Chris “Atos” Spears · Work Log

Combat

• Parties of four or more were losing kill experience: the servers per-kill experience limit assumed a smaller party bonus than the game pays, so every kill by a party of four or more was cut back to what a party of three earns. The limit now includes the full party bonus for everyone credited with the kill, so each extra member raises the partys total again. Solo kills are unchanged. (#12171)
• The character sheet Stats tab has a new Durability section listing Armor, Weapon and Shield Durability Effectiveness. Hovering a line shows how fast that gear wears now. Armor wear is divided by one plus the total bonus, so +100% halves it and armor always wears a little; weapon bonuses count up to 80%. The Oracle had said Armor Preservation 200 halves armor wear, which was wrong (it wears at two thirds), and now explains the stacking (0d90f15bef, #12148).
• The targeting circle for ground-targeted area spells such as Meteor Shower turned red on open, rolling ground, worst on the sand flats of The Breach. A low sand ridge between the caster and the spot was enough to refuse the spell: about a third of the open ground 15 to 30 metres from the reported spot read red. The circle now checks its line of sight one metre above the ground, the same height the spell uses when it lands, and checks the spot it is drawn on when aimed past range. At that spot the red share 15 to 30 metres out dropped from 307 of 972 points to 26. Tall walls and cliffs still block. (d4487b08f7, #12145)
• In the Tartarus maze wave battle, the creatures that spawn out in the maze and walk to the centre were being sent back to their spawn point and then removed while still on their way. The final boss, Lord Tolask Nird, vanished this way when players stepped out of the centre. The last wave then counted as finished without the kill and the run restarted from the first wave. Creatures walking back toward the fight or their spawn point are now left alone, and one that wanders off is only sent back to its spawn point, never removed. Every wave battle uses the same rule (a86fc3511e, #12133).
• Purify now removes the Corruption debuff that shadow spiders, wolves, bears and scorpions apply, as its tooltip says. The same fault kept it from clearing the plague a zombie bite leaves; that is fixed too, and Soothing Rain can now cleanse both. (#12118)
• Leg Sweep (#12406): the skill description now names its Polearm Specialization bonus, like the other active polearm skills. Specialization raises both the damage of the attack and the chance of the knockdown. A test holds the sentence to the skill's data (4c5bbf6203).
• Creature Rend bleeds no longer write a warning to the client log every time their buff tooltip is built. The bleed ending early when its victim attacks is intended, so it is now noted once per session at info (d24c438914).
• In big fights, the buffs a character gives itself with Splintering Strike, Offhand Attack and Body Slam, and stances recast mid-fight such as Berserker's Stance and Torpor, now keep reaching other players' screens. They were being counted against the share of effect slots that enemy effects use, and a recast counted twice. The client log line that reported it is quieter as a result.
• Creatures no longer respawn on top of a player standing where they spawn. A camp brings its next creature back at one of its other spots, and a spot of its own waits until the player steps away, for up to two minutes so nobody can hold a boss back. Mimics, traps and item summons still appear beside you. (86b569d50e)
• Becoming Confused now says so. A chat line and an on-screen notice say your movement keys are scrambled until it wears off, a second line says when they are back to normal, and the debuff tooltip says what the effect does. This came up on the mushroom spore traps on East Perennial Trail, where the Soltown tanner sends new players for cotton (#12224).

Oracle

• The Oracle answers which Carpentry items give Dexterity or Intelligence from the crafting guide again, after a merge had filed the answer under the wrong heading (aa106bb79b).
• The Oracle answers about sixty more questions players asked her since October 9: what Tremor and +Tremor Damage do, boss Fortitude, the damage resistance cap, why only one pet or summon can be out, the pet Teleport option, Assist Character, the Castle Atos storehouse turn-ins, instrument quality grades, Chaos Plant Pollen, Obsidian Bacon, the Pet Sounds slider, where Britt Mart is, the Aerie landmarks and Sada's quest in Solania.
• The Oracle can now say where each of the fifteen virtue armour pieces comes from: the quest giver for every Truth, Love and Courage piece, and where the three random encounters that give the gloves and gauntlets turn up (2b561c5397).
• The Oracle now says where to buy crafting parts that no recipe makes. Asked where to find a Locking Mechanism for the dungeon generator chest, it had answered that no guide covered it; it now names the Crafting Supplies merchants that sell one.
• The Oracle no longer opens an answer with her own notes to herself, such as "So answer: one pet slot. Cite the pets doc." Those lines are now cut and the answer starts with the answer. The same fix covers NPC dialogue. (#12344)
• The Oracle can now explain each Cabalist: the circle it carries, its timed attack and how to answer it, and why draining the siege army first makes the fight easier. Recent Balance Changes also lists the Cabalist circles, kits and tougher drained Cabalists.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-10 is up: Saturday went to the spiders. Every hostile spider in the game got a new set of abilities, the webs stopped ignoring strong characters and torturing weak ones, and the Spider Queen finally has somewhere to live. Also a purple cloud that haunted one player across two towns, a leaderboard that rewarded the most experienced characters with a negative number, and a day of fixing experience that was never being paid. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed two tracker entries from the overnight forum sweep: a new boss encounter with a tanking-focused buff reward, requested by Murphy, and a bug report about a saved game failing to load after a client update, reported by Barugon.

Maps

• The East Longfall Wetland map no longer draws the forest past the swamp's tree line as open sea. Once a Surveyor's Chart cleared the fog, about three quarters of the map showed as ocean. That ground is now drawn as mud, like the other swamp maps, and the channels inside the tree line are still drawn as water.
• The 3D map in Understorm Gold Mine now shows its tunnels and chambers. It used to draw the cave as rough shapes floating over a large flat sheet, and both were ground nobody can walk on: the terrain under the whole cave and the tops of the rocks the cave is built from. Every 3D dungeon map now keeps only floor a player can reach from an entrance or from the creatures, chests, harvest nodes, ladders and teleporters inside, and 54 maps were rebuilt that way.

Creatures

• Planned a pass on every bear, by tier. Grizzlies will pin and maul whoever they knock down and rear up to slam the ground; polar bears will raise a winter coat that fire burns away, and obsidian bears a glass hide that water quenches; and a bear will run down anyone who turns and flees. Bear Patriarchs will hold their dens together, mother bears will defend their cubs, and three legendary bears with trophies of their own are planned. Kill experience moves to par for every tier, so the strongest bears will pay about twice what they do now and some mid-level bears will pay less.
• Registered the switches for the bear pass, so every new bear ability can be turned off on the shard without a patch. Nothing changes in game yet.
• Planned a pass on every wolf, by tier. Packs from level 80 up will circle to your back, slow you with relay bites, drag you down when two of them are on you and leap at anyone who kites; arctic wolves will breathe frost and grow a winter coat that fire burns away; obsidian wolves will step behind you under the moon. New pack alphas are planned for the strongest packs in Jotungrund, The Outlaw's Run, Grusk, Tanglemire, Myrkur, Despair and the Obsidian Panopticon, and the Rime Mother and her mate for a den in Jotungrund. The strongest wolves will pay more experience, wolves from level 80 up will drop loot, and wolf pelts, bounty ears, an alpha fang trophy and a wolf-fur winter cloak are planned.
• Bears make a pained sound when they are hit. Their hurt sounds were filed under a name the game never asked for, so every bear took hits in silence; koala and capybara pets had the same fault and are fixed too. Bear attacks now name themselves in combat messages (Swipe, Claw and Double Swipe), and the Polar Destroyer resists Water like every other polar bear.
• The spider queens' Silk Cocoon got its art pass. It drew as a plain white shape because its material never picked up its silk texture; it now looks like a figure wrapped in silk and tied to the ground with webbing. The queens' egg sacs also sit in a skirt of web now.
• The spider queens' last three abilities are switched on. Both queens wrap a player they are not fighting in a Silk Cocoon that holds them, poisoned, until their allies destroy it or 8 seconds pass (it replaces the Web Shot stun), Xen Trohop calls her Chosen Young to her at half health with Call the Chosen, and the Spider Queen in Spindelskog wakes two more spiders from her nest at three-quarters, half and a quarter of her health.
• Field dressing a wolf of level 80 or higher now gives Crowns of the Obsidians at the rate a bear or boar of its level does. The Red Ice Snarler and the Lupine Arctic Destroyer got field dressing of their own with arctic wolf heads, and the Snarler gives a second carcass half the time and better odds at the Wolf Spirit helm and the tamer gear. Ferocious Obsidian Wolves give obsidian heads instead of timber and elder ones, and the War Wolf's meticulous field dressing pays what other level-80 wolves pay.
• Bears now close on a player who keeps away from them. A bear fighting someone who stands still out of reach makes a Bluff Charge that stops a few metres short and does no harm; from the Ferocious Brown Bear up, running away from a bear brings Run Down, a charge that hits, pushes back and stuns for about two seconds. Both show a cast bar, and a bear only does this to the player it is fighting, so a tank holding it in melee keeps everyone else safe. The smallest Brown Bear is unchanged.
• The shadow and guardian animals of the Episode 2 scenes, among them the Feram Cavas wolves of Spindelskog, now drop the extra gold and artifacts on Hard and Extreme that every other creature there drops. They had been paying Normal loot on every version.
• The Ferocious Grizzly Bear and the bigger grizzlies gained Pounce, a lunge that cannot be blocked or parried and knocks its target down, Maul, two heavy swipes used only on someone already down or stunned, and Crushing Slam, a ring around the bear that knocks down everyone standing in it (a timed jump avoids it). The strongest bears swapped Rend, a bleed that did the same small amount at every level, for Rending Claws, which grows with the bear and weakens healing on its target.
• Registered the switches for the wolf pass, so every new wolf ability can be turned off on the shard without a patch. Nothing changes in game yet.
• Wolves howl with a real howl and snarl when they spot you, a knocked-down wolf no longer plays its death, and wolf attacks show their names in the combat log (Bite, Snapping Jaws). The shadow and ghostly wolves, among them the Feram Cavas of Spindelskog, make attack, hurt, footstep and howl sounds instead of none. The Lupine Destroyers and the Red Ice Snarler bite with the tier 10 wolf weapon; they had carried a weaker wolf's.
• The crew rules the pirate captains use now come in families, ready for the wolf pass's pack alphas and the bear pass's Patriarchs: a captain holds only creatures of its own kind, so a wolf alpha never steadies a bear sharing its faction, and obsidian creatures never break and run. The pirate crews behave exactly as before. Nothing changes in game yet.
• Wild bears rise onto their hind legs while they wind up a Crushing Slam, and the slam lands as they drop back onto all fours, so the moment to jump is the moment the bear comes down.
• Bear Patriarchs now lead their dens. A Patriarch opens a fight with Patriarch's Roar, rising onto its hind legs with a growl to make up to six bears around it stronger, and the bears near a living Patriarch hold their ground instead of fleeing; when it falls, some of them may run for a few seconds. The Ferocious Brown Bear now stops to Gorge when badly hurt: a heavy hit during its three-second cast bar spoils the meal, otherwise it eats back a quarter of its health.
• Wolf packs from the Elders up circle to your back: their new Flank Bite tears a quarter deeper from behind, and a wolf that knows it moves round you instead of piling up in front. Blows from behind are already harder to dodge, block or parry, so keep the pack in front of you, put your back to a wall, or let a tank turn them. Younger wolves fight as before.
• The big polar bears now fight with ice. A Winter Coat cuts the damage they take until a fire or sun hit burns it away, and a burned coat cannot grow back for a few seconds; Whiteout throws a snow cloud that spoils the aim of anyone standing in it; and Rime Slam knocks down and slows everyone in the ring around the bear.
• Wolves from level 80 up hunt as a pack. Hamstring slows you and stacks three times from any wolf of the pack; with three stacks on you and a second wolf beside you, a wolf can Drag Down you for 2 seconds behind a short cast bar a hard hit interrupts. A wolf you keep away from snarls and leaps with Lunge, leaving a bleed, and obsidian wolves step through shadow with Shadow Lunge instead.
• The obsidian bears now raise an Obsidian Hide that cuts the damage they take until a water hit cracks it, leaving the glass brittle and taking more damage for a few seconds. The biggest of them also Magma Slam, fling a Magma Spill that leaves burning ground under its target, and Shatter into glass a moment after they die, hurting anyone standing close.
• Ferocious wolves now howl into a Blood Frenzy at half health, attacking and running faster for 20 seconds. The Lupine Destroyers and the Red Ice Snarler wind up a Savage Bite that leaves a bleed and misses if you step out of reach, and the Lupine Destroyers Shake It Off when held by a stun or root, as the Plunderers do.
• Arctic wolves from level 100 up now breathe Frost Breath: after a short cast bar they breathe an 8 metre cone of frost that chills everyone caught in it, slowing their attacks and their running for 6 seconds. A cone drawn on the ground shows where it will land.
• The strongest bears, the Destroyers, the Polar Mutilator and the Nightmarish Grizzly Bear, now rise and roar into a Wounded Fury when badly hurt, Shake It Off when held down too long, and fight to the death. The Polar Mutilator also swings a weapon of its own and uses Mutilate, a bleed that stacks five times on whoever holds it and cuts their healing, so the bear has to be passed between players. Myrkur's bear spawns can now bring the Savage Grizzly Bear and, rarely, the Grizzly Destroyer.
• The Red Ice Snarler of Jotungrund lives up to her lore: she howls a Chilling Howl that slows the attacks of everyone close to her, and Snare-Slipper shakes off a slow, stun or root and leaves her briefly immune and running faster, once every 30 seconds.
• Built Call the Pack for the Elven Watchdog, the Ferocious Timber Wolf and the Episode 2 timber wolves: below half health the wolf howls, and when the howl ends every wolf of its pack within 30 metres turns on its target. A wolf that has just answered a call cannot raise one, so packs do not chain across a zone. It ships switched off until a two-player test on the test shard.
• The Lupine Arctic Destroyer and the Red Ice Snarler now raise the bears' Winter Coat, which fire or sun burns away; the Ferocious Obsidian Wolves raise the Obsidian Hide, which water cracks; and obsidian wolves Shatter when they die, cutting anyone next to the body. The bleeds from the wolves' Lunge and Savage Bite now count as bleeds, so undead and other bloodless creatures are immune to them.
• The strongest wolves now pay experience in line with how hard they are: the Ferocious Obsidian Wolves 17,000 a kill (was 12,500), the Lupine Destroyers 72,000 (was 40,000) and the Red Ice Snarler 211,500 (was 80,000), before bonuses.
• Bears now raise cubs. Dens in Solace Forest, Deep Savrenoc Timberland and Jotungrund each hold a Mother Brown Bear, Mother Grizzly Bear or Mother Polar Bear with two cubs that follow her and run from anyone who comes close. Killing a cub sends its mother after the killer in a Protective Fury: she hits harder, attacks faster and moves faster for 30 seconds. Cubs give no experience and are too young to tame.
• The biggest wolf packs now have a pack alpha, a larger wolf that leads 28 packs from the Jotungrund patrols to Tanglemire and is the first back when its pack refills. While it lives its pack holds its nerve, and when it dies they may scatter. It howls a Rallying Howl that speeds up the wolves near it, marks the most wounded or most isolated player with Choose the Quarry so the pack turns on them, and hits harder in Alpha's Wrath when a packmate falls.
• Three legendary bears now roam Mistrendur: Scarhide in Myrkur, Cinderglass in the Obsidian Panopticon and Hvitr the Pale in Jotungrund. Scarhide marks a second player in the fight with Hunted and turns on them, Cinderglass vents a Steam Burst once water has cracked its glass hide, and Hvitr rears up for an Avalanche that knocks down and slows everyone on the ground near it. Each returns three hours after it falls.
• Added the wolf pass's new items: the Wolf Pelt for tailors, Wolf Ears, a bounty butchers pay the full 10 gold for, the Alpha Fang trophy, and the Pristine Rime Mother Head, which tans into a mount and a skin rug larger than the arctic wolf's. They start dropping with the wolf corpse bags and the Rime Mother.
• Bear kill experience now follows how tough each bear is. The strongest bears pay far more (the Polar Destroyer 40,000 to 95,290, the Polar Mutilator 55,000 to 122,480, the Ferocious Obsidian Bear 11,000 to 38,700) and the tier 4 to 8 bears, which paid well above their strength, pay less (the Polar Bear 750 to 400, the Large Grizzly Bear 1,150 to 610). Meticulous field dressing on the tier 8 bears and the Large Obsidian Bear now matches their tier.
• Wolves from level 80 up now leave loot on the corpse: gold, a chance at an artifact and Wolf Ears, a bounty any merchant buys and butchers pay full price for. Skinning gives Wolf Pelts from the Large Grey Wolf up, more often from bigger wolves, and the pack alphas add two more ears and a chance at the Alpha Fang trophy.
• Jotungrund has a new boss at the Giant Bones: the Rime Mother, the old she-wolf the Red Ice packs were whelped from, with her mate, the Rime Sire. She grows faster each time one of her wolves dies near her (Mother's Wrath), and below a quarter of her health she howls into Winter's Hunger, which a hard enough hit breaks. Her corpse holds her head, which tans into a Mounted Rime Mother or a Rime Mother Skin Rug. Animal Lore has a line for each of the pair and for the Red Ice Alpha.
• The three legendary bears have trophies of their own. Field dressing Scarhide, Cinderglass or Hvitr the Pale always gives its Pristine head, which a tanner can turn into a skin rug or a wall-mounted trophy in that bear's fur. Their bodies now hold loot as well: four Primal Bear Teeth every time, a one in three chance at a Helm of the Bear Spirit, and gold, artifacts and potions like other bosses of their level. Each legendary also has Slain, Vanquished and Conquered kill achievements that pay a bronze, silver and gold portrait of the bear. (#12170)
• The strongest bears now drop loot from their bodies as well as from field dressing: gold, an artifact roll, potions and reagents from the Ferocious Obsidian Bear (with obsidian chips), the three Destroyers, the Mother Polar Bear and the Polar Mutilator (which rolls gold twice), and gold and an artifact roll from the Episode 2 grizzlies, whose bodies now share in the extra loot on the harder versions of Lamech's Bazaar and Myrkur. The Polar Mutilator also field dresses for its own bundle: its head every time, Primal Bear Teeth more often, a second carcass half the time and more leather. (#12170)
• Added the Wolf-Fur Winter Cloak, a wool cloak with a wolf-fur collar and trim. Tailors make it at Tailoring 60 from six Wolf Pelts, two bolts of cloth, two yards of leather and ten wax, with a 700-gold scroll from the expert tailoring merchants in Ardoris and Brittany Estates. The wool and the fur each take a dye.
• Built the Ferocious Bear Patriarch's Bellow: once it is badly hurt it rears up and bellows, and unless the bellow is interrupted every bear within 25 metres turns on whoever the Patriarch is fighting. It ships switched off until it has been tested with two players on chaos. (#12170)
• The Rime Mother now counts as a boss: killing her advances Rime Mother Slain (Wolf), Vanquished and Conquered at 1, 10 and 100 kills, which award her portrait trophy in bronze, silver and gold. Built her pack waves, switched off until a two-player test on chaos: at three quarters, half and a quarter of her health she howls and Ferocious and Elder Arctic wolves run in to the den.
• Closed out the bear pass: wrote the team's reference page for every bear kit, den and legendary, and the Oracle's player guide to bears, which goes live with the pass. Two Animal Lore passages about bears were rewritten because the bears no longer act as they describe: the lore now tells you to hold your ground when a bear warns you, since bears run down anyone who turns away, and it describes the obsidian bears' glass hide that water cracks. (#12170)
• Wrote the wolf guide for the Oracle, which answers players once the wolf pass reaches chaos, and gave GMs short summon names for each wolf tier, the five pack alphas, the Rime Mother and the Rime Sire.
• Pack alphas now count toward three achievements, Pack Alpha Slain (Wolf), Vanquished and Conquered at 1, 10 and 100 kills, which award a pack alpha portrait trophy in bronze, silver and gold. The Rime Sire counts as an alpha. Alpha kills do not count as boss kills for guild and town prestige, since 28 packs refill their alphas.
• Skinning a Darkstarr Corpion now pays meticulous experience in line with its size: 1,000 a meticulous pass for the Darkstarr Corpion (was 500), 2,500 for the Large Darkstarr Corpion and 5,000 for the Darkstarr Destroyer, where a young dragon pays 1,000. The Obsidian Stag and the Spawn of Sobek went from 500 to 1,000.
• Creatures are no longer placed inside solid props. In The Outlaws' Run a creature could appear inside the mossy stone pillar in the ruined chapel yard, where only its eyes showed through the stone: the navigation map held a small sealed patch of ground inside the pillar, and spawns, creatures walking home and teleports could all land on it. Ground inside a pillar, rock or other solid prop is now skipped everywhere (#11849).
• The Obsidian Troll in The Rise no longer gets stuck a couple of metres inside the walkway over the pit, where players on the walkway could not reach it. Any creature that ends up inside the floor it should stand on is now put back on top of it. (d89d3b0bb5)
• Dragons in the Rise Pit room of player dungeons no longer fly up through the walkway over the pit. Flying creatures now keep their whole body under any walkway, roof or cave ceiling above them, and fly as before in the open. (d11dcc833d)
• The Aerie Skull Clipper and six wild lions each had an empty extra-loot slot that logged a warning every time one was killed. The empty slots are gone and drops are unchanged.
• Arriving in a busy zone such as Tartarus or The Rise no longer writes a client log warning about NPCs queued to spawn. They were still spawning at the normal rate, so this is now an info line, and the warning is kept for a spawn queue that has stopped moving (bce116e3f5).
• A spawn group that holds one creature at a time no longer tries to move its seats apart. The Courage Club rounds and the Port Harmony prisoners keep their creature on its own seat, and the client log stops warning about crowded spawners on every arena load (0ee1cfe535).

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• Images: looking down a Stucco Alcove Row Home chimney after the change.
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Images

Voice

• Child characters now speak with children's voices. Steve, a boy selling news in Aerie, spoke with a grown man's voice, and a check of every child in the game found 27 groups with adult voices, among them the news hawkers in Aerie and Port Harmony, the child thieves, the young squires on South Drachvald Spur, Harvey in Soltown and Christopher in Resolute. All were recast (1,230 new lines), and the spawner voice audit now fails any child whose voice is not a child's (#12156).

Combat

• Fixed creature kills in some zones, Deep Ravenswood among them, that were mostly missing from the PVE Kills leaderboard (one two-hour hunt of around 550 kills was credited as 15) and paid a quarter of the experience the same creature pays elsewhere. Every kill there now counts on the board and pays full experience.

Skills

• Regular city Adventuring Trainers no longer sell Aetheric Feedback, Focus Specialization or Subterfuge Specialization. These are Tier 4 skills and now come only from the Focus and Subterfuge master trainers. Reported by Elene Sali. (#12150)
• When the server refused a skill experience save, the pooled experience spent on that training was still taken, so each refusal shrank the pool. The pool spend now waits for its skill save to be accepted and is kept when the save is refused, while experience earned in the meantime still reaches the pool.
• The free skill a new character learns from a trainer in the opening lessons now stays learned. The game refused it and the skill vanished at the next log in, taking its experience with it. A learn the server turns down now also undoes itself on screen, and forgetting a skill no longer sends a stale save for it (d69e562139).

HUD

• On smaller screens such as 1280x768 the town name under the compass no longer covers the target frame. While the target frame is in its default spot it now moves just below the compass text when the two would overlap; a frame you dragged stays where you put it (reported by Akandriel).

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains why a cotton node gives at most one Beetle Carapace: each gathering byproduct drops once per node, and ordinary Meticulous Collection pulls pay the base material and experience only. It also names the byproducts for cotton, pine and maple nodes, not just ore. (#12144)
• When asked about an item, weapon property or stat that does not exist, the Oracle now says she does not know of anything by that name. Asked what a made-up +Frostfire Damage property did, she had described it as working like the Ignite Weapon rune. She now checks the names in a question against her guides and the full item list, and only offers the closest real thing by its own name (de91c27f62, #12242).

Housing

• Buildings made from building blocks, pillars and arches stay whole as you walk away. Small blocks used to drop out from 40 m and pillars from 75 m; they now stay drawn to about 120 m. The upper floor of some block buildings also vanished once you were 20 m from the lot, because blocks that had lost the link to the block under them were treated as furniture inside the house; those now stay visible when they stand outside the house (#12153).
• Stacked decorations can no longer end up linked into a loop after an undo, a layout apply or two people moving the same stack at once. A looped stack used to vanish from the lot on every visit; now a move that would make one keeps the item where it stood. Layout applies also move the bottom of a stack before what goes on it. (48f886c2e4)
• When an owner arrives at a lot with a decoration standing outside its boundary, the check now waits for the whole lot to load. A table or shelf out of bounds with items stacked on it stays in place with its items, where before the base alone went to the bank and everything on it dropped into the Decoration Palette. The "sent to the bank" chat line now only appears for items that were actually sent.
• Elven Globe chandeliers (#12397): the single-storey Elven Globe (Village Home) had no ceiling a decoration could hang from. The round hub at the top of the dome now takes chandeliers and hanging lights. The glass around it still does not, so nothing hangs in mid-air under the curve. The hub is about 10 m up, beyond double-click reach from the floor (945bc2b1b5).
• The chimneys on the Stucco, Kobold and Elven Alcove Row Homes now drop about a metre before the floor, with stone walls all the way down. They used to end in a stone floor about 20 cm under the top, so from the roof they looked blocked. This covers every height and both alcove sides except the Elven Four-Story w/ Right Alcove, whose chimney is built from two overlapping tops and needs remodelling first (22455dccac, #12366).
• Clicking Flip House on a house with furniture inside no longer writes a warning to the client log. The owner is already told to clear the floor first, and the same goes for a flip refused because the mirrored house would not fit the lot or would land on yard decorations. Other flip refusals still log as warnings (96bd4df02b, #12332).
• The game server no longer logs a warning that a house's changes went over the lot's storage limits when they did not. Every time a house's changes were saved, the server wrote that line, even when everything fit and nothing was sent to the bank. It now appears only when items really are sent to the bank.
• Arriving in a busy player town no longer writes a client log warning when the houses nearby take more than ten seconds to load their decorations. That wait is normal for a large town and every one finished, so it is now an info line, and the warning is kept for a wait that has made no progress for a full minute (2147956723).
• Pets and townsfolk walk around the furniture on heavily decorated lots. A chair or stool tucked under a table could stop a whole lot's walking routes from being built, so pets walked through tables, chairs and lanterns, and the busiest lots in Ardoris, Aerie and Tortuga did this on every visit. A lot can also hold about twice as much furniture before its routes reach their size limit.

PVP

• Asking the Oracle to restore her protection now takes 5 minutes to take effect; until then other flagged players can still attack you, and a chat line says when you are protected again. The Oracle is still the only way to turn Open PvP on or off, and the Oracle Statue Head can now restore protection as well as remove it (12f74dfc14, #12141).
• Options, Multiplayer now opens with a read-only Flagged for Open PvP box that shows whether you are flagged, why (your own choice, your party, a guild war, the area, or the time left before protection returns) and how to change it. Flagged players also get a Next Steps reminder row that can be closed (12f74dfc14, #12141, #12142).
• Asking the Oracle to restore her protection during a fight with another player is no longer lost. The game holds the change back until the fight ends, and the client now sends it again every few seconds until it goes through, so the character no longer logs back in still flagged for Open PvP.

Tools

• Team tooling config: the Discord message reader no longer asks for approval on every developer machine.
• The script hygiene commit check no longer crashes on an empty script file. It had refused every commit that touched one of the seven empty Python package files in the web tools.
• The server build no longer fails with a duplicate-attribute error when an old build of a shared library has left its output files in the source folder (406c3ed615).
• The conversation reward check stopped flagging one-time quest turn-ins as repeatable when their "already done" flag is written into the required conditions.

Dungeons

• Dragon Totems now name the dragon they raise, in the item tooltip and in the Dungeon Builder Rooms tab ("Blue Pit Dragon (Tier 2)" instead of "Dragon (Tier 2)"). Each level already raised a different, stronger dragon, one per room, but nothing in the game said which (#12152).
• The stairs in The Rise Dog Room have a solid back. From the space under the ledge you could see through the stairs between the two top posts and walk in under the steps, coming out on top of them. A stone wall now closes that gap, the same one the Lyceum room uses behind its stairs, and rooms already placed in a dungeon get it too.
• Re-running your own player dungeon inside ten minutes of a counted clear, or clearing it in under 30 seconds, no longer writes a warning to the client log. The server turns those clears away by design and the client now logs that as information; it also stops sending clears under 30 seconds, which the server never accepts. The Dungeon cleared message still shows (9f6075a862, #12323).
• The GreyStone and RedStone player dungeons no longer log a missing navigation file on every entry. Their built-in starting rooms use the dungeon's own navigation, and the client now recognizes them by their starting-room setting instead of by name (0406bc06d0).

Gameplay

• Characters stopped hopping when going down stairs and steep hills. After each step the game now lowers the character onto the ground below, as far as it could have stepped up, and the jump animation waits a tenth of a second before playing so a single missed step no longer starts it. Walking off a real ledge still falls (35699b898b, #12147, #6209).
• Checked the 33 specific complaints in a widely watched 2020 review video of the game against the current build: 3 are fixed, 11 partly fixed and 12 still hold. The early-game ones that still hold, such as town criers giving a random answer to quest keywords and the Soltown tanner tutorial sending players the wrong way for cotton, are filed as tasks, along with every other complaint that is not fixed yet (28 in all).

Tools

• The localization string generator accepts a translator note passed as a named constant; one such file had stopped every new string from getting a translation record (66e8be7911). The Options window test fixtures build again without starting the game manager, which had turned 27 of them red (05e1e71005).
• Added achievement-rates, which records Steam's public unlock percentages for the 29 Steam achievements as dated snapshots. The crafting tutorial's helm achievement stands at 3.2% of owners (3.3% in 2020), the baseline for the tutorial fixes. The Young funnel report now also counts how many new characters finish a town crafting tutorial, since Steam's lifetime figure moves slowly.

Quests

• Fixed the Black Arrow step Inform Simone in Ardoris staying on the compass after the journal marked it done. It happened when Simone was asked for help before being told about her daughter. Characters already stuck lose the marker without talking to her again.
• Grigor, who hides by the Understorm Gold Mine in Storm's Reach, now calls out to players walking past, and Agueda in town mentions he is waiting there for help. Both stop once his quest has started (383b24f424).
• The Battle of Solace Bridge now says why you can't climb out of the valley. Walking into one of the invisible walls along the cliff tops and battlefield edges shows "You can't go that way. Follow the compass markers to find a way out of the valley." on screen and in chat, at most once an hour. Players who fled up the cliffs used to hit these walls with no explanation.
• Jenna Karttunen in Jaanaford now tells Path of Truth travelers that Skitter, a faun in town, can give them the key to the Blackblade Pass. Before, players only found that key from Dion in Kiln, on the far side of the pass it opens.
• Getting the Blackblade Pass key from Skitter in Jaanaford or Dion in Kiln now adds a journal entry, and Jenna Karttunen's new lines about the pass are translated into all nine languages.
• Handing over the companion armor rewards from Isabel Spalding, Pip and Whitten stopped logging a false "flag already set" error. Players always received the reward and their quest progress.

Steam

• Updated the Steam store content survey to disclose the games use of generative AI: text-to-speech voices, translations, some icons and textures, and the live Oracle, catchphrase and book recording features with their moderation safeguards.

Taming

• Pet Speed Training, Pet Strength Training and Pet Taunting Training only work on your own pet now. A tamer in a party could cast them on a party member's pet, which then took the effect and its drawback. Heal Creature and Frenzy Creature still reach party pets. (374a68df95, #12135)

Offline

• Offline characters whose saves hold more skill experience than they earned now keep what they train. A mastery in training used to climb for about a minute and then drop back to its starting level, and the experience pool shrank each time (2403a9e671).

