v1.21.2/4 Story Chapter 2 Redux, TOPS-Lagspike patch

[Tyron]

Dear Extraordinary Survivalists
v1.21.2 and now v1.21.4, a stable release, can now be downloaded through the account manager.

Nearly 150 tweaks and fixes later, v1.21.2 is now ready! 

[Edit:] Also released 1.21.4 to address a few new issues introduced unintentionally in 1.21.2:
Tweak: Improved elk passenger animations
Tweak: Update community translations
Tweak: New command /dweather reset allows single players and server admins to reset Rift activity (needed if it was stuck in 1.21.2)
Fixed: Client crashes in 1.21.2 with a sailboat a few hundred blocks away
Fixed: Rift activity unchanging for up to 50 in-game days after updating from a existing game world from 1.21.1 or earlier
Fixed: Opened crates with certain types of contents (e.g. flax grain) rendered as unknown blocks. Github #7235
Fixed: Labeled chests label text was invisible, and fix lighting on the first sign drawn

(there was a v1.21.3 for a few brief minutes, now replaced with v.1.21.4)

 

Screenshot by 7Embre, shared in #screenshots on Discord

Game updates since 1.21.1

• Tweak: Moon appearance reverted to a squared appearance, but with correct level of illumination
• Tweak: Reduce mob spawn on medium, high and very high rift activity (low and apocalyptic activity unchanged)
• Tweak: First 3 days in game now start with low rift weather (for real this time!)
• Tweak: Further buffed the Rift Ward (radius 40 => 50 blocks, 14 days fuel => 21 days fuel per temporal gear, 5% chance of failing to block rifts => 2.5% chance of failing to block rifts)
• Tweak: Reduced bear spawn chance back to 1.20 levels
• Tweak: More intense torch particles
• Tweak: Sleek doors are now airtight, and will create a room such as a cellar or greenhouse
• Tweak: Stone spears can now be ground stored on 2-block high walls instead of 3.
• 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: Height of ground-placed hitboxes of crucibles, crocks, and pots reduced to make it easier to target them when placed on a table
• Tweak: Pillion now has max stacksize of 1, consistent with saddle and other elk tack
• Tweak: Scrambled eggs meal model revised and updated to have melted-cheesy-goodness!
• Tweak: Updated community translations, added a Hungarian translation
• Tweak: Game now removes username from file paths printed in log files
• Tweak: Added player pitch to the HUD debug screen
• Tweak: Add debug logging for villagers spawning and de-spawning
• Tweak: Command entity selector can now specify a tag to match, e.g. e[tag=helloworld]
• Tweak: Command .debug wireframe now has an alias: .debug wf
• Tweak: New command /entity find to find specific entities (e.g. missing villagers), usually accessible to server moderators
• Tweak: Certain other /entity information commands (e.g. /entity count, /entity countg, /entity list, /entity locateg) are now usually accessible to server moderators 
• 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: Some poultice healing still cancelling when in the air
• Fixed: Bandages could not be used while jumping
• Fixed: Player hunger sometimes not decreasing for a long time, after combi of a large meal and healing. Github #5688 #5815 #5516, with thanks to @traugdor
• Fixed: Player could be rail-roaded (sideways movement blocked) when walking along a path edge
• Fixed: Player not able to step up small heights when they formed a corner
• Fixed: Elk fixes
  • Lots of work to fix jitter and animation syncing oddities when riding an Elk in Single Player and Multiplayer. Plus tighter controls
  • Elk with a snaffle bridle would keep walking forwards if only left/right movement buttons were pressed
  • 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 dead tame and semi-tamed Elk would remain standing up
  • API Fixed: Unable to place saddle on semi-tamed Elk
• Fixed: Temporary workaround: If entities/tooltips become invisible, turning Ambient Sound level to 0 should now fix it. Github #6946
• Fixed: Missing self teal glow after respawning
• Fixed: Flat fog from weather no longer reduces deep cave visibility
• Fixed: Long-standing lighting bug where rooms and caves do not always become dark when closed. Github #6717
• 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: Village fixes
  • Villagers and lore mobs (drifters etc) no longer attack each other. Villagers attempt to flee from lore mobs when in close proximity
  • Make villagers clear their hands before holding weapons
  • Bowls in the village were missing
  • Attempt to fix Wall getting stuck at north gate
  • Fixed Kat getting stuck in her house at certain times and situations
  • Fixed a villager buying and selling things that he shouldn't (Folds)
• Fixed: Excavating out a ruin in sand did not remove the sand first
• Fixed: Players were able to use a knife to remove decor from chiseled blocks in claimed areas
