The damage so far

Distant models are models again.

Platforms: Browser production and desktop 0.1.7 on Windows x64, universal Mac and Arch x86_64. TestFlight remains BUILD 63.

This emergency visual-integrity release corrects BUILD 68’s broken distance rendering without changing combat, movement, traffic, saves or multiplayer rules.

• Characters, deer, vehicles, weapons, props and buildings now retain their exact authored full-detail silhouette at every gameplay distance instead of collapsing into full-envelope cubes.
• The browser batches compatible full-detail pieces once when a model loads, preserving the visible geometry while keeping frame time and memory within the release budget.
• Runtime LOD selection now fails closed: lower-detail geometry is ignored unless the manifest explicitly opts in and its measured triangle ratios and shape-safety gates pass.
• The asset generator can no longer manufacture twelve-triangle envelope boxes as lower LODs; future reduced meshes must be deliberately authored and independently approved.
• A new local model gallery exposes all 52 active, hash-verified game models with animation, distance, angle, triangle and LOD diagnostics, plus direct links to the five review contact sheets.
• Headless regression coverage now parses every active GLB at near, medium and far distances and rejects proxy geometry, malformed ratios, duplicate visibility and per-frame resource churn before release.

Every sight clears. Every broken block tells on itself.

Platforms: Browser production and desktop 0.1.5 on Windows x64, universal Mac and Arch x86_64. TestFlight remains BUILD 63.

Distance-rendering defect: this release activated unfit box-shaped lower LOD proxies for authored models. BUILD 69 supersedes it and adds runtime and pipeline gates that prevent those proxies from becoming visible again.

This quality batch makes the things closest to the camera read like deliberate game objects while preserving the combat, mining, loot and save rules underneath them.

• Pistol, SMG, shotgun, rifle and sniper now blend through individual hip and aim profiles, keeping their real sights on the reticle at both phone and desktop sizes.
• Hands, stocks, magazines and attachments stay inside the safe frame; aimed and suppressed muzzle flashes stay out of the sight picture.
• Mining progress now surrounds the targeted voxel with one reusable ten-stage crack shell instead of shrinking and tinting the block red.
• World drops are pooled hard-block miniatures with block, ore, stick and hide silhouettes plus one compact stack-count batch—no letter cards and no new gameplay stacks.
• The active adult civilian was rebuilt with a narrow readable face, separate hair, hands, boots and an asymmetric long coat, then supplied with eleven distinct in-place actions.
• The browser content pack now carries the authored LOD contract, and the loader resolves tagged skinned meshes even when an export’s semantic LOD roots are empty.
• Authored characters, animals and vehicles now share one versioned runtime loader, fixing a module split that could report successful parsing while gameplay quietly fell back to procedural models.
• The public roadmap and changelog now carry the complete BUILD 62–68 history, platform truth and the next medical/recovery design track without presenting plans as shipped work.

The city got an inside. Gunfire found its muzzle.

Platforms: Browser production and desktop 0.1.4 on Windows x64, universal Mac and Arch x86_64. TestFlight remains BUILD 63.

The integrated city-and-weapon pass made more of the world playable and put every loud shot back in the physical scene that caused it.

• Generic towers and blocks gained enterable ground- and first-floor rooms; shopfronts gained a public sales floor and restricted stockroom.
• Walkable stairwells reach every storey and usable roof, and police can pursue a genuinely sighted target between floors instead of waiting outside.
• City nights are darker without becoming blind, and mines now stay dark until a real opening or light source reaches them.
• Axe, pickaxe and shovel strikes now carry their own wind-up, contact and recovery weight while keeping the same mining rates and yields.
• Accepted authored fist, knife, SMG, pistol, shotgun and sniper models joined rebuilt CITY BANK, BLOCKMART and MOTOR BLOCK fronts.
• A nearby connected stash now wins the interaction prompt, complete gun loadouts survive transfer, and Escape closes only the panel in front of you.
• Each gunshot aligns flash, HDR light, smoke, tracer, casing, recoil and layered audio to that weapon’s authored muzzle socket.
• Material-specific impacts and one bounded street-canyon response make a loud shot belong to the block, alley or room where it happened.

The frame clock stops freelancing.

Platforms: Browser production and desktop 0.1.3 on Windows x64, universal Mac and Arch x86_64. TestFlight remains BUILD 63.

A focused fluidity and delivery pass moved expensive work away from the frame the player was trying to use.

• Gameplay now advances at a fixed 60 Hz while presentation follows the display; High became the honest desktop default without silent quality cuts.
• World generation streams in bounded slices, reducing the chance that crossing a chunk boundary steals an entire frame.
• Periodic save serialization moved to a Worker while explicit quit and transaction saves remain immediate.
• The post-processing chain warms before the title appears instead of compiling its first effects in the middle of play.
• Loose world pickups merge, expire after five minutes and stop at a hard world cap rather than growing with every abandoned stack.
• Installed-client connectivity was admitted to the persistent shard, and the feedback outbox kept its BUILD 64 recovery path.
• The complete Windows, universal Mac and native Arch delivery set shipped together; Escape from Crafting or BUILD no longer manufactures a Pause screen behind it.

