描述
The candidate branch for 0.I is the aptly named 0.I-branch. This is forked from experimental as of 08 July 2025. This is not the stable release, yet! We still have to merge fixes to the https://github.com/orgs/CleverRaven/projects/23, collect reports and fixes on other breaking bugs, and all the usual smoothing out steps.
No freezes
There will be no feature/content/string freeze step for the experimental branch. In some ways, it should remain Business As Usual in experimental, but I'd like to encourage mergers to slow down on merging major features and content to experimental while we figure this out, to keep backporting from being too much work. Contributors, likewise, might want to spend a little more time polishing and completing their major feature PRs rather than pushing them to merge right away. This is a recommendation, not a rule.
How to help
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Contributors can help best by focusing on bug fixes and completing unfinished content in the stable branch, rather than setting out on your new favorite project. We're all contributors on the dev team too, and I totally understand that you might want to keep working on whatever it is that strikes your passion. That is okay. The whole point of this structure is to allow people to keep doing that. However, we'd love it if you could find a little extra time to help patch and polish the stable branch, if you can.
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Players are strongly encouraged to play the I-stable candidate instead of experimental; once we're publishing regular releases of it, I'll link them in this post. We should also try to get them linked in the popular launchers. The biggest loss that this new structure has for us is that a lot of people are going to likely just keep going on experimental, which means we won't get playtest reports on what needs fixing in the stable candidate as much; more focus will, as always, be put into whatever new features are going into I-experimental. Of course, as above, the whole point of this structure is that you can do whatever you want, but if you want to help out and can't contribute, running a few games in the stable candidate and reporting on bugs will be indispensably helpful.
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Translators and tileset artists are even more strongly encouraged to work only on the stable branch. It's not going to be changing as fast and should therefore be easier to catch up on, which will lead to a much more complete stable release. (We are still working out the details of how translation will work. Expect updates shortly)
The Stable Backport process
For contributors: Fixes for 0.I blockers should be targeted at the 0.I-branch branch. If your changes resolves the issue on both the stable candidate and experimental you will need to open two PRs: One will target stable, the other experimental.
What to backport
This is going to be a lot more stringent than our usual stable process, because we don't have to work on freezes.
- New features should not be backported unless expressly cleared by someone with merge permissions/dev team status. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that would justify this. We're done adding new features to stable.
- New content is similar to new features. Clear it with mergers first, or you might find you're wasting your time.
- Changes to features should only be implemented if they fix a problem or severely incomplete portion of that feature.
- Bugfixes are cool. Most bugfixes are likely to be fine to backport.
- Optimizations and infrastructure improvements should only be backported if they make quite a significant difference to the game.
- Fixes/adjustments to existing content should be audited carefully. Anything that changes translation strings is going to delay stable release, so is better avoided (typo fixes etc are always fine). Balance changes, such as adjusting item weights or spawn chances etc, is more likely to be fine as long as it's well vetted.
- Routine translation and tileset updates should proceed as usual. Tilesets in particular should be backwards compatible, so we can backport everything. Translation management will require some input from those who know more than me about our workflow there.
When 0.I is about ready to ship we'll likely do a big batch backport of tileset assets and translations, as we did for the 0.H release.