From Beyond: Ancient Echoes Update Coming Next Week!

[ZeRoboButler]

I mean, this seems pretty normal to me.

When the atrium was added, the portal had all that tape over it 

only difference now is there is no tape lol. On the positive side, we get a look at what is coming, and a bit of lore to explore. 

[Sirdevil]

Perfect!! I've been saving spools for two weeks to see the new skins.
How exciting!

[Edible Coal]

they need money lol

[Popian]

2 hours ago, lowercase skye said:

that there's currently nothing to do with.

It's possible that they deliberately didn't include things in the beta because it's something that does not need testing and would spoil the "puzzle". Wouldn't build any expectations on that because if it's not there then it's not ready.

[hoxi]

I feel like I need to point out a few things for people that think this beta is ending too soon.

First, these two bits from what they said in the first announcement.

Quote

It is worth noting that this is not the "final update" for this arc

 

we took this opportunity to prepare some of the more tech heavy parts first

 

For anyone that hasn't been diving into the code changes, as implied with the "tech heavy" bit, this update has a decent amount of things that might not seem that big from some of the patch notes, but they are:

• There's a whole new system that allows transferring "payloads" of entities from shard to shard. It's used for one thing at the moment (that being the giant Whirlpool), but this opens up possibilities in the future, as well as for modding (like having a thing that directly transfers things from the forest to the caves, or viceversa, to some specific coordinates).
• A long standing issue that's basically now confirmed to have been there since Don't Starve, has been fixed, related to entity sleep status, and brains and stategraphs. This isn't gonna mean anything for many people but it's a really nice and welcome code cleanup that allows things to be implemented more cleanly in general (and it's already resulted in Klei removing some lines of code that were there for specific cases, as it's now handled automatically as expected and they're no longer needed).
• The new caves vault system is also its own huge thing and it's still being ironed out.
• We now have a "basic" system to determine biomes based on world gen (it's not actually basic, but I'm only saying so because it's not complete, as it's intended for the new Boulderbough trees, but it can be used for other things for modding, or Klei themselves could expand on it later and make it its own global thing).
• Further tweaks to mod loading (unsure, but my guess is that it's related to more security).

 

The beta also has some very important fixes that would be nice to have out already:

• T.I.N.G.L.E nodes causing engine-sided crashes due to some deserialization issues.
• Issues with Pearl eating everything and not giving her Pearl even after completing enough tasks for her.
• Sunken Chests not spawning all their potential loot, as well as being able to spawn too close to things that would block them and prevent players from getting them.

 

And trust me when I say, working on multiple branches, keeping them synced and up to date with each other, can be a nightmare (especially with this much, the first update alone changed 209 lua files compared to live), so releasing the beta with all these fixes and new features, which have been tested out in their very initial states and after being updated (and still are, we still have a week!), will probably be more convenient for both Klei and players.

Edited September 12, 2025 by hoxi
Minor correction

[Milordo]

8 minutes ago, hoxi said:

--snip---

Thanks. It matters more to have a more "dev perspective" behind the scenes. It explains a lot of things. Without knowning it, I would've guess only the giant whirlpool and the new content, together with the new biome were the only "tech heavy" stuff.

[Sephirona]

1 hour ago, hoxi said:

• There's a whole new system that allows transferring "payloads" of entities from shard to shard. It's used for one thing at the moment (that being the giant Whirlpool), but this opens up possibilities in the future, as well as for modding (like having a thing that directly transfers things from the forest to the caves, or viceversa, to some specific coordinates).

This is really cool. It was something I was sort of quietly wondering to myself too - I was lurking when the changes to Pearl's Island hit and I remember many were unhappy about losing an ocean base. If it is now possible to have shards affect each other in this way, a really cool next step could be something like progression/disruption in the caves causing magma eruptions that allow new island formation on the surface. If we could get new biomes and new mini islands at some point that would be really neat and bring both new survival challenges and base locations all at once.

[VaskalRascal]

2 hours ago, Kacpert25 said:

Oh... Well, I haven't checked the turf in this biome, so it's good to know that the current appearance is placeholder.

