Chris “Atos” Spears · Work Log

Audio

• The Aerie Rangers in Blood River Outskirts speak their "Aerie" answer again, and Phineas speaks his deed and poisoned-food lines. All three were reworded in September and their new recordings had never been uploaded. (#13113)
• Voice lines, catchphrases and voice previews now try once more when the connection to the voice server drops, instead of going silent after one attempt. Failed voice downloads are now reported to the team's logs, so an outage at one of the voice servers shows up across players (2eacff4058).
• The sound check that runs after each zone load now also reports a scene that asks for more sound voices than the game mixes at once. In a busy town that can leave footsteps and other effects silent while the looping sounds play on. This is the next lead on the near-silent town entries some players hear (7f5535b80d, #12469).
• The new "I could use more help" line quest givers say after a turn-in is voiced in all 196 NPC voices.

Crafting

• The Shrines of Sorcery, Necromancy, Gaiaism, Lunaism and Atenism now take the Uncommon ring of their school, as the Tempestry, Thaumaturgy and Theurgy shrines already did. They used to ask for a Red Dragon Egg, Dragon Skull, Pure Elemental Sand, Shadow Essence or Phoenix Talon. The Shrine of Chaos is unchanged because there is no Ring of Chaos. (2226ea8232, #13791)
• The Shroud of the Avatar can now be turned into Eternal Pattern: Shroud of the Avatar from its right-click menu. The cloak is used up, the pattern gives another cloak its look through Reshape Back Slot, and it cannot be traded. The Oracle still replaces a missing Shroud.

Localization

• Caught up the translation backlog in all nine languages: 2,142 new or changed lines each in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Japanese, and 1,782 in Ukrainian, covering the new loading tips, recent items, skill descriptions and interface text. A second reviewer read every new line and 292 were corrected.

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains that the Elder Producer title counts skills, not the Producer Level on the character sheet: any ten gathering, refining or crafting skills at 150 earn it, so a character at Producer Level 143 can hold it. The same answer covers Legendary Producer and the two Adventurer skill-count titles. (b44bd35e3e)
• The Oracle can now answer about eighty more questions players asked this week, including how to reach Port Graff, Eastmarch and Owl's Head, where satyrs are most common, the difference between Plate, Augmented Plate and Epic Plate armor, where to get coal and Corpse Wax, which blacksmiths and tailors sell recipes, town decorating, and how Recruit a Friend works.
• Questions sent to the developers' stream through the Oracle now always appear under the name of the character the player is on, checked by the game, and can no longer be sent from offline single-player mode.
• The Oracle learned what chaos build 325 changed: the Greater Agility blessing always wins over the plain one, the new Double Click to Equip option, the school ring each Shrine now takes, Copy to Offline Play, and the Ingot Mold that every ingot recipe now uses up.

Taming

• Collar Recovery now protects the Taming Collar on a failed tame against higher level creatures. The level the collar always survives went from 131 to 155 at skill 163 and from 155 to 181 at skill 200, which covers every creature that can be tamed (542306e1fe, #13790).
• Resurrect Creature no longer fails with "name not allowed" on a pet that already has a custom name. The name screen now checks only a name that changed, so older pet names stopped blocking the resurrect and the pet is no longer lost.

Gathering

• Blackblade Pass: a Tier 5 copper vein on the lower level shows up again. Since the Tier 5 ore swap two veins shared one identity and the game hid one of them.

Inventory

• Quick Deposit counts what the bags in your backpack hold toward a Keep When Depositing amount. A reagent bag holding the 150 Corpse Wax you keep now lets the loose Corpse Wax beside it go into the chest or bank (9b0aed040a, #13785).
• Inventory rows can now be starred. A star at the left of each row in the backpack, bank and chest windows adds the item to a new Favorites category, and the right-click menu has Add to Favorites and Remove from Favorites. A stack is starred by kind and anything that does not stack is starred one item at a time. Stars are kept per character, the search box answers is:favorite, merchants and vendors list starred kinds under Favorites too, and Show Favorites Column in the backpack options hides the stars. (#13878)
• The Hemlock Borer and Emerald Ash Borer have their own icons: a dark beetle with yellow spots for the pine borer and a metallic green beetle for the maple one. Both had always used the tree bark icon, so in a backpack or chest they looked like more bark (9da4f38239, #13937).

Pets

• A summoned Will-O-Wisp now glows larger and brighter the higher its level, so a strong summoners wisp is easier to pick out in a fight. It floats at the same height as before. (a9ff7ba5f6, #13786)

Combat

• In very large fights a character's own buffs and potions now keep showing to other players: once the effect limit is reached, an enemy effect on the character stops showing to others in their place. The full limit also no longer writes an error to the client log for every effect that lands.
• In the Tartarus maze horde, satyrs left standing out in the maze while players wait in the tower now head to the fight and stay there, and a satyr that wanders off is brought back to the fight. Before, many never arrived and players had to fetch them before a wave could end. This applies to every wave battle. (fbdef8be53, #13784)
• Xavara, the Fire Pillar, the fire elemental slain for Martella's fire summoning lesson, was grouped with bears. Elemental Slayer Damage now applies to her and Animal Slayer Damage no longer does (a6a306858a, #12952).
• Body Slam no longer swings the creature it hits around to face the player. The turn added on Oct 8 landed by a different amount each slam, so the party could not tell which side would be open. The creature now keeps its facing through the stun, and the same goes for Charge and Engage Opponent (2378f565d6).

Creatures

• The Spider Queen who nests in Spindelskog now has a name of her own, Vevmor, Spider Queen, so she is no longer taken for Xen Trohop of the Spectral Peaks. Her kill achievements, portrait trophies and Animal Lore line carry the new name in every language, and kills already counted still count.
• Pack wolves no longer freeze in a fight when they try to howl. The Rime Mother and Rime Sire at the Jotungrund den, and any pack alpha with a packmate near, stood beside the player without moving or biting because their Rallying Howl or Call the Pack never went off; the howl now lands and they fight on. The same fix covers Patriarch's Bellow, Call the Chosen, Call the Horde, Charnel Pulse and Death Wail (#13075, 58637875e1).
• The Relic Hunters of Lamech's Bazaar cast Mirror: a one-second cast that wraps them or their most hurt crewmate in a crystal shield for four seconds. While it is up, part of every direct hit on that pirate comes back at the attacker, or at a party member standing near them; damage over time is never sent back. The Privateers and the Plunderer Captain gained Cutlass Sweep, a spinning cut at everyone inside a ring drawn on the ground. Experience and loot are unchanged.
• The Myrkdraugr, Hollowmaw and the Charnel Glutton now pay portrait trophies at 1, 10 and 100 kills, in bronze, silver and gold frames like every other boss. Their "Slain" achievements used to unlock with no reward.
• Myrkdraugr's Heart, Hollowmaw's Heart and the Preserved Calcified Heart now have measured sizes, so they sit on tables and snap against other decorations.
• Charnel Pits now bubble and give off a poison haze.
• The creature audit now covers the zombie pass's 17 new creatures, which it had been skipping, and the boss roster lists the three zombie bosses with their levels.
• The Rime Mother and the Rime Sire at Jotungrund's Giant Bones hit harder: an ordinary bite went from about 206 to about 383 damage, and their special attacks rose with it. Their health is unchanged, so the fight takes as long as before.
• The banker's Trophies list now shows trophies only. The Zombie Slayer and Zombie Bane potion rewards no longer appear there as missing trophies once drunk, with a Replace button that could never work. The three zombie bosses' achievements are now labelled (Zombie), like every other boss's family.
• Creatures and NPCs settle into and out of their fighting stance over a quarter second instead of snapping their whole pose in one frame. Noble Stags in Tanglemire showed it most, since they switch stance whenever someone walks past (cecbe68ee9, #13074).
• The Charnel Glutton is a tougher fight: every Glutton has half again the health and gives half again the experience, and when badly hurt it flies into a minute-long fury that hits harder and attacks and moves faster.

Images

Graphics

• Graphics cards with 8 GB of video memory or less now keep 10% less of it for textures, leaving more room for everything else. An 8 GB card goes from 3840 MB to 3456 MB and a 6 GB card from 2048 MB to 1843 MB. Larger cards, Macs and the Steam Deck are unchanged.

Login

• The login form's Cancel button now stops a login that is still connecting and returns to the title menu; before, the click did nothing. A held Enter key on the screens after a cancelled login also no longer presses the hidden Cancel of the old Connecting message.

UI

• The party list now names a player dungeon when a party member is inside one. It used to label every player dungeon as a basement, reading "Location: Avallon (Basement)". It now reads "Avallon (Player Dungeon)", and shows the dungeon's own name when its owner has named it and you are in the same town (1749b32dd0, #13765).
• In the immersive 3D book, blank pages now use the same light paper as the pages with text. The blank last page and the pages flying past on a Contents jump used to come up a darker orange, and the spread you jump away from now keeps its text until its page turns. Reported by Elene Sali (#13764).
• The experience lines at the foot of the Skills window are colour coded to match the character sheet. Level captions, XP captions and the Today line each have their own colour, and level numbers and experience figures each have one of their own (62a99ffd73, #13706).
• Examining another player shows the schools they specialize in at the bottom of the Stats tab. It used to list your own specializations for whoever you examined. (50b4aab92c, #13066)
• Holding Ctrl over well-enchanted gear wraps its tooltip into a second column when the list runs out of height, so every enchantment and masterwork line stays on screen. The earlier column fix never took effect on real item text (2bbd3e697a, #13062).
• Options > Video has a new Disable Weather checkbox. It takes away the rain and snow, silences the rain and wind sounds, and stops thunder and lightning, while the sky keeps its clouds. The older Disable Weather On Low Performance checkbox now also silences those sounds and stops the lightning when it acts; before, it only hid the rain.
• Leave Guild no longer appears in the menu from your own character frame, your name in chat or the party frames, where one stray click could start it. It is still offered on your own row in the Social window Guild tab, with the same confirmation.

Docs

• Updated the team rules for quest content: removing, disabling or moving a quest step still needs a developer's direct sign-off, with no separate quest-owner approval step.

Housing

• In a player-owned town, the governor and stewards can set decorations down on the town's built docks, stone plazas and bridge decks again. These spots had been refusing every decoration with "Nothing beneath this item to rest on." since August, and the Lained main docks were where it was reported. (5ec5928176, #13788)
• A placed Practice Archery Target can be selected, moved and picked up again, on a lot or in a basement. Clicking it used to target the practice creature instead of the decoration. The plain Practice Dummy can now also be grabbed by its body as well as its base. (751f5bd609, #12897)
• Planting beds can no longer be placed with their frames inside another bed, with or without Alt. Snapped beds still meet frame to frame, and a bed can still be set on top of another. Beds already placed overlapping stay where they are, and one picked up can always be put back on its own spot. (7642a048bc, #12689)
• The Baron's Talking Mirror keeps its conversation open when another player arrived in the zone before its owner. In that case the chat still closed a few seconds after the mirror asked your name, every time, so it never learned it. The earlier fix only covered talking with close-ups turned off. (50dc48f7d7, #13880)
• A paid lot deed upgrade that is interrupted partway through is now finished on the next pass, and a deed upgrade that can no longer be applied is refunded exactly once.

Tools

• Unity Editor sharing: Claude sessions on the build machine now release the shared Unity Editor as soon as they finish a block of Unity work, and prepare everything else before taking it, so other sessions and the developer no longer wait on an Editor that sits reserved and unused.
• The guild site's test suite passes again: two inline styles from the town names change moved into the stylesheet, and four town tests now sign in a player from another guild, since owners' names on town pages are shown only to signed-in players.
• The tracker credit lookup used for work-log and patch-note credits now names nobody when an issue has no curated public name, rather than fall back to the account's tracker display name, which for game-login accounts is the account login.
• The release's report refresh step no longer prints a false item flag failure when the item catalog is behind the items it lists; it checks the item itself, as the deploy check does.

Combat

• Slows and holds now last as long on the Hard and Extreme versions of Lamech's Bazaar, Spindelskog and Myrkur as they do on Normal. The stronger monsters there used to shake them off at once, so Ice Field damaged the Extreme airship pirates without slowing them, and Hamstring and Root wore off the moment they landed. Damage and health on those versions are unchanged (7acbf01323, #13774).
• Blink cast while running sometimes spent its focus and started its cooldown while the character kept running. The spell checked the landing spot more strictly than the targeting circle did; both now use the same check, so a green circle is a spot Blink lands on, and a Blink that still cannot land says why in chat (2f986723af, #13135).
• Polar bears and wolves in their Winter Coat now take 30% less damage while the coat is up and their normal damage once it is gone. The coat used to stack its cut on itself for as long as it stayed up, so a bear fought for a minute or two took a quarter of every hit and kept that after the coat burned off. Obsidian Hide, the elemental mantles, Brittle, Scorched Coat and Exposed are fixed by the same change. Reported on Discord by The Spinok against Jotungrund polar bears. (6db69d621d, #13145)

PvP

• Confusion Resistance stacks from Chaotic Confusion now make the next Confusion less likely to land against strong casters too. Before, a well attuned caster landed every Confusion in PvP through three or five stacks. (5a290b59eb, #13781, #13780)

Client

• Four expected conditions from the chaos log triage no longer log as errors: a Steam account the account site will not link (#13821), the character-screen message check after a lost connection, which now also always moves the login on (#13822), a party loot roll that starts as the player teleports away (#13823), and a trade change that crosses a cancel (#13824).
• Four client log lines from the chaos error log were quieted or sharpened: a crystal puzzle resetting while you leave the scene, a lot door and chest state read that was already reported by its 20 second deadline, and an NPC conversation line that has no emote now log at the right level, with the reason (#13825, #13826, #13828).
• The watchdog that frees a lot container left checked out by a stuck transfer now names which part of the client leaked it, so the next occurrence points at its cause (#13827).
• Other players now see a seated character on the chair. Until now everyone nearby saw them sitting beside it while they saw themselves on the seat. Benches, stools, tavern seats and beds are covered too. (#13932)

Fishing

• You can fish from /sit on the ground now. The character turns to the water and stays seated through the cast, a movement key ends only the cast (a second press stands you up), and the rod stays in hand between casts. Bench and chair fishing works as before.

World

• The Teleport to Zone Scroll and the sextant now offer a Last Location choice in the Choose Destination window for any zone you have been in before. It puts you back where you stood when you last left that zone, and it has its own pin on the map. If you last left by walking out through the exit, it uses the entrance instead, facing into the zone. Following your party leader and the Teleport to Friend Scroll now arrive at the zone entrance when the leader or friend entered without one, where they used to put you at your own last spot in that zone, often deep inside Spindelskog or the Ruined Keep.
• The climbable rope marker is now a soft gold glow on the rope, vine or root itself. The ground ring it replaces was being mistaken for a stray decal, as at the airship rope in Lamech's Bazaar. Ropes still light up within about 20 meters, and Show Climbable Rope Markers still turns it off. (22e44fa6fa, #13903)

Creatures

• Small Wolf Spiders at the Kingsroad wolf den no longer appear inside a boulder: their spawn point was moved onto open ground, and creatures anywhere are no longer placed on the patch of ground inside a large rock when they spawn, return home or teleport (f3d21be5fc, #13762).
• Xen Trohop and the Spider Queen throw Silk Burst only once they are below 60% health again, and lay their Egg Clutch from the start of the fight. Two later kit additions had moved the health limit from Silk Burst onto Egg Clutch. (#13096)
• Three creature death bursts (the bear Shatter, the fire elementals' Ember Burst and the spiders' Venom Burst) no longer carry a 100 m minimum casting range they never used, and two rune checks in the Editor test suite now cover the Rallying Cry family and the humans' drinking-horn animation. (#13096)

Fishing

• A chum throw the server turns down (too soon, too close to another slick, the water already full) no longer marks the Chum stack as faulty, and the client log now names the refusal at info level instead of an unexplained error.

Images

Crafting

• An item a crafting station takes from a lot chest with Use lot storage now leaves that chest's window, so it can be dropped straight back in; before, it bounced back on every try until the chest was reopened. A partly taken stack in the chest also shows its lower count.

Lua Addons

• ShroudGetInventoryItems and ShroudGetEquipmentItems now give item names as plain text, like the other add-on text reads. Books, letters and sheet music had come through with underline markup ([u]The Cleansing Manifesto[/u]). The older ShroudGetInventory and ShroudGetEquipments name lists are plain too, and the add-on API is now version 44. (#13710)
• A Lua add-on variable declared without a value (local best) now starts as nil inside a for ... in loop. It used to hold the table the loop was going through, and a second name on the same line held the loop index, so add-on code checking if best then took the wrong branch. (7ac821351e, #13499)
• ShroudGetRecipe now answers every recipe ShroudGetKnownRecipes lists. It had returned nothing for 103 recipe book entries every character knows from the start, such as Combine Gem Fragments, Fracture Gem and the fish trophies, and ShroudOnCraftResults left out their recipe id. (#13692)

NPCs

• Townsfolk appear where they are standing when you arrive in a town. In Soltown the refugee camp children floated across the path to the field on every arrival, and Raymond ended up lying on top of his tent (#13776).
• Jopab, the Grusk Town Crier, answers his topics again. He loaded his catchphrase and mystery topics twice since 2026-10-08, which stopped him answering anything after his greeting. A new check now refuses any conversation that pulls in the same topic file twice. (d1ba296a73, #13876)

Community

• A Call to Arms producer experience blessing now raises the experience from harvesting crops, from mining, logging and skinning nodes, and from fishing. It used to reach only crafting, sowing and brewing, so a crop worth 800 experience still paid 800 during a 15% blessing instead of 920 (#13758).

Gathering

• The love letters on the ground in Necropolis Barrens for Hyuns Recover 5 Love Letters quest are now collected like quest items. Picking one up no longer starts the gathering swing meter, takes one pull, and pays no producer experience. Before, the loot window could list a letter followed by several Producer Experience rows. (#13725)

Quests

• Solace Bridge Outskirts: Captain Kinsey's first answer to "help" is now the main quest, and she mentions each side job (fishing for Fleta, gathering for Sedgewick and others) once instead of over and over. Players had taken those side jobs as the way to the free row lot deed and many stopped there. Fleta's and Sedgewick's journal tasks now read [Optional] in every language. Based on a report from a player who guides new characters to their first deed.
• On the Isle of Storms, Anaïs can now be talked to from anywhere she is visible. The area she appears in reached past her talking distance, so at its edge double-click and E did nothing, and stepping back and forth over it made her fade out and in again. The area is now round and inside her talking distance, and she stays a couple of seconds after you step out (#12252).
• Repeatable quests now show a green ! over the person you work them with whenever one is open to you, so a quest that can be done again no longer looks like any other. It covers 34 repeatable quests, including Corporal Heloise in Solace Bridge Outskirts, who keeps taking family heirlooms, Vinicius and his elven heirlooms, and the frost giant hunt in Jotungrund. A quest you have never done still shows the gold ! first, and the green one goes away while a daily or weekly waits for its reset. Requested by a player through the Oracle.
• After a player finishes a task, a quest giver with another task ready now adds "If you have time to spare, I could use more help." The word help links to their help topic, where the next task is offered. Givers who already ask in their own words, and givers with nothing left to give, say nothing extra.
• Private Fleta in Solace Bridge Outskirts now shows the gold ! while her fishing task can be taken, including after Captain Kinsey sends you to her. The same check found nine more givers whose task never showed a !: Sergeant Sedgewick for the iron ore and feathers steps, the Devotional caretakers in Ardoris, Resolute and Aerie for Visit Devotional Shrines, and Captain Burnes in Highvale Outskirts for Sever the Obsidian's Head. (2277a58e3e, #13871)
• Filmore in Solace Bridge Outskirts no longer gets his gold "!" back after the alpha wolf task is done.

Content

• Removed an unused copy of the Elemental Lord bark conversation (the Kiln boss keeps its own) and corrected the spelling of Suutak on the Well of Aldur boss fight object. Nothing changes in game.

Elementals

• The copper golem in Highvale Outskirts that Sven's ore quest sends players to no longer stuns everyone around it for 3 seconds with no warning. It now uses Tremor, the ground slam the wild earth golems use: a cast bar and a ring first, then a short knockdown that a jump avoids (7379efaf47, #12953).

Maps

• The Elad's Lighthouse map no longer draws a walled keep on the town's three Keep lots. An empty Keep lot showed stone walls and towers on the map while the lot itself was open grass. A fourth keep drawn on the north west plateau, where the town has no lot and no building, is gone as well. The lots still show their outlines.
• A player-owned town's map and minimap now pin its NPC buildings (bank, shops, crafting shop, tavern, stables, New You pavilion, moon tower) and the merchants, bankers and town guides placed there, each under its own name. A merchant's pin follows a rename and a moved building takes its pin along. (1f9d0992e4, #13877)

Towns

• Player towns that closed during the live years can no longer be entered as an empty copy of their map. A Recall Scroll bound to one now asks you to bind again and is not used up; 1,699 characters on the test shard were still bound to a closed town. Lot and vendor teleports to player towns newer than the game's town list, such as Haunted Keep of Solania, are no longer refused.

Voice

• The NPC voice map audit now shows, for each relayed-line voice entry, how many lines use it and whether those clips are on the CDN, so a catch-up publish can be judged without a hand check (974c608445, #13058).
• Fingers Slate, the Scavenger in Blood River Massacre, speaks his first-click line about the spare sword again (#12976). The same pass voiced 1,397 other recently reworded lines across 110 voices, mostly Soltown, Solania and Etceter townsfolk and their directions.

Fishing

• Chum slicks show their ripples as rings spreading over the water. Each ripple used to draw as a square block of white dots, so a slick looked covered in little grids. (0a6af95e5b, #12946)

Website

• Built the guild and town desk, switched off until the guild site goes out: a member's guild or town opens as a desktop over one of the game's loading-screen paintings, with its board, calendar, roster, chat, lots and pages in windows that move, resize and snap to half the screen, a bar showing who is online and the next event, and members' sticky notes on the shared desk. Phones keep the plain pages.
• Town chat can be read and answered from the website by a player-owned town's governor, stewards and residents under the same game rules as guild chat (built, switched off until it is deployed).
• The guild and town desk is switched on at play.catnipgames.net: members who open their guild or town on a computer land on their desk, with members' notes and town chat on the website switched on alongside it. Testers have a task for each (#13864, #13865, #13866).
• Guild and town desk: the desk, replying to chat from the website and asking the Oracle on the website became subscriber features. A member without a subscription keeps every other page and sees a note saying where to subscribe. The desk gained an Oracle window that answers like the Oracle in game, from the same hourly allowance, and takes reports and suggestions about the website (built and waiting to be switched on).
• Guild and town desk: the subscriber features and the desk's Oracle window were switched on. Reports filed from the Oracle window land in a new website category on the tracker, with the page, window size and browser attached.
• Guild and town pages no longer show Remove, rank and other change buttons to an account with admin access, which the game refuses from the website. Such accounts now see a note that their guild and town changes are made in game.
• Guild and town desk: a wallpaper chosen in Desk settings now shows on the desk at once and stays. The open desk used to put the old painting back within seconds. Start my desk afresh now closes every window and starts the desk again, as it says.
• Player screenshots that staff place on the website now stay up after they drop off the end of the 500-shot gallery feed. Before, the site took any approved shot older than the newest 500 off the page. The Community Hub now answers whether specific shots are still approved, and the site only takes a picture down when the hub says it was removed.
• Guild and town chat on the website shows an account with admin access a note to reply in game, where the reply box was. The game refuses chat sent from the website by such accounts, and the page used to report it as a mute.
• Rebuilt the guild and town website's Chat window like the game's own: tabs for Universe, Trade, your guild and each player-owned town you live in, a dot on any tab with new lines, and the box at the bottom for subscribers. Guild and town tabs take lines from subscribers; Universe and Trade are read only on the website. The explanations and the online list around the chat are gone. Not on the website yet (f5bbdc902d).
• The guild website's member list has a search box that matches names and ranks, and its column headings sort it. Every other list in a desk window (standings, applications, invitations) sorts by its headings as well, as those lists already did on the normal pages. Not on the website yet (0ba4e2f7e3).
• The guild website's tabbed Chat window (Universe, Trade, your guild and your towns) and the searchable, sortable member list are live. Universe and Trade are read only there; guild and town tabs take lines from subscribers.
• Rebuilt the guild and town Calendar as a full calendar: List, Week and Month views, a click on a day or a time (or a drag down the week) to add an event there, filters by source and tag, and the World Calendar's Calls to Arms, game master events, player events and Stronghold beside the community's own events, each source in its own colour. Members can now propose events, which only they and the officers see until an officer approves or declines them. Repeating events keep the same local time when the clocks change, and editing an event no longer moves it by the editor's time zone. Not on the website yet (2120e3f725).
• Universe and Trade stay read only on the guild website: players read both tabs and chat in their guild's and towns' tabs. The unreleased game server change that would have let the website post into Universe and Trade was withdrawn.
• The guild and town desk got two games, each in its own window: Flappy Bat, a bat flown between rock spires in an underground cave, and Hungry Wyvern, a wyvern steered to the eggs on a stone floor, one length longer with each egg and three points for a gold one. Each window lists the guild's or town's ten best runs by character name. Like the rest of the desk, they are for subscribers.
• Guild and town desks gained a Map window that holds the website's own world map, so everything the main map page shows is there too (fd76736d61). A map page opened by the desk draws without the site's header and footer, and only this site may frame it. Switched off until the next website and guild site deploys.
• The website's maps name who holds each lot for signed-in players, by the name on the lot's sign in game, in player-owned towns and the game's own towns: in a lot's popup, over the lots close up, and in a list under the map whose names move the map to the lot (bc48b03f01, 1990dd3a23, 52bdbc7956). A guild's members also see where their guild lives: a numbered pin by each place on the world maps and their lots outlined. A deed marked private in game keeps its holder's name off, and visitors who are not signed in see the maps as before. Switched off until the next website and guild site deploys.
• The websites guild and town lists gained buttons at the top that take a signed-in player straight to their own guild page and to each player-owned town they belong to.
• Tavern Trivia, a quiz game for the guild and town desk: rounds of ten multiple-choice questions about Shroud of the Avatar from a bank of 500 in 17 categories, from the story and the virtues to where each boss and master trainer can be found. A quick right answer scores more, the site checks every answer itself, and a round of all categories goes on the guild's or town's best list. Built and switched off until the next site update.
• Tavern Trivia gained a second set of 500 questions, about the Ultima games and Ultima Online: their story, virtues, people, towns, dungeons, magic and relics, and Ultima Online's cities, dungeons, bosses, skills, creatures and items. Players pick the set before a round, and each set keeps its own best list. Like the rest of the quiz, it is switched off until the next site update.

Elementals

• Read the elemental pass over its first two days on chaos build 324. No errors came from the new creatures, and players have beaten Experiment 0175 and the Binding Thralls. No elemental pays less experience per kill than before, and the level 130-150 elementals now pay up to twice what they did. Their damage sits on the target curve. The Grasping Tide keeps its current water elemental body. (2dc76a59d4, #12951)

Housing

• Large decorated lots such as castles no longer reload every decoration shortly after you arrive. When a lot was changed while you were away, the game used to rebuild the whole lot and move you to its front if you stood on it. It now updates only the decorations that changed and leaves you where you are. Lots you walk up to also load their decorations faster. (#12977)

Zombies

• Cleaned up zombie data. The Lepus Zombie Magna's base name now matches the name on its nameplate (it still read "Lepus Zombie Alpha" underneath, so the team's daily kill report could not place its kills). The Petrified Zombie's base faction is now Undead instead of the friendly shopper faction. An empty leftover zombie object was removed from Quel Shardfall.

Achievements

• Creatures in player dungeons, in player towns and from player-placed spawners no longer count toward Bestiary or boss achievements, leaderboards or prestige. They still give experience. Wild Fire Elementals now count toward Fire Elemental Hunter, which only player dungeon fire elementals moved before, and the chains only dungeon creatures could advance are hidden unless a character already has progress on them. (#12955)
• Slayer of Legends: a new Bosses achievement for defeating every boss in the game, 71 of them, with seasonal bosses left out. A kill counts for every party member near the boss when it dies, and bosses defeated before today already count. Hovering the row lists the bosses still to go. It grants the Slayer of Legends title, and a character wearing it with every boss down carries an ember aura over a rune circle that other players see. When new bosses join the list, the title stays and the aura goes out until they fall too.

Titles

• The Subterfuge mastery titles (Evader, Elder Evader, Legendary Evader) no longer require Pick Pockets. The skill can be bought from a trainer but cannot gain experience while ransom is off, which left the titles out of reach for everyone. (7daa51e209, #12421)

Leaderboards

• Added three world boss leaderboards for the 22 bosses whose defeat is announced across the world. World Bosses counts each player's boss kills and how many different bosses they have felled. World Boss Records shows each boss's fastest kill and the party that set it, and World Boss Best Times on the leaderboards web page lists each player's best time per boss. Fight times start at the first hit on a boss at full health and are checked by the server. The Leaderboards window also has a new Toggle Leaderboards key that can be bound in the keybindings. (c62c3cf409, #13708)

Tooling

• The sync push tool now merges localization files record by record and keeps both sides of the balance log, and hands any other merge conflict to the session to resolve, so a push no longer stops to ask.
• The guild site broker's deploy script has a test that checks every broker switch survives a redeploy.

Chat

• Opening a conversation with an NPC now keeps trying to put the typing cursor in the conversation box until it gets there, so typed words no longer go nowhere when the window is slow to build. Typing is still refused while an item is held on the mouse cursor, but the conversation now says "Put down the item on your cursor to type." once per hold. (f87613b87e, #12802)

Release

• Build 324 release records: build records for chaos builds 319 to 324 added to the patch notes ledger, and the 324 promote runbook closed out with the deploy follow-ups it finished.

Single Player Offline

• Copy to Offline Play brings only the books, notes and songs the character is carrying, never content that staff have removed, and no longer includes other authors' account details.

Server

• Stuck-spot reports are cleaned up and length-limited before they reach the server log.

Items

• Songs and books in vendor lists and the backpack now keep their titles when one song or book in the same list no longer exists; before, that one missing record made every title in the list read "Content not found". (9270abd6c4)

Releases

• Build 325 stopped at the deploys item check after all three clients had built. Two item catalog rows for the Lashed Storage Racks had been typed by hand and said the racks were not premium, while the items said they were. When the catalog and the server report disagree, the release check now reads the item itself at the builds commit, and the commit gate refuses a catalog row whose flags differ from its item. The racks are no longer flagged premium, since they are craft-only. Build 325 goes out from the builds already made.
• Build 325 went live on chaos at 4:27 PM Central after a 5-minute warning, with Steam's default branch moved to it the same afternoon. During the short restart the shard cleaned up Ingot Molds now that they stack: 10,340 used-up molds were removed and 107,398 others joined the stackable kind. The patch notes list 79 changes, from the painted fishing meter to Copy to Offline Play.

