NeroArcade

The first build with gameplay: a mini-game construction kit. Players build a game from module chips at a Game Bench, save it to a cartridge, play it on an Arcade Cabinet, link cabinets for versus and co-op, and copy, publish, download and remix each other's games. Requires Neroland Core 1.15.0 or newer (below 2.0) and Java 25. NeroEconomy (0.4.0-beta.1 or newer) and the NeroLink bridge are optional.

This build is feature-complete and has passed its automated tests (740) on all nine cells; it has not yet been verified in a live game. The scope cuts, known gaps and placeholders are listed at the end of this entry. The stage-by-stage development record is kept in BUILD-HISTORY.md.

Added

• Ten-slot games. A game is ten fixed slots — Arena, Pawn, Rule, Hazard, Pickup, Control, Pace, Modifier, Multiplayer and Theme — each filled by one module chip (Hazard and Pickup take up to three). An empty slot uses its documented default (Grid 16, Cursor, Survive 60 s, Four-way, Steady, Solo, Neon Void; no hazard, pickup or modifier). Every chip has plain-language settings (whole numbers, switches and choices only).
• 43 module chips: 4 arenas, 6 pawns, 5 rules, 5 hazards, 4 pickups, 4 controls, 3 paces, 4 modifiers, 4 multiplayer shapes and 4 themes. Each is crafted from a Blank Chip, its slot's reagent and (for all but the defaults) one more item; chips are templates and are never used up. Every chip has original sprites and a description, and appears in the gallery.
• Game Bench ("Build your game"): ten rack rows that say what each chip does with its live values, a settings panel per chip, a title box (chat-filtered, 32 characters), grey warnings for odd combinations, a live preview, TEST PLAY on the bench itself, SAVE TO CARTRIDGE and LOAD. Every disabled button says why. While someone edits, the bench shows a hovering holo-rack of the ten chips.
• Cartridges. A cartridge is a game definition, never code: an id, a title, the chips and their settings, a lineage of the games it was remixed from, and a revision. At most 8 KiB, checked by one fail-closed validator on every insert, copy, publish, download and import. A cartridge that uses a chip this server does not have reads "UNREADABLE HERE" with the reason; it is kept, never dropped.
• Arcade Cabinet. Insert a cartridge and use the cabinet with an empty hand to play. The game runs on the server — a fixed 20-step-a-second simulation with whole-number state, a seeded random stream and a replay of every match — and every player nearby watches the same 64 × 64 screen. The seated player gets a HUD (rule, score, timer, key legend, countdown, results card with NEW BEST) and arcade controls (pad W A S D, A Space, B Left Shift, aim on the arrow keys; Esc leaves the seat). An idle cabinet plays an attract loop; a cabinet with nobody near sleeps and frees its slot.
• Link Bus, Link Cable and Marquee Screen. Up to four cabinets on up to 16 cables play one game: the cabinet holding the cartridge runs it, the others are extra seats. Versus, co-op (shared or own lives) and hot-seat Turns for 2–4 players; a game with fewer players than seats starts ten seconds after everyone present is ready (the lobby counts it down), so a Versus game with one player brings in the computer opponent and a Co-op game with one player is played solo. A Marquee Screen (sizes 1–4) shows the bus's game with every score and rolls the top ten between games.
• Leaderboards. Every cartridge id has a top-ten board, and every player a personal best on it. Copies and downloads share the board; a remix starts its own. Only the match host writes a row, once per finished match. /neroarcade top shows the board of the cartridge in your hand or the cabinet you look at.
• Sharing. The Cartridge Duplicator copies a cartridge onto a Blank Cartridge (same game, same board, same credit). The Arcade Exchange lists every game published on the server (most hearted first, title, genre words, the ten slots, hearts and plays): publish, unpublish your own, download onto a Blank, give a heart, and fetch drafts sent from the companion app. Remix is a save from a bench loaded with someone else's game: the new cartridge gets a new id and remembers the original in its lineage.
• Sixteen example games (Paddle Duel, Serpent Garden, Stack Nine, Drone Maze, Lane Hopper, Hot-Seat Orbs, Tandem Sweep, Vault Run, Gunner Ring, Shrink Island, Mirror Pulse, Float Lane, Four-Way Rally, Crate Catch, Blind Tube, Stack Duel) that between them use every chip, each with a recorded attract demo.
• Gallery. /neroarcade gallery [clear] (operator, creative) builds a lit showcase hall — one cabinet per chip, a workshop dais stocked with the sixteen example games, and a four-cabinet link row under a Marquee Screen — and puts back exactly what it changed. /nsarcgallery capture [time] shoots the gallery screenshots; /nsarcber [reset] prints the renderer cost per frame.
• NeroLink companion app module neroarcade: your library, leaderboards by cartridge id, the cabinet you sit at (a label, never a coordinate), your recent events and the wiki; export a game as a file and import one into your own Exchange drafts; a "Record beaten" notification that names only the game and your new rank, and a daily "Cartridge downloaded" digest. Off in the app until the player turns the Arcade category on.
• Progression. Milestones neroarcade:first_cartridge, first_published and first_versus_win; world channels neroarcade:match_won, cartridge_published and record_set (scoped to a game or the Exchange, never a player); an "Insert Coin" quest chapter for NeroQuests shipped as data (ten quests).
• Integrations. Optional coin-op seats and paid downloads through NeroEconomy (economy.coinOp, off by default); theme colours registered with Neroland Core's palette; Neroland Core item highlights; quiet seams for tournaments, soundtracks and colony morale that do nothing until those mods offer an API.
• Commands. /neroarcade cartridge inspect, /neroarcade top, /neroarcade privacy credit [on|off], /neroarcade privacy export, /neroarcade gallery [clear], /neroarcade admin awake, /neroarcade admin unseat <player>, /neroarcade admin unpublish <player>; client /nsarcgallery capture [time] and /nsarcber [reset].
• Assets. Seven blocks with original models, 16 × 16 textures, four screen palettes and 23 synthesised sounds; recipes for every block, blank and chip; loot tables; the wiki bundled into the jar for the companion app.

