The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Fishing hotspots, critical catches and rare finds
• An unclaimed house fetched back out of the bank
• The Ruined Keep gets a story and a voice
• Offline saves protected and lost characters found
• World Events window and Call to Arms contests

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British speaking, with an accounting of what thy makers were about upon Monday. The ripples that promised the finest fishing in the realm proved to be the worst water in it, and have been set right. A keep in the Hidden Vale that no living soul would speak of has at last been given its dead, its songs and its grudges. A house one player believed lost forever has been fetched back out of the bank with every chair where it stood. And a demon besieging a good and loyal town spent the better part of a fortnight standing upon a flower bed. We shall begin with the demon.

So. Avallon is under siege. That means somewhere in that town there is a Cabalist, and the entire point of a Cabalist is that he comes out and finds you. This one did not. He walked to the town shrine, which in a player town is a piece of decoration sitting on somebody's lot, and then he settled in the middle of that lot, on a patch of ground the town's pathing does not cover. Nothing could reach him. He could reach nothing. Fourteen fights in one hour, and every one ended the same way: give up, teleport home, full health, back on the lawn.

The player filed it as "gets stuck on the village plot in the town centre," which is a generous way to describe a demon loitering in your garden. Two things were wrong. His standoff distance from the shrine topped out at eight meters, and a Village lot is twenty by thirty, so no version of that sum got him off the grass. And the gate he was meant to walk in through sat just past the edge of the walkable ground, so the game threw it away and dropped him at the shrine instead, which about half the sieges over the last two weeks did. A goal that lands on a lot now gets stepped out to the street at the lot's edge, he tries every gate in turn before giving up, and the check runs again every few seconds for the whole siege, so a siege already under way corrects itself.

Now. Fishing, which got a very long day, and which was lying to you three separate ways.

You know the ripples. You see a patch of disturbed water, the game puts a marker on it, and you think, there, that is the good spot. The bite bonus ran backwards. The math handed out nothing at the dead center of the ripples and the full fifteen points at the outer rim, so the place the marker pointed at was the only part of the ripples that did you no good whatsoever. Second, if the marker sat more than a meter above or below the water it never registered at all, because the search and the bonus were measuring the distance to it differently. And third, only one bait could use a hotspot, and if you used that bait, the hotspot threw away the scene's real catch list and gave you trout and junk armor. No trophy fish. So the water that advertised itself as the best fishing in the zone was, for most people, the worst fishing in the zone. All three are fixed. The center of the ripples now gives up to fifteen points of bite chance, fading away at the edge of the two meters you can actually see, every bait keeps the scene's normal catch, and the aim marker says so out loud: ripples here, fish bite faster.

Then there is Fishing Critical. There are two rod engravings, Heavy Iron and Silver, and they cost you ten and forty maximum durability. Four premium rods carry the line as well. Nothing in the game read that number. You have been paying durability for a statistic that did not exist. The suggestion on the table was to relabel the engravings or move them onto something else, but the premium rods cannot lose a stat they were sold with, so the stat was made to work instead. Each cast now has that chance to land an ordinary fish as two, and the roll happens before the reel fight, which means if you lose the fight you lose both of them. Trophy fish, junk and chests are never doubled. Nobody's tooltip changed. The tooltip was always correct. It was describing a feature that had never been built.

And then the part I actually like. Fishing landed something other than a fish about eight times in a hundred, and almost all of that was six pieces of junk armor, so anything interesting came up about once in four hundred and thirty catches. Two items, Old Boots and Old Shoes, were built years ago specifically to be fished up, and were never connected to anything. There is now a small pool of finds at the end of every catch table, different for each kind of water. Rusty kitchenware, bottles, lanterns, goblets, old rings and necklaces, unrefined gems, and twelve things you can only get with a rod in your hands. Four corked letters you can sit down and read. A Drowned Lantern. A Wisp in a Jar that only bites at night. A Petrified Ammonite out of lava. A Bog Torc. A Moon Pearl that wants a full moon. A Barnacled Strongbox you can open. And once in a very long while, the Drowned King's Crown. Something other than junk armor now comes up about one catch in eighty, and fish are still nearly every catch. The messages in bottles were asked for on the forums repeatedly, and the people asking were right.

