Dynamite arrived early on October 6 as a flash, a fireball and a smoke column, with a fuse that fizzed for about five seconds. By that afternoon a blast broke rock into stone and ore, dug craters, could fell a tree and stripped a lean-to. Most of the next two days went into what a blast felt and looked like, and many of the fixes began with something being quietly wrong.
The first was sound. After a close blast the world was meant to go muffled, but only the looping background did: wind and birds went dull while falling debris, footsteps and impacts stayed crisp. Those one-off sounds were being played outside the volume channels, so neither the muffle nor the volume sliders reached them. Routed through their channels, they now go dull with everything else. Recorded and measured, the bangs peaked without clipping and stood 37 to 40 dB above the sound of the woods.
The second was the fireball. It stayed orange for half a second, like a bonfire. Real dynamite footage reads differently: a white flash, a brief fireball of a tenth to a quarter of a second, then dark soil and smoke. And a rock that a blast broke in one go simply vanished; it now splits into its chunks and throws them, at about 10 m/s for a stick laid against it.
On October 7 the physics caught up. Until then no blast could knock anyone over. Now the side of the body facing a blast takes the shock wave’s full reflected force for the instant before it wraps round, so one stick at arm’s length, or a bundle of four 2 m away, puts a person down, while a thrower 10 m back barely feels it. The same day the bang began to echo, with a cliff 300 m away answering about 1.9 seconds later, and every awake animal within earshot began to bolt: about 260 m for one stick and 560 m for a big bundle.
A frame-by-frame review that day caught more. A playtest had pointed at the hand, and the stick turned out to be drawn beside the glove’s fist, with the fingers closed on nothing. The flash whited out the screen too long, the dust cloud had a black core, and after a night blast the bounce light kept the trees lit for a second. Each was fixed, and that evening every blast began to pick one of three fireballs with its own shape and pace, so no two look alike.
October 8 brought the handling: the stick gripped in a closed fist, lit by hand with two strikes of flint on steel in about a second and a half, and thrown with a held right mouse, from a lob of about 5 m to a throw of about 30 m. Dynamite still cannot be made. In the development build it comes from the creative tab.
