Update 1.35: 11th Anniversary Update

MAY 31 2026

Hello all,

Today, GunColony turns 11. In this celebratory update, we have added a new and improved Quest system to the server and a large resource pack update by Rijam. To serve as a new reward for completing quests, we have also added a Weapon Upgrade system for Mob-Arena, which let you unlock extra starting ammo and the ability to use weapons from the spectator area while waiting to respawn!

RESOURCE PACK UPDATE

In this update, we have added a large resource pack update by Rijam. This update fixes many issues and inconsistencies in our resource pack and adds a new remodel to the SG 552.

Detailed changelog of the resource pack:

• Added Incendiary remodel
• Updated Beretta pistol family: Beretta90two, M9A1, Single Beretta, Dual Berettas, Dual Elites.
  • Now uses the same model for the single guns and the same model for the dual guns.
  • Adjusted the position of the dual guns to match the position of the muzzle flash.
• Fixed PP7 and PP7-S having incorrect textures and views.
• Fixed the missing texture on the front of the Fire Launcher.
• Fixed the missing textured on the Zues ADS.
• Made the flame on the Flame Thrower glow.
• Fixed the UV bleeding on the M40A1.
• Fixed the missing textures on the E11s and Falcon 2 Scope ADS.
• Fixed the tech tree arrows being missing textures.
• Slightly updated the Spectre model.
• Made the Toast notifications invisible like they were in the past.
• Fixed Oak and Spruce block panels still using the old textures.
• Adjusted the Maxin MG GUI view to match all the other guns.
• Added the SG 552 remodel.
• Fixed the Acacia crate double slab not displaying.
• Added many more block panels (thin panels that builders can place into item frames for building).
  • Birch Crates
  • Jungle Crates
  • Acacia Crates
  • Dark Oak Crates
  • Warped Planks
  • Crimson Planks
  • Copper Block
  • Exposed Copper
  • Weathered Copper
  • Oxidized Copper
  • Polished Deepslate
  • Deepslate Bricks
  • Deepslate Tiles
  • Cobbled Deepslate
  • Deepslate (sides)
  • Deepslate (top)
  • Polished Blackstone Bricks
  • Polished Blackstone
  • Blackstone
  • Polished Basalt
  • Basalt (sides)
  • Basalt (top)
  • Smooth Basalt
  • Smooth Quartz
  • False Vines
  • Dirt
  • Coarse Dirt
  • Grass Path
  • Farmland
  • False Grass Block
  • Moss
  • Azalea (top)
  • Calcite
  • Tuff
  • Dripstone
  • Clay
  • Gravel
  • Sand
  • Cut Sandstone Top
  • Cut Red Sandstone Top
  • Sea Lantern
• Fixed leather armor for 1.21+

QUEST SYSTEM

We have added a new Quest system to the server. It has a completely rewritten backend, and will let us create flexible quests with dynamic, code-based unlock criteria. The quest progression criteria are still based on event triggers but can now include additional filters that can get very specific. This lets us create much more diverse quests than were possible before.

The new quest system also supports Achievements! There is currently one sample achievement in the game. Note: we are still working on the initial set of quests and achievements in this new Quest system. They will go live in a follow-up update very soon. Stay tuned!

UPGRADE POINTS SYSTEM

With this update, we are introducing a new Upgrade Points system which serves as a new type of reward from quests.

Currently, you can only obtain Upgrade Points from completing quests. Upgrade Points received from different quests will be available to different weapons.

Upgrade points may be given by the Quest system in any of the below weapon settings:

• For a single weapon;
• For a predefined set of weapons;
• For one single weapon category;
• For a predefined set of weapon categories;
• Universal (available for every weapon in the game).

We have also updated the existing “Weapon XP Token” system to support these weapon settings too, so we can now create unique quests that award Weapon XP Tokens or Upgrade Points for a specific group of weapons depending on the quest’s theme. This should increase the diversity of quest rewards possible within GunColony considerably.

WEAPON UPGRADES

This update contains the first two Weapon Upgrades added to GunColony, which you can purchase with Upgrade Points.

