Goanna v0.16.0-alpha

Goanna v0.16.0-alpha

Co-op fortresses for DorfCraft: the overseer now shows which house holds
each plan, room and chest, and has a Houses page for running a shared
fortress. The game installer offers a new Kindred Holdfast preview with
co-op houses. K flies as in the vanilla client, and the F free camera
key is gone. This release is Linux only; there is no Windows build.

Houses in the overseer

On a DorfCraft server, several players can share one fortress, each as a
house: the player and their workers, with a shared surname and a house
colour drawn in the fortress's background pattern.

• The Houses page, a new section on the overseer's rail. It lists each
  house with its colour, its head ("Poss of house Poss") and its workers.
  • The fortress owner can open the fortress to settlers, and banish a
    member after a confirm step.
  • Offices can be filled or vacated from a picker, including by heads of
    houses.
  • Your own workers have labour checkboxes and a workshop picker. Streams
    of work are not available yet.
  • The head, or the owner, can rename a house.
  • Mark shared, Mark locked and Clear mark set access on chests,
    workshops and other things your house built. Shared things anyone may
    use but nobody may dig; locked things only your house may use.
• House colours on the map. Plans, rooms and zones that belong to a
  house are filled faintly with the fortress pattern in that house's
  colour. The owner's own plans look as before.
• A Houses overlay (footer toggle) tints the map by which house holds
  each cell, with a dark line where two houses meet. The owner's house
  shows paler and striped. While it is on it replaces the pattern fills.
• An Access overlay (footer toggle) rings shared cells in the house
  colour and marks locked cells with a solid corner.
• Inspect and Plans name the house, for example "Issued by ben (House
  Reed)" or "Locked: only House Reed may use it".
• The overseer's first open after founding no longer drops with
  "connection timeout" while the first view is built.

Kindred Holdfast preview

Get ready to play and Content offer Kindred Holdfast (preview)
e394015697fc, which brings co-op houses. Use a fresh world: saved worlds
may not carry over between previews. It still needs Mineclonia 0.123.1.

Controls

• K flies, as in the vanilla client (D-pad left on a controller).
  It turns Luanti's own fly mode on and off, keeps collision and needs the
  server's fly privilege.
• The F free camera key is gone. It left the body behind and passed
  through terrain, which a vanilla client does not offer. The camera
  remains as a development view behind the control channel.

Known limits

• No Windows build in this release. Windows clients are not offered the
  update and stay on 0.15.1.
• After quitting, a server may refuse the same player with "already
  connected" for up to about two minutes.

Goanna is independent of the Luanti project.

Goanna game mirrors 2026.10.2

Game mirrors for Goanna's installer. Kindred Holdfast preview at DorfCraft e394015697fc (co-op houses); Mineclonia 0.123.1 and VoxeLibre 0.92.3 unchanged from games-2026.10.1.

Goanna v0.15.1-alpha

Shader packs are now chosen where you start or join a world, and the menus
are tidier, with explanations behind small (i) icons. It includes the
performance fixes from 0.15.0: far fewer stalls while
distant terrain streams in, for anyone updating straight from 0.14.0.

Shader packs, easier to find

• A Shaders choice on Start Game and Join Game. Under the materials
  choice, pick None (Goanna's own look) or any pack in your shader pack
  folder. Open folder takes you there; add a pack's ZIP or folder, as
  downloaded from Modrinth or CurseForge, and press Look again. The line
  under it says how the pack loaded on your last join, so a pack that does
  not load says so.
• The same choice in Settings, Graphics, now right under the graphics
  profile instead of folded away near the bottom. Both places save the one
  setting. A pack's own options stay folded beneath it.
• The choice that picks material packs on Join Game is now called
  Materials, not Graphics.

Shader pack support itself is unchanged from 0.15.0 and still experimental.

Tidier menus

• Explanations behind (i) icons. Setting descriptions, screen subtitles
  and the graphics profile's description now sit behind a small (i) beside
  what they describe. Hover to read one, click to keep it open, or tap on a
  touchscreen. With a controller or keyboard, the explanation shows while
  the setting it belongs to is selected. Read aloud still reads each one
  when you reach its setting.
• Errors, warnings, progress and anything you need to read before acting
  (download sizes, setup steps, the licence and hosting notes) stay on
  screen.
• Start Game with an existing world no longer shifts every row below
  the world name one column out of line.

