Bills Must Be Paid Bugs & Fixes: What Patch 1.1 Fixed and What's Left

Quick Answer: Patch 1.1 landed on August 16 and closed nearly everything on this page. Save slots exist now — three of them, with a confirmation step on delete — so the New Game button can no longer erase your run. The launch crash on DirectX 12 machines is fixed, so the "delete the D3D12 folder" workaround is retired. The Low-graphics blur is fixed. Steam Cloud now gives every account its own save folder, which ends both the cross-device sync failures and Family Sharing accounts popping each other's achievements. Two things changed that are not bug fixes and will surprise you: you can now choose which side the coin starts on before a Double or Nothing toss, and the Piggy Shuffle wobble tell was deliberately removed. Update before you troubleshoot anything below.

Version note: Written against Patch 1.1, released August 16, 2026 — the game's first patch, eighteen days after launch. Last checked August 17, 2026. Assembled from the official patch notes, launch-window Steam forum threads with developer replies, and the developers' pre-release changelog, linked inline. We re-check daily.

What Patch 1.1 Fixed

The developers shipped every outstanding promise in one build. If you have been waiting on any of these, they are done:

Three quality-of-life additions are worth knowing because they change how the menus behave: the skill tree remembers your pan and zoom instead of resetting, Q/E switches tabs in the upgrade menu, and piggy loot previews now show $ on the numbers. Midas Touch and Lucky Loss also got in-game text explaining what they actually do — Lucky Loss now states outright that Luck affects piggy loot quality, not gambling odds, which was previously something you could only learn from a forum reply.

One balance change costs you money. Two late skill-tree nodes went up: Second Wind's boost from $3.75M to $6M, and Last Stand damage from $13M to $35M. The developers call the old prices a bug — an earlier node was cheaper than a later one — so plan late runs against the new numbers, not against any guide written before August 16.

Game Won't Load or Crashes on Launch — Fixed in 1.1

This is done. Patch 1.1's wording: "The game could crash at the loading bar on certain setups (the DirectX 12 issue from the discussions). We applied a fix so the 'delete the D3D12 folder' workaround is no longer needed." The same build also fixed a separate crash that hit when relaunching the game after a session on Low or Medium graphics.

Update first. If you are still crashing on the current build, the old troubleshooting list is what remains, in this order:

1. Verify file integrity through Steam. Cheaper than a reinstall and does most of the same work.
2. Reboot the machine. Two reports had the hang clear on its own after a restart, and two more reporters became unstuck with no patch and no idea why — "I changed nothing, but now it works?" and "It did got fixed, thanks."
3. Reinstall. One success on a Ryzen 9 5950X with an RTX 3090 where the D3D12 deletion did nothing, and it also cleared the variant where the game simply does not start with no error dialog at all.
4. On Steam Deck, step through Proton versions. One Deck player fixed the hang by switching from Proton Experimental to Proton 9 (Properties → Compatibility), and the developers suggest the same. Deck is not broken generally — another player reports an LCD Deck working by default.

"Failed to load il2cpp" fatal error was the same family and had the same prescription, so treat it as covered by 1.1 too. If it survives the patch, post your specs in the discussions — this two-person team reads them and works from them.

Blurry Bill and Collection Screens — Fixed in 1.1

Also done. Patch 1.1 lists "Bills and the Collection Book are no longer blurry on Low graphics" and, separately, "Medium graphics no longer renders at reduced resolution" — a second display fault that was never reported on the forums but was making Medium look worse than it should.

Six players were affected before the fix, including a MacBook Air M1 case with bill amounts unreadable, and the old workaround was to run Medium or higher. You no longer need it. If your screens are still blurry, you are on the launch build — restart Steam and let the update apply.

"New Game" No Longer Wipes Everything — Save Slots Shipped

For two and a half weeks this was the costliest trap in the game: New Game erased all progress including prestige rings, instantly, with no confirmation prompt, and the game had a single save slot with no in-game backup. Four players lost finished runs to it.

