v1.0.0-alpha.21 is about things that happen over time. The headline is a status-effect system — timed buffs and debuffs that heal you, poison you, or change how hard you get hit — and the consumable item type underneath it, which is the foundation potions, food, and draughts all get built on. Beside it are two granted combat verbs, the Wither and the Kindling, and the decay and radiant damage types they bring with them. The world gets softer around the edges too: knee-high grass and plants now scatter across the map, sway in the wind, and part as you walk through them. And the game finally has a face — a real application icon everywhere Windows and macOS show one.

One thing to know before you patch: the player-movement packet format changed, so multiplayer now requires the client and the server to be on the same build. Update both together. Existing worlds and saves are unaffected.

Status effects

Entities can now carry timed effects that tick and expire on their own:

• Over time, good and bad. An effect can heal or damage whatever’s carrying it for as long as it lasts — regeneration, poison, burning, and everything in that family.
• Tougher or softer. An effect can also change how much damage you take while it’s up, so a defensive draught and a vulnerability curse are the same mechanism pointed in opposite directions.
• Re-applying refreshes, it doesn’t stack. Drinking a second potion of the same thing resets the clock rather than doubling the effect, which keeps the math honest.
• You can see what’s on you. Active buffs and debuffs list in the top-left with a live countdown, so a debuff you’re waiting out is something you can actually watch.

Consumables

The delivery mechanism is a new consumable item type: using one applies its effects to whoever drank or ate it and spends it from the stack. Consumables can carry a use cooldown, so holding the use button doesn’t dump your whole stack of potions in a second. That single item type is what potions, food, and draughts are all made of now.

Two new strikes

Two granted active abilities join the kit, each gated on a capability and bound to a key:

• The Wither — a decay strike that sweeps an arc in front of you.
• The Kindling — a radiant strike that damages what it hits and heals you, so it’s an offensive move that’s also your way back up.

Both introduce a damage type of their own, decay and radiant, and each gets its own armor-resistance channel — so resisting rot and resisting light are separate problems, the way fire and blast already were.

A world that moves

• Interactive flora. Knee-high grass and plants scatter across the world, sway in the wind, and part as you walk through them. They’re non-collidable, so you pass straight through, and you can clear them by hand. In a storm they thrash harder.
• Wind is a real value now. Weather can declare a base wind and a gust strength, and that feeds a wind scalar the renderer can read — which is what the grass is reacting to, and the groundwork for anything else wind-reactive.

The game has a face

The old smiley-face placeholder is gone. There’s a proper “sundered world” mark now — growth taking hold on one half, decay crumbling the other — and it shows up everywhere it should: the Windows taskbar and Alt+Tab switcher, baked into the .exe so File Explorer and pinned shortcuts use it, and on macOS the Dock, via a real Creation.app bundle that can now be built. It’s still placeholder art pending an artist, but the plumbing to show a game icon is done, and swapping the image later is the easy part.

Backdrops and weather, cleaned up

A cluster of rendering bugs that had been quietly making the world look worse than it is:

• Seams are gone. The thin lines where tiled copies of a biome background met — a vertical one that surfaced at certain positions as you walked, plus horizontal ones during snowfall — no longer show.
• Parallax actually works. Backdrops and weather were scrolling at roughly a sixteenth of their configured parallax speed, which is why distant backgrounds barely seemed to move. Forests drift properly as you travel now, and snow blows past at the speed it was always meant to.
• Art that doesn’t tile doesn’t have to. Biomes whose backdrop art has no clean repeat no longer show a hard vertical break where copies meet.

More fixes

• Falling into the ground on spawn. On slower machines or at low frame rates, loading into a world could still drop you through terrain that hadn’t finished streaming. The client simulation is time-bounded now, and a player who ends up embedded shortly after loading gets lifted free.
• Attacks that swung the wrong way. The server could track the wrong facing for a player, so melee attacks and other direction-based actions resolved backwards — most noticeable while facing left.
• Scripted items showing up late. An item handed straight to a player, like a scripted starting kit, appeared immediately instead of waiting for your next inventory action.

For modders

• Status effects and consumables are config plus script. Define effects in a status-effect-config file, then grant or strip them from Lua with entity:apply_effect and entity:clear_effect; a consumable declares its effects and cooldown in consumable-info. The Wither and the Kindling tune from a combat-verbs block in the player config.
• A new plant-config catalog for flora, with a reusable flora_sway shader you can point your own plants at.
• A shared shader contract. World-domain shaders — mod shaders included — can now read a frame clock, the player’s world position, and the wind scalar. That’s three things that previously had no supported way in.
• Spawn static objects from Lua at runtime with spawn_static_object_at(name, location) — trees and plants placed on demand.
• Force the weather anywhere. The new /weather command and the set_weather_at Lua global override a region’s biome-driven weather, for a set duration or until you change it back. Snow in a desert, if you want it.
• mirror-tiling for your own backdrop art, if it doesn’t tile cleanly.

What’s next

alpha.21 fills in a layer the game had been working around: effects that persist, a way to hand them to a player, and two abilities that use the new damage channels. Add grass that reacts to you and a world that finally scrolls at the right speed, and it’s a release you feel more than you read about. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.