[EXPERIMENTAL] v2026.10.1

NOTE: This version is only available on the EXPERIMENTAL game version/beta. You manually need to switch to it in Steam. Right Click on Fireworks Mania -> Properties -> Game Versions & Betas -> "Experimental". To go back to the normal version, change it to "Default Public Version".

Please note that this is work-in-progress stuff. There might be bugs, features might never end up in the real version of the game and things might be a little odd.

However, I share this version as I am asking for your feedback to help me shape the game - thanks for taking your time helping out

Added

• The hints on the right side of the screen now always match what your buttons do right now, and there are new ones for jumping, running, crouching, flying, changing view, getting up and push-to-talk. Know them by heart? Turn movement hints or interaction hints off under Settings > Game
• You can now see who's talking on voice chat: their profile picture and name pop up on the left side of the screen while you can hear them, and the Players list shows who's talking too. You can turn it off under Settings > Audio > Show who's talking
• New UI volume setting under Settings > Audio, for menu clicks, notifications and the Shop's unlock sounds
• You can now report a player from the Players tab if they misbehave. Pick what happened, and the report goes straight to the Fireworks Mania team. We review every report within 7 days. Do know that misusing this can get yourself banned from online play, so use it when its really needed
• Controllers now have their own look sensitivity and Invert Y under Settings > Controls. Invert Mouse Y only flips the mouse now, and if you had it on, your controller starts out inverted too
• Items that have a description in the Shop now show it in the Inventory too
• New "How the Shop works" button under the Shop's search box. It shows how you earn PyroPoints and what you can unlock with them
• The Home tab now gives a quick tour of the game: playing with fireworks, building your own shows, playing together and the Shop
• You can now hold D-pad left to talk on voice chat with a controller
• The Field of view slider under Settings > Game now says what it does, and that a higher value makes fireworks look smaller and less bright