Patch 1.1 closes it. Verbatim: "Save slots are here. Three slots with Load, New and Delete (with a confirmation step). Your current progress automatically becomes Slot 1. The New Game button can no longer wipe your save."

Two practical notes on the new system:

• Your existing save became Slot 1 automatically. You do not need to do anything to protect it, and you did not lose it in the transition.
• The confirmation step is on Delete, not on New. New Game now writes to an empty slot rather than over you, which is the actual fix.

You can still press the bankrupt button in the bottom-left corner to loop back through the prestige cycle and keep buying rings after beating the game — that was always the safe route and it still works.

If You Wiped a Save Before August 16, Try Steam Remote Storage

The developer gave the first actual recovery route on August 12, and it is not obvious:

1. Open store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage while signed in.
2. Find Bills Must Be Paid in the list and look for save.json with a timestamp from before the wipe.
3. Download it and put it back.

Steam keeps cloud copies of files with their upload times, so the version from before you pressed New Game may still be sitting there. The developer's own wording is that it is worth a try rather than a guarantee — "see if you can download the save.json from before the wipe."

If it is not there, write to them rather than replaying. Their offer, verbatim: "write us a dm on discord (or any other social or email) with your progress and we'll try to help you." The player who received that answer had already replayed the whole game in three hours by the time it arrived, which tells you both how short the game is and how fast this is worth checking — cloud copies do not last forever.

The Coin Flip Is Not Rigged — and You Can Now Pick a Side

The busiest thread on the forum, at 65 replies, is about coin-flip losing streaks: runs like 2 wins in 10, 1 in 13, or 10+ losses in a row, posted alongside players reporting 5-for-6 and 3-for-3 over similar samples. The developers answered it in the thread and then again in Patch 1.1's notes, where the wording is blunt: "We see that many of you are arguing whether or not the flip is fair, and guys, it is NOT rigged."

What 1.1 changed is control, not odds. You can now right-click (R1 on controller) to turn the coin before the toss and choose which side it starts on. The developers are explicit that making a physics flip "more fair" is impossible by design, so this is the compromise: you get agency over the starting state rather than a weighted outcome. The odds are still 50/50.

The control did not settle the argument, and that is worth knowing before you read the thread. It is still active after 1.1, still with the same two-sided split: players reporting 2-in-10, 1-in-13 and 10-plus straight losses on one side, players reporting 5-for-6, 3-for-3 and "seems fair" on the other. Nobody has posted tracked data either way, and a player in the thread makes the point that carries the most weight — a true 50/50 produces long losing streaks routinely, and people notice those far more than the equivalent winning streaks.

Three things to do with that:

• Skip the gambling if it is costing you runs. Two players who finished the game say this independently: one who went 100% put it flatly after a bad streak — "you can easily complete the game without it" — and stopped using it entirely, and another finished in about seven runs without gambling at all. The flip only matters for two achievements — do those with pocket-change stakes.
• Don't count on the luck perk. The "100% luck next run" card does not protect coin flips. Developer-confirmed, and 1.1 put it in the game's own text: Lucky Loss now explains that Luck affects piggy loot quality, not gambling odds.
• Treat the stake-size theory as unverified. One player tracking his own bets claims stakes over ~$5k lost far more often than small ones. He flags his own sampling bias, no one has reproduced it, and the developers have not addressed it.

Piggy Shuffle: the Wobble Tell Is Gone

Players had worked out that the piggies gave away the winner through their idle wobble before the shuffle started, and that was the only reliable way most people ever won it. Patch 1.1 removed it on purpose, and the developers said why: "once you got it the minigame became really unfunny to play."

