Chris “Atos” Spears · Work Log

Boats

• A kobold steam launch joined the boats, switched off on chaos and on for the QA shard: a 10 m riveted iron launch with a vertical boiler, a copper funnel and a twin steam engine whose valve gear works. Its furnace gauge reads 0 to 10. Banked it sits at 2 and the launch makes 5 knots; each piece of wood stoked at the fire door raises it a unit (a chunk of coal two), climbing a unit every five seconds and falling back a unit every two minutes. Speed and acceleration climb with it to 25 knots at 10, where the fire takes no more fuel and any still burning in strains the hull. The funnel's smoke grows with the furnace and trails behind her at speed.
• Crow's nest lookout (boats are on for QA only): while a player stands in a ship's crow's nest, everyone aboard uncovers the map at twice the usual reach, on top of the Scroll of the Wayfinder's Eye and Navigation. The rigging ropes up to the crow's nests now work at sea on the Pirate, Haunted, Huge and Giant Pirate Galleons, where before only the two Baron ships had them.
• Ramming another boat bow first now costs the rammer a quarter of the hull damage the crash used to, and the boat it strikes takes double when the bow lands on its side or stern. Rocks, piers and walls still cost full damage at the bow, and two bows meeting head-on both take the smaller share. A sloop at full sail rammed square into another sloop now loses about 5 hull points where it used to lose 19, and the sloop it hit loses about 40 instead of 20. Both amounts can be tuned live.
• The Giant and Huge Pirate Galleons no longer show sea water through the floor of their two lowest decks. Players can also jump off a ship in a town or adventure area and land in the water below; before, they were put back in the air over the dock. On The Great Sea going overboard still brings the player back aboard.

Creatures

• The bond between satyr leaders and their fauns now shows in a fight. Higher-level fauns play Calming Pipes that make the satyrs around them harder to hurt and sing a Steadying Song that mends a hurt satyr beside them. Kill the faun first and its leader goes into a Parted Fury, faster but easier to hurt; kill the leader first and the faun shows it is Masterless as it runs. (#15911)
• Built three new fauns for the satyr pass, not placed in the world yet: the Faun Piper, the Faun Cantor, whose Mortar Song leaves the foes around it easier to hurt, and Brule's Piper for Brule Rocktooth's coming fight. Each wears its own colors. (#15911)
• Satyr bands now travel with their fauns in more places: the fauns with the level 78 Satyr Fighters in the Northwest Blackblade Mountains are level 79 (with the new pipes and song), the extra satyr spawns in Spectral Peaks come as bands with a Faun following, and the satyr patrol in Tartarus (PvE) brings a Faun Cantor. (#15911)
• Brule Rocktooth in Spectral Peaks is now a named fight: a level 120 satyr with the high-level satyr kit and a new attack, Rockbreaker, that knocks down everyone close to him and then drops stones on the three players standing farthest away, slowing them. Brule's Piper stands with him, and he returns 45 minutes after he falls instead of a few minutes. The Courage Club's Brule is unchanged. (#15911)
• In Tartarus (PvE), four Satyr Elite Guards in the maze now each have a Faun Piper following them, and the arena waves bring Faun Pipers beside Elite Guards: one in the fourth wave, one in the fifth and two in the sixth. The PvP Tartarus is unchanged. (#15911)
• Lord Tolask Nird and his Elite Guards in Tartarus (PvE) now fight like the other high-level satyrs: the Lord charges, leaps, stomps and hews, his guards charge, stomp and sweep their bardiches, and all of them fight to the end and frenzy when badly hurt. The Lord no longer heals himself, the guards no longer root, and both hit harder. Two Faun Cantors now come with the Lord in the last arena wave. (#15911)
• Lord Tolask Nird has a new long charge, Wallbreaker Charge: after a short tell he charges a player standing 14 to 25 m away, and where the charge ends the ground breaks, knocking down everyone close by unless they are in the air. (#15911)
• Gave the eleven slime Acid Lash weapons their own internal asset names; they had kept the names of the weapons they were copied from.
• Dragons and wyverns in player-owned dungeons now fight mostly on the ground: they take off only about one time in ten there, and everywhere they now check the ceiling before taking off and stay grounded under one too low to fly in. Before, they took to the air at the start of most dungeon fights and flew the room and the next one. (#15923)
• A Gold Slime that burrows away now stays gone until its normal respawn time; it had been coming straight back at full health, so burrowing worked as a full heal. (#15837)
• Lord Tolask Nird now sounds his horn as he weakens: Muster the Company below two thirds of his health and Last Muster below a third each bring two of his Elite Guard into the fight, and they fall with him. His guards call out players who hang back with Guard's Challenge, and the guards nearby go after them. (#15911)
• Satyr band leaders can now sound a Horn Call once they are below half their health, bringing the satyrs around them onto their foe, and the leaping satyr fighters can shake the ground where they land (Hoof Quake). Both are on in QA and stay off on chaos until a test with two players. (#15911)
• Satyr and faun kill experience now follows how hard each is to kill: the stronger fighters, the Tartarus Elite Guards, Paragons and Royal Guard, the strongest archers and casters, and Lord Tolask Nird and his guards give more, and the satyrs and fauns from about level 46 to 69 give less. (#15911)
• Satyrs from level 78 up now drop Satyr Horns, more often the stronger the satyr, and Brule Rocktooth, Lord Tolask Nird and his Elite Guards always drop two or more. Fauns from level 79 up can drop a Faun Reed Pipe, an instrument played like a recorder, and Brule's Piper often does. Brule Rocktooth now has boss achievements for 1, 10 and 100 kills that reward framed portrait trophies, and he counts toward Slayer of Legends. (#15911)
• Brule Rocktooth's Animal Lore line now comes from the Brule in Spectral Peaks that it describes. Also wrote the team's satyr enemies guide, an Oracle guide to satyrs and fauns that goes live with the build carrying the satyr pass, and GM summon shortcuts for every satyr and faun tier, Brule and Lord Tolask Nird. (#15911)
• The satyr pass is built in full and waits for its first chaos build; the last fences on the files it shares with other creatures ran green. Horn Call, Hoof Quake and a satyr in a Parted Fury turning on the nearest foe stay off on chaos until a test with two players. (#15911)

