Update 1.34: Lobby Update

MAY 27 2026

Hello all,

For a long time, GunColony has been focused on our gameplay, from our weapon mechanics to the gamemodes. Some other basic areas of the game have been somewhat neglected as a result. Today, we are changing this status quo with a polish pass focusing on improving the match join experience in GunColony to get you into matches faster.

Going forward, our updates will also be powered by Kotkit, a new, 100% custom Kanban-style development tool tightly integrated with the way we develop GunColony. Besides helping us release new features, this new tool will greatly increase our ability to quickly patch small issues and improvement ideas that arise in the game and from community feedback, therefore giving us the ability to improve our game in the smaller areas that we have long neglected with limited development resources.

PVP LOBBY IMPROVEMENTS

We have added two new improvements in the PVP and Competitive lobbies to help get games started faster, both for the first match in a lobby and between matches.

First, you can now wait in the lobby indefinitely when it’s just you in the lobby (the timer is inactive, though the AFK kick is active just like usual). While you’re waiting, immediately and every 30 seconds, players in spawn will be notified that you are waiting. You can pick a map from the map pool in the meantime. When the second player joins the game, the map vote will only last 10 seconds instead of 30, and you will be notified with a notification sound.

Second, when more than half of players in the lobby pick the same match in the map vote, then the vote is immediately skipped and the match immediately starts in the winning map.

Combining these two changes means that if you want to play with a friend while the PVP lobby is empty, you can now start a match instantly. Or, the first player can pick the map first, and once the second player joins, they don’t need to do anything and the match will start in 10 seconds. Starting a PVP match with random players should also be easier as well.

In addition, in bigger lobbies, players will wait less time on average in the map vote since it can now be skipped with a majority vote.

MOB-ARENA LOBBY IMPROVEMENTS

Mob-Arena has received an even larger improvement in the joining system compared to PVP. Players can now individually join a Mob-Arena immediately if they want to, and different players can now join an arena at different times. There is still a 30 seconds start timer, but it is now per-player, rather than shared between all players.

In addition, when you join a Mob-Arena game in progress for the first time, you will now also join through the Mob-Arena lobby and can customize your loadouts and spawn in whenever you want to. This should be a big improvement compared to the previous behavior of putting you in the spectator area and then setting a 75% respawn progress.

Note that if you leave and rejoin the arena after previously having fully spawned in it, you will still have to start in the spectator area and wait out the full respawn timer. This is to prevent players from leaving and rejoining to cheese the respawn time.

While you are in the lobby, you now also have convenient options in your hotbar to vote for a Difficulty option, as well as to change your loadout. This brings the Mob-Arena lobby experience more on par with the more polished experience you currently get in the PVP lobby.

Note: you will not get the difficulty vote item or it will be removed, if the arena has already been started by another player, or you are in Endless mode.

BALANCE CHANGES

5mW Laser: removed the 15% hipfire penalty; added a 2% damage penalty in Mob-Arena only
- The always-visible laser on the 5mW laser is a very major downside for the modification in PVP modes, one that we feel deserves to be compensated with a more generous hipfire spread. You should find the laser to be much more consistent at its intended purpose now.
- Also, this modification was previously lacking a downside in Mob-Arena, so we added a new, slightly gamey 2% damage downside to the modification that applies only in Mob-Arena, just so that it isn’t always automatically better than the 1mW laser. We think the improved hipfire accuracy added in this update should roughly cancel out the damage downside when using the 5mW Laser in Mob-Arena.

OTHER CHANGES

Spectators in Mob-Arena can now deal damage to mobs.
- For now, this serves to allow grenades and airstrikes you throw before dying to continue to help your teammates while you are in the spectator area.
- But who knows what shenanigans we might add with this ability in the future…
Added a new admin command (/adminlink) to let admins link and unlink players in the new Discord linking system from inside the game or server console.
- Previously this had to be done via database management tools.
Since there is now a hotbar item for the Mob-Arena difficulty vote, the message that previously let you trigger the difficulty vote if you dismiss the auto-opened menu has been removed.

BUG FIXES

Fixed a bug where if players used the Medikit or Health Pack items before the match started, players could retain absorption hearts after the game started.
Fixed a bug where when the server stops and logs out players (especially in the test server for some reason), the Place player data may never be saved and unlocked, causing the player to be unable to join any other servers for a few minutes.
Fixed a 11-year-old long-standing bug since the release of GunColony, where if a Mob-Arena spectator gets kill credit for a mob (for example by the mob dying from environmental damage), the scoreboard will display duplicate entries for that player.

DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS UPDATE

For the last two months, we have been hard at work on a new development tool to help us update GunColony as well as develop our standalone game more easily going forwards.

Kotkit is focused on cutting edge LLM-powered features that will help us migrate large amounts of code from our legacy Minecraft codebase onto the Place engine, a process that we need to try and industrialize as much as possible if we want to launch the GunColony standalone game this year.

It also has a Kanban board design that will make it dramatically easier for us to write down small bugs and polish problems with GunColony as soon as we encounter them during playtesting and when we read community suggestions. Later, we can polish these designs and turn them into development tasks, and then easily publish them to the test server for playtesting. This should dramatically expand our pipeline for completing individually-minor but collectively-important polish items in GunColony that have generally been low priority in the past.

As much as Kotkit will be very useful as a development aid for GunColony (and it was initially conceived as an internal tool only), we eventually decided to build it as a general-purpose project separate from GunColony, as we think many other people will find a use for the tool. We are planning to open source the tool some time within the next few months.