Patch: Summer Super Patch (July 2026)
☀️ The Big Stuff
This one is mostly under the bonnet, and it is the biggest technical patch we have shipped. We took the engine up two versions, tore out the way puzzle boards were drawn and rebuilt it, and swapped our text rendering for something that never goes fuzzy. The headline is performance: a native arm64 build hitting native resolution at a stable 120 FPS on Steam Frame, and a healthy speed up on Quest as well. There is also a good deal of groundwork in here for headsets we do not support yet, which we have written up below rather than hidden.
Godot 4.5 to 4.7
The whole game moved from Godot 4.5 to Godot 4.7, two engine versions in one jump. That brings a newer renderer, better OpenXR support and a long list of engine fixes we no longer have to work around ourselves. You will not see the upgrade directly, but everything below is built on it.
Gameboards Rebuilt from Scratch
Board rendering has been fully replaced. The old approach built each board out of individual pieces and asked the headset to draw every one of them; the new one puts a whole board on screen for a fraction of the work.
That sounds like plumbing, and it is, but it is also the biggest performance change we have ever shipped. It lands exactly where standalone VR hurts, and it is why we are confident going into the next launch.
- Steam Frame: native resolution, a stable 120 FPS. We ship a native arm64 build, so nothing is emulated and nothing is translated. The game runs at the headset's native resolution and holds 120 FPS. No upscaling, no reprojection crutches, no small print.
- Quest is faster too. The same renderer work carries straight across. Frame times are steadier, headroom is up, and the headset runs cooler over a long sitting.
- Big boards stopped being expensive. 16x16 Sudoku and the larger nonograms were always the worst case for the old renderer. They are now comfortably inside budget.
So we are ready for the Steam Frame launch. Native build, native resolution, locked 120 FPS on day one. That is not a target we are hoping to reach later, it is what the build does now, and we think that is a big deal.
More Headsets, In Progress
WORK IN PROGRESS
Augmental Puzzles started life as one build for one headset. A large part of this patch was making it five: alongside Meta Quest and SteamVR there are now working builds for Pico, Android XR and Steam Frame, each with its own controllers, its own store entry and its own release branch.
None of those are on ready yet. Steam Frame went in for submission and the others are moving along behind it. We are not going to give you a date we cannot keep, so treat this as a progress report rather than an announcement. The hard part, getting one game to be five builds without any of them quietly rotting, is done and running every day.
Fonts with Infinite Resolution
Every number, clue and label is now drawn as a true vector shape directly on the GPU, using a Slug style renderer. Previously text was baked to an image at a fixed size, so leaning in close to a cell showed you the pixels.
Now there are no pixels to find. Text stays sharp at any distance and at any scale, which matters a lot in VR where you move your head instead of zooming. It also means we can resize UI freely without rebuilding font atlases every time, and effects like outlines, rim lighting and emboss come along for free.
More Animation on the Boards
With the render cost down we spent some of the budget back on motion. Cells, clues and board furniture now animate as you place, clear and complete, so the board feels alive under your hands rather than static.
Performance Improvements
A standalone headset does not have much memory, and we were using more of it than we needed to. We measured the whole build and then went after the worst offenders. The result is roughly a quarter of a gigabyte given back on Quest, before any of the renderer work above.
Two of those were embarrassing in hindsight. The godot graphics memory allocator was reserving large blocks and then sitting on the unused end of them, and the VR render target was keeping a second copy of a colour buffer that nothing ever read. Music now streams off disk as it plays instead of being unpacked in full and held there, so a five minute track costs a small buffer rather than the whole song.
What that buys you: longer sittings without the system deciding to close the app, room for bigger packs, and better manners when you have other things running alongside.
No More First Board Stutter
Shaders are now warmed up during the loading screen, a couple per frame, rather than all at once the moment something first needs drawing. The hitch when a board appeared for the first time in a session is gone.
Sudoku
Number Tally. A new counter shows how many of each number you have placed and how many are still to go. No more scanning the whole grid to work out whether you have any sevens left. It is the sort of thing you stop noticing after a day and then miss badly when it is gone.
Fixes around hint, undo and reset, plus a handful of smaller ones we have already forgotten about.
Nonograms
- Fewer brush mispresses. We reworked the toggle brush button so flipping between fill and mark does what you meant, not what your thumb did.
- Hints now highlight in colour, so you can scan the line the hint is talking about instead of hunting for it.
- Clearer boards. Rendering and visual clarity improved across the board, part of the same renderer work above.
- A better drag ruler. The counter is easier to read and now draws a line along your drag, so the length of the run you are about to fill is obvious before you commit.
New Pack: Spring 2026 Recap
NEW PACK
Spring back into spring with the Spring 2026 Recap Pack: every Daily Challenge from February, March and April 2026, collected in one place. That is 98 puzzles, all computer-verified, ranging from a quick 6x6 Sudoku up to a full 16x16 grid.
Miss a few days? Want another crack at the one that beat you? Relive the spring dailies at your own pace, in any order, with no clock ticking.
Fixed
- Passthrough stays where you put it. Opening the system menu, or setting the headset down and coming back, used to quietly switch passthrough back on. It now remembers what you actually chose.
- The scratch pad no longer eats a controller. Drawing on the pad could leave one hand's pointer dead for the rest of the session, and nothing short of a restart brought it back.
- Four tutorial fixes. A soft lock where raising an error with the keypad open stranded it on screen, two stages that could be passed without doing the thing they were teaching, two that could dead end with no way forward, and errors that stayed lit after you had corrected them.
- Nonogram drags no longer misread a tremor. A small hand movement at the moment of release used to paint a two cell line and throw away the toggle you actually meant.
- Save writing is more robust.
- Screenshots look right. In-headset captures were coming out washed out and over bright.
- 19 crash and correctness fixes in Godot engine relating to multi-threading we ran into while building this patch. Some have been packaged up and sent back to the Godot project, some others need more work before pushing back to main, so everyone else gets them too.
And the Rest
There is a pile of smaller fixes and tidy-ups in here that never made it into the notes. If something that used to annoy you has quietly stopped annoying you, that was probably deliberate. If it has not, tell us with the in-game feedback screen and we will take a look.
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