Chris “Atos” Spears · SQUIRREL!

On Friday's stream I opened the chaos shard to everybody. Opening it meant a config edit on the server, a swapped start script, and a restart that needed exactly the right environment handed to it. I got the restart wrong live on camera, and for about twelve minutes the login server told everyone their password was bad. The passwords were fine. The server was asking the wrong authority.

The panic cleanup afterward is where the real damage hid. At some point that evening I rebooted the Windows build machine and left it sitting at its login screen. The build agent on that machine only wakes up when somebody signs in. So when the midnight build fired, half the build farm was powered on, thoroughly locked, and fast asleep. The nightly release queued behind a Windows login prompt for five hours, every status light green the entire time, and the update landed at a quarter to six in the morning. The shard itself ran fine all night and people were playing in it, which the logs eventually convinced me of, because from where I sat everything was on fire.

So, the squirrel: a real door. One command, and an actual button on the admin page, that opens or closes the shard to non-testers while everything keeps running. Nobody gets dropped, the choice survives restarts and deploys, and the shard announces the change in chat. It is already built, and the last piece rides tonight's build. Shame is a fantastic project manager.

I pulled sixty days of numbers off the live server, every skill anyone cast, and sorted the trees from the bottom. One disqualification before the results. Chaos Magic came in last, but Chaos does not count, because it is the school whose most popular spell bills you in your own health. Nobody holds it against the tree with the poisonous sap that there are no picnics under it.

Which makes the Shield tree the least popular tree in the entire game. Congratulations. Six skills, 80,008 casts in sixty days, out of 14.8 million total, which is a little over half of one percent. The whole school gets pressed about 1,333 times a day across the entire live server, roughly what one archer manages before lunch. And this is the school for the item half the game is holding in its off hand. Shields are on every other arm in New Britannia and the buttons that go with them might as well be painted on.

Now, to the die hards. Seventy-nine people in the history of the game have learned the Shield specialization, 36 of them got it to 80, and 24 of you have logged in during the past year. I want to congratulate each of you on the courage it takes to look at twenty other trees and say no, the one with Bolster Balance in it. Testudo, the group formation skill, was cast 2,321 times by 16 people, so the Shield community can field exactly one testudo if everybody shows up. Dig In was pressed 2,633 times by 23 people, and I choose to believe every one of those was a considered tactical decision and none of them was a misclick on the way to Deflect. At these numbers you qualify as a support group, and this card can be the meeting.

Second and third place go to Sun and Water, the two things every great beach trip needs and, on the evidence, two things a fight can do without. Sun managed 127,171 casts, and 57,624 of those were Light. The torch. The spell you cast so you can see the dungeon you are about to lose in. Take the flashlight out and Sun drops to 69,547, and Shield gets its trophy taken away. The next most popular Sun spell is Searing Ray, so the school's total contribution to combat is a lamp and a sunburn.

Water did a little better at 144,260 casts, and 55,800 of those were Douse, the spell that puts out fires. The busiest Water mage in the game is a janitor following the Fire mages around with a bucket. After that it is Soothing Rain. A lamp, a sunburn, a bucket and a light drizzle. That is a weather forecast. It is a lovely afternoon at the beach and it is doing absolutely nothing to the lich.

None of this is on the players. When a school with a summoned phoenix in it only stays ahead of Dig In because of a flashlight, the phoenix has some questions to answer, and those are exactly the questions the balance pass is for. If you main any of these three, the discussion box is right there. Tell me what would get you to press the button. The 16 testudo people especially. I know you are organized.

A video went around this week of a player on the chaos shard fighting with lightning, and I want to be honest about the scale of what I watched. Thor looks like a kid shuffling across the carpet in wool socks waiting to zap his sister. That was not that. That was a municipal utility.

Here is the embarrassing part. Almost none of it came from a buff. It came from bug fixes. Discharge was supposed to strip Air resistance for thirty seconds and had been giving up after about two, so for years every bolt that followed it was landing against resistance that should have already been gone. Fix that one line and the whole school stands up.

Which brings me to the confession. In the old days, when a skill did not do what the design said, we did not always fix the skill. We turned knobs until the number on the screen looked right. Ten years of that leaves you with every dial at eleven and a stack of bugs quietly holding them there. Then the tracker gave up 115 bugs in one overnight pass, the props came out, and the dials are still at eleven.

So yes, I am fixing it, and no, none of this surprises me. I also have the elves re-reading every fix from the last two days, hunting for the other spots where the crutch came out and the number never came down. If your build suddenly feels illegal, enjoy the week and then tell me about it, because I am reading the reports and the eleven is coming off the dial.

Results are in from the nepotism contest, and I have to report a design flaw in my own prize table. I set up two awards for two different people. Most wins by a new player went to Sammegarian. Longest survival by a new player also went to Sammegarian. I read the board a second time hoping the other column would say a different name, and it did not. Congratulations, and thank you for making my accounting somebody else's problem.

