The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A blank line stole twenty-one creature abilities
• The zombie pass arrives with a stone plague
• Pets and summons keep pace with a runner again
• A memory leak that was ending Steam Deck sessions
• Castle walls snap together and level the ground

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with an account of what thy makers were about upon Wednesday. The dead beneath Myrkur and Despair have been given teeth, a plague of stone, and pits that keep sending them back for more. A single empty line in a single file had been robbing one and twenty creature abilities of half their menace. Thy pets, who have spent a fortnight dawdling along behind thee, keep pace at a run once more. And castle walls have learned at last to join hands, and to flatten the hillside beneath them. We shall begin with the pirates, though, because the pirates were funnier.

A player went walking in the Twins Foothills and met six pirates. Rogues and Swashbucklers, every one of them carrying a Boarding Hook, every one of them pleased to use it. The hook drags you across the ground to the pirate who threw it. One pirate with one hook is a fight. Six pirates, each keeping its own cooldown, none of them comparing notes, is a sport. The hook used to drop you seven to fourteen meters away, which was comfortably inside somebody else's throwing range, so the player got hooked about every three seconds, and reported with considerable patience that they were starting to feel dizzy.

That is sorted. A hook now lands you three or four steps from the pirate who threw it, in melee, where it was always supposed to put you. Once one hook lands, nobody else in that crew can hook you again for fifteen seconds. The pirates have also stopped backing out of a swordfight to go and fetch their rope.

Now, the one I have been turning over all day. Someone was building the zombies' new petrify attack and went to borrow the shape of Deep Freeze, the ice spell that locks a target in place. They opened it up and found that Deep Freeze was doing half of what its own file says it does. The file lists two effects. The game had loaded one.

The cause was an empty line. These ability files hold a list of effects, one under the other, and in twenty-one of them a blank line had been left sitting in the middle of the list. The reader that loads them treats a blank line as the end of the list. Everything below it may as well never have been typed. And here is the part that stings. Every check we have that reads those files as plain text saw the whole list and reported all clear. Our audits were perfectly happy. The game was reading half the page.

So let me tell you what has been missing. Elemental blasts and rings had been landing about two thirds of their damage, because the close-range share of the hit sat below the line. An obsidian golem knocked out of its Earthshaker wind-up never actually fell over, because the knockdown sat below the line. The spiders' Silk Snare was not slowing your casting. Riptide Pools were doing one tick of damage out of two. The Rime Mother's war cry was mostly just a cry. All twenty-one are doing everything they were built to do now, and elemental blasts hit about half again as hard as they did on Monday. There is a new check that refuses to let a blank line sit inside one of those lists ever again, and I am told it was written in a slightly annoyed tone.

Which brings us to the zombies, and I want to be honest about how this one started. A player found the fast zombies under Myrkur and worked out that they were enormous, numerous, and almost entirely harmless, and they earned a frankly spectacular amount of adventure experience in a single day. The easy answer is to take the experience away. We did the other thing. The zombies are dangerous now, and they pay what a dangerous thing ought to pay.

The Petrified Zombies have become a proper fight. Their bite calcifies you, slowing you a little more with each stack, and at the third stack they petrify you outright and you stand there like garden statuary. A Cure Plague Potion keeps the stacks from landing at all. Mid-fight they raise a crust of stone that takes thirty percent off every hit you land, which sounds miserable until you learn the counter, and the counter is wonderfully blunt. Hit it with a mace. Hit it with a hammer. Burn it off with Sun magic. The crust cracks, and a cracked zombie takes extra damage from everything after that. When they fall they crumble into stone, so do step off the body. The fast ones tackle anyone who tries to keep their distance, and feast on whoever is already down. The experience they pay has gone up by somewhere between two and nine times, because they have earned it.