I'm late to reply, but yes there is custom turf, it just hasn't been given the proper texture(s) yet. There's strings and everything for it in the files. :]

 

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, hoxi said:

A long standing issue that's basically now confirmed to have been there since Don't Starve, has been fixed, related to entity sleep status, and brains and stategraphs. This isn't gonna mean anything for many people but it's a really nice and welcome code cleanup that allows things to be implemented more cleanly in general (and it's already resulted in Klei removing some lines of code that were there for specific cases, as it's now handled automatically as expected and they're no longer needed).

I'm really curious about what exactly this entails! Would you care to elaborate on what specifically changed?

[Swiyss]

1 hour ago, Popian said:

It's possible that they deliberately didn't include things in the beta because it's something that does not need testing and would spoil the "puzzle". Wouldn't build any expectations on that because if it's not there then it's not ready.

I wanna believe this ^^, but I'm also not gonna get my hopes and hypes too high until I see something.

[Evelo]

I wish I could get excited again. Still doesn't add anything new to the pre-existing caves, just slaps on another addition.

[hoxi]

26 minutes ago, Sephirona said:

This is really cool. It was something I was sort of quietly wondering to myself too - I was lurking when the changes to Pearl's Island hit and I remember many were unhappy about losing an ocean base. If it is now possible to have shards affect each other in this way, a really cool next step could be something like progression/disruption in the caves causing magma eruptions that allow new island formation on the surface. If we could get new biomes and new mini islands at some point that would be really neat and bring both new survival challenges and base locations all at once.

Oh, things like that have technically always been possible by sending events from shard to shard and running scripts there.

This mainly allows sending entities directly, right now mainly for items, separately from the usual migration system that players use to go between shards.

 

22 minutes ago, VaskalRascal said:

I'm late to reply, but yes there is custom turf, it just hasn't been given the proper texture(s) yet. There's strings and everything for it in the files. :]

Yeah, even if it makes it into the game as is (I doubt it, there's a week left), the game is still using the new turf with placeholder art, so it won't have to be retrofitted or anything like that.

 

 

20 minutes ago, lowercase skye said:

I'm really curious about what exactly this entails! Would you care to elaborate on what specifically changed?

Basically, entity brains and stategraphs were able to be initialized when they shouldn't.

Under no circumstance should entities initialize their brain or start their stategraph while:

• Asleep (what normally people refer to as unloaded/offscreen, this is separate from being put to sleep by something like a panflute).
• In "limbo" (hidden and not networked, unless a "classified" target player is manually set, in which case the entity will exist for them, which is how player inventories and containers work).
• Entities can be asleep but not in limbo, or viceversa, or both at once.

This rule is fully enforced now. Before, specific checks had to be put in different places, and missing them resulted in issues (running either is pointless if asleep because physics are stopped, unless manually set not to, which is reserved for very few static things, like walls, and with limbo, that could lead to issues..).

Another issue that was addressed was that entities on creation, when checking for the engine sleep status, would return false, as the status hasn't been assigned yet. This is also accounted for now, though there might be cases that need to check for the new flag that Klei has set for it.

 

There's also some mechanics like being frozen, sleeping (like actual sleep, not the entity sleep status from the engine), and some other more unique mechanics that normally disable brains (stategraphs are fine in these cases as they literally handle the mechanics). Prior to these changes though, there were manual checks to see if a brain should start again when these mechanics were done (unfreezing, waking up, etc).

Now entities keep track of "stop reasons", and until all reasons are cleared, the brain won't be allowed to start (and when they are, they must also not be asleep on the engine and must not be in limbo).

 

The result of all these fixes is that many specific checks were able to be removed, and now any custom reasons to disable a brain can be provided, and when they're cleared, the brain will restart as expected if allowed.

The main thing to note is that if you have some script that checks for inst:IsAsleep() and can run when an entity has just spawned (like a component postinit, for a component that gets added on creation), you need to also check for inst.sleepstatepending if the code isn't supposed to run if asleep.

[Bumber64]

I remember someone mentioned that lunar altars dropped into the whirlpool were irretrievable. Was that an issue that was addressed?

I presume the proper behavior would be for them to teleport to nearby land.

Edit: It was fixed in the latest patch minutes after this post.