Images

• Faun Piper and Cantor
• Brule Rocktooth's portrait
• Eidetic Memory icon
• 

Community

• Filed a forum request for inventory quality-of-life work: coloring items below full durability orange or yellow instead of only flagging severe damage in red, and a bank filter that groups repair kits with ancient essence.

Images

Agriculture

• Right clicking a planting spot to water it no longer moves the green glow onto the spot you watered before; the glow holds still while the right button turns the camera (#15919).

Locks and Traps

• Built a sliding tile puzzle that locks and traps share: a padlock, a skull and crossbones, a key, a treasure chest or crossed daggers cut into tiles on a 2x2, 3x3 or 4x4 board, over ten tiers that grow the board first and then the shuffle, with a limit on moves. On the QA shard it now replaces the tumbler minigame when disarming Powder Kegs, Bomb Rigs and the flame, steam and spike plates in dungeons.
• Locked doors and chests can now be marked as pickable, so a player without the key can open one with the sliding tile puzzle and a Crude, Iron or Fine Lockpick. Running out of moves snaps the pick, and locks on player lots never take a pick. No lock in the world is marked yet.
• Placed five locked chests in the Volcano Archipelago for testing lock picking on the QA server: a 2x2 board, a 3x3 board shuffled 3 and 6 moves, and a 4x4 board shuffled 5 and 10 moves. They open with a lockpick only and lock again two minutes after opening. A lock can now set its own board size and shuffle in place of its difficulty tier (3605702fdd).

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains why your own character can show twice at the top left of the screen: the second copy is the target frame, showing you because you have yourself selected. Pressing Esc or selecting something else clears it (#15963).
• The Oracle can now answer whether a Rewards Program membership changes chat access, whether players have voice chat, what to do when a mount disappears, where the Bronze, Copper and Iron Studded Strip of Leather recipes drop, and why the bank looks the same on every character. Five oversized guides were also split so she reads them in full.

Crafting

• A Recipe Book search now opens on the recipes whose name matches before recipes that only use the item. Typing "board" on the Carpentry chapter used to open on Arrow and leave Pine Board and Maple Board on later pages.

Housing

• Fixed a lot claim made with a deed from the bag failing when Claim was pressed a second time while the first claim was still going: the lot stayed unclaimed and the bag kept showing the deed until relog. A second Claim now waits for the first, and unclaiming such a lot no longer errors.
• The lot sign no longer offers Flip House or Move House on a row lot that still shows the town's standard row house, where both always ended in a "could not flip" message. Both come back once a house is chosen with Change House (17b1773afa).

