Morterra's Christmas 2022 update adds downing players

On Christmas Day 2022 we released a Christmas event that returns every December, along with downing players and a round of balance changes. Underneath it was a long refactor of the Morterra engine.

Morterra's Christmas update went live on December 25, 2022. It added a Christmas holiday event to the browser survival MMO, set to run every December, and introduced downing, so a player can be knocked down before they die. It also fixed several bugs and rebalanced weapons, resources and crowns.

Changes

A Christmas holiday event that runs every December
Players can be downed before they die
A fix for the gravity trick
A fix for bear spawning
Stronger blowpipes and swords
Higher drop rates for sand and clay
A buff to sticks deposited in foundries
A timer on opening and closing doors
Pots that last longer
Crowns limited to one gem perk at a time, chosen by the wearer

Since we added crowns in August 2020, a crown had given all four necklace perks at once: no hunger or thirst from gold, faster healing from ruby, no wear on gear from diamond and better mining drops from emerald. After this update the wearer picks one.

The higher sand and clay drop rates matter for crafting: sand mixed with lime makes the cement for a foundry, and kilns turn clay into clay items.

Engine work

The biggest job behind this update made no difference to gameplay. Since our last update post in July 2021, we had spent countless hours refactoring the Morterra engine so that future updates would be easier to make and could come out more often, and we had big changes in the works.

A refactor that size was sure to cause new bugs. We asked players to report them in the report-a-bug channel on our Discord and gave a bug finder badge for any bug we didn't already know about. Two were already on our list: arrows pointing the wrong way, and the back faces of wooden doors and chests.

What we planned next

More holiday events
Signs
Looting players who are downed or asleep
Vaults: chests that store items on your account, so they survive wipes
3D player movement

Signs and looting downed or sleeping players arrived in the January 2026 update. Vaults were still on the plans list in that post.