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Goanna v0.14.0-alpha

Experimental support for Minecraft Iris and OptiFine shader packs, alongside distant terrain and native water fixes. These are the notes published with the release on 13 October 2026. Fixes, Servers and "Also in this release" add what the published notes left out.

Shader packs

  • Select a downloaded shader pack in Settings, Graphics, Shader pack. Use Open folder, add the ZIP or extracted pack, then Look again. Join or rejoin a world to apply the selection and its options.
  • Supported terrain, foliage, water and shadow programs are translated, and supported prepare, deferred, composite and final passes run.
  • Supported pack options appear in the graphics settings.
  • Pack water inputs, prepared skies and clear glass are improved.

Download the shader packs you want to use from their authors. This is a compatibility checkpoint, not full Iris or OptiFine support. BSL, Complementary, Photon, MakeUp and Eclipse have been exercised during coastal comparison work, with pack specific rendering differences remaining. Complementary still has uneven water and cloud layers. MakeUp has dark terrain, noisy water and missing clouds. Shadows can differ from Minecraft. Path traced and voxel lighting packs are not claimed supported.

Terrain and native water

  • Distant cliff sides and terrain undersides are kept, to reduce horizon gaps.
  • Unchanged terrain summaries are reused, avoiding unnecessary rebuilds.
  • Native water reflections reach further, with refined screen space tracing.
  • Distant wave normals are calmer and native reflection blending is corrected.

Fixes

  • Typing on a Steam Deck. A text box reached with the D-pad, such as Join Game's address, ignored the Deck's on-screen keyboard, so a Deck could not join a server. It now takes typing as soon as it has the focus.
  • Prompts for the device you are using. Messages name the control on what you last used, a controller's button or a key, and a failed connection offers a Back to the menu button instead of telling you to press Escape. A server that never answers is no longer reported as refusing you.

Servers

  • Distant terrain fills faster and costs the server less. On Luanti 5.9 and later, the server mod now does the heavy part of summarising distant terrain on Luanti's async worker threads rather than in the server step that every mod and player shares. On an explored Mineclonia world with one player, summaries took about half of the server step and now take about an eighth, and the far view fills about a quarter faster (60,000 blocks per 30 seconds against 48,000). The full detail blocks sent for nearby terrain are encoded on the workers too. goanna_far_summary_async = false keeps the old behaviour. Not yet tested with several players or games other than Mineclonia.

Also in this release

The published notes left these out. They are in the 0.14.0 builds, with how far each was checked.

Weather

  • Storms. Rain and snow vary across the world in storm cells about 600 nodes across that drift with the wind: a drizzle under a light deck at a cell's edge, full overcast and a downpour at its heart. Snow at a storm's heart becomes a whiteout, with the fog closing in.
  • Snow settles on up-facing ground open to the sky, texel by texel, and melts again afterwards, faster under rain. Before, snow made the ground wet and left puddles.
  • Flakes have shapes. Each flake has its own size, some are clumps, and up close a flake is a turning six-armed crystal.
  • Wet grass glistens with droplets that catch the sun, sky and lamps.
  • Hail and blowing sand are drawn by shader, so they stop at roofs. They fell through roofs as particles.
  • Other games' weather. Regional Weather, theFox's weather, Mymonths and Snowdrift are recognised, and so are pmb_core's and Kythen's rain. Each was run live on Minetest Game.

The owner checked rain and puddles in play on 11 October 2026 and found them fine. Known defects: blowing dust is nearly invisible, the sky stays sunny under a storm, hail is sparse, and the fake snow spawner is far denser than real snow.

Look

  • Flames have their own material: soft edges, colour and brightness that rise through the flame, a flicker, a glow and a heat shimmer that is off on Lowest and Low. Soul fire stays blue.
  • Nether and End portals have their own shaders. Checked live on Mineclonia, Luanti 5.17.0.
  • Texture resolution follows the graphics tier: 128 on Lowest and Low, 256 on Medium and High, 512 on Ultra.
  • Micro shadows are on at every tier, and Low gets the short relief march. Neither cost was measurable above noise on an RTX 3090. This is not a Steam Deck measurement.
  • Contact shade at corners now reaches play. A setting meant to softly shade the feet of walls and corners in direct light was stuck at zero.
  • Upright sprites are drawn as the vanilla client draws them, so Mineclonia's decorated pots no longer turn to face you. Sprites set against a wall, such as DorfCraft's engravings, sit on the wall and are lit as the wall is.

Playing

  • Usable items work. An item with an on_use action, such as DorfCraft's tools, sends a use on the press as the vanilla client does, not a dig. Checked live on Mineclonia, 21 checks.
  • Crafting makes one recipe run per click, or ten on a middle click, as vanilla does. A recipe that makes four used to craft four times. Checked by the formspec tests only, not against a live server.
  • Tables report the column clicked, so mods receive valid table events, and columns widen to fit their contents.
  • Your view range setting reaches the server. Every player asked for the default of 12 blocks whatever their graphics tier said.
  • Cutscenes and framed views work. When a server turns the player's view, Goanna now turns too.
  • Terrain changed by a mod no longer leaves holes at block edges. Checked live on Mineclonia.

Stability

  • A crash after the shader pack effect closed, reproduced and fixed.
  • Two races that could crash the client: one when the connection switches address during joining, one if a server sent its block definitions twice.

Materials

Packs for seventeen community mods were published as downloadable materials (asset epochs 2026.10.6 and 2026.10.7): Draconis, Goblins, Simple Airship, Steampunk Blimp, Animalia, Mobs Animal, Mobs Monster, 3d_armor, Edit Skin, Cottages, Basic Materials, DF Caverns, Nextgen Fungi, Bees, X Farming, More Trees and Mineclonia Furniture and Decorations. They download separately from the client.

Servers and the game master

  • Distant work pauses on a slow server step and resumes promptly. It used to stay paused for minutes after one slow step.
  • A world's modpacks load whole. Choosing a modpack for a world started from Goanna enabled only a mod with the pack's name.
  • The game master needs no setup on the server. It now talks to the server through files in the world folder, which works with the bundled server, and its service ships with Goanna. Games can add their own rules, orders and characters to it. No language model has been run against this yet.
  • DorfCraft's overseer view. A cut-away planning view drawn from the real world, for DorfCraft servers that offer it.

Validation

The shader checkpoint was observed against an unmodified local Luanti 5.17.0 server running Mineclonia release 38561, using Godot 4.5.1 and an RTX 3090. This does not establish performance or compatibility on other GPUs. Native water night and underwater visuals have not been rechecked. Linux passed native and integration tests, a live Mineclonia connection, Ubuntu 22.04 startup, and native and Photon coastal GPU smoke checks. Windows passed compilation in GitHub CI and archive verification, but has not been run on Windows. Forest, cave and underwater performance coverage has not been repeated for this release. The release's verification.json has the details.

Source checkpoint: 5bdefa52 (13 October 2026). Goanna is independent of the Luanti project.