• 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
• Recipe fixes:
  • Cupronickel plates and nickel plates did not have smithing recipes so could not be smithed
  • Wood path recipe is no longer shapeless, to not conflict with the crate recipe
  • Packed dirt recipe required a blank top row in the grid
  • Clay forming recipe for hoe mold did not match the shape of the output mold
• Fixed: Z-fighting on distant wood path
• Fixed: Rift Ward carried in hands was right in front of your face
• Fixed: Block breaking overlay missing on all chiseled blocks
• Fixed: Wrong block breaking overlay on tool and ingot molds
• Fixed: Block breaking overlay 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 Immersive First-Person mode was fiddly because of small camera motion right on placement
• Fixed: Mitigated crucible pouring particles were way off
• Fixed: Particles falling on fence floating mid-air
• 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: Ratlines on sailships could not be mounted
• Fixed: Labeled chest wouldn't let you properly type in full width messages  (note: there is a known issue, chest label text is now invisible in 1.21.2) 
• Fixed: Animals in basket traps which had been caught in 1.20 and earlier game versions could not be released in 1.21.x
• Fixed: There could be incorrect block shading next to stairs in some orientations
• Fixed: Adding a single shield to the armor stand rendered two of them - one on each hand
• Fixed: Might reduce mobs clipping into player as they run towards them
• Fixed: Thatch blocks had poorly aligned textures and incorrect textures.  Now should match hay blocks better
• Fixed: In handbook, margins on grid recipes would be incorrectly scaled on non-default GUI scale sizes
• Fixed: Handbook grid recipe spacing for bear pelt recipe was incorrect for some GUI scales
• Fixed: Handbook search input would always reset once a tutorial was started
• Fixed: Logged error when placing Base Return Teleporter
• Fixed: Clay tile pile shape was missing
• Fixed: Some wolf animations playing when they should not
• Fixed: Crash when breaking invalid chiseled blocks in ruins
• Fixed: Crash when breaking an anvil mold
• Fixed: Rare crash when another player holds hot items in tongs. Github #6783
• Fixed: Occasional crash when typing that would delete selected text
• Fixed: Game crash when clicking tutorial links to open the handbook
• 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: Minor fixes and changes to story locations and one ruin
• Fixed: Errors during worldgen when generating the story locations
• 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: Multi player fight Eidolon dropped elucidatory vessel at >1 stack size instead of multiple with 1 stack size
• Fixed: Missing death message translations for deer and goats
• Fixed: Missing language string for dead partially tamed elk, and inconsistent capitalization for other elk
• Fixed: Unable to type a - symbol into an empty number input box for negative numbers
• Fixed: Ctrl/Shift modifier no longer working on number inputs in GUIs
• Fixed: In Settings, a slider could occasionally crash when being scrolled with the mouse wheel
• Fixed: When loading older save games in 1.21.x, only update region maps if necessary
• 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: Reduce the incidence of a rare shader compile error on certain GPUs. Github #7015
• Fixed: Re-add ModMaker to the Mac build
• API Note: Calendar.TotalHours had bad documentation. It is not the amount of hours elapsed since game start, but amount of hours elapsed since january 1st of the year the game world started. To get actual game start ingame hours you can now use Calendar.ElapsedHours - which already existed before but returned the wrong value
• API Tweak: Make EntityBehaviorRideable.GetNextGait() virtual, as well as EntityBehaviorGait.SetIdle() and IsIdleGait()
• API Tweak: The categorycode for the utilities slot has now been broken up into different codes for different types of items.  These include: "pot" for cooking pots and crocks, "bladefalx" for falxes, "blade1m" for weapons about 1m long, "bowsmall" for simple and crude bows, and "bowlong" for recurve and long bows.
• API Tweak: Mortally woundable behavior now checks animation code names from the entity json, instead of animation names directly
• 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
• API Fixed: BlockEntityBookshelf NRE crash when using a modded bookshelf with no type
• API Fixed: Single ingredient modded pies show incorrect name in handbook
• API Fixed: Handbook would freeze game entirely sometimes when looking at ingredients for meals with a Quantity set higher than 1
• API Fixed: Modded tool molds would not always display proper output in handbook 
• 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

