This is exactly the follow-up I was hoping for - really glad the new pacing feels much more reasonable. And the late-game point is spot on: once you've got the strongest drill, active progress crawls, while the 8-hour offline cap lets you idle into a coin pile, bulk-buy top gear, then idle again and win by leaving. So the optimal move becomes "stop playing," which is the opposite of what I want the endgame to feel like. I'm reworking the late-game dig-power-vs-hardness curve so active play stays ahead of idling, and looking at how offline gains scale into the endgame wall. Thanks for sticking with it across versions and reporting this so precisely - genuinely valuable.