The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Creatures that could not reach what they were fighting
• A clownfish event that counted nothing, then paid
• Every mapped place in the game on one chart
• Ratings, a ladder and an academy for giant chess
• Two hundred and fifty new loading screen tips

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, come with word of what thy makers were about upon Thursday. Creatures that stood toe to toe with thee and then declared thee out of reach have been set right. A fishing call that counted not one of the fish you landed has been counted at last, and paid. Every map in the realm, town, wild and dungeon, is drawn upon one great chart. And the giant chess boards have learned to keep score. We begin with the crocodiles, for the crocodiles have earned it.

Picture a crocodile in Tanglemire. You pulled it away from the rest of its group, you fought it honestly, and halfway through the fight it stopped, looked at you standing directly on top of it, and decided you were out of reach. So it turned around and went home. Taking no damage on the way, because as far as that crocodile was concerned the fight was finished and you were a rumor. And if you did manage to kill it, the body sat there for roughly two seconds and then disappeared with your loot and your skinning inside it. Two different bugs. Same crocodile. Same bad afternoon.

The reach one is the funnier of the two, and it was not only crocodiles. Every creature in the game asks a simple question over and over during a fight. Is my target close enough to hit. For some creatures, in some situations, the answer came back no while the target was standing on their tail. Mid-fight, the creature would take that answer seriously, give up, and sprint for home with the usual immunity a creature running home gets. Your pets were doing the same arithmetic. A pet would look at the thing chewing on its owner, measure the distance to it, and politely decline. The Obsidian Panopticon was the worst place for it, and I have read the reports, and the reports were patient in a way I would not have managed.

That question gives honest answers now. Creatures fight the thing next to them, and pets attack the thing next to them. One related piece of good manners came along with it. If a creature gives up after a long chase and runs for home, your pet now stops chasing it, even if you were the one who told the pet to attack. Running a pet across two zones after something that cannot be hurt is nobody's idea of an evening.

The vanishing bodies were a separate fault with a tidy cause. Creatures live in groups, and when every creature in a group is far enough away from any player, the whole group gets put away to save the server work. That cleanup took everything in the group with it, fresh bodies included. The check that decides whether a group may be put away only looked at living creatures, so a body lying there with your loot in it never counted. The cleanup now takes only the living, and a body stays its normal time for looting and skinning. While we were in that neighbourhood, the corpses placed around the world as scenery, the ones at Blood River Massacre among them, have stopped rolling to the side and back when a scene loads. They were playing the looting animation at nobody. They lie still now, and move only when someone searches them.

And the dead got a little livelier on the test shard yesterday as well. The zombie finale under Myrkur and Despair is switched on, which means opening the treasure chest after the Liches' fight now raises the horde and whatever is waiting behind it. The water elementals got their Engulf turned on too, so the strongest of them can hold you in a Grasping Tide until a friend breaks you out. Both shipped dark last week and waited for a test. The test went well, which I enjoyed hearing and you may not.

Now the one that was our fault from end to end, and it involves thirteen clownfish. We ran a Call to Arms overnight. People went fishing. Eleven characters caught clownfish. The call counted zero of them. Not a rounding error. Zero.

Here is why, because the why is instructive. A Call to Arms is built around a goal, and the page offers a list of goal types. One asks players to gather or loot an item. Another asks them to catch a particular fish. Whoever set up that call picked the gather goal and pointed it at clownfish, which reads perfectly sensibly in English and cannot work in the game. A fish you catch does not arrive in your pack the way a lump of ore does. It arrives in a fishing bag, and the server credits a fishing bag only toward a catch-fish goal. So people fished all night, the fishing worked, the counter sat at zero, and the call ended having achieved nothing but a lot of wet boots.

Two things happened yesterday. The page will not accept that combination any more. Pick a fish under the gather goal and it switches you to catch fish with that species and tells you why, and every fish in the catalog is now marked as one, so the page can recognize it.

