We're wrapping up the year with another major update! Lots of New Sprite Art for Nick, Lewis & Noel!

• Hundreds of draft-quality sprites have been replaced with higher-quality drawings with improved lineart. Thanks to illustrator Alan McMillian for his continued hard work.
• For Nick and Lewis, this is a total visual overhaul. For Noel, about half of her animations have been improved, and the rest will come in a future update.
• Ultimately our goal every sprite to be at a similar level of quality to the full-color idle sprites. Hand drawn art is a painstaking and time consuming affair, so your patience is greatly appreciated.

• The game now searches for open Steam Lobbies when checking for matches, instead of our own matchmaking server. Players should now be able to host a lobby for long periods of time without the match getting de-listed.
• In lobby, there are four new buttons. One mutes the lobby BGM while in the lobby menu only (for alt tabbed lobby hosting). Another copies an invite URL to your clipboard. You can paste this URL into discord or somewhere to invite friends to your open lobby. A third button directly opens the Steam Invite Friend dialogue. Lastly, the spectate button flags you as a spectator. You will automatically go to the end of the line and get sorted behind active players. You can toggle this off by clicking again, or by readying up to play.

• Nick's dustloop passive now lets him do an enhanced extra rep of his B Combo in the corner, for a total of 250 damage.
• Previously his passive would tack on a total of 167-200 damage over the course of a combo.
• The game is more consistent about checking if Nick has corner. The special Cheesy Dust Loop combo should now always trigger if the opponent is in the corner or the space next to it, and if Nick is close enough to the corner space to kick it with his B attack.
• Cheesy Dust Loop no longer incorrectly gives Nick bonus damage if he anti airs an opponent jumping out of the corner, or if he lands a max range jB against an opponent standing next to the corner.
• There is a new achievement "I'm Not a Bad Guy" for doing a max damage Cheesy Dust Loop combo.

• If Noel would be hit by a very slow attack (adjusted startup longer than 40 frames) on the same turn as she places a Vine, her Vine will immediately be expended to protect her with Vine Armor.
• Vine Armor reduces the damage of a single incoming hit by 100 (to a minimum of 100). The attacker may not combo, and if the attack would normally knock down, Noel will stay on her feet.
• Throws bypass Vine Armor. All of Billy's attacks automatically break this armor as well.
• Previously, if the Noel player set a vine at the wrong time, she could be punished by even the slowest of attacks, losing a lot of health and possibly giving the opponent oki. Now it's a little less risky to deploy her signature setup move when you have the advantage, but you can still be easily called out for it if you don't.

• Noel's throw now causes push and no longer has any hitstop.
• Lewis and Nick's air throws were reverted to 1 square of push so they can get some meaningful offense going after a successful air throw.

• For attacks that do a medium amount of damage (100-200), hitstop has been reduced slightly.
• Rapidly hitting attacks now have less hitstop.
• In Strife Mode, the amount of extra hitstop has been reduced significantly.
• Air juggle animations have been adjusted across the board for less rotation.
• Many character foot positions have been adjusted for consistency. Some characters might be effectively taller as a result.
• Characters now react differently to Lewis' grab.

• Removed non functional blue highlighting from some buttons in the rebinding menu.
• On Steam Deck, the mouse (touch) controls menu is bigger so that you can actually press the buttons with an adult sized finger.
• In lobbies, the Salty Chat text is now a little smaller.
• A few menus have been translated to Brazillian Portuguese by community member Stealphie. You can access this partial translation by entering -language=pt-BR into the launch settings. More menus are being set up for localization in future updates. If you want to assist us with localizing the game into other languages, please join our Discord.

• Many old and no-longer-used draft-quality sprites have been removed from the game files to keep file sizes, memory usage and load times in check.
• Some achievement tracking variables have been moved back to PlayerPrefs for better performance.

• If player 1 or player 2 disconnects from a lobby match, it should now correctly bring all players back to lobby. Previously this only happened if player 2 lost connection. However if player 1 is the host, the lobby will still close if they disconnect.
• Fixed an issue where accepting a Steam invite from some menus would bring you to the Online menu without joining the lobby. It should "just work" now.
• Fixed a persistent and long standing bug where round win counts were not properly syncing for spectators.
• Potentially fixed an issue where client players were rarely not able to send commands to the host.
• Paul no longer gets Nick's bonus counter hit damage in the tutorial.
• PileDebunker should no longer appear to briefly teleport when it is punished.
• Paul no longer stands there for an extra half second after doing his throw.

• Note that this change will break some replays from the last patch. If you want to go back and watch or record videos of those replays, you can roll back to the last patch by entering the beta code "backupbackup" into the "private betas" field in the game's Steam prefernces. We recommend saving your past replays to video as we don't promise to keep these beta builds open forever.