UI

• Removed the text bubbles that repeated the top-right warning icons for low ammo, being encumbered and damaged equipment. The icons and their tooltips remain, and clicking the encumbrance or a damaged gear icon now opens its help page (64ad5faba7).
• Ardoris dock markers (#12120): every boat dock and gondola station on the Ardoris map read "Ardoris Ferry", so none could be matched to the Choose Destination list. Each marker now shows its own stop name, the same as the list, and right-clicking one offers Teleport here. The eight Xenos docks had the same fault and are fixed too (099fdbc806).
• The Social window's Guild tab has a Hide Details button beside the guild name. It folds away the leader and member counts, the guild description, the Message of the Day and the guild's web links so the member list gets the room, and the window remembers the choice (6fe292d923).
• A chat window that came back from a saved layout with no tabs stored for it used to reopen empty, showing no chat and sending none. It now comes back with the Main, Combat and Universe tabs.
• Opening the pet page of the character sheet on a summoned Will-O-Wisp wrote an error into the client log every time. The small copy of the pet built for the portrait frame has no creature behind it, so the wisp particle script that was looking for one is now switched off in that copy; the wisp draws and turns in the portrait as it did before.
• The key that opens the Social window is now listed in Options as Toggle Social instead of Toggle Friends, so searching Options for "social" finds it. All nine translations were renamed to match. Requested by Chadwyck.
• The French title screen no longer prints [i] and [/i] around the game title under Play Online and Play Offline, and the Spanish Play Online line now names Shroud of the Avatar in full. Reported by Elene Sali.
• A teleport refused for carrying too much weight now says the weight is what stopped it and suggests dropping, selling, or banking items; the old line was only "You are carrying too much weight." (f241fc9d99)

Client

• Conversations that stage a scene between two characters now play to the end. When the NPC you were talking to spoke one of the lines in its own staged exchange, the rest of that reply never arrived, and where it did arrive it could be labelled with the other character's name.
• Some conversations quote someone who is not standing there on purpose, such as the amulet in Resolute that carries a dead knight's words and the spirit-talker who speaks for the dead of Midras. The game had been recording each of those lines as broken content, twenty times over for one conversation; it now makes one note per absent speaker.
• Entering a player-owned town could leave the loading screen up until the player closed the game. The town was waiting on its own lot's decorations, and the game had never asked the server for them because an earlier request for the town's doors and crops never got its full answer. Unanswered requests like that are now given up on after 20 seconds, a lot whose decorations stall is asked for again, and the log names what a slow load is waiting on.
• A second cause of the same endless loading screen, seen arriving in Finchfield by Recall: a decoration creature spawner left over from the previous scene broke the step that reads the town's details, so the town never finished loading. One broken spawner can no longer stop that step.
• Lot doors, chests, lamps and planters now come up in the state they were left in when you zone into a town. The client had been asking for those saved states a moment before the connection that answers them was ready, so the lot started out with everything in its default state until a later request arrived.
• A Loose Dirt mound in Basalt Springs could stop refilling its cache for the rest of a visit after one dig. It refills on its timer again, and digging a mound with nothing in it now says it is empty rather than opening no window at all. The same applies to any loot container revealed by breaking something open.
• A pause of more than two minutes at the Select Bonus Effect window no longer makes the client give up on the enchant and re-read your inventory. The timer that cancels item operations the server has not answered now stops while the window is waiting for your choice, and masterworking got the same fix.
• Anaïs can be talked to with the camera zoomed all the way out on the Isle of Storms. The invisible area that brings her in when a player comes near was taking the double-click and the interact key from her, so a player who keeps the camera far out was stuck at her first lesson. Pressure plates now let clicks through to whoever stands on them. (Tester task #12388)
• A slow load into a busy town no longer gives up partway through. Two safety timers, one on the client and one on the game server, were counting the seconds a loading client spends frozen on a single large piece of scene content as time the server had stopped answering, so a load that was still working got abandoned and sent the player back to the overworld, or in some cases out to the login screen. Both now measure the wait the way they were meant to.
• Offline play: loading a save file is no longer refused and rolled back when the game misreads the save it has just written, which was costing Linux installs their loads. The claim one copy of the game puts on the offline save is also let go as soon as the game begins to quit, so starting it again shortly after closing it is less likely to find the save still claimed.
• A zone load into a player-owned town no longer logs a warning that the avatars equipment failed to load. The thirty-second mark was being measured from before the towns decorations started loading, so an ordinary busy town tripped a line blaming equipment that had in fact already arrived; the line now records what the load was actually waiting on and no longer reads as a fault. The loading screen, its recovery and its time limits are unchanged.
• A heraldry image the image host refuses is no longer logged as a bare error with no detail. The line now names the image, where it was fetched from and the response code, is written once per image per session, and sits below the error level because the crest simply draws blank and play carries on.
• An animation event aimed at a character or creature whose model had already been removed could throw an error inside the client and leave an attached visual stuck in its last pose. The check that skips a removed model now recognises one.
• A login submit the player had already cancelled no longer logs an error when the title screen picks it up a moment later. The front end behaves as it did before, dropping the stale submit, and the client log stops carrying the error line for it.
• Logging in no longer writes an error to the client log on machines where the game could not list its own install folders. The check that compares your installed files now has a second way to read a folder, so it finishes and reports a result instead of giving up for the rest of the session.
• Townspeople, blacksmiths and the Faun Survivors you can talk to no longer put an "Invalid target" warning in the client log when a hostile skill is aimed at them. The game refusing that skill is the intended rule, and it was the last source of these warnings on build 311 (61 in four days). A hostile creature that refuses a skill still logs a warning. The other warning in the same report, Tame Creature refusing an animal right after Animal Charm, is the case fixed for #11909 and stops once that fix reaches chaos (97f39cb4ae, #12328).
• An Ancient dragon getting back up after its first fall no longer writes a warning to the log each time. The check added on October 7 that puts a risen dragon back on top of the ground had nothing to fix in 119 rises on chaos, so an ordinary rise is now a plain log line and only a dragon that actually had to be lifted out of the ground still warns.
• The guide wisp no longer writes an error to the client log when a door, ladder or lot link on its route goes away while the route is being drawn. The route is dropped and the reason is logged once per summon as a warning (#12286).
• A character refused ghost mode no longer gets the "Ghost mode is only available on development accounts" message again on every zone change. The refusal now clears the saved ghost setting a shared install had kept from a GM session, so the message shows once. (03e24d04d5)
• Arriving at your home or a lot in a player town no longer puts a "spawn height corrected" warning in the client log. A lot arrival is placed half a metre above the pad and then set down on it, which was just over the warning threshold. The line is still logged, as information; a spawn that finds no ground, drops more than a metre or has to be lifted out of the ground still warns (690c101fb0).
• Mac clients no longer log stalls of several minutes while the game window is out of view. The game kept running the whole time; its frame clock fell behind and then caught up in a single frame, which read as one long stall. The remaining frame-stall and low frame rate lines are now plain log lines instead of warnings, so they still feed the performance dashboards but no longer show up in error triage.
• Opening a long dropdown list on a Japanese client no longer writes a warning to the client log. Japanese entries have no spaces and wrap between their characters, which is correct, but the dropdown check took each one for a single word split in half. It now treats them the same as an English entry wrapping at its space (2d1e315493, #12312).
• Creatures that despawn during a scene load are now dropped from the queue that links them to their spawn point. The client log no longer records a warning for each one when the load finishes (5c596355e3).
• The movement-stall check stopped flagging a stall when a player started moving right after a long frame, such as the first frame after a zone-in. All 82 of those warnings in a day came from this, and the check still catches a real stuck-in-place avatar.
• Inviting an offline player to your guild, or anyone the server turns down for an ordinary reason (wrong name, already in a guild or invited, invite list full), no longer writes an error to the client log. The chat line telling you why the invite failed is unchanged; real faults still log an error (9c58a4f792, #12282).
• A right-click menu left open while you change zones now closes itself; picking Leave Party from it after the zone change used to throw an error. Slot options in the Edit Deck window (Clear, Remove Rune, Lock Rune) now do nothing once the window has closed, where Clear used to throw the same kind of error (7b6aafb68d, #12287).
• Changing zones with the achievements journal open, or while a fish tank, mannequin or doll cabinet was still setting up its display, no longer logs a client error. Both were sending a request to the server after the zone had already been left. The journal now holds its refresh until the next zone, where the first refresh goes through straight away instead of being held back for a minute (919e946650).

Infra

• Team chat move from Mattermost to Discord: fixed the history import, which had stopped for a week on a thread an earlier run had already created. The final catch-up pass is now running, and eight of nine channels are fully moved.
• Two log lines stopped counting as warnings on chaos: a world boss killed in a private instance no longer records a refused siege ending (only a Cabalist or the stronghold leader can end a siege), and the Cabalist fight summary is now an ordinary log line that still always reaches the logging server (f35d01ceca).
• Timed trap switches (lightning strikes, tesla coils) stopped filling the chaos log with one warning per trap per visit. Their network-sync hint for designers is now one ordinary log line per scene per session; it was 248 warnings in 43 hours, 111 of them from one visit to Quel Shardfall (b1c1003b1b).
• Crafting at a lot station with Use lot storage on stopped writing a client warning every time the lot had nothing marked for crafting. It is now one ordinary log line per lot per visit; it was 151 warnings in 25 hours from 24 sessions. The 7 lines that looked like the client and server disagreeing were a container the crafter was not allowed to take from, which the server already refuses correctly (8c5a7a5dad).

Interface

• The Keybindings list in Options can now clear a key: right-click a Primary or Secondary slot to leave the action unbound. A help line above the list explains binding and clearing. Before this only Delete cleared a slot, and nothing said so, so players pressing Backspace got Backspace bound instead. Reported by Akandriel. (aba2cd6ac3)
• The Skills window level and experience lines moved to their own section at the bottom of the window, under a thin line, so the skill rings and trees start right under the top row. Requested by Astirian (#11970).

Testing

• The Options string id check passes again after the Download All NPC Dialogue strings were added to its list of carried-over ids. (52c02aa0ea)
• A location copied from inside a basement or player dungeon (bug reports, tester verdicts, the in-game Teleport button) now remembers which lot it belongs to, so teleporting to it shows that lot's decorations.

UI

• The emote bar comes back with the emotes you put on it every time it opens. A bar opened while the character was still arriving in a scene used to come up with ten empty slots, and an emote dragged onto it in that state was lost when the bar closed.

Website

• Moved the guild and player-owned town pages to a new, larger server with stronger flood protection, and set up the server the upgraded forums will run on. Guild pages, sign-in and uploads carried over unchanged.
• The Guilds and Towns pages got the new website look: one shared header with a light and dark theme and the world status, guild cards with heraldic crests, guild and town pages with a crest header and tabs, and a home page that greets your character and lists your guild and towns. Towns now show their real names instead of internal codes, the header shows your character instead of your login name, guild cards and headers show the play style and core hours set in the in-game guild finder, guild chat lists who is online beside it, and officers can set who sees each guild page from one panel.
• Each player-owned town on the Guilds and Towns pages now has a Lots tab: every lot drawn over the town's own in-game map, coloured settled, free, for sale or at auction, with the lots on the market listed under it. Lot positions come from the game's records, so a free lot on the map is free in game.
• The new official website is up for internal review on its own server, with HTTPS: the landing page, the Ultima to Shroud history, the guild finder with each guild's play style from the in-game guild finder, the town directory, status and downloads. It stays out of search engines until the copy is approved.
• The new website's calendar page reads the public World Calendar, links the full calendar, its feeds and the submission form, and lists each date under the reader's own day (an evening event in the Americas showed under the day before).
• Installed XenForo 2.3 with Enhanced Search on the new forum server as a private staging forum, under a licence in Catnip's name. The new forum look and sign-on get built there; the old forum's members and posts move over later by upgrading its database in place, which keeps every thread and link.

Guilds & Towns

• On a phone held upright, the guild site keeps its tables inside the panel: a guild's Members tab now shows each member's rank dropdown, Set rank and Remove on a line under that member's row instead of off the right edge of the screen, and the directory's recruiting table no longer runs past its panel. Reported by Elene Sali. (cecd3d6285, #12116)

Audio

• Spider hit sounds (#12126): spiders already play their hurt sound on landed hits. The unused sound cues on their damage animations stay unmapped, since mapping them would play two grunts per hit. A test now holds the spider hurt sounds in place (1004a077d2).
• The wild Phoenix, water elementals, shock and clockwork monkeys and the zombie raven pet now play their sounds from their bodies. Their sound sets asked for a model part that the game renames when the creature spawns, so every source fell back to the creature's feet and logged a warning.
• Footsteps now match the ground under your feet on every terrain in a zone. On most of the Isle of Storms they had played the dirt step on grass and rock alike. A step with no sound of its own for its ground now plays the dirt step. Areas with their own music, such as the Soltown cemetery, now play their pieces in turn, and the score starts at once after a zone change. The designed pause between pieces is unchanged.

Quests

• The Lunar Rift in each town no longer shows a "Find the Oracle" quest marker on the map and compass for characters who finished the Isle of Storms long ago. Isle of Storms tasks are no longer shown anywhere off the Isle.
• NPCs with a task for you now show a gold ! over their name, and a ? when they are part of a task you have already started. The marks are on by default, and the new Show Quest Markers Over NPCs option (Options, Interface) turns them off. New characters get a Next Steps tip explaining them. Requested by Jebediah Armstrong. (af2d3c98ee, 4b80c344d8, #12247)

Crafting

• The Blank Wax Cylinder can now be crafted. The Carpentry recipe showed in the recipe list, but the server refused it for every character who had not learned it from a scroll, so the Craft button never lit. It is now listed under Instruments, and a commit check stops an always-known recipe from shipping that way again.
• Salvaging a Bandit Spear or a Heavy Halberd at a carpentry station can now give a reshape pattern of it, at the same odds as the Norgard Spear and the Guisarme, and salvaging a Pitchfork always gives one. All three work with the one- and two-handed polearm reshape recipes.
• Exceptional crafts no longer roll +50 Maximum Durability. The live game retired that bonus years ago, and it came back on chaos in August. Exceptional gear gets its own slower wear bonus again, grand master recipes keep their Reduced Weight roll, and an exceptional instrument earns its higher quality. Items that already rolled +50 keep it.
• Clicking an empty Beer, Wine or Spirits Cask placed on a lot did nothing if the cask had never held a brew. It now opens like a cask whose brew has been finished and emptied. Casks with a brew still maturing behave as before.
• Repairing your crafting tool with a repair kit while a batch is running no longer ends the batch early with a server error; the next item waits for the repair to finish. Batch salvage and Quick Craft runs behave the same way. Clicking a finished brewing cask twice in quick succession no longer throws an error and leaves the cask locked.
• Items still landing on a crafting table when it closes (a finished craft, a recipe being placed) now go back to the backpack at once instead of after the next zone change. A full backpack gets a chat line saying the rest arrives at the next zone change.

Books

• Recording a book onto a wax cylinder now checks the cylinder again just before it takes the Crowns, so a cylinder moved out of the backpack while the recording is being made costs nothing. A charge that still ends without a recording is mailed back with an apology, and the window no longer says you were not charged after a server error or a timeout.
• The New Player Handbook wiki link in its last chapter now opens the community wiki at sotawiki.org, in English and all seven translations (#12368). It still pointed at the old sotawiki.net, which shows a database error; the /sotawiki command had already moved. Requested by Janzik.
• The hand-written love letter in the burning tavern during the Battle of Solace Bridge now ends when the alarm rings (#12225). It used to carry on for a whole paragraph about the attack and having to leave, which a widely watched 2020 review video of the game picked out. The read-aloud narration and the seven translations of the letter were updated to match.
• The New Player Handbook names its punctuation keys. In the 3D book's handwritten lettering the Turn Right key looked like a J and the keypad period, minus and the semicolon were barely visible, so they now read Right Bracket (]), Keypad Period (.), Semicolon (;) and so on, and the headings in the key lists are underlined. The read-aloud narration was rebaked to match (d2c34e1ce2).
• Read Aloud re-recorded for 1 book whose words changed since their last recording: Songs of the Sundered Blade.

Housing

• A decoration moved inside a house can no longer drop onto the ground under the house floor. Before, a gap in a floor let a moved bookshelf land out of sight beneath it, taking everything on its shelves along; that spot now shows red with "That spot is under the house floor." (#12140)

Events

• The World Calendar is public at catnipgames.net/calendar: Calls to Arms, official events, approved player events and every Cabalist Stronghold fall since launch, in the reader's own time zone, with month, week and agenda views, tag filters, add-to-calendar, four subscription feeds and browser notifications before an event starts.
• Players can add events to the World Calendar on the guild and town site (sign in, then Add an event); the team reviews each one before it is listed. The in-game Calendar window, in-game submissions and reminders arrive with the next chaos release.
• Recovered the six Cabalist Stronghold falls from launch day to October 10 from the server logs, each with the size of the party that brought Vitium down. A first pass read one party size from a group fighting in another zone at the same second; the recovery now only counts the stronghold's own players.
• The World Events line for a major boss kill now names everyone in the party who shared it, for example "Aeryn, Bram and Cade have defeated the Frost Giant". Before, it named only the character who landed the kill and counted the rest as companions. A party of more than eight names the first eight and counts the others (#11993). Requested by Akandriel.

Builds

• Fixed the chaos release dying halfway through the Windows client build: two copies of the Windows build agent were connecting under the same name and taking turns, and each switch cut the running build off. The second launcher is gone, and the agent launcher now refuses to start a second copy.
• The release now checks the test shard's server settings before it stops anything. Tonight a leftover setting made the new server refuse to start, and the automatic rollback refused for the same reason, which left the test shard down for about 11 minutes until it was restarted by hand. A setting like that now stops the release while the old server is still running.
• When a release builds every client and only the deploy step fails, the release now keeps that build's number, so the same build can be re-deployed in about half an hour instead of rebuilt over three hours. Before, it marked the number spent and then printed a recovery command that the number check refused.

Loot

• Vigilantes in Blood River Outskirts no longer drop the Wax Cylinder - Dispossessed on about every other kill. Each body rolled for it twice; a Songs of the Sundered Blade cylinder now rolls at most once per body or chest, so it turns up on roughly one vigilante in three (409aa3aedd, #12395).

Server

• Fixed a false error in the party service log: a member status update that arrived while a party was still loading its roster was reported as coming from someone outside the party. Party membership and the status updates themselves were never affected.
• View updates the game server turns away while a scene changes hands no longer get an error reply. The refusals were expected during a master switch, but each reply showed up as a warning in the client log, about 300 in three days (42da8d6c2a).
• Zoning in as a lot owner had become about 25 ms slower on average since October 5, and more than 200 ms for players with many properties in the Property Manager (tracker #12300). A count of free Property Manager slots added to the deed list read each stored property one at a time; it now reads them in one go. The same list now carries each dungeon's own name, so the Dungeon Waygate destination list shows your named dungeons by their names. Slow-operation notices under a second are logged as information now, since the per-operation timing figures already count them.

Chat

• Long Local chat lines in Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese and other languages that take more room per letter no longer vanish when they are too big to send. The speaker now gets a message asking them to shorten the line or send it in two parts.
• Chat text containing emoji is no longer cut in half when the server shortens it for logs, moderation and player reports. The web guild chat and the Universe page now measure message length the same way the game does, so a reply with emoji near the limit is no longer refused after it is sent.
• Universe chat now allows each player 20 messages in any 5 minutes. A message past the limit is not sent, and the player gets a chat line telling them the limit and asking them to wait. Both numbers are live settings the team can change without a restart; Traders, Nobles and Roleplay chat are unchanged.
• Chat gained emoji. A smiley button in the chat box opens a picker with the standard emoji and 24 Shroud of the Avatar emoji made from in-game art, typing a colon and part of a name offers matches, and smileys like :) and <3 become emoji when the line is sent. They show in every channel and in speech bubbles. Sixteen common emoji are free for everyone to send, Rewards Program members can send all of them, and everyone sees what they send. Two chat window options turn the pictures and the smiley conversion off.

Encounters

• The visitor who arrives after a Snowy Tundra encounter (a bounty hunter, pilgrim, wandering merchant or ecology researcher) no longer walks up onto a rock and gets stuck there. 32 of the rocks in that encounter had their no-walk area left in the wrong place, some more than 100 m away; each one now covers its own rock, and three more in the grassy plains encounter were fixed the same way.

Launcher

• Launcher v63: on Linux the Server box now shows the full "Shroud of the Avatar" instead of cutting it to "Shroud of the A". The Graphics, Server and Display boxes used to split the row equally; Graphics and Display now take only the room their entries need, and a server name too long to fit ends in an ellipsis. Reported by a tester.

Party

• When the party leader moves to another copy of the zone the party is in, members are no longer asked to follow a leader who "has left this zone". That prompt's Follow button did nothing; the "Joining" countdown already brings the party back together, and the prompt still appears when the leader really goes somewhere else.

World

• The single bed in the bandit shack in Solace Bridge Outskirts can be slept in again. It stands in a tight corner, and the game decided there was no room to stand beside it, so the cursor never offered it. Beds pressed this close to a wall now offer themselves and place the character beside them. Reported by Elene Sali.

Emotes

• Breathe Fire, Blue Fire, Fire Ring, Flowers, Ice, Snow, Sparkles and Spiders now play while seated in a chair, with the effect coming from the mouth. Before, they did nothing at all while sitting.

Travel

• A Recall Scroll used inside the town you are bound to, or a Teleport to Zone Scroll aimed at the arrival point you came in by, now takes you there. Before, the scroll was used up and nothing happened.
• The "Return to Previous Location" hot-air balloon no longer drops players into an empty, ownerless copy of a basement they had just left. After leaving a lot's basement for another town, the balloon now returns you to the front of that lot. After walking up out of a basement into its own town, it goes back to where you were before you went downstairs.

Camera

• Fixed the camera showing the sky through sloped roofs indoors, reported in the Solace Bridge Outskirts bandit shack and the Battle of Solace Bridge hut. The camera now stops short of a sloped ceiling or leaning wall and moves in closer to the character, at any Field Of View setting.

Inventory

• Dropping a bag or chest into its own open window, or into the window of a bag inside it, now shows "You cannot leave items here." Before, the drop failed with no message and wrote an error to the client log. Dropping an item back on the slot it came from is no longer logged as a warning (#12267).
• Taking gold or topping up a stack from a corpse the server had already cleared no longer marks the items involved as broken for the rest of the session; before, the next Take All on that corpse failed. Refused item moves the client already recovers from now log one information line instead of up to four errors (#12268).
• Opening bundles in quick succession no longer stops partway with the failed bundle greyed out until relog; they now open one after another, and Package Item For Trade hands its payment change straight back.

Sieges

• Switched on the Cabalist circles, kits and difficulty dial on the test shard. Every Cabalist now carries a coloured ground circle with timed pulses that warn in red first, and fights with its own abilities in place of the shared Embiggen, Berserk, Cloud of Wasting, Dazzling Rays and Meteor Shower. A drained Cabalist has four times its old health, and a kill at a fuller siege meter pays more. Turning the circles off now also gives every Cabalist its old abilities back, so a Cabalist can no longer be left with nothing but its weapon.

Addons

• The Community Addons window opens wider, and its Installs and Status columns size themselves to their text, so headings and statuses like "Update available" show in full. Names and authors keep a readable width, and the window no longer shrinks past the point where the list collapsed into dots. Reported by tester Elene Sali.

Networking

• When the overworld instance a player was joining closed a moment before the join arrived, the game now finds them another instance straight away instead of holding the loading screen 5 seconds longer, and no longer logs it as an error or prints "Game does not exist" in chat on test builds (6a7557f7c1).

Pets

• Pets on Follow can now climb 63 more ladders, vines and ropes across 65 towns, wilderness zones and dungeons, including the palisade towers in Westend, the signal tower in Sunless Barrens and the ruined towers in Libris Ruins. The client also stopped logging a warning for ladders no pet can use, and for ladders on a house shown in an item preview or on a deco still being dragged out of the bag.

Login

• Players whose connection cannot reach the game website at login now get the online License Agreement and Terms of Service that ship with the game. They had been getting the Offline Single Player Edition. The agreements now appear within about 10 seconds where a timeout used to take about a minute, and a player who already accepted that text is no longer asked again on every login.

NPCs

• Answering Edvard's name question in Blood River no longer writes an error into the client log. A player without the Blood River sword also has his sword reminder waiting, and in that case the conversation parser tried to strip an empty match out of the typed name. The conversation itself plays as before (022173623a, #12281).
• Asking an NPC for a second hand-in while a Give Items window is already open for another one now tells you to finish or close the open trade first. Before, the NPC answered but the window kept showing the first trade (seen at the Castle Atos stable when asking about a different horse). Two conversation reward log lines that reported normal behavior as errors were also quieted.
• Asking an NPC a second time on the same day for a once-a-day reward now gets a plain answer, such as "Dozer has nothing more for you today." Dozer's wax cylinder look in Lamech's Bazaar used to repeat his line and hand over nothing, which read as another empty search, so players kept asking. The repeat no longer counts as an error in the client log.

Party

• Clients no longer log an unknown-response warning when they send a party status update just after leaving or being removed from a party. The server stopped answering that update, which never expects a reply (8cfc509a9f).

Agriculture

• Picking up a planter with crops still in it and holding it over a lot no longer writes an error to the client log every 30 seconds. (d373c9f93e)

Networking

• The client no longer logs a second warning when a single scene or group server connect attempt fails during a scene change; it retries on its own and only warns if several attempts in a row fail (fefa517c04).
• A lost connection to the game no longer writes a warning of its own to the client log. Its cause (a dropped network, a frozen client, the server closing an idle session) already logs one, and the disconnect reason is still recorded at debug level (65f816eed9).

Vendors

• The Vendor Listings window can search all zones for a plus rating alone. Typing only "+5" with All Zones checked used to bring up "The all-zones vendor search is unavailable right now"; it now lists every player vendor item at +5 or better. A stat filter no listed item carries shows an empty list instead of the same message. Live on chaos now (e349319849, #12331).

Nameplates

• When a party broke up, the name and chat bubble of a former member could blink out for a few frames on every client in the old party, and each of those clients logged a warning. The plate now shows or fades straight away (4e15c67f9f).

Server

• Logging straight back in after a crash, a force-close or a dropped connection no longer loses the last minute or so of progress. The old connection now saves experience, inspiration, battle fatigue and kill counts before the new login loads the character (e73abf9865).

Music

• The Songs of the Sundered Blade note for An Epilogue sent players to a "hall of tombs" that no map names. It now points to the west side of the Grand Gallery in the Crypt of the Avatar, and the coffin that holds the cylinder shows the name Reliquary Coffin on hover, so it can be told apart from the dozens of broken coffins around it.

Items

• Picking up world items such as market crate food no longer logs a warning on every pickup once the hourly take history fills, and no longer scans every item in the scene each time. The client notes it once per scene and hour instead. Chaos build 311 had logged 593 of these warnings (efbeaa1e10).

Logging

• A spawner near a door that settles before a town finishes loading its lots now notes it once at info. The warning had fired in nearly every town (885 lines a day); a door that still never seals after the lots load keeps the warning and now names the door.
• The client stopped flooding its own log relay: a leftover targeting debug line and copies of other players' PvP fight lines were crowding out real log lines, up to about 21,000 dropped in one session. The drop summary is now a quiet line every five minutes instead of a warning every 15 seconds.
• The lightning coils in the Shaminian Hills crystal puzzle no longer send the server a lock request every time they switch. Each player's game already times them from the server clock, so syncing them added a message per coil per second for every player in the area and accounted for most of a performance warning (590 lines in a week). Busy puzzle switches and pressure plates now note it once per visit at info.
• The client log stopped warning on ordinary connection delays: a ping reply a few seconds late, a long send queue while a decorated scene loads, or one slow reply now log as information. A warning is kept for a ping missing 5 seconds, a 500-deep queue and a reply missing 30 seconds, and each connection ends with one summary line. That was about 1,800 warnings a day (b20e4bbb0d).

Inventory

• Starting a new stack in a placed chest and topping it up (Quick Deposit, Quick Restock, stack combining) could leave the stacks it meant to merge marked as busy for the rest of the session if the first move failed, and held the chest open for a minute. The merge is now rolled back when the first move fails.

NPCs

• NPCs whose question offers an answer nobody wrote a reply for now respond to it. Clicking "What else is going on?" when Baozhai at Castle Atos asks about Stanley used to get silence and left the answer buttons on screen; she now asks what else you would like to talk about and her topic list comes back. Typing another topic while such a question is open gets that topic's answer, and Vishpop in Grusk now answers "Not again!" when offering a daily story. Not on chaos yet (9ef8e729d7, #12275).

Progression

• New characters now get a tip the first time their experience pool runs low. It says their skills will grow slowly until they earn more, and a click asks the Oracle what the pool is and how to refill it. Left-clicking the low experience pool icon asks the same question. Practice dummies add nothing to the pool and only spend what is already in it, so the Oracle now says that too.

Add-Ons

• Lua add-ons can play the Announce Expiring Buffs warning themselves with add-on API 36. Every buff an add-on reads now carries the id of its spoken warning, and ShroudPlayWarningSound plays it in the Oracle's voice whether or not the option is switched on. Requested by Goriah Kuulas.

Combat

• Creatures that reach a ladder they cannot match to a side now find another way round instead of walking into the wall at its foot, as the elves in the Obsidian Panopticon did on every ladder (#12000, 8a5e680f68). The ladder mapping fix from #11885 lets them climb.
• Show Enemy Skills in Combat Log is a new option under Options, Interface, Chat & Conversation, off by default. With it on, the Combat chat gets a line each time an enemy uses a skill, heals and buffs included, naming the creature, the skill and who it was used on. Damage lines already named the skill that hit. (#11998)
• Rhapsody of Recovery now lands every focus tick on party members whose focus bar has room. A tick could be lost when the bard's game thought that player was already full. The song still skips the bard and pets, as its description says (#11984, 2493656252).
• The character sheet Draw hover now explains how draw speed bonuses combine: they add together, and a total past +70% is eased so it never reaches +100%. It also shows your total before easing and how long each card takes compared with normal. A Shield of the Wicked King plus Flurry showing 178.9% is correct (+112% eased), and the Oracle can now explain it too (777eae1b69, #12073).

Gathering

• Field dressing the smallest wild animals with Meticulous Collection now pays the same bonus experience as a rabbit. Doe, Young Stag, Small Grey Wolf, Red Fox, reindeer and the Small Wolf Spider paid 300 per meticulous pass where a rabbit or squirrel paid 60; they now pay 60. Their leather and spider parts are unchanged, and Grey Wolf stays at 300 with the other first-tier wolves, bears, boars and crocodiles. Reported through the in-game Oracle (#11915).
• Meticulous Collection bonus pulls on cotton plants, trees, and gold and silver veins paid half the experience of an iron or copper vein of the same tier from tier 6 up. Every gathering type now pays the same per pull, so a Pine Tree or Cotton Plant in The Breach lists 3,000 producer experience per bonus pull, up from 1,500. Reported by Chiasma.
• Emptied gathering nodes now go away when the loot window closes. Ore veins, trees, cotton and skinned animals could stay up and clickable after everything was taken, until a second click or a few minutes passed (d9c2cc1e9e, #12074).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-09 is up: The team built a single calendar for all of New Britannia in one day, covering Calls to Arms, official events, player events and every fall of the Cabalist Stronghold, from the shared rules up through the game servers, the website and a new in-game Calendar window. Taming stopped being cancelled by the animal fighting back, merchants stopped destroying arrows at the till, and a Soltown shopkeeper finally learned to climb his own ladder again. Plus a redesigned title screen, a launcher button that drops you straight into the world, and a great many sausages hung the right way round. Listen or read the transcript (14 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed three player-forum requests to the tracker: a planting-pot footprint fix, a Pet Stay command restore, and a GPU-load report in several zones after the render/upscaling change.
• The team's read-only Discord reader bot joined the community Discord, so the dev tools can read #general there directly when following up on player discussion.
• Answered a community question about Call to Arms kill counts: a party kill adds one to the realm total and one to each member's own ranking. The game master notes now cover sizing kill goals for creatures that groups clear quickly.

