v1.0.0-alpha.26 is a release for the people running the game rather than just playing it. The headline is a dedicated headless server — a standalone binary you can leave running on a box somewhere, no GPU and no window required. Around it: a day/night overhaul that makes a configured day actually last that long, friendly fire off by default and finally covering every way one player can hurt another, and a fix for Condemned so one player’s death no longer ends the world for everybody.

Read this before you update

Several save formats changed, so some old saves won’t load:

• Worlds saved before this release fail to load — the time of day is now stored with the world, and older saves don’t have it.
• A creature you tamed before this release stays tamed and rideable, but its owner is no longer recorded. Re-tame it if you want a teammate’s area attacks to spare it.
• Display names are now unique per server. A login is refused if someone is already using that name, case-insensitively.

Back up your save directory before patching.

A server you can leave running

creation_server is a standalone binary that hosts a save on a plain Linux or Windows machine — no graphics card, no window, nothing to keep logged in. It’s the same server the game runs when you host in-game, so there’s no second implementation to diverge:

creation_server --save <name> [--port <n>] [--profile <name>] [--upnp]

Ctrl-C saves and exits cleanly. On Linux, drop libsteam_api.so next to the binary — the same arrangement steam_api64.dll already has on Windows. The server configuration docs cover the rest.

This is what a persistent community server has been waiting on: a world that keeps running when nobody’s at the keyboard.

Days that last as long as you set them

The day/night cycle got a real pass:

• Configured lengths are honoured. A world type’s day and night lengths were being reshaped by a fixed internal ratio, so what you set is not what you got. They’re taken at face value now — the base game’s day is 12 minutes, its night 8.
• The sky agrees with the clock. Daylight and darkness now line up with the actual hours, which means night monsters no longer spawn in broad daylight, or hold off while it’s already dark.
• The time of day is saved. Reloading a world — or restarting a dedicated server — resumes where the clock was, instead of dumping you into midnight on every launch. New worlds begin in the morning.

Friendly fire is off, and this time it means it

Last release’s post noted that /pvp off only ever gated melee damage, and that arrows, thrown flasks, hazard zones, and combat verbs went through regardless. That’s resolved.

Friendly fire is now off by default, and turning PvP off stops teammates hurting each other across every damage source — melee, projectiles, thrown flasks and other area effects, granted combat verbs, and mod scripts. It protects tamed creatures as well as players, so your friend’s area attack won’t kill your mount. Ambient hazards are deliberately excluded: lava and rot gas still hurt everyone, because the world isn’t on anybody’s team.

It’s a per-server setting now (pvp: friendly-fire:), so a co-op host no longer has to remember to re-issue /pvp off after every restart.

Condemned no longer ends everyone’s run

The permadeath rules from alpha.23 had a flaw in multiplayer: one player dying ended the world for the entire group. Now a death eliminates that player — permanently, they can’t rejoin — and the world continues for whoever is still standing. The save only ends once every player who has set foot in it is gone. Singleplayer works exactly as before.

Accounts and moderation

A cluster of fixes around who the server thinks you are:

• Moderation commands act on the right account. /whisper, /mute, /ban, /kick, /teleport, and the client’s /ignore now resolve the verified player ID ahead of the display name — which closes a way whispers could be intercepted and stops a moderation command landing on the wrong person. A <player> argument matching more than one player now fails and names the candidates instead of picking whichever it found first.
• Offline servers stay offline. Hosting or joining an offline server over a plain connection — join-by-IP, or a non-Steam host — no longer quietly attaches your identity to whatever Steam account happens to be running. Your local player-id and display-name are used, which is what offline auth was always meant to do. Genuine Steam sessions are unaffected.
• A bad login fails fast. An over-long player ID or display name is rejected with a clear message instead of leaving the client hanging until it times out.

Smaller things

• /seed shows the current world’s seed. Worth knowing: a seed reproduces a world only at the same game version and mod set — a new seed is always a new world, but an old seed isn’t always the old world.
• An unrecognised difficulty is no longer dangerous. A save whose difficulty the game didn’t understand was silently loading at a harsher tier — double incoming damage, doubled oxygen drain, a decaying death pile. It falls back to the default tier now and logs what it couldn’t read.
• “Worlds visited” counts your own feet. The Almanac milestone was crediting you for worlds anyone in your party had seen, so joining a friend’s world marked you down for places you’d never been.
• One busy world no longer stalls the others. On a server hosting several worlds, scripting everywhere else used to stall while one busy world caught up.

For modders

World types can set their own day and night light colors (sun-light-color / moon-light-color), so a modded dimension can run a warm sun or a red-tinged night instead of the default white day and dim-blue night.

What’s next

alpha.26 is infrastructure with a view: a server that stays up, a clock that behaves, and co-op rules that don’t punish you for playing with other people. Between the headless binary and friendly fire finally covering everything, running a community server is a much more reasonable proposition than it was a week ago. Thanks as always to everyone playtesting with us; keep the reports coming — and back up your saves before this one.