Tavern games

• Mahjong: the Mahjong Table now follows a game as it is played. Each client tracks all 136 tiles from the table's updates and lays them out on the felt: the walls shrinking from the break, each hand standing toward its player, the discards in rows of six with the riichi tile turned sideways, and calls laid face up at the player's right with the called tile turned toward the player it came from. Tiles slide to their new places as they move, only the seated player sees the faces of their own hand, and at the end of a hand the winner's tiles turn face up. A player takes a seat by clicking one of the chairs, which claims the seat before they sit. Games at the table are not open yet.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Table's HUD. A seated player gets a rack of their own tiles with the drawn tile set apart, a button for each call they can make (Tsumo, Ron, Riichi, Kan, Pon, Chi) with a choice of shapes when a chi can be made more than one way, cards for the four seats placed around them, the round and the dora indicators at the top, and a timer. Choosing Riichi lights only the tiles that keep the hand ready. At the end of a hand a panel shows the winning hand, each scoring pattern with a plain description and its han, the points and who paid what, and the last hand of a game ends with the final standings. Games at the table are not open yet.
• Mahjong: sitting down at the Mahjong Table now brings the camera over the player's own tiles, with a button to switch to a view of the whole table or one straight down, a right-drag to look around and the mouse wheel to zoom; Home gives the normal camera back. A quick tap of a movement key no longer stands a seated player up, holding one does, and a player can discard by clicking a tile of their own hand on the table as well as in the rack. Games at the table are not open yet.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Table's console now shows each player's wind and score on the side facing them, with the dealer's in gold. The last discarded tile glows a soft yellow, and it turns orange for a player who can call it. A player's own discard moves to their discards at once, and while choosing a riichi discard the tiles that cannot be it dim on the table as well as in the rack.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Table's HUD has three play toggles. Auto-win declares Tsumo or Ron as soon as one is possible, No calls passes on every offer to Chi, Pon or Kan unless a Ron is also possible, and Auto-discard throws the drawn tile when it is the only tile that may go, as after riichi. A Settings panel holds Reduce motion, the table camera on sitting down, holding a movement key to stand up, how yaku are named (romanized, plain English or both) and the size of the rack. Games at the table are not open yet.
• Mahjong: a Mahjong window with a Rules tab. It explains the game in nine sections, from the tiles and a winning hand through calls, riichi, furiten, dora, draws and how a game ends, with a glossary. It lists every yaku with what it is worth in a closed and an open hand, and gives a scoring table for dealer and non-dealer wins. The window opens from the window list, from a Rules button at the table, and from any yaku named in a hand's result. Games at the table are not open yet.
• Mahjong: three public Mahjong Tables are placed in the world: two in the main square of Ardoris, one of them under the cherry trees, and one in the Castle Atos courtyard beside the giant chess board. A site search picked each spot for level, open ground that players can walk all the way around. The tables stay hidden until mahjong opens.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Academy's course was built: 15 lessons and a final game with 56 exercises, 39 of them quick drills (naming tiles, finding waits, choosing a discard, counting points) whose answers come from the same rules the tables play by. The Academy opens in a later update.
• Mahjong: a Mahjong Table placed in a home can host games. Its owner chooses who may sit down, with an access list, and whether computer players and Academy lessons are allowed, and the table cannot be picked up while a game is being played at it. Placed tables open in a later update.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Academy's server side was built: practice drills are dealt from a seed the server picks and the answers are checked on the server, and each character's stars and finished lessons are kept. The Academy opens in a later update.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Academy tab was added to the Mahjong window, with 16 lessons and 39 quick drills you can play anywhere: name the tiles, find the waits, pick the best discard, spot the yaku and count the points. Each answer is explained, and stars are earned for each drill. It opens in a later update.
• Mahjong Academy: lessons at the Mahjong Table. The seventeen table exercises of the Academy now play at a table that offers lessons: the learner keeps their chair and deals, and three tutors take the other seats. Each exercise deals a prepared hand, from a first Tsumo and Ron to calling Pon on a dragon, passing a Chi that would leave the hand with no yaku, declaring riichi, seeing furiten happen and staying safe against a riichi. A choice the exercise is not asking for is turned back with the reason and costs a star, a panel beside the table explains what happened when a tile completes a hand but brings no win, and hints light the right tile or button. The last two exercises are a full hand and a full East round against computer players, with stars for placing first or second. Not open to players yet.
• Mahjong: a coach at the Mahjong Table and a complete rules reference. While playing, a coach panel can show how far a hand is from ready, the tiles it waits on and how many of them are still unseen, a suggested discard, the yaku the hand could still make, and what a Pon or Chi would leave. Marks on the player's own tiles show how dangerous each one is against a player who declared riichi, and the coach explains when a tile completes a hand but cannot win (no yaku, or furiten). The tips are on against computer players and off by default with other people at the table. The Rules tab now describes every yaku and shows an example winning hand for each one. Not open to players yet.
• Mahjong: a Stats tab in the Mahjong window. Each finished East or East-South game is recorded for the players in it: placements (all games, games with other people, games against computer players), average placement, hands won, the share won by Tsumo, deal-ins, riichi and how often it won, calls and ready hands at a draw. The tab also shows the best hand with its tiles, every yaku with how many times it was won, any yakuman, the last ten games and the Mahjong Academy stars. Lessons and practice hands are not counted. Not open to players yet.
• Mahjong: achievements and three titles. Ladders count hands won, first places, riichi wins and yakuman across a player's characters, and the best character's yaku collection (26 kinds, the five value-tile yaku counting as one), yaku families and Mahjong Academy lessons and stars. The titles are Mahjong Graduate (finish the Academy's final game), Yakuman Winner and Yaku Master (win with all 26 kinds of yaku). Every achievement stays hidden until earned. Not open to players yet.
• Mahjong: two leaderboards. Mahjong ranks players by average finishing place in games with other people (20 games and one in the last 30 days to appear; games against the computer do not count), and Mahjong Yakuman lists every player who has won a yakuman hand. Both stay off until mahjong opens.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Table now has sounds for the deal and dice, draws, discards, riichi, calls, wins and drawn hands, heard within about 20 meters and set by the game's volume sliders. A high-contrast tile set (bright faces on dark tiles) can be chosen in the table's settings, and it changes the tiles on the table, in the rack and in the Mahjong Academy. Both settings sit beside Reduce motion. Not open to players yet.
• Mahjong: every mahjong string (the table, the rules, the Mahjong Academy, the coach, the stats and the titles, 783 in all) is now in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese and Chinese. Mahjong terms such as Riichi and Tsumo keep their romanized names in the Latin-script languages, are transliterated in Russian and Ukrainian, and use the standard native terms in Japanese and Chinese. Not open to players yet.
• Mahjong: the automated test client gained three more mahjong runs for the launch checks: the Mahjong Academy's final game played to its end, the coach checked on every turn of a game against the computer, and a game's result showing up in the Stats tab.
• Mahjong: rules and timing fixes from two code reviews. Players now see their own turn countdown, a computer player takes the same time to pass on a discard whatever its hand holds, an open kan's dora counts for a Ron on the very next discard, a concealed kan makes only a thirteen-orphans hand that declined to rob it furiten, and robbing an added kan keeps ippatsu.
• Mahjong: statistics count only the hands players play themselves (the computer's turns while they step away are left out), achievements and the yakuman board count games with another player or a Standard or Expert computer, public tables free the seat of a player who keeps others waiting or stops playing, and a character sits at one mahjong table at a time.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-16 is up: Friday fixed three combat numbers the game had been displaying without ever using, including the elevation bonus it calculated correctly and then threw away. The fishing meter became a painted wooden gauge that names the fish on your line. The new website was rebuilt on the game's own artwork, with a page for players coming back after years away. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed six player forum suggestions and bugs to the tracker: shorter Focus/Health potion cooldowns, crafting stations going dark and silent with lights off, movement keys no longer fighting focused UI windows, a formal player-owned-town recognition program, a launcher UI overlap between the "Play as" button and the What's New link, and overworld/town maps resetting blank on every re-entry.

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Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer about forty more questions players asked her this week, including the best places to mine iron and copper, which animals can be tamed and why the Highvale Outskirts ice wolves cannot be, the Burial Coffin daily with Shimzu in Spite, the Brittany Sewers entrances, what the Immune combat message means, repairing at a crafting station, and hiding the task list. Two older answers were corrected: the Conversationalist Teleporter can be reshaped with an Eternal Pattern, and most spiders can be tamed.
• The Oracle got a cooking guide and a round of corrections: Sharkfin Soup cannot be cooked yet because nothing in the world gives the shark fin it needs, brewing beer, wine and whiskey uses the Cooking skill at a cooking station, food keeps counting down while you are logged out, a critical cook pays bonus experience for the same dish, the market-stall bakers sell no recipes, and a Silver engraving on a cooking pot adds success chance. It also learned where Flour, Butter, Sugar and the other bought ingredients come from, which meal to eat for each stat, and the Smoked Wolf Ears pet food.
• Oracle: asked about a closed report, she now says why it was closed. Suggestions the team moved to the Player Wishlist are named by their wishlist number for voting, and reports closed with no problem found say so, where before she called every closed report fixed. Report numbers written inside a question ("13303 status", "13302 and 13303") are looked up too.
• The Oracle can now answer questions about chat rules and conduct: the rules players accept at login, which channels are moderated and what gets removed, what a chat silence does, how to report a player or offensive chat, and where to read the user agreement and terms of service (7f8789db1b, #13521).
• The Oracle no longer tells a player their report was filed when the report tracker returned an error. It said "I will try again" without retrying, then gave an issue number that did not exist. It now says plainly that nothing was filed, retries once in the same reply, and the server replaces any reply that quotes a report number no filing produced.

Tools

• Mahjong: a test harness that plays mahjong through the game client the way a seated player does, taking a seat, readying up and playing every move, and checks after each move that every client still holds all 136 tiles and none of them can see another player's hidden tiles. It runs once the first mahjong tables are placed.

Crown Store

• Crown Store sales can now run with extra items on sale, and a sale round can be set to a shorter length with a shorter relist wait. Call to Arms rewards can add extra items to the current sale. Game servers check for a new sale round every minute, down from every ten.

Housing

• Town Console size upgrades now cost 90,000 Crowns from Crossroads Village to Town, 120,000 from Metropolis to Municipality, and 120,000 from Municipality to Megalopolis.
• The Bats and Blackbirds decorations, along with the Fireflies, Butterflies and Landing Flies, have a Schedule... option in decorating mode: Always, Only at night, Only during the day or Never. A player suggestion through the Oracle (#13472).
• The lot marker window's two gear buttons are larger and now show their names, Manage Lot Claim and Lot Access, beside the gear. They used to be small unlabeled gears whose names appeared only on hover. Requested by Christ Pallid.
• The Light Settings window no longer has a separate Start State picker. On a light you can click on and off, such as a Bonfire, the Light picker now sets how it starts: Always on starts it lit and Off starts it dark. Requested by Chiasma.
• The Broadcast Automated Phonograph in a player town now holds twice as many wax cylinders at every town size (Holdfast 4 up to Teralopolis 24), in line with the raised town decoration limits. (e4abe67bb1, #13516)
• Brewing casks snap together the way planting beds do. A Beer, Wine or Spirits Cask (heraldry versions included) brought near a placed cask squares up to it and closes up flush against its side or end, lining up on its centre or edge when close. Casks only snap to other casks, the status line reads Cask Snap while one is snapped, and holding Alt places a cask freely. Requested by D'Laein Lachlan. (6699fea83e, #13477)
• A Conversationalist or house pet being placed now stands on the placement square for the whole drag and stays on it when set down, for every player in the scene. Before, players the game had not picked to run that NPC saw it far off the square, and it came down somewhere else.
• Search All My Stuff now names the town a house stands in today for items kept in its containers. After a house moved, the results kept the town or lot where each container was first placed, so a dresser in an Astoria house was listed under Stormsong Vale, a town that is no longer in the world (82c602fdd8).
• A placed Mystic Graff Gem now shows as a small glowing blue crystal shard that matches its icon. Since it became placeable earlier this month it had borrowed the purple Glowing Jewel Cube model, so the two looked the same on a display table (a222e9f6f4, #13142).
• Decorations sent to the bank with a lot (eviction or the Property Manager’s Send to Bank) start upright and unmirrored when placed again. Large Planting Beds came back standing on their long edge and could not be placed. (11956ee237, #13117)

Cooking

• Raisin Pile, Chunk of Cooked Meat and the original Ankh Cupcake now take 1 food buff slot instead of 3, so eating one no longer pushes out three active meals. The Focus bonus from Dupre's Duck Stew now lasts 2 hours like its other five bonuses; it ran out an hour early before. (27e352d41a)
• Clone Jar of Yeast Culture crafts as many as your jars and flour allow: each craft hands back its own Yeast plus two more, so one Yeast starts a full batch. Before, Max stopped at the Yeast you held and Quick Craft ran out after the first one. Reported by Vaentorian. Caramelized Onion Quiche is spelled right, the PvP trophy ingredient label lists Flesh, which it already accepted, and two Aerie cooking merchants no longer lean toward blacksmith goods. Two coffee buffs that no item ever used were removed. (25d39542e7)
• The Obsidian Boar Ribs and Boar Surprise recipe scrolls are now sold by the cooking supplies merchants, alongside the other Obsidian and Surprise scrolls.
• Bread you bake yourself now counts for the Bread slot in sandwich recipes. Bark Bread, Banana Bread, Garlic Cheese Bread and Gingerbread all work now, alongside the bakery loaves.
• Sweet Cunning Cat Stew can now be bought as a cookbook scroll. Its food buff lasts 8 hours instead of 4, the same as Dragon Stew.
• Level 80 cooking recipe scrolls now cost 1,000 gold, up from 200 or 400. Sweet Cunning Cat Stew costs 1,500 gold.
• Eleven newer level 40 and level 60 cooking recipe scrolls sold for 200 gold whatever their level. They now cost the same as the rest of their tier: 400 gold at level 40 (Bone Broth, Oozy Omelet and four others) and 650 gold at level 60 (Hemlock and Ham, Cracklin Cornbread and three others). Spiced Tea moved from 400 to 650 gold and Frog Fried Legs from 300 to 500 (7c5e1dcc92).
• Butchers now sell up to 5,000 raw meat in a single purchase, and bakers, innkeepers, tavernkeepers and waitresses up to 5,000 of each bread, the same limit as raw fish and cooking ingredients. The limit was 1,000. Prices are unchanged. Requested by Traveller13 (dca4e350c7).
• Sausage and Eggs can now be eaten without carrying Bacon. It had been using Bacons food ability, so eating one used up a Bacon and left the dish in the bag. It now has its own and uses up itself, with the same buff as before. The Plague Ward had the same problem with the Cure Plague Potion it was copied from, and is fixed too. A new check covers every food, drink and potion.

Launcher

• The launcher's What's new link no longer draws under the Play As button. Reported on the forum by Barugon.
• Launcher v65: the Server box no longer changes when the mouse wheel scrolls over it, an arrow key is pressed or a letter is typed, which had been moving some players to the QA server and saving it for their next launch. Only a pick from the open list changes it now, and the same goes for the Graphics, Display and Language boxes (2f07448fb8).

Crafting

• Cask brewing recipes no longer list a critical success chance in the crafting window. Brewing never rolls a critical, so the summary now shows the success chance only.
• Ingot Molds now stack. Each ingot smelt uses one mold from the stack, and used-up molds no longer pile up in bags as broken items. Requested by Zain Rampage.
• Sharkfin Soup can be made again. The Shark Fin it needs was a copy of Corpion Tail that nothing dropped; it now has its own name and icon, butchering a Tiger Shark gives 2 fins and a Young Shark gives 1, and cooking merchants in Brittany, Spite, Xenos and player-owned towns sell the recipe.
• The Keep patterns from salvage checkbox in the crafting station window now lines up with the checkboxes above it when the window is narrow enough for the options to wrap. It used to sit about ten pixels to the right. (f95f619f00)
• The Obsidian Forge in Hilt Fortress now hits players standing next to it for half the damage it did before. Its Focus drain is unchanged. (#13538)
• A critical success on a dish, potion or other item that cannot be worn now says it earned bonus experience instead of claiming an exceptional item, and Quick Craft runs of those items report only failures. The Cooking skill description no longer promises exceptional dishes and now notes that brewing uses Cooking; the Alchemy description no longer claims brewing. Both skill descriptions are updated in all ten languages. (11e1bf1416)
• Recipe hovers in the Recipe Book and at crafting stations now show the crafting experience one ordinary craft gives, with a note that a first craft gives five times as much and repeats give less (85bbca48d2, #13481).
• Solania's townspeople now say where the public Alchemy Station is: alone on the top floor of the Public Crafts and Supplies pavilion on the waterfront. Before, asking about alchemy sent players to the Magery and Alchemy shop, which has no station, and asking about crafting sent them to a warehouse that no longer exists. Asking also puts the pavilion on your map, and the new lines are translated into all nine languages. The Oracle can now list which towns have each kind of crafting station and tell you when a town has none. Requested by Padre Adamo.
• Ingredients that crafting with Use lot storage takes out of a lots containers now show under Recently Looted in Your Backpack, the same as items dragged out of a chest by hand. A batch craft carries the rest of its ingredients into the backpack, and those never appeared there before. Reported by shawn.

Website

• Found why some places were missing from the website's world map: towns that are a scene of their own, like Castle Atos and Blood Bay, and places with no adventure level, like Brittany Graveyard, fell through both of the lists the map is built from. Castle Atos, Blood Bay, Brittany Graveyard, the Oracle Temple and the two PvP Castle Arenas are now on it, with Castle Atos on its in-game marker. They show on the live map at its next update.
• The website's world map now has a picture for 31 places that had none, mostly dungeons and vaults such as Crypt of the Avatar, The Clink, Tartarus and the Kas, Libris and Midras Vaults, plus Blood Bay. Creature, NPC and gathering pins sit on the rooms they belong to.
• World map: searching for a town or area now shows it on its world map first, ringed in gold with a card saying what it is, and the card links to the place's own map. Dots on the world maps open the same card, and places that do not match the search fade. Requested by Goriah Kuulas. Goes live with the next website update.
• The Player-owned towns list now counts a town's governor and stewards as residents for its "Hide towns with 1 resident or fewer" box. A town lived in by its governor and one steward had been hidden as empty. Reported by Barugon.

Build & CI

• The scene-analysis bake that refreshes the scene and resource pages runs once a week, on Sunday morning, instead of every night. It held the Windows build machine every morning, so client builds waited behind it.
• The bundle build reuses the dependency information it has already checked earlier in the same build instead of asking Unity again for every asset. Those repeated lookups took about 20 minutes of each Windows client build.
• Found why Windows client builds had stretched to six hours: the deco snap settings on every house and building model stored item types as an enum, so each new item type made Unity 6 treat all of those models as changed, and the last build rewrote 327 zone bundles that came out identical (6.2 GB, about two and a half hours). The settings now store the plain numbers, and the build log names what changed the inputs whenever a bundle pass runs.
• Two more steps in the client build that redid work every time now do only what changed. The conversation step rewrote every keyword overlay and then re-imported about 12,000 conversation files to pick up one change (about 3.5 minutes), and the build rebuilt a 72 MB localization hotfix bundle from scratch that it then set aside unshipped (about 2 minutes plus the bundle write). Overlays are now written only when their contents change, and the hotfix bundle is skipped unless asked for.
• The bundle build re-checks 3,000 of its cached dependency entries per pass instead of 20,000. Across the last seven Windows builds the re-check covered about 115,000 entries and never found one out of date, and on a busy build machine it took up to 13 minutes per build.

Client

• /follow keeps up with a player moving at wolf speed. The follower had been reading a moving remote player as standing still, so it fell behind.
• The Linux game window title now reads "Shroud of the Avatar" without the build suffix.

Inventory

• Right-clicking a storage container on a lot now offers Restock next to Quick Deposit. It opens the container and tops your pack up to your Keep When Depositing amounts, the same as the Restock button on the container window.
• Renaming an item while it sat in the backpack (a merchant, teleporter, waygate or taming collar) no longer stops the backpack from updating; it now re-sorts the item under its new name (a4d391f7a4).
• Restock now tops up the stacks you keep in a bag inside your backpack. Before, the refill landed as a loose stack beside the pouch until you ran Consolidate All Stacks; a full pouch stack now overflows into the same pouch when it has room (#13669, 0943997866).
• The checkbox panel in container windows now has its own Options ^ heading that folds it away, the same way the Filter row folds the category tabs. Before, only the gear in the title bar closed it, and once opened it stayed open on every chest and bag (f48bbffffe, #13666).
• While you hold an item near the top or bottom edge of an inventory window, only the window under the cursor scrolls now. A backpack or bag window covered by another window used to scroll along with the one on top (f10073d30f, #13459).

Client

• Added a Show Floating Experience Numbers option under Interface, Character & Progress. It is off by default. When ticked, a gold "+N" floats over your character after a kill, a gather or a craft.

Proposals

• Published The Cook's Hand, the Cooking school proposals page: 55 cards built from a usage sweep of the old servers, the full cooking code and recipe data, the forum record back to 2013, and the genre from Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies to World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Stardew Valley and Valheim. In every month of the last two years a quarter to a third of active characters ate something, and nine in ten of the things they ate came from a cook, but even the most widely cooked dish had only a handful of cooks. The page found Sharkfin Soup uncookable, a breakfast plate that eats your Bacon and a level-100 stew that pays 300 experience, and proposes a nine-skill kitchen tree with Hearty dishes and Reserve casks. Each card has its own comment thread and vote arrows.

PvP

• Added the match clock to Cinderspire's portal in the Obsidian Trials' lobby: hovering it shows Preparation and the time to the start while the next match gets ready, or In Progress and the time left while one runs. The portal appears when the arena opens.
• Added the Obsidian Trials' field powerups to Cinderspire: Wrath, Swiftness and Vigor appear one at a time on levels the lava will not reach for a while, and one the lava reaches is taken away. Four braziers on the summit that stood in the air past the plateau's edge now flank the keep's doors.
• Added steam vents to Cinderspire: eight fumaroles beside the cliff breaks on the Lower Shelves throw a player who jumps from one up onto the Middle Shelves, and the steam burns anyone standing in the column.
• The four long bridges from the Needles up to the Crown Ledge in Cinderspire can be cut: a player at the post on the ledge end drops the bridge for everyone until the next match, and chat says who did it.
• Added /spectate to Cinderspire: from the start platform, your camera follows a fighter down in the arena. Type it again for the next fighter, or move to stop.

Maps

• The map and minimap now show water where a water lot's island has been switched off. The Keep and Castle lots in Brittany Estates, and some player town layouts, come with an island that only appears while the owner has Use Extra Land on, but the map always drew it, so a player swimming in open sea there showed up on grass. The lot itself stays drawn as before (099b913e8c).
• The + and - zoom buttons and the ... button on the Map window, the minimap and map items, the 3D map's rotate buttons and the crafting quantity buttons now show their symbols in the middle of the button in every interface font. They sat low before, the dots near the bottom edge (d2d79eadf4, 78354f1ac8, #13216).

Tooling

• The Tester Verification window (/verify) now signs in two-factor accounts. The window asks for an API key from the tracker account page after the password is refused, instead of reporting a wrong password.

Taming

• The six pet foods follow one set of rules: Bear Bites and Dragon Kibbles can be fed on the overworld map like the other four, and the pet food tooltip now reads "Double-click to feed your pet". Venison Jerky doubled a pet's threat for two hours; its bonus went from 1 to 0.3, in line with the taming gear that does the same job. Rabbit Pate lost a stray apostrophe from its name. (db5d0dc126)

Vendors

• Vendor Listings in Zone: once search results filled the list enough to show its scrollbar, every value from Weight to Location could sit a little left of its heading on every row. A search that shrank the list could shift them the other way. The headings now move with the scrollbar as it comes and goes. The same fix covers merchant buy and sell lists, the trade window and the other lists with column headings.
• The Change Prices, Reclaim Selected and Reclaim All buttons on your own player vendor's My Listings tab no longer go missing when another player's vendor was the first one opened in the zone; the Oracle now also explains these bulk tools when asked (#13613).

Elementals

• Water Elementals' Riptide Pool now looks like water: rain and ripples on the ground and splashes on anyone caught in it. It had been showing the fire elemental's flames and smoke (4c99c12a61).

Maps

• In Single Player Offline, explored map areas now stay uncovered when you leave a town or the overworld and come back, and after reloading the character. Before, every map came back fully fogged on each visit. Reported by Azuresun.
• In K'rawl the cave area past the Southeast Gate was labelled Southwest Expansion, although it sits in the southeast of the dungeon by its own compass. It is now Southeast Expansion in every language, and characters who found it keep the discovery. Malice's East and West Warrens were checked and are correct: they are the east and west wings of the Rotunda.

Combat

• When a floating Immune comes from a bleed on something with no blood or poison on undead and elementals, the combat log now says which, once per target and skill. The Oracle can also explain all three reasons "Immune" appears, including the stun limit after five stuns in half a minute. Asked through an Oracle report.
• Pets no longer take ever-growing damage from shadow creatures. Each bite stacks Corruption that makes the next bite hit harder; players shed it as intended, but pets kept it for good, so in Spindelskog a Feram Cavas that normally bites for about 120 was hitting tamed pets for over 3,000.
• Melee attacks on other players connect more reliably when the target is running, strafing or a step uphill. Reach against a player now counts their body, how fast they are moving and small height differences, which helps spears and maces most. Creatures are unchanged and a player on a ledge above you is still out of reach. A shard-wide switch can turn it back off.
• Dragon kills no longer post to World Events or start a realm celebration. This covers the Aether Dragon and all eight Ancient dragons. They are still bosses for kill counts, achievements and rewards, and an Ancient still tells nearby players when it falls and will rise.
• The Combat Decks window's Equip button now works in combat. It swaps decks the same way the Equip Deck keys do and costs the same Focus; out of combat it stays free (323ca57f52, #13665).
• Light Armor Specialization now makes Sprint faster as well as longer. A fully specialized character at Acrobatics 100 gets about +2.4 run speed from Sprint instead of +1.95, close to what Dash gives; characters without the specialization see no change. Sprint and Dash no longer stack: casting one replaces the other, while speed potions and instrument haste still combine with either (93be03fe31, #13688). Requested by Sethanon.
• Blessing of Agility and Blessing of Agility, Greater still do not stack, but the Greater one now always wins: earning the plain blessing from an Easy or Normal run at Lamech's Bazaar no longer removes an active Greater blessing (2ba968a960, #13480).
• The four Elemental Lords of the Breach and the Spawn of Pele now resist 70% of every weapon hit, which puts a crit on them in line with the level 140 elementals. Spells land as before. The amount is a Live Tunable. (9ff540c829, #13291)
• A Light spell cast while riding now floats above the riders head. It used to appear at head height, almost inside the character. The orb also drops back to its usual height after a dismount, where before it could stay raised. Reported through the Oracle.

Lua Addons

• ShroudGetInventoryItems and ShroudGetEquipmentItems now report weight and value for one item, as the add-on API documentation says. They had been giving the whole stack (31 Animal Hide read 12.4 and 310 gold instead of 0.4 and 10). New totalWeight and totalValue fields carry the stack figures, and the add-on API is now version 41. (#13533)

Rendering

• On the Isle of Storms, the sun's glow no longer shows through the white column arch before the lunar rift when it is seen from a distance. The sun's haze there was gathered only over the first 32 m from the camera, so anything further away got the same glow as the open sky; the Isle's sky now gathers it over 128 m and far arches block it like near ones (#13614).
• Took back the Isle of Storms sun haze change from earlier today before it reached chaos. Editor renders at the reported spot showed the white column arch was already clear of the glow, and the longer haze distance made the glow around the low sun brighter, including on the rock beside the arch. The report about the sun glow over the arches (#13614) is open again.

Books

• In the immersive 3D book, the green link cursor and the click area for website links now line up with the drawn words. Before, the area started about a line above a link and stopped short of its bottom edge, because the click position was worked out with a camera ray that drifted by up to 25 pixels where the book is placed.

Camera

• Page Up and Page Down now zoom the camera in steps: six presses cross the full range from far out to close in, and holding the key keeps stepping. One tap used to jump the whole range. Mouse wheel zoom is unchanged.

Chat

• Chat tab options have a new Friends Online box under Misc for the "is now online" and "is now offline" lines. They used to share Misc with skill and crafting messages, so hiding those during a long crafting session also hid friends logging in. Existing tabs start with the box matching their Misc setting.
• Staff can now set each account's chat moderation level from 1 to 5. Level 1 is the moderation everyone has today; higher levels also remove single insults, then strong swearing, up to level 5, which keeps that player's chat family-friendly.
• When the chat moderator removes a message from Universe, Trade, Noble or Roleplay, its sender now sees a short reason with the removal notice. Other players still only see the message disappear.

Inventory

• The Quick Deposit and Restock notice now opens below the skill progress icons on the right, where the old Damaged Gear and Encumbrance hints used to open. It used to appear under the top-right window buttons, partly over the minimap (14d6a6016c).
• Added a Double Click to Equip option, under Options > Interface > Inventory & Items and in the backpack's own options. It is on by default; with it off, double-clicking gear in the backpack no longer swaps out what you are wearing.

Client

• Fixed the camera holding still when the character or creature it was following disappeared; it now returns to your own character.

Combat

• Siege Cabalists, Vitium, the control-point Cabalists and the five Binding Thralls are 10 levels higher with 200 more Strength, about 13% more health and harder hits, so they take a group to bring down (276eee1fca, #13527).
• Skill cards now mark bonuses that grow with a specialization the character has not trained, with a gray "Grows with Shield Specialization" style note under the line. Bolster Balance had shown every bonus in green with nothing separating its base bonuses from the Shield Specialization part; its description now also says Shield Specialization raises the dexterity bonus and both critical hit reductions (#13496).
• Two players casting Judgment on the same target no longer cut each other short. The second beam used to end the first one early, which burst for almost nothing, and recasting did the same back; now each beam runs to its own finish (#13180, 110f38152c).
• With an enemy selected, the Target Party Member keys and Target Self now show the friend you picked in the target frame. Before, the enemy kept the frame and the key looked like it did nothing until ESC cleared the enemy. The enemy stays selected behind the friend, so attacks still go to it and heals go to the friend.
• Ice Field, Ice Fist and Ice Arrow now slow and debuff monsters with very high Strength. Against Frost Giants in Jotungrund and many other high-level monsters the chill used to end the moment it landed, which left only Ice Field's damage working. It now lasts at least 3 seconds, and durations against weaker targets are unchanged (d591836c17, #13101).

Creatures

• Dragon and wyvern bodies now stay on the ground while an Ancient dragon nearby is still fighting, and keep at least two and a half minutes after it falls so they can be skinned (requested by Arcuss Blackwing).
• Fixed the four corner Elemental Lords in The Breach walking in place and popping back to their posts. They had been set to patrol to the middle of the zone, far past how far they may stray; they now stay at their posts until pulled.
• Elementals no longer growl like a bear when they raise a mantle. Gale, Stone, Flame, Tide and Sand Mantle each have an elemental sound, ice elementals and obsidian golems in Winter Coat or Obsidian Hide use one too, and a toppled golem lands with a ground shake (#13181, b966e70d9b).
• The Aerie Rangers patrolling the camp in Blood River Outskirts walk their routes and stop at each point. One used to jog laps round the camp without stopping, and another walked back across the middle of the camp after every round (#13115).

Call to Arms

• Call to Arms reward letters now end with a record of the call: its name, the date it was answered, the goal, how much you added and your finishing place, so a kept or placed letter still says which call it was. Requested by shawn.
• Call to Arms calls with different goals now run at the same time, up to three at once, each with its own line under the compass. Calls that would count the same thing (the same creature family, any fish beside one kind of fish, two map-area calls) still take turns, and the Call to Arms window steps between running calls.

Gathering

• The gathering swing meter target can now land anywhere on the ring the marker has time to reach, including the right side. Before, every target sat between the top of the ring and the left. Slow opening swings can place it early; faster swings deep in a meticulous chain place it later so there is still time to react. Suggested through the Oracle.
• Mined ore and other harvest nodes that had been emptied sometimes stayed standing in their unmined look until clicked a second time. The player who harvested a node now checks whether anything is left in it, and an empty node switches to its spent look straight away. (ffca64c485, #13397)

Launcher

• Launcher v64: the checkboxes at the bottom of the launcher sit closer together, so with the Play As button, the What's new line and an error notice all showing, nothing runs under a button or off the bottom of the window.

Audio

• Phonographs, gramophones and jukeboxes now play at full volume anywhere in their hearing range and fade out only near its edge. The song still comes from the device's direction, and the ear turned away no longer goes silent (#13537).
• With Announce Expiring Buffs on, the warning for Ignite Weapon, Frost Weapon, Shock Weapon, Light, the weapon poisons and 39 more buffs now names the buff. Their voice lines had been recorded but never uploaded, so these buffs said "A buff is decaying." instead. No game update needed. (#13184)
• Automated phonographs and jukeboxes keep cycling through their cylinders until someone presses Stop. They could stop after two or three times through a list of recorded books. Opening the window while one plays no longer stops it, adding or removing a cylinder keeps it going with the new list, and a cylinder that fails to load is tried again a minute later (3765158af9, #13195).
• An Automated Phonograph or Jukebox left playing on a lot now starts its cylinders again by itself after a server restart or patch, keeping its Play in order setting. Stop is remembered too (#13740).

Towns

• The Town Directory counts you in the town you are standing in, so that town reads at least Low in the Activity column instead of Empty. The reading other towns show comes from the world map and only updates while you are on it (#13563).

Website

• Town governors can now choose which names visitors see on their town's page. A new Names on the public town page section on the town's Manage page lists the governor and each steward with a show-to-visitors box; an unticked name no longer appears on the town page or in the towns list for anyone outside the town, while residents and stewards still see everyone. (#13490)

Quests

• The Unbinding: when Experiment 0175 falls, a player on the golem step who has not read Marlin's Notes on Experiment 0175 is told the notes lie unread near where it stood, and Ivar's golem topic names the notes as the part left to do. The task tooltip now says both are needed (#13629).

Skills

• The Deflect description now says which attacks a shield can block: sword, axe, mace, unarmed, bow and crossbow attacks from the front, never polearms, and most spells only once Arcane Defense is trained.

UI

• New Allow Windows Off Screen setting on the Options Themes tab, off by default. When on, windows can be dragged or resized partly past the sides and bottom of the screen, with the title bar always left on screen to drag them back. Turning it off moves every window fully back on screen.
• Fixed the top-right HUD icons jumping back to the screen edge when a player who had moved them entered their own player dungeon. The Decoration Mode and Switch to Adventure Mode buttons now sit above the icons wherever they were placed.
• Lists with two stretching columns, such as Player Name and Location in the Social window, no longer shift their values a few pixels off the headings when one of those columns is sorted.
• The Combat Decks window can file decks into folders. New Folder in the footer makes one, the deck menu has Move to Folder..., and clicking a folder header folds it away. Decks keep their numbers while folded, so the Equip Deck keys still match the list, and decks in no folder sit under Other Decks (#13638).
• The Grandmaster badge hover now lists the first 20 grandmastered skills and ends on a "+N more (click to show all)" line. Clicking the badge shows the full list. A player with a couple of hundred grandmastered skills had a list that covered the whole screen. (199bce74c2)
• The Give Items window now says how many of an item have been offered while a hand-in is still short, for example "2 of 25 Anomalocaris (Lava Fish) offered." Before, a short offer only greyed out Accept Exchange. (ee3647749e)
• The Social icon in the top right corner is hidden in Single Player Offline mode, where the Social window cannot open and the icon did nothing (#13140).
• Cursor Size below 1.00x now makes the pointer smaller on Windows. Before, Windows stretched the small pointer back up to full size, so it only looked blockier.
• Search All My Stuff no longer shows the last character's results and search text after logging out and into another character; the window now starts empty at each login (0e7d373a46, #13099).

