Version 0.3.0

Mega Merge 0.3.0

Mega Merge now remembers what you do between runs. Big fruit, the daily and a new weekly challenge pay Seeds, and Seeds buy your way up a Seed tree that opens the opening draft, the strangest cards and new card backs. Fruit no longer stops at the watermelon - a black hole makes a pumpkin - and curse score becomes fuel for Divine merges. Every screen has been rebuilt in wood and paper, the fruit are lit by the valley's sun, and a run ends at sunset.

New

• Seeds, a currency you keep between runs. Making a Watermelon pays 5, and each fruit above it pays more. The first daily you finish each day pays 25, and the first weekly each week pays 100. Big moments pay too: passing a score mark, making a fruit for the first time, beating your best, and every achievement. The run summary says what paid, and your balance sits on the main menu. Zen runs earn nothing but achievements.
• The Seed tree. A new room on the main menu. Its nodes sit in four branches - Drafting, Cards, Harvest and Cosmetics - each with a price and the nodes it needs first, and each says exactly what it does before you buy it. Harvest nodes make Seeds come faster: up to 30% more on everything, extra for each Watermelon and for fruit above it, and more from the daily and weekly. Change your mind for free: refund one node, a branch or the whole tree, and every Seed you paid comes back.
• Drafting nodes shape how a run starts. Unlock the opening draft, widen it from six cards to eight and then ten, take a second card from it, and raise its odds until it guarantees an Epic or better.
• Card backs. Buy the Seedling back, or finish the Drafting, Cards or Harvest branch to earn a back nothing else gives. Face-down draft cards wear the one you choose.
• Pumpkins, a tier above the watermelon. Feed a black hole and it gives you one back. Merge near it and it cracks; burst it and it scatters seeds across the basket. Pumpkins and their cards open from the Seed tree's Pumpkin Patch.
• Twelve cards about pumpkins and their seeds. Gravitational Harvest pulls fruit towards a pumpkin and Pumpkin King makes small fruit score far more while one is on the board. Jack-o'-Lantern sets nearby fruit alight, Pumpkin Bomb clears the small fruit before releasing its seeds, Seed Rain drips seeds in while a pumpkin stands, Seed Bomb makes a burst pay far more of them, Scattershot throws them harder, Germination lets a seed merge skip ahead in the ladder, Seedling turns repeated seed merges into a Nature-imbued fruit, and Reaping pays a window of far bigger seed merges after a burst. Heirloom, a Legendary, gives every seed the imbue its pumpkin carried, and Rotten Core, another, damages every pumpkin on every merge until one goes off.
• Divine merges, paid for out of the curse ledger. The score a curse ate is no longer only a debt: a Divine merge spends it and pays double. Thirteen cards decide how you get there - Jubilee, Indulgence, Atonement and Reliquary convert; Communion, Deep Well and Anointing supply; Last Rites and Ascension fuel it; and Apotheosis, above 25,000 curse score, makes every merge Divine.
• A weekly challenge. One fixed run for everyone, new every Monday at midnight UTC, with its own best score. It sits under the daily.
• A run ends with a sunset rather than a panel. The light drops out of the valley, the camera steps back off the jar, and the fruit you were still holding burst one after another, each paying what it was worth as the score counts up beside it. Then the summary. A stray click, tap or key no longer skips it, and R no longer restarts partway through.
• The fail line gives you room. As it burns the camera backs away from a basket that is filling, and settles again when you clear it. A Last Stand reprieve shows on the line, with the time it has bought you.
• Close the game mid-run and carry on later. An ordinary run is kept when the game closes and waits for you, paused, the next time you start it. Daily and challenge runs are not kept.
• Skips are finite, and there is a Redeal. You get three skips a run, shown as pips under the button. Beside it, Redeal shuffles the row back into the pile and deals another without spending a milestone, twice a run, and it works on a curse round. Season Ticket and Walk Away add one more of each, up to five.
• Four cards about the chain. Safety Net stops a hand drop costing you links until your chain reaches ten. Toll Road doubles what a drop costs and makes your chain climb much faster. Counterweight pays flat points for the links a fumbled drop lost for good. Clean Hands pays extra on merges in a chain you have not dropped into.
• Five cards about the basket and the chain. Wide Basket, a Common, widens the basket, up to three copies. The Vice, a curse, closes the walls in a little with every merge. Vice Grip, a Chaos card, squeezes the walls but pays more for every merge. Fraying Rope, a Legendary, makes your chain time out far faster but lose one link at a time instead of all of it. Clockwork brings your timed cards closer with each merge.
• Five cards for the Molten crucible. White Heat melts faster, Open Hearth melts fruit that are merely near rather than touching, Rich Ore makes what it swallows worth more, Deep Pour lets it swallow more, and Continuous Pour, an Epic, makes the fruit a Molten merge produces molten in turn, so one hot apple can run up the ladder. They replace Slipstream and Leaden Core, which had stopped doing anything.
• Seven cards that call an imbue more often: Tinderbox (Fire), Hoarfrost (Ice), Hothouse (Nature), Lightning Rod, Mother Lode (Gold), Voidcall (Void) and Menagerie (Oddball, curses among them).
• Switch cards off. A card you opened from the Seed tree can be turned off in the Collection, and is then never offered. The Collection also has a search, filters for owned, locked, rarity and kind, and a quick mode for switching many at once.
• Read the cards you hold mid-run. Point at a card on the HUD to see what it does; click it to see the whole card. With a pad, walk onto them from the pause menu. A card with a cooldown shows it counting down.
• A history of your runs. Every run you finish is kept - what you scored, how far up the ladder you got, and the build you played it with.
• Button prompts on every screen a pad reaches, the pause menu and the run summary included, and a button that holds every popup on a card open at once. The mouse cursor and keyboard prompts step aside while a pad is in your hands.

