Changelog – PEAK RANKED

Versions follow SemVer. While the first number is 0, this is a pre-release: scoring rules may still change and leaderboards may be reset.

The version number lives in exactly one place — Directory.Build.props. The plugin, the package and the in-game display all read it from there.

[Unreleased]

[0.10.3] – Live Race times count

Added

• Live Race times now appear on the SPEEDRUN board, under their own LIVE RACE category. Until now a race reported its result only to the race itself: you saw who won, and then the time was gone. It was never a scoring problem — a race runs on a set seed, a set map and a set ascent, exactly like a speedrun — the time simply had nowhere to go. Races already run before this update stay where they are; this applies from here on.
• The Live Race window now starts with a choice: HOST A RACE or JOIN A RACE. Joining players used to see every setting the host had — and could click around in them without any effect. As a joiner you now only type the code; the race settings appear once you are in, as a read-only view. The host keeps the full setup page and can still change seed, map, ascent, route, player count and options while the lobby is waiting — everyone in the lobby sees the change the moment it happens.

Fixed

• One player who never loaded into the race world blocked the whole race. Their game failed to load, but the race kept waiting for their "ready" forever — everyone else was stuck on WAITING FOR PLAYERS. The server now gives up on a loader after 150 seconds and starts the countdown without them; the affected player is removed from the race with a notice instead of silently starting without a world.
• Custom run settings from the airport terminal leaked into races. If you had configured a custom run at the terminal earlier (grapple mode and friends), those settings came along into the next live race and broke it. Starting a race or a speedrun now resets all run settings to the defaults first — your terminal configuration stays saved and untouched.
• A leftover result from a previous race could be reported into the next one when going straight from one race into another without visiting the menu in between.

[0.10.2] – Ghosts are watchable again

A follow-up to 0.10.1. Deciding whether you could watch someone's ghost turned out to be far stricter than it needed to be, and 0.10.1 made it obvious by putting a map check in front of it.

Fixed

• Ghosts were blocked far too eagerly. Whether you could watch or race someone's ghost was decided by comparing your entire map catalogue against theirs. Any mod that touches the map pool changes that catalogue — so with such a mod installed, every entry on the board went grey and unplayable, even when the mountain in question was identical. It cut the other way too: a run recorded with such a mod could not be replayed by anyone, and uninstalling the mod did not bring it back. What matters is whether you have the one mountain that run took place on, and that is what is now checked. On the Daily Cup this was tested on, it takes the playable entries from three of six to five of six; the sixth genuinely has no recording. Runs already on the boards benefit too — nothing needs to be re-uploaded.
• Your own best run could stop showing up as a ghost for the same reason: installing a map mod made the game stop recognising your earlier climbs on the mountain you were standing on.

[0.10.1] – Fair play, corrected

The fairness checks from 0.10.0 were wrong about three things, and every one of them went against an honest runner. Eating during a run, drinking the last of a stamina buff, and climbing on an empty bar all looked suspicious to a check that had never seen enough real runs to know better. All three are fixed, and the runs they hit have been reviewed by hand.

New in the other direction: a scored run no longer starts at all when another mod has replaced the map you were about to climb.

Fixed

• Eating during a run marked it as suspicious. Hunger in PEAK does not grow smoothly, it grows in steps — one step roughly every fifty seconds. A runner who eats regularly bounces between two steps, and over a two-minute stretch the total came out as no growth at all, which reads exactly like a frozen status bar. Five finished Daily Cup runs were held back for review over this; every one of them was clean. The check now notices when you eat, instead of only when your hunger drops below where the two minutes started.
• The last second of a stamina buff counted against you. While infinite stamina is active, the game itself lets the bar climb past full and has no reason to pull it back down until something else touches it. For a moment after the buff ends the bar is therefore still above full — through no doing of yours. That moment is no longer read as an impossible value.
• Climbing with an empty stamina bar looked like flying. One of the server-side checks asked whether a climb had cost any stamina. On an empty bar the answer is always no, because there is nothing left to spend — so ordinary climbing at the bottom of the bar matched the pattern for sustained flight, as did climbing under a stamina buff. Both now count as the explanations they are. This check only ever wrote to the review log, so no run was ever held back by it.

