Update 8 (after chapter 1) teaser for worldgen V1: We are breaking our rule of "no changes for V1". For the last weeks we rebuilt how V1 loads its data. Until now, V1 lived in its own special corner of the server: its own file format, its own loader, file references, and no way to touch it the way you touch everything else in the game. That'll be over. Every zone, biome, cave system, block mask, surface cover, tree and prefab pattern, and noise function will be a regular asset in the same system as items, blocks, NPCs, and prefabs. About 8,800 of them. I. Same tools, same rules. Worldgen assets are plain JSON with a schema, so it works with the same editing, validation, and autocomplete you already use for other assets. II. Readable names and folders. We have reorganised all V1 assets to fit the asset type ordering style. III. Less duplication. Copy-pasted definitions were merged. The surface cover library alone went from 2,383 files to 1,171 without changing a single block in the world. IV. Node editor authoring. V1 graphs can be edited visually, with live noise previews instead of guessing numbers. The NoisePlayer is dead. V. Your worlds do not change. We held ourselves to one hard rule the whole way: the generated world is byte for byte identical to before. Same seed, same world. Every change was checked against thousands of generated chunks. VI. Native modding in the overworld. You can add and modify content in v1 easily. Examples will be provided to the modding community. Existing V1 mods will no longer function. VII. Oh.. It's also roughly 15% faster during runtime and 70% faster during boot. The old loader and the old asset format are deleted. Worldgen V1 will still be phased out eventually and fully replaced by V2 - however it takes more time and we needed to take some pressure off the team and decided to modernise V1 ONE LAST TIME(tm). Additionally as part of Update 8 we will make V1 compatible with cubic chunks. Details follow.

There will be no pre-release next week (October 8th). We are finalising chapter 1 now and pre-release would leak too much of chapter 1. This means the pre-release this week (October 1st) will be the last pre-release before Chapter 1. Sadly for modders this means that there are some changes you won't be able to see before version 0.7 comes out and thus you can only get your mods ready for 0.7 based on that pre-release version this week but need to get fully compatibility on patch day. For players that means you may want to play chapter 1 in a vanilla world initially and jump over to your modded worlds once mods had time to update. Sorry for the inconvenience but hopefully the content keeps you busy :)