Addons

• Add-on authors can publish to the Community Addons store straight from a public GitHub repository. Publish from GitHub in My Submissions takes the repository link and a tag (empty means the latest release), and the store fetches that version itself and reviews it like any other submission. Update from GitHub reuses the same repository for the next release, using the GitHub release notes as the changelog, and each version published this way links the exact commit it was built from as its Source. Requested by Seth Aeva.
• An add-on can now open up to 30 windows, up from 8, and each one keeps the position the player gave it. (a0efeaa9bc, #13237)

UI

• The Theme Editor Ornament style row now offers Citadel and Bastion, so a custom theme on any base can use the corner ornaments from those two themes. Their colours stay as drawn when the theme accent changes. Crucible has no corner ornament to offer.

Lua

• Add-on windows now have the same Remember Size and Position checkbox as storage containers, in the menu that opens when you right-click the windows title bar. While it is ticked, the add-on can no longer move or resize that window, so add-ons that resize themselves (for example when you switch tabs) keep the size you gave them.
• Lua add-ons can now show or hide your helmet, the same setting as Hide Helmet on the character sheet's head slot. ShroudIsHelmetVisible reads it, and ShroudSetHelmetVisible and ShroudToggleHelmet change it when you press an add-on key, click its button or type its command. With a combat deck equipped the change applies to that deck. This is add-on API 42 (20e3f46715).
• Lua add-ons can now save a characters data at logout. The new ShroudOnBeforeLogOut runs once when you choose Exit to Menu or Quit, while your character is still in the world, and what it saves goes to that characters file. After a lost connection it runs at the login screen and still saves to the character that left. With no character logged in, saving or reading a per-character value now returns false or nil with one console line, instead of writing a file no character ever reads. This is add-on API 43, requested by shawn (094495886b, #13342).

Towns

• Governors and Stewards can right-click a lot on the Town Console's Lots tab and add its holder as a town Resident. The option is greyed out for holders who already have a role, so a Steward is never lowered to Resident.

Gameplay

• Skinning a Yellow Dragon from its head now opens the skinning loot where the player knelt. The loot window used to close as soon as it opened, and players had to walk to the middle of the body to take anything. Looting and skinning a large corpse now measure reach from the nearest part of the body, and the mouse cursor agrees.

Interactives

• Quest-locked chests now show a message when clicked outside their quest step. Before, the cursor turned green and the click did nothing (a chest in Resolute Sewers).

Fishing

• Fishing from a stone pier or gazebo that stands above the water works again. The aim caught on the edge of the platform and refused every cast with "Invalid location." at the North Brightbone Woods lake; water in view past the edge now takes a cast (bebba9edf8, #13500).

UI

• The Leather, Cloth and Heavy Belts have their own inventory icons. All three had shown a crafting material: the Leather Belt drew the same rolled leather as Simple Leather Strap and Yard of Simple Leather, the Cloth Belt a bolt of cloth and the Heavy Belt an iron binding. The Belt of the Troll Lord and the Faerie Belt use the new leather belt (7b313c5f6b, #13498).
• The Lock Status Movement option is now called Lock HUD Positions, and hovering it lists everything it holds in place, including the window buttons and icons in the top-right corner. The character right-click menu entry was renamed to match. Requested by Scanphor.
• The Theme Editor has a new colour, "Gear slot (stat hover)", for the paper-doll slots that light up when you hover Resist or Avoid on the character sheet. That highlight used to share the "Warning tint" colour with other windows. Every built-in theme keeps its current highlight colour.
• On screens 800 pixels tall or less, such as 1280x768, the interface is now drawn at no more than 85% so the HUD has room for your own frame and a full party list. The UI Scale setting itself is kept and comes back on a taller screen, and the Themes tab shows a note under the slider while it is held. A party list too tall to fit below your frame now moves to the right of it. Before, a large party on a short screen was pushed up over your name, health, focus and buffs.
• Eleven artifact belts and sashes have their own inventory icons. All 106 versions of them had shown the Coil of Rope crafting component. The Belt of the Brutal Butcher, Belt of Control, Belt of the Dedicated, Belt of the Ox, Belt of the Patient Harvester, Spider Silk Belt, Belt of Zombie Skin and Bacchanal Belt each have a belt drawn for them, and the Sage's Sash, Slipshod Shooter's Sash and Savage Sash of Swiftness have sashes (#13675).
• In the character sheet Titles tab and the Titles window, the Search caption now sits beside its box instead of a wide gap away, and the box runs on to the category selector (68d31b8bf7, #13391).
• A party member who leaves for the main menu now shows as "Returning to Main Menu" in the party list. It used to read "Going to Welcome to Shroud of the Avatar".
• The category selector on the character sheet Titles tab read "All Categorie". The box was wide enough, but the default theme reserved a wide margin inside it that left the text 85px for a 94px name. Dropdown text now fills its box up to the arrow, everywhere in the interface, and a choice too long for its box ends in "..." (c3457b1b6f, #13392).

Leaderboards

• The Dungeons leaderboard now says that double-clicking a dungeon offers a teleport scroll to it, requested by Sethanon (f7a7e0fb3c, #13487).

World

• The rune riddle on the pit walls between the two faces in Boreas Colossus is readable again. The four inscriptions had been carved relief only and nearly vanished in the pit's dim light; the letters now carry a pale chalk fill (#13482).

Chat

• Added the eight virtue banners to the Shroud of the Avatar chat emoji, from :compassion: through :valor:, in the picker's Shroud of the Avatar tab.

Website

• Stewards now count as residents of their player-owned town on the World map, the town directory and the guild site, so towns run by a governor and Stewards no longer show as empty or get hidden by the small-town filter.

Localization

• The Boreas Colossus riddles can now be answered in Chinese and Japanese. Ysaranth accepts the English answer in any language, one-character answers such as 火, answers ending in Chinese punctuation, and answers typed inside a short sentence. Before this, Chinese players could not get past her.
• Siksaka at the Boreas Colossus now gives the gate key when a Chinese player says "nothing" in English. Typed English topic words now get an answer from NPCs in every client language when no word in the player's own language matched. Siksaka also accepts the Chinese and Japanese wording of his own greeting.

Offline Play

• Added Copy to Offline Play to the online character screen. It copies the selected character (skills, experience, bags and their items, gold, decks, appearance and its own quest progress) into Single Player Offline on that computer, after backing up the offline save. The online character is unchanged, nothing goes back online, and bank items, account gold, titles and houses stay online. Requested by Barugon.

Stability

• On Linux and Steam Deck, a zone change that freezes on the "Reclaiming memory..." loading step now closes the game after three minutes, so players no longer have to stop it from Steam. The client also records what it was doing so the freeze itself can be tracked down (Linux players hit it at about 2.5 per 1,000 zone loads; Windows almost never). (1d666bc1f3)

Oracle

• The Oracle's merchant list gained the 42 shopkeepers it had been missing in Brittany Estates, Brittany Fields, Port Graff, Spite, Resolute and Valhold, including each town's cooking merchant. It could only send players to Aerie for the Expert cookbook, which also sells in Brittany Fields and Resolute. The cause was the tool that reads merchants out of each scene, which kept one shop per shared merchant type. The Oracle picks up the new list with its next update (38b079f350).

Quests

• Captain Kinsey in Solace Bridge Outskirts no longer keeps her gold ! after a character has finished the zone, and the guards who send new players to her stop showing one once she has been met. The overworld tooltip for the zone no longer reports quests available because of these leftover offers. (6f1bf7d19d)

Localization

• 113 interface strings added over the past few weeks, among them the new Mahjong screens, the Oracle window and the Show Floating Experience Numbers option, had never reached the translation database, so every language showed them in English. They are in the database now and will be translated in the next translation pass.

Mounts

• Getting off a horse, stag or big cat no longer leaves the character standing in the dismount pose while it slides along the ground. The run now starts as soon as the dismount ends, including when a hit knocks you off a moving mount (#12454, 93be105f55).

NPCs

• Merchants out on their early-morning exercise, such as Doris Jeanette and Christoph Schneider doing yoga in Ardoris, open their shop window from Buy/Sell again. Before, they said their for-sale line and the conversation closed with no window (#13683, 6ddaae3640).
• Cathy, the Basement Deed Vendor in Owl's Head, now stands upstairs in the bank beside Boris. She had never been placed in the town, so her Wolf Ears bounty could not be turned in. She sells basement deeds and entrances and pays 150 gold for five Wolf Ears a day. (7c5d78392d, #13316)

Creatures

• Thugs at the bandit camp in Twins Foothills now come round the campfire to join the fight. One used to stop behind it every time. The campfire sits a little further east, the garlic patch beside the tent moved into open ground, and the tight gap between the tent and the tree behind it is no longer a route (#13660).
• A Water spell that a fire elemental's magic resistance reduced to nothing now breaks its mantle, where before only casts that did damage broke it, so about half failed. Resisted Fire or Sun spells now burn a Winter Coat and resisted Water spells crack an Obsidian Hide the same way. Reported by Kakari (64e301e492, #13172).

Vendors

• In Vendor Listings in Zone, picking the Consumable category and a stat now finds consumables whose buff grants that stat: Strength lists the Potion of Might, Grilled Sausages and every other food, drink or potion that raises Strength. Other categories still mean gear, so a Strength search for equipment does not fill up with food. The stat list gained Health Per Second, Focus Per Second and their combat versions, which most food grants. Not on chaos yet (91c83c6e1b, #13652). Requested by D'Laein Lachlan.

Travel

• Clicking a zone door again while the character was already leaving through it replayed the dissolve effect once per extra click (reported on the Ardoris Sewers door). The first click now starts the trip and further clicks on that door, or any other, are ignored until the new zone loads. Applies to every door, gate and portal that changes zone (#13389).
• The Tower Archway Teleporter, the other town archway teleporters and the Conversationalist Teleporter can now be set to Port Harmony, Grusk, Tanglemire, Vikland and Valhold. Their Change Destination list offered only places registered as towns, so the Episode 2 settlements never appeared, however often a player had visited them. (e97d974dcb, #13122)

Fishing

• Fishing bait text now matches the catch tables: Pale Leech no longer claims a Blood Leech bonus it does not have, Earthworm now says it draws Blood Leeches in fetid water, and the Dough Bait, Tiny Gemmed Starfish and Leech Lure hotbar names match the items (#13231).

World

• On the Linux client, the force fields on the platforms around the Sequanna Colossus drew as solid pink domes because the build was missing their material. The Linux build now includes it, along with the materials behind the red lamp glows on the kobold lamp posts in Bunker C, Bunker T and Krul and a few glowing pieces in Blood Bay, Lost Vale and the Tower of the Shuttered Eye. The Windows client was not affected.

Dungeons

• Leaving a player dungeon you reached through a Dungeon Waygate now puts you in front of its entrance, where walking out would have left you. It used to drop you on the street outside the lot. (5d69c5ce96, #13507)

Pets

• Resurrect Creature aimed at the pet of the player you are dueling is now refused before the cast starts, with a combat chat line saying why. It used to land on the caster instead, spend the reagents and raise nothing. Outside a duel, party members can still raise each other's pets (e863f8f99d, #13133).

Balance

• Two of Myrkur's zombie patrol packs now take six minutes to come back after being cleared, instead of one minute. The other packs keep their usual timer.
• The Ancient dragons were well below where they should have been. Each life had about half the health of the other level 150 bosses, such as the Spider Queens, so they went down far too quickly. Each life now has 19,887 health, up from 16,220, and an Ancient still rises once at full health before the fight ends. Kill experience is unchanged.

Tavern games

• Fixed the three public giant chess boards in Castle Atos, Elad's and Northwood asking for the board's state during the loading screen, before the game server had been joined. The request was refused, and the board could show an empty or out-of-date position until the next move was played. Each board now asks once the player has arrived in the town. Giant chess is not switched on for players yet.
• Planned Mahjong: four-player riichi at a table whose tiles sit on it in the world, so anyone walking past can watch the walls, the discards and every call. The game checks every rule, computer players fill empty seats and take over for anyone who drops out, and a Mahjong Academy teaches the game from the tiles up to scoring. A Mahjong Table for homes and public tables in Ardoris and Castle Atos are planned. There are no stakes of any kind.
• Mahjong: built the rules engine. It deals each hand from a shuffled wall it commits to in advance, enforces every rule from calls and riichi to furiten, kans and abortive draws, scores hands the same way as a published reference library on 6,039 test hands, and sends each player only their own tiles. Tables arrive in later steps.
• Mahjong: table sessions now seat four, hold each call answer until everyone with a say has answered, and give every discard the same short call window, so how fast the next tile comes never shows the table whether anyone could have called it. Chess, checkers and backgammon tables behave exactly as before.
• Mahjong: computer players at three levels. Novice plays for speed and keeps it simple, Standard also counts the tiles still out, calls only when the hand can still win, and folds with safe tiles against a riichi, and Expert adds hand value and the standings. Each one decides only from what its own seat can see.
• Mahjong: the server side of a mahjong table. Computers take the empty chairs when the last player readies up, every decision has its own timer with a time bank for each hand, and a player who drops out or walks away is covered by the computer for the rest of the game. Everyone nearby sees the table as it plays. Not open to players yet.
• Mahjong: the computer players played 600 full games against each other through the real table code with no illegal moves, no stuck games, and every tile and point accounted for after every move. Standard wins about one hand in five and deals into about one in seven. The mahjong switches are in place and stay off.
• Mahjong: the tile faces come from a public-domain riichi tile set, prepared for the table at high resolution, and the table itself is modeled: an automatic-table cabinet with a felt top inside a raised rim, a stick drawer on each side and a small display console in the middle.
• Mahjong: the Mahjong Table, a placeable table with four chairs that work as seats. Its 136 tiles show the faces of the public-domain riichi set on an ivory body with jade backs and a gold ankh, with engraved faces and rounded edges, and the table draws all of its tiles in one batch. Its Crown Store entry is in place but not on sale, and until games open the table says it is coming soon.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-15 is up: Creatures and pets that decided an enemy standing right beside them was too far away have been corrected, and bodies stop vanishing seconds after a kill. A fishing event that counted none of the thirteen clownfish players landed was fixed and then paid out after the fact. The website gained a world map of every mapped place in the game, and the giant chess boards grew ratings, a challenge ladder and a teaching academy, all still switched off. Listen or read the transcript (18 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Housing

• A flipped house now stays flipped when it goes into the Property Manager and comes back out, on the same lot or another one. Before, it came back on its normal hand with the furniture inside still placed for the mirrored rooms. Also fixed: unclaiming a lot failed every time after it had been unclaimed and re-claimed within a minute, and a refused drop from a chest onto a lot left the whole lot locked against Pick Up and the Property Manager until logout.
• A PvP kill trophy placed as a decoration now shows its kill record when hovered: who slew the victim, the zone of the kill and the in-game date, the same lines it already showed in a backpack. Before, a placed trophy showed only its name. Visitors to the lot see the record too. Trophies claimed before the kill record existed in July still show only their name. Requested by Graydios.
• Lot deed upgrade sales can now be scheduled with their own start and end time. While one runs, players see how long it has left in chat, next to each option in the deed upgrade menus, and on the upgrade confirmation.
• Grass and tree removers placed while standing out on an Estercove island lot are now saved. Before, they only appeared on the placing player's screen: moving or picking one up said "There was an error while updating the lot", and after a relog it was back in the bag with the palms regrown. (#13273)
• Text written on a sign in the Runic font now sits in the middle of the sign's hover box. It used to sit about 6 pixels low and 3 to the left, while the same sign in the Default font looked centered. Placed books with a Runic title get the same correction.
• A lot deed upgrade paid at the very moment its ten-minute price quote ran out could take the Gold Crowns and never upgrade the deed. The payment and the expiry are now settled in one step, so exactly one of them happens: the upgrade goes through, or the payment is refused with nothing taken.
• Applying a Decoration Layout to the same kind of house it was saved in puts the arrangement back the way it was placed by hand. The apply judged each item more strictly than hand placement does, so a layout of a furnished Viking row house left a hot tub, items set close beside each other and everything stacked on them in the backpack as "something is already in the way". The message at the end of an apply now also names the items it could not place.
• If a lot was unclaimed, evicted or foreclosed after its owner paid for an in-place deed upgrade but before the upgrade finished, the Gold Crowns were kept and the deed never changed. They are now mailed back. Re-opening the upgrade window also no longer reports an upgrade already in progress.
• Added Brittany Estates Pavers to the Crown Store for 1000 crowns: the gray and tan cut stone that paves the streets of Brittany Estates, as Small (2 m), Large (4 m) and Giant (8 m) floor pavers, 8, 4 and 2 to a pack. The stone is laid at the same size as on the Estates streets. Until now it existed only as the streets themselves.
• Guards in the player-run towns and player villages that share a map with other towns (Brekken Bay, Aldwater, Northshire, Shadowmist and 35 more) now belong to each town on its own. Every town keeps the same five guards in the same places; the split lets a town's guards get their own dialogue later.
• A lot, basement or dungeon sent to the bank now arrives as a lot bag named after the lot (with "Basement" or "Dungeon" added for those). Items can be taken out but not put in, and the bag disappears from the bank once it is empty. (53c2dc332a)
• The rope-lashed timber shelving from the Elysium Mines storerooms can be crafted as decoration in two sizes: the Lashed Storage Rack, about 2.6 m tall for house rooms, and the Large Lashed Storage Rack at the mine's full 5.3 m. Both are empty racks whose three shelves hold other decorations, made at Carpentry 30 and 50 from boards and coils of rope. The recipe scrolls sell beside the other shelf recipes at Albert Lock's decorations shop in Aerie; the racks themselves are craft-only. (4ee9f92fc3)

Lua

• Fixed add-on map titles and marker hover text starting with the add-on's whole store name cut at 40 characters, which made a Toolbox title read "Toolbox: Toolbelt, HUDs, Trackers, and mo: a test overlay". They now use the add-on's short name, the part before a colon or a dash, so the line reads "Toolbox: a test overlay". The add-on manager still shows the full name (3a980ae716).

Oracle

• The Oracle no longer warns that Dragon Totems salvage into Troll Totems, since that fix is in.
• The Oracle can now answer about fifty more player questions, including where Horatio and the K'rul entrance are, what Mend, Mend Chance and Wild Lightning do on gear, what element poison damage is, what each colour of dragon resists, which elementals to fight with fire spells, where to salvage Bone Powder, how to star favourite recipes, and how to hide the crosshair. She also now knows about the new elementals and zombies.
• Corrected the Oracle's answers about the Wild Lightning gear stat. It adds up across equipped items, Lightning's bounce reaches one extra foe, and the bouncing spells hit each foe for less. The guide also covers where the Imbued Gem of Wild Lightning comes from and which crafted gear can take it.

Combat

• The combat hotbar now says "No combat deck equipped" when no deck is equipped. Before, the bar drew nothing in or out of combat, and logging out did not bring it back. The game also no longer saves an empty deck choice while a zone is still loading your decks.
• Runes on the combat bar and the utility bar no longer show a success chance while swimming, since deep water stops them being cast. Light and Night Vision can still be cast in the water and keep theirs.
• Weapon damage now changes with height. A hit from above the target deals up to 25% more damage and a hit from below up to 25% less, about a tenth either way at 1 m and the full amount from about 6 m. It covers every weapon, bows included, and creatures as well as players; spells are unaffected. The game has always worked this bonus out, but it multiplied the hit before the number was ready, so height never changed anything. The loading tip about high ground is back. (#13248)

Creatures

• Plague Bloats, Shriekers and Charnel Gluttons spawned invisible and could not be clicked on chaos build 323. Each pointed at a part of its new tinted model that did not exist. All twelve now wear their models, and a new test checks the model reference of every creature and NPC.
• Practice dummies, archery targets and other creatures that never move now stay on their own spot. Some Castle Atos training dummies had been standing metres from their posts; one that gets moved now goes back within a few seconds, and creature attacks that throw, pull or yank a target no longer move them.
• The Spider Queen in Spindelskog and Xen Trohop no longer heal quickly during a fight. A tester group reported doing almost no damage to her on the Hard version of Spindelskog; her armour was low, and her in-combat healing was outpacing the group. Both queens now heal at the same slow rate as other bosses. Their abilities and armour are unchanged.

Tools

• The Creature Balance audit now reports effective health after each creature's damage resistance and absorption, so bosses with heavy armor are no longer compared on raw health alone. It also reads per-school resistances correctly; a full immunity used to show as 1%.
• A new pair review step has two independent reviewers check the same code change side by side, one fast and one thorough. Their findings are checked against the code, merged and fixed in one pass; its first use caught two ways a town upgrade purchase could lose a player's Gold Crowns before the feature shipped.
• The creature balance audit now counts every hit a creature's basic attack lands and the weapon it actually holds. It had been reading the wild elementals at about two-thirds of their damage, and two-handed fighters, dragon breath and spellcasting creatures were off as well.
• Updated the Unity MCP plugin in the Unity Editor from 0.93 to 1.0.1, along with the library files and project define it brings with it (c90504eb30).
• The Unity Editor's AI Game Developer plugin moved from 0.93.0 to 1.0.1, which adds query and bulk-edit tools for scenes and assets (c3b461f6af).

Call to Arms

• A party kill now counts once toward a Call to Arms: it adds one to the realm and one to a single party member, the members taking turns, so everyone's totals add up to the realm's count. Before, every member got the kill and the Top Contributors list came to about 1.5 times the realm (2,757 against 1,828 on the Elementals call). Kills already counted on that call stay as they are. (553755ed0b)
• Call to Arms has a new goal: uncover a number of square kilometers of fog-covered map, counted from map each player clears for the first time. Its matching reward is a wider map reveal blessing, which clears the fog over a larger circle around each player while it runs and stacks with the Scroll of the Wayfinder's Eye up to double the usual circle. The dev portal page takes the goal in square kilometers.

Vendors

• Vendor Listings in Zone: on some rows, Weight, Price, Per Unit and Owner Name were drawn out of line with their headings after a few searches or a window resize. The list reuses rows, and a reused row kept an older column width. Rows now take the current column widths each time they are shown. The same fix covers merchant buy and sell lists and the trade window.

World map

• Fixed the World map lot outlines in the game's own towns: every lot was drawn a quarter turn off and pushed to one side, so Keep and Castle lots sat well away from their walls and lots stacked on each other. Overlapping lots across all towns went from 2,739 pairs to 85, and Xenos from 65 to none.

Combat

• A creature's push that moves your character now gets a combat log line. The Air Elementals' Buffet, which does no damage, used to stop at "uses Buffet"; it now goes on to say "Air Elemental's Buffet knocks back" and the character's name, and Cyclone's throw reads "knocks down" (83148cafad, #13289).
• A Night Step that lands you behind your target now leaves a Shadow Opening. For 2 seconds after you arrive, your next Sneak Attack or Sap on that target counts as striking from behind even if it has already turned to face you, and "Shadow Opening" floats over your character while it lasts. (546a3d7fc8, #13293)
• When a burning aura or a damaging patch on the ground keeps hitting you for nothing, the combat log now says so once every 10 seconds instead of on every pulse. Hits that hurt, and dodged, blocked or parried hits, still show every time.
• Night Step tries the spot behind its target and then the spot on the caster's side, lands clear of large creatures, and says "No room to land" when neither works. It casts faster with Lunar specialization and arrives sooner after the cast (a6ce4580cc, #13292).

Images

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• Fishing meter, before and afterClean Catch! plaque
• The fish on the line, named
• Landing splash
• Catch card
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UI

• Fixed a case where the mouse wheel could zoom the camera in but never back out. With a slot in the Options keybinding list waiting for a key, scrolling the window bound Mouse Wheel Down to that action and removed it from Zoom Out with no message. The wheel now binds only when the pointer is on the waiting slot, scrolling, clicking elsewhere or changing tabs ends the wait, and a line above the list names any action a new binding took its key from.
• Added a Share Screenshot to Gallery key (Ctrl+F11 by default, rebindable) that captures the world with the HUD hidden and sends it for staff review for a new screenshot gallery on the website; plain F11 still saves a local screenshot, and sending opens once the gallery is switched on.

Gathering

• The harvesting bar no longer runs behind the gathering swing meter. The meter's larger default size had pushed the top of its ring into the bar, whose track looked like a scroll bar behind the mini-game. The bar now rises just clear of the meter at every Gathering Meter Size.
• Starting a harvest in the middle of an attack no longer leaves your drawn weapon out for the whole harvest. The harvesting animation moves the hand point that holds tools, so a bow hung by its bottom tip or floated beside the character; the weapon is now put away until the harvest ends (#13279).

PvP

• Readied Cinderspire for opening: a portal in the Obsidian Trials' lobby that stays hidden until the arena opens and a way back on the start platform, a map, its own loading screen, and the arena's text in all nine languages. The party windows now name the arena a player is fighting in; they used to say the Obsidian Trials in every battleground. The arena is not open to players yet.
• Cinderspire left testing status and got a survey chart like the other mapped areas, translated into all nine languages. Its portal in the Obsidian Trials' lobby stays hidden until the arena is switched on, which happens without a client patch.

Images

• Cinderspire loading screenCinderspire map

Maps

• The Castle Atos map and minimap drew the player about 12 m north of where they stood, so standing on the grass beside the castle's north wall showed them in the moat (#13297). The map's placement was set for a window 12 m off the zone; it now lines up with the ground, and every marker on the Castle Atos map moved with it.
• Party members now show on the minimap and the Map window, as small figures in the party name colour that follow them around the scene. A member out of the minimap's range waits on its edge in their direction, the figures show over unexplored parts of the map, and in a town clicking one sends the guide wisp to them. Markers on performing bards and the siege Cabalist now move while you stand still, too.

Maps

• The two side chambers in Paladis Passage now carry the names of where they sit on the compass and map: the one in the northeast corner is the Northeast Chamber, and the lair of Experiment 0175 at the south end is the South Chamber (they were called Southwest Chamber and North Chamber). Midmaer Passage and Quel Passage, copies of the same mine, had the same mix-up and got the same fix, and the Ore That Walks task now points to the south chamber. Reported by Violet Ronso (9c0c0559f5, #13280).

UI

• Edits to the default UI theme made in the Theme Editor are now kept after restarting the game. Before, they showed for the rest of the session and reverted to the shipped look on the next launch, even when loaded from a saved settings file.
• Containers whose contents belong to someone else, such as the crates in the Solace Bridge Outskirts camp, say Steal All again where they said Take All, and the owner line above the items is red. The container window lost both when it was rebuilt, so taking from a guarded crate gave no sign it was stealing until the Justicar arrived. Reported by Elogie (#13261, 8f2f2f20e8).
• Compass markers show a small up or down arrow again when the place they mark is more than about 3 m above or below you and within about 25 m, as the old compass did. The hint went missing when the compass moved to the new UI (4deabd807b, #13249).
• The Skills window's Tree and List buttons moved right, so they now start above the skill tree past the school column's scroll bar instead of sitting against the Adventuring and Crafting tabs. Requested by Rudigar Kipperface.
• Floating names over other players keep their title and guild name while that player has a weapon drawn. Since build 304 both lines disappeared from anyone walking around armed, because a drawn weapon counted as being in combat.

Pets

• A taming necklace can now be locked while you are wearing it, and a locked necklace keeps the pet inside: Tame Creature refuses to put a new creature into it. Lock To Inventory used to be missing from the worn necklace's menu, so protecting a pet meant taking the necklace off first. The necklace's tooltip now says when its pet is protected. Requested by Ceal Astra.

Quests

• With Show repeatable tasks ticked, the Journal now keeps a repeatable quest on the Active Tasks list after you hand it in, marked (repeatable tomorrow) or (repeatable next week) until its reset. Quests ready to take again are listed first. Before this, Fox and Rabbit and every other repeatable left the list until the next reset.

Towns

• A player-owned town resized since the last game update used to show its old size everywhere outside the town. The Town Directory tier column and sort and the jukebox broadcast cylinder limit now read the town's current size from the community site, which can take up to about 15 minutes to catch up after a change. It goes live with the next community site update.
• A player-owned town's governor can now buy the town the next size up from the Overview tab of the Town Console, paid in Gold Crowns at the old store's price (Holdfast to Hamlet is 55,000). The town grows at once for everyone standing in it, and a size change made by staff also reaches players already in the town within two minutes.

Housing

• Added a Custom choice to the Adjustable Training Dummy. Its owner types each defense the way the character sheet shows it, from Resist, Avoid and block and parry chance and amount to each school's total resistance, and a switch makes hits on the dummy use the player-versus-player damage rules. The dummy can also dodge now; before, no dummy dodged on any choice. Requested by Graydios.
• Grass and tree removers placed while standing out on an Estercove island lot, past the edge of the lot's square, now stay placed. On build 323 they showed up and cleared the trees on the placer's screen only, and after a zone change the remover was back in the bag and the trees were back. Picking a remover up from out on the island works now as well. Reported by Steve Sosaria. (d2cba5fb9b, #13281)
• A bathtub or bed placed on a lot can be used again. Since mid-September a Marble Bathtub on an upper floor or deck, or one standing close to a wall, kept the plain cursor and ignored clicks. On a lot the game now always offers seats, beds, bathtubs and instruments within reach, and places the character on the spot beside one when there is no room to walk there.

Inventory

• Quick Deposit leaves the weapons, armor and artifacts a character is wearing on them; since single items started going into a container that already holds a twin, worn gear with a match in the chest or bank was being moved off the character (84eb5a95ee).
• The Black Cutworm has its own icon, a curled black caterpillar. It had always used the Raw Cotton icon, so in a backpack it looked like a second stack of cotton (745e8b07eb, #13372).

Zombies

• Plague Bloats and Shriekers no longer spawn invisible. On build 323 their bodies failed to load, so they could be heard and could hit but not be seen or clicked. The unplaced Charnel Gluttons had the same fault and are fixed too.

Inventory

• A taming necklace with no pet in it now shows "(Empty)" after its name, such as Wooden Taming Necklace (Empty), so typing empty in the inventory search box finds the empty ones. A necklace holding a pet still shows its creature, such as Taming Necklace (Wolf). Requested by Ceal Astra. (31ab6203f6, #13266)
• The inventory search box learned deck: for gear a combat deck has saved as its Linked Equipment: deck:fire finds the gear of a deck whose name contains "fire", is:deck finds gear any deck uses, and -is:deck finds gear no deck uses. Works in the backpack, bank, container windows and Search All My Stuff, and the search help card lists both. Requested by Ceal Astra. (6d99a82188, #13266)

Oracle

• The Oracle explains that a player town holds one Broadcast Jukebox, heard across the whole town, and that plain jukeboxes and phonographs follow the raised town object limit. (e30c3c7768)
• The Oracle now finds your own bug reports and suggestions from the last 7 days when you ask about one without its number, and tells you which report it is and where it stands.
• You can ask the Oracle to send a question to the developers for their livestream. It goes on the list the developers read from during the stream, under your character name, with up to 3 waiting per account.

Website

• Rebuilt the old website's heraldry for the new site: a crest builder with 272 charges, 13 ordinaires and 13 divisions, picture uploads, a staff review queue, and a new image server the game reads crests from. Changing a crest becomes free, once every 30 days. It opens after the account move.
• Added the certificate chain for the website's new Let's Encrypt certificate to the game client, next to the current one, so the client's checks against the website keep working through next week's switch. Let's Encrypt's other current intermediates went in too, so a later renewal needs no new client.
• Built the Screenshot gallery page for the website: player screenshots the team has approved, credited with the character name, the place and the date, in a grid with a full-size viewer. It stays switched off until screenshot sharing from the game launches.
• Rebuilt the new website's visitor pages on the game's own art: the painted loading screens, the in-game book colours, ornaments and woodcuts, and the real logo. The home page says that all of Episode 1 is free to play, a new Coming back page shows returning players what changed, with a search over more than 1,000 bug fixes, and the world map fills the window.
• Built the signed-in half of the new website, switched off until after the account move: a Home with New Britannia's date, moon and where the lunar rifts lead next, your guild's and towns' events and threads, an account page, and asking the Oracle from the website. Every town in the game also gets a page with its merchants and what they sell, and patch notes and What's New now have their own pages on the site.
• Added more to the new website's signed-in half, all switched off until after the account move: your characters, lots with their tax dates, unopened letters and Recruit a Friend link, a search over every town's player vendors, the leaderboards and the roadmap, guild crests, and votes by game account on the design proposals, SQUIRREL! and What's New. The forum moved to the same look.

