The Unseen Trade

Subterfuge just had its best month in years: a full balance pass, a brand-new smoke bomb skill with its own crafted reagent, a client-side stealth visibility overhaul, and a Distract that finally works. The combat math is in the best shape it has ever been. What the school still lacks is everything around the math: a skill sold by every trainer that does not exist, a poison passive whose level is read by nothing, caltrops that vanish in a frame, no locks to pick, no traps to disarm, no pockets it is legal to pick, and no way to know how hidden you are. This document surveys what the genre learned about thief gameplay, measures the tree against it, and proposes twenty-four improvements — sixteen of them pure client or data work.

Executive summary

Shroud's Subterfuge tree is a direct descendant of Ultima Online's thief: the stationary/moving stealth split is UO's Hiding and Stealth, the smoke bomb is UO Ninjitsu's smoke bomb, the poison coatings are UO's Poisoning ladder, and the backstab passives are as old as the genre. But UO's thief was never just combat math. It was a web of surrounding systems — Detect Hidden as the counter-investment, Lockpicking as a treasure profession, Remove Trap as the party moment, Stealing as an economy — and it spent twenty-five years learning which of those survive contact with an MMO population. The answer, learned the hard way through the 2003 insurance patch that killed the player-thief overnight: the PvE loops survive. The theft economies that lasted (UO's Doom stealables, WoW's junkboxes, ESO's Justice fences, OSRS's Thieving) all point the skill at NPCs and the world, not at other players' property.

SotA holds the skeleton of every ancestor system and ships almost none of the surrounding body. Measured against the genre, our gaps cluster in three places:

1. Honesty and feedback — a trainer-sold skill that does not exist, a passive that trains nothing, an item whose description is empty, and no instrument anywhere that tells a player how hidden they are. The genre's founding lesson (Thief's light gem, 1998) is that stealth is only playable when the game tells the truth about it.
2. Counterplay and AI texture — NPCs have two states, oblivious and attacking; there is no re-stealth lockout, no facing arc, no observer-side detection stat anywhere in the codebase. Stealth power balances against everyone at once instead of against an opposing investment.
3. The thief's economy — no locks to pick, no traps to disarm, a Pick Pocket that cannot fire in any scene in the game, and not one item that grants a stealth stat. The school has combat verbs but no profession.

Twenty-four proposals follow. S1–S8 are fix-first honesty work, all client or data. S9–S18 build the counterplay spine and the toolbelt, still zero server code. S19–S24 are the systems tier — lockpicking, trapped chests, the PvE pickpocket economy, world stealables, the Perception counter-stat, and server-side broadcast suppression — each labeled with its real server cost. Two community asks are answered by name, and the whole ransom question stays where it already lives, on the PvP page's S22.

Where we are today

The tree holds seventeen entries: ten actives from Distract at the root through Camouflage and Silent Movement to Sneak Attack, Sap, Pick Pocket and Opportunity Strike, six passives from Train Dexterity to the Subterfuge specialization, and one ghost. Here is the tree as the trainer sells it, annotated with what each row actually does:

• 1Pick Lock is sold and does not exist. Work-in-progress icon, a description that reads "Coming soon", a rune with zero effects, and no refund path for the XP already sunk into it. Proposals S1 and S19.
• 2Pick Pocket cannot fire. Its target model is other players, its precondition is the ransom system, and every scene in the game currently reports ransoms off. The skill casts, fails, and blames a PvP flag. Proposal S21 points it at NPCs; the ransom decision itself stays with the PvP page.
• 3Poison Weapon trains nothing. The passive gains XP every time you use a poison, and its skill level is read by no formula anywhere. Proposals S2 and S16.
• 4No feedback instrument. The game computes your stealth value, every NPC's detection radius, and every player's visibility band each frame, and shows you none of it. Proposals S5 and S6.
• 5The toolbelt is thin. Caltrops burst for one frame, the smoke bomb item has an empty description and no merchant, and not one piece of equipment in the game grants Stealth or Subterfuge Mastery. Proposals S4, S3, S14.