Then it got worse for me. Sammegarian turned down the t-shirt. Passed on the object that costs me money and shows up at your actual house, and asked for the tester spot instead, because the goal was to play. I wrote a whole paragraph last week about how one of these prizes is an object and the other one is chores, and I said I knew exactly which one you would all fight over. I was being funny. Nobody told the winner.

So I had a prize with nowhere to go, which is the best problem this contest could have handed me. Wishdragon and Mondravis both climbed, both put real names on the board instead of quietly disappearing into guest rounds, and both are getting a guaranteed tester spot on the chaos shard as well. Three winners out of a two winner contest. Claim yours in the discussion below with your climber name and I will get you set up.

Now the part I actually care about. Several of you told my daughter her game was strangely addictive, and a few of you filled in her feedback form with real notes on what to improve. She read every one of them. She is at her computer coding those changes in while I write this. I have spent years explaining to people why player feedback is worth collecting, and I have never made that case half as well as a stranger on the internet telling a kid that her game kept them up too late. Thank you, from the dad half of this operation.

This page owes you a squirrel joke, and today it owes you a themed one. A squirrel gets called into a performance review. The manager says we need to talk about the hoarding. The squirrel says it is not hoarding, it is a long term investment strategy, and it has outperformed the acorn market four years running.

Full disclosure up front. My daughter made a game. It is called Corporate Ladder, it runs in your browser, and I would like her player numbers to go up, because before I am a game director I am a dad, and specifically a dad with access to a large audience. Am I leveraging a community that trusts me in order to make my kid's day? Yes. Openly. The game is about clawing your way up over the bodies of your coworkers, so I am calling this a themed promotion.

The game itself: the ladders scroll down, the rungs break under you, everyone is wearing a tie, and the last climber standing wins. There are fireballs, homing robots, bombs, and an HR department that holds votes about which of you gets blackmailed next. I have lost to it more times than I am willing to put in writing on a page my players read.

The contest. Tomorrow, Friday August 15, at noon Central, I am reading the world leaderboard, and two new players are winning prizes. One goes to the most wins by a new player, the other to the longest survival by a new player. New player means your name was not on that board before this post went up, and I saved a copy of the board before writing it, so please do not make me use it. Also a warning that matters: rounds played as a guest report nothing, so claim a name in the game or your greatness never happened.

Each winner picks one prize: a t-shirt, or a guaranteed tester spot on the chaos shard. Let us be honest about these. The shirt costs me actual money and arrives at your actual house. The tester spot is me convincing you that finding my bugs for free is an honor. One of these prizes is an object and the other one is chores, and I know exactly which one you are all going to fight over, and that is the most flattering thing about this entire community.

Winners get announced right here on this card, and you can claim yours in the discussion below with your climber name. My daughter does not read this page, which means she is about to have a mysteriously excellent Friday.

Today I get to celebrate one of gaming's oldest jokes. Out in the real world, achievement means the taxes got filed, the garage got cleaned, the degree got finished. In here, achievement means you fed a chicken until it loved you or spent a whole evening clubbing a thousand skeletons. Our industry looked at the least productive hobby ever invented and decided what it really needed was a formal system for recognizing your accomplishments. I have never stopped finding that funny, and today I intend to make it so much worse.

Later today the chaos shard should get the first real drop of the achievement system. Over two hundred achievements to start, a book you can open in game that shows every deed you have earned and all the ones you are still circling, and titles to wear over your head so strangers can see exactly what you have been doing instead of the dishes.

And the list of what comes next is already long. Server-wide leaderboards, trophies you can display, and more behind those. If we are all going to spend our evenings achieving nothing, we might as well keep score. The full plan is on the Book of Deeds page if you want to vote on what lands next.

Somewhere in the old rulebook it says that changing your mind should cost you something. Set a skill to unlearning and half the experience it drained was destroyed on the way out. That idea came from an era of game design that also thought a night of bad luck should undo a week of play, and I have never been able to explain it to a new player without hearing how it sounds.

What made it worse is where it ended up. The reliable way to avoid the loss was to buy the item that skipped it, so a rule about the cost of changing your mind turned into a thing you paid coin of the obsidian to get out of. I do not want that trade in the game.

So it is gone. Untraining returns every point of experience it drains, in every school. The scrolls stay for anyone who wants the instant version, because paying for speed is fine, but from here on no untraining destroys experience.

Forty-five days. Roughly a hundred changes a day landing on the chaos shard. This morning the universe looked at those numbers and scheduled a multi-hour power outage for my entire block, which I choose to read as the grid tapping out before I did. So today started late, and for a few hours the squirrels ran completely unsupervised.

Fear not though. The lights are back on, and the timing is almost suspicious, because the age of chaos is now shifting toward the age of balance. After a month and a half of changing everything at full speed, the next stretch is about weighing what all of that actually did to the game and tuning it until the scales sit level. The chaos shard keeps its name. It has earned it.