Changed

• Tap V (D-pad right on a controller) to cycle through First Person, 3rd Person, 3rd Person Reversed and the Far Away View like before, or hold it to pick one from a wheel. M is no longer used, which frees up a button on the controller
• The Tools Menu now shows a gold ring around the tool you're holding, and on the emote page around the emote you're pointing at
• On a controller, the Tools Menu now tells you what Quick Save and Quick Load do as soon as you press the stick to use them, and keeps showing it until you point at another tool. Let go before the ring fills and nothing happens
• In fly mode, Crouch (Ctrl, or pressing in the right stick on a controller) now flies you straight down, the way Jump takes you up. It used to make you fly slower instead
• Names above players' heads now show as far away as you can hear them talk, about 36 meters instead of 20
• Long names above players' heads now stay on one line instead of being split in two
• The glow on new items now goes away as soon as you hover over them, not only when you click them. On the Avatar tab, moving onto a character with a controller clears it too, without switching to that character
• The flashlight now points at whatever you're looking at, so it lights up things right in front of you, other players too. Your hand turns to aim it
• The Multiplayer tab now tells you when it can't reach online services, with a Try again button, instead of just showing an empty list
• The Shop's unlock sounds and the unlock whoosh are a lot quieter now, and the menu clicks a bit louder, so the menu sounds fit together instead of jumping out at you
• Max Players when hosting is now picked with the arrows instead of typed in, and goes up to 24
• Blueprints you save now take up about 40% less space. They are still plain text you can open and share, and your older blueprints load just like before
• The volume sliders now turn the sound down evenly across the whole slider. Before, going from 100 to 30 barely did anything and it all happened at the very bottom. Your volumes sound the same as before, so the numbers you see will be higher
• "SFX Volume" under Settings > Audio is now called "Game Volume", which says better what it does. It starts back at 100, so set it again if you had turned it down
• "Output Volume" is now "Voice volume", next to the other volume sliders under Settings > Audio, and works just like them. Voice still sits a little above the rest of the game, and loud and quiet talkers now sound more alike. It starts back at 100
• The volume for each player in the Players tab now turns down evenly across the whole slider, like the other volume sliders, instead of hardly changing at the top
• Going back to the main menu freezes about half as long as before, and the menu no longer locks up for a moment right after the loading screen goes away
• Spawning and launching fireworks no longer makes the game stutter: big cakes spawn about 5 times faster and launch instantly, and loading a big show takes half as long. Mod fireworks get faster too
• Loading the game's own shells into mortars is about 4 times faster now, so loading a blueprint full of loaded racks hitches a lot less
• Connecting fuses and lighting long chains of them no longer makes the game stutter: connecting one is about 5 times faster, and a chain catching fire all at once doesn't hitch anymore. Joining a game with a big show already built hitches less too
• Losing the connection to someone's game now shows a clear message instead of a technical error. That message, and the ones for being kicked, banned or the host leaving, now show in your own language too
• The chat lines about players joining and leaving, and the warnings when you hit the spawn limit, now show in your own language instead of always in English
• A lot more of the game now shows in your own language: the loading screen, Settings, hosting, Blueprints, joining a game, the Credits and the Workshop's filters. The Shop, the cards on the Home page and the emote names were still in English in most languages and are now translated too
• In multiplayer, only the host sees the Blueprints tab now. Everyone else used to get a tab that just said it wasn't supported yet
• The first time you start a game, the map picker now starts on Town, the first map in the list, instead of Flat. After that it still remembers the map you played last
• With keyboard and mouse, the key icons in the hints on the right and on buttons like Start are smaller now, the same size as the controller buttons
• The performance readout in the top left corner is now off for everyone. If you want to see what the game turns down to keep your framerate, switch on Show performance indicator under Settings > Advanced
• Fireworks now always look the way they were made, instead of the game quietly turning effects down in big shows. If you'd rather keep your framerate up, set Prioritize to Performance under Settings > Advanced. It replaces the Dynamic Performance Scaling checkbox, and everyone starts on Quality
• The performance indicator now also shows whether your CPU or your graphics card is what holds your framerate back, and how many milliseconds each one takes per frame
• Big shows run smoother. On my machine, the busiest moment of my test show now gets about 18% more FPS, the end of it about 38% more, and a 5,000-firework show waiting to be lit about 25% more
• Fireworks far away keep much more of their glow now, instead of thinning out into dull little dots
• Flying fast now tilts your character toward where you're flying, superman style: dive and you point down, climb and you point up, and you lean/rotate into turns and when flying to the side. Flying normally and hovering look just like before
• Updated loading backgrounds and menu background video to match recent updates