Added

• A scored run is refused when a mod has swapped out the map. Mods that change the map pool do it while the game is loading, long before PEAK RANKED can quarantine anything — so a runner could end up climbing a different mountain from everyone else and still submit the time. The mod now checks the one map you are about to load and says so plainly instead of accepting the run. Only the affected map is refused: MorePeak replaces a single slot, so on most days nothing changes and the run counts as usual.
• The speedrun window marks a swapped map. When a mod has replaced one, the same map name can appear twice in the picker. The replaced one now says so, so you can see which is which before you start rather than after.

[0.10.0] – Live races and fair play

Two big things. Live Race got a real connection: everyone starts in the same moment, the standings update as they happen, and — if the host allows it — you see the other racers climbing your own mountain. And scored runs now switch off every other mod for their duration, with what happens during the run checked against the game's own state instead of against a list of known cheat mods.

Added

• See your rivals on your own mountain. During a race the other climbers appear in your world, moving as they move — the same terrain, the same seed, the same starting moment, so their position means the same thing in your game as in theirs. The host decides when creating the race (SHOW RIVALS); with it off, only the standings are shared. The four nearest rivals are shown, fading with distance.
• Races run on a live connection instead of polling. The host presses start and everyone learns it in the same moment instead of up to a second and a half later, and the race panel — position, progress, stamina, status, items — now updates as it happens rather than in steps. It also uses about a tenth of the network traffic it used to, which matters on a weak line.
• Fairness checks that watch the game, not a list of mods. During a scored run the mod now records game-state signals alongside the trajectory it already records for your ghost, and the server checks them for effects the game itself cannot produce: stamina that stops draining while you climb, a status bar frozen in place, sustained flight, a position that jumps, a clock that runs faster than the wall clock. Every legitimate advantage in PEAK has a cause behind it — an item, a buff, a game event — so the check is simply whether the cause is there. That is why it does not need to know which cheat mods exist: a new one has to produce the same effect, or it is not an advantage.
• Cosmetic and quality-of-life mods stay allowed, and installing a cheat mod you never use does nothing. What gets flagged is an advantage in the run, not the fact that you mod your game.
• A new best time is marked as provisional until someone has watched its ghost. It stays on the board while it waits — hiding a record from the person who set it would be the worse trade.
• A new FAIR PLAY chapter in the help window spells out what is recorded during a scored run and what is not: nothing outside the game process, and nothing at all in a vanilla run.
• Every other mod is switched off while a scored run is active — and comes back when you return to the main menu. This holds for every start from the PEAK RANKED signs: Daily Cup, 1v1 duel, ghost training, speedrun, live race. Which mods may stay active anyway is decided by the server, not by the player: mods on the admin-curated allowlist keep running, everything else is quarantined for the duration of the run. Your mods are still reported with the run exactly as before.

Fixed

• You could be dropped from a race while you were still loading into it. Anyone who had not started moving yet counted as gone after 45 seconds — which is roughly how long loading takes. A player is now judged by whether their connection is alive, not by whether they have started climbing.
• A player who crashed while loading could leave a race stuck forever. The countdown waited for everyone to report ready, including people who were never coming back.
• Losing connection no longer scores you as a DNF. You are marked as disconnected and can come back; a scored result should not hang on a hiccup in your WLAN.
• Your own row in the race panel stayed empty. Your progress, bars and items were missing for the whole race while everyone else's updated — the mod was waiting for a state change that, after the switch to a live connection, nobody was asking for any more. The result card also froze on the moment you finished instead of following the rest of the race to the end.
• Player names in other writing systems showed up as empty boxes. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Cyrillic and Greek characters are not part of the game's body font, so leaderboard rows rendered □□□ where a name should be. The mod now borrows the fonts the game already ships for those languages, so names appear as their owners wrote them.
• The season sign fell back to the vanilla heading after opening the leaderboards. It read "SEASON 1 ENDS" correctly on startup, but once you opened a leaderboard and came back, it showed "NEW ISLAND IN" again — the game rewrites the label every time the menu page is switched back on. The sign now keeps its own text no matter who writes to it.