Housing

• A storage container placed on a lot can now be renamed where it stands. Right-clicking a placed chest offers Rename Item to anyone allowed to modify that container; before this the name could only be changed from the bag, so a placed chest had to be picked up first. Player vendors keep their own Rename Vendor option. Reported through the in-game Oracle (#12007).
• Round clay planting pots accept seeds again. A pot that had settled slightly into a floor, sat on a tilted floor, or stood on uneven ground in some towns read its own footing as an overlap and stayed at Unused soil; the Planting Barrel and the flat planting areas could hit the same thing. Planters pushed into each other still refuse seeds, and their empty soil now says the planter must be moved. (43f60ebf73, #11979)
• Player dungeons now allow 6 lights per dungeon point, up from 1. A dungeon under a Row lot goes from 50 lights to 300, and each bought dungeon point adds 6. Object, container and NPC limits are unchanged. Requested by Rovol.
• A lamp's Start State (lit or dark when the area loads) moved from its own right-click entry into the Light Settings window as an On / Off picker, for placed lamps and lamps built into a house. The old entry named the state it would switch to; it now appears only on a light that has no Light Settings. Requested by Chiasma.

Pets

• A pet sent at a creature now keeps fighting it while standing close enough to hit, even when the way to it looks blocked. Pets fighting Brign, Lord of Water at the edge of the water in The Breach used to stop and walk back to their owner mid-fight. A creature a pet really cannot get to still sends it back. (#11995)
• Casting a summon such as Summon Water Elemental while your dead pet still lay on the ground spent the cast with nothing appearing, and left Resurrect Creature unable to revive the pet. The summon now appears right away and the dead pet can still be resurrected and called back within the usual five minutes (311577e853, #11967).

Combat

• Staff-wielding NPC mages now show a spell name on the creature cast bar (Fire Arrow, Ice Arrow, Shock Arrow or Stone Arrow) instead of a raw system name like "NPC Avatar Auto Attack Staff Fire". Eleven other creature spells with the same gap, including satyr mage attacks and the Breach spells, got names too. Reported by Joe Z.
• The server check on a kills experience (added 2026-10-08, not on chaos yet) now accounts for the servers own doubling and any experience event before it compares. As first written it would have cut honest kills in half during an event and trimmed party kills without one.
• Spell and creature effects that end now always clear. A dark purple Cloud of Wasting from an enraged zombie or lich could get stuck after it faded, then show up again in later zones for the rest of the session; one player saw it covering the middle of every player dungeon foyer they entered. 58 effects could get stuck the same way, Death Shield, Gust, Life and the bard songs among them. A stuck effect is now also cleared at the next zone change. (8100d23fba, #11527)

Dev Portal

• The Events page and the Calendar Review page are live on the dev portal. Game masters can schedule world events, contests and festivals with their calendar tags, and review the events players submit for the World Calendar. Both open only for named game-admin logins.

Oracle

• The Oracle had told a player about a combat log skill-name option that did not exist yet. She now describes the new Show Enemy Skills in Combat Log option and no longer overstates what Show Verbose Combat Text does. (#11998)
• Bug reports filed through the Oracle now include the player's own messages from the conversation, word for word, below the summary. A long write-up was being cut down to a four-line summary, and the details were lost.

Emotes

• The Smoke Virtue emote's smoke no longer gets darker each time the emote is used.

Leaderboards

• The Guild Prestige and Town Prestige leaderboards have a Size picker (All Sizes, Large, Medium, Small) in the game's Leaderboards window and on the public leaderboards page. Picking a size shows only that group, ranked from 1 within it; requested by Ceal Astra. (dba2cbc947, #11968)

Taming

• Taming a creature onto a collar that already held a pet now counts toward the Taming achievements: creatures tamed, the family count and different kinds. Only a tame onto an empty collar counted before, so a player who kept one collar and tamed over the old pet saw those counts never move. Tames made over an old pet before this fix could not be recovered and are not in the counts. Reported by a chaos tester (#12002).

Audio

• The Announce Expiring Buffs warning has recorded names for 46 more buffs, including Light, the weapon poisons, the elemental weapon buffs and the Potions of Specialization. These buffs move no stat, so they had been left off the list of names we record and said "A buff is decaying." instead. The new lines play once their recordings are uploaded (#11848).

Options

• The V-Sync tick in Options, Video now has a note under it: with V-Sync off and Frame Rate Limit on No Limit the game draws as many frames as the graphics card can, so light indoor areas run the card at full load. Reported by SteelCore, whose high fan noise in a few zones came from that combination rather than the new Render Scale option (ed3b61ccd1, #12005).
• The party list has two size settings of its own in Options, Interface, under Character & Progress: Party Health Bar Size (75% to 200%) sizes each member's health, focus and Vigor bars with their numbers, and Party Text Size (75% to 150%) sizes names, titles, guilds and the location line of an away member. Neither changes UI Scale or your own frame, and both apply as you drag (12aa9a2632, #11988).
• The pet frame has its own size setting in Options, Interface, under Character & Progress: Pet Health Bar Size (75% to 200%) sizes the health, focus and Vigor bars and their numbers on the frame of your tamed pet or summoned creature. It leaves UI Scale, your own frame and the party list alone, and applies as you drag (93ffa912ed, #11981).

Oracle

• The Oracle can now explain who the Lady of the Willows is, as Julia the alchemist in Kingsport mentions her, and where the old willow grove is.

Audio

• Stairs and stone floors that played dirt footsteps now sound right: the wooden spiral staircase in Highvale Outskirts plays wood steps, and the snowy stone stairs, the ruin floor tiles and the wide stone stairs (plain and desert versions) play stone steps everywhere they are used. Reported by Elene Sali.
• Subscribers can now turn on Download All NPC Dialogue on the Audio tab of Options to fetch every NPC voice line (164,534 lines, about 5 GB) in the background, so lines play without waiting to stream. It raises the dialogue cache to at least 8 GB and keeps the download across new builds, re-fetching only lines whose audio changed. Requested by Hayk Strongbow.

Books

• Only the author of a player-written book can now press copies of its wax cylinder recording, from any character on their account. Cylinders of the game's library books can still be copied by anyone (35081e370c, #11987).

Website

• Settled most of the open decisions for the new official website: it soft-launches on a studio-held domain, the forum is upgraded in place with its history kept, existing subscriptions keep renewing unchanged, and the site tells the game's history from Ultima through Ultima Online, crediting Richard Garriott by name. The clickable mockup was revised with a more cinematic landing page, a This Week section fed by the World Calendar, a signed-in player dashboard, phone layouts, and guild and player-owned town pages that share one look and one sign-in with the rest of the site, alongside the atlas, market search, standings and other player tools.
• Built the first working version of the new official website: the landing page, guild finder, player-owned town directory, guild and town profile pages, the World Calendar week with add-to-calendar, status, and download pages, all sharing one look with the other player sites. It goes up on two new servers next, unlisted from search engines until the copy is approved.

World

• Removed a stone pillar that stood in front of the Hilt Fortress door in Nightshade Pass. It was left over from an older two-door layout and blocked the one remaining door (855442982c, #11991).
• In Estgard, the ruined stone stair on the way to the North Exit now sits on the ground. The ground under the middle of the flight had sagged, leaving slab edges up to 0.84 m in the air. It was raised to meet them, and no slab edge now hangs more than 0.21 m over soil.
• The path to the walkway bridge over the Estgard ravine, between the South Exit and Cenote Undine, used to end at a dirt bank about 2.5 m tall right in front of the bridge. That bank is now a ramp: the steepest part of the approach went from about 60 degrees to 17.
• Swimmers in Battle of Solace Bridge now float at the surface in both rivers. In the lower river by the barred-arch bridge the water sat up to 0.55 m above a swimmer's head. Under the small bridge a swimmer floated on top of the water, standing on a riverbed 1.1 m deep. Every water volume now follows the drawn river, two new ones cover the waterfall pool and the far end of the lower river, and swimming starts at 1.4 m depth, so shallower water wades with the head out. (ae2f11da1e, #10935)

Creatures

• The ambient bat swarms in caves keep flapping their wings again. The flight animations played one wing beat and then stopped, so the bats hung still in the air while still squeaking. Affects Crooked Shank, Despair, Myrkur, K'rawl and five other zones (882ea376f1, #11986).
• The cow by the Fishmonger in Owl's Head no longer tips nose-down into the cobbles while she grazes. Animals that lean with the ground now lean only as far as it slopes, and stand level on flat ground however long they idle (999fcec9f2, #11516).
• Planned a pass on every hostile spider, by tier. Brown spiders will snare, yank and feast on whoever is stuck in their webs; red spiders will cut healing, spit venom that eats armour and burst when they die; wolf spiders stop spinning webs from level 80 and pounce, cripple and mark prey for the pack instead; warp spiders trade their unannounced teleport for a ring you can step out of. The Spider Queen, who has never spawned anywhere, is planned for Spindelskog, and the web that held weak characters for over a minute and strong ones not at all will hold everyone for three to five seconds.
• Registered the switches for the spider pass, so every new spider ability can be turned off on the shard without a patch. Nothing changes in game yet.
• Spider webs now hold every character for three to five seconds, whatever their Strength. Before, a strong character was never held and a weak one could be held for more than a minute by a big spider. The same spider can web you about once every 12 seconds, and jumping still breaks you out. Warp spiders no longer teleport you at random with their poison, and spider poison now plays a spitting animation, so it no longer looks like a web.
• Creature AI can now aim an ability at a fighter other than the one it is attacking (the owner of a pet that is holding it, otherwise whoever is lowest on its list) and can raise a buff on itself whenever the buff is missing. Nothing uses either yet; the spider abilities that need them come next.
• Red and reef spiders from level 80 now spray venom in a wedge in front of them, with a warning on the ground a second before it lands; anyone caught receives less healing for a few seconds. Red Arachnids and up burst in a ring of poison a second after they die, and the strongest red spiders spit acid behind a cast bar that strips armour for 20 seconds. Stand beside the spider, step out of the ring, and interrupt the spit.
• Brown spiders from level 80 now weave: Silk Snare leaves a patch of web that slows movement and spellcasting, Brown Arachnids cast Web Yank to pull a player hanging back (or a pet owner) right up to them, they bite much harder at anyone stuck in a web, and the Ferocious Brown Arachnid throws a ring of web that roots everyone close. Each has a cast bar or a ground warning, and jumping still breaks a root.
• Wolf spiders from level 80 and the Black Arachnids no longer spin webs. They pounce on a player standing back (or on the owner of a pet that is holding them), and their bites slow; while that slow is still on you, a Black Arachnid can follow with a bite that paralyses for two seconds. Black Arachnids also cast Mark the Prey on a player they are not fighting, and every spider nearby goes after that player until the mark wears off. Each of these shows a cast bar.
• The Ferocious Warp Spider now casts Warp Snare, a ring on the ground that pulls anyone still standing in it to the spider when it closes. It also steps out of the air beside players who keep their distance, and below half health it shifts half out of the world for a few seconds, when weapons do nothing to it and spells hit it harder.
• The Ferocious Brown and Red Arachnids, the Nightmarish Red Spider and the strongest player-dungeon spiders now weave a Silk Shroud behind a cast bar: web wraps around them and they take 30% less damage for 20 seconds. The first fire or sun damage burns it away, and a singed spider cannot weave another for 10 seconds.
• Ferocious Black Arachnids now carry their brood: the first time one drops below half health, three Arachnid Spiderlings spill out around it, and four more burst from its body when it dies. They go for whoever it was fighting, last about 45 seconds and give no experience or loot.
• Built the Silk Cocoon for the spider queens: a cast bar, then the player she picks is wrapped in a cocoon that holds them for up to 8 seconds unless the group cuts or burns it open first. It stays switched off until it has been tried with two players on the test shard; until then the queens cast Web Shot, a three-second stun behind a cast bar. Nothing carries either yet; the queens get them next.
• The spider bosses now fight with the spider abilities. Xen Trohop spits Queen's Venom, which cuts healing received and stacks three times, sprays venom, yanks players standing back, wraps herself in a fire-weak silk shroud and throws a root ring below 60% health; Xoach Trohop snares, yanks and shrouds. Their enrages became Brood Frenzy and Engorge at the same strength. The queens also lost a hidden rule that raised their Strength and speed by up to 1,500 and 200% depending on how few animals stood nearby.
• Xen Trohop now grows stronger in plain sight: each of her Chosen Young that dies near her during the fight gives her a stack of Mother's Fury for 30 seconds, up to twelve, with more strength and a little more speed. Killing her escorts while she is idle does not call her to the killer. Kill the escorts first and away from her, or after her.
• Xen Trohop now lays egg clutches: every 45 seconds or so she casts for two seconds, and up to three spider egg sacs appear around her. Each one left standing for 15 seconds hatches two spiderlings; a destroyed sac hatches nothing, and fire burns them fastest. Interrupting the cast stops the clutch.
• The Spider Queen, never placed in the world before, now waits in the low valley near the middle of Spindelskog, in its Normal, Hard and Extreme versions, with the weaver queen's abilities from the spider pass. Her fight can also wake two Ferocious Red Spiders at three-quarters, half and one-quarter health whose deaths near her feed her fury; that part ships switched off until a two-player test on the shard.
• The hardest spiders now pay more. The Ferocious Arachnids, the Ferocious Warp Spider, Arachnairn Deathbringer, Xoach, Xen and the Spider Queen give more experience (a Ferocious Black Arachnid 40,000 to 84,500, Xen Trohop 50,000 to 123,000), and their corpses now hold gold, a chance at artifacts, Crowns of the Obsidians and reagents, taken before the corpse is field dressed. Field dressing the level-150 spiders also gives more silk and sometimes a second Spider Essence.
• Animal Lore now places Xen Trohop in the Spectral Peaks (it said the Hilt Fortress), and the Spider Queen of Spindelskog has her own named-specimen line. The spider pass is written up for the team, and an Oracle guide to spiders is ready to go live with the release.

Gathering

• The Meticulous Collection chat line after a harvest now says how many bonus pulls a Rich Find doubled, and a "Rich Find!" whose pass was interrupted before it paid is taken back off the swing meter. The Oracle's gathering notes were updated to explain that each Rich Find is usually one extra ore, that tin, tungsten and other byproducts drop at most once per node, and that silver and gold nodes have none.

Dungeons

• Dragons raised by a Dragon Totem in a player dungeon now give Adventurer experience when killed. Every totem dragon, at every totem level and in both The Rise Shaft and the Ancient Stone Troll Room, paid nothing before because the game server could not tell which creature had died. Trolls, elves and the other totem creatures already paid and are unchanged.

Performance

• Grusk stops drawing distant clutter once it is only a few pixels tall: steam pipes, railings, ornaments and lamps on the far side of the harbour. Looking across the harbour from the dock, set-pass calls fell from 2,107 to 1,497 and GPU time from 29 to 21 ms in testing, with no visible change to the town (#11962).

Quests

• Corporal Heloise in Solace Bridge Outskirts now tells a player plainly when they have no family heirloom with them, and that the swamp bandits carry them now and then. Her old answer read like a turn-in that kept failing. The heirloom hand-over itself works as before (dafe03d0e9, #11982).
• Sir Patrick in the Kobold Expeditionary Camp stays in his cage until a player unlocks it, then walks out through the door. A September navmesh rebake had left the cage out, so he walked through the bars as soon as the camp loaded (f8da451d75, #11838).

Oracle

• The Oracle now answers which Carpentry items give Dexterity or Intelligence. Nothing Carpentry makes has either built in and Carpentry masterworks add none, but a bow or crossbow keeps the Dexterity of an Elven or Sylvan bow string it is made with. It also points to the Alchemy enchants and the Tailoring and Blacksmithing masterworks that add both. (8e17e96179)
• The sound state in Oracle bug reports now also covers the audio listener (how many there are and how far the active one is from the character) and how many playing sounds outrank sound effects for a voice. Either can silence every effect while music keeps playing, and the volume levels alone could not show it.

UI

• The minimap ring that carries the N, E, S and W letters now takes the UI theme's window color and follows theme changes as they happen, so light themes like Air get a light ring with readable dark letters instead of dark letters on black. Requested by Astirian. (a22c7812af, #11972)
• The Journal no longer has an Information tab. Its help now opens from the question mark in the window's title bar, as in the Skills and Crafting windows, and the rewritten help names all five tabs, in every supported language. Requested by Astirian. (d0310e4ee3, #11971)
• A click that brings the game back to the front could be ignored when the interface had not yet caught up with the window having focus; that click now counts. This targets chat text selection taking several tries after pasting the text into another program, and the minimap sometimes needing a second click (f403bbc9b4, #11594).
• Player vendor names no longer spread their letters wide. The bold vendor name drew each letter about 1.6 times as far apart as the bold names over NPCs; it now matches them and stays larger and bold (d7510a1008, #11515).
• On a vendor's My Listings tab, clicking one of several selected listings now leaves only that listing selected. Before, every selected row stayed highlighted. Dragging a multi-selection still moves all of it, and the other vendor, merchant and mail lists behave the same way (cdf7bf3600, #10946, reported by Astirian).

Images

Audio

• Wooden rope bridges and plank walkways play wood footsteps instead of dirt, including the two bridges in Highvale Outskirts reported by Elene Sali (a002d2800f, #11965).

Crafting

• The crafting window's recipe list stays in place while a batch or the crafting queue fills the table. The recipe being made used to jump to the top and back each time its ingredients were placed. Items placed by hand that do not yet make a recipe still bring the matching recipes to the top (e91e2c2e04, #11966).
• The Swift Refine, Batching and Efficient Refine Materials skills now say in their description what trains them: only their school's refining recipes such as Leather or Iron Ingot, and for Batching only crafts of two or more with Quick Craft off. The Oracle answers the same question.

Towns

• Player-owned towns can set a PvP level cap. The Town Console has a new PvP tab where the governor or a steward picks a level from 10 to 199. While a player flagged for PvP is in that town, their adventure level and adventuring skills count as no higher than the cap; crafting and gathering skills are not capped, and removing the flag lifts it at once. A chat line says when the cap starts and stops applying. Requested by Lebu LionHeart.

Leaderboards

• The Leaderboards window shows totals above 2,147,483,647 at their real value. Experience, Gold Found, Vendor Sales and the other whole-number boards had shown -2,147,483,648 for anyone past that mark and ranked them last; on the All Time Experience board that was every Producer XP cell (cf89e0619a, #12046).

Mounts

• Pressing Escape on a mount now writes a line to the client log whenever the press does not dismount, naming what held it: a bound Mount / Dismount key, a window that Escape closes first, or the mount still settling. This follows a report that Escape stopped dismounting, which could not be reproduced (5bd3137346, #11969).

Launcher

• Typing on the Linux client could still freeze the whole game for a few seconds now and then, in chat and search boxes (tracker #12053). The old launcher started the game with the desktop input method switched off, and the new launcher had dropped that; it now does the same again. The client also checks the keyboard for accent keys a third as often while you type, and logs any typing stall of a second or more so the next report can be traced.

Voice

• The spawner voice audit now checks NPCs whose conversation serves both sexes against the bodies they stand in, and reads a body's sex from its 3D model file when the outfit name leaves it out. The first run found four groups speaking with the wrong sex of voice, including the vigilante guards at the Blood River camp and the Obsidian elf ambush in Highvale Outskirts (#11403).
• The vigilante guards at the Blood River Outskirts camp, the Obsidian elf ambush in Highvale Outskirts and the corrupted elf men nearby were recast from women's voices to men's voices to match the bodies they stand in. The new lines go live with the next voice upload (#11403).

Tools

• The double-click regression test no longer flags the buff bar hourglass, which already pairs presses on a timer. The test had been failing since October 2 (df8c664af4).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-08 is up: The toughest human enemies in Novia can no longer be stun-locked, and the pirates of Lamech's Bazaar now fight as a crew with hooks, smoke and a captain whose death breaks their nerve. The game is also fully playable in Ukrainian, after a hundred and twenty eight thousand lines of text. Plus chum slicks for shark fishing, fifteen tamed pets fetched back out of a backup, and ground detail that had been switched off since twenty eighteen. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Tools

• The tracker comment helper can now set an issue's priority and category in the same update, for bug triage passes.
• Added a private Web Sales report to the dev portal for the studio owner. It is rebuilt each night from the backup of the website store database and lists website purchases, subscriptions and failed payments.

Community

• Filed a wishlist request to export an online character for offline play (asked by Barugon), and closed out a QA-server mixup report at a player's own request.

Skills

• Not Train All on a school header in the Skills window now also stops Elixir Receptive and Elixir Extension. Before, a training elixir skill kept training after the rest of the school stopped. Train All and Unlearn All still leave the elixir pair alone. (b8850a39c0)

Taming

• The Collar Recovery tooltip now says that it protects your Taming Collar on a failed tame, and that a successful tame always uses up the collar. The old wording read as if collars were never used on low-level creatures (#11868).
• Tame Creature now tells you when a creature is too young to be tamed. Small Grey Wolves were never tameable, and the plain refusal read like a broken skill. Full-grown Grey Wolves still tame as before.

Add-Ons

• The Location Tracker sample add-on has room for a long location line wrapped over three lines, and the add-on reference now says a label needs whiteSpace = "wrap" to show a long line in full instead of ending in "...". The test script on the location readout verify task was corrected the same way, so testers can read the coordinates.
• Lua add-ons can read the World Calendar with add-on API 35: ShroudGetCalendarEvents, ShroudGetCalendarSummary and three more list the dates, what is on now and next, your reminders and the tags, and ShroudOnCalendarChanged says when anything changes. It is read only, and a new Calendar Strip example add-on shows the week ahead in a small window.

HUD

• The party list now moves below the separate Buffs and Debuffs bars while they sit in their default spots, so party rows no longer cover your own buff and debuff icons at larger Buff Icon Sizes. Companion bars follow the same rule. (#11846, fe1c412a16)

UI

• Redesigned the title screen so nothing sits over the hooded Avatar: Play Online now stands to his left and Play Offline to his right, each with its description underneath, and Options and Quit moved to the top-right corner. The Credits button and the Rewards Program banner were removed. All four buttons are new gold lettered art that grows slightly under the pointer.
• Find My Offline Characters moved from the title screen to the offline character screen, under Save and Load. Closing the window returns you to your characters with anything you brought in already listed, and an offline player with no characters but another save on the computer is shown the window once before character creation.
• The quantity window that opens when you Shift-drag to split a stack now shows the item's name in its title bar. Requested by D'Laein Lachlan.
• New players now start with the single-item gear tooltip, and holding Alt brings up the comparison with equipped gear. Players who already played keep the tooltip they had. With the comparison off, an item that can be compared ends its tooltip with a line saying Alt compares it.

Housing

• Taking a decoration out of a chest on your lot and dropping it straight onto the lot works reliably now. Before, the drop could be refused (most often for the last item in a chest, or when the chest window was closed during placement) and the item was then stuck half-placed until you left the area. The placement now keeps the chest available until it finishes, and a placement that is still refused puts the item back in the chest. (0f500201e7)
• The butcher sausage decorations (Sausage, Large Sausage and Sausage Links) now lie flat on floors and tables and hang flat against walls, front facing out. Before, they stood on end on a floor and stuck straight out from a wall. They can also be mirrored with the Mirror Flip Decoration key. Sausages hung on walls before September 21 are back where their owners put them; ones placed on chaos since August 15 take the new pose once picked up and placed again (tracker #11863, a29eb571ca).
• The Geometric Stained Glass Chandelier now hangs 8 cm lower, so its cap and glass bowl no longer disappear into house ceilings (8c292370cc).
• A refused Property Manager restore now puts both cards back where they were. Before, the house stayed drawn on the lot with an extra Empty Lot card in storage until a refresh, and moving that card could drop the house from the list.
• The server now writes a log line when it turns down a Property Manager request to store, restore, move or send a house to the bank, with the reason. Every store and restore also leaves an item-log entry naming the storage that left the lot and the one that came on, so a missing-house report can be traced.
• Farm lot doors now get their open or closed state before the crops on those lots load. On busy farming streets the doors used to wait behind the crops and open last. (#10972)
• Property markers can now be placed on ground levelled with POT Terrain Levellers. The lot keeps the levelled ground instead of being judged on the original slope, and the levellers' edges no longer drop back to the old slope inside the lot. On steep ground that is not levelled yet, the refusal now says it is the original ground that is too steep (#11860).

Images

Oracle

• The Oracle can answer about fifty more of this week's unanswered questions: where to catch a Young Shark and that a Call to Arms counts catches anywhere, the fishing ripples in each salt-water town, the Call to Arms Top of the realm list, Bedrock versus Blink and Engage Opponent, linked equipment on deck swaps, the item wish list, food buff slots, major repair cost in Crowns, the Tool Engraving Kits, Enchantment recipe sellers, the Breach Lords' weaknesses, the Kiln Cistern entrance and more. She also no longer says engravings add durability; they lower it.

Audio

• With Announce Expiring Buffs on, drinking a Health, Focus or Restoration potion no longer makes the Oracle say "A buff is decaying." a few seconds later. The 30-second penalty these potions leave was being counted as a buff; penalties are now skipped and real buffs still warn (6efe9bcc8c).
• The spoken warning before a buff runs out now follows the Master and NPC Dialogue volume sliders. It had been playing at full volume even with Master turned all the way down.

Images

Combat

• Fixed battle royale rounds that could stop advancing after the player whose game runs the waves left or lost connection mid-round: the cleared wave was never followed by the next one and the arena never reset. The waves now carry on when that role passes to another player, including when it returns to someone who held it earlier. The same fix covers control point battles. (#11867)
• The corruption bite of the Vigorem Cavas spiders and the claw of the Salvos Cavas scorpions now show their icon on the buff bar, with "Shadow Bite" and "Shadow Claw" as the tooltip title. Both used to show a blank slot named after the creature. (ebcbd5219e)
• The combat log now writes a line when a crowd control or debuff lands on a creature, naming the caster, the skill and the creature: stuns, mesmerizes, roots, confusion and knockdowns each read with their own word, and slows, bleeds and other harmful effects read as "is affected by". Each creature caught by an area skill gets its own line, and a recast on a creature that still has the effect adds none. Requested by Goriah Kuulas. (#11825, 45d9eb1b43)
• A thrown patch of Caltrops now stays on the ground for 30 seconds instead of 12, and its spikes stay visible until the patch ends (they used to vanish 2 seconds early). The 10 second slow on anyone who walks in is unchanged.
• Judgment, Searing Ray, Solar Flare and Rainbow Blast cards now show their normal damage range and list the daylight bonus (+50%) and the bonus against undead (+25%) on separate lines. The old range folded both into its top number, so it could only be reached in daylight against an undead target (#11777).
• Widened the log line that tracks K'rul bodies losing their loot early. It now also catches a body that is switched off rather than destroyed, and a despawn timer moved by a path the first version did not watch. Both versions reach chaos with the next build (#11488).
• Lightning Storm's chance to stun now rises with Lightning Storm skill and Dexterity, like the other Air stuns. A target's Air resistance still lowers it, and a Grandmaster with 60 Dexterity now stuns on about half the strikes, up from a third (fe5362dd71, #11864).
• The Frost Giant fight in Jotungrund resets about two and a half minutes after a party wipes. Before, anyone standing within roughly 175 meters, dead or alive, held the fight open, so groups waiting outside the wind wall could not get a fresh attempt. The giant also stays a few meters inside his wind wall now, so he can no longer get stuck on it and be hit from outside (611c3673cb, #11983).

Mounts

• The Dismount key binding is now Mount / Dismount: on foot it summons the last mount you rode, or the first mount in your bags, and says so in chat when there is none. Escape and the on-screen dismount button still only dismount. Requested by Arkah EMPstrike.

Graphics

• The Steam Deck is now recognised as a shared-memory GPU when the game picks starting video settings. It had been read as a separate 6 GB graphics card, which set a larger texture budget and kept an extra upload buffer on a 16 GB handheld where the system, Steam and the game share the same memory.

Mounts

• Light and Night Vision can now be cast while riding a mount, and the Scroll of the Wayfinder's Eye can be read there too. The rider stays in the saddle: the arms play the casting or reading motion while the legs stay in the riding pose. Light and Night Vision can be cast on the move. Charts were already readable while mounted. Every other spell and consumable is still refused while mounted. Requested by Rudigar Kipperface.
• The Tactics skill Gait Pacing now works. It had sat hidden in the skill data, unfinished, with another skill's numbers copied into it. It now appears in the Tactics tree below Mounted Speed Focus, Corsten in Desolis teaches it, and each level makes a mount's gallop cost less Focus: a quarter less at skill 100 and half at 200. Sprinting on foot is unchanged.

Add-Ons

• Add-ons that play their own sounds now get a number for each sound as soon as they ask for it to load and play it by that number, so two add-ons that both ship a file called ping.ogg no longer play each other's sound. Add-ons can also list loaded sounds by their full folder path and ask whether one is still loading. Add-on API 34; the Alert Sound example uses it. Requested by shawn.

Events

• Started the World Calendar, one calendar of Calls to Arms, official events, player events and the Cabalist Stronghold, public on the website and in game. First came the shared rules for player events: titles and tags such as PvP, Fishing and Tutorial, weekly repeats that keep their local time across a daylight-saving change, and who may submit. The game, the dev portal and the guild website check every event against the same rules.
• Every fall of the Cabalist Stronghold is now kept for good, with the size of the party that brought Vitium down when the kill is credited, so the World Calendar can say when he last fell. A game masters test opening is marked and never counted. Falls since launch can be recovered from the server logs.
• The game servers now serve the world calendar. Each one gathers the Calls to Arms, the game masters' events, approved player events and the Cabalist Stronghold's falls every minute, and the game client can page through any stretch of dates, open an event, submit or edit its own events and set reminders. The in-game calendar window that uses this comes next (870991bb21, #11892).
• The dev portal gained the review side of player calendar events: staff can approve an event (fixing its text, tags or place on the way), send it back with a note, decline it, cancel a listed event or one of its dates, and feature it. The host gets an in-game notice of each decision, and every submission is run past the text screen first as advice for the reviewer (eb1d6321c8, #11892).
• The game's side of the public world calendar is built: the data the calendar page will read, and calendar feeds a phone or email calendar can subscribe to (everything, or just Calls to Arms, official events or community events). They go public with the calendar page. Game masters can also tag their scheduled events (PvP, Fishing, New players and more) and choose whether a Call to Arms shows on the calendar as soon as it is planned (3335834bfa, #11892).
• Built the Calendar Review page for the dev portal, where staff go through the player events waiting for the world calendar. It previews each event exactly as players will see it, shows what an edit changes, and keeps every decision behind a confirm step, with a note the host receives in game. It goes live with the rest of the calendar (99fafc5172, #11892).
• Built the public World Calendar page for the website: month, week and agenda views in your own time zone, filters for Calls to Arms, official events, player events and tags like PvP or Fishing, a link to any event, and buttons to add an event to Google, Outlook or your phone with a reminder. It also shows when Vitium last fell. It goes live after the owner's go-ahead (c95305e833, #11892).
• The World Calendar page can now send browser notifications: pick a date, choose how long before (from the start to a day ahead) and press Notify me. If the date moves the notification moves with it, and if it is cancelled you hear about that instead. On iPhone and iPad it works once the page is added to the Home Screen. Live together with the page (9ba7f1f8aa, #11892).
• Built the in-game pieces the World Calendar window will be made from, ready for any window that needs them: a small month to pick days from, a date field that drops it down, a time field that reads times the way players type them (7:30 pm, 19:30, 1930, noon) and snaps to the quarter hour, and 32 icons for the event types and tags. Each event type has its own colour, checked for contrast on every interface skin.
• Built the in-game Calendar window: month, week and agenda views in your own time zone, switches for Calls to Arms, official and community events and the Cabalist Stronghold, tags and search, a details panel for each date, and a side panel with what is on now, what is next and when Vitium last fell. It opens from the Open a Window list, with /calendar, from World Events, or with a key you bind to Toggle Calendar.
• The World Events window now links to the calendar: each game master event opens the calendar on its date, and start times there read from your computer's clock the same way the calendar does.
• Built the writing side of the in-game Calendar: a form to add your own event (date, time, weekly repeat, place, tags), My events to follow each submission through review, reminders that go off in game with a banner, a chat line and a chime, and calendar dates shared in chat that open the calendar in each reader's own time.
• Built World Calendar submissions on the guild and town portal: the same form, rules and limits as in game, checked against the game's own records, with dates worked out in each player's own time zone and a page to follow, edit or withdraw each event. It stays switched off until the calendar opens.

