A new way to play

Berm has a new default way to play. It is called Journey, it shipped this weekend in v1.5.0, and it turns the whole world into a loot hunt.

You start a Journey world with your grappling hook, your baseball bat, and nothing else. Everything you are used to grabbing off the hotbar is out in the world instead: the build tool, the spawn gun, the jetpack, dynamite, toys, outfits, skins, all of it waiting in loot crates. Some crates stand in the open, further and rarer the deeper you push. Some are buried, and moving enough earth with a brush or a well-placed stick of dynamite brings a box to the surface right where you were working. A few sit on the seabed, and your grapple will reel you straight down to them. Crates come in four kinds you can read from a distance, a clothing trunk, a skin drum, a slatted spawnables crate and a gear flight case, so you know what you are walking toward before you get there.

What you find is yours for good. Finds and points travel with you between worlds and lobbies, opening a dupe pays points instead of pretending it was new, and building parts are counted stock now: find a pack, spend a wall, go dig up more. Three new things to swing came along too, a pool noodle with silly reach, an inflatable mallet that flattens everything around where it lands, and a frying pan that eats incoming paintballs with a clang.

And if all of that sounds like work, Sandbox is one card over on the create screen, still infinite, still instant, exactly as it was.

Journey is the headline, but it was one of five updates in three days. Here is the rest, in order.

Side by Side (v1.3.4) made building together smooth: watching a friend sculpt used to stutter for as long as they kept at it. Long Haul (v1.3.5) kept marathon build nights light, fixed rejoining a busy world, and stopped alt-tab from spinning your view around. Wild Wonders (v1.4.0) doubled the landmark roster to ten with a swim-through coral reef, causeway steps, terrace pools, a red monolith and a stone sentinel, made every landmark one-of-a-kind per map, and let a giant boar loose in every world. It never dies. It just gets very, very dizzy.

And a few hours behind the Journey launch came Fair Game (v1.5.1). Putting the giant boar down now drops loot crates around it for everyone who helped, and it stays down a full two minutes so the whole group can collect and gloat. It also fixes an embarrassing one: bonk weapons were checking their swing along a flat line at chest height, and every animal in this game stands below your knee. The bat has been swishing over wolves since 1.3.0. It connects now.

Five updates in three days from a one-person workshop. The light stays on.

All of it is live on build 39. Every changelog back to the beginning.

The Journey

1.5.0

1 August 2026

Journey is the new default way to play. You start with just your grappling hook and baseball bat, and everything else is out there in loot crates waiting to be found. Sandbox is untouched and one card over.
Step 2 of Create a World asks which one you want: two cards, Journey preselected.
Loot crates come in four kinds you can read at a distance: a clothing trunk, a skin drum, a slatted crate for spawnables, and a flight case for gear.
Your Journey finds and your point level travel with you between worlds and lobbies.
Options has a Reset your Journey row now, in the Interface tab: back to grapple and bat, crates back on the map. Your achievements, cosmetics and worlds stay yours.
Shared hotbar slots cycle. Tap the slot number again to swap between the things you own in that slot.
Toys, building parts and bridge kinds you have not found yet stay on the wheel and in the toy box, dimmed and marked Locked, so the catalog reads as a map of what is still out there.
Building parts are stock you can count now. Every part you find arrives as a pack, five walls at a time and smaller packs for the rarer pieces, and placing one spends one. The wheel and the parts list show how many of each you have left. Parts you already owned before this update come with a pack each, so nobody starts empty handed. Sandbox building is still unlimited.
Every crate of parts is worth opening. A parts crate always pays parts, even for a piece you already know, so you can go stock up on walls whenever you want more.
The build tool and the spawn gun are the closest tools to home, so you get your hands on both early. Find a part or a toy before its tool turns up and the card tells you what is missing and that it is not far.
Your hotbar shows only what you actually have. A tool you have not found yet is an empty slot rather than a greyed-out ghost of itself, and it fills in the moment you find one. Slot numbers never shuffle, so the ones you have learned stay put.
Opening a crate tells you what you got on one card in the top left corner, and every kind of find uses it: tools, toys, building parts, skins, outfits, dug boxes, sunken crates, batteries. It shows the thing itself, names it, wears the colour of the crate that gave it, and tells you where it went, which is the part you actually need. A tool says which slot number it landed on. A toy or a building part points you at the wheel that loads it. An outfit still points you at Attire. The lantern has no slot number of its own, so its card names the key that lights it. And when a crate has nothing new left for you, it says so and pays you points instead of pretending.
Dig up four boxes in one go and the cards keep up. They stack under each other instead of taking turns, so a whole handful of finds is on screen at once, and they fade out one at a time from the top as the pile drains.
The toy box and the building parts screen count what you have found.
Digging turns things up. Move enough earth with the brush or with dynamite and a buried crate surfaces where you were working. It wears the colour of whatever is inside it, so you can read the category before you open it.
Dug crates are the one place a paint drum turns up, so kit skins finally have a box of their own out in the world.
A couple of the further-out finds sit on the seabed now. They only ever land in water you can dive, your grapple hook reels you straight down to them, and there is nothing to run out of while you are down there.
If your world has a coral reef, one of those sunken crates is inside it.
Three new things to swing, and they all share the slot your bat is already in: tap that number again to cycle through whatever you have found. A pool noodle that reaches a good metre further than the bat, so you can bonk a wolf from outside the range it can bite you from, and flaps fast enough to keep doing it. An inflatable mallet that is slow and enormous and does not really aim: it clears everything around where it lands, and any loose ball or egg nearby hops. And a frying pan, which is the worst attack of the four on purpose, because while you are holding it an incoming paintball dies on it with a clang and tags nobody.
All three turn up in loot crates out in the world, at three different distances: the noodle is a short walk, the pan sits mid-way, and the mallet is out past the traversal puzzle beside the jetpack. In Sandbox you just have them.
Mini game rounds that hand you a paintball marker now actually hand it to you in Journey, even if you have not found one yet. It is a loan for the round: yours while the round runs, gone when it ends, and it never counts as a find. If you want to keep one you still have to go and find one.
The terrain brush runs on a battery in Journey now. It holds a lot of earth, and a gauge above the hotbar shows what is left whenever the brush is in your hands, in the same spot the jetpack shows its fuel. Move enough and it runs flat, and the brush stops until you put something back in it.
Batteries are things you pick up. Open a gear flight case or dig up a crate and a battery lands on the ground a few steps away, wearing its own model, and you walk over to take it. Every one you collect goes in your pocket, the count sits next to the gauge, and the find card names it like any other find.
You never have to fit one yourself. When the charge runs dry the next battery in your pocket goes in on its own and you keep sculpting. The brush only stops when the gauge is empty and your pockets are too.
The charge also trickles back while the brush is in your hands. That is the trade: put the brush away and nothing comes back, hold it and it slowly refills between strokes.
A dug crate always hands back more than it cost you to dig it out, so digging pays for itself and then some. Sandbox has no battery at all, same as always.
Dynamite is something you carry a stock of in Journey. It comes in packs of 24, you spend one every time you throw one, and dig up a box or open a spawnable crate and you get another pack. A box costs about twenty sticks to blow out of the ground and pays twenty-four back, so blasting your way through a dig keeps you supplied. The toys you keep, like the frisbee and the kick ball, are yours forever once you find them and are not counted at all. Sandbox dynamite is still unlimited.
Anything you can run out of shows how many you have. The spawn wheel puts the number on the tile, the hotbar puts a small one on the slot while it is loaded, and the toy box, the building wheel and the parts list carry theirs too. Run out and the tile says so rather than clicking into nothing.
Everything you build remembers it is yours, and it keeps remembering after the world is saved and loaded. Come back to a friend's world next week and you can still take down your own walls, bridges and props. Nobody else can, and the delete highlight goes grey on anything that is not yours so you are never clicking at nothing. The host can still clear anything in their own world, which is how a friend who moved on stops leaving half a house behind forever.
Taking down your own piece in Journey puts the part back in your pockets, one for one, right down to the rocks and driftwood. Change your mind about a wall and you have not lost it. Sandbox is unchanged: nothing is counted there, so nothing needs handing back.

