Chris “Atos” Spears · Work Log

The New Britannia Herald

The storm came off its leash and took the whole week with it

15 minTranscriptPodcast

Headlines

• Bug pass. Closed 115 reported bugs from the tracker overnight.
• Quick Deposit: one button on any container puts every stack it already holds in, with an Undo. Set Keep When Depositing on a stack to hold some back. The first build of it did the deposit and redrew neither window, so it looked like the button did nothing until you reopened the chest. Fixed, and the keep amount is now a total rather than an amount held back from every stack.
• Lightning Storm is back to its intended strength, along with caltrops, the explosive potions and one creature ability that had all quietly sped up the same way.
• Summoned elementals are back to their intended health after a week at up to double it, and the Will-o-Wisp gets back the half it had quietly lost.
• Sieges have to be fought now. The Bypass button on a besieged town shows up only for characters under level 20 or under 100 hours played.
• Seven skill defects from the description audit closed out: Shield Smash now actually deals the earth damage it advertises, Stone Fist cool-down finally answers to Earth Specialization, and Ammo Scavenger stopped shrinking the ammo piles it was supposed to grow.
• Every buff, blessing, food and potion in the game now has a measured value at skill 80, at 150, and at 150 with specialization.
• Worn gear can be dragged off an equipment slot again, after a fix landed this morning broke every such drag and, after a few tries, drag and drop for the rest of the session.
• Only the first realm celebration a shard ever ran was being saved. Landmark bosses have been announcing celebrations that never started.
• The backpack's Show Objects in Containers checkbox was hiding itself. One tick of the box, or one search, and it was gone for the rest of the session with the pack stuck flattened. Fixed, with tests that open the window twice.
• Everything now says Catnip Games: the folder holding your settings, add-ons, sheet music and chat logs, the licence agreement, and the Windows installer, which is signed with a current certificate rather than one that expired in 2018. Your files are carried across on first run and the originals are left where they were.
• Every lasting ground area and every bard song had stopped affecting anyone on the test build. Both fixed, along with the Lightning Storm cloud that left ten seconds into a longer storm.

UI

• Cleaned up the Damage Avoidance line on an armor pieces tooltip: it no longer shows a stray percent sign. Every other place that shows the same stat, the paper doll and the skill tooltips that raise or lower it, already showed a plain number, and the armor tooltip now agrees with them.
• The Combat Decks window no longer takes the keyboard on its own. Holding a movement key with the window open could stop the avatar and type that key into the "Swap with #" box; the box now accepts typing only after you click into it, and the keyboard navigation keys can no longer put the cursor there.
• The quit dialog's "Leave Now" button and the message shown while the client shuts down now appear in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. Both had been left in English since the dialog was rebuilt. Requested by rinaldi.
• Fixed the fizzle percentage on a combat bar glyph running under the mastery badge when the hotbar was scaled down. The small corner numbers and the mastery badges now shrink with the bar, so the percentage reads in full at every hotbar size; nothing moves at the default size.
• The low experience pool warning in the top right corner drew nothing at all: the slot held its space and answered its hover text, but the icon was blank. It shows its picture again.
• Fixed the emotes window lighting up every emote in the list after you clicked one and reopened the window, which previously only cleared on a client restart. Clicking an emote now highlights that emote alone.
• The emote bar draws an outline around each slot so an empty bar is readable, and the turn and close buttons move to the left side when the bar lies along the bottom instead of stretching across the top. Removed a stray gap after the last icon that left the row off centre in the frame. The bard bar picks up the same changes.
• Right-clicking your status bar in the upper left corner now opens that bar's own menu. It was passing the click through to the scene and opening the menu of whatever object stood near your avatar. The target, pet and party frames got the same correction.
• Checked the report that carry capacity in the backpack lagged behind a Strength change while the character sheet updated at once. The backpack readout has followed both figures live since the weight-readout fix earlier this month, and the carry capacity half of it is now covered by tests so it cannot drift back.
• Fixed item list sorting for named documents: a decoration layout you have recorded a lot onto now sorts by its title instead of jumping to the top of every list, and books, sheet music, letters and notes sort by their titles too. Reported by rinaldi.
• Mannequin, doll cabinet, fish tank and jukebox windows now open stepped down and to the right of one another instead of landing on the same spot, so the title of every open window stays readable. Bags, chests and loot windows already did this. Reported by rinaldi.
• The Skills window header now prints the two experience pools on separate lines, each captioned and with thousands separators, instead of running them together on one. At the window's narrowest width the category tabs and the Options button keep their full width, and the pool readout shortens instead of pushing them off the edge. Reported by rinaldi.
• Your own overhead nameplate no longer disappears behind your own gear. Tall equipment such as clockwork wings was covering the red health bar and the health numbers on your own plate, so your own plate now reads over your avatar the way a party member's already did. Everyone else's plate still hides behind walls and terrain. Reported by rinaldi.
• Fixed the keyword and answer list at the bottom of the NPC conversation window drawing over itself when the window was narrow. Each choice now stays inside its own button, shows its full wording on hover when it is cut short, and the list runs onto a second line rather than squeezing every choice into a sliver.
• The Clear Log button on a lot's decoration log works now. It used to be greyed out whenever the log was open, so there was no way to empty it. It is greyed out only while the log is empty, and pressing it clears the entries. The log for a single decoration clears only that decoration's entries.
• Checked the pet and summons character sheet, the pet right-click menu and decoration pets for the stray display codes a tester reported around an owner name. The codes are gone, and all three places now have tests holding them there, plus a stray line-break character can no longer reach a right-click heading.
• Added a regression test for the backpack window's gold total, so a readout that is drawn but never filled in fails the build instead of reaching players. The gold figure itself came back in an earlier chaos build.
• Consolidate Stacks now appears on stackable items in bank boxes, chests and other containers you can rearrange, not just your own backpack. The sweep also reaches into bags inside the container, so two stacks listed side by side in one window merge even when they sit in different bags. A second entry, Consolidate All Stacks, folds every group of matching stacks in the container together in one go. Reported by rinaldi.
• The resurrection meter at an ankh now draws a full-width track with the seconds remaining counted down above it, so a dead player can see how much of the wait is left instead of watching a fill with no end point. The control point capture meter shares the same track. Reported by rinaldi.
• The shop window at an NPC merchant now names the shopkeeper by title and name, so a pet merchant with a name of her own heads the window as "Pet Merchant (Donna)"; merchants placed in player towns used to head every window "Merchant".
• Dragging an NPC merchant window wider now widens the Exchange panel along with the goods lists. It had been fixed at its opening width, which cut item names to a few letters and hid the count on a stack being part sold.
• The skill tracker icons carry their training control again: each tracked skill shows a small state mark on its corner, and clicking it moves the skill between training, not training, unlearning and maintaining without opening the skills window. The mark stays in step with the skills window whichever side the change came from.
• Translated the "Use the Original Title Screen" checkbox on the first screen the game shows. It read English in all eight translated languages, and the matching entry on the Options window Interface tab was filled in at the same time. Reported by rinaldi.
• Dropping a two-handed weapon on one of the pet sheet's gear slots equipped it on your own character instead of refusing the drop. The pet gear slots now turn away anything that does not belong in them, and the same drop on an armour slot of your own sheet no longer jumps to your hands.
• A map opened from a map item, or from a map hanging in the world, no longer follows you into the next zone unless you pinned it. Pinned maps still travel with you, and treasure maps stay open either way since they point somewhere other than where you are standing.
• The ally target frame no longer appears on townspeople, shopkeepers, guards, town guides or player vendors. Those characters can be neither fought nor helped, so the box marked a target nothing could be cast on. Clicking one still selects them for emotes and the target portrait. The Next Target Ally key now skips them and cycles properly through the players and pets nearby instead of stopping on the first entry. Reported by RInaldi.
• Targeting yourself no longer draws a target box around the name and health bar over your own head, where it covered the middle of the screen during a fight. Your own status frame still shows the friendly border, and boxes on other players, pets and enemies are unchanged.
• Pinned the town crier's lot list against the two problems a tester photographed there: formatting codes in place of the Available and Restricted placeholders, and the bottoms of g, y and p sliced off the rows. Both had already been fixed in the shared list code, and 12 new tests now hold this window's own text and row heights so neither can return unnoticed.
• Fixed the player dungeon window: it now stays open after you pick something from its Options menu instead of closing on you, the button that opens that menu says "Options" rather than three dots, and the window can be resized so a long dungeon name has room to be read.
• The rename window no longer pushes its Submit and Cancel buttons off the bottom edge when it shows an "Invalid name." message, and the Change Dungeon view keeps both selector arrows on the window when a foyer has a long name.
• Clicking your own name and health block on the left of the screen no longer draws a second copy of it. Clicking a status block targets that character, and the target display used to fill with whatever was selected, so selecting yourself or your summoned pet drew the same block twice. The target display now leaves out anything that already has its own spot on screen.
• Closed out an old emotes window report after checking the video against the current build: clicking a column heading sorts the list, and the Show Emote Bar checkbox no longer disappears while the mouse is over it. Both were fixed earlier this month and are now covered by tests so they cannot come back unnoticed.
• Cleaned up the Basement window: it resizes now, a long custom basement name sits on its own line with the basement type underneath instead of being cut off with an ellipsis, the options button says "Options" instead of "...", and picking an option no longer closes the window out from under you. In the Change Basement picker a long name no longer pushes the right arrow off the edge.
• Fixed the block of name, title, guild and health above a character's head drifting for about a second after you stopped moving. It sat a fixed height above the head in the world while being drawn at a fixed size on screen, so a camera pushed in tight against a wall or a staircase read that height as a much larger gap and the block rode far above the head, then slid back down as the camera recovered its distance. Below four metres of camera distance it now holds the gap it has at four metres; at any ordinary zoom the placement is unchanged.
• Dragging a column divider on the Decorations window now moves only the two columns on either side of the divider, and the grip lands where the mouse released instead of drifting inside the next column heading.
• The resurrection ankh meter now reads 0 and turns green as the bar reaches the end of the wait, and the ordinary death countdown no longer flashes on for a moment between the meter closing and your character standing up.
• The masterwork and enchant picker now stays on top of the crafting window while it is open, so a click on the crafting window can no longer cover it and leave the craft stranded.
• Resizing the NPC conversation window while a long reply is on screen now keeps the current reply pinned to its first paragraph, instead of drifting up into older text once the drag ends.
• Dungeon Builder window opens on the right tab straight away rather than blank until Build is clicked, and double-clicking a piece in your backpack now highlights that piece in the list on the left as well as swapping it into the socket.
• The alt + interact key on a world item now behaves like alt + left-click on the same item: it picks the item up when it can, and stays quiet on a public bulletin-board note or any other placed decoration instead of opening it for reading. Plain E still opens a note.
• The Vendor Listings In Zone window now keeps your search text and the All Zones and Buy Orders toggles across a zone change, and the Clear button on the filter row now empties the search box, unchecks both toggles and drops every picked stat filter before reloading the list once.
• With two chat windows open, pressing Esc for the main menu or opening the Skills window could put the menu underneath the secondary chat. The window that comes forward now settles above the chat windows the way it should. (#4803)
• Alt+F4 at the title screen or character-select closes the game right away again; the earlier front-end quit change could freeze the client at that point and force a Task Manager close.

Content

• Sealed the gap in the Obsidian Keep (City) player home roof over the stairwell shaft. Rain no longer falls indoors under the stairwell.
• Sunlight now passes through the windows of the Elven Hill village player house. The window glass was casting a solid shadow, which left the interior dark even in direct sun.
• Perfume bottles now show the usual placement ghost while you drag them onto a lot. All five variants used to place blind because the shared base texture had a broken alpha channel and the placement shader alpha-tests the result.
• Tamed Polar Mutilators now have the same glowing red eyes as the wild ones, instead of looking like a plain tamed Polar Destroyer.
• The three obsidian shields now stay dark in the inventory picture and when placed as a decoration. The heavy round, triangle and rectangle shields had each been cloned from the plain version and kept its picture and its decoration model, so only the shield you had equipped ever looked obsidian.
• Wall candles that had been showing the flame but leaving the room dark now emit light when a scene loads. Placed lamps whose light was authored off follow the switch state properly again.
• Skarde hands over the bag of runestones the moment you accept his errand. Before this change, a player mid-runestone-sale had to close the trade window before the bag arrived, so the whole exchange read as one pre-arranged transaction. His daily reminder to bring in more runestones now also invites you to ask about the bag - the last of his runestone replies to still miss that opening.
• An old report said the ladders in the Halls of Artifice dropped players into the air on the way up. All 142 teleport landing spots in that scene sit within a millimetre of a floor and pass the same ground check the game runs, so it no longer happens. A new test re-checks all 142 whenever the scene is edited.
• The crest froth on the three Paladis Shardfall confluence waterfalls was retuned onto the water. The band now pulls in from the bank rocks, sits low and more opaque along the lip, and covers the lift-off line front to back instead of drifting off as puffs.
• Summoned Water Elemental: the ribbon that wraps around the torso from the shoulders down to the ground now stays on screen from every camera angle.
• Hay Cart, hay pile, the interactive Pile of Hay, and the horse, foal, cow and donkey hay statues now darken correctly when placed in shade. The loose fringe tufts around each hay pile were staying bright while the rest of the cart went dark under a roof or a tree; they now shade with everything else, and still do not throw hard blocky shadows in sunlight.
• The "Speak with Arabella" task that comes back after a Quest Reset Token now clears the moment you greet her in Aerie, Resolute, or Soltown; the map and NPC markers no longer linger.
• The five flat crystals in the Blessing of Atos shrine pool at Castle Atos now rest on the pool floor instead of hovering halfway up in the water, and each lit crystal glows a brighter purple that stays clearly visible at midnight even with bloom off.
• Stone Dungeon Rotunda chandeliers hung on the walkway ceiling now sit tight against the stone above them, and no chandelier can be placed floating in the air above either staircase opening.
• Rebuilt the NPC voice list. Hyla, the refugee child in Highvale Outskirts, is on it now (she was left off because the earlier fix stopped short of a rebuild). The rebuild also carried through some pending voice reassignments that had never rolled in: the hacked oracle spiders and the hacked watcher get their own voice separate from the town ones, satyrs get a deep booming bellow, fauns get an impish hoarse rasp, greater daemons get a deep menacing voice, and Margaery at the Ardoris castle gate moves off a hard-to-follow accented voice. All of these land the next time voice lines are generated and published.
• Player-dungeon totem rooms take their creatures only from the totem standing in the slot right now. An emptied socket that used to hold a totem no longer spawns the removed totem`s creatures on the next switch to Adventure Mode, and a totem dropped into a previously used socket spawns only its own set.

Server

• Lot markers no longer drop raw server error text into chat. Double-clicking a marker could put a red line in the chat window quoting internal error text instead of anything a player could act on. The server now keeps those details in its own log and the game handles the failure the way it always did.
• Listing a lot for sale no longer answers with an internal server error when the lot data has not finished loading. The lot sign now asks the seller to step away and open it again, and a test pins the refusal so it cannot fall back to the unexplained error.
• Only the first landmark-boss celebration on a shard was actually running. The rest were announced with no celebration behind them and no experience bonus, and left the three-hour cooldown running off a start time that never moved. The database write path now carries the right id across, so the second boss and every one after it starts a celebration the way the first one always did.

Client

• Bankers and other shopkeepers now open on double-click while the player is sitting in a chair. Previously only standing worked; sitting looked like the NPC ignored the click.
• Selling a crafting tool while it was still equipped left the crafting station convinced the tool was still there, and the next attempt to craft popped an error even though the recipe was fine. Selling any equipped item now clears the equipment slot as soon as the sale finishes.
• Quitting to the desktop takes 30 to 40 seconds and nothing written to the log said where that time went. The exit path now times each teardown step and records what it cost, so the next slow exit names the step holding it up instead of leaving it to guesswork. A session that hangs while shutting down is also recorded as a shutdown hang rather than reading like a hang in the world.
• The dungeon master's hand-fired line was in the code but missing from the project's network message list. The shard build rebuilds that list itself, so it worked there, but any build made outside that path would have refused the message. The list now carries it.
• Locking a shutter on a wood and plaster two-story village home now animates the shutter shut instead of snapping it flat (bug #4930). The same close animation and sound that a hand-close plays. Row home shutters and any other style with the same latent snap picked up the fix too.
• Dragging any worn item off an equipment slot no longer throws or drops the item into nowhere; the pick-up now removes the item from the character before removing it from the container, so the earlier "clear an equipment slot when its item leaves the inventory" fix stops tripping over the pick-up path (tracker #4981).
• Lamps set to Only at night now light themselves at the next evening after a scene reload, whether their start state was on or off. Before, a start-off lamp stayed dark through the following night as well.
• The town light budget now catches decoration items that were slipping past it, so heavily decorated Player Owned Town lots (disco chandeliers, glowing jewel cubes, blessing shrines, trophy displays, flame-trap heads) no longer keep every one of their fixtures at full render cost.
• The game now keeps your local files in a folder named Catnip Games rather than the old company name. The first run after the update copies your Lua add-ons, sheet music, chat logs, heraldry, decoration layouts, keybinds, graphics options and hotbars across, and leaves the originals where they were so an older build still reads them. Running it twice changes nothing.
• The license agreement now names Catnip Games as the copyright holder, and its privacy policy link points at a page that still exists. The data path error message and its eight translations, the Razer Chroma registration, and the reserved character name and add-on name lists were updated to match.
• The launcher now carries your settings across the folder rename before it starts the game, which is the only point early enough to keep your window size and resolution as well. It also keeps reading crash reports from an older game build that has not been updated yet.
• The Windows installer now publishes as Catnip Games, which is what shows in the security prompt and in Add or Remove Programs, and it is signed with a current certificate rather than one that expired in 2018. Existing installs stay where they are. The Linux package and the macOS package carry the new name too.
• Lasting ground areas went back to hitting what stands in them. Lightning Storm, Ice Field, Ring of Fire, Meteor Shower, Immolation and every bard song had stopped affecting anything on the current test build. Yesterday's fix to stop those areas reaching through floors measured their height from the wrong place, leaving the area floating about a metre above everyone in range. Reported by rickdoll.
• Lightning Storm's cloud now stays overhead for the whole storm. The pieces that draw it were authored to run eight to ten seconds and stop on their own, so an Air mage with the specialization watched the clouds leave at ten seconds while the spell kept striking for another fifteen. Reported by wishdragon after retesting the earlier attempt.
• Followed the Lightning Storm cloud fix into the cases that make a storm longer. A fully stacked cast runs more than twice as long, and a bard lengthening a storm already in flight was telling the storm but not its clouds, so they left on the original schedule. Both carry through now.

Content

• Obsidian chain armour, obsidian bone armour and the three obsidian shields can be masterworked and enchanted again, and the obsidian necklace and ring can be enchanted. The obsidian chain and bone chest pieces, all three obsidian shields, the necklace and the ring also take gems and jewels now, plain or imbued. The crafting station had been refusing them because those items were missing from the lists it checks. Reported by rinaldi.
• An NPC asked about a topic it had no written answer for used to reply with nothing at all, leaving your question sitting in the conversation window with no response under it. Guards were the most commonly hit. Those topics now get the same puzzled line an unrecognised word gets, while directions and goodbyes stay as quiet as they were meant to be.
• Tracked down why the Defender guard in the hills and forest siege encounters answered "guard" and "job" with text but no voice. Those are the only two of that guard's replies that name the place you are standing in, and the voice pipeline had no record of which siege scenes the guard stands in, so it built the lines around the wrong place name and the audio never matched. Both siege locations are now recorded for that guard and the four lines are queued for the next voice pass.
• Recast Margaery, the priestess guard at the Ardoris castle gate, onto a clear neutral English voice after a report that her accent and cadence were hard to follow and that she mispronounced words. Her new voice goes out with the next voice audio update.
• The riddle standing stones at the Sequanna Colossus no longer switch on when a player walks into them. They light only when you click one or use your interact key beside it, so squeezing past the stones on the steps no longer advances the puzzle out of order. The same stones are used in two other locations and got the same fix. (reported by garfunkelhumperdinck)
• April Furst in Greymark Forest handed out her Shoo emote on every mention of the curse, and after the first time the repeat was refused with an error line in the chat window. She now remembers the conversation, so the emote is granted once and her later lines about the elves and her gray vision play on return visits.
• Fixed the Isle of Storms tutorial guides staying invisible. The guides fade in when a player enters the space around them, and the check for a player already standing there when a guide arrives only looked at a limited number of nearby objects, so on crowded ground the player was missed and the guide never appeared. The check now covers the whole space.
• Obsidian bone armor now stays dark when you place it as a decoration and in its inventory icon. All five pieces used the plain bone armor model and icon outside of being worn, so an obsidian set and a plain set were impossible to tell apart in a bag or on a wall.
• Images: plain bone armor chest piece placed as a decoration, next to the obsidian version after the fix.
• Fire elementals in the two lava grotto dungeon rooms no longer spawn stranded on a scrap of rock in the lava. Three spawn spots sat on ground too small to take a step from, so the creature stood where it landed for as long as it lived; they now sit on floor the creature can walk and fight on, and a new editor test fails any player dungeon spawn spot whose footing is under 2.5 m across.
• Fixed lava bubbling up through the floor in the player dungeon room "Cave Stone Room - Lava Grotto (6x7) - 4 Conn". Two of the pool effects sat inside the shore rock, so their bubbles and heat haze rose out of solid stone about a metre back from the lava. Both now sit over the lava, in the room with spawns and the one without.
• Salvaging an obsidian weapon, shield or armor piece returns that item's own pattern, and a new check now fails the build if any obsidian weapon or armor is added without one. Reported as an obsidian shield returning no pattern at all (#2302).
• Redrew the Oracle Temple map. It was a grey and white plan that shaded the walls and roofs brightest and the floor you walk on darkest, so the parts that looked open were the parts you could not reach. It is now a blue floor plan with the open floor light and the built structure dark, and the position arrow is easy to find on it.
• Images: the Oracle Temple map before and after the redraw.
• Public vendors asked about "vendors" used to answer with a wall of text they never said out loud, while the same vendor spoke its answers to "vendor" and "buy". The reply is now laid out one sentence per line and three of its five sentences will be spoken once the next voice pack is built. The two sentences that quote the listing fee and the shelf limits stay text only, since those numbers come from server settings that can change.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-08-15 is up: The team read all five hundred and fifty nine skill and rune descriptions against what those skills actually do, and corrected a hundred and twenty one of them. More than twelve thousand broken conversation keywords were repaired across eight languages, so five hundred and ninety two NPCs stopped answering in English to players who chose otherwise. Matched armor sets finally pay the bonus they were designed for years ago, all four hundred and seventy six achievements got badge art, and player catchphrases went from idea to built in a single day. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Client

• Dungeon map fog of war now reveals only what you can see from where you stand. The reveal used to be a plain circle around the player, so a corridor uncovered the room behind a secret door, the space behind a breakable wall and the far side of a closed door; it now stops at whatever blocks your view, and openwork such as barred gates still lets it through.
• The log-in screen now writes down your user name as you type it. With Remember User Name ticked, a name typed and then left there without logging in is still in the field on the next launch, including when the launcher closes the game for a patch.
• The deco resize notice now names the limit it stopped at. Pressing the scale keys past a decoration's smallest or largest size reads "Already at its smallest size (scale 0.80X)." instead of a sentence with no number in it. Requested by rinaldi.
• Fixed Sequanna Colossus dropping most of its scenery when the camera was aimed slightly up. The rope bridge, the rock formations and the sun and moons all vanished at once and returned when the camera tilted back down. The map was carrying stale visibility data left over from an older version of itself, and that data has been removed.
• Summon Phoenix cast in silence. It now plays the summoning sound the other summon spells use, with three variations so repeated casts do not sound identical.
• Fixed a jerk in the view partway through a mount jump. The game counted a rider as landed while the mount was still up to 0.8m in the air, stopped the fall there, then dropped the rider the rest of the way in a single frame. Jumps now carry through their full arc and the mount lands on the ground instead of playing its landing on the way down. Jumps on foot were clipped the same way by a smaller amount and are smoother too.
• Summoning a mount while galloping on coconut halves used to leave the rider doing the coconut run, sounds and all, inside the new mount. The mount-up animation now plays and the rider ends up on the mount, for other players watching as well.

Crafting

• A locked container now protects what is inside it. The crafting table used to reach into a locked bag and pull the materials out of it while you crafted; items in a locked container are now treated the way a locked item is, so they can only be moved into your own main backpack until you unlock the container.

Combat

• Mummified Undead now only slows a summoned skeleton or lich's decay. Trained high it was cancelling the health loss and then reversing it, so the summon healed itself instead of decaying; a floor keeps at least a tenth of the normal drain, in combat and out of it. Reported by garfunkelhumperdinck.
• Lightning Storm is back to its intended strength. A fix earlier in the week, aimed at a slow that stopped refreshing while you stood in Ice Field, gave every part of a lasting ground effect its own timer. That was right for the slow and wrong for the damage: Lightning Storms damage runs on a shorter timer than its stun and had been held to the stuns pace since the spell was written, so it came off the leash and landed about thirty hits over a full storm where the numbers were set for thirteen. The gap widened the more a character had trained Air, because those two timers move in opposite directions with skill. Damage is back on the longer timer and slows, stuns and debuffs keep the separate timers the earlier fix gave them, so the Ice Field problem stays fixed. Reported by rickdoll and by Pith.
• Caltrops and the two explosive potions were speeding up the same way and nobody had reported them yet. One creature ability was too. All four are back to their authored pace. Effects written with no timer at all used to fall through and fire on every update; they now fall back to the same rule as everything else.
• The Lightning Storm report opened a wider question, so the whole 13 to 16 August run of skill fixes got read back. A lot of those fixes restored output that had been suppressed for years, and the values had been tuned upward to compensate while it was suppressed. The pattern that came out of it: the overshoot is almost all in how often things land rather than how hard, and only five authored numbers across the whole batch look genuinely inflated. Each one is being measured against its sibling skills before anything changes.
• The first batch of corrections from that read-back is drafted and waiting on approval. Seven changes, all of them putting a skill back in line with its own siblings rather than inventing a new number: two Air debuffs that stack further than anything else in the school, a Chaos shield buff that got doubled on the strength of a comparison that does not hold, Earth Shatters target count, a shield resistance that was doubled to preserve what a bug had been producing, and a Bludgeon stun that is the only one in its school not paying the schools own stun toll.
• Summoned elementals are back to the health they are meant to have. A fix on 10 August made a Strength buff on a pet raise its maximum health, which had never worked, but the way it recalculated also threw away the health each summon is authored with and rebuilt it from the summons own Strength. Elementals carry a lot of Strength, and specialization raises both numbers, so it was being counted twice: a specialized fire elemental sat at 1,894 health against the 943 it should have, and a specialization potion pushed it past three times. The same problem ran the other way for the summons that carry no Strength, so the Will-o-Wisp had quietly lost nearly half of its health and is restored too. Strength buffs and taming gear still raise a pets health. Reported by GarfunkelHumperdinck, who isolated it by toggling specialization off and on.
• Rend bleeds now keep the damage they were dealt with. Walking behind a target after the initial hit no longer inflates the remaining ticks as if backstab landed on each one, and the debuff icon range stops moving as you circle the target. Rapid Fire still checks position per arrow by design. Requested by Allium Oop.
• Lightning Storm's cloud now runs as long as the storm does. It had been on a fixed 13-second timer against a spell that lasts 10 seconds untrained, so every storm finished with about three seconds of bolts that hurt nobody and then hung in the air for three more. With Air Magic Specialization trained it went the other way, and the spell outlasted its own cloud. The cloud now follows the spell's real duration, fades out rather than blinking away, and an early end takes it along.
• Looked into a report that Lightning Storm's range had grown, and it had not. Nothing has touched the spell's radius since 24 July. What grew was how often it applied damage, which is already fixed and waiting on a deploy. The range documentation was wrong in both of the places we keep it, and now says what the spell actually does: the storm forms on the foe you have targeted rather than a spot you pick, it strikes everything inside the radius with no cap, and because the 12 metre cast range and the 12 metre radius add up it can reach something standing 24 metres away.
• Filed a defect found while measuring that footprint: every persistent ground field reaches a full radius above and below itself, because the flat shape they are authored as never reaches the check that decides who is inside. A storm or an ice field can catch players a floor up or down with nothing visible over them. It affects every field in the game, so it is queued as its own change rather than folded into this one.
• Shield Smash said it inflicted earth damage and did not. The hit and its stun carried no element at all, so earth resistance and earth attunement had no effect on either. Both count as earth now, and the damage against a target with no earth resistance is unchanged.
• Stone Fist told you Earth Specialization lowered its cool-down, which was true for the version creatures use and false for the version players use. That one sat at a flat 12 seconds at every specialization level. It scales now, starting from the same 12 seconds at no specialization.
• Aimed Shot gives up some damage against a fast-moving target. That only ever worked in player versus player: the speed it read is written by player characters and left at zero for every creature, so a charging bear paid the same as a standing one. It reads the creature's real movement speed now.
• Purify carried a two-tick schedule that nothing read, and an unfinished chaos skill still scaled off bard training that an earlier fix had stripped from its siblings and missed here. Both cleaned up. A seventh item on the list turned out to be correct as written and was closed with the reasoning rather than changed.
• Persistent ground fields hit only the disc they are drawn as. A Lightning Storm dropped on the ground floor no longer catches players on the balcony above or in the basement below, and the same goes for Ice Field, Ring of Fire, Meteor Shower, Caltrops, explosive potions and every other placed field.

Community

• Nightly forum sweep filed 4 tracker entries: a toggle for Escape's aggro-reduction, surprise dragon encounters in adventure scenes, farm-specific lot layouts, and a stuck "Speak with Arabella" quest report.
• New SQUIRREL card on the lightning damage going around in a video this week: most of that jump came from fixes rather than buffs, starting with Discharge's Air resistance debuff lasting its full 30 seconds instead of the 2 it had been expiring at, while the damage numbers that were tuned around the broken version stayed where they were. A tuning pass and a re-read of the last two days of fixes are queued. /blog/squirrel/#lightning-overkill

Tools

• Added an automated check that fails if a zone map ships from an older drawing pass than the one that paints lakes and seas as water and keeps gathering nodes off the picture. The South Hulenholt map was redrawn in July; the check is what keeps it and the other 24 new maps that way.
• Took a pass over the project's pending changes. The built item name index, rune list and recipe list went in as the build produces them: the name index that turns a typed word into item types had been sitting empty since the item search fix that introduced it, and the rune list was missing the three wrasse attacks. About ninety files of accidental churn from an editor pass were dropped instead, along with a set of loose loc identifiers that had been rewritten for no reason.
• The offline balance-audit ran every bard song through as zero power, which pinned the Savage Sonata golden red and blocked the post-rework recalibration pass. Fixed: an audit proxy is now treated as fully supporting for the party-support term, which in game is only ever a live combatant.
• The Unity Editor menus the team works from moved out of a top-level Portalarium menu and into one named Catnip Games, 405 entries in all, with the documentation that tells you which menu to open updated alongside them. Shader names were deliberately left alone, since every material in the game stores its shader by name.

Inventory

• Some things are spent the moment they reach your pack rather than stored there: experience potions, gold, character titles, pet emotes, emotes and storage upgrades. Take All handled them three ways wrong. A partly used experience potion had its remainder written onto an item that was no longer anywhere, so it vanished until relog. Titles, pet emotes and emotes announced themselves twice. And dragging one onto a crafting table, a vendor window or the store spent it instead of putting it there, because the check for "is this the player's pack" answered yes for twenty other bags too.
• Take All used to give up badly when a pack filled up part way through. The items it had already lifted out went nowhere: not in the container, not in your pack, and back only after a relog. It now works out what fits before it moves anything, leaves the rest in the container, and puts things back if something goes wrong anyway. It also started checking two rules it had never asked about: whether you are allowed to move each item, and whether you turned auto-stacking off.
• One rule now says what a bulk action may never touch, and every sweep asks it: Take All today, the deposit and sorting buttons next, and any undo of either. It has three levels. Four states stop an item moving at all, because they are what used to make a bulk move crash and take the rest of the batch with it. Above that sit the things that are spent rather than stored, which a deposit must never send but Take All must always redeem. Above that, the four flags you set yourself: locked, quest, no-trade and packaged.
• Locking an item to your inventory has been in the game for years and was invisible unless you right-clicked and went looking. A locked item cannot be removed, traded, sold, consumed, salvaged or used in crafting, it floats to the top of the list, and it has its own filter category. Your backpack now shows it: a mark at the far left of every row, hollow when unlocked and gold when locked, click to toggle. Only your own pack has it, because that is the only place an item can be locked.
• Quick Deposit. One button on any container you can put things into: every stack in your pack that the container already holds joins it, in one press. Open the reagent chest, press it, done. Nothing can appear in a container that did not already have some of it, so it is safe to press without reading the result, and locked, quest and no-trade items are never moved. A notice says how many stacks went, and carries an Undo for as long as it is up. Requested by Furios Farmer: right-click a stack and set Keep When Depositing to hold some back, remembered per character.
• The two cards behind Quick Deposit are marked built on the inventory proposals page, with a note on each saying what actually shipped and where it differs from what was drawn. Seven of the sixteen are done now. Replies are up in both discussion threads.
• Dragging a worn item out of an equipment slot works again. For most of today it failed: the piece left its slot on the character sheet while staying on the avatar, would not attach to the cursor, and after a few attempts drag and drop stopped responding for the rest of the session. The pick-up was taking the item out of its container before unequipping it, which only became a problem when equipment started listening for items leaving the inventory this morning. The unequip now runs first. Found in an 18-hour log sweep: 39 occurrences on the current build across four players, none on the six builds before it.
• Fixed the "Show Objects in Containers" checkbox disappearing from the backpack and bank. The window worked out whether a list was already showing bag contents by reading the same setting it writes itself, and the list is handed back to the window on every open, so the second open of a session read that back as the list's own choice, hid the checkbox and stopped applying the option. Ticking the box was one way to trigger it; typing in the Search box was the other, because a live search looks inside closed bags while it runs. Once it caught, nothing could un-flatten the list again. Reported by Rinaldi.
• The seven tests guarding that checkbox were all source-text checks, which is why a fault that only appears on the second open went unguarded. The fixture now builds the window and drives a real reopen: four new tests cover the checkbox surviving a reopen, a search-flattened view going back, a list that legitimately forces bag contents on keeping them, and an ordinary list carrying the setting's value.
• Quick Deposit said it had worked and then nothing appeared to move. The deposit really had happened, but neither window redrew, so the only way to see it was to close the container and open it again, and the stacks still showing in the pack were no longer there to drag. Both windows now update as the button is pressed. Reported by Gravidy and necronut.
• The Keep When Depositing amount is now a total across everything you carry of that item, rather than an amount held back from every stack separately. Garlic split across three stacks with a keep amount of 2,000 was keeping 6,000. A stack that could not have moved anyway, such as a locked one, counts towards the total. Reported by necronut.
• Undo on a deposit now takes the whole amount back off a container stack in one go. Where several stacks from your pack had merged into the same stack, reversing them one at a time could stop part way and leave the window showing something other than what was really there.

Launcher

• The launcher's two speed readouts now show a three second average instead of an instant reading. They were computed from whichever two progress updates happened to arrive last, and since the patcher reports in bursts that window often collapsed to a fraction of a second, so the numbers swung between wildly different values. A stalled transfer also froze the readout on its last number until it blanked out. Both tiles now average over a fixed three seconds and fall to zero across three seconds when nothing is coming down. The captions say so: SPEED (network, 3s) and EFFECTIVE (delta, 3s).
• Launcher build 28 is out on Windows, Linux and macOS, carrying the three second average speed readouts. Installed launchers pick it up on the next start. All three pointers were checked end to end after the push: a build 27 launcher is offered 28 with its signature and file hash verified, and a build 28 launcher reports itself up to date rather than looping on the update.
• The launcher now keeps checking for new builds the whole time it is open, about once a minute, instead of only at the moment you started it. A launcher left sitting on the desktop used to offer PLAY on a build that had already gone stale, which the login gate then refused. It patches on its own when a build goes live, and checks for a new launcher on the same schedule.
• Pressing PLAY no longer closes the launcher. It hides while you play and comes back when you quit the game, checks for a new build right away, and is ready to launch again without being restarted. Crash reports from a bad game exit now go out minutes later rather than waiting for the next time you open the launcher.

