v1.0.0-alpha.4 is a fixes-and-polish update. There’s one new bit for content creators — animated projectiles in flight — but the meat of this one is squashing bugs you’d actually run into while playing, plus some quiet hardening on the multiplayer side. Here’s what changed.

Projectiles can animate in flight

Projectiles used to hold a single static frame from the moment they were fired. Now they can play a looping animation for their whole flight — spinning arrows, flickering fireballs, pulsing bolts.

It’s a new optional flight-animation field in a projectile’s texture config, pointing at one of the projectile’s animation variations. The animation runs entirely on each player’s own machine, so it costs nothing on the network and works even for players who come into range after the shot was fired.

The shipped WOODEN ARROW is still single-frame, so using this needs multi-frame projectile art — but the door is open. See the updated Projectile Texture Configuration docs for the details.

Fixes you’ll feel while playing

Item duplication on pickup is fixed. If you tried to pick up a stack from the ground when your inventory only had partial room, the leftovers could get duplicated — you’d end up with more items than you started with. That’s fixed: the remainder now stays on the ground with the correct, reduced count.

Big pickups no longer overstuff a slot. Picking up more of an item than a single stack can hold used to cram the whole amount into one inventory slot, past its normal max stack size. Pickups now split across empty slots the way they should.

Projectiles no longer freeze on fast machines. On computers running above ~100 fps, fired arrows and bolts could hang in place at the spawn point instead of flying — a frame-rate-dependent bug in the client’s movement stepping. Projectiles now fly correctly no matter your frame rate.

Stability

• Mod-load hangs are gone. If a mod depended on another mod that failed to load, the client could freeze on the loading screen. Now the unsatisfiable mod is skipped and the problem is logged, instead of hanging the game.
• Server-triggered animations behave. An entity animation triggered by the server no longer loops forever in cases where that entity had previously played a looping animation.

Multiplayer hardening

On the networking side, we hardened the Steam multiplayer transport against a malicious peer sending oversized or endlessly fragmented packets — a pattern that could previously exhaust a server’s memory. Connections that do this are now dropped. Nothing changes for normal play; this is about making a hosted server harder to knock over.

What’s next

alpha.4 is a stability release — fewer ways to lose items, fewer ways to hang, and a sturdier server, with a little new expressiveness for projectiles on top. More of the same steady tightening is coming, alongside new content and modding tools.

If you’re testing with us: thank you, and keep the reports coming — the item-dupe and high-frame-rate projectile fixes both came straight out of playtesting.