The earliest entries are reconstructed from surviving development records. Going forward, releases, screenshots, and major milestones can be dated as they happen.
Grimhold begins as a persistent, tile-based survival world built around interconnected systems rather than a narrow combat loop.
Overworld generation, hydrology, map-area tooling, server settings, underground generation, and the systems needed to build and inspect a much larger world mature quickly.
Crafting, workstations, quality, containers, wildlife behavior, vehicles, world evolution, resource systems, cooking, and deployment tooling deepen the playable foundation.
Land claims gain owner control and color-group permissions for trespass, interaction, building, destruction, harvesting, containers, and doors.
Wild animals move toward persistent player-owned creatures with naming, feeding, enclosure behavior, breeding groundwork, genetics data, and mounted travel.
Players can till valid terrain with a hoe and plant supported seed-bearing crops, with persistence and editor support.
The active world expands to nine 5×5 grids—15×15 areas in total—creating roughly 90,000 chunk files and forcing a new round of performance and deployment work.
Server-side generation proves dramatically faster than the local laptop workflow, reopening the possibility of much finer hydrology sampling and faster iteration on world quality.
The project shifts toward an official website, a trusted download path, a public roadmap, a visual archive, and broader testing outside the designer's own machines.
Survival systems face real-world testing
Extended playtesting exposes issues with prospecting, resource collection, charcoal production, stockpiles, and other survival mechanics. The focus shifts toward fixing progression problems and making existing systems work together reliably.
Prospecting and underground resource improvements
Dirt and fire clay collection fixes identified
Stockpile and wheelbarrow issues documented
Continued improvements to crafting and survival
A major server overhaul begins
Early multiplayer testing reveals runaway processes and serious memory management problems. Development temporarily shifts from adding features to investigating server performance and addressing underlying architectural problems.
Server memory leak investigation
Compact underground geology and resource system planned
Unified wildlife spawning and lifecycle architecture designed
Server process and memory management improvements
🛠️ Grimhold Development Update — September 23
We're back up and running and ready for playtesting!
The last couple of days have been a bit of a nightmare. Our initial playtesting quickly fell apart after a runaway server process caused major memory problems. We've spent most of our time tracking down the issue, cleaning up the server, and improving performance.
The good news is that things are finally looking stable! The game server is currently using around 200 MB of RAM, and overall VPS memory usage is looking much healthier. We'll continue monitoring things as more players log in.
Unfortunately, we had one setback. All player accounts were accidentally wiped when I uploaded the wrong folder. That one's on me! Anyone who previously played will need to create a new account.
On the development side, we're also working toward a more efficient underground resource system and unified wildlife management to reduce unnecessary server load as the world grows.
What's next?
Resume playtesting and stress-test the server.
Monitor memory usage and server performance.
Continue fixing bugs uncovered during testing.
Get back to expanding the game instead of fighting the server!
Building a foundation for a larger world
With the server operational again, the next priority is sustained multiplayer testing, completing the underground resource and wildlife overhauls, and resolving outstanding gameplay bugs.
The goal is a persistent world capable of supporting more players, longer sessions and continued expansion without excessive resource consumption.