Fixed

• In multiplayer, things you shoot out of a mortar or throw far away no longer vanish mid-air once they get about 50 meters from you. You now see them fly all the way and land, and they disappear a few seconds after they stop moving
• Joining a friend's game that uses mods right as the game starts, like from an invite, no longer fails with "Unable to load map"
• Joining a friend from an invite no longer sometimes fails with "Unable to join" when the online services are busy
• On a controller, picking an emote no longer sometimes does nothing when you let go of the stick and the button at the same time
• The tool, emote and view wheels now always fit on the screen, on ultrawide screens and at a high UI Scale too. Before, the bottom of the tool wheel could be cut off
• Fixed the frame rate sometimes running above your monitor's refresh rate with VSync on, on PCs where the graphics driver overrides VSync. It happened if you went into a map quickly after the game started
• Lady Fingers, strobes and zippers no longer go quiet when the game runs slowly. At 20 FPS a Lady Finger string used to play only about one crackle in five. Now it crackles just like it does when the game runs smoothly
• Rockets with a big head no longer bounce off single shot racks their stick easily fits into. Only the part that actually goes down the tube has to fit now
• Rockets launched from a single shot rack no longer get held back. They used to burn part of their thrust before leaving the rack, so they now climb about a quarter higher, and every rocket in a row flies the same
• Mortars no longer jump, or tip over, when you spawn a shell straight into them, even when you click quickly down a row
• Loading a blueprint no longer makes things placed close together push each other around, or over. Things no longer do a little size pop as they load, which is what pushed them
• New items in the Shop that you can't afford yet were almost hidden behind their spinning glow. Now you can see what they are
• The Shop's unlock sounds ignored every volume setting, even Master. They follow Master and the new UI volume now
• Some mods could never be downloaded, Gibbons Fireworks collection among them. They failed every time with a "Data descriptor signature not found" error. They install fine now
• Turning something you're carrying with a controller no longer walks you around at the same time. You stand still while you turn it, just like with the Physics and Spawn tools
• In German, the Teleport, Tools Menu and Hotbar 1-4 rows under Settings > Controls showed garbled names like "Einstellungen_Controls_Hotbar01". They read properly now
• The join code in the game menu shows as dots again instead of question marks. "Hold to show" and "Copy" are now proper buttons, and holding to show the code works on a controller too
• Nobody could join your game if you'd picked a mod that was later deleted or hidden on mod.io. Deleted mods are now removed from your mods, and mods other players can't download no longer show up when you host a multiplayer game
• If a game turned you away as you joined, because it was full or you were banned from it, you could end up stuck in an empty map behind the message. Now you go back to the main menu
• The Developer Console, Show/Hide UI and performance stats rows under Settings > Controls were always in English. They now show in your own language
• The numbers over the tools at the bottom of the screen only show when you play with keyboard and mouse now. They are the keys that pick each tool, so on a controller they only got in the way
• In Hungarian, Ukrainian and Hindi, some loading screen lines, the messages about loading lots of mods and the "too many mods" message when hosting online were empty. They show properly now
• The Fuse connection visibility distance under Settings > Game now works for every fuse, also the ones you build or load after changing it. At 0, fuse lines only show while you hold the Fuse Connection Tool
• Exploded propane tanks no longer leave an invisible tank behind that you could bump into, that later blasts threw around with landing sounds out of thin air, and that a save brought back. Tanks that are part of the map even stayed until you left it
• Blowing up a building, a gas pump, a propane tank or anything else full of fuel went off twice at once, so it hit everything around it twice as hard and its boom played twice. It only goes off once now
• Big blasts, like a building going down or a propane tank, threw fireworks and other light things next to them at hundreds of meters per second, often straight under the map. An explosion now throws things at 50 meters per second at most: in my test, 4 of 82 fireworks next to a building ended up under the map instead of 26
• Fireworks and other things sliding fast into a building in City could get pushed down through the sidewalk and fall under the map. City's buildings now reach into the ground, so things bounce off them instead
• The Clear Fireworks and Clear Props buttons in the Inventory couldn't be reached with a controller. They now sit at the bottom of the category list on the left, so you can move down to them
• Clear Fireworks often left behind fireworks that had already gone off, so a few cakes from a show would still be standing afterwards. It clears all of them now
• With the Eraser or the Fuse Connection Tool, looking from a firework straight up at the sky kept it picked, so a click still erased it or started a fuse from it. Looking away lets go of it now
• After you throw or drop a firework, the Ignite Tool no longer keeps aiming at it, so pressing the button won't light it while you look somewhere else
• You could use things from any distance by looking at them while walking away. Now they stop being usable, and their Use hint goes away, once you're out of reach
• Using things works again straight after the Physics Tool. Before, it only came back once you looked somewhere else, or, if what you held was erased or blew up, once you switched tools
• A checkbox in Settings that you can't change right now is greyed out all the way, box and tick included, instead of only its name
• If you opened chat while holding push-to-talk, your mic stayed on while you typed and after you closed chat, until you pressed push-to-talk again. Opening chat now turns it off
• Your character's head no longer jumps back every few seconds while flying fast. You'd see it as the item in your hand jumping back and forth
• Fixed issues with 5" mortars doing funny stuff

- Happy testing, enjoy!

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