Pre-Release 0.805

Pre-Release v0805

This update adds atmosphere to Marahna and Aitos, enhances Death Heim's original final-battle artwork in diorama mode, and reduces rendering and editor overhead. It also brings a bonus from our ongoing ActRaiser 2 work: its winged Master is now available to import and play in ActRaiser's stages.

Audio

• Fix duplicate or rapidly retriggered menu and dialogue blips at instant message speed when Extended sound channels is enabled, including menu confirmations and Yes/No selections. Slower message speeds retain their normal per-character sound.

Presentation and environments

Classic means the flat action renderer, including widescreen. Both modes means classic and diorama. Environmental effects are optional in either mode; the background-material enhancements below require diorama.

• Both modes, with Environmental effects: Add Marahna Act 1 swamp atmosphere with canopy light, rolling mist and wakes, hanging vines, fireflies, jade wisps, moss and dew.
• Both modes, with Environmental effects: Add Marahna Act 2 temple atmosphere with warm shrine torches, cool window light, dust, low wisps, wet ledges and drips. Lighting stays aligned across the connected gallery and sanctuary.
• Both modes, with Environmental effects: Refine Aitos Act 1 lava bubbles, molten detail, warm light, waterfall spray and mist. Environmental recipes support US, Japanese and European terrain layouts.
• Diorama, with Environmental effects: Refine Aitos's distant storm and layered cloud lighting, with editable cloud openings, light shafts and background brightness.
• Diorama, with Environmental effects: Enhance Death Heim's original final-battle nebula with coloured glow, fighter illumination and sparse blue/magenta drifting dust. Preserve the original artwork, fight, sprites and timing; pause freezes the added motion. Enable Action 3D → Scene → Diorama 3D and Environmental effects. The normal effects switch controls this enhancement in the game and editor; the completion-scene option is independent.

Room-by-room diorama presentation work remains ongoing, including widening tile maps, refining background policies and skybox rendering, and adding unique environmental effects to more levels.

env-out.mp4

ActRaiser 2 and the winged Master

Work on ActRaiser 2 support is underway, including its action stages and world navigation. Full-game support remains in early development. In the meantime, you can use ActRaiser 2's Master in ActRaiser's stages, with gliding, diving and sword moves within ActRaiser 1's action levels:

1. In Workshop → Sights & sounds → Game imports, choose ActRaiser 2 / Master character.
2. Select your own unmodified ActRaiser 2 (USA) ROM (.sfc or .smc) and press Extract & install.
3. Restart your updated game and open System → Game. Enable ActRaiser 2 Master under Quality-of-life improvements. The setting starts off; you can switch characters during the same level.

Importing also adds ActRaiser 2 · above the clouds to the Workshop's Scenery choices. ActRaiser 2 · Fillmore patrol becomes available when the Workshop also has the original ActRaiser scenery from your US build ROM. The scenes respect your atmosphere and reduced-motion preferences. See the Workshop import guide.

Rendering performance

• Reduce repeated mist-lighting calculations and effect-resource preparation.
• Diorama: Reduce sprite-capture clearing work and repeated lighting work for transparent sprite pixels.

Performance improvements depend on the device, graphics backend and scene.

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For desktop installations, rebuild with the updated Builder. See Updating an installation. If you are moving from another installation, use Import previous installation… to bring its data into the selected game folder. Older saves in that data folder are automatically adopted into Slot 1 on first launch, with their originals preserved; no manual conversion is needed. See Upgrading older saves.

Pre-Release 0.804

Pre-release v0804

Note

This prerelease has been superseded. Checkout the latest release here.

Original release notes:

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Changes since v0803 (October 16, 2026).

This update adds optional twin-stick angel shooting, improves environmental lighting and scenery, and reduces rendering and frame-preparation overhead.