Inventory

• Restock button beside Quick Deposit on chests and the bank: it takes items out of the container until your pack holds the Keep When Depositing amount you set for each one, counting what is already in your bags. Items without an amount are never taken (a28ec06cd8, #11882).
• The Bank window has a Quick Deposit button now, and right-clicking a bank box offers Quick Deposit too, which opens the bank and runs it once the bank has loaded. It tops up matching stacks anywhere in your bank: a stack stored at another town's bank is moved to this bank and then topped up. New stacks count against your bank's item slots, so a full bank only tops up what it already holds. The bank had been listed as having the button since August, but it never appeared (ab7d1efdc1, #11898, requested by GenieUK through the in-game Oracle).

Crafting

• Rings, necklaces and Taming Necklaces keep offering the Minor stat enchantments (Minor Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Health, Focus) alongside the plain grade from Weapon Enchantment 50 through 99, the same window body armor already had. They used to drop out at 50, the moment the plain grade unlocked (37e6ff0fee, #11847).
• Bags in your backpack can now be kept out of crafting: untick Use this container for crafting in the bag window, or right-click the bag and choose Don't Use for Crafting. Crafting stations then take nothing from that bag or any bag inside it, spells still use the reagents in it, and a recipe that comes up short says how many are sitting in those bags. Requested by Joe (74d6dfb0bb).
• Salvaging gear can skip its pattern. The crafting window has a new Keep patterns from salvage checkbox at blacksmithing, tailoring and carpentry tables; untick it and salvage returns only the materials. Applied Eternal patterns still come back, and the choice is saved per character. Requested by Violet Ronso.
• At a crafting station the tool equipped for that station is listed at the bottom of the Your Inventory list again. It had been pulled up among the station's other items, so Tailoring Scissors of Prosperity sat between the player's locked tailoring gear and everything else (f49f204d09, #11913).

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains that the cog in the backpack title bar opens and closes the backpack options panel, and that each window remembers whether it was left open, after a player asked for a way to hide the options (1c83194f2b).
• The Oracle now answers where the item wish list is and how to use it: right-click an item or a player vendor listing to add or remove it, /wishlist to see the numbered list, /wishlist remove and /wishlist clear to edit it, and the 50-item limit per character. It also tells the item list apart from the Player Wish List suggestion board. (5500184a43)
• Oracle bug reports filed in Single Player Offline now record who sent them once the player has claimed rewards with their SotA login that session, so offline reports count toward tester credit the same as online ones. Requested by Elene Sali.

Launcher

• The launcher shows a Play As button with your last online character's name when that account has a saved password. It starts the game straight into the world as that character, past the title screen, login screen and character screen. New agreements and the besieged town warning still show. Comes with the next game build and launcher release. Follow-up to the saved accounts work requested in #11572.

Vendors

• All Zones vendor search finds items when a word of the search is a single letter. "augmented leather h" used to return nothing while "augmented leather he" worked; the one letter now matches any name word starting with it.
• The Vendor Listings in Zone search box remembers each character's past searches and suggests them in a list under the box: your recent searches when you click into an empty box, and the ones matching what you have typed so far. Enter still searches exactly what you typed unless you arrow down onto a suggestion. Requested by Kakari.

World

• In Estgard, the thick vine slung across the crevice above the green-moss cave now comes down onto the lower rock. Its end used to hang 0.4 m above the rock with open air underneath.

Fishing

• The fishing rod now stays in hand after a cast, so the next cast starts as soon as the line is in, and you can walk to a new spot with it out. It is put away when you draw a weapon, use another skill, jump, take damage, change pose or go a minute without casting.
• Sea water in open PvP zones now uses its own catch lists, where the Sailfin Tang aquarium fish turns up more often. The lists had been set up long ago but never switched on, so they were first brought up to date with the fishing finds and reef corals. (#10278)

Quests

• Kenley in Port Harmony now pays his first virtuous Love gift from his Love gift bundle rather than the bundle for the opposite path. Both bundles hold the same items today, so nothing changes in game; a new test checks every Virtue gift NPC pays each side from its own bundle (#11741, 92e932ad8c).

Travel

• The Cross-Continent Galleon now moves you between Novia docks with a short fade instead of reloading Novia. Trips to Hidden Vale and Mistrendur still load as before. Requested by Joe.

UI

• The Modern skill icons are now the default. Players who never changed Options, Themes, Skill Icons see the Modern art on the skill tree, hotbar, deck builder and tooltips; anyone who picked Classic keeps it. Requested by Segalleon Ashgard. (#11742)
• A chest on a lot or a bag opened from the bank now stays open when its last item is taken out by hand, so it can be restocked without reopening it. Corpses and world chests still close that way, and Take All still closes an emptied lot chest.
• New Buff Icon Order setting under Options, Interface, Gameplay sorts the buff and debuff icons by time left, shortest or longest first, on your own bars, the party list, the target frame and the pet frame. In the sorted orders a full bar keeps the buffs about to run out in view and puts the longest-lasting ones behind the +N icon. Order Applied stays the default. Requested by Akandriel and Gustach.

Commerce

• Merchants now refuse items worth 0 gold. Arrows dropped onto the Exchange list looked as if they had bounced back to the backpack, but they stayed in the sale and were destroyed for nothing at Accept. A worthless item now gets a "cannot be sold" line in chat, stays off the Exchange list and no longer shows on the Sell tab; the server refuses such a sale as well. Anything worth 1 gold or more sells as before.

Loot

• Opening a treasure chest in a party set to Roll with a party member nearby no longer opens an empty chest window when every item went to the party loot roll. A message now says the contents went to a party loot roll; the items still go to the roll winners. Reported from the Obsidian recipe chests in Hilt Fortress (7e534973a2).

Docs

• Corrected the internal Lunar school reference against the game data: Moonlight is an on/off gate that follows the moon's 7-hour orbit rather than night, Moon Worship and Moon Eater have real bonuses (Dexterity under the moon, a wider moonlit window), and Night Vision, Night Step range and Night Step reagents now match their runes (#4433).

Sieges

• The town siege fallback that aims the attackers at the town's central ankh now finds the ankhs in player towns whose centre ankhs carry a direction or bridge suffix, picking the most central one. Before, those towns skipped it and used the middle of the housing plots. (#10979)

Creatures

• Plunderer camps in Blood Bay and the skeleton Plunderers in South Longfall Wetland walk their patrol routes again. They had been standing where they spawned because their spawn points were missing the part that hands out the route; the spawn group now adds it, which also fixes five other camps with the same gap (6a1cb2de75, #10955).

Gathering

• The gathering mini-game has a Gathering Meter Size slider in Options, Interface (75% to 250%), and now draws a third larger by default. The ring, its decoration, the result text and the Swing button scale together. (#11916)

Dungeons

• The Dungeon Builder Rooms tab names the material of every piece. 48 pieces used to read Other, among them the rooms taken from shipped dungeons, the original hallways and the large secret door halls. A piece built from two materials, such as a transition, lists both and shows under either one in the catalog filter (b083cda0fe).

Pets

• Summons that cross zone lines got three fixes from tester reports: a fed tamed pet keeps its food buffs when a summon is cast over it, the focus upkeep for a pet or summon now holds on the overworld (tamed pets included), and a summon that dies just before a scene change stays dead (b39c89776e).

Taming

• An animal held under your own Animal Charm can now be tamed. The charm made the animal friendly to its caster, and Tame Creature refused it as a target; the cast bar also showed "<1% Chance" for it. The charm holds through the cast, since taming does no damage. Reported through the Oracle.
• An animal's attacks no longer stop a Tame Creature cast. Every hit during the cast rolled to interrupt it, so on a cast of 10 seconds or more the animal fighting back cancelled nearly every tame. Stuns, knockdowns and moving still stop it, the same as any other cast. Reported through the Oracle.

Chat

• The chat window's Unsend button is now a small curved undo arrow at the end of the text box line, after the channel arrow. It used to float over the bottom corner of the chat log and covered the newest lines when the window was small (e0b72c5717).

Pets

• Pet food can now be fed to a pet from the bags during combat, by double-click or the right-click Use Item entry. It used to be refused there while the Utility hotbar fed the same pet in the same fight. Potions are still held back from the bags in combat. (c1b0b32d62, #11884)

Server

• Episode 2 zones now check Episode 2 access on the game server as well as in the client. The Beyond and Lord British's Castle (Peaceful) now need Episode 2 like the other Mistrendur zones. The Episode 2 overworld and the player towns on it stay open to everyone (dcd808b640, verify #11941).

Maps

• The 3D maps in dungeons and adventure zones now show the same markers as the flat maps: quest steps, discovered exits and landmarks, and your /beacon, pinned to the model as it turns and zooms and faded when they are on another level. Requested by Jumentum.

NPCs

• Townsfolk climb ladders again. Since the ladder pathing change in late September they walked to the foot of a ladder, were refused the climb, and ran around there until the game moved them, which is why Martin in the Soltown General Store ran in circles and closed every conversation on his way to and from his room upstairs. Reported by Rudigar Kipperface.

Creatures

• A creature that holds a target but stands doing nothing for eight seconds now writes one line to the server logs saying what its AI last tried, what it was aiming at and what was holding it, so a stall like Goruk freezing mid-fight in the Ruined Keep can be traced the next time it happens. Creature attacks also no longer wait on a finished swing that a newer ability replaced (34c3d6a2da).
• Kobold townsfolk in Grusk, including the Storehouse Manager, no longer turn to a player's pet and cast Rallying Cry on it. Any creature that is not a pet now leaves players' pets out when choosing who to buff. Reported through the in-game Oracle (622549667e, #11665).
• Planned a pass on every hostile human, by tier. Tanks from level 79 will break free of a stun, knockdown, mesmerize or root about a second after it lands and shrug off controls for five seconds. The airship pirates in Lamech's Bazaar will fight as a crew, with a grappling hook, powder smoke, fire pots, a mark the crew turns on, a swig of grog at low health and a captain whose death can break their nerve. Ebon Dawn, barbarians and brigands get kits of their own, with no extra health or damage.
• Added the switches the human enemy pass hangs on, one per family and one for the break-free, so every new human ability can be turned back off without a patch. They change nothing yet. The Live Tunables page catalog also picked up eight knobs that earlier changes had left off it.
• The toughest human fighters can no longer be stun-locked. About a second after a stun, knockdown, mesmerize or root takes hold of one, it shakes it off and cannot be held again for five seconds, once every 30 seconds, with a Shake It Off icon on its nameplate while it lasts. It covers fighters of level 79 and up: the Swashbucklers and Privateers (the Lamech's Bazaar airship pirates from Normal up), the Ebon Cultist Champions, the Berserkers, Drakserkers and Isberserkers, and the Elite Skull Cutter.
• The pirates of Lamech's Bazaar, The Outlaw's Run and the coasts got a dirty-fighting kit by level. Privateers throw a Boarding Hook that drags a player 10 to 20 metres away into melee, and Ravagers drop Powder Smoke when a player reaches them, then step back. Anyone in the smoke misses more for a few seconds.
• Ravagers also mark players with The Black Spot: the marked player takes a little more damage and the rest of the crew goes after them. Relic Hunters lob a Fire Pot that sets the ground burning and blink out of melee, and the top pirates take a Swig of Grog at a quarter health, a two-second drink that a stun stops and that comes once every three minutes. Experience and loot are unchanged.
• Each of the three pirate camps in Lamech's Bazaar now has a Plunderer Captain. The pirates near a living captain never flee, and when it dies about one in three loses its nerve and runs for a few seconds before coming back to fight. The camps hold as many pirates as before.
• The Ebon Dawn cultists fight to their roles from about level 40. Shield-carrying Fighters and Champions raise Shield Line at the start of a fight, blocking more blows from the front (never from behind), and the Katana Champions answer a parry with Counterstroke.
• Ebon Cultist Marksmen and Namron Hathcock aim Executioner's Shot at a target below half health: a slow shot with a cast bar for double damage that misses if the target is healed above half first. High Wizards fire an instant Disrupting Bolt at a player who is casting, which often breaks the cast. Experience and loot are unchanged.
• Barbarian fighters from about level 60 Bull Rush: a short wind-up with a cast bar, then a charge at a player 6 to 18 metres away that hits and shoves. From about level 80, a barbarian's death makes its kin within 40 metres turn on the killer and swear a Blood Oath: 15 seconds of harder, faster blows.
• Barbarian casters from about level 50 carry a Damage Resistance buff for their wounded allies. The archers have a War Horn that calls the camp to arms, built and switched off until it has had a two-player test.
• Thugs, Ruffians and Fighters from level 19 wind up a Haymaker with a cast bar: a heavy swing that misses if you step out of reach in time. The Bandit Leader and the Red Sash leaders of Owl's Nest and Owl's Head now rally their gang, and Red Sash Fighters from level 39 throw Throwing Knives that leave a bleed. Level 1 and 5 humans are unchanged.
• The Elite Skull Cutter swings a working Crushing Blow in place of two player abilities that did nothing on a creature. Cid, the murderer can now slip out of sight to heal, and Retz, the murderer steps behind a player who keeps their distance.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-07 is up: A label that drifted one line out of place in yesterday's build left every Resurrect spell shouting into an empty room, and five tamed pets fell off their necklaces before anyone noticed. Wednesday also taught every item in the game to turn around and be looked at, stopped kill experience going to the person who did the least work, and gave taverns music the whole room can hear. Plus a snow tiger, a flying carpet, and a welcome back for players who have been away. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Build

• Build 311 is ready to promote to chaos. It carries the pet resurrect fix, and every pre-promote check passed: database migrations (none needed), the patch CDN on all three platforms, the external security scan, and a full promote dry run. It is uploaded to Steam, not live yet, and its patch notes are written. The runbook lists the 14 Taming Necklaces emptied since the start of the restore window so the pets can be put back after the flip.
• Build 311 is live on the chaos shard and on Steam. It carries the pet resurrect fix, kill experience that needs the party to out-damage every hostile creature on the kill, Teleport to Friend for party members who hide their location, the World Events window layout pass and the torch sound fix. Eight tester tasks are marked ready on 311.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now say where to lava fish: she names the adventure areas with fishable lava, from Sunless Barrens and Blood Bay to the Blackblade areas, K'rul and several mines, and the lava pool decorations you can fish in at home.
• The Oracle now explains that artifact upgrade recipes, such as Thimble of Evelyn, Common to Uncommon, are learned by crafting them once at a Smelting station, since no merchant or Crown Shop sells them. She says the same for any other recipe that can be discovered but is not sold in a shop, and she can say where the Thimble of Evelyn drops. Asked through the Oracle by Treewok.
• The Oracle can now help with The Minstrel's Horse in South Broken Road: she gives a hint for where Ugbar hid the key to Petunia's cage, the exact spot if you ask for it, and the true direction to the troll's lair, which is north-west of Fischer although his story says south-west.
• Bug reports filed through the Oracle now always say whether they came from online play or single player offline. Before, only offline reports were marked (6dc23bfb5e).
• The Oracle can now list everyone in Owl's Head who gives a quest: Thomas Strongbeard, Morton, Morgan, Myra, Colman, Guard-Captain Dreyfus, Marisol, Wycliffe and Mary at the College of Arms, with each quest's name, the topic to ask about and what you need first. She also warns that Morgan's job costs Truth and closes Myra's quest. Requested by Arcuss Blackwing through the in-game Oracle (#11564).
• The Oracle now answers questions about turning the music down on its own: the Music slider on the Audio tab already does this, and it was filing them as feature requests instead.
• The Oracle now answers that planter size does not change the producer experience a harvest pays. Every planter pays 800, 400 or 200 per plant by how well it was watered, and a Large Planting Bed pays more only because it holds 20 plants.
• The Oracle now explains what an exceptional craft adds: one bonus at random, either +50 maximum durability or slower wear for that kind of gear, so two exceptional swords can show different durability. Instruments always get the +50 (ea1dfd0414, #11721).

Recruit a Friend

• When a recruiter's Gold Crowns for a qualified friend are held back, the game server now logs the reason (crowns switch off, missing default character, monthly cap and so on). Before this every hold was silent, so an unpaid recruiter looked paid. The referral-admin tool now marks those friends as owed and shows the three program switches.
• Fixed recruiters never receiving their Gold Crowns. A database filter looked for a null key in a way the current MongoDB driver turns into a text match, so no payout was ever reserved. The first recruiter with four qualified friends has been mailed his 2,000 Gold Crowns by hand; the fix reaches chaos with the next build.

Price of the Oracle

• Dying to another player while carrying nothing now prints one death line instead of two, and that empty Price no longer sits in the Price of the Oracle window, counts on its notification, or raises the pending ransom warning on quit. Before, the winner claiming it left a row whose Get Items button failed.

Sieges

• The Cabalist Stronghold entry prompt and arrival banner now read "Tier 10 Siege" under the zone name. The line used to say "The Cabal's stronghold", which repeated the name above it. Reported in game by Joe.

Crafting

• Crafting at an alchemy table without a Mortar and Pestle equipped now puts a mortar in the off hand, so the pestle has something to grind into. With a Mortar and Pestle equipped, that tool supplies the mortar as before. Reported through the Oracle by Xiloon Galidom.
• The Salvageable category on a crafting table now lists only what that table can salvage. Before, a blacksmith table also showed cloth and wooden gear in grey, along with locked items that cannot go on the table. Tables that do not salvage now show an empty list. Reported through the Oracle. (b089c1479e)
• Trying to masterwork a ring or necklace now says plainly that jewelry can't be masterworked and can still be enchanted and take gems. Before, the forge reported a missing "Crafted Blacksmithing Equipable" or just "No Recipe Found". Reported through the Oracle by DeepSea Dobber. (269ecf51c4)
• The Short and Long Founder Heraldry Banners can now be salvaged at a tailoring table, and salvaging one returns its Eternal Pattern along with some cloth, the same as the Founder heraldry armor. Before, neither banner could be salvaged at all.
• Recipe tooltips now show what the crafted item does: a dish's buffs and how long they last, a potion's effect, or the item's description. It appears at crafting station recipe lists, on Recipe Book cards, and on recipe items in the backpack, bank and vendors. Weapon and armor recipes show no stats, since those depend on the craft. Requested by By Tor.
• Exceptional items no longer grant an additional +50 max durability bonus. The preservation bonuses from the per-type effects remain in place.

Creatures & NPCs

• Restored the tamed pets lost to the build 310 resurrect problem. Fifteen Taming Necklaces had been emptied; each got its creature back from the hourly database backup taken just before it was emptied. Two owners had already re-tamed theirs, so 13 were written, and all 15 now hold a pet.

Mounts

• The Chicken Mount and Magic Carpet summon runes got names and descriptions. Their hotbar tooltips and right-click menus showed a placeholder like ?SummonChickenMount? before.
• Finding items by name works again for everything filed after the Magic Carpet. The carpet's entry in the item name list was missing its name, which shifted about ten thousand names one row, so searching for Halberd found a castle wall. The carpet's own name can now be translated.
• The Chicken Mount and Magic Carpet hotbar icons now sit in the blue hexagon frame the horse, stag and cat mounts use, in both the Classic and Modern icon sets. They were a bare picture of the item before.
• Getting off the Magic Carpet now brings the rug down while the rider stands up. Before, the rider stood up on a rug still hovering in the air, the rug vanished, and then the standing rider sank to the ground.
• Other players' Magic Carpets and Supernatural Umbrellas now base their sound, dust and sparkles on how fast the rider is moving, the same signal their mount lean uses. They used to read a value that jumps whenever the game corrects a remote player's position, so the effects flared on every correction.
• The carpet's and the umbrella's dust and sparkle rates, and one scale over all of them that can switch them off, became live settings on the shard's tunables page, so their cost can be turned down without a new client. The page itself picks the new settings up at its next deploy. A failed umbrella effects spawn now waits between retries instead of retrying every frame.

Launcher

• The launcher has a Start game when ready checkbox. With it ticked, the launcher starts the game 3 seconds after it has finished updating (or straight away if nothing needed downloading), with a Cancel button for the countdown. It fires once per launcher session and is off by default. Requested by a player through the Oracle.

UI

• The World Events window no longer rebuilds every row once a second, so clicking the Call to Arms "(click for details)" link no longer misses; only the clocks tick. Participants-only blessings are now filtered where the list is built, the "You took part in this call" note sits on its own line, and a 0% blessing is no longer listed.
• Canceling the logout countdown after pressing Exit to Menu or Quit in Options now leaves you in the game with no window open. Before, the Options window came back. Cancel on the question version of the dialog still returns to Options.
• Combat Text Colors now name whose text each row colours. Glancing, Miss, Dodged, Parried, Blocked and Immune each split into a row for the words over your own character ("You Parried") and one for everyone else ("Others Parried"). Colours picked before the split carry over to both rows. Parried hits that still did damage had been drawing in the damage colour, so a Parried colour never showed; they take it now. Reported by Akandriel. (2b3f56f703, #11603)
• Options > Interface has a new Show Words of Power in Chat switch, so the "utters the phrase" line can be kept out of the chat window. The old switch only ever hid the speech bubble and is now labelled Show Words of Power Over Your Head.
• The Grandmaster badge list now names its skills in alphabetical order, and a list too wide for the screen ends on a "+N more" line instead of cutting off the columns past the edge.
• The Journal has a new Tips tab that keeps every tip read from the task tracker, newest first, with its date and full text; clicking a title opens the tip again without returning it to the tracker. A read lesson on the "Getting started" checklist can also be opened again. Before this a tip was gone once read, unless Reset Hints re-armed every hint in the game.
• Fixed Vendor Listings in Zone moving your selection onto a different listing. When more search results arrived, a row loaded its details on hover, or the list was re-sorted, the highlight stayed in the same place in the list while other listings moved through it, so the selected row and Get Directions could point at an item, owner and town you never picked. The selection now stays on the listing you clicked (1580f8118e).
• The Skills window shows experience earned today, a line reading "Today: N adventurer XP, M producer XP" under the lifetime totals. The day starts at the first login or zone change after midnight UTC, and each character now keeps its own start of day; before, only the first character played each day got a fresh one. Requested by Akandriel. (174d787250)
• Checkboxes in the backpack's Options panel now sit to the left of their captions, like every other checkbox in the game. Before, each caption came first and its box sat off to the right. The same applies to bank, chest and other container windows and to the Use this container for crafting row. Requested by D'Laein Lachlan.
• The chat box cursor blinks again while you type, as it did before the chat window moved to the new interface. With chat and the combat log in separate windows, only the box you are typing into blinks, so it is clear where your typing will go. Reported through the Oracle (#11554).
• The Oracle window's text can now be selected and copied: drag across a paragraph of an answer, your own question or a status line and press Ctrl+C. Each answer also has a Copy button beside its heading that copies the whole answer, ready to paste into Discord or the forums (7541b24f43). Requested by Chadwyck.
• The Social window Party tab now lists the open parties under New Party when you are not in a party, each with its own Join button and a filter box. The Join Party and View List buttons there, which only opened the Looking For Group window, are gone. Closing either list no longer stops the other from updating. (308c61f452)
• Crown Shop sale cards for seasonal items showed how long the item stays in the shop ("Expires: 26d 2h") in place of the sale timer, so a sale ending within the hour read as lasting weeks. The card now shows whichever ends first. Reported via the Oracle by Patosh (c085049e55, #11526).
• Food goes on the Utility Hotbar from a Ctrl+drag (take one) or a Shift+drag (pick a quantity) as well as a plain drag. Both used to do nothing; the stack now stays in the backpack and the slot uses it (#11542, 0f9415c821).
• The Combat Hotbar no longer lights up for food, says in chat why it refuses an item that cannot be used in combat, and no longer wipes the glyph on a locked slot when food is dropped on it (#11542, 0f9415c821).
• Inventory lists now scroll while you hold an item near their top or bottom edge: drag above the list to scroll up, below it to scroll down, faster the further past the edge. Works in the backpack, bank, chests, loot and crafting lists. Requested by Astirian. (78c5d57ada)
• Fixed the minimap sometimes needing a second click to open the full map. A click made while the mouse was still moving onto it counted as a tiny drag, clicks on its iron rim went to the world behind it, and a pointer slipping off the edge mid-click nudged it instead. A field log now reports any first click that still goes missing (224ae3c15c).
• The Skills window experience totals now put the in-skills figure in parentheses after the earned figure, with a thin divider between the Adventurer and Producer totals, so the line no longer reads as one run of numbers and commas. All eight translations carry the same change.
• A minimap or quest tracker dragged to the right side of the screen now stays the same distance from that edge when the UI Scale slider or the screen resolution changes. Lowering UI Scale used to slide both toward the middle. Positions are also kept across a login at a different UI Scale. (#11315)
• Night Vision now keeps its own icon on the buff bar for as long as it lasts, so right-clicking it offers Dismiss from the first second. A cast longer than the Group Buffs Lasting Longer Than setting (15 minutes by default, and Night Vision runs 15 to 20 minutes at skill 50 to 100) used to fold into the hourglass, and its own icon only came back once the time left dropped under the setting. Food, potions and blessings still group as before. Reported by Moon.
• The explanation lines under settings in the Options window now show in each theme's dimmer text colour, so they read apart from the setting names (6b74b0eb28).
• The World Events window has a new Upcoming Contests and Events section. A Call to Arms that has not begun moves there from Current Contests and Events, and events the team schedules (egg hunts, streams, parties) now show up to a week ahead instead of a day, with the weekday and start time once they are more than a day off. The "(click for details)" link now sits on the Call to Arms description line. (7bf3033f80)
• Shield spells (Shield of Ice, Shield of Crystal, Shield of Air and the rest) now keep their own icon on the buff bar however long they last. A strong water mage's Shield of Ice outlasted the 15-minute Group Buffs Lasting Longer Than default and went straight into the hourglass, so casting it over Shield of Crystal looked like the shield icon had vanished. (9c1d72f370, #10239)
• Disable Screen Shake is a new row under Options > Interface > Gameplay. It stops every camera shake in the game: spells such as Ice Field and Earthquake, Frost Giant and dragon attacks, traps, bombs and cave-ins. The effects still play, and ticking it in the middle of a shake ends that shake. Requested by Swish (e9fdcd85f8, #11681).
• The blue Shroud of the Avatar banner is now the only title screen. The burning intro that dissolved the old forest title art at launch is gone, and so is the Use the Original Title Screen checkbox on the main menu and in Options. The title music is always the new theme. (839035b0eb)
• The Guild Registry Browse tab cut long listings off after a few words on smaller screens. Resting the mouse on a guild's row now shows a tooltip with its full listing, Style and Hours (079d53ac89, #11610).
• Windowed mode: the minimap, quest tracker and buff bars go back to the spot you dragged them to when a narrowed window is widened again. They used to stay pulled in, and a logout while narrow saved them there. (ac6ee3f415, #11609)
• The two decorating settings in Options are now named Enable Housing Decoration Mode and Enable Housing Decoration UI (were "Enable Decoration Mode" and "Enable Housing UI") and sit together under Gameplay, so searching "Housing" or "Deco" finds both. The Toggle Deco Mode key message uses the new name. Requested by Wilfred.
• The Open a Window menu has a new More Windows... row listing fourteen windows that before opened only by chat command, such as the Town Directory, Guild Finder, Oracle and Performance Monitor. Each row shows its command, and rows you cannot use right now are grayed out with the reason (800a0e09c1).
• The World Events window no longer lists the 2x experience rate as an event, since 2x is the standing rate on the shard. Only a boost above 2x shows there now.
• HUD strips you have dragged into place now follow both of today's fixes together: when the game window or UI area gets bigger they keep their distance from the nearest edge, and when it gets smaller they are only pulled in to stay on screen, returning to your spot when it grows back (3874540b56).
• The Tax Credit Granted letter printed its amount in yellow gold and the granting player in light blue, both hard to read on the parchment page; the refund value in a vendor listing's expiry letter had the same gold. All three now print in dark bold text like the rest of the letter (a90c5c0c74, #11756).
• The Valiant Warden tooltip's "stronger from your Heavy Armor Specialization" percent is now measured on the redirected share the tooltip shows (55% became 31% at level 100), and every skill's specialization line now appears only in the current-level column, where a flat bonus beside the higher preview level read as the specialization fading (#11782).

Chat

• Chat lines sent from the dev portal are logged as web lines again. The server check added with Unsend, which strips moderator and unsend commands a client tries to send, was also removing the portal bridge's origin tag. The bridge now keeps that tag; players still cannot send it (#11620, 840ced605d).
• Ghosts can chat again on every channel except local. Guild, party, universe, trade, roleplay, zone chat and whispers now send normally while dead; local chat still comes out as ghostly OoOo over your head, and text emotes stay off until you are alive (#11604, 8c434fc64e).
• Added client logging to track down why selecting chat text sometimes takes several clicks. When a click on a chat line never reaches it, or a drag ends with nothing highlighted, the client now records where the click went, so the next build can show what is catching it.
• Clicking a link or a word in the chat log no longer turns the rest of that line dark blue-green. Each chat line takes focus when clicked so Ctrl+C can copy from it, and the default interface theme recolours a focused line; the links kept their own colours, so only the words around them changed. Reported by a tester on the earlier chat colour fix.

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Oracle

• The Oracle now gives the odds on clockwork dragon heads: about one kill in ten for the Blood Bay and Breach clockworks, about one in a hundred for the silver clockwork in K'rul. It also explains that the head is a tanning ingredient for the mounted trophy. It no longer places the Bronze clockwork in The Breach; that one lives in Blood Bay. (#11580)
• Bug reports filed through the Oracle now include the reporter's sound state: each volume slider, the levels the audio mixer is actually holding, the scene fade, the listener, the output device and how many sounds were playing. The report names anything that would silence sound. A "no sound effects" report that survived a full client restart had none of this to go on.
• The Oracle can now explain Gustball: how to summon the ball, how Gust launches it (harder with more Gust cards stacked), that the game keeps no score so players set their own rules, and where to get balls, fields and uniforms. Requested by Wilfred.
• The Oracle now has an hourly question limit by account: subscribers can ask 30 questions an hour at any level, accounts without a subscription whose highest character is over level 40 can ask 6, and everyone else keeps 60. Bug reports through /bug, Report Bug or a quest's Report a Problem are never limited and never count. (82abdc58ee)

Combat

• Body Slam now stuns a creature facing you. A creature that walked in during the slam used to end up behind where you landed and was stunned facing away; the slam now stops just in front of where the creature stands when you arrive and turns it toward you as the blow lands. Charge gets the same landing (f867b0b116).
• Elysian Illumination's glow and light now last as long as the spell. They used to switch off after four minutes while the aura kept healing and hurting, which left the area suddenly darker for anyone with Sun above 120.
• Fixed summoned creatures stacking when a player recast their summon while a GM was controlling it for an event. Each recast used to leave the controlled creature behind and add another one that could not be dismissed. The recast is now refused with a chat message until the GM lets go.
• A skill locked into the combat deck no longer gains an extra cooldown when combat ends and starts again while it is still cooling. Judgment used from four locked slots used to wait out two cooldowns after a fight restarted; it now returns after one (493e9aceb2, #11800).

