The Book of Deeds

Shroud of the Avatar already has an achievement system. A real one: a stat pipeline with server validation, a Mongo store, an unlock evaluator, a background job that pushes to Steam, and tiered kill-count achievements authored at 10 / 100 / 1,000 / 5,000. It has been running quietly since the Steam launch, and the game has never shown a player any of it. This document tours that dormant machine, surveys what the genre learned about achievements since Ultima Online, and proposes twenty-four improvements: a journal, a toast, per-creature counters, party-shared credit, a World Events channel, shard-wide celebrations, a trophy quartermaster, and a Steam catalog worth showing off. At the end sits the full first catalog: 115 achievements, 231 unlockables counting every chain tier.

Executive summary

Ultima Online invented the ingredients of the MMO achievement system in 1997: numbers you grind in silence that become titles everyone can read, deed tracks, point vendors, communal collection monuments. World of Warcraft built the roof over those ingredients in 2008: one journal, points, categories, a toast, and a retroactive grant that turned every veteran's stored history into a day-one cascade of recognition. Shroud of the Avatar, an Ultima-lineage game, then did something stranger than either: it shipped a complete, server-validated, Steam-connected achievement pipeline and never built the shelf. The one achievement the game ever authored end to end is the Frost Giant chain: kill the giant, a conversation flag fires, Wymond the explorer hands over a one-time title, and the quartermaster Hisa runs a repeatable trophy turn-in. It works today. It shipped once. It was never generalized.

This proposal finishes the building. It extends the dormant pipeline (never forks it), gives it a journal and a toast, generalizes the Wymond chain to the whole bestiary, and adds the social layer the owner asked for: party-shared boss credit, a World Events channel, and shard-wide celebration buffs when the great bosses fall. The gaps cluster in three places:

1. The tracking ceiling. Every stat must be a value in one flat 28-entry enum, six of which are test stubs. NpcKills is a single undifferentiated integer: the game cannot say what you killed. Kill credit is the killing blow only, sent by the client and trusted by the server. Cards S7, S8, S10, S16, and S21 raise this ceiling.
2. No player surface. No journal, no toast, no unlock timestamp, no history. The only consumer of the unlock evaluator is the Steam reporter, so the only place a SotA achievement has ever been visible is a Steam profile page. A player at 999 of 1,000 kills has no way to know it. Cards S2, S6, S14, S21, and S22 build the surface.
3. No social-reward loop. Unlocks grant nothing: no title, no trophy, no currency. Kill messages travel 40 meters of proximity chat and stop. Of the 219 titles in the game, exactly two are earned by defeating something. Cards S3, S11, S12, S17, S18, S19, S20, and S23 close the loop.

The machine nobody can see

Everything below the dotted line in this diagram exists and runs today. Everything above it is missing. The pipeline validates on the server (per-stat clamps, a change cap per message, a server-only edit flag), stores per account in Mongo, evaluates unlocks, and pushes them to Steam on a background job. What it lacks is any surface a player can see and any reward the game can hand over.

flowchart LR
  A["1 stat emitted\nkill, craft, discover,\nconversation verb"] --> B["2 client queue\nAchievements.cs, batch 20"]
  B --> C["3 UpdateStats op\nexisting request"]
  C --> D["4 server validation\nclamps, change cap,\nserver-only flag"]
  D --> E["5 Mongo store\naccount counter dictionary"]
  E --> F["6 unlock evaluator\nstat X reached N"]
  F --> G["7 Steam profile\ntoday's only surface"]
  E -.-> H["8 journal: missing"]
  D -.-> I["9 toast: missing"]
  F -.-> J["10 rewards: missing"]
  style H stroke:#a33d2e,stroke-width:2px
  style I stroke:#a33d2e,stroke-width:2px
  style J stroke:#a33d2e,stroke-width:2px

The prototype the game already shipped

The full loop the owner is asking for exists for exactly one boss. Walk the Frost Giant chain:

