v1.0.0-alpha.11 is a large hardening release. The bulk of the work is closing multiplayer exploits and crashes, making Steam networking more reliable, and shutting a batch of long-session memory leaks — with a good helping of worldgen and content fixes, some smarter mob behavior, stacking slabs, and a round of crafting and loot-table improvements for modders on top.

Existing worlds and saves carry over as-is. There’s a breaking format change for crafting configs (detailed below), but since the game is still pre-mods there’s no known impact. One worldgen fix does change generation for a given seed: an internal double-load of biomes was removed, so newly generated terrain will look slightly different.

A big anti-cheat pass

A cluster of multiplayer exploits — the kind a modified client could use against a server — are now closed:

• Invalid-input cheats rejected. A modified client could send “NaN” numbers to the server to act on blocks at the world origin from anywhere on the map, land an instant-kill hit that ignored health and invincibility frames, or negate all fall damage. The server now rejects these invalid values and computes fall damage from the player’s actual movement instead of trusting the client.
• No more block-trapping. A modified client could place solid blocks directly on top of another player or mob to trap them. The server now refuses to place a solid block where an entity is standing.
• No free-item crafting. An empty-ingredient recipe used to be a free-item exploit; recipes are now validated at load and rejected if they have no ingredients, a zero amount, or an unknown item.
• No self-damage from your own shots. Projectiles no longer damage the player or mob that fired them — a steep-downward or backward shot passes cleanly through its launcher. And no-clip operators (/noclip) no longer take fall damage passing through terrain, now enforced by the server rather than the client.

Steam multiplayer, made reliable

Several Steam networking issues that showed up under load or congestion are fixed:

• No more corrupt data from congestion. When the network was congested, a dropped piece of a large split message could be stitched back into a bad packet and corrupt world or entity data. Such messages are now cleanly discarded and re-requested.
• No more dropped updates under load. Reliable packets — entity spawns, inventory and chunk updates — could previously be silently dropped when a connection’s buffer filled. The transport now applies backpressure so they’re always delivered.
• Login races and leaks fixed. Rapid duplicate logins could leave an orphaned “ghost” player in the world, and a second login using another player’s Steam ID could disrupt that player’s sign-in — both are now rejected cleanly. Authentication sessions opened at login are also properly closed on logout, instead of accumulating and eventually interfering with reconnects.

Slabs stack now

Placing a slab into a cell that already holds a matching slab now fills it another division at a time — consuming one item each — until it becomes a full block. The placement preview already hinted at this; now it actually works.

Smarter mobs and better terrain

• Mobs handle slabs and ledges. Mobs used to get stuck walking across a run of slabs (their pathfinding treated a slab they were standing on as a wall) — they now walk along slab tops like any other floor. Simple mobs also jump over obstacles they can clear instead of walking up to a ledge and giving up.
• Content and worldgen corrections. Surface trees no longer spawn floating over caves or buried at the bottom of one — a spot where a cave breaks the surface simply gets no tree. Cave ore layout is more consistent (shallower caves yield coal, deeper caves also yield iron), the snow tundra has a snowy surface instead of green grass, the desert no longer shows gaps behind sand when you dig into a dune, and dirt/stone and snowy-grass/snow-pile borders now blend seamlessly on both sides. A cave type that grew grass hanging from its ceiling is fixed too.
• Crafting is exact. Crafting no longer occasionally consumes more materials than a recipe required when a single stack could satisfy more than one ingredient.

Modders: crafting and loot-table improvements

The config work this release centers on crafting and loot tables:

• Recipe overrides and custom stations. Crafting recipes can now declare an id so other mods (or later files) can override them — handy for rebalancing base-game recipes — or delete them via a top-level remove-recipes list. crafting-type is now an open tag, so you can define custom station categories (anvil, loom, …) instead of only Crafting/Smelting. Ingredients and results can be written as a bare item name (- Creation:DIRT) when the amount is 1, instead of the full {name, amount} map.

  Breaking: this changed the crafting recipe format (recipe ids, open crafting-type tags, bare-name shorthand). Since the game is pre-mods, there’s no known impact.

• Loot-table ergonomics. Entries now default weight to 1.0 and quantity to 1, and accept an amount shorthand for a fixed quantity — so a simple entry is just - item: NAME, matching drop tables. Loot tables can also declare a guaranteed list of drops always given on every fill (e.g. a quest key) on top of the random weighted rolls.

• Typos warn instead of failing silently. Misspelled field names in any texture config now log a warning at load (“Unknown field ’…’ — ignored”) instead of being silently dropped — so a mistyped projectile rotation offset that would leave an arrow unrotated, or a mistyped button hover-duration that would disable an animation, is now easy to spot. A healthbar missing its health-fill-layer (or having more than one) also warns instead of silently producing a bar that never depletes, and a structure spawn referencing a misspelled loot-table: name warns instead of silently spawning empty containers.

• Friendlier world-type config. The fall-damage sub-keys drop their redundant prefix (multiplier instead of fall-damage-multiplier), auto-save-interval-seconds replaces the wordier old name (both old names still work), a mistyped key or bad value now warns instead of being ignored, and light levels, counts, and durations are clamped to valid ranges.

Crash and leak fixes

A long list of crashes — many from malformed mod content or edge cases — are now handled gracefully instead of closing the game:

• Malformed content is skipped, not fatal. Mismatched light-mask or healthbar-texture sizes, a font missing standard metrics, a particle registered without a texture, an inverted particle offset range, an empty splash-text file, a save whose world-type mod is missing or renamed, and mod or font folders with non-UTF-8 names are all now skipped or fall back with a logged warning. A single corrupt font in a mod no longer stops the rest of that mod’s fonts from loading.
• Edge-case crashes fixed. Placing a block at the edge of the still-streaming world, clicking an inventory slot at the moment it changes, minimizing to a zero-size viewport, a .nan GUI-scale value, a missing or malformed config.yaml, and a world type with both day and night length set to 0 no longer crash the game. The structure editor also no longer crashes on a structure using a block from a mod you don’t have (the block becomes air) or a truncated file, and its inventory slot spacing no longer warps at non-default UI scales.
• Memory leaks closed. Per-entity healthbar GPU textures are now freed when an entity despawns, and several server/client leaks over long sessions are gone — player skin data and chat rate-limit timers left behind on every disconnect, an interact-cooldown table that grew with every block ever used, and a shelter-detection table that never shrank (which also fixes weather still treating you as “sheltered” after you dig away the roof above you).

Also fixed: default UI buttons now load on case-sensitive filesystems like Linux (two PNGs were named lowercase while the game looked them up uppercase), reduced-volume sounds no longer start with a brief full-volume pop, weather and ambient particles no longer occasionally spawn outside their intended area, and ambient particles in biomes with more than one particle group no longer interfere with each other.

What’s next

alpha.11 is a hardening release through and through — multiplayer exploits closed, Steam networking made reliable, a long list of crashes and leaks fixed — with stacking slabs, smarter mobs, cleaner terrain, and real crafting and loot-table improvements for modders alongside. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.