The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The stealth term that doubled Sneak Attack
• Skill decay retired and untraining made free
• Buffs surviving a zone change after six years
• Two and a half seconds cut from every zone load
• The Cave Wrasse gets its own attacks and an ambush

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what thy makers were about on Monday. The humble smoke bomb stands revealed as the deadliest opening blow in the realm. Death shall take no more learning from thee, and to unlearn a skill now costs thee nothing but patience. The blessings you carry will survive a walk from one province to the next, which they have not reliably done in six years. Every journey between zones is a little shorter. And every harvestable thing in the world has been drawn upon a map for all to see. We begin somewhere smaller than any of that, with a confession about your sword.

When you repair a piece of gear, your chat log tells you how much durability came back. It has always done that, and it works. When your gear takes durability damage, your chat log tells you nothing. Not rarely. Not on certain items. Never, for any player, as far back as anyone can check.

The line was written and the wording was fine. The code measured how much the durability changed, took the size of that change, and then asked whether that size was below zero. A size is never below zero. So the message sat there for years, correct and unreachable, waiting for a number that could not exist. It speaks now.

Right. The smoke bomb.

Sneak Attack multiplies its damage by how hidden you are. That sounds reasonable until you learn that hidden-ness in this game adds up rather than replacing itself. Camouflage on its own, at high skill with the specialization behind it, pushes you past what the game calls fully hidden. Cocoon of Night under a full moon pushes further. And Obfuscate, the crafted smoke bomb, drops a flat, whole additional point of hidden-ness on top of whatever you already had running.

Now, nothing else in the game cares about that extra range. A creature's perception clamps it. The test for whether someone can see you is a simple yes or no. Being extra hidden buys you nothing at all, anywhere, except in one place. Sneak Attack's damage formula was the only expression in the entire game that read that number as an open-ended multiplier and spent every last drop of it.

So here is the arithmetic that came out of it. Take a character with a hundred points of melee damage, hitting from behind. Unhidden, Sneak Attack does a hundred and twenty five. Opening from a specialized Camouflage, three hundred and twelve. And opening from Camouflage with a smoke bomb layered on top, four hundred and sixty two. Nearly four times the base hit. From a skill that costs five focus and one crafted bomb, and whose entire stated purpose is to give you two seconds to run away.

It was worse than that, actually. Because of the particular way the smoke bomb applies itself, the game never noticed you had attacked, so the bonus survived the hit and paid out again on your follow-up. We built an escape tool, and a good number of you correctly identified it as the best weapon in the school. That is not a failure of the players. The stealth term is now capped at fully hidden, which puts every stealthed opener at two hundred and seventy five. Unhidden Sneak Attack is untouched. If you have been running that combination, you did nothing wrong, and I am a little sorry to take it off you.

The larger piece of Monday was the skill system deciding to stop charging you for changing your mind, and it came in three parts.

The first is unlearning. When you set a skill to unlearn, it drains experience back into your pool. For most schools it returned half of what it drained and destroyed the rest. For some schools it returned everything. Which schools? Air, Fire and Bard, plus a handful of Ward and Elixir skills. About fifty five of them, on a list somebody transcribed by hand. That list was left over from old school reworks that promised a free respec while the rework was live, and then never expired. So walking away from a specialization at level eighty destroyed about one million eight hundred thousand experience if you had gone Death, and cost you exactly nothing if you had gone Fire. At specialization a hundred the gap was over twelve million. And nothing anywhere in the interface named either rate, or even mentioned that a rate existed. Every skill now returns everything. The drain still takes exactly as long as it always did, so the real cost of switching your build is still your play time, which is where that cost belongs.

The second part is decay. Dying pulled experience out of your skills. The rate at which it did that was scaled by a ratio, and the ratio was built by taking a value out of the skill experience table and dividing it by a total out of the adventurer table. Those two tables are different by roughly a hundredfold at every level. The practical effect was that characters at or above a zone's level cap lost about one percent of what was intended, while everybody from level forty up to that cap paid full price. Correcting the ratio would have switched real decay back on for the very players who had been quietly exempt from it for years, which felt like a strange gift to hand out. So decay is retired. Dying no longer takes experience off any skill, at any level, in any scene.

And the third part is my favourite, because it is embarrassing. Every experience figure the Skills window now shows you was already being calculated on your own machine, and shown to nobody. It sat inside a block meant for development builds. The only place an ordinary player could read an actual experience number for one skill or one school was the confirmation box on an unlearn scroll. Which means players were buying the item, opening the dialog, reading the figure off it, and hitting cancel. That is a beautiful piece of player ingenuity and it should never have been necessary. Hovering a skill now gives you the experience in it, what the next level wants, what unlearning would return, and how far it has moved this session. Hovering a school sigil gives you the school totals. And there is a new interface option to turn all of it back off, for those of you who would rather not see the machinery.