The desktop gets controls. The street gets names.

Platforms: Browser production and desktop 0.1.2 on Windows x64, universal Mac and Arch x86_64. TestFlight remains BUILD 63.

The usability hotfix recovered real reports, gave installed players direct control over presentation and stopped city fronts reading like anonymous slabs.

• BUILD 64 feedback drafts with malformed viewport or performance diagnostics now repair themselves on retry, and production accepts that one bounded legacy shape.
• Smooth, Balanced, High and Custom profiles expose rendering resolution, view distance, population, post processing, dynamic shadows and fullscreen.
• QUIT GAME and QUIT TO DESKTOP save before closing the native app.
• Escape closes only the top open window; Pause appears only when gameplay itself is unobstructed.
• Twelve active city frontages gained distinct hard-block marquee lettering from approved authored sources.

Dirty money remembers where it came from.

Platforms: Browser production and desktop 0.1.1 on Windows x64, universal Mac and Arch x86_64. TestFlight remains BUILD 63.

The economy, city memory, vehicle service, lighting, emergency traffic and tester feedback all became systems instead of optimistic labels.

• Robberies and chop jobs now pay dirty cash that cannot buy anything until a fence launders it for a visible 25–40% cut; vehicles carry more of it than a person.
• Repeat hits pay less and raise that site’s response, while three cities keep separate heat and notoriety; the full-payout second robbery and fading legacy-fame defects were closed.
• The Board exposes four priced progression paths with current requirements and a pinned HUD goal; a risk panel shows what a job can cost before the till opens.
• Owned cars consume fuel, refuel at FUEL and keep paid paint or spoilers through streaming and saves; canopy respawns now preserve the same car, body, tyres and service state at street level.
• Warm wilderness and cold city light gained deterministic kerb-aligned street lamps, while night stopped flattening the ground outside town.
• Responders keep their junction corridor, traffic can creep clear safely and ambulances complete scene, treatment, loading, clinic handoff and return without teleporting; block placement also stopped shouting over the scene.
• Bug and feature reports can be opened from the title, pause menu or F2, reviewed before sending and supplied with optional diagnostics or a screenshot; an offline outbox keeps drafts for manual retry.
• Screenshots stay private, report intake is rate-limited and retention-bounded, and the desktop launcher gained cinematic posters plus real update-download progress.

Consequences arrive. So does the ambulance.

Platforms: Browser production, desktop 0.1.0 on Windows x64 and universal Mac, and the current TestFlight build. Arch desktop begins with BUILD 64.

The reward pass made the chase settle honestly, then gave ordinary casualties a bounded route out of the street.

• Escape rewards use the current chase’s highest wanted level, so a later quiet escape cannot inherit an earlier four-star payday; mask and natural-decay escapes settle the same way.
• Empty throwables no longer threaten a till, CLUB and BAR no longer advertise a false robbery, and each successful block placement scores two points without extending a combo.
• Hardcore death removes upgrades with an unstashed gun, while a complete gun snapshot survives when it was actually stored.
• Ordinary pedestrians can become injured, critical, stabilised, evacuated or terminal instead of disappearing at the first damage threshold.
• Ambulances dispatch deterministically, treat, load and transport casualties; live evacuation reduces wanted pressure, and death or deliberate finishing delivers its consequence once.

A room code becomes a world that survives the room.

Platforms: Persistent-world browser foundation. No standalone installed-desktop or TestFlight release is recorded for this checkpoint; its client shipped forward in BUILD 63.

Season Zero replaced a disposable session with a dedicated world authority that could recognise a returning player and retain validated edits.

• The joinable client and server-owned protocol preserve accepted voxel edits across reconnects and service restarts.
• Reconnect identity survives, solo arrivals are kept at least 1,000 metres apart and a party gets one deliberate rendezvous instead of a permanent teleport.
• Identity, spawn, combat and edit authority moved behind one reconciled client/server contract while legacy rooms remained available.
• Push-to-talk controls and privacy groundwork shipped safely, but the voice service stayed off pending physical network and upload verification.

Cars bruise. Wood burns. The city remembers the hole.

The crash, fire and sound pass made destruction physical, persistent and much harder for the city to pretend did not happen.

• Cars keep localized front, rear, side, cabin, engine, fuel and wheel damage; failures change power, grip, steering and occupant risk before garage repair.
• Bounded reusable debris now breaks from authored damage sockets without turning every collision into a new memory leak.
• Wooden blocks ignite and spread at a deterministic fixed rate, stop at water and nonflammable barriers, then burn away through the permanent block-edit path.
• Only the originating client authors destructive fire edits; peers receive the same ignition seed while the dedicated world server preserves the resulting terrain.
• Gunfire, explosions, crashes and tool contacts gained layered CC0 recordings, physical variation and procedural fallback instead of one sound doing several jobs badly.
• Traffic and pedestrians gained the final safety interlocks that keep ambient city life from casually running itself over.

