v0.49.4 22 October 2026

Puzzles the whole party sees, better voice chat, talking mouths

• The world
• Playing together

Puzzles in co-op

• The whole party sees every move: braziers lit (and the order replayed from the tablet), watchers turned, rune tiles flipped.
  • Before, each machine ran its own copy, so a friend working a puzzle changed nothing on your screen until the cage opened.
  • Now the host runs every puzzle: your moves go to the host, who plays them and shares the move and where things stand with everyone. Players who join mid-run see the puzzles as the party left them.
• Mistakes: a wrong brazier flares under whoever got it wrong, on every screen, and it only burns them. The Catacombs' dark runes sting only the player who steps on them.
• Traps and fire runs: they keep the host's time now (a shared party clock), so the flames, blades and swinging traps burn and swing at the same moment on every machine. Before, a friend could seem to walk straight through fire on your screen.
• Much less delay:
  • Packets are 20 ms instead of 40.
  • A jitter guard keeps each speaker's queue short. When packets bunch up after a hitch on either machine, the backlog is played slightly faster, or skipped if it's long. Before, that delay stayed for as long as they kept talking.
• Louder and steadier:
  • An automatic gain brings a quiet microphone up to a normal speaking level, with a soft limiter so shouting doesn't distort.
  • Playback is boosted, with a limiter on the voice channel.
• Closer proximity chat: full volume within about 3 m, fading out completely by 18 m. Before, you could hear people up to 45 m away. Players who are dead, extracted or spectating still talk to the whole party.
• Mouths move with speech: a player's mouth opens and closes with their voice, syllable by syllable, on both bodies. Your own mouth moves too, so others see it on your character. It's drawn by the skin shader per character, so it costs nothing extra to render.
• Network protocol: now 16, so everyone needs v0.49.4.
• New test: (11 checks).
• Trials test: a second machine's copy of a puzzle follows a shared move.
• Net test: now plays on seed 720 (a run with every kind of trial). A client's watcher turn is played by the host and shown back to the client; the host's turn shows on the client; the late joiner sees the puzzle as left; and the client is on the party clock.

All updates