The Lost Planes

• A new kind of floor. From stage 2 on, any floor that is not a boss or a trader has a coin flip's chance of being the Lost Planes: no rooms, no corridors, no shrines, one enormous open field in the dark and a gate somewhere out in it. Find the gate and the run goes on as normal. At least two ordinary floors pass before it can roll again.

• Thousands of monsters. The field runs its own breed of skeletons, zombies, bats and coin slimes, built to be counted in the thousands rather than the dozens. They walk, grab, bite, dive and pop exactly like their dungeon cousins, every weapon, special and status works on them, and they drop shards and coins like anyone else.

• They come in waves. A director keeps the pressure on and raises it the longer you stay. Every few seconds a shaped wave lands just off screen: a wall across your path, a pincer on your flanks, a ring, a stream, a flock of bats, a zombie ambush. Between waves a trickle tops the count up. Waves land away from the party, so nothing appears on anyone's screen, co-op partners included.

• Four gates, three of them lies. Every Lost Planes floor raises four gates in four different quarters of the field. Three crumble to dust when you get close. The minimap is a compass on this floor: every standing gate glows as a point on the panel's edge, the point grows as you close in, and nothing tells the real one apart until you are there. Pick one.

• Who comes depends on the floor. Bones only at first, then coin slimes join, then rot, then bats in the night, then the plague, and from stage 7 everything at once.

• Shard farming has a ceiling. Kills pay full shards until the floor has paid out about two shrines' worth for your stage and party, then every further half a shrine's worth halves the payout, down to a tenth. Leave through the gate and the next floor pays full again.

Sound

• Every sound effect in the game was rebuilt. A hundred and thirty one sounds, each one auditioned, levelled to the same loudness and given its own pitch range and hearing distance: swings, hits, casts, impacts, deaths, grabs, bites, dives, traps, chests, shrines, portals, boss roars and the UI. Crowds no longer stack the same sound forty times in one frame.

• The trader's exit gate opens quietly, gate and elite spawns are quieter, the electric beam no longer plays its crackle twice, and staff and book finishers lost the stray bass thud.

Co-op

• A player can no longer vanish mid-run. A brief Steam lobby hiccup used to be read as that player leaving, and the game removed them, camera and all, while they were still playing. The host now waits ten seconds and checks whether the player is still streaming before anyone is removed, and a client never removes its own character.

• Chest picks are locked once confirmed. Reroll, skip and banish are disabled while you wait for your partner, so a confirmed pick can no longer be re-rolled out from under you.

• Lost Planes monsters stream to each player by distance, their deaths, grabs, bites and dives resolve on your own screen, and your hits on them count with your own stats.

Balance and fixes

• Winged Sandals: 5%, 7% and 10% movement speed per tier, down from 25%, 30% and 50%.

• A skeleton's grab can miss. It rolls your dodge chance like any other hit.

• The fire beam locks its aim when it fires and no longer follows the mouse.

• Phase Blade, War Cry, the Sentry Ballista and Plague Spread now find swarm monsters too.

• Leaving through the camp portal records your score on the leaderboard the same way a death does.

• Camp menus open without the hitch. The shop, the armor screen and the loaner reel are warmed up behind the entry fade instead of stalling the first time you open them.

• Killing a crowd at once no longer stutters: a 150-kill frame costs less than half of what it did.

• Running through a dungeon no longer bleeds frames to a pack that cannot reach you.

• Shards no longer drop invisible after a torch-lit room.

• Damage numbers and shards on the ground are drawn in one pass each, so a screen full of them costs almost nothing.

• The hard shrine's panel matches the rest of the UI.