Everyone must update
The network version went 25 → 29 — four steps in one build, including a change that renumbers how every character is spawned. An out-of-date client cannot join, and the server refuses it by name during the join. Restart Steam and update.
Crouch is real
It has been printed on your prompt strip for weeks and done nothing. Press C (or click the right stick) and you actually crouch — with a proper crouch pose, a crouch-walk, and a capsule that shrinks from your feet rather than your head, so you stay on the ground instead of sinking into it.
You stand back up automatically only when there is room above you. Crouch under a shelf and you stay crouched until you leave it. You can build and paint while crouched.
And there is prone
Hold the same key for about two seconds and the crouch becomes a full prone. Hold again to stand back up. Prone is slower still and you cannot sprint out of it.
The rule that matters in a chase: a hold can only ever lower you. Going down is instant, standing up waits for you to release the key — so panicking on the key while a hunter walks past will never pop you upright out of cover.
Both stances are available to hunters as well as hiders.
Body sizes actually do something now
The X1.4 and X1.7 buttons in the lobby have been picking a number and spawning the same body. They now resolve to genuinely scaled characters, and the lobby doll shows you the size you picked before you commit to it.
Hunters: build on your own body, in private
- Body-building in the forge is switched on. Press G to swap between working on your gun and working on your body, and back. Whatever you switch to un-hides itself automatically, and each remembers whether you had hidden it.
- B now depends on what you are building: it hides your body while you forge the gun, and hides your gun while you build your body.
- The hide phase is now private for hunters. Other hunters, the cubes they are building on themselves, their guns, their nameplates and their footsteps are all curtained away while you build — and they can no longer shove you sideways mid-placement. Previously you shared that room with everyone, could not ask them to move, and built with bodies standing between your camera and your own work.
Climbing was rebuilt
- WASD on a wall now means what it means on the floor. Movement while attached used to be a left/right scalar; it is now the ordinary camera-relative move vector, with Space and Ctrl riding vertically. Your body turns to face where it is going and holds that angle when you stop.
- A slip now reads as a slip. There is a real distinction between "still holding on" and "let go": lose contact and gravity resumes while you stay attached, so you fall away from the wall instead of hovering — and steering back in re-grabs it.
- Grabbing takes a deliberate hold rather than happening by accident, and there is a gold halo at mid-body so you can see the reach you actually have.
A worn disguise stops at the wall
Two opposite reports in one day, from one cause. Your disguise's cubes had no way to stop you — its collision cannot push your own body — so a build either held you absurdly far off a wall or sank straight through it.
It is now directional, which is the part a single distance could never express: the bare side of you approaches a wall exactly like a bare body, while the side with cubes on it stops where the cubes meet the wall. Turn around and the distance changes, correctly.
Building fixes from the 08-10 session
- A lopsided build no longer flings you to the ceiling. Finishing a big off-centre tower could drag your collision shape off your own axis, park its underside over the tower's footprint, and leave you pinned at the ceiling, floating and bare-bodied with the tower still standing below. One line, and the same displacement was quietly widening your climb reach too.
- You can build on the hunter's head again. On the 1.4× hunter body every placement was pulled toward the feet — by 0.6 m at the crown — and once the error passed a certain point the block was refused silently. Every refused click in that session is explained by it.
- A hunter's built body no longer renders as cubes floating with air gaps around the head and shoulders.
- The orbit camera no longer sits far out when building on a hunter.
Allow Build and Allow Paint finally work separately
They shared one gate, so each broke the other. Allow Build off silently switched painting off too — F opened nothing at all, with no message. Allow Paint off still opened the whole colour wheel over a tool the game had already refused, so every stroke was a no-op on a menu that looked alive. Each switch now governs only its own half, and the panel opens whichever one the host actually left on.
Your points survive the end of the match
Dropping out at the match-end boundary erased your points from everyone's view. Now a post-match rejoin gets its held score back, players who are identified but absent still appear as named rows in the results, and a body reclaimed by the server still banks the survival credit it earned.
Also fixed: a hunter who dropped mid-hunt and rejoined came back holding a grey stub that could not shoot; and the offline wifi badge beside the timer stayed grey forever after the player had already come back.
The round-start show comes first
Seeing the round begin and then getting the reveal was redundant. The hunter reveal now plays first, holding through the wait while everything finishes loading behind it, and hands off to the round exactly when it is ready.
Sound
- A full game-start sequence: a stinger, countdown suspense, and a voice line telling you your role.
- A ticking countdown loop, with a hit when time runs out and another when the round starts.
- Footsteps are synced to the animation. Walking used to lag behind the gait, so your steps did not land with your feet.
Interface
- The main menu, settings, create-server and language screens are rebuilt to the design reference, with a new splash video.
- The main menu's own key art is back — it had been accidentally re-skinned when a map card was re-shot, because both were reading the same file.
- New map cards for all three maps: a "dollhouse" view of the whole level rather than a distant speck.
- The lobby HUD now matches the design across all three maps, and the PeekaBlock logo is on the Custom Match screen.
- The first loading screen of every session toured the wrong map — a designer preview setting shipped switched on and overwrote the real pick. Candy would load under a screen reading CACTUS COURTYARD.
- The loading background no longer pulses dark every other image.
- Settings menu scrolling is no longer painfully slow.
- A full pass over the translations in all eight languages.
Known issues — please don't file these
- Plaster Gallery has a map card but no loading-screen preview tour. The preview system photographs a map from outside, and from outside a roofed building is a grey slab. It needs a different approach.
- The Zoo, Egyptian and Ice environments you may hear about are not in this build as playable maps — they are art still being made. The map list is Cactus Courtyard, Candy and Plaster Gallery.
- Crouch, prone, the body sizes and the climbing rework are all brand new and have not been through a full playtest. That is what tonight is for.
What we most want to know
- Crouch and prone under real pressure. Hide under something low, let a hunter walk past, and mash the key. Does it ever stand you up when you did not want it to?
- Climb a wall and move around on it. Does WASD go where you expect? When you slip, does it feel like slipping or like a bug?
- Hunters: build on your own body in the forge. Are you alone in there? Can you place on your head?
- Wear a chunky disguise and walk into a wall, facing it with the cube side and then with the bare side. Both correct?
- Build a big lopsided tower and finish it. Do you stay on the floor?
- Pick X1.4 and X1.7 in the lobby — does the doll show it, and do you spawn that size?
- Host a match with Allow Build off, then one with Allow Paint off. Does the right panel open each time?
If something looks wrong, press F12 the moment it happens — it marks that exact instant in your log — then run Collect-Logs.bat and send us the folder.