v1.0.0-alpha.18 is the release where combat gets its weight. There’s a proper defensive kit now — a block and parry to stand next to the dodge from a few releases back — and a game-feel pass that makes every hit land: the hurt-flash is back, blows shake the screen and hitch time for an instant, and damage numbers float up off what you hit. Dying finally has stakes, you can throw weapons, and multi-part bosses can be dismantled a piece at a time. It’s a big combat release, and the point where the tools of the last several updates start to feel like a real action game.

Existing worlds and saves carry over as-is — with one narrow exception: a world saved on an older build with a projectile in mid-flight won’t load. A world at rest is fine.

A real defensive kit: block and parry

Every player can now block (hold B to raise a guard) — and the first moment of that guard is a parry. A hit caught in the parry window is negated completely and staggers the attacker, opening them up; keep holding past it and further hits are cut down rather than fully stopped. Together with the dodge, that gives two distinct answers to a telegraphed attack — roll through it, or stand and turn it back — so reading a wind-up is now a real decision with more than one right response. Like dodge, block is baseline for every player and fully tunable by mods.

Hits that land

A pass over combat feel, so that dealing and taking damage actually reads:

• The hurt-flash is back. Taking damage flashes red again — for the player, mobs, mounts, and their weapons. It had quietly stopped working on the current renderer, which meant the player had no damage feedback at all; now a hit is unmistakable.
• Blows have weight. Taking a hit gives a short screen shake and a brief slow-down — a hitch of impact — both scaling with how hard you were hit.
• Floating damage numbers rise and fade over what you strike, so you can see how much each blow did.
• Moves read in multiplayer. When another player dodges, double-jumps, or air-dashes, their character flashes a distinct color for that move — so you can tell a dodge from a stumble instead of watching them blink across the screen.

Every one of these can be scaled down or turned off for motion sensitivity — the screen shake, the hitstop, and the damage numbers each have their own toggle.

Death you can walk back to

Dying means something on the harder difficulties now. On the tougher settings, death drops your inventory as a recoverable pile where you fell — you respawn empty-handed and have to make the trip back to reclaim it, with all the tension that trip carries. The peaceful difficulty still costs you nothing.

Thrown weapons

A new thrown weapon type makes the held item its own ammo — throwing knives, javelins, and the like. Each use hurls one from the stack toward the cursor, and spent throws can be set to land as pickups you can gather back up.

Bosses you can take apart

The multi-part boss bodies from a few releases ago can now be dismantled piece by piece. A segment that runs out of health is severed — it’s removed, leaving a real gap in the worm or cluster — instead of just draining a shared health pool. A part can be set to grow back after a delay, or to stay gone for the rest of the fight, so a boss can lose a limb and either press on maimed or rebuild it while you scramble. Alongside it, the set-piece toolkit gained an oriented beam-shaped danger zone that can sweep across an arena at any angle, area effects that follow a target (a mark that chases you before it goes off), and a hook that lets a boss react the instant it’s struck — so hitting a weak point mid-wind-up can actually interrupt the attack.

Crafting and building

• Craft from several stations at once. The crafting menu now shows the recipes of every station within reach together — stand between a workbench and a furnace and both their recipe lists appear at once, instead of only the one you opened.
• Block tags. A block can carry tags like ore or soil, and anything that references a #tag matches every block that carries it — so “connect to any ore” or “spawn on any soil” is one entry instead of a list of every block by name. It’s a shared registry any mod can add to.
• Tool-tier gates, documented. A wall that needs a high-tier tool to mine is a hard seal no weaker tool can break through — a clean way to build progression locks that open only once you’ve earned the right tool. It’s existing behavior, now written down for modders building gated, Metroidvania-style worlds.

What’s next

alpha.18 is the release where combat stops being a placeholder and starts being the thing you play: a defensive kit to answer attacks, feedback that makes every hit read, stakes when you lose, and bosses that come apart under pressure. The set-piece fights all of this was built for are the next thing on the bench. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.