Hello again! After a long day of work, Friday Update 9 is here with a highly anticipated feature - private worlds! But first, let’s talk about the other highly anticipated thing;
Survival mode is coming
Yes, you read that right. Earlier this week, I started working on the brand new Alpha engine for Blox! There’s plenty of new design choices being made based on everything I’ve learned from Classic thus far. There’s also some completely new things, like the awesome new 3D terrain generator and infinite terrain coming to survival:
Of course, it’s still early days with survival - I’m still on track to release Classic fully in good time (possibly after 0.40 or 0.41?), and after that, survival will be getting my undivided attention, which should optimistically lead to early access opening soon after!
That’s all future tho, let’s get back to what you can play with today!
A brand new Blox experience
Private worlds are finally out for testing! It’s been a long time coming, and full of tiny bugs, but now it’s stable enough to open up to you guys 
Here’s your quick tutorial on how things work:
You’ll be able to access your worlds via the newly enabled ‘My worlds’ button on the main menu - you know, the one that’s been sitting there conspicuously for a couple of weeks:
From there, you’ll enter the world selection screen, where all the fun stuff happens!
Click on any world from the list to select it…
… and click ‘Play world’ to join it, or ‘Delete world’ to remove it from your world list.
Alternatively, click ‘Create new world’ to make a new world.
You get your first save slot free! After that, it’ll cost 25 R$ to get extra save slots. If you don’t feel like buying extra slots tho, you can always reuse the ones you already have - deleting a world will free up that slot for reuse!
You get a bunch of nifty options for world customisation:
You can input a name to appear on your world select screen, and a seed to control how the terrain generates. You can choose between Small, Medium and Large worlds, and 6 different terrain types:
- Plains
- Forest
- Desert
- Ocean
- Island
- Flat (by popular request)
After that, you’ll jump right into your new world!
Gameplay differences in worlds
Moderation doesn’t apply in private worlds - you’ll notice that votekick and all moderator commands don’t exist here! It’s your own private sandbox, grief to your hearts content in there 
Aside from that, you get a new world saving feature which will keep your builds nice and intact! Here’s what to look for;
- While your world is saving, you’ll see a cloud with an arrow in the top left corner:
- If your world failed to save (for some reason), you’ll see a cloud with a cross instead. When saving fails, it’ll automatically retry in 30 seconds, and we’ll be sent a log of all saving errors that occur:
-
If everything saved correctly, then happy days
-
If you want to save your work manually (recommended before leaving the game), you can use the new /save command to manually save the world! You’ll get text feedback in the chat:
- /save has a 30 second cooldown after saving, whereas autosaving happens every 2 minutes.
tl;dr make sure to run /save before you leave, the rest is handled for you
This is a big change internally, so please make sure to report any bugs you find!
Can I invite friends to my world?
Not yet. I’m planning on getting it done for Friday Update 10 (or even 11 if it takes that long!)
You’ll notice a greyed-out ‘World invites’ button at the bottom of the world select menu; eventually, that’s going to be where you can view any invites sent to you. The internal framework for supporting invites isn’t complete tho, so it’ll be a bit longer before you can invite anyone over.
Either way, I hope you enjoy this update! Make sure to send me any suggestions, bug reports or feedback you have. Feel free to try out the new update here!
Other than that, I’ll see you next week 