v1.0.0-alpha.5 is a big stability-and-durability update. The headline is that your world saves can now survive a crash or power loss mid-write — but there’s a lot more here: a batch of memory leaks that used to creep up during long exploration sessions, a fix for a crash that could hit while crafting, mount-death cleanup, and a brand-new full Lua API reference for modders. No world, save, or mod format changed, so existing worlds and mods carry over as-is.

Crash-safe world saves

This is the one that matters most. Previously, if the server crashed or lost power while it was writing a save, it could leave part of the world half-written — and in the worst case a damaged chunk would be regenerated from scratch, wiping out every build and edit it contained. An ill-timed shutdown could destroy exactly the data the save was trying to protect.

World saves are now crash-safe. A crash or power loss mid-save leaves your previous save fully intact instead of corrupting it — your chunks, entities, and player data are protected either way.

Memory leaks fixed for long sessions

If you’ve done a long exploration run, you may have noticed memory usage creeping up over time. The game now frees memory for chunks you’ve moved away from — both server RAM and client video memory — instead of holding onto everything you’ve ever visited. Nothing changes on screen; the game just stops slowly eating memory the longer you explore.

A full Lua API reference for modders

Modders, this one’s for you. Until now the only documentation was an overview and the chat-commands page — there was no reference for what the objects passed to your hooks could actually do. This release adds ten new documentation pages covering the full server and client scripting API: entities, world and block access, weather regions, NPC dialogue, sounds, and lights.

The pass also corrected a pile of stale details in the existing docs — wrong hook names, missing hook arguments, and methods that didn’t actually exist. If you’ve been modding by trial and error, the guesswork should be a lot smaller now. Start from the docs and look under Lua Modding.

Quality-of-life

• Chat history recall. The in-game chat box now recalls your previously-sent messages with the Up and Down arrow keys, the way a terminal does — handy for re-sending or editing a command without retyping it. (Scroll the chat log itself with PageUp/PageDown or the mouse wheel.)
• New /noclip [player] operator command. Toggles no-clip movement for yourself, or for another player by name.

Fixes you’ll feel while playing

• Crafting crash fixed. Grabbing the last stack of a material an available recipe needed — while a crafting menu was open — could crash the game. It no longer does.
• Mount cleanup. If your mount died while you were riding it, you’d be left stuck to a mount that no longer existed. Now you’re dismounted properly. Likewise, dying while mounted no longer leaves you attached to the mount on respawn — you come back on foot.
• Invisible walls from mods. Entities made non-collidable at runtime by a mod still blocked movement as invisible walls. Fixed.
• Animation fixes. Looping entity animations (like wielded-item idle loops) no longer freeze on their last frame; item drops no longer lose their identity when an animation finishes on them; and riders seated in a rider_hidden mount seat are now actually hidden.
• Save-loading fix. Loading a world containing a mount no longer fails with “Unknown entity type: 7”.
• Modding robustness. A broken on_create mod callback no longer stops an entity or object from appearing, and those callbacks now fire consistently for all entity and static-object types (trees and several others were previously skipped). Assigning a whole new lua_data table from a script now takes effect everywhere, instead of the replacement being invisible outside the script.

Security & multiplayer hardening

A few fixes for anyone hosting a server, all about making one harder to knock over or cheat against:

• Movement validation. The server now validates player movement, so a malicious client can’t corrupt other players’ physics or teleport and speed-hack across the world.
• Chunk-request limits. A flooded server can no longer be forced into runaway world generation by a client spamming requests for far-away chunks.
• Bad-packet hardening. The server no longer crashes when sent a malformed entity — it rejects the bad data instead.

What’s next

alpha.5 is a durability and stability release — safer saves, leaner memory, a sturdier server, and real documentation for modders. Thanks as always to everyone testing with us; the crafting crash and the mount-death fixes came straight out of playtest reports. Keep them coming.