It’s raining where we are, and as rain symbolizes renewal, an unknown plant buds in the new demo, overflowing everywhere. It’s not a tree or a herb like the other, old plants. Would you take a guess? No, it’s not algae — although the brand-new water would be a great contender for water-based plants in the future.

They’re plants that just might win you in a bouldering competition. I think they’re called vines, but it doesn’t seem like they’re the grape-bearing kind, regardless of their fondness for hills. As you have to make do on a concrete island, they just have to stay content climbing walls.

But concrete islands have other perks. If you’re a plant, man-made (or wizard-made) pools can be a better deal than pushing through other plants waiting in line to take a sip from a puddle that’s taken millions of years to form.

That’s why the water in Idu actually resembles a real-life swimming experience to encourage the development™️ of large pools, channels for water transport, and all the other things you can do with water. The plants have been complaining, so our new motto is “more water, immediately, with less effort.”

Whether you like swimming or not, water on the surface of the islands in Idu may be responsible for increased fogginess, bathing the plants in warm sunbeams. We won’t tell you to bring your rainboots or snorkeling gear as part of the weather report, because we know better what pairs well with wizarding in non-corpuscular form — sparkles. Magic sparkling balls!

Gabion gates and instantly refillable pools

Water’s no fun if you have to pretend it’s water, so we replaced the slowly flowing, blocky, and glitching water-like substance with instant water. Assemble a pump on the water line with pipes, place the outlet in a pool, and watch the whole area fill up on the next fast-forward.

This will make it easier to focus more on building interesting pools, dams, and channel networks with less trouble than before, introducing a use-case for gabion blocks that divide water equally.

I know what you’re thinking: can you make Idu run Doom with gabion-gates? That’s left for you to experiment with.

Naturally, large bodies of water would be boring if you couldn’t swim and explore the underwater world, so you’ll have the full swimming experience regardless of your bodyless wizard nature.

Magic sparkles (known as particle effects)

If magic existed in the real world instead of, say, electricity, it would be boring and gray, because nobody makes colorful electronics anymore. Thankfully, we’re not in the real world, so magic has to come with side effects. We’ve introduced particle effects that will be used for visual feedback on magic spells and other actions in the world.

Currently, the Smash and Shrink spells give off sparkles on usage.

Climbing toward the future

Although we haven’t expanded the functionality of Converters in this update, we’re planning to keep working on them, alongside the look and feel of the game. However, we added configurable keybindings, toggleable UI for seamless screenshots, and increased the item pickup radius as well as the jump height for a more comfortable experience.

Full changelog

• New water mechanics: instantly fill large pools, build channels to transport water, etc
• Added a climbing plant
• Added a new particle system for special effects
• Improved climbing out of water
• Added swimming
• Increased jump height to 3 blocks
• Configurable keybindings (requires config file editing)
• Better fog
• Increased item pickup radius
• Added a key to toggle UI (F2)
• Fixed underwater spreading of Axemint
• Fixed excessive lag on fast forward
• Fixed infinite plant seeds