Update 1.29.5: Small Halloween Update

OCT 31 2025

Hello all,

We have managed to develop our first few boss skills with our work-in-progress Place Engine mob system, now available in GunColony for this small Halloween update that also fixes some issues such as the Flexible perk! Happy Halloween!

NEW BOSS SKILLS

Added two new boss skills to the server!

• Bomber Spiral: Summons Bombers that are launched a wide circle pattern around the boss
• Supercar: The boss rides a Z-Cart mount, with very fast speed but lower health than the mount summoned by the Steed skill

The two boss skills are added to several thematically appropriate bosses across Mob-Arena maps.

Bomber Spiral is added to:

• Giant TNT (Haunted)
• Pumpkin King III (Townhall)
• Bombbat (Street)
• Pigman Bomber (Nether)
• Cacodemon mini-boss (Hangar)

Supercar is added to:

• Hero General (Blizzard)
• Industrial Revolution (SignalHill)
• Gaz (GasStation)
• CyberPunk America (Cyberpunk)

Note that in some cases these skills replace existing boss skills on the bosses that have a similar gameplay purpose. For example, Supercar usually replaces movement skills like Charge and Speed. Also, due to the dangerousness of both boss skills, they are usually used at lower frequency by the bosses.

OTHER CHANGES

• Removed July 4th seasonal fireworks from spawn that we forgot to remove for a while

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a long-standing bug where the Flexible perk to not properly apply when you have no secondary weapon equipped (this was caused by loadout give order where the Weapons were given before the Perks, so the empty secondary weapon item type without the perk was given before the perk had a chance to be applied)
• Fixed a bug where zombie nametags were visible to humans in Zombie Siege (same change was applied to wolves which humans respawn as when they die)
  • This may have removed zombie nametags completely – can’t tell when testing with only two accounts – but at least it is better than the status quo

DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS UPDATE

As mentioned in the last blog post, we have tried very hard to implement a good Mob-Arena update for Halloween powered by new Place Engine features, but since we are still catching up to past development delays we were unable to create the comprehensive Place-powered mob system that we wanted to develop for the holiday. Nonetheless, we have completed a very significant amount of game systems work that allows us to put our first two boss skills into the game, written entirely with Place SDK logic. Specifically, we have added the ability to define Kotlin lambda functions as part of the Place DSL game object definitions, as well as a wide Bukkit-like gameplay API available for use inside these lambdas that encompasses concepts like Worlds, Blocks, and Entities. We have decided to take our time future-proofing these APIs as much as possible, as they will be the same ones used by modders in the Place engine years down the line. With these design improvements, our initial design of the Place SDK is now nearly fully completed (the only remaining part being a DSL to define modifiers, e.g. attribute modifiers on an item).

We are still hard at work on our mob system and related infrastructure. Since we’ve somewhat met our Halloween goal, our focus is now on creating a rock-solid, comprehensive mob system that fully replaces our MythicMobs plugin, including detailed logic to define Mobs, Items, and Skills. We are also investigating adding the ability to reload game object configuration on-the-fly without a server restart via JAR file loading. All of this work is very exciting as it means that the Place Engine’s code infrastructure is finally mature enough that we are now officially starting the phase of mass-migrating game features into the engine. We still have a long, long way to go until we migrate everything and are ready to launch the standalone game (though we can start to launch alphas of the game halfway through the process as we plan to in 2026), but we are starting to see the end of the tunnel – and more and more gameplay features in GunColony will start to benefit from the advanced features, flexibility, and data-driven design of our new game engine.