The second thing matters more. We went back and paid it. The eleven characters who caught clownfish while that call was running have been given the blessing the call promised, fifteen percent producer experience for a day. The two who landed two clownfish each have the Tabletop Fish Tank in their mail. That took a small tool that writes the contributions the call should have recorded and then walks them through the same reward path a successful call uses, so the mail that arrives is the real thing. If you fished for that call and got nothing, go and look in your mailbox.

Next, and this one went from a plan written at nine in the morning to live on the website before lunch. There is a world map now. Not the old community map, with all respect to it. Two hundred and forty-seven places, and a hundred and ninety-four of them are drawn from the game's own map art, straight off the sheets the game itself uses. Twenty-three more are filled in from the old community map's pictures, because the game has no sheet for them. Thirty have no map yet, and their pages at least list the ways in and out. Every place sits on its own spot on the Novia, Hidden Vale and Mistrendur overviews, and you can search across every map at once.

Then it got greedy, in the best way. Each map now shows what actually stands on it, read out of the game's own scenes. Merchants, with everything they sell. Trainers, bankers, quest givers, townsfolk, creatures with their levels, gathering nodes, the named ways in. Each behind its own switch, and the search box finds any of them by name. All four hundred and thirty-nine player-owned towns are there with their size, their residents and their claimed lots. The towns the game authored show their three thousand eight hundred lots coloured settled, free, for sale or at auction, with asking prices and current bids, and the six hundred and fifty-six player vendors standing on them by shop name. Sieges show live, with a banner naming the Cabalist and how much of his strength is left, and a red ring on the overview. The week's hot spots come off the game's own logs and rebuild every night: best hunting, best fishing, busiest places, player vendor trade. A place only appears once at least three different players are behind its number, and anyone who keeps off the leaderboards is left out. The hunting layer draws where monsters fell over the last seven days in thirty-two meter patches, and the first night came back with two thousand one hundred and sixty-four patches across a hundred and eighteen places.

And then the owner looked at it and said, and I quote, the maps are all borked. He was right. Eighty of the old hand-drawn pictures were coming out turned or mirrored. Fortus End was a quarter turn off, with all of its pins sitting in the river. The old calibration only holds if you first rotate the scene the way the old map's publisher did, and we had not. The repair is my favourite piece of work from the whole day. For each old picture, try all eight ways of turning and flipping it, lay each one over the game's own map sheet, and see which one actually lines up. For the dungeons the game never drew a sheet for, there is nothing to lay it over, so instead we line the picture up by where the scene's people and creatures stand, on the reasonable theory that townsfolk do not generally stand inside walls. A hundred and thirty-nine places now offer the switch between the current map and the hand-drawn one, and switching keeps your spot and your zoom.

One more map story, because it is a lovely little error. Our pins on the overworld used the centre of the hex you enter a place from. The game draws a town at its own marker instead. For most places those are near enough the same. For Xenos they were not, and Xenos has spent who knows how long sitting a step inland of its own castle on the coast. Fifty-three places moved to where the game says they are. A hundred and seventy-eight were already right.

Now the giant chess boards, which had an extraordinary night. Five large pieces of work landed between midnight and teatime, and I want to be clear before I describe any of it that none of this is switched on for players yet. It is built, it is tested, it is dark.

Games can be saved. Either player can offer to save and adjourn, the other agrees, and the game goes in the book. Against the computer one click does it. Later, the two of you take the stations at any giant chess board in the world, pick the game off a Resume tab, and the pieces walk back to where they stood. A game cut short because somebody had to log off is saved the same way, and the other player gets an invitation to come and finish it. There is a new Chess window listing your saved games and your recent finished ones, and any finished game copies out in standard notation for whatever chess program you like.

Rated play arrived with it. Rated games always use a clock, your rating starts at twelve hundred, and the board tells you what a win, a draw or a loss will do to it before you commit. There are limits so that two friends cannot sit and pump each other's numbers all evening, and a cooling-off period for anyone who makes a habit of abandoning rated games. A leaderboard came with it, and the titles Chess Master and Chess Virtuoso.

Then the part I keep telling people about. You can play rated games against the computer, which means we needed to know how strong each of the ten computer levels really is. So we made them play each other. About three thousand one hundred games of machine against machine, overnight, on a separate instance built for it. The first table came back embarrassing. Levels three and four were measuring stronger than level five, and level ten was five hundred and sixty-three points clear of level nine, which is less a ladder than a cliff. The levels were rebuilt and measured again, and the scale now runs from three hundred and sixty at level one to two thousand two hundred and sixty at level ten. A level only moves your rating if it is within four hundred points of you, so the lobby tells you which levels count before you sit down. Beat level ten and you carry the title Engine Slayer, which I would like on a plaque.

There is a challenge ladder as well. One rung per account, you climb by challenging someone a few rungs above you, the winner takes the loser's rung, and seasons run twelve weeks. Miss your games and you collect strikes and drift downward. The champion of a season gets a trophy in the mail and the Ladder Champion title, and a plaque beside every public board lists the top five.

And there is a Chess Academy, which is the piece I did not expect and like the most. Eleven lessons taught at the board itself, starting from the names of the squares, through how each piece moves, pawns, check, checkmate and stalemate, castling, and on into piece value, forks, pins, skewers and checkmate patterns. Thirty-nine exercises played against a tutor who takes the other seat. You earn up to three stars for each, more stars for fewer moves, and a hint will circle the piece you ought to move at a cost in stars. The board marks the squares your king may not use, and points an arrow at a piece you have left where it can be taken. Your mistakes and your hints are shown only to you, so a crowd watching sees the lesson and your stars and none of your blunders.

There are puzzles as well, runs of ten from real games in eleven themes, and anything you miss comes back after four hours, then a day, then three days, then a week, until you have it. A hundred and eighty-three stars in all. Normal games on a giant board now name the opening being played, so the board can tell you that you have just played the Sicilian and you may nod as though you meant to. The puzzles and the opening names come from the Lichess open database.

Something quieter now, and a theme worth naming, because three pieces of yesterday were the same problem. The game had been telling you things about itself that stopped being true.

Every loading screen tip was checked against the game as it actually plays today. Twenty-three were retired. One of them promised that fighting from higher ground adds weapon damage, which the game has never once done. Two described compass arrows the interface no longer draws, and were identical to each other besides. One linked a guide that has been retired. Two predated the change that lets you train a second specialization. One had unlocked deck slots backwards, which is an impressive way to be wrong. Eighteen of the twenty-three came back with corrected wording, and two hundred and fifty new tips were written on top of that, covering combat, magic, crafting, gathering, fishing, housing and lore. Forty-one of them only appear while you are loading into one particular town or dungeon.

The New Player Handbook had the same disease. Every new character was handed a book that pointed at a website guide which no longer exists, and that explained a bug reporting flow we replaced weeks ago. It is now a short book you read in the game. Six chapters, on talking to people, staying alive, skills and decks, where to find help, and the keys you actually need. No web links at all. It says plainly that the bug command has the Oracle write the report up for you. Seven languages, and the read-aloud recording matches the new text. The old Player Events book has left the starting kit, and copies people already own point at the calendar.

And the Oracle got about sixty more answers, including where to find Frogtown Market, Starfield and the Ardoris practice dummies, which mining nodes give nickel, and whether Life resistance reduces healing, which it does not. Its fishing answers were checked against the real catch tables and corrected, and some of them were wrong in ways that would cost you an evening. Time of day does matter: with most baits the largest fish bite more often in the morning and the evening. Most baits catch aquarium fish about equally often. The water listed for three places was wrong. There is a new guide on landing big fish: the best bait for each trophy, chum, and how to win the reel fight against the stubborn ones. It will also tell you how to switch the fishing mini-game off if you would rather fish quietly. The Oracle's window speaks all nine languages now, and a question asked in Japanese, Chinese, Russian or Ukrainian finds the right guide, where before most of them were matched against something unrelated. And when the Oracle files a report for you, the link under it now opens your own page of reports, with the status in plain words and any reply from the team. It used to point at the team's issue tracker, which players cannot open. So that link was, for a while, an elaborate way of saying no.

A handful of smaller things that will improve somebody's evening. Coup de Grace now glows cyan on the combat bar while your target is wounded enough for its bonus damage, matching the threshold its own tooltip quotes, and the polearm slashes that work the same way light up too. There is a switch to turn the glow off. Seeds and the Water Plants skill on the utility hotbar now show how many seeds or buckets you are carrying in the corner of the icon, the way potions always have.

Chests and containers have a Remember Size and Position box in their options. Tick it and that one container comes back where you left it, at the size you left it, instead of sharing one spot with every other chest in the world. If the banner in the middle of your screen has worn out its welcome, a switch under interface hints sends those announcements to the chat window instead. And the fishing and gathering meters have much larger text, with the fishing meter widened so its three labels still fit.

For the gardeners and the gatherers: planting beds of different sizes now slide into a corner and sit flush against both neighbours, where before the second bed would overlap and refuse to be placed. The plain pickaxe, harvesting axe, sickle and skinning knife can be masterworked at a forge up to five times, like a sword, and each tool's effects help only that tool's own gathering skill, so a masterworked sickle is a better sickle and nothing else. Those four can be salvaged for scrap as well. Air, earth and water elemental essence can finally be ordered at player vendors, which every other creature essence has allowed for ages.

Out in the world, climbable ropes, vines and roots now show a soft gold ring on the ground when you are within about twenty meters, one at the foot and one up on the deck where the rope is tied off. Decorative ropes and ladders get no ring, so the one you can climb stands apart from the ones that are only scenery. Town Criers have learned where the blessing pools are, so ask the crier in Castle Atos and you get directions to the two past the inner gate, both marked on your map, and the criers in player towns answer the same question about devotionals.

Two small joys. The dice from the DiceRoll emote now show what they rolled. The four, six, eight, twelve and twenty sided dice are rolled by the server, a number appears over each one as it lands, and everyone nearby gets a single chat line with all five results, so there is nothing left to argue about. An old seated-emote easter egg that throws the same dice is back as well, after a cleanup in September removed it by mistake. And Knightrider noticed that the Fish Finder Cloak was wearing the streamer camera emblem instead of the fishing hook it ought to have. It wears the hook now, on your back, on your wall and in the inventory icon.

Sweeping up. Seventeen tracker issues went down yesterday, and the small ones cluster the way they always do: a sash that refused to be traded, stealth breaking when you touched some perfectly innocent object, friend requests you can now have accepted for you, and a quest line that had been delivered in silence because nobody had recorded the voice for it.

Behind the curtain there was plenty more. Customer service got a support desk that can answer a question out of the game's own records, who caught what, who bought what, how many deer died, and then draft the fix, with a second check and a staff approval in front of anything that actually changes. There is a page that lets an admin close one scene, give everyone inside the usual countdown, and keep it shut until it reopens. The account move off the old website was pushed to a Monday morning window, with rehearsals for the steps that have never run end to end. Four player reports from the forums were filed properly. And yesterday's build went out to the test shard carrying The Unbinding and its Binding Stones, the copper golem called Experiment Oh One Seven Five, the zombie pass with its Charnel Pits and Ashton's quest, and castle walls that join as you place them, with a hundred and nine testing tasks marked ready the moment it landed.

The build before that one failed, by the way, and the cause was a test town that somebody had put on the build list without ever once saving it in the editor. One missing piece of data, and the whole release stopped. It is saved now.

What I am looking forward to is Cinderspire, which is a working name and still on paper. Sixteen fighters start around a three hundred foot spire of black rock standing in a lava cave. The lava rises for twelve minutes, swallowing one tier at a time, until the only dry ground left is the top floors of four towers. The last one standing takes the Obsidian Trials Medallions, and a match begins every fifteen minutes. There is already a tool that checks every spawn is the same seventeen seconds from safety and that each tier stays dry for at least a minute. I have wanted to build that room for forty years.

And one last word on those clownfish. Thirteen fish, eleven anglers, no credit at all, because the goal asked people to gather them. We hunted through the fishing code for a while before anyone thought to look at the goal itself. It was a red herring. Good night, friends, and mind the lava.