Build Log #01
Launch and Survival on the Streets
The first biweekly report of the MLM beta
This is the first of what will be a regular biweekly report on what the dev team and the community built together. Every two weeks we'll post one of these. The format will sharpen over time. The aim stays the same: tell you what shipped, what changed under the hood, who shaped it from the field, and what's on the bench next.
The two weeks behind us were the busiest in MLM's history so far. The beta went live. The streets opened. Dementals came online. Phase 2 systems landed one after another: trenches, butchering, condition and repair, the new crafting model, weapon stats in the UI. By the end of the period the game played meaningfully differently than the one that launched on May 10.
01What changed on the server side
Grouped by subject.
Dementals
- Detection ranges defined. Standing player visible at 50m, crouching at 40m, lying at 30m. Dementals see 180° forward, players see 360°. Lying still and not moving makes you invisible.
- Aggression activated. May 14 at 00:00 UTC. The streets started hunting back.
- Behavior tuning. Dementals now get excited, become tired, eventually doze off. Hit a dozing Dem from the front to wake it; hit from behind and it stays asleep. Walking chaotically by default, freeze when they spot a target. Falling on the ground and not moving drops aggro.
- Reincarnation point sanctuary. Players are now invisible to Dementals while standing on their own respawn point. A small mercy after enough deaths.
- Slightly less aggressive. First post-launch combat tuning pass dialed back overall aggression.
- Population cap raised to 10,000. When killed, new ones come from the edge of the map. Counterplay tools (barricades, traps, noise generators) are on the roadmap, not yet shipped, rolling out gradually over coming updates.
- Tripping rule. Dementals can now trip only on corpse piles showing the "intertwined bodies" visual (4+ bodies). Smaller piles don't cause tripping.
- Hiding rule. Hiding inside a pile of 3 or fewer bodies no longer breaks Demental line of sight. Body parts don't count toward the threshold.
Combat & weapons
- Quality bonus distribution defined. The first public explanation of how Quality determines stat bonuses, with a triangular probability distribution:
- Q1: -50% to -25%, peak at -50%
- Q2: -50% to 0%, peak at -25%
- Q3: -25% to +25%, peak at 0%
- Q4: 0% to +50%, peak at +25%
- Q5: +25% to +50%, peak at +50%
- Weapon stats now matter in combat. Stats started actually influencing combat outcomes. Shovel-axes classified as tools first, weapons second; they can chop and butcher with combat as a side use.
- Multiple weapon rebalancing passes. Weapon stats reset multiple times through May 22. No point hunting max stats while rebalancing continues.
- Melee victim movement lock. A successful melee hit prevents the victim from moving for 1 second. Spears benefit most: harder for an attacker to close on you. Pushing breaks the lock (test with warfork). Stated goal: easier to finish a fleeing Demental and prepares the combat system for future dodging and parrying.
Items, condition & repair
- Item condition system activated. All items got condition values. Damage doesn't degrade stats partially: the item works fully until condition hits 0, then it's dead.
- Repair mechanics activated. Items can now be repaired with materials. Condition % of the repair material determines what it can fix:
- Rag → clothes, at any condition
- Thread → twine, only at 50%+ condition
- Twine → rope
- Rope/rag → strapped stone
- Clothing tear mechanics shipped. As part of the crafting update, clothes can now be ripped.
- Twine from tights. Twine can now be crafted from tights.
Crafting
- Crafting overhaul. The old 5-tier tool system has been retired. The new system uses continuous tool efficiency:
"If crafting requirements are higher you'll just spend more time on crafting. This means that you may have all tools except one with very high efficiency and will still have to spend whole eternity to craft something requiring that tool."
Low tool efficiency no longer blocks crafting, it slows it down. One bad tool dominates the time penalty.
Butchering & cooking
- Bodies can be cut for meat, fat, and bones.
- Female torsos yield more fat, male torsos more meat. Heads give bone, no fat.
- Body condition near 200 needed to extract fat.
- Kid meat is the safest to eat. Elderly meat the worst.
- Cooked meat: less weight, less volume, less water, longer preservation.
Environment & tools
- Phone booths added. Hide behind or inside them.
- Trenches added. Trenches stop Dementals.
- Torches craftable. Made from sticks and ropes; condition increased with resin. CfB's advice: "prepare a handful of torches for future."
- Tin Can Alarms. A noise generator with material-based tuning. Add more cans to the alarm to raise its condition and increase clang frequency.
Death & looting
- Death broadcast on radar. A player dying now triggers a ping visible to everyone on the radar. Acts as a temporary substitute until full looting goes live.
- Loot Demental hunt event. A live event built around one Demental carrying unique loot. Shinary killed it and recovered what was inside. Doubled as the first live test of the player looting system.
Performance
- Corpse handling optimized server-side. Cheaper corpse processing reduced load. This was the moment that flagged the FPS situation as fixable on the server side too, in addition to the client work.
- In-air mob cleanup. Restart specifically to remove Dementals stuck in the air after trenches were added.
Discovered by players
- Scrap metal repair loop. Players found an emergent cycle in the new repair system: "Theoretically you can repair scrap metal by making a tin can alarm, repairing it with tin cans to 100% and then dismantle into a single scrap metal."