Controls and town menus

• Add optional twin-stick shooting for the angel in towns. Bind Shoot up/right/down/left to the right stick or keys while keeping movement on the left stick or D-pad. The new bindings start unassigned.
• Add System Settings under Other in the modern town menu. Closing settings returns to the same menu position.
• Make touch controls rebindable under Controls → Gamepad, with matching button labels and reliable quick taps. MENU remains available during rebinding. See the Android guide.
• Release touch inputs when the app loses focus or a physical controller takes over, and correctly restore default controls when resetting binding rows.

Presentation and environments

Classic means the flat action renderer, including widescreen. Both modes means classic and diorama; optional effects and HUD features are noted below.

• Both modes, with environmental effects: Expand Kasandora's desert and temple atmosphere with rolling sand, haze, torch motes and moving shadows. Improve the shared light and dimming response on scenery, the player and enemies.
• Both modes, with extended views: Preserve visible pickups and bosses when later enemy waves load. Hide the Pharaoh's stray startup placeholder before its entrance, including the Death Heim rematch.
• Diorama: Polish painted scenery and framing in Bloodpool, Kasandora, Aitos and Marahna, including Marahna's Act 2 and boss-room scenery.
• Diorama: Restore scrolling in Aitos's cave skybox.
• Diorama: Stabilize cameras in rooms that nearly fit the screen, preventing tiny horizontal drift and background flicker. Align game and editor camera limits with the available scenery.
• Diorama: Correct captured background and sprite priority, complete layer padding during room transitions, and remove bright boxes beside sprites at extended capture edges.
• Diorama: Keep projected sprite lighting aligned with scenery during frame interpolation, keep castle skylight behind foreground walls, and add Kasandora background heat shimmer.
• 3D church: Fix visitors appearing through menu panels or masking offering icons. This is an optional town feature, independent of action rendering mode.
• Enhanced town HUD, in either action mode: Correct population, SP and magic/hourglass alignment.

Room-by-room widescreen and diorama presentation touch-ups remain ongoing.

Performance and startup

• Diorama: Reduce CPU work for background capture, palette checks and frame preparation, and move eligible additive-background capture work to the GPU.
• Diorama: Optimize optional GPU frame generation with direct layer output and fewer intermediate copies. Enable validated motion-search and effect-submission shortcuts by default on Metal and Vulkan; D3D12 retains the reference paths for these shortcuts.
• Both modes, on macOS: Reduce the Metal presentation queue under VSync to limit presentation delay.
• Both modes: Prepare more graphics pipelines during startup, including diorama and frame-generation resources, to reduce first-use pauses when enabling those features later. Improve scheduling around software frame limits and add more detailed timing diagnostics.

Action editor and content updates

• Expand effect authoring with editable source regions, particle paths, rolling ground dust, background heat shimmer and moving torch shadows. Raise the per-room authored-emitter limit from 16 to 96, retaining geometry-budget checks.
• Add placeable player and receiver previews to the editor's shared diorama renderer, and use the game's diorama camera and framing rules for coverage guides. Preview custom monitor shapes as well as standard aspect ratios.
• Ship editable environmental recipes in action-effects.ini and include them when importing an installation. When bundled recipes change, preserve local edits in numbered .pre-update-N backups before installing the new defaults.

For desktop installations, rebuild your game with the updated Builder. See Updating an installation.

Pre-Release 0.803

Pre-release v0803

Note

This prerelease has been superseded. Checkout the latest release here.

Original release notes:

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Changes since v0802 (October 10, 2026).

This update focuses on smoother diorama presentation and startup feedback, with an early Android support in progress (build from source, no binary here).

Presentation

• Smooth layered background scrolling in Aitos, Northwall and Death Heim, fixing jumps and drift when the camera stops or the foreground reaches a level's edge.
• Fix gaps where diorama framing extended beyond the captured terrain, including at 4:3 and in very wide windows using Screen ratio → Auto. Refine Death Heim boss-room framing to show less floor.
• Restore the missing statue heads on Death Heim's hub platform.
• Let 3D church interiors fill widescreen displays and move the church HUD to the screen edges. Keep the original 2D artwork centered without repeating background tiles.
• Fix blue borders around 3D church scenes, including seams visible with CRT effects at 16:10 and wider aspect ratios.