Graphics

• Texture filtering: Crisp or Soft (Settings, Graphics, Materials).
  Soft blends between texture sizes as Minecraft does, which softens
  distant ground seen at a low angle; blocks up close keep their pixels
  either way. Crisp, the default, is unchanged. The difference is small on
  surfaces with strong relief, where the relief maps decide how sharp the
  distance looks.

Goanna is independent of the Luanti project.

Source checkpoint: aa4f80ef (15 October 2026). The release's verification.json lists every check run and what was not.

Goanna game mirrors 2026.10.1

Pinned game downloads for Goanna, independent of ContentDB availability.

• Mineclonia 0.123.1, unchanged upstream source archive at commit 52a43e5c4b1877d8301231eda3e28e6b41380f87.
• VoxeLibre 0.92.3, unchanged upstream source archive at commit a523240fb89713ffa6302696e8275bbd7de3bd49. This is the release available from its GitHub mirror; the 0.92.4 source host was unavailable when these mirrors were prepared.
• Kindred Holdfast development preview, four packages from DorfCraft commit d6b6bceb32b0922e675a1d172dc31d3be2131d47. Requires Mineclonia and Luanti 5.17. Use a fresh world; saved worlds may not migrate between previews.

All three passed isolated startup checks on unmodified Luanti 5.17.0 (Flatpak), without a connected player. This does not establish gameplay or visual acceptance. Source and licence notices remain in the archives. Kindred is packaged separately from the upstream games.

catalogue.json records exact sizes, SHA-256 hashes and source revisions. Verify downloads against SHA256SUMS.

For manual installation, extract the Mineclonia ZIP into Luanti's games/mineclonia directory, removing the archive's enclosing directory. Extract VoxeLibre similarly into games/mineclone2. Extract the Kindred preview's enclosing kindred_holdfast folder into Luanti's mods directory, then enable that modpack in a fresh Mineclonia world. Move separately installed Kindred packages aside first to avoid duplicate mod names.

Goanna's updated Get ready to play and Content installers use these mirrors. Existing Goanna application releases still contain the previous ContentDB starter URL until an application update ships.

Goanna is independent of the upstream projects and does not claim their endorsement.

Goanna v0.15.0-alpha

Smoother flying while distant terrain streams in: in our test flight the
longest stalls (over a tenth of a second) were about 60 per cent fewer and
the typical frame rate about a fifth higher. Joining a server you have
played on before no longer downloads its media again, and shader packs draw
their own skies and keep their full colour range.

Performance

• Fewer first sight stalls. Materials for every kind of block, near and
  far, are now prepared a little at a time from the moment the game's
  definitions arrive, rather than the first time each one comes into
  view.
• Distant terrain is built off the main thread. The work of turning a
  finished distant region into a mesh moves to the worker threads, and its
  upload to the graphics card is spread over several frames, with the old
  terrain kept on screen until its replacement is complete.

Measured on a flight over fresh terrain, three runs of each version
alternated, with both versions' ranges apart on every figure below:

Frame time, ms	0.14.0	0.15.0
Median	27.3 to 30.8	22.3 to 25.3
1% low	99 to 105	88 to 91
0.1% low	118 to 125	103 to 111
Frames over 100 ms, per run	10 to 15	3 to 7

That is about 18 per cent less time per frame at the median (a fifth more
frames a second), lows about 12 per cent shorter, and 60 per cent fewer
frames over 100 ms. A smaller stall, over 60 ms about every 2.7 seconds
while terrain streams, is still there in both.

How it was measured: a 76 second open route at 10 nodes a second over a
fresh copy of the standard Mineclonia world, the High profile with a 1024
node far distance, each run starting with an empty terrain store, against
a local Luanti 5.17.0 server, Godot 4.5.1, on an RTX 3090 in headless
gamescope at 960 by 540. Headless timings compare the two versions with
each other; they are not the frame rates you will see on a desktop. It is
one route over low land and sea, and the two versions also draw slightly
different content, so part of the median gain may not come from these
changes. Preparing every material up front may use a little more memory.