There is a whole world layer with it. Three new zombies join the horde. The Plague Bloat is swollen and bursts into bile when it dies. The Shrieker is a pale thing whose death wail sends every zombie nearby sprinting at whoever it was looking at, frenzied, unless somebody interrupts it. And the Petrified Brute is an enormous stone zombie that charges anyone standing off at range. Charnel Pits now stand in the Desolate Hills, the Spectral Foothills, Tartarus, Despair and Myrkur, and while a pit is standing, zombies that fall near it get back up as the Risen Dead. Break the pit and it answers with waves of the horde, and then with its guardian, a Charnel Glutton that grows fatter with every corpse it eats.

The counters got honest too. Sun, Life and Fire keep a zombie down for good, and Holy Water now stops absolutely anything from resurrecting itself. That was an owner call, and a good one. It used to work only on undead, and only in some places, so the Ancient dragons got up regardless and the dead in Myrkur got up every single time. Ashton in Soltown has a new quest about all of this, called They Always Come Back. The alchemists get a new potion, the Plague Ward. The whole thing is already translated into nine languages. And the boss finale behind the last chest in Myrkur and Despair is built and switched off, waiting on a two player test. It was asked for by a player on the wishlist, which I think is the best possible reason for a boss to exist.

Here is a small one with a long shadow. A couple of updates ago we fixed characters hopping and bouncing their way down stairs and hillsides. Lovely fix. Everyone liked it. The way it works is that after almost every step, the game gives you one tiny extra nudge straight downward to keep your feet on the ground.

The trouble is that when something asks the game how fast you are moving, the answer it gets back is your last move. And your last move was that tiny nudge straight down. So a player sprinting flat out across a field was reporting, in all sincerity, that they were standing perfectly still.

Your pets believed it. A following pet matches its owner's speed, and with its owner apparently motionless it fell back to its own top speed, which for a sheep is about two meters a second against your five and a half. Players on our testing Discord described summons and pets that could not keep up at all, and they were quite right. The same misreading reached the creatures chasing you and the checks for whether a pet's owner is on the move, so a great many things in the world had agreed among themselves that you were loitering. One correct reading of your travel speed now feeds all of it, and your pets are back at your heel.

Now the one that was costing people their evenings. A player on a Steam Deck lost nine sessions in six hours. Every time, the client died in the middle of a loading screen, and before one of them the quit dialog opened by itself and started the logout countdown, which is the sort of thing that makes you check behind you.

There were two causes and both are fixed. The first is that four internal lookups in the decoration system were never emptied. Every decoration from every player town you visited stayed loaded in memory until you shut the game down. You could walk through a dozen beautifully decorated towns in an evening and carry all of them with you for the rest of the night. Changing zones now releases the lot, so long sessions use markedly less memory for everybody, not only on handhelds. The second is that the texture budget on the Deck had been raised to about one and three quarter gigabytes, and we have put it back to the nine hundred megabytes it ran at in September, where it lost no detail at all. Sixteen gigabyte desktops keep the larger budget.

We also added two things that exist purely to catch the next one of these. Linux clients now report how much memory the whole machine has left, and every request to quit the game records whether it came from the window being closed, from the launcher, or from somebody choosing it in the menu. If that quit dialog opens by itself again, we will know who opened it.

Housing had an enormous day, so let me take the two best pieces of it. Castle wall sections and lot fences now join end to end while you are placing them. Two hundred and forty pieces had their joints measured onto a grid, and when you bring one near the open end of a piece already standing, it lines itself up and closes the joint exactly. Straights, corners, towers and gates close into a full loop on your lot. A test loop of fourteen pieces closed with no measurable gap at all. Castle stairs tuck up against the inside of a wall and slide along it. Hold Alt and you can go back to placing things wherever you please.

And in a player owned town, a wall or fence placed on the town's own ground now levels the ground beneath its base. If you have ever run a palisade down a hillside and watched it stand there on stilts of fresh air, you know exactly why this matters. On a test slope that drops about six and a half meters over fifty, the daylight under a palisade section went from as much as two and a third meters down to under a centimeter. Joined pieces share a height, and on steeper ground the run steps down, the way proper fortification should.