Room-by-room widescreen and diorama presentation touch-ups remain ongoing.

Startup and stability

• Prepare diorama action-stage shaders at startup or when the mode is enabled, reducing pauses when entering action stages.
• Show an animated loading indicator during lengthy GPU preparation.
• Prevent gameplay from briefly fast-forwarding after a host stall.
• Log shader and pipeline compilation times to help diagnose slow startup and graphics-driver issues.

Android preview

• Add an early native Android build for arm64 devices running Android 10 or
  newer with Vulkan support.
• Add on-screen controls for gameplay and menus. They follow existing keyboard
  bindings and hide when a gamepad is connected.
• Fix effect-shader compilation failures encountered on an Adreno GPU.

Android is currently a source-build preview, with no Android target in the Builder. Use make android ROM=/path/to/your-usa-rom.sfc; see the Android guide for setup and installation. The generated APK includes your ROM and is for your own device.

Action editor and tooling

• Add editable light boxes with brightness, soft edges, and separate effects on scenery, the player and enemies. Matching brightness regions merge without applying their lighting twice where they overlap.
• Place native effect guides over their actual source regions and refresh them after edits. Preview stays focused on the region being edited.
• Support Emscripten 6.0.12 alongside 5.0.7 for action-editor builds.
• Add project metadata for recomp.fyi tracking.

For desktop installations, rebuild your game with the updated Builder. See Updating an installation.

Pre-Release 0.802

Pre-Release v 0.802

Note

This prerelease has been superseded. Checkout the latest release here.

Original release notes:

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This release just focuses on the builder/workshop tooling distribution.

Release Size (Windows)

The release size for the Windows builds have been drastically reduced. WebView2 is no longer bundled with the release and will use your systems' installed version instead. This reduces the archive size by roughly 75% (557 mb -> 152 mb) making it more in line with the other platform release binary sizes.

Not only will you save space, but this should improve the security of the application by reducing the possibility of online virus scanners (i.e virustotal) from timing out when processing it. This provides another layer of visibility to help safely validate whether the release contains any malicious code, or if the binary has been tampered with in any way.

Trimmed Zig library

Every distribution has previously shipped with Zig's (Zig the builder's compiler) complete lib/ folder (19K files) for all platforms whether they were used or not.

This is now no longer the case. Each platform distribution now only keeps the library and header files relevant for it's own build. With this change you can expect a reduction in the overall time it takes for extraction, and file validation when opening the builder.

Number of files dropped per platform:

• Mac OS: 91%
• Linux: 84%
• Windows: 69%

This is most notable in the first launch of the builder tool, where the time to launch dropped from 32.2 seconds on my test machine, to 12.5 seconds.

Pre-Release 0.801

Note

This prerelease has been superseded. Checkout the latest release here.

Original release notes:

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Pre-Release v 0.801

Changes since v0800 (October 5, 2026).

A minor update focused on controls, dialogue and translations.

Controls

• Add analog angel movement in towns, enabled by default. Stick deflection
  controls speed; hold fire to keep your facing while moving. Adjust or disable
  it under Controls → Devices.
• Fix duplicate dialogue confirmations and menu movement on Steam Deck.
  Auto now uses the controller when connected, with keyboard fallback
  when disconnected.

Dialogue and translations

• Add controller button artwork and binding-aware text prompts, including
  support for remapped controls. Choose Text or Button glyphs under
  Localization → Game text → Button prompts; Text remains the default.
• Improve enhanced dialogue scrolling and pacing to match the original message
  speed, removing extra confirmations and duplicate or delayed dialogue blips.
• Keep spell and miracle names consistent with translated menu labels.
• Expand translation coverage for town-menu Help and fix word spacing and
  missing translations in town-event dialogue.