Joining

• Server media is kept between visits. Textures, sounds and models a
  server sends are kept in a cache, checked, and used again the next
  time, through Luanti's own file cache. Only missing, damaged or changed
  files are downloaded. On a local devtest server the first join
  downloaded 447 files and a reconnect downloaded none. If the cache
  cannot be written, joining still works as before.
• Clearer loading. The loading screen now says whether it is reading
  the cache, downloading, or preparing the world, rather than calling all
  three downloading.
• A place to ask for help. The README links the
  Goanna Discord server.

Shader packs

Still experimental, as in 0.14.0. These changes were checked side by side
with Minecraft Java 26.2 itself, the reference shader packs are written
for: the BridgeTest bridge serves the same Minecraft world to Goanna as an
ordinary Luanti server, so both draw one scene from one camera. Godot
4.5.1. They have not yet been reviewed on a Mineclonia world.

• Pack skies. A pack's own sky, sun and moon programs are drawn,
  instead of Goanna's sky. Eclipse's sky was observed with no shader
  errors. Custom sky geometry and sunset geometry are not supported yet.
• Full colour range. Lighting is handed to the pack's later passes
  without being clipped or gamma converted first, and packed material
  data passes through exactly. Blended material values remain
  approximate.
• Light as packs expect it. Packs receive block and sky light on the
  linear scale they are written for, and eye brightness measured at the
  camera, smoothed as the pack asks.
• Ambient occlusion and face shading as Iris does them. Packs'
  separateAo and ambient occlusion level settings are honoured, and the
  old per face shading is off by default.
• Glass and ice use the pack's translucent program. Against Minecraft,
  the error in glass colour fell from 77 levels to 21. Ice has not been
  checked.
• A missing sky input reads white, not black, matching what packs
  observe in Minecraft.
• Pack terrain textures are filtered as Minecraft filters them,
  sharp texels with blended mipmaps, which removes excess shimmer in the
  distance. Goanna's own terrain is unchanged.

Fixes

• A rare problem while joining. Water effects could read block names
  while the server was still sending block definitions. They now wait
  until the definitions are ready.
• No more errors from update checks for optional material packs that
  are not installed.

Known limits

Not run on Windows; the Windows build is compiled and packaged only. Not
tested on a Steam Deck in this release.

Everything outside the shader pack section was checked against Luanti
5.17.0 servers, with devtest and Mineclonia as stated in each part.

Goanna is independent of the Luanti project.

Source checkpoint: 995722c0 (15 October 2026). The release's verification.json lists every check run and what was not.

Goanna v0.14.0-alpha

Goanna v0.14.0-alpha adds experimental support for Minecraft Iris and
OptiFine shader packs, alongside distant-terrain and native-water fixes.

Shader packs

• Select a downloaded shader pack in Settings, Graphics, Shader pack.
  Use Open folder, add the ZIP or extracted pack, then Look again.
  Join or rejoin a world to apply the selection and its options.
• Translate supported terrain, foliage, water and shadow programs, and run
  supported prepare, deferred, composite and final passes.
• Expose supported pack options in the graphics settings.
• Improve pack water inputs, prepared skies and clear-glass rendering.

Download the shader packs you want to use from their authors.
This is a compatibility checkpoint, not full Iris or OptiFine support.
BSL, Complementary, Photon, MakeUp and Eclipse have been exercised during
coastal comparison work, with pack-specific rendering differences remaining.
Complementary still has uneven water and cloud layers. MakeUp has dark
terrain, noisy water and missing clouds. Shadows can differ from Minecraft.
Path-traced and voxel-lighting packs are not claimed supported.

Terrain and native water

• Retain distant cliff sides and terrain undersides to reduce horizon gaps.
• Reuse unchanged terrain summaries and avoid unnecessary rebuilds.
• Extend native water reflections and refine their screen-space tracing.
• Calm distant wave normals and correct native reflection blending.

Validation

The shader checkpoint was observed against an unmodified local Luanti
5.17.0 server running Mineclonia release 38561, using Godot 4.5.1 and an
RTX 3090. This does not establish performance or compatibility on other
GPUs. Native-water night and underwater visuals have not been rechecked.
Linux passed native and integration tests, a live Mineclonia connection,
Ubuntu 22.04 startup, and native/Photon coastal GPU smoke checks.
Windows passed compilation in GitHub CI and archive verification, but has
not been run on Windows. Forest, cave and underwater performance coverage
has not been repeated for this release. See verification.json for details.