Housing. A player in Tortuga used Unclaim Lot on their own town lot, expecting the house to wait for them in the Property Manager, the way it does when a lot expires or you are evicted. Unclaim takes the other path. Each level's deed went into its storage, the storage went to the bank, every placed container's contents went with it, and the lot went empty. Nothing was destroyed and nothing was lost. But the player opened the Property Manager, found it empty, and had every reason to believe a Townhome had just evaporated. The deeds were in the bank the entire time.

So a repair was written that reverses exactly those writes, one lot at a time, one level at a time. It refuses outright if anything looks different from what the teardown would have left behind: a later deposit, a second teardown, a missing container, the owner being logged in. It writes a rollback script before it writes anything at all. That player's Tortuga house and basement are back as two stored entries. Three hundred and nineteen items, ten containers, everything where they had put it.

The confirmation box tells the truth now. It says the house and basement come down, that their deeds and decorations go to the local bank, that nothing waits in the Property Manager, and it points you at Move to Storage if moving the house was what you wanted. And the server can now do the kinder thing: send an owner-unclaimed lot into the Property Manager with the house, basement and decorations still arranged, as long as you have a free slot for each level. That ships switched off until the prompt explaining it is in the same build.

Two more housing ones. A town steward in Tortuga opened the Property Manager and read "storage slots used, thirty-five of six," which is a bold thing for a window to say. Other players' stored houses get listed in there on purpose, so you can send home anything you left inside them, and the window was dropping them into the steward's own slots and counting every row as used. Those now sit below your own houses in extra rows, and the count only counts yours. And since the middle of August, a mug or a pile of coins sitting on top of a cabinet had been handing its name and its pick-up cursor to the cabinet underneath. You could see the mug perfectly well. The game kept telling you about the furniture.

Now the Hidden Vale. There is a keep up there. It has a drawbridge, a courtyard, walls with satyrs on them, a bridge, a wishing well, and a great many trolls. And until yesterday, not one person in the entire world would say a single word about it. No townsperson mentioned it. No book. No quest went near it. You could walk in, fight trolls for an hour, walk back to Owl's Head, ask everybody you met what that place was, and they would tell you about the weather.

It has a history now, and half of that history was already written in Owl's Head's own stories about the warrior the lake towns call Openhand. Townsfolk in Owl's Head, Kingsport, Noreach and Braemar talk about the keep and its trolls, and each of them points you somewhere: to Thomas Strongbeard, to Mary's story of the castle, or to Sergeant Halden's post out on the lake road. Halden is there now, a few steps from where you arrive, and he will tell you about Goruk, about the trolls, about the satyrs up on the walls, and about the three men of his watch who never came back. There are four things to read: a book Alvin sells in Owl's Head, a letter beside a fallen guard inside the drawbridge, a letter down the wishing well, and one on Goruk Mansmasher himself. All of it is voiced and translated into the game's eight other languages.

The named trolls talk in combat now. Goruk boasts about the toll every other troll in that keep pays him, and his last words carry across the whole place. Baern'Dawl the Lonely defends his bridge. T'eRKGL the Enforcer taunts whoever he has just killed, and here is the thing about T'eRKGL: until yesterday he had never appeared anywhere in this game. Not once. He existed, fully built, and nobody had ever placed him anywhere. He is in the north courtyard now, and he is in a terrible mood about it. Troll essence went up to about three a kill, named trolls about five, and the Mountain Troll finally gives as much experience as an ordinary one.

One more thing about Baern'Dawl the Lonely. There used to be two or three of him wandering that courtyard at the same time. Very hard to maintain the brand.

And underneath all of it, the floor plans are drawn for a party dungeon called The Deep Watch: the trolls' cellars, the crypt of the household that kept the fires burning, and the deep, where an elder troll named Uthrog the Last Sentry waits in a sealed hall. Three levels, ready for review. A keep with no story is only geometry. Giving one its dead and its songs and its grudges is the oldest work we do, and I have never once grown tired of it.