Interface

• Quitting from the title screen or character selection no longer asks "Are you sure you want to quit?". There is no character in the world at that point, so the game closes straight away. In the world the question still appears.
• New setting on the Interface tab, Skip the Logout Countdown, off by default. With it on, quitting or exiting to the menu leaves as soon as the server accepts the logout instead of showing the countdown, the same as pressing Leave Now every time. Your character still stays in the world until the countdown finishes on the server.
• Two pieces of text that had no name and printed as a placeholder now read properly. An attack dealing more than one kind of damage at once showed the raw list wrapped in question marks; it now writes the types separated by a slash, and that covers every combination rather than the one that was reported. The Riposte Defense stat had no name at all and now reads Riposte Defense.

Balance tooling

• The tool that scores every skill offline could not see the Lightning Storm problem, which is why a tester found it first. It treated a lasting ground effect as a single hit, because the number it was reading as the damage interval is actually the whole lifetime of the patch. Ground effects now get modelled the way the game runs them: how often the damage re-applies, how many times it lands over the life of the patch, and what that adds up to against how often the spell can be recast. On the current build it turns up Lightning Storm at four times the power the old reading gave it, Meteor Shower at three times, and Immolation at fifty times across its very long burn. Those are corrections to the reading, not changes to the spells.

Catchphrases

• The catchphrases window had no way in. It opened from a keybind that ships unbound, which meant you had to know it existed before you could find it. It now has a row in the window selector alongside the other windows, and /catchphrases opens it from chat.
• The safety check now waits long enough for a cold start. The model that reads a phrase answers in about a second once it is warm, but the first call after it has been unloaded takes half a minute, and the old limit turned that into a refusal of a perfectly good phrase.
• Fixed the catchphrase window sitting on "checking..." forever, reported by Rinaldi. The phrase was fine and the safety check approved it; the server then tripped over a missing settings file while working out the price, and the window had no way to hear about it. The price rules now fall back to their shipped values, the server always answers a check even when it fails, and the window gives up after 45 seconds and says so.

Tester Tools

• The /tester panel gained a Buffs section. Type part of a buff's name, pick it from the list, and it lands on your character. The catalog is every buff in the game that changes a stat, a few hundred of the roughly 1,700 rune records: store and town blessings, food and drink, potions and elixirs, stances, the self-buffs of every school, and the debuffs. You do not have to own the item, have trained the skill, or pay the focus.
• A level field sets how strong the buff is and a seconds field holds it for as long as the test needs, both clamped to what the server will store. What lands is the real buff, with its own name, icon and tooltip, and it replaces anything already running in the same effect group the way a cast one would. The suggestion list names each buff's group so that replacement is not a surprise.
• Clear takes back only the buffs the panel handed out, so a blessing bought or earned is left alone. Selecting a creature first sends the buff to the creature instead, which is how a tester watches a debuff work. Another player is refused. Combat telemetry pauses while an applied buff is running, joining the all-skills buff and the tuning overrides.

Build System

• The chaos build's two asset-bundle signature passes each reported a single "hashed in Ns" figure. That was enough to see the passes were expensive and not enough to fix them, so each pass now logs a breakdown: directory scan, dependency-closure query, the per-asset hash loop (including the slowest single asset and how many took over 100ms), and the final rollup. The Windows client build spends 334 seconds on the scene signature where the Linux build spends 28, over the same 43,571 inputs, and the breakdown is what will say which step owns that gap.
• The signature passes also now record the asset database's version counters on either side of each pass. If those counters move while a signature is being computed, an asset re-import ran inside the measurement and the import, not the signature, is the real cost. A build log already showed a 331-second asset pipeline refresh overlapping the 334-second scene step, which is the first thing the new numbers will confirm or rule out.

Player Dungeons

• The nine trap pieces for player dungeons could not be created from the tester panel, reported by Rinaldi. The list that panel searches is a generated file, and it was last built on the 13th, so it held two of the nine while the seven that landed on the 14th were absent from it. Rebuilt, and all nine are in the list.
• Searching that same list for "trap" turned up none of the trap pieces, because no piece in the kit is called a trap. They are the Pressure Plate, Shrieking Gargoyle, Snuffer Brazier, Message Plaque, Sealing Door, Boss Door, Dart Wall, Flame Jet and Spike Floor. The search now falls back to an item's internal name when its display name does not match, and items whose display name really does match still sort first.

Build

• A settings file that ships with a new feature never reached the test shard on its own, which is what broke catchphrases. The deploy now compares the settings files a build expects against the ones the shard actually has and names any that are missing before the build goes out. It found one more that had been missing for a while.

Design

• Counted which skill specializations players actually take, read from the live report dump rather than estimated. Taming leads every cut by a wide margin, and the crafting specializations rank far higher among players active in the last year than they do in the all-time totals. Light armour has the worst rate of players who take it and then train it to 80. It feeds the skill balance work.

Sieges

• The Bypass button on a besieged town now appears only while your character is still new: under adventurer level 20, or under 100 hours played on that character. Either one on its own is enough. Everyone else fights through the siege lines or turns back, player-owned towns included.
• Those hours are counted per character, so a new character on a long-standing account still counts as new. /played now prints your time on the current character under your account total.

Loot

• Ammo Scavenger raises the chance ammo turns up in loot and was meant to raise how much of it turns up. The second half ran backwards: training the skill lowered the average amount per drop, and past about one percent it made the largest stacks impossible to roll at all. Training it raises the amount now. The same bug was sitting in the offline loot path as well.

Balance

• Built a catalog of every beneficial effect in the game. It reads all 1,681 rune assets and works out, through the same formula engine the game itself uses, what each buff, blessing, food, drink, potion and stance is worth at skill 80, at skill 150, and at skill 150 with the matching specialization trained. 802 of them reach a player.
• The catalog is now a page for the team, with a detail view per buff and a findings pass. The first pass turned up two store blessings granting 0.5 where their eight siblings grant 10, three skill descriptions promising a specialization effect the data does not deliver, four spells reading a mastery from a school you cannot hold while using them, and four effect channels that are defined and used by nothing. None of those numbers have been changed yet.

World Events

• Only the first realm celebration a shard ever ran was being saved. Every one after it failed its write and was swallowed, so a landmark boss was announced on the World Events channel with no celebration and no experience bonus behind it. The record was written with a new identity each time instead of replacing the one already there. The three hour cooldown was also counting from celebrations that never recorded a start, which could refuse a later boss for a window that never existed.

Logs

• Swept 18 hours of shard logs and de-duplicated them: 837 entries collapsed to 224 distinct problems, then counted per build over the previous week to tell a new break from long-standing noise. Three were genuinely new and are fixed today. Two more were confirmed still open rather than closed on assumption: the Coto store purchase failure Gravidy reported yesterday fired again in the same shape, and the thirty-second equipment load first tracked earlier this month has come down from its peak but has not gone away, so what is left of it is a second cause rather than the one already fixed.

Control points

• Control points had no written record of what they do. The capture rules were documented; the waves were not, and each wave's roster lived only inside the scene files. There is now a full reference for all six of them: how the flag is taken, how the waves are driven, what every wave spawns, and what the numbers say about the difficulty curve.
• The reference is written against a new tool rather than by hand. It opens each of the six control point scenes, records the capture area, the wave timings, every wave's roster and where each spawner stands, and writes it out for the team to read and compare. Two of the six carry leftover settings pointing at a field the game stopped using, so reading those scene files directly reports the wrong creatures.
• Every control point runs eight waves. The shared template they are all built from carries six; each scene adds two more. The first wave has nothing in it and expires immediately: it exists to lock the side doors and raise the exit volumes that every later wave undoes. The seven that follow run from three enemies up to eleven, and each one opens another door.
• Each wave gets less time than the one before it, and the last wave keeps coming back for as long as players hold the point. Five of the six run an identical clock. Eastreach Gap is the exception, a few seconds longer on every wave and a higher floor at the end.
• Brightbone Pass and Eastreach Gap field the same fight. The same creatures in the same counts in the same waves, down to the named lich at the end. Vauban Pass shares its skeletons with both and brings Ebon Dawn cultists of its own, and Sanctus Spine's kobolds overlap with nothing.
• Two authoring gaps showed up at every control point rather than at any one of them. The capture zone's collider list is empty everywhere, so the test for whether something is standing inside it can never pass. And every last wave defines one more spawner than its own population cap allows, so one of them never fires.
• All of it landed on a new internal page: each point wave by wave, the clock next to an estimate of how long a party needs, a top-down map of where each wave spawns against the flag, and a side-by-side of all six. A control point with a battle in progress now reports which wave it is on, which took relaying that state off the machine running the fight, since that was the only place it existed.

Images

• Images: the Editor menu bar after the rename.

The New Britannia Herald

Every skill description read, every language fixed, armor sets switched on

15 minTranscriptPodcast

Headlines

• The Last Parser: 33 Conversation & NPC proposals published, 13 defects filed, votes open at blog/proposals/conversation/
• Every language now reads zero NPC keyword collisions, down from 12,482 broken conversations, and 592 NPCs stopped answering in English to players who chose another language.
• Party loot rolls stop losing items quietly. A refused handover now retries and then tells you, a full pack no longer swallows the item you won, and the roll window closes instead of hanging on the item forever.
• The Third Glyph went live: a skill combos deep dive with 80 votable proposals, 58 of them brand-new combos and 16 of those for Chaos, at /blog/proposals/combos/.
• Achievement badges: all 476 achievements got icons - tier metals up each ladder, thorned boss plates, gold laurels on title achievements, shown in the journal and on the unlock banner
• Read every skill description in the game against what the skill actually does. 121 corrected. Rend has never worked on undead, Ranged Defense never touched stun resistance, and Off-hand Defense grants parry rather than the damage resistance it promised.
• Player catchphrases went from idea to built in a day: pick one of 134 voices, pay cotos to turn your words into speech (every phrase moderated first, no charge unless it works), and fire them from a 12-slot bar so everyone nearby hears you. Awaiting deploy.
• The first new combo glyph since the original set: Bedrock plants your shield, holds you in stone, and shrugs off every knockback and knockdown until it ends.
• A matched suit of armor is worth wearing again: one weight class head to foot gives 10% more Damage Resistance. The feature was designed years ago and shipped switched off. The character sheet learned to explain itself in the same pass, naming which pieces count toward your set, which broken ones are counting for nothing, and where every point of resistance came from.
• Animal Lore joined the Taming tree: study a beast and read its stats, resistances and weaknesses, with tougher creatures needing more skill before they give anything up. Requested by Wishdragon.
• The inventory answers which bag is it in and how full is it: a Container column with an in: search token, search that reaches inside closed bags, and capacity fill bars from gold to red. Recently Looted got its Reset button back, opens newest first, and finally counts merchant buys and hand-dragged loot as loot.
• The Obsidian Item of Unlearning stops where you tell it to. Pick the level, keep everything above it. Requested by Barugon.

Combat

• Hard Headed now grants the resistance to stun, knockback, and knockdown its tooltip promises; only the stun half was in effect before.
• Provoking Shout is Heavy Armor school but was billing its focus cost through the Shield-school focus stat, so the Heavy head masterwork focus discount never applied to it. It now bills through the same stat as Taunt and the rest of the school. Skill also got its own icon slot instead of sharing Taunts.
• Shield Bashs specialization talent again drops the targets damage avoidance for the stun window. The reader that combined the debuff with armor avoidance was zeroing the debuff before adding armor, so against most creatures and any player without the Redirection avoidance skill it did nothing. Same fix restores the Redirection avoidance skills small per-level boost on the character sheet before level ten.
• Fixed a creature-side Light Armor Dodge rune that granted only half the intended defensive-buff duration; the timing now matches the player Dodge rune and the sibling Deflect and Glancing Blow runes.
• Fixed Bolster Balance's crowd-control resistance. At skill 100 the buff was landing on stuns, knockdowns and knockbacks at 0.70 while roots only got 0.35, because the same amount was being added to a shared crowd-control channel and to each of the three individual channels. The mask now covers only the shared channel and the authored amount is written at its true magnitude, so all four sit at 0.70. Nothing gets weaker.
• Cleaned up a never-fired third hit and its doubled-cost focus branch on the Blades ability Double Slash; the gating stat has never been granted by any source, so both branches were dead content and the visible focus cost and hit chances stay identical (#4528).
• Ranged Defense, the shield trees cap innate, was raising your block only against player bows and crossbows. Monster archers without a real bow item, lich and satyr aimed shots, and any content author who typed an incoming attack as ranged now all get the innates bonus applied on a block. Plain melee blocks are unchanged, and player spells stay on their own doctrine.
• Ammo Scavenger arrow-drop bonus now scales the way it should: an untrained character no longer gets bonus arrows on every kill and training the passive raises drops instead of lowering them (#4542).
• Fizzle chance defaults now match the shipped tweak values, so the standing-still-lowers-fizzle behaviour a reader would infer from the code lines up with what the game already does. No gameplay change.
• Rooted defenders now dodge dodgeable attacks at half rate again instead of never dodging while the attacker still saw the halved dodge chance as extra hit and crit weight.
• Pets with a heal or buff skill now consider the owners party as target candidates, not just the owner and themselves. An inverted null guard in the pet AIs target search returned the moment the party list existed and so silently skipped every party member (#4610).
• Blocking with an empty off-hand no longer stops more damage than blocking with a shield. Any equipped shield now out-blocks bare-hand at every level.
• Escape now says out loud what it always did: on top of the aggro drop it removes movement slows on both movement stats and breakable roots. One redundant removal effect was retired so the rune does the same removal work in a single pass instead of two.
• Break Armor now strips buffs about twice as often at full Bludgeon Specialization as it did before. A typo in the rune data was adding a small constant instead of scaling with the school, so the strip chance was pinned near 11 percent no matter how much a player invested. Break Weapon was not affected.
• Casting Savage Sonata, Dirge of Dissonance or Requiem of Ruin no longer ends the bard's own performance. Round three's "combat drops the stance" rule now separates a real hit from the combat entry the song cast itself triggers; a real fight still drops the stance and closes the performance the same way it did before.
• Offhand Attack no longer routes its main damage through a permanent-true stat check; the swing lands damage the same as before with no path where it silently deals nothing.
• Glancing blows now deal one third of normal damage instead of one quarter, in both the physical path and magic partial resists. The Damage Avoidance tooltip has said 1/3rd for years while the code applied 0.25; the constant was raised to match the tooltip, and a test now pins the number and the tooltip text together.
• Skill tooltips now state how many targets each skill hits: a Hits N Targets line beside range and cooldown, read from the same numbers combat uses. Single-target attacks say Hits 1 Target; self-only skills and ground fields like Ice Field show no line since nothing caps them. Requested by Rinaldi.
• Cleaned hand-written target counts out of 16 skill descriptions so the count appears once and cannot drift from the data. Whirling Blades said "multiple targets"; the real number is 6. Rend said nothing; it hits 2.
• Taunt's skill description told players that Heavy Armor Specialization increases the area of effect. It does not. The radius is the same whether or not you are specialized. What specialization actually gives you is a chance for a second aggro pulse on up to 5 targets, reaching 25% at Specialization 80, and the description now says that. A test pins the radius, the chance and the target cap so the text cannot drift away from the data again.
• Rend has never done anything to undead. Its bleed, its hit and its healing debuff are each blocked against undead targets, so the card was dead against skeletons, liches and zombies, and the tooltip never said so. It says so now. Bladed Combat also lost its placeholder text and now explains that its level raises the damage of every attack you make with a blade in hand.
• Started a full pass over every skill and spell description in the game, checking each one against what the skill actually does. The two halves of a skill tooltip come from different places: the sentence is written by hand, the numbers under it are generated from the skill data, and nothing has ever compared them. 559 skills and item runes are in the audit, each read against a generated fact sheet and then argued over by a second reviewer whose job is to defend the existing wording.
• Ranged Defense has been promising to dramatically increase stun resistance. It has never touched stun resistance; what it does is stop more damage when you block a ranged attack, and the tooltip now says so. Deflect had its own buff backwards, describing the large block bonus as something that arrives after a block rather than immediately. Testudo now admits it protects the caster too, and Charge reads as the gap closer it is.
• Root has been describing itself as a slow. It is not a slow, it stops the target moving entirely, and the duration is set by the target's strength rather than the caster's as the old text claimed. Earthquake now mentions that its knockdown chance improves with training, Earth Magic Specialization no longer claims to weaken your power against air, and Fishing admits that a higher skill lets a spot be fished more times before it dries up.
• Distract has been telling players it draws a single enemy while the generated line directly under that sentence printed the real number. It alerts five. Four more Subterfuge tooltips came with it, the sharpest being Pick Pockets, which never mentioned that a successful theft costs you Truth or that reaching in from behind is what makes the attempt work.
• Banish Undead stops the undead it kills from rising again. That is the reason to cast it over any other spell against undead, and it appeared in no tooltip. Four more Life corrections came with it, including a warning that Resurrection can fail outright when life attunement is strongly negative on either the caster or the body.
• Break Armor and Break Weapon both have a chance to strip a beneficial effect off whatever you hit. Neither tooltip mentioned it, and buff removal is the sort of thing players build a whole bar around. Ground Pound also turned out to carry a slow and an attack-speed cut alongside the stun it advertised, at baseline rather than as a specialization bonus.
• The Tame Combat Training tooltip advertises the exact Tame Level Bonus the pet actually receives; the old readout rounded a decimal value up while the pet only got the whole-number part.
• Discharge has been telling players that dexterity increases its stun duration. It increases the stun chance; the duration has no dexterity term at all, and since the tooltip prints both numbers live the contradiction was visible on the card. Discharge and Chain Lightning also both strip air resistance from everything they hit without saying so, while Lightning does the opposite and only applies that debuff if you have the specialization.
• Follow Through has been offering a lower fizzle chance on all glyphs. Weapon glyphs cannot fizzle at all, so anyone who took it for a melee bar bought nothing. Douse turned out to strip fire resistance debuffs as well as burns, Icy Breath raises cold damage and not only the slow, and the Water Elemental heals its owner during combat, which is the reason to summon that one and was written down nowhere.
• Solar Flare said it does extra damage during daylight. The daylight term is in its focus cost, so casting at midday is cheaper rather than stronger; the extra damage applies to undead. Fire Reach also turned out to widen the ring of flame Immolation puts around you, which no tooltip mentioned, and all nine magic schools have now stopped claiming their specialization weakens your power against the opposing school. It only weakens your resistance to it.
• Off-hand Defense has been promising damage resistance. It grants parry chance and parry damage reduction and touches resistance nowhere, so a dual-wielder taking it as mitigation was buying a different defence than the one on the label. Berserker's Stance was also hiding two costs: it raises your spell fizzle chance and drains health and focus while you are in combat.
• Rapid Fire has been describing itself as a continuous stream of arrows lasting until your ammo or time runs out. It is a burst at a single target, the later arrows hit for less, your skill sets how many fly, and the whole burst costs one lot of arrows however many that is. Piercing Shot also cannot be dodged or blocked, which is most of the reason to carry it and appeared in no tooltip.
• Puncture is the second skill this pass to turn out useless against undead in a way no tooltip mentioned. They are immune to its bleed and its healing debuff, so all they take is the opening hit. Spinning Attack also had its damage avoidance penalty pointed at the wrong person: it lands on whichever enemy started bleeding, not on the player spinning.
• Deflection and Absorb Impacts both read as general damage mitigation and both are weapon-only. Neither does anything about spell damage, which is the difference between surviving a lich and not, and neither tooltip said so. Knight's Grace also removes exactly one bleed rather than bleeds in general, and removes roots, which it never mentioned.
• Vanish and Cocoon of Night both refuse to start while a creature has you targeted, which is exactly the moment you reach for a hiding skill, and neither description mentioned it. Night Step also only teleports you behind the target at night; in daylight you arrive on your own side. Five Moon tooltips in all.
• Chaos Bolt is a five-way random pick and its description named none of the five. It now lists what you can actually get out of it. Tap Soul also returns more focus the closer you are to death, which is the reason to hold the card for a bad moment rather than open with it, and Chaotic Feedback and Torpor turn out to evict one another so a chaos caster cannot run both.
• Fourteen combo glyphs and artifacts turned out to be doing more than their descriptions claimed. Sawblade Sweep is the third skill this pass whose damage over time is dead against undead. Icy Thrust and Icy Puncture both slow on every hit, which is the difference between a damage combo and a kiting tool. Hamstring hands the attacker a stacking dexterity bonus, and Cloud of Wasting heals you for what it drains off living targets.
• The audit is finished. 559 skills and item runes read against their data, 121 descriptions corrected across 29 schools, 37 candidate findings thrown out by a second reviewer whose job was to defend the existing wording, and 21 cases where the description was right and the data was wrong, which are now filed as their own bugs rather than papered over by changing the words. A test now holds four rules over the whole set so the next new skill cannot ship with placeholder or copied prose.
• Critical heals now show their floating number in bright cyan instead of a yellow-green that was almost the same as a normal heal, so a crit heal is easy to spot at a glance.
• Combo glyph tooltips now agree with the combo table. Seven glyphs advertised a combination nothing could produce, and the four elemental summons (air, earth, fire and ice) could be made by combining two glyphs but never said so. Both directions are fixed, and an editor test compares the label list against the combo table on every run.
• Fixed four combo tuning defaults that disagreed with the values the game actually ships, including one that would have turned the focus cost of every stacked glyph into an invalid number if the tuning file ever lost that key. The focus curve now clamps its input, so no tuning value can break it, and a new editor test holds the code defaults and the shipped file together.
• Added a validation pass over the combo table. It flags a pairing with a glyph missing, one whose glyph can never reach the combining step, a passive standing in for a glyph, and any pair of glyphs claimed by two different combos. It runs alongside the rest of the rune validation, and all 29 combos in the game pass it.
• The combo lookup tables now rebuild each time the rune data loads instead of growing, so validation can run twice without reporting every combo as a duplicate of itself. The duplicate warning names both combos that claimed the same pair rather than one of the glyphs.
• Fixed the Stillness buff stalling partway up. Standing still is meant to add +1% spell critical chance and -5% glyph focus cost every 5 seconds, up to +5% and -25%, but it usually stopped around +3% and -15%. Its level only advanced when some unrelated event happened to recalculate the character sheet, and standing still is exactly when nothing does, so it climbed while the last fight's buffs expired and then stopped. It now steps on its own 5 second beat to the cap and holds there until you move. Reported by GarfunkelHumperdinck.
• Skill tooltips now list the combos a glyph takes part in and the partner glyph each one needs, in the skill tree, the skills window, the deck builder, and the hand in combat. Partners you have not learned show in red, and a glyph in many combos shows six lines plus a count of the rest pointing at the Combos tab. Card S9 on the combos proposal page, and it also covers the Bludgeon page's s12.
• The skill description sweep that keeps target counts out of tooltip prose learned to allow Taunt's specialization line, whose second-pulse cap has no data-driven line to live in.
• Built Bedrock, the first new combo glyph since the game's original set: Dig In plus Earth's Embrace. Casting it plants your shield and raises the earth around you. For a short time you take greatly reduced damage and cannot be knocked back or knocked down, but you are rooted in place until the effect ends. Shield required. New icon in both icon sets, the shield-plant animation, and a layered shield and earth cast sound.
• The original combo id range turned out to be full, with creature attack skills packed right after the last combo. New combos now continue in a fresh id range, and a new test pins the whole Bedrock data shape so none of it can drift.
• A deck swap hotkey that still pointed at a deck you had deleted threw an error once per frame for as long as you held the key, instead of doing nothing. The deck lookup now answers "no such deck" for a slot that is not there, which is what every caller was already expecting.
• Reveal Hidden now removes stealth and camouflage from hidden hostile targets inside its area. It used to play the animation, burn the reagents and start the cooldown while leaving every hidden target unrevealed.
• A knockdown card whose knockdown is a pure chance roll (no stat, no duration) now prints its "% Chance to knock-down" line under the description; before, it was blank. Leg Sweep is the example. Night Steps behind-target teleport now runs on the moon window like the rest of the Lunar school; a new moon at midnight now correctly falls back to the plain in-front placement.
• Knight's Grace now clears every slow on you instead of one. The skill spent a single removal budget across two movement stats, so anything that stacked slows left you crawling after a cast that said it had cleansed you. Its description has always said "slows".
• Knight's Grace also carried a second, leftover slow cleanse that fired about 1% of the time next to one that fires every time. It delivered nothing and printed a line in the tooltip. Removed, along with two stat references its effects never read.
• Provoking Shout has its own icon art in both art sets. It shared Taunt's picture, so the Heavy Armor tree showed the same button twice. A test now scores the artwork against every other skill icon, because a name-only check passed the whole time the two were identical.
• Ran the three Heavy Armor fixture files written last week for the Provoking Shout focus cost, the Hard Headed resists and the Taunt specialization tooltip. All three were committed without ever executing, because the shared editor was failing to compile at the time. All pass.
• Escape now clears the casters own slows and roots again. A stray disposition bit on the runes cleanse used to hand it to the enemy the caster was trying to get away from, leaving them stuck and stripping their target.
• The character sheet now shows an armor set line: which weight class your torso puts you in, how many worn pieces are counting toward the set, and what the next matching piece would raise the bonus to. The torso decides which set you are building and does not count toward it, which was true all along and stated nowhere.
• Broken armor is visible now. A piece at zero durability gives no protection at all, and the only sign of that used to be a small icon on another window. Broken slots get a red rim on the paper doll, the item tooltip says the piece adds nothing until repaired, and the sheet prices it: how much Damage Resistance a repair would hand back.
• Hovering Damage Resistance or Damage Avoidance lists every worn piece feeding that number and what each one adds, and lights those slots up on the paper doll. Broken pieces appear in the list at zero rather than being left out, so a total that looks low explains itself. The rows are what the total is built from, so the two cannot disagree.
• Wearing a suit that matches head to foot now earns 10% more Damage Resistance from your armor. The feature was designed years ago, given a value and half a tooltip, and shipped commented out. Every armor piece has to match your torso and none can be broken; shields, weapons and jewellery do not count against it, and neither do the spirit masks and Troll Lord belts marked as fitting with anything.
• Three things the armor code turned out to be doing: the set bonus table had entries for 5 and 6 matching pieces that nothing could ever reach, since only four slots count; no item in the game is medium armor, despite the weight class existing in the data; and the block-power formula was written out three separate times, once on the character sheet with its own hardcoded numbers, so the figure players read could drift from the one combat used. First test coverage the armor formulas have had, 44 of them.
• Animal Lore was added to the Taming tree, sold by taming trainers once Tame Creature reaches 20. Select a beast and study it from its right-click menu, with the /lore command, or with a Study Creature key you bind yourself, and you get a readout of its kind, level, condition, attributes, and how well it turns aside weapons and each school of magic. Requested by Wishdragon.
• How much Animal Lore tells you is your skill level against the creature's. A level 4 wolf gives up its basics to someone who has never trained the skill; a level 129 beast returns nothing until you have studied enough to read it. Further up, the readout adds the damage the creature deals, what it shrugs off, whether it can be tamed and how hard it is to skin. Beasts only, and a creature that hides its health keeps hiding it.
• The numbers behind that readout were already in the game with no way to reach a player. Polar bears blunt water, obsidian bears resist fire and death, and boars shrug off crowd control. Animal Lore is the first way to read any of it in game instead of on a wiki.
• Halberd of the Sun drains 25 Dexterity from its target for 20 seconds on every auto attack and free attack, and nothing said so. The weapon tooltip now lists the drain, and the debuff icon on the target has artwork and a name instead of an empty square with a countdown sweep.
• Ice Field's damage used to land as a single hit covering the whole time the chill sat on a target, so one cast dealt one hit and then nothing for a minute or more. It now deals its damage every 3 seconds for the same duration, and the tooltip states that interval.
• Fixed three problems with Bedrock: the resistance line printed its two protected types as one run-together word in question marks, stacking glyphs advertised a resistance above 100% that the game never actually gave you, and the shield burst from the cast stayed on the avatar until the next interrupted cast or death. The burst fix covers Dig In as well, which used the same effect. Blink and Chaotic Step no longer move an avatar that Bedrock is holding in place.
• Stealth (or Silent Movement) now ends the moment you start looting or skinning a nearby corpse, whether or not the cursor is green over the body. Two loot paths were doing two different things; both now break stealth the same way.
• Looting or skinning a body with the interact key now ends stealth even when the cursor is not on the body. Before, an interact press with a white pointer reached the nearest body and opened it while the avatar stayed hidden.
• Sawblade Sweep now sweeps 5 meters and hits up to 6 enemies, matching Whirling Blades, the skill it chains from. It previously reached 4 meters and stopped at 3, so the combo caught a smaller crowd than the move it is built from. The bleed it applies covers the same wider area. Reported by Rinaldi.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-08-14 is up: Player dungeon owners can now run their halls by hand as a live event, firing traps from a console, speaking through a boss and unlocking the reward chest when the party has earned it. The bard's own songs stopped cutting his music after a fourth attempt found the real cause. A cleared siege now comes off the overworld map for everyone, tamer gear finally delivers four bonuses it has advertised since launch, and sixteen school deep dives went up in a single day, dragging about sixty defects into the light on their way. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed 8 wishlist ideas from the forum sweep: Ranged tree improvements (Cora Cuz'avich), Tier 7 spell casting VFX (John Markus), mage poison without a weapon, expanded shadow-mob spawns, bardic mobs, hidden-attribute UI display, a third light-armor skill tree, and a UO-style Animal Lore skill (all Wishdragon/community requests).
• Announced the Corporate Ladder contest winners on the SQUIRREL! page. Sammegarian won both categories, turned down the t-shirt and took a chaos tester spot, so the spare prize went to Wishdragon and Mondravis, who both get tester spots too.

Content

• The Lost Vale on the overworld is meant to open once every eleven days but was resyncing at the start of every in-game month, so the wait was sometimes only six days. It now opens strictly every eleven days regardless of month or year rollovers.
• Master shields (regular and Obsidian, plus the +50 Durability Obsidian variant) no longer wear out roughly three times faster than starter Round and Triangle shields; a data typo had them taking triple durability damage per hit. The Carnal Vile Shield artifact had a matching typo that quietly multiplied its wearers armor durability damage by about ten; that innate stat is neutralized now, so the shield loses durability at a normal rate.
• The five crystals in the Blessing of Atos shrine pool are now flat purple discs set into the water rather than tall crystal shards, and they light in sequence from the back pair inward to the centre as the blessing climbs.
• Sharpened the Redthorn Flower in the Grunvald Shardfall crater. Its skin was reimporting with much lower crunched compression than the neighbouring Man-Eater plant, so up-close detail was crushed to visible pixelation. The diffuse and normal maps now import at the same quality as the peer plant, so the flower should look as crisp as the props next to it.
• Removed the bright blue slab at the bottom of every waterfall and river pool: an editor placement marker was leaking into the shipped game (Redmine #4573).
• Esmeralda in Highvale Outskirts now highlights the "ghostly echo" topic after you find any of the four echoes. A one-character truncation from the retired conversation exporter had chopped the first echo off her keyword gate, so the topic only surfaced once the second echo was in hand. (#4621)
• Fixed a bug where NPC "bark" triggers set to a random percentage were firing every single time a player entered them, not at the authored chance. Some crowded scenes will get noticeably quieter.
• The tall red-tendrilled plant in the shardfall scenes now shades its bark at the same detail as it colours it, so its cards read as crisp overlapping planks up close instead of blurry seams.
• Abela in Braemar and Esmeralda in Highvale Outskirts now offer their follow-up keyword ("Kelly Hayward" and "ghostly echo" respectively) once the relevant quest flag has fired, instead of hiding it behind a name only the wiki knew.
• A corrupt action verb inside an NPC response used to cut the response off partway through; the runtime now logs the bad verb and finishes the line. Cleaned out the ten shipped strings that had the fault (Blood River bounty turn-ins, the Grand Tour progress topic, a couple of test entries).
• NPC keyword highlighting rebuilds when a conversation loads, so the clickable words in a response always match the conversation shipped in the patch instead of a snapshot from the last bake.
• Alien plant pod near the Grunvald Shardfall crater loads its full color texture now. Its color map was clamped to half the source resolution while its normal map ran at full detail, so up close it looked muddy and the seams around the cap stood out. It now imports at its authored 512 and reads crisp.
• Fixed a room-freeze in the player-dungeon Stone Rotunda: an invisible ledge under the walkway had been stopping anyone climbing or descending either staircase. Chandelier and ceiling decoration under the walkway still work the same way.
• An NPC with several ambient chatter lines now cycles through every line before any repeats. The number the picker sent and the number the display used disagreed once the set was no longer fresh, so from the second bark on the NPC spoke a different line than the one chosen, often one it had just said (#4659).
• Floating water lanterns, paper wall lamps, and the fancy wall lamps now offer Light Settings... in their right-click menu the same way ordinary torches and lit deco always did, so a player can retune their colour, range, and brightness (#4657).
• The three sausages sold by the Owlshead butcher place as decorations again. They can be set on floors, market stalls and display containers like their steak and haunch neighbours; earlier they came up as a red preview no matter where you tried to put them.
• Sticky webs in Malice now play a chopping animation when you cut them, instead of standing still while the web pops open.
• Solace Bridge Outskirts: after Captain Kinsey tells you Lord and Lady Langstons names, both nameplates read the real names right away, without needing to walk over and click each Langston first.
• Cleared seven of the sixteen skill data defects from the 2026-08-15 audit. Leg Sweep now scales with Polearms Specialization for both damage and knockdown chance, Corpse Explosion catches the same five targets across its whole blast, Body Slam no longer reads its own root state instead of the targets, Earth Shatter hits up to five enemies inside its five metre radius instead of one, Rapid Fire honours Ammo Scavenger the way every other bow rune does, the Smelting proficiency finally reads "Refinement Time Bonus" like Butchery and Milling, and an unlocked cards cooldown tooltip now matches the timer it will actually run. The remaining nine are tracked as a follow-up.
• Five blessings were granting about twice the value their tooltips promised. Blessing of Expedience, Precision, Prevention, Reclamation and Stamina now match the numbers in their descriptions; Conservation and Guidance were already correct.
• The basic taming trainers at Solace Bridge Outskirts, Highvale Outskirts, and Blood River Outskirts no longer offer Obedience. Obedience stays where its design places it, at the advanced taming trainers that also teach Pet Hide Toughness.
• The third-floor left stairwell landing wall in the Lord of the Manor Keep city home takes wall decorations across its full width and height, matching the right stairwell.
• Night-only lamps now come on at 20:30 instead of 18:30, matching the follow-up on the original wish (requested by Allium Oop). The morning-off time is unchanged, and lamps without the night-only checkbox are unaffected.
• Reclaiming a player dungeon now clears the skeletons marking earlier deaths inside it. Before, rebuilding the rooms left old markers floating in the empty space where a reclaimed room had been, and they came back after re-entering the dungeon.
• Raised the nameplate on cows so it sits above the animal instead of inside it. Ophelia in Owl's Head had most of her name hidden behind her own back when the camera looked down at her; cows were the only large four-legged animal still using the default plate height. (reported by rinaldi)
• Asking the Oracle about Truth, Love or Courage now breaks its assessment of you into one sentence per line, so each sentence can carry its own recording. The passage before the assessment was spoken and the assessment itself never was. The recordings still have to be made, so the Oracle stays quiet there for now.
• The Rectangle Rug (Red, White, and Orange) can be placed in dungeon rooms again. The rug shipped with a collision box a few centimetres lower than its siblings, which was invisible in a normal house but caught the floor in a stone foyer or rotunda and refused the drop.
• Reveal Hidden now describes itself as a ranged area of effect instead of an area around the caster (from-jira #1336 / SOTA-71596).
• Obsidian bone armor and the three obsidian shields now accept patterns. Helm, chest, gauntlets, boots, leggings and the heavy round, rectangle and triangle shields were in none of the lists a pattern recipe checks, so the patterns that fit the plain versions did nothing on the obsidian ones.