Game updates since v1.21.2-rc.3

• Fixed: Broken player rendering when revisiting a sailboat
• Fixed: Constantly changing rift activity introduced in 1.21.2-rc.2
• Fixed: Version 1.21.2-rc.3 would fail to start on some hosted Linux servers
• Fixed: Furniture trader was selling raw fireclay. Now it's the commodity trader
• Fixed: Player hunger fix was not applied
• Fixed: suppressDesertStorm worldconfig not working

 

View full record

[Facethief]

Round moon; gone, but not forgotten.

[7embre]

1 hour ago, Tyron said:

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

Fixed: Thatch blocks had poorly aligned textures and incorrect textures. Now should match hay blocks better

Fixed: Art objects were sunken into base of display cases.

Thanks for that!

1 hour ago, Tyron said:

Fixed: Player not able to step up small heights when they formed a corner

Works like a charm - tested on multiple spiral stairways inside of a cathedral from the top screenshot

[StCatharines]

10 hours ago, Tyron said:

(Known issue: ... aaannd it turns out we broke something along the way: for labelled chests their text is invisible in 1.21.2)

Half of me wants to skip this update, but the other half is a prankster server admin...

  

10 hours ago, Tyron said:

• Performance: Higher frame rate when rendering large numbers of signs

I bet that's from the missing text. 

Edited October 5, 2025 by StCatharines

[Narcosis]

Man, that moon looked so great... not everything in this game needs to be square, you know.

[Sparticus247]

2 hours ago, Narcosis said:

Man, that moon looked so great... not everything in this game needs to be square, you know.

"All these squares make a circle" 

[DUCATISLO]

10 hours ago, Narcosis said:

Man, that moon looked so great... not everything in this game needs to be square, you know.

its a nice style of both

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

I agree, I liked the new rounded moon. It was still clearly pixelated, so I think it fit perfectly with the rest of the aesthetics of the game.

Edited October 6, 2025 by xXx_Ape_xXx

[StCatharines]

2 hours ago, xXx_Ape_xXx said:

I agree, I liked the new sounded moon. It was still clearly pixelated, so I think it fit perfectly with the rest of the aesthetics of the game.

Same, but I can also understand if it wasn't the direction the team wanted to go in. I'm happy to have experienced it, at the least, and it would be easy enough to implement as a mod.

[Ryilo]

In my modded game I'm still getting the labeled chests without the label showing, does anybody already know what mod is causing this, before I go and try to disable them one by one?

[Rodick]

Damn nice updates. Thanks

[Flakeinator]

I was getting hard freezes/crashing since updating when playing on my M4 Mac last night. I have to do more testing in the next day or two to see if I figured out a fix for the issue. I know that I played for about 2 hours last night and it hard locked 4 times and required me to Force Quit the game. I lost about 5-10 minutes of play time when it happened. I notice that the play time on the save also doesn't reflect almost any of the time that I have played on this world. I will post a new response in a few days when I get a chance to play again.

[Skellingtonne]

Funny thing is, with the moon shape change in 1.21 I was wondering why they hadn't gone ahead and changed the sun to be round as well. Now I guess we know why.

 

...

Bring back the round moon!