02What changed on the client side
Client work was led by d024778. Same grouping principle as Section 1: grouped by subject.
UI & controls
Client v3.0.6- New click detection system for floors and walls. Click targets are now more reliable.
- Click on a prone character fixed. You can now interact with downed players properly.
- Crouch and prone work with inventory open. Previously inventory blocked stance changes.
- Controls UI no longer softlocks on death. Dying with the controls UI open used to freeze the game; fixed.
- Esc closes the main menu. Standard keybind that wasn't there before.
- Signals render on top of the world. Message readability improved.
Logging system
Client v3.0.6 /- In-game logging system added. Records all in-game events and server communication. Logs land at
%localappdata%\MLM\Saved\Logs. Crash logging coming in a future build.
"I've added a logging system in the new version of the game to help us track down issues. If you're reporting a bug, it'd be awesome if you could attach your log file."
Performance
v3.0.6 → v3.0.7 → v4.0.2 → v4.0.5 ·- Default graphics settings slightly lowered. Higher FPS with no noticeable visual loss. (v3.0.6)
- FPS diagnosis. After reading the logs, d024778 found the bottleneck: "the world is just too crowded. The server is spamming tens of thousands of update messages, and the client is struggling." Server-side world density and corpse pile rendering were the main causes, not the new features.
- Diagnostic test build v3.0.7. Logging and the new cursor-tracking system disabled to isolate which subsystem cost the most FPS.
- Client optimization pass v4.0.2. Movement stutters noticeably reduced. Game-session creation rebuilt from the ground up; connection drops in heavy areas largely fixed.
- Further optimization v4.0.5. Server connection speed and movement stutters improved again. The current stable build.
Content
Client v3.0.6- In-game items updated. Item assets refreshed.
- Map updated. Map assets refreshed.
03What we built
Beta 1.0 went live, May 10
The first downloadable build of MLM dropped on Sunday May 10. Players logged in with their asset wallets or with voucher codes. Once a voucher was redeemed it became permanently locked to the wallet that used it, no longer transferable.
The build opened with a 3-day Accommodation Phase:
- Only players in the world. Dementals not yet active.
- PvP stayed on. Other survivors were the only threat.
- Building entries disabled. Focus was on the streets.
- Voucher redemption for in-game items deliberately offline.
The Accommodation phase was a chance to learn the world before the world started learning you back.
Bug Bounty Phase 1, May 10 to May 12
Alongside the beta launch we opened the first Bug Bounty: 150M QU for 1st place, 100M for 2nd, 50M for 3rd. The bounty ran for the full Accommodation phase. Reports were submitted in the #game-suggestions forum tagged "bug report." Some functionality bugs were found, some tied to migration to the production server.
(Phase 1 winners are announced in their own post.)
Dementals activated, May 12 onward
The Accommodation phase closed on May 12. Dementals came online in passive form first, populating the town center within twenty minutes. Wolf Pack threw a welcome party at the MLM Hotel and the rest of the community walked into a world that now contained Dementals.
Aggression came later. On May 14 at 00:00 UTC, Dementals became aggressive. That's when the streets actually started hunting back.
"The party is over, we are updating the server in 5 mins to enable aggressive dementals." — Come-from-Beyond, May 14 00:29 UTC
The Wolf Pack welcome party, May 12
The first community-organized event of the beta. Wolf Pack hosted at the MLM Hotel at 18:10 UTC.
Phase 2, Survival on the Streets
After Dementals turned aggressive, the focus turned to the central question of MLM: can you actually survive on the streets? The team made a deliberate decision not to enable any new features until that core mechanic felt right.
"We won't enable more features until this task is solved, it's critical to get core mechanics interesting and efficient." — Come-from-Beyond, May 14 22:39 UTC
That instruction shaped the whole period that followed.
Client developer
The client side of MLM has been built by d024778 for over a year. Across these two weeks they shipped four client releases (v3.0.6, v3.0.7 test build, v4.0.2, v4.0.5). Their work is detailed in section 2 above.
04Mechanics now clearly defined
Some things weren't new this period, they were finally explained. Worth knowing:
Demental sight model: 180° forward, 50m/40m/30m by player posture, line-of-sight breakable by going prone and freezing.
Dementals tune themselves: When too many surround a target, new arrivals bump into existing Dems and lose aggro. Some natural population pressure release.
Camouflage works only while stationary. All camo stops working when the wearer moves. Universal Camo is half as efficient as any specialized camo.
Breaking limbs. Break a Demental's arm to reduce its DPS. Break a leg to make it fall.
Distance-based behavior anchors.
- Hitting from the back of a dozing Dem keeps them sleeping.
- Standing too far from a light source reduces target chance.
- Whisper with
SHIFT + ENTERto avoid producing noise.
Quality stats interactions. Each Q-tier overlaps slightly with adjacent tiers. Q5 isn't a hard cap, it's the peak of a triangular distribution.
Trip hazards. Bushes, campfires, clay deposits, corpse piles (with 4+ bodies, visible as intertwined), sand deposits, stone scatterings, tall grass. These slow you and can wake or attract Dementals.
