v1.0.0-alpha.20 picks up the projectiles from a couple of releases back and gives them a whole kit — shots that pierce a line of enemies, launchers that fire a spread, throws that boomerang back to your hand, and arrows that can carry fire or blast instead of plain steel. Around that: a way home in your pocket, stalactites that fall on you, kelp forests, and updrafts and currents baked into the terrain. And the world itself picks a direction — worldgen now has a real depth axis, and danger is anchored to your spawn, so a world starts safe and turns hostile the further out and further down you go.

Two format changes to know about: a world saved on an older build with a projectile in mid-flight won’t load (a world at rest is fine), and the chunk-stream format changed. There’s also a mod-shader rename detailed below — the game is pre-mods, so in practice nothing out there is affected.

Projectiles grow a kit

Four things that each change what a ranged weapon can be, and all of them compose:

• Piercing. A shot can pass through and damage several enemies before it stops — a full-draw longbow shot punching down a corridor of foes. Blocks and static objects still stop it, so it’s not a wall-hack.
• Multishot. A launcher can throw several projectiles in a spread from one shot, on one piece of ammo. Stack it with pierce and a single trigger pull clears a lot of screen.
• Boomerangs. A projectile can fly out, curve back to whoever threw it, and get caught again — the thrown item comes back to your inventory — hitting enemies on the way out and the way back.
• Damage types. A projectile can deal fire or blast damage instead of physical, routing through the matching armor and resistance channel. A flaming arrow and a concussive slug are now different problems for the thing you’re shooting at.

A way home

A new reusable magic mirror channels for a moment and then teleports you to your home world’s spawn. Take a hit while it’s channeling and it breaks off — so it’s a genuine travel tool, not an escape hatch from a boss telegraph you misread.

The world gets more dangerous the further you go

Worldgen learned depth this release, and used it to shape difficulty:

• Depth is real now. A cave biome’s depth band maps to an actual normalized world depth instead of an approximation, so a biome named for the deep reliably generates deep.
• Ore rewards digging. Ore can be restricted to a depth band and grow richer the further down it sits.
• Danger is anchored to spawn. A world can guarantee a safe biome within a radius of where you start, and mobs can require a minimum distance from spawn or a minimum depth before they’ll appear. The practical effect: the ground around your first base stays survivable, and the world gets meaner the further out you travel and the deeper you dig.

Hazards, plants, and terrain that moves you

• Falling stalactites. A block can be a collapse hazard — it arms when you get close, telegraphs with a puff of dust, then drops and deals armor-mitigated impact damage to whatever’s underneath. Dripstone caves are the first use; the mechanism is general.
• Underwater plants. Foliage can root on the seabed of an ocean or lake and grow up through the water instead of only spawning on dry land, so kelp forests and their kin are possible.
• Permanent AoE zones in the terrain. An area effect can now be a fixed part of the world — an updraft column you ride up, a current that carries you along, a pocket where you can catch your breath. They never expire, they skip the telegraph, and worldgen can scatter them straight from the world seed, so they cost nothing in save data.

Fixes

• No more suffocating on your own platforms. Standing inside blocks you can walk through — wooden platforms, leaves, logs — was dealing suffocation damage. Moving around a base on platforms is safe again.
• World loading doesn’t freeze the window. Loading a world no longer locks the game up for seconds at a time; the loading screen keeps animating instead of the OS painting a “not responding” spinner over it.
• Stray clicks. Releasing the mouse anywhere counted as a click, so a press that started outside a button — or got interrupted by losing focus — could still press it.
• Untextured mob weapons now resolve their texture regardless of case, instead of rendering blank.
• Slab ghost-flash. Placing a slab briefly showed the wrong half; the preview now takes the same face from your cursor that the real block will.
• Faster world loading over the network. Chunk-stream packets are compressed above a size threshold — block data is repetitive and compresses well — and unpacked transparently on the client.
• Text fields do the rest of the shortcuts. Copy, cut, and select-all work now; only paste did before.

For modders

• Config presets. Block and item catalogs can declare a top-level presets: map and point entries at one with preset: NAME, so a repeated cluster of fields — a weapon tier’s shared wielded-item data, a block’s breaking triplet — is written once. Entry fields override the preset, nested blocks deep-merge, and presets can chain.
• Item tags. Items can carry global tags: the way blocks do, and a drop table can drop item: "#tag" to roll a random item from that category.
• The projectile kit is all config — pierce, shot-count / spread-degrees, return-to-owner, and damage-type — as are the new unstable-formation: collapse hazards, submerged: true foliage, and persistent: true AoE zones with an aoe-zone-bodies: preset block to place them.
• No more cross-mod global leaks. A script file that forgets a local no longer leaks that name into other mods; each hook runs in its own fallback environment.
• Breaking (shaders): the world-lighting occlusion buffer and its helper were renamed persistence / fetch_persistence → occlusion / fetch_occlusion, because the old name meant the opposite of what the buffer held. A custom world-domain shader that referenced them by name needs the new spelling; the binding index is unchanged.

What’s next

alpha.20 is a release about direction — outward and downward. Ranged combat has a real kit to build a weapon tier around, the world now knows how deep you are and turns that into difficulty, and there’s a mirror in your pocket for when you’ve gone too far. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.