KERNEL PANIC v2.4.0

The AI, onboarding and desktop QOL update. Enemies learned roles, bosses got fairer, the bestiary got smarter — and Windows builds exist now.

New Stuff

• Enemies think in roles now. Melee packs (DRONE, LANCER, SPLITTER, BULWARK) approach with lateral bias and early separation, so groups stop stacking into one blob. Ranged enemies (SPEWER, ranged bosses) hold a distance band, retreat when you breach it, strafe between telegraphs, and brake in place while telegraphing so the warning stays readable. TROJAN places corruption zones across your likely routes instead of chasing your centerline. OOM_KILLER no longer gets trapped inside enemy clusters, FIREWALL anchors outside your immediate space, and RECURSOR stalks from an offset instead of beelining at you.
• SPEWER uses cover: with a BULWARK roughly between it and you, it biases its position behind or beside the BULWARK.
• Elites got personality. Swift elites steer harder and re-enter attack state faster; volatile elites pulse visibly before their six-orb death burst, so the hazard is legible before contact.
• Tactical teleports. RECURSOR and boss teleports score destinations against your aim and movement, preferring flanking sides or your blind spot — never on top of you, with a safe fallback when you have no heading.
• The first ROOT split is one encounter now. The split triggers once at half HP, fragments fight like Lancers with a reduced ROOT burst, and the whole thing counts as a single boss: one card, one heal, one RECOVER, one unlock — issued after the second fragment dies. The HUD shows the fight as one combined ROOT.exe // FORKED block with MINI-A / MINI-B bars.
• Boss variants got bestiary entries. ROOT.exe, SEGFAULT, BLUE SCREEN and PAGE FAULT each have their own record with threat and counterplay. All bestiary entries also unlock on first sight now, not first kill.
• Color assist mode. A persisted, colorblind-friendly high-contrast palette plus code-drawn S/B markers for the ambiguous pair SPLITTER/BULWARK (markers supplement the silhouettes; no gameplay changes). SPLITTER and BULWARK also got clearly separated hues in the standard palette.
• Patch tooltips. Hover (desktop) or hold (touch) a HUD patch chip to see its full title, level, description and SYNERGY/TRADEOFF notes — like the HEAVY vs SPLITSHOT fire-rate tradeoff. Unknown combos honestly report "no direct interaction".
• Desktop key remapping. Rebind movement, dash, overclock, pause, abandon, mute, restart and confirm in settings, with duplicate rejection, Escape to cancel and a RESET KEYBINDS button.
• Program selection panel. A proper panel explaining each playable program's stats, mechanics and tradeoffs — and your active patches are explained in-game too.
• First-run hints. Short, non-blocking, once-only: MOVE // WASD OR TOUCH, DASH // SPACE / SHIFT, SIDESTEP THE LINE, SHOOT THE ORBS DOWN, KILL IT AWAY FROM YOU.

Fixes

• SEGFAULT corruption shots actually reach you now and resolve at your position or the midpoint — no more shots fizzling mid-air.
• Boss cleanup is atomic; duplicate boss RECOVER drops and the double victory heal are deduplicated — at most one guaranteed RECOVER per boss fight and exactly one victory heal.
• The ROOT boss charge actually applies its velocity (charges move now) and can no longer reschedule itself every frame.
• Abandoning a paused run requires confirmation: E no longer abandons your run. Abandon lives on its own Q key and asks twice — PRESS Q AGAIN // ABANDON PROCESS.
• The HUD dash readout reflects your real cooldown and charges (Quick Dash scaling, DAEMON's two charges).
• Wayland is properly detected as a desktop display (helper covers Windows/macOS/X11/Wayland/embedded), fixing cursor and input handling there.
• RECURSOR's teleport no longer errors at runtime, OOM_KILLER steals the mote it actually targeted, and the FIREWALL wall visibly rotates while respecting the global orb cap.
• Touch fire and timing propagation fixed; the touch-size setting now also scales the movement stick, with identical normalized input.
• Responsive combat UI: pause, game over, intro and patch panels follow the real viewport instead of assuming 1280x720, HUD bottom positions track viewport height, and everything fits narrow windows; the program selector stays responsive on touch.
• Boss and enemy behaviors (PAGE FAULT shield rebuild, SEGFAULT wind-up, RECURSOR zones, FIREWALL wall ownership) are covered by regression tests and behave consistently.

Balance & Feel

• Late waves speed up on a leash: a bounded cadence factor tightens enemy attack cooldowns from wave 6 onward, with a floor — telegraphs stay readable, and damage, HP and movement speed are untouched.
• The simultaneous-enemy ceiling now ramps early and flattens at 10 (late waves used to reach 16) — fights stay tactical instead of turning into a swarm.
• Elite SPLITTERs no longer multiply: their two child drones are explicitly non-elite, so one elite roll can't chain into an elite pack.
• Patch offer cadence tuned and the boss-clear flow smoothed.
• Lock-on is selectable in every mode again. The Weekly restriction is gone — it's an accessibility feature, and your saved preference is never touched.

Art & Sound

• Music rework. The soundtrack is now three longer synchronized stems — 16 bars at 116 BPM (~33s per loop, four distinct sections each): an always-on menu/arena bed, a combat layer with syncopated arpeggios, and a darker boss layer. Same three-intensity crossfade system, much less obvious repetition.
• Boot sequence overlay on launch, skippable with any input.
• Bestiary cards are man pages now, with a THREAT value and a BUGS line ("segfaults reproduce. two of them.").
• Stack traces on elite and boss kills — flavor text floats up, like segfault at 0xdeadbeef.
• Terminal reticle on desktop with spread feedback that widens as you fire.

Under the Hood

• Windows x86_64 exports exist now (release and debug), alongside the portable Linux builds and Android ETC2/ASTC texture import.
• The automated harness gained deterministic probes for cadence bounds, steering profiles, teleports, the split encounter, keybind conflicts and tooltip hit-testing, plus fixed cleanup/timing so tests no longer leak nodes.
• The README documents game installation and how to build from source on Linux.

Downloads

• KERNEL-PANIC-v2.4.0-release.apk — production-signed Android APK.
• KERNEL-PANIC-v2.4.0-debug.apk — debug APK for device testing.
• kernel-panic / kernel-panic-debug + matching .pck — Linux x86_64 builds.
• kernel-panic.exe / kernel-panic-debug.exe + matching .pck — Windows x86_64 builds.

Keep each executable beside the matching .pck with the same base name. Desktop debug builds are for development/testing.