The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• One world calendar, built end to end in a day
• Taming no longer cancelled by the animal biting you
• Merchants were destroying arrows at the till
• Martin of Soltown and the ladder he could not climb
• A new title screen and a straight path into the world

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what your makers were about on Friday. A single calendar is being raised for the whole of the world, with every Call to Arms, every revel, and the last fall of Vitium marked upon it. The beasts of the wild may no longer break a taming by the simple expedient of biting you. Our merchants, I am sorry to say, have been burning your arrows. And a shopkeeper in Soltown has at last remembered how to climb his own ladder.

We shall begin in Soltown, because a man pacing at the foot of a ladder is a sorry sight indeed.

Picture Martin. He keeps the general store, he sleeps in the room upstairs, and he gets up there by the shop's ladder. Since a pathing change in late September he has walked over to that ladder, asked to climb it, been told no, and then walked in a small circle at the bottom of it until the game gave up and teleported him into bed. And because being hauled about like that counts as being yanked back on a leash, and a leash cancels whatever he happens to be saying, he hung up on every customer he had on the way. For two and a half weeks, Martin has been the rudest shopkeeper in Novia, and it was entirely our doing.

The cause was wonderfully silly. When the ladder got its new pathing, the climb was wired between copies of its own top and bottom rungs, and when a townsperson arrived and asked which end was the other end, the copies did not recognise themselves. So every climb came back refused. Each copy now answers as the rung it is standing in for, which puts every townsperson in the world back on every two-way ladder in the world. Martin can go to bed. His customers can finish a sentence.

Now the big one, and it is big. We built a world calendar on Friday. Not a piece of one. The whole thing, from the rules at the bottom to the add-ons at the top, in a working day. Nineteen commits, something over sixty five thousand lines, four hundred and sixty four files.

Here is why it was needed. If you wanted to know what was happening in New Britannia this week, you had to look in about five places. Calls to Arms lived in one window. The game masters' events lived in another. Player events lived on the forums, or in Discord, or in somebody's signature. And the Cabalist Stronghold simply fell, now and again, and then nobody could tell you when. That last one caught me out, I will admit. Nothing in the game kept a stronghold fall for longer than about a week. The siege record is revived or deleted, the celebration lasts a day, and the logs roll over after six weeks. So the simple question, when did Vitium last fall, had no answer anywhere. Now every fall is written down for good, with the size of the party that brought him down. And a game master's test opening gets marked as a test so it never counts, because we do occasionally knock him over ourselves to check the door opens.

The order of the build was the clever part. The shared rules came first, before any of it was wired to a player: what a title may contain, which tags exist, who may submit, how long a series may run. The game, the dev portal and the guild website all judge an event against that same single set of rules, so there is no corner where the website says yes and the game says no. Then the game servers learned to gather it all up once a minute. Then the review page for the team. Then the public page, with month, week and agenda views in your own time zone, and buttons that push a date into your phone. Then browser reminders. Then the small parts a window is built from, including a time field that reads what people actually type. Half seven, nineteen thirty, nineteen-thirty, noon. It snaps to the quarter hour. Then thirty two little icons, each one checked for contrast against every interface skin we ship. Then the Calendar window itself. Then the writing side of it, so you can submit your own event, follow it through review, and get a banner and a chime when it is about to start. By early afternoon, add-ons could read the thing.

My favourite piece of it is the one nobody will ever see. Daylight saving time is a monster that eats a week of work if you let it near you. A weekly event here stores each of its dates as a fixed moment, rather than as the idea of Tuesday at eight, which means when the clocks move the series keeps its local time and the game never has to carry a map of the world's time zones around with it. The other piece I like: drop a date into chat and it arrives in the reader's own clock, in the reader's own language. You say Thursday at eight your time, your friend reads it in theirs, and nobody does arithmetic in the middle of a conversation.

The public page and the guild portal form stay switched off until the calendar opens, so there is nothing for you to click yet. The in-game window is built and waiting.

Next, taming, which got four fixes in one morning and now behaves like a skill rather than a riddle. Start with the smallest. The Collar Recovery tooltip was written in a way that read as though collars were never used up on low-level creatures. They are. A successful tame always spends the collar, and the tooltip now says so. Then the Small Grey Wolves, which were never tameable at all, but refused you with such a flat message that it read as a broken skill. It now tells you the creature is too young.