Dirty stuff smells. Items become dirty by being worn or by being handled with dirty hands. Smell attracts Dementals. Wash before traveling.
05Community contributions that shaped this build
This is the section that matters most. The players on the streets test the world; the world adapts.
If your name isn't here and you contributed, post in the forum and we'll catch you in Build Log #02.
What the forum looked like
The #game-suggestions forum carried roughly 60+ active threads during the period. Three themes dominated the volume:
Performance. The "FPS drop after server save" thread alone collected 64 comments. Shinary's community FPS config workaround ("Performance Increase and removing heavy FPS drops, try it!") collected 10 upvotes and 39 comments. The community ran its own performance-triage effort in parallel with d024778's client optimization sprint, and the two halves fed each other.
"Stuck" bugs. At least 15 separate threads about position-state edge cases: stuck on the Safari Cage (multiple variants), stuck on respawn after overload, stuck after server restart inside cages, ladder-stuck at the hotel. Several of these informed the respawn-related fixes and the v3.0.6 inventory/controls fixes.
Demental detection and behavior. Head-hit probability while crawling, aggro reset after flash bangs, dozing posture cues, visibility beyond field-of-view, hit detection on proning Dems. This whole cluster shaped the May 12 to May 14 Demental sight model and behavior tuning.
Other recurring themes: overload/weight handling (5+ threads, the "Overload in reincarnation" post collected 55 comments), body and corpse interaction, UI quality-of-life suggestions (volume settings, ESC closing menus, camera centering).
Most active forum contributors during the period:
- Beavis wrote the most thorough bug write-ups, including the Safari Cage edge-climbing reproduction with steps.
- Shinary posted detailed bugs, a Suggestion Megathread, and the community FPS workaround that became the most-engaged thread of the period.
- Yoshimit filed many bug reports and a Suggestion Megathread covering camera centering and attacking while prone.
- QubicMaxi filed multiple bugs around digging, sound, rain visibility, and fence collision.
- El Clip focused on suggestion-side contributions: head-hit probabilities, dozing posture realism, flash bang reset behavior.
- mersUDin contributed both bug reports and an efficient-movement strategy guide for navigating between Dementals.
- slagex filed bugs and UX suggestions including the volume-settings menu request.
06Events and moments
The Hotel Tithe incident, May 14. The Hotel inhabitants hadn't paid tithe to the Chapel. CfB killed everyone in the hotel as a message. The tithe still wasn't paid so CfB continued with his killings.
The Loot Demental hunt, May 17. A live event built around a Demental that carried unique loot. Players had to find and kill it to claim what was inside. Shinary won. The event also served as the first live test of the player looting system, which is being rolled out gradually.
The Cage Demental incident, May 22. CfB ran another Demental hunt event using cage mechanics, incentivizing players to move and hunt the Demental. Part of the same gradual looting rollout.
Treasure hunt, Sunday May 24. Three stashes spotted on radar. The community went out to dig them up. CfB confirmed they'll stay in place until dug out; radar marks will be removed in a few days but the loot persists.
07Things on the bench next
These were named but not yet shipped:
- Player looting (full rollout) — partial system has been tested in live events; full rollout coming gradually.
- Demental control toolkit — barricades, traps, noise generators, all part of the announced counterplay model. Being added gradually over coming updates.
- Item degradation over time/usage — system is in. Tuning ongoing.
- Stink mechanic for corpse piles — "don't create too many piles, we'll add stink soon."
- Coordinate system shift — center of coordinates being moved to the center of the map. Subtract 2048 from X and Y to convert.
- Cooking improvements — meat/fat preservation, cooking time tuning continuing.
- Tutorial video series — Episode 1 already published on YouTube. More episodes planned for new-player onboarding (login flow, corpse-loot UI, basic survival). Several new players in the past two weeks reached out for help simply because they didn't know they needed to input their seed phrase; tutorials should help close that gap.
- Field Research Program — formalizing the community feedback pipeline, building on the Survival Bounty model.
08Things rejected (and why)
Worth a section. The team turned down several player suggestions during the period, with reasons:
- Sewer system — sewers exist in the world but contain hydrogen sulfide. No plans to make them cleanable. "Too much effort."
- Easter eggs — rejected on immersion grounds. "Easter eggs break immersion."
- Acid rain — rejected on lore grounds. "Not lore friendly."
- Compass item — rejected because the radar covers navigation.
- Universal item auctions — "Let's just sell new stuff." Existing inventory stays where it is.
09By the numbers
A quick snapshot of the period:
10Closing the loop
The first two weeks of beta did what we hoped they would: stress-tested the world against real survivors and gave us the feedback we needed to tune it. We learned that corpse piles were the FPS killer and we fixed it. We learned the old crafting tier system was too rigid and we made it continuous. We learned weapon stats needed UI visibility and now they have it.
Build Log #02 will cover the next two weeks: May 24 through June 6. The likely focus is more survival-on-the-streets tuning, possibly the start of broader looting rollout, and whatever else the streets ask for.
Until then, stay alive out there.