The machinery every proposal plugs into

One pipeline carries the whole school. A stealth rune applies a concealment effect; the effect writes the additive Stealth stat and drives the two visibility axes (a dissolve everyone sees, a per-observer perception channel); NPC aggro multiplies its detection radii by the stat; player visibility runs distance-and-angle bands through one shared perception class; and exactly one damage formula reads the stat directly. Every proposal below extends one of these nodes. None forks the pipeline — that discipline is what let August's balance wave land 21 data changes without breaking anything.

flowchart LR
  A["Stealth rune cast\nCamouflage / Silent Movement / Obfuscate"] --> B["Concealment effect\nbreak rules + grace windows"]
  B --> C["CharacterStat.Stealth\nadditive, consumers clamp"]
  C --> D["NPC detection\naggro + hearing + peripheral radii"]
  C --> E["Player visibility\ndistance + angle bands"]
  C --> F["Sneak Attack damage\nstealth term capped at 1"]
  B --> G["Visibility axes\ndissolve + per-observer channel"]
  style B stroke:#c9a55a,stroke-width:2px
  style C stroke:#c9a55a,stroke-width:2px

Built this year — credited, not re-proposed

The August wave already fixed the combat math, and nothing here re-proposes any of it: the specialization term that read the wrong school, reaction windows cut from 11 seconds to 4.5, Sneak Attack gated to melee and its stealth multiplier capped, poison durations scaling with skill and spec, faster stealth cooldowns, a data-driven Distract radius that finally reworked into a five-target alert, the brand-new Obfuscate smoke bomb with its crafted reagent, and a client-side visibility overhaul — stealthed players actually disappear now, keep their name out of chat and the PvP list, stop being barked at by NPCs, and re-stealthing drops aggro when line of sight breaks. Testers got /tweak stealth dials and a /reactions overlay to check the new windows. That work is the floor this document stands on.

Territory: the PvP page owns the ransom system and everything downstream of it (its S22); alchemy owns poison recipes, oils, and the conserve chance (its S5 and S18); the Lunar magic school owns Vanish, Shadow Form, Night Step and Cocoon of Night; the traps epic owns trap-counterplay wiring; player dungeons own decoy doors. This page links rather than claims.

Lessons: Ultima Online to modern

UO shipped the complete thief in 1997: Hiding and Stealth as separate investments, Snooping and Stealing as a two-stage crime, Lockpicking as a treasure profession, Remove Trap as the party ritual, Poisoning as a PvP terror, Detect Hidden as the counter-stat anyone could buy. It was the best emergent drama the genre ever produced, and it was slowly dismantled by its own victims: every protection layer players demanded — item insurance above all, in 2003 — drained the player-theft economy until only the PvE loops were left standing. The recovery UO chose is the single most instructive decision in the school's history: the same expansion that shipped insurance shipped the Doom stealables, rare artifacts liftable only with the Stealing skill, and the thief became a collector. Twenty years later that is still what a UO thief does.

What each game contributes

Ultima Online: the ancestry itself — and the insurance arc, the genre's clearest proof that victim-protection and player-theft are a zero-sum dial, with PvE stealables as the recovery that worked. Dark Age of Camelot: detection as a smooth opposed formula players could reason about, poison as a loadout decision, and the Vanish lesson — escape tools must lock out re-engagement or they become engage tools. WoW: the complete themepark kit, plus two twenty-year lessons: maintenance is not gameplay (poisons went crafted, to vendor, to permanent ability), and lockpicking died of supply drought, not mechanics — when content stopped placing lockboxes, "LF rogue, tips paid" disappeared. ESO: the only shipped MMO thief economy — Legerdemain ranks earned by committing crime, pickpocketing with position and witness rules and a live success readout, the bounty-fence-launder pipeline — and the Nightblade cloak's cautionary tale that binary stealth counters leave both sides feeling cheated. GW2: stealth as a resource measured in seconds, and Revealed — one tunable lockout debuff that every anti-stealth tool in the game speaks. Thief: the founding vocabulary — the light gem, tools that edit the environment instead of the target, the blackjack's unaware-only rule, and a community that ran a 25-year prestige ladder on "finish it unseen."

Capability matrix

● native · ◔ partial or third-party · ○ absent. "SotA today" = the unity-6.5 migration branch after the August 2026 Subterfuge wave. OSRS's Thieving and EQ2's trapped chests inform S20/S21 but did not earn columns.

The twenty-four proposals

Tier 1 · Fix-first — honesty and legibility, client-only

Tier 2 · Core upgrades — the counterplay spine and the toolbelt

Tier 3 · Server-backed — each carries its cost on the label

S21 · Pickpocket NPCs: the fence and the junkbox

Tier 3Size XLtheft op + DB ledger rows

Pick Pocket is a shipped skill that cannot fire in any scene in the game — its target model is players, and the ransom system that made that meaningful is disabled. Every MMO theft economy that survived is NPC-victim: OSRS's gold faucet with an attention tax, ESO's justice pipeline, WoW's junkboxes. Point the skill at NPCs: coin and flavored loot off guards and merchants, locked junkboxes that feed lockpicking, stolen-flagged goods only a fence buys, and failure meaning a stun, a fine, and a guard response. The skill revives without touching another player's property. Requested by adambomb1200 — the most-viewed unanswered Subterfuge ask on the forum.