Audio

• Dolorast Vrul and the other Greater Daemon bosses moved off a friendly female narrator voice onto a deep, menacing villain voice with a demonic reverb. Takes effect after the next voice regeneration and CDN publish.
• The cat decoration pets footsteps and meows played from a fixed point rather than from the cat, so they did not travel with it as it wandered. The sound was looking for a bone on a body that had not been switched on yet; it now finds it either way. Same correction applies to any decoration whose sounds attach to a moving part.

Build tooling

• The chaos deploy now reads the server data file the shard actually loads, straight off the machine, before and after every restart, and reports what is in it. Deploys that ship no fresh data used to skip that check entirely, which is how the shard ended up running for weeks on a file missing every achievement counter.
• The nightly data bake now refuses to publish an incomplete set. It previously accepted whatever it produced as long as one file existed, so a table that failed to build shipped anyway and the feature it drove went quiet with nothing to show for it. Towns, achievement counters and milestone titles each have to be present and non-empty.
• A combat test fixture landed referencing a skill enum it never imported, which left the editor test assembly failing to build and blocked every test run on the branch. Added the missing import.

Audio

• Storehouse containers no longer read their status message out loud. The line they were speaking is descriptive text about the crate rather than dialogue, so a cast voice reciting it was wrong; the text above the container and in the chat log is unchanged. The same pass silenced 28 other bracketed lines that were being voiced, including the "Play ROCK shape" style prompts in the shape guessing game, several conversation choice labels, and three leftover writer's notes in South Drachvald Spur.

UI

• Alt + the interact key now picks up a world item, matching what alt + click already did. The default binding for that slot is Alt+E. Alt + click and alt + double-click behave the same as before. (#4606)
• NPC dialogue lands at the first paragraph of a new reply instead of the last: long multi-paragraph responses no longer open the conversation pane already scrolled past their start.
• The focus bar refusal flash now sits just outside the blue fill instead of on its outer edge, so the fill stays fully visible under the red pulse when you try to cast without enough focus.
• Bard skill tooltips now describe the reworked school. The eight retired bard skills say so and nothing else, so investing in one is no longer a trap. The surviving songs pick up their instrument requirement and the reminder that a bard silences their own support songs by dealing damage. Performance Stance describes the town entertainer mode it is now, Dance no longer claims to stop the song, and Savage Sonata no longer promises to buff tamed creatures.
• The compass strip has its dark background back inside the bracket frame, so the ticks and cardinal letters read against snow, daylight and other bright scenes rather than fading into them.
• The in-game Leaderboards window works on the test shard again. It had been asking a retired server for its numbers, so every board came up with a connection error. The boards are now built from the test shard's own play data.
• Leaderboards rebuild every hour, and the timeframes are rolling windows now. "1 Day" counts the last 24 hours rather than yesterday alone, so a kill at noon lands on the board within the hour instead of after midnight. A line under the table gives the age of the numbers on screen.
• The leaderboard opt-out in Options is honoured on every board, record-holder columns included. Turning off leaderboard participation keeps your name off all of them.
• Puzzle Box: the small panels behind the top row of arrows were dark, and the dark arrows disappeared against them. Those panels now carry the same light brass as the bottom row, sliced from the box art itself, so both arrow rows read the same. Reported in tester verification.
• Hovering the mouse over a windows scrollbar used to stop the wheel from scrolling that window. It scrolls the window now, same as hovering the content does. Reported as #2258.
• Rebinding a control with a joystick, flight stick, or HOTAS plugged in no longer grabs a drifting axis or a throttle at rest as the new binding on the first frame of the rebind prompt. It waits for a deliberate push before it captures an axis.
• Typing your own character name into the Add Player field on a lot you own no longer answers with the raw OperationInvalid popup. A different case or shorter valid form of the name that used to slip past the friendly-message shortcut now gets the same "you already have all permissions" line as the exact-name path.
• Right-clicking an item and picking Link Item In Chat only pastes the item into the front chat window now. With a tab torn off into a second window, the other window is left alone; before this both inputs received the same linked item.
• Crown Store purchase confirmations no longer open underneath the store window. The confirmation sits above every window from the first purchase of a session, so buying something no longer means resizing the store to find the button.
• Container windows now reopen where you dropped them. The last part of a drag was being lost when the position was saved, so a window closed right after a move came back at its old spot.
• Vendor Listings in Zone: the minimum on a stat filter can be typed as a whole number again. The box used to fire a search on the first digit and lose focus, so "Dexterity at least 10" went out as "at least 1" and the results looked unfiltered. It now reads the number when you press Enter or click away, and runs one search instead of one per digit. Reported by Rickdoll.
• Placed books and Valentine love letters close their reading window when you walk out of range now, the same way chests and merchant dialogs already do.
• Right-clicking a harvesting or crafting tool during combat now shows the Equip entry greyed out instead of leaving it off the menu entirely, matching how the skill window handles a skill you cannot use in combat.
• The HUD tracked-glyph strip is now stored per character. Switching to a different character on your account no longer inherits or overwrites the previous characters pinned glyphs.
• Toggle Rewards hotkey in an online session no longer opens the offline Rewards window with its unusable Claim Rewards button; only the online rewards list opens now. The offline window keeps opening on the same hotkey in Solo Player Offline.
• Left-clicking a skill icon on the tracker at the right side of the screen opens the skills window on the tree that skill belongs to again. The click had done nothing since the tracker moved to the new interface. Right and middle clicks on the icon still fall through, and the row close and pin buttons are unchanged.
• The character sheet's Stats tab gained a Crit Defense row beside Crit Reduct. The two were easy to confuse and only one of them was ever shown: Crit Defense lowers an attacker's chance of landing a critical hit, Crit Reduct lowers the damage of one that lands. Evasion supplies Crit Defense while you wear light armor, and Light Armor Specialization raises it without being required for it. Reading that number used to take an add-on. Requested by Wishdragon.
• Confusion Resistance and Mesmerize Resistance now appear in the character sheet's Resistances section, and the pet sheet picked up Attunements and Resistances sections of its own, which it never had. The pet's crit row was showing Critical Hit Defense under a Crit Reduct label with a tooltip about critical damage; the label and the tooltip now match the number.
• Building or reclaiming a dungeon with the Random Dungeon Generator Chest open now warns that the chest must be closed first, where the old message said only that a container was in use. The warning also appears as soon as you confirm rather than about five seconds later. Requested by rinaldi.
• Dungeon entrance window: the Materials line in the dungeon breakdown ran its list of material names off the right edge of the window, where nothing could reach it. The list now wraps onto a second line and the window is tall enough to hold it.
• Dungeon Waygates, the Dungeon Prize Chest, the Random Dungeon Generator Chest, the Resurrection Ankh, the Resurrection Chaos and the trap pieces now sort under the Blueprint & Dungeon category. Picking that category used to hide every one of them, so the only way to find a waygate in a full backpack was to scroll for it under All Items. Reported by rinaldi.
• The Guild Wars window no longer narrows past the point where its column headings fit, so shrinking it stops shortening "Time Remaining" to "Time Remai..." and leaving that column of numbers unlabelled. The width it stops at is measured from the headings themselves, so translated headings widen it rather than truncating.
• Unequipping a piece of gear from the character sheet now puts it in the inventory window right away. The item used to come off the character while the inventory list kept its old contents, so it only turned up after a category click or a reopen. Equipping from the inventory clears the row just as promptly.
• A pass over the Dungeon Builder window. The Last Run section reports one run instead of printing the last build and the last reclaim on top of each other, a build or reclaim now shows a notice in the middle of the screen for as long as it runs, the piece kinds are indented under the total they break down, the build and reclaim statistics put their breakdown in parentheses after the total, and the Deco column sorts by decoration instead of by room name. Reported by rinaldi.
• Right-clicking a party member in the party list at the top left now opens their menu, with Promote To Party Leader and Kick From Party for the party leader; left-clicking a frame still targets that member. A player name in chat answers to right-click as well as the left-click it already had. (requested by rinaldi)
• Fixed the Add-Ons window cutting off its buttons: shrinking the window down to its smallest height squeezed the bottom row so only the top half of Open Folder, Reload All and Get Add-Ons was drawn. The add-on list now gives up the space and scrolls, and Get Add-Ons sits clear of the resize grip in the corner. Reported by rinaldi.
• Windows now take their cue from the pin when you change scenes: an unpinned window closes and a pinned one stays open. The journal, emotes, the map, skills, your backpack, the recipe book, social, titles, lot deeds, combat decks and blocked players used to follow you into the next scene whatever the pin said, and the in-zone vendor list closed even when pinned. The decoration palette no longer gets stuck on screen after a scene change, which previously took a relog to clear. The compass, timers, emote bar, bard bar and hotbar are unaffected. (requested by rinaldi)
• The Theme Editor's "Based on" list was missing the Citadel and Bastion themes, so a custom theme could not be built on either one. It now lists all seven UI themes, and opening the editor while Citadel or Bastion is active shows that theme as the base. Reported by rinaldi.
• Restored the missing pieces of the item comparison tooltip: a vertical line between the hovered item and the gear beside it, a "Current Equipment:" heading over that column, and, when the matching slot is empty, the column still appears and reads "None". Requested by rinaldi.
• Window title bar buttons no longer run off the frame when a window is dragged narrow. A chat window at its minimum width was losing the close button entirely and drawing half a pin; the button row now keeps its size at any width and the chat tab strip gives up the room instead.
• Knight's Grace now lists its bleed cleanse in the tooltip and gives the number: one damage over time effect removed, or two once Heavy Armor Specialization is trained. The line was missing entirely, so the only way to learn the count was to take two bleeds and count what came off. Healing Grace and Passive Stance gained the same line. Reported by rinaldi.
• Property Manager: the dungeon slot on a lot deed card no longer hangs over the bottom of the parchment. Each line on the card was a few pixels taller than the card had reserved for it, and the picture on the last of the lot's three parts was the part that ran over the edge.
• Fixed four problems in the Light Settings window for placed lights, reported by rinaldi: the nine colour swatches all drew white instead of their own colour, nothing marked which colour was in use, Escape did not close the window, and the window kept driving a light after the player had walked away.
• A container on a lot listed for sale now says why it will not open, naming the listing instead of "You can not open this chest right now.", and the red server error line that used to appear in chat behind it is gone.
• The little weather word on the compass follows a Kobold Weather Machine now. Placing one in a Player-Owned Town would hold the sky at Clear or Foggy while the compass line kept naming the towns underlying weather; both now agree.
• Fixed two display problems at crafting stations: the "Craft again" offer no longer runs out of the middle column and over the inventory list when the window is narrow, and the crafting summary and the Craft, Salvage, Repair, Recipes, Take All and quantity controls now stay on the window at any height instead of falling off the bottom when it is made short. The crafting table list gives up rows instead. Reported by rinaldi.
• The Decorations window sorts again: clicking a column heading orders the list by that column, clicking it a second time reverses it, and the window remembers the column you chose. Item name, placed by, location and visibility all sort, and the list opens sorted by name instead of in no order at all.
• Recording a decoration layout onto a blank layout document now always reports what happened. A recording that failed part way through used to end with no message and leave the window unable to try again, and a lot with more decorations than a document can carry was refused with a bare line in a pane the player had just been taken away from. The refusal now stays on the recording panel with the title still typed in, and gives the lot's decoration count alongside roughly how many a document holds.
• Search All My Stuff no longer prints formatting codes after item names. A stack read "Crate [c][FFE4A3](3)[-][/c]" and a container read "Wooden Crate [c][BCF091](0/300)[-][/c]"; those rows now read "Crate (3)" and "Wooden Crate (0/300)" with the count coloured. Typing in the search box also matches the name shown rather than the codes behind it.
• The hover panel for a place on the overworld map was marking every town as both a city and an adventure zone. A town now shows only the city icon, both on the map and in the teleport destination list.
• The town directory no longer tells you to travel to a world map you are already standing on. Towns that are entered from inside another location, such as Wisteria Lane, Winter Spur and Daylight, now say so when you ask to see them on the map, and the same line appears when you hover the town in the list.
• The Options audio tab showed its "Character Voices" and "NPC Dialogue" volume slider titles in English no matter which language was selected. Both titles, and the NPC dialogue cache size dropdown below them, are now translated in all eight supported languages. Reported by rinaldi.
• Fixed the lot Decoration Log spilling off the page: on a log several pages long, entries and the page number could sit below the bottom edge of the page and overlap what was under them. A page now holds its own text, scrolling it when there is more than fits at the size the book is open at, and the page number stays at the foot of the page. Reported by Rinaldi.
• Fixed the recipe book search box: hovering it now shows the search syntax, which had been documented in the patch notes but never appeared on screen. Added a question-mark button beside the box that opens a card of example searches you can click straight into the field, and repaired the same hover on the crafting station search box. Reported by rinaldi.
• Chat tab options: the channel tick boxes now sit to the left of the channel names, matching the live shard, and clicking the name toggles the channel.
• The lot permission window now tells you when a name you typed does not belong to any character. Typing a misspelled name into the Access or Banned box and pressing Enter used to do nothing at all; it now raises a not-found notice and leaves the name in the box so you can correct it.
• The attunement shown in the skills window now updates while the window is open, so a buff that raises an attunement moves it at the same time as the character sheet instead of leaving it on the value from when the school was picked.
• Toggling Large Nameplates and Chat Bubbles no longer drops a party member's nameplate marking on every second click, so their name keeps its party reading distance, and an old chat bubble line no longer reappears over a character's head after the toggle.

Client

• Riding a horse diagonally at a zone edge no longer slips past the fade-to-black warning and drops you out of bounds - the boundary now catches diagonal approaches the same way it catches head-on ones and warps you to the next zone as intended.
• GM ghost mode no longer leaks a torch light or a floating helmet to nearby players (#2174).
• Toast emote no longer applies the drunk visual effect. Raising a glass in cheer keeps the camera steady; actual drinks still make you woozy.
• Watering or harvesting plants no longer nudges the Sow Seeds Bonus skill; that passive advances only when you actually sow seeds.
• Sale records in the bank for player-written books and sheet music now show the actual title. Rows that used to read "Sale of item (Book written by )" now fill in the real title once the server returns it, so you can tell two books by the same author apart in your sale ledger.
• A tall or short character no longer comes back at the default body height after riding. Whatever the Height slider was set to before mounting is restored exactly on dismount.
• Filling a bucket at a wishing well or fountain now walks straight to the stance spot the prop was designed for, so the avatar ends up next to the water instead of looping around and starting the fill a few paces off in open ground.
• The check that announces a world celebration read the server clock before the client had received it, which threw an error on every scene load. It now waits for the clock; a celebration still gets announced once, as soon as the time arrives.
• Fixed a lit torch leaving its pool of light behind at its old spot when picked up and moved. The light now travels with the torch. Same fix covers other placed decorations whose lights flicker (requested via #1969).
• Right-mouse camera turn gives the cursor back the moment the drag ends, even when the drag ends the same instant a window opens or you toggle reticle mode.
• Containers keep their "use this container for crafting" setting when you pick them up or move them around the lot. Ticking the box also takes effect at a crafting station you already have open, instead of waiting for the window to be closed and reopened.
• Being stunned or knocked down no longer darkens the edges of the screen. Stuns were playing the same closing-in effect that warns you are walking out of a scene, arriving about a second after the hit and holding for about a second; the camera wobble and motion blur that go with a stun are unchanged, and the scene-exit warning now stays visible if you are stunned while standing in it.
• Basements and player-dungeon interiors used to keep whatever music the previous scene was on, including the title theme, looping until you left. They now fade to silence on entry, and any trigger volumes inside still take over as before.
• Light Settings on a wall candle now opens with the candle's own flame colour and its range in metres. Lamps whose flame is out by default used to show a white colour swatch and a range slider that could only report a percentage.
• Planting Area items now show their placement marker the moment you pick one up to place, without you having to turn on Show Decoration Indicators by hand first.
• Stacked decorations no longer go missing when the item under them is taken away. Moving a decoration that has something resting on it into a container or onto the Decorations palette is now refused with a note to pick them up one at a time, instead of leaving the top item out of the world and findable only in the Decorations list.
• An NPC close-up conversation in a tight space no longer flattens the saved camera zoom preference. Before this fix, ending a close-up in a small room where the camera was pushed in tight against the walls could leave the camera zoomed in and quietly overwrite the saved zoom, so the next login came up with the camera stuck close to the character.
• Outdoor shadows drift across the ground steadily again. The sun's direction was only being refreshed every two seconds, so the dappled shade under a tree canopy shifted as a block every couple of seconds instead of creeping. It now refreshes about ten times a second, making each change roughly twenty times smaller. Reported by garfunkelhumperdinck.
• Signing in on a second machine now sends the first one back to the main menu. It used to show the lost-connection marker and stay in the world, with no way out but closing the game. The same handling covers any session the game service closes while you are playing.

Proposals

• Published The Company You Keep, the Party and Grouping deep dive: 34 proposals with per-card comment threads and vote arrows, filling the planned Party slot on the proposals index. The page measures our party system against Ultima Online's April 2000 retrofit, EverQuest, City of Heroes, WoW's queue era and its walk-back, FFXIV's Party Finder and Trusts, and the adventuring company as fiction writes it.
• The research behind the page found a party system better built than its reputation and invisible in play: a working party finder that nothing in the game points at, a 20 meter XP share radius no player can see, and parties that expire from the database 20 minutes after logoff with no name and no history. Twenty-three of the 34 proposals ride existing plumbing with no new network operations.
• Four latent party defects surfaced during the dive and were filed as #4610, #4611, #4613 and #4614, headlined by an inverted null check that has kept pets from ever healing or buffing their own party. The fixes are collected as the page's first proposal.
• Wrote the first party systems reference doc alongside the page; the system was previously undocumented outside code comments. The roadmap gains a Party and Grouping program row, and the proposals index now counts 15 system dives and 958 proposals in all.
• Published The Last Parser, the Conversation & NPCs deep dive: 33 proposals with per-card votes and comment threads at blog/proposals/conversation/. Behind it: a full corpus audit (32,973 topics, 42,276 answers), thirty days of live dead-end telemetry, and the genre record from Ultima IV to the LLM wave.
• The conversation audit filed 13 tracker defects: a bark trigger that overwrites its own percentage roll, keyword highlights compiled for the editor but never the shipped game, compound topic gates evaluated as single flag names, one gate truncated at exactly 50 characters by the export pipeline, questions forgotten after their seven minute timeout, and 592 conversations that quietly fall back to English for French, Italian and German players.
• Reworded the skill combos proposal page off crafting terms. It had been calling a glyph pairing a "recipe" and the two glyphs that make it "ingredients", words the game never uses for combos and that already mean something else on the crafting pages. The page now uses the game's own vocabulary: glyphs combine into a combo, and a pair of glyphs is a pairing. Card numbering, votes and comment threads are unchanged: /blog/proposals/combos/.
• Shipped the 19th system deep dive: The Three Walls, 30 proposals on the resistance systems. Magic wards, armor and crowd control each run their own pipeline with no shared rules; the page documents all three, walks thirty years of the genre from Ultima Online forward, and writes the crowd-control governor specification that five earlier proposal pages parked cards against.
• The research behind the resistances page verified the stun story in code: mesmerize resistance is a stat almost nothing writes and the one control still using a flat subtraction, so a wisp mesmerize lands every time on everyone; fifteen boss templates author their crowd-control immunity into a stat no code has ever read; and stacked stun resists can pass one hundred percent into accidental permanent immunity. All of it is carded for repair on the page.

Images

• The composed Company Window mockup from the new Party and Grouping proposal page.
• The snap notch on the options sliders, with Saturation dragged off center to show it.
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• The Estate Ledger and the Properties directory mockups from the new Housing and Lots proposal page.
• Puzzle Box arrow panels
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• The composed Combo Codex mockup from the new skill combos proposal page.
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• The Desolis map calibration before and after, with the world laid under the drawn sheet.
• 150-bot fireworks show in Castle Atos
• The proposed Defenses ledger mockup from the resistances deep dive: every resistance number the game tracks, printed on one character sheet panel.
• Bedrock combo icon, both sets
• Taunt and Provoking Shout, in both art sets.
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Server

• Audience counts above a performing bard now fall within a few seconds of a listener walking away or logging out; the number used to lag by up to two minutes in a room where nobody was starting a new performance or watch. Watching a bard also no longer costs framerate on a busy stage.
• A pass over 24 hours of shard logs turned 896 entries into 233 distinct problems, then into eight tracked items. Five are fixed and committed, three are filed with the evidence: a camera cursor lock that leaks and gets caught by its own safety net 27 times a day, six map positions where the navigation mesh loads uncut and leaves a pathing hole, and a question about where 171 daily unversioned logins are coming from.

Housing

• Lot signs now say why they turned an action down, in the lot window, instead of printing a line written for developers into chat. Listing a lot that still has a basement or dungeon on it, or one claimed with a no-trade deed, names that reason now; the window used to show a single code word. Requested by rinaldi.
• Claiming a lot explains itself too. A refused claim used to answer "there was a problem" almost every time; it now names the reason, whether the deed is too small for the lot, the deed only works in a player owned town, someone else already claimed it, or taxes are owed. One of those messages could only ever appear in player owned towns, so NPC town refusals always fell back to the generic line.
• Fixed the decoration bar pin button: it now lies on its side when the bar is unpinned and swings upright and sinks into the bar when pinned, matching the old bar. The pin is centered in its spot, the stray vertical and horizontal lines next to it are gone, and hovering it shows the Pinned or Unpinned tooltip. Reported by tester rinaldi.
• Dungeon waygates now show what they are set to. Hovering one reads back its name, where it leads and who may arrive; both right-click entries carry their current value; and both windows show the same three lines above the question, with the current destination already highlighted in the list. Requested by Rinaldi.
• A waygate you never named now says so. A nameless waygate cannot be named as any other waygate's arrival point, so a link aimed at it never lands, and nothing said why. A waygate leading to another dungeon also named that dungeon wrongly: every dungeon built from the same entrance deed shares an interior name, so the tooltip described the kind of dungeon rather than the one it led to.
• You can name a placed dungeon waygate now. The name is the waygate's address, since it is what another waygate types in to arrive there, and until now it could only be set while the waygate sat in your backpack. Requested by Rinaldi.
• The waygate's list of destination dungeons names dungeons instead of lots. It was showing the deed name, which is the same string for every village lot you own, so several village lots gave rows you could not tell apart; an unnamed dungeon showed up as a bare character name. Rows now read as the dungeon, with the lot underneath. A dungeon you have since removed from one of your own lots also stops being offered, instead of sending you to the bare lot.
• Prize chests placed inside a player dungeon refused every interaction, answering with an authorization error instead of opening. Staking gold, checking the balance and claiming a prize after a clear were all affected, for the dungeon owner and for visitors. Tip jars placed in a basement failed the same way. Reported by Rinaldion.
• Unclaiming a lot no longer warns about a basement and a dungeon the lot does not have. The confirmation now checks the levels actually placed on that lot, and when there are some it names them in the advice about the Property Manager, since the lot, the basement and the dungeon are each stored separately.
• Placing a player vendor as decoration no longer turned every decoration pet, vendor and cash register name in the scene into pink blocks until the next login, including the names on your other lots in the same town.

UI

• Options sliders with a centered default (Brightness, Saturation, Level Of Detail, Interior Deco Cull Distance, Camera Look Sensitivity) now snap onto that default when dragged near it, and a small notch on the bar marks the spot. Arrow keys still adjust in fine steps without snapping.
• The Achievements journal is now listed in the window menu, at the top of the list above Bard Bar. It had been reachable only from the /achievements chat command and the Achievements tab on the character sheet, so a player who did not know the command had no way to find it.
• Achievements also got a key binding. It ships unbound; set it under Options, Key Bindings, Toggle Achievements, and the menu row then shows the key beside the name the way the other rows do.
• The /deeds chat command was opening the Achievements journal. It now opens the Lot Deeds window.
• Achievement rows were drawing the unlock date and the progress count lower than the rest of their line, so both hung past the bottom of the row and the row underneath covered the bottom of the letters and digits. Two of the four labels in a row were keeping a 4-pixel margin above and below that the other two had dropped, which made the three lines add up to 77 pixels inside a 72-pixel row. All four are measured the same way now, the three lines come to 63, and the date and the count sit inside the highlight.

Skills

• Removed the gold amount from the skills window header. It sat next to the pooled experience line, had nothing to do with skills, and repeated a number already shown on the character sheet and the backpack. The header now runs from the tabs to the pooled experience readout and the Options button.
• The Obsidian Item of Unlearning now asks which level you want the skill left at. Right-click a skill, choose Instant Unlearn, and a slider and number box open between the floor the skill can reach and one level below where it sits today. It used to have no choice in it: every use dropped the skill to its minimum, so leaving a skill at 100 meant giving up everything below 100 or waiting out the unlearning drain. Requested by Barugon. Experience still comes back whole and one item is still spent per use.

Design

• Published the Housing & Lots deep dive, "The Deed and the Door": 31 proposals covering the deed and tax lifecycle, an ownership clock on the lot sign, in-game eviction warnings, an Estate Ledger, a properties-for-sale browser, grace and restoral around a lapse, guest books and lot mailboxes, and player-to-player rentals built on the role ladder's unused Tenant rung. Live at /blog/proposals/housing/ with per-proposal comment threads and vote arrows.
• Published the skill combos deep dive, "The Third Glyph": 80 proposals on one page. Twenty-two system cards cover discovery and teaching (the finished first-combo help window that nothing triggers, a combo journal with fanfare, combo names announced in the combat log, ingredient tooltips that name their combos, trainers and tomes), recipe-table hygiene, alternate recipes, a usage board, and a stack-math retune, ending at three owner rulings. A compendium of 58 new cross-school combo recipes follows, every adventuring school included and 16 for the Chaos tree, each one collision-checked against the 29 live recipes and every school page's claimed combos. Live at /blog/proposals/combos/ with votes and a comment thread on every card.

Bard

• The five party songs (Melody of Mending, Savage Sonata, Rhapsody of Recovery, Dirge of Dissonance, Requiem of Ruin) no longer force the bard into combat. Casting one drew a weapon, which stopped the music and dropped Performance Stance; the songs are non-combat abilities now and none of them triggers a fight.
• Casting any of the five now takes the instrument out instead of playing a cast animation, so a bard with the lute stowed draws it and keeps it out. Sheet music plays through the cast, and a re-cast or a second song leaves the tune alone.
• Watching a bard now tells you when it is over. "The performance has ended." prints in the Misc chat channel for everybody who was watching, whether the stance lapsed, the bard put the instrument away, or they dropped connection.
• The bard bar keeps what you put on it. It was saving nothing at all: the bar controller crashed during setup on a piece of hotbar plumbing it does not use, which took its load and save with it and left the bar working in every respect except remembering.
• Bar contents are stored with the character now instead of on the machine, so the arrangement follows you to another computer the way the hotbar always has. An arrangement made before the change is carried over the first time the bar opens. A hotbar load also stopped wiping the bard bar slots on its way past.
• The bard bar has a second row for sheet music. Drag pieces in from the pack and click to play; the ability row refuses sheet music and the music row refuses abilities, and both rows are saved with the character. Turning the bar upright puts the two rows side by side.
• Tipping a bard is a right-click on the performer now, beside Watch Performance, on a bard playing in a town or player owned town. It opens the tip jar window: an amount, a tick for tipping anonymously, and Deposit. The /tip command is gone.
• Tips collect in the bard's own tips rather than dropping into their purse, with a list of who gave what and when, and a Collect button that takes the lot. Bards open it from a Tips button on the Bard page of the skills window or from the button on the bard bar.
• Melody of Mending and Rhapsody of Recovery both said they help all friendly targets nearby. They only reach party members, they skip the bard playing them, and they skip pets and summons. Chant of Charming and Ditty of Detection sit in the tree with descriptions promising a charm and a reveal, and neither has ever been implemented, so both now say they are not available yet rather than advertising something the game will not let you have.
• A performance stage placed in a basement or a player dungeon stopped paying its venue bonus, with nothing shown to the bard to say so. Same cause as the prize chest, fixed alongside it.

NPCs

• Town NPCs now remember which idle lines they have already said to you and pick a different one for the next twenty minutes. The memory is per player, so what you have heard does not quiet the NPC for anyone else, and it is capped at 24 lines for 8 players per NPC to keep a crowded town bounded. An NPC that has run out of fresh lines repeats the one you heard longest ago rather than falling silent. Combat taunts and NPC-to-NPC chatter are unchanged.
• Fixed a bark bug underneath that: an NPC with several idle lines was speaking a line other than the one it selected, from its second line onward. The sender numbered the lines it had not used yet while the receiver numbered the whole set, so the two disagreed as soon as one line was spent. That is why the same one or two lines kept coming back. NPCs now work through the whole set before anything repeats.
• An NPC that asks you a question now remembers asking it. Answer after the question has gone (you walked off, or you talked to them again in between) and the NPC repeats the question with its yes and no options instead of saying it does not understand. It repeats once, and repeating fires none of the question’s consequences.
• Questions from NPCs now stay open for thirty minutes rather than seven. The two kinds that stop an NPC hearing anything else while they wait, the ones that take whatever you type as your answer and the ones that keep asking until you answer, keep the shorter window.

Achievements

• Achievement counts used to move only when you logged in. The journal now asks the server for current numbers when you open it, and there is a Refresh button beside the filters for when you keep it open while you work. It updates at most once a minute. Reported by Traveller13.
• Two journal display fixes from the same report. A tiered achievement you are partway through no longer shows an "Unlocked" date beside a progress bar that is still running, and the Earned list now shows every tier you have earned with the day you earned it instead of only the highest one.
• Groundwork for achievement badge art: the journal rows and the unlock banner can now carry a badge icon per achievement, with graceful fallbacks while the art set is generated. No visible change yet; the badges themselves are next.
• Every achievement in the game (all 476) now has a badge: a painted emblem in a medallion whose metal climbs copper, silver, gold and platinum up each ladder, a dark thorned plate for the 84 boss kills, a gold laurel on the 32 title-granting achievements, and the category color on the inner ring. Badges show in the journal rows and on the unlock banner; unearned rows draw dimmed.

Quests

• Phineas' recruiting speech in Blood River Outskirts had a quest condition that mixed "and" with "or" without brackets. The conversation parser reads those strictly left to right, so the line meant something narrower than it looked; the brackets are now written out and the gate behaves exactly as it already did.

Tools

• The conversation editor now warns on any quest condition that mixes "and" with "or" at the same bracket level, across every gate field on talks, responses, death lines, barks and NPC-to-NPC chatter. A test runs the same check over all 4,606 conversation files, so the shape cannot come back unnoticed.
• Rebuilt the skill data extractor that backs the tooltip audit. It now reads a skill whole: sub-runes and sub-effects where most specialization bonuses actually live, the innate rewards that are the entire behaviour of 191 passive skills, and every formula identifier resolved against the same tables the game builds at startup. Three classes of misreading are now impossible: a stale leftover damage string is kept out of the live figures, the lines the tooltip already generates are listed so prose is not blamed for omitting them, and the target-count rollup is pinned against the seventeen values the test suite already asserts.
• Checked in a test folder metadata file that had never been committed, so the folder keeps one identity across fresh clones instead of being reassigned a new one each time.
• Added a Scene Instances page to the dev portal: every scene instance running on the test shard, who is in each one, session length, and XP and gold earned this session as totals and per-hour rates. Admin login only.
• The unattended bug pass can now be pointed at a single day: -CreatedSince takes today, yesterday or a date and limits the queue to reports filed then, so a run over the day's new bugs stops when those are done instead of continuing into the older backlog.
• Pathfinding warnings that fire when a navmesh tile loads uncut now point at the tile that gave up instead of the scene as a whole, so the offending spots in six towns can actually be located next time they appear in the logs.
• The /t revel bot fleet again finds the live instance of a scene when a player is standing in it, so the show runs where players are watching instead of in a private room.
• Six pairs of interface strings had been minted onto the same internal id, which stopped the localization source-db regeneration dead on the first pair it met. The five remaining pairs now have their own ids, chosen so nothing already translated changes identity, and each site records the id it gave up.

Player Dungeons

• The Dungeon Prize Chest answers a click again. The chest had nothing on it to receive one, so it stood in the room as scenery: no prompt, no message, nothing in chat. Reported by Rinaldi.
• Chests already placed on the test shard have to be picked up and set down again. The chest was addressed by an identity that did not match its own asset, and correcting that leaves the old ones pointing at nothing.
• Dungeon waygates can be placed. A waygate is built from a dungeon entrance and still counted as one, so a dungeon turned every waygate away against a limit of zero entrances. It counts as an ordinary decoration now. Reported by Rinaldi.

Docs

• Bard round five written up on the roadmap and in the school reference, including the two traps behind it: the bar controller crashing on hotbar plumbing it does not use, and a tip pot that no automatic payout sweep can reach.
• Wrote the missing recipe for building a skill or spell from scratch: every file a new skill needs, the id collision check that bit us, which effect primitives express resists, immunities and roots, and the animation trap where a new skill casts with no animation and no error. Written from the Bedrock build so every step is proven.

Party

• The party finder now tells the server to stop sending listing updates when you close the window, and asks again when you reopen it. Before this it only ever asked to start, so opening the finder once left the server streaming party listings to your client for the rest of the session. The listing itself is unchanged: it still fills in on open and still updates on its own while open.
• The party window's version warning gave up whenever any one member was on a loading screen, so in a full group, where somebody is nearly always zoning, a real version split across the party could stay hidden. The check now passes over the member who is mid-load and keeps reading the rest. The out-of-date client popup also waits until your own version is known, closing a gap where it could fire at a client that was fine.

Localization

• Measured what the conversation validator actually says about translated NPC keywords, without needing an editor batch run. Across the eight languages, 12,482 conversations currently have two different topics answering to the same typed word; the lists that ship today name 592.
• The affected NPCs fall back to English for their whole conversation, and the list deciding that was last generated in 2024, before the machine-translation pass rewrote the dialogue. A test now runs the same conversations through the real game code, which caught the first bug in the new checker on its first run.
• Repaired the translated NPC keyword lists in five languages down to zero collisions (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese), with German, French and Chinese well down and a second pass running. Two topics answering to the same typed word meant one of them stopped answering at all.
• Several of these were plain mistranslations rather than near misses: French called an outlander a hors-la-loi (outlaw), Italian and Japanese both rendered "sword" as "beginning", and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese each had a bare "LA" in the where-are-you-from list, which is the definite article and matched almost anything a player typed.
• German and French keyword collisions down to zero as well. German is the hardest of the eight because it compounds: the matcher lets two words coexist when a space separates them, which is how English keeps "virtue banner" clear of "virtu*", and a compound written as one word gives that up.
• All eight languages now read zero keyword collisions, down from 12,482 broken conversations. With the text clean, the lists that force an NPC to speak English regenerate to empty: 592 NPCs across French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian were answering in English no matter what the translation said, and they now speak the language the player picked.
• Those lists had not been regenerated since July 2024, because the only way to produce them was an editor batch run out of the old version-control server. A check that used to need that now runs in about twenty seconds, and a new build gate fails any change that reintroduces a collision, naming the two topics that clash.

Parties

• Winning a party loot roll no longer loses the item in silence. If the handover is refused, the client now tries again a couple of times, and if it still cannot go through you get a chat line and a popup naming the item, and the roll window closes instead of sitting open with the item stuck in its queue.
• Winning a roll with a completely full pack used to drop the item out of your bags on screen, with no message either, even though the server had already handed it over. The item now shows up where it belongs, with a line saying your pack is over its item limit.
• A roll or pass answer that never reaches the server now says so in chat. It used to fail quietly and count as a pass.

Testing

• The nightly pass that reads tester feedback only ever looked at comments, so a bug report filed with everything in its description and no comment on it was never picked up. Fourteen had built up that way, the oldest six days old. All fourteen are answered and assigned, and the pass now reads that shape of report on its own.
• Seven verification tasks were still telling testers their fix was not on the test server, between one and nine days after it went live. Matched each one to the change that carries it and put them back in front of the testers on the current build.

Rendering

• Shadows now fade as the weather turns wet. A thunderstorm used to drop a shadow nearly as dark and hard-edged as clear noon, and a full storm cast a harder shadow than plain heavy rain did. Daytime shadow strength is now 0.41 in rain, 0.26 in heavy rain and 0.20 in a storm, against an unchanged 0.93 on a clear day. The change rides the existing weather blend, so shadows ease in and out over the ten seconds the weather takes to turn.