Community Hub

• A deck whose runes are replaced now starts its rating, rank and import count fresh; ratings of the earlier runes stay on the page, labelled. Deck and theme pages show the version and when it was updated, tell players who imported an older version, and refuse an edit that would overwrite a newer one. The hub side goes live with its next deploy (910590699b).
• Editing a published deck in game now says only "Saved." when the picked deck has the same runes, refuses a save over a change made elsewhere since the form opened, and hides the Runes list outside the world. Imported hub decks are named after the hub title instead of the author's own deck name, and the detail pane shows the deck's version and when you imported an older one (88ddbd4735).

UI

• Resizing the game window no longer moves your health frame partway across the screen for good. A resize used to save a new spot for the status frames, and a misreading during the resize could put the frame about a third of the way in from the corner. Frames that a smaller window leaves hanging off an edge are still pulled back on, and they return to the spot you chose when the window grows again. If your frame already moved, Reset Positions on the Interface tab of Options puts it back once.
• Added an Enemy Player Nameplate Distance slider to Options, Interface tab, Gameplay section. It sets how far away a hostile player's name and health bar stay visible, from 15 m (the old distance, still the default) up to 60 m, with the readout in meters or feet. Only players hostile to you are affected; friendly players, your party and creatures keep their usual nameplate distance. Requested by Graydios.

Gathering

• Gathering nodes inside your survey range now shimmer in their tier's color: white for tiers 1 to 3, then green, blue, purple and orange up to tier 15. Before this every node shimmered white, so a tier 1 and a tier 14 iron vein looked the same. Color Gathering Nodes by Tier under Options, Interface, Gameplay turns it off. Requested by Girlsname.
• A creature body that had been looted and skinned no longer stays in the world saying "That body is not ready to be looted yet." when the skinning loot was left in the window, cut short by a hit, or reopened after it was emptied. The body now goes away once its skinning loot is finished, however the skinning ended. (14d3e79ed0, #11306)

Login

• The login screen remembers the accounts that have logged in on your computer. An arrow beside User Name lists up to 10 of them, newest first; a name joins only after its login succeeds, so typos never show up, and a cross removes one.
• New Remember Password checkbox, saved per account and encrypted (tied to your Windows user on Windows, to the machine and user on Mac and Linux). The first time you tick it, a warning explains the risk on a shared computer. A saved password the server turns down (changed on the website) is dropped. Not on chaos yet.

Oracle

• The Oracle learned answers to about fifty questions players asked her this week that she could not answer: where Pick Pockets works (nowhere right now, ransom is off), the Summon Lich quest and Lord Nyrond, quest givers in Owl's Head, lava fishing spots, Shark Fillet and Sausage Casing, pet collar bonuses, Blank Wax Cylinders, DLSS and Render Scale, and what she can see about your character.

Achievements

• The Pumpkin Head in East Vauban Foothills now has boss achievements: Pumpkin Head Slain, Vanquished and Conquered at 1, 10 and 100 kills, each paying a framed portrait trophy in bronze, silver or gold. Killing him used to unlock nothing.
• The ten-kill achievement over his footsoldiers was renamed from "Pumpkin Head Hunter: Kill 10 pumpkin heads." to Pumpkin Head Footsoldier Hunter: "Kill 10 Pumpkin Head footsoldiers." Earned progress carries over.
• Boss achievements for 18 bosses that do not appear anywhere in the world are now hidden in the Achievements journal, since nobody could earn them: Your Worst Nightmare, the Spider Queen, the Bunny of DOOM!, the Ancient Blue, Red and Purple Dragons and twelve Ancient Undead lords. Each one reappears by itself the first time a player defeats that boss. The Nightmare in the Plains Road encounter is the ordinary Nightmare and never counted toward Your Worst Nightmare Slain. Reported by Rinaldi.
• The Achievements window names what each achievement pays beside its description: the trophy or item, the title, or both. When the next tier pays nothing it names the next one that does ("Reward at 10,000: ..."), and hovering the line lists every tier's reward. Requested by Patosh.

Client

• Fixed the conversation camera at Oracle shrines, which sat inside the shrine wall in every town and showed a dark blurred surface over most of the screen (tracker #11575). The camera now steps forward to the first clear spot on its line of view to the conversation, and hand-placed conversation shots focus on the player and the Oracle at their real distance instead of the usual two metres. Not on chaos yet.

Community

• Filed a tracker entry from the overnight forum sweep: bigger, higher-contrast login fields and an adjustable Oracle dialogue text size, requested by Isabel Ayin.
• Wrote 100 Shroud of the Avatar jokes for sharing with the community, each built on a real piece of the game: NPC lines, item descriptions, Oracle judgements, patch notes, the 2012 design archive and the game's history, with notes explaining the deeper cuts. (d74e8a9c01)

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Travel

• The Teleport to Friend list now gives every character in your party their own row, and a party member whose location has not arrived yet shows as unavailable for now instead of "blocking players from teleporting". The Share location option now says that members of your party always see where you are and can teleport to you.

Experience

• A kill now pays only when the players together did at least as much damage as the other creatures on it together, so three monsters each doing a little less than one player no longer leave that player the kill. Town guards count too outside a siege or control point fight, a creature hurt more than five minutes earlier is a fresh kill, a finishing blow counts only the health it took, and players denied a kill now get a chat line saying why. GM summons never count against players. (4b868ca602)

Vendors

• All Zones vendor search now finds tamed pets by what they are. Every tamed pet sells as a Taming Necklace, and the cross-zone index listed them all under that one name, so searching wyvern or bear found eggs and helms but no pets. The index builder now names each necklace the way the game shows it, for example Taming Necklace (Red Wyvern), across 571 pet types. It takes effect when the search service is next updated. Requested by Sethanon.
• Buy orders on the town Public Vendors can now be filled a few at a time, the way player vendor orders already could: leave Accept partial fills ticked, type the price of one, and sellers hand over any number up to what the order still wants. The same dialog had been posting the price of one as the whole order's price on Public Vendors (an order for 100 at 10 each went up for 10 gold in total); it now posts and charges the full total. (0f144357f6, #11820)

Housing

• Added the Adjustable Training Dummy to the Crown Store for 1000 crowns. Its owner right-clicks it and picks one of twelve defense profiles: plain, skeleton, zombie, lich, four elementals, fire dragon, troll, a plate-armored fighter or a robed mage. The dummy comes back at full health with roughly that target's resistances and armor, so spells and weapons can be tested against it. Requested by Graydios.
• Player town maps now cut lot outlines at the edge of the map picture. The fixed water castle in the forest, desert and swamp metropolis towns stands about 16 m past the east edge of the picture, and its outline used to hang off the map; it now stops at the edge, and a lot wholly past the edge is not drawn.
• Governors can no longer place or move a property marker where the lot would reach past the edge of the town map. The placement preview turns red with "This lot would reach past the edge of the town map." and the server applies the same rule to new lots and to moves. Lots already standing past the edge keep their ground and houses.
• The Light Settings window for placed lights has a new Only during the day choice, the opposite of Only at night: the light burns by day, goes out as night falls and lights again at dawn, switching at the same moments a night-only lamp does. Requested by By Tor. (3c224b5380)
• The Transfer Claim prompt now says that a lot you leave in an NPC town goes up for auction. It already said the house and decorations go to your Property Manager, and a player read that as covering the lot too.
• Added the Conversationalist Teleporter to the Crown Store for 2000 crowns. It is a Conversationalist in mage robes whose owner picks a destination from its right-click menu: any NPC town or Player-Owned Town, down to the arrival point. Anyone who meets it can right-click it to travel there, and its owner can write it a conversation that ends with the trip. It can stand on a lot in an NPC town, so a town can post a guide that sends travelers home. Requested by Andy Cold.
• An Automated Phonograph or a Jukebox now opens its wax cylinder list from the backpack, by double-click or the new Change Wax Cylinders menu entry, so cylinders can be changed before placing it. The cylinder limit and the broadcast restrictions still apply, and Play waits until the device is placed. Reported through the Oracle by Lazarus Long.
• A player who gives up a lot in an NPC town, by unclaiming it or moving its deed to another lot, can now claim it back for 24 hours after it goes to Lot Auctions, even if someone has already bid. Claiming it ends the auction and returns every bid in full. The lot sign tells the owner how long they have left, and bidders see a note that the owner can still take the lot back. A lot lost to unpaid taxes, inactivity or eviction gets no such window.
• Lot signs stop showing a lot as up for auction once its auction has ended without a winner. They used to keep that text, with Claim Lot hidden, until the town restarted.
• When the town host changed, a decoration creature seat that had been picked up or put back could throw an error on the new host and stop the other seats from hearing about the change, so a killed Practice Dummy could stay gone. Each seat now drops its old handover listener before adding a new one, and a removed seat clears itself out instead of erroring (7bad5b78cd, #11618).
• Placed Black Elder bushes (all sizes and the potted one) no longer change shape as you walk toward or away from them, which made them look like they were turning. They now keep full detail across a lot and switch once to a simpler version farther out (about 27 m for the large bush instead of 10 m). (7d737f1083, #11606)
• Converted seven upright hand-placed dead trees in the Oasis player town (the POT Desert 01 template) into painted terrain trees, so tree removers and lot claims can now clear them. Their look, placement and collision are unchanged; the five leaning dead trees were left as they were.
• Applied the same tree conversion to the POT Desert 01a, 01b and 01c templates: seven upright dead trees in each are now painted terrain trees, so tree removers and lot claims can clear them in all 17 towns built on those layouts.
• Fish tank accessories and fish won as Call to Arms prizes can now go into your own fish tank. Call to Arms prizes cannot be traded, and fish tanks refused anything untradeable. Fish tanks, mannequins and doll cabinets you placed now take such items, and only you can take them back out (#11821).
• Converted the hand-placed trees in the POT Swamp 01 and POT Swamp 01a templates into painted terrain trees (112 and 9 trees), so tree removers and lot claims can clear them in the 21 swamp towns built on those layouts. The ficus tree that could be walked through now has a trunk collider.

Pets

• A pet whose resurrect is lost to a client fault now keeps its creature on the Taming Necklace when the resurrect window runs out, instead of the collar being emptied. Pet resurrect requests are also checked more strictly on the pet owner's side; a normal Resurrect from any player still raises the pet. (e35982b12e)
• An undead summon held at zero decay by pet regeneration gear could still gain a hundredth of a point every tick, because the stat block rounded the regeneration cap up, and slowly climbed back to full. The stored value is now rounded down so it never heals. The two new pet sheet tooltip strings from yesterday's regeneration change also got their translation records. (a6e7a527f0, 98350c3390)
• Train Summoned Pet Damage now adds 0.25% to summoned pet damage at every level. The bonus used to move only in whole-percent steps every three to five levels, so levels 135 to 138 all gave 34% and the skill looked capped at 135. The pet sheet and the skill tooltip now show the same number. Reported through the Oracle (9ed896c655, #11730).

Networking

• An RPC that reaches a client with nothing to receive it is now written to the server logs, at most once per RPC name every ten minutes, instead of disappearing without a trace. That silence is why build 310's broken pet resurrects went unseen. The check-rpc-receivers commit gate now checks every class that declares a sent RPC, ignores commented-out code and runs in about 6 seconds, and its EditMode twin reads the compiled game by reflection. (e35982b12e)

Pets

• Pets no longer chase attackers they cannot fight. A pet that was not told to attack now leaves alone a creature on a floor above or below it, a creature walking back to where it spawned, one it already failed to reach, or one that is fully hidden, and lets go of one it was already chasing. In The Obsidian Panopticon pets had been running around the ground floor after something nobody could see. Telling a pet to attack still works on anything. /verbose pet explains each one it leaves alone.

Audio

• Bonfires, campfires, braziers, burning scarecrows and the large hanging torch no longer drop out and restart every 8 to 10 seconds. Both fire loops had MP3 encoder silence at each end; they are now gapless WAV loops at the same volume (7460074695).
• The gapless torch fire loop from yesterday played about 2 dB quieter than the clip it replaced. Its single loudest crackle was eased down so the torch now sounds as loud as before, within 0.3 dB (377bc21d9c).
• In the over-the-shoulder camera view, sounds from your own character played from the left speaker, most noticeably the Shield of Crystal cast and its hum while active. The game now listens from the middle of your character in that view. The normal view and first person sound the same as before.

Bard

• A bard who travelled from one town straight into another with Performance Stance up no longer plays to an empty room: the performance now reopens in the new town, so the listeners get their Vigor bars back. A refused performance now says so once in chat (69c7999998).

Tools

• The itemization catalog gate now also catches an edited loot bundle whose drops changed without a catalog rebake, so the GM and tester loot pickers stay in step with the bundles. A typical commit checks in about a second (b2d849a245).
• A new EditMode test keeps the dev emote chest complete: every learnable emote that has an emote item must be in the chest, so the next new emote cannot be left out of it (2a598c5cc3).
• The tracker skill now points issue reads at the existing read helper, after a session misread a wrong-key error as missing access (f1277b5b72).
• The pre-commit translation check now judges only the files in the commit. Leftovers from other changes show as a warning. Before this, one missed string turned the check red for everyone, people skipped it, and missed strings piled up.
• The creature audit behind the Creature Balance page re-read the pirates, barbarians and every other human with their new abilities; the roster grew by one, the Plunderer Captain. A reference page now lists what each human family does, the switch that turns each part off, and the checks that guard it.

Audio

• Radio Free Britannia in the Aether Vibration Device station list now sorts, moves with Up and Down, and can be removed like any station you added yourself. It used to stay pinned at the top of the list. (#11540)
• A Jukebox placed in a player dungeon now plays its song in every room of the dungeon. It used to fade out about 15 m from the box. The needle crackle stays at the jukebox, and when two are playing, the one started last is heard dungeon-wide. Basements and house lots are unchanged.

Creatures

• The giant frog's Eat and Spit attacks no longer show the Ice Field icon for the damage they leave on you: Eat shows the poison icon and Spit the acid flask. The Classic Sticky Tongue icon was redrawn as a flat gold frog and tongue on a green disc to match the rest of the Classic set.

Books

• A wax cylinder pressed from a library book is now named after the book ("Wax Cylinder: <title>") and its description says what it holds; before, it kept the name Blank Wax Cylinder. Cylinders pressed before the fix read Recorded Wax Cylinder. Reported through the Oracle (80069b7fc5).
• A recorded wax cylinder placed on a lot can now be listened to without picking it up. Right-click it and choose Listen to hear it yourself while you stay in that area, with Pause, Resume and Stop on the same menu. Anyone the lot lets in can use it, so a shelf of cylinders works as a listening library. A phonograph still plays a cylinder for everyone nearby.
• The Record a Book window for wax cylinders has a Preview Voice button that plays a short sample line in the chosen narrator voice before you pay. It covers the Narrators, Town Criers and Lord British. Requested by Aartemis (#11546, e3e89b8d86).
• Authors can now press more wax cylinders of their own recorded book straight from the book for 500 gold and a Blank Wax Cylinder. Picking the narrator and voice the book was already recorded in offers a copy, paid in gold for every narrator group, where before it meant paying for the whole recording again. A voice change in the recording window now checks that voice price, and an edited book still records at the full price.
• Fixed recorded book cylinders playing only for the player who pressed Play; everyone near the phonograph now hears the narration, including players who arrive partway through (#11583).

Skills

• The Skills window now shows your Adventurer and Producer level and the experience each still needs for the next level, on a line under the header (requested by Steve Sosaria). Before this the figures were only on the character sheet XP tab. (99249a6d1d)
• Instant Unlearn can now stop a skill at the level it is already on. A skill part way into its level, such as 100 with progress toward 101, can give back just that progress; the level prompt used to top out one level lower, so picking 100 took the skill to 99. Reported by Barugon.
• Crafting and gathering experience reaches the pool again on characters that train mostly from the shared daily-bonus pool. Training paid from the shared pool used to count against the room a character has for unspent experience, and once that ran out, every new award was dropped on the next save; one tester character lost all of its Producer awards overnight. The server now tracks shared-pool training per character and counts it as earned, and characters already affected get the room back the first time they earn or train. (2695643293, #11619)

Housing

• A wax cylinder dropped from the backpack onto a table or counter with a phonograph standing on it now lands on the table. It was refused as if dropped onto the phonograph itself (80069b7fc5).
• The Lot Auctions window now shows a greyed Closed button on a lot that has already been won and is waiting for its winner to claim it. Hovering or clicking it explains that bidding is over and the lot goes back up if it is not claimed. Before, that row had no button at all and read as a running auction that would not take a counter-bid. The winner's own row now shows its claim reminder, which never appeared before.
• The letter that comes with a Call to Arms reward can now be placed on a lot as a decoration. Clicking the placed letter opens its text and hovering shows its subject. Other letters still cannot be placed. Letters already delivered get converted by a one-time database pass after the next deploy (#11520).
• A player who gives up a lot in an NPC town can claim it back for 24 hours, even after someone has bid on it; claiming it back ends the auction and returns every bid by mail. Lots lost to tax or inactivity still go to auction with no window. Other players see the window on the lot sign and in the Lot Auctions bid prompt. Prompted by a tester who unclaimed a lot to put down a tax-free deed and lost it to a bid within minutes (#11724).
• Fixed the lot sign still saying "up for auction", with no Claim Lot button, after an auction ended and the lot stayed empty. A round-two auction also stopped showing the round-one winner as its leader (#11724).
• Fixed decoration indicator boxes turning the view black on Macs. With Decoration Mode on, standing inside a terrain leveller or tree remover box in a player town could black out everything behind its faces, and turning the camera made it come and go. The see-through effect shader they share now keeps its lighting math finite on Metal, which also covers particle effects that use it. Reported through the Oracle (#11712).
• Fixed tax credit from a Royal Scepter looking short when another player granted it. The credit was always added in full, but the lot owner's Lot Deeds window kept its old total until a deed changed. It now updates as soon as the Tax Credit Granted letter arrives (#11758).
• A player-owned town resized by the team now shows its new size in game. The Town Console tier line and lot space budget and the town's decoration limits all used the size the game build ships with, so Ivory Stronghold (raised to a Town on 2026-10-07) still read and behaved as a Crossroads Village; the bigger claim budget had worked all along. They now follow the town's real size, and a resize reaches players already standing in the town. Ivory Stronghold also ships as a Town from the next build. (e853223ee4, #11775)

World

• A stone ruin block on a hillside in Deep Savrenoc Timberland no longer floats. It was tipped about 30 degrees against the slope, so its underside hung 0.3 to 0.8 m over the grass. It now leans with the hill, with all of its bottom edges just under the grass.
• The sigils and blood splashes on the floor of the Daemon chamber in Northwest Blackblade Mountains no longer paint themselves onto characters standing on them. Their projection boxes reached up to 7.7 m deep, so a player crossing the big summoning circle came out covered in it; each of the 21 deep ones was refitted to the floor or rock under it and is now 0.65 to 1.47 m deep, with the floor looking the same. Reported by Goriah Kuulas.

Combat

• Rune tooltips for Riposte and Answering Blow now show their big hit with its parry or block window, and the smaller hit reads "If you have not parried an attack in the last N seconds" instead of implying a parry first. Opportunity Strike now states its dodge window for its extra weapon attack, which printed nothing before.
• Night Vision lights Tartarus again: in a dark area with no sky, the spell (and the Light spell's general brightening) only lit surfaces facing up, so Tartarus's maze walls, creatures and players stayed black. It now brightens every direction (e666378b3d, #11517).
• The glow around a targeted creature is brighter and wider, and stays visible with Night Vision up, where it used to almost disappear. The Highlight Strength slider on the Video tab now controls it; before, moving it changed nothing. Brightness is a live server setting, so it can be tuned without a patch (26239d9f55, #11489).
• Added a client log line that records when a creature's body loses its loot well before its five minutes are up, and which part of the game ended it. A player in K'rul reported bodies vanishing before they could be looted; the logs confirm it there, but it does not happen offline, so the next build will name the cause (#11488).

Fishing

• Landing a fish plays a bigger open-water splash picked from three recordings. It replaces a short, thin clip that a player said sounded like a bathroom sink. A Clean Catch now plays the splash under its chime. (f1bc319a2b)
• Fished-up Corked Letters now place as a corked bottle with a rolled letter inside; they used to place as a plain alchemy bottle. The Moon Pearl can now be placed, sitting in an open clam shell (2392e1ecd7).
• Salt-water fishing can now bring up 27 pieces of a coral reef as rare catches: 18 corals, 3 sea fans, 2 tube sponges, a scallop shell, a spiral seashell, an orange starfish and a reef stone. Each one places as its own decoration on a floor or on the ground, indoors or out, and has its own inventory icon.

Localization

• 81 game interface strings that had never reached the translation source list were added to it, so the next translation pass can cover them. Until then they show in English in every language.
• Added a Show Place Names in English option to the Language tab of Options. On a translated client it keeps town, region and location names in English in chat, on the map and compass, and in travel lists, while the rest of the game stays translated (b83b07076e).

Scalable Difficulty Scenes

• Skarde, who starts the Spindelskog runestone quest, now stands in Spindelskog Hard and Extreme as well as Normal, so the quest can be done on any version. The tier markers inside Spindelskog and Lamech's Bazaar now show each version's real tier (Spindelskog 10, 12, 14; Lamech's Bazaar 7, 10, 12, 18).
• The Hard and Extreme versions of Spindelskog, Lamech's Bazaar and Myrkur now scale every hostile creature, not only the Episode 2 ones. Bears, crocodiles, small spiders, Myrkur's black dragons and the boss waves used to be the same on every version, so Extreme bosses were weaker than the creatures around them. They now gain 10 levels per tier with health, damage and experience on the same curve as the rest of the game. Normal is unchanged.
• Episode 2 creatures in those zones now hit and pay on the standard curve. Their weapons used to make Easy creatures hit 2.3 to 2.9 times harder than other creatures of their level, and Extreme kills paid about 1.3 times the usual experience for the effort. Easy creatures hit softer now and pay 1.13 times what they did, and Extreme kills pay 0.72 times (Lamech's Bazaar) to 0.85 times (Spindelskog).
• Episode 2 creatures now pay experience in line with how much health they have, like the rest of the game. Zombies were paying less than half the usual amount for their toughness and now pay 2.25 times what they did; grizzly bears, razorback boars and elf fighters were near half and now pay about 1.75 to 1.9 times. The Myrkur ghost scorpions paid more than twice the usual amount and come down to it.
• Episode 2 lich casters' Intelligence now matches the other liches of their level. Their fire and death area spells grow with Intelligence and were hitting more than twice as hard as the liches elsewhere. The warp spiders and Corpions no longer carry flat stats added on top of their level scaling.
• Creature loot in Spindelskog, Lamech's Bazaar and Myrkur now depends on the version. Every version used to drop the same tier 10 loot. On Hard and Extreme every creature that drops loot also rolls that tier's gold and artifact tables, and on Lamech's Bazaar Easy the plunderers, skeletons, satyrs and fauns drop tier 5 loot to match the easier fight. Normal and all chests are unchanged.
• The wagon teleporter inside Spindelskog, Lamech's Bazaar and Myrkur now shows each version's tier next to its name, for example Lamech's Bazaar (Extreme), Tier 18, coloured by how dangerous it is for your level, the same colours Teleport to Zone uses.
• The game server now checks each creature kill's reported experience against what that creature is worth at its level and the zone version it died in, and pays no more than that. Honest kills pay exactly as before.

Vendors

• Vendor Listings in Zone shows listing dates again to the people allowed to see them: the owner of the lot a vendor stands on, the player who listed the item, and GMs. Since build 310 the window had dropped its date column for everyone. Other shoppers still see no dates.
• Vendor search no longer lists items from a player vendor that is gone from its lot, hidden on it, or on a lot that no longer exists. A 2021 listing in Noreach had kept showing under the name "Vendor", and Get Directions led to an empty lot. (34495c5c22, #11507)
• Vendors: select several orders in Your Orders on the My Orders tab, right-click, and choose Remove Orders to cancel them all at once. One confirmation shows how many orders and the total deposit coming back. A right-click on more than one order used to show no menu. Cancelling an order on a town vendor now also takes it off the list straight away. (279140f774, #11313)

Chat

• The chat moderator no longer removes swearing. "Friggin" and the strongest words both stay up, and so does a single insult in an argument. It now reads the last few lines of the channel before judging a message, and removes personal attacks that keep going: repeated at one player, continuing after that player asks to stop, or joining a pile-on. Threats, slurs, gold selling for real money, scams and sexual content are still removed. Not on chaos yet.
• Built a scored test set for the chat moderator: 93 labelled chat cases, each run five times, scoring what it removes, what it wrongly removes, how often it changes its mind and how fast it answers. On the old rules it removed every message it should have and 12 of 59 it should not have, all of them single insults or friendly banter.
• Measured the old chat moderator rules against the new ones on the same model. The old rules removed 13 of 22 swearing messages and kept the other 9, giving the same answer every time, so where the line fell depended on the exact words. The new rules got all 93 test messages right on every repeat, including removing escalating attacks that only show up when the earlier lines are read. The moderator also no longer skips a posted phone number because it guesses the number might be fake.
• The new chat moderator rules are live on chaos: swearing and one-off insults now stay up. Removing escalating attacks follows with the next server build, which sends the moderator the recent lines of the channel. Over the last two weeks the moderator handled about 42,500 messages, at most 34 in a single minute, and answered in about a second on average.
• Tested two newer, smaller models as replacements for the chat moderator. Both matched the current model on the 93 test messages and on 500 real chat lines from chaos, and neither was clearly better, so the moderator stays on its current model. Every service that shares the moderation GPU can now switch models with a configuration change.

Crafting

• With a crafting station open, double-clicking an item in your backpack, a bag, or the station window's Your Inventory list now puts it on the crafting table, following the same rules as dragging it there. Recipe scrolls still learn on double-click. Requested by Ythak DeThartas.
• Brewing into empty casks placed on your lot now works in batches: raise the craft quantity and each brew fills the next nearest empty cask, up to the number of empty casks on the lot. The "Brew into which cask?" menu is gone, and the crafting summary says how many casks the batch can fill. Requested by Ythak DeThartas.
• A player asked for a way to use a backpack worn on the back slot as a crafting source. It already works: materials inside a worn backpack are counted and pulled onto the crafting table like any bag in your pack. Added a regression test so it stays that way (71c25bd569, #11719).

Inventory

• The backpack, bags, chests, the bank and lot storage can now sort by type: click the empty heading over the item icons and items group by kind (equipment, tools, consumables, reagents, materials and so on), with weapons beside weapons and armor beside armor. Click again to reverse it. Requested by Astirian. (8892d4d9f2)
• Right-clicking a worn item on your own Character Sheet now offers Lock All Worn Items and Unlock All Worn Items, so a whole outfit can be locked to inventory in one click instead of one slot at a time. Requested by By Tor (bb2b3f37fd).

Add-Ons

• Lua add-ons can put their own markers on the map and minimap with add-on API 30, so they no longer take over your /beacon. Each add-on gets up to 50 markers per area, in six shapes made only for add-ons (pin, diamond, circle, square, star, flag) and any colour, with a name and a note that show on hover after the add-on's name. They never appear on the compass, cannot be clicked, cannot be placed in PvP areas, and are held to 20 changes a minute with a 10 second wait between moves. The map's ... menu hides them all, and the add-on manager hides one add-on's. A new Map Pins example adds /pin and /unpin. Requested by shawn through the in-game Oracle (#11728).
• Add-on saved settings holding a negative number, such as a map position or a window pushed to the top or left of the screen, made the whole settings file unreadable, and the next save replaced every setting with its default. Negative numbers now load. Settings written on computers that use a decimal comma, and the special value math.huge, no longer break the file either (f9942b9f3a, #11784).
• Lua add-ons can ask about the water around the player with add-on API 32. ShroudGetSceneWaterTypes() lists each kind of fishable water in the area (fresh, fetid, salt, lava), and ShroudGetNearestWaterType() gives the kind of water nearest the player within 30 metres and how far away it is. A player town's water-type decoration counts, the same way it does for fishing. Requested by shawn through the in-game Oracle (#11812).
• Lua add-ons can read the size of the game window with add-on API 31: ShroudGetScreenInfo() gives the window in pixels and in the units add-on windows are placed in, the UI scale between them, the monitor size, and whether the game is fullscreen, borderless, maximized or windowed. Add-ons that define ShroudOnScreenChanged() hear when you resize the window, change UI Scale or switch modes, so a panel can stay in its corner. Requested by shawn through the in-game Oracle (#11552).
• Add-ons can now ask the player to choose a sound or picture from their Lua folder in a list the game shows, instead of the player typing a file path into the add-on's settings. The list shows only files the game can load and can open the folder and refresh while it is up. Add-on API 33 ships with an Alert Sound example; requested by shawn.

Decorating

• The Decorations window search box now finds a player-written book by its title or by its author from the same box, and also matches the Placed By name. Book authors also match in the backpack, bank and Search All My Stuff boxes. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye. (#11537, 45a92101a0)

Creature Balance

• The Creature Audit now evaluates each creature's level-scaled stat formulas. It used to skip them, so all 145 Episode 2 creatures read about 30 health and 0 experience, and those rows pulled the balance curve the rest of the roster is measured against 45% low on health. Creature abilities are also measured with the creature's real weapon instead of bare hands.

Items

• The game server now logs the two kinds of bag write the item log could not see: a full rewrite of a bag that started empty, and items moved off a crafting table at a zone change when the save that follows fails. A player report of items vanishing on a zone change can now be checked against the record. The report that prompted it was checked against the item log and the stored bags, and nothing was missing.

Add-ons

• Fixed add-on settings that contain a "/" (a web address, a date, a folder path): one slash made the whole settings file fail to load, and the next save wrote empty settings over it. Files already hit by this load again, and a settings file that ever fails to load is now copied aside before anything is saved over it. Reported through the Oracle (#11514).

Items

• The sword-in-the-stone trophy is the Shroudbert Steinbot Seasonal PvP Trophy again. It was renamed "Treasure Hunter Trophy" in 2021 and handed out as a tournament prize after that; the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Place versions now carry their PvP names and a line saying what they were awarded for, and the Call to Arms page no longer accepts them as a prize. (#11560)
• New Fishing Tournament Trophy in 1st, 2nd and 3rd Place: a gold, silver or bronze marlin statue on a stone base, sized to match the PvP trophies. About 370 copies of the PvP trophy were won at tournaments rather than in Seasonal PvP; a database tool now turns those into the matching Fishing Tournament Trophy while the PvP winners keep theirs. It has not run yet. (#11560)

Taming

• Calling a tamed pet in offline single-player no longer turns its taming necklace red. The necklace can be taken off again and new tames land on it. Online play was not affected.

Map

• The world map search box, now called Find place, lists adventure areas the character has been inside as well as towns. Picking one marks its entrance on the map and compass. Requested by Patosh.

Inventory

• Sorting a bag or the bank by Item Name now orders player-written books by the title shown on the row. Titles that carried hidden characters or extra spaces had been collecting in a jumbled group at one end of the list, with copies of the same book apart.