Builder

• Improve Linux and Steam Deck Builder compatibility and startup reliability.
• Fix interrupted Linux release builds leaving stale locks on macOS.

Rebuild your game with the updated Builder to receive these changes. See
Updating an installation.

Pre-Release 0.8

Note

This prerelease has been superseded. Checkout the latest release here.

Original release notes:

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Pre-Release v 0.8

A major milestone for this release: the full USA campaign has been
successfully played from start to finish. This completed playthrough used
native graphics and covered all six towns, all 12 acts, Death Heim and the ending.

This update adds customizable regional gameplay, ten independent save slots,
an optional modern town menu, 3D church interiors, a completion ocean scene,
and editable scenery effects with combined editor projects.

It expands widescreen and Diorama authoring, moves more rendering work onto the
GPU, improves frame pacing, and adds styled translation templates. The Builder
also starts and builds faster, with a clearer update workflow.

Open the in-game settings with Esc, F1 or L3 on a controller.
Menu paths below start there unless they are marked Workshop.

Changelog

Regional gameplay and media

• Choose US, Japanese or European gameplay presets, or mix individual rules
  for combat, enemy behavior, stage layouts, magic, lives, scoring and town
  development under Regions. Regions → Presets → Apply gameplay preset…
  applies a whole preset; the other tabs let you customize individual rules.
• Combine European Beginner, Normal or Expert difficulty adjustments with
  your preferred regional gameplay rules using
  Regions → Action → Difficulty adjustments.
• Select regional artwork and music independently from gameplay and language.
  Choose them under Regions → Art & music. Extract supported media from
  your own donor ROMs in Workshop → Assets → Regional media.
• Save regional choices separately for each campaign. Settings explain when
  a change takes effect and whether it affects an existing town.
• Review population-rule changes at the Sky Palace before redeveloping towns.
  Confirming a conversion creates a recovery copy of the campaign.
• Customize magic controls and costs, starting lives and spell inventory,
  score-earned lives, retry scoring, room timers, pickups and Action Mode
  availability, including European Action Mode behavior.
• Choose regional enemy stats, hitboxes, movement, attack timing and boss
  strategies independently of their artwork. Supported encounters include
  the Centaur, Minotaur, Wizard, Antlion, Pharaoh, Aitos dragon and skulls,
  Marahna plant/head and Viper, Northwall bosses, and Tanzra.
• Select regional terrain, enemy and item placements, hazards, Aitos mosaic
  patterns, scene music routing and Death Heim arrival rules. Room-dependent
  changes take effect at the appropriate entry boundary.
• Customize town construction costs and timing, development and recovery,
  fishing, earthquake behavior, house-loss accounting, population and level
  goals, lair reserves and rewards, SIM combat, and story prerequisites.
  Persisted lair history prevents switching rules from replaying rewards;
  older saves receive an acknowledgement when their missing history matters.
• Fix Japanese placements on statue-materialization entries, check room actor
  capacity before changing state, and correct regional hook and return
  behavior around stage completion and town actions.
• Support regional title art, Death Heim graphics, European item graphics,
  town symbols, pyramid details, actor art and music sequences from donor
  packages, with fallback when a selected media package is unavailable.

See Regional Differences for more details on how each region plays.