Combat

• The Lich Fighter Statues lich can now be fought with any school of magic. Its magic resistance was so high that Stone Fist, Earthquake and Fireballs burn did no damage to it. A spell that any creature resists completely now shows "Resisted" over the target and in the combat log, where it used to show 0 or "Immune".
• The Crowd Control Resistance stat that dragons, the elemental bosses, the Spider Queen, Mechanical creatures and a few other bosses carry can now lower the chance a stun, root, knockback or knockdown lands on them, as its tooltip always said. Until now no roll read it. It ships switched off and goes on once it has been tried on the test shard; a creature that carries 100 can still be stunned at a fifth of the usual chance.

Creatures

• The Fire, Water and Air Elementals from level 130 up now hit as hard as other creatures of their level. In The Breach they had been dealing between a little over half and four-fifths of that. A Fire Elemental's Heat Haze now burns every 3 seconds at three times the strength, where it used to burn once a second for so little that good armour stopped all of it. Reported by Akandriel.
• Three Binding Stone monsters that spawned inside rock at Kiln Cistern and Sequanna Colossus now spawn on open ground and come to fight (e93ab0d82f, #13270).

Leaderboards

• Player dungeons with a custom name now show their town on the Dungeons leaderboard ("Lichhaven Dungeon in Maiden's Blush"). Before, the name appeared alone and players could not tell where to find the dungeon. Two dungeons in one town with the same name are numbered.

Client

• A wooden female mannequin placed straight from the backpack now shows its whole body. Since the 12 September change that let garments cover the mannequin, its placement preview was only a floating head and it stayed that way after it was dropped, while moving one that was already placed looked fine. The wooden body is now built the moment the mannequin appears, so the preview and the placed mannequin both show it.

Crafting

• Learning a recipe now opens the Recipe Book on that recipe even when a search was left typed in the book. Before, a search the new recipe did not match kept the book on the old results.
• Wrote a design study of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes crafting and harvesting: how its Action Point crafting with random complications, NPC work orders and group harvesting worked, the eight reasons players liked it drawn from about 30 player and press sources, the criticisms, and how each piece compares with Shroud of the Avatar's crafting today. Group harvesting, crafter outfits and work orders stood out as the clearest gaps.

Skills

• Fixed a skill mastery title earned while training staying off the Titles window and the character sheet Titles tab until the next login, even after the chat line saying it was earned. The list now refreshes once the save carrying the level-up is stored, and both lists check for newly earned titles when opened. Reported through the Oracle (Elder Angler).

Chat

• The chat window setting Show Emoji as Text goes back to pictures once for everyone after this update. Players who picked it before build 323, when the chat log could not draw emoji yet, kept seeing names after the fix; a Linux report of emoji shown as names came from this. The Oracle now explains the setting, and Oracle bug reports record it.

Login

• Logging in on a pier or dock that has since been picked up no longer leaves the character standing on the river bottom beneath it, unable to move; they start at the area's arrival point instead. A character who logged out while swimming still comes back in the water. Players returning after 90 days or more now start their first login at each area's arrival point, since towns and lots change while they are away.

Pets

• Tamers can now choose which pet command a third one replaces. Right-click Pet Speed Training, Pet Strength Training or Pet Taunting Training on your own pet's buff bar and pick Dismiss, then cast the new command. A dismissed taunt leaves the creatures on your pet, and the command's cooldown keeps running. Casting a third command without dismissing one still replaces the command closest to running out. Requested by Zain Rampage (30606bebb9, #13260).
• Fixed the interact key doing nothing on a body your pet was standing on. The pet no longer has to be moved off first. Party members' pets, summoned creatures and tamed creatures give way the same way, and a companion you can talk to still answers the key (#13243).

Lua Addons

• One press of Enter in an add-on's text box now runs its Enter action. The first press used to do nothing and only a quick second press went through, so add-on search and name boxes seemed to ignore the key. The box keeps the keyboard afterwards and chat stays closed. (2da431775a)

Vendors

• Vendor Listings in Zone with All Zones ticked finds Wolf Pelt when searched as "Wolf Pelt". About 690 items added since late September, Wolf Pelt and Holy Water among them, had been filed under their file names, so only a run-together name like "wolfpelt" found them and the category list left them out. The search now knows every current item name and category, and an item newer than the search list is still found by the words of its name. Reported by Brick.

Leaderboards

• The Dungeons leaderboard has a Type picker with All Dungeons, Adventure and Decoration. Adventure lists the player dungeons whose owner has Adventure Mode on, Decoration the ones with it off, and either pick numbers its rows from 1. A new Tier column shows the tier of the creatures an adventure dungeon's totems spawn, as one number or a range such as 5-12. Requested by Akandriel. Not on the test shard yet.

Chat

• The Universe chat limit now counts over 10 minutes instead of 5: 10 lines per 10 minutes, or 20 for a subscriber. The short anti-spam limits on all chat channels can now be adjusted on the Live Tunables page without a server build.

World

• Players standing near Ivar the Caretaker in Kiln were sometimes dropped into Kiln Cistern without going near its entrance. Zone exits now only send a player who is standing at them, and walking into the cistern entrance still takes you down (2d67b22b11, #13282).
• North Majestic Forest: a character knocked off the treehouse deck where the short plank bridge meets the platform, by the climbing rope, could be wedged under the deck until /stuck. The gap is filled and a fall there now reaches the ground (244764ced4, #11973).
• Blood River Massacre: the gap between the west gatehouse door and the stacked planks beside it could wedge a character until /stuck. It is filled level with the planks (06d28a7d7d, #8967).
• Libris Ruins: slipping off the stone stairs beside the big boulder near the bottom could sink a character into a slot between the stairs and the rock until /stuck. The slot is filled with a low step (568f3d7f8c, #10932).
• Highvale Village: the gap between the burning planks and the burning south gate could hold a character in place until /stuck. It is filled level with the planks (7de86a8380).
• Superstition Canyon: a narrow groove where the slope meets the foot of a cliff could swallow a character until /stuck. It is filled into a ledge at the foot of the rock (2a794c6480).
• Obsidian Panopticon: the crease where two snowy cliff rocks meet the ground could wedge a character until /stuck. It is filled level with the ground at both places it caught people (83647b7276).

Nameplates

• New setting Hide Titles and Guilds Over Players in Combat under Options, Interface, Character & Progress, off by default. Ticked, the floating name over a player in combat shows just the name; a player with a weapon drawn counts as in combat (728eb3cf67, #13367).

Build & CI

• The client build keeps every asset in the bundle it shipped in last time. The size-split bundles used to be cut again from scratch on every build, so one new asset could shift every later split point and force a rewrite of most zone bundles. One build this week changed 349 of 397 zone bundles that way, 4.6 GB of download for every player. Patches now carry what changed. Takes effect on the next client build, with nothing extra to download.
• A cross-check in the bundle build had forced both bundle passes to run on every build and added 5 to 14 minutes each time. Over nine builds it never caught a missing dependency; it only flagged the newer dependency walk for finding more references than the old method. It is now off by default, so a build with no content changes can skip the bundle passes again.

Conversation Studio

• The Conversation Studio inspector can now add and delete lines in a bark's alt responses (and the other plain line lists: bark, bump, death, reaction, unknown, Where-Is and NPC-to-NPC lines) with a "+ line" button and a Delete button per line. Kept lines keep their translation IDs.

Server

• The Report Stuck Spot window now keeps what the player writes. Each report is logged with its scene and position; before, the description was dropped whenever the bug-channel post was off (8ef4a44ffd).

Taming

• Feeding a pet Smoked Wolf Ears no longer locks the character up. The feed left every skill, summon and the mount answering "busy" and kept the player in combat until they logged out; reported by Belladonna Rose (02e60166c5, #13509).

Community Hub

• Built the hub side of the new screenshot gallery. Screenshots players share from the game are re-encoded without their metadata and stay hidden until a member of staff approves them on a one-at-a-time review page; approved ones go into the public feed the gallery on the website reads, credited with the character name, the place and the date. Players can see why a screenshot was not accepted and delete any of theirs from My screenshots, which deletes the picture at once. It stays switched off until launch.

Conversations

• May-May in Kiln and the fauns in Xenos no longer give directions to Etceter townsfolk; their conversations had been pulling in the Etceter directions list. The Xenos fauns now share the Xenos directions list with the rest of the town.
• Added a new Framework Guard conversation (male and female versions) with greetings, name, job and help replies, idle and combat barks, bump lines and death cries. No NPC uses it yet.
• Wrote Town Directions Plan A, a plan for giving every NPC town, player-run town and player village a shared set of directions to its shops, trainers, bankers, town crier and landmarks, spoken by the town's senior guard and a Helpful Automaton, with a starting survey of all 89 towns (14 already have directions in use).

Audio

• An Aether Vibration Device on a lot now plays at the same volume anywhere on that lot, on every floor of the house, and fades out a few metres past the lot edge. It used to fade with distance to the device, height included, and drop out at some spots on the stairs.

Fishing

• The fishing reel meter has a painted look: a walnut frame with a rope edge and brass corners, a spool, a float and a trout over the columns, water in the middle column, a fish riding the gold band and a red float on the bar you reel.
• Fishing callouts (Reel!, Fish on!, Clean Catch!, Line snapped!) sit on a wooden plaque with a matching mark at each end, a low line turns orange-red with a frayed tuft at its end, and a new Fishing Meter Style option (Themed or Classic) brings back the old look. The fight plays the same.
• When a fish is hooked, the reel meter now names it: a header shows its picture, its name with its size word, and Gentle, Fights or Fights hard. A kind your character has never landed shows as an outline over "Something you have never caught", and a new Fishing Meter Catch option set to Shape Only keeps every name back.
• The painted fishing meter reacts to the fight: the gold band glows and bubbles rise while your bar is on the fish, setting the hook sends a ripple out from the Reel! plaque, a landed fish throws a splash (a Clean Catch adds gold sparkles and a ring), a low line pulses and a snapped line cracks and shakes. High Contrast drops the glow, bubbles and pulse.
• Landing a catch shows a catch card for a few seconds under the callout: its picture, its name, its Fish Length for a sized fish, and tags for a Clean Catch, the first of its kind your character has landed, or a Critical catch. Fishing finds get a card too.
• The fishing line hangs with a gentle sag instead of a stiff straight rod, pulls taut and trembles when a hooked fish fights, and the water reacts: a bite splashes and rings where the bobber goes under, a nibble rings it, and during the fight the fish drags the bobber about just under the surface, splashing on a dash.
• Fishing got sounds in the world: a swish on the cast, the bobber dropping onto the water, splashes on nibbles, the bite, the hook set, a dash and the landing, a reel that clicks faster as the line comes in faster, a creak when a fish pulls hard against the line, and a soft snap from the rod when the line breaks. They come from the rod or the water and follow the sound effects volume. (3f357d31a2)
• The fishing proposals page marks Fish on: know what you hooked and The catch, shown as built in part: the meter header and the catch card are in, while Let it go, the warning before a dash and the hold-it-up moment are still open. (359e4f1489)
• The leaping fish planned as the last part of the fishing art pass was set aside for now. The fish models do not record which end is the head or how large the fish should be, so each species needs checking by hand before one can jump out of the water. (86c330d3ee)

Tavern games

• Built saved games for the giant chess board. Either player can click Save and adjourn during a casual game, and the game is saved once the other player agrees; against the computer one click is enough. Both players can later take the stations at any giant chess board and pick the game from the new Resume tab, and the pieces walk back to where they stood before play carries on. A game cut short when a player leaves is saved the same way. The new Chess window lists your saved games and your recent finished games, and each finished game can be copied as PGN for any chess program. It is not switched on for players yet.
• Built rated Speed Chess at the giant chess boards. Rated games always use a clock, and each character gets a Speed Chess rating that starts at 1200 and moves with every result. During a rated game the board shows how much your rating will change for a win, a draw or a loss, and afterward it shows your new rating. The Chess window has a new Ratings tab with your rating, record, highest rating and recent rated games, and a lookup for another character's rating. Limits keep the same two players from trading rating points over and over, and rated play pauses for a while for anyone who keeps abandoning rated games. A Speed Chess leaderboard and two titles, Chess Master and Chess Virtuoso, were added for the highest ratings. It is not switched on for players yet.
• Built rated games against the computer at the giant chess boards. The Computer tab in the board window can now start a rated game at 5+3 or 10+5, and each character gets a Computer Chess rating that starts at 1200, kept apart from the Speed Chess rating. Only the player's rating moves, and a computer level counts when its rating is within 400 points of the player's, so the lobby lists the levels that count before the game starts. The ten computer levels were played against each other over about 3,100 games, and their ratings now run from 360 at level 1 to 2260 at level 10. The Ratings tab in the Chess window shows the Computer Chess rating and the highest level beaten. A Computer Chess leaderboard, achievements for beating levels 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, and the Engine Slayer title for beating level 10 were added. A rated game where the computer opponent runs into a problem stops counting and carries on as a casual game, and casual games against the computer now allow ten takebacks per game. It is not switched on for players yet.
• Built a challenge ladder for the giant chess boards. Each account holds one rung, and players climb by challenging someone a few rungs above them. The challenged player offers times to play, or plays at once when both players are available, and a challenger who wins takes the other player's rung. Ladder games are rated Speed Chess games at 5 minutes plus 3 seconds a move. Missed games and missed deadlines earn strikes, players who stop playing slowly drop down the ladder, and Ladder Nights remind two players with an open challenge to meet. Seasons last 12 weeks, the top player of each season receives a champion's trophy by mail and the Ladder Champion title, and an achievement records how high each player finished. The Chess window has a new Ladder tab for joining, challenging and answering challenges, the board window has a Ladder tab for starting a ladder game, a plaque beside each public board lists the top five rungs, and a Chess Ladder leaderboard shows the season's standings. It is not switched on for players yet.
• Built the Chess Academy for the giant chess boards. Seven lessons teach chess at the board, from the names of the squares through how each piece moves, pawns, check, checkmate and stalemate, to castling, in 39 short exercises played against the Academy tutor, who takes the other seat. Exercises earn up to three stars, with more stars for fewer moves, and hints circle the piece to move or show the whole move at a cost in stars. The board draws the stars to collect, crosses on squares the king may not use, and arrows and rings when the tutor points out a piece left where it can be taken. Feedback and hints are shown only to the learner, and people watching see the lesson and the stars. The Chess window has a new Academy tab with the lessons, the best stars for each exercise and a button to start a lesson at the board, and a lesson panel in the board window shows the task and the lesson buttons. It is not switched on for players yet.
• Added chess puzzles and four new lessons to the Chess Academy at the giant chess boards. Puzzle practice gives runs of ten puzzles from real games in eleven themes, from checkmate in one and forks to rook endgames, and each run picks up where the last one of that theme stopped. A wrong move goes back to its square with a short note, and the other side plays its replies by itself. Puzzles missed or solved with help come back in Puzzle review after 4 hours, then after 1 day, 3 days and 1 week. The new lessons cover piece value and safe captures, forks, pins, skewers and discovered attacks, and checkmate patterns, and the checkmate lesson now ends with five puzzles, for 11 lessons and 183 stars in all. Normal chess games on a giant board now show the name of the opening being played. The puzzles and opening names come from the Lichess open database (CC0). It is not switched on for players yet.
• Added a coach and a post-game review to chess at the giant boards, and finished the Chess Academy course. In casual games against the computer the coach gives hints in two steps (first the piece, then the move), checks what the opponent is threatening, labels each move from Best move to Blunder, names the better move and the likely reason after a weak one, and can show opening tips and an evaluation bar. Players get 10 hints and 10 threat checks a game, and people watching the board see none of it. After any finished game both players can ask for a Game review with each side's accuracy, the count of inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders, and up to 20 key moments with the best move. Learn from your mistakes then replays the player's own key moments as exercises. The Academy gained Opening Principles, Basic Checkmates, King and Pawn Endgames and Rook Endgame Essentials, played against the tutor, and ends with Your First Coached Game, a whole game with the coach and Take back, for 16 lessons and 237 stars in all. It is not switched on for players yet.
• Added achievements and a title to the Chess Academy at the giant chess boards. Academy Pupil is earned for the first completed lesson, Academy Scholar for all 15 lessons before the final one, and Star Pupil for 180 of the 237 stars. Playing Your First Coached Game to its end, whatever the result, earns Academy Graduate and the Academy Graduate title. Each achievement counts the best single character on the account, so lessons on two characters do not add together. Oracle pages that answer questions about giant chess and the Academy were written and are held until the feature goes live. It is not switched on for players yet.
• Added game reports and fair-play reviews to rated chess at the giant chess boards. After a finished rated game against another player, either player can click Report on that game in the Chess window, pick a reason (Outside help, Losing on purpose, Stalling or Something else) and leave a note for staff. The other player is never told about a report. Reported games and some other rated games are checked by the chess engine and gathered into cases for staff to review. Only a staff decision changes a rating, and when a player is found to have cheated, the players who lost rating points to them get those points back. The public giant boards now also refuse a move, a Ready or a station taken from too far away. It is not switched on for players yet.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-14 is up: An empty line sitting inside twenty-one creature ability files had been cutting those abilities in half, and it was found by accident while building the new zombies. The zombie pass landed in force, with a stone plague, Charnel Pits and a boss waiting behind the last chest in Myrkur and Despair. There is also a fix for pets that could not keep up with a running player, a memory leak that had been ending Steam Deck sessions, and castle walls that now snap into a loop and flatten the hill underneath them. Listen or read the transcript (13 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Combat

• Coup de Grace now glows cyan on the combat bar while the target is low enough on health for its bonus damage, matching the threshold its tooltip quotes (20%, higher with Blade Specialization). Polearm slashes with the same kind of bonus glow too. A new Highlight Finishing Moves On Wounded Targets switch under Options, Interface, Hotbar turns it off. Requested by ZODROT.
• Climbing a ladder, rope, vine or root, opening or closing a door, and opening a chest no longer end stealth. Looting a body still ends it, and potions work as they did before (requested by Moon).

Community

• Filed four player forum suggestions and bug reports to the tracker: key-bindings settings organization, a Focus Regen masterwork tweak, a recurring Linux text-entry freeze, and a missing-town report on the public towns listing.

Vendors

• Air, Earth and Water Elemental Essence can now be ordered at player vendors. They arrived with the stronger elementals' new loot but were missing from the list of items that take buy orders, where every other creature essence already was. (#12951)

UI

• A new Show Center-Screen Messages checkbox under Options, Interface, Hints turns off the banner in the middle of the screen. Unticked, each announcement goes to the chat window once instead, and prompts such as "Leaving" a zone and the house placement keys still show on screen. Requested by Steve Sosaria. (#13192)
• Seeds and the Water Plants skill on the Utility Hotbar now show how many seeds or buckets of water you carry in the corner of the icon, as potions already did. The number goes down as you plant and water.

Combat

• Fixed creature bodies vanishing about two seconds after a kill when the creature had been pulled away from its group, such as the crocodiles in Tanglemire. The body now stays its normal time for looting and skinning.

World

• Climbable ropes, vines and roots now show a soft gold ring on the ground when you are within about 20 meters, one at the foot and one on the deck where the rope is tied off. Decorative ropes and ladders get no ring, so a rope you can climb stands out from the ones that are only scenery. Show Climbable Rope Markers under Options, Interface, Map & Navigation turns the rings off. Requested by Jebediah Armstrong. (#13196)

NPCs

• Ask the Town Crier in Castle Atos about the pools and you get directions to the two blessing pools past the inner gate, with both marked on your map. Until you have asked, the crier calls out about them to arriving players. Town Criers in player towns now answer questions about devotionals and pools and point to the devotionals marked on the map. Requested by Jebediah Armstrong. (#13197)

Website

• Rescheduled the move of accounts and the forum off the old website to a daytime window and rewrote the runbook for it: the forum and the old addresses now change over the same day instead of overnight, and the steps that have never run end to end get rehearsals first.
• Planned a new World map for the website to replace the old community map: every scene the game maps, sharper images, lots and who owns them, lots for sale, player vendors, towns under siege, events, and boards for the best fishing, gathering, hunting, PvP and markets, all read from the live game.
• The new World map is live on the website: 217 maps of towns, wilderness and dungeons, drawn from the games own map art (old community map art fills in 23 places the game has no sheet for), every place on its spot on the Novia, Hidden Vale and Mistrendur world maps, search across every map, and a link that opens any view. Old map links will open the same place once the old domains move.
• The World map has a Current / Hand-drawn switch: 152 places that the old community map drew by hand, mostly wilderness areas and dungeons whose game maps are now captured from the game itself, can show either picture, and switching keeps the same spot and scale.
• Each World map now shows what stands on it, read from the games own scenes: merchants with everything they sell, trainers, bankers, quest givers, townsfolk, creatures with their level, gathering nodes and the named ways in, each behind its own switch. The search box finds any of them by name and opens the map on that spot, and maps open centred on their content.
• All 439 player-owned towns are on the World map: each has its own page on its towns map with its current name, size, residents and claimed lots, links to its town page and lot map, and 344 sit on their spot on the Novia, Hidden Vale and Mistrendur world maps, with a switch to hide towns with 1 resident or fewer.
• The World map now shows which towns are under siege, live: a list on the map page, a banner on the towns own map with the Cabalist and how much of his strength is left, and a red ring on the world maps. It also has hot spots for the week from the leaderboards: the best hunting grounds, where players fight each other, the most dangerous places, the busiest markets and crafting towns, the most visited towns and the busiest player dungeons, with badges on each place.
• Every player-owned towns page on the World map now draws its lots as the game records them, coloured settled, free, for sale or at auction, with each lots size and its asking price or current bid.
• NPC towns on the World map now show their 3,800 lots, settled, free, for sale or at auction, and the 656 player vendors standing on them by shop name, refreshed every night from a copy of the game database on our backup server.
• Three more World map hot spot boards come from the week's game logs, rebuilt each night: Best fishing, Busiest places by player-hours, and Player vendor trade, which credits each sale to the town where the vendor stands, player-owned towns included. A place is listed only when at least three different players are behind its number. Each map can also show its fishing spots in 32 m patches, once ten fish from three anglers have come out of one.
• Each World map has a Hunting this week layer showing where monsters fell over the last seven days, in 32 m patches: 2,164 patches across 118 places on the first night. A patch appears only once ten kills from three different players land in it, and players who keep themselves off the leaderboards are left out. The Best fishing board now counts every catch the old fish leaderboard counted, and lists seven places this week.
• Fixed the World map's Hand-drawn pictures, which sat turned or mirrored on 80 places, Fortus End a quarter turn off among them. Each old picture is now lined up against the game's own map, or for dungeons against where the scene's people and creatures stand. Fixed lots, vendors and hunting spots that sometimes failed to appear on a map, and thin lines between map tiles at some zoom levels. The World page now links to the map.
• Towns and dungeon entrances on the World map's world maps now stand where the game's own map draws them, at each town's marker, where before they sat on the centre of the tile they are entered from. Xenos had been a step inland of its castle on the coast; 53 places moved by up to a few steps.

Images

• 
• Cinderspire layout preview
• Cinderspire greyboxFrom the start platform
• 
• Cinderspire mid-matchA Needle and the terracesThe bridge web

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer about sixty more player questions, including where to find Frogtown Market, Starfield, Cottage Grove and the Ardoris practice dummies, which mining nodes give Nickel Ore, how to masterwork an item, where Clownfish and Drudge Leeches come from, how to stop planting beds snapping, which totems a player dungeon can use, and whether Life resistance lowers healing.
• Added a My reports page where players follow the bug reports and suggestions the Oracle filed for them: status in plain words, what they reported, and replies from the team. The link under each report the Oracle files now opens that report there, and players can also sign in with their game account to see all of them. Before this the link went to the team's issue tracker, which players cannot open, and the Oracle told players to sign in there with their game password. It no longer does, and looking up a report by number no longer passes the reporter's account details to the Oracle.
• Checked the Oracle's fishing answers against the game's catch tables and corrected them. Time of day does matter: with most baits the largest fish bite more often in the morning and evening. Most baits catch aquarium fish equally often, and the water listed for Harvest, Port Harmony and Sunless Barrens was wrong. A new Landing Big Fish guide covers the best bait for each trophy, chum, the Fishing Expedition, the daily fishing towns and how to win the reel fight against the hardest fish. The Oracle also explains how to turn the fishing mini-game off for relaxed fishing.
• The Oracle window now follows the game language: its title, buttons, greeting, waiting lines, report links and error messages are translated into all nine supported languages. Questions asked in Japanese, Chinese, Russian or Ukrainian now find the right guides; before, most of them were matched against unrelated pages.

Call to Arms

• The Call to Arms page no longer accepts a fish as a "Gather or loot an item" goal, which can never count catches. Picking a fish there now switches the goal to Catch fish with that species. Last night's clownfish call was set up the gather way and counted none of the 13 clownfish players caught.
• Players who caught clownfish during last night's Call to Arms received its blessing, 15% producer experience for 24 hours, and the two who caught two each were mailed the Tabletop Fish Tank prize.

PvP

• Designed Cinderspire (working name), a timed free-for-all PvP arena. Sixteen fighters start around a 300 ft black-rock spire in a lava cave, and lava rises for twelve minutes, flooding one tier at a time until only the top floors of the keep's four towers are dry. The last one standing wins Obsidian Trials Medallions; a match will start every 15 minutes.
• Added a layout generator and checker for Cinderspire: one data file holds every terrace, pillar, bridge, stair, ladder and floating rock, and the checker confirms all 16 spawns are the same 16 seconds from the second tier and every tier stays dry for at least a minute.
• Built the Cinderspire greybox scene from the layout file: the stepped spire with the Obsidian Keep on its summit, 24 rock pillars, 60 rope bridges, 22 rope ladders, 18 rock stairways and 88 floating rocks. The lava rises on the server clock, so everyone in the scene sees the same height; it deals 250 damage a second, and bridges burn away as it reaches them. The 16 start pads sit on a ring-shaped platform hanging over the keep, and when a match begins each pad sends whoever stands on it down to its own pillar. The scene is not open to players yet.
• Added the match flow to Cinderspire: the timers strip counts down to each match and shows how many fighters are still standing and which level floods next, a banner warns ten seconds before each level goes under, and the last one standing is paid Obsidian Trials Medallions. The count and the winner are the same for every player in the scene. The arena is not open to players yet.
• Gave Cinderspire its art: the spire, its pillars and the rock under the stairs are now black basalt columns in the same dark stone as the Obsidian Keep on the summit, with plank-and-rope bridges, rope ladders, obsidian floating rocks with glowing crystals, a cave roof hung with stalactites, and braziers along the terraces, around the keep and on the start platform. The space under each stair was filled with solid rock; every other walkable surface stayed where it was. The arena now plays the PvP music, and a camera that sinks below the lava shows an orange haze. The arena is not open to players yet.

Inventory

• Chest and container windows have a new Remember Size and Position checkbox in their Options panel. Ticked, that one container always reopens in the spot and at the size it was left, instead of sharing one spot with every other chest and being nudged aside when other windows are open. The backpack, carried bags and the bank already remember theirs and show it ticked. Reset Window Layout clears it.

Emotes

• The dice from the DiceRoll emote now show what they rolled. The server rolls the D4, D6, D8, D12 and D20, a number appears over each die once it lands, and players nearby get one chat line with all five results. An old seated-emote easter egg that throws the same dice is back as well, after a September cleanup removed it by mistake.

Portal

• On the dev portal, the Players Online account drawer now lists each character by name with a link to the Character Viewer, and the drawer can be opened by link for offline accounts. The Character Viewer's account name now opens that account's drawer.

Images

Build

• Fixed a failed chaos release: a new wall kit test town had never been saved in the Editor, so it was missing its plot ID file and server report generation stopped the build.

Items

• The Fish Finder Cloak now shows the fishing hook emblem of the Cloak of the Master Angler instead of the streamer camera, worn, hung on a wall and in its inventory icon. Reported by KnightRider. (03fa187269)

Housing

• Planting beds of different sizes now fit together in a corner. A bed brought in beside one bed and into a second bed across its end slides along until it sits flush against both, where before it overlapped the second bed and could not be placed. While a bed is snapped, the placement text now says to hold Alt to place it freely, because Grid Snap does not override bed snapping.

Social

• A new Auto-Accept Friend Requests checkbox under Options, Multiplayer accepts friend requests as they arrive, so there is nothing to approve. Requests sent while the player was offline are accepted at the next login, and requests from blocked players are not accepted. Requested by shawn. (#13228)

UI

• The fishing meter captions (Line, Tension, Fish) and its reel hint went from 12px to 18px, and the meter widened from 150 to 180 so the three captions still fit. The gathering meter callout went from 18px to 22px and stays on one line, and the Swing button text went from 18px to 20px. Both size options still scale them.

World

• Dead bodies placed around the world, such as the ones at Blood River Massacre, no longer roll to the side and back on their own when a scene loads. They now load lying still and only move when someone searches them. It showed most when resuming an Offline game next to bodies that had already been looted.

Creatures

• Creatures and pets no longer decide that an enemy standing right beside them is out of reach. Creatures did this mid-fight and then sprinted home taking no damage, and pets refused mobs next to them, most often in The Obsidian Panopticon. A pet also stops following a creature that runs home after a long chase, even one it was ordered to attack. (#13220)
• Turned on the zombie finale in Myrkur and Despair and the water elementals' Engulf on chaos. Opening the treasure chest after the Liches' fight now raises the horde and the Myrkdraugr or Hollowmaw, and the strongest water elementals can hold a player in a Grasping Tide until an ally breaks it.

Tools

• Built the Support Desk, a staff page on the team portal where customer service works with an AI assistant. It answers questions from the game's database and logs (who caught what, who bought what, how many creatures died), drafts replies to players, and proposes fixes such as make-good mail or a Call to Arms blessing. Every database change is dry-run, checked by a second model and approved by a staff member before it runs, and past sessions are shared and searchable by player. It is live for staff on the dev portal.

Crafting

• The plain Pickaxe, Harvesting Axe, Sickle and Skinning Knife can now be masterworked at a blacksmithing forge, up to five times like a sword. Each tool has its own effects, and each effect helps only that tool's gathering skill: Meticulous Collection chance, gathering speed, critical harvest chance, survey distance, a few skill points, or extra durability. The four tools can also be salvaged at a forge for scrap metal. Requested by Scanphor.

Interface

• Checked every loading screen tip against the game as it plays today. 23 were retired for being wrong or out of date, among them one that said higher ground adds weapon damage and two that described compass arrows the game no longer draws, and 18 of those came back with corrected wording. 250 new tips cover combat, magic, crafting, gathering, fishing, housing, chat commands and lore, and 41 of them only appear while loading into a particular town or dungeon.

Events

• A World Calendar event can now repeat every day, so a run of stream nights is one event with one review, and a player can have 7 events waiting for review instead of 3 (requested by Lazarus). The guild and town site has it now; the in-game Calendar window gets the same choice in the next chaos build.

Tools

• Added a Scene Access page to the dev portal. An admin can close one scene on the chaos shard: players inside get the "instance is closing" countdown and then load into the overworld at the scene's spot, and anyone trying to enter while it is closed is sent to the overworld instead. Reopening lets players back in within about 15 seconds. Overworlds and tutorial scenes cannot be closed.

Releases

• Started the build 323 chaos promote runbook: build 323 reached qa this afternoon, the migration gate is clear, the patch edge serves it whole on all three platforms, and 109 tester tasks are ready to mark when it goes to chaos.
• Build 323 is uploaded to Steam, the patch edge is warmed ahead of its chaos update on all three platforms, and its 38-line player patch notes are written.
• Build 323 went live on chaos at 20:54 UTC, with Steam updated about a minute later. It brings The Unbinding and its Binding Stones, the copper golem Experiment 0175, the zombie pass with the Charnel Pits and Ashton's quest, and castle walls that join as you place them. 109 tester tasks were marked ready to test on it.

Diagnostics

• Put the log index template v15 live ahead of build 323, so the machine memory and swap figures that Linux and Steam Deck clients now report are stored as numbers and can be charted.

Books

• The New Player Handbook was rewritten as a short book read in the game: six chapters on talking to people, staying alive, skills and decks, where to find help, and the most-used keys. It no longer links any website, and it now says /bug has the Oracle write up the report. New characters no longer start with the old Player Events book, and existing copies point to /calendar. The Helpful Guide books link the current Game Guide. Translated into seven languages, and Read Aloud matches the new text.

Combat

• Fixed the floating Glancing Blow and Partial Resist words ignoring the "Glancing and Partial Resist on You" colour when the same hit was also blocked or parried; they drew in the red damage colour instead.
• The Taunt skill description now reads "Increases aggro on nearby foes." in place of "Increases aggro on player.", which read as if Taunt worked on other players. The nine translated descriptions were updated to match.
• The Summon Water Elemental description now says what Water Specialization does for the summon: it raises the elemental's level, health, damage and resistances and strengthens its heals. Before, only the Ice Elemental's description named its specialization bonus. (#13020)
• A dismissed Immolation now stays gone. Its fire could reappear standing on the floor of a player dungeon after a change of zone, and a player dungeon reloading after its owner switched modes could bring a dismissed buff back. Reported by Chiasma (#13038).
• Combat deck order now stays put for each character. An online character and an offline one with the same name shared one saved order, so playing one put the other's decks back in the order they were made. The deck hotkeys (Equip Deck 1 and on) now always equip the deck the Combat Decks window shows at that number; before, they could pick a different deck until the window had been opened. A character whose order was already scrambled needs arranging once more. Reported by Steve Sosaria. (ea1d2d0444, #13088)
• Charge, Body Slam and Engage Opponent now stop where you meet the target's body. Against bears, trolls and other large creatures they used to carry you into the body or out the far side, and an enemy stepping toward you during the charge got run through. Creature charges and pounces aimed at players stop at the player's body the same way.
• Debuff lines for burns, bleeds and poisons now show the damage each tick does to that creature, after its resistances and effects such as Obsidian Hide or Brittle. Before, they showed the damage before the creature's defences. Reported by The Spinok.

