Fault Line

The campaign update: six factions in a war you can win, the Rift they came from, and the tools to defend your walls and to storm theirs. Still server-side only: vanilla clients join and the server sends the pack.

• The Rift. An endgame dimension of faulted floating continents across seven biomes, one homeland per faction. Three different warlord seals, an ender eye and crying obsidian make a Fault Key, which opens a crying obsidian frame. Its creatures (Riftling, Fault Stalker, Rift Wisp, Hollow Sentinel, Shardback) each have a trick of their own and drop Rift Shards. At its heart stands the Sundered Citadel, where the seals wake the Sundered King, a three-phase final boss.
• A war you can win. Every faction has morale. Razing its camps and castles, slaying its warlords and holding off its raids wear it down; breaching a base heartens it. As it falls it fights harder: Seasoned, Veteran, Elite and Desperate raiders with more health, damage and armour, more guards, and castles where camps stood. Lost ground is rebuilt further off, by the faction or a stronger neighbour. At 0 a faction breaks and raids no more; break all six and the war is won. /faultline war and the War Map show the front.
• Defending. Craftable Ballistae that shoot raiders and engines and are fed with arrows, Caltrops, Snares and Pitch Pots, and Iron Bracing and Marchsteel Plating for walls. Raids plan their routes around all of it.
• Attacking. A Battering Ram you push into a wall and a Catapult aimed with a Signal Flag. Castles fight back: fortified masonry, manned ballistae and a dropped portcullis. Raze a castle and its ballistae are yours.
• Gear. Three tiers: faction raid weapons, each warlord's own weapon, and Riftsteel armour with the Faultbreaker. War Sigils hone Fault Line gear at the anvil, I to III. Every new player is handed a Field Manual, written from the server's own config.
• Six factions. Thornbound (climbers that scale walls), Galecrown (flyers over walls, water and lava) and Blightfen (mirewalkers through water) join Ironmarch, Ashen Pact and Tidewrack. Each has its raiders, escorts and a warlord (the Bramble Knight, the Storm Reeve and the Rot Abbess are new), materials, weapons, a seal, and camps and castles in its homeland. A new reference fort, the Lava Keep.
• Drama. Each faction's war horn when its raid marches and when a castle sees you. Warlords make an entrance the first time you come near: their name on screen, a roar and a blast of their colour. A score on the music channel: war drums in a raid or a castle assault, a theme for each warlord and one for the King, and stings when the line holds or breaks.
• Multiplayer. /faultline ally add <player> names a friend. Near your Standard they bring your raids while you are away, each defender past the first draws a bigger raid, and they get a copy of the report and can crew your engines. Weapons and engines spare your side. The war is the whole server's: razings and warlord kills are announced, and /faultline war keeps a roll of honour.
• Difficulty. story (small, soft raids, long warnings, warlords late, factions that break fast), normal, veteran and siegelord, in the config or with /faultline difficulty. The config file now names keys it does not know instead of ignoring them.
• Fixes: a status effect no longer shows the vanilla mob inside a model (every warlord's last phase did this). A War Map unfolded from a stack now carries its banners. A Siege Report made before any raid reads as a forecast. The Citadel stands on its own root, not on a paper-thin square of terrain. Far Rift islands fade into the sky, not stand out as flat shapes. warlordAfterRaids: 0 now really keeps warlords out of raids. The first raid after start-up no longer pushes a tick past 50 ms. A wild creeper, or any explosion, could blow up a Standard or the block under it, which dropped the claim and called off any raid with no report, and raiders could dig or build over one; Standards now survive both.
• Tests: 71 game tests on each loader, including a season of eight full raids on one base (with a death, a chunk unload and a save mid-raid), four bases raided at once, and the whole war won on every difficulty. A real-client smoke test joins a headless 26.3 client to a fresh server and checks the pack loads without errors.