Save slots and campaign tools

• Keep ten independent campaigns, each with its regional settings,
  randomizer recipe and enhanced player name, through the Saves menu.
• Automatically import older save.srm, save.ini, or actraiser.srm saves
  from the selected data directory into Slot 1 on the game's first upgraded
  launch, with the originals retained. See Upgrading from v0494.
• Set up regional rules for a new campaign before starting an empty slot.
• Switch campaigns or restart the game without closing and reopening its window.
• Export and import a complete campaign as a single .arsave file, including
  its regional settings and enhanced player name. Use Export campaign or
  Import save under Saves → Advanced → Actions.
• Choose save import and export locations through file pickers.
• Save your edits and restart in the same window with
  Saves → Advanced → Actions → Apply and restart, then choose Continue
  at the title screen to load the changes.
• Keep Advanced tools beside the slot list and clearly identify the active
  campaign they will change. SNES Y (default keyboard A) opens Advanced
  directly; previewing another slot does not change the edit target.
• Store every slot in its own numbered directory, with separate imports,
  exports and campaign backups. Automatically upgrade older slot layouts and
  preserve their original files and prepared new-game choices.
• Save SRAM, regional metadata and enhanced names as one recoverable snapshot.
  Interrupted writes preserve a complete previous campaign; invalid or missing
  managed metadata is reported for recovery instead of silently loading defaults.
• Persist confirmed regional edits for the active slot even before Continue,
  without advancing gameplay progress. Keep global boot overrides from
  accidentally applying to a different campaign.
• Prevent two game instances from owning the same save collection, and offer
  startup recovery for unavailable saves or interrupted slot switches.

See the manual's Save slots and
Save editor.

Experimental randomizer

• Save the randomizer's seed and options with each campaign. Continue restores
  the same setup without rolling it again.
• Independently randomize regional action and town rules for a new campaign.
  Enable Regional action rules and/or Regional town rules under
  Randomizer → Seed.
• Apply randomized stat scaling over the chosen regional base values and
  preserve the recipe, generator version and campaign identity across saves,
  imports and deterministic replays.
• Prepare a randomized game in an empty save slot without replacing an
  existing campaign; restarting before its first save retains the same setup.

To access these options, enable System → Tools → Show debug settings, then
open Randomizer at the title screen. See Seeded campaigns
for setup and current limitations.

Town menus and everyday play

• Choose a compact town command menu that remembers selections and lets you
  read about a miracle or offering before using it. Set
  Town 3D → Scene → SIM menu to Modern; it also works with 3D towns
  turned off. Original remains the default.
• Adjust the modern town menu's size with
  Town 3D → Scene → SIM menu scale (%).
• Skip repetitive SIM action explanations with an optional quality-of-life
  setting for the original town menu. Enable
  System → Game → Quality of life → Native menu quick use (off by default).
  It skips optional miracle explanations and selection instructions while
  keeping confirmations and outcomes. Use Describe menu item to read the
  full explanation when needed.
• Continue with the Sky Palace positioned over your last visited town using
  System → Game → Quality of life → Remember last town. This option is
  on by default and remembers the location separately for each save.
• Improve town-menu navigation, confirmation and offering handoffs, message
  paging, timed notices, native menu sounds and the remappable Describe hint.
• Keep the settings overlay accessible on The End and Best Player
  screens so you can restart or exit after completing the game.
• Fix repeated soft resets from the Sky Palace and retain working audio and
  input when restarting or changing saves in the same window.

See Modern SIM menu and
Native menu quick use.

Visual improvements

• Turn scenery lighting and particles on or off independently of spell effects
  with Video → Effects → Environmental effects (on by default). This
  controls the Fillmore and Bloodpool additions below in flat and Diorama views.
• Add canopy light, falling leaves and drifting motes to Fillmore's forest.
• Add water accents, mist, drips, dust and lighting to Fillmore's caves,
  temple and tower.
• Add moonlight, red-water reflections and low mist to Bloodpool's marsh.
• Add window light, torch glow and interior atmosphere to Bloodpool's castle.
• Improve the Centaur's lightning effects, controlled by
  Video → Effects → Action spell lighting and Action spell particles.
• Improve Northwall boss magic and water impacts, using the same
  Action spell lighting and Action spell particles options under
  Video → Effects.
• Add Bloodpool Act 1 boss-fireball lighting, embers and lingering moonlit
  smoke. Launched shots retain their effects after the boss dies, and frozen
  shots keep their smoke and motion clocks aligned.
• Refine powered sword-beam lighting and particles, including their room
  priority. Native sword and beam damage behavior is unchanged.
• Keep projectile effects attached to the correct native actor through phase
  changes, pauses, source retirement and reused actor slots. This ...

