Element Idle

Element Idle v1.1 — The Balance Update This is the big one. Two weeks of reports turned into a rebuilt economy, arebuilt skill tree, and a long list of bugs that were quietly making the gameworse than it looked.  READ THIS FIRST IF YOU HAVE AN EXISTING SAVE--------------------------------------------Element prices have gone up a lot. Prestige points now come in far faster tomatch the roughly 30x more per prestige at mid-game depth. Your save has been topped up automatically on first load so you keep exactlythe buying power you had. If you could afford fifteen more elements yesterday,you can afford those same fifteen today. Nothing was taken away. If the new prices look alarming, do one prestige before you judge them.  BALANCE-------- Prestige points are no longer divided by the prestige threshold. That threshold grows exponentially, so the deeper you got the more it ate, and PP per prestige flattened into a constant no matter how many particles you banked. One player logged twelve hours with zero income growth. The threshold now only gates WHEN you can prestige, not how much you get. - The prestige threshold is now weighted by element tier. Buying Hydrogen used to raise your next prestige requirement by exactly as much as buying Uranium. Cheap elements now cost proportionally less against it. - The threshold can no longer decrease when you buy an element. - Element costs rebuilt from the ground up. The old curve made the first fifty-two elements cost effectively nothing and the last nineteen cost 96% of the table. - Skill tree expanded to 63 nodes, eleven of which are permanent and survive prestige. - The fourteen "threshold reduction" elements now grant +3% to all particle gains each which entails to +42% across the set. Instead of an effect that sometimes made your threshold worse.  FIXES------ The periodic table was completely invisible on Hebrew, Arabic and other right-to-left systems. The interface was being mirrored and the table ended up off-screen. (poly1pol...

The 1.0.1 hotfix helped, but several of you came back and said the game was still running badly. You were right. Thank you to Dark-Noir, maplesyrupghost, stan, YaSHivaDa and shpasic for reporting it with specific detail - that's what let me find what I'd missed. Last patch I fixed the system that was SENDING too many updates per frame, and stopped there. I never checked what the systems RECEIVING them were doing. Two of the worst offenders had nothing to do with that bug at all, which is why some of you saw bad framerates with zero particles and nothing running. PERFORMANCE - five separate problems, all fixed: - The Periodic Table was rebuilding all 118 element buttons every single frame (~28,000 style objects per second), even while you were on a different tab. This was the biggest cost in the game, and it got worse the more elements you owned - which is why it "got laggy at higher numbers." - The ambient hum was a 3-second sound that wasn't set to loop, so the game re-synthesized the entire audio buffer from scratch every 3 seconds, forever, on the main thread. If your fans were spinning up, this was why. - The atom animation drew its four orbit rings as 256 separate line segments every frame - to draw shapes that never change. - The click sound was also rebuilt on every single click. That's specifically why fast clicking was worse than idling. - The project was set to Godot's Forward+ renderer, a full 3D lighting pipeline. This game draws circles and buttons. Now on Compatibility, which is far lighter and should help older GPUs most. AUDIO SETTINGS NOW SAVE Turning the sound off didn't stick - the save file stored thirteen things and not one was an audio setting. Volume, SFX and ambient hum all persist now. Thanks maplesyrupghost. FIXED BROKEN CHARACTERS IN THE UI I'd used emoji the engine's default font has no glyphs for, so they rendered as empty boxes - the splash screen was literally showing a box before the title. All replaced with plain text. Thanks stan. A...

Hotfix v1.0.1 — Performance & ProgressionThanks to everyone who played on launch day and took the time to report issues. Here's what's fixed: FIXED — Severe lag with auto-clicker skillsThe Infinite Loop and auto-click nodes were causing the game to drop to a few FPS in late game. This was a bug in how the game processed clicks internally, and it's now resolved. FIXED — Save file not restoring skill effectsAuto-clicks, crit chance, offline bonuses, and cost reductions were being lost when you reloaded your save. Your purchased nodes are now correctly restored. Existing saves repair themselves automatically on next launch. FIXED — Prestige requirements scaling out of controlThresholds scaled off the highest element you owned rather than how many you owned, so buying a high-numbered element could make progression impossible. Scaling is now steady and predictable, and the full 118-element table is actually reachable. FIXED — UI too small on high-resolution displaysThe interface now scales properly to your window and monitor, including 4K, ultrawide, and vertical displays. The periodic table and skill tree resize correctly, and the settings menu is no longer cut off. ADDED — Crit visual feedbackCrits were firing but invisible. They now show a gold "CRIT!" label so you can see them land. IMPROVED — Skill tree navigationYou can now pan the skill tree with left-click drag, not just right-click. Also fixed a crash when purchasing Oganesson (#118) and restored Radon's permanent offline bonus, which was being wiped on prestige.More balance work coming — skill tree pacing and content depth are next on the list. Keep the feedback coming.