v1.0.0-alpha.19 steps back from the combat push of the last few releases and widens the world a little. The headline is fishing — a whole new way to spend time by the water, with a collection almanac to fill — and around it, crafting grew up (catalysts, byproducts, and real fuel), terrain can now hurt you, and a long list of fixes lands for some things that had been quietly rough: falling through the world on spawn, getting stuck after respawning, and moving in water.

Existing worlds and saves carry over as-is. There’s a modder-facing config rename and a couple of worldgen additions detailed below, but nothing that disturbs your existing worlds.

Gone fishing

Fishing is in. Craft a rod, cast at any water, and wait for a bite:

• You don’t have to stare at it. When the bobber dips it makes a sound, so you can watch the horizon (or your base) and strike on the cue.
• Rare fish fight back. Common catches come straight in on the strike; rarer and legendary ones pull on the line for a few tense moments first before you land them.
• It’s not all fish. Junk turns up, and every so often a bit of treasure comes up with your catch.
• The waters are moddable. Which species live in which water is fully configurable, so a mod can stock its own ponds, oceans, and cave pools with its own catches.

And there’s something to complete: press J to open the almanac, a collection log of every fish grouped by the water it comes from. It tracks your biggest catch of each species and which ones you’ve reeled in shiny, and it lists the ones you haven’t found yet — so there’s always a reason to try one more cast. Every player fills their own book.

Crafting grows up

Recipes can express a lot more than “spend these, get that”:

• Catalysts. An ingredient marked as not consumed must be present to craft but isn’t used up — molds, blueprints, or a required tool that stays in your pack afterward.
• Byproducts. A recipe can now produce several outputs at once, so smelting a bar can also leave slag. It’s all-or-nothing: the craft only runs if there’s room for everything it makes.
• A real fuel system. Smelting now burns fuel. Items can carry a fuel value and grade, and a recipe can demand an amount of it — spent from your cheapest fuel first. Coal and the iron-bar recipe moved onto it, still one coal per bar, but now it’s a system a mod can build a whole tech tree around.

A more dangerous world

• Terrain that hurts. Blocks can now deal contact damage, so lava, spikes, and thorns actually wound anything standing in them — typed damage that armor reduces, like any other hit.
• Water underground. Fluid pools now generate as intended in caves and the overworld both (a bug had been quietly preventing them everywhere), and different fluids can pool at different depths — so caves feel less uniformly dry.

Servers can charge now

The rules for player-hosted servers loosened. The updated policy explicitly lets operators take donations, charge for access, and sell in-server perks — including pay-to-win and paid loot crates — as long as every player owns the game, nobody resells the game or its content, and operators run their own payments and follow the laws that apply to them (gambling disclosure, and child-protection rules if minors play). It’s written up in the new server hosting and monetization policy.

A big pile of fixes

A lot of rough edges got filed down this release:

• No more falling through the world. Spawning no longer drops you through terrain that hadn’t finished loading and wedges you inside blocks — and a player who does end up embedded is lifted free instead of suffocating.
• Respawning gives control back. Dying far from your spawn — in a hazard, say — could leave you frozen in place afterward. Fixed.
• Moving in water works at any frame rate. At high frame rates you could be unable to swim out of a fluid, or sink uncontrollably to the bottom; movement is frame-rate-independent now and settles at a gentle sink speed.
• World loading is stable again. A crash that could abort creating or loading a world is fixed, along with a rare streaming glitch that could leave a permanent hole in the world during fast exploration.
• Shots reach the cursor. Fast arrows and thrown weapons — and fully charged shots — were being silently slowed, throwing off their aim and range; they fly at their real speed now.
• Some sounds you couldn’t hear. A handful of shipped sounds (a chest opening, a couple of creatures) had been mixed almost to silence by mistake and are audible again.
• Smoother exploration. Biome and weather changes no longer hitch while their backdrop loads, and moving through the world stutters less.

For modders

• Deeper recipes, split across files. The catalyst, byproduct, and fuel options above are all config; a mod’s crafting recipes can also now be split across multiple files that load in order.
• Breakable prop objects. A new fixed, damageable “prop” creature never falls or wanders — the building block for boss fights gated behind lanterns, cores, or nodes you have to destroy.
• Clearer diagnostics. A runtime error in a mod’s script now names the actual file and line instead of an opaque key, and a mismatched config path warns instead of silently loading a default.
• Friendlier configs. A static single-frame texture now needs only its name (dimensions and the frame list are inferred), and a chat window’s position, width, and message count are configurable. Note one rename: the world-builder pools: block is now fluid-bodies: and takes a depth bound — old presets need the new name.

What’s next

alpha.19 is a broadening release — a relaxed pastime in fishing, crafting with real depth behind it, a world that bites back, and a batch of long-standing rough spots finally smoothed. With the moment-to-moment game feeling more complete, the set-piece content it all supports is still what’s ahead. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.