Changed

• New logo and mod icon: the family core-prism now plays on a neon arcade cabinet, with a pixel-font wordmark. The Modrinth and CurseForge pages are rewritten to match the other Neroland mods.
• The mod version moves from the 0.0.1-alpha.1 scaffold to 0.1.0-beta.1. Neroland Core is pinned at 1.15.0 and every loader manifest floors it there.
• Leaderboards belong to a cartridge id, not to a game's lineage: a remix with easier rules can no longer post onto the original's board. A board saved by an earlier development build under its lineage root loads as the board of that id.
• Personal bests expire a year after they were set (privacy.personalBestRetentionDays, default and hard cap 365; beating the best restarts the clock). Top-ten rows keep their 90-day default.
• Rules of play settled during review: a 20-tick respawn shield; hidden things never collide; a pawn's shots vanish with it; the Runner's landing locks its next hop for four ticks; the Laser Sweep starts far from every player and carries a moving gap; the computer player steers every tick and never steps into the void.

Fixed

• Worlds load on every Minecraft 26.x line. The Ring 24 arena chip's recipe asked for minecraft:chain, an item Minecraft has since renamed minecraft:iron_chain. One unreadable recipe stops the whole recipe list loading, so creating or opening a world hung on "Preparing world creation". The recipe now uses the iron chain.

Found and fixed by the design, compliance and security reviews before release:

• SAVE can no longer take over another builder's cartridge id or give two cartridges the same id.
• A running Link Bus keeps its host and every seat when a block changes nearby or the server restarts; nobody can push a cartridge into a linked or occupied cabinet, and only a seated player (or an operator) can take the host's cartridge out while anyone sits on the bus.
• Two players at one Exchange kiosk can no longer take each other's cartridges (the tray is each viewer's own).
• A player whose data is erased in the middle of a match is never written back as a score.
• Closing the Game Bench always stops its test play; a re-inserted chip keeps its settings.

Fixed — final review:

• A chip that throws on the server no longer takes the server down. The match ends abandoned (nothing is written to a leaderboard), the players see "This game stopped with an error; the cartridge may use a combination this server cannot run.", and the server log names only the error type and the chips. The cabinet does not try again until someone presses START.
• A Stacker piece hard-dropped into an empty column on a board that wraps top to bottom (the Wrap-around modifier on the vertical axis) no longer falls forever and freezes the server; after one full lap it locks where it is. Found by a new test that plays every arena and pawn with stacked chips at their extreme settings.
• A linked game no longer waits forever when fewer players than the game's seats are ready: two friends on a four-cabinet bus can play a four-seat Versus game, and one player can play a Co-op game.
• The gallery's showcase listings no longer count towards the "games published" quests.
• The Fabric manifest asks for Java 25, the version the mod is built for.
• The two cabinet power settings were removed (see "Not in this release").