Changed

• Every screen is rebuilt in wood and paper. The menus, Settings, the Collection, Progression, History, the pause menu, the draft, the run summary and the HUD share one look: one dark walnut button, paper panels, flat tabs with an underline, freshly painted icons and one gold focus ring for pad and keyboard. Quitting from the main menu asks first, and the game window has a new watermelon icon.
• Game Modes, the daily, the weekly and the challenges are one page, and each challenge keeps its own record in each mode, so a Watermelon% in Zen no longer disappears because you did not set it in Normal.
• The opening draft is something you earn now. A run starts straight into dropping fruit until you buy "Unlock a starting draft" in the Seed tree for 25 Seeds - one daily. This is true for existing saves too.
• About thirty of the strangest cards open from the Seed tree - pumpkins, wild physics, curses, black holes and a few oddities - so a new player starts with a simpler game. Cards you already had stay yours.
• A chain belongs to the drop that caused it. It used to count merges anywhere on the board inside half a second, which is why dropping as fast as you could click paid so well. A merge now joins the chain of the fruit that made it, and a collapse spreading outward carries it along.
• Only real button-mashing costs you links. A drop is charged only when it is your third inside 1.6 seconds, and a chain under five links is never charged at all. The charge is a quarter of your chain, and if the fruit you dropped is the one that merges, the links come straight back. The fruit waiting in the chute lights a ring while dropping it would cut your chain.
• Chain scoring has a ceiling you can reach. The chain multiplier tops out at 15 instead of 24. Fifth Link pays 1.7x instead of 2.4x, Chain Ratchet 2x instead of 3x, both at up to two copies, and Cold Start's fifth link pays four times instead of six, so stacking them no longer turns one cascade into the whole run's score.
• Cards say what they do, and make you earn it. A card prints the number it actually applies, a second copy shows what it adds, and seven cards that oversold themselves were retuned to match. Quickfire, Keystone, Rising Stakes and High Wire paid their best for ordinary play and now ask for it. A figure past 999% reads as a multiple: Long Odds says x40, not 4000%.
• Scorching reworked. The spread pays, it stops eating other imbues, it spreads far more slowly - a newly lit fruit no longer passes the flame on at once - and a basket full of fire pays about what the next-best card does rather than three times it.
• The black hole is a black hole. A true shadow, a thin ring of light, a bent disc, and fruit that shrink into it and redden away rather than blinking out. Two holes merge into one bigger hole, and it pulls from further out.
• The fruit and the valley are lit. Every fruit carries its own relief and a sheen, lit by the same sun as the mountain behind. Grass grows across the jar's foot, wind moves through the backdrop, and edges are smoothed.
• A merge lands with weight. The new fruit swings out past its own size and squashes on the way back in, and even a cherry-to-orange merge now throws a little light into the room.
• The HUD is tidier. The score panel keeps one width and a huge score shrinks to fit, the streak only shows while you have one, bars slide rather than jump, the pause button on desktop is a quarter of its old size, and the level icon grows from a sprout to an apple tree as you level up.
• No high scores inside a run. The HUD table and the pause menu's board are gone; your scores live on the main menu.
• The draft is easier to read. Darker description text on every rarity, a soft gold glow round the card you point at, proper marks on Redeal and Skip, and prompts on paper instead of wood. A draft of seven or more is dealt in two rows rather than one long, shrunken strip.
• Big moments get room. A draft that opens as you make a watermelon waits for the celebration to finish. A tap or click on an announcement banner sends it on its way, so a first Watermelon's five banners no longer hold the middle of the board for fifteen seconds.
• Golden fruit score five times, up from three, and Cascade gives an auto-drop four seconds to find its match, up from two.
• Curse and Chaos cards carry their own sound. The wind and the drone now come from the cards themselves, at the volume of every other card, instead of one sound over the whole round. There is a sixth soundtrack track, too.
• What's New shows every release, newest first, with a line marking where you had read up to.
• A Screen Effects slider replaces the Reduced Motion switch. It runs from 100% down to 0%, which turns off every flash, shake, particle, glow and camera move. If you had Reduced Motion on, you start at 25%.

