Battery saver mode is new and on by default: it draws the background more cheaply, so the game runs cooler and uses less battery. Switch it off in Settings if you want the full resolution look. The frame rate cap has a new Auto setting, now the default, which eases the rate down if your device starts running hot. Pick a fixed rate instead and the game will never change it on you. On Auto, the game now reads the device's own heat and Low Power Mode, so it eases off sooner when your phone is running hot.

TIME AWAY, REBUILT. Offline progress is now worked out directly instead of being replayed step by step, so a full away window is credited even when your board is full or your daemons are capped. It also compounds the way live play does. Every Recompile that crond fires while you are gone raises the multiplier the next run earns with, and with a BIOS core seated the chain escalates too, as many times as the window has room for. A long night climbs instead of flattening. A board that has not reached the Recompile gate yet gets built by your daemons while you are away, so a fresh run no longer has to be stable before crond can harvest it. unattended-upgrades spends your whole qubit bank out there as well, so a long window can lift its own daemon caps. Your Spawn Daemon works through a full board too: overflow queues as pages, exactly as it does while you are watching. The boot screen now shows all of it. The blocks graph draws the whole window from its start, with every Recompile and ESCALATE marked where it fired, and the receipt reports the kernels an ESCALATE minted. A stalled board is named along with the cap that stopped it, and a hint points at the upgrade that lifts it. EVENTS. Timed events run inside the game on a save of their own, with their own board rules and their own prize. Finishing one earns a skin, and you can put it on straight from the event screen. The run starts from scratch, but the tutorial does not replay. Plus. Skins you have earned now save to your iCloud, so they come back if you delete and reinstall. The Bug Hunter skin can be earned on the App Store build. Your Merge Daemon no longer stops dead on a full board: when only the daemon cap is in the way it takes one merge above it. HOW IT WORKS was rewritten to match the game as it is now, with entries for Page Split, the four levers, all five dials, the full-board valve and how leaderboard scores are counted. Settings can dismiss a recovered beta save you do not want.

NVDIMM AND THE MOTHERBOARD, EXPLAINED. Buying NVDIMM now walks you through it right away: what it is, how to store a tile and bring it back, and what the storage is for. A tile brought back out stays read-only for good: it earns and moves but never merges or splits. The first time you open the motherboard, a short series of cards shows what the slots are for, how to move an AI core onto one from NVDIMM, and what REBOOT wipes. How It Works in Settings explains both, including why a slot won't take a core and why a core goes back through NFS before moving to another slot. Tutorial cards no longer draw over the motherboard, and Settings no longer shows an empty bar under SKIN.

NVDIMM, EXPLAINED. Buying NVDIMM now walks you through it right away: what it is, how to store a tile and bring it back, and what the storage is for. Once the motherboard appears, one more card shows how AI cores reach it. A tile brought back out of NVDIMM stays read-only for good. It earns and moves like any other tile but never merges or splits, and the How It Works page in Settings now explains why. Settings no longer shows an empty dark bar under SKIN for a skin you have not earned.

STUCK BOARDS, AND A WAY TO TELL ME ABOUT THEM. A tile restored from NVDIMM holds a board cell it can never merge, and on a small board that could put Recompile permanently out of reach. What Recompile asks for now matches the tier your board can actually still build, so a save stuck this way unsticks itself on this update. When storage is full, a recompile keeps your best tiles. It used to drop a high tier off the board to keep a lower one already in storage. Settings has a Report a bug row. It opens a mail draft with your save attached, so a problem can be looked at on your actual board — read it over, or take the save off, before you send it. There is a Bluesky link beside it if you would rather reach out there.

STORAGE, CONTINUED. The last release stopped NVDIMM stacking read-only tiles past the slots you had paid for. It also stopped you changing which tile a slot keeps, which was not the intent. Nothing you carry can be merged, spent or thrown away, so once you held one carried tile per slot you were stuck with the tiles you already had. You can change your mind again: fault a stored tile back in, then bank the better tile you have built since. Locked tiles now fill the board and storage down to four free spaces between them, rather than stopping at your slot count. A board of locked tiles always leaves somewhere to park, so it can never wedge. Storage-full says what raises that limit: another storage slot, or another board cell.

