Chris “Atos” Spears · Work Log

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-24 is up: Saturday closed eighty tracker issues, including a grand title that was impossible to finish because one of its legends had no achievement attached to it. Stealth stopped betraying itself, every school's magic shield now lasts the same time, and the team declared war on the round trips that make a full backpack and a crowded town crawl. There is also the first sailing boat a player can steer, and twenty thousand trees that had flattened the frame rate of a volcano. Listen or read the transcript (14 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Tools

• The Volcano Archipelago prototype now uses the game's own ocean in place of the third-party water it was built with, which drew a stair-stepped shore line and dark streaks in the distance. The shoreline is smooth, the open sea is deep blue with the game's wave scale, and the busiest views dropped from about 2,300 to 1,700 draw calls and from 24 to 17 ms a frame in the Editor.
• Sand no longer pokes through the waves in the Volcano Archipelago shallows: a wave-height mask baked from the terrain calms the sea where it is under 1.5 m deep and brings full waves back by 6 m.
• The stream and the lava flows on the Volcano Archipelago now flow downhill; both had been scrolling uphill. The stream fades in below its spring and out into the sea instead of stopping at a hard white edge, and the two lava flows run down the shore into the water instead of ending in a flat tongue over the drop.
• The white beach sand on the Volcano Archipelago has finer ripples: its texture now repeats 1.6 times as often, and the wet sand along the waterline matches it.
• The Volcano Archipelago now uses the game's own sky, the Time of Day dome the shipped scenes carry, so its sun, clouds, fog and day cycle match the rest of the game and the ocean takes its sun and sky colour from it.
• Steam now billows where the two Volcano Archipelago lava flows reach the sea: a thick boiling cloud at each entry and a tall plume that drifts away on the wind.
• The QA shard was refusing every player who is not a tester since this morning; it is open to all players again with every feature in testing still on. QA deploys since October 21 had also been skipping the QA feature settings that are not Live Tunables, because the build server's copy of the source left out the file that lists them. The deploy now includes it and stops if it is ever missing again.
• The Volcano Archipelago lagoons and its stream no longer glow at night: their water now takes its light from the game's sun, moon and sky, so it goes dark blue after sunset and keeps its daytime colour at noon.
• The /verify board now lists the bug reports testers have filed, which were sitting far below the newest tasks and never loaded, so the Directives only toggle has something to hide again (a9381e9df9).
• The Volcano Archipelago is now part of the game build as a team-only test scene, so it can be loaded and tried in a real client and not just the Editor.
• The Volcano Archipelago test scene's south-west cove is now a pirate village and harbour. A quay and three 84 m finger piers hold six large sailable ships (the pirate, haunted and shogun galleons, the baron's frigate and galleon, and the galleon), each spawning moored in its own berth, with the houseboat and a rowboat at the cove pier and the sloop at a west jetty. Around them stand a tavern square with stalls and a fire, cottages, stilt houses, a harbourmaster, a shipyard with a galleon on its stocks, a fishing hamlet, a gun battery, a lighthouse on the headland and a wreck on the reef.

Images

Items

• Two new pieces can be worn in the head slot by male and female characters: the Dreadhorn Skull Helm, a closed horned helm made from a beast's skull with a hide hood down the back, and the Emberveil Horn Mask, a black horned mask over the whole face whose cracks glow. Each has a version fitted to the male and the female head and can also be placed as a house decoration. For now they come only from the tester tools.

Leaderboards

• The Creatures board shows creature names that contain a comma in full. Names such as Wrauk, Lord of Earth and Xen Trohop had shown as a stray quote mark plus the part before the comma, because the log reader split each line at every comma. Kills already counted under a cut-off name now add to the full names row. (532f1bc3a1)
• The Master Crafters leaderboard column "Recipes Known" is now "Recipes Learned", which is what it counts, in game and on the website, with the translations updated in all nine languages.

Images

Quests

• Geof in the Soltown refugee camp now asks about the iron blades when a returning player has not taken up his request yet, and asks how the search is going once they have. He stops offering the dance after he has taught the Hopak (601c9f9693).
• Raymond in the Soltown refugee camp kept a gold "!" for Return Raymond's Hammer, a quest taken out of the game on October 12, so the marker never cleared and looked like a new clue during the fire investigation. That marker is now off; his fire investigation "!" still works as before. (085a44b8b4)

Sailing

• Charted the waters around Blood Bay for the test sailing boats: the whole island, with mooring berths at each of its five piers and one boat tied up at the north-east pier. Still switched off on chaos.
• Players can swim anywhere in the Volcano Archipelago sea now, and the archipelago has its own sea chart for the test boats: open water mapped across the whole 4 km map, out to every edge, with a sailboat waiting off the south-west terrace.
• Every test boat now sails as its own ship. Six of the player-home ships became sailable at their full size: the pirate, haunted and shogun galleons, the baron's frigate and galleon, and the lord's houseboat, with their own decks and cabins and the house's ship's wheel as the helm. A rowboat joins the sailboat for small trips, and the galleon class sails as a pirate galleon. They are still switched off on chaos.
• Go ashore now works from the big ships, whose decks stand 4 to 7 m above a pier: the gangway looks down off either side of the hull and sets the player on the pier, a couple of metres in from its edge.

Housing

• Fish tanks no longer turn yellow next to house lamps, candles and fireplaces. The glass and water had picked up the full color of any nearby warm light; they now stay clear, with the faint blue-green water tint the see-through change of October 13 intended. Applies to all four tanks. (97bd70cbe5)
• Trees growing beside a claimed lot stay standing again. Since build 332 a lot also removed nearby trees whose branches reached over it, which left open air lots looking bare; now only trees whose trunk stands on the lot itself are removed. (#14802)
• New decoration: the Gothic Iron Brazier, a wrought iron brazier banded in brass. Clicking it lights flames, light, crackle and smoke together; clicking again puts them all out. It starts a new rare decoration drop pool (1% per roll) that will be added to chosen creatures; until then it can be made with the tester tools.
• New decoration: the Cherub Ornament, a pale stone cherub with spread wings under a pair of curling horns. It hangs on inside and outside walls and sits on shelves and mantels. It joins the Gothic Iron Brazier in the rare decoration drop pool; until that pool is added to creatures it can be made with the tester tools.
• New player home: the Crusader Desert House (Village), an L-shaped two-storey sandstone house with a walkable flat roof, a balcony over its corner yard and a steep outside stair. Indoor stairs run from the ground floor to the upper floor and up through a hatch onto the roof, pets follow over the stairs, and its floors, walls, ceilings, roof and outer walls take decorations. It fits Village lots and larger. For now only the tester tools make the deed; it is not sold or dropped anywhere.
• New player home: the Crusader Stone House (Village), the Crusader Desert House's layout in grey cut stone. The walls are stone blocks under the same cornice, the sandstone trim and the ceilings are grey, and the wood floors, doors, shutters and balcony are unchanged. Like the desert house it has indoor stairs to the upper floor and the roof, pets follow over the stairs, and its floors, walls, ceilings, roof and outer walls take decorations. Only the tester tools make the deed; it is not sold or dropped anywhere.
• 28 new decorations from the Crusader Castle set join the rare decoration drop pool: engraved metal tableware, clay jars and amphorae, three rugs, floor cushions, a bale, a barrel and a low inlaid table. The Iron-Banded Storage Chest (its lid swings open), the Wicker Hamper and the Lidded Wicker Chest store items. The pool still drops at 1% per roll, now shared by 30 decorations; until it is added to creatures, testers can make them with the tester tools.
• Large trees and castle walls placed in a player-owned town now stay visible from anywhere in the town. 4-Story and Epic trees used to disappear about 200 metres away, and castle walls came apart at a distance because their corners, stairs and smaller pieces hid at about 120 metres.
• Ten more player homes from the Crusader kit: the other five kit houses, each in the desert look and in grey stone. The Crusader Courtyard House wraps a walled courtyard under a striped awning, the Terrace House and the Cottage are brick, the Veranda House has a wooden gallery along both floors, and the Large House has a terrace over its front wing. Each has indoor stairs to the upper floor and the roof (added where the kit had none), working doors including new ones in the open archways, wall lamps, and decoration space inside, on the roof and on the outer walls. The kit's vases and crates were taken out, since the same props are already decorations. The deeds come from the tester tools only; none is sold or dropped.
• Deco Rotate Left 45 and Right 45 (and the 15 degree steps) could do nothing on a brewing cask stacked on another cask with Alt, or snapped beside one, when the cask underneath was turned off the 45 degree marks; which key failed depended on that cask. Every press now turns it. A step from a slightly turned decoration also no longer jumps 90 degrees instead of 45. (211574368f)
• A house pet placed inside a fence pen that closes on every side now stays inside. The navmesh cutter had been dropping the ground inside any closed ring of decoration cuts, so the pet was put back on the nearest ground outside the fence (4c03acb0cb).
• Lot owners can now take ownership of the decorations other players placed on their lot. On the lot sign, the Lot Access gear menu has Take Ownership of Others' Decorations, which covers the house, basement and dungeon and shows how many items will change hands before you confirm. It moves only what the owner could already pick up; items set to Private, items that cannot be traded, vendors, tip jars, prize chests and game tables stay with the player who placed them. Listing the lot for sale afterwards keeps the adopted decorations on it.
• The Floating Candles decoration shows its white wax again, lit and unlit; it had lost its candle material when the birthday candle materials were renamed. Two of its three candles had their fire sparkle off to one side and high above the wick, and the set never stopped drawing at a distance. All three now burn from the wick and the set drops out of view when it is a speck on screen. Floating props (the candles, floating islands, the Magic Mirror) also drift smoothly above 60 fps; before, they moved once per physics step.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer how to make Lute String, where peasant clothes are sold, when the Lord British birthday cakes refill, how the Troll Room, the Hilt Fortress rotunda and dungeon totem recipes are learned, the full Alchemy recipe list, what Shadow Essence is for, which creatures can be ridden, what a summoned skeleton mage attacks with, why Vanish ends early, where to fish for a Plesiosaurus, what Tidecaller means, and about 20 more questions players asked her this week.
• The Oracle now explains what Mining Survey Distance does: it is how many metres away mining nodes start to shimmer, and Survey - Mining adds a quarter metre per level. She also names the pickaxes that add to it. (#15149)

Images

Website

• Desk: added a Leaderboards window, the same boards as the game's Leaderboards window with your own characters marked, and an Achievements window that lists your account's achievements the way the in-game journal does, with progress toward the next tier and the date each was earned. Both went live later the same day.
• The Desk's Leaderboards and Achievements windows are now on for everyone at play.catnipgames.net. Open them from your Desk; testers can check them against the game on the verification board.

Inventory

• Items locked to your inventory that now sit inside a bag can be unlocked again. The Unlock From Inventory entry and the row padlock were only offered on items directly in the backpack, which left items locked years ago stuck in their bags, unusable and unmovable. Locking is still offered only in the backpack. (#15021, af6da14f77)

Performance

• Player vendors in merchant looks, and other decorations that wear a pattern, no longer freeze the game for up to half a second when they first appear: the look now loads in the background. The purchase order item list also loads in the background instead of freezing the game for up to 5 seconds the first time it opens.

Crafting

• Crafting stations now name a legacy (L) artifact on the table and say to salvage it first. Upgrade recipes only take the current version, and the station used to just say "No Recipe Found" (#15035).
• The Bandage recipe no longer needs any Tailoring skill, so every character can make one (2 Cloth Strap make 3 at a tailoring station). New characters also start with 5 Bandages.
• Quick Craft batches and Quick Craft salvage runs now show the progress bar, the item count and the Cancel button for the whole run. Before, they ran with no bar and could only be stopped with Escape. The Cancel tooltip now mentions Escape too.

Dungeons

• The spider egg clutch on the library wall of the Obsidian Keep under Desolis can now be woken by walking up to the cupboard in front of it. Its trigger had been left in the air above the cupboard, so it never hatched.
• Pressing Accept in the dungeon piece picker after the chosen piece was moved or used up no longer throws an error and leaves the window and preview stuck. It uses another copy of the piece from the backpack, or closes as a Cancel when none is left.

Combat

• The Soothing Rain skill card showed a shorter duration and smaller heal than the rain actually gave the caster, because it left out the target half of the attunement it reads; it now matches the buff bar, and other self-castable friendly area spells read the same way. A charged Douse now stretches its fire-blocking charge as far as its Fire Resistance buff; the number of charges is unchanged. (69ea66169a)
• Buffs cast with Deflect, Bolster Balance, Dig In and Testudo now end when the shield comes off, whether a deck swap or a manual unequip removes it. Before, a swap to a deck with no shield left them on the buff bar, and Dig In kept part of its block bonus (ff208d1ba2).
• Kobold, elf and human fighters at level 99 and higher now use Bolster Balance, which resists stuns, roots and knockdowns and weakens with each one it stops, and Knight's Grace, which clears controls, slows and bleeds. Kobolds and elves use Knight's Grace to break free of a stun; humans use it below half health.