Build health

• A test file committed earlier today referenced a type it never imported, which stopped the editor assembly compiling on the branch. While that is broken no session can run any test and the nightly test job has nothing to run. One missing import.
• A client build break stopped this afternoon's release to the test shard. The catchphrase payment code named a data type that exists in the editor and on the server but is left out of the game client, so it compiled everywhere it was checked and failed only when the client itself was built.
• Added a commit check that compiles the client the same way the build machine does, with the editor-only code excluded. It runs on any commit touching client scripts, takes about forty seconds, and turns the commit down instead of letting the break reach a build.

Scenes

• Cleared the stale prebaked occlusion culling data from Solace Bridge Outskirts. The scene no longer references the old bake and draws without precomputed occlusion.

Graphics

• Reworked how the client limits active lights. Lights used to pop on and off as you moved: the fade path could never run, shadow fade-in snapped to full strength, the shadow budget re-picked its lights every quarter second with no tie-breaking, and the distance bands had no buffer, so a light at the edge of its range blinked as the camera swayed. Lights and shadows now fade in and out, slot holders keep their slot unless something clearly closer arrives, and band edges hold until you really cross them.
• Towns now have a real light budget: the nearest decoration lights stay lit and the farthest fade out gradually, scaled by graphics quality and how much frame time the machine has to spare. Placing a lamp in a fully lit area starts it dark and fades it in only when it earns a slot. Other scene types have no count limit; the smooth distance fading applies everywhere. Filed tester task #4680.

Web

• A public leaderboards page is live, carrying the same boards as the in-game window, so the standings can be read and linked without logging in. Pick a board and a timeframe, sort by any column, and filter by name.
• The public leaderboards page picks up each rebuild within about a quarter hour. It was checking once an hour on its own clock, which meant the standings on the page could trail the ones being counted by nearly two hours.

Tooling

• Built the achievement badge art pipeline: one generated emblem per achievement ladder, tier plates (copper/silver/gold/platinum) rendered from a single master, boss and title-laurel premium plates, category color on the bezel, and verify checks that catch a wrong tier or a touched frame before anything ships.
• Achievement badge plates picked and committed: one gray master renders the copper, silver, gold and platinum tier frames, bosses get a dark thorned plate, title achievements a gold laurel. First pilot cropped emblems too tightly at the badge window; the generator and compositor now keep the whole subject inside it.
• The test-bot fleet can now trickle into a scene one avatar at a time: a new login-spacing option replaces the fixed ramp of roughly five logins per second. Used it to stage a fireworks show in Castle Atos on the chaos shard, 50 bots arriving one every 10 seconds and then 100 more at double pace, 150 in the courtyard by the end with rockets and fountains going off around the clock.
• The bots' automatic search for a live scene instance came back empty even with a player standing in the scene, so the fleet was pointed at the open instance by name instead and joined it on the first try. The search regression is filed as #4746.

Crafting

• Mining, Forestry, Foraging and Field Dressing used to describe themselves in four words each, along the lines of "Skill in Mining." Those four are the worst place in the game for a stub, because a gathering proficiency has no numbers panel under its description, so the sentence was all a player got. All four now say what training them buys: a better chance an attempt yields materials instead of failing, better odds of a good or critical result, a wider band on the swing meter, and the fact that tougher nodes both start lower and gain less from each level.
• Smelting, Milling, Tanning, Textiles and Butchery had the same problem as the gathering skills: three words of description each, and no numbers panel underneath to make up for it. All five now say that a higher level improves the chance a craft succeeds and opens recipes that ask for more skill than you have.
• Blacksmithing, Carpentry, Tailoring, Alchemy and Cooking now name the three things a level actually moves at the station: the chance the craft succeeds, the chance it comes out exceptional, and the chance a failure can be rescued by adding an extra ingredient. The Alchemy line also says that brewing draws on the same skill, which the skill tree does not make obvious.

Taming

• Pet Hide Training has been claiming to raise both physical and magical resistance on your pet. It only ever raised physical, so a tamer taking it to survive casters was buying the wrong thing. Four more taming tooltips came with it: Pet Obedience described a health threshold it does not have, Summon Pet and Pet Resurrection both hid real benefits of training them, and Pet Heal now says specialization increases the healing as well as stripping damage over time.
• The three pet commands now admit what they cost. A pet on Speed Training misses more, a pet on Strength Training takes more damage, and a taunting pet strikes more slowly. Taunt also now warns that when the command lapses, everything the pet was holding turns on you, which is the entire risk of the skill and was written down nowhere. All three say they are limited to two active at once. Tame Creature explains the roll: wound the creature first, its level works against you, training works for you.

Items

• The Shadow Shield potion pays for the damage you take out of your focus, and while its aura holds your damage resistance and absorption stop applying. For an armoured character that is a downgrade, and the label said none of it. Eight more potion and elixir descriptions came with it, including the Longevity and Potency elixirs, which were described interchangeably and do different things.

Launcher

• The launcher's "See what changed" link used to disappear the moment an update started and only come back when it finished, which is the one stretch where you are sitting there with nothing to read. It now stays on screen for the whole update and points at the build you are downloading. Requested by Gravidy.
• The patch notes link is also present now in the places it used to be missing: while the launcher waits for you to close the game, and after an update that failed or was cancelled. The "Open after each update" checkbox rides along with it, so it can be switched off mid-update. The automatic browser popup is unchanged and still fires once, after a finished update.

Maps

• Fixed the Desolis map, which has never lined up with the player marker. The entry that maps the world onto the drawn sheet took its two axes from a pair of calibration markers standing 311m apart east to west but only 10.6m apart north to south, so it read north-south movement 7.5 times too fast and east-west movement far too slow. The marker sat off the drawn town standing still and slid further with every step, and every point of interest icon was off the same way. Recalibrated against the painting using the town's two ponds as landmarks; the two axes now agree to 0.64% and every landmark lands within a third of a metre. Reported on the forums by Chiasma in January 2021.

Catchphrases

• Started the player catchphrase system: players will pick a character voice from a catalog of 134 English voices, type a short phrase, and have the game speak it aloud. Built the backend generation service first: it runs the phrase through AI moderation (strict, and it refuses everything if the moderation model is unreachable), synthesizes the approved text in the chosen voice, and publishes the clip to the voice CDN. Identical phrases in the same voice reuse the existing clip instead of paying to synthesize twice.
• Child-sounding voices are excluded from the player voice catalog outright, and the moderation policy for catchphrases is stricter than chat: a line that could read as either playful or hateful gets rejected so the player can rephrase.
• The server half of catchphrases landed: new game-server operations to pick a character voice, pre-check a phrase (the check also returns the price: 25 cotos plus 1 per character, 200-character cap), generate it, and manage the phrase list and a 12-slot bar, all persisted per character. Payment only happens after a phrase generates successfully, so a failed generation or moderation rejection never costs cotos, and generating the identical phrase twice resolves to the one you already own instead of charging again.
• The voice clip streaming code (download, disk cache, size cap, stale-cache rollover) that NPC voices use is now a shared component, so catchphrase clips ride the same cache and the same audio-options controls instead of growing a second copy.
• Built the Catchphrases window: browse 134 voices with search and gender filters, preview any of them, type a phrase and watch the price appear once moderation approves it, then pay and generate. Payment uses the same escrow flow as the appearance-change fee, so a failed or rejected generation returns every coto.
• Catchphrases now play out loud in the world: press the button and everyone within about 30 meters hears your phrase spoken at your character, with the same distance falloff as NPC dialogue. Both the sender and each listener enforce a cooldown, the volume slider you may have already set on a performer also applies to their catchphrases, and a new Player Catchphrases audio option turns them off entirely.
• Added the catchphrase bar: a small draggable strip of 12 slots you fill from the Catchphrases window and fire with a click. Each of the 12 slots can also be bound to a key in Controls, so a battle cry lands mid-fight without touching the mouse. Right-click clears a slot, and the whole bar flips between upright and horizontal.
• Wrote up the catchphrase system: a plan document with the build log and the switch-on checklist, a system reference in the docs, rows on the internal and public roadmaps, and a generator that publishes a short preview sample for each of the 134 voices so the picker can play them.
• Generated and published a preview sample for every one of the 134 catchphrase voices, so the voice picker can play each one before you commit. All 134 succeeded on the first pass.
• Audited the catchphrase generation service against runaway cost and tightened it. The free "is this phrase allowed" check now has its own per-player limits on both sides, character budgets are checked before a phrase is sent rather than charged when it is refused, and there is now a hard 30-day ceiling that a new day does not reset. A moderation take-down also sticks: a removed clip can no longer be picked up by the next player who types the same words.

Tester Tools

• The /tester panel can set the weather. A picker for all nine weather types, wind (Calm, Light or Heavy) and a wind heading, each with a Clear that hands the scene back to its own weather, plus a readout of the weather you are standing in. Checking rain, fog or a storm used to mean waiting for the weather clock to come round.
• The weather picker moves the sky for everyone in your scene instance, the same as the existing time-of-day setting, and the panel says so. Access widened to tester accounts on the server side, which is the half that decides.
• The verification board and the tweak values window now open as pages in a browser, beside the game, the way the tester tools window already did. Type /verify web or /tweak web, or use the new Pop Out button on either window's toolbar.
• The browser board and the in-game board are the same board. A filter typed on one shows on the other, a claim made on one reads as claimed on both, and the two share a single refresh instead of each polling the tracker.
• Filtering for a task number the board is not currently holding now reaches past the loaded page from the browser as well, so a task that is genuinely there stops reading as deleted.

GM Tools

• The GM event panel weather row gained the Clear button it had been missing since it shipped. Setting weather worked; handing it back meant dropping to the console.

Interface

• Opening Settings for the first time in a play session froze the client for about ten and a half seconds, long enough for Windows to grey the window out and call it not responding before it came back. Two things were doing that work on the frame the window opened: the Audio tab asked Windows for its list of MIDI keyboards, and the first such question in a session brings the whole MIDI subsystem up before it answers, and the same tab started the NPC voice system just to print how big the voice cache was, which clears that cache one file at a time after a patch. The keyboard list now loads in the background, and the cache size is only read when the voice system is already running. Reported by nyarkie.
• The Settings window now records how long each of its seven tabs takes to build and sends that to the logs, so the next thing that gets slow on that path is a number we can see rather than a report we have to chase. Finding this one took the client logs: of 63 stalls recorded on the test shard over two weeks, nine landed within fifteen seconds of a Settings open, and the live server had none of those across 6,623 opens.
• Hide Helmet and Hide Cloak are now remembered per character instead of once per install, so a knight who keeps the helm on and a mage who keeps it off no longer overwrite each other every login (requested by Barugon). Every character starts out with whatever the setting already was, so nothing changes appearance until you toggle it.

Oracle

• The Oracle's help guides caught up with the fortnight. They were last fact-checked on 2 July, and the two weeks since had made a lot of them wrong: the guide still described skill decay on death, which was retired on 3 August; the bard guide described the school before its rebuild; the taming guide still documented Refresh, which is retired, and the tree before it split. Every one of the 44 documents was re-checked against the game data, the balance record and the 121 in-game descriptions the skill audit corrected.
• Six systems had no Oracle guide at all and now have one: achievements, music and performance, guilds, player dungeons, housing and decorating, and pets. Those are the things that grew or shipped this fortnight and that a player is most likely to ask about, so the Oracle was answering them from nothing. The corpus is 50 documents now, and the pages are public at the same address the Oracle cites when it answers.
• Three of the help documents carried a source link pointing at a web address that does not exist, so the link the Oracle handed a player was broken. The README that taught that address was corrected along with them. The recipe data the Oracle answers ingredient questions from was also rebuilt: it dated from 1 July and knew nothing about crafted instruments, the performance stage or the smoke bomb.
• The refreshed help guides are live. The Oracle answers from 50 documents now instead of 44, and the recipe data it looks up ingredients in went from 3,099 recipes to 3,128. Asked whether skills decay on death, it now says they do not and points at the guide that says so.

Guides

• The Dungeon Builder's Manual gained three sections: the trap kit and how you wire it, waygates and where they can lead, and the prize chest alongside running a live event yourself. Its dated note said the Builder panel, the doorway finder and the Generator tab were still to arrive; they arrived. The list of things being considered next now says which three of them shipped.

Documentation

• The internal skill reference was re-checked against the same audit, so the two hand-written copies of this material stop disagreeing. Two real errors turned up in the taming page while doing it: its skill table still listed Frenzy and Refresh as live skills with the old prerequisites, and both the tree diagram and the Pet Range section put Pet Range one branch away from where the data has it.

Build-health

• The skill and rune validation checks used to raise a dialog box that froze the Editor until someone clicked Ok. They log to the console now. The same pass caught two creature skills that had been failing validation for weeks with missing name entries and gave them names.

Dungeons

• Accepting a dungeon piece could fail with an error if you had been teleported out of the dungeon with the picker still open, or if the piece you were replacing had already been taken back. The window now closes instead of erroring.

Inventory

• The inventory window can say which bag a thing is in. With "Show Objects in Containers" ticked, the table grows a Container column naming the bag each row lives in, and clicking that heading groups the list by bag with bags still sorting to the top. Column widths are remembered separately for the wider table, so turning the view on and off does not disturb the layout you set for the other one.
• Searching the backpack now looks inside closed bags. Before this, a bandage in a belt pouch answered no search at all unless you had already found the flatten checkbox in the Options fold. A live search opens the bags for as long as it runs and puts the view back when you clear the box, without changing your checkbox.
• The search box learned in:. Typing in:pouch lists what is inside a bag whose name contains "pouch", quoting matches a phrase whole, and a minus in front excludes it. A bag you have renamed answers to the name you gave it.
• Right-clicking an item that lives inside a bag gained Open Containing Container, which opens that bag window. It is offered for items nested in another bag, not for ones already loose in the window you right-clicked in.
• Containers draw a fill bar under the count in the footer: gold to 80 percent, amber from there to the limit, red at it. Your backpack measures carried weight against carry capacity, other containers measure item count against their item limit, and a container with no limit draws no bar rather than an empty one.
• The Recently Looted Reset button is back. The old inventory window had one, the rebuilt window lost it, and there has been no way to empty the list since. It sits beside the category filter while that category is selected.
• Recently Looted opens newest first. The order it needed has existed all along with no column header able to reach it, so the one tab that asks "what did I just pick up" was sorted by name. Bags still sit above loose items, and clicking a heading still sorts by that heading.
• Items that arrived since you last opened the inventory carry a faint tint on their row, which clears the next time you open it. All four skins define their own shade of it.
• What counts as recently looted is honest now. Buying from a merchant marks an item as new, and so does dragging a single item off a corpse. Neither did before. Moving your own things between your own bags no longer marks them, so equipping out of a side bag or clearing a crafting table back into your pack stops refilling the list with things you have owned for a month.

The New Britannia Herald

Dungeon masters get a console, and the bard finally finishes a song

17 minTranscriptPodcast

Headlines

• The Dungeon Master console: fire the traps in your room by hand, put a line in a creature's mouth, and open the reward when they have earned it.
• A cleared siege now comes down for everyone. Defeat the cabalists and the camp leaves the overworld map for every player, not just the ones who fought it, and the town stays free of its siege for an hour.
• Four bonuses tamer gear has advertised since launch, and never once delivered, now reach your pet.
• The Honest Gamble: 40 Chaos Magic proposals published with live usage data, the whole Magic ring now written, and eight defects filed on the way
• The School of the Soldier: 33 Tactics proposals published with live usage data, five audit defects filed, and per-card votes at /blog/proposals/tactics/
• The First Spear: 30 Polearms proposals published, the first weapon-school page. The dive found the school's identity written in invisible ink: no polearm hit can be blocked by a shield, and the game has never said so.
• The Blades school got its deep dive: The Blade Everyone Carries, 34 proposals for the biggest school the live sweep series has measured, with seven defects filed and two cards already built.
• The Bludgeon school got its deep dive: The Weight of the Blow, 29 proposals for the most cast melee school on live, with three defects filed and a 2019 bug report finally answered.
• The Ranged school got its deep dive: The Long Shot, 35 proposals for the second most specialized tree in the game, from an inverted ammo passive and a crossbow that secretly ships with longbow range to craftable arrow tiers, trick arrows, and named draw tiers. Six defects filed, school reference corrected.
• The Light Armor school got its deep dive: The Art of Not Being There, 30 proposals for the most worn, least committed school in the game, with thirty days of live usage data, a census of every character ever made, and six defects filed before publication.
• The Shield school got its deep dive: The Neighbor's Shield, 33 proposals, seven defects filed, and the block formula published for the first time.
• The Heavy Armor school got its deep dive: The Steel Between, 30 proposals, and the Combat ring closed the same day it opened: all seven weapon and armor schools examined

Taming

• The Collar Recovery skill was describing itself as a percentage, and at skill 100 that percentage read 184.7. The number is not a chance, it is how far the collar holds out against a creature level, so the skill now says the creature level your collar always survives to. On the character sheet it reads as Taming Collar Protection.
• Checked whether Collar Recovery stops paying off past creature level 100, as reported. It does not. The skill scales on a square root curve rather than a straight line, so a tamer at skill 100 never loses a collar below creature level 84 and loses it 15 percent of the time at creature level 100. No balance change. The roll behind it is now bounded at both ends and covered by tests.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-08-13 is up: The music systems landed almost all at once. Seventy five period songs went into the game, an on screen keyboard appeared, USB piano keyboards now play your instrument with real dynamics, and bard skills stopped putting the instrument away mid performance. Alongside that, the achievements the game has counted for years finally have a book to read them in, dungeon owners can stake gold in a prize chest, and twenty three reported bugs went down. Listen or read the transcript (19 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Nightly forum sweep filed 9 tracker entries: 7 wishlist ideas (tamer support tree, Piercing Shot debuff, light-armor defenses, magic-tree pet summon variants, a Water CC alternative to Ice Field, a skill de-leveling item, per-category NPC speech muting) and 2 bugs (Ice Field debuff duration mismatch, Double Cursor cursor vanishing at the main menu).
• Posted a new contest on the SQUIRREL! page: two guaranteed chaos tester spots for new players in Corporate Ladder, judged from its leaderboard at noon Central on Friday.

Social

• The Summon Party Scroll now summons your party. It was being destroyed on use and doing nothing, which it had done since the first import. Everything around it was already built, including the prompt each party member gets naming you and where you are, with the choice to travel or stay put. What was missing was the call itself and permission for anyone but staff to send it.
• Using a Summon Party Scroll with nobody to summon no longer costs you the scroll. The scroll is spent at the moment you cast, so the fix is refusing the cast: with no party, or with every other member offline, it tells you there is nobody to summon and stays in your bag.

Player Dungeons

• A fourth trap piece, and the first that carries a builder's own words: a message plaque. It is wired like any other effect rather than standing there readable, so a plate in the doorway can make the far wall speak the moment somebody walks in. Players a hall away still read it; a blank one says nothing.
• All four trap pieces now use the same placement rule the dungeon waygate does, so they turn up in the decoration list where they can actually work and not on a house lot where a trap sits inert.
• Dungeon Master mode landed underneath: an owner can put their dungeon into a live event, where they run the place by hand instead of leaving it to run itself. Nothing is recorded while an event is on, and that is the server's refusal rather than a request, so no visit, clear or record can come out of a run a person was animating.
• Two rules an event learned the hard way. It cannot start unless the dungeon is already in Adventure Mode, because switching modes reloads the dungeon for everybody in it and would take the event down with the room; and it always ends when the person running it leaves, so an event cannot outlive the only person who can fire anything in it.
• The Dungeon Master console went in: a Live Event button beside the mode switch opens a panel with Start Event, a button for each channel wired in the room you are standing in, Speak, and Release Reward. Firing a channel by hand runs the same path a pressure plate does, so every player in the room sees it from the same replicated state.
• Boss lines come from a fixed list rather than a text box. Free text spoken by a monster in somebody else's dungeon would reach every visitor attributed to a creature instead of a player, so the host picks from a curated set, the index travels instead of the words, and every player reads the line in their own language.
• Release Reward unlocks a chest the owner filled and locked before the event, rather than adding names to its access list. The access list holds ten entries, which would have quietly left an eleventh guest out of a reward they had just earned in front of everyone.
• Two more trap pieces, and both are doors. A sealing door shuts when its trigger fires and opens again when it clears, so the worst it costs a visitor is the walk back to open it by hand. A boss door starts closed and only ever opens, so the room it guards cannot re-close on whoever just cleared it.
• Player-built traps can take health now: a dart wall, a flame jet and a spike floor, all at the gentlest tier. They are bounded by a running account rather than a per-hit number alone, so one trap over ten seconds, one room over ten seconds and a whole dungeon over a minute each have a ceiling, and a corridor lined with the gentlest traps in the kit cannot do what none of them could do alone.
• The three damaging pieces are built on the store's trap decorations, which until now were scenery with no damage in them at all. Each has its built-in pressure plate removed, because the kit already has a plate to place and wire, and leaving it in would have given the trap a second way to fire itself outside the channel it answers to.

World

• Clearing a siege now takes it off the overworld map for everyone. Before, defeating the cabalists closed the siege instance a few minutes later and changed nothing outside it: the camp stayed up and everyone else was still routed through the siege lines until the astrology clock moved on. A cleared town stays free of its siege for an hour, then returns to the normal schedule, and it keeps its place under the concurrency cap while cleared, so clearing a siege takes one off the map instead of handing the slot to the next town. Player-owned and NPC towns behave the same. Requested by Cora Cuz'avich.

Tools

• The editor refuses to delete an item archetype, because saved items reference archetype ids and removing one can break those references. It now offers a bypass for the case the guard gets wrong, an archetype built and discarded before any build went out, and taking it logs which archetype went. Editor automation can take the same path without raising a dialog at all, which used to hold the editor's main thread until somebody clicked it.

Images

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• Proposals index, grouped by school
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• Water page mockup
• Sun tree, live usage
• The proposed Air magic moment of play, from the new proposals page: Charged marks build on the target bar, the stun forecast shows its math, and the deck carries a cheap Strike while the storm lives.
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• The Surge Ledger, the Chaos page's keystone interface proposal: the outcome table before the bet and the running tally after it.
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• From the Shield page: the composed wall vignette, the annotated skill tree with live counts, and the capability matrix.
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Proposals

• The inventory proposal page was checked back against the code two and a half weeks after it went up, and every card now says where it stands. One of the sixteen is built: hover tooltips returned to the item lists, and they compare a piece of equipment against what you are wearing. Three are part built by smaller fixes that took the pain rather than the design: the search box got its accent folding and renamed-item matching back, the category tabs fold away instead of eating four rows, and the display options and column widths became yours to set. The other twelve are open, and each card says what landed and what did not.
• Published The Visible Storm, the Air Magic deep dive: 24 proposals, each with its own comment thread and vote arrows. The research found the stun school running its whole control game invisibly. Stun odds appear nowhere, landed stuns show no timer and play no sound, the Intelligence driven escape has never been documented, and the crowd control resistance that already builds on every landed stun has never been shown to either side. The page asks for zero new stun power and spends the budget on a visible Charged state, a converter spell that turns control into focus and longer chains, a fair immunity window, and real jobs for the summon, shield, and mobility parts of the kit.
• The Air research pass filed seven defect bugs the same day (#4403 to #4409): Gust's push is wired as a visual effect so the root spell may never have moved anyone, Discharge's resistance debuff expires in about 2 seconds while its siblings last 30, the specialization elixir accidentally grants 156 meter Lightning casts for an hour, the summoned elemental's stun proc is wired as the wrong effect kind and does nothing, every Air stun lands in silence while a finished chain lightning sound sits unused in the files, Lightning Storm's stun ignores skill and stats entirely, and Chain Lightning's fifth and sixth targets take full damage because the falloff table was never extended for the 2021 buff.
• Closed inventory proposal S3, one-row tabs with a More menu: the folded category strip and the new search box are the shape we are keeping, so the pinned five tabs and per-category counts will not be built. The Recently Looted Reset button stays tracked under S8. Replied to both comments in the card's discussion thread.
• Published The Honest Gamble, the Chaos Magic deep dive: 40 proposals, the eighth magic school page and the one that completes the Magic ring on the proposals index. Every card has its own comment thread and vote arrows.
• The Chaos page runs on live data: 30 days of casting telemetry puts the school at 31,896 casts, 0.38% of all skill casts and last of all schools measured, with 96 of 1,251 casters touching it. The research also found Chaos Bolt resolves one of five hidden weighted outcomes and deals no damage on roughly one cast in ten, Confusion makes its victims immune to itself in two casts, and Juxtapose does nothing at all without the specialization.
• Filed eight Chaos defects found during the page research (#4462 to #4469), from the Confusion self-immunity bug to the last silent spell in the school. Two more were already tracked: the balance audit tool bug that once crowned Chaos Bolt the biggest outlier in the game was fixed back in July, so one card ships already built.
• The School of the Soldier is up: the Tactics deep dive at catnipgames.net/blog/proposals/tactics/, 33 proposals across four tiers. Tactics is the largest skill tree in the game and the fourth most specialized, but 30 days of live usage showed the actives concentrated in one corner: half the school's 206,722 casts came from about 32 dual-wielders pressing Offhand Attack, Passive Stance drew 16 players all month, and none of the game's 29 combos includes a Tactics rune. The page proposes fair percentage stance tradeoffs, a visible Parry window, the school's first combos named like sword forms, reaction glyphs that answer a parry, the Poise maneuver pool, and a brawler line for Pugilism. Every card has its own comment thread and vote arrows.
• The Tactics audit filed five defects (#4482 to #4486): Offhand Attack's specialization bonus sits behind a check that can never fire, the Offhand Defense tooltip names the wrong stat, Berserkers Stance promises a slow-cleanse that only specialists get, Gait Pacing ships unimplemented with another skill's reward data pasted in, and Elixir Receptive mislabels its own effect. The audit also confirmed the filed Magic Warding resistance bug (#2002) as the school's strongest open defect and mapped every proposal to it.
• The taming deep dive got a second edition: 22 proposals rewritten against the rebalanced tamer. Six July cards graduated as built with their final vote tallies shown, four retired on votes, the survivors were renumbered with formerly tags, and five new cards cover what the rebalance uncovered.
• The July taming page stays readable at a permanent archive with its original votes and comment threads live. The new Graduated section gives centerpiece credit to the commenter whose collar-recovery pushback was correct three weeks before our own audit amendment reached the same conclusion.
• Published The Unbroken Song, a Bard school proposals page: 27 cards in three tiers, from a whole-school tooltip pass to a song contest and a specialization fork, with the August rework credited card by card. Every proposal has its own comment thread and vote arrows.
• Thirty days of live telemetry sized the old Bard school before its rework: 2.09 percent of all casts, roughly one active player in eleven, with the retired skills carrying 48.6 percent of the volume. The page publishes verdicts on all eleven unbuilt skills and names a successor for the retired attack speed song.
• Filed seven Bard audit defects alongside the page, led by three support songs that end the bard's own performance when cast, and a data disagreement over how many allies a song actually reaches.
• The proposals index gained its Bard tile, the fourth of the Strategy ring's five, and the music page's bard paragraph was brought current with the shipped design.
• Published The Empty Hand, a deep dive into the Focus school with 28 proposals: honest names and priced tooltips, readable hand timers, a shaped mulligan, a stance that survives a walk, the first sprint discount, summon upkeep relief, six dead skill IDs revived as new deck verbs, Meditation, and a specialization perk that refunds the first Mind Wipe of every fight. Live cast telemetry and a full character census back every card, and each proposal has its own comment thread and vote arrows: The Empty Hand. With it the Strategy ring is complete: all five Strategy schools now have proposal pages.
• Published The First Spear, a Polearms school proposals page: 30 cards built from a 30-day live usage sweep, a full database census, the school's complete data surface, nine years of forum history, and the genre from Ultima Online to Path of Exile 2. The finding underneath the whole page: no polearm hit can be blocked by a shield, and nothing in the game says so. Each card has its own comment thread and vote arrows.
• Filed five polearm defects from the page's audit (#4520 to #4524): Bec de Faucon wearing Defensive Positions' icon, Spinning Attack advertising a bleed and a debuff that are a zero percent chance without specialization, three weapon attack runes with no names in the language files, stale range numbers on all four polearm weapon archetypes, and a catalogue of dead identifiers. Also added the root cause to the Halberd of the Sun's hidden dexterity drain: the -25 lives on the weapon's own free attack, which is why it never fires from glyphs.
• The proposals index gained its Polearms tile, the first of the Combat ring's seven. The school's reference doc was rewritten against the data in the same pass: the old version overstated the specialization's gold cost twenty times over and called Leg Sweep useless in PvP, when the flag it cited only filters flying creatures.
• Published The Blade Everyone Carries, a Blades school proposals page: 34 cards built from a 30-day live usage sweep, the full rune data surface, nine years of forum history, and the genre from Ultima Online to Sekiro. Blades is the biggest school the sweep series has measured, 460,427 casts in thirty days, 5.64 percent of every skill cast in the game, and the page found it carrying a shipped defense stat no code reads, a third hit that has never fired, and a signature counter armed only by another tree. Each card has its own comment thread and vote arrows.
• The Blades audit filed seven tracker defects alongside the page: the dead Riposte defense stat, the unreachable Double Slash third hit, three combos with no cooldown in drawn decks plus Quad Slash hitting out of order, an orphan icon and a mastery name collision, missing damage typing on multi-hit swings, a silent combo and a stuck blade trail, and stale tooltip strings. Two cards ship already built: the corrected school reference, and the Thrust weapon-poison fix that landed in July with the proc-eligibility correction.
• Published The Weight of the Blow, a Bludgeon school proposals page: 29 cards built from a 30-day live usage sweep, the specialization census, the school's complete formula surface, seven years of forum history, and the genre from Ultima Online's Mace Fighting to Path of Exile 2. The ledger underneath the page: the forums called it the worst melee school in 2018, and it is now the most cast melee school on live, with its best mechanic printed nowhere. Each card has its own comment thread and vote arrows.
• The Bludgeon dive filed three defects: a masterwork bonus that raises a stat no formula reads, so crafting it does nothing (#4537), a Break Armor buff-strip formula with an addition where its twin has a multiplication, pinning it near 11 percent at any mastery (#4538), and Ground Pound's three crowd-control riders rolling a zero percent chance with zero-second durations for anyone without the specialization while the tooltip advertises all three (#4539). The third one answers a player bug report from April 2019 that never got a reply.
• Published The Long Shot, a Ranged school proposals page: 35 cards built from a 30-day live usage sweep (162,638 rune casts by 273 archers, the widest caster base of any weapon school, plus 974,000 auto shots), a full character census (second most specialized tree of 21, 504 spec-80 characters), the forum record back to 2014, and a genre survey from Ultima Online to Bannerlord. All ten items on Cora Cuz'avich's August 14 wishlist map to cards, Barugon's August 13 Piercing Shot request is S11, and requests from Vladamir Begemot, Stealch, Daigoji Gai, Tirrag, Ysold and Bonulino are credited on their cards.
• The Ranged dive filed six defects: the Ammo Scavenger loot bonus rolls backwards so training it reduces your arrow drops (#4542), combo cast parameters read the rune list from the wrong serializer key (#4543), crossbows were authored with 25 m range but ship with 20 (#4544), the draw bar fills slower than the real charge whenever attack speed is above zero (#4545), the charged shot tooltip undersells an 8-tick bow by 26 percent (#4546), and two free-attack tuning values are dead or apply in the wrong mode (#4547).
• Corrected seven errors in the Ranged school reference in the same change: Piercing Shot can critical hit, Rapid Fire bills a flat 8 arrows per burst and Ammo Scavenger never applies to it, the full burst sums to 4.25 times weapon damage over 1.77 seconds, and the Range passive multiplies weapon range, reaching 32.5 m on a longbow at level 100.

UI

• With the Double Cursor Size option on, the pointer no longer goes missing after returning to the main menu, so players who use the larger cursor can see the menu buttons they are clicking (#4389).
• Training dummies and practice archery targets kept their overhead names in your town, lot, basement or personal dungeon even when Options -> Interface -> HUD -> "Show Names Over Decoration Animals" was turned off. Placed animals still respect the option.
• The I key toggles the backpack again while a container is open, and pressing it while the pointer sits on an open window still closes what is open. The Oracle toggle, the close-loot key, and the GM tools toggle move with it.
• Cancelling a craft or closing the crafting window while the timer bar is still filling no longer throws an error; the timer stops on its own when its UI goes away.
• Achievements journal rows now pull their height from the shared UI metric, so a future edit cannot silently drop them below the theme font and clip the tails off names and progress counts.
• The bard Inspiration readout no longer stays on screen forever once a player has banked meter: it appears whenever something changes, keeps the caption and the bar up while an Inspired bonus is draining, and steps out of the way once the drain is finished and the change has had time to be read.
• Fixed the achievements list drawing its rows too short, so the name, deed and progress bar no longer run into each other. Same fix carries the character sheets Achievements tab and the standalone Achievements window.
• The friend count on the social button in the top-right corner now sits as a plain digit tucked in the icons lower-right corner instead of on a small dark pill. Real notifications (unread mail, pending invites, ransoms, network trouble) still use the pill so they stand out. Reported as #4505.
• The floating price banner over a for-sale lot sign was rendering many times larger than intended and swallowing the yard around the sign. It now sits at a small, readable size a hands width above the sign.
• Hover text got its own color in the theme editor. Every list row, context menu entry, checkbox caption and clickable text line used to take its mouse-over color from the same slot as bright emphasis text, so anyone who tried to retune hover also moved every heading and sorted column header in the game. The new Text (hover) entry in the theme editor's Advanced list owns that color on its own. Existing themes keep the colors they had.
• List rows have three background colors and all three are now separately settable: Row (hover), Row (selected) and Row (selected + hover), listed together in the theme editor. Two of them were wired to the general Selection color before, which meant inventory rows ignored the row hover setting entirely and retuning row selection repainted the tab strips as well. A selected row under the cursor also used to change color depending on whether the list had keyboard focus, and now it does not.

Website

• The design proposals index is now grouped instead of a flat list. The skill schools follow the in-game skills window: Adventuring and Crafting, the same six rings, the same order, one card per school. Seven have a page; the other thirty are empty slots with vote arrows on them, so you can ask for the school you want examined next.
• The fourteen system deep dives on that page moved into six themed groups, each with a note saying what it does not cover. Weapons, Armor and the Enhancement Chain are about the item and the crafting bench, not the Blades or Heavy Armor schools, and Music and Sound is about the mix and performing, not the Bard school. Five more system dives we intend to write got empty slots too. The old newest-first list is still there at the bottom.
• The design proposals index got rebuilt in the same parchment style as the proposal pages themselves. Every skill school tile now carries the emblem the in-game skills window uses for that tree, the system dives show their own painted hero art, each tile has a short description, and written pages show how many of their proposals are already built: 56 of the 479 so far. The page opens on a new painting of a candlelit drafting table.
• The proposal pages caught up with the work: the achievements page now marks the World Events channel, boss announcements and celebration hour as built, the decorating and towns pages gained the cards for per-decoration lighting and town orientation that shipped from player wishes, and every tile on the index states its built count, zeroes included. The running total: 506 proposals across 22 pages, 62 built.