Offline play, where I owe some people an explanation. Players reported offline characters missing after a recent update. Nothing in those builds moved or deleted a save. Your offline save lives in a store keyed on the company name and the product name, and we changed the company name, so saves made before that change, and saves from the original game, sit in a place the current client never thinks to look. That is the whole mystery, and it is on us for not seeing it coming.

While looking at that, we found worse. Load Game used to clear your save and then read the file into it, which means a damaged file left you with nothing. Starting a new game, deleting a character, even the settings reset, all of them could take the save with them. Every one of those paths now writes a complete backup first and refuses to go any further if it cannot. Load Game reads the file and checks it in full before it touches a single one of your characters. And if the game closes partway through a save change, the next start puts it back.

On top of that safety work there is a new window, Find My Offline Characters, right there on the main menu. It goes looking across your whole computer: this game, the original client, test builds from before the rename, the Windows build running under Wine or Steam Proton on Linux, loose save files, old backups. From there you can lift a character out of an old save into your current ones, write a single character out to a file and hand it to a friend, switch wholesale to another save, or just back up on the spot. An import that would land on top of an existing character is refused rather than merged. Gold, bank contents and houses stay with the save they came from. If you have an offline character you have not seen in years, that window is where to start looking.

A player asked the Oracle for one window that showed all the realm-wide bonuses with their timers on them, and there is now a World Events window. Message of the Day at the top. Everything running right now with the time left on it, which covers Light of the Eight and the boss celebrations, Call to Arms blessings, experience events, Tamer's Grace and the fishing bonus towns. The current Call to Arms, which opens its own window if you click it. And the events and contests scheduled for the next day. It opens once at login by default, and you can call it up from the window menu or with the events command. Behind it, game masters can now schedule one-off and repeating events with a place and a description, and the servers pick that schedule up every minute.

Call to Arms itself grew two things. Placement prizes, so the top finishers can be given rewards of their own: first place alone, or the top three each with something different, or the top ten, or any mix of ranges, either replacing the normal reward or arriving on top of it. A tie goes to whoever got there first. And contest calls, where instead of the whole realm pushing one shared total, every player counts for themselves and the first one to reach the number ends the call for everybody. If the clock runs out, whoever has the most wins. The bar in the window and the line under your compass follow the leader, and a close finish is settled by when each player made their last kill, catch or craft. Every item a Call to Arms mails out now arrives bound to the player who earned it, so it cannot be traded, mailed on, or parked on a player vendor. You can still sell it to a merchant.

And test shard restarts count down inside the game now, at ten, five, four, three, two and one minute, with the countdown only starting once the new build is already sitting on the host, so the minutes are honest. The old warning said "restart in a few minutes." That was true in the way a weather forecast is true.

Three things about combat telling you the truth. Stone Fist's stun used to appear on a creature and vanish a moment later while it carried on hitting you, every single time in the Obsidian Panopticon. Every machine in a scene replays a cast and works out who it hit, and a rune with several targets and no radius was searching from its own local copy of you instead of from the target the cast carried. The machine that owns the creature has no copy of your selection, so it found nobody, the stun never landed, and the sync took it straight back off your screen too. Ice Fist's slow and Ground Pound's stun on its second and later victims had the same problem. All fixed. Sap in a duel used to give no skill experience and print "you hit nothing," because a stun on a player waits for that player's own machine to confirm it, and a passed roll now counts as a use. Stuns, roots and mesmerizes on players were all affected the same way. And the Courage Club arena had been spawning opponents inside walls: each round's seats sit in a little vestibule behind a sliding door, and when the door's state arrived it cut a strip of unwalkable ground across the doorway that covered the exact spot an opponent was standing on. Rounds now place their fighters after the door has sealed, the doors block a narrower strip, and a creature that closes distance by blinking can only blink somewhere it could have walked to in a straight line. No more blinking through a shut door.