The city gets a basement. The cars get mass.

A wide physical-play pass turned several separate experiments into one more coherent world.

• Fixed-step vehicle contacts carry mass, direction, rotation, PIT force and explosion impulses without replacing the readable arcade controller.
• The world map now pans and zooms, remembers its view and exposes explored underground depth slices.
• Neighborhood shops spread beyond downtown; connected caverns, coherent veins and prospecting create an underground exploration loop.
• Held placement, surface-aware building, quieter construction, doors, windows and itemised storage make lairs faster to shape.
• First Shift can recover an old home; contextual lessons continue; police gather evidence before surveillance or a rare coordinated lair raid.
• Turn signals, vehicle-camera pitch, wildlife facing, overlay Escape behavior, equipment motion, brightness and contrast received direct play fixes.

Attachments and a silencer that does not silence reality.

Workshops gained three permanent, removable objects: silencer, extended magazine and vertical grip. Real slots prevent duplication, capacity changes return spare rounds, and saves retain every fitment.

• First- and third-person models, HUD tags, magazine capacity, recoil, spread and muzzle flash follow the fitted object.
• Suppressed gunfire travels much less far, but remains loud nearby.
• An unseen, only-heard crime creates suspicion; a witness who actually sees it still reports the full offence.

First Shift, one honest clock and a lair that knows it is home.

New players received a seven-job, non-blocking opening docket while returning players kept quieter contextual tips.

• One 24-minute clock now owns the HUD, sky, dawn, dusk, night traffic, patrols and job bonuses.
• A placed workbench and enough player-built blocks define a movable, persistent lair.
• Crafting accelerates while held, keeps every recipe visible and explains missing ingredients instead of hiding the row.
• Pedestrians gained routines, panic, hiding, safe crossings and genuine delayed witness reports.

The beta got a front door and the future got a page.

The game moved from its retired public repository to hardblocklife.com, with a protected beta entrance and public game, support, legal and roadmap pages.

• The browser and iPhone still use the same canonical game files.
• Pedestrians commit across zebra crossings instead of reconsidering halfway into traffic.
• The first public roadmap separated playable systems from ordered ambition.
• Desktop and native builds gained explicit full and reduced content profiles so distribution-safe violence is selected during packaging, not by hope.

Crafting becomes a system. Police become a force.

Core Crafting split materials into parts, ammunition and location-based work while the police response learned stable squad roles and fair information.

• Steel, casings, powder, barrels, receivers and springs connect mining to weapons and five ammunition families.
• Hands, placed workbenches and city Workshops form three visible crafting tiers.
• Police dispatch from real stations, search the last genuinely observed position and use roadblocks, spikes and PIT only under bounded rules.
• Save migration and renderer-free acceptance made those systems safe for existing cities.

Traffic stops behaving like loose shopping trolleys.

Driving AI learned lanes, junction reservations, queues, crossings, overtaking restraint and emergency yielding.

• Vehicles look ahead, leave junction exits clear and avoid water, wilderness roads and other drivers.
• Building controls, footsteps and road markings received a direct phone-and-browser feel pass.
• Dense traffic became deterministic enough to reproduce instead of merely describe.

The police come from somewhere. Your pockets stop lying.

Police station dispatch and last-sighting pursuit replaced magical proximity, while carried gear became a deliberate two-gun loadout.

• The landscape-phone title finally fits the actual phone.
• Locked hotbar slots refuse to equip and explain how the missing item is earned.
• Natural spawns stream terrain before choosing a height, ending under-map arrivals.

The prototype learns how to be played.

Options, rebinding, multiplayer arrival rules, calmer movement, real roads and water, morning starts and cinematic lighting turned the raw sandbox into a usable beta.

• Every desktop action became rebindable and every prompt reads the live binding.
• Casual mode, bedroll recovery and contextual action chips made the one-life sandbox easier to learn without weakening the intended run.
• Natural terrain can be stepped; player walls and dug holes still require a jump; the camera no longer bobs.
• Road and water queries now ask the generated world instead of trusting an imaginary infinite grid.
• Sun, moon, voxel light, headlights, coloured emitters, bloom, wet streets and three visual looks established Neon Noir.

The city stops being a circle and multiplayer gets stakes.

Extraction rooms, persistent stashes, larger city identities, pavements, crossings and dynamic night lighting established the game’s shape.

• Shared rooms gained PvP, hostile status, police memory and hidden stash banking.
• BLOCKTON, RUSTPORT and PINE HOLLOW gained distinct scale, skyline, buildings and street edges.
• Pedestrians use pavements and crossings; drivers stop for them; night streets light from real emitters.

One life, public consequences and a city that repairs itself.

Death became the end of a solo run. Pulling a weapon became visible social information, masks could break a description, and construction crews repaired natural city damage after the heat died down.

• Banked score and hidden stashes gave survival meaning beyond the robbery itself.
• Scary weapons make witnesses react without treating every mining tool as a crime.
• Test loadouts cannot submit a ranked score.