STORAGE FIXES. This one is about NVDIMM, and about boards that could get stuck. Your NVDIMM will no longer take the last tile off the board. A fully parked board earns nothing, and if you had not already beaten this run's mark there was no way to start earning again — one page now always stays resident. A slot holds one tile wherever it sits, in storage or faulted onto the board. Parking and faulting can no longer stack read-only tiles past the slots you have paid for. An AI core can no longer be lost to an unattended recompile. Cores cross to the motherboard before anything else re-parks, take the last free slots ahead of lower-tier trophies, and fall back to the NFS bank instead of being dropped. A board that was already stranded repairs itself when you load it — a board with nothing left to bring back gets a tile, and a full board of read-only tiles gets enough locks lifted to merge again. A healthy board is never touched. A stranded board also pulses the storage strip and tells you the way out. Dragging a page back in is free, needs no slot, and works even on a full strip. Storage-full now names which board tiles are holding your slots, instead of advice you cannot follow.

THE MOTHERBOARD. A third layer underneath the game. Pull the slider on the right edge and your board slides away to reveal the motherboard beneath it — real slots waiting for AI cores. Each core you seat is a permanent point spent into that slot: more FLOPS, better qubit and kernel gain, a wider allocator, or cross-terms that make one currency feed another. Then hit REBOOT. It wipes everything — board, blocks, qubits, the whole upgrade tree, kernels and kernel mods — and the motherboard is the only thing that survives. Arrange it however you like beforehand; nothing you slot counts until you commit, and nothing you commit can be moved afterwards. Getting cores there. NVDIMM is the way in. Owning it is what opens the motherboard at all, and it is the only route a core can take to reach a slot. Once a core crosses it joins NFS, a bank with no size limit, and from there it moves freely between the bank and the slots for as long as you like. What the slots buy. The drive bays carry chosen kernel mods through the wipe with you. BMC parks the AI cores sitting on your board into NVDIMM when you Recompile, instead of letting them die with the run, and a second core carries the parked ones into the bank when you ESCALATE or REBOOT. The BIOS chip escalates on its own once populated, and flashes to UEFI to buy your kernel mods for you. The FPU raises the merge premium across the whole chain. BUS widens every allocation from bits to bytes, and DMA lands the entire burst as one transfer — so a near-full board takes a press it used to refuse, at the same price, for the same units. OPTIMAL merging. The merge lever has a third setting, unlocked by Branch & Bound. Instead of CHAIN's rule of thumb — never merge a tier down to its last copies — it works out which merges actually pay and makes exactly those. It binds the Merge Daemon as well as your defrag swipes, so the automation finally stops sawing through the chain you spent the run building. PHOSPHORUS. A second look for the board, earned by sharing Bitmerge from Settings. Green phosphor rain behind the grid and ribbon cables running between your chained tiles — a different idea, not a re-tint. Plus. Sound now starts off — sound effects and the ambient bed are both switched on from Settings rather than defaulting on, so the game stays quiet until you ask for it. Daemon merges and allocations have a mute of their own beside it, so your automation can run quietly while your own merges and presses keep sounding. Release notes now open on launch when a build brings changes you have not read. The Upgrades menu fits five rows where it used to fit one and a half, each explanation a tap away behind a ? rather than set into the row. Late-game boards stay still instead of thrashing between arrangements that earn the same, long away windows simulate in a beat rather than a minute, and there is a long tail of fixes across the allocator, the levers and the board.

Rebuilt the first-run tutorial. Nothing appears on screen until it has been taught. You start with just the board and are shown the exact tile to drag and the exact cell to drop it on, with an animated demo of the gesture. MALLOC, merging, your blocks, your FLOPS and recompiling then arrive one at a time, each as it becomes your next move. The rest of the interface unlocks once you have seen the upgrades button. Recompile and ESCALATE explain themselves. Both now lead with what you gain rather than what resets, and say plainly what is wiped and what survives. ESCALATE gets a proper introduction the first time it appears. Late-game pacing. Recompiling now asks you to rebuild your board each run rather than re-arming instantly, so runs are runs again instead of a menu loop. Overcommit's deep levels are worth buying once more, bottoming out at a wall you can still feel. Returning after time away. The loading screen's simulation graph now covers the whole stretch you were gone and plots the blocks you earned, rather than a rate that flatlines the moment your board fills. It also no longer stalls on long absences. Plus a long tail of fixes: tutorial captions stay on screen at every device size, the board-full prompt only appears when your board is genuinely maxed out, and the queued-page strip sits centred under the board.