Bellum Beta Build #725

Everything since Build 712: an armor rework, bullets that feel the wind, foliage that sways and reacts to soldiers, new lighting on Highlands and Tsavo, a recoil pass and a long list of fixes.

Changes

Gunplay & Armor

• Armor reworked. Backface Deformation now properly simulated. A plate that stops a rifle round now bruises the wearer (blunt trauma, based on the round’s momentum). Plates wear with every hit and fail when a round punches through or the backing is used up.
• Fix: Bullets now feel the map’s wind at full strength (it was about ¹⁄₁₀₀ of intended).
• Recoil pass: the rearward shove on each shot now lands in full and on time instead of as a soft, late push. AKM retuned, and its side-to-side hand jump is gone.
• First-person muzzle flip on rifles and machine guns is slightly stronger: the grip now dips as the muzzle climbs.
• Sights recover from vertical recoil 25% faster.
• Red dot and holo reticles blur and shake slightly on every shot.
• Mounted weapons: your view now stops at the edge of the mount arc. New setting Mounted Free Look (Gameplay > Controls, default Off) brings back panning past the arc.
• GM94 reload reworked: loads up to 3+1, firing interrupts a reload, and you always get the rounds you paid for. (there is a bug with rearming GM-94 frag rounds off the crate)
• Passive bracing against cover works again. Mounting only uses solid cover and terrain, and the bipod clearance check only looks at the barrel.

Movement & Controls

• Fast turns while prone are capped, so a prone soldier can no longer snap 180. Slow turns feel the same.
• Diving to prone lands you facing the direction you dove.
• High ready has its own keybind row (Gun High/Low Ready, Combat). Binding Fire to Space now warns about the conflict instead of dropping you to high ready mid-burst.
• The vault keybind is renamed Vault / Climb / Leap / Drop.
• Grenades: RMB starts the underhand throw on press and never zooms.
• Crouch sprint is faster: 300 (was 275), and 330 for Insurgents, Ranger RRC and SATYR Recon.
• The stamina bar drains and refills smoothly instead of in 5-point steps.
• Briefing card F5 / F6 no longer miss presses.

Game Mode

• Going down now knocks you unconscious instantly, with no slow pass-out.
• Going down now cancels whatever you were doing: an interrupted reload moves no ammo and an interrupted treatment applies nothing.
• Squad hold: during staging, a squad leader can hold an empty squad for 90 s and invite teammates into it. Invited players still pick their own role.
• Kill credit is shared: everyone who did real damage to a soldier that life shares the down and the kill. The feed shows the last hitter + N.
• Objective influence income cut by 20%.
• The insurgent Hideout now falls to one remote charge. The Combat Outpost is the only building that takes two.
• A COP can no longer be placed underground, in tunnels or under cover.
• The debrief shows ENEMIES HIT instead of accuracy, and now counts suppressive fire.
• Match recordings sent to players no longer show who reported whom.
• The WAITING TO START count now matches what the match actually needs to start.

HUD & Menus

• New Patch Notes tab in the main menu, with the full notes in game.
• Radial menus restyled: short slice names (caliber + capacity), magazines shown as counts (x7).
• Crate resupply wheel: a CROSSLOAD tray shows what you carry, RMB on a tile drops one unit, and the center reads REFILL KIT (or KIT FULL). Bandages are no longer on the crate.
• Deployment screen: the CROSSLOAD row has its own icon, opens the preset editor from anywhere on the row, and shows your preset as the same slot tiles.
• Ctrl+T inventory hides crossloaded items you can’t use, and blood bags until they can be used. Empty launcher stacks read 0.
• Phone, watch and B-TAK screens are sharper, and the water spots on the B-TAK screen are gone.

Lighting & Visuals

• Eye adaptation is off for now, so every map shows its lighting as authored.
• Highlands lighting overhaul.
• Tsavo lighting rework: golden hour, sunset sky, a visible sun with light shafts, cloud shadows, backlit leaves and a new color grade.
• Kambori: distant heat haze (300 to 600 m). Red dots and holos stay sharp through it.
• Less ghosting on red dot and holographic sights.
• Concussion effect redone: squinting eyelids and soft sun rays, and the sky no longer blows out to white.
• Sharper sun shadows on your first-person weapon.

Foliage

• Plants and trees sway in the map’s wind up close, tree trunks move with their leaves, and smoke grenades drift with the wind.
• Soldiers trample grass and push through bushes. Explosions push nearby plants outward.

Maps

• Kambori: Invisible (but solid) boulder clusters across the map are now visible. Grass placement and overlapping building fixes. New minimap, and the after-action and deployment maps now show Kambori imagery.
• Tsavo: fixed spots where you fell through ground that looked solid. Grass no longer lowers your weapon, floats, or disappears after pressing Apply in Settings. Shrubs restored. Cave 2 lighting finished, AO7 progress, new minimap.
• Corrugated fences get more wear and color variety. Rock and tree collision fixes, so feet land on the rock you see.

Audio

• Footsteps no longer play twice per step.
• New sole scuff when you reverse direction or whip around at a jog or sprint.
• Bullet cracks in machine-gun fire no longer cut each other off.
• M18 smoke no longer pops. New glove tap sounds.

Performance

• Epic: Lumen lighting and reflections now run at half resolution.
• Kambori terrain is cheaper to render.
• Lower audio CPU cost for gunfire, cracks and footsteps.

Changes

• Tsavo: tunnels are lit again (these need addtional tuning after the lighting rework).
• The VGM93 thermobaric grenade now uses its own explosion effect, not the rocket’s.
• Other players no longer hear 6 or 7 shots from your single tap, and back-to-back bursts stay separate.
• Fixed a main menu crash on ultrawide (non-16:9) screens with AMD frame generation.
• Fixed another FSR frame generation crash.
• DLSS frame generation no longer crashes when Windows drops exclusive fullscreen.
• Fixed a crash when minimizing or resizing with NIS sharpening on.
• Fixed a crash tied to the spawn selection map.
• Frame generation no longer stays off after a quick alt-tab.
• Fixed the main menu getting stuck on the loading screen.
• A weapon key pressed while holstering (binoculars, then 1) is no longer dropped.
• Spamming RMB to aim, or high ready, no longer lands a late extra toggle.
• Aiming while diving to prone no longer flickers the sights.
• Binoculars, crates, rally flags and phones no longer sway 7 to 10x harder than a rifle.
• URG-I recoil no longer goes dead after firing its M320.
• The RPG-7 reload can no longer be cancelled after the rocket is chambered.
• AK-74M iron sight alignment fixed.
• Armor damage now registers reliably (a client/server mismatch could drop it).