Research

• Designed how a scene could be built from separately made pieces placed at a new spot and angle each day: loading the pieces into the scene, turning their terrain, moving pathfinding with each piece, keeping object and loot IDs apart, building the server's sea map for each layout, and moving players across when the layout changes.

Housing

• A house door set to Always Open that ended up shown closed now opens again by itself, and clicking a closed one opens it; before, it refused the click and the owner had to log out and back in to get into the house (cddc3cd41c, #15926).

Party

• Switching characters and getting invited back into the same party no longer leaves your old character in the party list. Joining a party now takes the same account's other characters out of it right away (#15961).

Treasure Maps

• Added treasure maps that mark their X in deep water, for testing on the QA server. In the Volcano Archipelago, reading a Salt-Stained Treasure Map shows a parchment chart with an X, and the same X appears on the local map and the minimap. For half an hour after the reading, while the reader is in the area, a treasure chest lies on the sea floor at the X, 20 to 30 meters down. Anyone there can dive to it and open it, and once its loot is rolled the map becomes a keepsake that can be placed as a decoration. Every copy of the map marks a spot of its own. GMs and testers create the map for now (4357262fde).

Items

• The Belt of the Brutal Butcher now adds Field Dressing Meticulous Collection Chance, 2% on a Common up to 6% on an Epic, on top of its field dressing speed. With the swing meter, gathering speed only shortens each sweep a little, so the belt had stopped being worth wearing for skinning. Belts already owned get the new stat.
• Item tooltips have a Players pay line under Merchant pays: the range other players usually paid for that item over the last 30 days through player vendors, public vendors and buy orders, for the stack being hovered (Player Wishlist #15968, from a player report). An item needs 3 sales from at least 2 sellers to 2 buyers before it gets a line; sales between one account and itself, and sales involving staff or bot accounts, are not counted. The prices refresh hourly.
• Primary dyes now show at full strength on 143 more dyeable outfits, hats, weapons and decorations whose dyeable areas were painted dark, among them the Admiral and Riding outfits, the Heraldry tabards, the Reaper mask, the tricorn and wolf hats and the Darkstarr sword and shield. White dyes had read grey on them and glowing dyes barely glowed. The game's main material shader gained a per-material dye brightness, so every item looks the same as before until it is dyed.
• Item tooltips now explain Move Speed and Move Rate in a gray line under the bonuses: Move Speed raises the on-foot run, does not count while mounted and counts half in combat stance, while Move Rate scales all movement, mounted included. The character sheet Movement hover now says what its two numbers are, and the Oracle answers the same way. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Five more of the new slime weapons answer to their own names in the item data, instead of the name of the slime weapon each was copied from.

NPCs

• Emily in the Soltown refugee camp no longer closes her conversation partway through, which had made her Quincy quest hard to follow. Townsfolk who wander or keep a routine now finish the conversation you have open before walking back to their spot.

Pets

• Another player's pet or summon no longer stays stuck in its fighting stance on your screen after a fight, sliding along behind its owner instead of walking. It now drops back to its normal stance a few seconds after the last hit, the same as on its owner's screen. (69a93b7edd, #15964)
• The summoned Will-O-Wisp now mesmerizes a second enemy fighting you and leaves your own target alone; before, your next hit woke the enemy it had just mesmerized. Confused creatures now land fewer critical hits; before, Confused did nothing to a creature.
• A pet or summon healed to full after it last crossed a zone exit no longer comes back wounded the next time you log in. Quitting and exiting to the menu now save its current health before leaving the world. Reported by Bonulino (2cfcdf7f06, #16018).
• The summoned Daemon got a pass. Its Chaos Bolt now grows with pet gear and Train Summoned Pet Damage like its claws do, throws the element of the last Fire, Water, Air or Earth spell its owner cast, and leaves the target weaker to that element for 10 seconds. Summon Daemon no longer uses an Obsidian Chip on every cast (f63b3fc865, tester task #16034).
• A Chaos specialist who casts Summon Daemon while their Daemon is out now performs Abyssal Exchange, sending it back for one of three fiends from a deeper circle, never the same one twice in a row. The Brimstone Warden takes a quarter of every blow aimed at its master, the Echoing Fiend throws a copy of each Chaos Bolt its master casts for the same focus again, and the Maddening Fiend lays Chaotic Feedback on its master as a fight starts. The ordinary Daemon has a little less health, which puts it in the middle of the summoned creatures (6ea6a0c31c, tester tasks #16049, #16050, #16051).
• A fiend called up by Abyssal Exchange may turn on its master when they drop below a fifth of their health, and returns to the abyss a minute later. The ordinary Daemon stays loyal (tester task #16052).

