One button called PLAY, and it never leaves you standing there. It looks for a game, and if there isn't one it opens yours and drops you straight in. The old "No suitable game found" warning still exists, but now it only shows up when starting a game genuinely failed — not as the first thing a new player ever reads.
Eating a bot now pays Cash. It used to pay nothing at all, which meant that unless a real player happened to be on the board, nobody earned Cash and the entire upgrade half of the shop was priced out of reach. A bot is worth 1, a player is worth 2, and you can bank up to 6 a round either way. Roughly two rounds of hunting bots buys an ability upgrade.
The shop's cosmetics tab tells you it's empty instead of showing you nothing.
Rounds are three and a half minutes instead of five. The last minute used to be played on a city that was already eaten.
The city is much bigger. At eight players the arena went from about 410 to about 530 metres across, with 3,700 props instead of 2,445. Roughly 59% of the map is gone by the end of a round now, where it used to be 87% — so there's still a city out there when the clock runs out.
Bigger blocks fit bigger buildings, so the largest thing a city can place is now a 40-metre monster instead of a 33-metre one. There's more room at the top for a hole that gets huge.
Late-game growth is no longer a runaway. Once you were past the biggest authored size, every point made you wider at a flat rate — and since a wider hole eats faster, that fed itself. A hole hit 28 m at two minutes, 82 m at two and a half, 196 m at three and 316 m at four, on a map only 410 m wide. Growth now curves off at the top: a full round tops out around 80 m. Every size step below that opens at exactly the score it always did, so nothing about the early or middle game moved.
Eating another player is worth less of their score — 35% instead of 60%. A kill used to jump you a rung and a half up the size ladder in one bite; now it's about one rung, which is what it was supposed to be.
The main menu is reordered around PLAY. Host and Find a Game are still there, one row down, for when you actually want to pick.
The small text under the menu cards is readable. Those detail lines were white at low opacity over a coloured card — muddy grey at 12px. They're now dark, a little bigger and a lot bolder.
The QUESTS button's label was white on yellow, which was the hardest thing on the menu to read. It's dark now, like the border already around it.
The locked arena row in the lobby has a warm frame around it that matches the price tag inside, instead of a dashed border that never actually drew.
A grown hole turned every other hole on the map into a window onto the sea. Past a certain distance a hole's shaft stopped being drawn while the street above it stayed cut open — so from far away, other players looked like a mouth-shaped hole with the ocean visible through it and a nameplate floating over the top. Once a hole got big enough, every other player was "far away" by definition.
Quests could report stale progress when the system was switched off mid-session.
Hole skins, and the whole system behind them — Electric Teal, Candy Pink, Galaxy Purple, Midnight, Molten Lava and Random Color are all gone. The cosmetics shelf stays, empty, and your hole's colour comes from the lobby pick again, the way it did before skins existed.
Quests and the daily chest are switched off in this build. Nothing you'd already earned is deleted, moved or overwritten — a switched-off build doesn't read or write that part of your profile at all, so it's all still there if they come back on.
The QUICK JOIN card. PLAY does what it did, and more.
The bigger city hasn't been playtested by eye. 530 metres might feel like a long drive between props, and 3,700 props is more than the game has been asked to draw at eight players before.
The cosmetics tab is empty. There is nothing to buy with Gold right now.
Joining mid-round still puts you in spectator until the next round starts.
On a bad connection, a prop you swallowed on your screen can still reappear a couple of seconds later if the host disagrees.
Sweeping quickly over something half-swallowed can still hand it back.
The inside of the shaft is still very dark, so a prop is hard to make out over the last part of its fall.