Next, one that has been on the forums since twenty twenty. Buffs wearing off when you change zones. Strength of Earth was the usual victim, but it could take any of the roughly seventy six buffs whose length scales with your attunement.

Here is what was happening, and it is a lovely little piece of self-sabotage. When a buff is saved, the record kept only the moment it started. Not how long it was supposed to run. So when you loaded into a new scene, the game had to work out the duration all over again, and it worked it out from your attunement at that exact instant. Which is mid-load. Your gear is not counted yet. Your other buffs have not come back yet. So your attunement is at its lowest point of the entire session, the game computes a much shorter duration from it, compares that to when the buff started, decides the thing expired some time ago, and deletes it. The longer and more expensive the buff, the more likely it was to die on the way through the door.

The duration is now decided when the buff is cast and saved alongside it, so the loader just reads the number instead of guessing at it. The same fix covers potions, whose elixir extension was being re-read off your current gear the same way, and it covers the buff icons other players see floating over you, which could vanish by the identical route. Heals that tick over time and damage over time effects keep their rhythm across the load. Anything saved before this change keeps the old behaviour until it runs out, and then it is done.

Loading. Zone loads after your first one are now about two and a half seconds shorter, and I want to tell you where those seconds were, because it is not where anyone assumed.

The first thing that happened was a decision to stop measuring on a developer's machine. The team pulled one thousand seven hundred and eighty four real loads off the test shard, from real players on real hardware, and rebuilt the whole picture from those. The median load was ten point one seconds. That immediately corrected two conclusions from the old measurements. Garbage collection, which everyone assumed was costing about a second, costs about a fifth of that. And two point two seconds of apparently missing time in the middle of every load was one phase being reported twice. There was no mystery. There was an accounting error.

What the real numbers showed was that the biggest remaining slice was the client waiting on purpose. Two full seconds at the end of every load were a deliberate pause so that creatures could finish their fade-in effect where you could not watch them do it. Sensible idea. But the reveal that follows that pause already covers the whole fade window on its own, between hiding the loading screen, fading the camera up and fading the audio in. The pause was guarding something that was already guarded. It is skipped while a load is in progress and kept everywhere else. And there was another half second at the very start, added as belt and braces on top of a loading screen fade that had already finished animating. That is now about a couple of frames, which is all it ever needed to be.

The same measuring pass found the next target, and it is a much bigger one. Time spent loading art during a zone change tracks the decoration phase almost perfectly. On a map with nothing decorated, about a second. On a heavily decorated one, nineteen seconds, inside a load of thirty six. One town template spends forty one percent of its entire load doing it. So the next pass goes after decorations, and the team wrote down four other ideas they measured and rejected, with the reason each one fails, so nobody spends that week again. One of those rejected ideas would have looked like a free second and would have left your master volume stuck partway up. Forever. In a saved setting.

And now the fish.

There is a creature called the Cave Wrasse. It was brought back at the end of July, and it came back wearing a crocodile's entire wardrobe. Crocodile weapons, crocodile auto-attack, crocodile special attacks, and a sound controller cloned from the same crocodile. Which mostly worked, in the way that a costume mostly works.

While going through it, the team found three attack identifiers that had been reserved for this exact creature back in twenty fifteen and then never bound to anything. Eleven years, sitting in the tables, waiting. They are now a bite, a short-range cinder spit, and a sulfur roar that takes twenty points of Strength off up to five people at once for fifteen seconds. The roar plays a ninety frame animation that until Monday had only ever been used for fidgeting.

Then the ambush. The wrasse family has a full ambush behaviour built for it. Crouch, wait, hold still with no nameplate showing, then spring with a roar. All of it authored, all of it tuned per tier, and the flag that switches it on had never been set. Not once, on any of the five. So the tuning did nothing and the animation was unreachable. It is on now, and the tuning climbs with tier, which produces the pleasant result that the small ones, the ones you would glance at and dismiss, let you get closest before they go. The Broodmother is left out of it, on the grounds that a boss should have the decency to be visible.

Two more faults on the same family, both caught before anyone played it. Both of its sound sources named a specific bone on the skeleton, and the bone they named belongs to the crocodile it was copied from. The wrasse does not have that bone. So all five of them played their audio from the wrong place entirely. And its walking speeds were authored somewhere between one point two and three point five metres a second against an animation whose planted feet only carry it about zero point six five. It was skating across the floor at up to five times its own stride. Somebody sat down, measured the actual animation, matched the numbers to it, then checked the method against the crocodile to make sure the measuring was sound. The wrasse is still not placed in any scene in the game. So it is now magnificent, and it lives nowhere. We will get to that.

A few smaller things that will improve somebody's evening.