Housing

• Right-click Quick Deposit and Restock on several chests in a row now fill every chest. Chests clicked while the first deposit was still running used to give up after 3 seconds.

Audio

• Kobold Grenadier grenades, Fireball and about twenty other spell and creature impact sounds (Ice Field, Ring of Fire, Judgment, dragon bolts, spider spit and more) followed the Ambient slider instead of SFX, so they stayed loud with SFX at zero. They now follow the SFX slider. A new test fails on any effect sound that has no volume group.

NPCs

• Conversationalist NPCs in free chat now play the closest real gesture for words like nod, scoff or brighten, which the game had no animation for, and simply talk when there is no match.

Economy

• The five trap kits now sell to NPC merchants for a tenth of their old price. A Powder Keg Kit fetches up to 8 gold instead of 80.

UI

• Added Show Inventory Tooltips While Holding to Options under Inventory & Items. Set it to Ctrl, Shift or Alt and item tooltips in the backpack, bank, paperdoll and merchant lists only appear while that key is held. Always keeps the old hover behaviour.
• A Calendar pinned in an earlier session now opens with its pin standing, matching how Esc treats it. Clicking "(click for details)" in World Events while the Call to Arms window is already open now brings it to the front. A pinned window that still closes on Esc now leaves a note in the log saying how. (e4dd759087)
• The World Events and Call to Arms windows now follow the UI Scale setting and hide with the rest of the interface when the GUI is toggled off. Both had stayed at default size and on screen with the HUD hidden. (4ae6e0cad0)

Creatures

• Dragon wrasses now show their name and health bar just above their backs. All three sizes drew it under their feet, often under the ground, from a height setting carried over from the crocodile they were built from (e91dc7060c).
• Kobolds standing guard in the Kobold Expeditionary Camp now notice a player they can see at about 24 meters, up from 12 to 14, so they no longer let you walk up beside them unnoticed. Reported by Traveller13. The pit battle waves are unchanged.
• Ebon Dawn shield-bearers now raise Shield Line on themselves when a fight starts and again every 30 seconds. Before this they never did: the guard only went up on another wounded cultist once a fight was already going. (23dae99a48)

Skills

• The Revenant Stance description now says that life drains and Death Shield still restore health during the stance, and that the combat log lists that as healing. It and five other combat stances also say how to end the stance early from its effect icon. Updated in all nine languages.

Chat

• Chat log files have one date and time at the start of each line again when Show Chat Timestamps is on. The chat window's timestamp was also being written after the file's own, which broke programs that read the log. Reported by Raven Swiftbow. (b63a8bced9)

Voice Chat

• Voice chat has a new Talk Key setting: Press to Start and Stop turns the microphone on with one press and off with the next, so nobody has to hold a key through a fight. While it is on the voice chat box says "Microphone on", sound goes out only while the player is speaking, and it switches itself off after 10 minutes. Hold to Talk stays the default (2780ab9954).

Call to Arms

• The Call to Arms reward letter now says where each player finished, matching the rank shown in the Call to Arms window and the calendar results. Before, only placement prize winners got a place line. A biggest catch call ranks by each players longest fish.

Pets

• Pets keep the stance you set (Aggressive, Defensive or Passive) when you change scenes. They often came back on Defensive and stood still when the next fight started. A pet ordered onto a new target mid-fight now goes to it; before, a pet fighting some distance from you often turned back to you or stuttered in place. Reported by Zain Rampage.

Lua Addons

• Add-on API 55: ShroudGetAllSkills lists every skill in the game, trained or not, with its school, subcategory, the XP multiplier its tooltip shows, and its icon, so add-ons can build skill planners. Asked for through the Oracle.

UI

• Character sheet: a Tools button under the right-hand slot column opens a grid of all sixteen gathering and crafting tool slots, so tools can be equipped and swapped from the sheet. Empty slots show a faded picture of the tool that goes there, and the grid remembers whether it was left open.

Lua Addons

• Add-on API 55: ShroudGetOwnedCounts tells add-ons how many of an item you carry and have in the bank, and ShroudSearchOwnedItems runs the Search All My Stuff search for one item and reports how many sit in each place (house storage, other characters, mail, vendor listings), so players can build crafting shopping lists. Requested by Kronic.

Maps

• On the website's World map, places entered from the same hex now stand side by side; before, the last dot drawn covered the rest, so Journeys End sat hidden under Snug Harbor. 38 spots across Novia, Hidden Vale and Mistrendur were affected. Search also finds a player town by its players' name from any map page.

Bank

• Hovering the item count at the bottom of the bank window now shows where your bank space came from: starting space, space bought with gold, space from Crowns of the Obsidian and rewards, and the size and price of the next gold upgrade. Buying a Bank Upgrade from the Crown store with the bank open now raises the bank maximum right away.

Vendors

• A player vendor listing that can be bought a few at a time, or a buy order that can be filled a few at a time, now reads "(up to 1,000)" after the item name at the vendor and in Vendor Listings in Zone. Before, it read "(1,000)", and players with fewer than the full amount took it as all or nothing. Part-fillable buy orders also get the light blue price and a tooltip line, and the box that asks how many to sell shows the gold that many pays (a4c9cd5b29, #15097).

Travel

• Vikland, Port Harmony, Grusk and Tanglemire offer every gate you have found again. Since the last patch, entering Vikland from the world map went straight to its main gate, and a Teleport to Zone scroll to any of the four listed one gate and no Last Location. Despair, Myrkur and the high-level adventure areas still take teleports at their entrance only (a0c77fbd85).

HUD

• A compass you have dragged to a new spot now stays there. It used to slide sideways whenever the text under it changed length, most often while a Call to Arms line updated or ended. (6629048c21)

Magic

• The Light spell no longer goes nearly dark partway through when its glow is briefly hidden while it brightens, a party members shorter Light no longer replaces your own longer one, and combat chat now says when an enemy attack dispels one of your spells. (847e9aaab4, #12067)
• A spell effect that ended could put out another player's Light or other lasting glow when the game had reused that effect for them. The ending spell now leaves a reused effect alone (69641dad6f).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-23 is up: A quest NPC who vanished three seconds after she appeared is back in her cage for good, bandages arrive as a craftable cure for bleeding, and the in-game verification board stops asking for a password nobody could type. Deck Building went live on the companion site with thirteen narrated lessons and a deck simulator. The team also prototyped Episode 3 sailing ships and a horizon that hides distant islands by bending the world. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed two player wishlist ideas from the forum: a guild-wide broadcast mail for leaders and officers, and a Pecan Pie recipe that gives a temporary Forestry collection bonus.
• Every character who caught a bass on October 24 between 19:35 and 21:35 UTC, 22 players in all, was sent a Dyeable Fishing Rod by in-game mail.

Lua Addons

• Add-on API 45: ShroudGetParty returns every party member in one call, with online state, the scene they are in, the party leader, and death state and vitals for members in your scene. Add-ons listening for party changes now also hear when a member in your scene dies or is resurrected. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 46: ShroudGetPartyMemberRange tells an add-on whether a party member in your scene is near or far, within a range the add-on picks such as a heal's reach, so party frames can dim members out of reach. It never returns a position. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 47: the buff lists add-ons read for you, your pet, your target and party members now say who applied each effect, so a healer's add-on can track its own heals over time and tell them apart from another healer's. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 48: ShroudGetTargetDifficulty gives add-ons the difficulty tier and name color the game already shows for a hostile creature, so custom target bars can match the game's own colors. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 49: add-ons can dismiss one of your pet's commands on a click, the same as right-clicking its icon in the pet's buff bar, so tamers can use larger pet effect icons drawn by an add-on. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 50: ShroudGetRecipesMaking tells an add-on which of your known recipes make a given item, and ShroudGetRecipeIndex lists every known recipe in a short form, so crafting planners no longer read the whole recipe book after each login. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 51: add-ons can write, read, list and delete their own JSON data files, kept in a folder that survives add-on updates and reinstalls, for big caches and for exports such as a farming log. Each add-on is limited to its own folder and to 16 files of 1 MB. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 52: the item lists add-ons read (your bags, your worn gear and newly gained items) now say what kind each item is, in words that are the same in every language, plus whether it is a quest item, a tool, an artifact, locked or equipped. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 53: decorating add-ons can turn and resize a decoration taken from your inventory while you are placing it, so trees and plants can be set down with a natural spread. The size stays within what the item allows and nothing already placed is touched. From a Player Wishlist request.
• Add-on API 54: ShroudGetTargetAggro gives add-ons your target's threat list (who it is attacking and who it holds threat against, highest first), the same list /verbose aggro shows, so players can build aggro meters. Requested by Punkbeach.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer where the Shock Monkeys and the Opalis and Rhun ruins are, what Cat Claws and Bandages are for, how many decorations each basement size holds, the previous owner's 20 percent share of a lot auction, why a trade can be refused, what to tame in Superstition Canyon, how the Wishing Well, Dart Wall and Water Lily Cluster work, where fish tanks come from, which blueprints make a dungeon spawn room, and how to see the food you have eaten.
• The Oracle now says where every gathering jewel comes from. The Meticulous Forester, Forager and Miner jewels and the Expedient Miner, Skinner and Forester stones each come from salvaging one gathering artifact, and the answer names where those artifacts drop and how the artifact grade sets the chance. It also corrected an answer that said skinning had no jewel at all.
• The Oracle now explains why some spells stop you to cast: a yellow cast bar means stand still and a teal one means you can keep moving. It also says what Prevent Movement While Casting does when turned off: a movement key cancels a stand-still spell. Ignite, Frost and Shock Weapon are all stand-still spells. Prompted by a report that Frost Weapon ignored the option.

Quests

• Wolf Ears bounties now pay experience: the bounty masters' ten-ear daily adds 12,800 experience to its 250 gold, and Cathy's five-ear daily in Owl's Head adds 8,000 to her 150 gold. Reported by Belladonna Rose.

Tools

• The Unity dialog watcher now answers the Editor's licensing "Connection Lost" prompt when the prompt draws its message where the watcher cannot read it, as long as Retry is its only button. It had been leaving the shared Editor blocked.
• The Volcano Archipelago prototype can be played offline with a character. It has a spawn point on the south-west terrace, and an Editor hook moves the scene's water camera aside on Play so the game's camera rig drives the view instead of the world being drawn twice a frame.
• First in-game numbers for the archipelago: 18,000 to 22,700 draw calls and 65 to 85 ms a frame facing the volcano, nearly all from 20,708 terrain trees drawn as full meshes out to 1 km. Tree billboards from 150 m brought the same views to about 1,100 draw calls and 19 to 22 ms in a test run; that setting is not applied yet.
• Edit-mode UI tests no longer leave copies of the UI event system object in whatever scene is open. The UI reuses one copy and keeps it out of the saved scene; 48 had been saved into the archipelago prototype.
• New terrain budget for every scene: at most 24 tree types and 16 terrain textures, and terrain trees turn to billboards by 250 m. A test checks the Gaia prototype scenes against it.
• The Volcano Archipelago prototype now fits the budget: 20 tree types instead of 76 and 16 terrain textures instead of 20, with billboards from 250 m. The folded textures keep their colour through the terrain tint map. Measured in the Editor, the views facing the volcano went from 10,000 to 22,700 draw calls and 53 to 110 ms a frame to 1,150 to 2,300 draw calls and 19 to 27 ms.
• The tool that checks the Obsidian Trial arena for spots players can wrongly walk into now accounts for rock walls between its sample points, which removed hundreds of false hits (#14971).

Towns

• A hired town NPC set to Patrol on a town street or square now walks about its spot. Before, only NPCs placed on a lot walked, and street NPCs stood still. Patrolling street NPCs keep off the players' lots beside them.

Build

• The Windows build jobs now turn on long file paths for their own checkout before updating it. The profiler build had stopped at checkout on files from the Gaia Pro import whose paths run past 260 characters.