Pre-Release 0.494 - Windows Improvements

Note

This prerelease has been superseded and its downloads removed. Only the current
prerelease ships builds — see the latest release.

Original Notes Below

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WIndows Fixes & Improvements

With these fixes, I can confirm that the game should largely work on Windows. Testing confirmed that both Action mode and Sim mode (authentic + enhanced renderers) properly execute along with the initial build and install process.

The fixes include the following:

• [Global] Bug fixes for path prefix handling that caused Windows to treat local paths like network paths. This should fix a multitude of issues around settings persistence and saving
• [SIM Mode] Performance improvements towards DirectX APIs - reduced the number of texture updates per frame that caused expensive GPU allocations within DirectX 12. This fix resulted in roughly a ~6x increase in frames per second on my test machine bringing it's performance in parity with the other platforms
• [Settings] Add option to select graphics API via in game settings menu - you can now select between DirectX 12 or Vulkan

Pre-Release 0.493

Note

This prerelease has been superseded and its downloads removed. Only the current
prerelease ships builds — see the latest release.

Original Notes Below

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Pre-Release 0.493

This update lets you add your own instruction manual to the Workshop and the
game, and groups the game's settings by what they actually change.

Add your own instruction manual

• Choose a PDF under Help & manual and it is read both in the Workshop and
  in the game, from the Manual entry in the game's settings.
• The Workshop opens any PDF. The in-game reader needs a scan album — one page
  image per page — and the Workshop tells you at install time whether your file
  will work in the game, rather than leaving you to find out from the game's
  menu.
• Remove manual clears it, and installing again replaces it. A manual you
  install takes effect the next time you start the game; no rebuild is needed.
• With no manual installed, the game simply omits its Manual section.

Imperfect scans are accepted

• Pages do not have to be exactly the same size. Anything within 5% of the
  booklet's most common page size counts as a page.
• A home scan is never perfectly uniform: auto-crop finds a slightly different
  edge on each sheet, and the odd page sits crooked. None of that prevents a
  manual from being used.
• The comparison is against the most common page size in the book, so a cover
  scanned separately does not disqualify the rest of it.

Settings menu

• Game changes are now grouped by intent, under Original game bug fixes and
  Quality-of-life improvements, making it clear which options restore
  intended behavior and which go beyond it.

Existing installations

• Your saved settings are preserved.
• The page-size rule is part of the game itself. You WILL need to rebuild your game with this release for the new manual acceptance logic to work.

Pre-Release 0.492 - Hotfix 2

Note

This prerelease has been superseded and its downloads removed. Only the current
prerelease ships builds — see the latest release.

Original Notes Below

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Pre-Release 0.492

This update refines the connected 3D towns and adds an optional fix for an original-game dialogue bug in Aitos.

Connected 3D towns

• Towns now follow the globe’s curvature instead of sitting on a separate flat surface. Terrain, buildings, mountains, water, actors, and effects share a consistent perspective.
• Reduced rendering overhead, with improved performance in the tested Steam Deck town scenes.
• Restored ground and coastal-water dimming around the visible town area, including while panning.
• Improved camera orbit behavior at connected-world limits, including when loading older saved camera positions.
• Adjusted default landscape height, haze, cloud overlap, and distant blur for clearer views. The cheaper flat-world option remains available.

Aitos dialogue fix

• Added Correct Aitos messages, which prevents the northeast-mountain discovery from repeating the earlier “all monsters defeated” message when those events overlap.
• This option is off by default, preserving the original game’s behavior unless enabled.

Existing installations

Your saved settings are preserved. The revised visual defaults apply to new installations, missing preferences, or settings you explicitly reset.

Pre-Release 0.491 - Hotfix

Note

This prerelease has been superseded and its downloads removed. Only the current
prerelease ships builds — see the latest release.

Original notes below

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Fix some crashes due to broken caching.