Combat

• Ice Field's debuff icon on an enemy no longer shows a countdown that outlasts the debuff itself. The damage part of the field lands in one hit, and the icon used to keep printing its long tail as remaining time - the slow it named would clear in about ten seconds while the tooltip still promised more than half a minute. The countdown now only prints for effects that are still doing something. Requested by Barugon on the forum.
• Discharge's -10 Air Resistance debuff on the target now lasts the full 30 seconds, matching Lightning and Chain Lightning; it used to wear off in about two seconds.
• Fixed the Gust rune so it once again pushes its target back about four metres and can stun on hit. The push and the tooltip line for it had been set up on the wrong effect type and did nothing; the creature and weapon-proc versions of the same spell were fine, and match now.
• Fixed a longstanding typo in the Shield of Ice water attunement bonus formula that read skiLLLevel. The value already resolved correctly at runtime, but the typo could have caused a real bug the next time anyone re-saved the spell in the editor. An EditMode test now guards Shield of Ice against future rogue-cased tokens.
• Ice Field now keeps its slow refreshed on its own timer while a target stands in the field, instead of dropping off after the first tick and staying gone until the field ended. The damage tick keeps its previous cadence.
• Cone of Cold: the attack-speed slow was checking Sun resistance and Sun attunement by mistake. It now checks Water like the rest of the spell, so a Sun-warded target no longer walks through the slow while eating the damage.
• Vanish and Cocoon of Night now write a combat-chat line when they cannot hide you, naming the rune and whether a hostile was still targeting you or you were moving. Before the cast ended in silence and the focus and cooldown were spent with nothing applied.
• Moon Worship's Dexterity bonus now refreshes at moonrise and moonset instead of waiting for the next equipment or buff change. It arrives when the moon comes up and departs when the moon sets, inside about a second either way.
• Fixed a Cocoon of Night timing gap where the stealth wore off ten seconds before the heal it wraps finished ticking. At Grandmaster the stealth now lasts the same thirty seconds as the heal, and at lower skills it matches whatever the heal lasts.
• Chaotic Shield now boosts Chaos Bolt damage the way every other elemental shield boosts its element's damage. The flagship buff had a stray divide where every sibling had a multiply, and had been shipping at a quarter of the intended strength since the shield went in.
• Chaotic Step now honours its tooltip: raising Chaos specialization stretches the maximum teleport distance instead of only lifting the shortest possible hop, and the picker no longer gets confused when a strange spec/attunement mix would have pushed the shortest hop past the longest one.
• Chaos Bolts lightning branch now resolves its stun against the targets air resistance instead of water.
• Fixed a Chaotic Confusion self-nerf: two casts on the same target used to stack so much resistance that every further Chaotic Confusion on that target automatically failed for the rest of the window. Repeat casts on the same target still get harder to land, in a smooth curve now, and they never drop to zero.
• Bard songs and the Performance Stance stopped showing effects from skills the rework retired. The stance no longer wears the Heavy Armor buff glow, Savage Sonata, Dirge of Dissonance and Requiem of Ruin no longer flash the old Atonal Aria success or lay its aura on the target, and Melody of Mending no longer draws a projectile trail to its target.
• Bard: Melody of Mendings healing aura now stacks up to two instances on the same ally, matching Rhapsody of Recovery and what the class docs already say. The five aura songs each now agree with themselves and with the docs on how many targets they name, and a pair of leftover fire-template strings on the Melody and Rhapsody healing sub-effects, copied in from a fire-damage template, are gone. Actual aura reach is unchanged; the songs land through a physics area whose radius decides that, and the target caps were dead data at runtime.
• Spinning Attack's tooltip now says plainly that the bleed and damage-avoidance debuff are Polearm Specialization only, and that the avoidance drop is on the caster while spinning.
• Blades runes: Double Thrust, Quad Slash, Coup de Grace and Riposte now carry an explicit damage type on every hit. Before, only the first hit of Double Thrust and Quad Slash was typed and the rest borrowed the wielders weapon type mid-swing, so a single attack could be divided by different resistances depending on the sword you carried; Coup de Grace and Riposte had the same issue on every effect. All four are now consistent no matter which blade is drawn.
• Ground Pound now lands its attack-speed slow, movement slow, and stun for every bludgeon user, not only those with Bludgeon Specialization. Each rider rolls at 20 percent without specialization and 50 percent fully invested, ticks two seconds at a base slow (up to 13 seconds fully invested), and one second at a base stun (up to 4 seconds fully invested). Fully specialized players see the same ceilings as before.
• Fixed a rune-request wire bug that landed Shock Arrow and Piercing Breeze without their combo data. Anything gated on the combo list now sees it (#4543).
• Bludgeon masterworks with the Knockdown Chance bonus now extend the stun duration when Knockdown lands, instead of adding to a chance the ability already had at 100 percent. Already-crafted items start working retroactively and the tooltip now reads Knockdown Duration.
• Blades combos Icy Thrust, Smoldering Shiv and Quad Slash now carry a cooldown when cast from a drawn deck, matching the doubled-cooldown rule Hamstring and Sawblade Sweep already used. Quad Slash also lands its four hits in order, instead of the second slash resolving before the first.
• Retired a Blades stat named Riposte Defense Power and Duration that had been sitting in the character-state table since a much older Riposte defense buff was removed. Nothing had read the value in years, and the leftover name in tooltips promised a defense buff that never fired. The stat entry is gone from the initialization, formatting and audit paths; the current Riposte Power damage stat is unchanged.

Design

• Published The Patient Tide, a 25-proposal deep dive on Water Magic, the fifth magic-school page after Fire, Earth, Life and Death. The research covered every water rune asset, about forty forum threads back to 2014, and how Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Path of Exile, Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online each built their ice and water kits. Every proposal has a comment thread and vote arrows.
• The Water dive's central finding: every slow in the game shares a single effect slot per target, so a water mage's second cast erases their first and an archer's shot erases both. The page proposes a separate chill channel, chill as visible stacks, a freeze governed by the same crowd-control rules as every stun, and a Shatter payoff that spends the stacks. The 2021 specialization data ranks Water 19th of 21 schools; the ten-year-old debuff stacking request from Lord Baldrith, Garfunkel Humperdinck and Violet Ronso is the keystone card.
• The Water audit also turned up four data defects, filed the same day: Cone of Cold's attack-speed debuff typed against Sun resistance instead of Water, a misspelled formula token in Shield of Ice that only works because the parser ignores case, the shield's avoidance buff running half the duration of its siblings, and Ice Field's slow landing only at the moment a target steps in. Ice Field's tooltip duration bug from Barugon's report this week is referenced rather than re-filed.
• Published The Borrowed Light, a 28-proposal deep dive on Sun Magic, the sixth magic school in the proposals series and the first page in the series to carry live usage data: thirty days of skill casts from the live server sit beside every skill in the tree and every card in the catalog.
• The Sun data names the problem: the smallest school in the game at 0.90 percent of all casts, a torch spell that reaches 54 percent of every active caster while every other skill is single-digit reach, an anti-stealth kit that reached 16 players in a month, and a phoenix that has been the weakest summon for seven receipted years. The catalog runs from a tooltip honesty pass through a phoenix rescue to a Sunlance execute, bottled noon, and an eclipse event shared with the future Moon page.
• The Sun code audit caught the tree lying in both directions: Solar Flare has promised extra daylight damage since Release 70 while its damage formula has no daylight term, and Blind's description claims it raises your accuracy when the spell actually debuffs the target's avoidance, dexterity, and crit. Both fixes are data changes and lead the fix-first tier. Two suspected bugs did not survive verification and stayed off the page.
• Published The Silver Hour, a 23-proposal deep dive into Moon magic, the eighth school page. Research behind it: every Lunar rune and innate read against its live formulas, 30 days of live skill-use telemetry, about 30 forum threads back to 2015, and the genre record from Ultima IV's moongates to Elden Ring's night sorceries. Per-proposal comment threads and vote arrows as usual.
• The Moon dive's central finding: the school's signature Moonlight state is a binary gate on the moon's own seven-hour orbit, up half the time, decoupled from day and night, and the game displays it nowhere. Players, the wiki, and a bug moderator all read it as night, two dev corrections are on record, and no damage spell consults it. The keystone chain puts the moon on the buff bar with a countdown to moonrise, settles the vocabulary in every tooltip, and adds moonlit riders to the star spells.
• Thirty days of live casting data placed Lunar 7th of 10 adventuring schools while holding the most spells: Fireflies at 47,780 casts from 98 players is the school's experience trainer, Night Step's 23,552 casts come from 5 players, and the four identity spells (Animal Charm, Cocoon of Night, Moon Beams, the Will-o-Wisp) reached 59 players combined in a month.
• The Moon audit filed eleven defects (#4424 to #4434): the Wisp's damage-resistance passive pasted from the Phoenix and still reading Sun mastery on a Moon pet, Cocoon of Night's hiding expiring ten seconds before its own heal, Night Step's behind-target blink checking the sun instead of the moon, a malformed Celestial Blessing formula silently dropping a term, and the Moon Worship Dexterity bonus that goes stale across moonrise, reported by players since 2017.
• Every proposal page now carries All proposals and Work blog links at the top and bottom, so readers can get from any deep dive back to the index and the daily log. The page builder injects the same links into future pages automatically.
• Published The Art of Not Being There, a 30-proposal deep dive on Light Armor, the fifth Combat-ring page. Behind it: every skill read against its shipped data and the hit-roll pipeline, thirty days of live telemetry with per-skill caster and concentration counts, a census of all 120,340 character sheets, the genre record from Ultima Online to Path of Exile, and ten years of forum threads with every request credited by name.
• The Light Armor research pass filed six defect tickets before the page went up: Evasion reads raw Dexterity where its sibling skill divides it, a rooted defender gets their dodge chance halved and then the dodge outcome skipped anyway, the creature copy of Dodge runs half its intended duration, Escape cleanses twice and never mentions that it removes roots, two defensive stats are dead weight, and standing still adds spell fizzle while moving subtracts it.
• Corrected seven wrong claims in the Light Armor school reference while writing the page, including a myth that two identically named bonus variables were different things, a reading of Acrobatics as a 400 percent modifier when it grants four additive points, and Sprint math that started from zero instead of its real base of one.
• Shield school deep dive published: The Neighbor's Shield, 33 proposals with per-card comment threads and vote arrows. The school is the least played in the game: 0.52 percent of all skill casts over 30 days, 13 living Testudo users, one player carrying the school's only combo, and a specialization ranked last of all 21 trees.
• The shield audit filed seven defects (#4566 to #4572): the 75 percent block cap is really a floor in the roll while the character sheet displays a cap that does not exist, Ranged Defense skips spells and monster archers entirely, the whole rear half circle switches blocking off, an empty off hand out-blocks every shield item in the game, Bolster Balance resists stuns at double its authored value, Shield Bash's specialization debuff is clamped to nothing against most targets, and Master shields wear out three times faster than starter shields.
• The Shield school reference was corrected alongside the page: 16 errata, including three innate tables computed without their starting term, a Dig In specialization ramp that never actually ramps, and a claim that Charge needs line of sight in a game with no line of sight gate. Shield Smash, absent from the reference entirely, got its chapter.
• Live telemetry behind the shield dive: 46,027 Shield casts in 30 days against 8.9 million logged skill uses. Deflect leads at 17,551 casts. Eight players produce 70 percent of the school's entire volume. Tester task #4575 covers the page, its comment threads, and the vote arrows.
• Heavy Armor school deep dive published: The Steel Between, 30 proposals with per-card comment threads and votes. The dive verified the mitigation math line by line, swept 30 days of live telemetry (204 of 1,237 active players cast any Heavy Armor rune; the two aggro skills reach 21), and traced the taunt complaint from a 2017 ruling to this month's wishlist ask by Akandriel, whose requested investigation is the flagship card. This completes the Combat ring: all seven weapon and armor schools now have pages.
• Filed six Heavy Armor defects found during the dive (#4576-#4581): the glancing-blow tooltip promises one third damage where the game deals one quarter, Hard Headed grants one of its three promised resists, Knight's Grace carries a leftover cleanse effect that fires about 1 percent of the time, Provoking Shout bills its focus cost through the Shield school's cost stat and shares Taunt's icon, and the Taunt specialization tooltip advertises a bigger radius when the real bonus is a chance at a second pulse.
• Corrected the Heavy Armor chapter of the combat reference while writing the page: eight wrong claims fixed, including the direction of Absorb Impacts' durability cost (it multiplies armor wear, up to ten times unspecialized) and the specialization scaling-cap mechanism. The armor piece-count bonus table in the formula guide was also wrong past four pieces.

Balance

• The Summoned Will-o-Wisp had its two Focus school skills crossed. Training Summoned Health did nothing at all for a wisp, while Summoned Toughness paid into its health at triple weight and left its damage resistance out entirely. Both lines now work the way every other summons do.
• The wisp also scaled off Sun specialization on one of those lines, so a Lunar specialist got nothing for specializing. It follows Lunar now, matching the elementals and the undead summons.
• Two long-standing oddities in the same summon assets turned out to change no numbers. The undead summons read a stat that nothing in the game ever writes, and the daemons Chaos resistance of 3 against its siblings 500 was never a dropped pair of zeros: resistance grants are capped at full immunity on the way in, so every one of those numbers already meant the same thing. Both are tidied up and pinned by tests so they are not chased again.
• Tamer gear has been listing four bonuses for your pet since it shipped, and none of them did anything. Tame Creature Strength, Tame Taunt Power, Tame Move Speed and Tame Creature Dexterity all reach the pet now, so the Helm of the Wolf Spirit, the Ringmaster's Vest, the Ring of the Ringmaster, the Boots of the Energetic Tamer and the rest finally pay what they advertise.
• Tame Taunt Power's numbers on gear moved with it. They were written as 10 through 30 against a stat nothing read, and threat multiplies by one plus that value, so a Ring of the Ringmaster would have pulled 26 times the threat. All 34 values were divided by 100, which puts them beside every other aggro bonus in the game and matches the 0.2 the Rise taming reward has always granted.
• Tame Critical Hit Chance is retired. The newer versions of the Belt of Control and the Helm of the Stag Spirit had already moved to Tame Critical Hit Damage Multiplier at the same numbers, so the Gloves of Control and the Helm of the Wolf Spirit followed and the dead stat has no source left. Pet Speed Training was granting it too, so its critical hit half did nothing from the day it shipped; it now feeds the roll your pet actually makes.
• Two more dead numbers turned up while wiring those. Tame Creature Dexterity was being overwritten before anything could read it on any pet you own, and the pet character sheet's critical hit rate was running a copy of the spellcasting formula, so the figure it printed was not the one the pet rolled. Both read the real values now.

Jenkins

• The Unity test suite now runs on every code checkin: a new build-farm job on the Linux node picks up each push, resets its tree to the pushed commit, and publishes the results within minutes. Rapid pushes collapse into a single run, and the nightly Windows run stays as the backstop.

Client

• A tea cup in the off hand no longer jerks back and forth while combat mode is on. It holds the tea cup pose the same way a mug or torch does.
• A stray "Sending a message failed!" warning at every client boot is gone: the bard system no longer asks the server for a fortification bag before the client is actually on the game server.
• Every client boot asked for the UI skin catalog before the asset bundles had finished mounting, which threw and fell back to the default skin until a retry a second later. It showed up on 54 of the 57 sessions in a two-day log pull, on every build and both Windows and Linux. The catalog now waits on the real bundle-ready flag instead of guessing with a frame count, and the warning it logs names the actual reason.
• Under a bad logging-server window the client could stall a whole frame while its outgoing log queue chased its own tail. It drops the followup messages a failed send generates while the drain pass is running, so a rough log-server window shows up as a slow frame instead of a stall.
• Login progress bar no longer freezes near the end while the client warms its scene-map registry; the load moves off the main thread and the loading bar keeps ticking through it.
• A player-dungeon room could get into a state where it would not pick up again for the rest of the session. Placement and pickup now refuse cleanly instead of leaving the room half-moved and stuck.
• Crafting station recipe list no longer prints a background null-reference error when scrolling right after a login or a scene change; the row now waits until the player is actually in the world before checking the skill requirement.
• Creatures whose spawner link fell back to an arbitrary empty seat used to end up without a despawn callback and could not be removed by the ordinary path; the fallback now wires the minimum needed for despawn while leaving the seats own respawn clock alone.
• Ice Field ambience now holds at full volume through the effect and fades out as the ice patch disappears, instead of trailing off around the four second mark.
• Traced a run of client crashes reported by a tester, symbolizing the crash dumps against the exact build they came from. The faults were memory corruption on that machine rather than anything in the build: four crashes, four unrelated failure points, and two of them holding a pointer that was correct in every bit except a single stray one near the top, which is not a shape software mistakes produce. Left a record for someone to follow up with the player. Three earlier crashes from the same machine were ours, and had already been fixed on the 7th.
• Cut the retired-NGUI-teardown warning down to one line per window instead of one per leftover component. It had grown into the loudest thing in a player log, 208 of 376 lines in an ordinary session and 3,228 of 9,407 in one crash log, pushing the last moments before a crash out of the log the launcher uploads. The single line still names every component type, how many of each lost a widget, and every field involved.

Inventory

• Reverted a duplicate build of the S1 search tokens: this machine had not pulled the 13 August implementation and wrote a second parser for the same proposal, retired the same morning. The shipped version stands, with its crafting-grammar tokenizer and term chips.
• The inventory proposal page and its audit doc now describe the S1 search as it actually shipped: term chips with a match count under the box, rarity words for quality:, quoted crafter names, and unknown tokens named back to the player.
• The inventory proposal page intro note caught up with its own cards: two proposals built (S1 search tokens, S10 tooltips), two part built, twelve open.

Content

• The Air specialization elixir now buffs Summon Air Elemental Power for its hour, matching the Fire elixir slot. Before this fix it was granting the wrong stat and adding around 156 metres to Lightning cast range for the full duration.
• The Oracle in the Oracle Temple now sounds like the machine she is, and keeps the same robotic voice across every path of her endgame scene instead of switching timbre when the stage flips. Not on chaos yet — the audio pipeline has to regenerate her lines first.
• Satyr NPCs are being re-cast with a deep, booming, bellowing voice. The new treatment sits on a resonant British base and is pinned across every male satyr in the game, from the Xenos guards to the Broken Echoes fighters to the framework satyrs on the overworld. The audio ships with the next voice publish; female satyrs (Sanga, Modia) keep their existing voices.
• Fauns will now speak with an impish, hoarse, raspy voice, like a child with a sore throat, instead of the flat human voices they had. The recast reaches every male faun in the game (generic fauns, faun merchants, faun survivors, and named fauns such as Dozer, Fleck, Perri, Skitter, Dion and Bucket). Female fauns keep their existing voices. Ships to players after the pipeline bakes the new audio and the CDN publishes.
• The three waterfalls at the Paladis Shardfall confluence now break up their top lip as well as their foot. The flat river used to end in one hard line where it tipped over each fall, with a colour change on either side; each crest now shows some froth where the water spills over, so the join reads as breaking water instead of a straight edge. The spray at the bottom of the falls added last time is unchanged.
• Billy in Highvale Outskirts moves to a voice a tester agrees is a boy. He was on the highest voice in the boy family, built from a female base, and it read as a girl to at least one player; he is now on the lowest one in the family, built from a male base. His barks and his spoken lines still play in the same voice.
• Summoned Water Elemental ribbon material set to full alpha to match every other elemental (Air, Earth, Sand, Ice). Follow-up to the earlier water column fix - testers reported the summon-only torso ribbon still absent.
• Hyla, the refugee child in Highvale Outskirts, was missing from the NPC voice list because of a data typo in her conversation setup. Fixed the source data so the voice tooling can see her; her lines will be spoken aloud after the next voice publish.
• Player dungeons: a totem swapped for a different one no longer keeps spawning the previous totems creatures alongside the new totems, even after a Decoration Mode round trip. (requested by rinaldi)

Tester Tools

• The verification board's "My Claims" tab now lists only the tasks you claimed. It had been asking for everything assigned to you, so a tester who gets bug reports assigned lands on a tab dozens of tasks deep that they never touched: one account had 96 rows there and one actual claim.
• A task you have submitted a verdict on now reads "Verdict sent" in the Status column until the verdict is processed and the task closes. Before, nothing on the row changed when you submitted, so a task you had just finished looked exactly like one you claimed and forgot. The marker survives a relog and clears itself.
• The board also stops labelling a task "Claimed" on the strength of an assignee alone, and a task sent back for a retest now releases its old claim so someone else can pick it up.

Server

• Fixed a rare open on a placed container that used to look successful but left the container leased to nobody, so every following transfer refused with a permission error. The open now retries cleanly on that miss instead of handing back a container that only refuses.

Tooling

• The verdict sweep runs as a single headless turn, and one run answered that it had started the scan in the background and would collect the results later. There is no later, so a submitted verdict sat unprocessed for a quarter of an hour. The run spec now forbids backgrounding, and the runner retries once on the spot instead of losing the tick.

Gameplay & server fixes

• Switching your online mode to Open while inside a scene now re-instances you through matchmaking, with the leaving-instance countdown, instead of flipping your current private instance to Open in place. Switching back during the countdown cancels it. This closes the client half of the fake-open-instance exploit the server started blocking in June; the server-side bonus guard stays in place.
• Added a server-side diagnostic log to the multiplayer XP bonus guard: every combat award in an open instance now records whether the bonus was granted and who counted as the outsider that justified it. Filed after a report that the June bonus exploit may still pay; the log will show the exact case if it reproduces.
• Mode switching got its feedback back: a mode change you make yourself in Options now announces "Leaving this instance in 10 seconds" immediately, on screen and in the chat log, then reloads you into the right instance. The build 113 version used the party travel countdown, a silent 60 seconds that made the toggles look dead; reported by Vesper. Party members converging on each other keep the longer window.

UI

• A jukebox row for a song with no composer recorded printed ?Composer? in the cell, and the decoration palette printed ?Placed By? until the placer name arrived from the server. Columns with nothing to show are blank now. Each of those cells was also logging an exception once per row per frame for as long as the window stayed open.

Bard

• A bard playing a song no longer stops it by using their own abilities. Re-casting Performance Stance, or using Flourish, Dance or Group Dance, leaves the music playing, and so does picking sheet music out of the inventory while the stance is up. The fix that was supposed to do this in the last pass only ever reached the instruments you sit at, not the ones you carry.
• Entering combat now puts the instrument away. It drops Performance Stance and closes the performance, which replaces the state bards were being left in: an instrument still in hand with weapons drawn. Nothing had ever stowed an instrument on combat entry.
• Performance Stance keeps hold of the instrument for as long as it runs. If anything stows it mid-performance the stance brings it back out within a few seconds, in a town or player-owned town. Before this only the moment you took the stance ever readied it.
• Flourish, Dance and Group Dance each have their own animation and their own colour. Flourish spins, Dance is the Irish dance, Group Dance is the happy dance, and each puts a ring of music notes around the performer for the length of the ability: amber, teal and pink. Flourish previously had no animation at all, and the two dances shared one.
• The bard bar holds every bard ability now, all eighteen, instead of the four town entertainer ones. The party-support songs were still in the combat deck, and reaching the deck means drawing a weapon, which is what the bar was built to avoid. Songs cast from the bar work out of combat; in a fight the deck is still the route. The bar is drawn as wide as the abilities you have trained.
• The bard bar is easier to find: a row in the window list, a button on the Bard page of the Skills window, and the Toggle Bard Bar keybind in Options, Controls. It had shipped reachable only through Options, Interface. A bar you empty on purpose also stays empty now instead of refilling itself at the next login.
• The bard system asked the server for your stored inspiration during startup, before the client had connected to anything, so the request was dropped and logged a failure on every boot. The read now waits until you are in the world, which is also the first point it could have worked.
• Found the real reason a bard could not play through their own abilities. Casting anything puts your character into a combat stance so the cast animation can play, and the instrument is put away whenever that happens. It applied to every bard skill, which is why every one of them cut the song. A performing bard now casts without leaving the playing pose.
• Flourish, Dance and Group Dance no longer play a dance. The animation replaced the instrument-playing pose, so a bard using one stopped looking like a bard playing. The ring of coloured music notes is the whole visual now, and it lasts as long as the ability: amber for Flourish, teal for Dance, pink for Group Dance.
• The bard bar was refusing every party-support song. The check that decides what a bar accepts tested a combat flag before it tested the bard list, so the songs were turned away before the bar was ever asked. They drag on now, and dragging one lights up the bar the way dragging a utility skill does.
• The bard bar was three slots wider than it needed. It counted every bard skill on the character sheet, and three retired ones are never removed from older sheets. It counts only abilities the school can currently cast, which is nine, so a full bard gets nine slots.

Music

• The on-screen note keyboard no longer opens by itself. It is off by default and opens from the note button on the bard bar or from Options, Interface. Anyone taking an instrument out for one piece of sheet music had a keyboard across the screen until they went looking for the setting.
• The note keyboard now goes away for players who already had it switched on. Changing the default only reaches players who never touched the setting, so a one-time pass turns it off once per character profile. Turning it back on from the bard bar or Options keeps it on.

Crafting

• A recipe that fails at a crafting station on your own lot now tells you the "Use lot storage" switch in the crafting window is a separate opt-in, so ticking "Use this container for crafting" on a chest and forgetting the crafting-side option no longer reads as "not enough materials" with no clue what to do next.

Housing

• Marking a placed container as a crafting supply container while the container itself was being moved threw behind the scenes, so the toggle looked like it did nothing and could be left showing a setting that never saved. It now declines while the container is in transit and puts the checkbox back to the real setting. Three separate players hit this in two days.

Docs

• Corrected the Tactics school reference to match the shipping data: specialization does not extend stance durations (every stance reads a duration stat that nothing writes, so stances run a flat two minutes), the Berserkers Stance parry penalty described in the doc does not exist in the game, and Pugilism and Gait Pacing joined the tree tables.

Achievements

• Fixed a red server error that some players saw in chat after logging in or loading a scene, reading "No rules found for string stat key". The message was the server rejecting a batch of achievement progress containing one counter it did not recognise, and the rejection discarded every other counter in the same batch, so kills, fish caught and recipes learned could all go unrecorded at that moment. The server now keeps what it recognises, skips the rest, and no longer sends any of it to chat.

Build tooling

• The server report refresh now checks the achievement counter tables it ships, and stops the deploy if the combined report carries none. A report missing them merges cleanly and the shard boots fine, while every kill, fishing, taming, crafting and exploration counter silently goes unrecorded. That was the shape of the bug above.

The New Britannia Herald

Seventy five songs arrive and the bard is finally allowed to play

19 minTranscriptPodcast

Headlines

• The achievements catalog finally has a room to be read in: a new Achievements tab on the character sheet and a journal window of its own, grouped by category with progress bars, earned marks and dates.
• Player dungeons got a reason to walk into one: an owner can now stake their own gold in a chest inside their dungeon, and the first person to clear it takes the lot.
• Bards can finally play while they perform: casting a bard skill no longer stops the music, Performance Stance now starts and ends the whole performance, and the town entertainer abilities moved onto a bard bar of their own so performing never means drawing a weapon.
• Published The Unseen Trade, a 24-proposal Subterfuge deep dive: a stealth indicator, guards that investigate, lockpicking at last, trapped chests, and pickpocketing pointed at NPCs. Vote on the parts you want.
• An on-screen keyboard for playing instruments. Eight white keys, five black, an octave control, and the number key that plays each note printed on the key itself. The notes have been on the number row for years with nothing in the game saying so.
• Your instrument can be played from a real keyboard. Plug in a USB MIDI keyboard and it plays whatever you have equipped, with how hard you hit a key deciding how loud the note comes out. Striking harder has never changed anything before this, for any way of playing.
• Player-built dungeon traps became usable: a pressure plate and a shrieking gargoyle can be placed in a dungeon and connected to each other, and the trap proposal card now says which pieces exist and which do not.
• Bands no longer need a party invite: /band and a name syncs every player in the scene using it, at any size and across guilds, with an optional password.
• The game went from one period tune to seventy-six. Seventy-five public-domain songs from ten named pre-1900 sources, each one arranged so it sounds like something on every instrument in the game.
• A dungeon entrance stops calling hallways rooms, and stops counting an empty room as a fight. It now reports rooms, rooms with spawns, halls and an estimated floor area in square metres.
• The song library is something you earn. A bard in Soltown copies it out of his songbook a tradition at a time, for blank sheet music you bring him.
• Titles you can earn by doing. Ten thousand kills of a creature line grants that line's title, so ten thousand dragons makes you Dragon Nemesis, and five thousand crafting actions makes you Legendary Crafter. Two of the game's 219 titles were earned by defeating anything before today; there are now 34. Whatever you already qualified for is waiting at your next login.
• The world found its voice: a new World Events channel carries the news of the realm, and when a landmark boss falls everyone online shares an hour of raised experience for it.
• The inventory search box learned to filter: type:reagent, wt<5, qty>=50, dur<25%, is:locked and a minus to exclude, with each filter shown as a chip you can click off. First of the sixteen inventory proposals to ship.
• The achievements journal now covers the evenings, not just the fighting: farming, gathering, taming, fishing, every craft, and games at a table all leave a record, with two collections to finish.

Client

• Fixed crafting stations refusing to open for the rest of a session. If a scene reloaded while a crafting window was still up, which is what a player dungeon does when its owner switches between Adventure and Decoration mode, the game kept believing you were standing at the station you left behind and turned away every station you walked up to afterwards, anywhere in the world, until you returned to character select.
• Ice Field's frost and wind ambience now lasts as long as the ice patch. Both sounds were fading out after about two seconds while the ice stayed on the ground for six and a half, so their fades were stretched to seven seconds. Reported by Garfunkel Humperdinck while testing the earlier Ice Field sound fix.
• Fixed fallen trees showing a hollow gap where the trunk is cut open. Trunk bark now draws on both sides, so a trunk lying on its side reads as a dark hollow instead of a flat folded sheet of paper. Reported by GarfunkelHumperdinck in Paladis Shardfall.
• The Twirling Baton now shows in the off hand as soon as it is equipped, in and out of combat, instead of staying invisible until one of the baton emotes had been used. The baton and a Rose Bouquet held in the off hand also stay visible for the whole of /batontwirl and /batonthrow.
• Two of the obsidian shards riding the floating islands over Quel Shardfall were swinging through the rocks beside them instead of turning on the spot. They now hold still where they were placed, and the smaller shards that float free beside the islands still turn slowly in place.
• Container settings now save while the container's own window is open. Ticking "Use this container for crafting", or changing a container's permissions, used to flip itself back a second later with a message saying the item could not be changed, because the open window had the container checked out. The change is written through that checkout now, so it sticks. Reported by inuphet, vesper and rinaldi.
• The large rock formations in the shardfall areas were importing at half the detail their artwork holds, so they read as a blur up close. Measured at 45 to 65 texels per metre against a target of at least 128, they now import at full size. Affects Paladis, Grunvald and Verdantis Shardfall, Dysborg, Opalis and The Breach.
• The drifting storm cloud over the Shardfall zones draws at its full resolution again. The cloud art was already stored at the higher size, but the texture streaming system was holding it at a reduced one and never asked for the sharper version, so an earlier resolution increase never reached the screen. The cloud sheet is now kept out of streaming, and the same fix covers every Shardfall zone.
• Dungeon entrances no longer offer a Sample Dungeon. The option was retired on live, and on the older preset entrances that never had a sample set up it dropped players into an unlit empty scene with recall as the only way out (reported by belladonnarose, with confirmation from inuphet and knightrider).
• Fixed a blurry tree trunk in the shardfall zones. The tall tree with the swollen trunk was importing its bark at half the size the art was drawn at, while the mound-shaped tree beside it was already at full size. Reported from Paladis Shardfall; the same tree also stands in Grunvald Shardfall, Verdantis Shardfall, Dysborg and Opalis.
• Changes to a placed decoration that the server turns down now put the old value back and say why. Only one kind of refusal did that before, so the rest left the new setting on screen until the lot reloaded and then dropped it, which read as a setting that unset itself. This covers decoration and container permissions, the lock on a placed chest, crafting supply mode, tip jar display, and decoration light colour and schedule, including a lot that is listed for sale.
• Soltown played its crowd chatter twice at once. Two copies of the same townspeople loop sat at the same spot at slightly different pitches, running the background noise at roughly double its intended level and leaving it wavering against itself. One copy has been removed. Birds, wind and trees are unchanged.
• The tall red-tendrilled plants in the shardfall areas were sharing one small texture between their trunk, their wide collars and their tendrils, so the bark showed only a fraction of the detail it was drawn with. The bark now comes through at its full resolution, which is most visible on the collars you walk right past. Reported by GarfunkelHumperdinck.
• Option changes now reach disk within a couple of seconds instead of only on a clean quit. A crash, or the launcher forcing the game closed on patch day, used to throw away every setting changed that session.
• The New Crafters Town hedges got their leaves and flowers back. Their glowing cutout materials asked for shader variants the build never packed, so the leaf cards drew as flat grey and white slabs. The fix covers the other 150 or so glowing cutout plant materials too.

Lua Addons

• Add-ons can now perform free-text emotes that other players can read, through a new ShroudPlayEmoteText function. It takes the same text and embedded %emote% animation syntax as the /em command, plus an optional name to aim the animation at someone standing near you.
• Until now an add-on could play an emote animation but never produce a chat line, so nothing an add-on did was readable by other players or by their add-ons. Emotes now arrive at every add-on the same way the rest of chat already did, which is what makes two add-ons able to talk to each other.
• Sending text is held to what a player could type by hand. Add-on emotes come out of the players own chat allowance rather than a second one, keep the 384-character limit, and do nothing while an account is silenced or the character is dead. The animation throttle is shared with the older emote function so the two cannot be alternated to emote faster.
• The %emote% parser moved out of the chat window and is now shared by /em and the add-on path, with tests covering its long-standing quirks. It was checked against the original line by line first, so typed emotes behave exactly as before.

Content

• Widened the red river surface in Paladis Shardfall so it runs into the banks and the rocks. Along the south west bank the water stopped up to 2.75 m short of the shoreline, leaving a strip of bare riverbed and a visible edge where the surface ended. The waterfall lips were left alone, so the falls pour over the same edge as before. (reported by Garfunkel Humperdinck)
• Turned off two torches that were buried inside the rocks beside a stone exit archway, which had been making the rock face glow orange from the inside. The same archway and rock pile had been copied into nine scenes, including East Sanctus Forest, Elysian Plains and North Naryad Pinelands, and all nine were fixed. Reported by GarfunkelHumperdinck.
• The waterfalls at the Paladis Shardfall confluence used to end on a straight line where they met the river below, with the falling water and the surface meeting edge to edge in two different colours. All three of them now throw up spray where they land, so the water breaks up at the bottom. Reported by garfunkelhumperdinck.

Player Dungeons

• The doorway into a player dungeon now says what is behind it. Under the name and the owner, the hover label reads how many rooms the dungeon has, how many encounters are in it, and which materials it is built from, then whether Adventure Mode is switched on. The same rows appear in the window you get from clicking the door.
• Those counts are worked out on the server from the pieces that are standing right now, so a room added this afternoon is on the door this afternoon. A visitor on the lot outside has none of the dungeon loaded, which is why the client could never have answered this on its own.
• The entrance plaque also started showing the record it was built to show. The first-clear and record-time lines were being withheld at every doorway because the size check behind them was reading a count that is always zero out there. It now reads the server's own count of the placed rooms, which is the harder number to fake, not the easier one.
• The first trap piece a player can actually hold: a pressure plate. It is built on the pressure plate the hand-made dungeons already use, so it inherits the mesh, the plate-down animation and the proximity code that has two regression suites behind it. Its inventory icon is rendered from its own prefab rather than inherited from the decoration it was cloned from, which is how two earlier decorations ended up showing the wrong object in the bag.
• Switching a dungeon from Adventure Mode to Decoration Mode now takes the creatures with it. Adventure Mode was only ever a gate on new spawns, so everything already standing stayed, and owners decorated around live monsters.
• The mode flip clears the dungeon itself now, three times over: the creatures dissolve when you confirm, again after the countdown, and again once the dungeon has finished reloading. The reload alone could not be trusted, because it rejoins the same scene instance and a creature can ride it through.
• Creatures that had lost their spawner link were the stubborn ones: they sit in no spawner list and hold no despawn callback, so nothing in the game could remove them. Those are now found by walking the entities themselves. Pets, summons and living decorations are left where they are.
• The Cave Stone Lava Grotto room sold without spawns was placing nine fire elementals and skeletons of its own that ignored the dungeon mode entirely. Removed, and a test now refuses any dungeon room shipping a creature seat the cleanup cannot see.
• The Stone Dungeon Rotunda accepts wall and ceiling decorations. Its only wall surface sat on a disabled object the placement check could never hit, so the room refused everything. The curved wall, the upper ring, the walkway ceiling, and the dome all take decorations now. Reported by Cora Cuz'avich.
• Player-built dungeon traps can now be placed and connected. Two pieces to start: a pressure plate, and a shrieking gargoyle that makes a noise and takes no health, which is deliberately the first effect - the earliest version of the kit cannot be used to hurt a guest. Right-click a placed piece, choose Connect To, and it lists the other pieces standing in the same room; effect pieces get a second menu for how long they wait and whether they ready themselves again.
• A dungeon entrance was calling every hallway a room. Its tooltip now reports rooms, how many of them hold a fight, and how many corridor pieces join them up, and both the tooltip and the entrance window estimate the dungeon's floor area in square metres. Requested by Rinaldi.
• The encounter count at a dungeon entrance read one higher than the totems placed, because a room built to hold a fight and the totem seated in it were counted separately. Rooms with spawns now counts rooms that will actually fight you, once each, and a room built for a fight but standing empty is no longer counted at all.
• The entrance window lists a dungeon's layout kind by kind now: rooms, halls, stairs, transitions, secret doors, teleports, total pieces, floor area and materials. The numbers come from a table baked off the 126 dungeon piece prefabs, so the server can answer questions the piece names never could.
• The dungeon builder panel now says what is wrong with your traps. A Traps line reports the first real problem and names the piece: a plate connected to nothing, an effect nothing sets off, a piece nobody has wired yet. One line rather than a list, because the rules already rank the problems and the worst one is the one worth telling you about.
• A third trap piece: a snuffer brazier that puts out every torch in its room. A dark room is the whole effect, so a player carrying their own light is barely inconvenienced and one who is not gets a moment worth having. Building it turned up a defect worth keeping: the brazier carries a torch of its own, so the first version put itself out as it fired, which loses the builder the one light showing where the piece is.