Housing

• Brewing casks: pointing at the top of a placed cask without holding Alt now adds "Hold Alt over a cask's top to stack on it" under the refusal, so the stack key is shown where players get stuck. Casks full of maturing ingredients can also be set down again on Player Owned Town lots.
• Decoration pets such as the Peacock can now be placed on a player-owned town's streets by its governor or stewards. Every decoration pet was refused there before. They count toward the town's own animal limit, twice its NPC limit, and no longer use NPC slots (d47625f51f).
• The Rotten Helm, Zombie Mask, Wolf Mask and other face-covering head pieces now replace a wooden mannequin's face. Before, the wooden face showed inside the mask. Taking the helm off brings the face back. (733b732128)
• Wooden mannequins keep their arms under the Leather Chest Quarter-Armor, and the male mannequins keep their arms and chest under the Cotton Elven Elder Mage Robe and the Damask Lace White Wedding Dress. Each piece used to take the mannequin's arms away and leave the gap empty.
• A Backpack stood upright with the extra-axis rotate key now places on clear ground and on house and basement floors. It was refused as "already in the way" because part of its shape was seated inside the floor, and the upright pack no longer sinks into the surface it rests on. (#14769)

Images

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Chess

• Clicking quickly through the giant chess board's lobby (a tab, then a time control, then a colour) no longer brings up "The board is busy right now". The board takes one setup change every two seconds, so the game now sends your choices in turn and keeps every one of them.

PvP

• Level caps no longer lower carry capacity. A town that holds PvP-flagged players to a lower adventure level, or an area with its own skill cap such as Verdantis Shardfall, still lowers Strength for fighting, but carry capacity now counts Train Strength, Heavy Lifter and the other Strength skills at their trained level, so a normal load no longer leaves a capped player over capacity, slowed and unable to teleport. The weight tooltip says how much Strength the cap holds back. (a235dabb7b)
• The Obsidian Trial: a gap under the edge of a cliff rock let a player walk inside the rock and stay out of sight. The gap is closed (5f91358ec6, #14844).

Server

• Measured how well inventory, bank and lot item data compresses, using 749 real item stores and ten codecs. A player's own items deflate about 4.5x in today's small pages and about 7x in 24 KB pages, against the 1.6x measured earlier on mixed vendor rows. Write-up: payload compression evaluation in the research docs.
• Bags, the bank, mail and decorated lots now reach the client in pages of about 22 KB instead of 3.5 KB, so a full backpack arrives in about 5 round trips instead of about 30. The page size is a Live Tunable. A second switch, off on chaos for now, sends large messages deflated, about 7 times smaller for item pages; clients from this build onward can read them.
• With compression on, a bag, bank or lot page can now hold about 128 KB of items, roughly 6 times what a single message allowed before. It still travels as about 9 KB. The sampled big lots need 707 messages instead of 20,286. The stream of a lot you are standing in is now paced by the bytes it actually sends, so it delivers about 7 times more items per second over the same bandwidth. Both are Live Tunables.
• Mapped every request a town or player-owned town load waits on. Door, light and mannequin states load one lot at a time and hold up lot contents behind them, and mannequin, fish tank and planter reads also run one at a time. The write-up ranks ten ways to cut those round trips.
• Busy player-owned towns load door, light and chest states for up to 8 lots at once, nearest first, instead of one lot after another, and the next lots' contents no longer wait behind them. Town details on arrival come in pieces about 13 times larger. Both sit behind one Live Tunable so each part can be switched back.
• When a lot's contents load, the scene server now sends the lot's door, light and chest states along with them, so the game no longer asks for them in a separate round trip per lot. A state that changes before they are used is fetched fresh instead.

Combat

• Soothing Rain now lasts through a scene change and keeps healing until its time runs out. Before, it ended on every zone change (#14892).
• Added a Hold Auto-Attack While Stealthed option to the Controls tab. When it is ticked, a stealthed character no longer swings on their own at an enemy that comes into reach, so stealth holds until the player attacks with a click or a skill. Requested through the in-game Oracle.
• Melee hits on monsters can now show their damage number, flinch and sound as the weapon connects. Before, a player far from the server saw them up to a second late, because the hit first went to the machine that runs that monster and back. Off on chaos until a tester check; on for the QA shard. Reported by a player through the Oracle.
• Placing a ground spell with a left click no longer changes your target to the player or creature standing under the circle, or to a floating name under the cursor. Clicking a party frame while a circle is up still selects that character.
• Tab now brings a lone enemy back into the target frame after you pick a friend or yourself. In a one-boss fight a healer who clicked a party member used to see the friend stay in the frame however often Tab was pressed; heals still go to the picked friend.
• Engage Opponent, Charge and Body Slam work on plant creatures such as the Flesh Flayer and the Redthorn Flower. Before, each one said the target was out of range at any distance and the character never moved. Other targeted abilities, Root among them, still refuse plants as before. (4279ca82cd)
• Vanish and the other hiding skills now refuse to cast while a lit torch, Light, Immolation or Shield of Air would reveal you at once, and say so without spending focus. When a hide ends early, combat chat names what ended it.
• The Obsidian and Legendary Saber-Toothed Tigers and the Grizzly Bear of Lamech's Bazaar now use Shake It Off, the pirates' break-free: a stun still interrupts them, then they break free after about a second and shrug off controls for 5 seconds. One player can no longer chain-stun them to death. The Easy Bazaar's Grizzly Bear can still be held. (50b00bbdb5)
• Reviewed how long an unplayed rune stays on the combat bar and kept it at 19 seconds, shortened by draw speed bonuses as before (#14772). An unused 25-second setting in the deck code that suggested a different time was removed.
• The Bolster Balance skill card now shows its spell crit line correctly when no shield is equipped, and any skill-card line that works out to 0 is shown in gray instead of red (#14686).
• Deck rules: a stack or combo that is discarded or runs out of time now sends every rune back to the draw pile with no cooldown, as a single rune does; a cast stack's first copy returns half a second sooner for each extra copy; slugs land only in slots with no runes assigned; and charging a locked Camouflage, Shadow Form, Silent Movement or Vanish gets faster as the skill rises (Camouflage at 100: 1.25 s a charge, down from 3.75 s). The Deck Building lessons on the Desk say the same.

Logging

• Three more kinds of log line from chaos build 332 no longer show up as errors or warnings: late answers from a login connection that was already being closed, a computer chess game played without the engine service, and the cleanup of a friend whose account has no characters left.

Housing

• If another player picked up a decoration while you were dragging it, the drag now ends cleanly instead of breaking decorating and leaving a copy of the item standing on the lot until you zoned out. Opening a lot container while another player's craft is drawing on it with Use lot storage now says it is busy for a moment, where it used to fail with a general error.
• In player towns, mannequins, fish tanks and doll cabinets now fill in four at a time instead of one after another, and a lot full of one owner's decorative pets fetches that owner's pet data once instead of once per pet. A container whose contents never arrive now gives up after 20 seconds instead of waiting for the rest of the visit.

Tunables

• Retired 22 Live Tunables off switches that guarded behaviour fixes for bards, kill experience, crowd control, damage fields, harvesting and lot placement. None had been turned off in the four to eight weeks since those fixes shipped, so the fixed behaviour is now permanent and nothing changes in play.

UI

• The Adventurer Level row on the character sheet Stats tab shows the levels buffs and equipment add, in green after the earned level, such as the +4 from the Blessing of Spirituality. Its hover names the level the character counts as. Before, the row showed only the earned level, so the blessing looked lost.
• The Crown Shop preview of the Ancient Stone Lava Fishing Grotto showed a black box with a few rocks poking out of it. The box was the dark backing the room hangs around itself so nothing shows through gaps in the rock, which you never see from inside. Previews now leave that backing out and frame the camera on the grotto itself. (ddf53eaa01)
• The mail envelope in the top right corner is now a quarter larger than the toolbar buttons and sits a little lower under the Rewards button, so unopened mail is easier to notice. The toolbar and the other notification icons keep their size.
• Right-clicking a player who is already in another party now shows Invite To Party greyed out when they are in your zone, and hovering it says they are already in a party.
• A mount in the bags or on the utility bar can now be chosen with Set as Preferred Mount on its right-click menu. On foot, the Mount / Dismount key summons that mount whenever it is carried, and the choice is saved with the character. Before this the key summoned the last mount ridden and forgot it on relog.
• The "Your Gold:" readout now appears only on the backpack. Chests, the bank, plot storage, bags opened inside the backpack and reward windows no longer show it, which leaves room in their bottom row for buttons like Take All.
• Bank: items inside a bag or chest stored in the bank are easier to find. The tooltip's "You own" line now says how many of the banked ones are inside containers, and a search in the bank, backpack or lot storage says when a closed container holds more matches, with a Show Objects in Containers button beside it. A player had 1,691 crowns banked inside a container and could find only the 10 loose ones. (026e7dab02)
• Townsfolk placed in player-owned towns (town criers, bankers, merchants and the rest) could show their name at their feet. Their names now sit above their heads and follow the size the town owner set for them.
• Fixed the player vendor's My Listings tab, where the Item Name column kept changing width by a character at a time and the frame rate fell to about 10 at some UI Scale settings. Your Goods and Listed for Sale now keep a steady width and split the window evenly, and the two sides of the trade window got the same fix (f9d2c92973).

Dungeons

• Player dungeons: the Dungeon Menu button now sits on the same line as the top-right window buttons, just left of them. It used to take a row of its own above them, so entering your own dungeon pushed every icon in that corner down a row and some behind the minimap.

Inventory

• Consolidate Stacks over a very large number of stacks now merges 50 at a time, so chests and doors keep opening promptly while it runs. A quit in the middle no longer fills the error log, and a crafting batch no longer stops when you split one of its ingredient stacks partway through.
• Large destroys and stack merges now go to the server in batches: a multi-select Destroy sends up to 256 items per request, and Consolidate Stacks, Quick Deposit and Take All merge up to 100 stacks per request. Each item used to be its own request, and one big action could hold up zoning and chests for minutes. It ships switched off on chaos and on for QA.

UI

• Party list: each party member's pets, summons and companions now show as small health bars under their row, and a left click selects one for a heal. Up to four per member, with a "+N more" line past that; Show Party Members' Pets on the Interface tab turns it off. Requested by Majere.

Achievements

• Slayer of Legends no longer lists Elrin Nayer, who had no achievement of his own to earn. Ras'al'horag, Undead Lord, the Lich of the Mound and Razox Dread now have Slain, Vanquished and Conquered achievements that pay a framed portrait trophy, and all three count toward Slayer of Legends.

Traps

• Pressure plate traps no longer switch themselves off when stepped on again while the server is still answering the last step. Roving overworld creatures that chase a player past the edge of the map now start their encounter instead of vanishing.

HUD

• Reworked the status frame fix from Oct 23: the frames were being placed for the window size the game had at login, so they drifted after any resize. They now follow the window's current size.

Images

Operations

• Make-good mail from the team now skips accounts that have not logged in for six months. The mold payout had slowed to 156 letters an hour while it kept retrying full inboxes on long-idle accounts; with those letters set aside, the payouts for active players are going out again.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now explain the Bug Brigade titles, from the four retired Pest Controller ranks to Bug Hunter and Doctor of Dragonflies.
• The Oracle no longer says Earth Magic Specialization unlocks on its own at Bulwark of Earth 80. She now says it is learned from Vonda in Jaanaford, and that every specialization skill is learned from a trainer.

Sailing

• Built the first sailing boat players can steer, for testing. Whoever takes its wheel sails it, with speed that builds and fades gradually and a rudder to turn, while other players ride on deck and step aboard or ashore at the mast. It is switched off on chaos for now.

Crown Shop

• The Crown Shop sale now announces itself: each new round lists every item on sale by name on the Traders channel with how long it lasts, World Events gets a short line pointing there, and Traders gives a five minute warning before a round of 15 minutes or longer ends. The team can schedule sale events with more items or rapid fire rounds, and a Call to Arms can now reward the realm with rapid fire sales.

