Making-of: The Energy Fence

Some features look small and still touch every layer of the game. The energy fence is one of those — here's the complete making-of, from the wish to the documented weakness.

The wish: Players wanted to secure their bases against wild animals without bunkering down behind massive walls. So, a fence — but a sci-fi fence: energy panels you can craft, and a gate made of a shimmering energy membrane that you yourself simply walk through while wild animals stay outside.

The design: Two new blocks. The fence is a normal solid block (crafted from panels and cables, deliberately without a blueprint requirement — basic protection should be available early). The gate is the tricky one: visible, but without player collision — and server-side, the creature logic decides who may pass. Players and companions: yes. Wild animals and enemies: no.

The work behind it: The pass-through check had to go into all three movement systems (wild animals, companions, planet enemies). The client mesher got its first collision exception. The texture came from our AI pipeline, the hum from ElevenLabs — deliberately mixed as the quietest continuous sound in the game, because a fence that annoys you gets torn down.

The documented weakness: Flying creatures glide over the fence. We could have "fixed" that — an invisible force field up to the sky — but that would have felt wrong: a fence is a fence. Instead, the weakness is written in the Codex. Against fliers, you simply need a roof.

What we take away: a good feature has a clear rule ("stops ground animals"), an honest limit ("not fliers") — and both belong written into the game, not just into the code.