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains how to turn housing decoration mode off: untick Enable Housing Decoration Mode on the Interface tab of Options, or bind the Toggle Deco Mode key, which ships with no key set.
• The Oracle now records how long each answer takes. Two days on the self-hosted model: a typical answer takes 2.5 to 4 seconds, and no question has failed since the switch (11 failed with "the Oracle is silent" in the week before it). (ae25a1940a)
• The Oracle answers faster: the graphics card that runs her model got more power, and a typical answer dropped from 2.6 to 2.3 seconds, with the slowest ones from 4.5 to 3.6 seconds. (f5f469d1b5)
• The Oracle can list the street decoration limits for every player town size, from Holdfast to Teralopolis: objects, lights, NPCs, NPC buildings, containers and terrain levellers. Her terrain leveller answer carries the new caps.
• Tried speculative decoding on the Oracle model (a small draft model guesses ahead and the main model checks its guesses). Text came out 26% faster, but the draft used memory the Oracle needs to reuse its long prompt, so whole answers got slower (2.3 to 2.7 seconds) and the change was rolled back. (3ec26c127e)

Releases

• Started the build 320 chaos promote runbook: build 320 has been on qa since early today, the migration gate is clear, the patch edge serves it whole on all three platforms, and its 80-line player patch notes are written.
• Build 320 is staged for chaos: the promote dry run passes every gate, the Steam upload is in place, the patch notes are on the server, and the two trophy and letter fixes wait to run while the server is down for the update.
• Build 320 went live on chaos at 10:08 UTC, with Steam updated six minutes later. Tournament prizes already in players' hands now read as Fishing Tournament Trophies (374 converted, 21 original PvP awards kept), and 65 Call to Arms reward letters became placeable. Both conversions ran during the update downtime, before anyone logged back in.

Login

• On the login screen, Tab now moves from the User Name box past the saved accounts button and into the Password box, and Shift+Tab goes back. Before, Tab stopped on the saved accounts button and the Password box had to be clicked. Suggested by Brick. (762bab371d)

Tools

• The itemization catalog check now reads only top-level fields, so the fish tank ornaments list is no longer mistaken for an unbaked item. That false alarm had turned the nightly server gate red.
• The client smoke test now runs its shop, bank, eating and fishing checks in Kingsport, reads item cards for broken text, clears the World Events window and the level 10 tips question out of its screenshots, and no longer reports every window as blank on builds with the keyboard focus ring.

UI

• The Douse tooltip now says what its charge does, "Blocks the next harmful fire effect" (or the next 2 for a Water Magic specialist), where it used to show "+1-2 Doused" to everyone. Tooltip lines and notes that need a specialization the character does not have are now gray from start to finish, including Soothing Rain's fire removal and cleanse lines, which still showed green (reported through the Oracle).
• A Utility Hotbar slot no longer keeps its pink outline when Shift is let go before the number key; the outline clears once the key is up (e28d770321).
• The Quest Tracker now shows a task in light green once it is ready to turn in, meaning the person it goes back to is ready for you. It turns green at the same moment that NPC gets a question mark over their head, and every other task stays grey. Requested by Khara.

Diagnostics

• Added two diagnostics after a Steam Deck player lost several sessions in one night. Linux clients now report how much memory the whole machine has left and how much swap is in use, and every request to quit the game now records whether it came from the window being closed, the launcher, or the in-game menu.

Elementals

• Experiment 0175's Copper Veins, the Binding Stones and their Thralls now arrive in a spawn effect on the ground, fire or frost by element. The effect plays only when the creature has just appeared, so walking up to one that is already standing shows nothing.

Fishing

• The Chum rune now sorts with the other fishing runes. Before this it had no skill group, and every client logged an error about it once per session.
• The Chum recipe takes every fish fillet. It used to accept only ten of them (Bass, Barramundi, Carp, Catfish, Cod, Mackerel, Salmon, Sunfish, Tilapia and Trout), so fillets from Arapaima, Gar, Marlin, Pacu, Pike, Sailfish, Shark, Sturgeon, Swordfish, Tarpon, Tigerfish and Tuna, and the meat of all eight lava fish, could not be used. Fish Stew, Fish Sticks and Fishy Nibblers share that list and take them all now too.

Items

• Changing zones while an item list was still loading the titles of books, sheet music or recall destinations could leave that list without them for the rest of the session. The list now waits for the new zone and finishes loading them there.
• Six new hats can be worn by male and female characters: the Chef's Toque, Feathered Garden Hat, Conical Straw Hat, Frayed Straw Hat, Gentleman's Top Hat and Horned Raider Helm. Each has a separate version fitted to the male and the female head, and each can also be placed as a house decoration. For now they come only from the tester tools.

Chat

• Emoji in the chat log draw as pictures in a built client again. Build 320 showed every one as its :name: text because a shader the color emoji font needs was left out of the build, and the chat log retried and logged that failure on every line.
• Universe chat now allows 10 lines per 5 minutes for players without a subscription and 20 for subscribers (it was 20 for everyone). Staff can set a different limit for one player on the dev portal, and the limit message now shows the players own number. Trade, Noble and Roleplay chat are not limited.

Client

• When two network objects in a scene share an id, the client now logs which scene and which two objects instead of throwing an error halfway through setting the second one up. The Isle of Storms case behind the build 318 reports was already fixed and goes out with the next chaos build.
• Changing scenes now frees the decorations from the scene you left. Four internal lookups kept every decoration from every player town you had visited loaded until you quit, which added to the memory that climbed with each scene change on long sessions.
• On the Steam Deck the texture streaming budget went from about 1.85 GB to 925 MB, the figure the Deck ran at in September without losing any detail. Deck sessions had been closing during loading screens after a few hours of travel. Other 16 GB machines keep the larger budget.

Login

• The Steam account creation window now says when a username is shorter than 4 characters or an email address is mistyped, instead of "An unknown error has occurred. Please try again later." The server also refuses that input before it reaches the account site, and reads the site's plain-text refusal as a format error.

Oracle

• The Oracle can answer about sixty more questions players asked her this week, including the new bear and spider guides, the Rime Sire and tier 8 wolves, what Wolf Pelts, Sinew and Bone Powder are for, which fish fillets make Chum, Distance Units, turning off decoration mode, undead that get back up and why a summon lowers your maximum focus.
• The Oracle can now say where the Rime Mother, Rime Sire, the wolf pack alphas, the mother bears and their cubs, Scarhide, Cinderglass, Hvitr the Pale and the Spider Queen live. Asking for the Rime Sire used to get "no record of such a creature". Three Hidden Vale troll bosses that a rebuild would have dropped stay findable.
• The Oracle can now say which of the nine Hilt Fortress chests holds each Obsidian recipe (b4f4084010, #13037).

Commerce

• A vendor search that finished just as the player changed zones no longer throws an error in the client; the listing dates it could not fetch are asked for again on the next search.

Creatures

• Bears no longer spin round during their slams. Polar Destroyers twitched and turned abruptly around Rime Slam; every bear slam had kept a troll stomp's spin setting, so the bear swung toward where its target had been and then snapped round. All five bear slams now turn smoothly toward their target.
• The ice crystals from the Red Ice wolves' Chilling Howl now stay where the howl landed. They had been attached to the wolf and slid across the ground after the pack as it chased the player. The icy ground hit of the polar bears' Rime Slam had the same problem and now stays put too.
• Planned the zombie pass. Every zombie line gets abilities you can see coming and answer: Petrified Zombie bites that slowly turn you to stone, Shriekers that call the horde, Plague Bloats that burst, fast zombies that tackle anyone who runs, and a stone crust that maces and Sun magic crack. Zombies killed with Sun, Life or Fire stay down; in Myrkur and Despair the rest can get back up, stronger. Also planned: Charnel Pits that keep sending the dead back until they are broken, a boss fight when the final chest in Myrkur and Despair is looted (requested by Spinok), a quest from Ashton in Soltown, and Petrified Zombie experience raised to match their level.
• Holy Water now keeps anything down that would get back up on its own. Kill a creature within a minute of hitting it with Holy Water and it stays dead and can be looted right away. Before this it only worked on undead, and only in most places: the Ancient dragons got up regardless, and the undead in Myrkur and Despair got back up every time. The last fight of The Rise and the Breach Lords keep their own rules, since getting back up is part of how those fights are won.
• Laid the groundwork for the zombie pass: every new zombie ability, the Charnel Pits, the boss finale in Myrkur and Despair and the new quest each get their own switch, so any of them can be turned off on the live servers without a patch if it plays badly.
• Fast zombies run now. They used to slide along on their walking animation played several times too fast. Petrified Zombies have cold, stone-grey skin, so you can tell them from ordinary zombies at a glance, and zombie bites and claws make their sounds again. The zombie claw attack is called Festering Claws in the combat log, so it no longer shares a name with a bear attack.
• Zombies have two new attacks. Retch: zombies from about level 30 up, and Bogmen, stop and spray bile in front of them after a short cast bar. Anyone caught takes disease damage and is Bile-Soaked for 8 seconds, healing less while nearby zombies go for them. Grave Grip: Zombie Children grab you by the ankles for a few seconds, and you can jump or cleanse out of it. Their old ankle grab could hold a new character for 10 seconds. The Bogmen in the deeper swamps also lost a player spell they should never have had.
• Fixed 21 creature abilities that only ever applied their first effect. Elemental blasts and rings now deal their full damage (about half again what they did), an obsidian golem knocked out of its Earthshaker wind-up now actually falls over, and the Grasping Tide, Riptide Pools, the spiders' Silk Snare and Warp Snare and the Rime Mother's war cry do everything they were built to do.
• Petrified Zombies fight with a stone plague. Their bite now Calcifies, slowing you a little more with each stack, and at three stacks they cast Petrify to stun you; a Cure Plague Potion keeps the stacks off. They Crumble into stone when they fall, so step off the body. The fast ones Tackle anyone who keeps away and Feast on whoever is down, and the slow ones wind up a Grave Slam you can jump.
• Petrified Zombies raise a Stone Crust mid-fight that takes 30% off every hit. A mace, a hammer or Sun magic cracks it and leaves them Cracked and taking extra damage; they have a fifth less health to make up for it. The Petrified Zombies outside Myrkur now pay experience in line with how tough they are, two to nine times what they paid before.
• Fire now keeps a zombie down, like Sun, Life and Holy Water. The running Petrified Zombies in Myrkur and Despair, which never got back up before, can now rise once after a weapon kill and come back Ravenous: faster, quicker to strike and harder hitting. They still pay their experience only once, when they fall for good.
• Three new zombies join the horde: the swollen Plague Bloat, which bursts into bile when it dies; the pale Shrieker, whose Death Wail sends every zombie nearby at its target, frenzied, unless someone interrupts it; and the Petrified Brute, a huge stone zombie that charges anyone who keeps away. They take their places in zombie areas in a coming update.
• The zombie patrols in Myrkur and Despair are no longer one creature over and over: about one in ten is now a Plague Bloat, one in ten a Shrieker, one in twenty a Petrified Brute, and in Myrkur ordinary shambling zombies walk with the running ones. Myrkur's Liches arena wave now brings zombies of the dungeons own strength.
• Burning a Winter Coat off a polar bear, an ice wolf or an ice elemental now leaves the creature Scorched: it takes 20% more damage for about ten seconds, the way water leaves an obsidian hide Brittle. Before, the coat came off and nothing else changed, and because every bear resists magic, fire still seemed to bounce off a bear whose coat was gone.
• Alchemists can learn a new recipe from the potion recipe sellers: the Plague Ward, which keeps the plague, and the petrified dead's stone plague, off you for ten minutes. It is brewed from Festering Bile and Charnel Ash, two new reagents the horde will soon drop, along with a third, the Calcified Heart.
• Petrified Zombies now carry loot for their own level: gold, Crowns of the Obsidians and artifacts from their tier instead of a much weaker zombie, and sometimes a Calcified Heart. Plague Bloats drop Festering Bile, Petrified Brutes drop hearts more often, and the zombie patrols in Myrkur drop loot for the dungeon.
• The two zombie horde lords got boss loot: boss-tier gold, artifacts and potions, three to five Calcified Hearts, and their own Heart as a decoration, Myrkdraugr's Heart and Hollowmaw's Heart. They arrive with the Myrkur and Despair finale.
• Groundwork for the Charnel Pits: a zombie that falls near a standing pit gets back up as one of the Risen Dead a few seconds later, unless Sun, Life, Fire or Holy Water put it down. The Risen Dead pay nothing, drop nothing and fall with the pit. No pit is placed yet.
• The pirates' Boarding Hook no longer throws one player around a camp. A hook now lands the player a few steps from the pirate that threw it, and once one lands, no pirate can hook that player again for 15 seconds. Pirates also stop backing out of melee to throw it. A player had reported six Rogues and Swashbucklers in Twins Foothills teleporting them over and over until they felt dizzy.
• The Myrkur and Despair finale is built and switched off for now: after the Liches fall, looting the treasure chest wakes a zombie horde in the arena and then the Myrkdraugr or Hollowmaw. It switches on after a two-player test on chaos. Requested by Spinok.
• Built the Charnel Pits and their guardians, the Charnel Gluttons: bloated zombies that feed on the fallen horde and grow with every meal. Pits drop Charnel Ash, the reagent for the Plague Ward. They are not placed in the world yet.
• Zombies now speak in a fight and as they fall, each kind in its own way: hungry moans, Petrified Zombies muttering about stone, Shriekers wailing, Plague Bloats gurgling. The Zombie Aeronauts at the Well of Aldur stopped repeating the Solace Bridge lines.
• Charnel Pits now stand in the Desolate Hills, the Spectral Foothills, Tartarus, Despair and Myrkur. Break a pit and it calls up waves of zombies and then its Charnel Glutton; zombies that fall near a standing pit get back up as Risen Dead unless Sun, Life, Fire or Holy Water put them down.

Vendors

• Vendor Listings in Zone no longer lists items on lots where nobody can buy them, such as lots whose owner no longer holds the deed. Vendors that stand in a basement or player dungeon now show it in the Location column, for example "Nesoskia (basement)", so following Get Directions to an empty lot is no longer a dead end. Reported by Iron Man.

Dragons

• An Ancient dragon that broke off a fight and walked home no longer gets its rise back straight away. It now returns only after the dragon has been left alone for two minutes, so the group fighting it no longer sees it fall and rise a third time (#12995).

Housing

• The Decoration Layouts list now sorts when the Name, Items or Saved heading is clicked, and a second click reverses it. Before, the arrow on the heading changed and the list stayed in the same order. Items sorts by count, so 9 comes before 10. Reported by Michael DragonBreath. (f006cfbe29, #13042)
• Grass and tree removers now work across the whole island of an Estercove island keep or castle lot that uses Extra Land, and they clear the palms that stand down the slope below them. Dropping a whole stack of a decoration on your lot now says in chat how to place one at a time.
• Five of the six doors on the Wizard Tower (City) home now swing into their rooms. Both study doors onto the balcony, both turret doors and the bridge door had been copied from one template door and opened to its fixed angle, so one swung through the wall, one never moved and one opened outward.
• Empty ornament slots in a fish tank window now read Ornament. They showed "?DefaultSlot?" on the slot and in its hover text (8f36a0974c).
• Lot deed upgrade sales can now be switched on from the Live Tunables page without a new build. A sale takes up to 30% off every Gold Crown deed upgrade, from the backpack and at the lot sign, players get a chat line when it starts and ends, and the confirmation window shows the regular price beside the sale price. Before this, each sale needed a client and server build to start and another to end.
• Talking to the Oracle inside a town's Oracle Confirmatory no longer leaves you standing on its roof. With decoration mode on, a town owner's click on the Oracle could pick up the whole building, and when it snapped back the game lifted them onto the top of it. A click on the Oracle now always starts the conversation, and a building that snaps back after a refused move leaves you on the floor you were standing on.
• Added Steamworks Manor (Town), a steampunk home for Town, City, Keep and Castle lots. It is a stone and timber house with a round boiler tower under a riveted copper dome, brass stacks and steam pipes, a covered porch, a two-storey wing with a roof terrace, awning and crane, and a boiler yard with a flywheel. Inside are a hall with a grand stair, a workshop, a boiler room, a parlour, a gallery, a study, a library and a bedroom under the dome, with leaded windows, four working doors and decoration space on the floors, walls and ceilings. It was built in Blender and polished over five review rounds. For now the deed is testers only, created from the tester panel. (4e82f820fe, ccbc018e2d)
• Castle wall pieces and lot fences now join end to end while you place them. Bring a piece near the open end of a placed piece from the same set and it lines up and closes the joint exactly, so straights, corners, towers and gates close into a full castle loop on the lot grid. Castle stairs close up against the inside of a wall and slide along it. Stone, Dark Stone Spiked and White Stone pieces join each other, and every lot fence joins every other. Hold Alt to place freely; with Grid Snap on, a piece with nothing near it turns square to the lot (9ec0a4d07f, #13168).
• In a player-owned town, a castle wall or fence piece placed on the town's own ground now levels the ground under its base, so a wall run down a hillside stands on the ground along its whole length. On a test slope that drops 6.6 m over 50 m, the open air under a palisade piece went from up to 2.4 m to under a centimetre. Joined pieces within a metre of each other share one height; on steeper ground the run steps down. Walls already standing keep their ground until they are moved (9ec0a4d07f, #13169).

Progression

• Raised the margin the server allows between a character's lifetime experience and what sits in their pool and skills. Characters whose older records are slightly off now keep every point they earn; before, new experience was held back until the records caught up.
• The chat line for a kill that paid no experience because other creatures or guards did most of the damage now names the creature as its nameplate does, such as "Large Timber Wolf". Wild animals and other creatures without a conversation used to show a placeholder name there.

Housing

• Ceiling lights can now be hung under the pavilion on the roof deck of the Elven Four-Story Palace (City Home), in the small stair room beside it, and over the staircase that climbs to the roof. Neither roof had a surface that would hold a decoration.
• The Disco Ball Chandelier shows its spinning dots again in busy towns. Yesterday's change switched the dots off whenever the ball hung over a lower room without a light shadow, and in a town the few shadows the game can afford usually went to other lights first, so the dots never came on and changing their colour in Light Settings showed nothing. Up to two of the nearest disco balls over a lower room now get their shadow on top of the town's limit, and a ball on a raised deck or porch with open ground beneath it no longer counts as having a room below.
• Planting bed snapping now works with the camera on either side of a placed bed, so end to end snapping holds as well as side by side. Snapped beds meet at the edge of their wooden frames, which used to overlap by a few centimetres, and a bed pushed deep into the end of a long bed now comes out at that end.
• Added a ghost defense profile to the Adjustable Training Dummy. A dummy set to ghost strongly resists spells, lets life, sun and moon magic through more easily than the other schools, and soaks up much of each weapon hit.

Inventory

• Your Backpack can show a Keep column with each stack's Keep When Depositing amount, switched on from the Columns group under the backpack's cog (off by default, your own pack only). Clicking the heading sorts the largest amounts first. Requested by Michael DragonBreath. (1a2c6ccd47, #13044)

UI

• The 45 Modern weapon and armour skill icons redrawn yesterday are back to their detailed painted art. The redraw had moved them toward the flat look of the Classic set, which remains available under Options, Themes, Skill Icons.

Creatures

• Spider Egg Sacs and Silk Cocoons no longer show a tall dark shard standing out of them. Both were built from the Death Shard's art and its shard mesh was only switched off, which the game switched back on when the creature appeared (#12984).

Pets

• A tamed wolf standing idle howls at most once every five minutes. It had been howling a few times a minute since wolves got their new howl sound. Its other idle moves play as often as before (#13022).

Skills

• The Obsidian Item of Greater Unlearning and the Oracle's reset now lower Elixir Extension and Elixir Receptive with every other skill and return that experience to the pool. Both used to leave the elixir skills at full level. The Oracle's offer and confirmations say so in all ten languages.
• Restored one player's producer skills on chaos. On October 1 the Oracle's skill reset still lowered both trees at once, so a player who asked it to reset their adventurer skills lost their crafting and gathering skills too. Each producer skill is back at its level from the cutover copy of the character, and the same experience came back out of the producer pool.

NPC Voices

• The Helpful Automatons now all speak with one British machine voice. Since 2 October they had been cast on it but were still speaking with three different voices, because the new casting had never been published to the voice server. 288 lines were recorded in the new voice and published, so players hear it the next time they start the client. A new check, audit_map_drift, lists any voice casting that has been committed but not yet published, so a recast cannot stay unpublished unnoticed again.

Pets

• Pets and summons keep up with a running player again (reported by PoPoQiQi). Since build 318 the change that stops characters hopping down stairs and hills also made a running character read as standing still to their pets, so a following pet moved only at its own top speed and fell behind. The same reading reached creatures chasing a player and the checks for whether a pet's owner is on the move.

Quests

• The reading window for a note or book lying in the world now has a Take button, so a quest note like the one for Nena in Highvale can be picked up without the right-click menu. Requested by Swift Killer. (#13029)
• The bounty masters in Resolute, Brittany Estates, Desolis, Valhold and Jack of Diamonds now pay a standing bounty on wolves: 250 gold for ten Wolf Ears, once a day, with a small chance at a Clan of the Wolf leather armor pattern or the Pack Leader's Headdress recipe. Nothing dropped the Clan of the Wolf patterns before. Ask a bounty master about their job, then about beasts.
• Ashton in Soltown has a new quest, They Always Come Back, for those who finished his Solace Bridge work: four steps across the Charnel Pits, the notes of an Obsidian experimentalist in Despair, and the hunger below Myrkur and Despair.

Combat

• Escape now also removes one bleed, two with Light Armor Specialization, the way Knight's Grace does for Heavy Armor. Light Armor had no armor skill that cleared a bleed before. Requested by Joe Zhudarak.

Towns

• Player-owned towns newer than the client's town list, such as Haunted Keep of Solania, showed "POT Template Example: Mountains 01" as the zone title and on the town crier. They now show the town's own name (#13028).

Tavern games

• Built the server side of the giant chess board: chess clocks that run on the server, premoves, takebacks both players agree to, claiming a win or draw when the opponent walks away, and live board updates for everyone watching nearby. It is switched off until the boards themselves are built. The existing chess, checkers and backgammon tables also changed: the computer opponent now works out its move without holding up the rest of the server, the turn countdown refreshes every turn, and someone who walks up mid-game watches instead of taking a seat.
• Built the Giant Chess Board and Grand Chess Board decorations, with 1 meter and 1.5 meter squares and all 32 pieces standing on the board. They can be placed, moved and picked up like other decorations; games on them come in a later update, and they are not for sale yet.
• Built the in-world giant chess board. Players take the White or Black station and move the pieces by clicking or dragging them, with premoves, a board camera, a flat 2D view and colour-blind highlight colours. The game window has clocks, a casual lobby with time controls from 1+0 to 30+0 or untimed, draw offers, takebacks, and claiming the win when the opponent walks away. Anyone nearby can watch, and /chess plays and reads the board by typed moves. An owner can choose who may play on a placed board and keep an access list for it, and a board cannot be picked up while a game is running on it. Grand boards now stand in Elad's Lighthouse, Northwood and Castle Atos. None of this is switched on for players yet.
• Built games against the computer at the giant chess board. The computer has ten levels with their own names, from Novice to Grandmaster, and the game window shows each level's name and rough rating while you choose and on the computer's player card during the game. If the usual computer opponent cannot answer in time, a simpler one makes its moves and the game window says so. The game carries on when that happens. It is not switched on for players yet.

UI

• Soothing Rain's tooltip now shows its level 100 Fire Resistance bonus in gray below level 100, with a line saying it needs Soothing Rain at level 100. It used to show in green at every level (#13019).

Images

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• Pet Food, Smoked Wolf Ears
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Lua

• Lua add-ons can now keep copies of their own saved settings before a risky change, such as converting old data for a new version. ShroudBackupSavedVars copies the add-on's settings file to a dated copy beside it and keeps the newest five, ShroudListSavedVarBackups lists them, and ShroudRestoreSavedVarBackup puts one back at once, keeping the file it replaced. An add-on can only reach its own files. This is add-on API 39, requested by shawn.
• Lua add-ons that mark the map can now give their markers a title. ShroudSetMapTitle puts one line in the top-left corner of the full map, starting with the add-on's name, one per add-on in each area and up to three add-ons at once. It hides along with the add-on markers and never shows on the minimap. The Map Pins example (1.1.0) uses it to show how many pins the area has. This is add-on API 40, requested by shawn (9dcd38a3c2).

Testing

• Repaired a combat test for The Breach that had gone stale when The Rise's arena bosses started sharing its health scaling.

Audio

• Wooden stilt houses, piers, pier steps, wooden stairs, sheds and market stalls built in the island-village style play wood footsteps. They played dirt footsteps before, including the stilt house and the pier walkway in Jaanaford (#13086, #13085).
• Wooden scaffolding and its stairs, plus the last island-village sheds, watchtowers and wooden steps, play wood footsteps. They played dirt before, including the scaffolding at Graff Gem Mines Entrance and one flight of wooden stairs in Verdantis Foothills that stayed on dirt while its twin beside it played wood (#12041).

Guilds & Towns

• Every player town size got the street decoration limits of the size above it: objects, lights, NPCs, NPC buildings, containers and terrain levellers. A Holdfast went from 200 objects and 45 lights to 250 and 60, a Town from 600 and 120 to 750 and 150, and a Gigalopolis from 1,800 and 360 to 2,100 and 450. Teralopolis went up one more step, to 2,400 objects and 540 lights. The space for player lots in each town is unchanged.

Testing tools

• Testers on the QA list now get the developer tools on the QA server when they sign in with the internal GM client: the GM Tools window, the console, item creation, teleport, summon and fly. Accounts not on the list are turned away at sign-in with a message pointing them to the regular launcher.

Add-Ons

• The ShroudGetNearestWaterType add-on call no longer searches the whole scene each time it is asked, which made the game pause for up to 28 ms per call in a big town. Water bodies and town water decorations now keep their own list, so polling it every few seconds costs almost nothing (2ed55e8d02, #13152).

Crafting

• Wolf Ears now cook into Pet Food, Smoked Wolf Ears at Cooking 40: a chunk of coal, three Wolf Ears and a jar of beef stock make two. A tamed pet that eats one does 10% more damage to animals for two hours, the first pet food that raises damage. The recipe can be discovered at a cooking station, and its scroll sells beside the other pet food recipes.

Docs

• Wrote the zombie enemies reference for the team: every zombie line's abilities and counters, the rise and Holy Water, the corpse loot and where the code lives. The Oracle's zombie guide is written and waits for the zombie update to reach the test shard.

Achievements

• The Zombie Slayer achievement now gives 5 Cure Plague Potions and Zombie Bane 5 Plague Wards, paid to characters who already earned them at their next logins. The Myrkdraugr, Hollowmaw and the Charnel Glutton got their own boss kill achievements.

Localization

• The zombie update text (the Charnel Pits, the quest "They Always Come Back", the new zombie runes, voices, items and journal entries) is now translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese and Chinese.

Books

• Read Aloud re-recorded for 3 books whose words changed since their last recording: Elementals MarlinNotes0175, Elementals MicholaiBindingNotes, Zombies ExperimentalistNotes.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-12 is up: A new internal page measured how far every character ever made got through their opening hour, and the team spent the morning fixing the places people stop. A six year old video review of the game was worked through as a bug list, including the melee hits that had been landing a full round trip after the swing. Chat emoji brought the whole interface to a stutter, held a build back, and came back a different way by the evening. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Housing

• Wax cylinders with a recorded book on them now play in a Jukebox or an Automated Phonograph, including the Ornate one. The cylinder list shows the book's title, narrator and author, and the device moves on to its next cylinder when the book ends. Before, a recorded book showed a blank row and stopped the device on it. A broadcasting phonograph refuses a recorded book with a message saying why, and a player who walks up to a jukebox partway through a song now hears it from the right point.
• A Jukebox or Automated Phonograph window has a new Play in order checkbox next to Play and Stop. Ticked, the device plays its wax cylinders top to bottom as the window lists them and starts again from the top; cleared, it shuffles them as before. The setting is remembered for each device, and broadcasting phonographs do not have it.
• A new staff page lists every lot deed that expires within 30 days, for unpaid taxes or an owner who has stopped logging in, and the owners who are due a warning email at 15 and 10 days. It is rebuilt every night on our backup server; the emails start once the new mail service is set up.
• Fixed an error some players logged when leaving a town with player lots: crop data was requested in the moment between leaving one area and joining the next. Crop loading now waits until the next area is joined.
• Basements and player dungeons full of lights no longer drop to around 10 FPS when Shadow Distance is set high. Only the lights nearest the player cast shadows, up to 10 at once as in towns, and every light stays lit (d8dd0b9982, #12596).
• A second staff page lists the heraldry crests waiting for approval, with each crest shown, and the player-owned town submissions still waiting to be built. It is rebuilt every night from the copy of the old website.
• The pin on the housing decoration bar is now remembered between sessions. A pinned bar used to be gone after logging out and back in until you started decorating again; it now comes back pinned, and closing it with its X still unpins it. Reported by Isabel Ayin (c3531934b0, #12527).
• The warning emails for lots about to expire are written and tested, naming the town, the date and what keeps the lot. They start going out once the new mail service is set up; today that would be 60 owners.
• In player-owned towns, Decoration Layouts can only be saved or applied while standing on a lot. Applying a layout from a road between lots used to target the whole town and pulled its decorations and NPCs into the governor's backpack. Reported by Isabel Ayin. (67fc4dc534, #12533)
• Player dungeon owners can now turn creature respawning off from the dungeon entrance Options menu. With it off, a creature killed in the dungeon stays dead until everyone has left or the owner switches to Decoration Mode and back, so a large dungeon can be cleared. Pets and practice dummies keep respawning. Requested by Akandriel.
• The deeper chimney flue on the Two-Story w/ Balcony Town Homes (Wood & Plaster and Shingle-Roof) now also appears on the simpler model the game draws from a short distance away, which still had the old shallow, streaked pit (3dfb21e54b, #12438).
• A town governor can now send another player's decoration in the town's public area to that player's bank from its right-click menu. The option used to appear on house lots only, so a resident's faerie circle resting on a governor's town signpost left the governor unable to pick up either one (d1083f1013, #12374).
• Owners can give a placed Conversationalist quest sparkles (the wave and sparkle burst town quest givers do) and a quest bark: one line of up to 100 characters it calls out to players who walk up, shown over its head and in the chat log. Both are set from the Conversationalist's right-click menu, and visitors can mute the line.
• Fish tanks now take small aquatic ornaments as well as fish and an accessory. The 27 coral reef finds from salt-water fishing, the Petrified Ammonite, the Drowned King's Crown, the ships in a bottle and the small gold piles shrink to fit and sit on the tank floor, two per large tank and one in the Tabletop Fish Tank. Anything a tank cannot hold now says why when it is refused (3e325f97f0).
• The Conversationalist Teleporter can take the look of any Conversationalist, requested by Patosh. Each Conversationalist look has an Eternal Pattern, sold in the Crown Store for 400 crowns (92 looks) or gained by salvaging that Conversationalist at a tailoring table, and the alchemy recipe Reshape Conversationalist Teleporter applies it. The teleporter keeps its own name, destination and placement rules (1052c8d540, #12834).
• Flat pallet cots, the Canvas Cot and the Prison Cot now have a pillow at the head end. Lying down on one left the sleeping character's head floating above the mat, because the sleep pose rests the head on a pillow these cots never had. Reported by Elene Sali at Solace Bridge Outskirts and Highvale Outskirts (13fdf2e188, #11081).
• A placed Conversationalist Teleporter now shows Travel to and its town on its right-click menu, for the owner and every visitor. The entry never appeared before, so the menu could not send anyone anywhere. Reported by Lazarus Long. (be12272c16, #12912)
• The Disco Ball Chandelier no longer shows in the room below it. Its white light shafts now stop short of the floor, furniture and walls around the ball, where the Large and Huge sizes used to poke them out of the ceiling of the room underneath. When a room lies below the ball and the game cannot draw the light's shadow (Quality Level Fastest, or a house where other lights hold the shadows), its spinning dots switch off; a ball with nothing under its floor keeps them.
• Fish tank glass and water are much more see-through. All four tanks looked dark and murky; fish, ornaments and the wall behind now show through at close to full brightness (5ccf7ca215).

NPCs

• Asking an NPC for a second hand-in while the Give Items window is open for another one now tells you to finish or close the open trade first. Before, the NPC answered but nothing changed. The one-time reward from Isabel Spalding in Aerie also no longer writes an error into the client log.
• Arabella is standing by the braziers again when a new character arrives on the Isle of Storms. A change that stops killed creatures respawning on a player standing on their spot had also kept first-time NPCs away while a player stood nearby; it now applies only to respawns after a kill (fca6200b5f, #12706).

