Block 9 has had a quiet few days. The clicking has not stopped, but the building itself behaves a little better around you. GEIGER 0.0.2 is mostly about the parts of the job that sit between the contamination: getting into a shift, keeping a steady frame rate on lamp-heavy floors, and finding the settings you want without squinting at a cramped page.

There is no new floor to climb in this update. It is a refinement pass on the core experience, and I would rather it was solid than loud.

Block 9 is lit by a lot of ceiling lamps, and in GEIGER every lamp can cast a real shadow. That looks right, and it is also the most expensive thing the game does. On a crowded floor that is a lot of shadow views, most of them for lamps far from where you are standing.

Now only the lamps nearest to you cast shadows. In the scenes I tested, the corridors keep the same pools of light and the same dark corners, and the frame rate holds up much better on the heavier floors. Your own results will depend on your machine, so treat this as an improvement in how much work the game does rather than a promise of a number.

Building a floor is also quicker. The vending kiosk no longer rebuilds its collision on every floor, and the check that clears away unreachable clutter now does a good deal less work. What is placed on a floor has not changed.

The Options menu was getting crowded, so it is now split into pages: Display, Graphics, Game, Privacy and Access, with Audio and Controls still handing over to the s&box settings.

The new Graphics page has two settings.

Shadows chooses how many of the lamps nearest you cast shadows: LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH or MAX. Torch Shadows turns the shadows from your flashlight on or off, which is a cheap saving on slower machines.

There is also AUTO Shadows (BETA). It watches your frame rate and raises or lowers the number of shadow-casting lamps as you play, starting at six and never dropping below that. It works in my tests, but it is experimental and results will vary between floors and machines. If it does not help, or the frame rate feels inconsistent, pick LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH under Options, Graphics instead.

The menu key is now Q. Escape has been left to the s&box menu, where it belongs, and Q also steps back a page in the menus.

Going from the main menu into a run used to be a hard cut, and sometimes a new scene appeared before it had finished building. Now the screen fades to black behind a card from BLOCK 9 CIVIL DEFENCE, and it only lifts once the floor is ready. The card tells you what the registry thinks you are doing: REPORTING FOR SHIFT, RESUMING SHIFT or SIGNING OFF.

The first floors also load faster, because the models for the building are read in the background while you sit at the main menu. If a scene change ever stalls, the game returns you to the menu rather than leaving you in a half-built corridor, and your controls are handed back when the new scene is ready.

The missing notices in the lobby now load properly. The notices are hung once the lobby is running, and if you have opted in to Steam friends under Options, Privacy, their names and avatars are asked for from the main menu so they are usually waiting by the time you arrive. If that information is not available, the walls fall back to the residents of Block 9 that the register already knows. Nobody on a notice is more than a name and a face, and I would like to keep it that way.

The exposure report and the tip cards now draw their corner marks on both sides, which was bothering me more than it should have.

If you die and the death cannot reach the server, it is now kept and sent again, three tries at once and again when your next run begins, so you still land on the roll for the next liquidator. Behind the scenes the remains service has been reworked to be more careful about retries and repeated reports.

GEIGER is still a young game and the block is still being surveyed. Thank you for the runs, the reports and the remains you have left behind. If something in 0.0.2 misbehaves, tell me where and which floor.

Stay below 100%.