UI

• A window shrunk to its smallest size now holds that size while window snapping is on. Pushing the corner grip further in next to another window used to leave the window resting on the neighbour's edge, so it never quite reached its own smallest size. Reported by rinaldi.
• The brighter combo highlight on the combat bar only reached three sides. A tester checking the fix found the bottom edge and the bracket around the slot number still in the old dark colour: those two were left to the frame tint, which is the multiply the rest of the fix was written around. Both are drawn now, off the same measurements the sides use, so the outline closes all the way round at one colour and one weight. The opening the key number sits in stays open, and a locked glyph at rest is unchanged.
• The corner darkening that warns you are walking out of a scene no longer disappears when the vignette is switched off in the display controls. The spyglass framing, the photo camera vignette and the stun vignette hold the same way.
• Puzzle Box: the runic letters now sit in the middle of their brass panels rather than low on them, and they are drawn darker and heavier on both the drum and the paper. The first attempt at this lifted them about a third of the distance they needed.
• Puzzle Box: the tally sheet is taller and a little wider, so all ten guesses fit on the paper instead of the last one running off the bottom edge, and the guesses line up with the pegs that score them. The up and down arrows moved onto the small drum panels above and below each letter, and are larger and darker.
• The world map window now keeps asking for a zone map when the zone was still loading at the moment it first asked. A zone that has a map could show "Map not available." for as long as you stood in it, with the Oracle Temple as the reported case.
• Restored the Combat Decks window to its live layout: the deck icon leads each row again, the reorder arrows stack around the position number, the name sits over the glyph count, and the buttons follow the old order with the green fill back on the equipped deck. An under-filled deck shows "x / y Glyphs" with only the "+ N Slugs" warning in red, as before.
• Fixed the Equip and Alt tooltips on the deck window; they were wired to a path that never draws in game and now use the standard hover panel.
• Hover text on a list row, in the Social window and the party, guild and mail lists, was drawing above every window once it had appeared, including over item tooltips and over the icon of an item being dragged. It and the chat tab you pull off a window now sit in their proper place in the draw order, and the layers above the game windows moved into one shared list so they cannot disagree about who is on top. Reported by Vesper.

Player Dungeons

• Trap pieces can now remember how their owner wired them. The trap and trigger kit's rules landed last week, but every choice a builder would make was baked into the prefab, so a placed piece had no way to carry a player's decision. A piece now stores its wiring, its delay and what it does after firing on the item itself, the same way a dungeon waygate stores its destination. Nothing is placeable yet.
• A trap piece now fires the pieces it is wired to, with the wind-up and reset its owner picked. Delays run from none to six seconds, and a piece already counting down will not stack a second wind-up, so standing on a plate fires the dart wall once rather than once a frame. The traps in existing dungeons are untouched: they wire both ends inside one prefab, which is the thing two separately placed decorations cannot do.
• The first trap effect that does something: a wave spawner wakes the seats in its room whose creatures have been killed, instead of making anyone wait out an eight-minute respawn. It cannot add a creature or raise a tier, and it skips any seat still occupied, so the wave is the room's own encounter arriving when the builder chose rather than when the timer said.

Achievements

• The achievements the game has been counting for years now have somewhere to be read. The character sheet has a new Achievements tab, and there is a full journal window of its own that opens with /achievements. Everything is grouped by category with a progress bar, and the ones you have earned carry a mark and, from now on, the date you earned them.
• The kill ladders fold into one line each in the journal. A line names the highest rung you have earned and its bar runs to the next goal, so a creature family is one row reading "613 of 1,000" rather than four rows repeating the same count. That turns the 248 authored achievements into about 140 lines to read.
• Fixed a counting bug the journal turned up on its first run: the crafting achievements measure a total assembled from two separate counters, and reading that total directly answers zero. The Legendary Crafter row would have shown no progress at all on an achievement earned years ago. Progress and earned state now both go through the same arithmetic the unlock check uses.
• Twenty-four towns now have an Explorer achievement. Find every landmark in a town and you earn that town's deed, and it arrives as you reach the last one rather than at your next login. Owl's Head and Braemar keep the two achievements they already had.
• Thirteen smaller towns count their landmarks but award nothing yet. Once town gates and quest markers are set aside, Port Graff has one place worth finding, and Broochash, Noreach, Point West, Fortus End and Goti share the same list of a waterfall, a town square, docks, a bridge and four exits. Those towns need landmarks before they need an achievement.
• Reading every town's landmark list turned up older mistakes in the data: six spots carry names copied from a different town, two towns register their virtue shrines under a third town's name, and seven spots in Ardoris share one name, so reaching any of them marked all seven as found.
• Farming, gathering and taming now leave a record. Seeds planted, plants harvested, resource nodes and water sources gathered, and creatures tamed each got a counter and a chain of achievements over it, in three new journal categories.
• Fixed a hole in the taming item update while adding its counter: the pet collar path had no change guard, so a resent update re-entered it indefinitely and the collar-expiry message that clears the tamer name reached it too.
• Thirty-three titles can now be earned by playing. Ten thousand kills of one creature line grants that line's title, so ten thousand dragons makes you Dragon Nemesis; five thousand crafting actions makes you Legendary Crafter. Before this, two of the game's 219 titles were earned by defeating anything.
• Titles you already qualified for arrive at your next login rather than at your next kill. The server grants them, so the count behind one is the same count the party experience loop already credits to every member of a party.
• The two ladders left out of the wave are the total-kill and player-kill counts. Both are counted by the client and taken on trust by the server, which was tolerable while the only payoff was a Steam achievement and is not once the payoff is worn over your head. They return when those counters move to the server.
• Smelter, the one title of 219 with no entry in the localization table, has been rendering as its raw internal name. It now reads as Smelter.
• Fishing got its collection. Thirty kinds of fish, twenty four from water and six from lava, each with its own counter and a first-catch deed, plus a lifetime total and a chain for how many kinds you have landed that tops out at the whole roster.
• The fish roster is a curated list rather than a naming rule. Peeling size and mount suffixes off archetype names with one pattern invented a species called Shark Tiger Trophy0 Baby, so the sweep now peels in passes and reports anything it cannot place instead of guessing.
• Every craft discipline now counts. Cooking, blacksmithing, tailoring, carpentry, alchemy and thirteen more each got a counter and an apprentice to master chain, plus a counter for recipes learned.
• Winning at a game table now counts. Chess, checkers and backgammon each got a wins counter and a chain, and only a win against another player counts: beating the computer, or a game the other player resigned, abandoned or timed out of, counts for nothing.
• Twenty-one landmark bosses now announce their own deaths to everyone online: the Frost Giant, the eight Cabalists, the eight Ancient dragons and the four Elemental Lords. The line names who landed the kill, how many fought beside them, and where. The same boss killed twice by the same character inside half an hour only announces once.
• When one of those bosses falls the whole realm celebrates: every player online earns 10% more adventurer experience for the next hour, wherever they are. Log in during the hour and you join it in progress and are told how long is left. A second landmark kill inside the window resets the clock and never lowers the bonus.
• Places seen and emotes learned now count. Both are counted by the client, so they move while you play, and both are guarded so a recount taken before your knowledge has loaded can never overwrite a total with zero.
• Taming got its collection too. All 177 tameable creatures are counted individually, each of the fourteen families has its own chain, and a separate chain tracks how many different kinds you have tamed, ending at the full roster.

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Accounts and Store

• Reviewed the account, store and website systems end to end and wrote the plan for bringing them onto our own infrastructure. The plan keeps the existing account and purchase systems in place rather than rewriting them, so logins, pledges and reward deliveries keep behaving exactly as they do today.
• The review also produced a written record of how a purchase becomes an item in game, which was previously spread across several systems and understood by nobody in one place. Several gaps it turned up have been added to the launch checklist.

Dungeons

• Dungeon rooms that hold a totem now say which totems they take, on the item tooltip, before any points are spent placing them. Each creature family the room's slot accepts gets its own line, along with how many spawn points stand in the room. Requested by Rinaldi.
• Rooms whose slot takes more than one family list each family separately, so The Rise Shaft with Spawns reads Troll, Elf and Dragon. Until now the only way to find out was to place the room, carry a totem over and read a refusal that did not name the family.
• Player dungeons can now hold a prize. A new Dungeon Prize Chest goes inside your dungeon and you stock it with your own gold; the first visitor who clears the dungeon opens it and takes the lot. While the dungeon is open to the public and in Adventure Mode the stake is committed, so nobody can beat a dungeon and watch the prize vanish as they reach for it. Close the dungeon and you can take your stake back whenever you like.
• The gold moves from one player to another and nothing is created out of thin air, which is the point: there is nothing here to farm. The dungeon entrance advertises the prize before you walk in, and the dungeon hears about it when someone wins. There is a cap on how much a chest can hold and a cooldown before a claimed chest can be stocked again, both adjustable on the shard.

Server

• A technical status line the server sent when a request ran long was reaching players in chat, forcing the chat window open on arriving in a town. It now goes to development accounts only.

Audio

• Vinicius, the elf refugee at Blood River Outskirts, now answers in a female voice. Her record was corrected on August 5 and her recordings in the new voice went out with the August 8 voice publish, so the change is audible in game.
• Ignoring a player now silences the music they play. The game has worked out a volume for a blocked performer for years and then handed it to nothing, so an ignored bard kept playing at full volume; their instrument now fades out over about two seconds and stays out, for songs played from a file, for notes played by hand, and for the droning instruments underneath.
• Added a Performance Volume option to the right-click menu on another player: a slider and a mute box for that one performer, so a single loud lute in a crowded square can be turned down without quieting anyone else. The setting is yours alone, it is remembered between sessions, and the Instruments volume slider in the Audio options still applies on top of it.
• Notes played by hand from a performer you have silenced no longer take one of the twenty note channels, and a leftover fade from a stopped note can no longer cut the next note short.
• Player music got one audible distance. Everything a musician plays now carries 25 metres, and 50 while they are standing on a Performance Stage. Before this a song played from a file reached 30 metres, a note played by hand faded out at 10, which is closer than the distance the game counts you as part of the audience, and the drone instruments carried 500 metres because no distance had ever been set on them.
• Notes played by hand got a ceiling, with room for a two-handed chord so nothing is lost when you play in full. The cap applies both when you play and when your client hears somebody else play. The pool of audio sources behind those notes got a limit too: it used to grow every time it ran dry, and a held key could build 4,880 of them in a minute.
• Playing an instrument now puts a keyboard on screen: eight white keys from C up to C, five black keys for the sharps, and a control that moves the whole thing an octave up or down. Click a key to play it, hold the mouse down to hold the note.
• Each white key has its number key printed on it. The number row has played those eight notes for years and nothing in the game ever said so, so the keyboard doubles as the reference that never existed. Pressing 1 through 8 lights up the matching key on screen.
• The keyboard comes up when you ready an instrument and goes away when you stop. Drag it wherever you like and it stays there. Closing it unticks a new Show Instrument Keyboard row in Options, Interface, which is how you get it back.
• Bagpipes and the accordion draw their black keys and octave control greyed out. Both are recorded one note per key and have never been able to sound a sharp or change octave, so the keyboard stops offering it rather than taking presses that do nothing.
• Double-clicking a key no longer ends your performance. The game treated a double click anywhere as a reason to stop playing, which a keyboard you click twice in a row was always going to trip over.
• Plug a USB MIDI keyboard in and it plays your instrument. Turn it on under Options, Audio, pick your keyboard from the list, equip an instrument and type /play. How hard you strike a key decides how loud the note is, and the sustain pedal works. Everyone nearby hears exactly what you played, at the volumes you played it.
• Striking a key harder now makes a louder note, which it never did before for any way of playing. The loudness a note was played at had been worked out and carried all the way through the game and then thrown away at the last step, so every hand-played note came out at exactly one volume. Four touch settings are there if your keyboard feels too sensitive or not sensitive enough.
• Middle C on a MIDI keyboard plays the same note the 1 key plays, so the keyboard and the number row agree and there is no second layout to learn. There is an octave shift for keyboards that sit high or low, and notes past either end of an instrument are left unplayed rather than sounded at the wrong pitch.
• The note ceiling went up to make room for two hands. It was set for eight keys, so a ten-finger chord lost two notes as you struck it and a fast two-handed passage dropped notes for as long as it lasted. Nothing about the limit on how much sound one performer can make changed.
• Typing /midi opens a panel that says which keyboard is connected, whether the game is currently listening, the last note it heard and how hard it was struck. A keyboard that stays silent has several possible reasons and they all look the same from where the player sits, so the panel names the one that applies.

Combat

• Soothing Rain now rolls its chance to strip a fire damage-over-time effect on every tick of the rain, the way the skill description has always described it. The roll used to happen once, at the moment of casting, so standing in the rain for its full duration never got a second chance and most casts did nothing about a fire effect at all. The chance still comes from Water Specialization and still matches the number on the glyph tooltip. Douse is unchanged and still puts a fire out immediately.

Website

• Wrote up the community forum's customizations: the add-ons it runs, the template changes layered over the stock software, and the patches applied to its source. Archived copies of the parts that existed only on the live server, and listed what a move to newer forum software would need.

Bard

• Playing a bard skill no longer stops your music. Casting anything used to put the instrument away the moment the cast began, so a bard was silenced by their own songs and their own dances. Songs, Flourish, Dance and Group Dance now all play through, and the dance animation plays over the music instead of ending it.
• Performance Stance is now the switch for performing. Taking it sheathes your weapon, readies your instrument and opens your performance if you are in a town; when the stance ends the instrument goes away and the performance closes. Taking the stance no longer draws a weapon or flags you for combat.
• Performance Stance, Flourish, Dance and Group Dance are now refused outside towns and player-owned towns, which is where a performance has always counted. In exchange the party songs let go of the stance: Savage Sonata, Rhapsody, Melody, Dirge and Requiem work anywhere with an instrument in hand, as long as the bard has dealt no damage for 60 seconds.
• Watching a bard now works across a room. The check deciding whether you could see the performer was measured foot to foot along the ground, so a kerb or a slope blocked it and a watch would only start with the two of you almost touching. It is measured from eye level now. Facing a performer also ignores the height between you, so a bard on a stage still counts.
• Watching a performance now lengthens the blessings, food, potions and songs you were already carrying, rather than only the ones cast after the performance, and a chat line tells you when it happens. Right-clicking a player in a town also offers Watch Performance, so the command is no longer the only door.
• The town entertainer abilities moved off the combat deck onto a bard bar of their own, built the way the emote bar is. Turn it on with Show Bard Bar under Interface, drag it where you like, turn it upright or flat. It fills itself with the abilities you have trained, shows cooldowns, and takes nothing but the four entertainer skills.

Design

• Published The Unseen Trade, a 24-proposal deep dive on the Subterfuge tree: the research covered the whole skill list and the rogue itemization (poison coatings, caltrops, smoke bombs, the unimplemented Pick Lock) plus how Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, Thief and Old School RuneScape each built their thief. Every proposal has a comment thread and vote arrows.
• The catalog leads with an honesty pass: every trainer sells Pick Lock, a skill with no implementation, and the Poison Weapon passive earns XP that no formula reads. Later tiers cover a three-state stealth indicator, guards that investigate noises, a re-stealth lockout, lockpicking wired into the existing lock system, trapped chests, and pickpocketing pointed at NPCs with a fence to sell to. Pickpocket NPCs was requested by adambomb1200.

Launcher

• The update stopped deleting the language players picked. The game keeps that choice in a file no build tree contains, so the delete pass removed it on every patch and the language went back to auto-detect. The updater now leaves it alone, old manifests included. Reported by belladonnarose.

Housing

• Rebuilt the decoration bar in the Unity 6 client to match the live layout. It had unrolled into a single row of small horizontal meters stretched across the bottom of the screen. The compact panel is back: the inside and outside house pictures, upright budget meters with their icons, the pin and close column between them, the whole-lot meter row, and the indicators checkbox row, all drawn with the original art.
• The undo, redo, recent changes, layouts, and tighter fit buttons now sit in the middle of the decoration bar's bottom row. The basement and dungeon markers show in the center column again, the house pictures dim for the side you are not decorating, and the bar's buttons use the game's own tooltip panel.

Music

• Typing /band and a name puts you in an ensemble with everyone in the scene using that same name. No party invite, no size limit, and it works across guilds, so a festival can put forty players from a dozen guilds into one piece. Requested on the music proposal page.
• A band can take a password: add pass and a word after the name. The name and the password never leave your own machine, so somebody who guesses the band name but not the password ends up in a band of their own rather than in yours.
• Typing /band on its own reads back your band and an eight-character code for it. Everyone in the same band sees the same code, so two players who expected to play together and did not can compare codes to see whether the name or the password was typed differently. Without it, every one of those mistakes is just silence.
• The grouping the band feature needed was worked out in two different places in the code, once when a song is queued and once when it starts, and the two could disagree. They already did: a song prepared with /play and started with /playstart did not start for anyone in a party. The answer is now worked out once, when the song is queued, and remembered.
• Walking up to a performance partway through now lands you at the right point in the music. The check that decided whether to skip ahead was reading the seconds hand rather than the whole elapsed time, so arriving at exactly two minutes or five minutes into a song started you from the first bar, out of step with everyone else in the square.
• An ensemble used to be capped at party size, which had been hiding three faults in the bookkeeping. The worst: a performer who stopped and walked away left their slot behind, and the next player to pick up an instrument inherited it and started playing the departed performer's song.
• Forty players in one scene across a dozen bands is now a tested case rather than a hypothetical one, driven against the note caps and the audio source ceiling built earlier in this pass. What it exposed: a band adds no audio sources of its own, but the cost of each performing player has no ceiling on it. A limit on how many performances one client will synthesise at once is filed as its own piece of work, because it changes what players hear.
• Seventy-five bundled songs went in, all public domain and all period: fifteen country dances from Playford's English Dancing Master of 1651, Susato's and Praetorius's four-part dance books, Ravenscroft's rounds, Dowland, Purcell, Carolan, and the Scots and Irish collections. Every piece is arranged for fifteen instrument channels, so a lute player hears the melody, a harper hears the harmony, and a One Man Band hears the whole ensemble.
• Each bundled song carries its own paperwork. A new ledger records, per piece, the composer, the first publication, the exact edition it was made from, that edition's year, and where a copy of it lives. A test fails the build if a song is in the client without a row.
• Stan Clarke the Bard in Soltown now teaches the library. Ask him about his songbook, bring him blank sheet music, and he copies out a tradition at a time: fifteen country dances first, then rounds, then the older ballad tunes, ten batches in all. The songs land in your inventory and turn up in /playlist straight away.
• A new Helpful Guide to Sheet Music comes with the first batch and is sold in bookshops. It names the converters the community already maintains, Maestro and BruTE and abcMIDI and EasyABC, and says outright that they are other people's tools. It also writes down the band file format and the note limits, which have never been documented anywhere in the game.
• The first time you perform anything, a short window explains what the system is: notation only, no audio hosted by us, and a stream of your own cover is your own exposure. It appears once. Turning off gameplay hints does not suppress it.
• A chord length written the standard way, outside the bracket, is silently discarded by the music parser: the part keeps its bar count and plays in a third of the time. It was found in the first song written, and the build now refuses any song whose parts do not all end together.

Build health

• The localization string harvester had been refusing to run since this morning. It rejects a translatable string that starts or ends with a space, and it stops on the first one it finds, so a single indented tooltip line halted collection for the whole project. The indent moved out of the translated text and into the code that lays the tooltip out, which reads identically. Collecting again picked up 194 strings that had piled up behind the block.

Chat

• Added a World Events channel: a shard-wide feed the world speaks on and nobody types into. It arrives switched on in your Main tab and has its own checkbox in the tab options, so you can hide it or split it into a tab of its own. Unticking it hides the lines without cutting you off from the feed.

Inventory

• The search box in your backpack, in every container and in Search All My Stuff now understands filters, mixed freely with ordinary words: type:reagent, wt<5, val>100, qty>=50, dur<25%, quality:rare, crafted:Anna, is:locked and seven more states, with a minus in front to exclude and quotes for a phrase. This is the first of the sixteen inventory proposals to ship (S1).
• Every filter you type shows as a chip under the search box with a count of how many rows answered, and clicking a chip removes that one filter from what you typed. A ? button beside the box lists the syntax with examples that type themselves in on click, and a filter the search does not know is named back to you rather than quietly searched for as text.
• Two notes on the published proposal card: quality: takes rarity words rather than a number, since there is no quality number the game ever shows a player, so it reads quality:rare or quality>=rare; and a maker with two names needs quotes, as crafted:"Anna Smith".
• Search All My Stuff sends only the plain words you typed to the server and applies the filters to the results itself, so a query of nothing but filters narrows the items already loaded and says so on the status line instead of asking for three more characters.
• Under the hood, the crafting station and the inventory box now read their queries through one tokenizer, so a minus, a quoted phrase and a half-typed filter behave the same in either. The item categories moved out of the tab strip into their own class, which is what stops a type: filter and a category tab from ever disagreeing about what a reagent is. 56 new tests, plus the crafting search suite kept green as the proof that swapping the reader changed none of its behaviour.

Headlines

• A bard audit against the original design found three headline features that were built but connected to nothing: watching a performer fortified no buffs, the Inspiration meter was thrown away at every logout, and the songs never stopped buffing pets. All three work now.
• A decorated house can now be sold on its own, without the lot deed: it changes hands with its house deed and every decoration inside it, and the seller keeps their lot.
• Published The Unplayed Score, a 30-proposal music and sound deep dive: a Songbook window, a mute that works, band tokens, jam-in, MIDI keyboards, an Orchestrion Box that plays your compositions while you are offline, and an honest ladder for player voice. Vote on the parts you want.
• The tracking ceiling came off. Achievements are data now instead of a fixed list of twenty-eight counters, and the game finally records what you killed rather than only that you killed something.
• 248 new achievements. A kill ladder for every creature family that can carry one, plus a deed for each of the 84 named bosses.
• Party members get credit for the kills they fought. Counting moved to the server and now pays everyone who earned experience for the fight, not only whoever landed the last blow.
• Bug pass. Closed 28 reported bugs from the tracker in one sweep, with 8 more held for a decision or more detail.
• The bard rework now matches its design end to end: buff fortification climbs with watch time on two axes, Flourish and Dance each drive one, Group Dance takes a band, specialization lengthens everything, and the Inspired bonus reaches 15 percent.
• Dirge of Dissonance and Requiem of Ruin give the combat bard its two debuff songs, lowering physical and magic resistance on enemies near the performer.
• Masterworking crafted instruments works: the flute-at-the-carpentry-table dead end testers hit on build 110 is fixed for the next build.
• Basement entrance doors no longer sneak past the one-entrance limit; testers had stacked three entrances on one basement.
• An evening pass through tester reports: container windows cascade for real now, the decoration animal names option reaches placed pets, and the permissions failures traced to containers locking themselves while their window is open.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-08-11 is up: Tuesday was one of the largest days this project has had. The bard school was rebuilt from the ground up with full experience refunds, antialiasing was found to have never worked once in this client and now does, a player's report about a single spell icon turned into a hundred and forty-four redrawn glyphs, player dungeons got portals, and town governors can now turn their whole town to face a different direction without evicting anybody. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed four items from the forums to the tracker: an Air elemental focus-restore ask, an Ice Field focus-cost tuning ask, making Hide Helmet/Hide Cloak per-avatar instead of account-wide, and an untriaged report that skill icon cooldown circles render broken at the bottom of the icon.
• Added a new card to the SQUIRREL! page: the achievement system is due on chaos later today, with over 200 achievements, an in-game book of deeds, and titles, and with server-wide leaderboards and trophies to follow.

UI

• Hovering a party member's Grandmaster badge now always opens a tooltip. Standing together it lists their grandmastered skills as before; when they are in another area it shows the number of skills the badge is printing and a line saying the names are listed once you are in the same area, where before the hover opened nothing at all.
• The /verbose nameplate report now says why it has no reading instead of answering "not probed yet" in every case. A machine that cannot sample the frame, a sample that failed, a sample that came back empty and a check that is not running each report their own reason, so the line tells a tester something different depending on what is actually wrong. Reported by rinaldi.
• Gave the last 36 character statistics a display rule. Some printed a raw number with no percent sign or rounding, and some printed their internal name in question marks like "?Enraged?"; each only misbehaved when something put it on screen. Eleven of them are internal bookkeeping and are now hidden from tooltips entirely.
• Closed the gold ring at the bottom of the Modern skill icons. The redrawn art was cutting a notch through the ring on 187 of the 533 icons and showing on the stone border behind it. Reported by Barugon.
• The focus bar flashes red again when a cast is refused for lack of focus. The warning was lost when the status frame moved to the new interface, so a refused cast gave only the chat message; the flash now runs on the bar itself and leaves the fill readable underneath.
• The count of friends online is back on the social button in the top-right corner, showing as a number badge the same way unopened mail and pending invites do. It went missing when that button row was rebuilt on the new interface system, because the old text field it wrote into is removed as part of the rebuild.
• Pressing Escape while holding coconut halves opens the options menu again. The pretend gallop was being read as a real mount, so Escape tried to dismount instead of opening the menu, and the character gave a small hop and nothing else. Escape on an actual mount still dismounts.
• A lot listed for sale now reads as its own state instead of looking like an unclaimed lot: its own marker colour on the region map, at full strength rather than faded like an owned lot, still shown when the map is filtered to available lots, and a tooltip carrying the lot size, "For Sale" and the asking price. In the world the sign on a listed lot is tinted so it stands apart from a claimable one at a distance, and its floating label now reads "For Sale with House" above the price, since a listed lot comes with its house and decorations. Requested by alliumoop and .knightrider.
• Chaos Bomb's tooltip now lists the radius of its blast, and Taunt's does the same. Both hit everything in a circle around the caster and had been leaving that number off while other area skills showed theirs. Cone skills such as Cone of Cold still list no radius.
• Fixed two ways to lose your own overhead nameplate: resuming into a scene while still dead left it missing until you changed scene, and switching the large nameplate option on or off made the whole overhead display vanish or shrink to a few unreadable numbers, with further toggling never bringing it back. Nearby players' plates rebuild at the new size the same way.
• The Give Items window no longer says you are not carrying the items an NPC asked for while those items sit in the Offered pane. Once anything is offered, your side of the window says what you are handing over is in the Offered pane, and points at Show all items only while the rest of your pack is still hidden by the filter.
• Take All now closes the loot window a harvested tree, ore vein, plant or water source leaves behind once it is empty, instead of leaving an empty window that had to be closed by hand before the node finished its animation and started its respawn. Corpses, chests and other world containers are unchanged, and still follow the Close Loot Window When Emptied setting under Options, Interface.
• The emote bar now comes back the moment a fishing line is reeled in. A cancelled cast used to leave it greyed for a few seconds after the rod was done.
• Fishing from a chair no longer lets the seated emotes play. The bar greys for a seated cast the same way it does standing, and a press on a greyed emote does nothing instead of playing it with the rod still in hand.
• Chat, Map and Skills now come to the front when picked out of the window selector while already open, which the first pass at that fix missed. The quit and exit confirmation prompt sits above every window, so a window raised or dragged afterwards no longer covers the prompt you are answering. The window hotkeys stay as toggles: a key press closes an open window and the next press reopens it in front, and the selector row is what brings an open window forward.
• Container windows were meant to open in a staggered cascade since early August, but the stagger never ran on a first open: the window joined the interface before the code that positions it started listening, so containers sharing a remembered spot stacked exactly on top of each other. Reported by Rinaldi. Fixed, waits on the next chaos build.
• The Show Names Over Decoration Animals option now also covers decoration pets placed directly, such as the Wood Duck. It only reached animals from spawner decorations before, though the label promised all of them. Asked by Rinaldi. NPC town animals keep their names either way. Waits on the next build.

Client

• Fixed ghost mode so it actually prevents damage. The no-damage part was only applied on the ghosted player's own screen, so the server kept the damage and the health loss came back on the next refresh. Ghost mode now reports itself to the server, and an account that is not allowed to use it gets a line in chat saying so instead of a checkbox that appears to do nothing.
• Fixed creature pathing where the walkable surface stopped being carved around decoration. A single failure while carving a patch of ground threw away every carve in that patch, so creatures could walk through decoration there, and that carve is retried now. A lot holding more decoration than one patch can store falls back to plain ground instead of keeping the shape left over from its previous build.
• Dungeons now use the dungeon post-effect look. It was tied to a flag that only player-owned dungeons carry, so every built dungeon, sewer, mine and basement rendered with the surface settings; the look now follows the dungeon camera rig, which those scenes already use.
• Heavily decorated places load faster. The client used to ask the server for one container's contents, wait for the reply, and only then ask for the next, so a decorated town paid a separate round trip per container. It now has several requests out at a time, and other traffic no longer queues up behind them. Equipment loads were taking over 30 seconds and player town decorations over 60.
• Fixed a hat or helmet on a nearby character dropping out of view depending on which way the camera pointed. The test that decided whether a worn piece was on screen used a volume frozen at the pose the piece was put on in, so a turn of the head carried the piece outside it and the game stopped drawing it.
• Aspen bark now stays loaded at full resolution instead of being held at a reduced one, so the trunk sharpens as you walk up to it rather than staying soft at every distance. Two earlier passes raised how large the bark imports, which turned out not to be what was holding it back.

Combat

• Summon Daemon and Juxtapose cast in silence. Both now play a cast sound effect, in line with the rest of the Chaos spells.
• Retired Solo Stance and refunded every point spent on it. It was meant to give a bard their own songs back and let them fight without silencing their support, but the design allows no exception to either rule, and in practice the stance did nothing at all: the piece that was supposed to switch the self effects on was never wired to any song, so a bard standing in it produced no benefit for anybody while still holding a stance slot.
• Bard songs now really do skip pets, summons and tamed creatures. Yesterday's change was reported as doing this and did not: the flags it cleared restrict a song to pets rather than excluding them, so clearing them changed nothing and party songs kept buffing everyone's animals. There is now a real exclusion, and the three songs carry it.
• The Inspiration meter survives logging out. It was being banked correctly and then thrown away at the end of every session, so experience you had stored up and any bonus you had already paid a bard for were gone next time you signed in. The whole point is that you adventure in one session and spend it with a bard in another, so that now works.
• Watching a bard perform now actually lengthens the blessings, food, potions and songs you are carrying. The system that decided how much was built and stored and sent to your client, and then nothing read it, so the headline half of the town loop had no effect on anything. Buff strength is still to come; duration works now, and the readout says Fortified while it is running.
• Added /perform, so a bard can busk. Until now the only way to start a performance was to find a crafted Performance Stage that somebody had already placed in the town you were standing in. The stage is still worth finding and still pays more; it is no longer the only door in.
• Auras that sit on the ground or follow a player, such as bard songs, devotionals, lit torches and traps, now pass over just the one effect a target does not qualify for. An effect a target failed used to end that target's whole turn through the aura, so any later effect in the same aura never reached them and the aura forgot it had already served them.
• Standing idle no longer sends away a pet that has nothing to fight. Going away from the keyboard for ten minutes still dismisses a pet that is fighting for you, but having your own weapon drawn no longer counts, so a summoned elemental or a tamed pet parked in a town stays put. The message about the pet wandering off now appears once instead of repeating while the creature fades out.
• The summoned Ice Elemental now slows every enemy its attacks damage. Its slow used to land on about one attack in four, so an enemy could take several hits without ever slowing down. The slow itself is unchanged at 20 percent for 10 seconds, deeper with Water Specialization, and the skill description no longer says the attacks only have a chance to slow.
• Rinaldi caught a naming mix-up in the Torpor and Chaotic Feedback verify task: two steps said Torpid Torment where Torpor was meant. The task steps and a test comment were corrected; the in-game change itself was right and is on chaos build 109.
• Watching a bard now fortifies buffs gradually: about five minutes of attention climbs each buff family from nothing to its ceiling, on two axes. Buffs last longer and hit harder, the performer's Instrument Proficiency and Voice Training each shorten one side of the climb, and a band of bards speeds it up. Watching with an empty Inspiration bank fortifies too.
• Fixed the watch conversion stalling after one tick: the per-bard cooldown was re-arming on every heartbeat, so a full bank that should convert in ten minutes of watching needed a hundred and twenty bards. The cooldown now covers the whole watch session.
• Flourish now drives how much stronger the audience's buffs get and Dance how much longer they last, with Group Dance doing both, matching the design's split. A bard alternating the two holds both ramps up. What a performance converts is unchanged.
• Group Dance now takes a band, as designed: a party with another member present, nobody mid Flourish or Dance, and the solo moves wait while a bandmate leads one. A lone bard claiming full group-dance rate gets a Dance's worth and no more, enforced server-side.
• Two new bard songs fill the design's empty debuff slots: Dirge of Dissonance lowers physical damage resistance on enemies near the bard, Requiem of Ruin does the same to magic. Both follow the support-song rules: instrument in hand, Performance Stance, and silenced for a minute if the bard deals damage.
• Bard Specialization now does what the design says on every ability: songs and performance moves last a quarter longer at full mastery. Unspecialized bards are untouched.

Images

• Five of the summoned elemental glyphs in the Modern set, the notched ring above and the repaired ring below.
• BeforeAfter
• 

Server

• Fixed a login-record housekeeping timer on the master server that cleared expired records a moment before the database's own expiry pass did, then logged a warning that the database expiry had stopped. The safety net now waits three minutes past expiry, so that warning only appears when the database really has stopped clearing them. No change to how logins behave.

Tools

• Added a commit-time check that compares the client and server message tables and refuses a change where the two disagree. That kind of mismatch is what broke buying a listed lot earlier this week, and until now it was caught only by a comparison someone ran by hand.

Balance

• Bard song cast times scale off Bard Specialization now. Retiring Rhythmic Readiness had left all three songs dividing by a skill nobody can train any more, so the numbers were frozen at their worst case: Savage Sonata sat at a flat 15 seconds where a grandmaster used to reach 10. The new scaling reproduces the old curve almost exactly.
• The Inspired bonus a bard's audience earns went from 10 to 15 percent of adventure experience, the figure the design called for. It stays a pure bonus; nobody's baseline moved.

Docs

• Corrected the bard skill descriptions in game and the internal school reference. Savage Sonata was still telling players it buffed tamed creatures, none of the three songs mentioned that they only work in the performer's stance, and the reference still listed old focus costs, a tree that no longer exists and rotations built on retired skills.
• Rechecked a note in the test-runner guide that said the Editor test runner could not filter by class name at all. The truth is worse than either the old note or the first correction: the filter is intermittent. The same fixture answered with its five tests, then reported none, then answered with all five again, with nothing changed in between. The guide now says to filter by namespace and treat an empty class-filter result as a question to ask again rather than an answer.