Then this one, which I love. Animal Charm makes a creature friendly toward you. Tame Creature is a hostile action, and hostile actions refuse a friendly target. So if you charmed an animal into adoring you, and then tried to tame it, the game refused the target and the cast bar helpfully informed you that you had less than a one percent chance. You could persuade a beast to love you, and the reward for that was being told it could never be yours. Your own charmed animals can be tamed now, and the charm holds right through the cast, since taming hurts nobody.

And the real one. Every hit you take during any spell cast rolls to see whether the cast breaks. That is a sensible rule for a fireball. Tame Creature is a cast of ten seconds or more, aimed at a wild animal, and wild animals have opinions about being tamed. So the animal fighting back cancelled very nearly every attempt. The skill, as shipped, required its target to stand quietly and consent to the procedure. Ordinary damage no longer interrupts a tame. Being stunned, knocked down, or moving yourself, still breaks it, the same as any other cast.

Now the one I owe you an apology for. Arrows are worth zero gold. A shopkeeper's buy-back price for them was therefore zero, and because it was zero, nothing in the sale path recognised them as something that could not be sold. So you could drag a stack of arrows onto the merchant's exchange list. The icon would hop back into your pack, which looked exactly like a refusal, so you would shrug and carry on. The stack was still in the sale. And when you pressed Accept, the arrows were destroyed for nothing at all. No gold, no warning, no way to know. One player's two visits to a merchant show two hundred and forty eight arrows destroyed, and then another ten.

We have been running a free arrow disposal service and charging nothing for it. Merchants now refuse anything worth zero gold. You get a line in chat saying the item cannot be sold, it stays off the exchange list, it does not appear on the Sell tab, and the server refuses such a sale as well, so there is no path left to it. Anything worth a single gold piece or more sells exactly as it always did.

Housing had a cluster of its own, and three of them were about losing track of your own belongings. The first: take a decoration out of a chest on your lot and drop it onto the ground. If that was the last item in the chest, the chest emptied, the window shut the very next frame, and the server was then asked about a chest that nobody was holding, so it answered that the item was not yours. Meanwhile the decoration you had already dropped was sitting on the lot. Refused, but placed. Stuck half way, every retry refused, until you left the area entirely. The placement now holds on to the chest until the whole thing finishes, and a drop that is still refused puts the item back in the chest it came from.

The second was worse to look at. A Property Manager restore that got refused used to leave the house drawn on the lot and an extra Empty Lot card in your storage, and if you then moved that phantom card about, the house could fall out of the list. Both cards now go back exactly where they were. And the server writes down every Property Manager refusal with the reason for it, plus an entry naming the storage that left the lot and the one that came on, so when somebody reports a missing house we can follow it instead of guessing.

The third is the sausages, and I have been waiting all episode. The Sausage, the Large Sausage and the Sausage Links are modelled hanging, as butcher's meat does. Their data said they could go on floors and on walls. So on a floor, they stood bolt upright, a monument to breakfast. And on a wall, a two metre garland of sausage links came out at you horizontally like a boom on a sailing ship. They lie flat now, front side up, and they hang flat against a wall with the front facing out, and they can be mirrored. The wall-hung ones go back to the height their owners actually hung them at, between half a metre and one and a quarter metres lower than they have been sitting since the twenty first of September. Somewhere out there is a person who has lived with a sausage obelisk in their kitchen since August and never said a word about it.

The last of the big ones is about the first ten seconds you spend with the game. The title screen was a single panel of buttons drawn right on top of the hooded Avatar in the banner art, which is a strange thing to do to a painting. Play Online now stands to his left and Play Offline to his right, each with its description underneath, in new gold lettering that grows a little when you point at it. Options and Quit moved to the top-right corner. The layout is worked out from the art itself, so the figure's edges are measured and the buttons are placed clear of him at any window size.

Found on the way, as these things are: the login backdrop has carried an instruction to shift the art up by seventy five pixels, and that instruction has never once been obeyed. A screen capture matched the art at a shift of zero. We have all been admiring a composition that was never happening.

And then the launcher learned a trick. If the last character this computer took online belongs to an account whose password you have saved, the launcher now shows a Play As button with that character's name on it. Press it and you are in the world, standing where you left off, with no title screen, no login form and no character select. New agreements and the warning about a besieged town still appear, because those you should see. It arrives with the next game build and launcher release.

