21 September 2026

HEAT — Patch 3

Thirty achievements, a tutorial that ends, a dealer who takes cash, damage numbers, and a city that finally has fronts on its buildings.

2ho

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Well, what's new?

2ho

The biggest one yet: thirty achievements, a tutorial that ends, a dealer who takes cash, damage
numbers, and a city that finally has fronts on its buildings.

Achievements

Thirty of them, across five groups — crime, money, the street, the casino and the long grind.
They unlock on your sbox.game profile and land in-game the moment you earn them, with a banner and
a sound.

Press Escape → ACHIEVEMENTS for the full list: every one shows its name, what it asks for, a
progress bar and a percentage, with the finished ones marked DONE in green. The heading counts how
many you have out of thirty.

A few are meant to land in your first ten minutes — Knuckle Dragger for landing a hit, Jackpot for
one lucky spin. A few are not: Untouchable wants level fifty, Resident wants ten hours in the city,
Body Count wants a hundred people on the pavement.

A tutorial that ends

New players were being dropped into a city with no idea what it wanted from them. Now there's a
rail above the hotbar with five steps, one at a time:

Hit somebody — left mouse
Take what they drop — walk over it
Bank it before somebody takes it back — any ATM
Chain three crimes, then stop and let the spree pay out
Lose the police once they're after you

Five pips across the top show which one you're on. When a step lands, its pip fills green, a tick
slides in, the text goes green and the card lifts away as the next one fades up.

Then it's over, for good, on every server. Each step is a threshold on a stat that follows your
account, so anyone who has already done all five never sees the rail at all, and finishing it once
finishes it everywhere. If you'd rather not have it, it's a toggle in the Q menu — and if you want
it again, there's REPLAY THE TUTORIAL down in the Q menu's footer, which runs it properly
rather than ticking five boxes instantly.

Separately: the first time the police are on you and you've never got away from them, the game
tells you that getting away is a thing you can do. It stops saying it the moment you manage it.

The dealer on the corner

There's a man behind the laundromat who takes the notes in your pocket. Everywhere else in the
city is card only, so money you take off the street has to go through an ATM or the laundromat
before it buys anything. He doesn't ask where it came from.

He's got a proper pitch now — planks on trestles under a tarp, crates stacked either side, a price
board chalked up, a stool, a crate of bottles, a radio, and a tag sprayed on the wall behind him.

The snack shelf is gone. What he sells does something:


Speed	+35% run speed for forty seconds
Angel Dust	+20% damage for a minute, and you walk like it
Oxy	Heal three times as fast for half a minute
Adrenaline Shot	Thirty health, straight in the leg
Twoho	+30% charm and +30% experience for ninety seconds

Prices are street prices — eight dollars up to forty-five.

Clothes do something

What you're wearing changes what happens to you. Coats and hats carry charm, which is how much
people hand over when you mug them, plus run speed and maximum health. The shop tells you what each
piece is worth before you buy it, and the effects stack with whatever you've taken.

Damage numbers

Every hit throws the number off whoever took it — white, outlined, rising and fading over about a
second and a third. The killing blow is bigger and red.

Everyone sees everyone's. A number coming off somebody two streets away is how you read a fight
you're not in, and in one you're in, it's how you know whether you're winning.

District heat

The city remembers where you've been working. Every crime raises the attention on that block and
bleeds a little onto the ones around it. A warm block pays 25% more; a hot one pays 60% more
and is policed harder for it. Attention decays over about half an hour, so a district you leave
alone cools off on its own.

The chip under the jobs list tells you where you are and how warm it is.