The other half of the day was a whole new house. Steamworks Manor is a steampunk home for Town, City, Keep and Castle lots, built in Blender over five rounds of review. Stone and timber, a round boiler tower under a riveted copper dome, brass stacks and steam pipes, a roof terrace with an awning and a crane, and a boiler yard with a flywheel in it. Inside there is a hall with a grand stair, a workshop, a boiler room, a parlour, a gallery, a study, a library, and a bedroom tucked up under the dome. The deed is in testers' hands for the moment.

A handful of smaller things that will improve somebody's evening. Your combat decks will stay where you put them. An online character and an offline character with the same name had been sharing one saved arrangement, so playing one of them reshuffled the other's deck order, and the deck hotkeys could disagree with the window they are meant to match. Both are fixed, though a character whose order is already scrambled will need arranging one last time. The Quest Tracker shows a task in light green the moment it is ready to hand in, at the same instant the question mark appears over the person who wants it. And your backpack can show a column for how much of each stack you keep when depositing, if you switch it on under the cog.

Wolves are worth skinning now. Wolf Ears had been dropping for weeks with nothing much to do, and they have four uses as of yesterday. Bounty masters in five towns pay a standing bounty on them once a day. They cook into a pet chew that makes your pet hit animals ten percent harder, which is the first pet food that raises damage at all. And at Tailoring one hundred they make the Pack Leader's Headdress, a silver furred wolf headdress with glowing amber eyes, the wolf's answer to the Primal Bear Headdress. There are also six new wearable hats, from a chef's toque to a horned raider helm, each fitted separately to male and female heads.

And a confession. On Monday we fixed the Disco Ball Chandelier so its spinning dots stop leaking through the floor into the room below. On Tuesday a player reported that their disco ball had no dots anywhere in the house, on any floor, and that changing the colour did nothing whatsoever. The fix needs the ball to have a working shadow, and in a busy town the game can only afford a handful of shadows, which get handed out to more important lights first. The disco ball lost that argument every single time. Two of the nearest disco balls now get a shadow reserved on top of the town's limit, which is a sentence I never expected to say out loud, and a ball hanging over open ground no longer believes there is a room below it.

Quickly, then, because sixty-one tracker issues closed yesterday and I am not going to read you all of them. A large pile of wooden structures across the island villages had been playing dirt footsteps, including a pier walkway and a flight of stairs that stayed on dirt while its twin beside it played wood. They all sound like wood now. Five doors on the Wizard Tower were opening into walls or not opening at all. An empty fish tank ornament slot has stopped introducing itself with a placeholder. Charges and body slams stop at a creature's body instead of sailing out the far side of a bear. An Ancient dragon that storms off home no longer gets its resurrection back instantly, so your group can stop watching it rise for the third time.

The Oracle learned answers to about sixty more questions, including where every boss from the bear, wolf and spider passes actually lives. Her answers got faster as well, from two point six seconds down to two point three. We tried a clever trick to make her faster still, it made her slower, and we put it back. Every player town size moved up a decoration tier, so a Holdfast gets two hundred and fifty objects and a Teralopolis gets two thousand four hundred. The Chum recipe takes every fish fillet in the game instead of ten favourites. And for a few hours on an internal test build, no creatures spawned at all, anywhere. A world of perfect peace. We fixed it before anybody could enjoy it.

What I am looking forward to is that two player test on the zombie finale, because the last chest in Myrkur has sat there for years being merely a chest, and very shortly it is going to be a mistake. Thank you all for playing, for reporting, and for the particular kind of patience that lets a person be hooked by six pirates in a row and then write it up properly.

One last thing before I go. The Petrified Zombies have a single real weakness, and I am afraid it is a dreadful one. Hit them with a hammer, and they crack up. Good night, New Britannia.