• 1A party kills the Frost Giant in Jotungrund. 200,000 experience, level 200, and invisible to the boss-name filename convention: the creature-audit bake flags 76 creatures as bosses and the game's most famous boss is not one of them. That is why S10 proposes a curated registry instead of a heuristic.
• 2The giant's dying-words script fires. It saves a knowledge flag, opens a journal entry, and awards virtue. Pure conversation data, and roughly sixty other boss conversations carry the same block sitting empty. S3 fills them. One caveat the design respects: the script fires by proximity, on every client near the corpse. Right tool for "was present", wrong tool for "landed the kill", which is S16's job.
• 3The player travels to Wymond. His first-time branch grants a one-shot reward bundle gated by the flag; the bundle carries a title item; redeeming it grants the Giant Killer title permanently and idempotently. S11 generalizes the NPC; S12 generalizes the title.
• 4Repeat kills pay differently. Wymond has a separate repeatable bundle, and the quartermaster Hisa runs a token turn-in loop. Two loops at one pair of NPCs, the exact vendor shape the genre converged on.
• 5And then nothing happens. No counter recorded which boss died. No line reached anyone outside 40 meters. The party members who did most of the damage got experience and nothing else. S16, S18, and S19 are the missing second half of a chain the game already started.

Lessons: Ultima Online to modern

UO never had an achievements panel, but it invented most of the parts: fame and karma ground silently into displayed titles, virtue meters filled by deeds, bulk order deeds turned accumulated work into banked points spent at NPCs, and community collections let a whole shard fill a museum together. What UO never built was the unifying surface. An Ultima-lineage game adding achievements is finishing what UO started, not importing a foreign idea.

What each game contributes

Ultima Online (1997). Fame and karma, virtues, bulk order deeds, community collections: the ancestral mechanics. The takeaway is that titles, deed tracks, and point vendors are native to this lineage; the shelf is the only new invention required.

World of Warcraft (2008). Patch 3.0.2 defined the canon: a journal with categories and points, a separate statistics tab recording everything whether or not it awarded anything, meta-achievements, a hidden zero-point category for legacy deeds, and a retroactive grant players accepted because the policy was legible. Statistics-first architecture meant later achievements could be authored against data already recorded, which is precisely SotA's situation. Its failures: point inflation and broadcast spam. Takeaway: record everything, award later; honor unrepeatable history at zero points; retro-grant in one server-side pass.

Guild Wars 2 (2012). Achievements as the endgame of a horizontal game: account-wide lifetime points with reward chests at fixed milestones carrying small permanent perks, and collections that turn hoarding into visible progress. Its daily treadmill was the failure, cleanly redesigned in 2023 without deleting the legacy record. Takeaway: in a game without a gear ladder, a lifetime score with milestone rewards is progression; collections serve the decorator audience SotA already has.

Final Fantasy XIV (2013). Jonathas, an old storyteller in Old Gridania, recounts your deeds and hands over what they earned; since 2017 he also converts lifetime achievement points into certificates spent on a catalog that grows every patch. Two loops at one NPC: a specific deed buys a specific trophy, and generic accumulation buys from a catalog. Takeaway: the quartermaster should run both loops from launch, with the NPC as the flavor and the menu as the mechanism.

Elder Scrolls Online (2022). Update 33 moved achievements account-wide and triggered the most contentious achievement change in genre history. The anger was not about account-wide recognition, which players wanted; it was about deleting the per-character record to get it, with a login-lazy migration that could lose data outright. Takeaway: SotA's chosen scope model, per-character stats retained forever with an account-wide unlock layer, is the exact lesson ESO paid to learn. Migrate in one server-side pass, never lazily at login.

Old School RuneScape (2015, 2021, 2023). Achievement Diaries organize deeds by region and claim from a local taskmaster who hands over a region-themed upgrading item plus permanent local perks; they push traffic through quiet content. Combat Achievements curate boss deeds by difficulty, and the 2023 rework made every task award points with tiers unlocking at thresholds any task mix can reach. Its standing failure: thresholds rise as tasks are added and earned rewards switch off until you requalify. Takeaway: points per deed, thresholds frozen at earn time; regional taskmasters are a natural later extension of the quartermaster.

EverQuest II (2009). The closest population analog: a small, elder, housing-obsessed, collection-driven community. Its achievements and shiny collections endured because the rewards are house items: things to place, display, and trade. Server-race prestige dies when population thins; display and trade do not. Its failure was bloat. Takeaway: house-placeable trophies are the default reward class for a decorating game, and curation matters more than count.

Steam, the platform (2007). An achievement bound to a progress stat shows a progress bar on the profile page; rarity percentages are queryable; hidden flags conceal spoilers; the rarest-achievement showcase turns a veteran's profile into acquisition marketing. Two hard rules: 100 achievements until the game crosses Steam's profile-features threshold, and every achievement needs achieved and unachieved icons. Most important: grants through the game-server stats interface cannot be written by any client. Takeaway: curate the flagship 100 first, expand later, and grant everything server-side.

