Dear Extraordinary Survivalists — v1.21.0, a stable release, can now be downloaded through the account manager. Over 640 individual features, tweaks and fixes made it into this update. We continue to be humbled by the incredible community surrounding this game — with over 4000 mods on the mods database and countless player-created worlds, the creativity never ceases to amaze us.
This update focuses on the polishing of existing content along with several additions originally planned for v1.20, including the much-anticipated coral reefs. Looking ahead, future development will concentrate on v1.22 with a strong focus on new game mechanics.
Ocean & Coral Reefs
Sailing
Elk Taming & Riding
Visual Improvements
Storage & Homesteading
Survival & Combat
What's New
Story Chapter 2 Redux
Trader direction-giving, barber services, unique villager dialogue, new Lazaret lore and temperature fixes for the Devastation area.
Ocean Content
33 saltwater fish species, coral reefs with temperature-dependent variations, reef schools, large waves and wavy sand blocks.
Elk Taming System
Tame elk via crate traps, pillion cushion for dual riders, attach falx, bow, temporal gear and shields.
Sailing Improvements
Sail furling mechanics, ship naming with charcoal, shield mounting (up to 14) and 9 figurehead models.
Slow Healing System
Replaces instant healing with gradual recovery. Poultice-based player revival in multiplayer. Bear hide trophy armor.
Performance
GPU RAM usage of terrain reduced by approximately half. FPS improvements in grass fields, faster worldgen and 3-4% client-side tesselation boost.
Volumetric Clouds & Moon
Stunning new volumetric cloud system. Accurate moon shader with real-world astronomy calculations.
Storage & Homesteading
Colored crocks and bowls, shelf placement for pies, 12 ores per ground storage, new ceramic tiles and papyrus variants.
Detailed Changelog
Gameplay Balancing 16 changes
- Hats now provide protection from rainfall
- Anvil mold must now be destroyed to get the anvil
- Slightly higher vertical down search range of flowers on beehives
- Wolf attacks now have better cooldown and windup
- Improve irregularity of mob spawning
- A Hacked locust is now rope tie-able
- Sod roof now has an alternative recipe using logs
- Can no longer place an iron anvil top on a meteoric iron base
- Can no longer construct or light a pit kiln underwater
- Tweaks to charcoal pit and firewood burn efficiency
- Buckets now stack to 5
- Increased Rift Ward range from 30 to 40 blocks
- Fish meat satiation halved, drops doubled
- Tree seeds now burn for just 1 second
- Lime can no longer be crushed by hand with a hammer
- Killed Bowtorns now drop bone arrows
Survival Handbook 10 changes
- The Handbook now shows meal and pie recipes
- Cementation furnace carburization in handbook
- Show display/liquid containers that can hold items
- Show items that can be stored inside display/liquid containers
- List when an item can be placed on/in bookshelves, scroll racks
- Show more perish information in handbook
- Improved handbook guide for oven-baking and bread
- Show possible inputs for metal molding
- Show possible inputs for smithing
- Show 'Created by' section for various crafting methods
Performance Improvements 10 changes
- Reduce GPU RAM used by approximately half
- Improve FPS in large fields of grass, heather and similar plants
- Server Performance: Optimised the most bottle-necking AiTasks
- Reduce duration of lagspikes due to garbage collection
- Small server RAM reduction
- Faster worldgen for large water bodies
- Fix one potential memory leak on long-running servers
- Save RAM when many entities are spawned
- Reduced RAM use for animations
- Client-side tesselation speed improvement (3%-4%)
Commands & Configuration 6 changes
- Add ability to disable desert storm effects per world via /worldconfig
- The /land info command now shows AllowUseEveryone and AllowTraverseEveryone settings
- Make additional weather commands available in release mode
- /wgen commands may validly use 0 as range
- Fixed: '/whitelist off' and '/whitelist on' not saved
- Disallow invalid day-of-time setting
Bug Fixes 50+ fixes
- Bees in skeps continued producing honey below 0°C
- Aged hay could be used to make fresh thatched roofing
- Pink and smoky glass were missing slab recipes
- Missing recipes to make aged scroll racks
- Some ores not ground storable
- Significant memory leak with ground storage piles
- When harvesting animal, drop could exceed stack limit
- Rotating work item on anvil could misalign with smithing
- Trait 'Damage against mechanicals' didn't apply to ranged weapons
- Only show one bag per category on player
- Newly placed reed chests would not close
- Labeled Chests no longer showed their name in inventory
- Berries in raccoon mouths had bad visual offsets
- Shattered molds display proper amount of bits dropped
- Some liquid containers in grid recipe not rendering properly
- And many more — see full changelog on the forums
API Updates (Modders) Various
- Upgraded to .NET 8 with nullable context refactoring
- New tag-based entity AI system
- Allow worldgen mods to specify their own worldgen files
- Fruitpress can output different items via new Squeezable behavior
- Grid recipe enhancements and block texture improvements
- Comprehensive API extensions for crafting, animations and entity behaviors