Loot crates shrink naturally with distance now, and their lantern glow fades out past close range. They used to grow up to three times their size at range and glow at full strength across the whole reveal band.
Crate placement spreads across distance bands from your home tile, weighted toward things you have not found yet.
The tool crates from the old Journey ladder no longer double up with the new loot lanes. Every tool has exactly one crate, in the distance band it belongs to.
The giant boar stays dizzy even longer after a stun, so everyone in the group gets a good look before it is back on its feet.

Clicking a toy or a building part you have not found yet says so now, instead of quietly doing nothing.
Joining a friend's world no longer hides tool crates you have never found, and walking onto one no longer silently refuses you because your host already took it.
Guests get credit now, points and achievements and dailies, for the loot crates they claim.
The baseball bat could get stranded behind a locked paintball preference in a shared slot. The slot falls back to what you own.
The spawn gun no longer defaults to armed dynamite for players who cannot hold it.
Five tools each had two crates standing in two different places, and walking to the far one found a box that was no longer there.
Running a dedicated server: the console prints the lobby id to paste into the Join box now, so there is something to hand your testers. The Join box takes that server id directly now, instead of holding out for a four-character invite code that a hidden server never has. It also stopped calling a hidden server public, which it was doing by reading the saved preference instead of the value the server actually launched with.
Hiding the UI hides chat too now, so a clean screenshot actually stays clean.

Anything built before this update belongs to whoever hosts the world. There was no way to record who placed it at the time, so those pieces load unclaimed and only the host can clear them. They also hand nobody any parts back, because nobody spent any on them.
Clearing somebody else's piece hands that person nothing. Their parts live on their own machine, so there is no way to pay them from here yet.
Load a saved world and your guests get the terrain and the props but not the buildings or the bridges. Those come back for the host only, and everyone else sees the ground where they should be. Playing your own saved world on your own is unaffected. This is the first fix of the 1.5.x run.
A guest's thrown dynamite banks that guest no dig progress. The detonation runs on the host and the moved earth never reaches the thrower. It banks the host nothing either, and the guest's own brush digging is unaffected. Waiting on the next protocol bump.
Running an older build once after this one drops any Journey profile keys the older build does not know about. That is long-standing behaviour of the profile file rather than something new here.
The camera can still peek through very steep terrain in spots. A deeper camera pass is planned.
Some console lines (button1.sound, default_mask texture messages) come from the s&box menu itself, appear in every session, and are harmless. They are not from Berm.

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