The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Seven creatures whose enrage never fired
• The Dungeon Builder panel, the reclaim chest and the manual
• The Guild Finder, built in a single morning
• Pets that explain themselves, and a tuning window for testers
• A directory of all four hundred and thirty-five player towns

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with an accounting of what thy makers were about upon Thursday. The builders of dungeons have a proper panel at last, and a manual besides. Guilds may now go seeking members, and members may go seeking guilds. Every player town in the realm is written into a directory thou canst open with a single word. And seven great beasts, who were meant to fly into a rage as they weakened, have for years declined to do so. We shall begin with the beasts. Their composure is remarkable, and their story is the best one.

You have fought a Spider Queen. You have worn her down to half her health, and she escalates, exactly as she should. So you brace yourself for the second stage, because there is always a second stage. And there is. It is in there. It is written down. It has been sitting in her behaviour for years, attached to a signal that absolutely nothing in this entire game has ever sent. She has been waiting for a bell that nobody built a rope for.

The Spider Queens are not alone. One of our people went looking through the creature data this week and found seven of them in the same condition. The Polar Mutilator, a creature whose name is essentially a promise, had its enrage wired to that same dead signal, which means you could grind it all the way down to nothing and it would never once get cross with you. The Obsidian Eye casters, likewise. They have never been angry. Not once. Not in the entire history of the game.

The mechanism is dull and the result is not. A creature's escalation is attached to an event, and the event list has several entries, and one of those entries is raised by nothing at all. If your ability is on that entry, you have an ability that exists in every meaningful sense except the one that matters. Seven creatures were in that state. The pass also turned up two more escalation slots that were pointed at nothing whatsoever, and one pointed at a buff that draws an icon on the screen and changes not a single thing about the fight. That one is my favourite. It was doing a very convincing impression of a mechanic.

All seven now escalate properly, at half health and again at a quarter health. The Spider Queens get the second stage they were always meant to have. If you have a comfortable route through any of those fights, I would revisit it before you go in casually.

And while we were in that neighbourhood, we went through the five skills the community has been reporting as broken, and one of them was worse than the others. Moon Eater. The skill that governs how long the moon's influence lasts. It was subtracting hours instead of adding them. Every point you put into it made every Moon skill in your book weaker, including how long Animal Charm holds an animal. You were paying experience for the privilege of getting worse. It adds the hours now, half of them before the moon rises and half after it sets, which is what it said on the box the entire time. Shield Smash was missing the stun its own description promised, and it has that back. Corpse Explosion, meanwhile, has been quietly firing its damage over a corpse that just lay there, refusing to explode, which does undercut the name a little. The corpse bursts again once there is nothing left to loot off it. And Earthquake was the only spell in the game whose knockdown put no icon on anybody's status bar, so neither the caster nor the victim had any way to know it was running. It has an icon now.

Now. The dungeons. If you build one, Thursday was your day, because the whole thing turned into a proper workshop. Until now, the only window in the game that would tell you your dungeon point number could be reached exactly one way: walk to a glowing doorway, click it, and there it was. Want to know how many points you have left? Go find a doorway. Want to know what you spent them on? There was no answer to that question at all.

The piece window has grown into a Dungeon Builder panel with three tabs, and you open it from a button on your interface or by typing slash dungeonbuilder, no doorway required. Build is the piece picker you already know, except it is a real catalog now, with tiles and icons and how many of each piece you are carrying and what each one costs, dimmed out when your budget cannot take them. Before this, pieces flipped past one at a time with a pair of arrow buttons, no picture and no count, and the window already had all of that information loaded. It was just not showing you any of it.

Rooms is the new one. Every room you have placed, which floor it sits on, what it cost, whether it still reaches your foyer, whether it holds decorations, and what its totem spawns. That last one matters, because totem encounters had never had player-facing names in their lives. A room with a totem in it used to tell you nothing about what was going to come out of it. There are now nine creature families and six tiers with actual names, and a test that fails the build if anyone adds a family later without naming it.

And Rooms does one more thing I am fond of. It will find your unfilled doorways. A doorway only glows while you are standing in the room with it, so the only way to find the one you forgot was to walk your entire dungeon staring at the walls like a building inspector. Now you get a list of every open doorway with its room, its floor, a compass direction and a distance, nearest first, and picking one puts a marker over it. The third tab, Points, shows where your budget came from and where it went, including how much of it is tied up in rooms that have been cut off from the foyer. Pieces also tell you their cost on their own tooltip now, which they never did, anywhere. A hall is one point. A cathedral is forty-two. You are welcome.