Operations

• Build 318 went live on the chaos shard at 22:54 UTC on 12 October, and on Steam about 15 minutes later. The two item backfills it carries (tournament trophies becoming Fishing Tournament Trophies, and Call to Arms letters becoming placeable) are queued to run during the next server restart, while the servers are down and before players are back in.
• A chaos release can now run the database jobs a new build needs before players are let back in. After the new server answers its first test login, and before the launchers are pointed at it, the release stops the server, runs the queued jobs, starts it again and checks it once more. Until now such jobs either ran before the new build was in place or waited for a second restart after the release.
• Release and promote checks now refuse server item data whose stacking or trade flags differ from the build's; build 318 shipped older data, which is why cups, mugs and goblets would not stack on chaos until fresh data is deployed.
• Wrote down how support can check whether a web store purchase reached a player's account, and corrected the store notes where they pointed at a checking tool that was never built.
• A third staff page answers "I bought this on the website and it never arrived": it lists every store item of the past 400 days and whether it reached the buyer's game account, rebuilt every night. Its first run found 158 items from 22 accounts that need a hand delivery.
• The backer names chosen for the Domesday Book and the graveyard tombstones are checked every night against the account records, a job the old build servers did, so a newly submitted name cannot miss the game. Today's lists in the game are complete.
• Built the switch that moves the account check at game login from the old website's servers to our own on the day of the move. It refuses to run until logins are paused, the final copy of the account records is loaded, and a sample of about 300 accounts gets the same answers from both sides; logins then stay paused for one last check before they reopen.

Community

• Added two player suggestions from the forums to the wishlist tracker: making the Blessing of Avoidance buff easier to earn and more worthwhile, and saving QA-server and Live-server screenshots to separate folders so they stop mixing together.

Housing

• Planting beds now snap together while placing: a bed brought near another closes up flush against its side or end, squares up to it, and lines up with its centre or edge. Hold Alt to place freely. Pots and the barrel are unchanged. Requested by Steve Sosaria.
• Owners of taxed lots are now warned in game when their lot taxes are past due, once 15 days and again 10 days before the lot deed expires, with a chat line and a message at the next login naming the town and the date. The old warning email stopped with the old servers; email warnings come back once the new mail service is in place.
• Taking away a player's right to add items to a lot (revoking a Tenant, Kindred, Trustee or Co-Owner, setting them to Guest, or banning them) now sends everything they placed there to their bank. A player with items on someone else's lot can also send them to their own bank from the lot sign's Lot Access menu with Send My Items to My Bank, which covers players who left the guild of a Guild Chapter House or lost access to a town inn room. Before, those items stayed on the lot with no way to reach them (73f5ecdce5, #12542).

Pets

• Pets and summoned creatures follow you again after a kill. Telling a pet to attack a creature that died before the pet reached it, or a body, left the pet frozen where it stood until it was summoned again. A hit from something the pet could not reach kept it standing for half a minute after the fight, and a pet that fought something away from an owner standing still waited by the body until the owner moved. An attack order on a body is now refused with a chat line saying its target died (2a42d8aa58, #12673).
• The Ringmaster's Vest now grants Tame Hide Toughness in place of its bard Song Duration line, from 6 on Common to 15 on Epic, matching the Helm of the Bear Spirit (8f4af03d75, requested by Zain Rampage).
• Pet Hide Toughness Training and the Tame Creature Strength, Dexterity and Move Speed lines on tamer gear were each reaching the pet twice; they now count once. Magic resistance from Hide Toughness is unchanged (8f4af03d75).
• Changing a pet's follow distance now moves it to the new distance right away, including while you stand still; a pet set to Follow Far used to stay where it was, and a following pet kept trailing at its old distance for a few seconds (ba333a94fd, #12857).
• A tamed combat pet now takes 10% less of your maximum focus while it is out. Concentration still lowers it further, and summoned creatures cost the same as before (201250ba88, #12832).
• The Crown Store listings for the ten newer pets (koala, fox, goat, both Akita Inu coats, capybara, raccoon, baby raccoon and both red pandas) now show an in-game picture of the pet standing in Brittany Fields, matching the older pet pictures, in place of the painted placeholder renders. Requested by D'Laein Lachlan (367b3fb1aa, #10295).

Catchphrases

• Town Criers now teach their six catchphrases once per character. Switching to another voice and asking again used to teach the whole set a second time. The Catchphrases window also explains under the voice buttons that a chosen voice applies to new and learned phrases, and that the free starter set arrives in the first voice picked (1f5d79137c, #12688).

Creatures

• Barbarians stopped sliding across the ground in a fight. The chicken dance they do when a kinsman falls or when they break free of a stun now ends the moment they start to move; before, they slid toward their target for several seconds with their legs still dancing. Bull Rush, the Berserker and Drakserker charge, became a running sprint, where the barbarian used to glide the whole distance in its swing pose (e136e67911, #12679).
• Seven creature groups that had been spawning a single stand-in creature now spawn their full lists: the Obsidian Panopticon cells hold a mix of elves, Drakserkers, Privateers, fire kobolds, satyrs and a faun in place of all Elf Warriors, the East Vauban Foothills farmhand zombies went from level 3 to level 49, South Boundless Forest barbarian patrols gained archers and casters, Eastmarch zombies are male and female, and the Ulfheim storm adds Air and Ice Elementals (a204f18e69, #12572).
• Killing Xen Trohop, the Spider Queen of the Spectral Peaks, is now announced in the World Events channel and starts the realm celebration, like the other landmark bosses (69a1712ab6, #12521). Requested by Akandriel.
• Pets and summons belonging to another player no longer sink into hillsides on your screen when they run downhill after their owner, and no longer get stuck under the floor on the machines that run towns.
• Creatures and townsfolk standing near a door that is switched off in its scene (the Tanglemire guard by the viking house, the Hilt kobolds behind a metal dungeon door, a Desolis prisoner) no longer wait ten seconds before settling, and a town door that finishes loading in the last moment now gets a short grace to block its doorway first.
• Call the Pack and the Rime Mother's pack waves are switched on. Ferocious Timber Wolves, the Elven Watchdog, the pack alphas and the Rime Sire now howl below half health and bring nearby wolves of their kind onto their target, and the Rime Mother calls wolves to the Giant Bones at three quarters, half and a quarter of her health.
• The Ferocious Bear Patriarch now bellows for its den at half health. The two-second call can be broken with a stun or a heavy hit; if it finishes, every bear within 25 metres joins the fight against the Patriarch's target.
• Barbarian archers from tier 6 and the Ulfheim chief now blow the War Horn at half health. If nobody interrupts the two-second horn, every barbarian from tier 8 within 25 metres joins the fight against the horn-blower's target.
• Obsidian Eye mages can now raise a fallen Obsidian elf. A body that falls with a mage in reach waits up to 18 seconds for the mage to reach it and rises once at full health. Experience and loot are paid once, when it stays down.
• Hardened Obsidian Elf Guards now ward an ally, taking a third of the damage that ally receives for 30 seconds. Killing the Guard ends the ward.
• A wounded Simulacrum elf now splits off one or two images of itself. Each image has one health point, hits for a fraction of the original's damage and lasts 12 seconds, and gives no experience, loot or kill credit.
• Creatures that summon now raise their servants. Lich Mages from tier 10, the Elder Lich, the Aether Liches and the Skeleton Archmage raise up to two skeletons at half health, and adult dragons call two hatchlings of their colour at a quarter health (Brood Call). Servants pay no experience, drop nothing, and go when their master dies or resets.
• A zombie's bite now makes its victim sick: small disease damage over time until the infection runs its course. Party members standing close catch it too but cannot pass it on. Purify or a Cure Plague potion ends it early.
• Creature cone attacks now land when the creature is above its target, such as a flying dragon or a creature on a ledge. Before, the height difference failed the cone's angle check and the attack hit nothing.
• A Solar Flare or other Sun or Fire spell that lands on a wolf wearing a Winter Coat now burns the coat away even when the wolf resists all of its damage. The Rime Mother, the Red Ice Snarler and the Lupine Arctic Destroyer shrug off most Sun magic, so a Sun caster could never strip their coat before. A dodged spell still leaves it on.
• A creature that breaks and runs from a fight no longer turns untouchable when its run carries it past the edge of the ground it guards. Hits and burning damage keep landing while it runs, rests and walks home, and it no longer heals while you are still on it (#12090).
• The Rime Mother and Rime Sire no longer stand still and stop fighting at their Jotungrund den. Their reach was set by Choose the Quarry, a 20 m mark that does no damage, so they counted a target they could not get to as already in reach. Marks, lunges, pulls and self buffs no longer set any creature's reach, which also covers the other pack alphas, bears and spiders. Reported by Rinaldi. (10c8cd49ed, #12835)
• Bears, wolves, wolf spiders, dragons and Nefario stopped sliding across the ground when they charge. Bluff Charge, Run Down, the wolf Lunge, the spider Pounce, the juvenile dragon pounce, the red dragon lunge, the dragon and wyvern dive and Nefario's lunge used to carry the creature the whole distance in a frozen swing pose (the wolf in a bark); now its legs run, or its wings carry it, until it arrives. Boar and big cat charges also run until they reach their target, where they used to switch to their finishing attack at the start of the dash. After a creature leaves an attack early, its walk and run now play at normal speed (416589f1df, #12717).
• Fastus and the Daemons now run through their dashes. Both used to slide across the ground frozen in a casting or thrust pose (165d9c9223, #12894).
• Brule Rocktooth is now a unique satyr with one spot in the Spectral Peaks northeast woods and a slightly better loot table; a new Satyr Paragon takes his place in the other Spectral Peaks satyr groups, Xenos, the Halls of Artifice and the Obsidian Panopticon cells, and he still appears in wave 7 of the Courage Club (9281a8e010, #12944).
• Planned a pass on the elementals and golems. Every element will get abilities you can see coming: the Earthquake that stuns without warning becomes a telegraphed Tremor, and fire, water, ice, air, sand and earth elementals each gain attacks of their own. Elementals from tier 10 up will raise a visible mantle that their opposite element breaks open, so the elemental weaknesses become something to plan around. Also planned: Frost Golems, Black Ice, Storm, Hail and Sandstone elementals, Experiment 0175 (the copper golem from Marlin's journal that eats ore and grows), Binding Stones that hold elementals to six places, a quest from Ivar the Caretaker in Kiln, and fair experience and loot for the strongest elementals.
• Laid the groundwork for the elemental pass: every new elemental and golem ability gets its own switch, so any of them can be turned off on the live servers without a patch if it plays badly.
• Earth and sand elementals and the golems no longer stun with an Earthquake that gave no warning. They now cast Tremor: a cast bar and a ring on the ground, then a short knockdown for anyone standing inside it, which a well-timed jump avoids. Their Root became Stone Grip, a short hold that no longer depends on your Strength.
• Every kind of elemental now has an ability you can see coming, each with a cast bar a stun can interrupt. Air elementals cast Buffet, fire elementals throw a burning Cinder Spill, ice elementals breathe frost, sand elementals blast a cone of sand that makes you miss, lava golems burst into a ring of fire, and water elementals from level 80 throw a slowing Riptide Pool.
• Air Elementals are now weak to Earth, the way every other kind of elemental has a school that hurts it most. Copper Golems were set up as obsidian creatures by mistake and shrugged off almost every spell; they now take spell damage like other creatures of their level.
• Built the mantles the elementals will wear: a visible shield that cuts the damage they take until a hit of their opposite element breaks it, leaving them exposed to 20% more damage for a few seconds. Fire falls to water, water to fire, earth to air and air to earth. They switch on with the next part of the pass.
• The strongest elementals now raise a mantle of their own element that cuts the damage they take, until a hit of the opposite element breaks it and leaves them exposed for a few seconds. They have less health than before to make up for it, so they take about as long to kill as they did unless you bring the right element, and they give more experience: a level 140 Earth Elemental now gives 47,300.
• The strongest elementals fight with more than raw power now. Air elementals chain lightning between players who bunch up and blast away anyone who gets close; earth elementals sink into the ground and rise beside whoever keeps their distance; fire elementals scorch anyone standing beside them and burst into flame as they die; water elementals hurl back anyone at close range; and the ice elementals of the Obsidian Panopticon slow you with every blow until they can freeze you solid. The Tempest Elemental at the Well of Aldur no longer freezes mid-cast.
• The Ancient Obsidian Golems, the Ancient Ferocious Obsidian Golems and Garem Sloe now wind up an Earthshaker: a 2-second cast bar, then a slam that knocks down everyone on the ground close by. One hard hit during the wind-up stops it and topples the golem, which then takes 15% more damage for 8 seconds. They also wear the obsidian bears' Obsidian Hide, which Water cracks, and burst into glass shards when they die.
• The strongest elementals now cast Kinship Call at a player's summoned elemental of their own element: a 2-second cast bar that a hard hit or a stun stops, and if it finishes, the summon is stunned for 6 seconds. A summon of another element, or one kept more than 20 metres back or out of sight, is never called.
• The Fire, Earth and Water Elementals from level 130 now attack with the weapon of their own tier instead of the one the level 50 elementals use. Their basic attacks hit between 17% and 57% harder, which brings them closer to what other creatures of their level deal.
• Opened the spiders' brood system to other creatures, so the water elementals and the coming copper golem boss can raise the creatures their new abilities need. Spider broods, egg sacs and cocoons work exactly as before.
• Built Engulf for the water elementals from level 130: a bolt of water at someone other than the player they are fighting, and a Grasping Tide that rises where that player stands and holds them for up to 6 seconds until someone destroys it. It stays off until it has been tested with two players.
• The Fire, Earth, Air and Water Elementals from level 130, the level 150 Ice Elementals and the Ancient Ferocious Obsidian Golems now drop loot that fits their level: more gold, better artifacts, Elemental Essences of their element and sometimes an Elemental Core. Before, most of them dropped the same bag as a level 50 elemental. Copper Golems now drop copper ore and a little gold.
• New elementals on art that had never been used: Frost Golems and Black Ice Elementals (level 140) replace the level 50 air and ice elementals in Jotungrund, and Storm and Hail Elementals (level 80) come with the storm in Ulfheim. The elementals roaming The Breach are now level 140, which gives the strongest earth, fire and water elementals their first places in the world.
• Experiment 0175, the copper golem that escaped from Marlin's journal in Highvale, now lives in the north chamber of Paladis Passage as a level 100 boss. It raises copper veins and eats them to grow stronger and slower. A hard hit while it eats knocks it off its feet, and water breaks its polished plating. Killing it earns new achievements, and Marlin's notes in its chamber explain how to beat it.
• Garem Sloe now stands on the south approach into The Obsidian Panopticon and comes back three hours after he dies. He drops a boss's loot now, an Earth Elemental Core among it. The Tempest Elemental at the Well of Aldur is now named Suutak, Master of Tempests on its achievements and trophies, the name its nameplate already showed, and it drops Air Elemental Cores and Essences and Suutak's Bluster more often.
• Binding Stones now stand at Sequanna Colossus, Oracle Colossus, Boreas Colossus, Kiln Cistern, Grusk and The Obsidian Panopticon. A stone mends every elemental near it while it stands. Breaking it calls up more elementals at three quarters and at half of its health, and at a quarter its Thrall appears, a large elemental in bronze bindings that keeps the stone from harm while it lives. Stones drop Binding Shards, Thralls drop Elemental Cores, Essences and Shards, and each Thrall kill counts toward new achievements.
• Elementals and golems now speak. Each kind of elemental has its own lines in a fight and a last line as it falls ("The flame... gutters...", "Stone... to stone..."), golems grind and scrape without a word, and the Binding Thralls beg to be freed. Experiment 0175 now shows what it is doing as its health drops, ending with "It is starving. Keep it from the ore." Elementals that already had lines, such as those in Kiln Cistern, keep them.
• Elemental Lore: the Animal Lore study window now works on elementals and golems. It reads them through the attunement of their own element (Fire Attunement for a fire elemental, Water Attunement for water and ice, Air for air, Earth for earth, sand and the golems) and shows what each one turns aside and what it suffers from. A new Elementals lore section tells where they gather, which element breaks each one's mantle, and who binds them, with an Elemental Scholar achievement for uncovering all of it. The Storm Elemental now shrugs off Gusts like every other air elemental.
• Experiment 0175 and the Binding Thralls now award portrait trophies at 1, 10 and 100 kills, in bronze, silver and gold frames. Every new string from the elemental pass (abilities, items, the quest, the voices and Elemental Lore) is now translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese.
• Elementals and golems now move differently when they use a special ability. Earth and sand elementals and the golems slam the ground for Tremor and Earthshaker, the strongest earth elementals sink into the earth before an Earth Glide, and air, fire and water elementals leap for Buffet and their mantles. Water elementals had been speaking with the fire elemental's voice, laugh included; they now have a whispery voice of their own.

Tools

• The Lua add-on docs and the book narration corpus no longer show up as changed files after every rebuild when nothing in them changed.
• A new generated-file scan lists every committed data file, page and catalog that has fallen behind its sources, without changing anything. Its first run found the Oracle recipe and Crown Store datasets out of date.
• Spawn AI Awareness and Spawn NPC Controller inspectors now show their nested settings open, with no foldout arrows: every awareness override, plus Shopkeeper Name, Faction and Conversation Mode Parameters (9ed408cfda).
• The tracker comment helper can now reassign an issue in the same request as the comment.
• Fixed the command-line conversation tool used to author and check NPC dialogue: it had stopped building when quest data learned to read journal entries.

Housing

• The town lot auction design notes now record the owner reclaim window added on October 8: an owner who gives a lot up can claim it back for 24 hours by default, and the leading bidder is refunded in full.

Leaderboards

• The PVE Kills, Zones and Creatures boards now count kills made in zones run by a dedicated host, such as Deep Ravenswood. Those kills were being left out, so one player's day read 156 kills instead of 360 (e03dae036c, #12686).
• Players who turn off leaderboard tracking are now left off the leaderboards entirely instead of ranking under a "-" name, and staff characters no longer rank on the Experience, Achievements and other progression boards. Testers still rank.
• The Fish and Anglers leaderboards count only fish. Boots, bait, rings and other finds pulled up while fishing are left off, every trophy size of a fish shares one row, and an angler's Species counts each kind of fish once. Earlier days are recounted the same way, so some totals drop (efb36494ac, #10275).
• The Fish and Anglers leaderboards take each kept catch and its length from the game servers own record of the catch instead of the length the game reported. Older rows stay as they were. Not on the test shard yet.

UI

• Added an Interface option, Focus Search Box When Opening Windows, that opens the backpack, bank, Recipe Book and Decoration Palette with the cursor already in their search box. It is off by default because keys type into the box until Escape or a click elsewhere, and it skips the box while you are moving. Requested by Chadwyck.
• Bag windows opened from the backpack come back after a conversation with an NPC ends, in the same places and still pinned. Since late September every open bag, pinned ones included, was closed after Goodbye (866825e792, #12603).
• Potions and bombs dragged from the Utility Hotbar onto the Combat Hotbar move there. The Combat Hotbar used to light up for them and then send them back to the Utility Hotbar (reported with Holy Water). Fireworks, which the Combat Hotbar cannot hold, no longer light it up. (f149f78f71, #12634)
• Holding Ctrl over a weapon or shield no longer runs the expanded item tooltip off the bottom of the screen. When the detail lines would not fit, the tooltip continues them in a second column, and the compare-with-equipped tooltip does the same for each item it shows.
• Fixed: on a fresh install (and after Reset Window Layout) the chat window opened too large and too high, covering the left end of the hotbar. It now starts in the bottom-left corner beside the hotbar, sized to the room there, or full width just above the hotbar on smaller screens. (db530b5a23, #12567)
• The character sheet XP tab now shows how much experience is left to the next Adventurer and Producer level, and /xp prints the same two lines. Inside a zone with a level cap the tab now measures progress against the level the character has actually reached; before, the progress row could read well past 100%. Requested by By Tor. (#12565)
• The MIDI Keyboard dropdowns on the Audio options tab now widen to fit their text. With no keyboard plugged in the Keyboard row read "No MIDI keyboard foun", and "Off (every note full volume)" ran under the arrow on Touch Response.
• The Load From A File screen for blank books and sheet music now lists files whatever the case of their ending, so Story.TXT shows on Mac and Linux. Files it cannot read, such as a .rtf saved by TextEdit or WordPad or a Word .docx, are named under the list with a note to save them as plain text; before, the screen said the folder was empty. Reported by Lily Byrd. (1ca157b5c6, #12534)
• The mouse wheel now pages through the topic buttons in an NPC conversation, the same as the arrows at each end of the row (4f1f1cbda2, requested by Pravidian).
• New Show Deck Name Above Combat Hotbar option under Options, Interface, Hotbar puts the equipped combat deck's name over the combat hotbar while it is on screen, and follows deck swaps and renames. Off by default; requested by Akandriel. (515eef01b6, #12491)
• The stat filter in the Vendor Listings in Zone window opens wide enough for its entries, so one-word stats such as Blacksmithing no longer break in the middle of the word (675ba47a0f).
• Options, Interface tab has a new Nameplate Colors section to set the name colour of party members, guild members, other players and hostile (PvP) players, for players who cannot see the party blue. The choice shows over heads, in the party and target frames and in Players in Scene, and dims at night like the game colours (3ef2952e8b, #12466).
• The item preview window shows the training dummies and the Blackbirds decoration instead of opening on an empty view; a dummy whose model cannot be loaded shows its icon (56785d0c29).
• The appearance screen (character creation, the Magic Mirror and New You merchants) now has a dice button at the right-hand end of the category tabs in place of the Random text button at the bottom left. The tab padlocks now have a tooltip: a locked category is left alone by the dice, red is locked and yellow is unlocked (736085aa31, #12538).
• The 3D preview window shows the whole Shadow Horse Mount and Ghost Horse Mount. Their bodies were invisible in the Crown Shop preview, which showed only a floating saddle and bridle (0477fc9fb0, #12096).
• The Vendor Listings search with All Zones ticked now finds recipes by the word "Recipe". The search index held each recipe under its bare name, so "Recipe" or "Recipe:" found only the Dragon Skull recipe, and that one only because it was indexed under its file name. Recipes are now indexed as they read on the row, "Recipe: Iron Ingot". Goes live with the next vendor search update on chaos. Reported through the in-game Oracle (9b76487521, #12079).
• With Separate Movable Buff and Debuff Bars on, damage from scene hazards such as the Castle Atos braziers, poison, spikes, steam and sticky webs now shows on the Debuffs bar instead of the Buffs bar (275640f7b8, #12095).
• A pet's health bar above its head now shows only after the pet has taken damage, instead of staying up at full health for the whole fight (86bf067ef2, #12862, requested by Phenyx).
• Closing the full map after pressing World Map now returns the round minimap to the local map. It used to keep showing the whole continent until the next zone change (5a64ff45db, #12841).
• The Modern combat skill icons were redrawn so they can be told apart on the hotbar. 45 icons across the weapon, armour, Tactics and Subterfuge trees had shared a pale blue glow, a silver figure and a white burst; each now shows a bold silver figure on a flat background, and the icons that had turned blue are back to their purple, green or red. At the smallest hotbar size the average gap between neighbouring icons went from 40.5 to 49.0, level with Classic. Requested by By Tor. (#12753)
• The Conversation window now opens near the bottom of the screen, so it no longer covers the face of the character you are talking to (most visible with Arabella in the first conversation of the game). Players who never moved the window get the new spot; a window you placed yourself stays where you put it. (6b75f7891e, #12760)
• A map item opened from the backpack now stays fully visible while the mouse pointer is over its window. With Auto-Fade Maps on it used to fade to almost nothing a few seconds after opening, even while it was being read, and now it fades only partway when left alone (963cf95669, #12727).
• The click diagnostics for the chat text selection and minimap reports (#11594, #11486) now reach the server logs. Until now they were only written to each player's local log, so a day of chaos build 318 left nothing to read (15a7f45c1e).
• With Show Place Names in English turned on, the quest tracker, the Next Steps task hints and the compass task tooltip now show town and zone names in English inside translated task text. Words a player says to an NPC and player town names are left as printed. (be8fb0cf26, #12850)
• The quest tracker can shrink to one line or be turned off from Options > Interface > Hints, a right-click on the tracker, the Journal's Settings tab or a new Collapse Task List key. On one line it shows only the top task (requested by MarlOfKark).

Infra

• The rebuilt pledge report now installs itself on the game server every night after it is built, through a receiver that checks it the way the game does and holds back any sudden drop for a person to look at. The first run found nothing to change.
• Inventoried the old Amazon cloud account the website media still lives on (eight storage buckets, about 990 GB, mostly old game builds) and started copying the parts we need, about 68 GB of website images, uploads and old site files, to our own backup server, checked file by file.
• The old live game's final database copy, taken at the October 1 move to the new servers, is now filed on our backup server and kept permanently. Until today it existed only on the game server it was restored into.
• Listed every scheduled team job that still runs on a work machine and where each one moves: five need an AI assistant login on a server first, and two need a decision on where their output should land.
• Traced why about one login in thirty could not download the license agreements on the latest build (network filtering and lookups on the players' side; the website answers normally), and added those downloads to the list of old-website services that move to our own site in the next client release.
• Wrote and tested the tool that copies every index of the old log servers to our backup server, ready to run once the backup server has its own connection to the old datacenter.
• Finished copying the old Amazon cloud account's website images, avatars, heraldry crests, map tiles and old site files to our backup server: 68.7 GB in six storage buckets, every file checked against the original.
• Set up an encrypted off-site copy of the game, account, forum and website backups, so they no longer exist only in one building. It is tested end to end and starts sending once its storage bucket is created.

Party

• Each party listing in Looking For Group and on the Social window's Party tab got an arrow beside the leader's name that opens the list of who is in the party, leader first. A member who has blocked you is shown as Hidden member, and players invited but not yet joined are shown as a count. Requested by Akandriel.

Images

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• The news archiveAn archived post
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• Fish tank ornaments
• Flat cot, beforeFlat cot, after
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• Disco ball, the room below before and after
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• Experiment 0175 Gold TrophyBinding Thrall Gold Trophy

Items

• Worn Dark Fairy Wings now show the thin dark chains over the shoulders in place of the leather harness. The earlier change had only reached the decoration version, because worn wings loaded the original model instead of the updated one. (46958ba5bd, #12687)
• Closing the Crown Shop or the Give Items window right after offering or buying something no longer hides the item until the next zone change. The game now waits for the item to arrive and puts it back in your backpack.
• Added Water, Air and Earth Elemental Essences, an Elemental Core for each element and the Binding Shard for the elementals to drop, and a second recipe for the Potion of Resistance, Elemental that uses one essence of each element with garlic and empty flasks.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer about forty more questions players asked her this week, including where the Ring of Brittle Brawn, the Frozen Tear of Titans and the Ring of the Lava Angler come from, what an Odd Container holds, pet gear on summoned elementals, where the Pet Merchants are, why Creatures Slain and PVE Kills differ, Lunar Rift destinations, where Pumpkin Head appears, dual wielding artifacts and what a Black Pearl costs at a merchant.
• Rewrote about 740 sentences in the Oracle's knowledge base, which also feeds the new player guides, to drop long dashes in favour of plain punctuation. The facts are unchanged.
• The Oracle can now say where the Ardoris Sewers entrance is: a barred archway on the east side of Ardoris, east of the crafting pavilion, with a second way in from the Solania Catacombs. Reported through an in-game Oracle question (#12856).

Combat

• Immolation cast before a zone change kept its icon and flames in the new zone but stopped burning creatures until it was cast again. It now keeps burning there, and other players in the zone see the buffs a character arrives with again (#12678).
• The Fortify Defenses skill card now shows its critical hit damage reduction: a line under each level column reads "Within 2 seconds after taking a melee or ranged critical hit: +65% Melee and Ranged Critical Hit Damage Reduction for 30 seconds" (+73% at level 120). The description now says the reduction stacks up to 5 times and it cannot lower the attacker's critical damage multiplier below 125%. Before, the card showed only the Damage Avoidance bonus and the description said it "grants protection from critical hit damage", which read as crits being blocked (2ddb2e03be, #12526).
• A character knocked down by a creature always gets back up. When a knockdown was refused, for example because a stronger one was already holding the player, the character could stay on the ground for good with Jump unable to break it. Players met it most often against the Troll Twins at Troll's Bridge, where it looked like a stun that never ends. (bbaec970ac, #12539)
• The Fireflies debuff on its target now reads "+95% Melee and Ranged Critical Hit Damage Taken" where it used to say "-95% Melee and Ranged Critical Hit Damage Reduction", which looked like a reduction. The skill tooltip and the Will-O-Wisp debuffs that lower the same value use the same wording. Reported through the Oracle (db03dbf8a7, #12525).
• A heavily buffed character who recast a stance such as Berserker's Stance or Torpor no longer has part of the new stance go missing for other players (a439e5eaaa).
• The Testudo buff can be dismissed from the buff bar. Dismissing it ends the movement slow and the wall, and party members inside the wall lose its resistance at the same moment (#12523).
• The four corner Elemental Lords of The Breach now fight as a Convocation. A Lord that falls re-forms at full health after five minutes unless all four fall within that window. When all four fall, each pays its experience and loot once, the royale opens for ten minutes, and then all four return together.
• A Convocation break now credits every player who fought at least two of the four Lords with all four.
• Gael, Lord of Air has a new kit: Eye of the Storm at its corner, a ring that is safe inside and punishing outside, plus Squall, Downdraft, Gale Force and Hurricane. Chain Lightning, Chaos Bomb and Berserk are retired.
• Wrauk, Lord of Earth has a new kit: Burden of Stone, a blow the group shares, Rockfall and Worldbreaker at its corner, an Earthquake that can be outrun, and a Ground Pound that stuns only its target.
• Pyre, Lord of Fire has a new kit: Kindle, a burning mark that hurts everyone standing near its target, a wider Ring of Fire, Consume Servant against pets, Firestorm and Magma Lance. Drain Focus and Berserk are retired.
• Brign, Lord of Water has a new kit: Wellspring, a long heal that only a group's combined crowd control or healing reduction can stop, plus High Tide, Crashing Tide, Undertow and a harder Ice Field. Ice Arrow is retired.
• The Breach royale has its second pass: the Death Power Shards armour the Spawn of Pele until all four are broken together and re-form when broken, the arena Lords grow stronger as their siblings fall, the first wave no longer repeats for five minutes, and the Spawn of Pele uses its new kit.
• Shield block was trimmed for player combat after a report that it was blocking too much: damage over time can no longer be blocked on any tick (the first tick used to be), a mesmerized character can no longer block, and the Strength part of what a block stops is now the square root of Strength instead of Strength divided by 10 (about the same up to 100 Strength, less above it). The character sheet Block hover says so.
• The client no longer sends combat effects to the game server while leaving a scene, where the server had already let go of the game and dropped them (e683d4c909).
• The burst at the end of a finished Judgment beam now always appears and its splash hits the creatures beside the target; a creature fireball that loses its target shows its impact where it stopped, and buff visuals such as Celestial Blessing and Spellbinder Stance that end while their character is hidden are cleaned up before they are reused.
• Riposte, Opportunity Strike and the other counterattack runes now glow gold on the combat bar while the window opened by a parry, dodge or block is still open, with a short flash as it opens. A new Highlight Ready Counterattacks option under Interface turns it off. Requested by Padre Adamo.
• Testudo now also raises armor effectiveness for the caster and every ally inside the wall, by 8% at skill 40 and 20% at skill 100. The boost works on each person's own armor, so a heavily armored tank gains far more than the old flat bonus of about 9 to 18 damage resistance. Requested by Akandriel.
• The Water magic bonus for standing in water now switches on in the Tanglemire swamp and in other open water drawn at sea level. Before, only rivers and lakes with their own water volume counted, so a mage knee deep in the swamp got nothing (7705708c24, #12882).

PvP

• Asking the Oracle to restore her protection no longer roots and stuns the character for the 5-minute wait. The character stays attackable until the wait ends but can move and fight as normal, and the buff tooltip says protection is on its way back. Leaving or joining a PvP party still freezes for its 30 seconds. (36c06f2814, #12685)
• Restoring the Oracle's protection now takes 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes. The character is held in place and stunned for those 30 seconds, as when joining or leaving a party, and stays open to attack from flagged players until it ends.