Source checkpoint: 5bdefa5 (13 October 2026).
Includes the shader checkpoint aaadaeb and a release-compiler fix.
Goanna is independent of the Luanti project.

Goanna v0.13.0-alpha

Goanna v0.13.0-alpha

You can say a chat line instead of typing it, and chat from a
controller. Starting a world with the recommended materials now gets the
newest ones, and the AI game master can give named and enchanted items,
put buildings in the world and have its characters build them.

Chat

• Voice typing. Hold T, speak and let go: the words appear in the chat
  box unsent, read aloud says them back if it is on, and Enter sends them.
  A quick tap of T opens chat to type, as before. Speech is turned into
  text on your own computer by Whisper; nothing is sent anywhere. The
  speech model (57 MB, or 181 MB for the larger one in Settings, Audio)
  downloads the first time you use it. The microphone is open only while
  T is held. It has been tried with synthesised speech, not yet with a
  real microphone.
• Older processors. Voice typing needs a processor with AVX2, which
  most PCs from 2013 on and the Steam Deck have. On one without it, holding
  T does nothing more than open chat.
• Escape closes chat with one press. It took two.
• Chat from a controller. D-pad up works like T: hold it to speak a
  line, tap it to open chat. In the chat box, A sends the line and B
  closes it. On a Steam Deck, the Steam keyboard (Steam and X) should
  type into the box. Tried only with simulated button presses, not yet on
  a real controller or a Deck.

Materials

• Recommended means the newest. Starting a world with the recommended
  materials first downloads the newest version of that game's materials
  if a newer one is out, showing the download; pressing Start Game again
  plays with the installed ones instead. Before, the world got whatever
  version happened to be installed, which could be the old blurry baked
  maps rather than the sharp authored ones. Old maps left in a world by an
  earlier version are cleared as it starts.
• The bundled materials install however Goanna is started. A
  release found its own Mineclonia materials, and Luanti's base textures,
  only when started from inside its Goanna folder. Started from a desktop
  shortcut, Steam or another folder, it never installed them and played
  with an older pack or none.
• Material updates are on. The Download material updates switch
  (Settings, Updates) starts on for everyone with this version, including
  anyone who had it off. Some had it off without choosing to: one of
  Goanna's tests could overwrite a player's settings when run on their
  machine. Turn it off again there if you want it off.
• Overlaid and combined textures get their own relief. A texture made
  by laying images over each other, combining parts or turning one, such
  as Crimson and Warped nylium's sides or the chiseled bookshelf's front,
  now draws each part with that part's authored maps, in the right place
  and the right way round. Before, the whole face took the first image's
  maps, or none.
• Paintings show their pictures. Mineclonia's paintings drew as plain
  blocks of wood.
• Still to come for Mineclonia. The fix for iron, gold and netherite
  tools whose wooden handles shine like metal is not yet in a published
  pack. Mineclonia's pack stays 1.3.1 for now.

Read aloud

• Every line is heard. A line that arrived while another was being
  read, such as the server's reply to a command, was shown but not
  spoken; lines now wait their turn. Turning Read chat off and on again
  no longer reads out what came while it was off.

Experimental

• The game master knows what the world holds. It searches a catalogue
  of the game's items, creatures, enchantments and structures instead of
  guessing names.
• Rewards. It can make an item, with a name, a few lines of
  description and, in Mineclonia, enchantments, and leave it near a player,
  in a chest, or have a character carry it over. A reward is never put in
  your inventory; you choose whether to pick it up. Rewards have their own
  budget, separate from fights.
• Buildings. It can put up a building it designs or one of the game's
  own, and order a character to build one node by node while you watch.
  It never builds on protected ground, where players have dug or built, or
  on anyone, and undoing a building puts the ground back. Buildings are off
  unless the server's operator turns them on
  (goanna_director_structures), and a world started from Goanna's menu
  has no way to turn them on yet. In Mineclonia, the temples, huts and
  shipwrecks come without their loot.
• Easier for a model to use. The game master's tools were reworked so
  a model calls them correctly more often: one tool per kind of order, the
  same words for the same things throughout, and a short brief when it
  connects. A model that only voices characters can be given just those
  tools. See docs/director.md.