Website

• Rogue of Novia on the Desk: the newest line of the message log is no longer cut in half, and the line under the map that describes the square under the pointer no longer moves up and down as the pointer goes on and off the map. In a short Desk window the side panel now scrolls instead of running over both.
• Deck Building on the website Desk has the same margin on both sides inside a Desk window; its content used to sit against the window's left edge under an indented tab row. The Practice combat bar now shrinks to fit a narrow window instead of running past its edges. (4ddd02e46c)

Magic

• Every school's shield now lasts the same time at the same skill, specialization and attunement. Shield of Crystal gained Earth Specialization scaling, Elysian Illumination gained Sun attunement scaling, and Chaotic Shield moved to the shared formula, which makes it shorter for casters with little Chaos attunement and longer for those with a lot.
• The Acara's armor set no longer slows spells or raises their focus cost under the new heavy armor rule. It is plate made for Air mages; its fizzle chance is unchanged, and other armor worn with it still counts. (5410949a12)

Inventory

• A full bank now accepts a stackable deposit that only adds to a stack already stored in that town's bank, including a drop onto a bag row that holds a matching stack. The earlier fix for this (#2048) checked the wrong container and never took effect. (6a0844731c)
• The bank now treats matching stacks banked in different towns as one. Depositing an item merges it with a matching stack banked in another town, Consolidate Stacks now works on stacks banked in other towns, and a new Stack All button in the bank window merges every matching stack across all your town banks into the bank you are standing at. Each stack merged away frees a bank slot. (9522f43696)

Creatures

• The bats flying in Despair and Myrkur beat their wings at a bat's pace. The two large bats were flapping about 20 times a second and now flap about 4; the medium bats went from about 8 to 5 (a57d113633, #14948).
• Lamech's Bazaar (Hard) now fields Ferocious Saber-Toothed Tigers across its whole tiger pack. Five of its eight tigers had been the same Adult Saber-Toothed Tiger the Normal version uses, so they were no tougher on Hard. Normal and Extreme are unchanged. (ee79c9ad84)
• The black foal in the Desolis horse pen no longer ends up on the house next to the pen, jumping between two of its floors several times a second. The town foals in Desolis, Aerie, Brittany Fields, Braemar and Owl's Head, the Aerie ducks and the cat in the Manor of Mystery are built from house pets, which keep to lots and buildings, so they could not stand on the ground where they spawn. They now walk ordinary ground, and a town animal that cannot get back to where it spawned is put back there (#14925).
• A creature that sank into the ground while standing still now rises back onto it within about a second. Brign, Lord of Water, in The Breach could walk back to his spot after a chase and stop with only the top of his body above the sand, still targeted at full health and out of reach. Before, only a moving creature was checked. (ee0f830473)
• Creatures that are fighting each other now turn on a player who walks up to them, everywhere in the game. A bear lured onto a pack of tigers used to keep fighting while a player stood beside it; now any creature in the fight that can see you leaves the other animal and comes for you. Pets and summons are not counted as a fight between creatures.
• The Charnel Pits no longer bleed. Rend, Puncture, Hamstring and every other bleed now show Immune on a pit, and like other undead it also shrugs off poison and takes the extra damage of skills made against the undead. Reported by Rinaldi.

Radio

• Added the website route that will carry the official radio stations to the Desk's Radio window, so browsers can play The Royal Jukebox and New Britannia Herald Radio from the website itself. The route has its own limits per visitor and keeps listen passes out of its logs, and the radio service now counts each visitor behind it separately. The route is not switched on yet.
• Added the Radio Stations staff page for the community radio list. A station added, edited, reordered or switched off there reaches every player's radio within about a minute, older game versions included, with no patch or server restart. Its Check button says whether an address will play in game: MP3 and Ogg Vorbis do, AAC, Opus, FLAC and HLS do not.
• Added the game server's side of the Desk's Radio window: it hands out listen passes for the browser, takes song requests paid from the Desk through the same purchase code as a request made in game (a player who is in the game sees their gold change at once), and publishes what each station is playing and what is queued. Refund mail for a song request now reaches players who have been away from the game for a long time. Not switched on yet.
• Built the game server side of the Desk's upcoming Radio window. For the signed-in player only, it lists the official stations open to them with what is on the air and what plays next, gives the song list with the reason a song cannot be requested yet, the player's gold and the character a request is made as, and hands a listen pass or a song request to the game server, which runs the request with the same code as a request made in game. A station the game server has not updated for three minutes shows as off the air, and nothing it answers names an account. It is not switched on yet.
• The Desk has a Radio window for The Royal Jukebox and New Britannia Herald Radio: Play and Stop with its own volume, what is on the air and how far into it, Up Next with when each item starts (the hourly world news and Herald episodes included), and Request a Song for 1,000 gold, made as the character you played last, with the same song list, search, reasons and messages as the radio window in game. The sound keeps playing while the window is minimized, and the icon shows only while a station is on the air for you. It stays switched off until the official radio goes live.

Decorations

• The Gilded Hoard Tip Jar now shows its Tips label when the owner ticks "Show Tips label on the jar". The gem glows and sparkles had been pulling the label far away from the jar. (#14938)
• Mounted Stag Antlers now hang on the walls of the Stone Five-Story w/ Veranda town home. The back of the trophy reached a few centimetres into the stone, so the antlers were refused on 1049 of 1084 wall spots measured in that house; they now hang on 438, refused only beside pillars and window or door arches, the same as a plaque.

World

• Braemar: three rope pieces that hung in the air beside the taming trainer's pen, up to 1.8 m off the ground with nothing to hang from, are gone. The coiled ropes and books on the ground stay. (5f19cba5e4)
• The Hilt Fortress entrances in Equitas Passage and Paladis Passage no longer have an empty second doorway beside the door. Since the two doors were merged in July, the old arch stood open and players could walk through it behind the wall. It is now solid stone. (0e20c99b2c, #14983)
• On the Novia overworld the skull spike that marks the Sunless Barrens entrance stood about 7 m from its name banner; it now stands directly under the banner (#14684).

Crafting

• Unticking Keep patterns from salvage now also stops the patterns a salvage can roll by chance, such as the Rusty Chainmail Chest Armor pattern. Those results are left out and the salvage gives materials instead, and the item tooltip stops listing the pattern while the box is off. Before, only the pattern named on the item was skipped. (2b15b45b6f)
• The four Shadow potions (Shadow Form, Shadow Poison, Shadow Pet and Shadow Shield) now take 4 Shadow Essence per craft, down from 8, and still make 3 potions. The Shadow Essence drop rate is unchanged.

Items

• Holding the Creepy Dolly while taking out an instrument no longer makes the character grow and shrink, which looked like a jump. The Dolly keeps its size effect while the instrument is out (#14861).

Mail

• The mail window has a Sent tab. It lists the mail an account sent in the last 30 days and shows a read-only copy of each: who it went to, the message, the gold and postage, and the items, greyed out. A mail sent to several friends at once is one entry.

NPCs

• Choosing Mute on an NPC now also stops it speaking its replies aloud when you talk to it. The text still shows, and other NPCs of the same kind keep their voice. Players who muted an NPC earlier need to unmute and mute it again (#14943).
• Pressing Enter in a Conversationalist's Say box now sends the line; before, only clicking Say did (#14986).
• Conversationalists that run on a written persona now greet the player when a conversation opens, in the character's own voice. Before this the window opened empty and the character waited for the player to speak first. If no line can be generated, the character still opens with a short greeting.
• The Custom NPC Editor now shows a Conversationalist's character budget: the limit before a file is picked, characters used against it once one is, and a warning with the amount over when a file is too long. Subscribers now get 20,000 characters on any Conversationalist. The Conversationalist window on the guild and town desk counts against the same 20,000 and warns when a text runs over, where before a long paste was cut off at 6,000 without a word.

Fishing

• Spotted Catfish sizes 6 to 10 now measure longer than the sizes below them, and every Spotted Catfish trophy shows the same Fish Length as the fish it was tanned from. Before, sizes 6 to 10 used another catfish species' shorter lengths and the size 5 to 10 trophies used a third species' numbers. No fish anyone has caught changes length. (#14973)

Party

• A party started from a Looking For Group listing now begins on loot mode Roll at a value threshold of 1, the same as a party started by invite. It used to show Roll with a threshold of 0, so nothing went to a roll and the first player to open a corpse kept everything (e8f369ec4a).

Voice Chat

• The Voice Volume setting for one player now runs from Muted up to 400% in even loudness steps, with a notch at 100%, so a soft speaker can be turned up to match a loud one (8e79482a77).

Call to Arms

• The Call to Arms admin page now offers Extra Crown Shop sale items as a reward for everyone. The server has supported it since the 10-17 change, but the page never listed it. The number is an item count (1 to 12), not a percent, and the reward is refused in the realm blessing, where it would never reach the shop (9a5173ae1e).
• Added Biggest catch calls: a fishing Call to Arms that runs its full time and ranks each player by the length of their longest single fish, so placement prizes go to the biggest catches. Ties go to whoever landed that length first. The window, compass line, chat announcement, calendar results and reward letters show each fish's length as its item card does.

Books

• The Helpful Guide to Deck Building no longer tells players to unlock deck building at a trainer or names Lieutenant Tilton, who does not teach it. Every character can build decks from the start, and the book now says so, with a Getting Started chapter (Y opens the Decks window) and corrected tips. The new text is in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian, and its Read Aloud narration was re-recorded.

Calendar

• Players can now hide events from their own World Calendar: one date, every date of a series, or a one-date event. Hidden events leave the month, week and agenda views and their reminders stop going off; Show hidden events brings them back faded, with a button to show them again. Nobody else's calendar changes. The list is kept with the account, so the Calendar window in game, the website calendar and guild and town calendars hide the same events. Not on chaos yet.

Combat

• Bandages are a new consumable that stops bleeding. A bandage stops up to five bleeds on the character using it, removes the reduced healing a Rend wound leaves, and heals a little over a few seconds. It can be used mid-fight from the bags or a combat deck slot, with a 20 second wait before the next one. Every tailor knows the recipe: 2 Cloth Strap make 3 bandages at Tailoring 10.
• The Rend attacks of cats, ravens and clockwork automatons now count as bleeds, so a bandage stops them, and undead, elementals and plants no longer bleed from them.
• Control point bodies that still have loot or a skin on them now stay for their normal time when the next wave arrives. Late in a long fight the last kills of a wave used to vanish within seconds, loot and all.

Conversations

• Eastmarch, Etceter, Fortus End, Kiln, Northwood, Point West and Resolute now give directions. Each town has a guard who answers where to find its shops, trainers, bank, guild registrar, landmarks and exits (a Docent Knight in Resolute), plus a Helpful Automaton beside the town crier, and most answers mark the spot on the map. Etceter and Northwood kept their existing directions and gained the missing places.
• In Kiln the guards Renly and Xanyria now give directions, and in Resolute so do Brigid, Lord Marshal Declan Robinson and Knight-Captains Agnetha and Baldwin.
• Townsfolk no longer give directions to Crown merchants, which are no longer in the game. The Brookside Helpful Automaton now stands on the ground beside the town crier instead of on the gallows platform.
• Fixed NPCs that had two topics answering the same word, where only one answer could ever be heard. Cecile Ferray and Anna the Guard now give either of their trouble lines, the Reindeer gives its ice cube quest when asked for help, and Norman, Agent of the Oracle, answers New Britannia and the mainland separately. (#14835)
• The Helpful Automatons in Solace Bridge Outskirts, Blood River Outskirts and Highvale Outskirts now give directions to the merchants, trainers, camps, landmarks and exits of their areas, and mark most of them on the map.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-22 is up: Voice chat is built and switched on for the staff test shard, with positional voice nearby, party voice anywhere, speech to text into chat and six voice fonts. A mount that cleared entire staircases in one go now walks down them properly. Slaying weapons start working on creatures that are more than one kind of thing, hidden players stop being visible to other hidden players, and Calls to Arms learn where they are being fought. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

UI

• A quick right click now puts away the fishing, Harvest Plants and ground spell targeting circle without using the skill, the way Escape does. Holding the right button to turn the camera keeps the circle up.
• Video options gained an Ambient Occlusion Strength slider under the Ambient Occlusion toggle. It runs from no contact shading at all up to twice the new default, and the default itself is a quarter stronger than before (intensity 1.0 to 1.25), so corners and wall bases read a little deeper without touching anything. The slider greys out while the toggle is off.
• Skill tooltips have a new Show Next Level in Skill Tooltips option under Options, Interface, Character & Progress. Turned off, a tooltip shows only the current level at full width, about half the height on a small screen, and holding Alt brings the next level back for that hover. Holding Alt with the option on hides it.
• Pressing Follow on the party leader prompt while in combat, dead or too encumbered no longer throws the offer away. Chat says you will be asked again, and the same prompt returns once you are free to travel, as long as the leader is still in the zone it named (#14759).
• Key bindings no longer fire from keys typed into chat or a search box. Target Pet, the party and companion target keys, Fly Up and Down, the decoration keys and a few window keys still went off while typing, including Shift bindings typed as capital letters, and on German and other AltGr keyboards typing { [ ] } or @ counted as holding Ctrl. Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+0 still work from chat.

Community

• Filed a bug (#14697) where the Linux client shows a Windows-style file path in the discarded-mail save notice, reported by Eric Blutaxt on the forum, and relayed two pieces of forum feedback on open balance/town-rule items to the team.