Localization

• Ukrainian is now a game language. Українська is in the Options language list (and in the launcher picker from the next launcher release), and a computer set to Ukrainian starts the game in Ukrainian. Window titles and handwriting fonts that lack Ukrainian letters (Є, Ґ, Ї) switch to faces that have them. (723c2bbce6)
• Started the Ukrainian translation: built a 6,375-term glossary from scratch (no earlier Ukrainian work existed), then translated the first 29,238 of 128,120 lines, including every journal entry and loading tip. The player is addressed with the informal "ти". The rest follows in the next passes. (5e71830dcb)
• Finished the Ukrainian translation: 99.4% of all game text and every NPC conversation, plus 696 of the 703 in-game books. A repair pass fixed 1,865 conversations where two topics had been translated to the same word (job and help both became "робота"), so typing a topic in Ukrainian reaches the right answer. A quality pass added Ukrainian forms to 153 topic word lists that had kept only the English ones. (b173a92115, 0f5cf03520, 763c969ffa, aa62da0cbe)
• Fixed a duplicate string id in the Options window (Stuck? and Render Scale shared one) that had stopped the localization database from updating since Oct 6. About a hundred new strings from the last two days are now queued for translation.

Loot

• Books of Learning roll across their range again. Since the min-roll fix every book paid the bottom of its range (Legendary always 300,000); the server now scales the book's typical amount along with its minimum and maximum, so a Legendary rolls 300,000 to 400,000 again (#11464).

Skills

• Train to Level: right-click a skill in the skill tree or the list view and pick the level it should train to. It takes exactly the experience that level needs and stops there, and the rest stays in your pool for your other skills. Hovering the skill shows the target and what is left; Clear Training Target lets it train on. Requested by Steve Sosaria through the Oracle (7d1ec36e2d, #11487).
• With the tester all-skills buff on, a trainer refused a skill the character had never learned as "already learned", and its skill tree tile had no training arrow. Trainers now teach those skills, and the arrow appears once the skill is learned (62ad5d767a, #11652).
• About a hundred skills whose bonus grows by less than a hundredth per level now apply their exact value at every level. The game used to round those bonuses to whole hundredths, so Vital Points and Blade Speed only moved every 16 levels, every school Specialization showed +144% on the character sheet where its tooltip said +143.8%, and Hard Headed resistances were rounded down to whole percents. Applied values now match the tooltip (#11768).
• The summoned pets calculator on the tester hub follows the same change, so its numbers still match the game: a Grandmaster Skeleton specialized in Death now reads 1,411 health where it read 1,410.

Maps

• On some Linux graphics cards the 3D dungeon map failed to set up and then drew with no fog of war. It now tries a second fog format, and if the card still refuses it the map window shows the 2D map instead. Failures now log the graphics card so affected hardware can be identified (#11463).

Quests

• The Port Harmony Virtue gifts from Aloysius, Kenley and Tacey now show in the Journal under Show repeatable tasks after the weekly reset, so the checkbox covers all 40 repeatable quests. Each gift has a journal entry about the weekly gift and its wrapping paper, translated into every game language, and it stays off Active Tasks (4587573007, #11309).
• Four Mistrendur daily turn-ins paid regional renown on every repeat: Elder Bodil's Bag of Runestones, Erla's Nibbled Bone, Thaddaeus Smails's aldurite fragments and Max's prisoner packages. Renown now comes from the first turn-in only, and the repeat days keep their item rewards (0b4cf5d92e, #11310).
• Quest data fixes from the repeatable-quest audit: the Siege Scout's arcane catalyst hand-in now closes its journal task right away, the Proper Greeting step Greet 4 Distracted Visitors points its quest marker at the right task, and five journal entries had spelling errors corrected (0b4cf5d92e, #11310).

World

• The rocky river bank beside the small arched bridge in Solace Bridge no longer looks like a pale blur next to the mossy boulder at the water's edge. Its rock texture was stretched to one repeat every 68 m and loaded at half its painted resolution with extra compression on top; it now repeats every 23 m from the full-resolution texture, about six times the detail. The flat desert rock on the same map got the same fix. Reported through the Oracle (#11320).
• Terrain in about 108 zones draws the surface detail of its ground textures again. The rock, dirt and gravel layers all carry normal maps (the cracks and ledges that catch light), but a Unity change back in 2018 had turned them off for every terrain using the UV-Free triplanar shaders, so hillsides and cliffs read as flat paint. Rocky wilds like Superstition Canyon change the most; town grass and paths change a little. Cost on a fast card is under 0.6 ms a frame at 1080p (a12a9f9d96, #11734).

Input

• Fixed the first click after zoning counting as a double-click. Pressing both mouse buttons to run right after loading into a zone sometimes opened a nearby crafting station or plant pot instead. Holding the right button now also keeps a left double-click from using an object (#11087).

Dungeons

• Compendium of Pain and Suffering: a chamber no longer resets its wave while you skin or loot corpses outside the circle of torches with nothing attacking you. Chambers still reset if you leave, die, or zone out. Reported by Sandie Oreos through the Oracle.

Cloth

• A long cape now rests on the ground and folds back when its wearer sits, instead of its hem sinking into the ground, and it rests on the rug the same way when riding the Magic Carpet.

Dev Portal

• Player Health page now shows Recruit a Friend stats: daily bound/qualified trends, per-recruiter counts, qualify rate, and per-day activity.

Fishing

• Chum is a new Butchery recipe: 5 of any fish meat and 1 Salt make 3 Chum. Throwing Chum into fresh, swamp or salt water leaves a chum slick about 6 m across for five minutes, and everyone fishing nearby sees it and can cast into it (101ebe1786).
• Casts that land in a chum slick bite a little faster and catch sharks and big trophy fish more often. On a herring cast in salt water a Tiger Shark goes from 1 in 3,320 casts to 1 in 344, trophies of tier 2 and up turn up about four times as often, and waterlogged armour a quarter as often. The server decides the catch from where the angler stands, so the slick cannot be faked.
• The item search in the GM and tester pickers had every name after the Magic Carpet shifted by one row; the index is lined up again.

Call to Arms

• The Call to Arms line under the compass now reads "Call to Arms (realm): 78 / 100" so the number is clearly every player's total. A player who caught 2 sharks saw it jump by 4 when another angler's catches landed at the same moment and reported their catches as counted twice; each catch counts once, and your own share is "Your part" in the Call to Arms window.

Catchphrases

• Catchphrases can now be taught as well as bought, requested by Joe. A player selects one of their phrases in the Catchphrases window, targets another player and presses Teach; the other player hears it once and can pay 2,500 gold to learn it, spoken in the teacher's voice. The gold is spent, not passed to the teacher. (b98c9a5756, #11816)
• Town Criers teach six catchphrases for free when asked about "catchphrases", and a character's first catchphrase voice now comes with six starter phrases in that voice. Characters that already picked a voice get the starter phrases the next time they open the window. (b98c9a5756, #11816)

Build

• The chaos release and the nightly server report build both failed on The Rise: the report step refused eight fight-room spawn points that have no creature set on purpose, because the room's spawner picks one when the fight starts. The report step now skips that kind of spawn point and still refuses any other spawn point with no creature. A test covers the rule.
• Build 310 went to the qa shard after the server report fix, with every item type in the server tables. It is staged on the patch CDN and uploaded to Steam, not yet live on any Steam branch. A runbook for promoting it to chaos covers the two town template moves (Rampage Island and Astoria), the web pages that still need deploying, and the data fixes owed after the flip.
• Patch notes for build 310 are written and staged, so they publish at the flip when 310 reaches chaos. They cover the Ruined Keep trolls and quests, the Roleplay chat channel with Unsend, Render Scale, All Time leaderboards and about seventy fixes.
• Build 310 is live on the chaos shard and on Steam. The patch notes cover the Ruined Keep trolls and quests, the Roleplay chat channel with Unsend, Render Scale, All Time leaderboards and about seventy fixes.
• The build ledger now records build 310 as promoted to chaos on Linux and Mac as well as Windows, and the Windows record has its full build details back, so the next patch notes start from the right baseline.

Mounts

• The dev mount chest (LootDev_Chest_MountsAndFoals) now includes the Chicken Mount, so devs can pull every mount from one chest for testing. A new test fails if a future mount is left out of the chest.
• Built the Magic Carpet mount, held back for staff testing for now: the rider sits down on a purple floral rug that lifts about 18 inches off the ground, banks into turns, plays a quiet mystical sound while it moves, and stirs up faint dust that trails behind it with gold and lavender sparkles on the rug.
• The Supernatural Umbrella now raises a small patch of dust under the rider's feet and lets gold and aqua motes fall from inside the canopy like light snow, both trailing behind as it moves. Its wind is a little louder at speed, and its inventory icon now shows the mount's own wine and silver umbrella.
• Fixed the Chicken mount drawing an empty slot on the utility hotbar; it was missing its skill-table entry, which is where the hotbar gets its icon. A new check now covers every mount, so the next one cannot ship with the gap.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-06 is up: One decoration the team had placed in Ardoris stopped every house after it from loading its doors, chests and lights, leaving players shut inside their own homes. Tuesday also found three separate ways to lose a house you had paid for, a siege army that spent ninety minutes trapped in a flower bed, and a shield skill whose knockdown chance fell as your skill rose. Plus wax cylinder recordings, a new Render Scale setting for slower machines, and a hundred and eighty four tracker issues closed. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

UI

• The quest tracker more tips line now counts only tips waiting for room on the list. It had been counting tips the player put away and the hints of quests already on the tracker, so it could read "4 more tips" with nothing left to see, and putting tips away never brought it down. Reported through the Oracle (#11462).
• Item right-click menus now have a Preview entry that opens the Crown Store's 3D model window. It works in the backpack, bank, containers and equip slots, on a town merchant's goods, on player vendor listings and on both sides of a trade. Armor shows on your own character, and weapons, decorations, dungeon pieces, mounts and house deeds show as their model. About 9,600 items have a model worth looking at this way, and until now only the ones sold in the store could be previewed at all. It ships switched off and the team turns it on with a live setting, no patch needed. Requested through the Oracle (#11429).
• A recipe scroll now previews the item it makes, and a named variant previews its base item. About 33 garments with no decoration model and 14 weapons with only a held model were hidden from the preview or opened it empty; they now show. A worn piece that also carries an attachment no longer throws an error in the preview (4a99a9cc8d).
• The World Events window got a layout pass. "Active Now" is now "Active Bonuses", descriptions sit indented under their titles, Call to Arms blessings show their time left on the right like every other bonus, fishing towns read "Fishing bonus in" the town, and the Call to Arms and scheduled events share a "Current Contests and Events" section whose Call to Arms entry has a "(click for details)" link to the Call to Arms window.
• Fixed: a Call to Arms blessing that only rewards the players who took part was listed in the World Events window for everyone. It now shows only for participants, marked "You took part in this call."
• The Grandmaster badge tooltip beside a character's name now wraps its skill list into extra columns when the list is taller than the screen. Long lists used to run off the bottom where the last skills could not be read.

Community

• Filed three tracker entries from the overnight forum sweep: a World Events window follow-up to also list active sieges, an untriaged visual-glitch report in Approach to the Shuttered Eye, and an investigate-only task for a lag report at Lamech's Bazaar.

Items

• The GM emote loot chest now contains every learnable emote that has an emote item. 16 were missing, including Firework, Hopak, Hear Ye, Feed Animals and the five Swipe emotes. Tame, Drink Sit and Breathe Ice are still left out because no item exists for them yet.

Towns

• Storehouse containers no longer lock up after their Give Items window closes. Opening a second container while one was still open, or closing the window with several quick clicks, left the first container ignoring every click until relog. The window now hands the first container its offered items back before switching, a container stuck that way recovers on the next click, and a container you just closed reopens after one second instead of five. Tests cover the new rules.

Oracle

• The Oracle answers about sixty more of the questions players asked her yesterday: brewing whiskey in a cask, socketing jewels into rings, White Iron and Obsidian Chainmail, the hedge recipes and who sells them, which boots take dye, pickaxe engravings, Fishing Critical, which gear raises or lowers aggro, the Meticulous Collection x/10 and x/11 counter, Books of Learning, the named dogs in Harvest and Northwood, Troll's Bridge, where Episode 2 starts, town stewards and water lots with extra land.
• The Oracle no longer tells players to turn on Show Bard Bar. The bard bar was switched off in September, and the Oracle now explains that bard songs and the entertainer abilities go in a combat deck or on the ordinary hotbars, with tips collected from the Bard page of the skills window (#11454).
• The Oracle can now give the total skill experience for every level from 151 to 160, and says which Polearms skills cost the standard rate, four times or twenty times as much, with the experience Polearm Combat needs from 140 or 150 to 160.
• The Oracle now lists all 33 plantable seeds by growth time, says which five no merchant sells, and explains the Eternal Garlic, Mandrake and Nightshade seeds, which return on every harvest. Requested by Chadwyck.
• Players back after 90 or more days away now get a welcome back notice on their first login: how long they were away, that skills and systems have changed, and a What Changed button that opens the patch notes. For the next 7 days, asking a town Oracle to unmake one skill keeps Instant Unlearn free until the week ends instead of for ten minutes, through logouts and on every character of the account. Requested by Jebediah Armstrong through the in-game Oracle (#11445).
• The Oracle can now explain how to write your own dialogue for a Conversationalist: importing an Ink script, the length limits, the visitor details a script can use, and the new typed answers for passwords and riddles. The taming guide was split in two because its end had grown past what the Oracle can read.

Nameplates

• Fixed giant nameplate pieces with no text hanging over the scene: a party leader mark in the sky, or a red and black health bar over a large red glow (#11458, reported by jack102367 on the forum). A party member's plate never fades with distance, and one that stopped updating while they were far away kept that far-away size. A plate that has not been updated this frame is now hidden until it is, and a client error elsewhere in the frame can no longer stop a character's plate from updating.

Taming

• Tame Creature now says That creature is part of a quest and cannot be tamed. when cast on a quest creature such as the Frothing Red Ice Snarler in Jotungrund. Those were never tameable, but the old generic refusal read like a skill problem even at Taming 150. The ordinary Red Ice Snarler, found with some Arctic wolf packs there, can still be tamed. The Oracle now explains the difference too.
• Resurrect Creature and Resurrection stand a dead pet back up again. On build 310 the spell reported success and the pet stayed down, then dropped off its Taming Necklace when the timer ran out. A new release check refuses any build where a network message has lost the code that receives it.
• Queued a restore of every tamed pet lost in the last 24 hours for the next chaos deploy. Once the build with the resurrect fix is live, each emptied Taming Necklace gets its pet back from the hourly database snapshots.

Audio

• Ghosts are about a third quieter: their constant whispering and their attack, hit, death and spell sounds were all turned down, in Elysium Mines and everywhere else ghosts appear. Requested by Crow. (#11447)
• The Aether Vibration Device on a phonograph now plays the lot owner's station for everyone on the lot, including players who arrive later, and Stop turns it off for everyone. Players who would rather not hear it can turn off Hear Shared Radio Stations in Options, Audio tab. Only plain web stream addresses are shared. The station list also gained Up and Down buttons, and clicking a column header now sorts your stations and keeps that order (caf2509ffa, #11453).
• Placed phonographs and jukeboxes now fade with distance the way instruments do. Before, a gramophone a few metres away dropped to a quarter of its volume or less, so with the Phonograph and Instruments sliders set the same it was drowned out by a nearby harp (327645fa7c, #11456).

Portal

• Call to Arms page: opening a finished call with contributors showed an "appendChild" error and an empty Top Contributors table. A misplaced parenthesis from the contest-call change turned each reward cell into text. The table renders again. (41687175d5)

Chat

• Full channel names typed on their own (/universe, /local, /zone, /nobles, /traders, /party, /guild) now switch the chat channel like the short forms do, and /orb followed by a message now sends it on Nobles (#11446).

Mounts

• Added the Snow Tiger Mount, suggested by Cassioppia through the Oracle. It is a saddled white tiger that rides like the other cat mounts and uses their walk, jog, run, jump and mount animations, fitted so the saddle stays under the rider at every step. It is not in the Crown Store yet; for now testers can create one from the tester tools.

Add-Ons

• /loctrack is now a small box you can drag anywhere, and it keeps its spot between sessions; it used to sit fixed over the health bars. Options, Reset Positions puts it back. Add-on API 29 gives Lua add-ons the same readout: ShroudGetLocationText() returns the /loc line and ShroudFormatLocation(x, y, z) writes any position the way /loc does, so a coordinate from an add-on links when pasted into chat. A new Location Tracker example add-on shows both. Requested by Joe through the in-game Oracle (#11433).

Images

Gathering

• Field dressing spiders now pays bonus experience on the same tier scale as crocodiles. Every spider, from the smallest Wolf Spider to the queens, used to pay one flat amount per meticulous collection pull, so a Ferocious Red Spider in Spindelskog paid 600 producer experience where a Massive Crocodile beside it paid 1500. Spiders now pay 500, 1000, 2500 or 5000 by tier; small spiders pay half what they did, and the larger spiders, arachnids and queens pay more. Reported through the in-game Oracle (#11440).

Leaderboards

• Characters with an accented letter in their name (for example Tólito) now show their full name on the kill, death, fishing, consumable and gold leaderboards instead of a dash. The board publisher now matches names the same way the game server stores them. (#11430)

Combat

• Casting a bard song in the middle of a fight no longer drops you out of combat about ten seconds later. The instrument now keeps the combat bar up the way a drawn weapon does until you put it away, so drawing again no longer adds heat and costs a charge on locked glyphs that are still cooling down (#11424, 0be01128d0).
• Losing to another player with nothing the Price of the Oracle could take no longer prints the two death lines a second time when the Price is claimed or runs out. A duel loss was the easiest way to see it. (acf02a02ae)
• Reaction skill tooltips now state their condition. Aetheric Feedback's combat focus regeneration only applies when cast within a few seconds of landing a spell critical hit, but the tooltip listed it as if every cast gave it, so a player reported the skill broken. The line now reads "Within 4 seconds after landing a spell critical hit", with the window taken from your Focus specialization. Riposte, Answering Blow and Opportunity Strike state their parry, block and dodge windows the same way. Combat behavior is unchanged.

Achievements

• Named boss achievements now end with the creature type, such as Torc'Dawl the Broken Slain (Troll), so searching the Achievements journal for a type like troll or undead lists every named boss of that type beside its Bestiary ladder. Bosses whose name already says it, like the dragons, keep their plain name. Requested by Rinaldi. (1eacbf8dc6)

Crafting

• The crafting station now asks before a reshape or a Pattern Remover destroys a plain pattern. Only Eternal patterns come back when an item is reshaped, stripped or salvaged; plain ones never have, and the game did not say so. Items carrying a plain pattern also show it in the tooltip, marked as not Eternal. (a0336d58b8)

Loot

• With Auto Roll for Loot on, party loot rolls go in without opening the Loot window, so it no longer sits on screen through the rest of the fight. Results still post to chat, and an item too heavy to carry still opens the window so you can pass.

Housing

• The Housing help topic now describes the current lot permissions: all six roles (Guest, Tenant, Kindred, Trustee, Co-Owner, Banned), the Lot Permissions window, and the per-decoration settings that keep Private items safe. It no longer says Kindred and Trustees can take any decoration, and it says that items other players placed go to their own bank. Updated in all eight languages, with re-recorded narration. (8d226650d4)
• Grass and Tree Removers and Tree Removers from the Crown Store now work on your own housing lot as well as in player-owned towns. The remover sits on the lot but its square can reach past the lot line by up to half its width, so water lot owners in Estercove can clear the palms and bushes around their islands. Picking it up brings the trees back. (cf3b685464)
• Fixed island keeps and castles in Estercove that share an island shape: claiming one could make trees vanish from the matching spot on a sibling island, and giving it up could restore the wrong island. Each island now tracks its own trees. (cf3b685464)
• Two player towns on the chaos shard grew one size: Ivory Stronghold from Crossroads Village to Town, and Astoria from Village to Crossroads Village, giving each governor more ground to hand out as lots.
• Players who knew Ivory Stronghold or Astoria before those towns moved to new maps have them back in their Teleport to Zone list and the map's Find Town search, and the four lot auction winners still waiting to claim got a fresh 7-day hold.
• Wrote Painted Trees Only Plan A, a plan for replacing hand-placed trees in the 23 player-owned town templates with painted terrain trees, so lot owners' tree removers and lot claims can clear them. It sets which trees qualify (upright, standalone, near the ground, with collision), calls for a dry-run report per town before any change, and ends each town with a navmesh rebuild. Nothing has been changed in any scene yet.

Inventory

• Added a Drop Onto a Bag Puts Items Inside option to the Options window and the backpack window's own Options panel. With it off, an item dropped on a bag's row lands in the window beside the bag, as drops did before the bag-row change last week. It is on by default. Requested by Saphira Eragon.

Dragons

• An Ancient dragon that gets back up after its first fall now stands on the ground it fell on. The Ancient Yellow Dragon in Northwest Blackblade Mountains could rise under the sand, out of reach, and the wrasses it knocked loose after that appeared under the sand with it. Wrasses a dragon drops on the dunes now land on top of the sand. (3009c562d1, #11330)

Housing

• A lot owned by a subscriber now holds twice as many NPCs, and the extra room is for decoration pets only. A City lot can keep 16 animals for a barn, while vendors and Conversationalists still stop at 8. The lot's basement gets the same doubling. Requested by Wilfred.
• Looked at what extra decoration pets cost before raising the cap, using the crowd and decoration frame-time tests from earlier this year. A pet runs on the client only and costs mostly CPU, an estimated 0.1 to 0.3 ms of frame time each, so the raise is limited to pets on subscribers' lots for now.

Chaos

• Chaos no longer gives every account subscriber status. Subscriber perks there, such as the 48-deck allowance and the new pet room, now follow a real subscription. Existing decks are kept.

Social

• The vendor search now filters by durability, the chat filter removes insults aimed at other players, and the leaderboard pages gained the All Time view.

Travel

• Fixed the Teleport to Friend Scroll refusing party members who hide their location. Party members are now listed with the zone they are in, including ones who are not on your friends list. Hiding your location still applies to friends and guildmates outside your party. Reported by Monchichi.

Pets

• Pet regeneration gear and pet food can now stop a summoned skeleton or Lich from losing health entirely. Before, regeneration only slowed the loss down to the Mummified Undead limit, so a summoner already at Mummified Undead 150 got nothing from it. Regeneration still never heals the summon on its own, and the pet sheet tooltip explains the rule. Reported by Eidsyas Nomis. (5794850f55)

Experience

• Experience for a kill now goes to a party only when it did at least as much damage as any single hostile creature on it. Before, a player who landed one hit on a creature other monsters were killing took the whole kill's experience. Pets still count for their owners, and town guards and other friendly creatures never count against players. (63264dc353)

Creatures

• The Sticky Tongue slow that giant frogs put on players has its own debuff icon, a frog tongue dripping green goo, in both the Classic and Modern skill icon sets. It used to show the Ice Field icon. Reported by Rinaldi.

Community Hub

• Authors can now change the runes of a deck they published. The Edit form for your own deck has a Runes list: pick one of your decks and Save, and the hub publishes its runes as the new version. "Keep the current runes" still saves only the title and description.

Housing

• Pianos, grand pianos, large harps, kettle drums, harpsichords and pipe organs can now be placed on a player-owned town's town plot as well as on lots and in houses. Players sit at them and play the same way as before. (d8537ce5b5, #11190)
• Picking up a Player-Owned Town Wagon while its teleport was starting left your character invisible and, if the screen had begun to fade, stuck on black. The trip is now cancelled cleanly: you stay where you were, fade back in, and the screen returns. The same fix covers the other placeable teleporter decorations (672884f372, #11183).
• The Chess Game Table, Checkers Game Table and Backgammon Game Table can now be bought. They were playable since July but no merchant, store or drop offered them, so only GMs could hand one out. Every decoration merchant that sells a plain Table now sells all three for 5,000 gold each, and each table has its own icon in place of the plain table picture (5ebabfbf5e, #11166).
• The Unclaim Lot hint now says to save your decoration setup to an empty slot in the Property Manager before unclaiming, since unclaiming sends everything to the bank as loose items. The sentence is translated into all eight languages and the spoken hint was re-recorded. (48c4f4486e, #11105)
• Chandeliers placed as decorations and chandeliers built into player homes now light 25% further. The Light Settings range slider scales from the new base, so its maximum reaches further too. Other lamps, candles, torches and the disco ball chandeliers are unchanged (0f9f95b72e).
• Decoration layouts place towers whose bottom blocks are sunk into the ground again. The placement check could not see the ground from underneath it, so it read every sunk block as floating and skipped it along with everything stacked on top; one 243-piece layout applied as "0 changed". The message at the end of an apply now also gives a reason for every skipped item. (cac197cb98)
• A placed Recall Target can now bind you to its lot: right-click it and choose Bind to This Lot. Placing one used to leave your old bind in place, so a recall kept going to wherever you were bound before. Its description now says how binding works (df94c70c3e).
• Fish tank windows show only the slots that tank has. Every tank had shown four fish slots and an accessory slot, so the Large Circular Fish Tank refused a fourth fish it seemed to have room for. The bowl now shows 1 fish slot, the tabletop tank 2 plus an accessory, the large circular tank 3 plus an accessory, and the large rectangle tank 4 plus an accessory (9e7a4c0de8).
• A Practice Dummy or decoration animal on a player-town lot stays standing when the scene host is another player far across town. Before, coming back up from your basement while someone else hosted the town could leave the lot empty for many minutes, and a client restart did not bring the dummy back (f6af2ee990, live off switch 40e87e3ff4, #11092).
• Storing or restoring a house with the Property Manager no longer deletes a furnished house when the server's copy of the lot is out of date. It now checks the saved house before deleting anything. A restore that cannot complete now leaves the lot and the stored house as they were and says so, where before it put up a blank house and the stored one dropped off the list.
• Dragging an item from the backpack onto a chest placed on your lot now puts it in the chest. A closed chest opens and the item follows it in. Items that are not decorations, such as crafting symbols, used to go back to the backpack with no message. Decorations dropped over a chest are still placed (#11063).
• A practice dummy that the scene host unloaded (for example while its owner spent a few minutes in the basement) now stands back up as soon as someone returns, instead of staying gone for three minutes through a reload or restart. Being killed still uses the normal respawn delay. Follow-up to this morning's fix (e41ba91373, #11092).
• While you drag a Recall Target into place, its preview now shows as a solid green pad and arrow, or solid red where it can't go. Before, only a faint outline showed, and it was nearly invisible on grass. Other decorations with a ground marker, such as tree and grass removers, get the same solid preview (#10889).
• Fixed the yellow boxes around butterfly, firefly and other effect decorations and tree removers staying on in every town after a placement went wrong. They now switch off as soon as a placement ends and again on every zone change (#10870, d49375a338).
• In the Turreted City House and Twin Spire Manor (City Homes), the pillar on the right of the middle first-floor arch was hollow on the side facing the arch, so a player could walk into it and stand inside. That side is now solid like the rest of the pillar (bb5f6f0bba, #10885).
• The Baron's Talking Mirror keeps its conversation open after its greeting. It used to close the chat window right after asking your name, every time it was clicked. Female characters now get the mirror's "new mistress" greeting and name question, which a typo in its dialogue had blocked. (0744526f42, #10224)
• The Lot Auctions window lines its columns up. Lot, Price and Leading used to shift right on rows with long town names and drift off their headings once the list scrolled. (36cef42930)
• A greyed Travel button in the Lot Auctions window now gives its reason on hover and when clicked. Before, clicking it did nothing. The Bid button explains itself the same way.
• Standing in the town where a lot is up for auction, that row's button now reads Locate and marks the lot on your compass.
• Upgrading a taxed lot to a tax-free deed at the lot sign now returns the taxes already paid ahead on it as gold, in a letter from the First Bank of Brittany. Those days used to become Tax Credit, which only pays lot taxes, so an owner with no other taxed lot could not use them. The upgrade dialog says which happens. Not on chaos yet (12dcf458dd, #11357).
• The Round Tower (Village Home) battlements no longer hold you up over the gaps. An invisible rim along both edges of the roof battlements sat just above the tall blocks; it is gone, so stepping into a gap now drops you onto the stone. The two lower terraces had the same problem plus a cover over every gap, and now work the same way, with decorations placeable in their gaps. An invisible wall above the outer edge of both rings stops you walking off the tower through a gap or off a tall block. (dea5996291, #9093)
• Planting Pots can be placed rim to rim again when set diagonally or turned against each other; they had been stopping about 25 cm apart. Pots pushed into each other are still refused (de517964de, #11372).
• A player who won a lot at auction found the lot sign still saying the lot was up for auction, with no Claim Lot button, so they could not claim the lot they had paid for. The sign only refreshed when the deed or a sale listing changed, and the auction closes elsewhere. It now updates within about a minute of any bid, close or claim. A one-time repair will give winners who lost a lot this way their lot back with a 7-day hold, or their gold back if someone else has since claimed it. (cf066a34cd, #11379)
• The Light Settings window on placed decorations now has a Light picker with Always on, Only at night and Off (9ee0e2b01c). Off puts out the light and glow of a smelter, forge or cooking station, or any other placed light, while the fire and smoke of crafting still show when someone works at the station. Asked for through the in-game Oracle.
• Selling a lot with a house on it no longer leaves the buyer with an empty lot. The sale never recorded the new lot and deed for the buyer, so the house came off the lot and went to the buyer's Property Manager. Every chaos lot sale with a house in the last 20 days did this. The sale now records them, and it stops and refunds the buyer instead of moving a house with nowhere to go (e9ccd3776c, #11395).

Offline

• Fixed loading a saved single player game on Linux. Since build 308 every Load Game on Linux was refused and the current save kept, because the client misread its own settings file after the game rewrote it shorter. Windows was not affected. (08ba411316, #11193)

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-05 is up: Monday went to fishing, housing and the Hidden Vale. The water that advertised the best fishing was the worst place in the scene, a stat on four premium rods had never been read by anything at all, and a keep full of trolls that nobody in the world would talk about finally got a history, a sergeant on the road outside and a dungeon planned underneath. Also a siege demon who spent two weeks standing on somebody's lawn, and a repair that put one player's house back with every chair where it stood. Listen or read the transcript (18 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• The 11 prize winners from the October 2 Twitch stream drawing were sent a Companion Pet (Choose One) bag by in-game mail. Each bag opens to a choice of Capybara, Fox, Raccoon or Red Panda. One winner has not been matched to a character yet.
• Nightly forum sweep filed two wishlist suggestions: an earlier/later transition window for "only at night" lighting, and Points of Interest markers on the new 3D zone maps.
• Switched on Recruit a Friend on chaos. Type /recruit in the world for a personal invite link; a friend who has never played enters the code on the login screen before their first login. Once the new player has played two hours and reached Adventurer or Producer level 5 on their own computer and connection, the recruiter is mailed 500 Gold Crowns and earns the Envoy title, and the new player gets a Black and Tan Rottweiler. Qualified recruiters appear on a new Recruiters leaderboard. Only accounts created from today can join with a code. (340d356106)

UI

• Skill tooltips now show in numbers what a specialization does to a skill. A line that needs a specialization you have not taken quotes the value you would get at your current level in it, where it used to show 0 (Spellbinder Stance's Combat Focus line), and lines a specialization strengthens say by how much, such as "N% longer from your Heavy Armor Specialization" under Body Slam's stun. Requested through the Oracle by Akandriel (257989ca5f).
• The Mining Pickaxe and Foraging Sickle cursors now show a wooden handle like the Skinning Knife and Forestry Axe cursors, so all four gathering tools match when you hover a node. The pickaxe and sickle had been drawn all in grey. The faded out-of-reach cursor follows the same art. Reported by Chadwyck. (dfa4192a35, #11168)
• Rend and other harmful effects you land now show their icons over every creature you hit, including ones you have not selected, with Show Creature Effects left Off. With no target locked, the creature in the target frame shows the same icons over its head. (26e46c3723, #11089)
• The status icons in the top right corner (overloaded, damaged gear and the rest) now sit to the left of the minimap, level with its top, and add new icons toward the left. In the strip to the right of the minimap, a new mail or friend notification pushed them down behind it. With the minimap off or dragged away they return under the toolbar.
• The "Acquired On" and "Completed On" dates in the Journal task details now use the same colour as the dates on the Journal tab. Reported by Astirian.
• Unticking Show party member effects icon hides the buff and debuff icons under other members in the party list again. The rebuilt party list had kept drawing them whatever the setting said; your own frame keeps its icons. (3dcbddf482)
• Right-clicking empty ground no longer opens the menu of your own pet or a player standing next to you. The click was being matched against whatever stood in the middle of the screen. Reported through the in-game Oracle.
• The Options window has a Stuck? button at the bottom left while you are in the world. It runs the same thing as typing /stuck, with the same confirmation and stuck spot report, so a trapped player no longer needs to know the command. Not on chaos yet (530c10fee0, #10880).
• Hovering an entry in the Body Markings or Face Markings list in the appearance editor now shows that marking on your character. The first attempt never worked in the game because the list opens a moment after the click, and the preview gave up before it appeared. Moving off the list or closing it puts your chosen marking back. Requested by Elene Sali (2cf0b86201).
• The World Events window that opens at login no longer lists "Double experience". That bonus is a permanent server setting, so the row looked like an event that never ended. Experience is still doubled. (771458de27)
• Selecting yourself or your pet now shows clearly: the highlight around your own health bars, or your pet's, draws at full strength instead of half. Next Target (Tab) shows "No hostile targets nearby." when it has nothing to pick, since it skips wildlife by design. Reported through the Oracle as targeting keys doing nothing.
• The /sotawiki chat command now opens the community wiki at its new address, sotawiki.org. It still pointed at the old sotawiki.net domain.
• The login screen now puts the cursor in a box when it opens: the password box when your user name is remembered, otherwise the user name box. Returning players can type a password and press Enter without clicking, and Tab works from the start. Requested by D'Laein Lachlan. (b4090f53f2)

Housing

• Fixed house doors, chests and lights not responding in Ardoris on build 308, which left some players stuck inside their homes after logging in. A decoration the team had placed in town was stopping every house after it from loading its objects. The same error also printed a red Server line in chat that included the player's account name; scene server refusals no longer send any account name to the client.
• Follow-up to the Ardoris house door fix: lights and other switchable decorations the team places in a town keep their on or off state for players who arrive later.
• The Property Manager now restores a stored home onto a bigger lot, the same way a smaller house can already be built on a bigger lot from a deed. A Town home goes onto a City lot with its decorations in place and then counts as City size. Water homes, homes with Extra Land on, and Row homes on the default row house still need a lot of their own size. Reported on Discord by Cora Cuz'abich. (b3551debae)
• The Iron Chandelier hangs from the Red Barn Two-Story's roof beams and ridge again. Placement measured it as one solid metre-wide block reaching up to the beam, so the roof slope beside its chain read as in the way; it is now measured by its shape at each height, which also applies to other decorations that collide as their own model. Under the ridge, 28 of 32 reachable spots now take it (0 before).
• Dropping a decoration where it cannot be placed now says why in chat. On town property in a player-owned town only the governor and stewards can place, and a lot you cannot decorate says you lack permission; both used to send the item back to the backpack without a word. The report came from a steward whose role had been lost in the governor-change wipe fixed on 10-05.

Travel

• A player town's Teleport to Zone destination list now catches up with the town's signposts every time the town starts up on the server. Signpost names a governor changed before the 10-03 fix had stayed in the list for days. The list again shows only the signposts on the town's own grounds, as it did before the 10-03 change, so a signpost on a resident's lot stays off it. (92206d3e43, #11186)

Combat

• Holy Water now sits in the Consumables skill group with the other thrown potions. It had no group, so every session logged an error for it.
• Spellbinder Stance's tooltip now shows the combat focus regeneration that Focus Specialization adds, in gray with "Requires Focus Specialization" when you lack it, quoting what the specialization gives. Before, that line was hidden and the stance's own +0.1% Focus Regen read as the specialization bonus. Same treatment Berserker's Stance already had. (76d0cf22df, #11175)
• Recasting Chaotic Feedback no longer deepens its Life Attunement penalty past what one full cast reaches. Since build 308 the penalty kept growing for as long as the spell was recast; it now holds at the single-cast level and still does not reset on recast (#11104).
• Charge (Shield) knock-down chance no longer drops at high skill. Past skill 150, or sooner with a Charge Stun Chance masterwork shield, the chance fell with each level (98.3% at 140 and 94.7% at 160 on the reported shield). It now holds at 100%. The real roll in combat had the same fault and is fixed with it. Reported in game by By Tor. (460cbc7482, #11288)
• Shield of Crystal could leave its rotating crystal sphere standing on its own after the shield ended. A player saw one in Rhun Vault that stayed put while they walked around until they changed zone. The game now refuses to place an aura when the character it belongs to is gone, so a stray sphere can no longer appear. When the shield ends, its crystals also fade with the rest of the aura now, instead of spawning for another second or two. Shield of Ice had the same fade problem with its ice crystals and is fixed too. (97584e37f6, #11106)
• Rend's bleed, the part of the skill that reaches a second enemy, now always lands on the enemy you aimed at and then on the nearest other one. It used to pick its two targets in no set order, so the aimed-at enemy could go without a bleed and the second bleed moved to a different enemy each swing. Crates and barrels no longer use up the second slot. A missed or dodged Rend also no longer adds a bleed that vanished two seconds later, which on an enemy already at three Rends pushed a real one off. (873a72c47d, #11090)
• Deflect's large bonus counts down on its buff icon again. Since late August the icon only timed the long window, so there was no way to see the bonus run out; the icon now drains over the large bonus first, then shows the long window. Dodge, Parry and Glancing Blow use the same rule. Reported in game by By Tor. (bcece8db1d)
• A put-away weapon no longer stays in your hand out of combat. A player saw their sword in hand while running around town after fishing and recalling. The game now checks twice a second, while your hands are free, that a sheathed weapon is hidden, and hides it if something left it showing.
• The combat hotbar now explains itself when it is empty out of combat: runes are drawn once combat starts, and locking a rune in Edit Deck keeps it on the bar. A player report read the blank row as the bar breaking after a deck change. Changing a skill's training mode mid-fight no longer wipes the runes already drawn onto the bar (44326d08db).
• Rainbow Blast's rainbow starts from straight in front of the caster again. A change on September 17 that was meant to centre it had moved the rays about three quarters of a metre to the caster's right, where they looked like they came out of the main hand. That happened on every cast, with or without weapons (#9938, 0ce8de32de).
• A summoned Ice Elemental can no longer keep a mob slowed for good. Its slow lasted 10 seconds and was refreshed on every swing; now it runs its full length without refreshing, and the target then ignores slows from any pet for 8 seconds, so a mob is slowed a little over half the time (0400b84fb0).
• Nothing can be slowed by more than 50% in total. Several slows on one target used to add up past a full stop and leave it crawling at the minimum speed; encumbrance and armour weight are not slows and are unchanged (0400b84fb0).
• Raised the height of Indigno's sky throw by 10 m to 45-60 m, so a landing costs about 250 more fall damage. Players with a lot of Safe Fall took almost nothing from the old 35-50 m throw.

Dragons

• An Ancient dragon now says in chat when it falls and when it rises again, and clicking its body before it rises explains that the fight is not over. Its first fall cannot be looted or skinned and pays no experience, and players near the Ancient Yellow Dragon read that as a bug (2da7535103, #11184).

Inventory

• House chests now offer Quick Deposit in their right-click menu, requested by Aartemis. It opens the chest and runs the same deposit as the button on the chest window, topping up stacks the chest already holds. Anyone allowed to add items to that chest gets the option (#11153).
• Search All My Stuff quick results (the rows shown before you press Enter) now say "Bank:" and the town for items in your bank. They used to say "Inventory", so banked stacks looked like carried ones. The Location column is also colored by kind of place in both quick and full results: carried items stay plain, bank rows are cyan, and lots, mail and vendors each have their own color. Reported by Chadwyck. (1d3e98f2ed)
• A chest or backpack holding enough bags to need the scroll bar now keeps one row of empty space below its last item. Dropping there puts the item in the chest itself. Before, every visible row was a bag, so anything dropped landed inside one of them (#11118).
• Experience in a loot window can only be taken as experience. Taking part of a stack with Shift-drag or Ctrl-drag, or a stack over 32,767, used to drop it into your bag as an item that could be kept and traded. A partial drag into your backpack now adds that amount to your experience, and dragging experience to the bank or a trade window is refused. The server refuses the move too (4fd28c588c, #11167).

Player

• A ghost always moves at full speed on the walk back to an ankh. Pack weight, slows and roots from the fight no longer carry over, the weight icon stays off the buff bar until resurrection, and ghosts can sprint without spending Focus. Reported by GenieUK. (721a99419f, #11197)

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer 45 more of the questions players asked her over the last day: which dyes and crops give the most crafting experience, where to mine silver and harvest black pearl, strap stats, where the Holy Water and Recall Scroll recipes are sold, partial buy orders at player vendors, decoration layouts, heraldry banners, Air artifact wands, Blistering Ray, the Middle Downs mound puzzle, the regions of Novia, where to find Beau and Willow for Pet Every Dog, and how to get an old offline save back with Find My Offline Characters. She also now says the Neon Tetra bites during new and crescent moons, and she no longer sends offline save questions to player support.
• The Oracle's Enchantments guide now lists Shooting Star Power under the Moon gem, and notes that Solar Flare, Banish Undead and Discharge Power also roll on weapons since build 308. A player reported the gap through the Oracle.
• The Oracle has a new Skill-Mastery Titles guide, split out of Skills and Advancement, with an answer for why a title like Tamer has not arrived at level 100: every skill in the school counts, passives included (e665eda92c).
• The Oracle now has a guide to lot and decoration permissions: every lot role from Guest to Co-Owner, the Block Doors, Strict Deco Move Permission, Guild Chapter House and Thin Indoor Fog options, each decoration's own Remove, Move, Container and Vendor settings and their defaults, the Edit Access lists on chests, doors and vendors, and when roles handed out by guild officers on a Chapter House lot stop applying. Older housing answers that listed only Guest, Kindred and Trustee were corrected. (#10849)
• The Oracle now knows where the game data folder is on Linux as well as Windows and Mac, including where settings files, offline save files and backups sit inside it and how to carry settings to another computer.

Pathfinding

• Creatures whose spawn point stands right beside a door now settle onto the ground there. The navmesh lookup used to pick the door's own path link, reject it, and give up, so one plunderer on the Tenebris Harbor north wall and one fighter in waves 4 and 7 of the Ulfheim village battle royale logged an error on every load. Other checks that look for ground near a door use the same lookup and are fixed with it.
• Closed house doors stop placed pets and Conversationalists on heavily decorated lots again. When a lot was too crowded for the walkable ground to be worked out around every decoration, the doorways were dropped along with everything else and closed doors blocked nothing. Doorways are now always kept. The earlier fix only covered houses moved with Move House (1c9d43f8d1, #9506).

Testing

• Fixed /verify answering "the verification board is not available right now" on build 308. The board had been opened to every account, but the game never told the client which accounts were regular players, so it turned them away. (e3735fa1ca, #11199)

Combat

• A buff cast before entering a zone with a skill cap now drops to the capped strength there. Strength of Earth cast at Earth Magic 138 had kept +60.7 Strength inside Grunvald Shardfall (cap 100), where a cast inside gives +48.4. The buff gets its full strength back after leaving the zone. (528d345c3a, #11182)
• A Corpion's sting poison keeps hurting until it runs out after you kill and loot the Corpion. Looting destroyed the body at once, and the poison still on you went on counting down for 0 damage with a gray number. A looted body now stays until its poisons and bleeds finish, at most 30 seconds, then fades as usual (a6474fa3e9, #11181).

Map

• Bard performances now show on the map, requested by Barugon. In a town, each player giving a performance gets a gold lyre marker on the map and minimap, labelled with their name, and it follows them as they move. Clicking it sends the guide wisp there. (65938d8057)
• On the overworld map, a town with a performance in progress gets the same lyre at its entrance, with a count when several bards are playing. Town rooms report their performers to a small shared table every 30 seconds, so this works across game servers and clears itself within 90 seconds if a room goes down mid-song.
• Moving a devotional in a player-owned town no longer leaves its old icon on the Map. Each shrine keeps one icon, which goes with it when it is moved or set down somewhere else, and logging back in no longer brings back the old spot. Not on chaos yet (a440303748, #11392).
• Right-clicking a town teleporter sign post marker on the Map now offers Teleport here, requested by Barugon. It works while you stand at a sign post and goes anywhere that sign's destination list would, so the list no longer has to be opened. Away from a sign post the option is greyed out with the reason. Not on chaos yet (953ca3d01e, #11393).

Audio

• The gates at the Palace of the Mountain in Ardoris, and the matching castle gates on the east side of the city, now creak open and clank shut like heavy metal gates. They had been playing the short click of a small wooden door. Reported by Laney. (ab2a9f592c, #11178)
• Clockwork Attack Cats in K'rul no longer die with a low whimper that sounded like a dog. Two of their three death and hurt sounds were deep enough to pass for one, and about a third of their deaths were silent, so the cry heard was often from a Clockwork Attack Dog in the same pack. They now use the higher cat meow and always cry on death; the Clockwork Cat pets share the change (aed3801a4f, #11371).
• New Crafting Success Chime toggle on the Options Audio tab turns off the chime a crafting station plays when a craft succeeds, exceptional crafts included. The fail sound and all other sounds are unchanged. Requested by Xrossfire Bugseye.
• Torch fire sounds loop smoothly now. The shared torch crackle used by hand torches, guards, dungeon wall torches, hearths and the juggling torches emote had a short gap every 9 seconds, caused by the MP3 copy of the sound. It now plays from the uncompressed original, so the loop no longer restarts audibly.

Fishing

• The four corked letters you can fish up now open and show their letter; before, they showed an error line. The Helpful Guide to Sheet Music sold by booksellers had the same problem and now shows all 13 pages. The letters also lost a quest requirement and a one-per-character limit they had picked up by accident, so every player can catch them. A new test now catches any book that ships without pages.

Travel

• Picking up a Player-Owned Town Wagon (or another teleporter decoration) during its departure animation no longer leaves your character invisible. The trip now finishes and you arrive at the destination as normal. (9b531a8ab2, #11183)

Achievements

• The Aether Corpion, the Frost Giant and Riei Firefeather each have one set of kill achievements. Each was the only creature in its family, so a Bestiary Hunter achievement counted the same kills as the boss chain and unlocked together with it (Aether Corpion Hunter beside Aether Corpion Vanquished). The three Hunter rows are gone and the boss chains and their trophies are unchanged. The achievement builder now skips any family that is a single boss. (3ea30056e9, #11179)

Audio

• The Music volume slider now also sets jukeboxes, phonographs, music boxes and radios. Players with Music at zero had still been hearing all of them, since each played on its own bus. The Phonograph and Radio sliders still trim those sources under Music, and instrument performances keep their own slider.

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Maps

• The South Broken Road map now draws its river as water. The old map was art from before the map capture tool could see water, so the river showed as brown riverbed. It was recaptured at the same alignment, so explored areas on the map did not move. An audit found about a dozen other old maps that may be missing their rivers or lakes; those are queued for the same treatment.
• Seventeen zone maps that left out water now show it. Their sheets dated from before the map tool could see water, so lakes were drawn as gravel, swamp water as mud, and some rivers and streams were missing. Redrawn: the four desert player-town layouts, North Ravenswood, Southmarsh, Greymark Forest, Ferig's Battle Camp, East Veiled Swamp, North Brightbone Woods, West Perennial Trail, Rumor Peaks, Grannus Colossus, Lamech's Bazaar, Crooked Shank, Sequanna Colossus and Yew. Each map keeps its old framing, so areas already explored stay where they were. (f22287bf06, #11264)
• All 111 older maps in zones with water were compared with a fresh capture of the zone before any were replaced. Blood River and Upper Fortus keep their maps: their water is red in the game, and the maps already draw it red. Grusk and Sunless Barrens keep theirs too, since they draw the sulphur pools in their own colours. A new test lists every older map in a zone with sea or rivers, so the next one added gets checked. (f22287bf06, #11264)

Books

• Read Aloud now keeps up with the books: a nightly bake re-records any book whose words changed (an edited page, a new narrator, or a pronunciation fix), publishes the audio, and commits the manifest, with a $3 nightly spending ceiling that hands anything bigger to a person. Before this, an edited book went silent until someone re-ran the bake by hand.
• Read Aloud works again on six books edited after their narration was recorded: the New Player Handbook, Advanced Combat - Combos, Songs of the Sundered Blade, and the Helpful Guides to Fishing, Deck Building and Inventory. The Blood River letters and the 32 prophecy books were re-recorded too, so the reader now says "bone steel" the same way every time. 41 books, $0.32 of synthesis.
• The Record a Book window now marks each narrator group with how it is paid (Narrators and Lord British in Crowns, Town Criers in gold) and checks the price on its own when the window opens or the group changes, so there is no Check Price button to press. Priced groups show their price in the list, and changing the voice keeps it. Requested by Aartemis. Tester task #11314.
• Recording a book onto a Blank Wax Cylinder no longer fails every time. The server read the blank cylinder's item id from its settings in the wrong form and refused every cylinder before charging anything. Reported by Aartemis.
• Read Aloud re-recorded for 12 books whose words changed since their last recording: FishingFind CorkedLetter ChildsWish, FishingFind CorkedLetter ShipsLog, FishingFind CorkedLetter ToWhoever, FishingFind CorkedLetter UnpaidDebt, RiseBook DigSlate, RiseBook R1 Count and 6 more.

Images

Quests

• Kortreek's daily kite experiment in Grusk now shows in the Journal when Show repeatable tasks is ticked, as one row however many of his five platforms you have visited. Before, a repeat day left nothing in the Journal for it (c5cdb06af6, #11146).
• The Journal's Show repeatable tasks checkbox now lists 37 of the 40 repeatable quests, up from 4. A quest shows once you have done it, while it is open to take again, and hides after the turn-in until the next reset. New on the list include Kaiser's dragon tooth, Marisha's keys and encoded cards, Vishpop's stories, the Courage Club and Sneak Scene coins and Julia the Alchemist's troll heads. The three Port Harmony Virtue gifts still do not show. (68a6039859, #11276)
• The repeatable quest count is now 40. Erica's amulet in Vikland and Annora Jenkins' two Port Harmony jobs were counted as repeatable and are one-time quests: each turn-in closes for good once done. The Oracle's repeatable quest answer follows. (68a6039859, #11276)
• The Vikland children Baun, Tove and Gisli no longer give a blank reply when asked about Erica after her story is finished. The last Episode 1 journal entry now says Arabella will take you to the city of Brittany; it previously said Britain. (72b061e4ab)

Sieges

• A besieged player town whose shrine sits inside a walled flower bed no longer traps the Cabalist and his army in it. In Arx Draconis Lowlands Dolus and every soldier with him formed up inside the bed, could not reach anyone, and took hits as "Cover" for an hour and a half. The siege now checks that the Cabalist's spot connects to the rest of the town and moves it to the nearest open ground when it does not (3395d9721c, #11170).

Books

• Switched on wax-cylinder recordings on the chaos shard, all three narrator groups at the prices set on 10-05: Lord British (150 + 20 Crowns per 1,000 characters, read by a Game Master first), Narrators (100 + 10 Crowns) and Town Criers (50,000 + 5,000 gold). Lord British recordings use the same cloned voice and model as the nightly Herald. A first test recording came back as a 9-second clip after review. Tester task #11269.
• The ~ Places to Live ~ letter on the town bulletin boards (Ardoris, Soltown, Jaanaford, Resolute, Aerie, Vertas) and the book of the same name no longer point at the old rental forum, which has had no posts since 2024. The new text explains how to find a home in game: become a Tenant on someone's lot, get added to an inn room's locked door, buy a listed lot, or claim one with a lot deed. Translated into all six languages and narrated again. The same dead forum link was also removed from 101 old web-store house descriptions.

Crafting

• Masterwork and enchant Revise Effects offers chain like live again. Since August the second offer in a chain was rolled at half the live chance, so at Mastery 100 a third revise came up 12.5% of the time instead of 50%. Masterwork and enchant success chances were never affected. Reported by Joe Zhudarak. (b54f7b6d6f)
• Fixed the cooking Wooden Bowl and Wooden Plate not salvaging. Both now salvage at a carpentry station into Wood Scrap, with a chance of Wood Pulp or Ashen Heartwood, the same as the decorative Wood Bowl. (#10888)
• The Clay Tip Jar and Treasure Map - Sewer recipes no longer show "Recipe: Recipe:" in their names, in English and the eight translated languages. Reported through the in-game Oracle.
• The Craft Again button in crafting station windows reads "Craft again: Bolt of Cotton Cloth" instead of "Craft again: Recipe: Bolt of Cotton Cloth" (#10236).
• When Use lot storage takes a material from a crafting chest that you are also carrying, but locked or inside a locked bag, chat now says so once: "Locked in your inventory, so not used: 3 Ingot Mold." Crafting already uses the unlocked Ingot Molds in your inventory before the chest; locked ones are passed over on purpose. Requested by Ceal Astra.

Leaderboards

• Ten Leaderboards rank lifetime totals or this month's score and show the same table for every timeframe. They no longer offer the 1 Day / 7 Days / 30 Days picker, which did nothing on them. Achievements, Slayers, Master Anglers, Tamers, Farmers, Master Crafters, Experience and Dungeons now say Lifetime in its place, and Guild Prestige and Town Prestige say This Month. Farmers with 1 Day picked had looked like it was showing several days of stats. Reported by Steve Sosaria. (a489057566, #11149)
• The leaderboard service now publishes an All Time view of every board beside 1 Day, 7 Days and 30 Days, counting everything since the October 1 launch. The kill, death, fishing, consumable and gold boards add up every day since launch, which needed the service to stop discarding days older than a month. The public leaderboard page gains an All time choice and now labels the Guild and Town Prestige boards as this month's season instead of "Last 24 hours".
• The Leaderboards window has an All Time timeframe beside 1 Day, 7 Days and 30 Days on every board. The career boards (Achievements, Slayers, Master Anglers, Tamers, Farmers, Master Crafters, Experience and Dungeons) showed only a lifetime total before, behind a fixed Lifetime label. They now offer all four timeframes: game servers record each hour's kills, catches, tames, crops, gathering, crafting, experience and dungeon visits, and the 1 Day, 7 Days and 30 Days views add up those hours. All Time stays the career total. The shorter views count from the update that carries this, so they start empty. Guild Prestige and Town Prestige keep showing the month's season.
• Double-clicking a dungeon on the Dungeons leaderboard now offers to use a Teleport to Zone Scroll, and on confirm lands you in front of that dungeon's entrance in its town. Same checks as Teleport to Lot (no scroll, in combat, mounted, town not yet visited). Requested by Sethanon.

Crafting

• Obsidian Bone, Obsidian Chainmail and obsidian shield patterns can now be applied at a crafting station. The thirteen patterns that salvaging obsidian gear hands out were missing from the pattern lists the Reshape recipes check, so they never showed up as usable (4837be62c8, #11134).
• Double-clicking a recipe you can't make, right after one you can, no longer puts the first recipe's materials back on the crafting table. The table is left empty and the window says what is missing, so Craft can't make the previous recipe by mistake. Materials you placed on the table by hand still go back as before (de43e7e4f3, #10218).

Taming

• Every creature that can be tamed can now be studied with Animal Lore. Wild young dragons and wyverns had no Study option because they are not animals; they now get the Study entry, the taming bonus and the skill experience. The Aether Dragon cannot be tamed and still has no Study option. (#11158)

Decorations

• Blue Butterflies and Orange Butterflies decorations show sharp wings again. Their wing art was drawn from a low resolution copy, so placed butterflies looked like faint smudges at any distance; every other butterfly in the game uses the same art and sharpens too (e8b0390484, #11151).

Skills

• The Skills window now shows how far each school is toward its mastery title, under the school name in Tree view: for example "Tamer title: every Taming skill at level 100 (14 of 16 so far)", followed by the skills still short. It moves on to the Elder and Legendary titles as each is earned. A player at Tame Creature 139 had reported Tamer missing; the title needs all 16 Taming skills at 100, and two were still at 1 (e4e49541ea).

Launcher

• The launcher now shows the game as your Discord activity ("Playing Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues", with a play timer) on Windows, Mac and Linux. Discord used to recognise the game only when it was started from Steam. Arrives with the next launcher update (#11295).

UI

• The colour squares in Options > Interface > Combat Text Colors now show the colour each row is using and update while you drag in the picker. Before, every square stayed white and the chosen colour was only visible by reopening the picker.

Lore

• The canon library's Canonical Names and Spellings page was split in two, and Easily Confused Names (Evard and Edvard, Dire and Dirae, and the rest) is now its own guide page. (c45e76a9ca)

Quests

• Kresimir and Lyudmila in Castle Atos now list fox-and-rabbit as a topic from the first conversation. A character who had never played used to see only a greeting, with the daily reachable only by asking about games first. On repeat days they also remind you the rabbit is still missing. Before, they said they were not playing (#11133).

Tools

• The item conservation audit, which looks for any item stored in two places at once, now re-checks each item it flags before reporting it. The scan takes about four minutes on the test shard, and an item a player moved during that time could be counted in both containers. That is what the five suspected duplicates reported on October 5 turned out to be: each was an ordinary move made while the scan ran, and each was in one place afterwards. Items like that are now listed separately and no longer fail the audit. (ec1c28929b, #10984)

Dungeons

• The Dungeons leaderboard records each player dungeon's best time and who set it again. Most dungeons counted their clears but never saved a time, so Best Time read 0 and Best Time By stayed blank; the next clear of each one now fills them in. A dungeon nobody has cleared reads 0 instead of 1. Times from earlier clears were never saved and cannot be restored. (0c6d075414)
• The Live Event window in player dungeons can now be resized and opens larger. Its status message no longer runs underneath the Start Event and End Event buttons; if the window is made small, its contents scroll instead (7b67616bd0).
• Myrkur's Damaged Automaton now keeps its own record of whether you have answered its number riddle. Myrkur and Despair used to share that record, so solving the riddle in one dungeon could carry into the other. Translations of the automaton's lines carry over. (e8a1a738c2)

Towns

• Town role changes are now recorded in the server log with who made the change and the role it replaced, so a player who finds themselves demoted from Steward can be told when it happened and who did it (786e576776, #11086).

Catchphrases

• Catchphrases in the eight new languages work on chaos now. The voice service was still the English-only version when build 308 shipped, so every non-English phrase answered "service busy" (a player reported it through the Oracle). The service was updated and a French phrase came back spoken in French. The Preview samples for every voice in all eight languages (1,072 clips) were published too; before this, Preview played nothing outside English.

Creatures

• Enemies walking home after you break off a fight no longer stand untouchable for up to a minute when they cannot make headway. A creature that gets no closer to its spawn point for 10 seconds is now put back there. In The Obsidian Panopticon the elves were hitting the old one-minute limit 35 to 174 times a day (6e97628413, #10976).
• A dragon killed just before its big fire breath no longer leaves the flames burning at its corpse's mouth, and the strong fire breath cones now stop when the dragon closes its jaw. Not on chaos yet (b64da93496, #11383).

Mail

• Call to Arms reward letters, tip jar payouts and dungeon prize stake refunds used to say they came from the player reading them. They now show Call to Arms, Tip Jar or Dungeon Prize Chest as the sender, the letter text drops the "received mail from" line, and they offer no Reply (921a6698d0).

Rendering

• Mac players saw stall awnings, paving and a light beam in Haven Ridge and Frogtown Market blow out into a flat white glare. The lighting pass and the bloom glow now discard a broken bright value instead of spreading it across the screen. Normal lighting is unchanged: a test render through the old and new code came out identical. Not on chaos yet (95a53d95ff, #10884).
• On Mac, thin cloth and wood seen from behind was lit as if you were looking at its other side. Standing in front of a red and white striped market stall, the underside of the awning looked brightly sunlit from below. The Mac shaders now flip the surface direction on the far side the same way the Windows ones do, so the underside sits in shade. Doors, shutters and building trim seen from behind are lit correctly too. Windows is unchanged. Not on chaos yet (6389ba1d10, #11355).

Movement

• A character wedged inside a rock or wall came back inside it on every login, unable to move or jump. A login whose saved spot is inside solid scenery now starts at the zone entrance, and /stuck no longer hops you into another rock nearby. Not on chaos yet (a6b2ef1f55, #10880).

Vendors

• When an item was listed on a player vendor is now shown only to the vendor's owner, the player who listed it, and GMs. Other shoppers no longer get a Date column on the vendor's Buy and Sell tabs or in the Exchange, and the server no longer sends them the date at all. Vendor Listings in Zone dropped its Time column for the same reason. Your own dates still show on My Listings and My Orders.
• Vendor search can now filter by durability. The stat picker has a Durability row (the second number of "Durability: 30/80", the limit a repair restores) and a Current Durability row, each with a minimum, so worn-out 15/15 listings can be left out. The old row for the durability bonus effect now reads Maximum Durability Bonus. Never-damaged items used to count as 0 durability in the search index; they now count as full. Not on chaos until the search service is redeployed. (b0bd887556)
• Queued the vendor search durability rollout (index field, search service and indexer redeploy) for the next chaos deploy.
• Restocking a player vendor now adds to the listing you already have. Dragging more of a listed item onto the vendor opens Restock Your Listing with "Add to your listing of N" ticked, so the stack grows instead of a second row appearing. Untick it to list a separate lot. A stack sold whole opens on its old price scaled up; one sold individually keeps its price each. (e2a02d3a7d, #10229)

Localization

• Added the English source records for 106 recently added interface strings, so the translation pass can reach them (c54b2be087).

Overworld

• In single player offline, the Castle Atos tile on the overworld map shows its name, summary and Enter Area button again. It had been hidden offline while pressing E still entered the castle (b531d1cc6e, #10843).

Performance

• Grunvald Shardfall no longer drops to single-digit frame rates when you face west. The thousands of dry grass tufts along the west edge of the zone were drawn as full models out to 225 metres, including the ones hidden behind the cliffs, and each one cost two passes. They now switch to their distant version from 50 metres, which cut the draw work facing west from about 1,930 set-pass calls to about 430 with no visible change.
• Water splash and ripple effects now reuse their particle copies when a character steps back into the water, instead of making a new pair on every waterline crossing. Measured cost per crossing went from 0.30 ms to 0.007 ms, which matters along shorelines where the waterline is crossed almost every step.
• New Render Scale video setting for slower graphics cards: the 3D world can be drawn at 85%, 75%, 67% or 50% of the screen resolution and stretched back to full size, while menus, chat, nameplates and combat numbers stay at full sharpness. At 50% the world draws a quarter of the pixels.
• The stretch uses a port of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0, an edge-aware upscale followed by a sharpening pass, with plain bilinear as the cheaper choice under the new Upscaling setting. New installs on very low-end graphics chips start at 50%; existing players stay at 100% until they change it.

Tools

• The live tunables page now lists the two Rend switches added earlier today (the aimed-at enemy first, and the bleed waiting for the hit roll). They were already working in game but missing from the page, and the page's own test caught it.
• Offline play: setcharacterpooledxp now raises lifetime earned experience to back the new pool, as the online server already did. Before, setallskilllevels after a pool set was refused by the offline conservation check and the skills rolled back to their saved values. Offline addxp for producer experience also measured its change against adventurer experience; fixed.
• Offline play: setcharacterpooledxp, addxp and the tester Grant XP now write lifetime earned experience straight to the local save. They used to go through the regular experience call, which refuses any change over 10 million, so large amounts were dropped and setallskilllevels was still refused afterwards.

World

• The narrow crack between a boulder and the zone edge by the bear and wolf cave in South Majestic Forest, where a player got wedged and could not move or jump, is closed off. Not on chaos yet (eea28288dd, #10880).