Capability matrix

● shipped and first-class · ◔ partial, adjacent, or limited · ○ absent. [a] The full pipeline runs today, but only 28 stats exist, six of them test stubs, all account-scoped. [b] Four kill tiers and four crafting tiers are authored and live; visible only on Steam. [c] ESO shipped account-wide by deleting the per-character record, the failure SotA's model avoids. [d] Unlock state is recomputed on demand; no unlock has ever been recorded with a date. [e] The party experience loop exists and fans out per member; achievement credit was simply never inserted into it. [f] WoW broadcasts reach nearby players and the guild, never the server. [g] OSRS clan broadcasts are the genre's best-configured matrix; RS3 adds true global scope. [h] WoW's dragon-head ceremony buffed one city by proximity; the true everyone-online precedent is Guild Wars 1's Favor of the Gods. [i] 219 titles exist; two are earned by defeating something. [j] The Wymond and Hisa pair shipped the full vendor pattern for exactly one boss. [k] The Steam reporter is live, but the catalog is 14 rules and rarity is not mirrored in-game.

The twenty-four proposals

Tier 1 · Quick wins: wake the machine

Tier 2 · Core build-out

Tier 3 · Server-backed: truth, the world stage, and payouts

Considered and rejected

Two candidates were promoted out of this list on the strength of the genre research: achievement points became S23 once it was clear the quartermaster's certificate loop has nothing to convert without a total, and the legacy category became S24. The rest stay rejected.

• Meta-achievements. Completing sets of achievements for a marquee reward is real retention design, but it is pure catalog authoring on top of composite rules and earns nothing until the base catalog is broad. Revisit as data after a year of content; it needs no engineering, so it needs no card.
• Realm-first races. On a small shard they crown the same three players and then become dead UI. Races die when population thins; display and trade do not. The announcement line already delivers the social moment of a notable kill without a permanent scoreboard.
• Full retroactive reconstruction. Rebuilding per-creature history is impossible: the per-kill transaction rows expire after one hour by design. The honest policy is the locked one: already-tracked counters grant instantly, new counters start at zero, and the legacy category honors the non-reconstructable past.
• Broadcasting every unlock. Holiday achievement spam is WoW's documented failure mode. World lines are reserved for super-boss falls, celebrations, and the rare milestone; personal unlocks get the personal toast and a local chat line.
• Tradeable trophies. The community asked for the opposite in as many words: trophies should reflect earned achievement, not be buyable. Deed trophies are no-trade with no packaging escape; collection components can stay tradable in spirit.
• Live leaderboards. A web leaderboard stack already exists, including a monster table, and ranking is a different product from recognition. If wanted later it is a web feature reading the same stats, not an achievements card.

The composed surface

The danger with twenty-four proposals is twenty-four widgets. The composition rule: one journal (a character sheet tab, S6), one toast surface (the queued-message banner the game already owns, S2), one channel (World Events, S17), and one buff chip on the bar the player already reads (S19). Here is the whole system on screen at once, the moment a party's kobold hunt crosses a rung while the realm celebrates a boss fall:

Sequencing

Five phases. Each ships player-visible value on its own and unblocks the next. The infrastructure ordering inside phase three is deliberate: definitions first, then atomic writes, then the dual-write scope model, so the write path is reworked once, on its final shape, before anything multiplies concurrent writers.

flowchart TD
  S7["S7 data-driven definitions"] --> S8["S8 family counters"]
  S7 --> S13["S13 breadth stats"]
  S7 --> S23["S23 points"]
  S21["S21 atomic history"] --> S14["S14 scope model"]
  S21 --> S20["S20 reward hooks"]
  S21 --> S16["S16 party credit"]
  S21 --> S22["S22 offline catch-up"]
  S16 --> S8
  S16 --> S18["S18 announcements"]
  S10["S10 boss registry"] --> S18
  S10 --> S11["S11 quartermaster"]
  S17["S17 World Events channel"] --> S18
  S18 --> S19["S19 celebrations"]
  S20 --> S11
  S20 --> S12["S12 milestone titles"]
  S23 --> S11
  S3["S3 deed flags"] --> S11

Appendix

A1 · The first catalog: 115 achievements, 231 unlockables

The complete proposed first wave. Chains count as one row; the Tiers column carries the ladder, so the 115 rows unfold into 231 unlockables. Names and deeds are final-copy candidates and follow the plain-voice rules. The Trigger column shows the proposed stat key; rows marked exists ride a counter the game already tracks and grant retroactively at launch (13 rows). Steam marks the curated Steam subset (110, counting each chain's top tier). WE marks the deeds that post a World Events line when earned (35: every boss deed, every chain's 10,000 rung, and three marquee rarities).