Edited September 12, 2025 by Bumber64

[Frosty_Mentos]

6 hours ago, lowercase skye said:

Are there plans to finish things up in this final week? Right now this update adds a technologically impressive but purely-decorative area with nothing to gain from visiting it except some cosmetic masks, a biome with a placeholder turf and very little decor, a cool new tree that's still lacking a lot of its unique drops, and a new mob which is very visually impressive but impossible to actually damage or kill. I'm not usually one to worry about betas being fast and loose or coming out underdeveloped, but so far this one is almost exclusively cool technology that there's currently nothing to do with.

Will we get a phase 2 like Hostile Takeover, maybe? That seemed like a pretty effective format to allow for the hype of frequent updates without the loose ends that such a thing usually entails.

They made all those things in a very short amount of time after Warbot, give them time and they'll cook up the rest.

[Mike23Ua]

How much of the new contents will be accessible without having to open rifts first?

[lowercase skye]

Just now, Mike23Ua said:

How much of the new contents will be accessible without having to open rifts first?

Everything except the changes to the fumarole biome when a shadow rift is open, which means you'll miss out on:
- The fumaroles let out miasma rather than just heat.
- Boulderbough trees will dig up gems more often.
- The new Mega Blight will roam the biome.

You should still have a pretty complete experience with this update without rifts open, but some things will be missing if you don't have them on. Remember there's a toggle in the world settings!

[Mike23Ua]

11 minutes ago, lowercase skye said:

Everything except the changes to the fumarole biome when a shadow rift is open, which means you'll miss out on:
- The fumaroles let out miasma rather than just heat.
- Boulderbough trees will dig up gems more often.
- The new Mega Blight will roam the biome.

You should still have a pretty complete experience with this update without rifts open, but some things will be missing if you don't have them on. Remember there's a toggle in the world settings!

Cool so it’s like the Gashalt/Shadow Creature Warzone? I hope in the future Klei continues to do more updates like that: Accessible early game with something new to explore, gets nastier once rifts are triggered. ❤️

[Dragonboooorn]

Its funny how they were able to push massive (compared to recent) MONTHLY updates, but now they do near to nothing in a span of 3 months 

[SapoLover]

39 minutes ago, Dragonboooorn said:

Its funny how they were able to push massive (compared to recent) MONTHLY updates, but now they do near to nothing in a span of 3 months

Let them cook

Edited September 12, 2025 by SapoLover
Why did I get a Haha? I won't be able to sleep thinking about it

[Snapchrap]

38 minutes ago, Dragonboooorn said:

Its funny how they were able to push massive (compared to recent) MONTHLY updates, but now they do near to nothing in a span of 3 months

I think you may wanna go read what hoxi said.

[Szczuku]

If this update comes with its own animated trailer and main menu artwork+theme then it'll feel like a waste of klei artists' time.

I feel like this sorta small, preparation update shoulda just stay im beta until the rest of content is made available. Kinda how New Reign had long betas that span multiple smaller updates and finally released as a one big update

[Captain_Rage]

8 hours ago, hoxi said:

I feel like I need to point out a few things for people that think this beta is ending too soon.

They simply have too much spare time, lol.

 

The new update is looks wonderful! Can't wait to play it! 

 

[SilverSpoon]

@JoeW, I think this is probably the last chance, please forgive asking directly. 

Regarding Moonstorm setting plant mobs on fire, may I ask whether any changes or any official statement that it is proper and fair are planned? In two separate polls, about two-thirds of forum players dislike this in both polls, and many player have given many detailed reasons for why it should be changed.

At the least, could you make it toggleable in the settings? That alone would go a long way toward resolving our problem.

, 

Edited September 12, 2025 by SilverSpoon

[Caldig]

Will new additions be available for old save?

[Ridley]

18 hours ago, Milordo said:

WHAT

 

Like, COME ON! There is still so much to do!!!

- What about Ruins, new biome and Lunar grotto generation rework?

- What about GWD must needed final touch-ups?

- What about fumarole biome together with other possible forgotten biomes?

Isn't this outside the scope of what the update was intended to be? I thought this was supposed to be the setup for the next big part of Charlie's story, not a cave and GWD rework.