Best of all: the Random Dungeon Generator Chest runs in reverse. Close an emptied chest inside your own dungeon and it offers to take the whole thing back, every placed room, furniture included, straight back into the box so you can roll a fresh layout immediately. It pulls rooms out starting from the ones farthest from the entrance, and if a room refuses to come, everything leading to it stays put, so a reclaim that stops halfway leaves you with a smaller dungeon whose rooms all still connect to the door. That is a lovely piece of care in something most people will never notice.

And then the same day, a Guides section opened on the website, and the first guide in it is the Dungeon Builder's Manual. Fifteen sections. The point budget each lot size grants and the two ways to raise it. Choosing a foyer, and why swapping it later banks everything inside. The five reasons a piece refuses to go where you want it. Totems, the essence chain, Adventure Mode, the live map, access and PvP, and what publishing actually asks of you, which is that you clear your own dungeon before anybody else can be measured against it. Every price and limit and message in it was checked against the real thing first. The illustrations of the interface are hand-built rather than painted, because generated lettering comes out garbled, and a manual that misquotes the window it is describing is worse than having no manual at all.

Elsewhere, and I want to be careful about how I say this, the Guild Finder went from nothing at all to finished in about fifty minutes. The plan was written just before four in the morning. The server foundation landed at half past four. The wiring at ten to five. The window at a quarter past five. By twenty past, ninety-one tests were green across the whole thing. I have shipped features that took a quarter, and this one took less time than breakfast.

Here is what it does. Open the guild tab or type slash guildfinder and you get a registry of every guild that has said it wants members, with a headline, member count, playstyle tags, and core hours shown in your own local time rather than somebody else's. You search it, you sort it, and you apply with a message. Officers with the recruitment right get an inbox, a listing editor, and a live count of pending applications sitting on the guild tab.

The interesting decisions are the honest ones. A guild that is at war carries a marker on its row and again on the apply dialog, so nobody signs up for a fight they did not know was happening. One pending application per player per guild, enforced properly so it cannot be gamed. Applications expire after thirty days. A decline puts a seven-day cooldown on that guild. Joining anybody withdraws your other applications, because you are in a guild now. And you can accept a player who is not logged in, which already worked, but the research caught something better: a player who is online at the exact moment they are accepted would have heard absolutely nothing about it. So a notification for that case went into the plan as a required piece before a line of it was built.

Guilds got two more things. The message of the day is its own permission now. It had shared a permission bit with the guild description since the day that list was written, so you could never hand one right to somebody without handing them the other. And guild wars end honestly. A war that ran out its clock on a tied score used to end in complete silence and then display as a defeat for both guilds, which is a very Britannian way to handle a draw. Draws now show as draws, with their own colour in the war list, and every war ending announces itself in chat and in a popup that names the winner, or the draw, or the guild that forfeited.

Now, your pets. Two new commands. Type slash verbose pet and your pets and companions will say in chat why they are not doing the thing you asked. The stance refuses it. They are still walking back to you. The target is out of reach. Their attacks are on cooldown. Repeated reasons collapse to one line every fifteen seconds so a thoroughly stuck pet cannot bury your chat log. Slash verbose aggro puts threat numbers over your pet and over your target, asking the machine that actually runs the creature's behaviour for a copy once a second, and showing nothing at all rather than stale numbers if no answer comes back.

The reason this took so long is the part that stings. The pet behaviour already had a full debugging surface. All of it. Every readout. It was compiled out of the real game and required the creature to be selected in the editor, so for years the only people on earth who could see why your pet was standing there were sitting in our office. Both new commands are in every build, no account flag needed. And ordering a pet to attack another player, which is refused, used to be refused with no message whatsoever, so it read as your pet simply ignoring you. It now says it will only attack creatures. Twelve other refused commands that printed nothing but "ignored your command" now name a reason.

Two more pet items in the same day. Other people's pets have been holding a single frozen pose and gliding across the ground like furniture on ice, and they now walk, jog or run with their legs moving, worked out from how far the creature actually travelled on your screen. And calling a pet to you now puts it next to you, which I would have thought was the entire point of the command. It had been calculating the destination from wherever the pet was originally summoned, so it could cheerfully drop your pet back on that old spot, or move it nowhere at all, while the chat line assured you it had come to you.

Alongside all that, our testers got slash tweak, which is an in-game browser for gameplay numbers. Categories down the left, values on the right, laid out like a file browser. Pick Pets, click leash range, and change the value at level zero, at eighty and at a hundred and fifty, and your pet re-tethers the moment you press Enter. Those three numbers used to live inside a single method as constants, which is the reason that trying a longer leash previously required a whole build. A set of changes can be named, saved and copied out as a share code that another tester pastes in. Two guards ride along with it: combat telemetry pauses the instant anyone touches a combat value, so a tuned session cannot poison the balance data, and a session that is not running stock numbers says so loudly, in the window header, on the tester panel, and in a chat line at login.