[DUCATISLO]

this update somehow fixed me from crashing while smiting if I had god rays on...weird but thx

[Nevermine]

Will a new flatpak be forthcoming eventually?

[Flakeinator]

Just an update to my above post about game freezing/locking up on my M4 Mac. It seems that I was able to play without issue for about 2-2.5 hours this evening. Not sure if the update to 1.21.4 fixed the issue or if it had to do with my removing all previous versions of .NET on my machine manually using directions from Microsoft. Either way remove 7.x and 8.0.17 seemed to help the issue and maybe this new update helped out.

Either way... thanks for the update and I am glad that I can play the game again with out crashes.

[Arisatona]

Rift activity didn't changed for me. Still stuck at "high" 

[Maelstrom]

Rift activity can remain "stuck" at a given level for some lengthy times.  I've seen rift activity stay at high for a full day/night cycle.  

[Rodick]

12 hours ago, Nevermine said:

Will a new flatpak be forthcoming eventually?

Yea I had to download tar.gz since last flatpak was 1 month ago updated. I hope they can follow up and update as soon new update hits, since a lot of users are swaping from Windows to Linux, I am just saying would be nice.

[Aksha]

I really like the square moon and the square sun. And the cubic clouds. It's stylish. And not banal.

[Echo Weaver]

22 hours ago, Ryilo said:

In my modded game I'm still getting the labeled chests without the label showing, does anybody already know what mod is causing this, before I go and try to disable them one by one?

Was this actually fixed? I see it as a known issue in the change list above.

[Nevermine]

9 hours ago, Rodick said:

Yea I had to download tar.gz since last flatpak was 1 month ago updated. I hope they can follow up and update as soon new update hits, since a lot of users are swaping from Windows to Linux, I am just saying would be nice.

Nice, enjoy the new stuff. Flatpak's kind of the only option for me using an immutable distro.

[Flakeinator]

So after playing for about 1.5-2 hours it hard locked up again. I made some mortar in a barrel and the moment I made it (64 in total) the game locked up and I had to Force Quit it. So I am not sure what is happening. Afterwards I did notice a little bit of lag here and there and my fan was running hard core as well. I really wish that it would generate a log file so that I can figure out the issue or at least upload/post it. Thoughts?

[Echo Weaver]

45 minutes ago, Flakeinator said:

So after playing for about 1.5-2 hours it hard locked up again. I made some mortar in a barrel and the moment I made it (64 in total) the game locked up and I had to Force Quit it. So I am not sure what is happening. Afterwards I did notice a little bit of lag here and there and my fan was running hard core as well. I really wish that it would generate a log file so that I can figure out the issue or at least upload/post it. Thoughts?

I'm seeing this too. I went back and revisited the Github issue where it was discussed and compared my Vintagestory.runtimeconfig.json contents to the ones suggested by Alex998878. They are not exactly the same. Vanilla has a line 

"System.GC.NoAffinitize": true

while Alex's version has the line

"System.GC.Concurrent": true

I left the vanilla line untouched and added the missing line from Alex's version. This SEEMS to have improved the situation. It's hard to be sure when you're talking about an erratic issue to begin with. And I will not pretend to have any idea what any of these settings actually do.

[Flakeinator]

11 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

I'm seeing this too. I went back and revisited the Github issue where it was discussed and compared my Vintagestory.runtimeconfig.json contents to the ones suggested by Alex998878. They are not exactly the same. Vanilla has a line 

"System.GC.NoAffinitize": true

while Alex's version has the line

"System.GC.Concurrent": true

I left the vanilla line untouched and added the missing line from Alex's version. This SEEMS to have improved the situation. It's hard to be sure when you're talking about an erratic issue to begin with. And I will not pretend to have any idea what any of these settings actually do.

I did a fast ChatGPT query (I won't paste the long responses here) but I have a feeling that the second line you added might be needed to prevent the freezing/pausing. I will add that to my game and see what happens. I wonder if having a lot of mods also impact this as well.