Crafting

• Recipes that make a crafting part now show that part's Material Crafting Bonus in their hover, so the Copper Spear Head and Iron Spear Head recipes say what each head adds to a spear before you make one. Hovering a material in the right-click material menu shows its bonus too, and the Oracle now answers where to find these.

Housing

• Trees beside claimed lots in player towns are back. Since a recent fix, a claimed lot hid any tree whose branches reached over it, which took long-standing trees in Wolves Den. Now a lot hides only trees standing inside it, plus trees whose branches reach its house from within 8 m, with branch size judged by where most of the leaves are.

Images

• Bandage item icon:
• 
• Deck Building:
• Radio window, Stations tab:
• Radio window, Official tab (sample data):

Combat

• Creature hits on a player who was not the first into the scene now count the Damage Resistance from that players armor masterworks and crafting materials. Before, only the first player in a scene got the full bonus; PvP hits had the same gap.
• Holding a rune in a locked slot in combat now says why it will not build charges when the other copies of it are in the deck: a locked rune charges only from the copies left out of the deck. The line shows once per rune each session.
• The Razorback Destroyer in South Drachvald Spur now has Fortitude like the bosses do: a stun, knockdown or mesmerize only takes hold when four land within about three seconds, so one player can no longer stun-lock it.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer questions about the new player-set traps: where the trap kit recipes come from, how to learn Set Trap and Trap Sense, and who a trap can hurt. She also knows where to get the Silver Candlestick recipe, how to learn the Scarhide, Cinderglass and Hvitr trophy and rug recipes, where the Meticulous gathering jewels come from, what Venom Sacks and Ultraslay are, and that Pet Range stops growing at skill 150.
• Corrected the Oracle's answer on discarding runes: right-clicking a rune on the combat bar, or pressing Ctrl and its number, throws it away and the slot draws again. It had said single discards were switched off. The correction reaches the Oracle with its next update.
• The Oracle now answers how to get another Shroud of the Avatar: say "shroud" to the Oracle in her temple in Brittany with no Shroud in your backpack. She also explains turning the Shroud into its Eternal Pattern. Reported by Pop Lancermane.
• The Oracle can now say which masterwork and enchanting skill each kind of item uses, and no longer says the pickaxe, harvesting axe, sickle and skinning knife cannot be masterworked. (b0502d8940)

Traps

• Fixed a trap kit on the hotbar refusing every use with "You can't do that with this trap right now." once the stack it was dragged from ran out. The slot now uses any stack of that kit you carry, so crafting or buying more kits keeps it working. Reported by Lothar Griher.
• Fixed the trap minigame panel throwing an error every frame at startup until the language data had loaded, which also left hidden copies of the panel behind. Any game window whose build fails part way now cleans up after itself before trying again.

Crafting

• The payout mail for the 19 non-ingot crafting molds went out: 100 new molds for each one a character held on 20 October. It was missed when build 332 went live, so those molds had turned into a single mold each until the mail arrived. The letters are going out through the day.
• Masterwork and enchanting skill tooltips now name the items each skill covers: fishing rods use Masterwork Ranged Weapon, heavy belts Masterwork Plate Armor, cloaks and wings Masterwork Cloth Armor, and rings, necklaces and shields Weapon Enchantment. Ten descriptions in all nine languages. Requested by Rinaldi. (834a6a4a0a)

Infra

• The staff Server Health page now checks all 25 services on the portal server (up from 7), its scheduled jobs, the tunnels from the build and archive machines, whether the game server and the patch channels are on the same build, and 16 site certificates. The login probe, held back until the account move, now reads as paused with its reason. The disk tile shows its percent sign.

Skills

• The thin rule between the level and the XP on each experience line of the Skills window now shows. It was hidden when the window first filled in and never came back; it is also drawn in the section heading colour now so it reads next to the coloured figures. (472e8015a0)
• Set Trap no longer gains experience from every other skill you use; it now trains only when you finish setting a trap (01d9f5fa9f).

Dungeons

• The Shrieking Gargoyle trap piece has a new "Shriek When Approached" setting in its decoration menu. When it is on, the gargoyle shrieks on its own when a player comes within 5 meters, with no pressure plate needed. It goes off once per approach and is off by default (c247945c7a).

Inventory

• Answering No when a dye is dropped over an item in a chest or bag now finishes the move: the dye lands in that container instead of going back to where it was picked up. A dye that could stay stuck on the cursor with no question shown, after which no dye worked until relog, is also fixed. Requested by Astirian.

Website

• Updated the website design rules so its pages can show the game's Modern skill icons and other illustrations in the game's painted look, each captioned for what it shows.
• Built and switched on Deck Building on the Desk: thirteen lessons with spoken narration on building and playing a combat deck (locked and open slots and their cooldowns, drawing, deck size and dilution, stacking, charging, combos, casting on yourself and your pet, Focus and swapping decks), many with a task to do on a working combat bar; a Deck Builder that works like the game's Edit Deck window and reads and writes the game's share codes; a Practice bar against a training dummy; and a Deck test that plays one or two decks for minutes in a moment and shows how often each rune reaches your hand. Requested by Isabel Ayin.
• The Desk's town icons went live on the website: each town's folder shows its own picture, and a player-owned town's governor can pick the one everyone in the town sees.

Community Hub

• Pressing Publish on a theme or deck already shared on the Community Hub now opens it for editing with its stored description filled in, where it used to stop at "You have already published this." The publish and edit forms now say what Publish, Save and Cancel do, and an item of yours with no description says so in game and on the website. On the website, the author of a theme or deck also gets an Edit details button on its page, and My items shows each description.

FX

• Lasting buff visuals such as Strength of Earth, Shield of Air and Enlightenment no longer switch themselves off after a zone change, which hid them on other players and on anyone briefly off screen.

Quests

• Fixed Find Patrator in South Longfall Wetland. Patrator used to vanish from her cage a few minutes after a player reached the pirate camp and did not return while they stayed nearby, so players who freed the other caged elves first never found her. She now stays in her cage while a player on the quest is nearby (#14650).

Gameplay

• Refusing a table game seat someone already holds, or pressing Copy to Offline twice too quickly, no longer prints a developer note in red into the chat window. The usual refusal message still shows.
• A new character's free skill from the Solace Bridge tutorial trainer no longer disappears a moment after it is learned. Using a recipe scroll for a recipe you already know now says so. The giant chess Rematch button clears once the board has moved on. A boat teleporter set to a retired player town now says the town is unavailable instead of loading it and dropping you on the overworld, and control point losses early in a wave now reach the leaderboard.

Images

Testing

• The in-game /tester verification board signs players in to the issue tracker through their game session. It no longer asks for an account name or password, so Steam logins and recently made accounts can claim tasks and post verdicts. Open in Browser opens the task on the tracker already signed in.

Dialogue

• Samuel Redstone in Ardoris told the black arrow story two ways, saying the bird was going "to fast" in one answer and "too fast" in the other. Both answers now read "too fast", the translations carry over, and the corrected line has its own voice clip.

Rendering

• Researched a curved world effect for sailing and larger maps, so distant terrain, islands and ships sink below the horizon instead of fading into fog. A screen-space post effect cannot hide anything, so the plan is a vertex-shader bend that lowers the world by distance from the camera, with drawing and streaming limited to what is above the horizon. Physics and the server stay flat. Evaluated the Curved World asset against the project: it supports our Unity version and renderer, and the terrain, grass, tree and building shaders get its bend added by hand.

Vendors

• The first vendor search after a zone change no longer waits about 20 seconds before showing results. Results now appear within a few seconds while the town is still loading in.

Client

• Pressing Play on the title screen no longer freezes the game for about a second while it reads its shader list.

Housing

• Tipping a tip jar set to show visitors Deposit only no longer shows "That did not work. Try again." in the jar window. The tip always went through; the window now thanks the donor instead.

Mail

• Players running the Windows version on Linux through Steam Proton or Wine are now told the real Linux folder their discarded mail was saved to, in place of a C:\users\steamuser path their file manager could not open. The same goes for the lines that name the decoration layouts, saved settings, book import and chat log folders. Reported by Eric Blutaxt.

Planning

• Researched how the sailing ships planned for Episode 3 could work, and built an early prototype of how they handle. Nothing is in the game yet.

Towns

• A hired town NPC set to Patrol inside a building no longer sinks into the floor as it walks. Patrolling NPCs now keep their feet on top of a building floor, a deck or the ground.

UI

• One click on the minimap opens the full map again. The first click on the minimap, and on a few other controls in a window sitting behind another one, was being dropped while the game brought that window to the front.
• The Theme Editor now says why a background picture cannot be shown (larger than 2048 x 2048 pixels, over 8 MB, or not a PNG or JPG) instead of leaving the windows plain without a word.

Creatures

• Adult dragons, the clockwork dragons and the Aether dragon have three times the health and give three times the experience, so they are now fights for a group. A Yellow Dragon in Northwest Blackblade Mountains went from about 7,400 health to about 22,100. Their attacks hit as hard as before. In the two weeks before the change, nine in ten kills of the Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, Orange and White dragons were made by a single player. Ancient, young and juvenile dragons are unchanged. (32aa3c979f)

Items

• Birthday Candles bought before the candles came in eight colors load again, as the White Birthday Candle. They had stopped showing up in inventories.

Performance

• A character's learned recipes now load in the background when entering the world, so a character with many recipes no longer freezes the screen while the title-screen download finishes.

World

• The kobold trolleys in Grusk only carry a player standing in one. Before, a trolley that ran into a player on the track could carry them through its own walls and drop them into the sea under the town. A player who leaves a trolley, mine cart or the Port Harmony gondola without jumping and falls more than 6 m is put back where they boarded. Dust devils still carry players off.
• Leaving Approach to the Shuttered Eye for the Novia world map often put players on the roof of the Tower of the Shuttered Eye. They now arrive on the ground in front of the tower, at the edge of the swamp.

Conversations

• NPC topic buttons now spell people and places with capitals in every town: Alaina Post in the Peladjar Inn shows Ingvar and Beatrice instead of "ingvar" and "beatrice", Palace of the Winds and Peladjar Inn read the same on every Ardoris NPC, and the Ardoris guards' Goodbye button is capitalized. About 2,400 topics across 74 areas changed, with their translations carried so other languages show the same names. Everyday topics such as help and rumors stay lower case. (c7110881c0)

Inventory

• Changing zone right after moving a few hundred items at once (Take All, Quick Deposit, Consolidate All Stacks) now waits for the moves to finish instead of disconnecting after a minute and undoing the ones not yet sent. The lot chest also stays open until the last move lands.
• Take All on a container window whose bag had already been removed no longer throws an error; the window closes instead.

Voice

• The Drunken Ritualist in Tenebris Harbor has a new voice: a gruff, weathered one in place of the smooth narrator voice he had before. It reaches every client after a relog, with no patch needed. (374041f685)

World

• A practice dummy in Westend that stood under the ground, and showed up sunk in or floating depending on who was watching, now stands on the ground with the rest of its group.

Docs

• Added a reference page on the Order of the New Britannian Empire award: the recipients from 2014 to 2023, the title, medal and plaque each one receives, and a note that the game has no in-world memorial to them yet.

Localization

• The game client no longer writes an error to its log in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian for a translated note whose book left the game with the unfinished LOTI basement. A new check catches translated books left behind when a book is removed.

Tools

• The Volcano Archipelago Gaia prototype got its polish pass (a0b76eb1f1) and fifteen rounds of follow-up fixes (through c31345a267). Each island has its own terrain detail and texture palette, about 20,000 trees and plants, grass and fern layers, and about 5,000 rocks, cliff pieces, driftwood, shells, corals and a shipwreck. The volcano has a broken summit with a saddle, varied gullies, lava tongues on its ash flank and a crater floor of black crust with glowing cracks around a hot pool. The lava channels carry crust plates, the lagoons are calm turquoise, rock meshes keep their island colours, and the scene has fog, ambient occlusion, a fill light and a colour grade.

Travel

• Walking into The Outlaws' Run and other high-level adventure areas from the world map asks which entrance you want again; the last patch had sent everyone to the main entrance. Leaving a place for the world map now puts you over the place you left. Since mid-September some exits, The Outlaws' Run among them, set you down on the next tile, sometimes on top of a neighbouring town (f222edf971).
• Town boats aimed at a player town that has since closed now show that town's name on hover instead of "POT Template Example: Forest 01b". Using one says the town is closed to visitors and brings you back to the town you sailed from after a few seconds; it used to show a maintenance message for 30 seconds and leave you on the Novia map. Trying a closed town again from any boat or Conversationalist now says so straight away, with no loading screen.