Quests

• The gold ! and ? quest markers now actually show over NPC heads. The first version, on chaos since build 318, drew on a layer the floating names never use, so no NPC showed one. The mark now draws with the name: it sits just above the name or title, hides behind walls with it, fades with distance, and steps aside while the NPC is talking in a speech bubble. Reported by Jebediah Armstrong. (705aeac898, #12676)
• The town crafting tutorial is one apprenticeship that Edwin in Soltown, Gilda in Aerie and Bledig in Resolute all carry on. Bledig stopped offering the lessons again to players who took them elsewhere, Edwin takes the finished helm on the first greeting from players who started in another town, all three say the lessons are finished once they are, and Gilda and Bledig can no longer be skipped straight into their shop mid-tutorial (96ca801d16, #12544).
• NPCs with a task for you now show the gold ! over their name in more of the starting areas. 55 quest givers in Solace Bridge Outskirts, Soltown, Ardoris, Highvale Outskirts, Resolute, the Blood River Massacre, Blood River Outskirts, Owl's Head, Kingsport and the Plains tutorial encounter had no marker because their quest lived only in the conversation. Taking the task clears the ! on every NPC who offers it.
• The Ruined Keep quests and The Overseer chain in The Rise got clearer journal entries from the quest owner's review: each step now says where to go next and in which scene, and task titles are plain instructions such as "Get 3 Troll Heads" and "Defeat Elrin Nayer". Five tooltips now put the period inside the quotes. Translations were updated in all nine languages.
• The Unbinding, a new quest from Ivar the Caretaker in Kiln, opens once his Dangerous Waters quest is done. He sends players to break the Binding Stones his old master Micholai cut: the one in Kiln Cistern, two of the three at the colossi, the stone Experiment 0175 swallowed in Paladis Passage, and the last two at Grusk and The Obsidian Panopticon. The rewards include a second recipe for the Potion of Resistance, Elemental, Elemental Essences and Cores, and a new Shattered Binding Stone decoration. Experiment 0175 now also drops a Core of Experiment 0175 decoration.

Vendors

• A player vendor can now be added to your favorites while you stand at it. The vendor window has an Add to Favorites button beside Refresh in place of the small unlabelled star that sat there before, and right-clicking any player vendor offers the same option to every shopper. A chat line confirms the change, and the vendor shows under Favorites in Vendor Listings in Zone. A vendor window switched to a second vendor now shows that vendor's own favorite state. Requested by Spore.
• Player vendors and Vendor Listings in Zone show every player when an item was listed again. Anything listed more than a year ago shows ">1 year". Requested by Blondinette.

NPCs

• Mistress Valdis, the Ebon Dawn boss in Solace Bridge Outskirts, had two bright pink dots in her eyes, left over from untextured test pieces. They are now hidden, as they already were on her other appearances. The Oracle in the cities, on the Isle of Storms and in player-owned towns showed a pink or white wedge under the back of its head where a bone from its skeleton poked through, and that piece no longer draws. A test now checks every NPC model for parts that would draw with no texture (77e6d7e925, #12615).

Pets

• A pet told to attack now stays on that target until it dies, you give another order, or the pet is pulled back to you. Aggressive pets used to drop the order for whatever was hitting them, so it had to be repeated, and later drifted to other enemies (af666760c9).

UI

• Buff and debuff icons under the player, target, party, pet and companion bars are now drawn from a smoothed smaller copy of each icon. The detailed Modern skill icons had broken up into speckled noise at those sizes on 1440p and 4K screens (reported by Ernesto Sandoval).
• Long pop-up menus now scroll when they are taller than the screen. The window list (Open a Window:) had grown past what fits at 1280x768 and 1280x1024, which cut off every entry after Search All My Stuff. The title stays in place while the rows scroll.

Achievements

• The Aether Lich in Deep Ravenswood and The Fall is now a boss with its own achievements, Aether Lich Slain, Vanquished and Conquered at 1, 10 and 100 kills, each awarding a framed portrait trophy in bronze, silver or gold (3c95098285, requested by Rinaldi).
• Pet Every Dog!: /pet now counts the nearest dog that has not been counted yet. Zoey in the Brittany Graveyard stands two metres from Cheyenne, and Burly on the Kingsport docks beside Maxwell, so once the first of each pair had counted, petting the second often went to the first again and never counted (aea177a813, #12918).
• Hovering over the Pet Every Dog! row in the Achievements window lists the dogs still to pet and the ones already petted, each with its town, so a player stuck one dog short can see which one is missing (aea177a813, #12918).
• The Nightmare in the wolf and stag road encounters now has its own achievements, Nightmare Slain, Vanquished and Conquered at 1, 10 and 100 kills, each awarding a framed portrait trophy in bronze, silver or gold. Before this its kills counted only toward the unicorn achievements (33d6872d9f, #12900).

Characters

• The hair color picker gained four dark shades at the end of its bottom row: Jet Black, Warm Black, Deep Brown and Dark Brown. The darkest choices before were a charcoal grey and a mid brown that washed out on high contrast screens. Existing characters keep their hair color. Reported by Elene Sali. (9b1838abe8, #12537)

Images

• Buff bar icons, before and after
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Images

Taming

• In offline play, a tamed pet dying no longer turns its taming necklace name dark red. Before, the pet could not be resurrected or summoned again until you logged out, so it stopped fighting and training, and a different necklace broke the same way when its pet died. Online play was not affected. Reported by Dragonfist. (a7dc1a0c55, #12535)

Control points

• Vertas Pass and Vauban Pass now keep escalating past their eighth wave like the other four control points, so a long run at either one ranks on the Control Points leaderboard. Before, every wave past the eighth there was a timed repeat and a two-hour run was recorded at wave 7. The tornado that appeared at wave 7 at both points is switched off.

Server

• The LoggingServer pilot project builds again. A Recruit a Friend settings class it depends on moved into its own file so the project no longer pulls in the database layer (#12432).

Oracle

• The Oracle now answers questions about wolves: how the packs hunt, what the strongest wolves do and how to counter them, the pack alphas, where to find the Rime Mother at the Giant Bones in Jotungrund, and what to do with Wolf Pelts and Wolf Ears, including the Wolf-Fur Winter Cloak recipe.

Skills

• The Skills window footer now reads one side per line: Adventurer level and XP, then Producer level and XP, then today's experience (ee80c792fc, requested by Astirian).
• The Revenant Stance description now names its Death Specialization bonus: specialization lowers the chance of the stance fizzling. It was the only stance whose description left its bonus out (6ec7427875, #12450).
• Pooled experience that a training skill draws on is now saved in the same step as the skill's gain. Closing the game or losing the connection right after training could keep the gain without taking the experience from the pool; both now land together or not at all, and experience earned into the pool is saved straight away.

Combat

• A pet or summon killed by creatures no longer puts "No experience for <ENTITY WITH NO NAME: SummonLichFighter(Clone)>" in its owner's chat. That line now only shows for a creature you fought that other creatures or guards finished, reported by Lothar Griher.
• Sap and Opportunity Strike no longer play the Trip leg sweep. Neither skill ever had an animation of its own, so both now use the Sneak Attack strike, which matches the weapon in hand. Reported by Padre Adamo.
• Creatures in Deep Ravenswood and other adventure zones attack a player who arrived soon after a server restart again. They had been ignoring that player, area spells included, until hit directly. (9842f8ec11, #12661)
• The knockdown line on the Earthquake, Trip and Leg Sweep skill tooltips now says how long the target stays down ("Chance to knock-down for 3 seconds"). Before, it gave only the chance. Earthquake's knockdown lasts longer with Earth Specialization, and the tooltip shows that too. Requested by Rinaldi.
• Dig In now raises the Damage Avoidance of the player using it as well as nearby party members, so the character sheet Avoid value goes up while the stance holds. The tooltip shows the bonus as a plain number to match the sheet, where it used to read as a percentage. Reported through the Oracle (804b410264, #12524).

Sieges

• Cabalist pulses now also strike the tamed pets of the players they hit, once per pet. Steady circles still leave pets alone.
• The fall from Indigno's throw is now credited to Indigno: the kill taunt fires and the combat log names the throw. Focus shields, Protection and Death Shield can now absorb the fall.

Diagnostics

• The corpse diagnostic that explains bodies vanishing early now resets its 40-line limit every hour. The hosts that run each adventure zone never change scene, so they had gone quiet within half an hour of starting. The log line also says when a body skipped its skinning stage. This is groundwork for an Obsidian Wolf skinning report from Deep Ravenswood.

Magic

• Reveal Hidden now gains area from Sun Magic Specialization (about 5 metres more at specialization 100), and both it and Dazzling Rays now say what the specialization does for them in their descriptions. Requested by Seth Aeva (8f15b678e0, #12416).

Options

• Added a Highlight Brightness slider to the Video tab of the Options window. A recent change had doubled the glow around a targeted creature or player, so charging a heal on yourself turned your own character bright green. At the default setting the glow is back to its earlier strength, and sliding it to the right gives the brighter glow (98d4812237, #12658).
• Mouse Look Mode added to Options, Controls: the camera turns as you move the mouse without holding the right button. It needs a key on Toggle Cursor, which switches back to the pointer; the checkbox stays greyed until one is bound, and the Oracle now explains it. Requested by Murtagh.

Achievements

• The silver and gold boss portrait trophies of 34 bosses whose name takes "the" now start their description with a capital ("The Frost Giant, defeated ten times."), in English and in the German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian text. The trophy generator writes it that way for new bosses too.

Creatures

• Fixed Spider Egg Sacs that looked untouched after being broken: a broken sac now fades away at once and the clutch shows its empty shell, and a whole sac shows its health bar before the first hit.
• Creature health bars no longer go missing for a player who was first into a zone. Elder Timber Wolves and spider egg sacs in Deep Ravenswood showed no health bar, and the egg sacs no hits, a few minutes after the player arrived (33b787b0cc, #12655, #12668).
• The red and reef spiders' Venom Spray was playing a dragon's green breath effect: a flame several times the spider's size that kept pouring for about two seconds after the attack, with a dragon's roar. It is now a short spray sized for a spider that ends with the attack, and the stray poison the old effect dealt beyond the wedge on the ground is gone.

Audio

• Large fights no longer lose all their sound. Combat one-shots now share a voice budget: at most three copies of the same sound play at once, distant sounds give way first, and sounds within 8 m of the listener (your own abilities and what you are fighting) always play. Looping spell and aura sounds no longer outrank hits and casts, and the client mixes 128 voices instead of 64. Reported by Joe Zhudarak.
• The Aether Vibration Device now says in the chat log why a station you picked will not play: its address opens a web page, it streams in a format the radio cannot play (AAC), or it could not be reached. Before, the device went quiet with no reason given.
• After each loading screen the game now checks the sound and turns the loading fade back up if a zone change left it down, a likely cause of towns going nearly silent after arriving from the overworld. Any sound level that still reads wrong is logged so the next case can be traced (#12469).
• Wooden carts, wagons and wheelbarrows in towns play wood footsteps when a player stands or walks on them. They played dirt footsteps before, including the hand-cart by the Jaanaford chicken yard (#12923).

Inventory

• An item dropped on a bag's row now says in chat which bag it went into. A stack of crowns moved out of Rewards onto a bag's row had gone into the bag with nothing said, and was reported lost (a8ecc7221e, #12644).
• When Take All, Put All, Quick Deposit or a crafting gather failed while the move was still being prepared, the items it had already handled stayed greyed out as busy for the rest of the session and the chest stayed checked out for a minute. Those items are now released straight away, the chest is handed back, and the bags involved are re-read from the server.
• Quick Deposit puts away artifacts and other items that cannot stack when the container already holds one of the same kind, each in a free slot of its own; Vexlyn's Spark had stayed in the pack beside its twin in the chest. Bags are never moved, and a full container now says it has no free slot (3d6a1d5c6f).
• The inventory window's Options panel has a new Keep Bags in Search Results checkbox. With it ticked, a search leaves every bag in the list above the items it finds, so each result can be dragged straight into the bag it belongs in. The match count still counts only the found items. Requested by Michael DragonBreath (#12863).
• Changing zones while a bundle was still opening no longer leaves bundle opening stuck. Every later bundle used to grey out, wait about two minutes and fail until the game was restarted, and the bundles still waiting to open stayed greyed out too. (#12902)
• Items in a move, split, merge or trade offer that was still on its way to the server when you changed zones no longer arrive greyed out and unusable until a relog. That covered the backpack, bank, rewards and mail. After such a zone change the backpack is also read again from the server, so anything caught mid-move shows where it really ended up (9ef8453b71, #12913).
• Changing zones while an item action was still waiting on the server no longer leaves it stuck for the rest of the session. Take All on that letter, recipe staging at a crafting station, lot deed upgrades and pet collar renames all work again in the next zone, a decoration layout being applied stops when you leave the lot, and bank or rewards bags caught mid-move are read fresh from the server the next time they open (9cb721cb71, #12921).

Maps

• Caves, dungeons and adventure zones with a 3D map now mark every way out on the map and minimap before you find it, including the many exits that never appeared at all, such as several in Blackblade Pass. Fog of war still hides an exit until you explore near it, and the compass still waits for discovery (#12411).
• An NPC with a task you can take now shows on the map and minimap as a gold marker, the same gold as the !. Before, only NPCs whose task you had already started appeared. NPCs that come out a little after you arrive, such as night guards, now get their marker too. Show Quest Markers Over NPCs turns the map markers off along with the !.

Conversations

• The Oracle's daily virtue test answer buttons now read Yes and No without a trailing period, in every language. Requested by Chadwyck.

Crafting

• The Printing Press takes blank books from lot storage when Use lot storage is on, so Copy Book no longer reads Blank Book 0/1 with blank books sitting in a crafting container. A book with writing in it is never taken from lot storage.
• Blacksmiths can now craft the Wall Torch (Blue Fire), which had no way to be obtained. The recipe takes the plain Wall Torch ingredients plus a Sapphire Fragment at Blacksmithing 40, and is learnt only from a rare scroll dropped by the lich Elrin in Despair. Requested by Blondinette.

Portal

• The Character Viewer on the dev portal can now search by account name as well as character name, listing every character on the matching accounts. A character's account name now links to that search. Requested by the team.

Items

• Artifacts: Mace of the Undone, Hammer of Breaking, Assassins Blade, Boots of Skulking, Gloves of the Cutpurse and the Bacchanal Belt now come in Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary and Epic versions that upgrade at a Smelting Station like other artifacts. Copies players already owned became the Uncommon with the same stats, and the mushrooms now drop the Common. (6654c8c29b, #12490)

Launcher

• The Linux Chaos Shard launcher now adds itself to the applications menu with its icon on first run, so it can be pinned to a dock. Dragging the bare file onto the elementaryOS dock had shown a generic icon that would not launch.

Map

• The round minimap now stops at the edge of the zone map, and your arrow moves toward that edge instead of the map showing a grey band past it. In Battle of Highvale the band showed across the top and left of the minimap from the moment you arrived. Away from the edges the minimap stays centred on you. Reported by Rudigar Kipperface. (2bcd238b91, #12577)

Agriculture

• A planter no longer logs a client error when its growth check runs while it is still being moved or saved; the check waits for the earlier change and the new growth rate is no longer lost.

Audio

• Music Filter now starts off, so radios and phonographs play at full quality. A note under the box on the Audio tab explains the old-time sound it adds, and players who set it themselves keep their choice. (934d541e0c, #12205)

Onboarding

• Highvale Outskirts and Blood River Outskirts point new Courage and Truth characters on to Resolute and Aerie (#12556). While in the camp, the town task stays at the top of the tracker and of Next Steps. The exit that faces the town is now named Road to Resolute or Road to Aerie and is marked for the task on the compass and map, and /guide leads there. Horatio and Eilliana end their greeting on the road out, and the task hints no longer say to finish the camp first. The page that tracks where players stop had found most of these characters stopping in the camp.
• Loading the Isle of Storms tutorial no longer logs a duplicate network id error: the Armored Watcher spawn point added yesterday had copied the Fly watcher's id, and now has its own.
• Leaving the game partway through the Isle of Storms and coming back no longer puts a new character back beside Arabella at the very start. The island now resumes where the character left, so a player who had reached Anais's combat lesson returns there, both in Play Offline and online (b008deb967, #12756).

Gathering

• Late swings in a long Meticulous Collection chain on the gathering meter stay hittable. Each hit speeds the marker up and shrinks the target, and from the fifth hit on the target had narrowed to about 55 milliseconds of travel. The target now stops shrinking at 120 milliseconds; the opening swings are unchanged. The game team can tune the floor live. (07cba7580c, #12492)
• Clicking an ore node from behind the rock it sits against walks the character around to a spot beside the node they can reach. Before, the character could push into the rock for up to 20 seconds before the swing started. A walk that stops getting closer now starts gathering at once when the node is in reach. Reported through the Oracle.
• Ten ore veins in Blackblade Pass, six copper and four iron, were the Tier 2 kind in a Tier 5 area and paid Tier 2 experience. They are now Tier 5 veins and pay the same experience and ore as the rest of the pass. Reported through the Oracle.
• Moving while skinning or gathering now always stops it. A movement key pressed together with the swing key, or in the pause between swings, used to stand the character up and let them walk off while the swing meter kept running. (8f9971a5c8, #12083)

Login

• Pressing Cancel on the connecting message just as a login attempt finished no longer writes an error to the game log.
• The End User License Agreement and the Commercial Terms of Service now ship with the game. Login no longer downloads them from the old website, which 3 to 4 percent of logins could not reach, and players who already accepted are not asked again. (c047b38613, #12768)

World

• Ruined Keep: a dip in the lakeside path north-west of the lake let the lake show through as a small pool that characters waded or swam in, with ripples but no visible water from the ravine side. The dip is now filled level with the path. (1a4044043b, #12599)

Oracle

• Typing /oracle or /ask followed by a question inside the Oracle window now asks just the question, and the Oracle can tell players about both commands and the other ways to open her window (5d54021c4e, #12358).

Overworld

• The overworld hex readout no longer throws an error when it refreshes while the character is still loading in; it stays hidden until the character exists, then shows the scene under the marker.

Crafting

• Double-clicking an item onto an open crafting table no longer logs a client error each time it is placed. (26c8793453)
• The crafting table's background recipe check no longer logs a false disagreement with the server when another item lands on the table while a check is in flight (ed0462196b).

Mounts

• Getting off a mount now writes a line to the client log when movement keys are held and the character has not started running a second later, recording the movement lock, speed and the animation the body is playing. This follows a report that dismounting with forward held leaves the character standing for several seconds, which could not be reproduced offline (5cb1d15f0c, #12454).
• Mounts lean into turns, starts and stops again. The stairs and hillside fix from two days earlier had left your own mount riding upright, because the small step down onto the ground each frame was read as the horse standing still (3cfc36b9f7, #12779).
• The Supernatural Umbrella now floats for anyone holding one. It used to lift only staff accounts, so on everyone else's screen a rider looked like a person standing still with an umbrella, and nobody else could see staff floating either. The umbrella is still not sold or dropped anywhere, so for now a GM has to hand one out.

Taming

• When your character dies with a tamed pet still alive, chat now says the pet went back into its collar and that Summoning calls it back. Resurrect Creature cast while that pet is not dead now says so too, instead of only "failed to resurrect". Reported by Professor Misery via the Oracle (4d6176fafb, #12063).

Website

• The last 11 player guides held back from the new website are now published, so all 97 are live. The guides and the in-game Oracle no longer call the live world a test shard, and the auction guide now gives the real three-day auction length.
• Set up permanent forwarding addresses on our new website for every web link the game client opens (store pages, account sign-up, password reset, the bug forums and more), so those pages can move later without another client update.
• The new website's News page now holds all 1,117 posts from the original Shroud of the Avatar website, from the 2013 Kickstarter to September 2026, with search and filters by type of post and by year. Their pictures now come from our own servers, video players show as links, and links between old posts lead to their new pages.
• Built the new account pages that will replace the old website's: create an account, choose or reset your password, and change it. They go live when game logins move off the old website, and new user names can only use letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores.
• The FAQ (on the website and from the Oracle) now answers whether the game needs open ports and what the IVYTOWER, CICADA and POTPIE connection messages mean. Those messages link the old website's FAQ; once that address points at the new site, the links land on this answer.
• Built the single sign-in behind the new account pages, so the website, the guild pages, the community hub and the forum can all sign players in with one account. Each player chooses a public name for them, separate from the private user name they log in with. It goes live with the account pages.
• The new account pages also take a Steam sign-in, so players whose account was made through Steam can use them without ever having set a password.
• Tested forum sign-in with a game account from start to finish on the new forum's private test copy: a player already on the forum lands straight in their own forum account, and a new player gets a fresh one. The forum add-on that does this is ours, kept with the rest of the code.
• Prepared the forum for its move: every member of the old forum whose email matches exactly one game account (396,974 of 397,388) is linked to that account ahead of time, so they sign in with their game account and land in their own forum account with their posts. A member no game account has the email of can claim their forum account by signing in with an account that uses that address, once the address is confirmed by a mailed link. The 63 members whose email several game accounts share are sorted out by support.
• Once the new forum opens, its own registration form, password sign-in and password reset are replaced by one Sign in with Shroud of the Avatar page, so the game account is the only way in. Tested end to end on the forum's private test copy.
• When the new forum opens, members whose forum name is the user name they log in to the game with (344 of them posted in the past year) see a notice offering one free name change that takes effect right away, and the old name is not shown on their profile afterwards. Forum groups that come with game access (Adventurer, Developer+, Episode2) are still added at sign-in from the game account, as on the old forum.
• Forum members keep their profile pictures in the move: the pictures the old forum showed came from the old website's media storage, which is now copied to our own backup server, and 14,783 of them were rebuilt and loaded into the new forum's private test copy. The same pass runs again on the final copy at the switchover.
• Old links keep working after the move: once the old website's address points to us, links to the old forum open the same thread or board on the new forum, old news and page links open their new pages, and the old short links (player guide, known issues, patch notes, the shop) open their replacements. The list was built from the forms of the old links found in 1.1 million forum posts.
• The guild and town pages can now sign players in through the new account sign-in, with the game password or through Steam, so the accounts made through Steam, which never had a password, can use the pages too. It switches on together with the new account sign-in at the account move.
• The License Agreement and the Terms of Service players accept at login now have their own pages on the new website, with the same text the game shows, and from the next game build the login screen's "open in a web browser" link opens them there instead of on the old website.
• Players who still have the old launcher keep being pointed to the new one after the move: the new website now gives the old launcher the same answers the old website does, and the three small launcher updates it downloads were copied to our own backup server and checked against their download records.
• Prepared the old website address for its move onto our own servers: old links, the old launchers and the game's offline reward claims keep answering after the switch, and payment notifications sent to the old address are kept for processing. The new account site can now send its emails through our new mail provider.
• Scripted the move of game accounts onto our own servers: the final copy of the account and forum databases, the restore, and the switch of the game's sign-up and password reset links. The forum gets the same treatment, with its sign-in through the new account site and its mail through our new provider.
• Built the new web store for play.catnipgames.net: Gold Crowns of the Obsidians, add-ons and charity items, paid by card or PayPal, with purchases arriving in the Reward bank in the game as before. It opens after the move of game accounts, once a first real purchase has gone through end to end. The forum's move was also rehearsed from start to finish.
• The guild and player-owned town pages are now part of play.catnipgames.net: visitors see the real guild and town pages with the website's own header and navigation, and players can sign in there with their game account to try them. The new store can be browsed at the same address; purchases open after the move of game accounts.
• Guild and town boards: each Report link now says what it reports (this post, this thread, this image), and the thread's own Report sits beside its title instead of under the last post, where it looked like a second link for that post.
• Lists on the website now sort by any column: click a heading to sort, click again to reverse. The player-owned towns list, for example, sorts by residents, stewards, region or governor.
• The guild directory now lists every active guild (at least two players, active in the last six months), 250 of them today, with members and how many played this month, sortable by any column. The player-owned towns list hides towns with one resident or fewer by default; untick the box to see all 439.
• The website's World Calendar page is now the full calendar (month, week and agenda views, filters, the Cabalist Stronghold, subscribe links and browser notifications) instead of a seven-day summary, and the old calendar address leads there.

Chat

• Vendor listings, NPC merchant stock and crafting recipes can now be linked into chat with Link Item In Chat, and any of them, or an item from your own bags, can be dragged onto the chat text box to link it. Readers see the listed item's real tooltip. Requested by Pulverizer.
• Universe chat lines posted from the team web page stopped tripping a forged-key warning on the chat server, and the page marks them by sender again (5579e874fb).
• /commands now also lists the commands that only work in Single Player Offline while you play online, each marked "(Single Player Offline only)". Requested by Steve Sosaria.

Client

• Animations that only the game controlling a creature used to see, such as carried-aura releases and creature emotes on monsters, pets, summons and practice dummies, now reach every player nearby; a duplicate resurrection message every client sent and nobody received was removed (#12696).
• Headless test clients and some older graphics cards stopped logging graphics-capability errors for the 3D dungeon map, the character sheet doll check and the ocean; each feature now steps aside quietly on a machine that cannot run it (#12734).
• A spell interrupted because its target died during the cast is no longer written to the client log as a warning (580d6ffc1e).
• The guide wisp now leads to a target standing close by on open ground, such as an NPC across a town square, instead of fading out over the player's head.
• From the next game build, every web link the game opens (account sign-up, password reset, the store pages, bug forums) passes through the new website first, so those pages can move to new homes without another game update.

Trading

• Clothing and armor wearing an appearance pattern that cannot be traded now show No Trade on the tooltip and are refused at the trade window with a clear message; before, they went into the trade and it failed with only "Failed to update the trade."

Mail

• Mail that had already been taken, discarded or expired elsewhere on the account now drops out of the mailbox. Before, it showed as an empty row and pressing Discard on it gave an error.

Content

• Spread out creature spawn points that were stacked on one spot in five places: the spider egg clutches in the Desolis underground, the Blood River stables, the library and throne room waves of Lord British's Castle (Invasion), the door waves of the Grusk Factory kobold arena, and the Cabalist boss seats of a forest road siege encounter. Creatures in those groups now appear side by side instead of inside each other.

Localization

• The Next Steps tip about the gold ! marker over quest givers, the instruction it prints, its Options toggle and the experience pool tip now show in all nine translated languages. They had shown in English on every translated client since they were added. Reported by a French player (#12804).
• Anaïs now speaks the player's chosen language all the way through the Isle of Storms. The line right after her greeting had fallen back to English in all nine translated languages after an English rewording in September, and her offer to end the tutorial early, a few lesson lines and five of her short calls had never been translated. They are now in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese (80b2a463a2, #12811).

Loot

• Songs of the Sundered Blade cylinders that come from creature camps (the Blood River Outskirts vigilantes among them) now drop about once in twenty bodies after your first copy, down from about one in four; the first copy of each song is still guaranteed, and bosses and chests are unchanged (2b6946287a, #12861).

Gameplay

• The Oracle in Castle Atos, and other townspeople, now appear straight away when a player is standing near their spot. A spawn change from earlier in the week kept the Oracle away from its shrine for up to two minutes while a player waited in front of it. (57548717a5, #12802)

Voices

• The Elven Refugee Patrol in Blood River Outskirts and eight town guards (Alard, Willas, Guard Daniel, Garin d'Albert, Eryx, Euryptus, Marcus de Delchiln and Zane Underwood) were speaking with a robotic-sounding voice and now have natural ones. The voice casting tool now keeps that voice for automatons and the undead. Live on the voice server, no update needed (a718a2671e, #12858).

Fishing

• Fishing with ordinary bait at a lava Fishing Override Obelisk on a town lot is now refused before the cast and the bait is kept. Before, the cast went out and then ended with nothing. Gemmed Lure with a Lava Fishing Rod now works there (e67f138b9f, #10281).
• Five bait items that were never finished, Cut Bait, Leech Lure, Dough Bait, Bird Liver and Tiny Gemmed Starfish, now start a cast like the other baits instead of doing nothing or running an unrelated effect. None of them can be obtained in the game yet (fd8af50a47, #10268).
• Mounted fish trophies keep the size of the fish they were made from. A Small Tiger Shark becomes a Small Tiger Shark Trophy and a Large one a Large Tiger Shark Trophy, on the wall or hanging, and trophies already placed take the word too. A fish’s tooltip, and its trophy’s, also shows the real-world date it was caught under the New Britannia date. Requested by Weins201 and Isbel (670b970af4, #10276).
• Fishing spots tire in patches about 8 metres across, so walking a short way along the bank finds fresh water. A tired spot used to be a diagonal stripe running across the whole map, and on banks that ran the same way you could walk a long way without leaving it. The aim marker now says “This spot is tiring. Try further along the bank.” when the water you are aiming at has been fished hard enough to cost bites (bca4494526, #10277).

Travel

• A player-owned town renamed by the team now shows its new name in the Teleport to Zone list straight away. The list used to show the old name (Journeys End instead of Journeys End Marketplace) until the player had visited the town or opened a guild or town window (6cb9b27547, #12695).

AI

• Monsters that walked up to a pet, a summoned elemental or another creature no longer stand beside it doing nothing for up to ten seconds before attacking again; a tester saw it with Goruk Mancrusher in the Ruined Keep (cfe5f3162c, #11614).

Lua

• Evaluated bLua, a native Lua 5.4 plugin for Unity, as a replacement for the add-on scripting engine and decided against it. It has no per-call time limit or file sandbox, which the add-on host depends on, and its speed gains come from faster script parsing, while add-ons spend their time calling into the game. The findings are written up in the add-on host docs so the question does not need reopening.
• Measured what player add-ons cost the client, with a new benchmark that runs the add-on engine outside the Editor on the same code paths as a released build. Every call an add-on makes into the game creates a few hundred bytes of short-lived memory, and the Buff Icons sample with 8 buffs creates about 38 KB each time it draws. The review also found three engine problems to fix first: some game errors escaped add-on error handling in released builds, error recovery left memory behind, and each new script context reserved about 2 MB. The written plan halves the CPU time of that sample and removes about 44% of its garbage without changing how add-ons behave.
• Made the engine that runs player add-ons do less work per call. Text formatting and plain text search now skip a slow compatibility layer (string.format went from about 8.8 KB of short-lived memory per call to under 0.6 KB), pairs and ipairs loops create about half the garbage, calls from the game into add-ons create half as much, and starting a coroutine no longer reserves 2 MB. Three faults were fixed along the way: pcall in a released build now catches errors raised by game functions, one add-on in an endless call loop no longer breaks every other add-on until a reload, and string.format with a precision longer than its text prints the text instead of failing.
• Add-on calls into the game take a direct route in released builds. Each of the roughly 250 game functions add-ons can call used to go through a slow general-purpose lookup on every call; calls with ordinary arguments now go straight to the function, which halves the time a buff-bar add-on spends drawing. The game also stopped repeating work within a frame for the busiest calls: buff lists, party member lookups, key checks, stat names and texture loads are worked out once per frame and reused.
• The client stopped running immediate-mode GUI work when nothing uses it. Add-ons that draw with the older ShroudOnGUI callback now run it once per frame to draw and again only when a mouse button goes down or up, where before every key press, scroll and camera-drag frame ran every such add-on again. With no add-on using that callback, the pass is switched off entirely. The loading progress strip shown during start-up also stops being checked once the main menu appears; it used to be asked to draw on every input event for the rest of the session.
• Reading a field of the small game objects add-ons receive (a screen point, pet details, a deck, the in-game date) no longer goes through a slow general-purpose lookup in released builds. Fields are read directly, and anything unusual is still handled exactly as before.
• Took more garbage out of the add-on engine's call path. Reading a table or function an add-on keeps in a variable, or any field of a table, no longer makes a throwaway copy, and the bookkeeping for each call into the game is reused instead of rebuilt. Together with the earlier changes today, the Buff Icons sample now creates 11 KB per draw instead of 38.7 KB and takes 58% less time.
• Local variables in add-on code stopped copying their value every time they are read. A local that no inner function captures now holds its value directly, so loops over tables create less than a third of the garbage they did this morning. The Buff Icons sample now creates 8 KB per draw where it created 38.7 KB at the start of the day.
• The add-on authoring guide gained a short section on keeping add-ons light: do work when something changes, pace the rest, build text only when a value changes, and keep the draw callback to drawing. The Buff Icons example (version 1.1.0) now follows it, looking up which icons to show only when buffs change and refreshing hover text once a second, and the Gold Tracker sample in the guide only rebuilds its text when the number moves. The add-on store's automatic review also learned to point authors at these patterns.
• Add-on API 37 lets the game do three jobs add-ons used to do every frame. Add-on windows can be told when they open and close, so an add-on no longer has to keep asking whether its window is showing; a picture can turn with the player's compass heading by itself, so a compass needle costs nothing per frame; and a new callback fires when a world calendar date starts or ends. The Calendar Strip example (1.1.0) now uses that callback instead of checking once a minute.
• Reviewed every place the client still uses Unity's older immediate-mode GUI. Once the main menu shows, nothing runs it any more unless an add-on draws with the older ShroudOnGUI callback; what is left are tools opened on demand. The add-on drawing calls stay as they are for existing add-ons, and the write-up sets out how a newer drawing option could replace them later.
• Ran the new add-on engine tests and every existing test of the files changed today inside the editor as well: 252 tests, all passing.

Patch Notes

• Patch notes have an Add-ons heading. Build 318's fix for add-on settings being wiped by a slash or a negative number moved there from the end of an Interface line, where an add-on author missed it (696e83e3c5).

Add-Ons

• Add-ons that track loot with ShroudOnItemsGained no longer count an item twice when you pick it up from your bags and put it down again. A fish caught and then dragged into another bag used to show up as two catches. Reported by shawn (1b01b22c82, #12911).

Lua Addons

• Add-on API 37 gives crafting planners recipe detail (requested by shawn): ShroudGetRecipe names the station, lists the materials a slot such as Metal Sheet takes with how many you have and what each adds, gives results their base stats, and counts what you carry across every bag, with item keys that are the same in every language. ShroudGetRecipeBook returns every recipe you know in one call (57d2df39ae).

