Fractal Block World news & patch notes

Added new area: I2 Mountains. These can be found in Ostrich Ferns (in I2). At the center of these mountains is a new weapon mode for your Laser: the Cold Beam. This costs two ammo but freezes monsters for 2.5 times the amount of time as the standard fire.

Added new area: Beta Cube. This can be found in the main treasure area inside Ying Trees. This is intended for very hard difficulties, where monsters limit which areas you can go. In a Beta Cube you can get RejuvenX and EMP upgrades.

Load time of the xar package has been improved by bundling Lua script files together.

There are a few more window API functions added for modding.

Recall that for several technical reasons, the engine cannot make changes to chunks that are not part of the active chunk tree. However, there is a loophole: The engine can read and write chunk files for chunks not in the active chunk tree (chunk files are "random access"). In this update we are starting to take advantage of this loophole.

In addition to the Creation Manual PDF, there are now lists of functions and their arguments in HTML form. These lists can be found in the creation manual page on the game's website.

Made certain side displays a little smaller.

The side display system has been improved. You will need to select which side displays are visible again. There is a new menu to select the order in which the displays appear on your screen (you can change the order by dragging your mouse). Side displays can now specify which height they want to use. It is intended that they always set the height to be a multiple of the default side display height. That way the user can change the default side display height and that will affect all displays. The "small" side displays are now smaller. Finally, side display Lua scripts are no longer all loaded when you load a game. Instead, each script is only loaded when it is needed. Support for partially transparent blocks is now in beta.

The new game menu has been modified. You still enter your player name and then the package you want to play (just like before). However, after this you are given a list of options. The first option is to start a new game. Another option is to change the "starting configuration". Another option is to change the seed. Then, the remainder of the options are to set variables that are passed to the package. We call these variables "mutators" See the guide on how to add mutators to your own standalone package (if you are a modder).

The standard xar package now has the following mutators: "One Way", "Low Ammo", "Low max ammo upgrades", "Low upgrade buying", and "No stable singletons room". You can read about what these do in the new game menu.

Now some of the Williston Fields at the base of Williston Trees (in I1) have orange cubes in them. These cubes contain Cannon Max Ammo upgrades. Let's call these "rich fields". Rich fields inside larger rich fields are even better, etc. This gives a reason to shrink several times in Williston Fields.

The Great Mylantis Cavern has been added to. Now there are many small boats as well as one large boat called "The Mount P". These boats contain two new super weapon modes for the Cannon weapon: "The Sheriff" and "The Judge". Try "going fishing" for Trolls in the Great Mylantis Cavern using The Judge. If you have an old waypoint in The Great Mylantis Cavern, then it will no longer be valid (but you can go back into the cavern by using the cheatcodes noclip and shrinkany).

Ultrawide monitor support is in beta.

As a modder, there is now a way to synchronously cast a ray into the world and get what block and moving entity it hits.

There is now the environment variable "engine.exit_on_deprecated". When this is true, the program will exit whenever the package uses a deprecated API function.

It is now easier to pass information to and from procedural world generation code.

The waypoint system is no longer hardcoded into the engine. That is, the engine no longer has any concept of what a waypoint is. Instead, the waypoint system is written in Lua as part of the base package. This makes it much easier for modders to create their own waypoint system (or modify the existing system).

A new dungeon has been added: Supermassive Black Holes. These are at the center of Galaxies. In the treasure room you can pick up the following new Dark Hole weapon mode: The Quasar Drive. This is like the Black Hole drive, except it costs 60 dark holes to use (instead of 20) and it makes the player move even faster. It still lasts only 30 seconds, but you can "stack it" up to 300 seconds.

We fixed an old quirk of the engine: monsters only respawning when the chunk they are in is recreated. This fixes the glitch where users were able to remove the Inner Core at the end of the game by sleeping for an hour in a certain location.

There is a new mini area: The Space Root Pink Prison. If you try to use Pink Rings in Outer Space, this area will trap you to prevent you from growing out of the Space Root chunk. Although there was no way to abuse this previously, it is probably safer to have it this new way. Players may find this area interesting for other reasons as well.

Now there is optional mesh directional lighting. You can enable this with Options -> Engine -> Rendering. You can change the min and max lighting values. Also note that in the same place you can easily turn on anisotropic filtering (before you needed to do this from the console or program_startup.txt).

Various improvements have been made to the chunk file database for saved games. For example, we now wait to process "remove chunk file requests" until the player saves the game.

There is now an optional cursor for menus. You can specify whether there is a cursor for both windowed mode and fullscreen mode. The intended use case is to not use a cursor for fullscreen mode, but then the user can quickly ALT-ENTER to windowed mode and use the cursor to click outside of the window.

The game now uses a SQLite database for saved games. This should help Linux users. This will apply to new games that are created, but old games will use the old database model. You can tell if the old database model is being used because there will be a yellow cylinder on the HUD.

In Tweedle-Dee Air there is a Tweedle Haunted House. These has several dungeons all focused around the idea of it being dark and you need to worry about seeing.

In addition to the old waypoint system, there is a new related system: bookmarks. Many waypoints in the world are now next to "bookmarks" (when it is not confusing). When you right click on a bookmark, it will become your "current bookmark", and you will be teleported to your current respawn point. This is intended to quickly go back to town to buy and sell. Then, when you right click on ANY respawn point, you will be teleported back to your current bookmark.

There is a new weapon mode for your Dark Hole weapon called the Black Hole Drive. This decreases air drag for 30 seconds, allowing you to move at about twice the speed. This can be found at the end of the Catacombs.

You can improve your telekinesis ability at certain stations. You can increase your telekinesis radius. The starting radius is 24. Also, if you have not used telekinesis for 30 seconds, your next telekinesis is free (does not cost money). This number 30 is decreased when you upgrade your telekinesis ability.

There is now a town at the top of I3 Inner Trees called Starksboro. Inside this town is the Library Library, which tells you where the libraries are in the world. Also in Starksboro is a Green Key. Can you figure out where to use it?

There is now a library in the treasure rooms of Amethysts: the Pink Library. This tells you which areas have Pink Rings which allow you to teleport outside of those areas.

Several modding API functions have been replaced (or removed entirely) by better solutions. This includes the genesis mode bool, Pink Ring teleportation, and Blue Ring teleportation. If you are a modder, you can now create your own entities that function like Pink Rings, Blue Rings, or Teleporters.

You now create a mod to change the font that the game uses.

If you open the console and run the command gendoc, then in addition to what it did before, it will create the folder Output/Documentation/ProgrammingAPI and it will generate several useful files there. These files list the functions you can call from Lua and the Lua functions which are called by the engine. This is useful if you are a modder.

Blocks can now have their own custom render functions. See package_tutorial2 for how to do this. If a block script has an __on_render function, that will be used to render the block. However, in this case the block must not be "visibly solid".

Previously the game could render 6 levels of detail. Now it can render up to 50. You can specify the number of levels to render by putting a line like the following into your Input/Scripts/program_startup.txt file:

set engine.render.num_render_levels 10.

If you do this, you might also want to open the console while you are playing the xar package and enter the following command:

set package.state.globals.render.levels_fade_out_local.enabled true

This will cause levels to be shaded darker if they are far away from the player's current level. For example, since in this configuration we are rendering 10 levels of detail, the player's level L will be 100% bright, the next coarsest level L-1 will be 90% bright, the next coarsest level L-2 will be 80% bright, etc. You can also set

package.state.globals.render.levels_fade_out_local.max_level_shade and

package.state.globals.render.levels_fade_out_local.min_level_shade

to tweak the behavior (setting the shade value of the viewer's level (max render level) and the min render level.