Quests

• Geof's iron blade in Soltown is now a quest item. It no longer goes into the party loot roll, members who already carry one or have handed one in no longer see it on corpses, and picking one up updates the tracker to Bring the Iron Blade to Geof.

Travel

• Choosing Last Location on a Teleport to Zone scroll or sextant now returns you to where you left Northwood. Before, most of the western half of town counted as standing at a town exit, because the exit walls on the map corners run diagonally, so the game sent you to the North Entrance. Other towns with diagonal corner exits had the same problem.

Magic

• An elemental called through Juxtapose now fights at the average of the Juxtapose level and the source summons level, rounded up, and its cooldown and focus cost follow that level too. It used to match the regular summon of that elemental, and was nearly powerless without that summon trained; this covers the Earth, Air, Fire and Ice pairs (#15905).

Pets

• Wrote an internal study of which summoned and tamed pets players use, from cast counts and the time each pet spends fighting. The Earth Elemental leads the spell summons and tamed T15 wolves and wyverns lead overall; the Skeleton Mage and Will-O-Wisp are almost never used as fighters.

UI

• Fixed the hover info on a name in the Social window (online status, Last Online time, your note) drawing behind the window, where it was hard to read through a see-through window and hidden at full opacity. The same fix covers the Players in Scene, Blocked and Titles lists.

Combat

• Party members now share a creature's experience and kill credit when they damaged it, themselves or through a pet, from any distance. Before, anyone more than 40 m from the body when it died got nothing, which left out archers, casters at range and anyone kiting. A member who was far away and never hurt it still gets nothing.
• Charging a crowd control card now adds 5% of its base duration per extra card, down from 25%, so a six-card stun, root, mesmerize or knockdown lasts 1.25 times its base instead of 2.25 times. A charged Crushing Blow that stunned for 29 seconds now stuns for 16.25, and the bonus is no longer rounded down to whole seconds. Charged buffs, damage over time and heals keep the larger bonus.

Quests

• The Take button on the reading window for a note lying in the world picked nothing up; it now takes the note while you read it, and Alt + click on the note does the same. (#15962)

Farming

• Crops on large town farms now start loading as soon as their planters appear, instead of waiting for every door and chest in town to load first, which could leave planters reading Unused Soil for up to 20 seconds. A farm you leave by signpost and come back to shows its crops straight away. (8546b83a9a)
• Crops on a town farm now arrive together with the rest of the lot, so each planter shows its crop as soon as the planter appears. Before, every planter asked the server for its crops separately, one after another, which on a big farm could take many seconds on the first visit. (c2c4517dd4)

Sieges

• A siege scout now stands in every besieged town, a few steps from where the town crier usually stands, so Arcane Catalyst can be turned in without going to the Cabalist Stronghold. He stays for a few minutes after the siege is broken so the players who defeated the Cabalist can report to him.

Inventory

• In the backpack and bank lists, the Durability number of any item short of full now shows in orange, and the maximum after the slash turns orange once it has worn below what the item was built with. The yellow at 20% and the red at 0 are unchanged. A new Repair Supplies category tab shows every repair kit and Ancient Essence together. Requested by Galorn.

Login

• The Steam create-account form now says there have been too many attempts, and to wait and restart the game, when the server stops taking attempts on a connection. It used to show an unknown error.

