Pinionfall v2026.10.05

Pinionfall now starts and plays on a recent phone, with on-screen controls and a lighter sound graph. It picks a graphics preset that fits the machine, rounds its terrain, bark and rocks up close, and has a sidebar where every control works.

What changed

This release is about where Pinionfall runs. Until now it assumed a desktop graphics card, a keyboard and a mouse. It now measures the machine it starts on and fits itself to it, and on a phone it brings its own controls.

Phones and tablets

A recent phone starts the world and plays it. On a touch screen the game adds a stick for the left thumb (any direction, held against its rim to run) and JUMP, HIT, USE and AIM for the right, with smaller FLY and SNEAK buttons above them. One finger on the world turns the camera, two pinch its distance or twist to roll in flight, and a tap points at something for USE to act on. The character screen scrolls under a finger and its preview pinches to zoom, and a finger on a sidebar title bar scrolls the list instead of pulling the window off.

Sound has its own profile there. Every sound in the game is synthesised live, and the full graph is more than a phone’s audio thread can render in time, which is heard as crackle in everything, the soundtrack included. The light profile keeps the soundtrack and thins what surrounds it: plain stereo panning in place of head-related panning, shorter reverbs, fewer music voices, and music scheduled further ahead so that a long frame cannot make a bar late.

A phone runs the lowest graphics tier, which now draws the earlier, lighter sea and does not compile what it does not draw: the cloud shader, the largest in the engine, is built only when clouds are switched on. The frame rate is modest and a desktop still shows the game as intended, but it is the same world. The controls are described in Phones and tablets.

Graphics presets that fit the machine

The first time a machine opens the game it is probed: the GPU’s name and limits are read and a benchmark of a fraction of a second runs. From that the game picks Low, Medium or High, and the GRAPHICS window says which and why. High is the game as authored. Medium draws fewer pixels with lighter shadows and clouds. Low halves the render scale, drops tree and lamp shadows and uses small texture and geometry pools, at about half the memory. Every setting stays editable, and a change is remembered as a difference from the preset.

The game also protects itself. If a session dies while starting, or right after a setting was changed, the next load sets the changed settings aside, and if that is not enough it lowers the preset one step at a time and says what it did. The details are in Graphics presets.

Rounded surfaces

Up close the terrain is no longer faceted: near the camera its triangles are split into smaller ones as they are drawn, and rounded. Tree bark, the world tree and rocks are rounded when they load, and the bark rounding ships baked. All of it sits behind a SURFACE DETAIL window with a switch per kind and sliders, and with a kind switched off the frame costs what it did before. Colliders do not change: what you walk on is the same surface.

Settings windows that all work

The sidebar is regrouped around controls that do something: display, shadows, lights, post effects, terrain, vegetation, trees, clouds, water and weather each have their window. Toggles left over from features that no longer exist are gone, and so is the world rebuild, which could break the planets it rebuilt. A PLANET window names the planet you are standing on and edits its sky, sea and weather, and only that planet’s.

Updating

git pull
npm ci
npm run setup:assets

1 of 6 asset bundles changed (public-baked.001, 4.9 MB in total). npm run setup:assets downloads and re-extracts only those; the others stay as installed.

It also deletes the 6389 asset files that earlier releases shipped and this one retired, but only while their contents are exactly what a release shipped: files you edited or added are never touched.

The physics build is unchanged (WASM 9ef2827b, parry v0.30.2, rapier v0.35.3).

Documentation

These pages are built from engine files that changed in this release:

Roadmap

Planned: Terrain density rework, Save safety, Quest and companion polish, Intro robustness, The Lost Origin, Cross-planet quests, NPC archers and casters, Child NPCs, Multi-slot saves, Spells v2 and Music and lore affinity.