And there is a town directory in the game now. Type slash towns. All four hundred and thirty-five player-owned towns, each with the terrain it is built on, its size tier, which world map it sits on, and how busy it is at this moment. It opens sorted by activity, so the towns with people standing in them come first and the quiet ones sink. Search matches names and biomes and tiers, and every column sorts both ways.

The part I like is Show On World Map. Select a town, press the button, and the map pans to it and draws a ring around it for ten seconds. That sounds trivial. It was not, because the world map had never once in its life been asked to point at a place. It only ever drew the scene you were standing in. And since it follows you, jumping the view somewhere else would have simply dragged it straight back, so the jump clears the Follow box the same way dragging the map does. Off that particular world map the button greys out and tells you which map to travel to instead of doing nothing at all, which is the sort of small honesty I appreciate.

Town governors got the other half. The Town Console's lot tab takes a whole selection now. Restrict, unrestrict and reserve act on everything you have picked, there is a Select Shown button that grabs every row your filter has left on screen, and there is an Open Town button that opens claiming on every unclaimed lot in one press, leaving reserved lots alone and telling you the count before it commits. Setting up a sixty-lot town used to mean sixty separate walks to sixty separate lot signs. It now takes about ten seconds behind a progress bar, and it tells you afterwards how many changed, how many already had that setting, how many were skipped, and how many moved while it was working. Anything that failed sits behind a Retry that re-runs only those.

Now, several things you look at have been lying to you. The river at Solace Bridge has been a flat white sheet, because the texture the water samples went missing from the build and the river fell back to plain white and painted over its own riverbed. It reads as water again, with depth and ripples and foam at the banks, and so does every river built the same way. The Air Elemental was blending itself almost out of existence and reading as a faint smudge in daylight, and is now a violet figure with soft edges. The summoned Water Elemental was missing its bottom half, because the swirling column that should run from the ground to its waist was being emitted at about a third of its proper size, leaving a floating torso. Ferns have been drawing their fronds as solid blades. And shooting stars have been crossing the sky at any hour at all, which in daylight looks less like a shooting star and much more like the sky flickering white at you.

Some window matters. Closing the Options panel in the middle of a slider drag left that slider holding onto your mouse, so reopening Options gave you a slider that followed every movement with no button held, could not be clicked free, and left logging out as the only escape. Sliders let go now. Equipment sitting in a bag showed no tooltip at all while every other item in the list did, because the comparison against what you have equipped is the one extra step an equipment tooltip takes, and if it could not be built you got nothing. It is treated as an extra now. The mailbox list was drawing empty rows where mail should be. And the backgammon table has a board on it. An actual board, with a raised rim, a bar down the middle and twenty four points in alternating light and dark, turned so they run toward the two seats. It has been a bare wooden table this whole time, which is a very sad thing to invite friends over to play at.

One that is worth a sentence on its own: zone loading now finishes releasing the scene you left before it starts uploading the one you are entering. Those two used to run over the top of each other, and the cleanup ran before the garbage collector rather than after, so every zone change handed back less memory than it should have and a long session drifted upward. One reported route climbed by nearly five hundred megabytes without the player ever logging out. It was worst on Linux, where a busy city was running at eleven frames a second on a card with memory to spare.

The lightning round. Another nineteen reported bugs went off the tracker, and a good many of them were tooltips and windows behaving in ways I would rather not describe in detail on a family programme. Crafting had a good day: a critical success on an equipable can now roll from two bonus pools that were written years ago and never handed out once, bows finally get the gem enchant effects every other weapon type already had, and reroll chances now count the reroll you just took instead of giving you one free step at full odds.

Hats and helmets have stopped vanishing depending on which way you turn the camera. Two basement doors that answered no clicks at all now open. Castle gates that hand off to a second mechanism open from the saddle. Decorative bowls hold things again, and containers no longer refuse an item everywhere except a small patch in the middle. Decoration stacking is a per-item limit now instead of one number for the entire game. The Frost Giant in Jotungrund has been recast onto a voice that is actually low, after testers rejected the first attempt on the grounds that he was still speaking higher than the villagers standing next to him. Enfeeblement got a real description in all ten languages and, for the first time, a sound when you cast it.

And a stray window had been sitting on top of one of our editors for weeks, drawing a mock crafting recipe at nobody. Twenty-four of them had piled up, one per test that opened two windows and could only close one. They clean up after themselves now.

That is Thursday. A very good one. I am looking forward most to seeing what people build once they can see their own dungeon written down in a list, and to the first player who reclaims an entire dungeon back into a box just to watch it happen.

Which brings me to my parting thought. We built a chest that swallows a whole dungeon. Rooms, corridors, furniture, all of it, back into one container. Thirty years in this business, and I have finally invented the closet. Good night, and mind the Spider Queens. They are in a mood now.