Housing

• Players asked for property selling to be split in two: sell a lot with its deed, or sell a decorated house on its own. The first has been in since late July. The second landed today: a house you have put into property storage can be offered to a named player from the Property Manager, and it changes hands with its house deed and every decoration inside it, chest contents intact. Your lot and your lot deed stay yours.
• The buyer sees an offered house in their own Property Manager, with the seller and the price on it, and buys it there. Gold moves through the same escrow the lot sale uses and the seller is paid by mail minus the same fee. Listing a house returns any other player's items to their own bank first, and untradeable items come back to the seller rather than crossing accounts. A house that is offered cannot be put back on a lot, moved to another town, or sent to the bank until the offer is cancelled or the house sells.
• The same mechanism covers a stored basement or dungeon, which closes a follow-up left open by the lot sale. Requested by players; tracked as a wishlist item.
• Basement entrance doors slipped past the one-entrance-per-lot limit, so a lot could hold several entrances to the same basement; hatches were still blocked correctly. Doors now count toward the limit the same way hatches do. Found by belladonnarose, Rinaldi and inuphet. Waits on the next chaos build.
• Traced the unable-to-change-permissions reports to their cause: an open container window holds a lock on its own container, and every settings change is refused while it is open, including the new use-for-crafting toggle that lives inside that window. The popup now says to close the window instead of blaming another player; the full fix is queued as a tracked bug.

Content

• The square and round patterned floor rugs were not picking up the lighting of the room they sat in, so they read as washed out in every house. All 39 of them now take the room's own light and accept shadows from furniture and from characters standing on them.
• Closed a gap in the floor of the underground chamber in Quel Shardfall. Half the room sat 11 cm out of line with the other half, leaving a slot about 8 m long that looked straight down on the grass outside. The two halves line up again, and the join where the room meets the stairs at its north end closed up by the same amount.

Design

• Published the music and sound deep dive, The Unplayed Score: player music, instruments, ensembles, game audio and voice reviewed against Ultima Online, LOTRO, Mabinogi, Final Fantasy XIV, Sea of Thieves, Rust, Guild Wars 2, ArcheAge, Second Life, Minecraft and World of Warcraft, ending in 30 proposals with per-proposal comment threads and votes. The through line: Shroud shipped a real ABC music engine in 2015 and built the performer economy this month, and everything around the engine is the open ground. Headliners: a Songbook window, a mute that actually works, band tokens for cross-guild ensembles, one-key jam-in, native MIDI keyboard support, and an Orchestrion Box that performs your sheet music to visitors while you are offline.

Achievements

• Achievements are no longer limited to the fixed list of twenty-eight counters the game has had since 2016. There is now a second set of counters named by text, authored as data beside the old ones, so adding an achievement is a data entry rather than a code change. The counters that already existed are untouched and nothing had to be converted.
• Built one hand-checked list of every named boss in the game, 84 of them. Bosses used to be identified by a naming convention in the files, which missed the Frost Giant along with all eight Cabalists. A boss that appears in more than one place now counts as one boss rather than several.
• Kills are now counted per creature family and per named boss, and the count goes to every party member instead of whoever struck last. The server does the counting from its own record of the fight. 1,422 creatures are mapped across 58 families.
• Added 248 achievements: a 10 / 100 / 1,000 / 10,000 ladder on each creature family large enough to carry one, a shorter ladder on the small ones, and a first-kill deed for each of the 84 bosses. Ones earned while fighting are announced at your next login, the same way the crafting achievements already work. New counts start at zero for everyone.

Crafting

• Masterworking a crafted instrument at a carpentry table did nothing: the attempt ended silently with no bonus choices, while enchanting worked fine. The proficiency routing rejected instruments; they now ride the same path wands and staves use. Reported by inuphet. The fix is committed and waits on the next chaos build.
• The new masterwork coverage test also caught the durability variant of the Vile Mace filed under the wrong crafting station, which left it impossible to masterwork anywhere. It moved next to its base version under blacksmithing.

The New Britannia Herald

The bard rework lands, antialiasing finally renders, and towns can turn

16 minTranscriptPodcast

Headlines

• Skill experience is now saved with a receipt: the game holds each batch until the server confirms it, and sends it again if it did not land.
• Player dungeons got waygates: place a portal, attune it, and step from the far end of your dungeon back to the entrance, or straight into another dungeon.
• Coordinates now travel, from a wishlist request by Jack SinAssist: paste a location into chat and click it to see it ringed on your map, with a matching readout and a Go to box on the map itself.
• DO NOT PANIC: the bard changes landing today are part one of several, nothing is on live, and every point spent on a retired skill refunds in full.
• A player spotted that the new Summon Earth Elemental icon had stopped looking like an Earth spell. They were right, and it was 139 icons wide: 144 skill glyphs redrawn so each one carries its school colour again.
• Antialiasing has never once worked in this client. It works now, with four methods to pick from, and it is on by default for machines that can carry it.
• Sieges stopped arriving all at once: towns now come under siege on their own schedule, with a hard ceiling of eight besieged player towns across the map.
• The bard rework is finished: seven skills retired and refunded, six new ones in their place, two stances that decide whether your songs help your party or you, and a town loop where watching a performer pays you in adventure experience. Towns can build a stage for it.
• Placed lights can be set to burn only at night, lighting themselves at dusk and going out at dawn. Streetlamps no longer have to choose between noon and darkness.
• Town governors can turn their town to face a different direction, moving the sun, sky, compass and wind together, with no map rebuild and nobody evicted. Requested by John Markus.
• Crafted instruments became real gear: quality rolled from the carpenter's skill, masterworks, enchants, and a bard song that finally gets stronger for carrying a better lute.
• Tester nyarkie found that a finished player dungeon could not accept a single decoration. Spend the last dungeon point and the dungeon refused totems, chairs, torches and chests alike, though only rooms ever cost points. Fixed, and the generator now seats totems from the chest too.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-08-10 is up: Monday's biggest repair was undoing Saturday's. A change that stopped pets healing themselves collided with pet data that had been doing the same job for years, and wounded pets began draining health while standing perfectly still. A player read the changelog and caught four of Sunday's fixes as wrong, all four came back out, and the lot sale feature was put right end to end after its first day with testers. Listen or read the transcript (14 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

UI

• Pinned the bank window and it stays open on Escape. Pinned a container inside your backpack and it stays open when the backpack itself closes on Escape.
• Twenty seven rebuilt windows were still carrying the old version of themselves underneath, drawn empty but still catching the mouse. That is what made the quest hand-in window refuse items and the map window pick up hovers belonging to nothing, both fixed one window at a time. The leftover layer is now switched off for every rebuilt window, so a drag, a click or a tooltip always lands on the window you can see. Affected windows included both vendor windows, the merchant, player trade, both character sheets, deck building, scene vendors and plot storage.
• Added a check that lists which rebuilt windows still have the old widgets sitting in the build behind them, and tests that fail if a future rebuild reintroduces the problem or quietly opts a window out. Stripping those widgets out of the files for good is queued as its own job.
• The tab locks in character creation now hold the sliders. Locking a tab protected the choices made from lists but every slider on that tab still got a new value on Random, so a locked eyes tab kept its eye colour and lost its eye shape. Sliders on a locked tab keep their values now.
• Rebuilt windows can be moved by their left edge as well as the title bar. The bar is about one line of text tall, shrinks further with the text-size and UI-size settings, and a long title plus an icon and three buttons leaves very little of it free. The new strip runs the full height of the window down its left padding, so no window loses any room, and the cursor changes to the move cursor over it. A window with no padding on that side, such as the chat log, does not get one.
• The basic weapon attack skills now show what the next levels give them. Skill tooltips carry a preview of the skill twenty levels higher, and the basic attacks were the one family left out of it even though their damage does climb with level.
• The /loctrack overlay now prints exactly what /loc prints. It had been showing a different area name and two decimals instead of three, and on comma-decimal game languages it printed numbers that could not be read back at all.
• Coordinates pasted into chat are now links, from a wishlist request by Jack SinAssist (#4159). Clicking one opens the map and rings that spot for twelve seconds; a coordinate from another area names that area instead of pointing at the wrong place. Detection is narrow enough that ordinary chat is untouched.
• The map gained a coordinate readout in the bottom right corner and a Go to box that takes a pasted location. Both go quiet in the 3D dungeon view, in scenes with no map sheet, and at heights the map calibration does not cover, rather than reporting a number that means nothing.
• A player reported that the Modern Summon Earth Elemental icon no longer looked like an Earth spell: gold had flooded the medallion and the green background was gone. They guessed the other elementals had the same problem. Checking all 533 icons in the set found 139 whose background colour had drifted, mostly blues and purples turned gold.
• A skill glyph carries two colours: the square border is the kind of skill, and the round disc behind the art is its school. The border was safe because the generator stamps the original one back pixel for pixel. Nothing was really protecting the disc. The check meant to guard it averaged colour over a band that turns out to be 77 percent border, so it read the same number for a green background and a blue one.
• 144 glyphs were redrawn, including all five summoned elementals. Earth is stone on green again, Ice is ice with a blue core instead of a gold sun, and Air and Water no longer come back painted as bare human figures. Borders are byte-identical to what shipped, so no skill changed category.
• Dragged windows now stick to the edges of the other windows on screen and to the edge of the screen, and matching edges line up on their own, so two windows can be put flush without pixel-hunting.
• Resizing a window from its corner grip snaps the same way, and against a neighbouring window it will also match that window's width or height. Hold Shift while dragging or resizing to place a window with no snapping at all.
• Options, under Themes, gained a Snap Windows to Edges checkbox, on by default, and a Snap Distance slider covering 2 to 40 pixels.
• The "Hide Title and Guild Name" option on your own status plate moved to the same per-character storage. Both settings stay where they were, on the guild right-click menu and the status plate right-click menu, and an existing choice carries over to the first character you log in with.
• The siege confirmation window now names the town you are walking into and the cabalists besieging it, and says what entering and bypassing each do. It used to be one sentence that named neither. Players under level 20, who are routed around a siege automatically, are no longer told they have to fight through it first.
• New option under Options, Interface, Nameplates and Chat Bubbles: "Show Names Over Decoration Animals". On by default. Turn it off and the chickens, rabbits and frogs that players place as decorations drop their overhead labels, while townspeople, wild creatures and other players keep theirs. Both forum requests came from Isabel Ayin.

Client

• Distant creatures aggrod on any player no longer freeze and bounce for observers watching from far away. The wide movement smoothing window that stopped the freezing for peaceful wanderers now covers combat at range too. Close-up combat is unchanged.
• A camera rig prefab that looked like dead weight turned out to be authored into 70 dungeon, sewer, mine and basement scenes, so it stayed. The code that picks a camera rig now spells out both ways a scene can get one, the fallback no longer throws when its prefab is missing, and a new test fails if a rig prefab ends up somewhere nothing can reach it.
• Antialiasing works now. It did not before: the client was rendering every edge unsmoothed, and the Use Antialiasing checkbox in Video options wrote a value that nothing on screen ever read. Deferred rendering rules out the hardware kind, and the one software method that was wired up had been compiled out of the shader all along.
• The checkbox became a method picker: Off, Fast, Quality and Temporal. Fast is a cheap edge filter, Quality is a stronger pass that covers far more of the picture, and Temporal compares frames over time, which is the only one that touches the shimmer on distant fences and foliage. Your machine picks a starting method on first run, and players who had ticked the old box get Quality.
• Two more faults turned up on the way. The automatic quality tuner could only ever take antialiasing away, never give it back, so a machine that dipped once stayed degraded until restart. And the new Quality pass silently did nothing outside play mode, which is the kind of thing that ships looking fine and is not.

Community

• Filed three player suggestions from the forums to the tracker: a Moon Eater skill-scaling issue, aligning map coordinates with the /loc command, and teleporters linking a player's own dungeons together.

Crafting

• Removed a stray build-server warning line from the client copy of the recipe cache. It could never fire on a real problem, but it wrote a log line for every ingredient combination of every recipe each time the cache was built, a few thousand writes on a full recipe set.
• Crafted instruments are now real gear. A lute, flute, harp, tabor drum, accordion, street organ, recorder, bagpipes or one-man-band you make yourself carries a quality that depends on the carpenter who made it, with some luck in each craft, and a critical craft produces a better one.
• Instruments can be masterworked at a carpentry table and enchanted at an alchemy table, up to five of each, and salvaged back into scrap wood. Six separate rules had each been enough on their own to refuse an instrument, so they all had to move together. Instruments still never wear out.

Crash Reporting

• Checked the last 24 hours of client crash reports and found one that was not a crash. The log attached to it showed a complete play session that ended in a normal shutdown, filed as a startup failure. The launcher had been reading exit stamps frozen nine days earlier, so every clean session on that machine was being reported. 24 of the 227 reports on record carry that one frozen stamp.
• Added a staleness check to the rule that decides whether the last session ended badly. It keys on the boot stamp rather than the clean-exit stamp, because a real crash leaves an old clean-exit stamp too. A session whose engine started always records a boot stage after its launch, so a boot stage older than the launch on a session that provably ran means the stamps are describing some other session. Genuine crashes still report, and a test covers that case.
• The launcher has been reporting which settings file it read since build 21, but the receiving end never listed that field, so it was dropped on arrival and never stored. Added it, which is what makes a frozen-stamp report diagnosable instead of a guess.

Combat

• Skills that key off undead now recognise every kind of undead. The game asked whether a creature was undead and nothing else, so Ancient Undead, who are undead and humanoid, failed the question along with most liches. Cleansing Rain and the Banish Undead weapon proc were doing zero damage to them. Solar Flare, Rainbow Blast, Searing Ray, Elysian Illumination and the Blistering Ray proc were losing their undead bonus against them. The Sawblade Sweep bleed and the boar rend attack were bleeding Ancient Undead they were written to spare, and now refuse it. Sawblade Sweep's own damage still lands, and Whirling Blades, which carries no bleed, is unchanged. Glyph tooltip damage ranges are unchanged.
• Creatures that kill themselves by exploding now actually die. The detonation set the health number without going through the path that raises a death, so a boom bunny was left standing invisible, still targetable, still wearing its name plate, and leaving no body. It now dies, drops its body and clears its plate.
• Moon Eater and Sun Eater now scale to their own cycle. Both granted the same flat bonus hours for the same price, but the moon runs on a seven day orbit and the sun on a single day, so at skill 100 Sun Eater took daylight from 75% to 95.8% of the clock while Moon Eater moved moonlight from 50% to 53% of the orbit. Each skill now clears the same share of its own dark stretch per level and reaches permanent light at skill 200.
• Two smaller fixes rode along with the eater rebalance. The lunar bonus was being dropped to zero whenever there was no local player, which cost a trained character their extra moonlit hours across a scene load. The day window also moved into a shared model beside the lunar one, so the two opposite polarities are no longer written out by hand at three call sites, with five new editor tests pinning the scaling rule to the values the assets actually ship.
• Aetheric Feedback's Focus buff now lasts 60 seconds plus one second per point of Focus skill level, so 160 seconds at skill 100 and 260 at 200, instead of a flat 60 at every level. The skill only unlocks after Spellbinder Stance and is built to ride it, but the stance itself runs about 160 seconds at skill 100, so the buff expired about a third of the way in and had to be recast two or three times per stance. The Combat Focus Per Second part of the skill still lasts 60 seconds, and the focus cost, cast time, cooldown and critical-hit window are unchanged. Asked for by players on the forums.
• Bard songs no longer buff the bard who sings them. The friendly half of Savage Sonata, Rhapsody of Recovery and Melody of Mending carried a "self" flag, so every song quietly doubled as a personal buff, and pets picked them up too. Both are gone: party support goes to the party.
• Bard songs cost focus for the first time since the school shipped, and only two run at once instead of the whole tree. Songs also compete with potions and food for buff slots now rather than stacking on top of them.
• Playing a bard now requires an instrument in the instrument slot, and which instrument matters: its crafted quality and any masterworks or enchants feed song strength. Singing without one works at half strength, and the Voice Training skill closes that gap back up. Voice Training shipped in 2021 with the in-game text "this skill currently does nothing", which was accurate until today.
• The bard combat tree is retired: Atonal Aria, Anthem of Alacrity, Psalm of Stagnation, Mesmerizing Melody, Concussive Canticle, Refrain of Resistance and Rhythmic Readiness are gone. Every point of experience spent on them comes back to the adventurer pool at full value on next login, to spend on anything. What remains is the support kit the rework is built around.
• Groundwork for the bard rework's Inspiration loop: adventuring now banks Inspiration, measured in the adventure experience you earn, and carrying an Inspired bonus adds 10% on top of the experience you would have earned anyway. Nothing was cut to pay for it. A character who never visits a bard earns exactly what they earn today. Watching a bard to convert the bank comes next.
• Inspiration is banked and spent by the server as it awards experience, so it scales to how long you actually played rather than to a session timer. PvP kills neither bank nor spend it, which keeps bard buffs out of the pre-fight checklist.
• DO NOT PANIC. Everything above is the first of several parts of the Bard overhaul, and none of it is on a live shard. Bard is being rebuilt as a two-role class rather than trimmed: a party-support role that asks you to commit to it, and a new in-town performer role that does not exist yet. The parts landing now are the ones that had to come first. Judge the whole thing when the whole thing is in front of you, on chaos, where you can play it and tell us what is wrong with it.
• Every point of experience invested in a retired bard skill comes back in full, and nothing in the overhaul cuts anyone's experience to pay for anything. If you main a bard, you are not losing your investment. You are getting it back to spend.
• Bards now pick a stance. Performance Stance carries the party kit at full strength and none of it touches the bard; Solo Stance turns that around, giving the songs' benefits back to the bard while party support is suppressed. They share the same exclusive stance slot as Berserker's, Defensive, Passive, Reckless and Spellbinder, so you cannot run a combat stance and a performing one at the same time. Switching takes two seconds, thirty on cooldown, and focus.
• Dealing damage in Performance Stance silences your party support entirely for a full minute, and it fades within a fraction of a second of the hit landing. It is all or nothing rather than a sliding scale, so there is no chipping in a little damage and keeping most of the buff. Solo Stance has no such rule: in it you are free to fight.
• Bard party support now only lands while the bard is in Performance Stance. Every buff the surviving songs give a party runs through the same gate, so the stance is a real choice rather than a label.
• Groundwork for the town performer half: the server side of performing, watching, reading your Inspiration and tipping a performer is in, along with the list of buff families a performance will be able to fortify. Blessings, food and drink, potions and songs can be fortified; debuffs, stances and artifact effects deliberately cannot.
• /watch and /tip are in. Watching a performer is something you ask for on purpose rather than something that happens by walking past one: you need to be near the bard, facing them, and able to see them. Turning your head costs you the moment, not the session, and a performer stepping behind a pillar has a few seconds of grace before you lose them.
• Tips no longer need a jar. /tip 50 Some Name hands gold straight to a performer in the same scene, on the same debit-first path the tip jar uses, so the gold is either moved or not moved and never both.
• The Inspiration readout is in: a small bar that appears when you have Inspiration banked or an Inspired bonus running, and gets out of the way when you do not. It is deliberately not a permanent meter sitting at zero, since that turns a bonus into a chore.
• Bard picked up an entertainer half: Instrument Proficiency, Flourish, Dance and Group Dance. The innate makes a well-crafted instrument worth carrying, scaling its quality and enhancement slots up to double what they add to a song, and worth nothing at all if you sing without one. The three actives cost focus, need an instrument in hand, and only one runs at a time.
• The performance moves are how a bard works a room rather than parking a looping song in it. A flourish keeps the instrument playing. Dance and Group Dance put the lute down, which is worth more. Resounding Reach, Musical Fortitude and Voice Training now hang from Instrument Proficiency, and Voice Training stopped claiming it was not yet implemented.
• Melody of Mending got a new job. Its drafted one was slowing a party's battle fatigue, and there is no battle fatigue, so instead it now banks Inspiration faster for everyone sharing an experience award with the bard. Same idea from the other side: the party gains more rather than losing less.
• Torpor and Chaotic Feedback can no longer be active at the same time. Casting either one ends the other, the way a new stance replaces the one you were holding. Running both together let Torpor's damage reduction and healing pay off the health cost Chaotic Feedback charges for its casting and draw speed.
• Both spells now say so in their descriptions, and Chaotic Feedback keeps the exclusivity it already had with Torpid Torment and Spellbinder Stance. A test pins all three groupings, since that membership is data and losing it would only show up in game.
• A better instrument now makes a stronger bard song. The song formula had been restored to read an instrument's quality and its masterwork and enchant bonuses, but no instrument in the game had any of those, so it read the same 1.0 for everyone and the new Instrument Proficiency skill was worth nothing at any level. A perfect, fully enhanced instrument is now worth double a plain one.

Engineering

• The shared code that both the client and the server compile is kept in sync by copying files across, so an edit made on only one side gets overwritten without warning on the next sync. Added a test that pins the recipe cache pair and fails if the two copies ever diverge again.

Servers

• Checked whether cross-instance presence replication was actually broken, using the logging added for it last week. Over seven days every one of 483 login and logout events was applied on both group instances, and the once-a-minute presence self-heal ran at 99.9% of its ceiling. The friends-list problem this was filed for was a blind spot in the logs, not a broken hop.
• Fixed a case where one network message the transport refused to carry would take the whole connection down with it. The message was stamped with a sequence number before being handed over, and that number was lost when the send failed, which left a permanent gap the receiving end rejects. It now hands the number back, so a refused message costs one message instead of a connection.
• Stopped a refused message on the server-to-server social link from disconnecting every player on that group instance. The link used to tear itself down on any send failure, and that teardown cascades into a full reconnect that drops all connected players. It now drops the single message and carries on, and only rebuilds the link when the connection is genuinely gone.
• Group instances that reconnect now drop their old stale connection instead of leaving it registered. A leftover half-open connection could be picked as the delivery target and swallow an entire reconnect resync without a trace in the logs.
• Fixed a blank server identifier not surviving the trip between servers. It was being written out as a placeholder character, so the check for it on the receiving end could never fire.

Skills

• Skill experience now waits for the server to confirm it was saved. Batches used to be sent and forgotten, so anything the server could not store was lost until that skill changed again; a batch that fails is now held and sent again, and the queue survives a scene change or a dropped connection.
• Levelling a skill threw an error and did nothing for anyone with the tester all-skills buff active. The buff adds skills for display without adding them to the real character sheet, and the level-up path was asking the display question and then writing to the sheet. It now asks the sheet. Affected both skill tree clicks and the tester Set Skill button.

Player Dungeons

• Added the Dungeon Waygate, a portal decoration you place in a dungeon and attune to somewhere else. It can lead to another waygate in the same dungeon or back to the dungeon entrance, which nothing could do before: the only thing in a dungeon that moved you was the exit, and that left the dungeon entirely.
• A waygate can also lead into a different dungeon, arriving on the waygate there whose name it carries. Each waygate sets who may arrive on it, from nobody to anyone who can get in, so a link between two players needs both owners to agree. A waygate never opens a door the dungeon entrance would have refused, and access is re-checked on arrival in case the destination was locked after your last visit.
• The waygate stores its destination on the placed item and its aim as the destination waygate’s name, matched once that dungeon loads, so pointing one somewhere needed no new server call. Leaving a dungeon you travelled into now puts you at that dungeon’s own entrance rather than guessing between two builds that share a scene name.

Server

• Reconciled seven files that had drifted between the server code and the client's copy of it. Parts of the client share source files with the server, kept in step by a script that copies whole files, so an edit made to only one side gets overwritten the next time it runs. Four files needed the server's version, three needed the client's, including one enum table where the client held 37 content entries the server had never received.
• The log sweep also turned up things worth tracking rather than fixing on the spot: stale login records being cleared by a safety net instead of by the database itself, a persistence queue backing up to 100 items under decoration load with equipment taking 30 seconds to arrive, an operation code arriving from clients that the server has never had a handler for, and navmesh tile failures at two named positions. Filed with the evidence.
• Items recycled through merchants keep the id they were sold under. Player-sold items are stored and handed back out later as monster drops, and both paths minted a fresh id on the way out, so the two halves of an item life could not be joined up in the logs. Each stored item is handed out exactly once, so reusing its id is safe.

Rendering

• Nine shader Fallback declarations were pointing at art that no longer exists, so those effects had no simplified version to fall back to at all. The worst was a misspelled name carried by all three blood shaders, one of which backs 72 materials and the blood hit effects. All nine retargeted; the project now has 481 fallback declarations across 1,039 shaders and none unresolved.
• The Ring of Fire ground decal declared an emission output and never wrote it, and its deferred pass does not blend, so the lighting buffer took whatever was left in the register. Restored the write to match the omni version of the same effect.
• The decal eraser used in Etceter had a subshader holding a grab pass and nothing else, which Unity 6 rejects outright, so the shader was unsupported and the eraser silently stopped erasing. Added a no-op pass so the subshader is valid again.
• New Shader Message Audit tool and EditMode test read the compiler messages Unity stores on each shader asset. The old method was grepping the build log, which under-reports by about 85 percent because the build machines keep a warm shader cache: three same-commit builds compiled 50, 105 and 117 shaders and reported 6 or 7 warnings, while the last cold-cache builds compiled 938 and 1,197 and reported 47 and 66. Measured before and after: 0 errors both ways, 101 distinct warnings down to 91.

Tools

• Added a checker that compares every one of the 239 shared source files against its counterpart and reports the ones that no longer match, so this drift gets caught the next time rather than years later. Divergences that cannot be fixed by picking a side are listed separately, each with a written reason.
• The icon generator now measures the background hue over the pixels the original art paints as background, names that colour in the prompt for every icon, and draws the icon again if it still comes back wrong rather than trying to colour-correct it. Two attempts at measuring it were wrong first: averaging hue gets dragged off by the dark outlines in the art, and excluding gold by brightness as well as hue keeps the gold shading, which is plentiful enough to win.
• Repairing the existing art without redrawing it was tried and thrown away. Rotating the background hue back also rotates the picture on top of it, which turns a yellow firework purple and a gold shield green. An icon whose background was painted over cannot be corrected, only drawn again.

Networking

• A single failed send on an internal link between servers used to tear the whole link down, and that teardown disconnected every player connected to that server. The failure is now contained: the link survives it, and only the one event that could not be sent is dropped. Two related faults went out with it, a duplicate registration that could wipe state which had just been rebuilt, and a setup failure that was ignored instead of logged.
• Checked whether friends' online status really was failing to carry between the two game instances. Over seven days every one of 483 login and logout events was applied on both instances, with timestamps matching to the second. Replication is healthy. The original report was a misreading caused by a log line that did not exist at the time, which has since been added.

Build health

• The client and server copies of the crafting recipe cache had drifted apart: the client copy carried a stray build-warning line that fired once per ingredient per recipe. Removed it, so the two copies, and the whole directory pair the sync script maps, are identical again. Added a test that fails if they drift a second time.

User Interface

• The backpack has an Options row again, holding Show Locked Items, Show Quest Items, Show Equipped Tools and Show Objects in Containers. The first three survived the interface rebuild as settings the item list still obeyed, but the control that changed them did not come across, so they were hiding items with no way to switch them back on. The row starts folded and remembers whether you left it open, per window. Picking the Locked or Quest category still shows those items even when their box is unticked.

Nameplates

• The check that watches whether world-space names and health bars are correctly hidden behind walls asked Unity "is my capture still attached to the camera?" by comparing object references. Unity hands back a fresh wrapper object every time you ask, so that comparison never matched and the check could never pass. It reported the capture dead in every scene, 149 times in one day, while the same message listed every other part of it as healthy. Worse, the deeper check that reads back actual pixels skips whenever the capture reports dead, so it had never run once since it was written. Attachment is now matched by name, and a capture that really does get detached is put back before anything is reported.

Combat UI

• Casting with too little focus could jam the rune bar. The failed attempt tried to flash a focus bar that no longer exists under the new interface, and the resulting error escaped into the rune bar state machine, which reset itself and dropped the click. Three of those in a fight and it stopped recovering. 14 errors a day.
• A tester reported that the combo indicators on the combat bar could not be seen: the orange around a locked combo glyph was barely visible and the green around an unlocked one was not much better. No colour would have fixed it. The highlight was drawn by tinting the slot frame, tinting multiplies, and that frame art is near-black line work whose brightest pixel is RGB(129,129,130), so a full-strength green arrived as roughly RGB(0,40,0). The highlight is now a solid outline of its own in the gap between slots, drawn at the colour it is actually set to. It leaves the bottom edge open so the slot number stays readable, and a locked glyph sitting at rest looks exactly as it did before. The two dimmer highlights nobody had reported, the glyph you are holding and one running on extended time, came back with it.

Tooltips

• One combat statistic had neither number formatting nor a display name, so every rune tooltip refresh logged an error and the tooltip fell back to the internal code word. It now reads Attack Accuracy and formats as flat points. 70 errors a day, all from hovering runes.

Maps

• The fog-of-war fetch went out before the client had finished joining a scene, so it arrived at the lobby instead of the game and was refused. The retry then sent it again. 56 log lines a day for a request that had nowhere to land. It now waits for the scene.

Inventory

• Closing a container window while its own close was already running reported itself as a window that could not close at all. The game was force-unlatching it afterwards to keep the button alive, and writing a warning each time. 171 of those a day, the single largest warning source in the client log. The re-entrant close now says what it actually is.

Housing

• A lot listed for sale is frozen against renaming the house and against adding decorations, which is intended. Two of the three paths logged that refusal as an error, and one told the player "There was an error while updating the lot." It now says the lot is listed for sale.
• A player-owned town can hold more than one broadcasting Automated Phonograph now, scaled by town size: one for a Holdfast or Hamlet, two for a Village or Crossroads Village, three for a Town or City, four for a Metropolis and up. A house lot still gets one.
• A placed light can now be set to burn only at night. Right-click the decoration, open Light Settings, and tick "Only at night": the lamp lights itself at dusk and goes out at dawn, so a town owner no longer has to pick between streetlamps that burn at noon and a town that stays dark. It works on anything that gives off light, including the many decorative lamps that have no on/off switch of their own.
• Using a night-only lamp by hand still works: it does what you told it until the next dusk or dawn, then goes back to following the clock. The schedule is worked out on each player's own machine from the shared world clock, so everyone sees the same lamps lit at the same moment and nothing is sent between them when dusk falls.
• A player-owned town can now be turned to face a different direction. The Town Console has an Orientation tab with a slider and eight compass points, and the sky turns while the governor drags it, so sunrise can be put where the town was actually laid out. Saving sets it for everyone standing in the town, and Reset puts it back to the way the map was built. Requested by John Markus.
• Turning a town moves everything that tells you which way you are facing, not just the sun: the moon and stars, the sky, the compass, the map north arrow, and the wind. The wind takes the same turn as the sky, so a wind that came off the northern sea still comes from the north afterwards, and it swings round rather than snapping. Towns that never set a facing are untouched, along with every other scene in the game.
• Changing a town lighting direction used to mean recreating the map, which destroys walls and lot placements and means evicting tenants, so nobody did it. The facing is stored per town as an offset from the map it was built on, so no rebuild happens and nothing on the lots is disturbed. There is also a /setpotorientation command that takes degrees, a compass point, or reset.
• Images: the same town at the same hour, before and after the governor turned it a quarter turn. Nothing on the ground moved.
• A player dungeon that had spent all of its dungeon points refused to accept anything at all: a totem, a chair, a torch, a chest. Only rooms, halls and stairs cost dungeon points, and only those are refused now. Reported by nyarkie, who hit it after filling a dungeon with the generator and then trying to place a totem.
• The Random Dungeon Generator now seats totems as well as raising rooms. Drop totems in the chest with your pieces and each one goes into a slot that takes its creature family, with the shared slots kept for the totem that has nowhere else to go. Totems cost no dungeon points, so a build that used the last one still seats them. Requested by nyarkie.
• A freshly placed dungeon totem left the empty socket art showing through it until the next time the scene loaded. The code looked for the socket one level above the totem, and placement parents a totem to its room instead, so it never found it.

Logging

• A puzzle switch driven on a timer wrote the same performance notice on every tick, describing how the scene is authored. 144 identical lines a day from two switches in one scene. Latched to once per switch, which keeps the notice and drops the repeat.

Social

• The online friend count reads null on the live shard even though the interface asset has it wired, so it now falls back to finding the label itself. Filed the underlying question separately, since a reference that is correct in the project and empty in the running build points somewhere else.

Tests

• Three new EditMode suites came out of this. One fails against the old reference-comparison check and pins the Unity behaviour that made it wrong. One ratchets the list of character statistics missing formatting or a display name, so the set can only shrink. One holds the line between the display question and the sheet question in skill code.

Rendering

• Re-serialized the dungeon camera rig out of a nine-year-old file format, which also dropped a block of dead settings it had been carrying. Checked every scene reference still resolves before committing.

Crafting

• A container placed on your lot can be marked for crafting again, so a station on the same lot can draw materials from it when Use lot storage is on. The checkbox went missing in the inventory window rebuild, and because crafting only ever pulls from containers you have marked, Use lot storage was finding nothing at all. Containers marked before the rebuild kept their mark and still worked, which is why this looked fine for some players and broken for others. Reported by .rinaldi.
• Brewing casks now only mature while they are placed in the world as decoration. A sealed cask kept its progress in a chest, a bank or a backpack but stopped aging, so the maturing time on a whiskey cask means something again. Casks already brewing before the change keep aging the old way wherever they sit. The tooltip on a paused cask says maturing is paused, shows the time still needed, and says to place it to continue.

Gameplay

• Planting and watering now report what they used. Seeds, water and fertiliser come out of a backpack stack, and the chat log only mentioned them on the pass that emptied the stack, so a full stack of water could drain with nothing said about it. Every pass reports its own consumption now.

Audio

• Buffs that are already running no longer replay their cast sound. Every zone change, in-scene teleport and login rebuilt each running buff and fired its cast sound and cast burst again as if it had just been cast, so a player with several buffs up heard all of them at once on every zone line. The lasting glow and its looping aura sound still play. Only the one-shot cast audio and the cast burst are held back.
• Broadcasting phonographs went from replacing a whole scene's music to covering the ground around them, about fifty metres. Walk into range and its cylinders take over, walk out and the town's own music returns, walk between two and the music crosses over. Before this only one could ever be heard: a second one anywhere in the town simply overwrote the first, which is what a town with a phonograph on the town plot and another on a resident's lot has been doing all along.

Content

• The Blessing of Atos scales with how many players are in Castle Atos, across six tiers from Weak to Maximum Strength, but the shrine looked identical at every one of them. Five crystals now sit in the shrine pool and light one at a time as the tier climbs: none lit at Weak, all five at Maximum Strength. The buff tooltip is unchanged and still gives the exact answer.
• The crystal count is read from the same component that picks the blessing itself, so the pool cannot disagree with the buff a player actually receives. Wiring it up turned up two defects, both fixed and pinned by tests: a marker that was already dark was never written at all, so it kept the glow its material authored and all five looked lit at every tier; and the markers' lights were authored inactive, which meant the component that owns them never initialised and the first switch-on threw.
• The player-count bands ran 21-30 and 30-200, so at exactly 30 players two blessing strengths applied at once and whichever landed last won. The top band starts at 31 now. A test asserts every count from 1 to 200 matches exactly one band.
• 

Images

• The five summoned elemental glyphs, original art above and the redrawn Modern art below.
• 

Guilds

• Whether your guild name shows on your nameplate is now remembered per character instead of per computer. Hiding it used to hide it for every character you logged in with on that machine, and the setting did not travel to another computer.

World

• Sieges no longer arrive in one wave. Every town used to read the same hour off the same clock, so the towns holding that hour's devotional went under siege in the same instant and cleared in the same instant, which is how half the map ended up besieged at once. Each town now gets its own hour in the twelve hour cycle, redrawn daily.
• Added a ceiling on how many player-owned towns can be besieged at the same time: eight across the map, three in any one region, both adjustable. Nothing about a siege is stored anywhere, so the choice of which towns make the cut is computed the same way on every client from the shared clock. The eleven NPC town sieges are exempt and run as before.
• Added a tweak that restores the old rule where only low-level players may skip an NPC town's siege. It ships off, so nothing changes until it is turned on. Player-owned towns stay skippable either way.
• The siege window also spells out what Enter and Bypass do, so a player who has just met their first siege is not guessing.
• Dungeon waygates would not travel between two dungeons built on the same entrance type. Both share a scene name, and the check that stops you reloading the scene you are already in read that name as "you are already there" and refused the trip, after the screen had already faded. It now tells two dungeons apart by the lot each hangs off.
• Coming out of a dungeon you reached by waygate now puts you at that dungeon's own lot, rather than at the front gate of a town you may never have visited. Travelling by waygate also carries the destination town's map position, so the world map no longer shows you back where you started.
• A dungeon waygate used to look exactly like a dungeon entrance, since it was built from the same rift. In a dungeon with both, nothing told you which portal moved you inside the dungeon and which took you out of it. Waygates now burn green.
• The Dungeon Waygate was also showing a wooden signpost in your bag, borrowed from the town teleporter it was built from. It has its own icon now, rendered from the portal itself.