Changed

• Two settings are gone, because they were never really yours to choose. When the clock starts and whether items are rolled from the run's seed decide what a time even means — and a leaderboard can only compare runs made under the same rules. Both now apply to everyone: the clock starts on your first input, and a scored run always draws its items from its seed, so two people on the same seed find the same equipment. Vanilla runs are untouched as before. Your old entries in the config file are simply ignored.
• Long help chapters scroll instead of running off the bottom. The FAIR PLAY chapter had outgrown the window, and German text is regularly longer than English — a text cut to fit the window would be the language bending to the layout.
• Conspicuous runs are handled more gently and more quietly. Where a threshold is calculated rather than absolute — a section that looks too fast, an unusual movement pattern — the result card now says under review instead of flagged, because an exceptionally fast honest run can land there too and it should be clear that the time is being checked, not thrown away. Runs are still never rejected, only set aside for a human.

[0.9.1] – Hotfix

Fixes the 1v1 ghost duel: it now takes place on the opponent's mountain instead of a freshly rolled one. Ghost training and the ghost recording itself are fixed along with it — without a stored recording there was nobody to race in the first place.

Fixed

• The 1v1 ghost duel is a duel again. Your attempt rolled its own seed and loaded today's map, while the ghost had climbed a mountain built from its own seed and map. Same route, different terrain: the opponent pulled other items out of the same chest, found a different temple layout, and a ghost from an earlier day was on an entirely different mountain. Duel and training now reproduce the opponent's mountain, and matchmaking no longer offers opponents from multi-player lobbies, whose item pool is larger than a solo one. Where the opponent's mountain no longer exists in your version of the game, the times still compare — the terrain cannot.
• Ghosts are recorded again. Runs over the whole mountain never had their recording stored, so ghost duels and ghost training started against an invisible opponent and the opponent panel stayed hidden. Short runs were unaffected, which is why it slipped through the first release.
• Runs whose recording was rejected no longer claim to have a ghost, and the leaderboard greys out entries you cannot race against.
• Ghost training against an entry without a recording now says so instead of starting a run against nothing.
• The MODE column named the wrong thing. A Daily Cup run showed up as "Set Seed" on the speedrun board, and every free speedrun as plain "Speedrun" — on a board where every row is a speedrun, that said nothing. Runs now name their category: Daily Cup, Ghost Duel, Speedrun Set Seed, or Speedrun Random, depending on whether you set the seed yourself or had it rolled at the start. Set-seed and random attempts are also ranked separately now — a prepared run no longer pushes a blind one off the board. Runs uploaded before this update count as set seed.
• The season sign in the main menu sometimes kept the vanilla heading "NEW ISLAND IN" instead of "SEASON … ENDS". Its countdown was correct even then.

[0.9.0] – Beta

First public release.

Included

• Timing with automatic splits per biome, compared against a reference run and the sum of your best segments, in a panel styled after the game's own windows.

• Modes: Daily Cup (ranked, ELO), 1v1 ghost duel, Speedrun with a seed and map of your choosing, ghost training, Live Race for up to eight players.

• Ghosts: your own best run and other players' runs from the leaderboard, animated and holding the item they held. Opacity is configurable.

• Opponent panel: clock, stamina, status effects in the game's own bar colours, and the inventory as icons — in duels, in training, and per player during a race.

• Leaderboards in the main menu: Daily Cup with ELO and tiers, a speedrun board by map and route, and your own run history.

• Seasons: a season is a calendar month, ending on the 1st at 17:00 UTC. The main menu shows the running season and its countdown on its own sign under the map rotation; at the end, standings go to the Hall of Fame and ratings are soft reset.

• Vanilla stays vanilla: starting from the left signpost gives you timing only — no seed control, no ghost, no submission. The panel says so.

• AI disclosure: the mod states openly that it was built with AI assistance — a rotating banner under the timer during every run, and a speech bubble in the main menu.

• German and English, following the game's language setting.

• Server-side run checks: split times must be internally consistent, and each section has a minimum duration calibrated against real world-record runs. Suspicious runs are flagged and held out of the boards for review, never silently dropped.

Known limits

• Cheat detection is early. It catches obvious manipulation; thresholds are set generously so a genuinely fast run is never rejected, which means some cheated runs will get through at first. Boards may be corrected retroactively during the beta.
• Co-op runs are not verified (no seed handshake between players).
• Losing connection during a race means you are out; there is no rejoin.