Rooted Weekly Dev Log: Week 36, 2026

Three big threads this week: the new open-world terrain built from real Oregon ground, the modding layer with Steam Workshop, and the online layer with dedicated servers, plus the audio architecture, wildlife, and building, combat and AI work. Modding moved a lot, and modders will soon be able to test their mods on the alpha. The game runs on a dedicated server in testing, and meetings with hosting partners are planned so that servers are available from the early access launch. The build also boots on PlayStation 5, so I can test and optimize on the console from now on. None of this is in the public build. From the next weekly dev log I will be sharing visuals again!

The open world, from real Oregon ground

The map now starts from real Oregon ground. Real terrain and real map data, roads, trails, rivers and lakes, feed the voxel world, and a region comes in with its content in place. So far I have built up to 350 km² of terrain across the different biomes, for testing and iteration.

• Five real places, one world - a stretch of the southern coast with beaches, dunes and an estuary; the forested hills and tidal sloughs behind Coos Bay; the Newberry volcano with its two crater lakes, obsidian flow and cinder cones; the high desert and river canyon around Smith Rock; and at the center a small river-basin town that acts as the hub where the four biomes meet.
• Rivers, lakes, caves and points of interest - rivers and lakes at their real levels, cave entrances at the foot of cliffs, and a density pass that keeps a point of interest within a few minutes of walking from anywhere.
• Roads and junctions - I built a road tool that carves nine road classes into the voxel terrain, from highways to forest tracks and trails, and builds the junctions on its own. It laid every road of the new map, about two thousand roads and trails and close to three thousand junctions, with a bridge and roadside kit and road signs on top.
• The coast - the western edge is a real coastline, straightened so it runs along the map edge: beaches, a dune belt, sea cliffs, a river mouth, and the sea itself, which floods the estuary and the sloughs into coastal marshes.

It is early. Water is a flat placeholder surface, not every biome has its own materials and vegetation, the two towns have their street grids but no buildings, the coast has no waves, and the whole thing lives on my machine outside the main branch. It is a working level I can walk, not a finished map. New screenshots of the world come back next week.

Modding and Steam Workshop

Mods are content-only packages: a mod carries data, assets and blueprints, is cooked into a drop-in package, and loads through the game's own feature system. The example mod is a craftable baseball bat built with data only, so a modder has a working blueprint to copy while animation and combat stay on the game side. This is the same data-driven path the game's own items use, which is why it works for mods.

• Steam Workshop - upload, subscribe and manage mods from a Mods tab in the options, with per-player load preferences.
• Coop with mods - a session carries the list of active mods, players must match it to join, and modded sessions are flagged in the browser.
• Saves survive a missing mod - items from a mod that is no longer loaded are kept in the save instead of being dropped.
• Safe mode - after a crash the game starts with mods disabled so a broken mod cannot lock you out.

The Workshop round trip has only been exercised from my own machine; a real second-player test is not done. From the next build, modders can start: there is little to mod so far, but I will put what they need at their disposal, documentation, files and the example mod.

Audio architecture

Sound had been left aside in the alpha until now, so this was a big catch-up session. The game now has a dedicated audio module built around a data-driven event registry. Gameplay code posts named events (about a hundred of them: footsteps, construction, weapons, wildlife, the player's body, weather) and never references a sound directly, so every take can be swapped without touching code. The mix is driven by game states. I am coding it so that sound designers can work on it at a high level of quality, and the workflow is currently being tested by Romain, who works on the sound design of Backrooms: Extractions.

• World sound - biome beds, interiors, weather overlays and wind, all generated as procedural sound graphs by script, with zones and regions placed in the world.
• The player's body - breathing that only starts under effort, cold or stress, and a heartbeat tied to state.
• Options - a dynamic range setting and voice ducking, plus vocal efforts on melee.

Wildlife

Most of the wildlife work went into behaviour, and it is starting to get interesting. Animals now roam according to need zones: watering holes, feeding grounds, bedding cover and perches shape where they go. The mule deer pack is in, on a native animation setup, and eagles fly. I also added contamination, which adds a lot to the gameplay and to the pressure: contaminated variants exist as a minority of each species, keep clear of player spawn points, are capped per species, drop tainted meat and ruined hides instead of the clean versions, and they also attack the human AI. Herd behaviour in coop is not validated.

Online and dedicated servers

The online layer now runs on the engine's native EOS and Steam subsystems, and the groundwork for dedicated servers is in: the server checks game version and password at login, enforces the real player cap, and replicates weather and the notion of host. A dedicated server has been advertised on EOS and joined by a client in a real test: the game runs on a dedicated server. Meetings with hosting partners are planned so that servers are available from the early access launch. The listen server remains the default way to play together.

PlayStation 5 bring-up

The game and the voxel terrain compile, link and run on a PlayStation 5 devkit, with memory budgets and console framework guards in place, and a gamepad-only controls tab for controller play. That lets me test and optimize on the console from now on.

Building, combat and AI

• Building - doors and windows snap into wall openings, constructions produce a shelter signal, building from a site crate gates on the crate's stock, and placement has an undo window, lock, nudge and mouse-wheel rotation. Feedback cues for place, deposit, promote, demolish, collapse and repair are data-driven.
• Throwing and projectiles - a composable projectile system with a ground-aim throw.
• Enemy AI - a pass on hunting, near misses, reactions to corpses and rallying, and a firefight pass (fire lanes, bursts, fire tokens, breaking stalemates). I also stopped them from shooting each other: in some test scenes, if an enemy happened to hit another one, it turned into a settling of scores between them, which was funny to watch but not the plan.

Also this week

• Coop fixes: the remote player's backpack visual, impact effects for everyone, crosshair after travel.
• A crash fix on the interaction prompt icon.
• Zipline link, unlink and ride abilities granted to the player, and cleanup of dead legacy blueprints and maps.

That's the week from the development side!

Mat