The game finally has a real name

Big news first: the game finally has a real name. It is called Steadfall. The old placeholder name is gone for good, and we have been scrubbing it out of the docs this week.

Laying the groundwork for character customization

This was the main focus this week, though to be clear, it is all planning and foundation so far, not the customization system itself yet. We mapped out how it will work: body sliders, scalable proportions, and clothing that deforms to fit instead of clipping through you. We will start with two baseline player models, "Adam" and "Eve", and get the skeleton properly rigged for both first person and third person so everything lines up right before we build customization on top of it.

Right now the player model on screen is just a plain clay mannequin. It is not meant to look good. It is there so we can work out how the arms and legs should actually move before we put real character art on top of it.

The clay mannequin player model standing in the grass under the trees, seen in third person.

To be clear, actually building the customization system is taking a backseat for now. We are spending this time carefully planning what needs to be in place first, so we are not redoing the same work later once the real system goes in.

As part of that rigging work, we also got other players actually animating for the first time. Before this, they would just stand there like mannequins: not looking where they aimed, not swinging weapons, not even registering as airborne. Now you will see other players moving, aiming, and using their gear like real people instead of statues.

That work goes hand in hand with netcode, which we have been shoring up alongside it. Real multiplayer tests will be dropping soon.

On top of that, we added a mods folder, mainly to speed up our own development. You can drop a custom model in and define what type of object it is, and the game will pick it up without touching any code, and it will tell you clearly if something is wrong with a mod that fails to load. This is not a real modding API yet. That is something we want to build out properly for workshop content down the road, but for now it is mostly a dev tool.

Bow rework

Earlier in the week the bow and arrow got a solid upgrade. The arrow is now a real, physical object that sticks around through the reload instead of vanishing, and the whole thing is scaled correctly to the world. We also cleaned up a ton of console spam that was quietly hammering performance from the main menu.

The bow held in first person in the tool poser, out in the meadow.

Behind the scenes fixes

Early in the week was mostly foundational work: builds now show exactly which version you are running, assets got reorganized so they are easier to manage, and we squashed a few annoying bugs, including worlds freezing you in midair on load, the main menu weirdly staying on screen after hitting Play, and a major rendering issue that was quietly costing over 100 FPS.

That is the week. Excited for where customization goes from here.