v1.0.0-alpha.22 has no headline feature, and that’s deliberate. After several releases of piling new systems on — fishing, status effects, projectile kits, combat verbs — this one goes back and fixes what was underneath them. It’s the largest bug-fix and hardening pass since the alpha began, and it’s paired with a performance sweep on both the server and the client. Players stop dying on spawn, multiplayer stops rubber-banding, things stop vanishing out of your inventory, taming works for the first time ever, and a set of ways a hosted server could be knocked over or duped are closed.

Two things to know before you upgrade, both about mounts. The mount save format changed, so mounts in existing world saves won’t load. And separately, mobs already saved in a world stay untameable and won’t pick up edits to their mount config — only mobs that spawn after you upgrade get the fix. Everything else in your worlds carries over.

You can spawn into a world without dying now

This was the worst cluster, and it’s gone:

• No more dying the instant you arrive — to suffocation or a phantom fall that the game thought you’d taken.
• No more sinking through solid blocks. Players slowly settling through the floor is fixed, which also fixes standing on slabs and other half-height surfaces.
• No damage while you’re still loading. Drowning, suffocation, and contact damage no longer land on you before the world has finished appearing and you can react.
• Respawning doesn’t hurt. The trip to your spawn point was registering as a fall and charging you for it.
• Logging back into a changed world is safe. If the terrain moved under you while you were away, you no longer land in a hole or wake up sealed inside new blocks — where you left off gets checked against the world as it is now. Players on platforms, riding a mount, or mid-hop are left exactly where they were.

Multiplayer that stays in sync

• Rubber-banding and freezing, fixed. Remote players and mobs could stutter, snap back, or lock in place — and it was never limited to one of them at a time, so a busy scene could go still all at once.
• Reconnecting after a crash gives you back the right character. Position and inventory were rolling back to the last save while equipment and unlocks didn’t, leaving you as a mix of two moments in time.
• Fewer disconnects while the world loads in. Rare drops during heavy exploration, when a lot of new world was arriving at once, are fixed.

Things that stop disappearing

• The item on your cursor is safe. An item picked up but not yet placed was silently deleted if you disconnected, the server shut down, or the world autosaved while you were holding it. It goes back to your inventory now.
• Block edits at the edge of loading. Changes made right as that part of the world unloaded behind you were lost on the next visit.
• Mobs keep their configuration. Mobs loaded from a save were losing their pathing, hit area, and mount data — most visibly, a boss that survived a restart lost its post-hit invulnerability window and could be melted.
• Terrain very far out. Building beyond roughly 16.7 million blocks from the origin, in the negative direction, was quietly corrupting the terrain out there.
• Structures aren’t saved half-built. A momentary hiccup while a building generated could leave it permanently saved with a slice missing.

Combat corrections

• Ranged attacks are credited to whoever fired them. This one had wide effects: mobs can now aggro and retaliate against an archer, parrying a projectile works, and rapid shots at the same target respect the post-hit invulnerability window the way melee always did.
• Status effects work on mounts. A poison or heal-over-time applied to a mount did nothing at all — it just sat on the HUD forever. Now it runs its course and expires, and a damage-taken debuff actually applies.

Taming works

Feeding a tameable mob its food item did nothing whatsoever — the feature had never worked since it went in. It works now. The catch, as above: mobs already sitting in your world save stay untameable, so you’ll need newly spawned ones.

Performance

• Server. Hosted servers hold up much better under load. A crowd of enemies all targeting you at the same moment no longer spikes the server, large flowing-fluid spills and worlds crowded with entities no longer cause the slowdowns they used to, and each additional connected player costs less than before.
• Client. Smoother frames when a lot of the world arrives or scrolls into view at once — fast travel, switching worlds, or moving fast through new terrain. Loading into a world and playing with the inventory open are both lighter, too.

Server hardening

For anyone hosting:

• Denial-of-service vectors closed. A client can no longer slip past the server’s rate limiting to flood it with requests, and a connection that stalls partway through being established is dropped instead of holding a slot indefinitely. Steam-hosted servers now enforce the same connection cap as directly hosted ones, and hosting no longer hangs at startup on certain routers.
• A config foot-gun. A negative interact-cooldown-ms was switching off the interact rate limit entirely; it’s clamped to zero now.
• Duplication and memory. Save loading is hardened against tampered save data that could be used to duplicate items, and a malicious or corrupt server can no longer exhaust a connecting client’s memory.

Rendering and UI

• Item names read like names. Cherry Log, not cherry_log — in inventory tooltips, in the fishing almanac (which uses each fish’s proper name now), and in catch messages.
• Roofs shelter what’s under them. Putting a solid roof over an open area now darkens the space beneath it and keeps weather out, instead of leaving it lit and rained on.
• Ambient particles behave. Particles drifting off trees and other scenery were pouring out far faster than intended, at a rate that shifted with your window size and zoom.
• An item that isn’t meant to glow no longer lights up in your own hand at night.
• Lighting stops flickering in areas lit by a lot of light sources at once.

Crashes, and a few odd ones

Two server crashes are fixed — breaking an interactable that has no matching item, and entering a world that had to be created on the spot (through a portal or on login) with a misconfigured preset or a save location it couldn’t write to. Both now reject the action cleanly and log it instead of taking the server down. And a crash at an unlucky moment can no longer leave a world that refuses to load afterwards.

Then the strange ones: mobs pathing into each other where two of them overlap; scripted and structure-placed spawns being blocked by loot lying on the ground or a projectile passing through; an entity vanishing right after you rejoined a world you’d quit to the menu from; and dropped items landing half a block off in negative coordinates compared to positive.

For modders

• Display names derive themselves. An item with no display-name now gets one from its identifier — mod prefix dropped, snake_case title-cased — so you only need the field when the derived name is wrong. Existing display-name values still win, exactly as written.
• Taming food takes a bare name. mount: → taming: → food-items: now qualifies an unqualified item to the declaring mod, matching drop-table and every other item-referencing config. Fully-qualified Mod:item names are unchanged.
• A missing projectile is a real error. An item whose projectile: names something that doesn’t exist now fails at load time and tells you which projectile, instead of quietly loading an item that fires a 1-damage stub.
• A lot of textures won’t black out your rendering. Mod content heavy on textures could silently break all entity, static-object, or animated-block rendering. More is allowed now where the hardware supports it, and anything still over the limit is dropped with a clear log instead of taking everything else down with it.
• Breaking: the mount save format changed — mounts in existing world saves will not load.

What’s next

alpha.22 is the release where the foundation gets shored up. None of it is exciting to read about, but spawning without dying, keeping the item on your cursor, and a server that doesn’t buckle under a crowd of enemies are the things everything else is built on — and several of these had been quietly wrong for a long time. With the base solid, the set-piece content is back at the front of the queue. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; a lot of this list came directly from your reports, so keep them coming.