Build

• Measured where Windows client build time goes: about 85-90% of a full build runs on one core, and the two asset bundle writes alone take about 51 of 119 minutes. On the same commit the old Windows builder ran those passes about twice as slowly as the Linux build node. The causes were low process priority, antivirus scanning with no build exclusions, and sharing the machine with open editors. The write-up compares CPUs for the next build machine.
• The Windows build agent now runs at normal priority instead of below normal. Every Unity, git and 7-Zip process it starts used to inherit the lower priority. The antivirus exclusion list for build machines is now kept with the build tools.
• Client builds now clear their old asset lookup files in a single refresh. The build used to delete them one at a time, refreshing the asset database after each of about 330 files. That cost about 15 minutes of every Windows resource bundle pass.
• Tried Unity's multi-process asset bundle building on the current Windows builder. Both bundle passes came out only 4-6% faster, because the machine ran a single worker process and had no memory to spare for more. The test will be repeated on a better-equipped build machine.
• The mac client build no longer crashes in the bundle-cache change report: that log-only step now skips on macOS, where it hit a native crash that held release build 350. The Windows and Linux builds still print the same report.
• Windows client and server builds moved back to the main workstation. The mini PC that took them over on 11-01 was 2 to 2.5 times slower per step, and builds will stay on the workstation until a dedicated build machine is ready.
• The nightly Unity test run moved to the mini PC, so it no longer competes with client builds on the workstation. It now updates its own copy of the project to the latest commit before each run.

Chat

• The chat tab options now list each player town your character is a resident of as its own box, so each town's chat can be put on any tab. The Chat Channel picker offers only the towns a tab shows. A character with no town keeps the single Town box. From the Player Wishlist.

Tools

• The four Daemon boss level-of-detail prefabs were saved in the Unity 6.5 format, so the Editor stops rewriting them in every checkout.

PvP

• The Obsidian Trials Trader in The Obsidian Trial has a shop window. It lists his PvP potions and teleport scrolls for Obsidian Skull Coins and his victory emotes and PvP ranks for Obsidian Medallions, with prices, your coin counts, and why a row cannot be bought. His conversation trades still work and now take their price once (0632041222, #15944).

Trading

• A trade now says "You can only trade containers that are empty." when a chest carried in the backpack still holds items the trade window could not see, instead of a bare "Failed to update the trade." (03b628dba8).

Website

• Staff accounts can now type into their guild and town tabs in the website's Chat window, with the GM badge their lines carry in game. Before this they could only read there.

Rewards

• Players who logged in to the chaos shard since November 1 were mailed the November login reward box (Horned Pole Tribal Totem and Locking Emote). The server had kept offering October's reward since the October 30 update, so 594 accounts got nothing on login; anyone logging in for the first time this month after the mail-out gets the box the usual way after the next server restart.
• The monthly login reward now changes over at midnight US Central on the 1st while the server is running. The server used to pick the month once, when it started, which is how November's reward went missing until it was mailed out. On the chaos shard from the next build.

World

• Fixed swimming in the sea around Smokehaven. Away from the village, players in deep water ran along the seabed instead of swimming, because the scene's physics only covered the middle of the map. It now covers the whole archipelago, and a test checks every new sea scene for the same gap.

Inventory

• Grabbing items in the backpack, bank or a container to drag them no longer counts as a double-click. Picking several reward boxes with ctrl or shift and then dragging them into the bank was opening them. A double-click now only counts on the same item twice and uses it when the second click is let go, never once a drag has started. Reported by Daxstalker.

Research

• Researched how large a single outdoor scene can get: floating-point precision, physics and pathfinding limits, client memory and loading, server traffic, and who runs a scene's creatures. Corrected two earlier notes that overstated the default physics area (it is 1 x 1 km, not 2 x 2 km).

Movement

• A jump in place lands where it took off again. Since chaos build 343 every jump moved the character about half a metre back: the fix for characters held in the air on a ledge read the way down from a jump as being held and slid the character off. Mounted jumps had the same drift. (5c7f377094)

Skills

• Eidetic Memory now wears the blue frame of the Focus skills you cast, in both icon sets. It had kept the grey frame the skill tree uses for passive skills.

Launcher

• Released launcher 68 on Windows, Linux and macOS. It reads the installed game's own name, so settings, logs and crash reports follow the client now that its name no longer carries the old (DEV) tag, and it carries the old (DEV) settings across once.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-11-01 is up: A flat marker on every zone exit had been stretched across whole maps, so wolves and humanoids broke off a chase and trotted home for no reason a player could see. That is fixed, along with creatures teleporting to their posts instead of walking, and pets refusing to fight a dragon standing in a doorway. The day also brought a new line of gel cubes and oozes, eleven new satyr fighter abilities, full gamepad and Steam Deck support, and sound in a dungeon that had never had any. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml