Chris “Atos” Spears · Work Log

Bard

• Bard glyphs (Group Dance, Dance, Flourish and the songs) can be charged from a locked combat deck slot while Performance Stance is up. The stance keeps the weapon sheathed to hold the instrument, and charging had required a drawn weapon, so these glyphs only ever went off as a single cast (#10339).

Leaderboards

• The Farmers board now lists the top players on every column you can rank by. It used to keep only accounts that had harvested a crop, so gatherers with thousands of resource nodes and no crops never appeared, even ranked by Nodes Gathered. Experience also keeps characters with Producer XP and no Adventurer XP.
• Fewer leaderboard rows read "-". A player with tracking on used to be named only after killing a monster in the last two weeks; now fishing, gathering, crafting or any other logged play counts, and turning tracking off takes effect at the next hourly refresh.
• The Farmers board fix is live on chaos. The in-game window shows it within the hour.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-03 is up: Saturday's biggest fix came in as nineteen separate reports of giant rotating rectangles hanging over the world, and all of them were a single health bar that had forgotten how far away it was. The team also got creatures in a Cabalist's army to fight back, taught the launcher to finish a download Windows refused, replaced the dev work log with patch notes written for players, and made the volume sliders mean something below the top third. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Crafting

• The crafting window now points at the recipe the items on the table belong to (#10338). Putting boots and an Eternal Pattern on a forge moves Reshape Heavy Armor Boots to the top of the recipe list, and the summary names it as the closest recipe until the coal is added. Before, the table said No Recipe Found and the reshape could only be found by searching for it.
• Choosing a Process fish recipe at a Butchering Station now puts the fish size you hold the most of on the table. With one Mackerel and six Amberjack Mackerel it used to stage the single Mackerel, so the batch stopped at 1 and the Max button stayed greyed out (158c88909d, #10746, reported by Patosh).
• At a crafting station, an item dragged out of a bag and dropped on the windows Your Inventory side now goes back into that bag. It used to land loose at the top of the backpack, where it looked like it had vanished.
• The Sausage and Eggs dish now shows in the deck builder's consumables list. The dish's asset-group entry had been left out when it was added. (b33e774ff4)
• The crafting window's Your Inventory pane has a Filter box under its category dropdown. It reads the same search words as the backpack: a plain word narrows the list by name, and type:reagent, qty>=50 and the rest narrow it by what an item is. Requested by Chiasma.
• Confirmed the recipe book search already finds a word anywhere in a recipe name, so typing stage lists Performance Stage alongside Stage and Stage Stairs, and added a test that keeps it that way (7ee466c005, #10835).
• Five storybooks can now be salvaged for Wood Pulp at a Tailoring Station like the rest of their shelf: A Boiled Seed Cannot Sprout, Everyone Needs Courage and Don't Give Up Your Goodness from container loot, and Share the Reward and St. Godric and the Stag from bookstores. They had been marked as printing-only with nothing to return. A new test checks every book the container loot table can drop (0ece8a1ce1, #10840).
• Weapons enchanted with a Garnet, Amethyst, Diamond or Citrine can now roll a spell power bonus, as Fire, Death, Water, Earth and Chaos gems already could: Solar Flare, Shooting Star, Banish Undead and Discharge Power respectively, with a double-strength Heavyweight version on two-handers. The existing procs stay in the pool. Asked in game by BeDbMa.
• A brew can now go into an empty brewing cask that stays placed on your lot. At an alchemy station on the same lot, leave the cask off the table and the window offers the nearest empty placed cask, or a list to pick from when there are several; the cask starts maturing where it stands. Requested by a player through the Oracle (#10824, a482787a43).
• Recipe cards in the Recipe Book and at crafting stations now show how many items one craft makes, such as "x5" after Flour, and the hover reads "Makes 5 Flour". 599 recipes make more than one; single-item recipes are unchanged. Requested by Bonulino. (b9723d017e)
• Added Holy Water, an Alchemy 30 potion thrown at your current target. It lowers the target's Life resistance by 10 for a minute, and an undead creature that dies while still marked by it does not rise again. One craft makes three from 1 2 Year Whiskey, 10 Garlic, 3 Mandrake Root and 3 Empty Glass Flasks; the recipe is sold with the other alchemy potion recipes. (766cbaa5d0)
• The four alchemy bomb recipes were listed outside the Alchemy Consumables recipe-book category file, which made that file unreadable. They now sit in the list with the other potions. (766cbaa5d0)

Crown Store

• The Coral, Pirate's Booty and Seaweed fish tank accessories opened an empty preview window in the Crown Shop. Their preview now shows the accessory model sized for the large rectangular tank, and the doll cabinet wallboards got the same fix (#10626, 274a567f65).
• Item names on Crown Shop cards cut off after about 19 letters, so most ended in "...". The cards are wider and the name now wraps onto two lines, which fits about 35 letters; a name longer than that still ends in "..." and shows in full when you hover over it. The window's narrowest size grew slightly so it still shows two columns of items (#10294, 737c603a77).

Vendor Search

• The vendor index setup script now adds the price-each-with-pennies field to the live search index, which the Raw Cotton and Nightshade Vendor Listings fix (fbf4dc3953) needs before its server half can deploy (bfc6900264, #10588).
• Deployed the server half of the Raw Cotton and Nightshade fix (#10588): the live vendor search index now carries the price each for stacks priced with pennies. The blue "each" price in Vendor Listings in Zone shows once the next chaos client build is out.

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Music

• Sheet music tooltips now name the songs writer: Composed by for a players song, on the original and on every copy. A copy of a song that ships with the game reads Transcribed by and the copiers name, where it used to be filed as the copiers own song. Requested via the in-game Oracle. (492bcfc91b)

Website

• The account page's Game Client / Steam tab and the Free Game Access page on shroudoftheavatar.com now download the new launcher for Windows, macOS and Linux. Both still offered the old installers, which only reach the old servers (#10605).

Combat

• The Watcher on the Highvale Outskirts trail can be attacked again. Its spawner had it set up as a town guard, so every spell and weapon swing aimed at it printed "You hit nothing!". It now behaves like every other Watcher: it breaks, and breaking it reduces the Courage of the one who broke it. (758a1fba22, #10340)
• A party member's buff and debuff icons now clear from their party row when the timer reaches 0. Some used to stay at 0 seconds, and a long buff could sit there for as long again as it had lasted. Your own buff bar and the target frame get the same fix. (23033c6f32)

Skills

• Group Dance moved to its proper place in the Bard tree. It now sits under Dance and unlocks at Dance 20, where before it hung under Flourish and asked for Flourish 20.
• Skill tooltips now show how much more experience a skill needs for its next level and what lowering it by one level returns to the pool. The Instant Unlearn level prompt shows the experience returned for the picked level as the slider moves. Requested by Steve Sosaria. (57ab75ae0b)
• When a mastery skill refuses to train because its school is not one of your specializations, the chat now adds a line naming the schools you do specialize in, or says you have none. Reported through the Oracle (#10788).

Skills

• Magic Warding in the Tactics tree now has the grey frame every innate skill uses. It had borrowed the old Block icon, whose blue frame marks a buff you can slot. The shield picture is unchanged, in both the Classic and Modern icon sets, and a new test checks that no innate wears a coloured frame (#10618, e7a6da81b5).
• Animal Lore and Pet Range now gain four times as much experience per use. With a large adventurer pool, level 26 now takes 2 uses per level (it took 8), and level 100 takes about 7 (it took about 26). The experience a level costs is unchanged. (f671881391)

Traps

• Fallen cave stalactites now stay on the floor after they drop. They used to sink into the ground and reappear on the ceiling a few seconds later (Lamech's Bazaar spider cave, Verdantis Mines and eleven other zones, #10656).

UI

• The Vigor bar tooltip and the hovers on the Stats tab's critical chance rows now say that a full Vigor bar is your normal critical chance. The "(+X% Vigor)" figure is the part of the chance shown that an empty bar would take away, and Vigor never raises critical chance above its normal level. The numbers themselves did not change. Reported by Akandriel. (cc5def42c0)
• The item comparison tooltip now ends with a line saying that holding Alt shows the item alone and that the comparison is turned off in Options, Interface tab. A player could not find that setting from the tooltip. The settings search also finds it for "comparing" and "compared".
• The Change Basement picker now centers its "Select Basement from Deeds in Inventory" heading over the basement name and arrows; it used to sit against the left edge. Reported through the in-game Oracle. (7945432466, #10330)
• Quitting or choosing Exit to Menu in the world now opens the logout countdown directly instead of asking "Are you sure?" first; the countdown's Cancel button is the way back. The question still appears when nothing would follow it: with Skip the Logout Countdown on, with a ransom pending, or when not connected.
• The Open a Window menu keeps "Vendor Listings in Zone" listed on the overworld, grayed out with a tooltip saying it only covers the town or area you are standing in. Before, the entry vanished there and read as a missing window (#10321).
• The Oracle window now remembers the questions you typed into it this session. With the ask box empty, Up brings back your last question and keeps going back, and Down goes the other way, the same as recalling lines in chat. Once you type or edit, the arrows move between lines of the box as before (ef0d2b92b5, #10323; requested by D'Laein Lachlan through the Oracle).
• The minimap now wears the compass's iron border, the same worn iron texture at the same thickness, and the band under the N, E, S and W letters is the compass strip's dark in place of gold. The iron repeats around the ring at its native size, so it stays sharp at every Minimap Size and UI Scale. Requested by D'Laein Lachlan (716496dd5c, #10324).
• Added Import Settings from Live Game to the Options gear menu on the chaos client. It copies options, key bindings, window layout and chat tabs from the live game installed on the same computer, and leaves the live game's own settings untouched. Until now the copy only happened the first time chaos ran, so anyone who had already played it kept the chaos settings. Requested in game by D'Laein Lachlan.
• The main menu box no longer stretches to the bottom of the screen with a tall empty gap under Quit. Its space for the Play button descriptions was kept from a moment when the screen was narrow and never shrank back; it now resizes when the screen width changes. Reported by Astirian (2abfd9884a, #10306).
• The default Astirian UI theme now ships with Window Opacity at 67% and Pattern Scale at 414 px (was 30% and 256 px), so bags stacked over the backpack no longer show the text of the window underneath. Players already on Astirian move to the new look, including anyone who picked it in an earlier build; other themes and any slider a player set themselves are unchanged. Requested by Astirian, the theme's author (ad8b4e3776, #10304).
• The vendor window heading now names the vendor: a renamed player vendor opens as "Vendor (its name)" and a Public Vendor shows the shopkeeper's name, where every vendor used to read just "Vendor". Requested by D'Laein Lachlan. (#10283)
• Player and public vendor shelves have a new Per Unit column next to Price. It shows what one item of a listing costs and sorts by it, so a stack of 100 at 500 gold and a single at 10 gold line up as 5 and 10. Requested through the in-game Oracle. (1c78be335f, #10286)
• The "You've Died!" help window no longer opens at every login. Closing a pinned help window with the X now takes the pin off too, and help windows already stuck this way are cleared once on the next login (#10694).
• The extra key between Left Shift and Z on ISO keyboards can now be bound in Options, Controls. Unity reported no key code for it, so with a US layout the backslash it types could not be assigned to anything; the game now reads it from Windows and shows it as \, or as < on the German, French, Spanish and Nordic layouts that type < there. (e7696888ff, #10260)
• Seeds and fishing bait can now be dragged from the backpack onto the Combat Hotbar, as players asked. Each seed type keeps its own slot showing how many of that seed you carry, and pressing it plants that seed the same way the utility hotbar does. A bait slot starts fishing. Bait used to light up the bar and then drop back into the bag, and seeds were refused outright. Unlocking a seed slot in Edit Deck leaves the seed in place (#10707).
• Edit Deck opens taller, so its Combos tab shows about five combos at a time. The window used to open so short that the list had room for one combo and a sliver of scroll bar, and a player reported the combo list as missing. Edit Deck forgets its old saved size once so everyone gets the new one, and the Oracle can now say where the combo list is (17121799ff, 13c9b37ad1, #10775).
• The Titles category selector, in the Titles window and on the character sheet's Titles tab, now sizes itself to fit its longest category name. It used to cut "All Categories" down to "All Cate". (#10288, cb192d1acd)
• Book titles no longer show underlined in item list rows (backpack, bank, merchant and player vendor). Published blank paper, printed books, letters, sheet music and decoration layouts read as plain names in lists; the hover tooltip keeps the underlined title (#10808, 9ad9878b88).
• Common Storehouse Containers say when they are full again. After the four daily turn-ins, clicking a container only wrote its "full" line to the chat log, where a chat tab without NPC lines hid it, so the click looked like it did nothing. The container line now also shows in the middle of the screen, and the chat log keeps its copy (02624b4f7c, #10810).
• Escape closes the full map again. Talking to an NPC while the round minimap was up quietly pinned the map, and a pinned map ignores Escape, so it stayed that way through every login. The pin is no longer copied over, and the map's saved pin is cleared once on the next login; anyone who pinned the full map on purpose pins it again. Reported through the Oracle by Chiasma. (6db9538f2d, #10783)
• The loading screen no longer tells players to report bugs on the old forums or join the Bug Brigade. Those two tips are gone in every language, and a new tip says to type /bug or pick Report Bug in the Window Selector so the Oracle writes the report up (f6f73bf190, #10826).
• Added a Combat Text Colors section to Options > Interface: one colour row for each kind of floating combat text (damage to others and to you, critical hits, glancing blows, miss, dodged, parried, blocked, immune, ultraslay, heals, critical heals and focus), each with a Default button, plus a reset for the whole section. Unpicked rows keep the game colours. Requested by Pulverize. (7c24252c36, #10210)

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Launcher

• Launcher v60: the What's new since vN link under the buttons now closes the What's New panel when it is already open. Before, a second click did nothing and only the panel's Close link got back to the download view (#10673).
• Mac launchers opened straight from Downloads now update themselves. macOS runs an app opened that way from a locked copy, so every launcher update failed and several Mac testers stayed on v57. Launcher 61 updates the real copy and repairs a stuck v57 the next time it opens, with no reinstall (8aa5a67cb3, #10897).
• After a launcher update on a Mac, the launcher reopens by itself. It used to close and wait for the player to start it again. The tester hub and Tester Guide now say to drag the Mac launcher into Applications before opening it.
• Mac launcher 62 no longer closes by itself about a second after opening. It happened on about half of the reopens right after a self-update. Compressed .NET single-file apps on Apple Silicon hit a runtime bug there (dotnet/runtime #123324), so the Mac launcher now ships uncompressed: 21 crashes in 40 post-update relaunches before, 0 in 40 after (#10898).

Pets

• A pet that cannot reach the monster it is fighting now comes back to its follow distance (Close, Near or Far) instead of running into its owner and staying there while they move. Reported by PoPo QiQi. (f5e5eef838, #10658)
• A fighting pet no longer stands on top of its tamer. It used to pick its attack spot on the tamer's side of the monster, walk onto a tamer meleeing that same monster, and follow every step, losing attacks and blocking moves behind the monster. It now takes a spot beside the tamer and moves only when the tamer steps onto it (#10658).
• The pet sheet now explains why regeneration pet gear stops changing an undead summon's Health Regen. Undead summons always lose health; gear and pet food slow the loss only to the Mummified Undead limit, and the tooltip now says when a summon is already there (def187a617).
• New editor tool, Compose Store Tile From Capture: turns an in-game screenshot of a pet into a Crown Store tile with the band and logo the older pet tiles carry. It is the first step toward replacing the newer pets' studio-style store pictures with real in-game shots, as players asked; the pictures themselves are not reshot yet. (#10295, dca58500ec)
• Summoned Fire Elementals and other ranged pets and creatures no longer stand still mid-fight on hills and rocky ground. They now judge their attack spot from the ground they will stand on, and move to another spot when the one they reached cannot see the target. Reported through the Oracle in the Obsidian Panopticon. (437ce27fd9, #10823)

Docs

• The leaderboard deploy notes now warn that the service's staging copy had fallen behind the running install, and describe how to update only the changed modules safely (9818771e22).
• Corrected the access-tier notes: Episode 2 gates the Mistrendur adventure zones such as Vikland, while the Mistrendur overworld stays open to every account. A report of Vikland refusing entry after the 2026-10-01 account switch was closed as working as intended, since zone access now follows each account's own Episode 2 entitlement.

Housing

• NPC buildings in player towns (tavern, bank, shops, towers and the rest) now level the ground under them when placed, the same way lot markers and terrain levellers do, so they can go on slopes of up to 5 m across their footprint. The levelled area turns with the building, and a building set on an existing leveller pad keeps that pad. Requested by Ythak DeThartas.
• A wax cylinder dragged onto a phonograph in the world now stays in your backpack, with a chat line on how that phonograph takes cylinders. It used to be placed as a decoration on top of the device, and on the Dual Wax Cylinder Phonograph it landed inside the horns where it could not be picked up again. Reported by Chiasma.
• Moondials spin again when clicked, and the wide constellation ring on the larger moondials lies flat at its normal height instead of standing on edge through the floor. Both broke with last month's ring-facing fix; the sun, moon and planet rings still point at the real sky whichever way the moondial faces. Reported in-game by By Tor and Phenyx.
• In player-owned towns, the town crier a governor places as decoration now says it does not pay the one-time gold for visiting a new town, and that the town's own Town Crier does. Its old hint read like a missing reward. Translated into all eight languages (#10305, reported via the Oracle).
• Sitting in a hot tub no longer puts the room behind a white fog. Each steam puff is a billboard almost six meters wide, and a seated player's camera sits inside the plume, so the puffs filled the screen and washed out the curtains across the room. The steam on all seven hot tubs is now capped at 30% of the screen per puff, which clears the view from the seat and looks the same as before from outside the tub (#10314).
• Fixed /fly moving you up and down while you rotate a decoration in hand (50bb094cb5, #10299). Fly height ignores E and Q while Shift, Ctrl or Alt is held, so the slow rotate and the 45 and 15 degree snaps no longer shift the camera. Fly Up and Fly Down are new entries in the Keybindings list (E and Q by default) and can be moved to other keys, such as [ and ], without taking keys from Interact or Rotate Left/Right. Shaped with darkline, who reported it.
• The Property Manager now marks a stored house that belongs to another player. When you had items in a friend's house that was later packed away, its card showed their house name and a plain item count, so it looked like your own house. The card now reads "Another player's house" and "N of your items", and the Send to Bank confirmation says only your items go to your bank. (d567ab4d13)
• A town governor or steward can now mark a claimed lot as a memorial from the lot sign's Manage Lot Claim menu, and clear it again. A memorial lot no longer lapses for inactivity while its owner still holds the deed, but unpaid tax still forecloses it. The sign reads In memory of the owner. Before, only staff could set a memorial. (e732ac803e)
• The Elven Tree and Druid Tree town homes now offer Move House on a Town lot. Their canopy is wider than the lot, so the game found no spot to move them to; houses bigger than their lot with no room now fit by the ground they stand on, and the canopy may hang over the lot line. The same change lets 63 other house and lot pairs move, including airships and galleon drydocks on City lots (#10809).
• Move House now says why a house stops: dragging past the back, front or side of the lot puts a message on the top bar, such as "The house is already as far back as this lot allows." A few Town Homes, including the Stone Five-Story w/ Veranda and the Viking Three-Story Stronghold, already reach the back line of their lot and had looked stuck (a4f5e736af, #10209).

Combat

• Creatures raised by an ally (skeleton mages, liches and the Lepus zombies raising their fallen) now show their health bar while they fight you. Before, a raised creature stood up at full health and attacked with no bar until someone hit it, and its bar could come back empty. Reported from the Obsidian Panopticon.
• Charge (and Engage, Body Slam, or a creature pulling you) no longer leaves your character under the ground when the target stands on a slope. The end of the rush now lands you on the nearest ground, so you stop falling through the world after charging a dragon on a hillside (9f86161450, #10663; reported by Salenia through the Oracle).
• Skill tooltip lines for a bonus that needs a specialization you do not have, such as the critical damage on Berserker's Stance without Tactics Specialization, now show their numbers in gray beside the "Requires" note. They used to stay green and read as a bonus you already had (95564ea893, #10331).
• The Tremor weapon enchantment shakes the camera again when it procs. Since the server began running creatures on its own hosts, a player's client never recalculated the creature it hit, which is the only place the shake was played. Other player attacks with a camera shake that land on creatures were affected the same way and are fixed too. (399014093e)
• Ground-targeted spells such as Meteor Shower now only need a clear line of sight to the spot. They were also held to Blink's rule that you could stand there, so the target circle turned red on house decks, piers and rails with nothing in the way. Releasing on a red circle now says why in chat instead of dropping the spell with no message. (966653fab2, #10319)
• Jumping while Chaotic Feedback is up no longer plays a blood spurt and a hurt grunt. The 5 health each jump costs still shows as a damage number and in the combat log (eec10b0cbe, #10308).
• Vitium's Ring of Fire burn deals damage again. The change that doubled it wrote the multiplier where the formula reader could not handle it, so the burn errored on every tick and dealt nothing; it now hits for twice the usual Ring of Fire burn, and a new check catches the same formula shape in any rune (c0cd8a71e2, #10711).
• Charged Shock Weapon no longer shows double its hit damage. Charging an enchant only makes the buff last longer, but the buff icon and skill tooltip multiplied the quoted hit by the charge level, so a six-charge cast read 6-10 Air damage over hits of 3-5. The buff, tooltip and stun line now quote what each hit deals; Frost Weapon and Ignite Weapon get the same fix (21cdc8affe, #10719).

Quests

• The Vikland buried treasure chests now stay above ground for ten minutes after you dig them up, up from four and a half. A fight with the spiders at the dig spot could use up the whole window and sink the Daemon chest before it was opened, which left the quest stuck for a day because digging uses up the instructions. If the Daemon chest sinks before you loot it, the loose stone now gives you a new set of instructions right away (3ce41a70ef).
• Fixed the Ardoris Black Arrow quest so the "Inform Tanya" step puts a quest marker on Tanya Cumpston, the same as "Inform Simone" does for Simone. The step counted as finished the moment it started, so its marker never showed. A new test now checks every quest step for the same mistake and found five more, logged for follow-up (13c5581e2f, #10816).
• Followed up the five quest steps the Black Arrow fix flagged. Ellery in Ardoris now keeps a quest marker from the moment she asks for her rent until you pay her, and Jean Christian Dupre in Brittany Fields now shows that he has the "Wanna Buy a Duck?" quest to offer. Of the other three, one was fixed in data that no scene uses yet, one already worked, and one is a duplicate of a marker Edvard already shows (28de51ef34, #10829).

Interface

• Search All My Stuff finds crafted weapons and armor by their material. A search for Bronze listed bronze ingots, sheets, bindings and recipes but no Bronze Spear or Bronze Plate Chest, because the material word is added to a crafted item's name from the part it was made with. The search now checks that part, and Bronze Spear finds the spears too. A search for Sheet still lists only sheets. (#10325)
• Rewards Program members now show a small treasure chest icon beside their name on nameplates, the target frame and party rows. Members can hide it from their own right-click menu. Requested by CICI.

NPCs

• NPCs move their mouths while their spoken dialogue plays, opening and closing with the voice. Before, the mouth moved only on the talking gesture, so a line spoken during a wave, clap or salute played over a closed mouth; Anais's first meeting on the Isle of Storms was the clearest case (5767d27986).

Vendors

• Player vendors: select several rows in Listed for Sale on the My Listings tab and press Change Prices (or right-click the selection) to set them all to one price or raise or lower them all by a percentage. A preview shows each listing's price before and after, skips any that would fall under the vendor minimum, and totals the commission. Stacks sold a few at a time take the new price each, pennies included. (a228483ae0, #10336)
• Select several rows in Listed for Sale on a vendor's My Listings tab and press Reclaim Selected to take them all back at once, or right-click the selection and choose Remove Listings. One confirmation names the count before anything moves. The button sits beside Reclaim All on player vendors; the right-click entry also works on public vendors, where several selected rows used to bring up an empty menu. (d0d8b43e31, #10772)
• A purchase order you could not fill because some of your items were locked used to look fillable, and Accept then did nothing. Locked items no longer count toward an order: the order greys out, its tooltip says how many of yours are locked, and the vendor window shows the same reason while Accept is greyed (dc06a21d47). Reported by Thranin Greybeard.

Map

• Player-owned towns with an Oracle Confirmatory building now show the Oracle on the town map, with the same icon NPC towns use for their Oracle Temple. The pin goes away when the building is picked up (3a7d82e1ee).

UI

• The Recall Scroll tooltip in the backpack, bank and on merchants now shows where the character is bound, or "None" when unbound. Before this only the hotbar tooltip showed it.
• Added a Tooltip Opacity slider to the Themes tab of Options, under Window Opacity. It sets how solid the background behind hover tooltips is, from 25% to 100%, so item stats stay readable over a stack of open windows. The 90% notch is the old look, and the text stays at full strength at every setting. Requested by Astirian.
• Added a Distance Units option under Options, Interface, Map & Navigation. It switches skill Range and Radius, knock-back and Pet Range tooltips, fishing depth, the decorating measurements, the light Range field and dungeon builder doorway distances between meters and feet. Range and Radius now name their unit, and fishing depth follows the setting (meters by default, where it used to be feet only). Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye (70da946a11, #10287).
• The Trade window now opens wide enough for both item lists. It used to open so narrow that item names were cut to a few letters and the gold button read "Se...". A window saved at the old size widens the next time it opens. Reported by Elene Sali.
• Examining another player no longer runs their crit chance and regen rows through your own Vigor bar. Their sheet now shows their figures at a full bar with no Vigor amounts; your own sheet is unchanged (1a5103f21a).
• The Call to Arms window now saves its pin as soon as you toggle it, like the other pinnable windows.

Party

• Promoting a party member whose matchmaking preference is Open to leader no longer starts a 60-second "Leaving this instance" countdown that moved the whole party to another copy of the zone. The party now stays put; switching to Open by hand still moves you. (047262511e)

Pets

• A pet that stopped beside its owner on a staircase could stay sunk into the steps until the owner moved again. Pets now finish settling on to the step after they stop. Reported by Jack SinAssist at the Castle Atos stairs (149c9dae69).
• A pet that dies in the middle of a fight no longer keeps you in combat: its corpse used to block the sheathe key with "You cannot sheathe your weapon while your pet is fighting." A living pet that is still fighting holds you in combat as before.

Help

• Entering a player-owned town now opens a one-time Shops and Services in Player Towns help window, read aloud like the other help windows. It explains how to find what is for sale with Vendor Listings in Zone and Get Directions, which crafting stations repair gear, and what the town map marks. It appears alongside the existing welcome, so characters who already saw that still get it once. Requested by Chaos Shadowstorm.

Items

• Dark Fairy Wings now hang from two thin dark chains over the shoulders, the same chains the Ice Wings use, in place of the wide leather chest harness. Requested by Cassioppia. The other winged back items keep their harness. (863da9652a)
• The fur collared cloaks (Black Sun Cloak, the three Sigil cloaks, the Lord British cloak and the community cause and convention cloaks, 44 in all) now sway as much as the Viking Cloak while running (b85ac56d4f, #10815). Their cloth is the Viking panel under a thicker collar but was tuned stiffer; it now uses the Viking settings, and the hem moves 0.30 m off the body at a run against 0.26 m before. Reported by Patosh.
• Five Obsidian Potions (Expedience, Precision, Preservation, Reclamation and Stamina) are back to the strength they had on the original live servers. A summer fix had halved them. The Reclamation shop text no longer quotes a subscriber number that stopped being true. (#1481)

Community

• Logged four player suggestions from the forums to the wishlist queue: redirecting the /sotawiki command to the actively maintained Sotawiki.org (requested by Janzik), letting the Oracle accept follow-up info on an already-open bug report (requested by Wilfred), a new horn/trumpet/trombone instrument (requested by Jumentum), and retargetable Adventure Zone teleporters from the COTO store (requested by Mal Hari).
• Filed two bugs from forum reports: Property Manager showing another player's house and sending their items to the reporter's bank on Send to Bank (reported by SammiX), and the Tanglemire "Fix the Spirit Wheel" daily failing to hand over its quest items from most guard NPCs (reported by Jumentum).

Fishing

• The fishing reel fight now runs when the HUD is hidden after casting. Before, hiding the HUD between the cast and the hook set skipped the fight and handed over the catch (afe6c8a61f).

Interactives

• A ladder inside a building can no longer be used from outside its wall. Players could click the roof ladder of the crystal-locked stone house in Vikland through its back wall and reach the roof chest without the crystal; the Purple crystal tower nearby had the same gap. Clicking from outside now shows "You have to be inside to reach that." A sweep of all 460 house ladder ends confirms ladders still work from inside, ship rigging included (#10317).

Inventory

• A bag in the bank now updates its item count and weight as soon as items are moved in or out of it from its own window. Before, an emptied bag kept showing its old count and weight in the bank list until the window was reopened. The same applies to bags in the backpack and in chests.
• The inventory search box learned size: size>2 finds a Pumpkin Trophy or Trophy Jack O' Lantern by the Size its tooltip prints, and trophy fish answer the same search by Fish Length (len also works). Works in the backpack, bank, merchant panes and Search All My Stuff. Requested by Steve Sosaria. (c7cfca802e)
• The Recently Looted inventory category keeps its items through a logout. Each character remembers its own list on the computer it plays on, and Reset still empties it for good. (e32572b515, #10794)
• The backpack list's lock column shows padlocks again: a closed gold padlock on locked items and a faint open one on items you can lock, with the closed padlock on the column heading. It had shown a gold dot, which did not read as a lock. Reported through the Oracle (1965024ad0, #10792).
• The bank now says when its category tab is hiding items: "Other categories hold N more items." appears under the tabs with a Show All Items button. A player whose bank was still on the Container tab saw nothing after a vendor order delivered a Crown of the Obsidians and reported the delivery as missing; the item had arrived. (823f7e2406, #10180)

Lighting

• Crafting pavilion lamps in a busy player town no longer go dark at the far end while you stand at the other. Since the bonfire fix last week, big lights across town were outranking the pavilion's own lamps for a limited number of lit slots. Lights within 25 m of you now always come first, and the bonfire next door still stays lit. Reported in game by Patosh (#10293).

Books

• Writing on a Blank Sheet of Paper now shows how much fits. The sheet holds one page, about 700 to 800 characters, but the counter read "/ 12000 characters" and anything past the page was cut with no message. The counter now reads "N characters, one page", and a red note appears when typed or pasted text did not all fit, pointing to the Blank Unrolled Scroll for longer writing. Flyers and holiday cards get the same counter and note.
• Pasting into the middle of a one-page letter no longer erases the text after the cursor. Only the pasted part is shortened to fit, ending on a whole word. The writing area also wraps lines like the finished page, where before each paragraph ran off the right edge as one long line.

Crafting

• The Sausage and Eggs dish was missing from the consumables group the other cooked dishes load through; it is registered now (e0f0b5776a, #10463).
• Salvaging Kelly Hayward's Memories, the Owl's Nest quest dagger, now returns Pattern: Kelly Hayward's Memories along with the metal scrap. Before this it returned scrap only, while the companion virtue weapons each returned their own pattern. The pattern is a dagger pattern and works with the Reshape One-Handed Blade recipe. (3678cacd28, #10297)

Oracle

• The Oracle can now say how many adventure areas the game has (211: 163 on Novia, 25 in the Hidden Vale, 23 in Mistrendur, split by tier) and how many player-owned towns you can reach from the world maps (about 350). (b959458987, #10290)
• The Oracle stopped linking to pages that do not exist. A player asking about the boat-shaped water homes got a "Housing and Decorating" link to a placeholder website (#10284). Search results now carry each guide's real address, and every link in an answer is checked before it is sent: a link naming a real guide is pointed at that guide, and any other link is shown as plain text. (731d5d4046)
• The Oracle can say what taming level a creature needs. Asked what skill it takes to tame a creature, she had nothing to answer from (#10258, reported by Greagoir Pendragon). She now looks the creature up by name and says whether it can be tamed and which Summoning level and tier the tamed pet needs before it can be called, using the game's own taming tables for the 137 tameable creatures placed in the world. She also says that Tame Creature itself has no minimum level. (d233c40c97)
• The Oracle's dragon, pet and taming guides were updated for dragon round two (the thrown Wing Gust, the underbelly, dragon wrasses and Blood Suck). The answers go live with the game build that carries the changes.

Tools

• The two metadata files the game client writes beside its runtime process files are now ignored by git, so they stop appearing as stray changes (9a8d1bc23a).

Oracle

• The Oracle learned answers to about 70 questions players asked her this week that she could not ground: farming and the best-selling crop, player vendor looks and listing times, renaming town signpost exits, the free story deeds, Call to Arms, how critical chance is worked out, resetting the main quest, Sir Patrick at the kobold camp, the Find the Treasure dig in Vikland, troll kill rewards, the Breach elemental bosses, gold veins, and several things that do not exist, such as Myrkwood or a Destiny Pool recipe (12b853b8da, verify #10742).

Fishing

• Fishing Meter Contrast: a new option under Options, Interface, Gameplay gives the fishing reel meter a High Contrast palette. The Line bar used to turn from green to red as the line ran low, which players with red-green colour blindness cannot tell apart; High Contrast uses the gathering meter's colours, a cyan line that turns orange, a magenta tension bar and a yellow fish bar on solid backgrounds. Landing a fish now plays a water splash instead of a second version of the hook-set click, and the hint under the meter names your Fishing Reel key, or your Jump key if Fishing Reel is unbound (138171f6f7, #10274).
• The Neon Tetra can now be caught with a rod in fresh and fetid water, during the dark of the moon (new moon and the crescents on either side). Before this it only came from fish traps, which do not count as catches, so its achievement and Complete Angler at 68 kinds could not be earned. (2bdf3c3fe4, #10269)
• The fishing bobber is now a modelled float with a lime top, a white bottom and a stem with a bead, in place of the flat lime ball, and it is twice as big on the water (6d8db03b29). A custom theme bobber colour still recolours the lime parts.
• The Helpful Guide to Fishing was rewritten for the fishing mini-game, with chapters on casting, the bite and "Reel!", the fight meter, landing a fish, and turning the mini-game off and what that costs. It had described the old passive cast, a green cursor and hotspots that improve quality. Two fishing loading tips were corrected, and all of it is translated (83bd6c4ddb, #10273).

Client

• Fixed a client bug where a failed write of the crash-recovery marker stopped the game from saving your position for the rest of the session, so a relog or crash put you back wherever that write had failed. The marker write is now guarded and position saving keeps going (805cf45d90, #10703).

Decorations

• Placed faerie circles, in every colour, can now be selected from any camera angle. Right-click shows Light Settings... again, and decoration mode can pick them up without going through the palette. Each circle had only four paper-thin click strips flush with the ground, so the ground usually took the click; it now has a low clickable ring over its mushrooms that players and pets still walk through. Reported by Patosh. (21a16ca905, #10303)
• The Blue Spring Fountain w/ Floating Candles and the Spring Fountain w/ Floating Candles can be placed again. Every attempt was refused with "Part of this is hanging off the surface" on any floor or ground: the surface check measured down from the fountain's collision, which starts 23 cm above its base, and could not reach the floor. It now measures from the base, the way the resting check has since the lamp post fix (8409fc9ff8, #10820).

Gathering

• A gathering node no longer locks up when a creature hits you partway through a harvest while you are moving. The node used to refuse every click for up to a minute and could lose what you had already gathered; now it stays clickable and opens a loot window with those items (3e4ff4d508, #5989).
• A mined node with items left in its loot window now goes away about 30 seconds after you close the window or walk out of range. It used to keep its untouched look for five minutes, so a vein you had finished with looked like it was still there. A harvest interrupted by a creature still keeps its loot on the node for five minutes (7fdfa4d056, #10250).

Maps

• The map window no longer re-reads a map picture that failed to load on every frame it is open (7861b74d56, #10721). A missing sheet is now tried once per scene visit and warned about once, instead of the roughly 88,000 log warnings a day build 303 produced, and the window shows "map not available" rather than flickering back to "loading".

Inventory

• Obsidian Potion blessings (Capacity, Conservation, Expedience, Guidance, Precision, Prevention, Reclamation, Stamina) can be dismissed from the buff bar like every other potion buff. Right-clicking one, or its entry in the long-lasting effects hourglass, used to show no Dismiss option, so the multi-day buff stayed until it ran out. (2008b3ae36, #10670)

Travel

• The Choose Destination list opens again every time you use a Teleport to Zone Scroll or the sextant. A starred destination sits at the top and is already selected, so one click takes you there, and you can still pick another spot or move the star. A single star used to skip the list entirely, with Shift as the only way back in. (56c1da8d9f, #10734)
• New option Travel Straight to Starred Destination (Options, Interface tab, Map & Navigation), off by default and set per character. With it on, a Teleport to Zone Scroll or the sextant goes straight to a zone's one starred destination without opening the Choose Destination list. Holding Shift when you pick the zone opens the list anyway. With it off, the list opens with the star selected as before. Requested by Fifi Brindacie. (46edfa454b, #10786)

Quests

• Private Fleta's To Catch a Fish in Solace Bridge Outskirts can be picked up again: Captain Kinsey points new players to her, she asks for a salmon, the journal tracks it and the hand-in pays once. The quest had been switched off, and each of her keywords now gives one answer per quest stage instead of a random pick (83bd6c4ddb, #10273).

Sieges

• A Cabalist killed by one player ends the town siege again. Since late September a solo kill paid out but left the siege standing with no word why, because ending a siege needed two players in the town; that requirement is now off by default (6b8e082680, #10246).

GM Tools

• The GM panel has a Tester Tools button that opens the old tester tools window: load zone, skill levels, granted XP and target levels, buffs, item creation and duplication, gold, fog of war, time of day and weather. Since /tester switched to the verification board on 2026-09-30, staff had no way to reach those tools. (035db060a7)

Recruit a Friend

• Started Recruit a Friend: players will get a personal invite link, and a new player who enters its code before their first login counts once they have played two hours on their own computer and internet connection. This first piece (invite codes and the rules for who counts) is in the code and switched off until the rest lands.
• Recruit a Friend now has its own records: who invited whom, each player's invite code, and the reason a recruit did or did not count. One recruiter per new account, fixed once set. Still switched off.
• Recruit a Friend's limits can be adjusted on the live shard without a new build: the two hours of play, the level a recruit needs, how long a new account has to qualify, and the Gold Crowns a recruiter receives.
• The game client and servers can now pass an invite code at a new player's first login and ask for Recruit a Friend progress. The login itself is unchanged; the code travels in a separate message right after it. Still switched off.
• Built the Recruiters leaderboard for Recruit a Friend: players ranked by how many of their invited friends went on to play their first two hours in the last day, week or 30 days, with an all-time total beside it. It is not live yet; it appears once the board is deployed and the program is switched on.
• Built the Recruit a Friend invite page that a recruiter's link opens. It shows the invite code with a Copy button, the four steps to join (a free account or Steam, the download, entering the code before the first login, then two hours of play and level 5) and the program rules, and a link without a working code asks the friend to get the link again. Not live yet: it goes up when the program is switched on.
• The servers now run the whole Recruit a Friend loop, switched off: an invite code is accepted only during the first login of a new account, a recruit who has played two hours and reached level 5 is checked against the recruiter's computer and connection, and a recruit who counts earns the welcome pet while the recruiter receives 500 Gold Crowns by mail and the Envoy title. Mailed Gold Crowns now always stack with the ones a player already has.
• A new player who mistypes an invite code can log in again and fix it, as long as their account is under 30 minutes old and has not entered the world yet. Once an account has played, no code can be added to it.
• The login screen has an I have an invite code link that opens an Invite code box under the password, and the Steam account window has the same box. A new player types (or pastes) the code a friend sent before their first login; the game checks it right after login and says whose invite they joined with. In the world, /recruit shows your invite link, copies it, and lists the friends who joined with it. Codes are not accepted until the program is switched on (a41bac4c0d).
• Staff have a Recruit a Friend admin tool: it shows who joined with whose invite and why a recruit did or did not count, and can correct a wrong verdict or withdraw an invite code. Every change is recorded on the record with who made it and why, and nothing is ever deleted (79fd19aaa9).
• The Recruit a Friend rewards are in: the Envoy title and achievement for a recruiter whose first friend counts, and an Answered the Call achievement that gives the new player a Black and Tan Rottweiler that cannot be traded or sold. Both stay hidden until earned and switched off until launch (fed160cc52).

World

• Leaving Whiteguard Foothills for the world map now puts you on the road beside its marker, on the Castle Atos side of the river. Every exit used to land on the far bank: the zone's map tile had no arrival point, and the fallback picked the next tile over, which is across the water. The same spot is used for Start On World Map after logging out in the Foothills (#10259).
• Leaving Brittany Alley and several riverside player towns no longer puts you on the far side of a river or city wall on the world map. When the town's own spot on the map can't be used, the game now picks the tile you walked in from, or a nearby one you can reach from it (#10780).

Creatures

• Dragon round two is planned: Wing Gust will throw players a fixed distance wherever they stand, standing under a dragon will hurt every second, and big hits will knock loose dragon wrasses with a Blood Suck that drains anyone who stands still. Decision log in the dragon pass plan (epic #8720).
• A dragon's Wing Gust now throws everyone it hits about 12 metres clear of the dragon and up into the air, wherever they stood. Before, it pushed a player only as far as they already stood from the dragon, so someone beside it barely moved.
• Standing under a dragon is no longer the safe spot: a grounded dragon now crushes anyone beneath its body about once a second (Underbelly Crush, from the dragon, with no dodge, parry, block or jump to avoid it). It stops while the dragon flies. Adults, Ancients, clockworks and the Aether dragon have it; young dragons and wyverns do not.
• Three new dragon wrasses were added for dragons to shed in a fight: the Wrasse Whelp (half the size of a Cave Wrasse), the Dragon Wrasse and the full-size Great Dragon Wrasse, at levels 49, 79 and 99. They count toward the Wrasse kill achievements and pay half the experience their level would suggest, with nothing to loot or skin. They do not appear in the world until the dragon drops arrive.
• Dragon wrasses got Blood Suck: a wrasse latches onto a player who has stood still for four seconds and drains health and focus every second (25, 40 or 50 a second by size), healing itself. The first step or jump breaks it.
• Dragons now shed dragon wrasses: every hit of 400 or more knocks one loose beside the dragon, growing from Wrasse Whelps to Great Dragon Wrasses as the dragon weakens, at most 10 per dragon. Clockworks, young dragons and wyverns shed none. Dropped wrasses pay experience and count toward the Wrasse kill achievements.
• The Blood Suck beam now holds from the dragon wrasse's head to the victim's chest for the whole drain. It used to flash for about a second of a latch that lasts up to 30. It drops within half a second of the step that breaks the hold. (b8ae0d1700, #10804)
• Each dragon wrasse size has its own colour: Wrasse Whelps are ember gold, Dragon Wrasses crimson, Great Dragon Wrasses dark red with a gold edge. All three used to wear the Emberglow cave wrasse's orange. A new mesh is filed for an artist. (b8ae0d1700, #10804)
• Dragon wrasses now drop when a dragon takes a heavy hit. On the QA shard the drop failed every time it was triggered, so no wrasse ever appeared; the spawn now runs where the game expects it to (6c7744b1f3). The same fault was waiting in the lich servant summon, which is still switched off, and is fixed too.

Tooling

• The test guide now warns that a window layout test which sizes the window through its style quietly measures the default size, and that Editor-panel layout tests leave more room than the game does. Both turned up while fixing the Edit Deck combo list (716a5da8ae).

Towns

• Rampage Island is now Ivory Stronghold, at its governor's request. The town moved to the Desert 01b stone docks map and to a new overworld spot in the Novia desert beside Oasis. Governorship moved to the governor's other account the same day, with stewards kept.
• Added a script that moves an emptied player town onto a different town map. It refuses while any lot, placed item or open storage transaction remains, so nothing a player owns is stranded.
• Astoria moved to the Forest 01b stone docks map at its governor's request, keeping its place on the Novia overworld.
• Castle Atos: the wandering cleanliness elemental no longer gets wedged in a wall between two timber houses, where it could not be clicked or talked to. Its route circled the houses and most of its paths ran through them; it now walks the open market lane east of them, and a new test checks every path on the route is clear (ca6036ac89, #10806).
• Fixed a player owned town's daily message posting to chat again when entering one of its player dungeons, and again on each return to the town. Each message now posts once a day; a changed message still shows right away (#10821).
• Added a Toggle Town Console key to the keybind list (Options, Controls). It starts unbound; once set, it opens and closes the Town Console in your player town, and outside a town it says why in chat. The lot sign gear menu now shows the Town Console entry to town owners and message-of-the-day stewards too (#10817).

Localization

• Six game strings that a merge had left out of the translation source (a Vigor tooltip line, a sheet-music dialog button, teleporter list labels and two wax-cylinder chat lines) and the player-owned town help page were added back, so translators can reach them.

Audio

• Covered wooden bridges played dirt footsteps; they now play wood (97cd91d3f2, #10814). The same fix covers 97 built pieces tagged wood or stone, including palisade walls, city walls and stone bridges, that also fell back to dirt.

Dungeons

• The eleven Cave Stone player dungeon rooms and hallways have their own inventory icons, each a top-down picture of that piece. They used to show the same grey placeholder icons as the Stone Dungeon pieces, so the two sets looked alike in bags and chests. Reported through the Oracle. (3fd474541a, #10822)

Mounts

• Female characters riding a mount now hear their mount's steps. Horses had played no hoof sounds on any ground, cat mounts no paw steps, and the horse head toss and rear made no whinny, snort or stomp. Male riders were never affected. Reported through the Oracle (8530168fb6, #10811).

Social

• The Party tab in the Social window now keeps its View List button while you are in a party, so you can browse other open parties and switch to one without leaving first. Requested by Sethanon. (6da11fb5df, #10851)

Dungeons

• Seventy-one more player dungeon pieces have their own inventory icons (62f401ce3a, #10838). Ancient Stone, Icy Cave Stone, Prison Stone, Dungeon Stone, the three marble sets, the transition pieces and the encounter rooms all showed the same two grey placeholders; each now shows a top-down picture of that piece.
• The Random Dungeon Generator Chest can now be crafted (57a1ca2b88, requested by Patosh). Before this, no recipe or shop gave one out. The Carpentry recipe needs Carpentry 40 and takes 10 boards, 4 metal bindings and a Locking Mechanism. Carpenters sell it beside the storage chest recipes, and booksellers stock it with the dungeon recipes.

Input

• Shift plus a number pad key can be saved as a key binding with Num Lock on. Windows lets go of Shift while a number pad key is held with Num Lock on, so Shift + Keypad 0 used to save as plain Keypad 0. The game now remembers Shift for that press, and the saved combination fires in play. Needs Allow Shift in Key Bindings on. (31b9616870, #9944)

Audio

• Background music now fades down over about a second when an NPC talks to you and fades back up over about two seconds, instead of dropping almost instantly. A new Lower Music When NPCs Speak option on the Audio tab turns the effect off; jukeboxes and phonographs still quiet the music either way.

Documentation

• The cloth measuring notes now cover comparing two garments: measure each against the same run with every cloth point pinned, because distance from the standing pose counts leg animation as cloth movement and ranked the stiffest fur cloak as the liveliest.

World Map

• The names of seas, bays, lakes and islands on the overworld map now clear from the fog once you reach that water's shore. They are painted out in the water, where the reveal around you never reached, so Spindrift Bay or the Bay of Storms stayed hidden however much of the coast you had walked. Eleven names are covered, and shores you explored earlier count. Requested by Mondravis. (efc26630a0)

Testing

• The /verify board is open to every player. Any account can type /verify (or /tester), sign in with the name and password they play with, claim a verification task and post a verdict. Before, only tester and staff accounts could open it. The tracker side goes live once its sign-in plugin is redeployed. (e2449926e4)

Client

• Fixed an error that spell and creature effects with camera shake threw when a zone change or camera rebuild replaced the camera mid-shake (#10386). The shake now just ends. It showed up in 14 sessions on the current chaos build.
• The frozen sea in Jotungrund draws its ice on Windows clients again. Past the shore a player saw a large flat white area that looked like a far-off mountain lying on the ground and slid around as they moved (#10397). The sea is 84 identical ice planes that the game draws as one instanced batch, and the build had shipped the ice shader without its instanced version, so the ice did not draw where the planes are and the snow mountains sunk far below it showed through.
• The asset bundle build now keeps the instanced version of a shader whenever any material using it has GPU instancing switched on. Unity 6 decides which variants to keep one bundle at a time, and a shader packed into a different bundle from its materials lost that version without any error. 3,908 instancing materials sat on 103 shaders in that position; the ones that really instance now keep it, and the next chaos build rebuilds every bundle once to pick it up.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-02 is up: Friday brought Call to Arms, a realm-wide goal with a deadline that every server counts toward, and killed three separate freezes that had been stopping the game for forty-five seconds or more. The team also taught a hundred and ninety-eight movable houses how much ground they actually stand on, sorted out four things that made tamed pets bad at their job, and re-checked every claim in the Oracle's knowledge base against the live game. Plus pirates, in the first quarter of next year. Listen or read the transcript (14 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Combat

• Fixed a knockback aimed at a spot on the ground that threw an error on every watching client and never played the toss. Twenty clients hit it at once during a crowded fight in Castle Atos. A character thrown off a ledge by an area knockback now also takes fall damage, as a direct hit already did. (#10385)
• Fixed a Courage Club round that could never finish: an opponent stuck where nobody in the arena could reach it took no damage and held the round open, so the daily could not be completed. A wave battle opponent that no player in the arena can reach or walk toward is now sent back to its spawn point after 20 seconds and removed 20 seconds after that, the recovery an opponent that runs off already gets. (#10383)
• Looked into a report that the water spells only slowed the airship pirates in Lamechs Bazaar. The pirates have no immunity: the attack-speed and melee-damage-taken riders grow with the Water specialization and do not land without it, and build 303 hid some chill rows on the targets buff bar (fixed in 304). Added tests that keep it that way.
• Fixed creature stuns ending after about half a second for some players in a group while lasting their full length for others (#10517). Stuns, roots and other timed effects now run their full length for every player in the zone, and stuns players put on creatures were corrected the same way.
• The Toggle Auto-Attack key (T) now works for every character. Newer characters had been held on Auto-Attack until an adventuring trainer taught free attack, and no trainer in the starting areas could, so T did nothing and unticking Auto-Attack in Options snapped back. Asking a trainer about free attack still hands out the guide book.
• Creature stuns now last their full length for every player in a scene. Players who were not the scene owner had a two-second stun cut to about half a second, because each effect's timer started from the scene owner's clock instead of from when the effect arrived (#10517).
• Torpor no longer freezes you completely. It roots you in place and you can keep attacking and casting at the slower speed its description promises, and its heal starts ticking at once instead of after the root ends. A recast soon after being stunned no longer loses the root and its damage avoidance. The description is updated in all nine languages.
• Recasting Chaotic Feedback no longer resets its Life Attunement penalty. The penalty grows the longer the buff runs, and recasting on cooldown used to start it over from zero, so heals stayed at full strength. Recasts now refresh the duration and the penalty keeps growing from where it was.
• Buffs cast with Heavy Armor skills (Inner Strength, Absorb Impacts, Glancing Blow, Knight's Grace, Provoking Shout) now end when you stop wearing heavy armor, including when a deck swap puts light armor on. They used to stay on the buff bar until they timed out, and some kept their bonus. Light Armor buffs such as Sprint follow the same rule, and swapping between two heavy armor decks keeps your buffs. (#10645)

Community

• Filed four player suggestions from the forum: an option to stop buffs folding into a "+" icon, a clearer path to loading a saved offline character, player-accessible daemon dungeons with a Balron world boss, and a siege bug where leashed enemies ignore damage while chasing a moving cabalist.

Music

• /play and /playlist on the test client now also find songs kept in the live games Sheet Music folder and in the old Portalarium copy of the test clients folder, and a song saved as Song.abc.txt plays as ABC. When a song still is not found, chat names the folder songs are read from. Reported by Owyn DeGrace (#10387).

Proposals

• Published A Line to Everything, the Fishing school proposals page and the first gathering school examined: 40 cards built from a 30-day live usage sweep, the full fishing code and data, the forum record back to 2013, and the genre from Ultima Online to Stardew Valley, Dredge and Russian Fishing 4. In the last 30 days on the old servers 100 anglers made 23,631 casts. The page found twelve working baits where the guides said seventeen, a 68-kind collection nobody can finish, and 305 ripple hotspots whose bonus runs backwards. Each card has its own comment thread and vote arrows.

Gathering

• Clicking a tree, ore node or forage plant while mounted now plays the normal dismount and then starts gathering, instead of refusing with a chat message. Field dressing and hotbar tool use from the saddle also use the proper dismount animation now. Requested by Patosh.
• Field dressing no longer prints "You are busy with something else right now." on every swing. The gathering mini-game swings on the Interact key and a left click, and each press also counted as a click on the body. Clicking a body you are already working now says nothing, a body another player is field dressing says so, and a body that is not ready yet says that instead. Reported by Patosh.

Oracle

• The Oracle fishing guide was corrected: lava lures are used up less often than ordinary bait (it said more often), casting into lava needs a lava-capable rod and a lava bait but not the Lava Fishing skill, a worn spot recovers one cast every five minutes, twelve baits work today, and the Neon Tetra cannot be caught yet. It also learned rod masterworks and the daily fishing towns.
• The Oracle learned answers to 120-odd questions players asked her this week that she could not ground: applying patterns and Eternal Patterns to armour, boots and gauntlets, where the Smoke Bomb, Royal Purple Dye, Surveyor's Chart and Copper Studded Strip recipes come from, Cartography, Meticulous Collection, repair and maximum durability, summoned pet special attacks and summoning tiers, master trainers by school, town counts, the /vent emote, and lot binding and decoration limits. Her old answer that gear can never change its look was wrong (patterns reshape it) and is corrected.
• The Oracle can now tell players where their past conversations with her are saved: the OracleLogs folder in the game data folder (/datafolder opens it), one file per day. The chat log guide points there too, since her answers are not part of the chat log.
• The Oracle now says the Royal Purple Dye recipe and Royal Elderberry Seed were a Founder pledge reward that can only be had from other players today. An answer added earlier that day had wrongly sent players to the website store. Reported by Lazarus Long.
• The Oracle's daily research pass now checks the store listings, item notes and the archived wiki for pledge rewards before telling players an item comes from the store.
• The Oracle no longer sends players looking for an "Experience Indicators" section in Options, which never existed. Its guides now name Show Low Exp Pool Icon under Interface, Character & Progress, and explain that the icon only appears while a pool is low (0158e7a0e4).
• The Oracle now tells players that Instant Unlearn is free only for the ten minutes after asking a town Oracle to unmake one skill, and needs an Obsidian Item of Unlearning outside that window. It had been answering that unlearning was free at any time. (55b75010ad)
• The Oracle now answers how long an auction winner has to claim their lot: three days by default, counted down in the lot's Time Left, plus what happens to the gold and the lot if the window runs out (#10528).
• The Oracle can now answer where to find a Cave Wrasse: none of the Wrasse family lives in the world yet, so they cannot be hunted, tamed or studied with Animal Lore, and she points Master Naturalist hunters at skipping the family. The Green Wrasse aquarium fish still gets its fishing answer.
• The Oracle no longer sends players to the Ardoris and Owl's Head carpenters for Two-Story and Three-Story shingle Row Home recipes, which do not exist. A question about a recipe now searches recipes only, and when the name belongs to a house deed she says so and names the housing merchants that sell it (415942c7c8).
• The Oracle can rank a craft's recipes by the producer experience one craft pays, and can cap the list at your skill level. Recipe answers now show base experience too. The top Cooking recipes are nine skill 80 dishes at 3,200 base; Sweet Cunning Cat Stew needs skill 100 but pays 300. (2ff7d291bd)
• The Oracle now knows the Crown Shop. Asked where to get an item sold only for crowns, such as the Obsidian Item of Greater Unlearning, she names the Crown Shop and its list price, and says so when a seasonal offer is not on sale right now. Before, she only knew what NPC shopkeepers sell for gold and had no answer. Her guides now also say who sells both unlearning items and how to open the Crown Shop. Reported in game by Strophios Majere. (baa189e110)
• The Oracle now knows that the Magic Mover is the old name for the Property Manager, and tells players where to open it (Lot Deeds window, a deed's right-click menu, or Manage Lot Claim on the lot sign). Before this it sent anyone asking about the Magic Mover looking for a window that does not exist. Reported by Trinity.
• The Oracle text box is now five lines tall, wraps long lines and scrolls once a message outgrows it, so a bug report can be read back and fixed before sending. Enter still sends; Shift+Enter starts a new line. Suggested by a player through the Oracle.
• The Oracle can now say where the player town Dara Brae is: a Village on a Mistrendur island, found through the /towns directory (#10574).
• The Oracle can now list the towns of the main story: the places on the Love, Truth and Courage paths in order, who you meet in each, and where the final chapter goes. It is a map of the journey, not a walkthrough. (64ffc2186c)
• The Oracle now answers how many character slots an account has: a new free account starts with one, backer pledge tiers include more, and single slots are sold in the Add-Ons store (a8988bba9a, #10622).

Images

Maps

• Redrew the Desolis town map from the town itself. The old hand-painted map drew the pond near the middle of town about 15 m across while the water reaches much further, so a player wading or fishing there showed on dry ground on the minimap and the full map (#10390). The new map is a top-down render of the terrain, with ponds, cliffs and ruins where they stand; the map marker lines up to within 10 cm.
• Explored ground on the Desolis map carries over to the new picture. Fog of war is stored in map cells, so a new map would have slid everyones uncovered area about 75 m; a one-time data step moves each accounts explored cells onto the same ground in the new map.
• The Well of Aldur has a map. The Map window there said "Map not available." and fog of war never cleared, because the zone had no map at all (#10400). The new map is a top-down render of the floating islands with the sky between them left black. It starts fogged like every other map at this tier, and the map marker lines up to within 9 cm.

Balance

• The summoned Ice Elemental now turns aside physical hits half as often. At high Water skill it was glancing about half of all melee hits and outlasting the Earth Elemental, which is meant to be the tank. Its health, slow and resistances are unchanged.

Chat

• The chat moderator on the Traders channel stopped removing ordinary sales posts. A shop ad pricing a town deed at 2.88m had been taken down as a real-money sale; prices in gold shorthand (5k, 2.88m, 1.5 mil, 3kk) now count as in-game gold, and shop, vendor and deed ads are allowed. Selling for real money is still removed. The moderator also now knows which channel a line was posted on. Checked against 14 test lines: the old rules got 1 wrong, the new rules none.

Images

Audio

• The internet radio converts stations to the sound card's sample rate with a windowed-sinc filter instead of linear interpolation. Most Windows sound devices run at 48 kHz and most stations at 44.1 kHz, so nearly every station had a dull, gritty top end since the radio moved off FMOD. Tone tests went from 8-19 dB SNR at 8-15 kHz to over 90 dB. Stereo was measured intact end to end. Reported through the Oracle (#10393).
• Volume sliders now change the sound evenly across their range. They used to fall off steeply: 70% Master was about 16 dB down and 50% about 26 dB down, so many players kept Master at 100% to hear the game. Half a slider is now 6 dB down. Every slider at 100% sounds the same as before, and any slider set lower will be louder after the update (#10501).
• A loading screen that bailed out partway no longer leaves the game quiet until the next zone load. Turning off Mute When Not Focused now always brings the sound back.
• Footsteps from male characters now fade out and stop about 25 meters away. Their falloff never reached silence, so on the Overland Map you could hear another player walking across the continent. Horse and cat mount steps under a male rider share the fix. Reported through the Oracle by Elene Sali.
• The Announce Expiring Buffs warning now names Dodge, Parry, Glancing Blow, Torpor, Vanish and 12 other buffs that used to say "A buff is decaying." Their short opening burst had hidden the longer buff from the list of names we record. The 17 new lines are live without a client patch. Reported by Barugon (#10598).
• The Audio tab of the Options window has a new Pet Sounds slider covering everything tamed and summoned pets make, yours and other players'. Wild creatures and your own character are unaffected. Requested by Zain Rampage (aed40a614f, #10568).

Dev Portal

• The Player Health page gained Past week, Past month and Date to date views next to the single day. A range shows its totals (each player counted once across the range), concurrency and arrivals day by day, and a day-by-day table; clicking a day opens it hour by hour. Ranges go up to 92 days and each view has its own link.
• The Player Health page now loads its script and styles with a version stamp, so a browser holding the previous copy no longer leaves the new Past week and Past month buttons doing nothing.
• The Call to Arms page on the dev portal is live. Game masters can now create, schedule and watch realm-wide goals on the Chaos shard from it. It had been built on Oct 2 but never put on the portal, so the link answered "not found".

Housing

• The Mystic Graff Gem can now be placed as a decoration. It had no model to place, so dragging it onto a display table or case sent it back to the bag. It now sits on displays, floors and walls as a small purple jewel. (#10401)
• Phonographs, jukebox songs and Aether Vibration Devices placed on a lot are now heard only by players standing on that lot. The music fades out over three metres past the lot edge and comes back in step when you walk back on. Broadcast phonographs still play across a whole player town, and decorations in the town itself keep their old distance fade. Requested by Patosh in game (#10402).
• The Carved Oak Weapon Rack sits flush against the walls of a house on a turned lot. It had stopped well short of the wall for the same reason as the fireplaces fixed earlier this week (#10070); a regression test now covers the rack (#10363).
• Placed house pets and Conversationalists no longer wander into furniture. A Dun Foal was found standing inside a picnic table, where it could not be clicked; wander and nap spots now have to leave room for the pets whole body beside tables, benches and crafting stations (d411dc96c0).
• Lot auctions: raising your own maximum while you are already the leading bidder no longer pushes the current price up against yourself, and the raise only takes the difference from your gold.
• Placed decorative crop plants (Nightshade, Tea, Mandrake, Garlic and nine others, plain and Mature) show their name on hover and can be picked up and moved again. Their only collider sat on a layer the hover and click checks skip, so the decoration palette was the only way to remove them. They are now solid to walk into, like the decorative apple tree and tomato plants (#10523).
• Added the Recall Target, a decoration that sets where a Recall Scroll lands you on your lot and which way you face. Before this, a lot recall always put you at the middle of the lot's front edge, which could leave a moved or turned house's door on the far side. It stands on the ground or a house floor, shows only while you place it or have Show Decoration Indicators on, and town decoration merchants sell it with the housewares. Requested by Cora Cuz'abich (c92aa985b6, #10531).
• The four door-style basement and dungeon entrances (Wooden, Gothic Wooden Arched, Studded Wooden Arched, Gothic Metal Arched) can now be resized from 0.80X to 1.20X with Alt+Z and Alt+X, the same range as the hatch entrances, so a door can be shrunk to fit a short wall. Scale keys on a decoration that cannot be resized now say "This decoration cannot be resized." instead of doing nothing.
• Placed Spike Traps, Dart Walls, Flame Jets and Spike Floors show their name on hover and can be picked up and moved again. Their only solid collider sits on the walk-through layer the hover and click checks skip, so the decoration palette was the only way to remove them. Both checks now fall back to that collider when nothing else is under the cursor, and the traps stay walk-through (#10584).
• Chimney extensions can be placed through the floors, ceilings and roof of a house again. The Through-Roof chimney was refused with "Something is already in the way." because the thin rings up its flue counted the ceiling and the sloped attic roof as obstacles; the Average-Ceiling and High-Ceiling pieces had the same trouble with the ceiling above them. The chimney's base still has to keep clear of walls, doors and other decorations. (0889e62b85, #10629)

Pets

• Added a Companion Pet (Choose One) prize bag for events and giveaways. Opening it lets the player pick a capybara, fox, raccoon or red panda. It is not sold in the Crown Store.
• Pets and companions on Follow can now climb a ladder inside a player house after their owner. The house's floors load only when someone steps onto the lot, after the ladder had already given up on finding a path. Ladders in dungeons that load their rooms while you play now wait the same way. (82ba8f0ebc)
• Examining a pet now shows the Summoning level needed to own it, in gray when you meet it and red with your own level when you do not. Examine on another player's pet also opens the pet you clicked instead of their first pet. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye.
• A summoned creature's character sheet now shows the same Damage range in and out of combat mode. Summons put their weapon away outside combat, and the sheet was pricing their attack as barehanded until the player pressed Z. Actual hits were never affected. Reported by Chiasma (728a372806).
• Found why pets could not follow up the ladders inside Brittany's city-wall towers: the tower floors were never part of the pathing bake. The two tower models now feed their floors to the bake, and forced rebakes keep small deck-sized gains instead of discarding them as noise. The floors reach players with the next rebake of those scenes.
• A summon dismissed while hurt and then cast again comes back at full health. It had been returning with the wound and buffs of the one before it. Summons still keep their health across a zone line, and tamed pets still come back hurt after a dismiss (reported by Pulverizer).
• Pets now follow you up and down 13 of the ladders inside Brittany Fields' city-wall towers. The towers' floors were rebaked into the pet pathing map with the navmesh-rebake job. Ten big towers on the far edges of the zone sit outside the area the map covers and are next.

Vendors

• Vendor Listings in Zone now shows a stack listed with "Sell individually" in blue as "total (N each)", matching the vendor's own window. The cross-zone vendor search never carried the per-item price, so every row looked like a whole stack; the search index now stores it. Requested by Chadwyck.
• Vendor owners can now keep a vendor out of the All Zones search in Vendor Listings with a new right-click option, "Exclude from Vendor Listings in All Zones", separate from the zone option. The older "Exclude from Vendor Listings in Zone" option now applies to Vendor Listings searches too, where before it only reached the overnight zone list. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye.
• In Vendor Listings in Zone, a stack sold at a price each with pennies (such as 4.1 gold each) now shows its blue "each" price like whole-gold listings do.

Music

• /play on the test client now finds song files kept in the live game's Sheet Music folder, and /playlist lists them. Before, the test client only read its own folder and answered "song not found" for each one. A song that still can't be found now names the folder the client reads. Reported by Owyn De'Grace.
• /play now also finds songs saved as Song.abc.txt, which Windows produces when file extensions are hidden. They play as songs and show in /playlist.

UI

• The Vendor window Date column no longer reads "De..." at the default window size. Item Name now keeps only the room its longest visible name needs and lends the rest to columns whose text is cut off (#10367).
• A background picture behind the windows (a custom theme's own picture, or the Themes tab Custom Image) now shows in its own colours. It had been drawn at the stock patterns' strength, 6% at the default sliders, which read as a dark silhouette; it now follows Window Opacity alone. The Themes tab hides Pattern Intensity while a picture shows, and both the Themes tab and the Theme Editor now note when a theme's picture is showing in place of the backing pattern (#10371).
• Every theme setting now has one home, requested by Joe Z. The Options Themes tab keeps what applies to every theme (Window Opacity, Highlight Intensity, the fonts), and the Theme Editor holds everything a theme records: backing pattern, background picture with an Open Folder button, Pattern Intensity, Pattern Scale and corner ornaments. The two used to share those rows and either could cancel the other. The editor now opens beside Options instead of closing it. A Backing Pattern, Custom Image or Corner Ornaments choice made on the old Themes tab moves into the player's theme, or into a new theme called My Look, so no window changes on update (#10432).
• Health bars over enemies show up reliably in a fight again. Since the nameplate rendering moved off NGUI, a creature's bar could stay hidden until its next hit and its buff icons could draw as a tinted square, worst while it was poisoned, frozen or burning. A creature's bar now also shows as soon as it starts fighting, even at full health, and a recycled bar no longer opens a fight empty and slowly filling (#10430).
• New Inventory Tooltip Delay option under Options, Interface, Inventory & Items: None, Short, Medium or Long before an item tooltip appears in the backpack, bank, containers, merchant, trade and crafting lists and the paperdoll. None keeps the current timing.
• With Continue Chat After Submit on, the cursor now stays in the chat box after you send a line. Before, every Enter pulled focus out of the box and the window faded.
• Hotbar key labels now update as soon as a slot is rebound. Rebinding Combat Hotbar 1 to X had left the combat bar showing 1 under the slot while X fired it; the catchphrase bar and instrument keyboard labels got the same fix (2b87bc9333).
• Fixed a login where the mouse pointer was gone, a cross sat in the middle of the screen and the camera turned with every mouse move. Saved settings had switched camera mode on with no key bound to Toggle Cursor, the only way out of it. The game now keeps the normal pointer until Toggle Cursor has a key. Reported by Elene Sali.
• The Teleport to Friend Scroll lights its Teleport button for party members again. Players it cannot reach are greyed out and show the reason on hover, and a double-click follows the same rule (reported by Salenia).
• The right-click menu on the long-lasting buffs hourglass is now titled "Cancel a long-lasting effect". It used to repeat the tooltip heading, which made the list of "Dismiss" entries look like buff details.
• Added an Offset New Windows option to Options, Themes. Turned off, bags, chests and loot windows open exactly where they were last put instead of stepping aside from windows already open. Requested through the in-game Oracle.
• On the Linux client, typing into the backpack search or chat froze the whole game for several seconds, longer the more was typed, with every key and click held back until it ended. The accent support added on Oct 1 asked the desktop for the keyboard state up to four times per character from the game itself, and on Ubuntu 24.04 each of those answers could take a long time. It now reads the keyboard on a thread of its own, so the game never waits for it, and it can be switched off live for the shard or one tester (#10520, dc95892282).
• The keybinding list on the Options Controls tab has All, Bound and Unbound buttons beside its Filter box, so actions with no key (or only the bound ones) can be listed on their own and combined with a typed search. Empty slots now read "None" in a dimmer italic so they stand apart from real keys.
• With Buff Icon Size or Health Bar Size turned up, the party member list now moves down to sit below your own status frame instead of drawing the first member's name under your buff icons. It moves back up when the frame shrinks again. Reported through the Oracle (#10357).
• The Vendor Items window (Locate Player Vendor Items) has sortable column headings for item name, quantity, price, location and time remaining. Quantity, price and time left were not shown before; the window still opens with items on standing vendors ahead of the stored ones. Requested by Chadwyck.
• The Crown Shop shows the "Sale Ends" time under each sale item from the first open. The timer never started when the window first opened, so the line stayed blank until the shop was closed and reopened (d5fc0e8cf1, #10572).
• A container window now closes when you empty it one item at a time by double-click, Alt+click or dragging, the same as it already did after Take All. Your own backpack and the bags in it still stay open (#10560).
• The Social button in the top-right corner shows the number of friends online again as soon as you enter the world. When the friends list finished loading before the interface appeared, the count stayed hidden until a friend logged on or off or you switched windows (#10343).
• The character screen now shows an Add Character Slot button when every character slot on the account is in use. A new account has one slot, and after its first character the screen gave no way to make a second one and no reason why. The button opens the store page for an extra slot (388e6f8b51, #10624).
• The conversation window's topic buttons, the "To <NPC>:" label and the goodbye and vendor buttons now draw at the same text size as the dialogue, and Oracle answers and the Oracle typing box moved up to the same size (reported by Astirian, #10623).

Infrastructure

• The cross-zone vendor search index on chaos gained a per-item price field. The mapping update and a full reindex (281,262 listings and 13,207 buy orders in 48 seconds) ran with the indexer staying online, and 427 split listings and 94 buy orders now carry the price.

Taming

• Animal Lore no longer fails to show its readout on a creature whose spawn had no creature type assigned yet; such a creature now simply reads as not tameable.

World

• At the Vertas Pass control point, players caught by the final-wave tornado fell through the map. The tornado throws whoever it touches to a fixed landing spot, and the scene had that spot set about 26 m under the ground. It now drops players on the hillside south of the flag, the same place the house teleporters already use, and a test checks the landing stays above the terrain. Vauban Pass, the other point with a live tornado, was checked and lands players on the surface (#10368).
• The weapon shop in Aerie no longer looks like it floats. The ground along its street side sat 8 to 22 cm below the stone base for most of the wall, and 58 cm at the far corner. It now meets the base all the way round, and the walkable area in front was updated to match (#10354).

Inventory

• The Repair entry on an item menu checks the item again when clicked and skips bag items it cannot read, so it no longer does nothing on a click after the bags changed.
• New Open Banks and Containers on All Items setting under Options, Interface, Inventory & Items. Off by default, so bank and container windows still reopen on the filter tab you picked last; turned on, they always open on All Items. The backpack keeps its remembered tab either way. Requested in game by phil.
• Quick Deposit no longer greys out when the container already holds a full stack of 32,767. What will not fit starts a new stack beside it while the container has a free slot, and the notice says so when it has none. Undo takes a new stack back whole.
• Added two backpack options, Show Backpack Title and Show Backpack Search Bar, in the backpack's own Options panel and under Options > Interface. With the search bar hidden the window can be dragged one row shorter, and a picked category still filters and shows in the title. Requested by Keyman.
• The Quick Deposit button on a container window no longer greys out when none of your stacks match the container. Pressing it now moves nothing and says why, where before a crafting chest holding none of your hides showed a dead button with no explanation (#10529).
• Search All My Stuff now names a lot by the name you gave it in the Location column, so in:"lot name" lists the items on that lot. It used to report a count and show none of them. Unnamed lots show the house name instead of an internal id.
• A bag holding 16 or more empty bags can be moved into a house chest or the bank again. The client counted every bag packed inside it toward the per-move limit, while the server counts only the outer bag (3954077c93).
• The Show Objects in Containers checkbox now belongs to the window it is ticked in. The backpack, bank, chests and bags, and lot storage each remember their own choice, so ticking it in the bank no longer flattens the backpack beside it. Existing settings carry over to every window. (682376dc58)

Sieges

• Creatures in a Cabalist's army now fight back while they follow him. Before, a creature walking after him could not be hurt and ignored whoever hit it, and one mid-fight would break off and run after him whenever he moved. A creature that is being hit now stays in the fight unless he drags it well past its usual range, and a hit on one walking after him turns it on the attacker. Worst in the Cabalist Stronghold. Reported by Barugon.

Towns

• A town message of the day set from the Town Console stayed up for only 30 minutes on chaos before the countdown ran out. It now lasts a year, the same as on the live game. Guild messages of the day had the same 30 minute limit and were fixed with it (#10424).

Add-Ons

• Add-ons can now set a skill to train, maintain, unlearn or stop (add-on API 27), and can read and change which skills the HUD skill advancement column shows, so an add-on can stand in for the Skills window. Training changes follow the Skills window's rules and only happen when the player clicks the add-on, presses its key or types a command. Requested by shawn.
• Add-on API 28: ShroudSetPlayerVitalBarsVisible lets an add-on that draws its own health and focus bars hide the game's while it runs; they come back when the add-on is turned off (#10449).

Housing

• Dragging a placed decoration on a lot that was still loading no longer fails; the grab now waits while the button is held and picks the decoration up once the lot is ready. A move started from the decoration palette is ignored until the lot is ready.
• Lamps, candles, fireplaces and chandeliers placed inside a house no longer light the outside walls and ground at night. Indoor deco lights now cast shadows that keep the light inside, including the many lights that shipped with shadows off, and they get first claim on shadow slots over outdoor lamps (#10412).
• Moving items between a lot and a bag inside a placed chest now shows up in that chest's View Log. The moves always worked, but the log skipped them and chat showed a red "not found" line after each one. Destroying an item inside such a bag had the same problem. (fd5a1d7898)
• The Property Manager got a Locate Lot button on each deed card for a lot in your current zone. It marks the lot on your compass, opens the compass, and clears once you arrive. The deed right-click menus offer it too, greyed out for lots in other towns. Requested by Chiasma.

Trading

• Teaching a recipe or emote in a trade no longer fails with a bare "Failed to update the trade." A recipe or emote you cannot teach is now refused when you drop it, onto the trade list or onto the other player, and crafting a recipe no longer makes the Recipe Book show it as teachable when the server says it is not. If the server still turns a teach down, chat now says why and your recipes and emotes refresh. (#10442)

Client

• Fixed an error logged when a creature spawner was removed by a zone unloading while its creature was still loading in.

Crafting

• The enchant and bonus effect picker now keeps its Revise Effects button in view on items with long names. Socketed armor names pushed the button off the edge of the window, so players enchanting a socketed chest never saw a reroll offer. Long names now end in an ellipsis instead. Reported through the Oracle (#10448).
• Pork Sausage Links had been on sale at butcher stalls with no recipe that used it, and Sausage Casing could not be bought at all. Two new Cooking recipes: Pork Sausage Links (Cooking 20, pork, casing and curing salt make four links) and Sausage and Eggs (Cooking 40, a food with the Bacon buff that uses two links and two eggs). Both scrolls are sold by the cooking recipe merchants, and bakers and cooking supplies shops now stock Sausage Casing. (#10463)
• Quick Craft with a very full bag no longer drags the interface. With 3,500 items in the backpack, a batch of 100 crafts held the game at about 4 frames a second, so windows would not move and chat would not type. During a batch the crafting window, the recipe list and the bag lists now update twice a second, and each recipe list update checks your bags once instead of once per recipe. In an offline test the same batch of 100 went from 113 seconds to 24. (d9fe90b879, #10595)
• Pork Sausage Links finally have a use. A new Cooking recipe makes them from Pork Meat, Sausage Casing and Curing Salt, and a new Grilled Sausages dish (Cooking 30) turns three links, an onion and cooking oil into a one-hour meal buff with +3 Strength. Butchers now stock Sausage Casing, and the recipe scrolls sell beside Salt Cured Pork and Squirrel Skewers. Reported by Diablotine (f22f933cba).

Audio

• Fixed an error logged when a book narration was stopped while the next chapter was still downloading.
• Eretria Moonglow, the alchemist in the Aerie Elixirium, no longer speaks with a loud echo. Her shop is a wizard tower whose stone halls carry a long reverb, and spoken lines went into it at full strength. NPC voices and catchphrases now keep a little of the room at a lower reverb level, so they sound clear inside the towers (#10353).

Pets

• Pets on Follow now come up and down 30 more town and wilderness ladders, vines and ropes, among them the stables ladders in Aerie and Brittany Wharf, a Port Graff guard tower, the Harvest palisade and the Solace Bridge siege tower. An audit of 27 zones found 467 of 581 ladders already linked; the rest each missed walkable ground at one end, and now carry a per-ladder correction instead (891fdae69c).

NPCs

• Fixed an error logged when a zone change started while the camera was fading out of an NPC conversation.
• Frieda in Kingsport and Noella and James Cook in Aerie had a blank Goodbye button that did nothing. It now reads Goodbye and ends the conversation, and any NPC missing a goodbye line gets a working button instead of a blank one. (c04f7ed4c5)
• Creatures that sank into rock or a wall stayed inside it, where every attack on them was refused. This showed up in The Obsidian Panopticon and elsewhere since the 2026-09-22 fix for bouncing creatures on the Jotungrund ice. The check that decides whether a creature has fallen through the ground now looks down from the walkable surface above it, so a creature inside a rock is put back on top of it within a second. Jotungrund's ice creatures still walk without bouncing (#10403).

Tools

• New Ladder Link Audit Editor tool: checks every ladder in a zone against its navigation data, reports why each one a pet cannot use fails, and writes the corrections.
• The navmesh-rebake Jenkins job gained a FORCE option that rebakes named scenes even when they look unchanged, for prefab edits the per-scene check cannot see.

Offline

• Offline play: the character screen no longer logs an error while checking whether quest progress can be reset.

AI

• Fixed two pathfinding errors: a guide wisp route from a spot with no walkable neighbour, and a creature starting to flee as its zone unloaded.

Tools

• Grant mail: staff can now queue make-good mail for players from a script, and the game servers deliver it with a letter explaining why. Each mail goes out once even if the script is run again. First batch: 23 characters who lost Tangulmyr spirit wheel and Vishpop's story daily rewards to a bug between September 30 and October 3 get the missed maces and experience after the next chaos update. (52b951d2c6)

Creatures

• Town guards and other NPCs no longer get stuck walking in mid air. Something could occasionally lift an NPC to about roof height, and since mid-September nothing brought it back down, so a Forewind guard was seen patrolling above the street. An NPC left in the air now drops back to the ground within about a second. A creature standing over a gap in the ground is still held in place.
• The Yellow dragons on the Dragon Beach in Northwest Blackblade Mountains respawn about four minutes after a kill again. The dragon update had slowed the whole beach to 15 minutes for the first dragon and 30 for the second when it meant to slow only the Ancient Yellow, which stays rare. Reported by Sethanon.
• A creature's health number shows its real maximum on players who are not running that creature. The target frame could read "7000 / 0" for a whole fight on the Blackblade dragons. Reported by Sethanon.

UI

• The UI Scale slider now starts from the Windows display scale for anyone who has never moved it, so the interface comes out about as large as Windows draws everything else. A 1080p laptop at 125% starts at 125%, a 1440p monitor at 100% at 83%, and a 4K monitor at 100% at 75%. A size you picked yourself is kept, and Options Reset to Defaults sets it from the display again.
• The character sheet now draws a yellow border around worn gear that is almost broken (20% durability or less), alongside the red border on broken gear, and the border updates as gear wears with the sheet open. The right-click gear list colours low durability the same way. Requested by Estroma Tólito.
• New setting Show Health and Focus Bars on Player Frame (Options, Interface, Character & Progress) hides the health, focus and vigor bars on your own status frame, for players whose add-on draws its own. Your name and buffs stay. On by default, so nothing changes unless you untick it. Requested by shawn through the Oracle (#10449).

Quests

• The Read the Handbook task in Solace Bridge, Highvale and Blood River Outskirts now completes when you read the New Player Handbook on the plinth. Before, the trainer said you had read it while the task stayed open. Asking the trainer about the handbook also closes a task left open by the old bug.
• Fixed the Speak with Arabella task left by a quest reset staying on the compass and over Arabella forever for characters who had already started all three paths or reached the Oracle. The journal marked it done after any greeting, but the marker only cleared on three greetings those characters never hear; it now clears on the same conditions as the journal. (e13bc58e7b)

Travel

• The Teleport to Zone destination list now includes the Town Crier in Port Mirren, The Brave Coast, Estercove and the ten forest villages that share two town layouts. Those towns had a crier arrival point in place that was never switched on, so the list showed only docks and gates (0ee777bade).
• A signpost renamed in a player-owned town now shows its new name in the Teleport to Zone destination list right away. The list used to wait up to an hour for a background pass, so renamed, newly placed and picked-up signposts all showed their old state until then (7bfac249ce).

Combat

• Added a test that checks every damage type against the hit-effect table. On the current chaos build, a Sound hit (the dragon roar, bard songs) stops partway, so an NPC takes no damage from it. That is already fixed for the next update. (f7e21fa776)
• A Water specialist's cold spells now each show the Melee Damage Taken line in their debuff tooltip on the target. Only the strongest chill counts, so one icon shows it plainly and the others add a grey note naming the spell already being counted. Before this, Ice Fist could show no chill at all when an Ice Field had landed first. (#10352)

Towns

• Two more retired player towns, Alpha Centauri and Rift's Legacy, no longer show in /towns, the beacon list or the teleport scroll's zone list. Their old map spots belong to Isle of Apples and Rift's End, but their old entries still marked them as teleport destinations. A short retired-town list now keeps them out, along with The Barren Shores. Reported by a tester. The directory lists 406 towns.

Patch Notes

• Patch notes are now written for players. Each chaos build gets a short list of what changed in the game, under fixed headings, instead of a copy of this work log. After each chaos deploy a writing step reads everything that went into the build and keeps only what players will notice (003e51d8d1).
• The patch notes page shows one combined list when a link covers several builds, newest changes first under each heading, with a build-by-build view a click away. A build whose notes are still being written says so and fills in on its own. Builds before 302 link to this work log for their week.
• Launcher: a What's New panel shows the patch notes inside the launcher as an update starts, with a link to the full page; the browser no longer opens by itself. It ships with the next launcher release (c4285daa0d).
• /patchnotes in chat opens the patch notes for the build you are running instead of the old shroudoftheavatar.com page (15a5849035).

Trade

• Trading no longer locks up after a player leaves the zone with a trade window open. The old window could stay up after loading, the next trade would not open, and Cancel did nothing until the next zone change. Walking out of range mid-trade now sends one cancel instead of one per frame. (4fb01d4061)

Release

• Added a release check that fetches every file of a new patch the way the launcher does, through the CDN and from the main patch server, and compares each one with the signed manifest. It also fails any file too large for the CDN to cache, and promotions to chaos now run it before anything moves. Patch 303 passed on Windows, macOS and Linux (6,464 files).
• Wrote a patch release runbook covering every step from the nightly build to players: the CDN check, promotion, post-release checks, the manual Steam step, patch notes and rollback.
• The patch release runbook now has a step for warning players: an in-game message and a Discord post 10 minutes before the release, with message templates, on top of the automatic warning sent just before the server restarts.
• Patch 303 is live on chaos. Downloads go through the CDN again, after two days on the main patch server since the slow patching on 10-01; the CDN was preloaded with every changed file before the switch, and every file was checked first.
• Prepared Patch 304 for chaos: the build is being uploaded to Steam ahead of the flip, the CDN check passed on all three platforms, and the release checklist now includes the Desolis map fog migration that has to run while the servers are down. The Steam upload script also runs from Windows again (f1e04c6ccc).
• Patch 304 went live on chaos and Steam. Steam had the build uploaded before the switch, so Steam players waited about 7 minutes instead of 26 last time. The Desolis map fog migration ran before players could log back in (66 explored maps carried over to the new map).
• Fixed the public patch notes, which had stopped at build 301 because the notes tool read only one platform's record of each release. A second fix stops the tool from marking test-only builds as released (f4fb3f0956).
• Owed after the patch: 23 characters who missed quest rewards got their make-good mail, and the Player Health page gained 1,064 logins that happened before the server started recording them.

Social

• Raised the friend list limit from 10,000 to 25,000 after a player passed 10,000 friends and could no longer add anyone. The login load now fetches friend names and last-online times in batches of 1,000 instead of two lookups per friend, and the list arrives in pages about four times larger, so a very large friend list fills in much faster.

Steam

• Steam uploads are now labelled Patch N in the Steamworks build list, in place of an internal build code, so the right build is easy to pick when setting it live.
• Patch releases now upload the build to Steam before the server switches over, so Steam players get the new patch within minutes of the restart instead of waiting for the upload to finish.
• On Windows, the window Steam shows when you press Play now lists the normal window first as Play Shroud of the Avatar and names the other entry Play Shroud of the Avatar (Borderless Window). Players had been picking the borderless entry by mistake and reporting a missing title bar. The "(Unity 6)" tag is gone from every entry, and Patch 303 is live on Steam.

Skills

• Asking a town Oracle to "unmake one skill" makes Instant Unlearn free for ten minutes, for as many skills as you like: pick the level, confirm, and the experience goes back to your pool with no Obsidian Item of Unlearning needed or used. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye. (84fe996c8e)
• Clicking a Bard skill at another trainer, and asking the Oracle where Bard is taught, now name Vikland only. Both used to add the Ruins of Utheim, where Oski the Bard trainer has never appeared (his spawn there was switched off). The scene analyzer behind both now skips NPCs that never spawn, so other zones cannot make the same claim. Reported by Rovol (#10508).
• The Skills window has a new line under its tabs with each side's experience: Adventurer XP and Producer XP, each as an earned total (the figure the level comes from) and the amount held in skills right now. Hovering it explains the gap between the two. It follows the Show Skill Experience Numbers option. Requested by Steve Sosaria (#10466).

Localization

• The town Oracle's unlearn offers (reset everything, reset adventurer or producer skills, unmake one skill) are now translated into all eight languages; they showed in English before. (488de1ff07)
• Three new Options settings (Show Backpack Title, Show Backpack Search Bar, Show Gear Effects on My Character) got fresh translation ids so their translations can never show on the new keybinding filter buttons that took the same ids.
• The Show Auto-Attack Status option got its own translation id; it had shared one with the keybinding lists All button.

Launcher

• The launcher now closes a leftover copy of the games crash reporter before it patches. After the Patch 303 restart some players were stuck at 1213 of 1225 files, because a crash reporter from their last session was still running and Windows would not let the launcher replace it. Ships with the next launcher update.
• Released launcher v58 on Windows, macOS and Linux. It closes a leftover game crash reporter that left some players stuck at 1213 of 1225 files after Patch 303, shows the curated patch notes in a Whats New panel, and reports downloads from the main patch server correctly when the CDN is off. Installed launchers update themselves the next time they start.
• Launcher v59: when Windows refuses to let the launcher replace a game file, it now clears a read-only flag, closes a leftover crash reporter from any folder, or moves the old file out of the way, then finishes the patch. This covers the players still stuck at 1213 of 1225 files after v58.
• The Mac launcher now names itself Shroud of the Avatar Launcher in the menu bar, matching its window title (the menu still said Chaos Shard after the rename). New downloads unzip to Shroud of the Avatar Launcher.app; an existing install updates in place and keeps its old file name, so Dock icons, game files and settings stay where they are. Ships with the next launcher build.

Nameplates

• Fixed a huge red bar strip that could float in the world near giants and other creatures. A health bar that had faded out could switch back on frozen at its old size and angle when the creature faded in or out; hidden bars now stay hidden (#10361).
• Health bars, bar frames and buff icons no longer hang over far away creatures at many times their normal size. On build 303 a hidden nameplate could be switched back on by the creature's fade while it still carried a stale size and the creature's facing, so the giant bar moved and turned with its creature until the player walked close. Reported by Patosh.
• The party list now shows each member's name and bars only, so a full party no longer runs down most of the screen. A new Show Titles and Guilds in Party List setting under Options, Interface brings the title and guild lines back (off by default). Floating names over players also drop their title and guild lines while that player is in combat (182442d261, #10411).
• Reviewed the giant health bar fix (dca154cb7d). The diagnosis holds: a plate hidden by distance keeps its stale size and facing, and anything that re-enables its draw calls shows it that way. The new forceRenderingOff guard is correct, but it only holds because the earlier change (347b481b34) keeps those draw calls out of the character fade, which otherwise rewrites that flag whenever a far creature dithers. Wrote that dependency into the code comment (27dafae3f9).
• Added a test for the guard that keeps far creatures' bars from drawing giant (1749fa5ff0, #10474). It covers the path a distance-hidden plate really takes, where the plate is switched off and nothing rebuilds it.

Patcher

• The map picture for Aerie and Ardoris was missing from the build 303 patch on every platform, Steam included, so their M map showed blank. When the map sheets were split into smaller files, the patch publisher mistook the first file, which holds those two towns, for a leftover of an older split and left it out. The publisher now only skips a file when the new split clearly replaces it, and it lists every file it skips. The next patch brings the two maps back with a 7 MB download.

Hotbar

• Utility bar slots now show the key set for them under Utility Hotbar 1-10 in Options. Before, a rebind left the slot showing 1 or !, so it looked like the rebind had done nothing. Key bindings that use Shift now work with either Shift key, where Shift + 1 bound with Left Shift used to do nothing under Right Shift. (61918e8e5c, #10541)

Portal

• New Announcements page on the dev portal: staff set a message the server repeats to everyone online as the Admin chat line, every 5 minutes to once a day, with an optional start and end, send now, switch off and archive. The master server sends at most one message every 30 seconds and keeps each message on its own clock across restarts. Live tunable announcements.enabled holds them all. Not on chaos yet.

HUD

• Added an optional Auto-Attack status box: tick Show Auto-Attack Status under Options, Interface, Character & Progress and a small box shows Auto-Attack On, Off, or Off (Basic Attacks Off) at all times, dimmed while your weapon is put away. It can be dragged while Lock Status Movement is off and Reset Positions puts it back beside the player frame. Requested by Chaos Shadowstorm.
• The top-right help pop-ups ("Your equipment is damaged!", low ammo, encumbered) now leave 16px of space above them instead of 8px, so they no longer crowd the skill progression icons or a task list parked on the right (977bfce5d6, #10633).

Options

• Added Show Gear Effects on My Character under Options > Interface > Character & Progress. Turning it off hides the skin a Ring of the Cuttlekin, Frogkin or LichKind ring puts on your character, plus the effects on masks and hats such as the Grim Reaper Mask 2016. It only changes your own screen, so other players still see them. Set per character, requested in game by Joe. (dfe92a0a4b)

Performance

• Greymark Forest had the highest draw-call count of any zone, about twice its sibling forest. Its reflective water was redrawing every shadow in range to build a reflection where shadows cannot be seen; the reflection now skips them. Gathering also stopped keeping a leftover wood chip effect per swing for the whole length of a harvest chain. Reported through the Oracle by Sandie Oreos.

Server

• Sent the missed daily quest rewards by in-game mail to the 23 characters a reward bug had shorted, plus one more character found in a follow-up check. No rewards have been refused since Patch 304 went live.

Magic

• The Chaotic Feedback description now lists its side effects: Life Attunement drops further the longer the buff runs, discarding a rune costs health, and drained focus costs health. It also says Chaos Specialization reduces these costs without removing them. A tester without the specialization had read the Life Attunement penalty as a bug.

Addons

• Community Addons: pressing Install now also installs any add-on the chosen one needs. Buff Monitor System installed without the SotA Event System add-on used to report "Installed" and then show as not installed, because the game skipped it at load. An add-on that is on disk but could not start now shows as installed with the reason, and can be removed.

Leaderboards

• Deaths to a GM's event monsters now count as deaths to creatures on the Leaderboards. They had been counted under To Players, and the GM was credited with a PvP kill for each one (#10596).

Achievements

• Apprentice, Journeyman and Master Seedsman now count different crops you plant (10, 20 and all 30). They asked for farming recipes, which do not exist, so nobody could earn them. Planting the same crop again does not add to the count, and an Eternal seed counts as its ordinary crop.
• Removed the Miner, Forager, Woodsman, Skinner and Fishmonger recipe achievements. No recipes exist for those skills, so they could never progress; gathering and fishing are still counted by the Gatherer and Angler achievements.
• Mylo the greyhound in Castle Atos now stands still just south of the shrine, inside the castle walls. He had been standing behind the east wall, where he could be selected but nobody could get close enough for /pet to count toward Pet Every Dog!. A new test now checks that nothing stands between him and the courtyard. (bc5e3219fc)

Dialogue

• Five starter trainers (Leonard in Highvale Outskirts, Lieutenants Corliss and Tilton in Solace Bridge Outskirts, Zosimus in Blood River Outskirts and the Solace Bridge combat trainer) no longer say they cannot teach free attack or send players to Vertas for it. They now explain the Toggle Auto-Attack key, in all eight translated languages. The Italian "Auto-Attack Disabled" message also said "Enabled" and now says "Disabled".

Books

• The Free Attack guide book no longer tells players to find a combat trainer to unlock the technique. It now explains the Toggle Auto-Attack key, in English and the six languages the book is translated into.

Crown Store

• The Crown Store Sales page now also records lot deed upgrades paid in crowns, both at the lot sign and for a deed in the pack. Each one is listed as a Deed Upgrade sale and shows the deed it was upgraded from. Recording starts on chaos with the next server release.

Items

• The Royal Scepter and Royal Orb tooltips now always say whether the item can be used: either the time left until the next use or that it is ready now. They used to show nothing unless the item was cooling down. Results in Search All My Stuff also show the full item tooltip on hover.

Voice

• The reworded free attack lines of Leonard, Lieutenant Corliss, Lieutenant Tilton, Zosimus and the Solace Bridge combat trainer are voiced again, and the Free Attack guide book reads its new text aloud.

Books

• The general bookseller no longer lists the same book twice. The three Blade of the Avatar volumes and Hearts of New Britannia showed at both 500 and 50 gold under two names, and seven shorter tales were doubled under different titles (#10600). The extra listings from the September book pass are gone, each book sells once at its original name and price, and copies players already own still read and sell. A new test fails if the bookseller ever stocks one book text twice.

Interface

• With Cursor Size above 1.00x, the cursor no longer stays invisible after you let go of the right mouse button from turning the camera, which a Linux player reported (b68820d4d8).

Onboarding

• Saying no once to Anaïs on the Isle of Storms now clears Talk to Mischievous Child from the task list. Before, it stayed next to Enter the Lunar Rift until you left the island unless you turned her down a second time. (b348259055)

Leaderboards

• The Leaderboards window counts only play since the October 1 launch. The 30 Days view had still been adding up the September test period: one player's 30-day kills read 20,942 and now read 1,056, matching the 7 Days view until a full week has passed. Control point runs and the guild and town prestige ladders start at launch too; career boards such as Slayers still show lifetime totals. Reported through the Oracle (081ff685b8, #10129).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-01 is up: The team spent Thursday taking the launcher apart seven times until patching stopped getting stuck, then fixed the two loading percentages that were throwing players back to the login screen. Eleven player towns got walking maps built with their own landmarks, so guards and pets stop strolling through statues and shop walls. There is also a new elephant, and a Chaos Bolt tooltip that finally admits what the spell does. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Commerce

• Dragon Essence and Fire Elemental Essence can now be ordered on player merchants. Both were missing from the list of items you can place a buy order for, while every other essence was on it (1d086e1cd8).

Rendering

• Harvestable pine and maple trees sway in the wind again. The fade and highlight effects shared by game objects were overwriting the wind data on these trees, so they stood still among the moving forest. Reported by Dravos Serpenthelm (25dd00e34a, #10107).

Infra

• Restored the Catnip Dark theme on the team tracker. A container recreate in September had dropped it back to the stock light theme. The login box, which still showed the old cream panel and light autofill fields, is now dark too.
• The server's slow-operation warning (any action taking 200 ms or more) is now logged as a warning instead of an error, so the error log shows faults only (6ad044272c).
• Nightly backups of the web box now include the proposal page comments and votes and the team Discord bot's state, which had been left out of the backup set.
• The pre-flip CDN warm now probes its spot-checked files from the machine running the flip and compares the Cloudflare PoP on each end. A HIT from a second PoP is evidence Smart Tiered Caching is on for the zone; a MISS there is a warning that names the dashboard toggle. The flip never waits on it.
• The one game asset over Cloudflare's 512 MB cache cap stays uncached by decision: it only moves on a first install, and the storage bucket served it at about 92 MB/s when measured.

UI

• Health bars over heads keep their colored strip after a zone change. After teleporting or zoning, the bars over your own head, your pets and enemies could go blank, leaving only the name and numbers, until you zoned again. The bar texture now survives the character fade that runs when a character loads into a zone (f4d678dd3a, #10130).
• The add-player box in Lot Permissions, the door and vendor Edit Access window and the Town Console Citizens tab now has an Add button (it reads Ban on the lot Banned tab). Enter used to be the only way to add a name, and the "Add Player..." text beside the box looked like a button that did nothing. A name the game cannot find now shows a not-found message in all of them. (05b4cdb546)
• Pressing Tab after clicking a window no longer moves the typing cursor into the chat box, which made the next movement keys type into chat. Tab now only does what it is bound to (Next Target by default, or Toggle Cursor), still hops between text fields while typing, and can be bound in the Controls tab without the rebind getting cancelled (a10bc687b6, #10115).
• Shopkeepers, trainers, bankers and other service NPCs no longer show a health bar under their name. A merchant below full health used to wear a red bar in town (Magic Merchant Opal on Mystic Isle). (#10096)
• The Stats tab on the character sheet now shows the PvP critical damage multiplier the combat roll uses. The figure in brackets on the physical and spell rows was half the main number, so a 200% multiplier read 100% against players while crits really hit for 141%. Weapon Critical Damage gear now raises the physical row as a percentage on top, as it does in combat, where it used to be added in. The hover text no longer says PvP damage is halved (97a03381ef, #10144).
• The quantity window for splitting a stack has a Max button that fills in the whole stack in one click, so moving a full stack no longer needs a slider drag or typing; merchant buy and sell quantities get it too (18999d9314). Requested by Karoth A'lmanar.
• Worn gear on the Character Sheet and a pets toy now offer Repair from the right-click menu during combat. Before, the menu came up empty whenever a weapon was drawn. Every other option on it still waits until combat ends. (c37ead6002)
• Skill tooltips in the Skills window now show the skill's XP Multiplier (for example Gust x0.5, Discharge x1, Chain Lightning x2), including on skills not yet learned, so training costs can be compared before committing. The value was never shown in the game before.

Call to Arms

• Added Call to Arms: a game master can set a goal for the whole realm with a deadline, such as slaying 4,000 Kobolds in four hours, catching fish, gathering an ore or crafting an item. Every player on every server counts toward it, a party kill counts once for the realm and once for each member, and an announcement goes out when a call starts and when it ends.
• While a Call to Arms runs, a gold line under the compass shows the realm's count and the time left. Clicking it opens the Call to Arms window with the goal, a progress bar, the rewards on offer and how much you have added yourself.
• A Call to Arms the realm completes can grant a blessing for some hours (more adventurer experience, producer experience, gold from creatures and chests, or resources from mining, logging and skinning), for everyone or only for those who took part, shown as a buff-bar icon. It can also mail an item to everyone who added at least a set amount. The bonuses are applied by the server.
• Added a Call to Arms page to the dev portal for creating, scheduling and watching calls, with controls to cancel one, finish it early or re-send its item rewards. Call to Arms reaches the test shard with the next deploy.
• Fixed problems in Call to Arms found in review before it reaches the test shard. A gather or loot goal counts only items from creatures, chests and resource nodes, so salvaging, unpacking or opening mystery boxes no longer adds to it, and kill goals have their own limit of 30 kills a minute per player (300 for other goals).
• A Call to Arms blessing for those who took part shows on the buff bar after logging back in, including after the call has left the compass. The portal's re-send button for item rewards works on calls that ended long ago, and a reward item the server cannot find no longer leaves the delivery stuck open.
• Reviewed the Call to Arms counting before it reaches the test shard and fixed what the review found. An item won on a party roll now counts toward a gather goal when the winner claims it (it never did). A resource node counts only what the node itself yielded, so a bag filled from elsewhere and then harvested adds nothing. Credit banked in the last few seconds before the realm reached the goal is kept for the player who earned it; before, every other server threw that batch away, and a player one kill short of the item minimum lost the mail.
• Smaller Call to Arms fixes from the same review: fishing goals use the 30 a minute cap kills have (one credit per catch), gather and craft credit is banked only after the item move or the craft has been written, a partly failed write no longer credits the rows that did land a second time, and the per-player rate window is each player's own minute.
• Fixed the dev portal's Call to Arms page from the same review: a second request cannot replace one still waiting for the master (a Force complete over somebody's Cancel used to pay the rewards instead of withdrawing the call), a re-run of item mail on a call that ended days ago keeps its card on the board, a retitle no longer trips over a regenerated catalog, and the page warns when more than one master has started against the database lately.
• Fixed the Call to Arms client from the same review. Logging out and in as another account on the same client no longer inherits the first account's blessing icon and "Your part"; a blessing icon the first status reply missed is asked for again; a scheduled call held behind another reads "waiting to begin" instead of "in under a minute" for an hour; after a call ends the window stops asking you to add more, says whether you earned the item, and lists a failed call's rewards under "What was on offer".
• The Call to Arms window now has a Top of the realm list: the ten players who have added the most, by character name and amount, and your own rank among everyone who answered. It refreshes with the rest of the window every half minute while it is open.

HUD

• The target frame can be picked up by its effect icons again. A press on a buff or debuff icon under its bars was treated as a press on a window and ignored, so the frame often would not move. Changing the screen resolution now also pulls your own, target and pet frames back on screen if the new size left them hanging off an edge.
• Double-clicking the long-lasting effects hourglass on your buff bar now lays every buff it holds out as its own icon right after it, so each one can be hovered or dismissed. A second double-click folds them back in. The hourglass gets a gold edge while it is open, and its tooltip says which way the next double-click goes. Your own frame only, since party and target rows have no room for the extra icons. Requested by Brick. (a587168c1a)

Pets

• The pet sheet (Examine) and the Pet tab on the character sheet now show the critical damage multiplier of your pet under each critical chance row, one row for physical attacks and one for spells. Elementals had no multiplier row before, since the only one shown was for melee and ranged attacks. The PvP figure in brackets now matches the combat roll: a 200% multiplier reads 141% there, where it used to read 100%. Requested through the Oracle by Sethanon (bbee4b5f07, #10124).
• Companion critical hit chance and critical hit damage bonuses from gear and skills now reach summoned elementals. Their attacks are magic, and the bonuses used to apply only to physical attacks, so they did nothing for elementals and the Pet tab spell critical rows never moved.
• Pets now keep a fight after Pet Taunting Training runs out. The end of the taunt used to send every creature the pet was holding back to the tamer, including the threat the pet had earned by fighting, so a pet held nothing past each 12-second window and the tamer came out of it with about twice the threat they had going in. A pet that dies still hands its fight to the tamer. Reported by a player through the Oracle (#10119).
• A pet's Aggro Power now also raises the threat from its own hits and swings. Before, it only reached rune and healing threat, so the taunt and taming gear did nothing for the threat a pet builds while fighting. The tamer's share of the pet's threat is unchanged.
• A pet under Pet Taunting Training now holds the creature it is fighting while its tamer stands back: for the length of the taunt the pet keeps its full threat anywhere inside its tether, the tamer takes no share of it, a creature that turns to the tamer is pulled back on the pet's next hit, and using the taunt no longer draws nearby enemies onto the tamer. Reported by Chiasma through the Oracle.
• Tamed pets stay with the fight. A pet no longer sets off on a long route around a ledge, wall or stream to reach a target a few metres away, and it only picks up a new target it can reach without leaving its tether. /verbose pet says when it lets a target go for either reason (329df2ad8f).

Skills

• Sending unspent XP to another character on your account failed every time for characters whose pool held starting-skill experience they had trained back down. The XP tab and the send window offered the whole pool, and the server only accepts up to the lifetime XP the character earned. Both now show and pre-fill the amount that can actually be sent, so sending the full amount goes through. (#10117)
• The Obsidian Item of Unlearning and Obsidian Item of Greater Unlearning can be used from every place a player looks for them. Double-clicking either one in the bags opens the Skills window and says which menu to use, the List view now offers Instant Unlearn on a skill, and right-clicking a skill tree icon or its List heading offers Instant Unlearn All Skills in this Tree. Before, only the Tree view and the Options button offered them. Reported in game by Brick. (38af00b235)
• The Oracle's free skill reset now offers three choices: adventurer skills only, producer skills only, or both. Each half refunds into its own experience pool and leaves the other half and its pool alone. (174b132655)

Vendors

• Double-clicking a Vendor Listings search result in another town now offers to teleport you there with a teleport scroll. A player vendor drops you in front of its lot, a town NPC vendor at the town arrival point, and the vendor is marked on your compass when you arrive. Pinned favorites work the same way. Requested by Sethanon (f9e6262ef2).
• Listing an item on a player vendor straight out of a chest on your lot no longer fails with an InternalServerError message. Items without a custom name were refused 21 times in a day on chaos build 301; no items were lost (3708974f71).
• A stack sold individually on a player vendor can now be priced with pennies each, such as 0.1 or 0.25 gold. Every purchase rounds up to the next whole gold, so three arrows at 0.1 each cost 1 gold, and the quantity prompt shows the total as the buyer picks how many. Requested by D'Laein Lachlan.

Housing

• Amberjack Mackerel, Brook Trout and Peacock Bass trophies went red with "Something is already in the way" on open wall in a Small Old Keep set at an angle. Their wooden backboards were caught by the same wall check as the fireplaces fixed yesterday, so that fix covers them. Added a test that hangs all four backboard trophies on every wall of a turned keep (c3971c7a16).
• A Player Run Town lot that was still showing an auction can now be claimed with a deed from the Lot Deeds window. The claim takes the leftover auction down and refunds the leading bid. A claim refused because a lot is up for auction, or held for the player who won it, now says so. It used to read "There was a problem while trying to claim the lot." (548a3de748, #9937)
• A lot up for auction can now be bid on from its lot sign: a Bid at Auction button opens the Lot Auctions window on that lot with the bid box ready, and the sign no longer offers Claim Lot while bidding is open. Lot Auctions is also in the window selector, fills in on its first open, and its Time Left column now counts down. (46004d8100, #9941)
• Yellow decoration boxes, such as the "Blackbirds" box on the PaxLair docks, no longer show for players who never asked for them. Placing an effect or sound decoration used to switch Show Decoration Indicators on permanently; the setting now starts off for everyone once (90d024dae1).

Inventory

• Alt + left-click on an item in a bank, container or loot window moves it into the backpack again. The click had done nothing since those windows moved to the new inventory grid. (c457d65fc8)
• Fixed the in: filter in Search All My Stuff: "shield in:bank" used to report every match and then show none of them. It now filters by the Location and Container columns, so in:bank, in:mail, in:vendor, a town name or a renamed chest all narrow the list. Reported by Gravidy. (d7303e5c44)
• Fixed Consolidate Stacks and Consolidate All Stacks in the bank leaving matching rows apart. The bank keeps items in separate records behind one list, and consolidating only merged within the clicked stack's record; it now merges across every record for the town. Full 32,767 stacks no longer stall Consolidate All, and one press now finishes the job.

Crafting

• When a recipe is short of materials you are carrying in a locked bag, the crafting window now says so: "Locked in your inventory: 24 Black Pearl", with a reminder to unlock them or move them into your backpack. Locked bags still keep the crafting table out, and the recipe hover shows the locked count under a short ingredient. Reported by Sethanon.
• The Recipe Book now keeps its search after a conversation with an NPC. Talking to a merchant used to bring the book back with an empty filter and the full recipe list; it now returns on the same search and page. Reported by Gravidy.

Weather

• The compass reads Clear in the Northwest and Southeast Blackblade Mountains and the other zones whose sky never shows weather. It used to name rain that was not falling, and water spells took their wet bonus from it there (#10102).

Client

• Wooden female mannequins no longer go see-through under clothing that shows skin. Since the 12 September fix that let chest pieces cover the mannequin, a Coconut Bra, Wedding Dress or Firedancer Leggings left only the head visible, because the mannequin draws bare skin as invisible so its wood shows there, and that wood had been taken away. Outfits with bare skin now keep the wooden body under them. Fully covering pieces such as doublets still hide it, so the earlier fix holds for them.
• Up and down mouse-look now turns the camera as fast as left and right when the two Camera Look Sensitivity sliders match. Vertical input was partly dropped every frame, leaving it at about two thirds speed at 60 FPS and slower at higher frame rates, so it also stops depending on frame rate. Both sliders now show a number (1.00x at the default notch). Vertical look is faster for everyone; players who raised Y to compensate may want to lower it. (f9b3406b70)
• The shared scene asset bundle that every zone depends on (the one the login screen loads when you press Play) now builds as two or three parts of about 200 MB instead of one 465 MB file. Zone loads find the parts the same way they did before; the login preload mounts all of them. Takes effect on the next client build, with a one-time re-download of those assets.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer more questions players asked her this week: combat text size and colour, the interface fonts, the expiring buff warning, theme publishing limits, what a merchant pays for worn gear, selling Crowns, mail expiry, scene reset and respawn times, the Performance Stage recipe, Splintering Strike, Dexterity, and where to learn bard skills. Her bard trainer answer was also corrected: Oski, in Vikland and the Ruins of Utheim, is the only bard trainer.
• Added a KB drift check that lists, for each of the Oracle's 75 knowledge-base pages, every change to the game files that page was checked against since its last review. 70 of the 75 pages had such changes, so a full re-check of every page started today.
• Rebuilt the Oracle's merchant, area and world data from the current game files. Merchant stock went from 1,839 to 1,887 distinct items, so questions like "where do I buy X" now cover items added in the last two weeks.
• Re-checked every one of the Oracle's 75 knowledge-base pages, claim by claim, against the current game: 4,121 claims checked, 300 corrected and 17 removed. The worst page was Options and Settings, which still described the old options window (24 fixes).
• The most common error was in eleven skill and magic pages, which said only one specialization skill can train at a time. You can specialize in two schools. Shock Weapon, Answering Blow and Arcane Defense were missing from their school and trainer pages and have been added.
• The Oracle's answers now match recent changes: stunned or knocked-down enemies cannot block or parry, auto-resurrect waits 5 minutes, Dig In lasts twice as long, Cone of Cold costs 35 focus, the bard stance works anywhere, kobolds fight with their new kit, and riders can talk to NPCs without dismounting.

Images

Skills

• The Skills window's tree icon menu and the List view's tree headers now offer Instant Unlearn All Skills in this Tree for players carrying an Obsidian Item of Greater Unlearning. Those entries used to be reachable only from the Options button, and without that item they were greyed out and did nothing when clicked. The Options entries now say which item is needed, or that the item is locked, and the gradual Unlearn All entry explains that it uses no item (db5836dabd).

Music

• Blank Sheet Music can now be filled by copying a song you carry. A new Copy From Inventory button sits next to Load From A File. A copied player-written song keeps its original writer, and songs that ship with the game can be copied too.

Tooling

• The crash triage tool picks the right player or GM symbols again for current builds, which stopped keeping the client package next to the symbols. Crash reports that used to read as "nothing readable" now say what Windows recorded: a power loss or blue screen, the game files becoming unreadable mid-session, a "not responding" kill, or a session that ended while the game was frozen in a loading step. Six reports from the last day moved out of that bucket.
• The nightly forum sweep no longer ends a run early when something else holds a lock. It retries for a few minutes and then reports what blocked it, so a skipped night shows up in the log. One night in late September was lost this way and caught up by the next run's 48-hour lookback.

Mounts

• Mailboxes open while you are mounted. Town, post office and lot mailboxes used to answer a rider with "You cannot interact while mounted!"; they now open the mail window from the saddle, like doors and player vendor stalls. Requested in game by Sethanon (30236ea0c4).

Navigation

• Added a changed-scene navmesh rebake: it finds every scene whose geometry (the scene, its prefabs, models and terrain) changed since its navmesh was last baked and rebakes it, from a new Catnip Games/Navmesh Editor menu, a command-line script, or a nightly Jenkins job. Each fresh bake is compared tile by tile with the shipped one: a result within bake noise is only recorded, a real change replaces the cache, and a loss of walkable ground past 3% is held for review. Scenes are never re-saved. Git history flags 138 of 434 scene caches as older than their last scene edit.
• The navmesh rebake Jenkins job runs headless on a linux build node instead of the Windows agent, and now finds the few scene navmesh files whose names use a capital M, which only resolved on case-insensitive file systems.

Interactives

• Fixed the rowboats between the plot islands and the main island in island player towns such as Estercove. Clicking a boat from the dock could drop you onto the boat you had just clicked, so it took two clicks to cross. Introduced by the 2026-09-20 ladder change, which mistook the boat's NPC-only return point for the far end of a ladder. One click crosses again (#10184).

Stability

• Fixed a crash on slow machines where a load that timed out and fell back to the overworld could still try to place the character into the abandoned scene a moment later. The spawn now notices the load it belonged to is gone and stands down (bcc07090b8).
• Hovering a place that shows a scene tooltip could freeze the game for up to a minute when an asset was still streaming in (a 55 s freeze in town on build 301). The tooltip icons now load in the background at startup and never make the game wait; at worst an icon appears a frame late. (1d65998c13)
• Fixed a client freeze tied to the companion chat window. When a connected companion stopped reading, a burst of chat (crafting, in the crash report we traced) could stall the game for 45 seconds or more, and one log showed a 382 second stall. Chat now goes to each companion through its own background sender with a size limit, and a companion that falls too far behind is disconnected and can reconnect.
• Fixed long freezes during zone changes on lower-memory machines. The decal system kept a culling group for every camera that had ever rendered, and once a zone change destroyed that camera each group made every frame wait for the whole scene load to finish, so freezes grew the longer a session ran (45+ seconds after a few dozen zone changes). Dead cameras are now dropped every frame, and the distance culling systems let go of the old camera when a load starts. (4576b7cbf3)
• Cut the noisiest client warnings in the chaos logs. An open book with out-of-date narration was writing one log line every frame and overflowing the log relay, so it now checks once per book. The title screen no longer waits on its own login preload to read the offline agreements and login reward items. Repeated decoration hitch reports, rune refusals on barrels and crates, and character sheet checks while the doll is off screen are now counted or logged quietly instead of warned every time. Dropdown menus that opened too late for the width fit are now fitted when they first show, and failed server responses name their return code. (2b9a6d44f5, b7db0b51e2, 6708e45a41, 274dc4d5fd, 9f82ae92cf, ca6cbef5da, b3caeff306)
• Restored a sheet-music callback type that a later commit had dropped, which had stopped the client and the shared game-server code from compiling. (02bc942d53)

Creatures

• Knocked-down satyrs now fall, lie on the ground and get back up. Their knockdown slots had pointed at clip ranges that imported empty, so every satyr stood in its bind pose (a T-pose) for the whole knockdown. They now use the satyr knockdown animation that was already in the art set. Covers every satyr, including the Tartarus guards. (6877859415)
• Satyr archers now raise, aim and fire their crossbows. The attack clip was cut with a start frame after its end frame, so it imported empty and the satyr dropped into its bind pose (a T-pose) on every shot. It now covers the raise, aim, shot and recovery. (d110cc43bb)
• Vitium's Hollow Eye: while Vitium fights, the eye on his mask now glows brighter for 3.5 seconds every 30 seconds and then fires a searing beam. Anyone within 40 metres who has the eye on their screen when it fires, with no wall in the way, loses all of their Focus. Turning the camera away or down, or standing behind cover, keeps it. The beam takes Focus only, never health, and the combat log warns when the eye starts to open. It has its own switch and works with either version of Vitium's kit; his stronghold is still switched off. (8a203a7a8d)

Social

• /follow no longer stops a second or two after the followed player starts moving with "You cannot follow (name) there." The check for a blocked follower only counted the gap closing, and a follower keeping pace holds that gap steady, so every moving follow ended. Moving toward the target now counts too; a follower that is really blocked still gets the message.

Tools

• The staff GM log channel no longer posts a line every 10 seconds while a GM has the online-player roster open. Read-only GM lookups now go to the server log only; GM commands that change something still post. (853788ab0d)
• The GM command that sets a character's pooled experience now raises lifetime earned experience to match, so skills trained from that pool are accepted. Before, every training step was refused by the server and the character sheet reloaded with the same pool, 94 times in 22 minutes in one session (473fc62b36).
• The community sentiment dashboard reads live chat from the new live shard instead of the retired legacy servers. It uses the server's own chat log for Universe, Trade, Noble, guild and town chat, plus local, scene and emote chat. It never reads whispers or party chat, and it drops lines the chat moderator removed. (9b3882bd41)
• Built a read-only collector for the launch-week community post. It reads the shard database and the log store for new and returning accounts, hours played since launch (lifetime play minutes minus the restore dump), creatures killed, crops, ore by type, items crafted, achievements, dogs petted and boss kills, pulls the Cabalist Stronghold and Breach fight rows with names and the players' leaderboard opt-out flags, and asks the tracker how long each day's bugs took from filing to fix. The draft post is in the repo for review. (f40fefe3c4)
• The nightly navmesh rebake job crashed on its first run while opening the Novia overworld scene, because the large terrain could not load without a graphics device. It now runs on the build machine that has a GPU, the same way the server report bake does. (798ab87ff7)
• The community-stats collector can now compare client frame rate by scene between the old client (September on the old server) and the new one (since launch), ranked by where players spent their time, with an exact per-scene figure and a per-graphics-card breakdown so the two clients are compared on the same hardware. First reading over the ten most-played places: six within a few frames, Soltown and Tanglemire better, Castle Atos and Owl's Head worse, with the same-card check pointing at a real drop in those two rather than only the launch-day crowds. (0a6c3657d6)
• The combat telemetry now logs a pet DPS line for every player: tamed and summoned pets each get a 15-second damage window, tagged by pet type and the creature it is. Until now pet damage was only measured inside opt-in /balance sessions. The old live servers never recorded pet damage, so this starts the record from scratch. The nightly balance rollup keeps each pet types best and typical DPS.

Housing

• Decoration undo no longer clears itself with "Someone else changed this lot" when you are alone on your lot. Growing plants, player vendor refreshes and chest check-ins had been read as another player moving your items; now only a real move or removal of an item you edited clears the history. A failed save of your own move says so instead.
• A Performance Stage, a plain Stage or the Gallows can now be set down over pavers and rugs. All three were refused with "Something is already in the way." because the placement rule treated them like one rug lying on another. Pavers can also be laid up to and under the edge of a stage that is already placed. Two pavers or two rugs still cannot overlap. (9545bf4ae4)
• A house decorated and then moved can now be moved back to where it stood. The move check measured yard decorations against an outline of everything the house draws, so a Town Sized Treehouse counted its whole canopy as building and refused to return over decorations placed beneath it. Each of the 198 movable houses now carries a map of the ground its walls, floors and trunk actually stand on, and only that ground blocks a move. The Treehouse stands on about 6% of its outline. Reported in game by Brickbat.

Quests

• Tangulmyr spirit wheel daily: the guards now hand over the repeat Spirit Wheel Bone and their Amulet of Testimony every day. Both were set up as one-time rewards, so every run after the first gave nothing (51 refused rewards over 11 sessions on chaos). An audit test now catches any reward offered on a repeating conversation branch that is set up one-time. (24adaa091c)
• NPCs that offer a replacement for a lost quest item hand it over again, once per day. Since the one-time reward change last week those lines played with no item. Covers Ayen, Kyle Behrand, Min Liang Tang, Skitter, Gawain, Dolfyk, Captain Kinsey, Ackerley, Valinia and the Oracle; Valinia and the Oracle now replace only the item without paying the quest experience again (083f168ef3).

NPCs

• NPCs that hand over or take an item in conversation now point toward you. The reaching gesture those conversations asked for only exists for player characters, so in about forty conversations (Tangulmyr guards, Trygve, the Brittany graveyard scribe and others) the NPC stood still and the client logged an error each time. A new test checks that every gesture a conversation asks for can be played by an NPC. (2e5666958e)
• NPCs now reach out and grab when a conversation takes an item from you: mail deliveries to town criers, quest hand-ins, and the thank-you line when a hand-over goes through. NPCs who play a chosen gesture at that moment (a salute, a nod, a bow) keep it.
• NPCs gained the Grab animation, male and female, built from the player version. The 74 conversation lines that already asked an NPC to grab, which played a point instead, now play the real grab.
• NPCs can now perform all 67 emotes that players can learn, including the juggling sets, breath and weather emotes, salutes and victory poses. 59 of them got new NPC animations with female versions. NPCs hold a camera, fan, shovel or pipe for the emotes that need one.
• Tavern bartenders in player-owned towns gained four bar fidgets: cleaning a glass, wiping the bar, leaning on the bar and chatting. Conversation lines that asked NPCs for the royal wave, the DarkStarr salute, Calm Down or the victory emotes now play them instead of leaving the NPC standing still.
• The Altruist Monks in Bramble, Solania, Etceter, Brittany Fields, Brookside, Westend, Northwood and Port Harmony now cough, nod, ponder, read and meditate while they idle.

Launcher

• The launcher's Language picker now saves to your user folder as well as the game folder, and shows the language you picked last, in the launcher or in game. A game installed under Program Files used to forget the choice (#10138).
• The patch heartbeat and the launcher health report now tell edge bytes from origin bytes on a channel that has no CDN edge. Since the chaos edge base was cleared on 2026-10-01, every launcher v57 session was reported as edge traffic when all of it came from the origin. Launcher v58 (built, not yet published) books it as origin and says so on failed-attempt lines; the health report flags the older rows.
• Windows players were getting "Windows protected your PC" and Edge download warnings on the Chaos Shard launcher even though it is signed. SmartScreen builds trust per file, and the download was being replaced with every launcher release, which reset that trust each time. The Windows download now stays the same file between releases (the launcher still updates itself on first run), so its reputation can build. Until it does, use More info then Run anyway, or Keep in Edge.

Logging

• Client logs: ladders on player lots (houses, town deco towers, walls and air balloons) no longer raise a warning when their top cannot be reached by pathing, since that comes from the placed item and not the zone. They are noted once per zone instead, which takes about half of these warnings out of the triage list. The crowded spider egg spawner warning now says which zone and object it came from, once per clutch. (0915804e07)

Art

• Grass and wildflower clumps no longer show a thin line of pixels along their top edge up close. Reported by Dravos Serpenthelm in Northwest Blackblade Mountains; the same fix covers 109 grass and flower textures on every scene, following the earlier Pax Lair fix. A new test checks every scene terrain so it cannot come back.

Client

• Starting an NPC conversation after closing a map or other item window no longer fails with an error. The conversation opens, and item windows left open come back when it ends (2da2550264).
• The language picked in Options now saves on every install, including games installed under Program Files, and a saved setting written as a code such as "de" is understood at startup (b81762aea7).
• A field repair kit used on the taming necklace you are wearing now keeps the repair. Before, the kit was used up and the repair was lost (6b72b1c675).
• Cleared a set of client errors from the chaos logs: hit effects for the newest damage types, NPCs walking toward a door or gate that was removed, the effect save at a zone line after a dropped connection, phonographs off a plot, pet name refreshes after the owner leaves, backpack drop targets, multi-item drops where one item would not stack, the texture cache, a crafting run with an empty bag, the guide wisp route after a navmesh change, and the decoration palette during a zone change (a707aa10e6, 3ff769509d, dad3ee39cf, ab43652928, 8720acbc92, 8c6d30c340, 09f00e5793, e0cf3bc5c9, 5e9a464bc2, e6030e58ca, a4f91456ce).
• The scene map sheets now build as five or six bundle parts of about 100 MB instead of one 562 MB file. That file was the largest object in every build, too big for the CDN to cache at all, and the biggest single download in every first install. Takes effect on the next client build; players re-download the map sheets once when it lands.

Website

• The public roadmap now shows the October 1 move as done and carries two new dates: Episode 2 wraps up by the end of 2026, and Episode 3, with pirates, sailing ships and the next chapter of the quest line, begins in the first quarter of 2027. The tabs are now In the game, Rest of 2026 and 2027 and beyond. In the game added the rebuilt start screens and character creator, add-ons with the Community Addons window, and the Old World title, and the fixed-bug count went from 650+ to 1,000+.
• Planned a full replacement of the official website. Newcomers get a front page that explains what Shroud is, where it comes from and what changed in 2026. Players who sign in get one hub for their characters, homes, deliveries and account, plus an installable phone app mode. The plan also covers a new store and an upgrade of the forum to XenForo 2 that keeps every thread and old link. Work starts on a domain the studio holds.

Wiki

• Converted the two Shroud of the Avatar novels by Tracy Hickman and Richard Garriott, Blade of the Avatar and The Eye of Scales, into chapter-marked text for the team's canon library, and taught the library's page checker a new Novel canon tier so lore pages can cite the books by chapter and page.
• Added twenty pages to the Canon Library on the team wiki covering the two Shroud of the Avatar novels: synopses of Blade of the Avatar and The Eye of Scales, pages for Aren Bennis, Syenna, Amanda, Evard Dirae, Maradn, Milos Karpasic and others, the sword of the Avatars, the Council of Might, and Midras, Opalis, Hilt, Desolis and Etceter. A new concordance page lists where the books agree with the game and the fifteen places where they disagree. The novels now count as their own canon tier, and the game wins any conflict.

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Crown Store

• The game server now keeps a permanent record of every in-game Crown Store purchase: account, character, item, category, crowns paid, list price, and whether it was on sale or from the Vault. Before this a sale was only written to logs that are deleted after two weeks. Recording starts with the next chaos server update.
• Built the Crown Store Sales page for the dev portal. The overview shows crowns spent per day with a trailing average, new and returning buyers, sales by category and how that mix changes over time, the top items by crowns and by units, how much of the revenue comes from the top items and the biggest buyers, price points, and a weekday by hour heatmap of when people buy. Every number compares against the previous period. Further tabs hold the full sales ledger with search, sorting and CSV export, a per-item table that also lists everything on the shelf that sold nothing, and a per-buyer table. It is live on the portal.
• Recovered the last two weeks of Crown Store sales from the logs so the page starts with history: 459 purchases from September 13 on, each matched to the character who made it.

Travel

• Teleport to Zone Scroll: the Choose Destination list now has a star beside each destination. When one destination in a zone is starred, the scroll and the sextant go straight there without the list. Holding Shift while clicking Teleport in the Select Zone window opens the list anyway. Requested by phil.

Leaderboards

• The October 1 start date on the leaderboards is now saved with the rest of the leaderboard code, so a later update to the leaderboard service keeps September test-server play off the 30-day boards.

Magic

• Shield of Air's Focus Transfer Ratio now shows two decimal places in tooltips, so a ratio of 0.96 no longer reads as 1 and each skill level's gain is visible (49640cca0f).
• Shield of Air's description now says that while its Focus Transfer Ratio is below 1, focus potions restore that fraction of their focus (b74b8f8a68).

Bug Fixes

• Logging out in The Rise and choosing Start On World Map put players on the snowy ridge above the Superstition Canyon gates. World map starts now use the marked arrival spot in that map tile when there is one, so this one lands on the canyon floor at the gate (245424accc).

Build

• Copying a song onto Blank Sheet Music was partly undone by a later server change that overwrote two files with older copies, which broke the client build. The missing pieces are back and both the client and server build again. (3a8d3d38b4)

Combat

• A bard with a song running now moves at full speed with the instrument out, in or out of combat, so a support bard can follow the group. Songs used to hold the bard to a quarter-speed walk with no strafing unless Performance Stance was up in a fight. Free play and performing to a room with no song up still walk. (7c38915fc1)
• Zombies that get back up after dying now stay down for good when the killing blow is Sun or Life damage, the same weakness liches have. Sun and Life spells count, and so do weapon hits that carry either school. Zombies killed with ordinary weapons still rise as before. (ef6ebf4cd4)
• The Daemon Chaos debuff from a summoned Daemon no longer lists "+0 Air Attunement" style lines when the summoner has no Chaos Magic Specialization. Any buff or debuff line whose amount rounds to zero is now left off the icon tooltip (#10256).

Mail

• Mail on the chaos shard was expiring a few minutes after the mailbox was opened, sending attached items to the bank. Letters now stay 14 days, then show a warning and a day count, then expire 5 days later. Reported by Lazarus Long.

Server

• The login server now keeps a record of every login, with the time the account was last seen before it. Until now each login overwrote that time, so there was no way to tell how many players logged in in a given hour or how many came back after a long break. Goes live with the next server build.

Dev Portal

• Built the Player Health page for the dev portal. It shows one day at a time, hour by hour: players logging in, average and peak players online, new accounts, new characters, and players back after more than three months away. Prev and next buttons, a date picker and a 30-day bar chart step from day to day. Players online is now kept per hour indefinitely, where the old samples were dropped after a week, and a script rebuilds the logins since launch from the logs. It is live on the portal.

Gameplay

• Fixed the horse trainers (Nob in Owl's Head and the others who teach a horse to accept a rider) refusing a horse on a wooden taming necklace whenever a non-wooden taming necklace for another pet was also in the bag. The trainer now offers the necklace that belongs to that horse.

Docs

• Audited the seasonal content and wrote up a seasonal calendar: which holiday windows switch what, and when. Pumpkin Head runs from July 16 to November 16 every year and is live now. The audit also found that Krampus has been missing for all of December. Two holiday windows that share his spawn cancel each other out, so he only appeared January 1 to 16. The Halloween eye painting decoration shows two paintings at once for the same reason. A fix is written up for the next client build.
• Wrote a short player-facing summary of the changes since build 301 for posting, with about 250 work entries condensed into a page of grouped notes.

Teleport

• A Teleport to Zone Scroll now lands you at the zone entrance, the spot walking in from the world map uses. It used to put you back where you last stood in that zone, which for anyone who last walked out was one step from the exit and facing it, so walking forward zoned you straight back out (Spindelskog Normal, #10203).

Taming

• Animal Lore now reads a beast in full once your skill matches its level. The Defenses and Secrets sections (weaknesses, attacks, tameable, skinning) used to need 30 and 60 levels of skill above the beast, which put every beast above level 140 out of reach under the skill cap. Build now shows from 20 levels below and Defenses from 10 below (#10207).

Guilds

• The guild portal's Standings pages and the prestige line on the in-game Guild tab are switched on. Since prestige launched on October 1 the standings pages had answered "not found" and the Guild tab never showed a guild's rank, because the portal was still running the version from before prestige shipped. The in-game Guild Prestige leaderboard was not affected.

Gathering

• Added two live settings that scale the experience Meticulous Collection bonus pulls hand out on mining, forestry, field dressing and foraging nodes, one for adventurer experience and one for producer experience. Each bonus pull on a high-tier ore vein paid 10,000 of both, so a full chain could pay up to 140,000 adventurer experience. Both settings start at 1, so nothing changes until they are tuned.
• Fixed Books of Learning always paying the top of their experience range. Each book now pays an amount within its range, as its description says (Legendary: 300,000 to 400,000).

Testing

• The client smoke test no longer reports Mylo missing from Castle Atos when he is there. On builds whose test bridge only sees characters within 30 m, the step now teleports beside his spawn spot and looks again; a warning now means he is absent from his own spot.

NPC Voices

• Every Helpful Automaton will speak with the same voice, a British one called Rosalind, so the machines that help you sound like the same model of machine. Three of them were on Australian, Singaporean and neutral voices. The recorded audio still has to be generated before you will hear the change.
• NPC voiceover is live now, so the accent standard stops being applied in sweeps. From here an existing character's voice only changes when someone decides it should, one character at a time, and the Helpful Automatons are the first.
• The accent plan now records where the voices come from: inworld.ai today, and probably elevenlabs.io for future ones. The distinction matters for reading the plan, since what it says about which accents are available describes one supplier's catalog rather than voice synthesis in general.
• The Westend Tour Guide shares the new Helpful Automaton voice, and will keep sharing it. Four automatons now speak with the same British voice on purpose, since they are the same model of machine.
• The Helpful Automaton voice change is committed but the audio still has to be generated, which happens on the machine that holds the voice library. Filed as a task so it gets picked up; nothing in the build runs the voice pipeline on its own, deliberately, since generating audio costs money.

Telemetry

• Every mini game now records whether the player actually played it and how well they did: harvesting, fishing, the Puzzle Box, the Languard Gemstrike teletype and the tavern table games (chess, checkers, backgammon) all log the same played and 0-100 score fields, so the mini-game players and the skip-it players can be compared side by side. Fishing casts also record which fish was rolled, landed or lost, and its trophy tier. (fa35a0c431)

Emotes

• Ten emotes that only NPCs used, Hawking, Hear Ye, Clean Mug, Feed Animals, Rummage and five Swipe gestures, now have emote scrolls so players can learn them. The scrolls are not handed out yet; they will arrive as quest rewards and interactive gestures. The Swipe emotes also gained chat lines.

Sieges

• Fixed town sieges ignoring every kill when a test bot happened to be the one reporting deaths in that town. The Cabalist's power meter in Aerie never moved and he could not be beaten for good; army kills now drain the meter and his fall ends the siege whoever reports it (78e7dde3ea). Reported by Patosh.

GM Tools

• GM possession: Tab targeting now holds its pick while the creature moves away from the GM's parked body, and the possessed creature swings its basic attack on its own at a hostile target in reach. An Auto-attack toggle in the Possession window turns it off, and the target Clear button now works (43eab48a8f).

Stream Desk

• Stream Desk prize draws now take everyone in the Twitch chat during the stream, with no minimum watch time or follow requirement by default, plus anyone in game who says a phrase staff choose on Universe, Trade, Noble or local chat. Each Twitch account and each game account gets one entry, so alts and repeats add no chances. Banned accounts, staff and moderator-removed lines are left out, and in-game winners are announced by character name.

Infrastructure

• The chat moderation model's server stopped tying up about 11 CPU cores during every request: the model runs entirely on the GPU, but its runtime had 64 CPU threads busy-waiting on it. It now uses 4 threads (about 0.8 cores on average) and generates at the same 34 tokens per second.

Server

• Dev, GM and admin commands on the chaos shard now post to a staff-only #gm-logging channel on the team Discord, as they did on the old live Mattermost. Every staff-only server command is listed with who used it, and gold grants, item edits, impersonation, town admin actions and test-scene travel carry their details. Repeats within 10 seconds are folded into one line.
• The message of the day now welcomes players to the new home of Shroud of the Avatar and points them at /bug for reports.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-09-30 is up: Tamer's Grace gives every character forty levels in the repriced taming skills, tapering away over forty days, so pets locked out by August's price change answer again. The Oracle's free skill reset now lowers your skills instead of unlearning them, a siege boss's health bar finally drops on every client, and a full run of thirty-seven thousand client tests turned up ninety-seven problems nobody had reported. Also Markdown books, a two-minute hang zoning into Castle Atos, and a decorative goose that could hold your whole combat deck hostage. Listen or read the transcript (13 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed a wishlist suggestion from the forum: a skill, buff, or consumable to slow or stave off Vigor decay, requested by Barugon.
• Raised the confidence the Discord community watch bot needs before it deletes a message from 0.90 to 0.96. Messages it is less sure about still go to the moderators as flagged alerts.

Discord

• New bot for the community Discord, The Oracle. Cerebras gpt-oss-120b reads each message as it arrives, in batches of up to 20 (about 1 second per batch). It flags harassment, hate, threats, scams and doxxing to a staff channel, and it collects questions nobody answered within 10 minutes so staff can reply. It starts in shadow mode: severe messages are reported as "would delete" until the team reviews a few days of results and switches on automatic deletion. On 22 hand-written test messages, every verdict was correct.
• The Oracle can now be asked questions in the community Discord with /oracle (for example "/oracle What blade skills are available?"). It answers in a thread from the same knowledge base as the in-game Oracle. The question bot and the new chat-watch bot now run as one Discord app, The Oracle.
• The Oracle's chat watch now deletes harassment as well as threats, doxxing, hate and scams, and automatic deletion is switched on. The first live test showed the model rating a direct insult "low" severity and a posted home address "medium" while being 99% sure of both, so deletion is now decided by category and confidence instead of severity.
• When Discord blocks one of The Oracle's deletions because of channel permissions, the staff alert now says "delete failed" instead of implying the bot is still in test mode.
• The Oracle's chat watch now treats swearing aimed at another person as harassment, so "you fuck everything up" is deleted. Swearing at the game ("this boss is bullshit") and friendly banter are still left alone.

Leaderboards

• The Dungeons leaderboard names a dungeon its builder never named by its town ("Haven Ridge dungeon"), or by its owner when they have not opted out ("Name's dungeon in Haven Ridge"). These rows used to show a long id after the town or a raw zone code such as Novia_R8_City_PointWest. Two unnamed dungeons in one town are numbered. (93ada045e3, #9883)

Map

• In zones with fog of war, the minimap now shows the area past the edge of the zone map in the same black as the fog. Near a zone edge it used to show a grey band beside the fog that looked like part of the map had failed to load. Reported by Astirian in Oracle Colossus. (9ad6d101f1)
• The map and the round minimap now stay closed in places that have no map, such as house basements, instead of opening on a blank "Map not available." window. The map key says so in chat, and the minimap comes back by itself in the next area that has a map. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye. (e6122f89ac)

Oracle

• Questions asked in the community Discord now feed the Oracle's knowledge base. The Oracle bot logs every question it sees there, along with the first answer someone gives, and quietly checks whether the Oracle can answer it. Anything she can't answer joins the list of gaps researched and filled each morning.
• The Oracle can now explain how damage and healing turn into threat (with a worked example), what the Crystal Sword does, the Crown Exchange and its three bank clerks, the Stillness buff, Ultima Mode, the 5 second regen tick, skill experience from 110 to 150, where to see your level, how to switch specialization at the Oracle, Taunt's second pulse, and where to check whether the server is up.
• Corrected two Oracle answers: Provoking Shout raises the threat from runes and healing but not from damage itself, and Frenzy is no longer listed as a taming skill a trainer teaches, since it was retired.
• Bug reports filed through the Oracle now include a Cloth row: whether Cloth Simulation is on and how many of the character's worn cloth pieces are simulating. A Linux player reported that the option would not turn on, and nothing in the client explains it, so the next report will show whether the setting failed to save or the cloth failed to move (7a449c22e0).
• A GM test client started in headless mode used to save Cloth Simulation as off, which turned it off for every later normal launch on that machine. It now turns cloth off for that run only (7a449c22e0).
• The Oracle's player dungeon guide was rewritten and split into three: Player Dungeons, Player Dungeon Pieces and Player Dungeon Generator. It had still said you must clear your own dungeon before publishing and listed a trap that never shipped; it now covers publishing without a clear, Keep Layout Secret, buying several dungeon points at once, trap prices, the waygate pad, totem costs, generator styles, seeds and reclaim. Live on the Oracle now.

Decorations

• The rings on the hanging rod of the Lord British 63 Banner and the plain Lord British Banner drew as bright pink squares because they pointed at a material that never existed. They now draw blue, alternating with the yellow rings as intended. Reported by Barugon. (db9ea3e22c)
• Lamps that keep their light off until lit (the Paper Wall Lamp, Floating Water Lantern, wall candles and the fancy wall lamps) now count as lit decorations. Before, walking away could hide the lamp while its light kept shining, and stepping out of a house hid the lamp but left its glow on the wall. Hiding a house interior now also puts out every light on a chandelier, where it used to put out only the first. (#9983)

Launcher

• The launcher's server list now names the main server Shroud of the Avatar, the live game world. QA stays listed as the staff test server.
• Fixed the launcher stalling at 1089 / 1090 files on build 299. A large game file that failed partway now continues from where it stopped instead of restarting from zero, keeps trying while the download keeps moving, and survives closing the launcher. An update that fails while the launcher sits idle now shows a message naming the file. Ships in launcher v51.
• Launcher v51 shipped the resumable whole-file download. Within hours, the uploaded launcher logs showed a second stall in the same family: the patch path that fetches only the changed parts of a file still restarted each part from scratch, which left a new player stuck at 325 / 1090. Launcher v52 continues those parts from where they stopped as well.
• In launcher v53, when the changed-parts download of a game file fails twice in a row with no data, the launcher fetches that whole file instead. The first v52 failure showed why this helps: a download server that does not hold the file yet only answers a request for the middle of the file once it has loaded everything before that point, which far from the source can take longer than the launcher waits. A whole-file download starts receiving data right away and resumes if it drops.
• In launcher v54, when the download network cannot finish a game file, the launcher fetches that file from our own patch server instead and keeps the part already downloaded. Some players were stuck on one file, often at 1089 / 1090, because the download server nearest them stalled on that one file every time, even after Repair. The same files were intact on both servers.
• Launcher v55 moves to our own patch server about 1.5 minutes after a download stops on a stuck file, down from 4 to 5 minutes in v54.
• Launcher v56 says Shroud of the Avatar in its heading and window title instead of Chaos Shard. Install folders and self-update are unchanged. (b1c8ec7280)
• The final old-launcher build now tells players that a new version of the game is out and sends them to the download page on shroudoftheavatar.com. Its Windows files are now code-signed. Still not live.
• Tested the final old-launcher build on Linux and Mac as well as Windows: an old install updates itself to it, keeps the old game files, and opens the download page. Added the replacement update-service page the website operator will deploy alongside it.
• The old launcher hand-off is live. Every install of the original launcher now updates itself to a final version on Windows, Mac and Linux. That version tells players a new version of the game is out and opens the download page for the new launcher. Checked against the live servers with an untouched old install; the update takes about two minutes.
• Read the launcher error logs from every v56 session at once and found five separate reasons patching got stuck, where the earlier fixes had each chased one. Launcher v57 (9333905925) addresses all five; details in the next bullets.
• A file the CDN stops sending, or sends at a crawl, now moves to our own patch server after about 15 seconds instead of several minutes. Before, any trickle of bytes reset the patience count, so one player sat at 1.7 KB/s per file for over an hour. After two files move, the rest of that update comes from our server. Block maps can now come from there too.
• Two updates could run on the same game folder at once and break each other's downloads. A folder lock and a one-update-at-a-time rule now prevent it; a second launcher waits for the first and logs which program holds the folder.
• Repair now fixes the game folder's permissions (one Windows administrator prompt) when Windows will not let the launcher write to it. The installer grants write access to the Users group, which covers PCs where the person approving the prompt uses a different account from the player.
• The launcher checks free disk space before an update starts, instead of running out half way and leaving a game that will not launch.
• An install pointed at a drive root or a shared Games folder could have had its unrelated files removed by the cleanup step that deletes old game files. Cleanup now never follows folder links and stays inside the game's own folders when the install shares its folder; first-time setup puts the game in a subfolder of its own.
• When the launcher spots a new build by itself it now waits a random moment, up to two minutes, so a release no longer sends every open launcher to the download servers in the same minute. A running update also reports its progress every five minutes, so a stuck update shows up in our logs while it is stuck.
• Every build release now pre-loads the files that changed into the download network before players are pointed at the new build, so the first wave of updates no longer hits files the network has never seen (c24c486b70). A new launcher-health report sorts the launcher error logs by cause and download speed in one command.
• Launcher v57 is live on Windows, Linux and macOS; open launchers update themselves within a minute. Game downloads on the Chaos shard now come straight from our own patch server while the download network is slow; the next build release switches the network back on after pre-loading it.

Skills

• The Defensive Stance description now names the ten skills its defensive bonus strengthens: Parry, Fortify Defenses, Deflect, Dig In, Testudo, Bolster Balance, Dodge, Evasion, Glancing Blow and Absorb Impacts. It used to say only "your defensive skills", and the Oracle named just two of them. (72d2960436)
• Asking a school mastery to train while standing at a skill trainer or an Oracle Confirmatory now opens the specialization choice for that school, and confirming it sets the mastery training. Before, the game repeated the "visit a trainer or Oracle" message even there. Away from them the message now says what to do on arrival, and the skill tree right-click menu offers Specialize in this school too (a2aec49079).

NPCs

• Dozer in Lamech's Bazaar took 1 gold for the Emerald-Set Axe Key Stone but stopped handing it over once a character had bought one before. He now sells another once a day, and any NPC that sells an item in conversation only takes the gold once the item is in your backpack. A refused sale says no gold was taken.
• NPCs that say an idle line on a timer no longer save up copies of it while busy and then say them all back to back. The Brittany Wharfs banker had been repeating his one line about a dozen times in a row; each NPC now holds at most one waiting idle line, so it comes round every one to two minutes as intended (#9917).
• Guards in Taenby Landing walk around the shops instead of through them. The town was built without any of its buildings in the map NPCs walk by, so a patrolling guard went straight through the back wall of the magic shop. The map has been rebuilt with the buildings in it, and the bake now includes them every time it is rebuilt. Endurance, Brekken Bay, Coral Cove, Port Titan and Forewind share the same town layout and get the same fix. (#9969)
• NPCs and pets in eleven player towns walk around their town's own landmarks instead of through them: the statue in Brekken Bay, the ruins in Port Titan, Aldwater's raised platform and shops, the house on Platinum Keys' square, the galleons on the shore at Pericaliya, Exile Island, Parrot's Roost, Nesoskia and Platinum Keys, the guardian statue in Etan Glen, the rocks in Smaragar, and the circle of stones in The Beyond. These towns share a zone with other towns, and the walking map was built with only the shared parts in it. Each of them now loads a walking map built with its own layout. (#9991)

Combat

• Rend's description no longer says the target does not need to be bleeding already. The sentence repeated what the opening line says about Rend opening its own bleeding wound. Reported through the Oracle by Akandriel (47091e201d).
• The Valiant Warden tooltip now shows the share of a protected allys damage that comes to you. It used to print the wards weight as "+85% Protection Modifier"; a skill 100 Warden with Heavy Armor Specialization 140 actually takes 46% of each hit, and the line now says so (#9877).
• The Glancing Blow description now says that raising the skill makes both of its bonuses stronger and makes the smaller, longer bonus last longer (about 64 seconds at skill 30, 111 at skill 100). It used to name only Heavy Armor Specialization, which lengthens the short burst. Reported through the Oracle by Akandriel (#9875).
• The Absorb Impacts description now says the buff lasts longer as the skill rises (the damage reduction runs about 50 seconds at skill 30 and 97 at skill 100, before Specialization). It used to name only Heavy Armor Specialization, which lengthens just the damage reduction part. Reported through the Oracle by Akandriel (#9876).
• Coup de Grace's tooltip now says when its execute bonus applies: a line under the damage reads the target health it starts at, worked out from your own Blade Specialization (20% unspecialized, 32.5% at 100, 45% at 200). The description gives the same scale. Reported through the Oracle by Akandriel (656b42794a).
• The Inner Strength description now says that raising the skill makes both the Strength bonus and the buff's duration grow (+13 Strength for 110 seconds at skill 30, +20 for 180 seconds at skill 100, before armor and Specialization bonuses). It used to name only Heavy Armor Specialization as extending the duration. Reported through the Oracle by Akandriel (#9874).
• Chaos Bolt's tooltip showed range, cooldown and reagents but no damage. It now lists all five outcomes under "One outcome per cast:", each with its odds: fire with a burn (32.8%), cold with a slow (24.6%), lightning with a stun chance (32.8%), a curse that leaves the target hitting harder (8.2%), and a curse that teleports you to the target (1.6%). The three damaging outcomes show their damage ranges at your skill level, and Night Step's tooltip now says where it puts you (#4466). Not on chaos yet.
• The hotbar tooltip on a charged glyph now shows the longer duration the charge gives. Pet Speed Training, Pet Strength Training and Pet Taunting Training quoted their one-charge time at every charge (20 seconds where six charges ran 45), and the same fix covers every charged glyph whose effect lasts longer. The tooltip and the buff now read the same rule. The Skills window still shows one charge (#9964).
• Immolation burns the Etceter Crag Bandits again once you have them targeted, or once one is already fighting you or your party. Since late August, damaging auras that move with you left neutral creatures alone until they attacked first, so a bandit you stood next to with only Immolation running never took damage. Walking past bandits you have not targeted still leaves them alone. The same rule covers Elysian Illumination and the damaging bard auras (#9993; 016376ae8e).
• Dying in Revenant Stance now shows you your own risen skeletons. They were rising all along but drew as soul wisps like everything else while you were dead, so a caster without the Death specialization never saw them. A combat chat line now says whether anything rose. (#9995)
• Frost Weapon and the three Ice Fist combos (Icy Puncture, Glacial Glissade, Icy Thrust) now apply the Water chill: a Water specialist's slow from them makes the target take extra melee damage, about 10% at specialization 100, counted once per target and capped at 15%. Glacial Glissade's description no longer mentions an ice sheet it never placed. Reported by a tester through the Oracle (de9673fa72).

Books

• Previewing a file loaded into a blank book in the Runic, Flowing Script or Illuminated lettering no longer pushes Back to Files, Publish and Cancel over the bottom edge of the book window. Those letterings draw taller than Default, and a page that ran long squeezed the buttons out; the page now gives up the room and scrolls instead. The Write It Myself preview had the same problem and got the same fix.
• The Load From A File screen for books and sheet music shows the folder it reads files from again, with an Open Folder button beside Refresh and a message when the folder is empty. The screen stopped naming the folder when it moved to the new interface, and the test build reads its own folder separate from the live game, so a tester saw an empty list with no explanation.

UI

• The broken tool, weapon and armor warnings now list only the items that are actually broken. A tool at zero durability used to list every worn tool under "Your tool is broken" too, so one broken skinning knife read as three broken tools (bbf7c50ec7).
• The N, E, S and W letters on the round minimap now fit the gold ring at every Minimap Size. The ring gets thicker as the minimap grows, from 10 to 22 pixels, but the letters stayed one size, so they stuck out of a small ring and floated inside a large one. Each letter is now sized so its capital is as tall as the ring is thick, and placed using the font the theme picks, since every face sits its capitals at a different height. Measured across six theme fonts at the smallest, default and largest sizes, the letters now land within a pixel of the ring edges; before, they were off by up to 7.
• The date line above each Journal tab entry now takes its colour from the UI theme. It used to be a fixed pale blue that measured 1.58:1 contrast on the light Air theme; Air now shows it in dark blue at 5.87:1, Classic in a deeper blue, and the other themes in their own accent colour.
• The Crown Shop button shows its red dot again when a sale or vault round is up that you have not looked at yet, and the Rewards button does the same for newly delivered rewards. Both dots had been missing since the corner icon row was rebuilt. Reported by Womby.
• The Crown Shop button in the top-right corner shows the green new-sale star again when the On Sale items change, and the Rewards button shows the same star for a new reward. The interface conversion had replaced the star with a small red square that players did not recognise (09b0dcac36, #9955).
• The combat hotbar's keys are easier to find in Options, Controls, Keybindings. They were always rebindable but were listed as Hotbar 1, Hotbar Self 1 and Hotbar Discard 1, and the only rows with "combat" in the name were the NonCombat Hotbar ones. The rows now read Combat Hotbar, Combat Hotbar Self-Cast, Combat Hotbar Discard and Utility Hotbar, and keys you already set are kept. Clicking a combat hotbar rune with the Self-Cast Modifier held also follows your binding now; it was still reading Alt (#9950; 7a4cf5d9ca).
• Fixed the small "+N" number beside each icon in the skill column (levels gained this session), which drew as dark smudges. It is now bold, one size larger, and has a black rim behind the digits so it reads over bright and dark ground. (#9946)
• The full map window stays open when you change zones. It used to shrink to the round minimap at every zone line and forget that you had picked the full map. Escape and the close button still drop it back to the minimap. (#10014)
• Inside a town or dungeon, the World Map button now marks where you are on the continent with a yellow ring, and with Follow ticked it opens centred on that spot. It used to open on the middle of the continent with nothing marked, and Follow did nothing there. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye. (#10012)
• Take All now closes a container window once it is empty, the way live does: lot chests, other players' lot chests and bags opened from the bank close along with corpses and world chests. Your own backpack and bags stay open, and a window with items you could not carry stays open over them (#10011).
• The Linux client now types accents and apostrophes from dead keys. On the US International layout, ' then e had typed a plain e and an apostrophe could not be typed at all, because the Linux player never composes dead keys. The client now reads the dead key from the keyboard itself and types é, à, ï, ñ and the apostrophe in chat, the login screen and every other text box (#10018).
• Options, Themes tab, has new Interface Font and Title Font dropdowns that set the window text and title fonts under any UI theme, and a pick stays through a theme switch. Theme Default keeps the theme's own fonts. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye (edc0808f4a).
• Paying the New You beautician for a new appearance failed every time with "Payment failed. Please try again later." when some of the crowns were locked or inside a locked bag. The conversation now says how many crowns can be spent and that locked ones do not count, and nothing is charged. (#10037)
• With the camera zoomed far out, creature and player nameplates now rise as you zoom so the health bar and buff icons no longer sit on top of the creature. At normal zoom nothing moves; your own plate and your pets' plates are unchanged. Reported through the in-game Oracle.
• The target, pet and party frames now offer Unlock Status Movement and Reset Positions in their right-click menus, the same entries your own frame has, so the target frame can be moved without going through your own frame or Options.
• When two windows overlapped, a click on the window in front could go to the window behind it: closing the Recipe Book over a merchant window brought the merchant forward and left the book open. The game now keeps the on-screen order of windows matched to their stacking order after every raise, so clicks land on the window you can see (f4d9bd2827).
• Buffs folded into the long-lasting effects hourglass on the buff bar can be dismissed again: right-clicking the hourglass lists a Dismiss entry for each grouped buff, named after it. The "+N" icon for buffs hidden past a full bar works the same way. (1f02dc5d2c)
• Clicking the gold crown icon or count in the Crown Shop now opens the Get Crowns window; it used to do nothing. The crown package Buy buttons also open the main web store when a package link has not loaded, where they used to do nothing.
• The inventory scroll bar works again while Ctrl or Shift is held. Before, a click on the scroll bar was ignored with either key down, so a Ctrl-click or Shift-click selection in the backpack, bank or a container could not scroll down to more items without letting go of the key (#10027).
• Shift can now be part of a key binding, the way Ctrl and Alt can, through a new Allow Shift in Key Bindings option on the Controls tab (off by default). Shift only takes over keys you actually bind with it, so sprinting with Shift and the Shift + number hotbar row keep working. A new Sprint (hold) binding lets sprint live on another key. Requested by shawn (937e0f4913, #10023).
• Removed the "N offers" count from the Crown Shop top row. It always showed the same number as the selected category in the left list, as reported through the Oracle (#10024).
• Added Show Vendors in Zone Tooltips under Options > Interface > Map & Navigation. Unticking it leaves the Vendors section out of a town's hover tooltip on the overworld and in wagon and balloon destination lists. It is on by default. Requested by Akandriel.
• The hourglass tooltip on the buff bar, which lists every long-lasting buff with its stats, now continues in a second column when it is taller than the screen. With ten or more buffs it used to run off the bottom and the last ones could not be read (027439003e).
• In the inventory options panel, the Container switch in the Columns group now hides while Show Objects in Containers is unticked and comes back when it is ticked. The Container column only exists while bag contents are listed, so the switch used to stay behind controlling nothing. Reported by Xrossfire Bugseye (#9997, a8072459d2).
• The backpack Options checkboxes Show Quest Items and Show Dread Artifacts and Shroud now explain each other on hover. The Scepter of Dread, Heart of Sorrows, Bonesteel Crown and Shroud of the Avatar answer only to the second box, and a player who unticked the first and still saw them reported it as broken. (#9940)
• The Crown Shop shows each item's "Sale Ends" timer in full again. The item cards were a few pixels too short for their last line, so depending on UI Scale the timer was cut in half or hidden completely. Cards now size themselves to fit everything on them (#9994, #9943).
• Player vendor signs now follow the Large Nameplates and Chat Bubbles option and grow by the same quarter step character names take. Cash register and decoration animal names follow it too, and toggling the option takes effect at once (b28e507d1e, #10053).

Inventory

• The gold padlock heading at the left of Your Backpack's columns now sorts the list: one click puts every locked item at the top, above bags and quest items, and a second click reverses it. It used to ignore clicks (#9870).
• Two stacks of the same item that both show a value of 0 now combine. A Supply Cache stack and a stack picked up in the world carried different hidden reward markers, so they looked identical but stayed in separate rows (#9960). Stacks with a real value, or with No Trade on only one side, still stay apart.
• Dropping items onto a bag in an inventory or chest window now puts them inside the bag. A Shift-selected group dropped on a bag in the same chest used to do nothing, and a drop from another window left the items loose beside the bag. Works for one item, part of a stack, or a whole selection; a bag that fills up takes what fits. Bags on a crafting table keep the old behaviour so the table rules still hold. (be284a0969)
• Pressing Delete on a highlighted backpack item now opens the same destroy confirmation as the right-click Destroy Selected Item(s)... entry, for one item or a whole Ctrl/Shift selection. Typing Delete in the search box or chat is left alone. (#10006)
• Each bag you carry now remembers where you put its window. Drag or resize a bag window once and it reopens on that spot at that size, whatever order the bags are opened in and after a relog. Before, every bag shared one saved spot and cascaded off it in opening order, so the windows swapped places. Reset Window Layout clears the saved spots.

Images

Conversations

• Clicking Goodbye on Arabella before your manifestation on the Isle of Storms now keeps the conversation window open on her "Wait!" line instead of closing it as she speaks. Saying goodbye again straight after closes the window. The same applies to the other characters who ask you to stay before leaving, including the Isle of Storms Oracle, Grannus, Sequanna, Lord Demig and Gawain (#9898).

Crafting

• In single player offline mode, ticking Use this container for crafting on a placed container no longer fails with "There was an error while updating the lot." The setting now saves offline the same way it does online.
• The message area at the bottom of a crafting station window now shows only the newest message. It showed up to three, and since a crafting message usually wraps to two lines, the second one was cut off halfway. The full history stays in the chat log.
• In Single Player Offline, the crafting windows "Use lot storage" option now works at a crafting station placed on your own lot. It was always grayed out offline, so containers marked "Use this container for crafting" could never supply a craft. Public town stations still do not offer it (#9974).
• Quick Craft batches no longer slow the whole interface. The crafting window rebuilt its full recipe list every frame of a quick batch (about 14 ms a frame with Only craftable ticked, more with full bags); it now updates twice a second during a batch and once more when the batch ends (#10010).
• Crafted instruments brought over from live no longer load at 0 durability. Instruments made before they had durability now show full durability, no longer lose durability when you die, and can be repaired with a repair kit. Reported by Scanphor.

Login

• Starting the game from Steam now remembers how you last logged in on that computer. A player whose last login used a user name and password, usually for a second account, gets the login form with the Log in through Steam button instead of being logged in to the Steam-linked account. A last login through Steam, or a first launch, still logs in with no clicks.
• The Steam button on the login screen read "Log in through" and stopped, because the old screen showed a Steam logo after those words and the rebuilt screen dropped it. The button now reads "Log in through Steam". Reported by Gravidy. (20e00e763b)
• The login screen's connection-error messages no longer show raw formatting codes around the FAQ link; they used to end in "see the [9999cc]FAQ[-] for help" (3f72ca23b5).
• Character select lists an account's characters in the order they were created again. The server never asked the database for an order, so the list followed storage order, which a data reload shuffled. Reported by Sosarian. (769ede8145)

Oracle

• The /bug chat command and the window selector's Report Bug now open the Oracle on a new bug report instead of the forum's bug section, and text typed after /bug goes in as the first answer. Reported by Violet Ronso.

Steam

• Two players reported a missing title bar in windowed mode on Steam. The first Steam launch choice is the borderless window option, which has no frame by design; a Steam settings change to list the normal window first is queued. Until then, pick the entry without "Borderless".

World

• The player-owned town Cold Haven is back on the Mistrendur world map. It was added as a holdfast in southeast Mistrendur in August, but only its records made the move from the old version control server, so the map marker was missing and the town could not be entered. The map tile, town marker, siege visuals, town layout and the small terrain flatten at the site were brought across (#9911).
• Clicking an Ardoris Boatman sign at any of the seven Ardoris gondola stations now opens the Choose Destination list, the same one the Ardoris Ferry rowboat beside it opens. The sign used to show its name and do nothing on click. (#9998)

Client

• The game window on Windows is now titled Shroud of the Avatar instead of "Shroud of the Avatar(DEV)". The long build line in the top left corner of the login and game screens is now shown on GM clients only; players see a small build number in the bottom right of the login screen. (911ec3aa3a)
• World nameplates on Chinese and Japanese clients no longer flood the client log with "no row for font" warnings: the world label font table now maps the NotoSansSC and NotoSansJP faces, and an unmapped font warns once instead of once per nameplate (520+ warnings in 90 minutes on b299, 321 from one session). Nothing changes on screen. (3a8c4162c0)
• Fixed the first world entry of a session sitting at 94% and then sending the player back to the overworld for characters with very large banks on a slow connection. The world no longer waits for the full bank list before placing your character, and the loading screen now gives a slow but progressing load more time before giving up. One tester with 3,141 different banked item types was bounced on every login; their load needed about 190 seconds against a 180-second limit. (e29fec9971)
• A first start of the test client now carries over the live game's keybinds, hotbars and options when the test client has no settings of its own yet. Before, players coming from live started with everything at the defaults. Reported by Sosarian. (a254d9e6fa)

Housing

• /fly (and /slew) works again for town governors in their own town and for dungeon owners in their own dungeon with Adventure Mode off. The late-September split of GM tools out of the player client had removed it along with the GM-only commands. (c62d87537d)
• The Property Manager no longer raises an error when listing a renamed house another player has offered you; the card shows the name its owner gave it (17c41e6d5a).
• Light Settings now changes how a lamp itself looks. Colour and Brightness tint the glowing shade and candle flame of the Paper Wall Lamp, the Floating Water Lantern and other switchable lamps, where before only the small light inside changed and the shade kept its cream glow (#9957). Untuned lamps look the same as before, and a switched-off lamp shows no tint.
• A placed Practice Archery Target can be picked up and moved again: pressing and dragging the target itself now grabs its decoration instead of only selecting it as a combat target. The Practice Dummy moves the same way. Deco animals still move by their food bowl, hay or nest (b996ae7b40).
• Broadcasting phonographs in player towns play across the whole town again. Since August they only carried about 50 meters, so most of a town never heard them. A town plot holds one broadcasting phonograph again; towns that placed more keep them, and the most recently started one plays (c47be96afa).
• Decorative house pets such as the raccoon appear on the square they are placed on again. Setting one down inside a house, or moving one that had wandered off, used to leave it about a metre away, usually against a wall or furniture.
• In the Small Old Keep, the stone band along the bottom of the inside walls now takes wall decorations. Before, aiming at it said "Nothing here will hold this item", so the Wooden Door Basement Entrance could only hang a metre up the wall. It now stands on the floor. The door also sat slightly too deep and was refused on some keep walls at any height; that is fixed as well. (d1dae3b852)
• Selling a stored house to another player now says plainly where other players' decorations go: they return to the bank of whoever placed them, and the buyer receives the decorations you placed. The Send To Storage confirmation carries the same note. Nothing changed about where items go; the old dialog had promised the buyer every decoration in the house. (dc4752d1e2)
• Lots given up in a Player Run Town no longer go to auction. The NPC-town lot auction was also catching player-run villages like Snell's Bend, so a lot unclaimed there showed "up for auction" and could not be claimed back. Auctions already running there are cancelled with the bidder refunded.
• Fireplaces and other large decorations can be set flush against the walls and into the corners of a house whose lot is turned at an angle again. Since August the placement check measured them with a box squared to the map, which on a turned lot like the Small Old Keep in Bastion's Point reached into walls the item never touched and showed "Something is already in the way." Pushing an item into a wall is still refused.
• In the Basement window, Change Basement is now a smaller button down by Options and Close, with a gap below Enter Basement. The two used to be full-width buttons stacked together, and players were clicking Change when they meant to go in (#10090).

Maps

• Map fog now always clears the patch of map under your feet. In tight tunnels the walls are close enough that the sight check counted nothing as seen, so fog in places like the dead-end tunnels of Etceter Crag Mines never cleared however long you explored (#9965, reported by Scanphor).

Overworld

• Traced the "Cold Haven is not a valid scenario" error on entering Cold Haven to the same missing town layout entry fixed this morning for its world map tile (#9911); it goes away with the next chaos build. Added a test that every overworld town tile names a layout its town scene actually has, which would have caught this one: 312 tiles checked, all resolve.

Taming

• Charging Pet Taunting Training no longer lowers the Aggro Boost it gives your pet. Each extra charge had been cutting it, down to 56% of a single charge at six charges; it now stays at the full value at every charge level while charging still lengthens the command. Reported by Chiasma.
• The Pet Range skill tooltip now shows how far your pet may get from you at your level and the level 20 above, with the bonus over an untrained tamer, e.g. "Pet range 18 m (+3 m)". Before this the "At Level" header had nothing under it. Reported through the Oracle by Chiasma (#9951).

Creatures

• Added the Elephant, a new tier 10 beast at about half real size (1.8 m tall). It leaves players alone until attacked, fights back with tusk strikes, and can be field dressed for leather. Summon-only for now while the model is checked in game. (319765b9a2)
• Vitium's Ring of Fire now deals twice the damage. Vitium casts his own copy of the creature Ring of Fire, so the liches, satyrs, skeleton casters and other creatures that share the spell hit as before. (4110a2c5d9)

Logging

• Cut about 3,700 lines a day from the chaos warning log. Asset loads that overlap in the world are now counted instead of logged one by one, and the headless test clients no longer report shader, image effect and slow-boot warnings that only describe their GPU-less machines. Players still report all of these. (7f0f28acc6)

Mounts

• Cat mounts (Lioness, Black Panther, Jaguar and Snow Leopard) now play soft paw steps instead of the horse's hoof sounds, with snow, mud and water steps that match the ground. Horse mounts are no longer silent on wooden floors and bridges. (#9963)

Bard

• Players with Bard Specialization or Melody of Mending playing no longer see a Vigor bar under every nearby players nameplate. Bars over heads now show only near a bard performing in town; a bard still reads Vigor on the party list and the target frame. (#9978)

Tools

• The Players Online roster now shows adventure XP and crafting XP earned this session as two separate sortable columns. Crafting XP used to appear only in a tooltip.
• On the Players Online page, Session time now runs from login across zone changes, so it covers the same period as the value and XP columns. A baseline taken before the character sheet could be read no longer counts the player's lifetime XP as earned this session. These two collector fixes are waiting on a service deploy.
• The Universe chat admin page can speak in global chat again. Its posting account stopped working when the shard moved to live account logins, and it now runs on a dedicated live account.
• Lines posted from the Universe chat admin page now show with the GM tag and colour in game.
• The Accounts admin page now also searches the live website, so an account made there since the August copy of the account database the page reads shows up and can be given tester and tracker access. Its game flag, game access and game password controls are gone: since launch those live on the website, and changes made on this page no longer reached the game. (7cb0eab2ab)
• Town admin panel: the Reason and confirm-name boxes moved from the bottom of the Change something card to the top. Renaming a town or changing its governor failed with "A reason is required" while those boxes sat off-screen; a refusal now highlights and jumps to the box it needs.
• The automated client smoke test grew from 13 driven steps to 22, each new one aimed at a bug fixed in the last two days: a second purchase of the same item, walking away after a fight, Performance Stance with no instrument, a GM-created lute arriving broken, the shop, mail and list windows, the chat log file, the bank and its banker, /bug opening the Oracle, and zoning into Castle Atos with Mylo there. It now also reads the whole session's chat for error text players saw in those bugs, and the log scan flags six more failure lines. A run on build 301 finished with no failures in about four minutes.

Patch Notes

• The patch notes page now waits for a new build when the launcher opens it before that build's notes are up. Build 301 went live at 16:42 UTC and its notes followed at 16:47, so a player who updated straight away saw "Build 301 has not been published yet". The page now says the notes are on their way, checks every 30 seconds, and shows them when they land (#9970).

Pets

• Added a small Elephant companion pet for GMs, about 1.2 m tall. It follows its owner or can be placed as a house pet, stomps along when you dance and grazes when told to sit. It is not sold, dropped or rewarded anywhere and cannot be traded. (52d0655af0)
• Undead summons (Summon Skeleton, Summon Lich) no longer decay while you are in a town and neither you nor the summon is in combat, so a summon can come along to town events without recasting. Decay resumes in combat, outside towns and in a town under siege. Requested by Sethanon.

Tools

• Added a scenario navmesh audit that measures, for every town and encounter variant that shares a zone, how much walkable ground sits under that variant's own buildings. All 72 shared zones were checked, which is how the eleven towns above were picked. Teleporter wagons and boats at town exits account for most of the rest and were left alone. (#9991)

Housing

• Planting areas follow the Show Decoration Indicators setting again. With it off, the green square on a placed planting area is hidden for everyone, owner included; it still shows while the bed is being placed (f742702a4b, #9981).

Release tooling

• Patch notes now go up seconds after a chaos update instead of minutes. The build list sync opened one connection per build record, 458 of them by build 301; it now reads them all in one request, about 4 seconds. Its connections also time out when the link drops; three background runs had been stuck on a dead one since September 28.

Website

• The Server Status box on shroudoftheavatar.com now shows the Chaos shard: Online with the players-online count, Testers only, Maintenance, or Offline, refreshed every minute. It replaced the old Live and QA lines, which had read offline since the move.
• The Download the Game page on shroudoftheavatar.com now gives the Chaos Shard launcher for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux, served from our CDN. The old installers it linked only reached the retired servers.

Bard

• With Performance Stance up, putting your instrument away now keeps it away. Before, a bard who stopped playing with Escape, Jump, /play or a drawn weapon had the instrument pushed back into their hands every five seconds, with the slow playing walk back on each time, until the stance ran out. It now stays away until you take it out yourself with /play, a bard song, Flourish, Dance, /perform or the stance again, and changing zones still brings it back out as before. /perform off also stays off now instead of reopening a few seconds later. Reported by Salenia (#9956).

Items

• Handing items to an NPC who refuses the hand-in now returns them to your backpack right away. They used to vanish with an "inventory refreshed" chat line and only come back after the next zone change (e0126b0669).

Interface

• Every Cursor Size setting now goes through the operating system cursor, so sizes from 1.05x to 1.50x are no longer drawn smaller than 1.00x on scaled displays, and dragging the slider resizes the cursor right away (fc9a38ce68).

Music

• The first time a Songs of the Sundered Blade wax cylinder can drop for you, it now always drops if your account has never looted that song. Later kills and chests keep the 30% chance. Belladonna Rose reported killing Xavara six times without seeing "The Blade" (#9958, 4cbd0af9f1).

Journal

• The Conversation & Journal Font option now applies to all journal text: task lists, the lines above a task description, the entry count and the Information tab. Buttons, tabs and settings keep the interface font (1fc63c3e39).

Vendors

• Vendor Listings in Zone: Get Directions no longer stays greyed out for player vendors that the overnight town census had not recorded. The vendor search now reads each vendor's lot from its house record, and the window also uses the lot a nearby vendor actually stands on. Reported through the Oracle for a shop in New Crafters Town (ddc4f9365c, #9949).
• Player vendor name tags are easier to read. Vendors whose owner had not listed anything in two weeks used to show their name in dim gray, which in older malls was almost every vendor; every vendor name is now white and bold, about a third larger, and stays fully visible at the normal camera distance before it fades. A vendor with old stock still sits down in its chair. Reported in-game through the Oracle. (a4ee92d635)

Content

• Mylo, the miniature greyhound in Castle Atos, now spawns when the town loads and stays there, so players looking for him for the Pet Every Dog! achievement find him without first walking up to his spot. (871a7e614b)

Networking

• Zone changes no longer stop at 57% with a OnFailedToConnectToPhoton error after one dropped connection attempt. The client now retries the new zone's server up to two more times, and if it still cannot connect, the loading screen explains what happened in plain words. About 0.3% of zone changes on chaos today hit this. (377845b65c)

Add-Ons

• The Submit Addon dialog now fills in the version from the addon's own manifest.json, or from a single-file addon's Version line (so 1.2 reads as 1.2.0). If that number was already submitted, it offers the next one up and says why under the field. After a package uploads, its manifest.json is updated to the version sent, so the local copy and the store copy always match. (82591fa522)

Quests

• Mendo's Need for Seed daily in The Outlaws' Run and Vishpop's daily story in Grusk pay out once a day again. Since the 2026-09-26 reward change, the server had treated both as one-time rewards and refused every later turn-in, and the handed-in seeds stayed out of the bag until the next zone change.

Gathering

• A player hit by a creature while harvesting a node could finish the harvest, take the loot, and then be unable to move. The game now frees you on the first movement key after the harvest ends, or by itself a couple of seconds later; a normal harvest still plays its stand-up animation (7522fa47a6).

Economy

• Crown payments now say when locked crowns are the reason you cannot pay. The Crown Shop, packaging an item for trade, deed upgrades, plot storage fees and dungeon point upgrades used to count crowns inside a locked bag, accept the confirm, then fail with a vague error. They now count only spendable crowns and show "Only X of your Y Gold Crowns of the Obsidians can be spent" with how to fix it. The Crown Shop no longer offers to sell more crowns to someone who already has enough locked away (eed0c66f94, #10058).

Audio

• Music from an Aether Vibration Device now follows only the amp you are wearing. It keeps playing while amps on mannequins nearby are moved, and it stops once you no longer wear an amp (607efcf4ae).

Social

• Blocking a player now always works. Accounts with very long block lists carried over from live (one had over 10,000 entries) had hit the social list limit, so every new block and friend request failed with a raw red server line in chat. Friend requests past the limit now show a plain "social list is full" message, and the client no longer throws an error after the refusal.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-09-29 is up: A crude name walked straight through three separate checks at character creation, and the fix had to learn the difference between an insult and the town of Scunthorpe. The tutorial deleted from the Battle of Solace Bridge is back, fallen log and all, along with a new house rule about who may remove quest content. Plus a tax setting that would have evicted a hundred and forty seven deeds, an art dealer who was cast as an animal because his surname is Wolf, and a hundred and eighteen scripts pried off the old interface library in one day. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Combat

• Rend's description now says it opens its own bleeding wound, so the target does not need to be bleeding already, and that elementals, plants and other bloodless creatures take the hit and the healing debuff without bleeding. Reported through the Oracle by Akandriel (04820d526a).
• The specialization Change button's near-a-trainer check also requires reach through a house wall, like the other interaction checks (1930e73fa5).
• Clicking a house pet on a lot no longer makes it your attack target. A clicked goose or clockwork raven used to hold the hostile target, so every attack rune on the bar went gray and said "Invalid target." until you clicked away. Pets still show their name on hover (d519ea3239).

Sieges

• The Cabalist health bar in the target window stayed full for the whole siege fight for everyone except the one player whose client was running the Cabalist, even while his health was really dropping. It now goes down for every player, including those who arrive after the fight has started. The Power bar under the compass is unchanged: it follows the siege army. Reported by Barugon (3f951931ad).

Community

• Filed a bug for the login dialog and the Resume / Start on World Map dialog changing size when hovering buttons, caused by help text popping in and out (requested by Barugon).

UI

• The Leaderboards window opens wide enough to read its names. The Fish board cut names such as Amberjack Mackerel (Saltwater fish) to "Amberja..." at the opening width while Number Caught and Largest Caught sat mostly empty. Number columns now stay as wide as their headings, the board's name column takes the rest, and the window opens at 1170 pixels instead of 1000. Reported by Elene Sali (4561f31a59).
• The main menu and the character screen keep their size while you hover Play Online, Play Offline, Resume or Start On World Map. The help text under those buttons now has its space held open, sized for the longest line in your language (fd4df3c166). Requested by Barugon.
• Item and decoration windows (maps, help pages, phonographs, jukeboxes, mannequins, doll cabinets, fish tanks, sign editors, guild war windows) come back working after an NPC conversation, where a phonograph used to return with a dead Play button. Several treasure maps, help pages or war scoreboards open at once no longer land on top of each other after one is closed.
• Gave the login screen an entrance. The form now eases into view with a rising fade the first time you reach it after launch, and the frame around it carries a subtle ambient shimmer instead of sitting static. The Log In button gets a soft breathing glow once both fields are filled in, and the news-of-the-day line can now rotate through more than one server message instead of always showing only the first.
• The bank's Refresh button stays inside the window when a large gold amount or a longer translation widens the bottom row (bc1dd3c944).
• Custom themes saved in a settings file come back when the file is loaded. They were being skipped on load (413773d06f).
• Twenty-five item icons from the September art import (the horse mounts, buckets and several decorations) are smoothed when drawn at other sizes instead of looking pixelated (0da845c2ad).
• The login screen's entrance now includes the game logo, settling into place above the fields the first time you reach it after launch, and the background picked up a second, fainter layer of art drifting slowly behind the main picture.
• Potions dragged from the backpack now lock onto the combat bar, and can be dropped on a deck slot or the In This Deck list in Edit Deck. The drop used to do nothing and the potion fell back into the bag (#9806).
• Turning the HUD back on during a zone load no longer re-activates the crosshair behind the loading screen. Nothing drew, but the client logged a warning on every load, 527 a day from 100 players (9b7b308554).
• The main menu, login form and character screens now draw every button as a closed box with a frame on all four sides. Before, each one had an open corner bracket, and stacked five high they looked unfinished. Play Online, Log In and Resume have gold captions again, the Rewards Program banner has its bevelled frame and peach headline back, and the login form's Forgot and Create Account lines are plain text links. (9380be6404)
• Scroll bar handles no longer shrink to a dot on long lists. A full backpack in list mode drew a handle about 3px tall; every scroll bar in the game now keeps it at least 24px long, and short lists keep their proportional handle. (8cca68fe60)
• The Journal now plays a book opening sound when it opens and a closing sound when it closes, whether from the J key, the window menu, the title bar close button, or a click on a task in the task list. Requested by Astirian.
• Reset Window Layout now puts dragged columns back to their normal widths in every list window. Before, a window already open that session kept its dragged columns and saved them again, so Vendor Listings in Zone could come out of a reset with Item Name and Per Unit cut to a few letters and Location past the right edge. Vendor Listings in Zone also opens wider, with room for long owner, vendor and location names. Reported through the Oracle.
• The two critical chance rows on the character sheet's Stats tab now read like "30% (+12.4% Vigor)": your chance and how much of it Vigor supplies, both in percent. The critical rating moved to the last line of each row's tooltip. Requested by Akandriel. (aa7e6c7a5f)

Images

Oracle

• The Oracle now answers nine more questions players asked her this week: whether Knight's Grace boosts Inner Strength, whether a Voice's Dread artifact reagent costs experience, how to earn Master Naturalist, how to reach the Tester Hub, how Fyndoro's Tablet of Finding works, the full list of rune combos, what Entrails are for, where to buy sheet music, and that there is no "Wand of Ember" (she points to the two real ember wands).
• When the Oracle lists where to buy something and the merchant sells the recipe rather than the item, she now names it "Recipe: X" the way the game does. She had been telling players that tailors sell Blank Sheet Music, when they sell its recipe.
• The Oracle has a new Books and Writing guide: getting a blank book, writing one in game or loading a text file with Load From A File, where the Custom Books folder is on Windows and macOS, the formatting tags, Markdown files, and printing copies on a Printing Press. A player asked how to import a book this morning and the Oracle had nothing to answer from.
• The Oracle's What's New guide was split in two, with windows, options, launcher, add-on and Oracle news moving to What's New: Interface and Tools, so every section can be read in full again. The old company name is now blocked from the Oracle's guides by a check that fails if it appears.
• Traced a rise in AI provider usage since mid-September to its source: the Oracle answering player questions accounts for about 99% of it (around 450 model calls a day since 09-15, up from about 190 in the early-September lull), while name screening, the wiki assistant and the character helper together stay under 1%. The per-feature usage queries are now documented for the next check.
• The Oracle service deploy script now installs the module behind the new launcher error-log route. The first deploy attempt stopped at its import check before restarting, so the running service was never affected.
• The Oracle window now reopens where it was last dragged and at the size it was last given, across a full restart. It used to return to the top left corner on every launch. Reset Window Layout now resets it too (#9786, reported by Astirian; b6b0fad67d).
• The Oracle now answers questions about an Aether dragon season: there is none, and she explains that the Aether dragon can appear at any time of year as a rare dragon encounter on hills, plains, tundra and desert, or very rarely on the Blackblade Pass dragon beach (3ef30ce870).
• When you ask the Oracle about a comment on a report, such as a request to reopen it, she now says who posted it and on what date in her first answer, with the date written as a month and day instead of 2026-09-28 (c37ba05e67).
• The Oracle can now say how many repeatable quests the game has: 42, of which 37 are daily, 3 weekly and 2 hourly. She lists each one with its quest giver and place, explains when daily, weekly and hourly quests reset, and points to the Show repeatable tasks checkbox in the Journal (6da2483cdc).

Addons

• The Community Addons on/off checkbox is now labelled "Enabled" in place of "Run", and the install note and new-addon chat message now name that box so players can find it after installing (7ecab94f3f).
• Ticking Enabled in the Community Addons window on an addon that needs another addon which is off (FXStop needs SotA Event System) left the box unticked with no reason shown. The box now stays ticked and the details say which addon it is waiting for, matching the Lua manager window (f81cdfaf90).
• Turning on an addon that needs another addon which is off now prints a chat line naming the addon to turn on first, from both the Community Addons and Lua manager windows (0cbd0553f0).
• Add-on party reads now reach the whole party. The slot getters such as ShroudGetPartyMemberName only answered for yourself: every other member read as "None" on every slot. Slots now run from 0 (you) through the rest of the party in party frame order, so a for slot = 0, count - 1 loop finds everyone, buffs included. ShroudGetPartyMemberNamesInScene now returns a normal Lua list of real names, so ipairs and # work on it. Reported by the author of the Toolbox add-on. Add-on API version 26. (ac63e8c01b)
• Fixed a bug in the add-on Lua engine where looping straight over a table (for v in list do) failed with "attempt to call a table value". It now walks the table's values, which keeps add-ons that looped over the old party names list working (ac63e8c01b).
• Add-ons can now place up to 25 HUD frames on screen, up from 8, so buff trackers that give each indicator its own frame no longer stop at the eighth. The 35% screen-area limit for an add-on's frames is unchanged. Requested by Goriah Kuulas.

Books

• Blank books load Markdown files, requested by womby. Load From A File lists .md files, and a new Text Format choice reads a file as Markdown or Classic (the book's own style tags, as before). Headings become chapters, and bold, lists, quotes and dividers turn into the book's normal formatting, so existing books are untouched.
• The Load From A File screen gained a Preview of the pages as they will publish. While a file is loaded, saving it again in your own editor updates the preview on the page you were reading.
• Books near the 12,000-character limit that used curly quotes or long dashes failed with "Failed to publish." even though the counter showed them under the limit. The server now applies the limit to characters, the same count the counter shows.
• Centered lines in player-written books now sit in the middle of the page, in the flat book window and the 3D view. Lines marked with the Center button used to lose the marker and stay on the left margin, and Markdown headings and dividers are drawn centered the same way. Books from the world draw as before, website links included.
• Using a Blank Sheet Music opened a black window titled "Book" that said "This book is blank", reported by Elene Sali. It now opens on a plain page with two empty staves, titled "Sheet Music", with its own wording. Blank paper and seasonal cards also name themselves again, and every blank item now sits on a page.

Bard

• Taking Performance Stance with no instrument equipped says the bard prepares to sing again. It used to announce readying an instrument called "None". (88503b5643)
• Standing near a bard who is performing in a town now speeds up your Vigor recovery on its own, about one point every 7 to 8 seconds against 15 in town alone, and around 5 while the bard uses Flourish. Before, only a player who chose Watch Performance and kept facing the bard got the faster rate. Your own Vigor bar also shows over your head while you are in the audience, even with your own nameplate and health bar options off, and Watch Performance now says when the bard is not performing. Reported by Vesper (#9840).

Store

• Checked how web store purchases, crown packs, subscription packs and the monthly login and subscriber rewards reach the game once the new servers take over on October 1. Every store offer sold since 2018 resolves to its items in the launch build, and the October and R154 reward boxes carry their contents on chaos. Added a launch-day check that shows which monthly reward the game server picked when it started and lists what each box holds; before, nothing reported that choice (2bca3c72a6).

Tester Tools

• Moved the GM launcher download off the tester hub. It is now offered only on the developer portal, behind a named staff login.
• Typing /tester now opens the Tester Verification window in every client, the normal launcher included. Tester accounts no longer have the old tester tools on the server (gold, items, free skills, time and weather, fog reset, test scenes); staff keep them, and one server switch turns them back on.
• The game client now matches the server on tester access: a tester account opens only the Tester Verification window, even on an older GM install. The tools window, value tweaks, reaction overlay, deco showcase, browser companion and the verification windows teleport button are staff-only.

Items

• Creating an item the server cannot load, such as a tester Create Item for a chart the shard does not know yet, now gets the same clear refusal as moving one instead of a server error (#9511).
• Added the Shiny Black Tricorn Hat, a glossy black version of the Brown Tricorn Hat. It replaces the 2-Story Fall Elm Tree in the R154 subscriber reward, which now gives the Gossamer Chaos Cloak, the Raccoon Decoration Pet and the new hat.
• Items identified only by their asset id (crafted-by history, jukebox and phonograph songs) now load under their real name in the client log. They all used to log as one blank placeholder. A crash that a failed lookup of that kind could have caused is also guarded (440fe51f58).

Login

• Launch prep for October 1: the game servers now open a fresh secure connection to the account website for every login and reward check, instead of reusing an idle one the website may be closing at that moment. That closes a small window in which a correct password could fail. Checked again against the live account service afterward (617c39aad1).
• The login and character selection screens now show black bars at the sides on monitors wider than the art (32:9 ultrawides and multi-monitor setups). The loading screen picture and its progress text used to show through there.

Tools

• The client smoke test merchant step no longer fails on a fresh login: the control bridge now opens the shopkeeper first when no shop window has been created yet, instead of giving up because it could not find one (4c6448d808).
• The client smoke test now also casts a spell at the practice dummy, swaps weapons with the character sheet open, opens and closes ten main windows, runs a chat command, greets a townsperson and travels to the overworld. Its log scan now fails a run on a main-thread freeze of 30 seconds or more, which it could not see before. A full run takes a little over two minutes (bd676fb5da).
• Pressing Play on the startup scene in the Editor shows the main menu and login form again. The Steam auto-login no longer fires inside the Editor, and the front end keeps one camera drawing, so the Game view stopped painting "No cameras rendering" over the login form (bf54668b30).

Crafting

• Crown repairs at a crafting table no longer fail when an old-style Crown of the Obsidians is on the table, the tester item creator offers only the working crown, and the fifteen Stone Dungeon hall and stair pieces take a normal crown again so they can be crafted (924cbc17a4).

Housing

• Added the Chaos Trophy, a half-meter obsidian star decoration that can stand on floors, table tops and outdoor lots and can be mirrored while placing. It cannot be traded, and every account receives one in the October 2026 login reward, whose box is now named "Login Reward (October 2026: Autumn Leaves, Jack O' Lantern and Chaos Trophy)".
• The Chaos Trophy now mirrors cleanly with N while placing; its mirror marker had been on a rotated node.

Chat

• The chat log file now keeps saving after a write fails. Before, one failed write (usually the day's file open in a program that locks it) stopped chat logging until the client restarted, with no warning. Now the game says so once in chat and names the folder, holds the unsaved lines, and writes them with their original times when the file can be opened again (88b4431ad6).

Localization

• The east and southeast exits of the Human Battle Encampment and the north exit of West Ravenswood now show their names in the player's chosen language on the compass and map; they had read in English in every language since they were added in September.
• Harvested the English text database ahead of the translation catch-up: 710 new item and trophy strings, 77 interface strings, 80 new journal entries and about 150 edited lines (including the glyph to rune rename) are now visible to the translation pass (49c96ef57d).
• Translated everything added since the last pass into all eight languages: about 1,100 strings per language covering the new trophies, wax cylinders, fans and emotes, interface text and 177 journal entries from the main story passes (e6e949487b).
• Skill descriptions, help pages, loading tips and tutorial dialogue no longer say "glyph" in other languages: 248 lines the rune rename had left behind were retranslated in all eight languages (e6e949487b).
• Every new translated line was read by one reviewer and every finding checked by a second; 671 lines were corrected where both agreed, mostly terms that drifted from the names the game already uses (e6e949487b).
• Books are now translated in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian: 680 books per language, up from as few as 110, including the Dire Prophecy volumes. Chinese and Japanese books follow once the book window has a font for them (922261cb10).

Launcher

• The Launcher now sends its own error and warning lines to the team log search at the end of each session, right after a failed patch, or on the next start after a force-close. A patch that stalls partway can now be diagnosed without asking the player to find and send a log file. Players can switch it off in the launcher settings file.
• The Launcher (v50) now names the file when a game file keeps failing to download and suggests checking antivirus or running it as administrator. Before, it showed a technical error and kept retrying. Each failed download attempt also records its cause, so the next stuck patch can be diagnosed from the report.
• Launcher error reports are live end to end: a test line sent to the public route reached the team log search within seconds. The setup script for the account that writes them now refuses to replace an existing password, which would have cut the reports off.
• Built the final version of the old Live launcher on Unity 6. Old installs will update themselves to it through their existing self-update, and it then sends players to the download page for the new launcher. It keeps the old game files next to it untouched. Tested locally on Windows; not live yet.

Build

• A full run of the client test suite (37,584 checks) found 97 failures. Fourteen commits fixed the real problems it caught and corrected 43 tests that had fallen behind the game; 6 failures remain, each waiting on a decision (298b622c63).
• Fifteen shaders from the new pet art pack compile on Metal (0f462abd45).
• Removed the Windows Update pending-restart check from the start of the Windows client build. It refused a chaos release while a restart was queued; the update policy on the build machine still keeps Windows from restarting under a running build.

Networking

• Zoning into Castle Atos could sit on the loading screen for about two minutes and then drop you on the overworld map. The server gave a loading client 10 seconds to finish connecting to the scene, and a big town can keep a slower PC busy longer than that while it loads. The server now waits 30 seconds. Five hung zone-ins since Monday traced to this (#9821).

Housing

• The Coral and Cream and the Blue and Green Baroque Rugs can hang on inside and outside walls like every other rug (196cc8f152).
• A statue, chicken or practice dummy placed as a decoration comes back after you walk away and return again. The fix from the 29th had been lost in a merge (5df2619176).
• The Leather Bota Bag and the Ice and Rough Stone building blocks are set up the way the decoration mirror flip expects. They look the same when flipped (a03f528e8e).

Mail

• Taking the gold out of a vendor sale mail now dims the "Sale of item" line right away; before, it stayed bright until you clicked off the mail. The inbox line's Gold and Items tags now clear at the same moment. Fixes #9814 (f53e0f098f).
• The mail Reply button now opens the writing screen straight away. It used to show the recipient list for a few seconds first, and clicking a friend there sent the reply to them instead of the letter's sender. The Inbox buttons now wrap so Open Folder is never cut off, and the writing screen labels its numbers as Items, Gold and Postage.

Localization

• The LoginFormLocalizationTests fence was red for five weeks. It is green again, with a check that matches how the localization data now works (1ecd39c459, #9819). Converted UI Toolkit windows keep their old prefab label ids in code, so about 350 of those ids now also appear in the per-language code-string tables. That is intended: the code copy follows English edits. The fence now fails only if one of those ids got there without coming from code.

Pets

• Raccoon pets dig again. A changed file reference had left their dig animation empty (26d4d38559).

Creatures

• The totem-summoned Black Dragon's effects are sized to its smaller body again, and the tier 8 Ancient Undead drones have their own name records again (26d4d38559).

Client

• Companion level and companion retreat read the same in the Mac editor as everywhere else. A level 20 owner's companion showed as level 22 there (fc52ce4cc1).
• The GM tools mark the sorted Players Online column again, the decoration showcase list stops clipping letters, and the tester tweak help for child and faun nerve says which creatures it reaches (31c35da43b).
• The Resume button on the character screen and the Play Online / Play Offline buttons on the first menu no longer jitter when the mouse rests on their bottom edge. The space held for the help text under those buttons now only ever grows, so the window can no longer shrink back under the cursor. Reported by Gravidy.
• The headless test clients stopped reporting the world-space name depth capture as broken. They have no graphics device, and the check was repeating a failure already logged as a warning: 634 error lines a day out of the chaos logs (085215d960).
• Fixed the copy to file button in the /debug console. It now saves the selected log entry to a text file and opens it in your text editor, where every click used to log a new error and open nothing. The file is also saved as UTF-8, so non-English log text stays readable (#9787).

Tools

• The Summoned Pets tester page shows summoned elementals resisting their own element at 50%, matching the game since the 25th (fc52ce4cc1).
• Editor navigation tools no longer fail when they reload a navigation tile outside play mode (11b27d882e).

Quests

• Stanley's Path of Love help line gate is written with explicit grouping. It behaves as before (a34f1b7cec).

Economy

• A Crown Exchange purchase now updates your gold and backpack as soon as it goes through. The server was taking the gold and delivering the Crowns all along, but the window never refreshed either one until the next login, so a purchase looked like it had failed and one player bought eight bundles before reporting it. Closing the window mid-purchase also no longer leaves the Buy button greyed out. (afefa92797, #9815)

NPCs

• Guards in the Human Battle Encampment now take a knee on their patrol route. The kneel never played because the patrol step had no hold time set; waypoint emotes with no hold time now fall back to 8 to 10 seconds. The same fix covers a kneeling NPC in the Caverns of Skrekk and a guard and fisher in Blackblade Foothills (#9789, 4b8e7ed1b5).

Content

• Soldiers patrolling the Human Battle Encampment kneel at the first stop of their route again. Two waypoints asked for the kneel with no duration, so the soldiers paused and walked on (774803e093).

Inventory

• Fixed the backpack scroll bar stopping short of the end of a long item list, where the mouse wheel also refused to go further and the last items could not be reached. Every row in the list is now exactly the same height, so the list keeps one length however far it is scrolled.

Skills

• The Oracle's free skill reset ("unmake my training") now lowers every skill to its lowest level and keeps it learned, with all the experience above that level returned to your pools. Before, it removed every skill and you had to buy each one again from a trainer. A skill another learned skill depends on stays at the level that skill needs, masteries are lowered with the rest, and elixirs and specializations are untouched. (c169c2b32b)

Taming

• Added Tamer's Grace for every character: +40 to Tame Creature, Summoning, Combat Training, Pet Attack Precision Training and Pet Hide Toughness Training (skills you have trained), dropping by one each day for 40 days from October 1. The August taming cost change left many players unable to summon pets they already owned; this gives them time to train back. It cannot be dismissed, and its tooltip shows the day's bonus and when it next drops (b73a318000).

Journal

• The Journal Active Tasks and Completed Tasks tabs now list the newest task at the top, matching the Journal tab, so a task just picked up or just finished no longer lands at the bottom of a long list. Requested by Astirian.

Gathering

• The Swing button under the gathering meter now names your Interact key (E by default) in place of the Harvest Swing key (L). E, Space and a left click already stopped the meter; players who rebound Harvest Swing to E were losing E for ladders and doors.

Vendors

• Dragging the column dividers in Vendor Listings in Zone no longer squeezes a column narrower than its own heading. A few drags used to leave Item Name, Time, Price, Per Unit and Vendor Name reading Ite..., Ti..., Pr... while Location kept the width. Layouts already saved that way open with every heading readable, and the window keeps room for a column dragged wide. Reported through the Oracle.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-09-28 is up: Five new companion pets went into the Crown Store with four tricks each, and the whole front end of the game, every screen you see before the world loads, was rebuilt on the new interface. Towns run faster after dark now that the moon has stopped casting shadows over them. The server code that moves your belongings around was taken apart and rebuilt so a failed save cannot leave an item in two places or in none. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

UI

• The item comparison tooltip now heads its third column Stat Changes: instead of "If you equip this:", with the eight translations updated to match. Requested by Astirian.
• The Open a Window menu no longer lists Decoration Palette, Lot Deeds, Lot Listing, Property Manager or Search All My Stuff while a new character is on the Isle of Storms. They return once the player leaves the Isle.
• The Skills window's Tree and List buttons no longer slide back and forth each time the Adventurer or Producer pool figure changes. They now sit beside the Adventuring and Crafting tabs, and all four tabs keep a fixed size (eb99409309).
• Cursor Size between 1.05x and 1.50x no longer makes the cursor smaller than 1.00x on displays with Windows scaling above 100%. Larger sizes now account for the display scale (#9622, reported by Elene Sali).
• The Potential Network Problem icon no longer flashes for 5 to 10 seconds every time you enter the world. It now waits out the load and a short settling period, and still shows for a real connection problem (fe1f380b93).
• The lines between the skill groups in the Skills window's Tree view are now drawn the same way as the group heading underlines. A report showed the line under Refining on the Crafting tab but none under Gathering, while every heading underline displayed. The lines look the same as before. Reported by Astirian (b3dc4ad289).
• In a besieged town the figure in the Character window no longer turns pale and flat. The siege sky had been lighting it too. It now keeps its own lighting while the town outside stays dark (6a35dd90c8).
• Skill cards on the hotbars now use the same text size as the skill card in the Skills window and on the skill progress icons. Last week's change that kept hotbar cards in the lower third of the screen had also cut their text from 16 to 13 pixels; the text is back to full size, and the card stays narrow and low on the screen. Reported by Astirian through the Oracle. (b978c6cc2b)
• Quest tracker task lines and Next Steps tips now have a soft dark edge so they stay readable over bright sky. The rebuilt tracker had lost the shadow the old one drew under its text (from a player report).
• Nameplates over guards, townsfolk and merchants read more easily against a bright sky: their grey is lighter (0.7 to 0.8), the letters in the name, title and guild lines sit closer together, and the name is about a tenth larger in both nameplate sizes. Player names still read brighter than NPC names. (53468b17a4)
• The party member list no longer covers the frame of a summoned creature or pet. While the pet frame is showing, the party list moves below it, or beside it on shorter screens, and goes back to its spot when the pet is gone. The pet frame can be clicked and dragged again at small resolutions like 1280x768. Companion bars follow the same rule. Reported through the in-game Oracle.
• The hourglass that holds long-lasting buffs (Options, Group Buffs Lasting Longer Than) now lists what each grouped buff gives under its name and time left, the same stat lines its own icon shows. Long lists stop adding stat lines after 30 so the tooltip fits on screen, and every buff is still named. (6b5c530cbb)
• In the appearance editor (character creation, the Magic Mirror and the New You shop), hovering an entry in the Body Markings or Face Markings list now shows that marking on your character. Moving off the list or closing it without a click puts your chosen marking back. Requested by Elene Sali.
• New Health Bar Size slider under Options, Interface, Gameplay: 75% to 200% for the health, focus and Vigor bars on your own frame and your target's frame, with the numbers on the bars scaling along. The rest of the interface keeps its size, so bigger bars no longer mean raising UI Scale for every window. Party, companion and pet frames keep their normal bars. Requested by Joe (5e70cf1ef6, #9592).
• The health bar floating over an enemy you have targeted shows its health again. The target outline was drawn in front of the bar, so it read full, empty or showed a small red patch while your target frame counted down. The outline now sits behind the bar. Reported through the Oracle as #9610 (2e8df00914).
• Options gained a Chat Text Size slider under Interface, Chat & Conversation. It resizes the chat log and the typing box in every chat tab and every chat window, live and apart from UI Scale (#9593). The per-tab Font Size box still sets a single tab.
• The outline around a targeted nameplate's health bar now pulses at half its old rate, about once every 1.2 seconds, so a hurt summoned pet no longer reads as flashing. Requested by Astirian (f027df12b0).
• Fixed a summoned pet's owner line sitting flush on top of its health bar on the overhead nameplate. The name and owner line now sit one line higher, leaving a gap the height of the owner line above the bar. Player guild tags are unchanged. (#9583)
• The character sheet Dodge hover now explains that the number is your dodge rating, that an attacker's Dexterity lowers it, and that you cannot dodge from behind or while stunned, knocked down or rooted. It used to say only that the stat raised your chance to dodge (#9589).
• The critical chance rows on the character sheet now label the number in brackets as a rating: 34% (rating 51 +25 Vigor, +97%) instead of 34% (51% +25% Vigor, +97%), which read as four percentages that did not add up. The chance is the rating divided by the rating plus 100, and the row hovers now say so. Pet crit rows on Examine and the Pet tab got the same change. Reported by Akandriel.
• Your pet's status frame now sits a short step under your own frame instead of at a fixed spot sized for the tallest frame a player can have, which left about 100 pixels of empty space for most players. It moves down when your frame grows (a second row of buffs, a bigger Health Bar Size or Buff Icon Size) and back up after your frame has stayed shorter for ten seconds. A pet frame you have dragged stays where you put it. Requested by Astirian (#9580, 6383437e7e)
• The character sheet Critical Chance and Spell Critical Chance hovers now say the chance is against a target with no critical defense, such as a practice dummy. They used to say only that it was "based on a practice dummy" (#9589).
• Clicking the Achievement Unlocked banner now opens the Achievements window on that achievement, with its category selected and its row highlighted and scrolled into view. The reward and discovery banners link the same way, the many-at-once summary opens the journal, and every other center-screen message still lets clicks through to the world (6f71b97e94, #9578).
• The charge bar's cooling section is now blue with diagonal stripes. After a six-charge Rend, the next hold can only reach five, and the sixth segment still cooling down was a near-black that testers could barely tell from an empty segment. It now stands apart from both the orange charges and the empty track (0bb1d4b33e, #6291).
• The minimap's gold ring no longer draws small cream marks behind the N, E, S and W letters, which made the letters look smudged (e1186dce1b).
• The minimap's - and + zoom buttons moved from inside the ring to just below it, on a dark backing, so they no longer cover the bottom of the map and stay visible over light map art (e1aeaae680).
• The character creation name screen has more space under "By what name shall you be known in New Britannia?" so the question no longer crowds the First Name field (99f33241e3). Reported through the in-game Oracle.
• The location line under each character on the character select screen is now burnt orange so it stands out from the name and reads against the dark card (requested by Bobb Ross, bd12fd57d9).
• The Next Steps panel no longer tells a new character on the Isle of Storms that the map opens with M. The map is closed on the Isle, so the suggestion now waits until the player reaches the Outskirts (#9716, 7bb4409d9c).
• The main menu on the title screen now sits lower so it no longer crowds the game title. Its top edge moved from about 29% to 33% of the screen height on both title backdrops. On a short window or at a large UI Scale the gap shrinks so the whole menu stays on screen. The login form stays centered as before. (#9706)
• Widening Vendor Listings in Zone now gives the extra room to columns whose text is cut off before Item Name gets any wider. Owner Name, Vendor Name, Location and the price columns widen until their text fits, and Item Name takes what is left; at the narrowest window size nothing changes, and a column resized by hand keeps its width. The NPC shop window and the trade window follow the same rule. (#9709, 08ea3bbe96)
• The character appearance window now sits in the middle of the open space left of the mirror, instead of against the far left edge of the screen, so the options and the character are close together (#9712, f1ae9884d7). Dragging to turn the character now lines up with the island mirror's glass.
• The "You are Encumbered!" help message no longer bounces up and down once the skill tracker column is full. Each new skill joining the column made the rows spring up and back down, and the message followed them; it now moves up only after the column has settled (#9707).
• The main menu and the character screen now have gaps between their groups of buttons and text. The main menu has a gap under Play Offline, under Quit and under the hint line; the character screen has one under the location line and one above the Log Out row. Each gap is one line of button text (16 px). Requested by Astirian. (76bc141926, #9705)

Audio

• Door open, close and locked sounds now play at half their old volume. The door clips were mastered as loud as the level-up fanfare and played at full volume from arm's length. Reported by Barugon (3447883cbf, #9630).
• Footsteps play again on the grassy and dark forest-floor ground in the Human Battle Encampment. Those two ground types were set to a surface the game does not have, so every step there was silent and logged an error. They now use grass footsteps, like the other battle camps, and any unknown surface now falls back to dirt footsteps.
• Restoring voice to lines from the NPC gesture pass. When a gesture moved from brackets to italics, the spoken words stayed the same but the line lost its voice clip. A new re-key tool found 76 lines whose recording already matched and put them back on the voice server, with no new recording. Louis the Cook, Julia the Alchemist and Ted in Kingsport speak again, along with about 30 other NPCs. Wessen the horse, the Blood Bay drunk and three growls are still silent. Their spoken text really did change, so they wait for the next voice pass. (#9597)

Mail

• Player mail now has a Message box under the subject, so a letter can carry a short note (up to 500 bytes, line breaks kept). The receiver sees it when they select the mail and on the letter itself; older mail opens as before. Requested by Akandriel.
• The Send To box in the Mail window only accepts name characters again, and the Subject box stops at 125 characters. Both limits stopped working when the window moved to UI Toolkit, so a long subject was only refused when you pressed Send.
• The mail window has a Reply button beside New Mail. With a letter from another player selected, it checks the sender's name and opens the writing screen addressed to them with a "Re:" subject filled in. Vendor, bank and tax mail leave it greyed out. Requested by Rovol. (e88f404b54)

Client

• Reopened and refixed offline play for new female characters after a tester report on build 292. Both fixes from the day before had failed on that build. The startup load of the character models asked for the wrong file path and loaded nothing. The file that makes other models wait for the character models was deleted by the build on every second run, so it was missing from build 292 after shipping in 291. Both now work, and the failed model load now shows up in the log by name.
• The client no longer logs a skybox error on about a third of launches. The night shadow settings were read every frame before the game had finished loading its tuning values; they now wait for them (9192d35762).

Oracle

• The Oracle answers eleven more questions players asked her this week: taming over the pet already on a necklace, the Summoning a Polar Destroyer needs, where to buy the Scroll of the Wayfinder's Eye recipe, the blessings in the game, the Wand of Undying Embers against Vexlyn's Ember of Conflagration, the Hotbar Discard keys, the Vendor Listings in Zone window, the task list size setting, practice dummies, paintings and the Novia Painting, and where the launcher shows the game build. Her recipe list also picked up 22 new recipes, and names with an apostrophe no longer show it doubled.
• The Oracle now reads the public comments on a tracker report and its current status. Asked whether anyone had requested a reopen on a closed report, she answered no because she could only see the original description (#9618).
• The Oracle now reads the guides before telling a player an item has no recipe. Asked how to make a Temna Trophy, she used to say there was no recipe and offer a report; she now explains boss trophies are earned by defeating the boss. She also answers the newest question in a conversation instead of going back to the previous one (#9585).
• After the Oracle files a bug report, a player can now ask her for another screenshot and the game attaches a fresh capture of their screen to the same report, up to three extra per report. Asked for one before, she either refused or wrote a note on the report saying a screenshot was attached when no new image had been added. (#9694)

Images

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• The Crown Exchange window with its Buy button back under the countdown lines.
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NPCs

• NPC merchants now say a short line in a speech bubble when you close their shop window: a thank-you after Accept, a "perhaps another time" after Cancel. Requested by Akandriel.

Inventory

• The backpack title bar has a coin button that opens Vendor Listings in Zone. Before this, the only ways in were a Windows menu row and an unbound keybind (af7ac9eb9f).

Tools

• The crash symbolication tool now picks the player or GM symbol set by matching the crashed GameAssembly.dll against each build flavor. Since the player/GM split it had been resolving player crashes against the GM symbols, which gave believable but wrong function names. (22be11ab78)

Economy

• The Crown Exchange window no longer loses its Buy button. The window had a fixed height and the price, stock and countdown lines filled it, so the button and the purchase message were cut off below the frame; the window now grows to fit what it shows, and a size saved from before grows with it. (db888dba1e, #9604)

UI Toolkit

• Hotbar, combat bar, bard bar, emote bar and deck-builder rune slots, party rows and the build number stopped writing to the old NGUI widgets they no longer draw with (batch 35.5b of the NGUI removal).
• The pet status bar now draws its follow and disposition boxes and the red despawn countdown with the rest of the bar in UI Toolkit (batch 35.5c of the NGUI removal).
• The inventory, crafting, bank and decoration palette windows stopped keeping hidden NGUI labels, dropdowns and checkboxes behind their UI Toolkit views; Take All now comes from a setting on the container windows instead of from an old button (batch 35.5d of the NGUI removal).
• Books, parchments, holiday cards and sheet music stopped keeping hidden NGUI buttons, titles and edit fields behind their UI Toolkit window (batch 35.5e of the NGUI removal).
• The decoration strip over the hotbar stopped carrying the old NGUI controls and a fade loop that no longer ran (batch 35.5f of the NGUI removal).
• The decoration strip meters now carry their icons as data and no longer keep the old NGUI bar code (batch 35.5g of the NGUI removal).
• The saddle icon that dismounts you now draws with the rest of the HUD in UI Toolkit, in the same spot and still answering both mouse buttons (batch 35.5h of the NGUI removal).
• The top-right HUD corner now keeps its icons and the social and help buttons as its own data instead of reading them off the old NGUI widgets (batch 35.5i of the NGUI removal).
• A new EditMode test, NguiAbsenceTests, keeps count of the game scripts that still use NGUI (161 of them, down from 186 at the start of this pass). Scripts can only come off the list, never go on.
• Deleted five unused NGUI-era UI classes and three dead helper methods that nothing in the game reached. The list of scripts still using NGUI is down to 155.
• Ten HUD controllers (combat hand, harvest bar, cast bar, combat text, overworld tile, player frame, FPS meter, party column, timers, rune effect icons) dropped their leftover NGUI fields. Nothing on screen changes.
• Deleted eight more unused NGUI-era classes (an amount slider, a text editor, a clear button, a scroll list, a quest row and others) and two prefabs nothing used.
• Ten window controllers (merchant, vendor, character and pet sheets, skills, file lists, rewards, compass texture) dropped NGUI fields nothing read. 126 scripts still use NGUI, down from 186 at the start of the day.
• Fixed a stale HUD test that still expected the old two-argument buff/debuff lane balance call; the guarantee it checks (buffs never push a debuff into overflow) holds.
• NGUI helper calls in a dozen UI controllers became plain Unity calls, dead NGUI grid and button code went, and four more unused NGUI-era classes were deleted. 112 scripts still use NGUI.
• New tool ngui-strip.py removes NGUI components from prefabs and scenes while keeping every object, reference and translation intact, with a self-test on byte-exact fixtures. A dry run shows 5,871 components to remove across 64 UI prefabs.
• The equipment, encumbrance and experience-pool warning icons in the top-right corner now carry their pictures and colours as prefab data instead of reading them off old NGUI widgets at startup.
• The combat hand no longer depends on an NGUI grid to survive the hotbar cleanup. Without this fix, removing NGUI would have broken the hand on the next deck change.
• Nine more UI controllers (deck info, skill advancement, quest item giving, jukebox, mail addressee list, equipment slots, emote bar, charge bar) dropped NGUI widget fields that only ever got written to. 98 scripts still use NGUI.
• Fifteen more UI scripts (vendor listing forms, progress bar, item icons, skill tree and school panels, toggles, hotkey and XP labels, the HUD corner) dropped NGUI state nothing on screen read. 84 scripts still use NGUI.
• Window tabs, the window pin, the rune school filter and the "Show combos I cannot make" switch now keep their state without NGUI, with every starting selection carried over from the old widgets. 79 scripts still use NGUI.
• The hotbar no longer falls back to its old NGUI rows for the frames before its UI Toolkit rows are ready; the fallback now waits and draws nothing. 78 scripts still use NGUI.
• The confirmation dialogs lost their leftover NGUI buttons, which would have thrown once NGUI is stripped, and the player, target and party frames now carry their focus-number and grandmaster-badge settings as prefab data.
• The crafting station window and the skill tiles hold their buttons, counts and prices as plain state, with the gold coin art baked on the tile prefab. 74 scripts still use NGUI.
• The skill experience popups under the top-right corner now lay out, close and pin through UI Toolkit instead of NGUI, and each popup slides in from the right edge. 71 scripts still use NGUI.
• The NGUI ratchet test skips the local-only Debug folder, so it passes the same on a clean checkout as on the machine that wrote it. A listed debug script is not in git, and the test used to fail on every other machine (found by the batch 34/35 commit review).
• While you carry a decoration, the permission and placement-status lines under the cursor now draw through UI Toolkit, and releasing an item over the health, target or pet frame returns it to your pack instead of placing it behind the frame. 69 scripts still use NGUI.
• The dismount saddle only takes a right click that both presses and releases on it. A right-button drag that ended over the saddle used to throw you off your mount.
• The skill tree stopped building hidden NGUI path sprites and spawns its tiles without NGUI. 68 scripts still use NGUI.

Images

Oracle

• The Oracle's Fire Magic guide gained a section on the two Fire artifact wands, Vexlyn's Ember of Conflagration and the Wand of Undying Embers, with each tier's stats and what sets the two apart. Vexlyn's trades Water Attunement and extra focus cost for more Fire Attunement and Intelligence; Undying Embers carries the Fire Mage Bonus that lengthens burns. (#9594)

Content

• NPCs whisper with the right motion again. The whisper animation NPCs share was wired to the end of the seated version, so Julia the Alchemist in Kingsport seemed to do nothing on her oracle answer. Four more NPC emotes had the same mix-up and now play the right motion: tipping a hat, blowing smoke rings, and two parts of playing dead. Female NPCs get the female version of each. (#9597)
• A second swamp tree in North Celestial Wetlands was growing up through a pile of boulders about 13 meters south of the one removed last week. gravidy found it while testing the first fix, and it has been removed too.

Quests

• Clicking a Dormant Automaton Monkey in Blood River Outskirts before Gus asks for one, or after returning his, said "You may only have one Automaton Monkey." even with none in your bags. Quest items you cannot take yet now say "You have no use for this right now." The pickup stays one per character. (#9595)

Add-Ons

• The add-on crafting report now names what a craft made. ShroudOnCraftResults gave the recipe's name ("Recipe: Crimson Pine Binding (Milling)") where the product belonged, and nothing said how many items a craft produced. Each result now carries the product's name, a new made count (a craft of 4 bindings reports 4) and the list of what the craft put on the table, and ShroudGetRecipe lists what one craft makes and how many. Reported by shawnbutts. Add-on API version 24. (87c12fd472)
• The Lua add-on docs examples page now lays its four example add-ons out as a centered grid of cards, with the package icon where there is one. It and every example page had been squeezed into one narrow column at the left edge. Each example page also puts the add-on's name above its download button.
• Checked the four example add-ons against add-on API 24 and fixed what had drifted. Buff Icons now shows toggles and stances (it hid every effect with no timer), keeps a tooltip steady while an icon blinks, and labels creature effects that have no icon. Damage Meter no longer counts your own falls as damage and keeps a rune's tooltip open between refreshes.
• Avatar's Companion sample: effects with no timer no longer show a red "0s", effect names read as players see them, the journal keeps each character's totals apart when you switch characters without restarting, and on API 23 the Effects tab groups food, potions and blessings together. The API reference now warns that a per-character save in ShroudOnLogOut lands after the character has already left.
• Add-on Lua now treats a table field set to nil as absent everywhere: spec.width = nil or a nil style colour no longer gets an add-on window refused, and a saved variable set to nil reads back as nil. Reported by shawnbutts.
• Lazy string patterns such as the trim idiom s:match("^%s*(.-)%s*$") work on text of any length. They stopped with "pattern too complex" past about 100 characters.
• Add-on pictures animate with SetUV again: a picture already on screen kept its first frame until something else redrew it. Reported by shawnbutts.
• Add-on pictures can carry the game's own cooldown wedge, the dark sweep on buff and hotbar icons. SetSweep sets it, and SetSweepTimer lets the game run it every frame and clear it at the end, so a cooldown tracker needs no sprite sheet. Requested by shawnbutts.
• A label in an add-on window given a height now takes that height. It stayed about 21 pixels tall unless minHeight and maxHeight were set as well.
• Add-on API 25: ShroudGetPlayerVitals returns health and focus with their maximums, the buff lists are plain Lua tables, ShroudGetPartyMemberBuffs lists a party member's buffs, and ShroudOnPartyChanged fires when someone joins, leaves or changes scene. Requested by shawnbutts.
• ShroudGetTargetName returns the name the target frame shows. A stag read "ENTITY WITH NO NAME" followed by an internal object name.
• The add-on API reference now explains primaryDurability: the most a repair brings an item back to, which wears down with use and only a crafting station repair raises.
• The /fps Performance window shows how many milliseconds a frame your Lua add-ons take, on the top row, while any add-on is turned on.
• Add-on API 25 answers a report from the author of the Toolbox add-on: buff lists are plain Lua tables, ShroudGetPlayerVitals returns health and focus with their maximums, and add-ons can read party members' buffs and hear when the party changes (ShroudOnPartyChanged).
• Add-on pictures can show the cooldown wedge the buff bar and hotbar draw, either set to a fraction with SetSweep or left to run down on its own with SetSweepTimer.
• Four add-on window fixes from the same report: a sprite-sheet picture redraws as soon as its frame changes (reported by shawnbutts), a label keeps a height shorter than one line when given one, the card panel style draws on the Air and Crucible skins, and targeting a wild animal gives add-ons its name where they used to get a debug text.
• Add-on Lua matches standard Lua in two more places: a table field set to nil is gone everywhere, saved variables included, and the usual trim pattern works on text longer than about 100 characters.
• Add-ons share one set of game values such as your gold and health; if one add-on overwrites one, the game now puts the right value back on the next frame for all the others.
• The /fps window shows how many milliseconds your add-ons take each frame and names the busiest one, while any add-on is turned on.
• The card panel style also draws with its skin's own frame in the game's card tiles (recipe cards, store shelf, Next Steps) on the Air and Crucible skins.

Travel

• The map beside the Teleport to Zone entrance list now faces the same way as the zone's own map, so each entrance pin sits on the side its name says. In zones with a turned compass, such as South Broken Road, the Northwest Entrance used to show at the top right; 129 of 457 compass-named entrances were on the wrong side and none are now. (#9605, 9f20d67995)

Maps

• Castle Atos now looks like an ordinary zone. Its map shows no housing lot, the zone title drops the "(Player Owned)" suffix and the town help popup, and Teleport to Zone lists it with the NPC towns when the POTs filter is off. Reported through the Oracle (#9576).

Tester Tools

• The /verify board is back in the regular game client for tester accounts. Testers can claim tasks and post verdicts without the GM client, signed in to the tracker with their game login. Teleport to Bug Location stays in the GM client.

Voice

• Caravaggios Wolf, the art dealer in Ardoris, now speaks his conversation lines. The Ardoris voice casting had filed him as an animal because of his surname, so he was skipped when the town was voiced. He now has his own voice (187 new lines), live without a patch from the next login (c4fea92423).

Addon Store

• The Community Addons store now approves a submission on its own when the automatic safety scan rates it safe with at least 0.75 confidence. Anything rated caution or dangerous, or scanned with low confidence, still waits for a staff reviewer, and staff can unapprove an auto-approved add-on at any time.

Housing

• Player-town lot markers and terrain levellers can no longer be placed where their levelled ground would end up under the water. Chaining levellers down a shore had let a Village Property Marker sit below the waterline, and its lot kept that ground after the levellers were picked up, so land buildings stood in open water. The placement check now tests the height the ground will be levelled to against the water across the whole footprint instead of one point at its centre. Lots already placed are unchanged (4619ab76f1, #9577).
• The Disco Ball Chandelier, in all three sizes, now has Light Settings like other lamps, so its colour, range and brightness can be changed and the light it throws on the floor and walls takes the new colour. Its light had been left out of the adjustable set even though it counted against the lot light limit. A few other decorations built the same way now offer Light Settings too (63e0321795, #9573).
• Lot tax on the new servers now uses the live rules: a lot is evicted 60 days past due instead of 28 hours, and the royal tax credit grants 15 days every 30 days instead of one day every 20 minutes. The test values would have evicted about 147 taxed lots on the first sweep after the move, against 3 under the live rules (34d263d8fe).

Build pipeline

• First full release through the rebuilt pipeline with Steam in it: build 294 went out to the internal test tier, was promoted to chaos, and Jenkins then uploaded it to the Steam staging branch by itself. The run found one gap, fixed the same day: the Mac download for testers who skip the launcher did not update when a build reached chaos by promotion.

NPCs

• Talking to NPCs from the saddle works on the next chaos build. On build 292 the greeting pulled riders into the conversation close-up, which removed the mount and closed the window. Riders now stay mounted and out of the close-up, like seated players. (048e30b9ad)

Content

• The October login reward and the R154 subscriber reward now have their contents; both boxes were empty before. The October login box holds a Red Autumn Leaf Pile and a Hannibal Jack O' Lantern. The R154 subscriber box holds a Gossamer Chaos Cloak, a Raccoon Decoration Pet and a 2-Story Fall Elm Tree (74cec40612).

Voice

• Recorded and published the new voices for about 30 NPCs whose dialogue was switched to match their body last week. Parker the life magic trainer and Guildmaster Cai Lau in Ardoris, Miranda, Beatriz, Tacey and others, plus the women running city shops and village criers, still spoke with their old voice until now. 2,525 lines, live without a game update.

Testing

• Added an automated smoke test for GM client builds. In about ten minutes it creates a fresh character, raises a skill, changes zones, attacks a practice dummy, buys and sells at a merchant and asks the Oracle a question, saving screenshots along the way.
• The smoke test finishes by scanning the client log and grouping exceptions and errors by cause. Its first run, against build 294, found a null reference thrown on every frame of startup in the sky shadow code.
• Confirmed the client automation bridge is compiled only into GM builds, and took two of its helper files out of the player build as well.

Onboarding

• The Battle of Solace Bridge teaches the controls again. The movement, camera, jump and journal prompts, the fallen log on the rift path, and the arrival check that clears a leftover movement task are all back, so characters who reach the scene without visiting the Isle of Storms still learn them. Each prompt still skips players who already learned that lesson on the Isle.
• The switched-off "what to do next" hint is back in the Battle of Solace Bridge scene and stays switched off, so every piece of the old tutorial is in the scene again.

Pets

• A fox or goat that lay down to sleep no longer buries its head in the ground. Played through the pet's own animator, the fox's nap bent its neck about twice as far as the artist's pose and put its head 8 cm under the ground. Unity smooths every rotation key its own way, and the pet animation builders had placed their keys for straight lines between them, so a quick move into a long hold swung past the pose it was holding. The builders now place keys for the curve Unity actually plays, and all 47 of the koala, fox, goat, capybara and raccoon family's own animations were rebuilt: the koala's ear no longer swings around during its nap, and raccoon paws and toes no longer flick. The goat's sleeping pose from its art pack rested its head 7 cm into the ground, so the goat now lifts its neck to lay its head on the ground. Reported by Ceal Astra. (4938d09e38)

Dungeons

• A Lich Fighter Statue in a player dungeon now raises its lich again when you come back to the room. Before, walking far enough away for the lich to be put away left the statue empty for the rest of the visit. The same fix covers practice dummies and other decorations that stand up a creature (#9733).
• Player dungeons can be published without the owner clearing them first. Publish Dungeon to the Public used to refuse until the owner had beaten the current layout in Adventure Mode, which kept builders who do not fight from opening theirs. Clearing it yourself is now optional and still sets the author's best time on the plaque, and editing a published dungeon no longer takes it off the public list. The player dungeon guide is updated to match. Requested by Akandriel. (ab0ce179bd)
• A player dungeon's owner can now keep its layout a secret. Keep Layout Secret from Visitors in the entrance Options menu replaces the room counts, halls and floor area on the entrance tooltip and Dungeon window with "Layout kept secret until you go inside" for anyone who has not been in yet. Once a visitor has entered, the layout shows for them, and the owner always sees it in full. Visits, first clear, the record time and any prize still show to everyone. The option is off unless the owner turns it on. Requested by Akandriel (#9725).

Process

• Quest and task content is no longer removed without a developer's direct permission. The quest owner signs off on any cut to quests, tasks, tutorial prompts or the props they depend on.

HUD

• Your own, target and pet status frames now follow the mouse pointer exactly when dragged, and can sit flush against every edge of the screen at any UI Scale. At UI Scale below 100% they used to lag behind the pointer and stop about 100 pixels short of the left edge, and at every scale they stopped short of the left and top edges. Saved frame positions are unchanged. (#9719)

Moderation

• A player was able to create a character named "Butthead". The name check now refuses crude insults used as names, including when they are hidden inside a longer name, spelled with numbers ("Butth3ad"), or split across the first and last name ("Butt Head"). Real names that only contain a rude-looking piece, such as Butts, Button, Cassandra, Dickens and Scunthorpe, still pass. Staff accounts can still take reserved names but no longer skip the offensive-word list.
• The AI name screen now counts crude insults and vulgar compound words used as a name as profanity, so it refuses them at creation instead of sending them to the review queue. On a 66-name test set it refused all 12 names that should be refused and none of the 39 real and fantasy names that should pass, with a median answer time of 0.2 seconds. A Create click now waits for the name check that is already running. It is not on chaos yet.

Tutorial

• On the Isle of Storms, where there is no map, the chat line for discovering the Mirror now reads "marked on compass" instead of "marked on compass and map". Other scenes keep the original wording. Reported through the in-game Oracle (32424549e4).

Dungeons

• A lich killed at a Lich Fighter Statue now stands up again about two minutes after it dies. Before, the statue stayed empty until you left the dungeon and came back. Practice dummies and other decorations that raise a creature follow the same rule (47bb6ea494).

Build

• The Mac client build no longer reports a PowerShell startup crash as a shader compiler failure. After a green Unity build, the shader check now retries PowerShell up to three times and names the real problem if it never starts. Tonight's release was held on exactly that: the Mac build was sound, but the check never ran.

Combat

• Elysian Illumination's healing aura now grows with Sun Attunement. It had added only a point or so for any amount of attunement, so a caster at 216 healed about 10 a tick; the heal now multiplies by attunement like every other heal, roughly 26 a tick at that level (fb4a583c63).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-09-27 is up: Every map in the game with fog on it now has a chart that uncovers the whole thing for your whole account, plus two new recipes for clearing fog on the spot. The Ancient Undead of Despair were carrying their stun resistance twice and adding it together, so Body Slam had never once put a Guard Drone on the floor. Also two clients out of one build ahead of the October move, and a long profiling day at Etceter that cut the middle frame by a fifth. Listen or read the transcript (18 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed two player-forum reports to the tracker: a Guild Alliance system request with a cross-guild chat channel (requested by Janzik), and a regression of the party interface overlapping/misplaced player names bug (reported by Jumentum).

Housing

• Escape now cancels Move House on the first press. It used to open the Options window instead, and the next Escape closed Options and cancelled the move together. Found by a tester while checking the Move House key fix.
• Placed pets and Conversationalists no longer walk through closed doors in a house that has been moved with Move House. A moved house loaded with its front door shut also lets pets back in once the door opens (reported by Chadwyck).
• Closed doors now stop placed pets and Conversationalists in 30 more home styles, among them the Log Cabin, Red Barn stalls, every interior door of the Lord of the Isle Mansion, the Obsidian Inn, the kobold great halls and the pirate galleons. An audit of all 2,401 house doors found 227 that were never marked as doorways. A fence test now checks every home.
• Devotionals placed in a player-owned town now count as ordinary objects instead of NPC buildings, so they no longer use up the slots a town needs for its bank, Oracle and shops. Towns that already have devotionals down get those slots back. Requested by Brickbat.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now say where all fourteen dogs for Pet Every Dog live, why a stunned enemy can still parry, what the launcher's error messages mean, where to find a Leather Bota Bag or dragon meat, why a craft might not raise your crafting skill, and that there is no Grand Admiral title. These came from questions players asked her this week.

Tools

• The client-control harness no longer loses a freshly launched game: a client that was shutting down at the same moment used to delete the new one's connection file.
• The Windows build agents now run with no window. Windows 11 had been showing each agent as a terminal window on the desktop, and closing it took the build node offline mid-build; two profiler builds were lost that way. The agent also relaunches itself if it exits (a1f8cfa6ca).

UI

• The Crafting tab of the Skills window tree drew its Gathering, Refining and Production school icons smaller than the icons on the Adventuring tab. They now use the larger size the original window gave them, so both tabs read the same.
• Skill tooltips in the Skills window no longer spread across half the screen. The level comparison had its own wider column, which pushed it into a second column and made tooltips such as Swiftness about 800 wide on a 1080p screen; it now sits inside the normal 360 column, and the tooltip frame ends at the last line of text instead of running to the bottom of the screen. Reported by Astirian through the Oracle.
• The party member list no longer gets stuck on top of your own health bars. Clicking a member's row to select them used to pick up and save the whole list, and with a big party that saved spot could sit over your own frame or against the top edge of the screen. A click now only selects, the list follows Lock Status Movement like the other status frames, Reset Positions puts it back under your frame, and a member leaving no longer shifts the Target Party Member keys onto the wrong people (reported by Jumentum).
• Companion and pet bars now sit under the party member list and move with it. They used to open at a fixed spot that fell inside the list once a party had two or more members, so companion names drew over party rows. Reset Positions now puts them back too. (#9522)
• The Next Steps window has a thin line between the list of suggestions and the details pane. A short list with no scrollbar used to leave the two columns reading as one open area (#9524).
• Pointing at a web link in the flat book window now shows the green link cursor that chat links use, and the cursor goes back to normal off the link or when the book closes. The immersive 3D book gets the same cursor in a follow-up (#9497).
• The minimap has a new default spot beside the warning icons in the top right. Its top now lines up with the damaged equipment icons and its right edge sits under the character sheet button, so the warning icons and skill icons stay near the top of the screen instead of being pushed below the map. A third warning icon wraps onto a second line to the right of the map. Players who never moved their minimap get the new spot automatically.
• The immersive 3D book now shows the green link cursor too, but only where a click would open the link, and hands the cursor back while a page turns or the book closes (#9497).
• The quit confirmation had its question sitting just above the Quit and Cancel buttons, with a wide empty strip of window over it. The question now sits midway between the top of the window and the buttons, and the window is a little taller to make room. The logout countdown and the Please wait message are spaced the same way. Reported by Astirian.
• The minimap's gold ring now sits evenly on the N, E, S and W letters (it had been drawing a few pixels high), and the - and + zoom buttons are centered under the N and S instead of sitting to the right (52632bcc54).
• Stopped the skill-advancement column from logging a "Screen position out of view frustum" error every frame while the top-right HUD corner was still laying out. The column now skips that frame and keeps its last position.

Housing

• The chimneys on the Wood & Plaster and Shingle-Roof Two-Story w/ Balcony Town Homes now go about 1 m down, matching the Village homes. Before, the pit was 19 cm deep and its walls showed the stone texture stretched into streaks. The Village Wood & Plaster Balcony home named in the report already had the deeper flue; the screenshot showed the Town model (reported by Elene Sali).
• Selling a lot in a player town, or a house from storage, now sends a No Trade container back to your bank with everything still inside it. Before, the container reached the bank but would not open, and its contents were out of reach.

Guilds

• The Declare Guild War window works again when you challenge the same player a second time. Reopening it after pressing Cancel, or after that player accepted an earlier challenge, brought back a window where Send Challenge, Cancel and the X button did nothing and no challenge was sent. The window can now also be closed while a challenge is still being sent, and a challenge that goes through after the window closed is withdrawn. Reported by Elene Sali.

Images

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Images

• Next Steps divider
• Quit confirmation spacing
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UI Toolkit

• Planned batch 30, the last NGUI screen: the front end (login, main menu, agreements, character select and character screen, offline load). A read of the screen found no live 3D rendering behind it and two panels that were never reachable, so the work is nine panel conversions, a dead-code pass and a final strip of the old interface from the prefab.
• Front end batch 30, first step: deleted two title-screen panels no player could reach, the old Play splash and the in-game account signup (accounts are made on the website). Also added a prefab surgery script the rest of the batch uses to take the old interface out of the front-end prefab.
• The front end's message boxes moved to the new interface: the lost-connection, no-access and Steam link notices, and the second "are you really sure" warnings for deleting a character or resetting its quest state, which now use the shared confirmation box. Enter no longer skips past the lost-connection notice while its connection check is still running.
• The End User License Agreement and Commercial Terms of Service screens moved to the new interface. Continue stays locked until the agree box is ticked, the text scrolls in blocks so a long agreement draws in full, and the "open in a web browser" link sits on the screen itself.
• The main menu moved to the new interface: Play Online, Play Offline, Options, Credits, Quit, the "Use the Original Title Screen" checkbox and the Rewards Program banner. The Play Online and Play Offline descriptions that used to pop up on hover now show under the buttons, and also when a button is reached with the keyboard.
• The Steam account link screen, where a Steam player with no game account makes one or links an existing one, moved to the new interface. Its "Forgot User Name or Password" line looked like a link but did nothing when clicked; it now opens the account recovery page.
• The avatar list you pick a character from moved to the new interface: one card per character with its name and last location, empty slots up to your limit, and the Log Out or Main Menu button under the list. The cards work with Tab and Enter as well as the mouse, and the "Empty" label on unused slots can now be translated.
• The character screen moved to the new interface, all three versions of it: the plain one, the one with Select Avatar, and the "still in the game" screen after a quick relog. Resume, Start On World Map, Select Avatar, Character Options, Delete Character, offline Save and Load, and Log Out work as before. Character Options is now a labelled button instead of a small icon.
• The offline Load Game screen moved to the new interface, with the same two columns as the Save Game dialog (file name and time saved). Load and Delete wait until a save is picked, a double-click loads, an empty folder says so, and a deleted save leaves the list at once.
• The front end's Loading... plate, shown while the avatar list loads and while a character is created or entered, moved to the new interface. An unused offline connecting plate left over from an earlier conversion was removed from the title screen.
• The front end's background art and the intro burn moved to the new interface. The login and character screen art fill the screen height as before, the login art keeps the nudge that lines its phoenix up with the menu, and the original title screen shows centred with black bars on wide monitors. The burn uses the same shader, drawn into a texture the new interface shows, so it looks the same.
• Ran the new front end in the game: the intro burn, main menu, license screens, avatar list, character screen, Load Game, Steam link, message box and loading plate all draw and respond. Three layout faults turned up and were fixed: some labels drew a dark band behind them, Load Game never said "No Saved Game Files Found", and Load Game and the license screen carried empty space under their buttons.
• Stripped the old interface out of the front-end prefab: 1,469 documents down to 167, 370 objects down to 48, with every dialog kept switched on so the client still boots straight to the login screen. The 53 strings its labels carried stay on the login manager so their translations survive. The offline Load Game screen keeps its old file list for now, because that list is shared with the Save and book-import windows.
• Closed batch 30: no screen before the world is drawn by the old interface any more, and the NGUI conversion has no screen left to convert. What remains is removing the old interface itself, starting with the one old file list still shared by the save, load and book-import windows.
• Planned the NGUI teardown as batches 34 to 37. Every screen is now on UI Toolkit, but the old package still does live work: the centre crosshair, the health bars and buff icons over nameplates, vendor and pet labels, book page breaks, and the icon atlases are still drawn or measured by it, and 191 prefabs and 50 scenes still carry its components. The plan replaces those first, then strips the prefabs and deletes the package, with page breaks and icon positions checked against the old code.
• NGUI teardown step 34.1: the right-click menu vocabulary (the actions a menu lists and the interface that offers them) moved out of the old NGUI menu class into its own file across 122 files, so that class can be deleted later without taking the vocabulary with it. No change in game.
• NGUI teardown step 34.2: the text helpers the chat, tooltips, social windows, mail and books borrowed from NGUI (stripping markup, writing and reading colour codes, naming objects in logs) moved into project code. A new test compares each one against the NGUI original, including out-of-range colours, so every colour code and log line comes out the same.
• NGUI teardown step 34.3: books, letters and parchments now measure their pages with the game's own text measurer instead of borrowing the old interface's. A new test measures 25 library books plus markup, long words and Japanese text in every page size the book prefabs define, and gets the same page breaks as before every time. One intended change: page breaks no longer shift with screen height or UI scale, so a book now breaks the same way on every screen.
• NGUI teardown step 34.4: the art that windows cut out of the big interface image sheets (skill tree frames and lines, crafting station pictures, emote icons, deck locks, the decorating bar) now comes from simple sheet files baked from the old ones, rectangle for rectangle. Some of that art used to appear only if another window had been opened first in the session; it now always resolves.
• NGUI teardown step 34.5: the floating names over player vendors, cash registers and decoration animals are now built from settings stored on those 48 objects instead of being copied from the old interface's label. Same size, outline and placement; names still switch to the Japanese or Chinese font with the game language.
• NGUI teardown step 34.7: the crosshair in the middle of the screen is now drawn by the new interface. Its pictures, the out-of-range darkening, Reticle Brightness and the rules that hide it (HUD off, conversations, loading screens) are unchanged, and it still sits under every window.
• NGUI teardown step 34.8: the Languard Gemstrike mini-game and the Magic Mirror reflection stopped borrowing from the old interface package; the game got its own helper for building its buttons, and the plain transparent shader the mirror uses moved into the project's own shader folder.
• NGUI teardown step 34.9: the text face settings the new interface reads (fonts, sizes, outlines, alignment) stopped storing the old interface's own setting types. Every saved face reads back exactly as before; a new test pins that.
• Sped up the new world-label test so it reads only the four folders the labelled prefabs live in; it had been scanning the whole art tree and holding up the shared Editor.
• NGUI teardown step 34.6, first half: built a small replacement for the part of the old interface that still draws the health bars, buff icons and leader marks over characters. A new test builds more than fifty bar, fill and timer settings both ways and requires identical geometry. Nothing switches to it yet; the nameplates move over in the next step.
• World nameplates now draw their health and cast bars, buff icons and leader marks with a small plate renderer of our own instead of NGUI. It is a line-for-line port of the parts NGUI did for the plates, so they look the same; the prefabs converted by swapping component scripts and kept every authored size and colour. The village, discovery and vendor signs still use NGUI until a later pass.
• Fixed the mail window so a received attachment can be dragged into your backpack or taken with a double-click again; only Take All worked. The crafting, scene vendor, give-quest and file-save lists also stopped building a hidden second copy of their rows in the old interface library.
• Removed the old interface library from every list in the game. The backpack, bank, merchant, vendor, crafting, mail, trade and other lists stopped keeping a hidden second copy of their rows, and ListUI lost about 1,400 lines. Items in a merchant shopping cart can be dragged out of the cart again.
• Deleted five unused list classes and moved the teleport and arrival-point rules they carried into their own small classes. The offline Load Game screen lost its last 44 components from the old interface library, so the front end prefab now has none.
• Moved Skills, Mail, Social, the book reader, crafting stations and every container window off the old interface librarys window frame; no window uses it now. Skills and Social now keep their pin when closed, and item windows such as maps and the jukebox no longer reopen by themselves at the next login after being closed.
• Removed the old interface library from the checks for whether you are typing in a text field, from the invert-scroll option, and from how the game UI is created. Its live world-click routing stays until the next batch, where it goes together with the component it depends on.
• Thirty converted windows, among them Mail, the character sheet, the bank, merchants and vendors, stopped keeping hidden old-library widgets just to hold their text and button states. Most of those widgets turned out to be unused and were deleted. The rest became plain state objects.

Build

• Fixed a release pipeline flaw that marked a build as failed after it had already gone live. A release step that ends with only a warning, such as the staff client having nowhere to publish yet, now leaves the release standing; a real failure still stops it.
• The chaos release now checks, before the client builds start, that the nightly server reports cover every item the build ships, and bakes fresh reports at the release commit when they do not. Tonight's release built all three clients and was then refused at deploy because five new pets were missing from the reports.

Maps

• The map is switched off on the Isle of Storms. Its map only ever showed a black field of stars that never filled in as players explored. On the Isle the map key now says "Map not available." in chat, the Map entry in the window list is greyed out and the round minimap stays hidden. It comes back when the player steps through the Lunar Rift (#9499).
• The World Map button in a town shows the world map the right way up. It used to be turned by the town's own compass north, on its side in Aerie and upside down in Solania, with the town's lot outlines and markers drawn across it. The world map view now shows the map picture alone, and Local Map brings the town markers back (#9494).
• The Teleport to Zone entrance list gained the destination's map beside it, drawn under the player's own fog of war, with a pin on each entrance it offers. Selecting a row lights its pin and clicking a pin selects the row; undiscovered entrances get no pin. Entrance positions for 853 arrival points were baked into the scene data to place them. Requested by MrChadwyck.

Combat

• A creature killed while Enraged no longer keeps the Enraged icon on its corpse. The icon had been coming back under the corpse name and in the target frame a moment after death (#9496).
• Knight's Grace no longer removes the movement slow that Testudo puts on its caster. The slow now lasts for Testudo's full duration alongside its damage resistance, and Knight's Grace still clears slows from enemies. (#9474)
• A creature stunned by Body Slam (or knocked down) no longer parries or blocks your attacks. Dodge and glancing blows were already switched off while stunned; parry and block had been left out, so a stunned monster still turned aside some swings (ce5988b8f9, #9471).

Infrastructure

• The team Discord feed channels now carry the chaos shard instead of the live servers. Chaos had its staff feeds switched off; they now post straight to the team bot, and the chat moderator flags land in an admin-only channel. The old Mattermost feed mirror was removed.

Performance

• The Performance window's frame time graph now draws its bars by scaling them instead of resizing them. The graph scrolls, so every update resized all 150 bars and made the whole interface rebuild, several times a second: opening the window to check the frame rate was making the frame rate worse.
• Per-frame garbage in busy towns cut: the game's internal coroutine scheduler stopped allocating on every resume, chat channel checks, pathfinding graph names, music ducking and three leftover on-screen debug handlers stopped creating throwaway objects every frame. At the Etceter square these were about 10 KB of the 18.8 KB the game threw away each frame.
• Four more small per-frame allocations removed: the asset bundle loader's timer, the compass's marker placement, spawn despawn checks and the friend-count badge now reuse what they built instead of making new objects every frame.
• Network packets stopped allocating new buffers each time they are sent or received: about two thirds less garbage per packet on the client (dab88bb501).
• Measured at the Etceter square with the first round of garbage fixes: the game now throws away about 6.8 KB a frame instead of about 14 KB, with less than half as many allocations. A new ecdump diagnostic goes into the next test build to track down the largest remaining source.
• Removed 408 bytes of per-frame garbage found in the Etceter profiler capture. The nameplate depth-capture health check now looks at the camera's command buffer count and only does the full attachment check when that count changes, or once a second. The ocean now remembers which texture formats the graphics card supports instead of asking again every frame. (9d0f01f0cc)
• shadowdump console command lists what draws shadows right now: the sun or moon and how visible its shadow is, each camera, each shadowed light, and the shadow-casting objects inside the shadow distance by layer and scene area. Four switchable shadow settings (moon shadow floor, shadow distance scale, cascade count, shadowed lamp cap) ship off, for pricing the night shadow cost at Etceter on one build (2dbc6a380d).
• Night shadows in towns cost less. At night the moon now casts shadows out to half the usual distance (300 m to 150 m on the highest setting), and a small lamp or candle casts shadows only while you are near the area it lights. Measured in Etceter at night in rain, each change saved about 2 ms a frame (30.3 ms before; 28.1 and 28.0 ms with each on its own) and looked the same in side-by-side screenshots. shadowdump and the new comparison scenario did the pricing; turning the moon shadow off entirely saved 4.3 ms but visibly brightened the ground under trees, so it stays off (32af943a11).
• The moon no longer casts shadows at night, worth about 4 ms a frame in Etceter; the ground under trees reads a little brighter at night. Lamp, candle and fire shadows now end at a distance that scales with how far each light reaches: a small table lamp keeps its shadows to about 10 m, a large fire keeps them as before (e523ae532e).
• Lamp and fire shadows now reach as far as each light is big: four times the distance it lights, up to 110 m. A fire lighting 15 m keeps its shadows to about 60 m, where before no light cast shadows past 25 m; a small table lamp still stops at about 10 m. The shadow budget still caps how many lights cast shadows at once (b48453a7a9).
• Planted crops no longer cast shadows. A garden holds dozens of small plants, and each one was drawn again for every shadow in view; crops still sit in the shade of trees and buildings (d37c87e1c9).
• Coroutine resumes stopped allocating memory, about 3.8 KB of garbage a frame in Etceter. The cause was code that briefly switched the thread language setting to format numbers; in Unity that switch permanently marks the main thread, and after that every coroutine resume allocated. Numbers are formatted without the switch now, and a test stops it coming back (08dbccf576).

Creatures

• Trolls and dragons show one Enraged icon when they enrage. A second, blank Enraged icon used to appear beside the one listing the bonuses. A troll or dragon that loses you and walks home now enrages again in the next fight; before, its enrage waited out a ten-minute cooldown (#9495, reported by Joe Z).

Lua Addons

• Lua addon store submissions now post a notice to a new staff channel on the team Discord, with the addon, version, author and a link to its review page.

Books

• A tester found that clicking a website link in the immersive 3D book turned the page instead of opening the site. It did not happen in our own tests, so the book now writes a line to the game log naming the step where a click on a 3D page failed to find its link, and a retest has been filed (#9498).

Stability

• Fixed a Linux client crash at startup: with the companion turned on, one earlier crash or forced quit made every later launch close during loading. Mac shared the same fault. Both now start normally and clean up after the old session themselves.

Add-Ons

• Add-on creators can now give an add-on a support link, such as its forum thread or code page. The Community Addons window shows it on a Support line in the add-on details, under the size, installs and update date, and asks before opening the page in your web browser. Creators set it in a new Support link field when they submit, or in the package manifest, and updates keep it. Requested by Tirrag.
• Add-on packages can now carry .mp3, .aif/.aiff and tracker music files (.mod, .it, .s3m, .xm) as well as .ogg and .wav, which covers every sound format the Lua API plays. The store checks the contents of each file against its extension, and a package that uses the new formats declares add-on API 21. Requested by Goriah Kuulas. The Lua API version is now 21.
• Add-on sounds now load on macOS. The sound loader was given a plain file path, which the Mac client read as a web address, so no add-on sound played on a Mac in any format.
• The Community Addons window has a View unapproved checkbox on the Browse tab. With it on, an author sees their own submitted add-ons that are still being scanned, waiting for review, or were removed from the store, marked with that state, and can install them from the list to test before approval. Only the author sees them, and those test installs are not counted as store installs. This followed a request from Goriah Kuulas for faster add-on updates. (836a35ea30)
• Add-on packages can now carry their own data files. A package lists up to 16 .json files in a new data_files field of its manifest, and its code reads one with ShroudLoadData, which returns the file as a Lua table. A package reads only its own files, each up to 256 KB. /lua check reports data files that are missing, too large or not listed, and the store checks each one at upload. Requested by Goriah Kuulas. The Lua API version is now 22.
• Add-ons can now group buffs by kind. Every buff an add-on reads carries a Category: Food, Potion, Blessing, Skill, Song, Pet, Consumable, Poison, Equipment, Event, Environment, Creature or Other, so a custom buff bar can put food in one row and blessings in another without keeping its own list of names. The categories come from data the game already has, so new foods and blessings sort themselves. Two new calls read a buff's category by position, and ShroudBuffCategories lists all of them. Add-on API version 23.

Exchange

• Fixed the Crown Exchange clerks in Central Brittany, Ardoris and Aerie opening an empty chat window. They were the only NPCs in the game missing the second file every conversation loads, so they had nothing to say and no Exchange button. Each clerk now greets you, points you at the exchange and says farewell, and a new test fails if any conversation is missing that file again.

Website

• What's New now covers work through September 28: 105 new entries (new pets, Crown Exchange clerks, map charts that clear the fog of war, talking to NPCs while mounted, movable buff bars, Episode 1 main quest fixes and more) and 17 existing entries updated. Votes on existing entries carry over (e70b2542d6).

Client

• Fixed offline play for new female characters: loading stopped at 94%, waited out two three-minute timeouts and fell back to the main menu. The character model was being picked up through another item's files before its own, which left it without any of its game logic. The game now loads both character models while it starts up. Reported by Elene Sali.
• Followed up the offline female character fix with a general one. Many character, creature and effect models are packed in one file and referenced from others, and each only works if the game loads it from its own file first. The build now records which of these models every other item reaches, and the game loads those models first, whatever loads them. This covers monsters, NPCs and effects the same way it covers the player models.
• Walking past the large garden lot in the centre of Resolute no longer freezes the game for about 45 seconds. Working out where creatures can walk on that lot around its 783 decorations failed and was retried from scratch every time you came back to it. The game now remembers the result and stops retrying after under a second. Reported by KnightRider (4072de4c62).

Crafting

• The Recipe Book search no longer goes blank on the first search of a session. It used to load the item behind every ingredient and result of every known recipe before showing anything; it now reads those names from the item catalog. A "Searching..." line shows under the Filter box until results are up, the typing pause dropped from 0.6 to 0.2 seconds, and Enter searches immediately. Requested by Gravidy. (#9457)

Localization

• The 792 English lines added over the last few days now have translations in all eight languages, including the new Chart of map items, the Scroll of the Wayfinder's Eye, the Crown Exchange clerks and the Decoration Showcase filters. Chart place names were checked against the names each language already uses for those places, and 410 records were corrected to match.

Oracle

• The Oracle no longer mixes her own planning into answers. A tester still saw lines like "Search again." or "The user asks about fishing." around real replies after the August fix. Those sentences are now cut wherever they appear, including a run of them glued to the front of an answer, and she no longer answers her own internal reminders out loud. Reproduced locally with an Angler achievement question before the fix; three ten-question test conversations came back clean after it (#5243).

Server

• Went over the game server code that moves items between bags, looking for any place where a failed save could leave an item in two places or in none. Every kind of storage is now checked before an item move writes anything.
• More game server hardening around items: buying from and selling to merchants and player vendors, moving and stacking items, and opening item bundles now check every save up front, so a save that would fail stops the whole action before anything changes hands.
• Bank, plot storage and dungeon upgrades, item upgrades, experience redeems and lot tax payments now take the payment before they grant anything. A tax payment made twice at the same moment no longer overwrites the other one, and an account tax balance can no longer be spent below zero.
• Vendor listings and buy orders now stay closed until the item or gold behind them has been taken, and an expired listing at a town vendor is taken down before its refund is mailed, so a failed save can no longer refund it twice.
• When delivering an Exchange purchase runs into an error, the server now checks whether the crowns reached the bag before it refunds the purchase by mail.
• Tip jar and prize chest payouts, lot and house sale proceeds and Exchange refunds can no longer be paid twice when a delivery is retried after the first payment mail was opened and discarded.
• A container or placed item that could not be checked back in because of a database error now stays reserved and is retried, where it used to be dropped from the retry list. A check-in that fails the same way every time now keeps its items reserved for a GM to sort out, and the player who held them can no longer take them out.

Economy

• Magic merchants now sell the Scroll of the Wayfinder's Eye recipes (single and Batch of 12). Players had been looking for them there; before this they were only at alchemy crafting merchants.

Infra

• The Server Health page's players-online tile now counts every player in game across the shard, with bots excluded. It had been reporting the player count of the single busiest scene (it showed 2 while 11 were online). The players-online history chart, which never drew because of a name mismatch, now renders too.

Gameplay

• Water reacts to people in it again. Players, other players and NPCs standing, wading or swimming in water now leave ripple rings and throw splashes that grow with their speed. Stepping or falling in throws a splash with a splash sound, and footsteps through shallow water sound like water instead of the river bed. Before this, only your own character got ripples, the splash effect was never played, and NPCs left none.

Networking

• Fixed the client getting stuck after a server restart: it kept the old scene after the drop, so every scene join after logging back in was refused until the game was relaunched. It now clears that state when the connection is lost, and a join that finds leftover state drops it instead of refusing.

Moderation

• The AI name screen now also checks guild names, item and pet renames, plaque text, and item names at vendor listing time. A blocked name tells the player why (for example "It contains profanity.") instead of a bare "Name not allowed". It stays off on chaos until it is switched on.

Items

• Moving, splitting, redeeming or upgrading an item the server cannot load now fails with a clear refusal instead of a server error, and chaos releases now check that the server report set knows every item the build ships (#9511).

Ops

• Fixed a failed chaos release: a stray pipe character in one row of the DB migrations ledger shifted its columns, so the release gate read a "no migration" row as a required migration. A new commit-time check now rejects any ledger row with the wrong number of columns.

Skills

• Fixed the Skills window on chaos build 292: clicking any school left one skill icon floating in the middle of the screen and no tree would open. The skill tile had missed the switch to the new plate drawing in the morning's nameplate batch, so its icon loaded empty and the window stopped on the first click. A new test now checks every UI prefab for the same miss.

Steam

• Set up the Unity 6 client on Steam for the Oct 1 launch: a private staging branch with its own launch options for Windows, macOS and Linux, and a dedicated upload account. Build 288 went up to that branch, about 28 minutes for all three platforms. The public branch still serves the old client until launch.

Launcher

• Released launcher 48. Staff and testers now get a one-click GM Launcher download on the tester hub: run it and it installs the GM build to its own Chaos Shard GM folder and shortcut, next to a normal install, with no config file to edit. The GM and player launchers can also run at the same time.
• Released launcher 49. A GM install now shows a GM BUILD badge next to the Chaos Shard logo and says Chaos Shard GM in its title bar, so it is easy to tell apart from a normal install.

Pets

• Five new companion pets are in the Crown Store at 1,000 crowns each: the capybara, the raccoon, a baby raccoon, and two red pandas, the dark russet red panda and the paler Himalayan red panda. Summon one from your backpack to follow you, or place it on your lot as a house pet that naps between wanders.
• The raccoons and red pandas sit, lie down and curl up asleep when you stop, and their dance has them bob, stand on their hind legs washing their paws, hop and spin. The capybara sits down and dozes off, and its dance is a sway, a sit-up waving a forefoot, a bar of little twisting hops and a spin.
• The raccoon family shares one rig: the baby is the adult with the vendor's cub proportions (bigger head, ears and paws) at two thirds the size, and the red pandas are the same animal in their own coats with longer ears and a fuller tail. Their fur cards needed a remapped mesh to draw on the game's shader, and their walk, trot and run were rebuilt to play in place after the pack's versions slid the body forward and snapped it back every step.
• The capybara, raccoon, baby raccoon and both red pandas learned four tricks: Roll Over, Play Dead, Beg and Zoomies, from the pet's right-click menu or as /pet roll over, /pet play dead, /pet beg and /pet zoomies. They roll onto their backs pedalling their paws, keel over and lie there twitching until you walk off, beg until you move (the raccoons on their hind legs pumping their paws, the capybara sitting up waving its forefeet), and run two fast laps in a circle. Dance and the new tricks come free with these five pets.
• Their idle antics doubled from four to eight. The raccoons dig, spring up startled, waddle about on their hind legs and chase their tails; the capybara shakes itself off, stretches, flops onto its side, loafs, chases its tail and pops into little hops.
• Summoned, they now swim after you across lakes and rivers, floating with their backs above the water, and walk out on the far bank. As house pets they walk to a new spot before each nap, and visitors see them arrive before they lie down.
• Other pets that share the same animation setup can pick up any of these by getting their own clips for them; until then they do not offer the tricks, so no pet freezes trying to play an animation it does not have.

Build pipeline

• Steam uploads rejoin the deploy pipeline: after every chaos deploy, Jenkins queues an upload of that build to the private Steam staging branch. Until chaos serves the player build, these runs stop without uploading, marked as a warning rather than a failure. The job also had a missing script in its file list that would have failed its first run.

Login

• Starting the game from Steam now logs in with no clicks: the game skips the main menu, signs in with your Steam account and goes to character select. The old client needed a click on "Login with Steam". Unlinked Steam accounts still get the link screen once, and after a logout the menu and login form come back as usual. The Steam login ticket is now sent at its real length; it used to be padded to 1024 bytes.