Hey everyone, been a hot minute eh?

You were likely wondering where the mentioned updates were, if we made any progress since, etc.

Oh do I have news for you:

• Mechanics Updates 🦾
• Art & Clan Updates 🎨
• Bug & Exploit Fixes 🐛
• Events 👻
• Plans 🔮

Let’s get into it.

Mechanics Updates

Gun Game

A brand new mode that’s been in the works for some time has been added to Blocktanks!

In this new mode, you must use the weapons you are given to rack kills and progress to the next weapon! Every kill builds towards your score, while a death will currently subtract only one point from your max-achieved score, so you should be able to consistently progress.

Each weapon-set will pose its own set of challenges, can you rise to the top in this new game-mode and claim victory?

Note that Gun Game will be alternating with FFA throughout the week, with Gun Game as the more prevalent mode.

We’re excited to share this new mode with you, as it’s actually a legacy piece worked on by a number of us over the years: Soy Milk, Cooldog, Kevdude, and most recently reworked by UnknownUser.

Hopefully the labor of love doesn’t go unnoticed, so if you see any of them in-game, be sure to give them a thanks or congratulations on getting it across 🥳

Abilities

We mentioned this last post, but thanks to Unknown’s efforts, Abilities have also been added experimentally in Blocktanks! Abilities in Blocktanks are intended to provide an active-skill-based trigger to spice-up gameplay. Using them at the right time could help land a kill, or even save your neck!

Our starter three abilities are:

• Dash (to give you a burst of speed in a direction)
• Phase-dodge (to let you very briefly dodge a hit in-place)
• Yoink (dodge a power-up to yoink that power-up)

You can select any of them freely in your settings menu, make sure you also set a key-binding to use them!

I mentioned that these are very experimental. Feedback to abilities is mostly positive, given our rounds of beta testing, but some folks have voiced their concerns with how it may impact the core feel of Blocktanks.

As a result, we’ll be setting abilities on an on/off schedule for the coming weeks and will provide a survey at the end to ask questions like, “do the cooldowns make sense”, “do the durations make sense”, “should we keep the abilities on a schedule or turn them on or off by default”, etc.

You’ll know whether abilities are turned on for the day when you see:

RAGS (Rapids, Grenades, Shotguns, Snipers)

As part of our beta testing, we created a new match setting that forces:

• All bots to despawn
• All power-ups disappear from the field and player inventories
• New power-ups can’t be dropped
• Each player is given exactly 15 rapids, 1 grenade, 3 shotguns, and 2 snipers
• Every kill a player makes refills their weapon-set
• Every death that player takes also refills their weapon-set
• Limited ammunition to promote timed kills as opposed to spamming

Why? Because of course, we were secretly testing weapon formats for a future ranked mode! (Y’know, your second top-voted priority)

One of the major problems in current public matches is that whoever begins to win a match builds power-up momentum to continue winning. It isn’t of course impossible to counter that, but we wanted ranked to feel balanced at all times.

We felt bottle bombs, bombs, and miniguns would also limit player movement too much, so, RAGS 🎉

If you missed our rounds of testing, don’t worry! I’ll pop-in from time-to-time, you can always ask me to enable the setting in matches to try how it feels. (Or who knows, I might be tempted to do it anyway to duel you 😏). There’ll be more chances.

Survey

What marks these updates especially is that they’re the first major mechanical updates we’ve made in several years!

We of course, don’t dare presume these updates are finalized or “how the game should be”, so please play-test the changes with us, and stay tuned for the survey in a few weeks! 🙏

Art & Clan Updates

I had a simple goal. I wanted artists to be able to make unique cosmetics for our shop, but for a long-time, we’ve had strict rules like “that decal is too wide and will cover the team colors”, and “no that arm is too large, how can folks see what team the player’s on”. Sooo,

Solo-only Gear

Yep, I made it so artists can elect to make arms, decals, and stickers solo-only. What that means is, if you play FFA, BR, the new Gun Game, etc. modes, you as a player should be able to equip these solo-only cosmetics, and it shouldn’t matter, because there’s no team colors to cover.

That should greatly allow our artists to expand what’s possible in Blocktanks, but I also added:

Paint

My gun-game screenshot above already teased it, but since there’s no more concern for hiding team colors, letting players pick their own solo-mode colors felt like an extremely logical, and flexible, choice. So when you go to FFA, BR, or GG, you should be able to pick your paint colors and try new item combinations.

But with both solo-only cosmetics, and solo-only colors, that painted a new problem. You would want builds that could be deployed to team-modes and solo-modes. We gotchu:

Loadouts

Well I wasn’t about to leave you high-and-dry here. Though it was a “Medium”-voted priority, you are now given two loadout slots by default, accessible in the appearance-change menu.

This feature allows you to save an entire cosmetic build you like into a given loadout slot, no more needing to manually swap everything.

If you haven’t messed with loadouts yet, the default is that your first loadout is set to “All”, and the others “None”, so it should play like it always has.

And if you do mess with loadouts, you’ll find there are also neat new loadout rules you can set:

It reads as it should hopefully, you can assign a loadout for strictly red-team use, blue-team, even solo-only. Equipping a solo-only cosmetic will auto-convert the loadout to solo-only. Hitting the Save button will save these rules.