Seen in: OSRS (stun on failure, mitigation charms, per-target lockouts); ESO Justice (bounty, fence, launder — the full fantasy shipped with NPC victims only); WoW (junkboxes feeding lockpicking and a cross-class market); UO (witness-count catch chances, quoted as history).

Pick Pocket✕

Town merchantunaware, back turned

Chance72%

Success: coins, goods, sometimes a locked junkbox.

Failure: a stun, a fine, and the guards take an interest.

Stolen goods sell only at a fence.

Implementation notes

The steal effect is the surgical site: today it docks Truth virtue and calls the ransom manager, player targets only. The NPC branch rolls server-resolved loot from NPC-class tables (guards carry keys and small valuables, merchants trade goods, commoners coin and junkboxes), shows a live success percentage on the cast — ESO proved the readout is load-bearing and must never lie — enforces a per-NPC lockout timer, and wires the existing caught-in-the-act path to a stun plus guard aggro plus a gold fine. The yield must be server-granted, not client-asserted: a theft operation is a new request group, which means the manual receive-dispatch wiring into the op router and registration in both server build files — named here because skipping either ships a silent failure. Stolen-flagged items sell only at an outlaw fence with a daily limit and a laundering cut as the inflation valve; the flag and the counter are database shape changes with their migrations-ledger entries. Junkboxes are locked containers only S19 opens — the two economies feed each other. The behind-arc-plus-hidden gate reuses the exact distance-and-angle math the stealth work shipped, and the misleading PvP-flag failure message dies in passing.

client Lserver XL: theft op, fence, tables + 2 DB ledger rowsperf nonetests loot rolls, lockouts, fence limits

Considered and rejected

• Re-enabling ransoms / PvP player theft. Owned outright by the PvP page's S22, and the genre verdict is unanimous: UO's insurance gutted it, ESO cut player enforcers before launch, New World cut its whole criminal system. Every victim-protection layer drained player-theft everywhere it was tried. Not one point of this page re-litigates it.
• PvP pickpocket disabling deck glyphs (requested by John Markus). Evaluated honestly and shelved: Pick Pocket cannot fire anywhere today, so the interaction has no substrate until the PvP page's ransom work lands — and glyph-disable would make combat integrity depend on client-asserted theft. If ransoms return, this is the first PvP-theft interaction worth revisiting, and the credit stands.
• Bolting a detection stat into the existing perception class. Its header forbids exactly that; S23 is the honest net-new version built beside it.
• A full server-authoritative stealth rewrite. The server holds no live player positions (roughly two seconds stale) and zero stealth logic; knife-range server adjudication is not possible on this architecture. S24's broadcast suppression is the achievable half.
• A skeleton key or unbreakable lockpick. An infinite-use tool deletes the consumable economy permanently; Skyrim players never gave theirs back. S19 ships breakable picks only, forever.
• A long lockpicking minigame. The genre's pacing ceiling is about ten seconds with a stat-check bypass — ESO shipped force-lock as its own admission. The five-hundredth lock must be instant.
• A literal light gem. SotA's detection has no light model; an instrument keyed to nothing lies, and a lying instrument is worse than none. S6 drives from the real inputs instead.
• Body carrying after Sap. No server positions, and evidence management is out of MMO scope; S13's "the NPC does not remember" rule is the MMO-shaped substitute.
• Player-enforcer bounty hunting of thieves. ESO designed it and cut it as a griefing engine; nobody has asked for it back in a decade. Consequence stays NPC-side.
• New poison recipes and conserve mechanics on this page. Alchemy territory — its S5 (conserve by skill, credited to Ysold there) and S18 (weapon oils). S16 ships the slot rule and defers every recipe.

One night's work

The danger with twenty-four proposals is a game with twenty-four widgets. The composition rule for this page: one instrument (the stealth eye, S6, which also carries Revealed and the suspicion states), one toolbelt (the consumables: caltrops, smoke bomb, Smoke Pot, noisemaker, coatings, lockpicks — all items, no new UI), and one tree (the same seventeen slots, with the dead ones alive). Everything else is a rule the S5 table publishes. Here is the whole loop in a single run — approach, entry, prize, exit — with the proposal that carries each beat:

• 1The eye (S6) is the only new HUD element on this page; suspicion tells (S9) and Revealed (S11) render through it and the existing overhead/debuff systems.
• 2Every tool on the belt is an item using shipped machinery: four-asset consumables and effect fields that already run 41 variants.
• 3The tree keeps its seventeen slots. Pick Lock and Pick Pocket come alive; detect and disarm fill the dead space beside them; Perception (S23) is the one genuinely new node, and it exists for the people hunting thieves.

