v1.0.0-alpha.25 is about making a weapon yours. Three new craftable benches — reforge, socket, and salvage — let you re-tune what a weapon does, change what kind of damage it deals, and break down what you don’t want. Alongside them: the first groundwork for a divine caster, the opening move of a game-wide difficulty calibration, the game’s first genuinely tuned enemy in Nightmaw, and lava pooling in the deep caves.

Read this before you update

Old saves may not load. Both the player save format and the melee-weapon save format changed this release, which means an existing character won’t load, and neither will any save holding a melee weapon. This is the disruptive kind of alpha update — if you have a world or a character you care about, back up your save directory before patching, and expect to start fresh.

Worlds themselves survive, with one caveat: lava only appears in terrain generated from now on. The deep caves you’ve already explored keep the shape they had.

Reforge, socket, salvage

Three benches, each doing one job. Drop a weapon in and work it through the station’s panel; every enhancement is per-weapon and sticks with it through saves and trades.

• Reforge re-tunes a weapon’s stats along paired sliders — trade damage for a slower swing, dial knockback up or down — and attaches a behavioral affix on top. It’s the “make this sword fit how I actually fight” bench.
• Socket slots infusion items into a weapon to change the damage type it deals, and pulls them back out again when you want them elsewhere. The fire and blast damage types from a few releases back are what those first infusions tap into.
• Salvage breaks an item down into materials, so the gear you’re not using is worth something.

To try it now: the iron short sword can be reforged, socketed, and salvaged, and fire and blast infusions are craftable. The benches are wearing placeholder art for the moment.

A caster, in pieces

The first parts of a divine caster are in. There’s a new per-player resource, Channel, which regenerates on its own — a meter appears on your HUD once you’re holding the right weapon — and a divine focus weapon that spends it.

A focus doesn’t fire ammo. It casts a projectile or drops an area zone at your cursor, either instantly or as a committed channel with a cast time that a hit will interrupt. That interrupt matters: a long cast is a real gamble in a fight, which is a different rhythm from a bow. This is groundwork rather than a finished class — the shape of the resource and the weapon is what’s landing here.

Numbers with room to move

The player now has 100 health instead of 10, holds their breath longer, and drowns at a steady, survivable pace. The health change is the important one: at 10 health there was nowhere to put a hit that should feel like a scratch, so everything landed hard. This is the first step of a game-wide difficulty pass, and the rest of the numbers get calibrated against this new scale.

Nightmaw

The night creature has a name — Nightmaw — and it’s the first enemy in the game tuned as an actual encounter rather than a placeholder. Bare-handed it takes around a dozen hits to put you down, and crafting your first armor visibly helps. That’s the loop the whole difficulty pass is aiming at: a threat you can survive if you’ve prepared, and that punishes you if you haven’t. Everything else gets tuned to this bar next.

Lava underground

Deep caves can flood with lava now — it glows from inside, flows sluggishly, and burns anything standing in it. Combined with the contact-damage terrain from alpha.19 and the armor correction in alpha.23, the deep is finally a place that can kill you for being careless. Placeholder art here too, and again: only newly generated terrain gets it.

Damage you can see landing

Poison, rot, and burn used to drain your health silently. They now land in visible once-per-second ticks, each with the hit flash and floating damage number every other hit gets. The total damage is unchanged — it just reads as something happening to you instead of a bar quietly sliding down.

Fixes

Small this time: wooden platforms render with their texture instead of appearing untextured, and the Home Mirror has a proper inventory icon.

For modders and server operators

• Affixes can actually do things. A weapon affix can carry real behavioral effects — widen a swing, dash toward the cursor on use, apply a bleed or rot on hit, grant a restorative ward, or run a custom Lua hook. Author them in affix-config.yaml; they attach at a reforge station.
• Sound overrides. A sound entry can carry an override: field to replace another mod’s audio — or the base game’s — with your own file, matching the texture override that already existed.
• /pvp gates melee only. Worth knowing if you run a server: the /pvp <on|off> operator command only controls melee damage between players. Projectiles, thrown flasks, hazard zones, and granted combat verbs damage other players either way, and the setting resets when the server restarts. Nothing about the behaviour changed this release — it’s now documented, and it’s pending a design decision.

What’s next

alpha.25 starts turning gear into a system you engage with rather than a ladder you climb: a weapon you’ve reforged and socketed is one you chose the shape of. The difficulty calibration underneath it is the bigger project — Nightmaw is the first enemy tuned to the new scale, and the rest of the game follows. The caster class the Channel resource is for comes after that. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming — and back up your saves this time.