These rules also allow for overlap to switch things up for you, e.g.:

• Having multiple red-team-only loadouts will randomly pick one for you when you join red-team
• Having an “All” and a red-team-only loadout will also randomly pick one for you

So feeling bored with your tank’s wardrobe and want to see something different, or maybe you want to show off your different setups? Loadouts will let you shine the way you want, give them a whirl!

To thank our supporters, a new benefit to VIP has also been created, in that VIPs will be given a third loadout slot compared to the default of two. We plan to add more loadout slots as well in-time, so stay tuned!

Clan XP Update

Y’know, I don’t think we ever really had an incentive to clans outside of basic community and the occasional event reward. We’ve fixed that.

At the end of every week, members who:

• Contribute 5,000 XP to their clan
• Remain in their clan
• Are part of the top-earning clans

Get bonus XP for the above!

So members who meet the above criteria will get the following XP based on the clan’s weekly positions:

1. The #1 clan based on weekly XP gives 20,000 bonus XP to all qualifying members
2. The #2 clan based on weekly XP gives 12,000 bonus XP to all qualifying members
3. The #3 clan based on weekly XP gives 7,000 bonus XP to all qualifying members

Ready to join a clan and get in on the fun?

Bug & Exploit Fixes

Oh, do you remember back in the May update, I mentioned a few key things we were working on? One of which, our beta testing validated and we snuck-in:

Patching Shooting Through Walls

This bug has existed for years in Blocktanks! Ngara posted a patch for it awhile back but we got it out recently following our beta tests 🥳

Here’s a sample of Rhykon’s October 2022 video demonstrating the bug:

Took us four years to get a patch for it but hey, we did it 😂

IP Bans / Privacy Policy Update

Also in Blocktanks’ many years, we’ve had a number of seriously problematic individuals. Everything from scammers, exploiters, profanity-raiders, repeat-farmers, etc.

We lacked any means of hitting malicious users harder, as a traditional IP ban would have meant also banning schools. But we worked around this constraint by permitting account exemptions.

So you should be aware that effective immediately, Blocktanks does collect and utilize IP addresses (network identifier) for the purposes of moderation. The privacy policy reflects this as well:

https://blocktanks.net/privacy

HOWEVER, as mentioned by the policy, your IP addresses are actually not shown to moderators. The only folks who currently have any ability to view the actual IP addresses are high-ranking developers, e.g. Kevdude, Cooldog, and I.

With this update, malicious users will be hit harder, so you can rest a bit more assuredly.

Guest Play Returns

If you haven’t seen it, guests can play Blocktanks once again! We had urgently disabled them in May following massive guest-raids pre-IP bans. Folks spawned tons of guests for the purposes of farming and exploit-raids, which we promptly addressed.

But with more muscle, we have created a toggle we can leverage to enable or disable guest play as we need, while smiting would-be-abusers.

If you try to play as a guest and cannot, don’t fret, but you can probably guess why.

Player Visibility Patch

Blocktanks has also been long-plagued by a major problem. Roof, Field-of-Vision (FoV), and tracer exploits allowed players to see others in unfair circumstances. Some of which ruined previous events, such as Spooky Snipers, Hide-and-Seek, etc.

We rolled out a brand new patch where a player’s location should only be transmitted to others that should be able to see them.

Meaning…

Events

Spooky Sniper Returns!

HAH, yes. We had to skip bringing this favorite back in 2025 until we had any semblance of exploit patches and moderation ability.

Spooky Snipers is a special limited-time mode where you must remain sneaky while hunting your quarries. Snipers also have… additional tricks to them than usual. Traverse the maze carefully, surprise your foes, and don’t be seen!

There are numerous prizes for this event, such as XP and new paints, more on that below:

https://blocktanks.net/event

Climb the leaderboard and rack those successful hunts up!

Spooky Shenanigans

Blocktanks itself seems to have adopted Spooky’s feel.

_{This will actually be the case from here on for every October, as I’ve finally automated the transition 😅}

But lo, the CMs and devs have some tricks further in store as Halloween approaches!

_{Did you think I stopped at RAGS, muahahaha 😈}

Our art team is working on getting some shop updates in as well, so keep an eye out! 👁️

Future Plans

With all that out of the way, what’s next, you may ask?

Well I yapped a ton already so I’ll make this briefer. On top of continuing ranked, and addressing your coming survey feedback, we’re going for all the things you voted and prioritized as “High”

• Currency (I’ve mentioned this for over a year lol)
• Achievements
• Clan quests
• QoL, such as dark-mode applying everywhere
• Blocktanks tutorial

Conclusion

Welp, I’m beat writing all this. Hopefully that’s a testament just to how much has changed and how much effort we’ve poured in over these last months.

As a minor recap, we got various mechanical updates out into BT right now, added several cosmetic changes for everyone to better express their styles, attempted to patch several exploits for this Cybersecurity month and event season, added a new clan incentive, and so-on.

And equally hopefully, there’s something in this update series you’ll like 🤞

Would love to catch you in Spooky Snipers or Gun Game. If so, I’ll see you there 🫡

Spooky but Warm Regards,

SirDrone
Blocktanks Developer