Radio

• Official radio: wrote the message format between the game servers and the new radio service on the voice box, and the signed stream links that keep the two official stations inside the game client. 24 tests.
• Official radio: planned two in-game radio stations run on our own server, The Royal Jukebox (pay 1,000 gold to queue a song everyone tuned in hears, up to 20 in the queue) and New Britannia Herald Radio (the last 20 Herald episodes with an hourly Lord British news segment on trophy fish, fallen bosses, freed towns and lot auctions), plus an upgrade of the Aether Vibration Device itself.
• Built the track list for the coming official radio stations from the game's wax cylinder songs: 213 of the 245 cylinders made it, while cylinders that cannot be broadcast, spoken word, sound effects and anything over ten minutes stay off the air.
• Built the streaming core of the official radio service: each station goes out as a steady MP3 stream with the song title inside it, new listeners start with three seconds of audio so playback begins at once, and only game clients holding a signed link get in.
• Wrote the script side of the radio's hourly world news: the NPC dialogue service turns an hour of trophy fish, fallen landmark bosses, freed towns and town lot auctions into a short in-world bulletin for Lord British to read, with a light joke or a bit of local lore for each item. Every draft has to pass a content check and moderation, and none of it is live yet.
• Built the voicing step for the radio's hourly world news: the catchphrase service checks each script again, keeps the bulletins inside daily and 30-day character budgets before anything is spent, reads them in the Lord British voice and publishes the file. A repeated request reuses the file it already made, and none of it is live yet.
• The radio service now brings songs in from the game's download server and converts each one once into a steady stream format at an even volume, checking every file before it can air; the music station's shuffle never repeats a song within two hours.
• The radio service learned the jukebox's rules: paid requests play in order at the end of the current song, a request that cannot play is handed back for a refund, and a fresh world-news segment airs once between songs at most every 45 minutes.
• New Britannia Herald Radio has its running order: the latest Herald episode first, then the latest world news, then older episodes in turn, with a brand-new news segment cutting in at the end of whatever is playing. It reads the Herald's public podcast feed, so only published episodes can air.
• Official radio: built the game server side of The Royal Jukebox: a song request costs 1,000 gold, the queue holds 20 songs with at most 3 per player, a request that cannot play is refunded by mail, and the radio only names players whose privacy settings allow it. Staff can skip, remove, pause and price it live.
• The community radio station list can now give each station a genre, a description and a website, and the server picks up a new list without a restart.
• The radio service on the voice box gained its control hub: it links to the game server, plays the paid jukebox queue and the news breaks, picks up where it stopped after a quick restart and goes quiet on any brake. An end-to-end test plays its stream through the game client's own radio reader.
• The Aether Vibration Device shows the song a station is playing: a Song row in its window, a song line in the device tooltip, and /nowplaying (also /np and /song) in chat. A new option, Announce Radio Songs in Chat, posts each new song. Titles change when the song is heard, and stations that send accented titles in older encodings read correctly.
• Radio devices remember their last station for each character. Worn headphones pick their station up again after a zone change or a login (option Resume Worn Radio), and a switched-off amplifier opens with its last station selected.
• The radio window has a Stations tab with a search box that ignores accents, All, Community and Mine filters, genres and descriptions for community stations, and a Check button that tries an address before it is saved. Stations that stream AAC, Opus, FLAC or HLS now name the format in chat; Opus and FLAC used to read as an offline station or a web page.
• Fixed: two radio devices shared one window, so a single Play tuned both, walking away from one closed the window open on the other, and the window showed the wrong device's station. An NPC's radio left playing out of earshot no longer keeps streaming.
• The game server now writes the radio's hourly world news: a few minutes past each hour it gathers the hour before (trophy fish and the bait that caught them, fallen landmark bosses and who felled them, towns freed from siege, town lots at auction), has the bulletin written and read in Lord British's voice, and hands it to the radio. A quiet hour, or one with nobody listening, costs nothing, and players are named only when their privacy settings allow it.
• Documented the radio upgrades in the radio system notes: the station window, how stations are told apart, the per-character device memory and the community list's new fields.
• Added a team rule for the radio's world news: the names of anything not yet announced go on its deny list in the same change that adds them, so a bulletin can never mention them.
• Added the installer and service units that will run the official radio stations on the voice box. Each release plays every station in a private test run before it replaces the running one, restarts go to QA first, and a failed check rolls back on its own.
• The voice box setup script now prepares the box for the radio service: it installs ffmpeg, adds the radio's service accounts and folders, and keeps the radio and its audio conversion off the processor cores voice chat uses.
• Added the deploy script and the build check for the radio service. The check builds the service, its tests and its voice box setup whenever a commit touches them, and the nightly build also plays every station on a local test copy.
• Fixed: shard deploys never refreshed the default community radio station list, so the new list with genres and descriptions would not have reached the test shards. Every deploy now ships it, and a rollback puts the previous list back.
• The Aether Vibration Device has an Official tab for the two stations run for the game, The Royal Jukebox and New Britannia Herald Radio: what is on the air and how far into it, what plays next and when, and a song list for requesting a song on The Royal Jukebox for 1,000 gold, with a line for every reason a request can be turned down. The stations are not on the air yet.
• A new privacy option, Let Lord British Name Me on the Radio (Options, Multiplayer, on by default, per character), decides whether the hourly news and the request queue may use your character's name. A lot owner can share an official station on a phonograph's amplifier, and each visitor hears it with their own pass to the stream.
• Documented the radio window's Official tab in the radio system notes: how the client keeps the station list and the queue fresh, how official streams retry, the privacy option and the staff commands.

Titles

• The skill mastery titles no longer need the Warding skills. Each Warding skill sits in another school's tree (Earth Warding in Air, Fire Warding in Water, Magic Warding in Tactics), so a caster who never trained it could not earn Aerokineticist, Pyrokineticist, Healer, Tactician and the other school titles, or Magician above them. Characters whose other skills are already at the level get the title on their next login.

Housing

• Yule Stockings of every year, 2016 through 2025 and the craftable ones, now hang on inside and outside walls. Before this, every wall refused them. They no longer stand on bare floors, where they sank out of sight below the boards.

Quests

• Each character who finished the main story now holds one Shroud of the Avatar at a time. The Oracle replaces a lost Shroud only when your account has no spare one in a backpack, the bank, a house or on another character, and its Eternal Pattern counts as a Shroud whether loose or applied to a cloak. The Turn into Eternal Pattern prompt says so, and the Oracle explains it when she refuses.

HUD

• Fixed the target frame sliding toward the left edge of the screen after the game window changed size, and the player health frame jumping onto the target frame's spot. The HUD corner the status frames hang from now follows every window size change, and the on-screen check waits for it before moving any frame.

Rendering

• The sun's haze from Volumetric Lighting is now drawn only in the main view. Other cameras the game renders, such as reflections, now leave it out, and the haze in the main view looks the same as before. Part of looking into a roof shape one player saw flash across the sky in Crossroads.

Oracle

• Bug reports filed through the Oracle now include the main Video settings: Reflections Quality, Volumetric Lighting, Ambient Occlusion, Render Scale and Antialiasing, with the antialiasing actually in use when the game has lowered it to keep the frame rate up.

PvP

• Trap Sense now finds and disarms the traps a place is built with as well as traps players set: bear traps, flame, steam, spike and lightning plates, arrow plates, falling stalactites and the large rockslide. While Trap Sense is on, nearby built-in traps get a ring on the ground; using it beside one plays the disarm minigame, and a disarmed trap harms no one in that area until the area closes. Plates, doors and switches keep working. Trap Sense also shows an icon in the warning row while it is on, and the walk it holds you to no longer speeds up during its own cast.

Interface

• The quest tracker no longer suggests a trainer for Refresh, a Taming skill that has been removed from the game. Its trainer suggestions now name only skills a trainer can still teach, matching the training window (ed52340466).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-21 is up: Wednesday the player website switched on for everyone, and within four hours the team had built an entire twenty-six-floor dungeon crawl on top of it, stocked from the game's own creatures, spells and artifacts. Your first hour in Soltown got shorter and stopped sending you on errands. And a long list of creatures finally learned where their own bodies were, including a polar bear who had been catching fire beside a campfire he was not standing in. Listen or read the transcript (18 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Towns

• Wrote Town Crier Discovery Plan A, a plan for giving every NPC town a Town Crier discovery near its main town crier and arrival points, with a survey of all 87 towns: 22 have none yet and 64 have one that still needs work.
• Every town now marks its town crier on the compass and map. Fourteen towns and villages that had no town crier marker got one, including Braemar, Desolis, Jaanaford, Mud, Resolute and Tanglemire, and the existing markers in the other 73 now sit on the town crier and also cover the main arrival point. The markers stay off player lots and do not count toward exploration achievements.

Voice Chat

• Voice chat between players was built. Hold Caps Lock to talk: players nearby hear the voice from where the speaker stands, and party members anywhere in the world hear it without position. A second key, unbound at first, talks to the guild. It is switched on for the QA shard and stays off on chaos for now.
• Speech to text: what a player says can show in chat as a line marked "(spoken)", and a Speech to Text Only mode types the words into the chat box for the player to check and send, without sending any sound.
• Voice fonts: Dwarf, Orc, Wraith, Automaton, Elf and Giant change how a voice sounds to other players. Listeners can turn voice fonts off.
• Each speaker has a volume slider and a Mute Voice choice on the player menu, and blocking a player stops their voice in both directions. A speaking mark shows on party frames and over heads, and a HUD indicator lists who is talking.
• Spoken words are transcribed on our own voice server and checked by the same moderation as typed chat. Audio is never recorded or stored.
• The first time voice chat is turned on, the game explains what happens to the player's voice and asks before it opens the microphone. The Mac client now asks macOS for microphone permission with a short reason.
• Staff can now turn off voice chat for one account without muting typed chat, for a set number of minutes or until restored, from the /voiceban command or the admin Players page. Two new shard options limit talking, or voice fonts, to paid subscribers while everyone else can still listen; both are off.

World

• In Savrenoc Timberland the two skull statues beside the Haunted Graveyard gate stood 0.14 to 0.89 m off the ground and now rest on it. Six more of the same statues, in the graveyard and in front of the zone's exit archways, had gaps of 0.09 to 0.53 m under their downhill side and were lowered too.

Calendar

• Opening the Calendar from a World Events entry with no start date no longer leaves it stuck on a period that never loads; it opens on today instead (#14583).

Conversations

• Brookside now gives directions. A new Docent Guard in the town square and a new Helpful Automaton beside the town crier answer where to find its shops, trainers, the bank, the guild registrar, the docks, the Lunar Rift, its ponds, the bog, the manor and its exits, and mark landmarks on the map.

Infra

• A dedicated voice server went up for voice chat. It runs one voice relay per shard and the speech recognition (NVIDIA Parakeet and SenseVoice through sherpa-onnx, on the CPU). Its self-test passed on all 11 reference clips, and it transcribes a 4 second English line in about a tenth of a second.
• Voice server releases now carry the list of game names (places, NPCs, lore terms) that speech recognition uses to spell them correctly, and every model file is checked against a pinned checksum before use.
• The voice server build is checked on every commit that touches it, every night, and before each chaos release.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer where to buy dungeon blueprints and chest patterns, what a Shard of Night is for, how to make a Recall Scroll, whether a lot won at auction comes with a deed, which creatures resist Moon magic, where to find fresh fishing water and the Aether Tetra, and how to train Resurrection. She no longer offers a title screen setting that was removed.

Images

Tools

• Removed 30 stray copies of the GameManagerMsgHandler object from five scenes, including Jaanaford. The game builds this object at startup, and a copy saved into a scene replaced the real one when that scene loaded. The Editor now leaves it out of every scene save, and a commit check refuses a scene that still contains one.

Website

• The news at the top of the signed-in Home is live on play.catnipgames.net: the lead story with its summary, then the next four posts, above Today in New Britannia. Staff now write posts on the site itself.
• The account page and town links on the companion site no longer list a town as yours because of an old leftover town record. Only towns where you are governor, a resident or a steward appear.
• The news editor on the new website no longer refuses posts that name the test shard, and each post written there shows an Edit link to news editors. (78f13f715d)

Images

Login

• Saved logins and named settings files now save even when another program has the old file open (the launcher, an antivirus scan, a cloud-sync client). Before, the new list or settings were dropped with a warning in the log. The last-character record got the same fix yesterday.

