I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard MMORPG gamers say they love everything about the weird and wonderful sandbox of Project Gorgon… except for the dated placeholder graphics. Welp, that’s what the last couple of crowdfunding rounds were meant to fix, and today we’re getting a fresh look at improved textures and models in the alpha.

“This particular iteration of Serbule is focusing on three things: the textures and models in Serbule city (some of which are already live), the terrain (the grasses, trees, and so on), and the sky,” says Elder Game in its blog post today. “Graphics work always seems to take vastly longer than I hope it will. Part of that is because it needs to be tested on lots of hardware — and we don’t have a full set of testing hardware, so we also have to try to ‘simulate’ low-end machines, which requires some development work. But it’s coming along, slowly but surely. Here’s a few screenshots. They’re a couple days old, and the game already looks a bit different from these, but it will give you an idea of where we are in the process.”

Check out the whole dev post for an explanation of each shot (especially that nighttime image). The tiny team has also been hard at work on crafting skills too, in particular brewing. But I can’t stop looking at those skies.