v1.21.2-rc.1/rc.2 Story Chapter 2 Redux, TOPS-Lagspike patch

[Tyron]

Dear Extraordinary Survivalists
v1.21.2-rc.1/rc.2, an unstable release, can now be downloaded through the account manager.


Screenshot by Plipp, shared on #screenshots on Discord

[Edit:] Also released rc.2 to account for a possible future fix for the prospecting on border regions.

This update addresses several significant areas of the game that I want to mention here specifically:

• Near spawn on our official server (also known as TOPS) players have built very large storage areas - we were able to significantly reduce chunk loading lag spikes caused by these
• Unfortunately a change we've made in 1.21 caused wrong Prospecting Pick results in some areas in older worlds, specifically within a few hundred blocks of a 1.20=>1.21 chunk border. This is now fixed for new worldgen, but readings in old border regions will remain incorrect, for now. ("Old border regions" are the places close to what was the edge of the world, when a server first moved from game version 1.20.12 to game version 1.21.0 or 1.21.1.) We will see if perhaps we can address this further through other means 
• We did a lot of work in getting Elk riding as smooth and tightly controlled as possible in both Single Player and Multiplayer
• Our second boss fight should be less janky now.

 

Game updates

• Tweak: Moon appearance reverted to a squared appearance, but with correct level of illumination (WIP)
• Tweak: Reduce mob spawn on medium, high and very high rift activity (low and apocalyptic activity unchanged)
• Tweak: More intense torch particles
• Tweak: Height of ground-placed hitboxes of crucibles, crocks, and pots reduced to make it easier to target them when placed on a table
• Tweak: Stone spears can now be ground stored on 2-block high walls instead of 3.
• Tweak: Sleek doors are now airtight, and will create a room such as a cellar or greenhouse
• Tweak: Tool and Ingot molds show metal breaking when using a chisel
• Tweak: When breaking ingot molds, only the one you're pointing at will break
• Tweak: Pillion now has max stacksize of 1, consistent with saddle and other elk tack
• Tweak: Updated community translations, added a Hungarian translation
• Tweak: Add debug logging for villagers spawning and de-spawning
• Tweak: Added player pitch to the HUD debug screen
• Tweak: Command entity selector can now specify a tag to match, e.g. e[tag=helloworld]
• Tweak: Command /entity locateg now has an alias: /entity find
• Tweak: Catch the most common OpenGL errors at startup and provide more helpful error message. Github #6888
• Tweak: On Linux installations, revert using DRI_PRIME=1 by default [Details: that setting may select the wrong GPU on some systems, if the dedicated GPU is actually 0.  So now the setting is not present by default, but the player can easily uncomment that line in the run.sh to enable it if appropriate for that system, has to be done manually for now.]
• Tweak: On MacOS installations, enable .Net server garbage collection to help with constant lag spikes
• Tweak: For Intel Arc GPUs, add recommendation about allowSSBOs setting at game start
• Performance: Higher frame rate when rendering large numbers of signs
• Performance: Improved loading times for translocators, teleporters, rift wards (and cheese curds bundle!)
• Performance: Improved loading times for large numbers of signs
• Performance: Improved loading times for large numbers of crates and labelled crates
• Performance: Improved loading times for barrels (on both server and client)
• Performance: Fixed various potential memory VAO memory leaks on game exit (seen in client-debug.log)
• Fixed: Lots of work to fix jitter and animation syncing oddities when riding an Elk in Single Player and Multiplayer. Plus tighter controls.
• Fixed: Elk body could be tilted the wrong way when it steps down or up, especially while walking backwards (the fix applies to all creatures but most obvious on a ridden Elk)
• Fixed: Temporary workaround: If entities/tooltips become invisible, turning Ambient Sound level to 0 should now fix it. Github #6946
• Fixed: Some poultice healing still cancelling when in the air
• Fixed: Rare crash when another player holds hot items in tongs. Github #6783
• Fixed: Long-standing lighting bug where rooms and caves do not always become dark when closed. Github #6717
