v1.0.0-alpha.14 is a big one. Three new pillars land at once — travel between separate worlds, sealed areas that only open for the right key or ability, and combat that finally hits with weight — the boss toolkit keeps filling in, and underneath it all is the largest single pass yet over the mod config format. There’s also a satisfying pile of fixes for things that had quietly been broken, including the village and a couple of invisible menu buttons.

Existing worlds and saves carry over as-is. There are a lot of breaking changes to config keys this release (all detailed in the changelog), but since the game is still pre-mods there’s no known impact.

Travel between worlds

Worlds are no longer one-way. A player can now move from one world to another mid-session — the game rebuilds itself for the destination behind a loading screen while keeping your inventory and connection intact. Arrive at the new world’s spawn, or at exact coordinates you choose. This is the groundwork for portals, dungeon entrances, and separate cave or sky realms that generate with their own rules rather than as more of the same world. Operators can hop between worlds directly with a new /world command, and cross-world /teleport and a /kill command landed alongside it.

Sealed doors and gated areas

A block can now be a locked door — one that only opens for a player who has the right ability or item. Interact with it while you qualify and it opens permanently, for everyone; approach it without the key and it tells you what you’re missing. Some barriers open the moment a qualifying player reaches them, so a whole sealed wall can fall away at once the instant you earn the ability that unlocks it.

Paired with world travel, this is the foundation for progression-gated, Metroidvania-style worlds: abilities you unlock from a boss or an item become persistent, follow you between worlds, and open the paths that were closed before.

Combat that hits with weight

Fights have more physicality now:

• Knockback. Weapons and projectiles can shove what they hit — a melee swing knocks the target away from you, a projectile drives it along the shot’s path. Hits land with follow-through instead of just subtracting a number.
• Deflected hits read as deflected. Striking an armored or invulnerable target now plays a metallic “clang” and a spark burst, so a shrugged-off blow clearly reads as blocked rather than a miss you’ll second-guess.
• Bosses can move you around. The set-piece toolkit gained forced movement — updrafts and wind currents that carry you, suction that pulls you in, and grabs that hold you in place until you struggle free. Together with the segmented bodies and burrowing from last release, the big fights now have most of the moves their designs call for.

Modders: the biggest config pass yet

The consistency-and-strictness work that’s run through the last several releases had its largest single installment here — dozens of changes, with the same two goals as always: one name and shape for each idea across every file, and mistakes that announce themselves at load instead of failing in silence. The highlights:

• A block declares its own item. Just defining a block now makes it obtainable and placeable — no more writing a matching stub item for every block. You only add an item entry to give it a display name, tooltip, or other extras.
• Real climate for biomes. A biome’s temperature and rainfall are now actual units on a fixed scale (°C and mm) instead of a value that only meant “where this biome sits relative to the others” — so adding one biome no longer silently reshuffles all the rest. Biomes also now declare their own type (surface, cave, or sky-island).
• Structure groups say what they mean. A group of structure pieces is now written as either one-of: (pick exactly one, by weight) or any-of: (roll each independently), so the file tells you whether a slot yields one thing or several — instead of one ambiguous key that behaved two opposite ways.
• The worst silent failure is gone. A one-letter typo in a block’s required tool used to quietly turn a pickaxe-only block into one breakable by hand — looking exactly like you’d intended. An unknown tool category is now a load-time error that names the value. Tool categories are also an open registry now: a mod can invent its own.
• Materials can be plural. An item can be several material tags at once, so it satisfies any recipe that wants one of them. And a drop table can point at a shared loot table by name instead of re-listing its contents.
• A great many renames for parallelism — recipes keyed by name, tree/structure sizing and spacing as {x, y} maps, particle offset ranges as min/max, world-Y consistently altitude, health/oxygen blocks that read alike, and more. A handful drop the old spelling entirely, so modders updating configs should read the changelog’s rename list.

Typos keep running out of places to hide

The “a mistake tells you instead of vanishing” guarantee reached nearly every remaining corner: structure placements, world-generation presets, control bindings, weather hooks, and the inline item references buried in drop tables and recipes all now reject an unknown or misspelled key with a named error. A control binding pointing at a key name that doesn’t exist — or pairing a keyboard key with a mouse trigger — is caught at load instead of registering a binding that can never fire. And the modding docs got a large accuracy sweep to match, including a new Shared Blocks reference page for the nested pieces (hitbox, light, drop-table, scripts, particles) that show up identically across many configs.

A batch of fixes you’ll notice

• The village has houses again. A change to how structure chains roll had left the shipped village config meaning something it no longer did, so it usually generated as a lone stretch of road with no buildings. Fixed.
• Two invisible menu buttons. The pause menu’s Disconnect and Quit Game buttons were rendering as nothing — a texture-lookup mismatch that deleted the button outright instead of falling back to a default. They’re back.
• Doors and chests animate. The door and chest never changed appearance when opened — their scripts and textures referred to the same states by slightly different names, which silently matched nothing. A door also drew open while actually shut. All fixed, and an unresolved animation name now warns instead of doing nothing quietly.
• Blank icons and missing recipes. Items that blocks and interactables create automatically — the crafting bench, furnace, chest, door, bed, and more — were being set up too late, so they drew as blank in the inventory, a dozen recipes silently vanished, and several blocks dropped nothing when mined. All now resolve regardless of load order.

What’s next

alpha.14 widens the game in three directions at once — worlds you can travel between, areas you unlock rather than just walk into, and combat with real impact — while the boss toolkit and the long config cleanup both near completion. Portals, gated progression, and set-piece bosses are the threads we’ll be pulling on next. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.