Goanna v0.12.0-alpha

Goanna v0.12.0-alpha

Goanna can read the game aloud and be played from the keyboard, sounds
come from where they are, new materials arrive on your first visit to a
world, dug blocks remember their progress, and the AI game master's
characters can now walk, follow, patrol, trade and fight on its orders.
Mineclonia's pack in the box is 1.3.1, with every mob and outfit skin.

Accessibility

• Read aloud. Ctrl+B, in the menu or in a world, turns on speech
  for chat, text the game puts on the screen, what you point at, what you
  hold, your health, and menus and forms as they open, then each control
  you move to. It speaks through your system's voice, so a screen reader
  user keeps their own voice and rate. Settings, Audio chooses the voice,
  its rate and volume, and which of those things are read. On Linux it
  needs speech-dispatcher and a voice such as espeak-ng. It has not yet
  been tried by a blind player; see docs/accessibility.md.
• Menus and forms from the keyboard. Tab and the arrow keys move
  through the main menu, Goanna's menus and every game form, Enter
  presses. On inventory slots Enter picks up and puts down, Shift+Enter
  moves the stack, Ctrl+Enter takes half; Left and Right switch tabs; Up,
  Down and Enter choose the links in a conversation. When the game sends a
  form again, the focus stays where it was.

Sound

• You hear your own building. Placing a block makes its sound for you
  now, not only for everyone else. Using an item, taking damage, falling
  hard, jumping and landing make their sounds too, footsteps quicken as
  you run and sound in water and on ladders, and other players and
  creatures make footsteps as they walk.
• Sounds come from where they are. They fade with distance as in the
  vanilla client and pan fully left and right, and a creature's sounds
  move with it instead of staying where it started. Sounds cannot yet seem
  to come from above or behind you on headphones.

Materials

• New materials on the first visit. Joining a world whose materials
  you do not have, the connecting screen shows them downloading and the
  world opens with them, instead of with the server's art until next time.
  Skip and play now joins straight away, as before.
• Smaller downloads. Joining a Minetest Game server no longer also
  downloads Mineclonia's 84 MB pack, and a pack's older versions are no
  longer downloaded before its newest.

Starting worlds

• No more starting with a Luanti too old for the game. A Luanti whose
  version cannot be told from where it is installed, such as a
  distribution's package, is now asked its version. One older than 5.10 is
  listed as too old and never used, and Start Game installs Goanna's own
  server instead. Starting a world says which Luanti the game needs rather
  than starting a server that cannot run it. Not yet tried on Pop!_OS,
  where it was reported.
• Digging picks up where you left off. On a Minetest Game or Mineclonia
  world started from Goanna, a block you stopped digging keeps its
  progress until it changes or the server stops, for everyone playing
  there, vanilla clients included. Kythen keeps its own.

Fixes

• Kythen's map opens. Images a game sends after you join, such as
  Kythen's map, never arrived, so the map did nothing.
• What you point at is described. The text a game gives a block or
  creature, such as a chest's owner, shows in the corner as in the
  vanilla client.
• Inventory tabs switch at once. Clicking Recipes in Minetest Game's
  inventory did nothing until it was closed and opened again.
• Inferred relief turns off on creatures too. Turning it off left it on
  for mobs and players already drawn.
• One notice for new materials. Installing several bundles at once
  printed the same chat line once for each.

Experimental

• A program playing as you sees and hears more. Besides menus and
  forms (which 0.11.0 already let it press, fill and choose in, without
  saying so), it now reads the HUD with its colours, the names over
  creatures, what the crosshair is on, and the sounds you hear with their
  direction, and can ask for a picture of the screen. See
  docs/agent-interfaces.md.
• The game master's characters can act. Besides speaking, a cast
  character can now be told to watch someone, walk somewhere and stay,
  patrol a few points, follow someone or keep its distance, hold an item,
  open its trades to a player, or, if it can fight and was cast armed,
  attack, with the same fairness limits as an encounter. It carries each
  order out by itself. See docs/director.md.
• The game master from a shell. tools/goanna-director-cli runs the
  AI game master from a terminal or a script, one command per call, with
  the same checks as the MCP service. See docs/director-setup.md.

Goanna assets 2026.10.7

Versioned enhanced-material bundles. They are indexed by asset_bundles/catalogue.json in this repository, not by a file on this release.

Goanna assets 2026.10.6

Versioned enhanced-material bundles. They are indexed by asset_bundles/catalogue.json in this repository, not by a file on this release.