Three of them are about your pets. Pet Range, the taming skill that decides how far your pet will chase something before giving up and coming back, was in the skill tree with a working curve and everything wired up to read it, and no trainer in the world offered it. So every tamer in the game has been fighting on the untrained floor of two metres, which is why your pet has been disengaging roughly the moment it left your side. Trainers teach it now, and trained up it stretches to about ten. Separately, Follow Close, Follow Near and Follow Far set the distance without ever putting the pet into follow mode, so a pet on stay would cheerfully announce that it was following you closely and then continue standing exactly where it was. And four faults in how a taming attempt resolves are fixed, including the one where a creature that was never on the tameable list could report a success, take your collar, and hand you nothing.

There is now a Resource Atlas, public, on the Catnip Games site, with no login. Two hundred and twenty one zones that carry harvestable resources, sixteen thousand two hundred and sixty placed nodes, twenty nine resource types, each zone drawn as a map from above so you can see where the nodes actually stand. You can also go the other way and pick a resource to see which zones carry it, ranked. Copper is the most common thing in the world by a nose, with cotton just behind. And it tells you something the wiki never could, which is how many of a zone's spots are live at any one time. Forty emerald spots with twenty three live means you will never find all forty, and it is worth knowing that before you plan a route.

The launcher can now keep a copy of the build you have installed and run it later. Players asked for this, and until Monday there was no way back to an older build, because patching converges your install onto the current one and deletes anything not on the list. On the same drive, keeping a build takes seconds and no extra disk space, because the copy shares its files with the install until a patch replaces them. On a different drive it does a real copy with a progress bar and a cancel button. Playing a kept copy leaves your normal install alone.

And an apology to our Mac players. The Mac launcher went live at the end of July, but the nightly release pipeline had only ever been taught to publish Windows and Linux. So the Mac update channel sat still while the shard moved on without it, and because the game requires your build to match the shard, Mac players could not log in at all. Two testers reported it. It is published for Mac now, every release carries all three platforms, and if the Mac build machine is ever offline at release time the run flags itself instead of quietly shipping two thirds of a release. That machine, incidentally, had fallen off the farm on the second because a disk image lost contact with the drive underneath it, and every attempt to reconnect died at the same step. It heals itself from that now.

Finally, four of the best known artifacts in the game, the Scepter of Dread, the Heart of Sorrows, the Bonesteel Crown and the Shroud of the Avatar, now actually appear under the Artifact filter in your inventory and draw in the same bronze as every other artifact. Their own tooltips have been calling them artifacts this whole time. The filter and the colour simply disagreed with the tooltip, and the tooltip was right.

Lightning round. There was a wave of specialization fixes, thirteen findings out of one deep read of the system, and I will spare you all of them. The highlights: every summoned elemental was levelling off Water Magic specialization regardless of what it was made of, so Air, Earth and Fire specialists got nothing for their trouble. A summoned Phoenix had exactly zero magic resistance unless its caster happened to specialize in Sun. Heavy Armor's specialization was designed to raise how much of a hit your armor can absorb, and the line that was supposed to apply it was overruled by a hardcoded number one line below. And a caster could level every magic mastery, park them all, and keep drawing attunement in nine schools at once while occupying no specialization slots, which is a build I am almost impressed by.

Elsewhere, one zone in the entire game was capping your production skills as well as your adventuring ones, so a gatherer above the cap had every bonus evaluated as though they were worse at it than they are. Fixed, and it was the only zone doing it. Parties fighting in basements were collecting an open PVP experience bonus that basements are specifically meant to be excluded from, because the exclusion test compared a whole set of flags against one flag and therefore never matched anything. The Journal has stopped opening itself every time you log in, which a tester told us in July was still broken after the first fix, and the tester was right, and we have added a test that makes that particular mistake impossible to repeat. The encumbrance warning marks in the corner now draw large and bold instead of at body text size over busy artwork. Seventeen tracker issues closed.

And our test bots, the ones that stand in for a crowd of players, were invisible to every creature in the game, walked about twice as far as they needed to because a piece of path smoothing had its left and right the wrong way round, and stood at attention like a regiment. They now wander, bow, clap, wave and dance. If you ever see a small crowd of people doing nothing but dancing in perfect silence, do please walk away.

That is Monday. A good day, and an unusually honest one, because a lot of what got fixed was work that had been done years ago and never switched on. The reserved attack identifiers from twenty fifteen. The ambush nobody flagged. The experience numbers computed and shown to nobody. My favourite kind of day, really. Everything was already there. Somebody just had to look.

And I will leave you with this. After eleven years of borrowing a crocodile's teeth, the Cave Wrasse finally has its own. Which means we can all stop shedding crocodile tears about it. Goodnight, my friends. Be well, and be virtuous.