Two about loading and your bags, both from players on slower machines. Entering a busy player town used to give up waiting for your character after a flat ninety seconds while the town was still loading, and the loading screen had no idea the spawn had died, so it sat there about three more minutes before dropping you on the overworld. It now waits as long as the town is making progress, and when loading really has stalled it gives up in seconds. Separately, a zone-in that got cut off could leave a very large backpack partly loaded for the rest of your session: one character with around six thousand items came out the other side weighing four hundred instead of six hundred, with a reagent pack, zone scrolls and pet gear apparently gone. The server had all of it the whole time. A slow backpack now counts as progress on the loading screen, and any zone-in after an incomplete read loads the whole thing again. The backpack that showed up empty after a teleport until you flipped the filter and back is fixed too.

Voices had a good day. Every banker, guard and merchant that a player town has given its own name now says that name out loud in its usual voice, which took one thousand six hundred and sixty-eight new clips across thirty-two voices, including the fishing merchant in Haven Ridge whose silence started the whole investigation. Separately, a player in Owl's Head reported a male vendor greeting him in a woman's voice, and he was right: two voices in our catalogue are filed as male and measure higher in pitch than our female ones do. They are off thirty roles now, and the casting tool will no longer hand goblin voices or our highest male voices to ordinary townsfolk. And catchphrases can be spoken in eight more languages, in any of the one hundred and thirty-four voices, for the same price as English.

Crafters, four quick ones. Crafted instruments show their quality on the tooltip as a grade and a percent, so two lutes out of the same workshop can finally be told apart, and an exceptional instrument craft now earns the same bonus other gear does. Instrument masterworks cost maximum durability like every other masterwork, having somehow been the only ones that were free. An equipped instrument and the weapon in your hands now take turns giving their bonuses, because an enchanted instrument had been stacking its stats on top of an enchanted weapon for anybody carrying both, which Vesper spotted and reported. And the Item Sold letter from your vendor now lists the crafting failures on the thing you sold.

Faster now. Wounded creatures have stopped fleeing every fight: every animal and humanoid that could run away always did, because a nerve roll existed and nothing ever asked it. About three in ten now run when they are badly hurt and the rest fight to the end, children and fauns still always run, and wolves keep their own braver odds. The chat moderator catches insults aimed at a player even when there is no swearing in the line, which it used to wave straight through. Complaining about the game, a patch or a zone is still allowed, as is calling yourself names. Staff can set a silence or a stricter filter from the web side and it applies on that player's next line without waiting for a relog. There is a new out of character channel with its own color and its own slash command. And night-only lights on your lot now come on half a game hour before evening and go out half an hour after dawn instead of snapping at the exact moment, which Barugon asked for.

The Oracle learned treasure maps end to end, including the lemon trick for the hidden clue. She learned how to send unspent experience to another character on your account. She picked up about forty answers from questions players asked her over the weekend that she could not handle, one of them asked in Portuguese, and she will now say plainly that a thing does not exist rather than inventing it, which she had been doing for a Ring of the Mound that nobody has ever made. About four hundred lines of recent English text went into all eight languages. Teleport to Zone sorts properly by tier and by episode and remembers your choice per character. Retired player towns turn away old links instead of loading an empty shell. Astoria moved up a size tier. Ivory Stronghold finished its move to the desert beside Oasis, and the two lots left behind went home to their owner's bank with the decorations still arranged. Water sources placed on a lot give water again. Around thirty player and tester reports closed with code behind them.

And one piece of housekeeping I enjoyed. The chat moderation model moved off one machine's graphics card and back onto another, largely because under moderation load the first machine's fans were running at over twenty thousand revolutions a minute. Somewhere in a server room, something was screaming about your language.

That is Monday. Yesterday's build is out on the test shard and on Steam with its notes written. The thing I am honestly looking forward to is The Deep Watch. There is something about a sealed hall with one very old troll at the bottom of it that I have never grown out of. Go and look at the keep. Talk to Sergeant Halden. He has three men to tell you about, and he has been waiting a long time for somebody to ask.

And thanks to yesterday's work, you can now cast a line into deep water and reel in a ruler. Twelve inches of pure royalty. Good night, citizens, and good hunting.