• Fixed: Propick density search mode readings in areas originally created in very old saves (1.18 and older) could become incorrect when nearby (map border) areas were generated in game version 1.21.x
• Fixed: A villager buying selling things that he shouldn't (Folds)
• Fixed: Occasional crash when typing that would delete selected text
• Fixed: Unable to type a - symbol into an empty number input box for negative numbers
• Fixed: Many issues with the 2nd boss fight
  • Fixed hideous flight paths
  • Fixed hideous hurt animation when it was on ground
  • Shields not blocking projectiles if they came from a relatively high angle
  • Not able to hit boss when inside its hitbox
  • Picked up projectiles turning into stones when collected
  • Stays a little longer on the ground on the slam attack for melee attacks and no longer slides away
• Fixed: Bowls in the village were missing
• Fixed: Block breaking overlay missing on all chiseled blocks
• Fixed: Excavating out a ruin in sand did not remove the sand first
• Fixed: Wood path recipe no longer shapeless, to not conflict with the crate recipe
• Fixed: Z-fighting on distant wood path
• Fixed: Bad held transform on the Rift Ward
• Fixed: Ctrl/Shift modifier no longer working on number inputs in GUIs
• Fixed: Wrong block breaking decal on tool and ingot molds
• Fixed: Block breaking decal on trunk not disappearing in some cases
• Fixed: Pick block will properly select the ingot mold you are pointing at
• Fixed: Quern handles z-fighting with adjacent forge (they'll still clip)
• Fixed: Cozy bed did not have sleep hours
• Fixed: Bear hide leg armor selection box when dropped on ground was way off
• Fixed: Dark fins on salmon and mahi-mahi
• Fixed: Resolved an issue where failing to set up a player on their first join could prevent them from being saved correctly in the savegame
• Fixed: Placing beams in IFP mode was fiddly because of small camera motion right on placement
• Fixed: Mitigated crucible pouring particles way off
• Fixed: Reduced bear spawn chance back to 1.20 levels
• Fixed: Particles falling on fence floating mid-air
• Fixed: Game crash when clicking tutorial links to open the handbook
• Fixed: Handbook search input would always reset once a tutorial was started
• Fixed: Errors during worldgen when generating the story locations
• Fixed: Missing death message translations for deer and goats
• Fixed: Missing self teal glow after respawning
• Fixed: Flat fog from weather no longer reduces deep cave visibility
• Fixed: Rare crash for Hopper picking up food item during off-thread item physics
• Fixed: Prevent game crash when ground storage placing above world height. Github #7023
• Fixed: Might reduce mobs clipping into player as they run towards them
• Fixed: Tower elevator up/down arrows were hidden by the up/down levers when player was seated at the elevator position in front of the up/down levers
• Fixed: Thatch blocks had poorly aligned textures and incorrect textures.  Now should match hay blocks better
• Fixed: Multi player fight Eidolon dropped elucidatory vessel at >1 stack size instead of multiple with 1 stack size
• Fixed: Command /weather setw still did not clear fog from sandstorms
• Fixed: Allow command /fixmapping applyall force to be run from the server console
• Fixed: Dead tame and semi-tamed elk would remain standing up
• Fixed: Missing language string for dead partially tamed elk, and inconsistent capitalization for other elk
• Fixed: Cupronickel plates could not be smithed.
• Fixed: Art objects were sunken into base of display cases.
• Fixed: Adult pigs were not being aggressive towards the player when piglets were around.
• Fixed: Reduce the incidence of a rare shader compile error on certain GPUs. Github #7015
• Fixed: Re-add ModMaker to the Mac build
• API Tweak: Mortally woundable behavior now checks animation code names from the entity json, instead of animation names directly
• API Fixed: Crash if a mod added the ability to place bowls on elk, boats, or similar
• API Fixed: Duplicate keys are created for POI Registry dictionary - wispae
• API Fixed: Defining any textureSizes: [] in a model caused it to ignore the default TextureWidth/TextureHeight
• API Tweak: Allow a renderer, when registered, to also reserve a range within RenderOrder for itself and one other renderer type
• API Tweak: Attempt to kill game on launch if a mod assembly is already loaded

