Two weeks: the world loops, and the server takes charge

It has been a packed two weeks since the last big update, so this one is a long list. The short version: the world wraps around now, the ground is made of real rock, the sky became an instrument, and multiplayer went from "clients can see each other" to a dedicated server that actually runs the rules.

The world comes back around

The world is a loop now. Walk in any direction for long enough and you arrive back where you started, with no wall, no seam and no loading screen on the way. The far country even bends away over the horizon. The map is 32 kilometres around, so it is finite, which means anywhere in it is worth finding, but the walk never ends.

The ground is made of something

The terrain got a real geology pass. The ground is built from twelve kinds of rock stacked in layers the way rock actually stacks, ore seams follow the bedding instead of floating randomly, and what you find depends on what you are standing in. Soil and sand take their colour from the rock they came from, chalk is not grey, and the prospecting pick reports what is genuinely buried under your feet. On top of that: mountain ranges that run in a direction, river networks that actually connect to the ocean, deserts with steppe halos around them, and a sky ceiling raised from 95 metres to 253 so peaks can be peaks. Limestone burns to quicklime now, and mortar builds brick and ashlar walls.

The sky became an instrument

The planet has two hemispheres and a real calendar. The sun follows your latitude and the date, the moon follows its phase, and the stars are a real catalogue that turns with the season. Planets wander against the star field, eclipses darken the day on schedule, meteor showers land on their dates, and a sextant can read your latitude off the sky. Weather is a place now too: storms are somewhere and you can walk into them, wind has a bearing the clouds lean into, snow and ice arrived (walk on one, wade through the other), the snowline moves with the season, the forest turns in autumn, and there is an aurora where an aurora belongs.

Multiplayer grows a spine

This is where most of my time went, especially this last week. The game now has a proper dedicated server, its own program with no screen, that owns the world and runs the rules. Hosting a LAN session, finding one, and setting your name all happen from the menu. Chat crosses the wire, proximity voice chat is in on push to talk, players have names above their heads, and there is a join line when someone arrives.

Under that is the unglamorous part: making the server the authority on everything. Building pieces, terrain edits, containers, machines, power, fluids and inventories all replicate now, and the host charges for what you build and resolves what you earn. Then came the long hunt through every case where a client and the host quietly disagreed: grenades that only existed on one screen, bandages that healed nobody, armour that protected only the host, beds that did not respawn you where you slept, reconnecting players treated as strangers while a ghost kept their belongings. Dozens of those, found by comparing the two worlds number by number and by long soak tests with two players, and fixed one by one. Client prediction and reconciliation went in as well, so movement holds up instead of rubber banding.

The art track

Dragonfly9307 has been busy in parallel: character models and the lighting pass that makes models sit properly in the world, plus trees and foliage. The new flint knife is already in the game, the emitter now turns behind the title on the main menu, and glass got real layered rendering. Trees are also becoming procedural on the code side, so authored art and generated geometry can meet in the middle. More of this lands every week and it shows.

The website and accounts

steadfall.com is built and open for the first time: this devlog, a press kit, and the account system that gives every player a permanent Player ID, which is what servers use to recognise you, hand your belongings back, and make bans mean something. Accounts include email confirmation and display name checks. To be clear, accounts are not open to the public yet. The site is still behind a wall while the alpha is private, and they will open up when there is something to sign in for.

That is the fortnight. Next up is mobile game testing, alongside more of Dragonfly9307's art direction, covered above, landing in the game.