People keep asking why I have disappeared into client performance for weeks. Here is the honest answer. I want to be able to put a hundred and fifty people in one room, set off the fireworks, and have everybody still dancing instead of watching a slideshow of themselves dancing.

That is the actual goal. So I filled a castle with a hundred and fifty players to find out how far off we are, and the answer was far enough that a party that size would have arrived as a series of photographs. There is a profiler in the client now and I have been walking through the frame looking for anything that gets worse when more of you turn up. Two of the things I found got worse with the square of the crowd, which is the technical way of saying the game was charging you extra for having friends. Those two are fixed, and the script work in a hundred and fifty player frame came down by about eleven milliseconds because of it.

The fireworks are a real part of this and I am not being cute about it. Nothing in the game limits how many effects can be going at once, and a proper celebration gets to somewhere around two thousand eight hundred of them at the same time. I am putting off capping that for as long as I possibly can, because a party where the fireworks run out is not a party, it is a meeting.

I do have to warn you about one thing. PvP is going to get faster out of all this as well. So are sieges, control points, and every other occasion where a lot of people end up in one place hitting each other instead of dancing. There is sadly no way to make the game run well for a ballroom without also making it run well for a brawl, and believe me, I looked. An unavoidable side effect of the dance party work. We will all have to live with it.

Cora Cuz'avich asked for this one, and Cora was right.

Every decoration in this game is wearing a collision box several sizes too big for it. You know the feeling. You have a chair and a table and you would like the chair to be under the table, the way chairs have been going under tables for several thousand years, and the game turns the chair red and holds it a hand's width away like the two of them have had a falling out. Two crates that obviously want to touch, refusing to touch. A plant hovering politely off a wall.

So there is a Tighter Fit button in decorating now. Switch it on and whatever you are holding gets a collision 25% narrower while you are placing it. Not shorter, just narrower, so things still sit on top of each other properly. Put it down and it goes back to its normal size, so nobody walks through your furniture afterwards, and it still will not cross your property line no matter how hard you shove.

Chests, crafting stations, and planting beds do not get to play. You have to walk up to those and click them, and I would rather not ship the ability to bury your own crafting table in a wall. Everything else is fair game.

This one is a peace treaty.

Jack has had it with standing at an anvil watching a bar fill up. He wants to load the table, press the button, and go do something else. Laz went the other way entirely and was very taken with the idea of a character who never earns a single point of experience and never advances at all, ever, on purpose.

So here is the compromise that keeps both of them quiet. There is a Quick Craft checkbox on the crafting table now. Tick it and the timer goes away, the craft resolves the moment you press the button, and you gain no experience for it. Same materials, same chance of ruining the thing, same wear on your tools, same item at the end. You are paying for the speed out of your experience bar.

Jack gets to stop watching the bar. Laz gets to craft for a thousand hours and finish exactly where he started. I get to find out what this does to the economy, which is the part I am slightly nervous about, so vote away if you have opinions.

Public safety notice. If you scrolled the work log and saw the wrasse screenshots, I am sorry. That art is the original from ten years ago, posted exactly as it came back out of storage, and it is hideous.

Now that I have wiped the blood out of my eyes and can see again, I can tell you two things. One, you now know one of the reasons these things got pulled in the first place. Two, they are getting a real quality pass before any of them are released back into the wild.

For the newer players: the Cave Wrasse is not a fish. It is a weird sperm-shaped lizard thing that lives in caves and survives on dragon droppings and shed dragon skin, which tells you everything you need to know about the neighborhoods it hangs out in. I want it back, and I want it back with multiple new visuals, new abilities, and new behaviors, so you can never again assume the wiggling shape at the edge of your torch light is the harmless one.

Also a boss. Something down there has been eating dragon leftovers for a very long time, and it has been doing well on them.

This page. You are looking at it. The idea was: what if the ideas had somewhere to go that was not the middle of a sentence about server migrations. It took longer to pick the name than to build the page, and the name was never really in question.

Vote on whether this page should exist. I will keep it either way, but the buttons will make us both feel better.

What if you put dungeon room pieces inside a chest, closed the lid, and the chest assembled them into your dungeon for you. I said this out loud one day, nobody stopped me, and it is in the game right now as a test item: drop rooms in, close it, confirm, and the pieces bolt themselves onto your open doorways with a different layout on every roll. Whatever does not fit stays in the chest and tells you why.

I am telling you this so you understand the stakes. Everything else on this page is an idea exactly like that one, except nobody has stopped me yet.

An optional render mode that flattens the lighting into bands, inks the outlines, and pushes the color toward painterly, so the game you are already playing looks like the classic Ultima art I grew up staring at. Same world, same characters, different universe.

This one also escaped. It is real, it is experimental, and it is in internal testing while we decide if the art direction holds up. That is two escapes out of the first two squirrels ever posted, which statistically makes this the most dangerous page on the internet.