 

View full record

[Never Jhonsen]

43 minutes ago, Tyron said:

• Tweak: Sleek doors are now airtight, and will create a room such as a cellar or greenhouse

That's big

[StCatharines]

3 hours ago, Tyron said:

• Performance: Improved loading times for translocators, teleporters, rift wards (and cheese curds bundle!)
• Performance: Improved loading times for large numbers of signs
• Performance: Improved loading times for large numbers of crates and labelled crates
• Performance: Improved loading times for barrels (on both server and client)

HUGE. That's been a long-standing RAM-eating issue, with signs/crates, etc. being entities.

[Echo Weaver]

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

Tweak: On MacOS installations, enable .Net server garbage collection to help with constant lag spikes

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

Fixed: Re-add ModMaker to the Mac build

So much Mac love here! I really feel appreciated. Thanks!

I've become completely addicted to ModMaker, and losing it made me sad.

4 hours ago, Tyron said:

Tweak: Reduce mob spawn on medium, high and very high rift activity (low and apocalyptic activity unchanged)

Though.... clearly I have different expectations for rift spawns than the average user. I love the current spawn rate on stable. Maybe now that I have ModMaker again, I can look for what changed and patch it back....

I find this particularly entertaining because I'm always the one piping up on the forums about how I don't care for head-to-head combat. 

Edited September 24, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, Tyron said:

Tweak: Moon appearance reverted to a squared appearance, but with correct level of illumination (WIP)

Well now I am sad; I was quite enjoying the new rounded moon. Oh well, I daresay the new looks quite nice too. 

[TeaJay]

Ever since 1.21 I'm getting a lot of "Host not responding" errors on my single player worlds. Any ideas what could be causing this and can I do anything to fix it? It feels like every time I play for an hour or two I start getting this error. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

@Tyron When is a fix for the long-standing hunger bug coming? I have made a PR to the VSEssentialsMod repo and I cannot see that any action has been taken regarding it. https://github.com/anegostudios/vsessentialsmod/pull/29

In the PR I outlined exactly what the bug is and how it is being triggered and why it is severely game-breaking. If this is not the correct way for ordinary players like me to fix bugs in the game, please let me know. I just like solving problems and enjoy helping out wherever I can!  

Note to clarify: This bug is not the delay that comes from eating a full meal. It is the bug that occurs when you take starvation damage and eat a single grain of flax and then never have to eat again for several in-game days on Wilderness Survival difficulty.
The bug occurs also when you take damage from any source and eat any food and so it can be disguised as normal gameplay operation, but the most egregious example outlined above shows how bad it can get and why it is game-breaking on any difficulty.

Edited September 24, 2025 by Teh Pizza Lady
added note to clarify

[Echo Weaver]

7 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

When is a fix for the long-standing hunger bug coming?

It might be worth including at the top of your description why this is NOT the intended hunger decay pause but a bug. This is the one that causes a hunger decay pause when you eat a berry right after taking starvation damage, right? I've never seen anything like the length of pause some of those issue reports are describing, but I know that the "wait until you take starvation damage and then eat a berry" cheese is a well-established early-game strategy. 

It's never seemed to me to be severely game-breaking, but I saw in the fix you posted to ModDB that it screws up your expanded stomach mod.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

9 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

It might be worth including at the top of your description why this is NOT the intended hunger decay pause but a bug. This is the one that causes a hunger decay pause when you eat a berry right after taking starvation damage, right? I've never seen anything like the length of pause some of those issue reports are describing, but I know that the "wait until you take starvation damage and then eat a berry" cheese is a well-established early-game strategy. 

It's never seemed to me to be severely game-breaking, but I saw in the fix you posted to ModDB that it screws up your expanded stomach mod.

hmm good point. It seems a LOT of people are misunderstanding the difference between this bug and the hunger delay after eating a meal... but in the PR I also linked to 5 issues submitted that outlined a myriad of ways for the bug to trigger. The most egregious of them being, "Take starvation damage, and then eat a single flax grain and never have to eat again for several days on Wilderness Survival difficulty."

I will update all my posts with this information.

[Echo Weaver]

6 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

It seems a LOT of people are misunderstanding the difference between this bug and the hunger delay after eating a meal...

Yeah, you're very specific in your PR, but I almost left another comment on your mod saying, "But it's supposed to work this way," before I read through and realized that no, it wasn't. Just assuming they're busy and they get plenty of player confusion about stuff that's working as intended, so you might not be getting that second glance.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

5 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I almost left another comment on your mod saying, "But it's supposed to work this way,"

 you wouldn't............dare....... LOL

out of curiosity, how did you find it? I don't recall being overly braggadocious about either of my mods...

[Echo Weaver]

1 minute ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

out of curiosity, how did you find it? I don't recall being overly braggadocious about either of my mods...

I am an obsessive loser who literally hangs out on ModDB. I love seeing the cool stuff people think of going by.

[StCatharines]

Quick question re: pit kilns. Everything I've tested, it takes 20 hours when firing with firewood, and down to 10 hours when using charcoal. Is it intentional that it still takes 20 hours when firing fireclay bricks and refractory bricks, 16 at a time, even when using charcoal? It seems like a mistake somehow caused when the stacks changed from allowing only 12 bricks to be fired at a time to 16 bricks.

[Maelstrom]

It shouldn't matter what is fired in the pit kiln.  Fuel determines duration.  Probably a bug.

[StCatharines]

Or, I have a mod modifying brick stack sizes without knowing it, and without saying so on the mod page. Whoops.

No clue which mod does so, but vanilla doesn't allow 16 bricks to be fired, only 12. I thought it had changed in 1.21. 

 

Edit: It appears to be Bricklayers doing the shift from 12 to 16 bricks, so perhaps the bug starts there.

Edited September 25, 2025 by StCatharines

[Maelstrom]

Good point.   Haven't played in a while and even longer since I fired a stack of bricks in a kiln.   Maybe I should stop playing The Crust so much.  

