v1.0.0-alpha.17 is a stabilization-and-polish release with one marquee new feature: weapons you draw and hold, starting with the bow. Around it is a wide sweep of fixes — creatures that now actually swing at you, a sky-world void floor, and a long list of multiplayer and stability repairs that make the game hold together more reliably in co-op and over long sessions.

Existing worlds and saves carry over as-is — no reset this time.

Bows you draw and hold

Weapons can now charge. A bow (or any launcher that opts in) draws while you hold the primary-use button and looses when you let go, with the shot’s speed and damage scaling to how long you held it — up to a full draw, and never below a minimum. The draw is visible to other players, so an incoming full-power shot is something an opponent can read and react to, in keeping with the readable-combat work from the last release. And a launcher can be marked interruptible, so getting hit mid-draw cancels the shot — drawing a bow becomes a commitment, not a free action.

Creatures that actually fight

• Two of the game’s creatures now perform their melee swing. Both had an attack configured but nothing ever triggered it, so they’d close in and simply never hit you. They connect now.
• Empty-handed attacks can use a creature’s own body animation. A mob with no weapon can now play its own attack animation — a lunge or a slash — instead of an invisible held-item swing, so an unarmed attack actually reads as one.

A floor to the void

A world type can now define a void floor — a depth below which anything falls to its death instantly. It’s a true void death: it ignores armor, the minimum-damage floor, and invulnerability frames, so a sky world can make falling off its islands a genuine hazard instead of an endless, harmless drop. It’s off by default, and operators in noclip are exempt.

Multiplayer and stability

A large batch of repairs to how the game behaves under real network conditions and over long sessions:

• Lost connections end cleanly. Dropping your connection to a server now returns you to the disconnect screen right away, instead of leaving the game running against a dead link for 30 seconds — or, if the connection failed before any data arrived, hanging indefinitely with no way out.
• Chat can’t be flooded. The server’s chat rate limit could be bypassed by sending a rapid burst of messages, letting one client spam chat for everyone. The limit is now enforced with no gap to slip through.
• Starting a new world no longer crashes. Creating a world could occasionally crash partway through loading, before the world even appeared, when enough of it was generating at once. Fixed.
• Inventory icons stay correct. When the set of items changed between saves — a mod adding or removing content — inventory icons and tooltips could start showing the wrong item. Visuals and lookups now stay tied to the right item as content changes.
• Cleaner hosting. A server that opens a router port to host now removes that forward when it shuts down instead of leaving a stale mapping behind, plus a handful of smaller networking and shutdown fixes.

For modders

• A dependency check that understands versions. A mod that requires another mod now accepts any equal-or-newer compatible version instead of demanding an exact version-string match, so 1.0 versus 1.0.0 — and newer releases of a dependency — no longer fail for no reason.
• Controls from different mods coexist. When two mods (or the base game and a mod) define controls under the same category name, the earlier one’s key bindings no longer vanish from the rebind menu.
• More math in config formulas. Particle, terrain, and wielded-item expressions gained abs, floor, ceil, sqrt, min, and max on top of the existing set.
• Safer, more forgiving config. Mod file paths (script hooks, sounds, shaders) can no longer point outside the mod’s own folder, and a config that writes a bare number where text is expected no longer fails the whole section. Server scripts also gained a give_item call for handing an item directly to a player.

What’s next

alpha.17 is a settling release — a big new weapon feel in charge-and-hold bows, creatures that fight the way they were meant to, and a lot of quiet work making multiplayer and long sessions dependable. With the combat toolkit steadying, the set-piece bosses it was all built toward are what’s next on the bench. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.