Railcraft 12 is finally here!

Today I woke up to some rather disappointing drama. I hate drama, but it happens.

Everyone was complaining about me locking Railcraft bugfixes behind a paywall.

I admit being caught a little by surprise by this. And quite frankly, the “bug” everyone is up in arms about, is as far as I can tell, an illusory association of Railcraft with server lag, which we haven’t even proved exists, let alone fixed. We’ve been investigating this issue as high priority for a few weeks now but have so far found no evidence that anything is actually happening. The reason it is being reported is simply because we added a debug message that gets spammed every time the game autosaves, which has lead to it being associated with lag. But our profiling and inspection efforts have revealed no such association actually exists that we can find, making the reports anecdotal.

Fast forward to a couple days ago, I released a new build as we’d resolved most outstanding bugs and were preparing to move towards official stable public release. I could have posted 12.0.0 then, but I’ve screwed up enough releases recently to want to get it right and not post something that breaks on load.

Now, the entire reason any of the Betas ended up on CurseForge at all is because a few months back we decided, as a reward and thank you to Patrons and to increase the availability of the mod for everyone, to tie public beta releases to a specific funding goal. This month, we fell $50 short of that goal. So when I went to post the release candidate build I was disappointed to find that, according to the rules we’d put in place, it had to be a private build.

For years, all of our beta builds have been private builds. There is nothing new about this. We’ve always done this. Betas are private, stable releases public. I know Railcraft has been a long time without a stable release, and for that I apologize. It’s entirely my fault. I’ve rewritten most of the mod three times now, and it burned me out. So for a couple years I had a hard time giving Railcraft the attention it needed. Many things were broken, and there were many bugs introduced into the code while I was gone that had to be resolved. All this takes time and dedication to put right. Over the last six months I’ve renewed my dedication to making Railcraft successful and moving forward towards feature parity with the old 1.7 builds. We aren’t there yet. Some things are still missing, but what is there, works, mostly. And so it is time for a stable release finally.

Now on to today, I woke up to find everyone attacking me and not really sure why. It took me a while figure out what everyone was so upset about. A few stupid comments from liach taken out of context about a non-existent bug apparently. And so to address this, I am releasing the stable build now. I’d planned to wait until Monday, but in light of the drama I think its important to get it out now.

I know Railcraft has always done things a little differently. And lets not pretend that it would even still be around without Patreon. Its been a long journey together with you guys. You know me. I’ve been here forever. I do this for you, Patreon makes it possible for me to continue. Maybe public betas was a mistake, it always causes me headaches when I publicly release unfinished builds in any form. I just really thought everyone wanted to see that the mod was still around and kicking so I implemented a policy that seemed fair and beneficial to everyone. I’d really hate to have to end the policy of public betas, I really wanted everyone to have access to the mod as soon as possible. But if its going to inflame the community every time I release a non-public build, I may have to return to the old model of “no public releases until its ready!“. I don’t want to do that. Does that make sense?

I love this community, and this honestly isn’t the first time its tried to crucify me. This isn’t my first rodeo. I know it will all blow over in a few weeks. I just ask that you take the time to understand the situation before you jump on the clickbait bandwagon and attack me. I will never lock bugfixes behind a paywall. Ever. There will always be a pubic release eventually. Be patient and accept what I can give, when I can give it to you. I’m on your side. I want people to enjoy a bug free mod and have fun. It’s why I mod.

I thank you for your continued support and understanding. I wish I could have posted this on Monday without all the drama and focused on the mod instead of the drama.

There are a lot of changes by the way. To many for me list here and I’m frankly having trouble remembering them all. I’ll just leave you a link to the master changelog instead.

Download Railcraft

12.0.0