays paused while you change Settings from the pause menu.
• New Splash Screen when the game starts. Press any key to skip it.

Fixes

• Fixed accepting a friend's invite sometimes trying to join the session twice.
• Fixed a rare case where the game could save over your casino while it was still loading and wipe your progress.
• Players and visitors can now walk through fallen bodies instead of climbing over them or shoving them around.
• In co-op, fallen bodies now look the same for every player and no longer twist into strange poses at a distance.
• Carrying an object no longer pushes trash bags, baskets, money bags or safes around, and you can't place objects on top of them anymore.
• Bombs no longer block players and visitors.
• Street lamps now follow the day schedule correctly, even after skipping a day.

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