A handful of smaller things now, grouped by the evening they improve rather than by the code they live in.

Your bags and your bank. There is a Restock button beside Quick Deposit now, on chests and at the bank. It pulls items out of the container until your pack holds the Keep When Depositing amount you set for each one, counting what is already tucked away in your bags, and it never touches anything you have not given an amount to. Quick Deposit has also finally reached the bank itself, on the window and on the right-click menu of a bank box, and it will fetch a stack stored at another town's bank over to this one before it tops it up. Our own notes have claimed since August that the bank already had that button. The bank did not have that button. And the little window that opens when you split a stack now tells you which item you are splitting.

The crafting table. A bag in your pack can be kept out of crafting entirely, from the bag window or its right-click menu, so the stations stop helping themselves to your reagent pouch, while your spells can still draw from it. If a recipe comes up short it tells you how many are sitting in the bags you have fenced off. Salvage no longer forces a pattern on you: one checkbox at the blacksmith, tailoring and carpentry tables keeps it to materials only, and an applied Eternal pattern still comes back either way. Rings and necklaces keep offering the Minor stat enchantments at higher skill, instead of losing them the moment the plain grade unlocks. And the tool you have equipped sits at the bottom of the station's inventory list again, rather than in the middle of your gear.

From the saddle. Light and Night Vision can be cast while mounted, and the Scroll of the Wayfinder's Eye can be read up there too. The arms play the casting motion while the legs stay in the riding pose, so you stay in the saddle and the mount keeps moving. Everything else is still refused while mounted, and the coconut halves and the umbrella remain, I am afraid, entirely non-magical. The Dismount key is now Mount and Dismount both, so on foot it calls your last mount back.

Reading a fight. The combat log writes a line when your crowd control actually lands, naming you, the skill and the creature, with its own word for a stun, a mesmerize, a root, a confusion and a knockdown. Each creature caught by an area skill gets its own line, so in a pack fight you can see what you caught. The corruption bites of the shadow spiders and the scorpion claws show a proper icon with a proper name, where they used to leave a blank slot named after the creature. Judgment, Searing Ray, Solar Flare and Rainbow Blast list their real damage range with the daylight bonus and the bonus against undead on separate lines, rather than one hopeful top number you could only reach at noon against a skeleton. And Lightning Storm's chance to stun grows with your skill and your Dexterity now, like every other Air stun, so a Grandmaster stuns on about half the strikes instead of a third.

The lightning round. The fishing rod stays in your hand between casts, so the next cast starts the moment the line is in, and you can walk to a better spot without putting it away. Salt water in the open player-versus-player zones got the catch lists it was always meant to have. Those lists were written long ago and never switched on, so they were brought up to date first, and the Sailfin Tang finally has somewhere to be.

The Oracle picked up about fifty more of this week's unanswered questions, from where to find a Young Shark to the weaknesses of the Breach Lords. She also stopped telling people that engravings add durability. They lower it. She has been confidently wrong about that for some time, which I find oddly comforting in a machine.

A hundred and twenty seven tracker items were closed on Friday, a couple of dozen of them tester verification sign-offs that had been waiting their turn. Among the rest: points of interest now show on the three-dimensional dungeon maps, pinned to the model as it turns. The gathering meter draws a third larger and has a size slider. Plunderer camps in two zones had been standing precisely where they spawned because their spawn points never handed out a patrol route, and the fix caught five other camps with the same gap. A vine in Estgard had been hanging forty centimetres above the rock it was supposed to rest on. A chandelier came down eight centimetres so it stops vanishing into ceilings. Caltrops stay on the ground for thirty seconds. Battle royale rounds no longer stall when the player running the waves loses connection. And the Steam Deck has stopped being told it has a separate six gigabyte graphics card to spend.

That was Friday. What I am looking forward to is the week the calendar opens, when you will be able to see your own event listed beside a Call to Arms and the last time Vitium fell, all on one page, all in your own time. Until then, go and find a sausage hanging the right way round on somebody's wall, and know what it cost us.

We spent a day teaching butcher's meat to lie flat, and I am delighted to report that the results are the best of the wurst. Good night, and be well.