Security

• Everything that decides a game runs on the server. Input is accepted only from the player who holds the seat, for the current match, at most 30 packets a second (excess is dropped, never a kick). Display cabinets cannot affect the host.
• Leaderboards are written by one path only: the match host, once per finished match, never for an abandoned or hot-seat match.
• Cartridges are data and fail closed: an unknown chip, an over-budget setting, a cartridge over 8 KiB (12 KiB as an imported file) or a lineage over eight entries is refused, never repaired.
• Companion-app imports keep a cartridge id only when it is the requester's own draft or listing; any other id becomes a remix with a fresh id and its own board. Export requires the cartridge id. Both actions are rate-limited and idempotent, and can each be switched off.
• Publishing replaces an existing listing only for its author or an operator; one player may list at most 16 games (privacy.listingsPerAuthor); /neroarcade admin unpublish <player> removes everything one player listed.

Privacy

• Credit is opt-in (/neroarcade privacy credit on|off, off by default). Without it a player is "Anonymous builder" on games and "Anonymous" on boards; turning it off strips the name from every board, listing, draft and loaded bench on the server.
• Cabinets and benches never send a builder's id or credit to bystanders. Seats and matches are memory only; no play history is kept.
• Retention: top-ten rows 90 days and personal bests 365 days (both hard-capped at 365), imported drafts 30 days, export files 7 days.
• Export: /neroarcade privacy export writes everything NeroArcade holds about you to one file in the world folder (once a minute).
• Erasure: Neroland Core's /neroland data eraseme (and the operator's erase) reaches every NeroArcade store — boards, bests, credit, Exchange listings and hearts, drafts, loaded benches, seats, the export file and the companion-app data — and refreshes each store's backup. Cartridges that are already items keep what they carry.
• Notifications carry a game title and a rank or a count, never who or where. pushNotifications.enabled=false publishes nothing to the NeroLink bridge.
• Anonymous crash reports for errors in NeroArcade's own code (Sentry, EU servers; no names, UUIDs, IPs or world data; at most 10 per session). On by default; opt out with telemetryEnabled=false in config/neroarcade.properties. PRIVACY.md is the full disclosure.

Not in this release (scope cuts)

• 0.2.0: the Holo-Arena (playing a game out in real blocks at world scale), tournaments, a cross-server exchange, NeroNotes soundtrack chips and sprite editors. Tournaments and soundtracks have quiet seams only.
• The companion app's "Challenge a friend" action: there is no way yet for both players to agree to it.
• Coin-op is built but disabled by default (economy.coinOp=false); it needs NeroEconomy and an operator who turns it on.
• Hiding the vanilla hotbar and crosshair while a player is seated.
• Turns across a Link Bus. A Turns game is hot-seat at the cabinet holding the cartridge, and is never recorded on a leaderboard.
• More than four seats on one game or one bus.
• The Marquee multiblock. The Marquee Screen is one block that scales its picture from 1 to 4.
• Per-axis wrap set by an arena. Ring 24 always wraps left to right; the Wrap-around modifier chooses its axes.
• Theme variants (Neon Void's "Variant" setting was removed until they exist); the cartridge item's per-game glyph is decorative.
• Global or cross-server leaderboards; a record of which games a player played.
• Cabinet power: cabinets and the duplicator do not draw Core energy in this version, and there is no power setting; the NO POWER state exists for a later release.

Known gaps in this build

• Runtime verification is pending: the screens, the gallery, linked play, the render budget and the phone notifications have been tested in code, not yet in a live game.
• A paddle that does not move returns a ball that comes off a corner along the same diagonal, so a Paddle Duel between two idle players can stall until the match's time limit.
• Recipe-book entries unlock when you first hold one of a recipe's ingredients.
• Hearts are deduplicated per server session, and an Exchange listing's play count can rise again when a cartridge is taken out and put back in. Both are signals, not scores.
• Erasure cannot reach cartridges that are already items, or a Game Bench in an unloaded chunk; PRIVACY.md says so.
• Rich notification text needs NeroLink 1.1.0 or newer (older bridges show a generic "events update"). With pushNotifications.enabled=false, a NeroLink 1.x bridge may still announce the stored record alert with a generic "alerts update" that names nothing.
• The gallery capture and /nsarcber messages are English only.

Placeholders

• "Insert Coin" is the quest chapter's working title.
• The quest pack has not yet been registered in NeroQuests' own sibling-pack test; that registration happens in the NeroQuests repository.