Banking

• Fixed offline play refusing deposits into the bank of the town the player is standing in. Castle Atos counts as a player-owned town, and offline those banks are shown as withdraw-only, which wrongly included the one you were at. Other offline town banks are unchanged. (#10845)

Crown Shop

• The Horse Decoration Pet (Choose One) description in the Crown Shop said "horf" four times where it meant horse. It now reads horse and horses, and the Italian and Japanese translations that copied the word are fixed too (8aaca94b10, #11358).

NPCs

• Player-written custom NPC dialogue can now ask for a typed answer: an Ink choice that starts with @type gets no button, and the player has to type one of its answers in a text box to take it, with an optional @wrong choice for anything else typed. Requested by Patosh. (94696fce77)

Art

• Vikland's large banana leaf plants draw as solid, shaded foliage again, after showing up bright yellow-green and half see-through with pale boxes around every leaf. The Unity 6 importer migration in June had lost the link from 42 older models to their own materials; the same repair puts the leafy look back on the Billboard Foliage bushes, the Ambient-Occlusion palms, bamboo, banyans, maples, mimosas, sycamores and willows, and a few weapon and spell-effect models (75d8d5d7ac, #11390).

Dev Portal

• Player Reputation page added to the staff portal. Moderators can give an account a standing (Watch, Warned, Probation, Restricted), keep dated notes with chat flags attached as evidence, and see that player's chat flags, reports and staff actions on one timeline. Chat flags are now kept past the 14 days the logs hold. A review queue lists accounts with a serious flag, a run of flags, or reports from three or more players. Standing carries over only to alts a reviewer has confirmed. Not deployed yet.

Economy

• Music merchants now sell Blank Wax Cylinders, which were craft-only before (Carpentry 30). Any player can now buy one to record a book onto.

Items

• Crafting and gathering tool tooltips show the tool's bonus. Tools of Prosperity read Tool Bonus: +10 under their durability line and the Founder's Artisan tools read +5; before this nothing showed what set a Prosperity tool apart from a plain one.
• Horned Spectacle Helm and Crested War Helm: two new heavy helms made from a bought helmet pack. Each has a male and a female version fitted to that head shape, so the nose guard sits in front of the nose and the back covers the skull on both. Plate Helm stats; for now testers create them with the tester tools, and a merchant or recipe comes later. (4b194901a7)

NPC Voices

• Invigilatus in Vikland and the Pale Ones of Vikland, the Grusk factory and Spindelskog were cast on women's voices, though every one of them is a man. Their conversation records had no gender set, so casting drew from the male and female voices alike. They are now recast on two gravelly male voices, with 185 lines recorded. Players will hear the change once the new clips are published (d80194e31a, #11391).

Tools

• Dev console: arrowing to a history or autocomplete entry and pressing Return now puts that entry in the command line, the same as Tab. Before, Return ran the half-typed text and cleared the line. A second Return runs the entry.

Vendors

• Player vendor owners can choose their vendor's voice. Right-click the vendor and choose Change Voice... to pick from five voices that match its look, or go back to Default. A vendor with no voice set now gets one of the five at random, so a street of vendors no longer all sounds the same. Requested by phil (e996ed489f, #11250).

Chat

• Players can take back their last chat message. For two minutes after sending a line to Universe, Trade, Nobles, Roleplay, guild, town or party chat, an Unsend button shows over the corner of the chat log; clicking it, or typing /unsend, removes the line from everyone's chat. Only the most recent line can be taken back, once. Local chat, emotes and whispers are not covered.

Infrastructure

• The log server now keeps six weeks of logs instead of two. Since October 1 it takes in about 2.3 GB of logs a day, about fifteen times September's rate, so six weeks comes to roughly 100 GB of the 420 GB it has free. The health page also gained a log server disk check that warns at 70% full, well before a full disk could stop logging.

Towns

• Ivory Stronghold has its desert entrance beside Oasis on the Novia overworld again. A later save of the overworld had restored the old island over the move, so nobody could enter or discover the town, and it was missing from the Teleport to Zone Scroll list and the world map's Find town. The siege camps for Astoria, Mount Midir and Erak were tied to old town ids and now show during a siege.

Conversation Studio

• The Conversation Studio condition editor now always shows the raw expression field under its Advanced label, instead of hiding it behind a collapse triangle.
• The Conversation Studio action editor now always shows the raw action strings field under its Advanced label, instead of hiding it behind a collapse triangle.

Client

• Discord now shows "Playing Shroud of the Avatar" for players on the stand-alone launcher. Discord only recognised the game by its old program name, so it appeared only for Steam launches. The client now reports itself to the Discord app with the area you are in and a session timer, and Options > Multiplayer has two new toggles to hide the whole status or just the area. The character name is never shown. Reported through the Oracle. (986db9ee3c)

Editor Tools

• The Journal Studio entry in the Catnip Games menu now sits directly under Conversation Studio.

Gathering

• After a node that ran any Meticulous Collection bonus passes, chat now prints a second line with the bonus pulls you got out of the most your character can get, how many missed swings paid nothing, and whether the chain was full or ended on a failed roll. When your Meticulous Collection chance is what held the limit down, the line names your chance and the chance the full 11 needs. Requested by Janzik and Blorius vonHeldenburg.

Mounts

• Built the Supernatural Umbrella, the mount with no mount: hold the open umbrella and you lift about 14 inches off the ground and travel at horse speed, tilting as one piece into the direction you are heading. It is a held item rather than a summoned animal, so equipping it is the summon and taking it out of your hand is the dismount. A hit knocks you back to the ground for three seconds.
• The umbrella mount is not available to players and will not be until it is approved. It is registered in no store, no loot table, no recipe and no spell, and the float only works on a developer account, so there are two separate reasons a player cannot ride it. The rider pose it uses is still a placeholder standing idle; the authored float animation is the next piece of work.
• The dev mount chest now rolls the Supernatural Umbrella alongside the horses, stags and foals, so testing it no longer means creating one by name. That chest is a GM tool rather than world loot, and the umbrella is still not something a player can obtain or use.
• The Supernatural Umbrella has its look: the ornate umbrella model, recoloured to a dark purple-leaning wine canopy with cool silver scrollwork instead of the brown and gold it ships in. The colours come from the dye channels the ornate dyeable umbrella already uses, on a material of the mount's own, so the Ornate and Clockwork umbrellas players own are untouched.
• Mounts now bank through the turn itself. The lean measured the sideways push a rider feels, and in a turn the rider turns with it, so the curve cancelled out: steering with the right mouse button held leaned hard because the body faces the camera while you slide sideways, while the same corner taken on A or D barely leaned and W+A leaned not at all once you were under way. The turn now contributes its own lean, so every way of steering the same corner banks the same. Turning on the spot still leans nothing.
• Rode the new mount bank and kept it. Worth knowing where it shows: on a horse or panther, A and D turn the animal, so the turn was always visible and the change firms it up. The umbrella mount strafes instead, stepping sideways with no turn, which is where the lean reads most clearly.
• The umbrella mount now leads with the umbrella. The arm holding it tilts toward the direction you ask for on the frame the key goes down, while the body is still coming up to speed behind it, so the umbrella reads as the thing pulling you along rather than something you happen to be carrying.
• Floating under the umbrella has a sound now: a light wind that comes up as you gather speed and falls away as you coast to a stop. Hovering in place is silent. It plays from the umbrella itself, so another floating player's wind comes from where they are.
• The floating rider's legs hang now instead of standing in mid-air. No new animation was made for it: the float borrows the airborne part of the jump, which already has the legs off the ground and loops.
• Tried the jump's airborne pose on the floating umbrella rider to get the legs hanging, and put it straight back: with no jump arc under it the pose reads as an animation error rather than as floating. The rider stands upright in mid-air again until a float animation exists.
• The umbrella's wind could not be heard in play. Four things were wrong at once: the level was set for background ambience, it only reached full volume above mount speed, it faded from two metres away while the camera sits further back than that, and it followed the movement system's target speed rather than how fast the rider was actually going. All four fixed, and the client log now says so when the sound cannot be found at all.
• The umbrella wind fades out now instead of stopping dead. It followed the rider's speed directly, and speed collapses in about a tenth of a second when you let go of the keys, so the sound cut off like a switch. It has an envelope now: quick to come up, slow to die away.
• Kept one thing as it was: putting the umbrella away cuts its wind immediately rather than fading it. The sound belongs to the umbrella, so it leaves when the umbrella does.
• Brought the umbrella mount's plan up to date with where the work actually stands: what landed in which commit, what was verified in the editor, which decisions were the owner's and which were made on the way, and why the plan stays In Progress even after a build carries it.

Call to Arms

• A Call to Arms can now pay two sets of rewards: one for the players who take part, and one for everyone else. The second set is a blessing that covers the whole realm, and an item mailed to every player who is in the world when the call is answered and did not earn the participants' item. Both pay only if the realm makes the goal. Game masters set them in a new "For everyone else" section on the Call to Arms page, and the in-game window lists them under the same heading. Not on chaos yet.
• Daily Kills page added to the admin portal beside Call to Arms. It shows how many creatures of each family players killed per day over the last 7, 14, 30 or 90 days, from the kill log the leaderboards already count (history from Sep 7): a chart of the busiest families, a sortable table of all of them with the daily average and best day, a per-creature breakdown when you click a family, a CSV download, and the kill calls that ran in the range. Trolls, for example, averaged 38 a day over the last 30 days and hit 608 on the day of the Oct 4 troll call.

Front End

• The main menu background is now the new Shroud of the Avatar banner, replacing the Rebirth of Chaos art. The original title art still burns away to reveal it when the game starts.

Inventory

• Fixed the backpack showing an empty list after a teleport or zone change until the filter was switched away from All Items and back. It now redraws on its own once the new zone loads (#10943, 83cdd5c393).
• Fixed a zone-in that could leave a very large backpack partly loaded for the whole session. If the loading screen gave up while the bags inside the backpack were still arriving, those bags stayed empty until the next full logout, so the weight dropped and whole bags looked lost. The items were never gone from the server. A slow backpack that is still arriving now counts as progress on the loading screen, and any zone-in after an incomplete read loads the whole backpack again (98ff2e5d21).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-04 is up: Sunday's pass on the dragons gave them an underbelly that crushes, a Wing Gust that actually throws you, and a brood of dragon wrasses that latch on and drain anyone standing still. Ground-targeted spells stopped being asked whether you could walk to the spot and started being asked whether you can see it. The team also built the whole Recruit a Friend program in a day and left it switched off, taught the Mac launcher to update itself, and found a damage formula that had been doubled into dealing nothing. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

World

• Swimmers in the deep parts of the Battle of Solace Bridge river now float with the head at the surface. Three of the river's water volumes sat 0.3 m below the drawn water, and the stretch below the waterfall sat flat under a river that climbs 0.8 m, so a swimmer's head ended up 0.65 m under. The volumes now match the river (head within about 0.1 m of the surface at the reported spots). (11b3b58faf, #10935)

Combat

• The sheathe key now refuses while any pet, companion or summon of yours is fighting, with the reason shown on screen. Before, a fighting companion let the weapon go away and then drew it again a moment later, which looked like Auto-Attack ignoring its setting. Reported by Sephald.
• Fixed Courage Club opponents that started a round inside a wall or a door where nothing could hit them, or out on the arena floor before their door had opened. Each round now places its opponents after its door has sealed the doorway, and the arena doors block a narrower strip, so every opponent stands in its own room until the door slides up. Creatures anywhere that blink to close distance now only blink toward a spot they could walk to in a straight line, so none blink through a closed door or a wall. Reported by Jumentum. (2195e64580, #10940)
• Fixed Stone Fist's stun on creatures. The Stunned icon appeared on the enemy and vanished a moment later while it kept fighting, every time in the Obsidian Panopticon; the stun now holds for its full length. Ice Fist's slow and Ground Pound's stun on the second and later creatures it catches were fixed the same way (#10925).

Community

• Filed 5 items to the tracker from a forum sweep: per-lot Player Owned Town permissions, hiding the crafting window inventory panel, an Auto Attack bug where disabling it in settings doesn't stop the weapon re-drawing, a Moonshadow-to-Novia boat dropping players at the wrong spot, and Resolute Courage Club arena enemies spawning inside walls.

Deploy

• Chaos server restarts now count down in game. Players online get an Admin chat line at 10, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 minutes before the restart, then a final notice; the countdown starts once the new server build is already on the host, so the minutes are real. It replaces the single "restart in a few minutes" warning and the hand-sent 10-minute notice. An aborted update tells players the restart is cancelled.

Housing

• "Only at night" lights now switch on half a game hour before Evening (8:00 PM) and go out half a game hour after Dawn (about 3:42 AM), instead of exactly at the period change. Requested by Barugon. (22103f03c1, #10929)
• The Unclaim Lot confirmation now says that any house or basement on the lot is taken down, that their deeds and all decorations go to the local bank, and that nothing is kept in the Property Manager. It points to Move to Storage for moving a house. The message after unclaiming names the house and basement deeds and mentions the bank location filter. A tester had unclaimed a lot to move a Townhome and could not find it afterwards; the deeds were in the bank the whole time.
• The Property Manager no longer counts another player's stored house against your storage slots. A house you had left items in is listed so you can send those items to your bank, but it used to fill one of your own slots and count as used, so a town steward saw "35 / 6" with no free slot. Those houses now sit below your own in extra rows, and "Storage slots used" counts only your houses. (8ac7b780c2)

UI

• The crafting station window has a gear button in its title bar that opens options for that window only. Its first setting, Show Inventory Panel, hides the Your Inventory pane on the right and narrows the window. The choice is remembered between visits. Other windows can use the same gear for their own settings.

Books

• Started wax-cylinder recordings: a book read aloud and pressed onto a cylinder that plays on any phonograph. The narration service now takes a whole book, checks every passage against a book moderation policy, reads it in one of three voice tiers (the Lord British voice, the Inworld narrators, or Kokoro voices), and publishes it in ten-minute segments. Lord British recordings wait for a GM to read the text before any audio is made. Everything ships switched off.
• Built the rest of wax-cylinder recordings, still switched off: a Blank Wax Cylinder (Carpentry), a Record onto a Wax Cylinder entry on a book's item menu with a price check before anything is paid, Press a Copy on a recorded cylinder, and phonographs that play a recorded book chapter by chapter, joining late listeners at the right place. Lord British recordings go to a Game Master review queue on the moderation page before any audio is made or any Crowns are taken.

Testing

• Tester-filed bugs on the tracker now move from New to Ready once they have been answered and assigned, so New only lists reports nobody has read yet. The 26 answered bugs that had been sitting in New were moved, and three older reports from July and August that the nightly triage had been skipping were answered (reported by Elene Sali).

World

• Leaving Moonshadow by boat, wagon or on foot now lands you beside Moonshadow on the world map. Before, it put you across the river in front of New Crafters Town. Requested by SammiX. (8f06f79096, #10939)

Audio

• Town NPCs that a town has renamed, such as a banker or fishing merchant given its own name, said the line where they introduce themselves with no voice, because voice clips only existed for their default names. The voice tools can now collect the names towns have chosen and record each one in that NPC's existing voice. The recording pass for names already in use is next (9e104234d4, #10918).
• Renamed town NPCs now say their names out loud. Every banker, guard, merchant and other town NPC that a player town has given its own name now speaks that name in its usual voice: 1,668 new voice clips across 32 voices, including Haven Ridge's fishing merchant William Dance from the report. The same pass recorded three town lines that had been silent since earlier text changes, two Town Crier greetings and a banker line (8aaa2fdfde, #10918).

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains treasure maps: reading the map, the lemon trick for the hidden clue, digging with a shovel and /dig, the ambush and chest that follow, combining map pieces, and where maps drop. Her player-owned town answers moved into their own guide (9e223a5c16, #10923).
• The Oracle now explains how to send unspent experience to another character on your account: the character sheet's XP tab, the 250 Gold Crown price, why the sender's level drops, and why the Account Pool from the login bonus cannot be sent (#10962).
• The Oracle learned about forty answers from questions players asked her over the weekend that she could not answer: Ankh Resurrection Delay, Pattern Removers, Guild Chapter House lots, storage in a first house, ship houses with a working gangplank, Suutak's Bluster and Ring of the Deep Woods drops, making cloth (asked in Portuguese), Meticulous Collection chance by skill level, armor and spell fizzle, and what the gold star beside a name means. She also now says plainly when asked about things that do not exist, such as Unholy Water or a Ring of the Mound. They go live with the next chaos build (bcb6f5947f, #10968).
• The Oracle can now answer questions about fishing finds: what each kind of water can bring up besides fish, the twelve items that can only be fished up, and which ones need night or a full moon.

Housing

• Decorations set on top of a chest, cabinet or other furniture that opens show their own name and the pick-up cursor again, and can be right-clicked and picked up from there. Since mid-August the hover check walked from the item up to the furniture it rested on, so a mug or a pile of coins on a Small Dark Cabinet named the cabinet instead. The check now stops at the item itself (#10919).
• Added a DbTool repair that turns a house its owner unclaimed back into a Property Manager entry with every decoration and chest where it stood, then used it to restore one player's Tortuga house and basement (319 items) after an Unclaim Lot banked them as loose items (#10926).
• The game server can now send a lot its owner unclaims into their Property Manager with the house, basement and decorations still arranged, the way an eviction or expiry already does, whenever they have a free storage slot for each level. A full Property Manager still sends everything to the bank. It ships switched off until the unclaim prompt that explains it is in the same build (#10926).

UI

• The note under Skip the Logout Countdown in Options > Interface now starts "When ticked," and names the Quit and Exit to Menu buttons. It sits indented and dimmed under its checkbox and shows as the checkbox tooltip, after a player read the old full-width line as a rule with no setting attached (#10922, 2966412182).
• Added a World Events window that lists the Message of the Day, the realm-wide bonuses running now with the time each has left (Light of the Eight and other celebrations, Call to Arms blessings, experience events, Tamer's Grace, the fishing bonus towns), the current Call to Arms, and the events and contests scheduled for the next day. It opens once at login by default (Show World Events at Login in Options, or the checkbox in the window), from the Open a Window menu, or with /events. Requested through the Oracle (1596a06bf9, #10930).

Crafting

• Crafted instruments now show their quality on the tooltip as a grade and a percent (Crude, Plain, Fine, Superior, Exquisite), so two instruments from the same crafter can be told apart. An exceptional instrument craft now gets the same Exceptional bonus as other gear: +50 maximum durability and +1 to its name. Reported by Joe Z (85ff2d1fbe, #10934).
• A successful instrument masterwork now costs maximum durability like a weapon masterwork: 10 for most effects, 15 for the bard mastery one. They had been the only masterworks with no cost. The Enchantment Failure and Masterwork Failure lines on every item tooltip no longer show a stray box character (85ff2d1fbe).

Sieges

• Fixed the Cabalist in a besieged player-owned town getting stuck on the lot his shrine stands on. A player town's shrine is a decoration on someone's lot, and his spot was the middle of that lot, where the town's pathing has a hole, so every time he gave up on a chase he was put back on the lot out of everyone's reach. He now stands in the street at the edge of the lot, and the spot is checked again every few seconds for the whole siege, which also corrects a siege that is already running. Reported on Fastus in Avallon (#10245).
• The Cabalist walks into a besieged town from one of its exits in more towns. When the exit picked for him sat past the edge of the town's walkable ground, he started the siege already standing at the shrine, which about half of the sieges over the last two weeks did. He now tries each exit in turn before falling back to the shrine (#10245).

Call to Arms

• Added placement prizes to Call to Arms. A game master can now give the top finishers extra or different items: first place only, first, second and third each with their own prize, the top ten, or any mix of place ranges. A placement prize either replaces the normal reward for those places or comes as well, and a tie for a place goes to whoever reached that amount first.
• Every item a Call to Arms mails, the normal reward and the placement prizes, now arrives bound to the player who earned it. It cannot be traded, mailed on or listed on a player vendor, and it can still be sold to an NPC merchant. Placed players get a line in the reward letter saying where they finished.
• Added contest calls to Call to Arms. Instead of the whole realm working toward one total, each player counts for themselves, and the first player to reach the number wins and ends the call for everyone. If time runs out first, whoever has the most wins. The winner is named on the world events channel and in the Call to Arms window, and takes first place for any placement prizes.
• During a contest the line under the compass and the bar in the Call to Arms window follow the leading player. A close finish is decided by when each player made their last kill, catch or craft, not by which server reported it first.

Combat

• Crowd-control skills used on another player train again. Sap in a duel gave no skill experience and printed "You hit nothing!" because the stun or mesmerize waits for the target's own client to confirm it; a passed roll now counts as a use. Stun, root and mesmerize skills on players were affected the same way. Reported by Hamberglar.

Proposals

• The fishing proposals page now marks three more cards Built: S3 (the Neon Tetra bites in fresh and fetid water while the moon is new or a crescent, so Complete Angler can be finished), S7 (Fleta's fishing quest is open again, and the guide book and loading tips teach the hook and the fight) and S8 (a High Contrast reel meter, a splash when a fish lands, and a hint that names your reel key). None of the three is on the test shard yet. The proposals index now counts 147 built cards across all pages, up from a stale 83.

Images

NPC Voices

• Two catalogue voices labelled male (median pitch around 215 Hz, as high as our female voices) were re-cast off every NPC that used them, after a player in Owl's Head heard a male vendor speak in a woman's voice. That covers 30 casts, including Owl's Head's house deed and decorations sellers and the shared male banker, deed seller, home merchant and public vendor. The casting builder now also keeps goblin and villain voices and the highest male voices off ordinary townsfolk. The new voices are live on chaos.

Voice

• The catchphrase voice service can speak a phrase in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese or Japanese in any of the 134 voices, using Inworld's TTS-2 model and its language setting. English phrases keep the model and recording they always had, and the moderation check is told which language it is reading (a470d28a68, #6794).
• The Catchphrases window has a Language dropdown under New Catchphrase. Any voice can speak a new phrase in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese or Japanese for the same price as English, Preview plays the voice in the chosen language, and the phrase list shows each phrase's language beside its voice. Requested by Ythak DeThartas (336321ae53, #6794).

Fishing

• Fishing hotspots: a cast into the middle of the ripples adds up to 15 points of bite chance on each bob, fading to nothing at the edge of the 2 m of ripples you can see. Before, the bonus ran the other way over a 1 m circle. Every bait now keeps the scene's normal catch in the ripples, where Red Worm used to get only trout and junk armor, and the aim marker reads "Ripples here. Fish bite faster." The Ancient Golden Necklace, which only came from the old ripple list, can now be fished up anywhere about as rarely as the Ancient Golden Ring (79580667f2, #10270).

Tools

• Added an Events page to the dev portal where game masters schedule one-off or repeating events and contests with a place and a description. Game servers read the schedule every minute and show players anything running now or starting within a day in the World Events window (1596a06bf9, #10930).
• The Player-Owned Town admin panel now accepts a character name when setting a town governor. Towns moved to a new template also stop appearing under their old location.

Gathering

• Water sources placed on a lot (wells, fountains, basins) gave no water at all: the first try broke the source and every retry failed until the scene reloaded. Fixed, along with a rare jukebox-on-a-lot startup failure from the same cause (12c900c8e3).

Items

• An equipped instrument and the weapon and shield in your hands now take turns giving their stat bonuses: the instrument counts only while it is out, and the hand items only while it is put away. Before, an enchanted instrument stacked its stats on top of an enchanted weapon for any character (reported by Vesper). Tooltips carry a note under the bonus lines. (7f2597b158, #10989)

Tools

• The harvesting and fishing telemetry lines now record what each node or cast paid: items and producer experience per harvest, experience per fishing cast, and how many seconds each took. This lets the mini-game and the opt-out be compared on reward per minute as well as per node (415c06fa44).
• New Mini-game Metrics page on the dev portal for admins. It sets the harvesting swing meter and the fishing reel meter against the opt-out: how many nodes and casts use each, bonus pulls, catch rate, trophy tiers, items, fish and experience per node, per cast and per minute, how chains and casts end, and the same split by gathering skill and skill level. Items, experience and time fill in once a client build with the new telemetry is on the test shard (e6257f3beb, a5ed338923, 6a006cb9f0).

Loading

• Entering a busy player town on a slower computer no longer fails while the town is still loading. The game used to stop waiting for your character after 90 seconds, then leave the loading screen up for about three more minutes before sending you to the overworld. It now waits as long as the town keeps making progress, and if loading really stalls the overworld fallback happens within seconds (1d7dcd6927).

Travel

• Teleport to Zone sorts usefully by Tier and by Episode. Tier lists tiered zones first in either direction with tierless towns and overworld last, Episode groups each episode by tier, names break ties A to Z, and zones you cannot reach keep their place instead of jumping to the top. The window remembers your sort per character. Requested through the in-game Oracle (cf496c7e30, #10924).

Fishing

• Fishing deep dive S2 is built: two build checks now catch a fishing bait the game accepts but that cannot start a cast, hold the working-bait count at the twelve the guides list, and fail if any shop, loot list, recipe or store ever offers one of the fourteen baits that cannot cast. A census of the 158 catch lists found 91 fished and 67 unused (PvP salt lists, set-aside baits, baseline tiers); each unused one is now archived by name until its fate is decided (0db8f8d3a4).
• Fishing deep dive S5 is built, differently than proposed: Fishing Critical now works. Each cast has that chance to land an ordinary fish as two, decided before the fight, so a lost fight loses both. Trophy fish, junk and chests are never doubled. The Heavy Iron (5%) and Silver (3%) fishing rod engravings used to cost durability for a stat that did nothing; they and the four reward rods that carry it keep their tooltips (84d8481d30, 7c576bd69c).

Towns

• Retired player towns such as Brittany Fort can no longer be entered through an old link. Before, the trip loaded a bare town template with no buildings. The server now turns the trip away, and vendor and lot teleports refuse before they use up a scroll. A new check confirms that every listed town's layout exists in its template, including towns with no overworld tile.
• Astoria moved up a size tier from Village to Crossroads Village, raising its plot budget from 25,200 to 33,600 square feet.
• Changing a player-owned town's governor no longer removes the town's stewards and residents. Only the new governor's own role entry is dropped. A full town eviction still clears all roles.
• The town map-move script can now bank whatever is still placed in a town's old location to its owners, for when the owner can no longer get there to pick it up. Ivory Stronghold's move to the desert map was held up by two lots placed after the move was scheduled, and this clears them.
• Ivory Stronghold finished its move to the desert map beside Oasis. The two lots its governor claimed on the old island after the move was scheduled were cleared from there: both houses went back to magic-mover storage with their decorations in place, and the deeds and lot markers went to the governor's bank.

Localization

• About 390 lines of recent English text are now translated into all eight languages: new window and system text, skill descriptions, the Envoy title, the /bug loading tip and the player-owned town help. Every line passed the markup check on the first pass, and German quotes and Chinese punctuation were moved to the style each language already uses (f8ffea864f, #11062).
• Found that adding a conversation keyword can move the translation keys of lines that never contain it, because the game's keyword sort breaks ties unpredictably; the check before adding one and the repair after are now written up for the translation pipeline.

Fishing

• Fishing brings up more than fish and old armor now. Each water has its own rare finds: rusty kitchenware, old boots, bottles, lanterns, goblets, old rings and necklaces and unrefined gems, plus twelve new items you can only get with a rod. Finds land with no reel fight, and fish are still nearly every catch. (d7d74b42b7)
• The new fishing finds: four Corked Letters to read in salt water, a Drowned Lantern and a night-only Wisp in a Jar from the swamps, a Petrified Ammonite from lava, a Lost Wedding Band, a Bog Torc, a Moon Pearl that only bites under a full moon, a Barnacled Strongbox to open, and, very rarely, the Drowned King's Crown. Messages in bottles were requested by Hemswal The Descended, Arya Stoneheart, majoria70, Sonja and Hemnu Lightbringer; swamp lanterns by Mapper; lava finds by Weins201.

Offline

• Offline single-player saves are now backed up before anything can remove them. Load Game reads and checks a save file before it touches your characters; a damaged file used to wipe the current save and leave nothing. New Game, Delete Character and the first offline login after a game update each write a full backup to the Backups folder in SavedGames first, and refuse with a message if they cannot. If the game closes in the middle of a save change, the next start puts the save back. This is the groundwork for an Offline Character Manager that finds characters kept by older builds and the original game (#10983).
• New Offline Characters window, opened from Find My Offline Characters on the main menu. It finds single player saves anywhere on this computer: the original game client, test builds from before the Catnip Games update, Steam Proton and Wine on Linux, save files and backups. From there you can add a character to your current offline characters, save one character to a file to share with a friend, switch to a whole other save or backup, or back up on demand. Your save is backed up before anything changes it, an import is refused rather than overwriting anything, and gold, bank items and houses stay with the save they came from (#10983).

Release

• Fixed the Jenkins job seed, which stopped parsing after the new in-game restart countdown options were added and held up the chaos release. Logged as RF-74 in the release failure ledger.

Infra

• Moved the chat moderation model (gpt-oss-safeguard:20b) from the EPYC server's Tesla T4 back to the build server's RTX 3090, with the same tuning the T4 setup had: 16k context, a single request slot, a 4-thread CPU limit so it stays out of the way of builds, and a warm-up after every boot. The six policy boundary checks all passed at 0.7 to 2.7 seconds per message. Under moderation load the T4 had pushed the EPYC box's fans to over 20,000 RPM.

Ops

• Wrote a deploy runbook for build 308, the next chaos promote: patch notes go first, then the migration check, the Steam upload, two post-deploy town retemplates (Rampage Island and Astoria), the chat moderation switch to the new GPU host, and the side services that ride along. Also corrected an ops page that still described the old flip-first promote order.
• Build 308 went live on the chaos shard and on Steam. The 80-line patch notes went up at the switch-over, Astoria moved to its new forest map, and in-game chat moderation now runs on the build machine's GPU, so the older server's copy was shut down.
• Fixed the patch notes sync tool, which failed every time it was asked to upload a single build's notes.

Pets

• Pressing the sheathe key while a pet or companion is still fighting no longer opens a popup with an OK button. The refusal now shows only as a line in chat. Requested by Jupp.

Vendors

• The Item Sold letter now lists enchantment and masterwork failures on the sold item, with the max durability they cost, and shows the item's durability the way its tooltip does. A letter with no buyer name stored now skips that line instead of failing to open. Requested by Daxstalker.

Chat

• The chat moderator now removes insults aimed at another player on Universe, Trade and Noble, even when the line has no swearing or slur in it. Before this, a line like "you're an idiot if you think that's right" was allowed. Complaints about the game, a patch or a zone are still allowed, and so is calling yourself names (ba6afb18dd).
• Staff can now silence a player from the chat moderation page for 1 hour, 12 hours, a day, a week or until restored, and put repeat offenders on a stricter chat filter that also removes mild profanity, rude or mocking remarks, baiting and spam. Both apply on the player's next line without a relog. Before this, a silence set from the web portal only took effect after the player logged in again (ba6afb18dd, 90fa6507af).
• Added a Roleplay chat channel for in-character talk. It reaches every player on the shard like Universe, with the same rate limit and moderation, and has its own colour, a checkbox in chat tab options, an entry in the channel menu, and the /rp and /roleplay commands. The Universe tab shows it by default and the Main tab does not; existing tabs that showed Universe pick it up once on the first login after the update.

Creatures

• Wounded animals and humanoid enemies now run away about 3 times in 10 when they drop to a fifth of their health. Before, every one that could flee always ran, and some ran at half health; the half-health roll is gone. Children and fauns still always run, and wolves keep their own higher odds.
• The Ferocious Orange Pit Dragon at the bottom of The Rise now stays in the open middle of its pit. It used to walk along the pit walls with half its body inside them, squeeze out through the two doorways and chase players down the tunnels: the scene had a navigation mesh built for its size all along, and nothing held the dragon to it. Its run before it takes off is shorter too, so it takes off inside the pit, and it flies low enough to pass under the walkway that crosses above it. (12c33aee5d, a7cb0b8cb9, #11124)