The HUD

The left column has been rebuilt so everything shares one shape:

A HEALTH chip in front of the health bar, built exactly like the level badge — same 78×24
box, same type, only the colour differs
Health moved above the level bar. It used to sit under the bounty at the bottom of five rows,
which is where the first outside player failed to find it
Numbers beside every bar — 197 / 197 HP and 13861 / 19079 XP, dimmed so they don't
compete with your pocket cash. The HP number goes red under 30%
LV is now LVL, on the HUD and on nameplates
BOUNTY wears the same chip as the rest and reads as a plain figure — $2.10, with no total
after it, because nobody is working towards a bounty cap
STATUS has its own row under the bounty for your notoriety title, and climbs into the
bounty's place when you don't have one
Spare ammo reads 99 SPARE on an amber pill instead of a grey whisper next to a 40px
magazine count
The district chip sits under the jobs list rather than on top of the spree counter, and its
two halves share a line so HOT doesn't ride high against the district name
Hotbar tiles are uniform — every glyph is three characters (Angel Dust is DST, Twoho is 2HO)
so no tile is wider than its neighbours

Nameplates

Every plate carries hit points now — 197 / 197 HP, red, turning white on a dark red pill
below 35%. Your own included, so you can find your health without hunting for it, and so you can
tell whether a fight is worth starting. The maximum includes upgrades and what they're wearing, so
a plate reading 189 is telling you they've spent money on staying alive.

Level, title, bounty and health can each be switched off separately in the Q menu.

The Escape menu

A proper menu rather than a dead end:

What you've earned this sitting — cash in and out, best spree, most wanted, police down,
levels gained, times taken down, time played
ACHIEVEMENTS — the full list with progress
SETTINGS
GIVE UP, for when you're wedged in the scenery. It costs what a beating costs, so it can't be
used to walk away from a chase for free
LEAVE GAME — there was previously no way out of the game except closing it

Escape also backs out of the shop, the bank and the Q menu without opening a second window behind
them, and Q won't open the settings on top of the Escape menu.

The Q menu

Split into four sections across three columns — Sound, On screen, Nameplates and
Popups — instead of one empty column and one overflowing. Every row is the same height and
labels shorten rather than wrapping, so nothing pushes its own row taller than its neighbours.

New toggles: the first-steps tutorial, the controls list, and the four nameplate rows.

The city

Every venue in the city had a blank facade. The windows, doors and trim were being built six
units out from the footprint — but the walls are thirty thick and centred on it, so all of it was
buried inside the wall. The bank, casino, laundromat, supply store and pawn shop have had
frontages this whole time and nobody could see them
Generic buildings got a ground floor — shopfront glazing divided into bays by mullions,
fascia boards above, awnings on the low-rise streets and a quarter of downtown
Doors no longer have the plinth cutting across their bottom third — they sat one unit proud
of it, city-wide
Mullions sit inside the glass instead of growing out of the plinth below and vanishing into
the fascia above
The park: paths are laid into the lawn instead of standing two units proud of it with their
end faces out in the gateway, the plaza no longer shimmers where its two squares overlap, and the
fountains throw arcs of water rather than a flat cross of it
The casino stopped blowing out to white — twelve shadowless lights at full brightness were
stacking on every surface
The pawn shop's stock bars are on the pegboard instead of twenty units out in the room
The supply store's clothes rail is bracketed to the wall instead of standing in the middle of
the floor
Bigger crowds — more people per player, over a wider radius
Police patrol near the city borders, where spawns used to collapse because the sample sphere
was mostly off-map

Fixes

A knocked-down body had no collision at all. You couldn't shoot someone lying on the floor,
and once they got up you could never knock them down again — for the rest of their life. Fixed
Shots that land on a body on the floor now reach the person it belongs to
Ragdolls no longer leave clothes behind in a T-pose, and no longer drop you floating nine
units over the road when you get up
Drug effects survived death — the damage bonus, the wobble, the run speed and the charm all
carried through a respawn. They're cleared when you go down, busted or wasted
Charm from drugs only ever worked for the host. Everyone gets it now
Money reads as money — $142.53 rather than a pile of cents, on the HUD and the leaderboards
Damage numbers used to appear for a single frame; the hotbar briefly rendered six empty tiles;
the achievements list printed on top of itself. All three fixed

people

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