30 new sound effects

Until this patch the only things you could hear were your own orb, pickups and a few UI sounds — the enemies, the boss and your own character were silent.

• Every enemy has a hit, a death and an attack sound, written to be told apart: skeletons crack dry, the Plague Carrier is dull and wet, the Specter is pure air
  
• The Plague Carrier's fuse ticks faster as it is about to blow — the sound alone tells you how long you have to leave the radius
  
• The Grave Warden has nine sounds of its own: opening gong, mace, dark flame, charge, void sword, scream, sky beam, every phase change and its death
  
• Your character has a hurt sound and a death sound
  
• Bone Orbit and Grave Nova are audible too — and Grave Nova's level-5 aftershock has its own weaker sound, so a maxed nova reads as two waves instead of one blast twice
  
• Sounds fade with distance and are dropped when they happen too far away, so a fight across the map no longer sits on top of your own
  
• Repeated sounds are spread in pitch and rate-limited — thirty enemies dying at once is a crowd, not a machine gun
  

Musıc ın the base and maın menu

Both used to be silent. They now play a calm 48-second loop in A minor written for the game, and it carries over from the menu into the base instead of restarting.

Atmosphere

• A vignette and drifting fog and dust over the graveyard — the world has air in it now
  
• Every building in the base carries its own light, in its own colour: the Trader warm yellow, the Skill Station violet, the Shard Station teal, the Vault mythic pink, the Upgrading Bench a forge orange. The Portal glows dull while locked and pulses when open
  
• The Grave Warden carries a phase aura in the same colours as its health bar, flashes on each phase change and fades out when it dies. Its flames, screams, sky beams and void swords all throw light
  

The Grave Warden can no longer be outrun

Walking in a straight line used to be a guaranteed escape: the boss crawled at half your speed and stood completely still through every wind-up.

• Its chase speed now scales with your own move speed — every speed upgrade you buy raises its ceiling too, so you can never simply outgrow it
  
• It keeps moving while attacking instead of freezing for the length of the animation
  
• Telegraphed attacks lead where you are going. Running in a straight line gets punished; changing direction still beats them, because the aim locks in when the telegraph starts
  
• Its dash strike is a real lunge that scales with distance, and the dark flame projectile is nearly twice as fast — it used to be slower than the player it was chasing
  

Up close it is still slower than you, on purpose: there has to be room to manoeuvre.

Settıngs, ın tabs

The settings panel was one long column with the window mode sitting next to hit stop next to Reset Save. It is now three tabs — Graphics, Audio and Gameplay — with Controls and Close pinned to the bottom.

Interface

• The extraction decision card moved to the bottom of the screen. It used to appear dead centre, right where the portal opens, blocking the view at the worst possible moment
  
• The portal used to announce itself twice, in two places, saying the same thing. Now there is one card: what you would bank, and what you would risk
  
• The base shows a quiet reminder of the build key in the corner — the build menu was otherwise only discoverable during the opening objective
  

Fixes

• Electric Cloud ignored your SFX volume setting — it was playing on the master bus
  
• Removed an engine error that fired on every Light Orb explosion