That matters because of what is left. One player who had already noticed the same thing describes the honest state of the minigame: the cups move faster than the eye can track, so he had never won it "naturally" — only through the tell. After 1.1, Piggy Shuffle is a straight guess for most players. Bet accordingly, and do not go looking for a slow-motion capture trick that a guide written before August 16 promised you.

The same patch fixed a cosmetic bug where Double or Nothing's winning stack did not pile up cleanly.

Antivirus Blocking the Game

One launch-day report of Windows Defender blocking the game reached the developers: "Sorry to hear that — we'll look into this. We haven't had this issue previously."

This is the classic shape of a false positive on a freshly signed indie binary. Allow the game through your antivirus, then verify game files through Steam.

Demo Saves Don't Transfer

Developer-confirmed on launch day, twice: "The save from the demo will NOT transfer to the full game."

The reason is scope, not oversight. Per the pre-release changelog post, the full version rebalanced piggy HP against the new prestige layer, reworked the RNG and piggy spawner, added legacy points to the bill system, changed upgrade nodes and added the shop. A demo save doesn't describe a compatible game state. (The demo's integer-overflow bug — money capped at 2^63-1, then flipping negative — was also confirmed fixed for the full version.)

Motion Sickness: the Toggle Now Actually Works

Three players reported the swaying desk making them ill, and the problem was that the existing Motion Effects setting did not stop the camera tilt — turning it off left the worst offender running.

Patch 1.1 fixed the toggle rather than the effect: "Motion Effects off now disables everything, hammer camera movement, screen shockwave distortion, and the main menu parallax." If you bounced off this game on day one, the setting does what its name says now.

The same section of the patch also unlocked the cursor: the mouse is only locked to the window while aiming, so menus, pause and results screens free it.

Cross-Account Saves and Achievements — Fixed in 1.1

Two reports had pointed in opposite directions and nobody could name the mechanism: one player's second Steam account on the same PC inherited their full save and achievements, another had the same account on two devices showing Steam Cloud as synced while the saves differed.

Both were the same underlying fault, and 1.1 names it: "Saves now sync correctly between devices (PC and Mac included), and Family Sharing accounts no longer see each other's saves or pop each other's achievements. Every account now gets its own save folder."

If you shared a PC and had achievements fire on the wrong account, that stops now — but the ones already granted are not retracted by a patch.

Supporter Pack

The cosmetics-only supporter pack is live. The developers state plainly that it is cosmetics only, and that when new content does arrive for Bills Must Be Paid it will be a free update for everyone. If you saw supporter-pack cosmetics in the UI during the launch window with nothing to buy, that gap is closed.

Reports We're Tracking

None of these have a fix or a second clean confirmation yet. Each gets a proper section if that changes.

• Achievements not unlocking on Linux. Two players report nothing at all firing under Proton — one fixed it with Proton 11 plus the launch option PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%, the other saw zero achievements on Proton 8.0-5 and 9.0-4 after finishing the game and buying everything. Separate from the Family Sharing fault above, and separate from Freedom, which turned out not to be a bug at all — see the achievements guide.
• Ignite visual oddity — the ignite skill's hammer flame doesn't always behave as expected. Vague and single-source.
• Stutter and lag on capable hardware — two day-one reports (a Ryzen 1700 + 7900 XT forum post, and a refunded review calling the game "not smooth and laggy") against multiple reviews praising smooth performance. Both reports have confounds; no developer reply.

What Comes Next

The developers answered the "where is more content" question directly in the patch notes, and the honest summary is no date and no commitment. They have ideas they want to prototype first, they point people to Discord to be notified, and they say plainly that the last months have been demanding and they need to rest and handle personal matters before returning. They also confirm there will be more games from them in future.

Plan around that: treat Bills Must Be Paid as feature-complete for now. Any new content, when it comes, is free for everyone who owns the game.

Reporting Bugs That Aren't Here

Use the Steam discussions. The two-person team's launch-window response rate is hours, not days, and they've already shipped guidance straight from player threads. Include your graphics preset and platform.