Announcing Outside tag 4.2.1.1: The Anthropocene

We, the release team, have decided that it’s a good time to [tag our current trunk build](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/climate/anthropocene-epoch-crawford-lake.html) and call what we’re doing a new patch set. We use something very much like semantic versioning around here, except that since we have three tiers of releases, patch sets get the fourth digit.

We know you’ve been playing a lot of Outside version 4.2.1.0. In fact, we’ve been routinely setting active player records. And we realize that 4.2.1.0 was not a very long lived patch set. Normally, our patch sets have shelf lives in the millions of years. However, player activity has significantly changed the Outside play environment, with all servers reporting significant fundamental changes as a result of the actions of the Human players. We have decided not to take direct action against Human players at this time, but we will note that if the Human players don’t get their carbon gas emissions under control soon, we will not be able to keep most of our servers Human-playable. In particular, Human players have been complaining about the ridiculous heat waves on numerous servers. That wasn’t us. That was *you*, Human players.

Human players have also introduced a number of other things into the environment, including microplastics and artificial elemental isotopes, in particular Plutonium and Americium. In fact, that introduction into the global player environment marks tag 4.2.1.1.

But what’s a “tag”? Quite simply, it’s an archived version of the code we’re running. Every now and then, we declare a tag to establish a baseline. Other projects have a habit of calling them “releases”, but we’re doing true continuous release, with patches happening literally every moment. The dev team is huge, after all, and it’s not like any time is better or worse for a release. As such, version numbering in itself is a bit weird for our project.

We’re going to be referencing a moment about 73 years ago of in-game time to establish our new baselines for reporting, analytics, and all those other things people love to get worried that we’re spying on you with (but we’re not, and you’re boring—your Google search history is pretty telling, Human mains). That’s about the time that Human mains started creating runaway nuclear chain reactions for…we aren’t even sure why at this point, because it’s not like y’all have used them against each other but those two times.

For independent server operators, we are offering a migration assistance program. If you have a custom server you wish to migrate to the Anthropocene, please use the email link in the Server Administration Center, and we can help you roll out this version to your mod set (not that we expect much of this: apparently most independent servers are still running 3.2.1.x, as it appears that y’all really like your dinosaurs).