[Thorfinn]

The food thing after hunger damage has been there quite a while. It is really a big deal, though? People who are prone to abusing it are probably the same type who would just go into creative and give themselves a stack of bread or something. And it's not like food is at all hard to come by, apart from a polar start.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

11 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

The food thing after hunger damage has been there quite a while. It is really a big deal, though? People who are prone to abusing it are probably the same type who would just go into creative and give themselves a stack of bread or something. And it's not like food is at all hard to come by, apart from a polar start.

It is if you're playing wilderness survival and you suddenly don't have to eat for days due to said bug. It feels really game-breaking and takes half the challenge away, especially in those less-forgiving environments.

It's personally a big deal to me because it forced me to write a companion mod to my Expanded Stomach mod to keep it from breaking. That's why I'm so passionate about it getting fixed. But others have pointed out how it breaks the harder difficulties of the game when you can eat a single flax grain and not need to eat again for a long time after.

[Facethief]

13 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

The food thing after hunger damage has been there quite a while. It is really a big deal, though? People who are prone to abusing it are probably the same type who would just go into creative and give themselves a stack of bread or something. And it's not like food is at all hard to come by, apart from a polar start.

If like you said, people who abuse that exploit can just cheat themselves food, why keep the exploit?

[Thorfinn]

Wilderness is all I play. I just know of the existence of it, and consciously avoid it. On the occasion I forget before hunger pains, I simply eat two berries. The first brings you above zero, the next one undoes the extended hunger pause.

[EDIT]

It occurs to me that this would probably cease if they just implemented eating over time, similar to the way they did healing over time.

Edited September 25, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

Just now, Facethief said:

If like you said, people who abuse that exploit can just cheat themselves food, why keep the exploit?

I'm not saying to keep it. Just that it isn't game breaking to anyone who chooses not to use the exploit. As for those who do? So what? We are talking about making food last longer, not giving a PvP player an Admin Sword.

[Echo Weaver]

I have possibly taken advantage of this exploit on default survival when I strayed too far, it's dark, and the rift activity jumps to apocalyptic. I'm running home, I have a few berries in my hand, and I don't want to stop moving because there are crawlies everywhere. But now that it's described in detail, I certainly haven't stalled my hunger for days, just eaten a single berry when I start taking damage to avoid running out of food before I get back to my base. But I'm pretty sure I needed to eat multiple times when this happened in my extended stone age game recently, so maybe running also negates it.

[LadyWYT]

29 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

As for those who do? So what? We are talking about making food last longer, not giving a PvP player an Admin Sword.

I mean, I don't know exactly how to trigger the exploit, but I have 100% taken advantage of it on occasion in multiplayer when it happens, at least in circumstances that food is a bit on the scarce side. 

Overall, it's something that players have to both be aware of and understand how to trigger in order to properly exploit it, and while it does break the game balance(especially on higher difficulties), I don't think the majority of players use the exploit and it's not as serious as a lot of other issues that affect other parts of the game. Hence why it probably hasn't been fixed yet. It's something I would expect to be fixed eventually though, since the player is meant to eat regular meals and not go days without any food at all. Sure, they could just cheat food in, but that's not really a good argument for leaving the exploit unfixed since the player can just bypass pretty much any aspect of the game via the console and creative menu. 

18 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

But now that it's described in detail, I certainly haven't stalled my hunger for days, just eaten a single berry when I start taking damage to avoid running out of food before I get back to my base. But I'm pretty sure I needed to eat multiple times when this happened in my extended stone age game recently, so maybe running also negates it.

I think the game does eventually figure out that hunger needs to start ticking again, but it does seem to take a while for the game to recalculate. Usually the fastest way to fix the issue when it occurs is to just reload the world/relog on the server.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

2 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

I have possibly taken advantage of this exploit on default survival when I strayed too far, it's dark, and the rift activity jumps to apocalyptic. I'm running home, I have a few berries in my hand, and I don't want to stop moving because there are crawlies everywhere. But now that it's described in detail, I certainly haven't stalled my hunger for days, just eaten a single berry when I start taking damage to avoid running out of food before I get back to my base. But I'm pretty sure I needed to eat multiple times when this happened in my extended stone age game recently, so maybe running also negates it.

Running has no effect once the bug is triggered.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

I'm not saying to keep it. Just that it isn't game breaking to anyone who chooses not to use the exploit. As for those who do? So what? We are talking about making food last longer, not giving a PvP player an Admin Sword.

I don't think the argument was whether it was game breaking or not but more that it shouldn't exist. Fixing it has side effects, for sure, but when I think about it, I want to play a game that doesn't have bugs and exploits like this.