Fixed

• Your best score stays on the leaderboard. A bad run after a good one used to take its place. Only a run that beats what you already have is posted now.
• The tutorial finishes. It stopped after "merge two of these", so the fail line, the draft and the "Got it" that ends it were never reached.
• Your first game after starting the game is the mode you picked. Choosing Zen, a challenge or the daily first used to deal a Normal run.
• Losing and going again deals new cards. The next run dealt the same opening cards every time for the rest of the session.
• Faces are fixed. The biggest fruit had nothing left to merge into and wore a tear forever; it looks proud now. The strawberry's mouth shows, and the pear and pineapple wear their faces at the top again.
• The drop preview shows where a pear will land, instead of drawing it hovering half its height above its resting place.
• Big merges stop washing out. Making a watermelon no longer whites out the play column, and the merge flash sits under the new fruit rather than bleaching it.
• Score figures read cleanly. They stay on the board near the walls, clear the WATERMELON caption, add up ("250 + 26", not "250 x 1.1"), and a black hole's payouts count up as one number instead of a pile.
• A card you pick stays still. It keeps its own words as it leaves instead of rewriting itself into what a second copy would say, and no longer shrinks out from under the mouse and snaps back.
• Several cards now do what they say. Discerning Palate, Vintage Year and the other rarity promises say "every draft but Chaos and Curse", which is where they always stopped. Like Calls to Like aims at the fruit an auto-drop becomes after Ripening. Unspent Link fires the shot it promises, Lucky Dip drains a banked queue, Counterweight lights up when it pays, and the "nearly full" cards no longer think a fruit in your hand is a full basket.
• Auto-drop cards stop freezing the game. Two merge-triggered ones together snowballed within seconds.
• Mimic fruit stop sitting inside another fruit refusing to merge.
• The end of a run tells the truth. The fail line ends the run at the top of the mark, not halfway through it. A first run is graded on what it scored, not an automatic S, and the summary reports the highest fruit on the board rather than the one in your hand.
• The game pauses when it should - with the Steam Overlay open, and when a pad is unplugged mid-run - and Escape in the pause menu's settings goes back to the pause menu instead of into the run.
• Steam Cloud stops rejecting the save. It had grown past the quota.
• More of the game speaks your language. Achievements, challenges, the tutorial and the level-up and feat banners were English in every language. Chinese and Korean are drawn in their own letterforms, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean text is larger so fine marks like ー draw whole.
• Menus fit a tall or narrow window instead of shrinking into a strip in the middle of it.