You know those weeks where you're heads down, coffee-fueled, and the commit log looks like a novel? That was this week. And last week. And honestly the week before that.

It’s been a bit of a rough few weeks here. Too many big changes got put in too late without enough testing. Sometimes, enthusiasm overwhelms judgement. We just want you guys to have all the cool stuff as fast as possible. And that’s often not the right decision.

We've been doing a lot of bug fixing. I know that's not as sexy as "NEW DRAGON TYPE" or "BEHOLD THE DYNASTY OF DOOM", but this is the work that makes everything else possible. So, let me walk you through what's been going on.

Ugh. No doubt some of you have seen me on Discord. If you’re not on our Discord server, you should join. It’s the place to chat live with us. We live there.

The Modding Expansion Hit a Wall

We've been pushing hard to expand modding support. More moddable systems, better tools, smoother Workshop integration. The goal is to make it so that if you can imagine it, you can build it and share it.

But when you open up more systems to modding, you also open up more ways for things to go sideways. We ran into some serious issues where mods that worked fine individually would conflict in unexpected ways when combined. Load order edge cases. Data files that referenced assets the game expected to be there but weren't. XML parsing that was too trusting of what it was being fed.

The team has been burning the midnight oil on this. Not because we had to ship something by Friday, but because modding is core to what makes Elemental special and we want it rock solid. Some of the fixes:

• Mod conflict detection and better error handling. Instead of a mysterious crash, you now get a clear message about what went wrong and which mod caused it.

• More robust XML validation. The game is now much better at gracefully handling malformed or incomplete mod data instead of just falling over.

• Load order improvements. Mods that depend on other mods now resolve their dependencies more reliably.

• Memory stability under heavy mod loads. We found and fixed several leaks that only showed up when players were running 10+ mods simultaneously.

If you're a modder, you should notice that things are considerably more stable now. If you're a player who subscribes to a bunch of Workshop content, same deal.

Usability: The Little Things That Matter

While the engineers were buried in mod infrastructure, we also shipped some quality-of-life improvements that I think you'll appreciate:

Battle Advisor

Other Usability Wins

An in general we keep finding places to put more hotkeys in.

The Unglamorous Truth About Bug Fixing

Here's the thing about bug fixing: nobody cheers for it, but everyone notices when you don't do it. A stable game that loads your mods without crashing, that doesn't leak memory over a 200-turn game, that handles edge cases gracefully and that's the foundation everything else is built on. But this is a big game.

This is what Elemental looks like in Clairvoyance’s constellation view. And this doesn’t even include the engine or SDKs.

We've closed out a significant number of bugs in the last two weeks. Some were ancient. Some were brand new, introduced by our own modding expansion work. Some were reported by you on the forums and Discord. Every single report helps, even the ones that are just "it crashed when I did a thing" our crash reporter captures enough context that we can usually track it down. Even when a spell crashes in tactical battles.

What's Next

Hopefully 1.02 is a step in the right direction. We will do a 1.03 if necessary but the goal is to move on towards 1.1 which has meatier gameplay features. But we didn’t want to do that until we solved the bug issues.

Keep the bug reports coming. Keep making mods. Keep telling us what you want.

We're listening.

As always, if you're enjoying Elemental: Reforged, a review on Steam goes a long way. And if you've made something cool in the Workshop, drop a link in the comments as we love seeing what you build.