⚠️ Everyone must update — again, and this one is a double break
The network version went 22 → 24. An out-of-date client cannot see your lobby in the server list and cannot join it. Please make sure every single person restarts Steam and updates before you organise a session. If someone reports an empty server list, that is what it is.
Leave a decoy standing: the clone ability
Press Q as a hider and you leave a frozen copy of yourself exactly where you stood — same pose, same disguise, same paint, right down to the wall you were clinging to. Then you walk away and let a hunter waste a look on a statue.
- Two clones at a time, each on its own 10-second cooldown. At the cap, a fresh press recycles your oldest clone rather than refusing — a ready charge that does nothing feels broken.
- C erases every clone you have standing.
- A clone has no collision of any kind and shots pass straight through it. It is a bluff, not a target — you cannot use one as a shield, and a hunter shooting one loses nothing but the second it took.
- A clone is exactly as visible as you are. One planted during the hide phase stays invisible to hunters until the phase flips, same as you do.
- Repaint or rebuild yourself and your standing clones follow along.
Watch for the Q — ◆ ◆ — C strip above your climb prompts: a full diamond is a ready charge. The ability has a Clone toggle in Custom Match, and it is on by default in Hide & Seek and Ticket, off in Infected and Tag.
A third map: Plaster Gallery
Zack's full-scale voxel exhibition hall — a complete two-level gallery with 28 sculptures in it. Some are finished, some are damaged, some were deliberately left unfinished for you to extend in-game. It is brand new and has never been through a full playtest, so please be rough with it.
One slider rounds your whole disguise — and your actual body
The per-cube SHARP toggle is gone. In its place is a single BEVEL slider in the Build panel that rounds everything you have built, live, as you drag it — retroactively, including cubes you placed an hour ago.
The part that took the longest: your character's own body follows it too. The body is not made of cubes — it is one baked mesh — so it could never be re-rounded at runtime. It is now pre-baked at fifteen different roundness levels and swapped as you move the slider. Your paint survives the swap.
An honest limit: at the top of the slider your body's edges are a wide chamfer rather than a true sphere. Making it a real sphere would mean changing how paint is sent over the network, so it is deliberately not done yet.
Cubes stop pulling away from your body as you round it
Directly downstream of the above: raising the bevel pulls your body's edges and corners inward, while the flat middle of each face stays put. A cube stuck to a flat face kept touching; a cube overhanging an edge lifted off. That is why the gap looked random. The body now holds its original shape underneath anything you have attached to it, so the join stays closed at every setting.
Still true, and known: the cube's own face against your body stays square. That is a separate job.
Building on an arm now builds on the arm
The invisible box used to work out which body part you clicked was, for the torso, big enough to swallow the entire character — both arms end to end, the head, the upper thighs. So every block you placed on a limb reported "torso", attached to the torso, and then sat still while your arm moved. Placement now reads the body's own skin data and names the part exactly. Blocks on a limb also stop at the surface you aimed at instead of drifting off it.
Modified blocks join back up with what they touch
Scaling or moving a block used to quietly turn it into a loose piece that would never fuse with the cubes it visually continues — so a stretched slab showed a seam against its own neighbours. It re-joins them now.
By design, unchanged: the Move tool snaps in quarter-cells, and a block deliberately parked on a half-step remains its own piece. Precision won that argument.
Spectating: watch the people still playing
- Get caught, and A/D now cycle through the players still in the round, with the camera following whoever you are watching. Previously those keys were advertised and did nothing.
- 5 (FREE CAMERA) is finally real for a caught hider. The prompt has been printed on that screen for a long time and was wired to nothing during a match.
- New — scouting. A hider who is still alive can press 5 to detach the camera and go look around. Your body stays standing exactly where you left it — visible, solid and completely catchable while you are away. It is a gamble, not an escape hatch. Hunters do not get this.
Loading screens show you the map now
Instead of one static card, the loading screen walks through several camera views of the map you are about to play, chosen automatically from the map's own layout, with a caption on each. Use them — the point is that you can plan before you land.
You can hear where the hunter is looking, and taunts carry
- The hunter's automatic whistle now guides them. It rises steadily as they close in, so every ten metres nearer is clearly louder. Hiders: it is now a real tell — if the whistle is getting louder, move.
- Taunts carry much further across the map (about 5 dB louder at long range). Bait is meant to be heard, so manual taunts deliberately keep the flat, everywhere-carry curve while the automatic whistle got the directional one.
The world stops letting you walk through it
- Doors are permanently open and static. No more swinging on approach. (A first pass accidentally swung the already-open ones shut — if you walked into a closed front door on the desert map recently, that was it, and it is repaired.)
- Solid collision added to props you could previously walk straight through: the safes, container boxes, cowboy hats and windmill metal on Cactus Courtyard; the 55 loose cookie cubes and 7 candy pieces on Candy.
- More collision and mesh fixes across the desert props — cart, revolver, boots, hats, station, train, boulders, cacti and signs.
Menus and panels
- Main menu buttons lit up when your cursor was nowhere near them — the invisible hover area was about five times the size of the button you can see, and neighbouring ones overlapped. Hovering now matches the artwork.
- The menu's icons sat visibly outside their own buttons. That turned out to be a hidden developer-only button taking a slot and squeezing the whole column.
- The Build panel is back at its proper size and the HISTORY row is inside the frame again.
- The round-start splash now fully covers the screen as it fades, which hides most of the stutter at the moment the hunt begins.
Known issues — please don't file these
- There is still a hitch when the hunt starts. It is smaller than it was, but shaders in this game still compile the first time they are used, mid-match. That is the remaining cause and it is not fixed yet.
- C is now "clear my clones". Crouch was never wired up and still is not — use a held pose to get under a low gap.
- Sessions cap at 10 players. A refused player currently sees "relay drop or host teardown" rather than "the server is full" — if someone cannot get in and you are ten, that is why.
- A colour picked off a distant surface still reads washed out up close.
- Plaster Gallery's spawn placement and the map preview shots are a first pass.
What we most want to know
- Play Plaster Gallery. It has never had a full playtest. Anything at all — spawns, collision, sightlines, whether it is fun.
- Actually bait someone with a clone. Place two, hit the cap and place a third, clear them with C. Does a hunter fall for it? Does the strip read correctly?
- Run the BEVEL slider top to bottom with cubes stuck to your body, and look hard at where the cubes meet you. That seam is the fix we are least sure of.
- Build on arms and legs, then walk around and have someone else confirm the blocks move with the limb.
- Scale a block in the middle of a structure — does it still look like one piece?
- As a living hider, press 5 and go scouting — then get caught while you are away. Your body is supposed to be catchable the whole time.
- Listen for the whistle. Hunters: does it point you anywhere? Hiders: can you tell when they are closing?
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. F12 and the logs genuinely work again in this build; the previous one shipped without them by mistake, which is why we got so little back from it.