Tumblefire Update - August 27, 2026

Tumblefire · published · build 24973616

Hey everyone,

Big update! Lots of changes in this one - let's get into it:

Gameplay

  • Stop settled parts freezing in mid-air over a razed lot (#617)

  • Warm the shaders behind the train screen, and cache the rest of the hot-path loads (#589) (#592)

  • Make Explosive Expert do the thing it says on the tin (#581) (#586)

  • Always give back the train's ride lock on level load (#562, #564) (#574)

  • Swap NPC alerts, pain and breathing to the new voice actor packs (#569) (#572)

Fire & Destruction

  • Spread a razed building's ash over the ground it covered (#595 Part 2) (#622)

  • [fire/world] Fire could not bring a building down properly: the monitor deleted it too fast (#404) (#616)

  • [art/debug] Make the smoke column continuous, and fix the framing bug that made every review shot 2.28x too far (#614)

  • Soften smoke puffs and take the building fire column to ~4x building height (#613)

  • Make smoke a rising column: tight at the fire, billowing as it climbs (#612)

  • [world/debug] Stop the legacy 30% unweld pre-empting #403's collapse, and build a fixed-camera burn review harness (#611)

  • [art/perf] Volumetric near-field fire (#602) - fixes the blowout outright, costs 2.2x, off by default (#610)

  • [perf/debug] Pace fire-plume construction across frames, and make the benchmark repeatable (#606) (#608)

  • Share the three per-fire resources that were rebuilt for every burning object (#605)

  • Regrade the two towns whose frames failed the fire invariant, and make the gate able to notice (#416) (#603)

  • [world/art/debug] Make a razed lot read as one, fade parts into ash, and localise the close-range blowout (#595, #594, #416) (#600)

  • [perf/chaos/art] Localize the multi-second stall, make kinematic chaos events hit things, and soften the smoke (#597)

  • Build the destruction FX pools during loading, not on the first break (#589) (#591)

  • [art/perf] Fix the locomotive smoke, and warm the rest of the hot-path loads (#589) (#590)

  • Make the #513 spawn anchor an instrument that can actually fire (#513) (#584)

  • Tumbleweeds pile up, take a shove, and lay fire behind them (#559) (#582)

  • Cut the pale heat haze to about a third of its height (#567) (#575)

Combat & Weapons

  • [perf/npc/world] Uncensor the frame metric, fix the bark spam, and make the benchmark measure what it claims (#596)

  • Pin the barrel chain against the blast curve (#560 follow-up) (#585)

  • Give explosives distinct roles instead of one bigger boom (#560) (#580)

  • Attenuate blasts through geometry, and fix two live blast bugs (#566) (#576)

World & Environment

  • Stop the spawn-anchor diagnostic blaming a position write (#513) (#624)

  • [art/loot] Stop loot orbiting the building origin, and soot painting dark slabs (#623)

  • Anchor building foundations so a blast cannot throw them (#609)

  • [art/npc/world/debug] Fix facades at the source, bone-parent hats, portal Dust Creek, and add two isolation harnesses (#598)

Bug Fixes

  • [perf/world/debug] Fix four freed-object throws in the collapse sweep, and measure the vantage the benchmark was hiding (#604)

  • Make the debug-scene readout legible, the panel was fading its own text (#599)

  • Fix the Windows-illegal tracked paths that corrupt the index for saves, restore lost file (#573)

  • Raise demo money cap $500 -> $5,000 (#571)

Performance

  • Make the frame audit a controlled experiment, and fix the metric that made every #594 ablation unreadable (#601)

  • Look at an actual frame from new godotwright playtesting harness, for the first time (#416) (#587)


Thanks for playing Tumblefire and for all the feedback - it genuinely shapes where this game goes next. If you run into anything weird, drop us a line in the community hub or on Discord. We read everything.

-- David McHale (HeartCoded) & the Lost Rabbit Digital teamBuild 598b7ed · Full changelog on GitHub for the VIP folks