Server

• The game server now records every players connection quality every five minutes (round trip, jitter, lost packets and stalls) in the server logs, so a lag report can be checked against what the server measured without asking the player to open /netstats. It starts with the next chaos build.
• An account that had lost its admin rights while a support impersonation request was still set on it logged a warning at every login. The login now clears the leftover request once and moves on.

Tools

• The shared trees sync-and-push script no longer stops for a permission prompt on every run; plain git pushes still ask.
• Documented how to read the results of a Unity Test Runner window run, which writes no results file, so a full-suite run from the window can be triaged in one pass.
• Committed the terrain files and project settings that Unity 6000.6.6f1 and Gaia Pro rewrite on load, so they stop showing as changed on every machine. No terrain content changed.
• EditMode tests that read GameManager no longer fail with a type-initializer error when the Editor has a scene other than the login scene open; the edit-mode static constructor now skips the offline Play-mode boot (3124da4150).
• Three EditMode tests for the quest-chest refusal text and the Move House edge banner compared localized strings by identity, which can never match for boxed structs; they now compare by value.
• The Combos help topic has a new narration recording for its rune wording, and the help narration bake now runs on a Mac without a Vorbis-enabled ffmpeg; the Oracle's Town Sieges guide names Temna's Turncoat Bolt in Temna's own section again.
• Added a scripted interface to the Gaia terrain tool so terrain can be created, shaped with heightmap stamps, textured and planted from automated editor sessions. It returns at once on long jobs and is polled until done, avoids the tools pop-up dialogs, and refuses to run while more than one scene is loaded, so it cannot repaint a game scenes terrain by accident. A 512 m test world got a 150 m stamped mountain, four texture layers, 200 trees and grass. The installed edition is the regular Gaia for Unity 6 4.2.6, not Gaia Pro.
• The one-minute test watchdog now keeps asking a timed-out Editor test to stop until it does, after two slow tests on the Mac swallowed the first request and ran on. Its self-test now reflects that Unity 6.6 only stops a test inside engine calls.
• The Unity Editor no longer logs errors when a navmesh cut or recast object is added to a scene, or when a second scene with pathfinding is opened alongside the first. Neither error meant anything in the Editor, and both were failing scene tests.
• The Recall Scroll tooltip tests now load the skill table they read, so they pass in the Editor outside Play mode.
• A new TestCultureGuard runs every Editor test with English number formatting, whatever game language the machine has saved, and puts back any thread culture a test forgets to restore, naming the test in a warning. Twelve tooltip tests had failed on a machine set to German.
• Built a 4 by 4 km Gaia ocean prototype with 30 small islands about 200 m across, each a different shape, around a central island with a 173 m volcano. Its crater holds a lava lake, two glowing lava flows run down to the sea with steam where they meet the water, and the smoke plume drifts away from the sandy southwest side, where a flat terrace and a sheltered cove are kept free for a later fishing village.
• The prototype islands are designed in a script and written to the terrain within 5 mm, with open water at least 20 m deep and Oceanis for the sea. Three review agents checked each version for depth, size, uniqueness, geology and technical faults; their rounds caught lava flowing uphill out of the crater, smoke blowing over the village and rock painted on the seabed.

UI

• The choose-one reward window ignores a second click on Choose while the first pick is still being opened, and no longer logs an error when the window was closed before the reward arrived.
• Using a mailbox again while the mail window is already open keeps the window up instead of leaving it confused.
• A worn or broken pet collar, toy or accessory now shows its own warning icon in the top-right corner, drawn with the item's picture, and its tooltip says it is the pet's gear. Pet gear was listed under "Your armor is broken" before, which sent players looking for armor they were not wearing (5df196041d).

Vendors

• Buying from a merchant or vendor into a bag that already holds as many items as a bag can store now says the bag is full and to make room or choose another bag. Before, the purchase failed with a generic error and the items in the cart were greyed out for the rest of the session.
• Consumable stat search no longer lists Iolo's Cat Gut Goulash under Rhythmic Readiness, a buff the dish lost on 10-21 (ab08339f21).

Combat

• Slaying weapons now apply their bonus to every creature of their kind. The Two-Handed Mace of Elemental Slaying did no extra damage to Obsidian Golems, the Two-Handed Sword of Elf Slaying missed some elves, and Cuthbert, Undead Bane missed the Ancient Undead and most liches, because each counts as more than one kind of creature.
• The Kobold energy devices and The Breach's Death Power Shards now leave every humanoid creature unbuffed. Before, a humanoid that also counts as another kind of creature, such as the Ancient Undead or the elves, could pick up the buff. None of those creatures stand near a device or shard today, so fights there play the same.
• Weapon enchant effects on the Vanduul Polearm (all three versions) now sit on the polearm head. Ignite Weapon used to burn along the shaft around the hands (be3862cd9a).
• Bolster Balance now wears down as it works: each stun, root, knockback or knockdown its wearer resists takes a fifth of its crowd control resistance away, so five resists use it up. Recasting restores it in full. The Dexterity bonus and critical hit reductions do not fade.
• Hidden players are no longer drawn at all for players outside their party. Two hidden players in PvP used to see each other as a faded figure up close; now nothing shows at any distance. Party members still see each other while hidden. (#14558)
• Knight's Grace now costs a tenth of your maximum focus instead of a flat 12. Its Heavy Armor Specialization bonus is now the bleed clear: it removes two bleeds with the specialization and none without it, and it no longer raises Heavy Armor Mastery. Stuns, roots and slows still come off for everyone.

Travel

• Walking back into an adventure spot no longer sends a player to a former party member's private instance, where they were refused at the loading screen and returned to the overworld on every try. Matchmaking now skips instances private to another character and any instance that already turned the player away, and a refusal says in chat that it was another player's private instance.

Quests

• Julia the Alchemist in Kingsport no longer offers the satchel of healing herbs for Guard Winslow after the herbs have become the elixir or Winslow is healed. Before, she could say her hand-over line again and nothing arrived. A lost satchel can now be replaced once a day.
• Guard Winslow in Owl's Head now takes the elixir when you greet him. Before, the hand-over only opened if you typed a word like "medicine", and greeting him without the elixir opened an item window that could not be filled.
• Gus in Blood River Outskirts asks whether you found one of his monkeys only when you carry a Dormant Automaton Monkey; before, everyone he had asked got the question and the hand-in window. NPC item checks now read item names that contain spaces (4ea465b72f).

PvP

• Trap kit runes now have their skill entries, so the five trap kits show proper tooltips and casting text; the retired Hidden Caltrops text no longer ships in the nine translated languages (e7a0171bff).

Twitch Drops

• Set up the first Twitch Drops campaign on Twitch, the Spectator's Collection: the Twitch Purple Dye at 30 minutes of watching, the purple lantern string at 1 hour, the Twitch Purple Glowing Dye at 2 hours and the Spectator's Clockwork Cat at 4 hours. It stays switched off until the client build carrying its rewards is out.
• Twitch account linking is open on the Community Hub: sign in from the game's Community Hub window and link your Twitch account at community.catnipgames.net/twitch so drops can reach you. Delivery is switched on behind it; the first campaign, the Spectator's Collection, starts once the next client build is out.

Pets

• A non-combat pet set to Lock To Inventory can now be summoned from the bags by double-click or Use Item. The lock refused it before, even though summoning never takes the pet item out of the pack. Locked potions and food are still refused. (#14613)

Calls to Arms

• A Call to Arms can now be limited to a place: a call for 200 fish in Central Brittany counts only catches made in Central Brittany and its districts, and the compass line, the Call to Arms window and the start announcement say where. Two calls for the same thing in different towns can now run at the same time.
• New Call to Arms goal: defeat other players. It counts Obsidian Trial kills that earn the reward coin and open-world kills that create a ransom; kills of your own account never count, and the same two players count once every 10 minutes.

Networking

• Switching networks mid-session (Wi-Fi to a phone hotspot, say) no longer prints a group server refusal with the player's old and new addresses into chat; the client reconnects as before and the refusal is logged as a warning instead of an error.
• Opening a door or a container now logs how long the open took from the click, how much of that was waiting on the server lock, and the player's ping at that moment, so slow opens can be measured by place and by connection. A Live Tunables switch turns it off.

Tests

• The automated checks that audit creature runes now list the deliberate additions from the recent bear, zombie, spider, wolf and human passes: new bleeds, gap closers, self buffs, slows that hit only players and pets, and creature casts that borrow a player skill icon (3f0f84398c).
• Four automated checks were updated to follow intended changes: exact Sun specialization values, the "(Zombie)" boss achievement names, the fishing bait effect numbers and the per-piece dungeon kit icons (2142fea79b).
• Fourteen client regression tests that read game source were updated to follow code that later work had renamed, moved or lengthened (compass marker rank, goodbye refusal reset, Crown Shop holding bag release, hotbar combat row, keybinding order and others). Each still checks the fix it was written for. (90aa0e6fcf)
• Re-pinned 14 server and combat regression tests to code that had changed on purpose (the world boss fight clock, the referral crowns fix, the next-craft preview, the 1 billion experience allowance and recent damage balance changes). Each still guards the behaviour it was written for.
• Two Editor tests caught up with the code they check: the log relay recursion test now finds the right overload of LogEvent, and the offline save tests expect the error report a corrupt save is supposed to write.
• Fixed a missing brace in a water source test file that stopped the editor test suite from compiling.
• Two slow Editor tests now finish well inside the one-minute limit: the bundle signature check measures the UI folder on its own (17 s, was over 60 s cold), and the shader bundle tests compile the player scripts once for the whole set (clock material test 12 s, was over 60 s).

Creatures

• The tier 8 Ancient Undead drones use their own name records again, and the capybara companions hit animation calls the hurt sound by its current name (74e143e9d9).

Performance

• Profiled the 42 hosted town masters: a quarter of their CPU went to the audio mixer running its pitch shift, flange and chorus effects for clients nobody listens to. Headless clients now run audio at the lowest output setting, which should free about 10 cores on the hosting box once the next build reaches it.

Housing

• Cancelling the Dungeon Builder after previewing a room with more doorways than the original no longer fails part way through closing the window.
• A Wishing Well with no lot behind it no longer offers to fill a water container it could never fill. Wells on lots work as before.
• The Brittany Estates Pavers and the Crested War Helm and Horned Spectacle Helm decorations now mirror on the flip key like the other pavers and helms, instead of tipping onto their side.
• Decorative animals in a player-owned town no longer count toward the town's NPC limit. They now have their own limit, set at twice the NPC limit, and the NPC meter tooltip shows both counts (3f43ff04f1).

UI

• The typing-stall log line, the Options "now bound to" keybinding note and the Calendar agenda rows were brought in line with the UI Toolkit rules the test suite enforces (no NGUI reads, search-hideable rows, shared row height). Nothing changes on screen. (227ad96a4f)

Conversations

• Nine NPC lines written since the September spelling pass read traveler and gray again, with their translations carried over; the Italian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese copies of two keyword aliases that were still English in four towns are translated; and the Conversation Studio gate lint no longer flags two separately grouped parts of one gate as ambiguous.

Networking

• A refused group sign-in after a player's network address changes is logged as a warning and no longer printed into chat on test builds.

Combat

• Started a balance notes document that records what runes do according to their data, beginning with how many harmful effects each cleanse removes, Knight's Grace (all stuns, slows and roots, plus one or two bleeds) and Bolster Balance.

Towns

• Player-owned towns now count as members the governor, the stewards and everyone who holds a lot in the town. A lot holder the governor assigned the lot to, or who holds a town role, is a Resident; anyone else holding a lot is a Squatter. Being given the Resident role with no lot no longer counts. The town page on the guild site lists every member with their role, and governors can keep squatters out of the town's web pages, Town Hall, chat and Desk.

Inventory

• The backpack and bank open 16 pixels wider the first time, so the favorites star column no longer eats into the Item Name margin. A chest or bag window opening beside the backpack starts 16 pixels further right so it still clears it.
• Hovering a container now says how full it is, for example "Items: 256 / 300". A carried bag shows it on its item card in the backpack and bank, and a chest standing on a lot shows it under its name for any player allowed to put items in it, without opening it first. The count turns red when the container is full.

Testing

• Two editor tests that failed on the Mac now test what they mean to: the conversation camera rig check stands near the world origin, where float rounding no longer swamps its 1mm tolerance, and the Edit Deck school filter check runs at a window height where the rune list has room to lose.
• Three automated checks for map captures, the Rise pit dragon and the Courage Club arena were corrected to match the data the game ships.
• Added a regression test that keeps a player playing a grand piano or other fixed instrument placed on the bench for other players, while the report of pianists appearing beside the bench is investigated (ed2c2765d8).

Referral

• The Recruit a Friend invite pages Create Account button now opens the same account sign-up link the games login screen uses.