Docs

• The Bard school reference was rewritten. It had been describing a tree that no longer exists, and two of its sections were flatly wrong: the instrument requirement is no longer inert and songs are no longer free to cast.

World

• Towns can build a Performance Stage now. It is a Carpentry recipe, placeable on player town plots, and a bard who performs from one holds a crowd half again as well as one busking in the street. Reuses the existing stage model rather than new art, so the plain craftable Stage everyone already owns is untouched.

The New Britannia Herald

Pets stop bleeding, house lots sell again, and four fixes come back out

14 minTranscriptPodcast

Headlines

• The lot sale feature works end to end after the first day of tester reports: purchases complete, abandoned purchases free the listing after 5 minutes, and listed lots show a floating For Sale price label.
• Decoration layouts applied to a lot without the right house skip the items that would float in mid-air and report the count.
• Bug pass. Closed 44 reported bugs from the tracker.
• Pets stopped losing health while standing still: the self-heal removal from two days ago collided with pet data that had been doing the same job all along, and a wounded pet was draining a tenth of its health every five seconds.
• Four fixes from yesterday's unattended bug run were wrong and have been taken back out, after alliumoop read the changelog and called them: the Brittany castle secret room, the player dungeon spider drops, the Serpent's Spine pipe ladder, and the second map marker at Lamech's Bazaar.

UI

• Fixed the region map so the yellow you-are-here arrow always draws on top of the markers around it. A travel destination or active task marker used to cover the arrow when the player stood on the same spot, which hid their heading exactly where they most needed it.
• Ring tooltips now compare against both worn rings. Hovering a ring in your bags shows it beside the ring on each hand, where before only one ring slot was read and a ring worn on the right hand never appeared in the comparison.
• Fixed the interact key emptying a container stored in the bank. Opening a banked bag and pressing interact moved everything inside it to the backpack; bank storage is now left alone the same way your own bags and lot storage already were, and looting corpses and world chests is unchanged.
• The emote bar now stays dimmed for as long as an activity blocks emotes. A fishing cast runs about thirty seconds and emotes never worked during one, but the bar only dimmed for the moment after the bait went in and then looked usable again for the rest of the cast. The same rule now covers crafting, conversations and riding.
• Skill tooltips for healing and other friendly-target spells now show a Range line with a number. Any spell that could be cast on yourself as well as on someone else was dropping that line, so Healing Touch and Healing Ray listed no range while Death Touch and Death Ray listed theirs.
• Fixed overworld places that drew their name but no map or compass icon after you had discovered them. It happened where the entrance also carried quest data, so the icon only showed while that quest was active. Longfall Woods was the reported case.
• Cleansing Rain now lists the size of the area it covers. The tooltip showed the heal and the damage to undead but never how far either reached, because the radius was only printed for spells that also have a casting distance. Chaos Bomb and Dazzling Rays gained the same missing line.
• Fixed your own nameplate disappearing for the rest of the session after you died, logged back in while still dead, and then resurrected. Your name and bars now come back with you, at the usual height over your head.
• Fixed the /stats chat command reporting crafting and gathering skill levels as 0. Those lines were showing only the bonus from gear and effects; they now show the trained level plus the bonus, matching the skills window and the crafting stations.
• Mounts in the Crown Shop now open the 3D model preview when their item square is clicked, so a mount can be turned and zoomed before it is bought. The preview also works for a mount already in your bags. Previously the click did nothing for mounts while other items previewed normally.
• Fixed the player marker on the Valhold town map. The map was calibrated with its north to south spacing about a third wider than its east to west spacing, so the marker drifted further from the player the further they walked from the middle of town, by up to 45 metres at the town wall. The location icons on that map read from the same calibration and moved with it.
• Fixed the item preview window showing the avatar's skin and underwear through the Men's Swimsuit. The preview now switches off the body parts a garment covers, the same way the character does when the garment is worn, so a full body outfit previews the way it looks in the world.
• An item picked up from the world arrives worth no gold and no merchant will buy it, but its description still read that it could be sold. The tooltip now states that the item cannot be sold to merchants, on the line under No Value, and the description text is unchanged for copies bought or crafted.
• Fixed a gustball name label riding the ball as it rolled: the label was pinned to a point on the ball, so it swung in a circle and dropped below the ground. It now stays above the ball while the ball moves.
• Walking up to a crafting station now closes the NPC conversation window. Players who had turned off conversation close-ups were left with the chat window sitting on top of the crafting table.
• Concussive Canticle takes about 15 seconds to charge, but the casting bar read "Erupts with a powerful note" the whole time. It now reads "Crescendos to a powerful note" while the song builds, in all ten languages.
• Add-on start functions now run after your character finishes loading in. They used to run during the loading screen, when the game had no character yet, so an add-on that read a stat at start-up got the invalid-stat value instead of a number and came up blank or showing -999.
• Sorting by Price in the merchant window now orders the rows by the numbers in the Price column. Both lists on the sell side were ordering by the item's plain value across its whole stack instead, so a big stack of cheap goods sat above a single item the merchant was paying more for, and a partial stack in the Exchange sorted by the stack it came from.
• Fixed a duplicate map marker at Lamech's Bazaar on the Mistrendur overworld: the town label and the caravan wagon beside it were both drawing a marker for the same place, and the second one listed quest tasks from another region on hover. One place now gets one marker.
• Fixed the mouse pointer reappearing partway through a right-click camera turn. A window opening or closing while you were looking around handed the pointer back mid-gesture, jumped the view, and left the camera stuck once the pointer reached the edge of the screen. The turn now holds until you release the button.
• Lamech's Bazaar shows both of its overworld markers again. The town label and the caravan wagon beside it are two different ways in, one straight to the normal tier and one that lets you pick the tier, so removing the second one yesterday took away a travel option. The wagon's hover text was the actual bug: it read its task list from a stale destination and listed quests from Novia. It now reads Lamech's Bazaar.
• The runic letters on the Puzzle Box mini-game now sit centred in their brass panels; they used to draw a few pixels low.
• Soothing Rain and Douse tooltips now spell out the actual percent chance to remove Fire damage over time, next to the description line that promises it.
• The Open a Window menu no longer shows a Find Items row to regular players on developer builds; the row now only appears for GM/Dev accounts.
• The Crown Shop store-info block on testing clients now hides the vault line when the current round is empty, so the label matches what is on the shelf.
• The "Require Control Key to Drag Glyph On The Combat Bar" option now takes effect. With it checked, a drag off a combat bar slot only picks the glyph up while Control is held; casting, discarding and combining still work with no modifier.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-08-09 is up: Sunday was spent putting right what a new image pipeline had taken away, including a lost exposure setting that had made every scene too dark and a night vision spell that had turned the world into an old green monitor. Overhead names finally stopped drawing through stone, after four attempts and one build where they vanished altogether. Pets stopped healing themselves, decorations stopped resting inside each other, and the Distract skill learned to distract something other than your own pet. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Client

• Fixed the Pirate Tricorn Hat of the Cap'n on female avatars: the braided trim was locked to a fixed gold and ignored the secondary dye, so it now takes the dye colour the same way it already did on male avatars.
• Fixed a rain sound that played under a dry sky in The Obsidian Panopticon, Solace Bridge Outskirts, and Highvale Outskirts. Those scenes use a weather set with no falling rain, and the rain loop had been left on the two rain weather types; storms there still show rain and sound like it.
• Fixed two decorations that logged repeated errors every time a lot holding them loaded. The ice hot tub had two overlapping level-of-detail setups covering the same parts of the model, so its distance fading was undefined; it now has one, and the tub, water and steam fade together at long range. The training orb pet was looking for a mount point its model does not have, so its sounds sat at the placement spot instead of following the orb.
• An NPC conversation window left open after you walked away used to swallow every keyword, goodbye included, with nothing said about it. The first keyword sent from out of earshot now ends the conversation and puts a line in the chat log naming the NPC.
• Fishing now plays your own reel in. The bobber travels back across the water to the rod and the line shortens as it comes, where before it jumped to the rod in a single frame for the player who cast it. Other players watching already saw the full travel and still do.
• Fixed conversations dying after an emote for players who turn off conversation close-ups. Playing an emote while an NPC window was open put the character into a state the conversation did not accept, so every keyword and typed line after it went unanswered, goodbye included, and a looping emote held that state until the window was closed. Keywords and typed lines now reach the NPC while an emote plays, and talking no longer cuts the emote short.
• Weapon effects such as poison drips now turn off while a weapon is put away and come back when it is drawn. Applying a poison to a sheathed weapon used to start the drip on a weapon nobody could see.
• Hide Helmet now hides masks that cover the face. Both Grim Reaper Masks stayed on the character with the option turned on, along with the wolf, zombie, stag, unicorn, horse, headless and Day of the Dead masks; hiding one of those puts the character's own eyes back.
• Fixed a freeze where reading several inventory items in quick succession left the character stuck in an arms-out pose that ignored movement until a spell was cast.
• Readying an instrument now stops whatever you are harvesting. Starting a song while mining, chopping, foraging or field dressing used to leave the harvest running underneath the music, bar and payout included.
• Fixed the glow over a resurrection ankh drawing a faint square patch around itself in foggy areas. Ghosts saw it at every ankh in a misty zone once they backed off far enough for the fog to reach the effect. The glow now fades into the fog the same way the rest of the effect does.
• Ground decorations now clear the grass under their whole shape instead of around the point they rotate about. The roadway paver turnaround left a band of grass standing across both of its arms and cleared a matching strip of bare ground in front of itself; the long curves were off in the same way.
• Fixed rain falling inside the Stone 2-Story Keep with Corner Turret village home. The keep has an open stairway up to its roof, and rain landing on those steps used to fall straight through them into the rooms below. Rain now stops on the steps, and the floors underneath stay dry.
• Cone of Cold now draws its whole ground burst. The frost effect was being cut off part way through, so the ice crystals on the ground turned up only some of the time and the flare at the end never appeared at all.
• Fixed the upper right window on the Blue Tile Roof 2-story row house. It was a solid panel that could not be seen through from the street or from inside, whether the shutter was open or closed, and it now uses the same glass as the other four windows on the house.
• Fixed the Starrbot emote playing the Party Blow Horn animation when used while sitting down. Seated Starrbot now plays the Starrbot dance and keeps going until you cancel it or stand up.
• Fixed the two elixir skills so a character who has learned only one of them can still set it to training. Clicking the training button on a lone elixir skill used to stop responding once it reached untrain, and the skill stayed there until the other elixir skill was unlocked.
• Fixed the Buoy Rope decoration refusing to be placed at its largest size. While an item is held for placement the game floats it slightly above the surface under it, and that gap was the same at every size, so art that dips below its own base pushed through the floor once the item was scaled up. The gap now grows with the size of the item. Where a decoration comes to rest is unchanged.
• Fixed the Gustball appearing to jump straight to the goal after a hard hit. Other players now see the ball travel the length of the field instead of vanishing and reappearing.
• Fixed Vertas Pass placing you at the south exit when you entered from the north side of the overworld for the first time. Zones with more than one overworld entrance now put you at the entrance you walked into, and the entrance list still opens once you have found a second way in.
• Unlearning a skill now stops at the highest level required by the skills you actually learned under it. Learning one branch used to hold the parent skill at the level demanded by branches you never trained, so a character who knew only Discharge could not take Gust below 20. The unlearn scrolls, the slow unlearning drain, and the minimum level shown in the tooltip all follow the new rule.
• Fixed dyed cloaks losing their colour when a Buckled Gambeson or Buckled Cross Hatched Gambeson chest piece was equipped. The male version of those two chest pieces carries a back panel that the game counted as part of the cloak, so recolouring the chest repainted the cloak with it. Cloak dye and chest dye are now kept separate in both directions.
• Fixed a crafting table bonus that was applied only some of the time. A table adds its quality to your crafting skill while its window is open, but that was reaching your odds only when something else refreshed your character at the same moment, so the same recipe at the same table could quote different success and exceptional chances from one visit to the next, and the craft was rolled with whichever number you got. The bonus now goes in when the window opens and comes back out when it closes.
• Fixed the Frostgeist ice spell showing a flame and smoke effect on the player it hit. The lingering visual is now the same frost effect the player Ice Field spell uses. Damage, duration and slow were already correct and are unchanged.
• Props an emote or an interaction puts in the avatar hands no longer count as solid objects for the camera. The Guard emote raises a sword in front of the chest, and the camera used to settle between the sword and the face and block the view from the front.
• Wall decorations can now be hung on player-placed decorations that are themselves walls. A crafted wooden number was refused on a crafted Wooden Wall because the wall also holds items, and that reading covered its wall faces. Far east room dividers and stone ruin wall pieces had the same problem.
• Fixed a pickup block at the carry limit: gold, experience orbs and other items that weigh nothing can now be picked up when your pack is full, while items with weight are still refused.
• Fixed the crafted Twirling Baton offhand: with weapons drawn, characters held their left hand as if it were wrapped around a teacup, and the pose restarted every couple of seconds so the hand kept twitching. The left arm now uses the normal combat animation. The Rose Bouquet offhands shared the same pose and are fixed with it, on male and female characters alike.
• Fixed the game master teleport-to chat command so it finds a character named with a space, such as a first name and a surname typed the way the name appears in the world. Only the dotted spelling and the bare first name matched before.
• The Tame Creature glyph now says "You cannot tame that creature." when the target is not tameable, instead of telling you to select a target while a creature was selected and highlighted.
• Fixed the Kobold time machines fighting each other. A town holding two of them at different hours could swing its sky between midday and dawn every few seconds, and a machine that had been picked up kept driving the sky. A town now settles on one machine and stays with it, and a machine put away stops affecting the time of day.
• Fixed the Golden Ornate Greenhouse Four-Story (Row) home, where stepping into the greenhouse floor opening beside the ladder stopped the character partway down until they moved. The ladder carried two invisible click volumes several times bigger than the ones in every other row house, and the top of the lower one formed a ledge inside the opening. Both are now the size the other row houses use, so the drop reaches the floor below in one fall and the ladder still works from both floors.
• Fixed town NPCs following the player after a conversation ended. Closing the conversation window left the NPC treating the talk as still running, so it kept walking to wherever the player went, and a crowd built up after visiting several quest givers or merchants in a row.
• Fixed the light from a Moonlight or Sunlight enchantment showing up only on the wearer's own screen. Other players in the scene now see it too, appearing and disappearing as the enchanted piece is equipped and removed.
• Fixed rugs sinking into the entryway floor of the Stone Two-Story Keep with Corner Turret village home. The hall floor rises slightly from the door inward, but decorations were being set down on a flat line that ignored the rise, so square and small rectangular rugs placed past about the third tile ended up below the floor surface. Decorations in that hall now rest on the floor the way they do elsewhere in the house.
• Fixed bare arms rendering at the wrong skin shade on garments that draw the wearer's skin as part of the garment mesh, such as the Ringmaster's Vest. The skin colour now survives equipping, fading, highlights and dye.
• Four window sills in the Pristine Gothic Mansion w/ Widow's Walk refused decorations while the sills either side of them worked. Two on the second floor and two on the third, all on the front wall, take items again.
• Fixed the camera decoration in player dungeons. Clicking one in an attached room said the camera was out of reach and did nothing; it now places you in front of the camera and takes the photo, the same way a chair seats you.
• The Walk keybind now works on the Overworld map. It toggled walking in towns, scenes, while swimming and while mounted, but did nothing on the Overworld, where the /walk and /run commands were the only way to change pace.
• Fixed the Round Palapa decoration drawing on top of window glass. Its roof and posts were being rendered in the see-through pass, so looking out of a house window at a palapa in the yard showed the palapa painted over the glass. It now draws as solid geometry and layers behind glass correctly.
• Fixed virtue symbols on banners turning solid black when the sun or a light source sat behind the banner. Symbols painted onto a surface were discarding the ambient light of the scene, so they had nothing left to show once no light reached them directly. This covers other painted-on details as well, such as blood, scorch marks and floor markings.
• Fixed the Banker and Town Crier at player-owned town docks sometimes loading as ordinary townsfolk named Merchant and Villager, with no bank window and nothing to say. The client now re-checks the town spawn points before giving up on a match.
• Fixed the Multicolor Holiday Lights: the bulbs that should have been red were rendering white, so the strand read as white, green and blue in the Crown Shop preview and in daylight. All three lengths now show red, green and blue.
• Fixed the Hay Cart decoration casting hard rectangular shadows across its own hay pile. The loose tufts around the outside of the pile are flat cards, and each one was dropping a full solid rectangle into the shadow pass under direct light, which striped the pile with dark bands and left the fringe looking dirty. Those tufts no longer cast shadows. The hay body, deck and wheels still do, so the cart keeps a correct shadow on the ground.
• Male avatars now play a sound when they use the sneeze emote, along with the occasional fart that can follow it. The male avatar's sound list carried no entry for either one, so the animation played with nothing heard, while female avatars played both.
• Fixed a case where a dead player stayed a ghost for good: if the client reloaded the scene while you were still in the death walk, the countdown never ran out again and the only way back was to reach an Ankh. The remaining walk time now carries through the reload and the automatic return to life happens on schedule.
• Falling far enough to lose health while riding a mount now throws you out of the saddle. Riders used to stay mounted through any drop while still taking the fall damage. A landing your Safe Fall training absorbs to no damage leaves you seated.
• Blank Sword of Midras books carried an oversized collision box copied from a different book prop, so two of them placed side by side stopped short of touching and left a gap. The collision box now matches the book model, and the books sit flush.
• Fixed a red edge that ran along the belt of the Yule elf jacket and grew more noticeable the further away the character stood. The jacket texture maps now build the smaller distance versions the rest of the wardrobe already uses, so the seam between the dyed jacket and the black belt blends instead of flickering.
• Pets no longer get pushed out of a placed Adobe Stables. The building was removing its own footprint from the walkable area of the lot, leaving nowhere inside for a pet to stand, so a pet put in there ended up outside and would not walk back in. The Upscale Stables had the same problem fixed earlier.
• Fixed decoration sound on lots ignoring the volume sliders. A bonfire you placed yourself kept playing its fire loop at a fixed level however you set Master or SFX, because sound from a placed decoration was never routed to the mixer the sliders control. Placed decorations now route through it, so the sliders quiet them and zero silences them.
• Fixed the entrance players land at when they leave a siege. A town owner picks which entrance arrivals use, and travelling in from the overworld map already honored it, but walking out of a siege put players at the entrance the town template ships with. Both routes now use the entrance the owner set.
• Fixed the teleporter ladder beside the large steam pipe in Serpent's Spine Mines, which was only drawn once you had backed away from it. That copy of the ladder had lost its close-range model, so the rungs vanished as you walked up to it and came back when you retreated.
• Decoration NPCs placed on a lot no longer walk off the property after their owner. One that had never been given an order came out set to follow, trailed the player away from the lot and kept snapping back until a relog; it now patrols its spot as placed, and Stay and Patrol orders still stick. Right clicking one of these NPCs from off the lot also opens a working menu instead of a dead one.
• Batch crafting now stops on its own when a tool wears out partway through and the only spare the player owns is locked in their backpack. Before, it counted the locked spare as available, failed partway through the refill, and left the ore and coal on the table red and unusable until the scene was reloaded.
• Fixed a dyed one handed weapon losing its colour when it was moved to the off hand. The same sword now shows the same dye in either hand, and the dye itself was never lost from the item.
• A creature whose death animation carried its body into a wall could not be targeted or looted afterwards, worst on the large mushrooms in Norgard Fens whose bodies travel several metres. The corpse now keeps a clickable area on the side of the wall it died on.
• Fixed the Russian text shown when an engraving kit is dropped on a tool that cannot be engraved, such as a Founder or Artisan tool. The line had lost its negation and read as though the kit could be used while no engraving happened, and it now says the kit cannot be used on that kind of item, matching English and the other seven languages.
• Shutters and doors that a lot owner locked now come back closed when you return to the area. The lock was saved, the closed position was not, so a row house with its shutters shut and locked showed them open again on the next visit.
• Dungeons no longer darken the screen corners more than the overworld does; the shared dungeon look now uses the same vignette strength as outdoor scenes.
• Crafting stations now hold the camera still for the whole crafting session. The hold was only applied when the station could swing the camera to one of its scripted angles, so a station crowded by decorations, or one you could not walk right up to, opened its window with the camera still free to spin.
• Summoning an air elemental no longer leaves a blue glow hanging on your character. Spell effects now switch their lights off at the moment they stop, instead of leaving the light burning for several seconds after the sparks have gone.
• The ladder at the Serpent's Spine Mines pipe teleporter is hidden at every distance now. It is scenery meant to stay out of sight so the teleporter reads as part of the pipe, and yesterday's fix drew it up close instead of stopping it drawing far away. The teleporter and its collision are unchanged.
• The stored buffs a tamed pet remembers across a stow or a zone line no longer lose the whole list to one bad record, and expired buffs are dropped from the pet bag rather than replayed on every summon.
• The NPC voice cache now rebuilds itself when the client updates, so a bark or line that had its audio re-recorded on the server picks up the new take on the next play instead of holding the old one forever (Redmine #3922, caught on the Drunken Ritualist in Tenebris Harbor).

Content

• Fixed the Ring of the Lava Angler, which listed a bait saving bonus that never applied. All five qualities of the ring, and the Master Lava Angler jewel, now reduce how often a cast uses up bait, matching the freshwater and fetid water angler rings.
• Fixed the chandelier in the Dungeon Stone Medium Two Entrance Room, which kept lighting the room after it was switched off. Its candles went out but its main light stayed on, so setting the start state to Off left the room bright. The light now switches with the rest of the fixture.
• Corrected the Market lot deed description in the crown store. It carried the shared property deed note saying the deed could claim lots in player-owned towns and player-run towns, but no player-run town has a market lot. The Market deed now names player-owned towns only, and the other lot deeds keep the original wording because their lot sizes do exist in player-run towns.
• Fixed the Elven Hut village home deed showing the Elven Peaked-Roof house in its tooltip thumbnail and item preview. The deed now previews its own house, and what each deed can place is unchanged.
• The hanging chandelier in the Ancient Stone Crypt dungeon room can now be clicked to snuff its candles and lit again, matching the chandeliers in the other Ancient Stone rooms and halls.
• Killing the broken Oracle machines in the kobold ruins no longer costs you courage or leaves the Oracle telling you that you needlessly killed its servants. The working watchers around town still report their own death as before.
• Destroying one of the Oracle''s watchers costs courage only to the player who destroyed it. The loss used to land on everyone standing nearby, so a watcher killed by a wandering creature or by another player took courage from bystanders too.
• The four Kobold Steel & Stone Fence decoration pieces now have their own inventory icons. All four carried the water lot post and rope fence picture before this, so the corner, the gate, the long piece and the medium piece were impossible to tell apart in a bag.
• Fixed the hidden room in Lord British's Castle: when a player performs the song that fades the wall, everyone standing in the area now sees it fade and can walk through, instead of only the performer. Applies to the castle in Brittany and the one in Mistrendur.
• Fixed the spider encounter room in player dungeons never dropping its dungeon room blueprints. Spiders leave no corpse, and the room paid out through corpse loot, so the reward had nowhere to land. The larger spiders and bosses in that room now leave a lootable body, and field dressing still works once you close it.
• Fixed the Ancient Undead Round Shield placing as a decoration with the wrong artwork. Its archetype had been copied from the Lord British Round Shield and still pointed at that shield's decoration model, so a placed Ancient Undead shield came down blue and yellow. It now has its own decoration model and matches the shield you see when it is equipped.
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• Fixed the player dungeon troll encounter room: a level 5 troll totem spawned an ordinary troll on the room's boss spawn point instead of the named boss, so the room filled up with rank-and-file trolls and no boss. Levels 2, 3, 4 and 6 were unaffected.
• Pet food is no longer eaten when no pet is out. Feeding with no pet summoned, or with the pet out of reach, now fails with a no valid target message and leaves the food in your pack. All five pet foods are covered.
• The overworld map preview for Artifice showed no Resource Types list. Its gathering nodes belong to a scene variant, and the tool that builds preview data skipped variant content, so the list baked out empty. Artifice now lists cotton, maple, copper, silver, garlic, and mandrake.
• Switched on the beacon lamp at the top of the Knight Founder Lighthouse (Village Water Home). It was turned off, so the tower only showed a faint sweep of light rays and lit nothing around it. The lamp now shines level and in a focused cone, the same aim the Shogun Lighthouse beacon got last week.
• The Large Tent decoration now reads Large Tent in game and shows a picture of the tent in inventory, replacing a run-together name and a bucket icon. A report that it could not be entered at its smallest size was measured against the doorway at every size the decoration can be set to, and the smallest setting still leaves a walk-in gap about twice the width of a character.
• Fixed snow falling through the roof of the Stables town building. The barn was missing the invisible weather shell that other roofed buildings carry, so rain stopped at the roof but snow did not.
• Fixed a strip of second-floor in the Grand City Chateau that refused decorations. The landing joining the tops of the two stair flights, about fifteen metres across, would not accept a rug, a table or anything else, while the floor either side of it took them normally. It now decorates like the rest of the storey, at the same height, and placement is still refused out over the open stairwell.
• The front door of the Obsidian Tower (Town) water home now starts closed when the scene loads. It had been set to start open, so it swung open on every load and the only options were to lock it or leave it open. The two upper doors in that tower were already correct and are unchanged.
• Decorations can no longer be set down on the drawers of the Gothic Chest of Drawers, the Dark Gothic Chest of Drawers and the Celestian Commode. An item placed on an open drawer was left hanging in the air once the drawer slid shut. The tops and bodies of all three still take decorations, and the drawers still open, close and hold what you store in them.
• Acara's Plate Gauntlets of Defiance were built from the material meant for the decoration version of the armour, so worn they came out darker than the rest of the set with a stronger blue glow. They now use the same worn material as the Acara chest piece, at every rarity and on both male and female characters.
• Corrected 39 typos and grammar errors in text players read: 20 across the six Through the Lunar Rift books, 5 in journal entries including the Blood River bridge tutorial, and 14 lines of NPC dialogue in Solace Bridge Outskirts and Ardoris. Wording only, with no change to what any line says. Reported by a player proofreading in offline mode.
• Turned the crying back on at the burning building in the Battle of Solace Bridge, so you can hear Charlotte again as you approach and it stops once you reach her.
• Fixed the Highvale Outskirts frostgeist investigation: Esmeralda sometimes answered the first question about a ghostly echo with a brush off and wrote nothing to the journal, which left the four echoes required but never written down and turned every later question about the final step into a dead end. She now always gives the full explanation and the journal entry.
• A leaning dead tree in Tanglemire had collision that leaned with the trunk, making a slope shallow enough to walk on, so running at the base carried you up the trunk and about 20 metres into the air. The collision now stands upright and the trunk stops you at the ground.
• Fixed the small rumpled rug: it now reads Small Rumpled Rectangle Rug (Ocher and Green) instead of a leftover working name, shows a picture of that rug instead of an unrelated red and silver one, and its surface matches the model, so a decoration placed on it rests on top of the folds rather than having them come up through it.
• Ice Field no longer plays an off-timing thump about four seconds after the spell lands. The initial ice crash, the ambient frost loop, and the visual effect are unchanged.
• Cone of Cold cast finally lands with a proper frost attack sound instead of the distant puff it used to make.
• The hidden room in Lord British's Castle in Brittany goes back to opening only for the player who performs the song. A change yesterday had it fade for everyone standing nearby, which let people into a room they were not meant to reach yet. The group-wide open stays on at the castle in Mistrendur, where it belongs.
• Player dungeon spider rooms go back to dropping nothing. A change yesterday gave the harder spiders and the boss a body you could loot and then skin, and had them award dungeon room blueprints. Blueprints are meant to come from adventuring out in the world, and no creature should be both lootable and skinnable, so that change is out.
• The moving storm clouds over the Shardfall zones no longer look like large blurry squares. The cloud sprite was being drawn from a texture capped at 256 pixels while the source art was 1024, so every cloud showed the same handful of blocky pixels; the cap is now back at 1024 and the sprite reads as a cloud shape instead of a tile.
• Pets no longer pick up the buffs from attunement shrines (the nine schools: Atenism, Chaos, Gaism, Lunaism, Necromancy, Sorcery, Tempestry, Thaumaturgy, Theurgy) or from Blessing of the Moon, Blessing of the Sun, and Blessing of the Tamer fountains. Those buffs do nothing for a pet and were just clutter on the pet status window.
• The Summon Daemons loincloth now renders from every angle instead of vanishing when you circle behind the pet (Redmine #3901).

Combat

• Fixed Dig In leaving a player unable to move or use skills after being knocked down. The stance had no way to end once the knockdown pulled the character out of combat, so it kept holding movement and the skill bar locked. Being knocked down now ends Dig In.
• The Oracle no longer says your protection is restored when something else still keeps you flagged for Open PvP. Asking her to restore protection still clears your own flag, but when a party set to Open PvP, a guild war, the area you are standing in, or the short cooldown after a status change is holding the flag, she now names it and says what has to end before you unflag.
• Fixed ground-aimed area spells affecting only what stood next to the caster. Moon Beams, Corpse Explosion and Reveal Hidden are placed as a circle up to 20 meters away, but every target more than a few meters from the caster was being dropped, so casting past melee range did nothing. All three now affect what is inside the circle.
• Skills that throw their damage as a projectile no longer apply their debuffs to a target who dodged the attack. Ice Fist, Flame Fist and Concussive Canticle used to apply their debuff as the skill was cast, before the bolt reached the target. Those effects now wait for the bolt to land, so a dodged cast applies nothing and a hit applies everything as the bolt strikes.
• Fixed a taming collar that could be left unusable after a pet died: if another creature was summoned into the pet slot before the owner cast Resurrect Creature, the skill reported success while the pet could no longer be summoned or resurrected. The collar is now released when the resurrect goes through, so the pet can be summoned again.
• Fixed the shield spell auras dropping out partway through the buff. Shield of Ice, Shield of Crystal and Shield of Air each carried a fixed 8 minute 20 second visual timer, so any caster whose shield lasted longer than that lost the glow while the buff was still running and still protecting them. The visual now ends when the buff ends.
• Fixed the Concussive Canticle tooltip so its damage figures rise as the glyph charges. The tooltip printed the single-charge damage the whole way up the charge bar while the song hit for the charged amount; the other bard songs that scale with charges read their count the same way and now move too.
• Fixed damage resistance masterworks on armor. The bonus is meant to scale with the crafter's skill and with which masterwork slot the effect landed in, but it was always applied at the lowest possible value, so an Armor Defense masterwork from a highly skilled crafter was worth about half what its tooltip promised and never improved. Flat Damage Resistance masterworks reached the character correctly but were understated on the armor tooltip.
• Gear carrying a taming chance bonus, such as jewelry made with an Imbued Jewel of the Stag, now counts toward your chance to tame a creature. The bonus was listed on the item and the character sheet but the taming roll ignored it, so the jewel did nothing and the percentage on the casting bar was the same with it and without it.
• Fixed Savage Sonata firing a stray arrow. The song is an area buff, but it was still wired to the archery projectile visual left over from the template it was built from, so every cast launched an arrow that looked like it came out of the bard and flew through them toward the target. The arrow is gone; the song ring visuals and what the buff does are unchanged.
• Fixed combos built by holding one glyph and pressing another: if the held glyph was a locked one, it cast itself when you let go, spending focus and a charge. The combo is built and nothing fires on release.
• Stunned creatures now play their stun animation. Cats were the reported case: the animation existed for every cat but the game never asked for it, so a stunned cat held its idle pose for the whole stun.
• NPCs no longer react to a player who is hidden by a stealth effect: they stop calling out lines at them and stop turning their heads to follow them, so a hidden player is not given away to everyone nearby.
• Knight's Grace now clears the Rend that Polar Destroyers apply. It had recognised only bleeds from blades, polearms, bludgeons and ranged weapons, so a bear's claw bleed kept ticking through it while a boar's came off. It now covers every kind of physical bleed.
• Fixed a pet's maximum health not rising when a Strength buff was cast on it. The buff reached the pet's Strength all along, but its health was still worked out from the unbuffed number, so Strength of Earth and Savage Sonata looked like they had missed the pet entirely.
• Rend and Puncture were meant to have no effect on undead, but the immunity only recognised undead with no other classification, so Ancient Undead took the full bleed while a plain skeleton was immune. The check now looks for the undead classification on its own, and both skills show Immune on Ancient Undead.
• A hit soaked up by Shield of Air now puts you in combat the same way a hit that reaches your health does, so consumables have to come from your deck for the rest of the fight instead of straight out of the inventory window.
• Dig In now plays its casting sound. The other shield skills had this sound wired up; Dig In had the audio clip and prefab on disk but nothing pointing to them, so it fired silently.
• Pet healing bonuses from gear or food now heal your pet out of combat as well as during combat. Before this the bonus only applied while fighting, so a wounded pet had no way to recover between fights. (#4110)
• Ice Fist now applies its slow, attack-speed reduction, and dexterity debuff to both enemies it hits, not just one.
• Chaotic Shield now plays a casting sound when cast; the rune had no cast SFX authored and was silent (#3899).
• Chaotic Step now plays a casting sound. The Chaos school step spell was silent; the charge and step visuals fired but no cast audio played.

Server

• Plants no longer lose their growth when a lot is given up. The growth a plant put on while it stood on the lot is now recorded as the lot's contents move to the bank, so a planter taken back out and placed again holds plants at the same stage they reached, and time spent in storage no longer counts against them.
• Adventure experience earned from a kill now reaches the client about a second later, so the skills window and the /xp command show the new total right away instead of holding the old one until the next character save. Producer experience was already immediate and is unchanged, as is the deliberate wait on undead that can still rise again.
• The Players Online window in the GM tools no longer shows a stale zone for a player who is between zones. If the roster catches a player mid-hop the zone column shows "-" until the next refresh instead of the zone they have just left.

Community

• Filed 6 items from the forum sweep: a balance concern about the incoming Shock Weapon enchant's stun risking crowd-control stacking, a contested ask for zone difficulty indicators to weigh more than character level, a longer Focus buff from Aetheric Feedback, less potion-sickness from lesser potions, dragon/wyvern spawners for player-built dungeons, and an untriaged crash-to-desktop bug on scene transitions.

Images

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• Valhold map marker, before and now
• Hay Cart shadows, before and after the fix.

Audio

• Frost Weapon now plays a cast sound. Its rune had no cast-audio prefab authored, so the spell went out silent even though its sibling Ignite Weapon has always had one.

Housing

• Fixed the broken lot purchase: buying a listed lot answered a server error and disconnected the buyer because the client and server disagreed on the purchase message after a code regeneration. Buying a lot works end to end again.
• An abandoned lot purchase no longer locks the listing. If a buyer disconnects mid-purchase the hold expires after 5 minutes, the owner can cancel again, and other buyers can buy. Stuck listings from before the fix free themselves on the next sweep.
• Listed lots now show a floating For Sale label with the asking price over the lot marker, and the sale texts say the lot deed is included. Change House hides while a lot is listed, and lot options that change what the buyer receives are frozen during a listing.

Decoration

• Applying a decoration layout to a lot without the house it was saved on no longer leaves items floating in mid-air. Items with nothing to rest on are skipped, the finish message says how many and why, and nothing is lost from inventory.

Pets

• Pets stopped losing health while standing still. Two days ago pets stopped healing themselves; a shared piece of pet data had already been subtracting that same self-heal for years, so with nothing left to subtract it it pushed the number below zero and a wounded pet drained about a tenth of its health every five seconds with nothing attacking it. The rate now lives in one place. A pet holds its health exactly where it is until you heal it.
• Skeletons and liches got their old lifespan back. The same data carried the fix for undead summons, which are meant to decay while they are out, so they had been fading roughly three times faster than intended. Decay speed is back where it was, and the summons that are not undead still do not lose health at all.