Slayer chains (18)

Boss deeds (14)

Combat and PvP (8)

Crafting and professions (14)

Exploration (12)

Fishing (8)

Taming (7)

Quests, story, and virtue (10)

Social and community (9)

Housing and decoration (8)

Economy and collection (7)

Grounding notes. All 18 slayer families exist in the creature-audit bake; sibling folders are counted together (the corpion and scorpion folders hold one creature line, so they are one chain), and the bandit chain counts only outlaw-type humans. Trophy rewards map to decoration assets that already exist: the dragon trophies in nine colors plus the clockwork set, the mounted troll, the eight wyverns, Phoenix, Nightmare, the sabertooth head, and Sobek; the Spider Queen and the Spawn of Pele have no trophy asset today, which is why those two deeds pay tokens and are first in line if the art budget opens. Composite deeds (Master of the Elements, Cabal Breaker, the fishing collectors, Pilgrim) use the composite-stat support the rules system already has. Dropped for a second wave: the twelve named Ancient Undead as a defeat-all composite, Ribbit the Frog King, the seasonal Krampus, and the conversation-scene Titans, which have no clean kill signal yet.

A2 · What already exists: the zero-invention ledger

A3 · Constraints every card honors

• Extend the dormant pipeline, never fork it: the rules schema, the store, the evaluator, and the reporter stay the single source of truth.
• The flat stat enum is the ceiling until the data-driven catalog lands; no card assumes hundreds of counters before S7.
• Server-authoritative counting happens at exactly one insertion point, the party experience loop, and every new counting stat is server-only.
• Published Steam achievement names and goals are frozen forever; tier goals freeze at earn time; milestones are never revoked.
• Zero new network operations where a rail exists: chat channels, room properties, and announcement records carry the social layer.
• Deed trophies are no-trade with no packaging escape; every grant is idempotent and logged.
• Per-character records are never deleted to make account-wide recognition work; the retro grant runs as one server-side pass.
• Every player-visible string ships through the localization pattern with English fallback, and follows the plain-voice rules.

A4 · Test surface

The pure-logic pieces are all EditMode-testable without scene objects: the rules sweeps (unique names, ascending goals, canonical curves), the toast crossing detector, the journal model (grouping, rollup, progress math), the boss registry validation, the family-mapping completeness check, the points totals and threshold math, and the line formatters. Server-side, the existing rules-helper unit suite extends to string keys and merge semantics, the bot client already drives the experience-award op end to end for fan-out tests, and the write-path rework gets a concurrent-writer conservation test. The catalog validators run at export so bad data cannot reach a bake.

A5 · Sources

Genre: Ultima Online (fame and karma, bulk order deeds, community collections, Clean Up Britannia), WoW patch 3.0.2 and 5.0.4 documentation, GW2 achievement point rewards and the Wizard's Vault, FFXIV's Jonathas and achievement certificates, the ESO Update 33 account-wide migration and its feedback thread, OSRS Combat Achievements and Achievement Diaries and clan broadcast settings, RS3 server-wide announcements, EverQuest II achievements and collections, Guild Wars 1 Favor of the Gods, and the Steamworks stats and achievements documentation. Community: the wishlist threads on achievement titles and no-trade event trophies. Internal: the creature-audit bake, the dormant UserStat pipeline, the Frost Giant conversation chain, and the trophy decoration catalog; file-level anchors for every claim live in the companion planning document in the repository.

Prepared 2026-08-05 against the unity-6.5 migration branch. Companion markdown: docs/plans/2026-08-05-achievements-improvements-proposal.md. Twenty-four proposals: five quick wins, twelve core, seven server-backed, plus a first catalog of 115 achievements. Comments and votes below are read by the team.

General comments

No account needed. Every proposal above also has its own Discussion box for talking about that one alone; this thread is for the plan as a whole. Comments are plain text, held to basic decency, and may be trimmed.