• More Starting Ammo: Increases the weapon starting ammo in Mob-Arena by 10% per level, up to 5 levels. Affects both first spawn and when respawning. Costs 1 Upgrade Point for the first level and the cost increases by 1 Upgrade Point per additional level.
• Ghost Gun: Makes the weapon available to use in Mob-Arena’s spectator area while you are waiting to respawn, so you can support your teammates.
  • This gives you something to do when you are waiting to respawn! You can change the weapon you receive through the Loadout GUI.
  • To balance out the mechanic, the Upgrade Point cost required to unlock this feature depends on the weapon’s Supply cost. It is also cheaper for secondaries than primaries, and halved for Hardcore Weapons. Starter pistols (i.e. 0 Supply pistols) will have the Ghost Gun feature unlocked automatically for every player.
  • Weapons have infinite ammo when used from the spectator area.

GUNCOLONY IN ITS 12TH YEAR

Thank you everyone for being part of the GunColony community as it enters its 12th year! For a while now, the server has changed slowly over time as we have been working on the foundations of the Place engine. However, as this update hopefully proves, we are finally at a turning point in terms of being able to build impactful game systems and features in the server, and building them right within the Place engine so that they will support our future standalone game unmodified.

The next year will be an exciting one for GunColony as we finally have both the game engine infrastructure and development tools to crank out new features in Place at record pace. We managed to build all of the new code-based features in this update in just 2 days of focused development. During the rest of 2026, we will start migrating features over to the Place engine at a large scale, greatly improving the server in the process, and finally realize our dreams of bringing GunColony into a free, polished, and accessible standalone experience!

WEAPON CHANGES

To go along with the new remodels and model improvements by Rijam, we are updating a few of our weapons to better showcase them:

• Dual Berettas: added two new weapon-exclusive modifications: 24-Round Magazine and 40-Round Magazine
• SG 552 (CS 1.6 scenario):
  • Now has a full-auto firing mode just like the SIG556xi in the CS 2 scenario
  • Can now appear in Arms Race (not sure if we will keep it permanently, but it should be really cool to see in this gamemode!)
• Gewehr 98: increased entity penetration to be on par with K98k; made ZF-4 scope modification available to the G98

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a long-standing bug where the Gunslinger perk in PVP replenished the ammo of the held item rather than correctly replenishing the ammo of the secondary weapon item
  • The perk should now work as intended
• Fixed a bug where changing weapons in Mob-Arena loadout using “Equip in Mob-Arena” button on the weapon details GUI did not update the live weapon in the hub shooting range
  • Since we also fixed several other edge cases in the last update, the hub shooting range should reliably track your equipped Mob-Arena weapons now

DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS UPDATE

During this update, we have improved the Place engine by adding a new, future-looking server-side UI reactivity engine. Intentionally overbuilt for our current use case (chest GUIs), it is designed for all our future user-facing UI needs in the Place engine, and stays true to Place’s philosophy of combining a performant game server with a thin client to achieve an unprecedentedly accessible and moddable multiplayer game experience.

Our new engine allows dynamic slot-based polling of any gameplay data anywhere in the world state. All polling occurs exclusively server-side with lightweight lambda functions, and the GUI state is only refreshed when the relevant gameplay state actually changes. Upon refresh, server-side changes are computed per slot to optimize CPU utilization, and minimal slot updates or diffs are sent to the client to optimize network utilization. The API also does not expose any thread safety considerations to the caller but still manages to benefit from multi-core CPU concurrency, thanks to Place’s thread-per-world and thread-per-player model; this is a part of our general goal of making Place mods easy to develop yet still performant by default.

Today, in GunColony, our new reactivity backend will begin to power new Minecraft chest GUIs that can update their state while they are already open, with way less development hassle than naive imperative approaches. Since these GUis are built in Place, they will be available to players on the future standalone game client as well as those playing on Minecraft, without any code changes.

In the future, the same reactivity backend will also power Place’s server-rendered web UI system, which will render all GUI and HUD contents for every online player and support customization from server-side-only mods. Server-side dynamic UI rendering is a concept that is currently rare in complex web apps or multiplayer games, but one which we’ve now fully proven with the Phoenix LiveView-inspired engine in our new development tool Kotkit. Today’s reactivity backend in Place is the first step towards that future ambition of a fully and freely moddable multiplayer game accessible to anyone.

Oh, and this entire reactivity system was built in a day. Go figure.