Sequencing

flowchart TD
  S5["S5 break rules"] --> S6["S6 stealth eye"]
  S9["S9 suspicion ladder"] --> S12["S12 noisemaker"]
  S9 --> S13["S13 unaware Sap"]
  S9 --> S17["S17 ghost runs"]
  S11["S11 Revealed"] --> S15["S15 Smoke Pot"]
  S11 --> S18["S18 quarry mark"]
  S11 --> S23["S23 Perception + flare"]
  S2["S2 Poison Weapon"] --> S16["S16 second coat"]
  S1["S1 trainer honesty"] --> S19["S19 lockpicking"]
  S19 --> S20["S20 trapped chests"]
  S19 --> S21["S21 pickpocket NPCs"]
  S13 --> S21
  S21 --> S22["S22 stealables"]
  TE["Traps epic"] -.-> S20
  PVP["PvP page S22: ransoms"] -.-> RJ["Rejected: PvP deck-glyph theft"]
  AL["Alchemy page S5/S18"] -.-> S16

Appendix

A1 · What each tier actually costs

A2 · Constraints every proposal honors

• No observer-side detection exists; only S23 creates one, flagged as net-new, built beside the perception class whose header forbids bolting it in.
• The server holds no live player positions and no stealth logic; nothing here pretends otherwise, and S24 suppresses only at ranges where two-second staleness cannot matter.
• The Stealth stat is additive and unclamped; every new expression that reads it clamps by ternary, exactly as the August Sneak Attack cap does.
• The effect-type enum serializes by value and is append-only; nothing here inserts, and S11 needs no new type at all.
• Reagent-gated skills stay out of the rune classifier that feeds NPC stealth-skill lists; S15 proves its consumable stays clean before it ships.
• New consumables are data-only four-asset chains; the only genuinely code-shaped builds are the ones labeled that way (S19, S20, S21, S23, S24).
• Territory is honored: ransoms with PvP, recipes with alchemy, Lunar's stealth suite untouched, trap wiring with the traps epic.
• Every sample string in the mockups follows the player-facing voice rules and can be lifted verbatim.

A3 · Test surface

The pure-logic pieces — S6's state thresholds, S9's suspicion machine, S10's arc multipliers, S11's lockout rules, S13's unaware token and diminishing returns, S18's distance scaling, S19's pick-versus-tier odds, S21's loot rolls and lockouts, S23's band widening — are all EditMode-testable with no scene objects, extending the SubterfugeBalanceTests and StealthPerceptionTests suites the August wave established. The S5 audit doubles as a source-scan test pinning the break rules so they cannot drift silently.

A4 · Selected sources

UO: UOGuide (Hiding, Stealth, Detect Hidden, Snooping, Stealing, Lockpicking, Remove Trap, Poisoning, Ninjitsu, Smoke Bomb, Item Insurance, Doom stealables), uo.com wiki, UO Outlands thieves-overhaul notes. DAoC: disorder.dk stealth mechanics, Crows of Winter detection guide, apothecary poison reference, 1.109/1.121 patch notes. WoW: Warcraft Wiki (Poisons, Pick Lock, Sap, Vanish, Distract, Stealth mechanic), Wowhead junkbox and lockpicking guides. ESO: UESP (Justice, Legerdemain, Pickpocket, Lockpicking), ESO-Hub, the cloak-counterplay forum record. GW2: official wiki (Stealth, Revealed, Initiative, Deadeye). Thief: Game Developer's postmortems and light-gem histories, TTLG ghosting rulesets. OSRS: the wiki's Thieving, Blackjack and Stall pages. Also: Skyrim/Oblivion lockpicking pages, MGS enemy-status references, PoE Smoke Mine, Albion invisibility potions, Sea of Thieves and EVE Crimewatch consequence design. Full URL list in the research notes accompanying this proposal.

Prepared 2026-08-13 against the unity-6.5 migration branch, three days after the August Subterfuge balance wave it builds on. Companion markdown: docs/plans/2026-08-13-subterfuge-improvements-proposal.md. Twenty-four proposals: eighteen client or data only, six server-backed, each grounded in the classes and assets that would carry it.

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.