v1.0.0-alpha.24 is about keeping a record. The Fishing Almanac from a few releases back turned out to be the first chapter of something bigger: The Almanac is now a single collection book with room for everything the game will eventually ask you to find. It opens with Waters — your fishing log, unchanged — and adds Discoveries, which tracks the worlds you’ve been to and shares them with your party. On top of both sits a milestones system that turns collection progress into rewards, and Steam achievements now hang off it.

Two things before you patch. Client and server must be on the same build this time — the milestone message changed shape, so mismatched builds won’t agree on it. And on Forsaken, the pile of items you drop when you die now decays after a short while instead of waiting for you indefinitely.

The Almanac

What was the Fishing Almanac is now a chapter of a larger book:

• Waters is that fishing log, moved in as the first chapter. How records are earned and displayed hasn’t changed — your biggest catch of each species, which ones you’ve landed shiny, and the ones still missing.
• Discoveries is new, and it’s the first of the world-fact chapters: it tracks the worlds you’ve visited. In co-op it’s shared with your party, so a world one of you finds is on everyone’s page.

The structure is deliberate. Fishing, discoveries, and eventually a bestiary all belong in one book rather than three separate screens, and this release is where that book gets its spine.

Milestones

Hit a collection threshold — visit your first world, catch your first fish — and you earn a milestone, announced with a banner.

The important part is what they pay out: cosmetics, titles, and lore, never power. A milestone will never hand you a better weapon or a stat bump, so filling the Almanac stays something you do because you want to, not because the game punishes you for skipping it. Right now milestones are tracked and tallied — the reward effects arrive with the cosmetic and title systems they depend on.

Steam achievements now unlock from these milestones. The wiring is done on our side; the achievements themselves still have to be registered on Steam before they’ll actually fire, so don’t be alarmed when nothing pops yet.

Death piles decay on Forsaken

Dropping your inventory where you fell has been the deal on the harder difficulties since alpha.18. On Forsaken, that pile now expires after a short time — technically recoverable, realistically gone if you don’t hurry back. It makes the run back a real decision instead of an errand you can put off forever. Awakened’s pile is still permanent, so the difficulty below it hasn’t changed. Old saves with a pile already on the ground still load; Forsaken ones will now expire.

Small comforts

• Weapons idle with some variety. A held weapon or tool can pause before it settles and cycle through several idle animations, instead of snapping straight into one repeating loop the instant a swing ends.
• Weather underground. Cave biomes can carry their own ambient weather now — a creeping haze, a fall of spores — where before only surface biomes could. It’s the groundwork for caves that feel actively hostile rather than just dark.
• / opens chat ready to go. Pressing / in the world opens chat with the slash already typed, so a command is one key away.

Fixes

• Travelling between worlds no longer wipes your progress. Your fishing log, your milestones, and your coin balance were being cleared when you moved between worlds. Nothing was ever actually lost — the server had it all along, it just stopped being shown to you — but it looked exactly like losing everything, which is arguably worse.
• Flowing water is cheaper again. Water running through areas containing overlay blocks was doing a lot of redundant work for no visible benefit.

For modders

• Milestones are config. Almanac milestones are defined in their own config, with the thresholds and rewards spelled out per entry.
• Milestone ids are now protected. A mod could declare a milestone under another mod’s name, or claim an id some other milestone already held. The first let it hand out rewards — and achievements — it had no claim to; the second paid the same milestone twice. Both are refused at load time now.
• Weighted loot markers. A structure’s loot marker can weight its candidates instead of picking evenly between them — a chest spot that spawns a barrel 80% of the time and a crate the other 20%.
• Cave biome weather is available to cave biome configs the same way surface biomes have always had it.
• Breaking (protocol): the “milestone reached” message changed shape, so a client and server on different builds won’t agree on it.

What’s next

alpha.24 is a structural release wearing a friendly hat. The Almanac getting chapters, a milestone system underneath it, and achievements wired to that system all point the same direction: a game that remembers what you’ve done and finds ways to acknowledge it. The cosmetics and titles those milestones pay out are next, and the bestiary chapter is waiting for its turn. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming.