The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Water ship houses set sail from their lots
• Boats take hull damage and sink with their crew
• Life Warding retired after it cut incoming heals
• Cinderspire learns to settle a fair finale
• Basement doors finally reach the floor
• Sunless Barrens stops drawing rock through rock

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British speaking, with word of what thy makers were about upon Saturday. Thy house may now put out to sea with all thy furniture still aboard. A ship that takes enough punishment will go to the bottom and take her crew down with her. A ward thou hast trained for thy protection has been spoiling every heal thou hast received, and it is undone. The lava arena has learned how to settle a tie. And fifty-seven more waters are charted and open to sail. We begin, though, with a man standing in the middle of the ocean, on foot, waiting for a boat that was never going to come.

Picture it. You walk down to the harbour at Central Brittany, you head out onto the open sea, the loading screen does its work, and you arrive. On foot. Standing on the shore of the ocean itself, which is a place that really ought not to have a shore. So you wait for your ship. And in the worst version of this, no ship ever came for you at all, and there you stayed, like a man who has turned up to a regatta in walking boots. That one is fixed. You now arrive already at the wheel, before the sea is even drawn. If the game ever does find you standing out there on foot, a ship comes and collects you, and if no ship can reach you, you get set back down safely on the shore at Central Brittany.

And that is the modest half of the sea news. Here is the other half. Your house can sail. If you own one of the nine water ship houses, or you are a co-owner of one, you walk up to the lot sign and you put out to sea. The house leaves its lot, and the ship is sitting there in the water beside it with every single decoration still aboard, exactly where you left it. Your chests work. Your crafting stations work. Your books are still readable. You can take the whole thing out around your town's harbour with your furniture rattling along behind you. You cannot place or move or pick up anything while she is under way, which I think is the correct call, because there is no version of redecorating at sea that ends well.

When you tie up back at your berth, the helmsman is offered the chance to moor her on the lot again, and she settles in where she was. Sail right out of town and the house stays at home where it is safe, while you and your crew carry on in a bare copy of the ship, which can put into any other charted harbour. That copy clears itself away about fifteen minutes after the owners and the helmsman have gone. Every town with water lots was given a harbour chart for this, player owned towns included. Shallow harbours like Kingsport and Solania will float the houseboat happily, but the big galleons draw too much water, so they stay outside.

Now the part I have been waiting to tell you. Boats take damage, and boats sink. Lose a quarter of the hull and she slows down and smoke starts coming off the deck. Lose three quarters and she is slower still, sitting low in the water, your crew pumping over the sides, and she leaks until you get her tied up in a slip. Take her to nothing and she stops answering the wheel altogether, loses way over a few seconds, and goes down over about a minute with everybody aboard still standing on her deck. Then the water has you, and you swim or you dive. Everyone aboard gets a line in chat for every hit with the hull left in percent, and there is a hull bar above the speed readout at the helm, which I suspect will become the most stared at bar in the game.

If the boat you sank belonged to the harbour rather than to a player, she reappears at her mooring five minutes later, good as new, which is a kindness to the harbour and a small insult to your gunnery. The last two water ship homes learned to sail as well, the Huge and the Giant Pirate Galleons, seventy-three and ninety-four metres of ship, with their own decks, rope ladders up their sides, and the house's own ship's wheel for a helm. Both lie at anchor outside Smokehaven's harbour, one either side of the mouth, and they weigh anchor when somebody sails them off. The Giant turns so slowly that the sea gates had to give her extra time to come about, which is the most flattering bug report a ship has ever received.

Underneath all of that, fifty-seven more maps were given sea charts, so boats can actually sail them. Port Harmony, Vertas, Blood River and Dysborg among them. Ten maps have water too shallow, or no floor under the water at all, and those stay dry along with the three overworld maps. There is now a check that fails the build if somebody adds a map with an ocean on it and forgets to chart it. One more thing. The map sheet for the open sea was redrawn without town markers, which had been showing as red circles along every coast and, charmingly, scattered out in open water. Nothing is out there. Sail with confidence. All of the sinking and all of the house sailing is on the test servers for now, and switched off everywhere else.

Right. Let me tell you about Life Warding, because this one is embarrassing and I would rather you heard it from me. Life Warding is a defensive skill. You trained it to resist Life damage. There is no Life damage in this game. Nothing in New Britannia deals any of it to a player. So the skill was already doing nothing whatsoever for you. But it also lowered your Life attunement, and your Life attunement is what every Life heal you receive is measured against.

So picture a healer in your party doing everything right, and the better you had trained your protection, the less of their heal was landing on you. Magic Warding carried the same penalty as part of its package. That is all gone now. Life Warding is retired outright, and every character who trained it gets the whole of that experience back on their next login. Magic Warding keeps its real job and drops the Life penalty, so heals on a warded fighter stop being trimmed. The two ward gems that fed the skill no longer drop and no longer craft, and the ones already sitting in your bank still fracture and sell as they always did.

In the same spirit, the balance team built something I like very much. It is an audit that takes every player skill in the game, looks at what the skill costs you in focus, asks what you get back for that focus, and then compares it against the other skills doing the same job. First run, and it found something structural. There are sixty-eight skills with a flat focus cost that never moves as you train. Your focus pool does move. So at skill level one hundred and twenty, those sixty-eight skills are taking less than half the share of your pool that they took at level sixty. They get cheaper the stronger you get, without anyone ever deciding that. Skills whose cost scales with training hold their share exactly. The audit also called out Fire Arrow as underpriced for the damage it does, and Shooting Star and Death Field as overpriced. No costs have changed yet. The measuring comes first, then the argument, then the change.

A few things did change in combat. Purify comes back in fifteen seconds instead of thirty, and the Bucket of Water takes ten instead of five, so dealing with a fire is a decision again rather than a reflex for the bucket. Opportunity Strike no longer burns the global cooldown when you use it inside the window right after a successful dodge, so your next skill is ready at once, and the skill card says so. And the weapon swing tooltips finally tell you the truth. Opportunity Strike used to report one hundred and forty-five percent effective, which is not a number you can do anything with, and Shield Bash, Shield Smash and Flaming Bash never showed their hit at all. Now they all show what the swing is worth with the weapon you are actually holding.

Over in Cinderspire, the lava arena, the polish rounds have been coming thick and fast, and my favourite fix of the whole day is this one. Until Saturday you could enter the arena on two of your own characters and the match would count that as a contest. You could win a tournament by beating yourself. A very pure kind of victory, and absolutely not what we are going for. One account is now one contestant.

The rest of it is the slow work of making a fight feel fair. The medallion tier only counts fighters who stayed in until the lava or an opponent took them. A brief drop in connection no longer ends your match. A finale up on the roof always resolves, and if two fighters are still standing when the clock runs out, the one with more health left takes it. The countdown now counts down to the flooding of the level you are actually standing on, flood warnings go only to the people they concern, and you get a thirty second warning when your own floor is next in line. If you are up on the start platform but not standing on a pad, somebody finally tells you to step on one. And when the lava does take you, the screen reads as a deep crimson rather than the blinding red it used to be, which was accurate and rather hostile as a parting impression.

And here is the clever one. The arena is built out of rock columns and terraces, and rock built out of pieces has seams, and seams have holes you can see straight through if you happen to stand in exactly the wrong place. Finding those on foot is hopeless. So the team wrote a sweep that renders the entire arena from about nine hundred separate viewpoints and reports every place daylight gets through. Neighbouring cliff columns now share a single cap edge, every recess got a solid back wall, terrace tops overlap their own edges, and the pillar tops are one flush surface, because the old tiling left thin dark cracks between the tiles. Nine hundred viewpoints. No human was ever going to check that by hand.

Now, housing, where I have four fixes to confess to and they are all the same shape. If you have ever tried to stand a basement door or a dungeon entrance against a wall in the Shogun Five-Story Palace and watched it refuse to come down to the floor, that was real. The house only accepted wall decorations from the top of the wooden wainscot upward, so your cellar door sat three quarters of a metre up the wall like a hatch on a submarine. Against the outer walls it would not go low at all, and the game told you the item could not sit on that surface, which was true in the sense that there was no surface there to sit on.

All of it now takes decorations down to the floor. Inside and outside the palace, on the cabin decks of both Shogun ships, where doors had been stopping a fifth of a metre up and as much as half a metre up in the stern cabins, and in both Obsidian Towers, where the stone skirting had been holding doors a hand's width off the ground. And in the Viking Great Hall, the placement surface on the ground floor sat six and a half centimetres above the actual floorboards, so every item anyone had ever set down in that hall was floating about eight centimetres in the air. If you own one, pick those items up and put them down again and they will settle. A sweep of the rest of the house models found around twenty more with the same gap, somewhere between two and seven centimetres, and those are queued as their own job.

There is a lovely small thing tucked inside that story. To check the Shogun houses properly, somebody needed to survey nine of them and show the results to the rest of the team. So the tracker tool was taught to attach files to an issue in the same post as the comment, with the images shown inline in the note. Built in the morning, and used that same afternoon to post a nine house wall survey. That is the kind of day I enjoy.

Performance next, and the Sunless Barrens had a strange one. A player fishing the lava down there measured sixty-two frames a second while facing a wall, and twenty-three frames facing out across the lava. Same spot, same machine. You just turned around. What was happening is that the mesas sitting behind the canyon and the cave walls were still being drawn in full, through solid rock, because the zone was being generous about what might possibly be visible. It now stops drawing small distant rock pieces much sooner. The worst views came down from about seventeen and a half milliseconds of graphics time to fourteen, and from twenty-three to just under eighteen, with nothing different to see on screen.

Two more fixes to the way the game starts. The grapnel haul meter had been loading its painted frame during boot, where its seven textures each had to queue behind the background loading, and it was the single most common startup stall warning on the last test build. Four and a half thousand of them in ten hours. It now paints itself the first time you open it, which is the only moment anybody needs it. Learned recipes were doing something similar behind the title screen and now load in the background as well. And spell effects that could be left switched off after their first use, if you happened to look away while they faded, now finish properly and come back every time. Wave of Sorrows was one of those. The shadow spiders' dark area attack was another, and I am told nobody missed it.

Then there is the one that stopped everybody's day. The editor test suite grew big enough to hit a hard limit in the C sharp compiler on how much plain text a single compiled chunk of a project is allowed to hold. Sixteen megabytes. Cross it and nothing compiles for anybody, which is a wonderful reward for the sin of writing too many tests. A thousand and thirty-two of those tests never touch game code at all, so they moved into a compiled chunk of their own, and the main one dropped from ninety-nine point seven percent of that limit to eighty-four and a half. There is a report now that shows how close each one is getting, so the next time we walk toward that wall we will see it coming.

Smaller things that will improve somebody's evening. Anglers first. All eight of the new fish can be placed as decorations. Every one of them, from the Humboldt Squid to the Great White, reached down below the floor when you tried to set it anywhere, so the placement marker stayed stubbornly red on every surface in the world. The big Tiger Sharks had the same trouble. Both shark trophies on stands now have collision where the shark actually is. The fish in the catch zone on the themed fishing meter had been vanishing on Windows whenever it swam downward, because it had no artwork for facing that way, and now it has. Chum throws as far as you can cast your line, which grows with your Fishing skill, where it used to stop at fifteen metres for everybody. And the Fish and Anglers leaderboards count all eight new species, including the catches you have already made.

Three things about your hands and your inventory. Dragging several selected stacks onto a stack of the same item no longer gives up partway through when the total would go past the stack limit. What fits merges, and the remainder lands beside it as its own stack. Picking a different recipe at a crafting station no longer keeps the quantity from the recipe before it, so a recipe you have never made at that station starts at one, while the ones you have made come back at the amount you last used. And the Reshape Two-Handed Bludgeon recipe, which had been asking you for Two-Handed Blugeon Equipment since the day it was written, can now spell its own name. The translations had it right the whole time, which is a little humbling.

A few corners of the world got straightened out too. The practice dummy in Westend that kept sinking into the shore had a spawn point snapped to an old navigation layer most of a metre under the hillside, which dropped the dummy through the ground and into the water below. A spider egg clutch in the Warrens in Malice had its four spider spots bunched into two metres of narrow tunnel floor, so two spiders could spawn inside one another, which I imagine was unpleasant for both of them. Those are spread along the tunnel now. The grey wolves and brown bears in Highvale Outskirts can be tamed again, after every single one of them had been refusing on the grounds that it was part of a quest. And a besieging Cabalist at Fortus End had been turning up instantly at the shrine instead of walking in, because the town exit he had been given sat on a scrap of ground three triangles wide with no path off it.

On the business side of things, the first weekly development update went up on the Shroud of the Avatar news page on Steam, built out of this work log's own daily headlines with a link back here for the full detail. The new website answers at a second address of its own now, shroud of the avatar dot online, while the dot com transfer is pending, and every address you already use keeps working exactly as it did. Opening the Desk while signed out shows you what the Desk actually holds, instead of dropping you onto a sign-in form and wishing you luck. Wall Chess joined the Desk's games, where you race your king across the board while walls rise and crumble between the squares and the Warden works to shut your path down. It is built. It is not switched on yet. And Steam Wallet purchases for Crowns and for Episode Two early access are built and waiting on paperwork.

Lightning round. Fourteen reported bugs went down on the tracker on Saturday, along with a good heap of tasks, most of them the small indignities of a large game. An achievement window that showed the same list on two different tabs. Two body markings that shared one translated word in Spanish and Japanese, so one of them could not be chosen at all. Characters have stopped sliding off the edges of crafting stations and chests. Nine songs on the Royal Jukebox and one episode of this very show had never become playable on the radio, because the step that measures how loud a track is had been stalling on them, about seven hundred times since the twenty-fifth of October. Fast high-level harvesting had been running into an anti-cheat ceiling partway through a long session and stopping your producer experience without a word, so the ceiling went up.

The Oracle learned another dozen answers, among them whether you can be in more than one guild, which is one guild at a time, shared across every character on your account. Translations in all nine languages caught up with the new fish, the new houses, the new combination runes and the reworded skills, and a review pass corrected two thousand and ninety-eight lines along the way. The Smokehaven chandler has started selling a cannonball recipe and the molds for it, and the mold is a light single use item now, so a stack of ninety of them no longer weighs a hundred and eighty. The build machine for the Mac moved to a dedicated little box, where its very first build sat and did nothing for eighteen hours because the machine was parked at its login screen, which was a hard way to learn a lesson, and it now fails in the first minute with the answer written out. And two players who salvaged a subscriber reward helm before it was giving the pattern back got a new one in the mail, because that one was ours.

That is Saturday in New Britannia. What I am looking forward to is the first time somebody's house sails out of a harbour with their entire dining room aboard and a chest of armour sliding gently to port. Take your ships out onto the water, find the places where they still misbehave, and tell us. We will keep plugging the holes, in the rock and in the hull.

I did ask the team how work on the sinking feature was coming along. They told me it was going down well. Goodnight, citizens, and thank thee for thy company.