Update 1.18.0

This is a long-overdue care pass touching performance, install size, Steam Deck support, and a stack of minor bugs. The two headliners: a major Steam Deck compatibility restoration, and a project-wide disk footprint + load-time reduction.

Steam Deck: major compatibility restoration

HHBF was one of the first games verified for Steam Deck at launch. Since then, it had quietly drifted out of compat. This patch puts it back in shape, top to bottom.

• Game now pauses cleanly when the Deck sleeps. Press the power button mid-shift and your save is flushed, audio mutes, and the simulation freezes. Wake up to the pause menu with everything intact, no more customers magically progressing while you were away.

• Full gamepad support in the rebinding menu. Before this patch, the Controls screen could detect controller input but only let you bind keyboard keys. Gamepad bindings are now first-class: every action can be bound to either, and they work simultaneously.

• Live keyboard/gamepad prompt swapping. Interaction prompts now read the active input device and update on the fly: `Press [E] to use` becomes `Press [RT] to use` the moment you put the keyboard down and pick up a controller. Switches back the same way.

• Native 1280×800 16:10 handling. Deck's display aspect is now treated as a first-class resolution. UI elements that anchor to screen edges get a small safe-area inset so nothing hugs the bezel awkwardly. Ultrawide users benefit from the same fix.

• Auto-tuned settings on first Deck launch. When the game detects it's running on a Deck for the first time, it applies a balanced preset: 1280×800, Medium quality, MSAA off, hard 60 fps cap on both Deck LCD and Deck OLED (so OLED Decks aren't burning battery rendering 90 fps you can't feel mid-shift). Subsequent launches respect any manual settings you change.

• New "Restore Deck Defaults" button. Tucked into Settings → Controls. Resets visuals + keybindings to the recommended Deck preset if you've tweaked things and want a clean slate.

• Steam Cloud save sync. Your save now mirrors to Steam Cloud after every write and downloads the newer copy on launch. Start a shift on your desktop, finish it on the Deck, and your progress comes with you. Last-write-wins, automatic, no per-slot ceremony.

Performance & install size

• Dramatic install size reduction. Project-wide texture compression pass across every major location: Apartment, City, Burger Farm, Warehouse, Charlie, Parking Garage, Sewers, Radio Station, Flashback Surgery, Toes Room, and others. Disk footprint and VRAM usage both drop substantially.

• Audio asset re-encoding. Sound effects and music re-compressed at sensible bitrates. Smaller download, no audible quality loss.

• All scenes fully lightbaked. Static lighting was finally baked across the entire game: every restaurant interior, exterior, OOB scene, Dream Scene, Ending Laboratory, Boss arenas, Museum Interior, Key Room, Drive Through, Bungalow, Break Room, 50s Diner, and more. This is a huge perf win for low-end hardware: lighting that used to be computed every frame is now precomputed once, freeing the GPU for the things that actually need it. Visual quality also goes up across the board, with proper bounced lighting and shadows where there used to be flat shading.

• Apartment occlusion culling rebake. Reduces drawcalls in one of the most-visited scenes in the game.

• Significantly improved game save performance. Saving is now dramatically faster with far less hitching during autosaves and manual saves.

• Reduced in-game stuttering. Optimized memory usage across restaurant operations, customer interactions, food assembly, and AI encounters to minimize frame drops and micro-stutters.

• Smoother AI encounters. Improved efficiency of distance checks and physics queries during enemy encounters, reducing CPU overhead.

• Optimized cooking and order systems. Streamlined collision detection and item handling across the assembly board, drink station, fryer, and bagging systems.

• Improved water rendering performance. Optimized AQUAS water caustic and lens effect updates.

• Reduced memory churn. Cached frequently-used timers and references across 100+ scripts to reduce garbage collection pauses.

• Removed unnecessary background processing. Cleaned up 73 unused engine callbacks that were consuming resources silently.

Bug fixes

• Fixed action figures not saving in the apartment. The Sammy, Petey, Charlie, Farmer, and Happy action figures now correctly save their position when placed in your apartment, and they reappear where you left them after a restart. This was the most-reported save bug in the game. The root cause was an internal name mismatch in the five prefabs, which caused the apartment save system to silently fail when trying to reload them. Note: action figures missing from existing saves will not be auto-recovered (you will need to re-collect those); anything placed after this patch saves correctly.

• Fixed camera collectible not spawning correctly. The SureShot Camera collectible now properly appears in the restaurant when unlocked.

• Fixed Landing Gear collectible not saving. The Landing Gear music collectible now correctly saves and loads its collected state.

• Fixed season calculation. August is no longer incorrectly classified as Fall; seasons now transition correctly throughout the year.

• Fixed AI encounter data not persisting. Total AI encounter count now properly saves and loads between sessions.

• Fixed coroutine stacking in restaurant simulation. Prevented a rare issue where customer spawning and shift timing could double up, causing erratic behavior.

• Fixed incorrect DontDestroyOnLoad usage in the achievement system.

Presentation

• Refreshed Main Menu icons. Cleaned-up iconography on the title screen, small but visible polish for the first thing players see.