Performance

• Nightshade Pass stops drawing its far bushes and trees at full detail. The pass holds about 38,000 trees and bushes, 8 to 30 times as many as the neighbouring zones, and each one kept drawing out to about 300 m, with the nearer ones casting shadows as well. They now switch to billboards and fade out sooner. Looking up the pass from the overworld entrance, frame time in testing fell from 27 to 17 ms on the processor and from 14 to 8 ms on the graphics card, with no visible change near the player (b39ce8a080, #12899).

Harvesting

• Pressing E to swing during the harvest swing meter no longer opens the loot window of another dead creature nearby, which could cover the meter and make you miss the swing (30237bb67f, #12930).

Tavern games

• Planned the giant chess board: a board in two sizes whose pieces move themselves when you click or drag them, rated speed games with a server-wide rating, a computer opponent with its own leaderboard, saved games, a challenge ladder, and a Chess Academy that teaches the rules and strategy. Public boards are planned for Elad's Lighthouse, Northwood and Castle Atos.
• Built the rules core for the giant chess board: chess clocks with increment and lag compensation, a draw instead of a loss when time runs out but the opponent could never checkmate, chess notation for saved games, and the game modes the board will offer. Nothing new is visible in game yet. Two rule fixes reach the existing chess tables now: kings with bishops all on one square colour is a draw, and a repeated position counts as the same even after a pawn double step no pawn can capture.

Crafting

• Checked the town crafting tutorials (Edwin the Tanner, Gilda Metcalfe, Bledig deCani): all five of their recipes already have a 100% success chance for a new character, and a failed craft elsewhere only uses up its wax or salt. A new test keeps the tutorial recipes at that guaranteed success (758a7c7e8d, #12214).
• The town crafting tutorial (Edwin the Tanner, Gilda Metcalfe, Bledig deCani) now asks for 4 raw cotton, 2 spools of thread and 8 animal hides, the amounts the leather helm uses (was 12, 6 and 10). Edwin says the East Perennial Trail is just southwest of Soltown and that hides come from skinning its bears, and cotton there grows back in 5 to 7.5 minutes instead of 10 to 15 (f72719bf88, #12212).
• Confirmed the Printing Press already copies a published Unrolled Scroll onto a Blank Unrolled Scroll or a Blank Book, and added a test so it stays that way. The Oracle now explains how.
• At a crafting station, right-clicking a recipe now chooses which material each of its "any of a kind" ingredients uses, such as which strap goes into chainmail. The menu lists every material of that kind you carry, and what your lot storage holds when Use lot storage is on, with counts. The recipe then takes only that material, from your backpack first and lot storage for the rest, and says so when it runs out instead of using another one. Before this, crafting took the first material in its own list that you had enough of, and with lot storage there was no way to steer it. Requested by Jemma Star. (abae394a82, #12132)
• Double-clicking a Reshape recipe at a crafting station now puts a blank piece on the table before one that already has a pattern, from your backpack and from lot storage. Before, it often picked a piece you had already reshaped, and the reshape replaced that pattern. Reshape Pattern Remover works the other way and picks a piece that has a pattern first. A piece you put on the table yourself is still the one used. (3b4f348703, #12104)
• Salvaging a Dragon Totem at a blacksmithing station now gives back Dragon Totems from the levels below it. Since Dragon Totems were added they had salvaged into Troll Totems of those levels. The six Dragon Totem recipes are also listed under Dungeon Totems at the smelter now, next to the other totem families.
• Recipe Book search now opens on the chapter you were reading. A search for "sausage" from Cooking used to open on Tanning recipes, with the Cooking matches several pages further in. Reported by Chadwyck.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-11 is up: Sunday went to the predators. Every wolf and every bear in the game got a full pass, with pack alphas, mother bears and cubs, three legendary bears, and a new she-wolf boss denned at Jotungrund. Also fixed: parties of four or more losing experience on every kill, a player-town loading screen that never ended, and dungeon maps that were drawing you the outside of the cave. Listen or read the transcript (18 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

UI

• Checked the minimap in the Solace Bridge starting area against a 2020 review that showed the player drawn beside the path. The map lines up with the world to within a few metres along the trail and on both bridges. The arrow marker of that time put its tip a few metres ahead of the player; since September a dot marks the exact spot. A new test holds the Solace Bridge map in place.
• The Guild Registry now has its own row in the Open a Window list, so finding a guild to join no longer means knowing /guildregistry. The old Guild Finder row inside More Windows was removed. Requested by Akandriel. (fe9e792894, #12149)
• The window buttons in the top-right corner, together with the mail, friend and warning icons under them, can now be dragged like the other HUD pieces. Turn off Lock Status Movement and a move handle shows to their left. Once they are moved away, the minimap takes the top-right corner and the skill tracker starts below it. Reset Positions, or letting go near the old spot, puts them back. Requested by Scanphor. (843d0cb28b, #12134)
• Added a Deck Builder Tooltip Delay setting under Options, Interface, Hotbar. Rune cards in the Edit Deck window used to pop up the instant the pointer touched a rune, the combo list and slot row included; they now wait about a second by default, with None, Short and Medium also offered.
• Names over corpses, creatures and objects no longer show through the harvest swing meter or across the Meticulous Collection caption. Names behind them fade out while they are on screen and return when they go away.
• In the Edit Deck window, runes stacked on a slot get a taller band above the slot, and each rune in a stack now shows at least a 10px strip, so seven runes fit before the stack compresses (four before) and the back runes can be dragged out again. A rune let go above a slot or in the gap between two slots now lands on that slot instead of snapping back, and the slot column a carried rune would land in is lightly highlighted.
• Selecting yourself or your pet shows them in the target frame again, as on the original servers. Target Self (F1), clicking your own health bars, the Target Pet key and clicking your pet all fill it, and the border around your own bars still shows. A selected enemy keeps the frame while you pick a friendly target behind it.
• The Options window shows the build number again, at the bottom next to Stuck?, so players can see which build they are on without leaving the game. It went missing when the window was rebuilt in July. A player asked for it back through the Oracle.

Camera

• The conversation camera indoors now checks both sides of you and the NPC and stands on the side with room. In a shop too small for both faces it switches to the close-up on the NPC. When a wall still pulls the camera in, the focus follows it, so the NPC no longer blurs into what looked like a low-detail model. Reported in a review of the game.

Community

• Filed six player-raised items from the forums to the tracker: halved bard skill training costs and a vendor-list recent-items filter as suggestions, plus bug reports for Steam login failures, a decoration-layout tool that could pull in neighbors' belongings, a book file-import picker, and offline-mode training necklaces.

Onboarding

• SBG-1907, the automaton guarding the gate in the Battle of Solace Bridge, now teaches Thrust and Bladed Combat as well as its archery skills, so a sword fighter no longer has to learn a bow skill to cross. Thrust on the Combat Hotbar opens the gate just as the archery skills do. A character still held at the gate is now told to train with SBG-1907; before, the gate gave no message at all (fdf9002a6c, #12215).
• New characters on the Isle of Storms now finish the skills lesson with a real fight. After using their first hotbar skill on the training dummy, they meet an armored watcher whose plating turns aside plain weapon swings: a basic attack does a tenth of its damage and shows as a glancing blow, while the skill hits in full. Anaïs ends the lesson once it falls. Before this, auto attack won every fight on the Isle. The chat log also says once when the weapon in hand is badly worn and once when it breaks. From a review of the game (11c7ffe031, #12210).

Tools

• git-sync-push: sessions now push the shared work tree with one command that merges the newest upstream work, runs the server compile gates, pushes, and retries when someone else pushed first. A push used to take about eight separate git commands, and one of them waiting on an approval stalled an overnight release for eight hours. (a63052e455)
• New Where Players Stop page on the dev portal for admins. For every character made since launch it shows how far the character got through the Isle of Storms and its starting path (Solace Bridge, Highvale or Blood River) up to its first town, and for players who stopped coming back, the step they stopped at, the last scene they stood in, the quest tasks still open in their journal and how long they had played (6be6adb5ea).
• Wrote up the first reading of the Where Players Stop page. Most new players who stop do so within their first hour. Players on the Love path carry on past the Charlotte escort, and on the Courage and Truth paths the largest group stops in the Highvale and Blood River Outskirts camps, before reaching Resolute or Aerie. Two follow-up tasks are open (d59da58761, e37fdd7bad).
• The boss roster and the creature audit now show the Spider Queen of Spindelskog as placed, using the latest nightly server reports. 58 of the 95 bosses now have a seat in the world, up from 57.

Tracker

• The tracker's dark theme painted over the icons on the text formatting toolbar above the Description and Notes boxes, leaving a row of blank buttons. The theme now leaves those buttons' icons alone and gives them a light background so the dark glyphs read (#12345). It goes live with the next tracker theme update.

Infra

• The nightly portwire-gate check had failed every night since September 28 on its own add-on store route self-test, which broke on Windows line endings, so the checks after it, including the full PortWire spike harness, had not run since. The self-test now reads its samples line-ending independent, and the failure is logged in the release failure ledger. (25ce5d9a92)
• The guild and town pages, the staging forum and the new website now have nightly off-site backups with a weekly restore test, and the code server's nightly backup runs again after a leftover snapshot folder had stopped it since 29 September; dated one-off folders like that one no longer stop a backup.
• The nightly pledge report, which decides how many extra months a backer's lot deed survives a long absence, is now rebuilt on our own backup server instead of the old build server; its first run matched the old report byte for byte.

Overworld

• A wandering creature that catches a character on the overworld map now asks first when its encounter is far above the character's level (ec05744f70, #12216). The window names the encounter's level and the character's own, and offers Enter or Slip away; slipping away leaves the character on the map. Characters within 10 levels of the encounter are pulled in as before. Almost every overworld encounter is level 30, and a widely watched 2020 review video of the game showed a new character dropped straight into a bandit fight that way.

Quests

• Soltown quest steps that only lived in the journal now get a line in the quest tracker: Return Raymond's Hammer if you show him the hammer but keep it, Travel to Ardoris when Evans asks you to warn the city, and Offer Help Around Soltown when Stanley lists the people who need help. Starting Geof's, Bentley's or Edwin's job takes over from Stanley's line.
• Nyssa's request about Markus stayed on the tracker after you handed her the letter. It now clears at the hand-in, and characters already stuck with it lose it the next time they zone. Two of her lines that checked the wrong flag now play at the right time.
• Clearer tracker names: Stinking Bandits is now Recover Stan Clarke's Family Ring, and each Grand Tour stop reads Grand Tour: Visit plus the town, with a tooltip naming the automaton to speak to. Every new and renamed line is translated into all nine game languages.
• Every journal entry handed out on the Isle of Storms, the Battle of Solace Bridge and Soltown was checked for a tracker line and a way to clear it. A new test fails if a step on that path lands with neither.
• The town crafting tutorial (Edwin the Tanner in Soltown, Gilda Metcalfe in Aerie, Bledig deCani in Resolute) now accepts only a Leather Helm you crafted yourself. A helm bought from a merchant, looted, or already worn used to finish the tutorial the moment the hides were handed in. The tutor no longer shows the return marker after the second hide, and the crafting station lists the recipe each step asks for at the top.
• Town Criers now answer questions about the undead mystery. Ask one about the "mystery", the "investigation" or the "undead" and they name the next person or place on your Path of Love, and asking again gives the same answer until you move on. Before, each ask got a different unrelated rumor. A character who has not started the path is sent to Edvard at Solace Bridge. (975f2aff52, #12211)
• Stanley in Soltown no longer ends the Path of Love notes errand when he asks your name. Answering used to close it without taking Edvard's Notes on Solace Bridge or paying the reward, and the notes stayed stuck in the bag. Characters already caught by this can now hand the notes in.
• Stan Clarke the Bard in Soltown now counts a songbook batch only once the Blank Sheet Music is handed over. Closing the window, or asking twice in a row, used to skip that batch for good.
• Asking Nyssa in Soltown about Markus now puts the task to learn his fate on the tracker. Players who asked about Markus first never got the task.
• Raymond's hammer hand-in in Soltown, left over from a quest removed from the game, is switched off, and the hammer topic no longer offers itself.
• Harry in Soltown now waits for a clue about the red cloth before he can be pressed to confess to the refugee camp fire. The red cloth topic is offered on both clue routes, Stanley answers questions about Harry after the confession, and the investigation's map markers clear one step at a time.
• The crafting apprentice lessons in Soltown, Aerie and Resolute no longer take over every topic with a reminder; the teacher reminds you when greeted. Edwin accepts a typed "yes", the teachers mention the skinning knife when asking for hides, and a character who finished the lessons in any town is not offered them again.
• Soltown townsfolk now give directions to Nyssa, Raymond, Harry, Evans and Castle Atos, and asking for Stanley, Arabella or Edwin marks them on the map.
• Soltown conversation fixes: Stanley's help answer names the people who need help and adds the tracker task, Baozhai answers "What else is going on?", Richard James and Linda point toward Stanley and Nyssa, Harvey no longer ends the conversation on greeting, and the bank automaton mentions Bancroft only to players he sent.
• Spelling and typo pass over the Soltown quest dialogue, the crafting tutor lines in all three towns, several journal entries and three Soltown Sewers pickup messages.
• Jeanne in Soltown now takes her daughter's necklace through a hand-in window, so the reward is only paid when the necklace changes hands. Bentley's farm answers were tidied, and his directions now all say southwest.
• The Soltown fire mystery now needs Martin's clue before Harry can be pressed to confess. Raymond's account of the man in red waits for the investigation, Evans answers questions about the fire, and finished steps leave the task list.
• Stanley's help answer in Soltown now names Arabella and Jeanne, and starting their requests clears the neighbors task. Stanley's courier marker only shows while the errand is available, Arabella's Stanley line always wins, Annika always greets players Bancroft sent, and the crafting automaton talks about Edwin.
• The East Perennial Trail map now marks cotton and bear hunting areas for the crafting apprentice lessons, and Gilda and Bledig accept a typed "yes" or "no" at their apprentice question.
• Jeanne and Geof in Soltown no longer keep a quest marker when the necklace or an iron blade is brought before they ask. The East Perennial Trail map marks where skeletons drop iron blades, Quincy's body in Solace Bridge now carries his name, and Emily keeps talking about Quincy if his sword is lost.

Vendors

• Added a Hide Seller button to Vendor Listings in Zone. Selecting a listing and pressing it hides every listing from that seller, in this zone and across All Zones. Hidden sellers are listed under the search bar with an x to show them again, and the list is saved per character. Requested by Chiasma.

Creatures

• Wolves no longer bend their necks up toward a player's face while they bite. A wolf now turns its head only toward a target within 25 degrees up or down and 60 degrees to either side, and its neck takes half as much of that turn. Measured on the Grey Wolf, a bite at close range had bent the neck 45 degrees. The limits on every creature's head turning also mean what they say now: a 45 degree limit used to stop at about 35. This came from a 2020 review video.
• A creature killed in the middle of a slow attack, such as a troll's Swipe or a spider's Paralytic Bite, now plays its death at normal speed. It used to keep the slowed speed of the attack and could look frozen as it died.
• Creature spawn rosters now roll each creature at the odds it was given. The last creature on every roster had been getting one extra share of the roll, so the rarest spawns showed up more often than intended: the Red Ice Snarler in the Jotungrund wolf patrols, set at 1 in 17 (6%), was appearing about 11% of the time.
• The description of the barbarians' Bull Rush now includes its 2 second stun on arrival, along with the hit and the shove. The charge was built with the stun and plays the same as before.
• Measured the original wolf slow, Wolf Tendon Attack, against the 50% slow cap. It takes 0.1 m/s a stack off a player on foot, 5.5% at three stacks, and does not slow a mounted player or a creature, so it stays as it is on tamed wolves, quest wolves and wild wolves below level 80. Hamstring, which replaces it on the wolves from level 80 up, slows 10% a stack and counts toward the cap.
• Four wolf packs in the Ruins of Utheim spawned Large Grey, Timber and Large Timber Wolves (level 20 to 40) in a tier 8 area, because their spawn lists gave the Obsidian Wolf a weight of zero. They now spawn level 80 Obsidian Wolves like the rest of the area's packs, so the north-east quarter of the map holds up to 20 more of them at once.
• The Cabal's army in the Cabalist Stronghold no longer picks the wooden decks over the yards as places to stand, so Cabalists and their minions stop climbing a ladder to crowd onto the planks for minutes. A creature that stands in one spot for ten seconds while trying to rejoin its Cabalist is now put back beside him. Reported by Rinaldi. (58799a50ba, #12578)
• Settled on one standard for how much experience a creature should pay per kill: the Creature Audit level curve. The Episode 2 checks had carried an older copy that disagreed by up to 2x and now read the audit directly. No change to experience in game.
• The 322 spider egg clutches placed around the world are now a Spider Egg Sac you can attack. Walking up to one stirs it, and it hatches its spiders about four seconds later; destroy the sac first and nothing hatches, leaving an empty shell. The sac takes extra damage from Fire and Sun and gives no experience or loot.
• The Lupine Alpha in The Obsidian Panopticon showed up hot pink on QA, reported by inuphet. It had been given an old wolf model whose body never had a texture. It now uses the Lupine Destroyer's look at a larger size, and a new test fails any creature model with an untextured part.
• Fixed a QA build bug where a creature running away, such as a hurt bear cub, could stop every creature in the zone from finding a path for the rest of the visit. The check that keeps creatures out of solid props now runs only where the engine allows it.
• Dragons and wyverns in overworld encounters no longer break off a fight to fly back to where they appeared and heal. A fight that drifted away from that spot shrank how far they would chase instead of widening it. After a fight they now return to their patrol route around the encounter. Reported by Belladonna Rose on the forums.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer about thirty more questions players asked her since October 11: which creatures drop Obsidian Chips and where to farm them, where Wood Pulp and tree bark come from, where the Shield of the Wicked King, the Banner of Ethos and the Boots of the Energetic Tamer come from, who sells cloak recipes, whether the game has rested experience, what Inspiration, Corruption and deck slugs are, attaching items to mail, whether a moved house keeps its contents, and where to find Cold Haven, the Ancient Corpse in Grannus Colossus and the Obsidian Cave puzzle in Vikland. She also now says plainly that there is no Frostfire damage on weapons (#12549).
• The Oracle's mail guide now says a bag can be mailed with its contents inside, and explains the Add Gold button, sending part of a stack, and mailing up to 20 friends at once.
• Benchmarked a self-hosted Gemma 4 26B model on the build machine's RTX 3090 as a single replacement for both the Oracle's hosted model and the chat moderation model. On 81 real Oracle questions it answered in 1.6 s at the median against 2.3 s for the hosted gpt-oss-120b, and it passed all 101 chat moderation test cases at 0.3 s per message while the Oracle was under load. It still says "I don't know" without searching on about a quarter of questions the knowledge base answers, so it is not switched on yet.
• Found why the self-hosted Gemma 4 model said "I don't know" on 14 of 60 questions the Oracle's knowledge base answers: on half it never searched, and on the rest it stopped at the short search previews instead of opening the guide. Two new Oracle settings now search with the player's question before the model answers and hand it the full text of the best matches, which brought misses down to 2 of 60 at a 1.8 s median answer time. Both are off until the Oracle actually moves to a local model.
• Fixed the Oracle's guide search failing for good when two players asked their first questions at the same moment after a restart, which made it answer "my reference library is unreachable" until the next restart. The search model now loads once, at startup.
• Tested Qwen 3.8 27B on the build machine's RTX 3090 as the alternative self-hosted Oracle model, using the HyperQwen server build tuned for that card. It gave the best answers of the local models (clean "I don't know" on every unanswerable question, and it reads the guides the way the hosted model does), but at 6 to 8 s per answer for one player and 15 to 28 s for four at once, against 1.8 s and 3.8 s for Gemma 4. Gemma 4 stays the choice for this card.
• Moved the Oracle, chat moderation, the Discord community watch bot, new-character name screening, the character AI helper, NPC dialogue and the forum review summaries onto one self-hosted Gemma 4 model on the build machine's RTX 3090, replacing the hosted gpt-oss-120b and the separate moderation model. Each service still falls back to the hosted model if ours is unreachable. Checked before switching: chat moderation 101 of 101 test cases at 0.33 s, name screening 66 of 66 with no wrong blocks, and the Oracle answering in about 2 s.

Gathering

• Skinning an animal now puts your character beside the body. The game measured from a point near the animal's shoulders, so next to a big animal such as a cow the kneeling character's head could end up inside the carcass. Your character now walks to the nearest side of the body, steps off it first if standing on it, and turns to face it. This also came from the 2020 review video.

Oracle

• The Oracle now answers salvage questions from each item's own salvage data. It had told a player that Blank Bulletin Board Flyers salvage at a Tailoring station because the flyer is a Tailoring recipe; flyers cannot be salvaged anywhere. Recipe answers now say where each crafted item salvages and what it returns, and the Books and Writing guide lists which blank books, papers and cards salvage. (#12201)
• The Oracle no longer shows its private reasoning ahead of an answer when it arrives without the usual markers, as in "analysisWe have recipe info..." followed by the real reply. The reasoning is now cut, and a reply that is nothing but reasoning is asked again. The same fix covers NPC and character chat. (#12571)
• The Oracle's music guide now says what instrument quality does: it makes bard songs stronger, by up to a quarter for a 100 percent instrument plus 5 percent per masterwork or enchantment. It also says that Carpentry skill and luck decide the quality when an instrument is crafted, and that Crude to Exquisite are the only grades.
• The Oracle now finds shop items asked for in the plural. A player asked where to buy garlic plant seeds and was told no merchant carries them, because the item is named Garlic Plant Seed; 13 merchants in 10 towns sell it. The same miss hit 1,631 of the 1,664 items merchants sell when asked in the plural, such as cooking pots and carrot seeds. Plural and singular questions now get the same answer, and it is live on the Oracle. (#12139)
• The Oracle now explains how to take a dungeon totem down a level: salvage it at a blacksmithing station, which gives back totems of the same family from the levels below at about three quarters of their cost. Requested by Zain Rampage, who asked for a smelting recipe that does this.
• The Oracles answer on Cloud of Wasting, the Bonesteel Crowns power, now says the cloud lasts about 10 seconds and gives the wearer focus back while it lasts.

Tooling

• The morning-routine notes now say the chaos server log timestamps are true UTC since the server moved to native Linux, so log times line up with crash reports and Discord messages without the old seven-hour correction.
• Claude sessions working a tracker issue now title their plans and subtasks with just the issue number, keeping the editor title bar short.

Combat

• Sword hits now show their blood splash and hit sound when the blade connects. Before, the wait for the server's reply was added on top of the swing's own timing, so every hit landed a full round trip late. This was the main combat complaint in a well-known 2020 video review of the game. (e681f9b19a)
• Celestial Blessing now gives the caster a Moon Attunement buff when they have Lunar Specialization, matching the Sun Attunement that Elysian Illumination gives Sun specialists. The buff goes to the caster even when blessing someone else and lasts as long as the blessing. Requested by Joe Zhudarak.
• A combat deck with linked equipment equips again in offline play, from its hotkey and from the Combat Decks window. When one linked piece cannot be put on at that moment, that slot keeps what you are wearing and the rest of the deck still loads. Before, the whole deck refused to equip and nothing said why. Reported by Steve Sosaria.
• Attack-slowing effects now stack to at most half a character's attack speed. A mob hit by Ice Arrow, Ice Fist and Cone of Cold beside an Ice Elemental used to freeze in place after each swing, neither moving nor attacking; it now keeps chasing and attacking, more slowly.

Maps

• Ardoris no longer has fog of war, and its map and minimap now show the North Exit, West Exit, East Exit and Travelers' Docks from a character's first visit. Before, an exit only appeared after the player had already walked to it. The compass still adds exits once they are found.
• The Mistrendur overworld map no longer shows two icons for Lamech's Bazaar or for Myrkur. Each has a name banner and a travel point beside it, and both were drawing a map icon; the map now shows one per place. Reported on the forum in 2021.

Wolves

• The Frothing Red Ice Snarlers that lead the Jotungrund wolf patrols now count toward the wolf kill achievements and Animal Lore, like the other Red Ice Snarlers. Their experience and the Rabid Transit quest are unchanged.

Audio

• An Aether Vibration Device now keeps the area music silent anywhere on its own lot, where it used to fade the music out only for a player standing next to it, so crafting at the edge of the lot played the radio and the area music together. The radio plays at full volume within 10 m and fades out by 20 m.
• New Background Music slider on the Audio tab, under Music. It turns down only the music of the place you are in; jukeboxes, phonographs, music boxes, radios and instruments keep playing. Music still sets all of them.
• Player-run towns and every player-owned town now have ambient sound across the whole town, where before their birdsong sat out at the map edge. Grassland, forest and island towns carry birds by day, a dawn and dusk chorus and crickets or owls at night; swamp towns play marsh sounds, desert towns wind, and the alpine and mountain towns a mix of wind and birds. The river in Snell's Bend is louder so it can be heard from the bank.

Skills

• Train to Level: a skill set to train to a level wore the same green triangle as any other training skill, and kept it after reaching the target. It now shows a light blue triangle under a bar in the skill tree, the list view and the skill trackers. Reaching the target clears it and sets the skill to Not Training, with a chat line. The skill tree right-click menu gained Not Training, so stopping a skill no longer means clicking through Unlearning, which could cost a level. Reported by a tester (2798b708c7, #12157).
• The Skills window experience totals now show bonus experience, the experience a character holds without having earned it (daily bonus experience trained from the Account Pool, pooled experience items and its starting skills), for example "Adventurer XP: 12,000,000 earned + 1,050,000 bonus (13,050,000 in skills)". Skills holding more than the earned total had looked like lost experience. /xp lists the same figures.

Login

• Investigated the Steam login failures on the test shard that began this morning. Valve, our Steam key and the game client all check out; the ticket check on the live website is refusing every Steam login, and that is with the owner. Logging in with your SotA account name and password works in the meantime.

Website

• The Guilds and Towns pages no longer answer "The game's records are not answering right now" when a player opens an edit page, saves, posts on a board or adds a calendar event after the site has been quiet for a minute. Each of the site's workers kept its own connection to the game's records and reused it after the game side had closed it for being idle. The site now opens a fresh connection when the old one is stale or closed, logs every failed call so a report can be matched to it, and the error page keeps showing who is signed in.

Audio

• Added Say "Attention" First under Announce Expiring Buffs in Options, Audio. Turned off, the Oracle names the buff that is running out without saying "Attention." first. It is on by default, so the warning sounds the same until you change it. Requested by Barugon.

Player

• The overloaded slowdown now follows the pack weight while a character is over capacity (31fc5aa612, #12188). It used to be re-measured only when a buff, an equip or a zone change happened: bank most of a heavy load but stay a little over and the heavy slowdown stayed; cross capacity and keep harvesting and the near-zero slowdown stayed until a cast of Sprint snapped it to the true rate, which read as the speed buff slowing the character. Oracle bug reports now carry a Movement row (move rate, speed, weight against capacity, walk mode, instrument out, mounted) so the next report of this shape names its cause. Verify task #12560.

Combat

• Spell critical hits now have their own colour in the floating combat text: violet over other characters and magenta over you. When your own spell lands a critical hit, the words Spell Critical also appear above the number, so you can see when Aetheric Feedbacks Focus regeneration window opens. Both colours have rows under Options, Interface, Combat Text Colors. Requested in game through the Oracle.
• Critical hits that deal Chaos damage, such as Tabula Rasas direct hit, now open Aetheric Feedbacks window the same as every other spell school. Before, they counted as weapon critical hits.

Guilds

• Right-clicking your own name in the Guild tab of the Social window now offers Leave Guild, which asks for confirmation first; the same entry appears when you right-click your own character. A guild leader is also told in that confirmation that leadership passes to another member, or that the guild is disbanded if they are its last member. Suggested through the Oracle (#12167).

Website

• The new forum (still behind a staff login) has the Shroud of the Avatar look: the site's header and footer, its fonts, and parchment and night colours, with the header's Theme button switching both together and remembering the choice.
• Mapped every account, store, forum and community service the old website and its servers still provide, decided for each one whether it moves to the new sites, gets archived or retires, and set the order of the move.
• First drafts of new player-facing terms: Terms of Service, license agreement, privacy policy, cookie notice, store and refund policy, code of conduct, moderation and appeals, age policy and imprint, replacing the 2022 terms and the 2011 privacy policy. They wait on company details and a legal review before they publish.
• The new website has a Player Guides section: 86 guides in nine groups, from getting started to housing, magic and crafting, with a search box. They are the guides the Oracle answers from in game, now readable in a browser, and each one keeps its own address so links stay put.
• The new website, the forum and the guild pages now always write the game's full name, Shroud of the Avatar, in their pages, header and footer, and the site's copy check refuses the short form from now on.

Localization

• The Animal Lore lines about the spider queens now read correctly in all nine translated languages: Xen Trohop broods in the Spectral Peaks, and the Spider Queen of Spindelskog has her own line. Localized clients had still placed Xen in the Hilt Fortress.

Patch Notes

• Wrote the player patch notes for build 317, covering everything since build 311: the bear, wolf and spider passes, the new bosses, the Cabalist fights, the World Calendar, chat emoji, Ukrainian, quest markers and about 80 lines of fixes.
• Rewrote the player patch notes as build 318, which replaces build 317 for the chaos shard and still covers everything since build 311. Added the Buy Orders tab, stacking cups, destroyable spider egg sacs, ambient sound across player towns, the Earth Elemental Earthquake change and the attack slowing cap, and noted that chat window emoji show by name for now.

Vendors

• Vendor Items window (Locate Player Vendor Items) gained a Buy Orders tab listing every buy order you have placed at player vendors. Selected orders can be cancelled from anywhere with Cancel Orders, and the deposit goes straight back into your gold, where before you had to stand at the vendor. Requested by phil. (066ebad1f4)
• Vendor Listings in Zone and the devotional pins on player town maps refresh every hour again. Since the move on 1 October they had shown what player vendors and towns held on that day.

Items

• Cups, mugs and goblets now stack in the inventory like plates and bowls. Equipping one from a stack puts a single cup in the hand and leaves the rest in the bag, and new cups join the bag stack instead of the one being held.

Offline Play

• Fixed two offline save tests that had been failing since they were added. They test the save being rolled back and expected no error to be logged, but that path logs an error on purpose. The Linux Load Game fix behind a forum report of an older save that would not load passes its tests and goes out with the next chaos build.

Operations

• Build 317 staged for the chaos shard: the CDN edge holds and verifies the build on all three platforms, the security preflight found no failures, the database migration gate is clear, and the Steam upload is under way. A promote dry run passed every gate. The release checklist adds two item backfills (Call to Arms letters and tournament trophies) to run after the switch.
• Build 317 was held back from the chaos shard after full testing turned up bugs, among them a stutter whenever a window opened or a buff appeared. The release checklist now targets build 318, which carries the fixes; the catchphrase voice clips, the item backfill tools and their dry runs carry over from the 317 staging.
• Build 318 staged for the chaos shard: it reached the qa shard on all three platforms, the CDN edge holds and verifies it, the security preflight found no failures, the database migration gate is clear, the Steam upload is done, and a promote dry run passed every gate.

Chat

• The emoji picker now has a thin gold line between the row of category icons and the emoji below them, so the first row of emoji no longer reads as more categories. Requested by Rinaldi.
• The chat emoji picker shows pictures again. After the interface stutter fix it had shown long emoji names piled on top of each other in its grid and tab row; the picker, its tabs, the skin tone button and the typing suggestions now draw each emoji as a picture.
• Emoji show as pictures in the chat log again, including skin tones, families, flags and the Shroud of the Avatar emoji. They are drawn from a new emoji font that windows without emoji never load, so the interface stutter fix stays in place. Offline play can now send every emoji.

Interface

• Fixed the stutter on the QA build that hit whenever a window opened or closed, a buff appeared or a combat line arrived. The chat emoji sprites added the day before had made every interface label do extra work each time its text changed: a window with 30 lines of text took 70 ms to appear and now takes 2 ms. Until emoji pictures come back to the chat window another way, emoji there show as their names in colons, such as :grinning:. Speech bubbles still show the pictures.

Images

Housing

• Developer and GM accounts can now enter private and restricted lots, basements and dungeons and pass owner-locked doors, so staff can look into player reports where they happened. Before this the lock could only be bypassed on internal GM builds.

Pets

• The summoned Earth Elemental's Earthquake was the strongest summon attack on chaos. It now hits at most 4 enemies instead of 10, damages each of them twice instead of up to six times, and stuns about half of them for 1.5 seconds instead of every one for 3. A strong elemental's quake no longer keeps damaging its targets nonstop, and each hit is the same size as before. Wild earth elementals and golems are unchanged, and the team can now adjust these numbers on the shard without a patch.

Forums

• Checked the old forum against the game accounts ahead of the move to the new forum: 99.9% of the 397,388 forum members match exactly one account, so when single sign-on opens nearly everyone keeps their name and every post without doing anything. The few hundred who do not match will get a way to claim their forum account.

NPCs

• Conversationalist NPCs running a player-written Ink script now show their reply after a choice written in square brackets, such as * [Hello]. The first line after those choices used to be dropped. Reported by Aartemis [FDI].