Hey! After the last two massive updates, we’re going back to a weekly update cycle. Naturally, this will be a smaller update than last week, but it’s one step closer to a full release of classic Blox!
Before we talk about this update tho, here’s a progress update on a highly requested feature;
What’s happening with private worlds
Private worlds are a pretty big deal! Thanks to previous updates to the engine, starting work on a private world system was surprisingly simple; I even got an early prototype up on YouTube!
I’m looking to implement new world types too! Aside from the default Plains type you know and love, I’ve implemented these new world variants:
- Forest
- Desert
- Ocean
- Island
- Flat (due to community demand!)
They all look really cool, and you’ll be able to choose between then when you make a new world! They’re even present in 0.38 internally, they’re just not enabled yet 
You’ll also be able to choose a world size, with three options: Small (96x64x96), Medium (128x64x128, default) and Large (192x64x192). Large worlds are a bit of an experiment - at the moment, they’re the laggiest of all world types, simply due to the sheer volume of block updates. I’m looking into optimising these significantly, and have already started working on that with this update!
Of course, you’ll be able to choose a world seed too. If you find a world seed you like, use /seed to get it, then note it down somewhere. Later, you can enter that seed into the box and recreate the exact same world! Text seeds also work; they get converted to numbers for you. Otherwise, leaving the field blank chooses a random seed as usual.
So when are worlds coming out? Initially, I was aiming for this update, but due to some difficulty with world saving, they’re disabled for now. Hopefully by next update, the basic implementation of worlds will be done so you can play around with them. Inviting friends into your worlds is likely to follow in the update after that, but again, this isn’t a guarantee!
So, back to this update!
What’s new in this update
Aside from worlds, there’s been a few other changes in this update. Firstly, as a thank you to the early access players, I’ve added all four thousand of your usernames to the game credits! Just click ‘Credits and licenses’ on the main menu, then ‘Early access players’. See if you can find your name in the list!
If you instead joined us here in pre-release, you still have some fun stuff to play with too! Leaves are now way more performant on fast graphics - they’ll render opaque and generate less faces to render. In heavily forested worlds, you’ll really notice the difference.
Falling block entities are now enabled too! They were added in 0.37, but were too laggy for production. Now, thanks to the new Lua VM and some server optimisations, they run really well and look awesome!
Last, but not least, options now save between sessions! If you quit playing with music disabled and far render distance, you’ll now get those same options when you log back in! A small but useful feature for sure 
For the curious, here’s the full changelog:
Changes
- Enabled falling block entities - sand and gravel would now fall smoothly using the entity physics solver as a result.
- Fixed a bug where the font renderer would incorrectly label empty text boxes as having malformed character data and emit warnings.
- Changing graphics quality in the Options menu would now prompt a full world re-render.
- On fast graphics quality, leaves would now render opaque and occlude adjacent blocks, improving performance.
- Added a list of all early access players to the game credits under a dedicated submenu.
- Added five new world generation types - Forest, Desert, Ocean, Island and Flat.
- Game options now saved between play sessions.
- Optimised block ticks on the server - now, instead of cloning the map of blocks to tick, a lock was used to defer changes until the current block update pass was complete.
- Split block ticks into two maps, periodic ticks and random ticks.
- Grass would now spread faster to nearby dirt blocks.
- Fixed a bug where the player entity for a client would spawn before the client had loaded the world fully; now, player spawning is deferred until the start of world simulation.
Bugs
- Blocks could still be interacted with when viewing some UI (e.g. the block select menu)
- The inventory icon for leaves would not update with graphics settings, meaning the icon would use the graphics quality setting of when the UI was first initialised.
- Rarely, a race condition would cause block tick map changes to occur out of order, resulting in incorrect ticking behaviour for some blocks.
Anyway, I hope to see you next week! Please feel free to leave any feedback, bug reports or suggestions in our community server - find it under the game’s social links! 