Options

• Show Climbable Rope Markers and Show Floating Experience Numbers moved to their alphabetical places on the Options Interface tab, above Show Minimap and after Show Cloak.

Build

• The Book of the Dead sample audio plugin that came with the Gaia Pro import no longer ships in Mac or Linux players, and the Mahjong tile shader no longer raises a compiler warning.

Maps

• The Well of Aldur gets its own Chart of Well of Aldur, which drops there like the other area charts and uncovers its whole map. The Twitch Purple dyes can now be ordered at vendors like every other dye, and the item name list, Deco Showcase catalog and a reshape recipe were brought up to date with recent items.

Summoned Pets

• The Summoned Pets tester page now shows an undead summons capped regeneration the way the game stores it, 0.01 health a second lower at the decay floor for some builds.

Decorations

• The Altar Chandelier no longer casts a solid dark circle on the floor under it indoors. Its own center bowl was blocking the light going straight down. (b924ef8f66)

Mounts

• Riding a mount down a flight of steps, such as the stone stairs to the Brittany Wharfs docks, no longer throws the rider off partway. The mount was leaving the top step at full speed and landing at the bottom hard enough to take fall damage, which always dismounts. It now follows the steps down, and real drops still hurt (aeb58a5500).

Items

• The Rend Length bonus on bladed weapons is now called Rend Duration, since it makes Rend last longer and the old name read like blade reach (5ee12b34e1, #14555).

Releases

• Player patch notes are drafted for the next chaos build: 55 lines covering everything since build 325, led by trap setting and Trap Sense, Liberated towns, place and player-kill Calls to Arms, and armor slowing Air spells. (971084d62e)
• Patch notes now go up before the build ships. The patch notes page and play.catnipgames.net's Patch notes lead with Coming in the next update, the notes for the build after the one players have, and the entry clears itself when that build goes out. The next update's 55 lines are up now. (a84285ee77)

Operations

• Wrote the deploy checklist for build 332, the first chaos update since build 325: the event trophy database job, the mold payouts, new log field types, the Twitch Drops rewards and the Call to Arms page changes.

Art

• Added the Sky Master, Oceanis and Orion Space Framework sky, ocean and space art packages to the project, with a few script fixes so they build on Unity 6.6. Nothing in the game uses them yet (81cede3ae7).

Community

• Four of the five prize winners from the October 22 Twitch stream drawing were sent a Giant Chess Board by in-game mail. One winner has not been matched to a character yet.

Achievements

• The Achievements window now shows a row's whole Reward line whenever the row has room. A reward longer than its description used to end in "..." at any window width, so "Reward: Cap'n Markus Darkfeather Trophy" read as "Reward: Cap'n Markus Darkfeather Tr...". On a narrow window both lines shorten and hovering either shows it in full (#14648, f88fbb375a).

Content

• Iolo's Cat Gut Goulash no longer lists a +5% Rhythmic Readiness (Singing Speed) buff. Rhythmic Readiness was retired in the bard rework, so the line did nothing. The food keeps its other six buffs. (#13895)
• Small piles of loose rocks on cave and mine floors no longer stop a player who walks into them, such as the pile under the mine arch in the Soltown Catacombs. The same pile stands in about 47 caves, mines and towns. Rock piles scaled up to knee height or more still block. (#14426)

Conversations

• Merged 193 duplicate keywords into the keywords they were copied from, across 783 conversations, so NPCs answer hello, goodbye, help, rumors and many named topics through one shared keyword each. Some keywords now show clearer names, such as "birthplace" for "where are you from" and "Fire Lotus Tavern" where no name showed. New wording for the busiest keywords waits until it is translated, so no language loses its translated keywords. (#14428)
• Aerie and Ardoris townsfolk give better directions. Most residents, guards and shopkeepers in both cities now answer where to find every shop, trainer, banker, guild registrar and landmark, and mark most of them on the map. Aerie's old answers pointed the wrong way and were rewritten, and in both cities the Helpful Automaton now gives directions too. Aerie's Southwest Gate and each Ardoris boat stop are now separate discoveries.
• Khasi's palace in Ardoris is called the Palace of the Winds everywhere: on the map, in the quest journal and in conversation. Some places still said Palace of the Wind.
• Ashley Amber in Resolute answers questions about the Oracle's watchers with one keyword, "watcher", where she had two topics with different answers. (#14535)
• Guildmaster Naoko Khan in Ardoris answers questions about Ardoris and the Isle of Eternal Dawn through one topic, choosing between her two lines at random, where she had two topics that both answered "isle of eternal dawn". Other Ardoris NPCs with a separate Isle of Eternal Dawn keyword now answer it through their Ardoris topic. (#14536)
• Finished the duplicate keyword merge: every one of the 368 groups the quest owner reviewed is applied, 201 duplicate keywords in all. The last pass gave Damai, the moon tower in Owl's Head and Ravensmoor in Braemar clearer keyword names, and taught some Braemar NPCs "bone throne" and "throne of bone". (#14539)
• Combined 23 more pairs of NPC keywords that covered the same topic under two names, and gave the others a name of their own, so every keyword in the game now has a unique name. Several also read better, such as "Avatar" with a capital letter and "kobold" in place of "kobolds". (#14540)
• Franseza Moisan, Roper Holiday and Vivienne in Aerie talk about Albert Lock, but their keyword was named for Albert Halverson of Braemar. It now reads "Albert Lock" and answers to albert, lock and albert lock. (#14546)
• Richard Starr in Brittany had an answer about his liege lord that no keyword could reach. He now has a "liege lord" keyword and answers "I serve Lord British." (#14548)
• The Helpful Automatons in Broochash, Jaanaford, Aerie and Ardoris now stand beside each town's town crier, next to a lamp, so they are easy to find.
• About twenty NPC answers that no keyword could reach now have keywords, such as Jeffrey Post's sneeze, Parker's training offer and Harold Bachman's pie advice. Guard Brenda in Owl's Head now answers through her Hidden Vale topic. (#14564)

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-20 is up: Tuesday was a day of long-standing annoyances getting named out loud. One player's saved window size shrank to a single pixel and took the whole client down with it, armor started charging mages for the privilege of teleporting in full plate, and more than half the floors in our player houses stopped pretending to be dirt. The team also built a tool that fits bought animation onto our characters, and used it the same morning to add nine dances. Listen or read the transcript (14 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Oracle

• The Oracle now answers or gives up inside its time limit, and a report it files always shows its Filed report line. A slow answer used to run past the game's own wait, so the player saw "could not be reached" and asking again could file the same report twice. (#14041)
• Added 25 answers to the Oracle's guides from questions players asked her this week: where Charnel Ash drops, who sells the mounted trophy, skin rug, mannequin and Tub of Floating Apples recipes, what raises or lowers your chance to fizzle, that you can keep moving while you drink a potion, how often the Replenishing Obsidian Potion of Guidance Box refills, what Primal Bear Teeth are for, and which Cabalist strips your armor.
• The Oracle now explains how Summoning relates to a tamed pet's level. The level on the Pet tab is the level the pet fights at. Summoning only caps the level a pet starts at, about 108 at Summoning 150, and levels from Combat Training, taming artifacts and collars stack on top. The old answer said a pet fights at your Summoning cap. (#14423)
• The Oracle now explains how spell damage scales with the attunement difference between caster and target: the bonus has no cap at 200 (about 4.6 times at 400), and a caster who is behind loses damage in a straight line down to nothing at 110 points, so 100 behind deals about a tenth rather than the reciprocal of the 1.9 times bonus. (#14370)

Combat

• The four Elemental Lords in The Breach and the fire elemental bosses in player dungeons take damage from every school of magic. Before, only the element each one is weak to got through and every other spell showed Resisted. The weak element still hits hardest.
• Fixed two client errors from the overnight test server logs: an add-on reading buffs no longer hits a divide-by-zero when a burn was carried in from another scene, and armor wear no longer throws when the item left the bags while a trade or sale was finishing (280e879920, #14468, #14469).
• Creatures that strike from their body as they die, such as a falling troll or an obsidian bear's Shatter, now land that hit when the body hits the ground on every player's screen, and the red ground marking clears with it. Before, the hit could come up to a second after the body had landed (reported through the Oracle).
• Large creatures no longer burn to death standing beside a campfire. The polar bear at the barbarian camp in the Snowy Tundra Encounter used to catch fire from the ground next to the flames and burn until it died; creatures now only take campfire damage when they step into the fire, and players are unchanged.
• Knocked-down and knocked-back creatures can now be clicked and hit where they lie. Big cats fall onto their side when knocked down, and their hit area used to stay where they had stood. It now follows the body until the creature is back on its feet.
• A polearm that had been put away no longer leaves its swing streak in the air while you run. Reported by Deiter VomPasker.

Tools

• Added the addallemotes developer command, which unlocks every emote on a developer client for testing without saving anything to the account.
• The internal QA test shard now runs every feature still in testing, so it can be checked there before it reaches Chaos. On Chaos those features stay switched off until each one is ready.
• Measured the Unity Editor automation plugin the team uses against Unity's new Unity CLI and its Pipeline package on the live project. The current plugin answered a simple Editor call in 105 ms against 368 ms, while the Unity CLI failed fast instead of hanging behind an Editor dialog, captured screenshots with the Game view hidden, and reported compile errors directly. Unity's older AI Assistant MCP server is now deprecated and was ruled out.
• Added Unity's Pipeline package to the project, live in all three development Editors, so the Unity CLI can drive the Editor next to the existing automation plugin. The plugin stays the default; the CLI takes Game view screenshots when the view is hidden, lists compile errors after a recompile, and runs test classes that can be cancelled. Both now share the same one-at-a-time Editor reservation. A new Editor dialog watcher finds dialog boxes that freeze the Editor, saves a picture of each, and presses Retry on the licensing reconnect prompt.
• Added the Gaia terrain toolset to the Unity 6 project, with its water, sky and lighting presets, stamps, sample assets and spawner packs for SICS Games, Polyart Studio, Vivid Arts, Staggart Creations and Baldinoboy.
• Fixed the Gaia Pro terrain tool import, which had stopped the Unity project compiling. 98 Gaia Pro files that the importer had written over the old Gaia 2 copies (same asset IDs) moved to their proper folders, and the old Gaia 2 install was removed. None of its textures or other assets were used by any shipped scene or bundle.

Interface

• The Options window's Interface tab has two new sections: Fishing & Gathering holds the mini-game switches and their meter settings, and Combat Text Colors on You holds the colours for text floating over your own character. No setting changed, they moved out of Gameplay and Combat Text Colors, which had grown too long to scan (2704b35973, #12110).

Localization

• Added 50 recently written interface strings to the translation database, among them the Lot Deeds tax lines, Eternal Pattern conversion, the dungeon story editor and the Precise Timestamps option, so translators can pick them up.
• About 2,000 more lines are now translated into all nine languages, covering the new daily quests and their titles, updated Soltown quest journal entries, recent items and skill descriptions, and the new specialization pair names. Every new line was checked by two reviewers and 479 were corrected. The pair names were also checked so no two pairs share a name in any language.

Oracle

• The Oracle now knows about the 112 new dance emotes on the way, including Breakdance, Moonwalk and Charleston. It can list them, explain how the random sequence dances work, and tells players plainly that the new dances cannot be learned yet.

Tools

• Moved the project to Unity 6000.6.6f1 and the Unity MCP plugin back to its public 1.3.0 release, replacing our patched 1.0.1 copy.

Housing

• A placed lamp now records its light, flame and visibility state when its switch is used or its Light Settings window opens. This is for a report of an Elven Table Lamp on a hot tub rim staying dark on the Linux client, which did not reproduce in testing (#13928).
• When the game refused a quest bark typed for a Conversationalist, or a custom NPC persona, the NPC stopped responding to its owner menus until relog. A refused line now leaves the NPC usable, and the bark dialog says the line could not be set.

Quests

• The town crafting tutorial is shorter. Edwin the Tanner in Soltown, Gilda Metcalfe in Aerie and Bledig deCani in Resolute now hand over the crafting tools as soon as you agree to be their apprentice and ask for the 8 animal hides straight away; the raw cotton, thread and bolt of cloth steps are gone, so the lesson is four talks and one trip out of town. Characters partway through the old steps are moved on to the hides the next time they speak to any of the three (6dc1f3cf6e, #13842).
• Two optional side quests moved from the Solace Bridge Outskirts to Soltown, so new characters meet them after they have their row lot deed. Master Archer Varren by the southern gate now asks for the maple wood, iron ore and feathers for his arrows and hands out the make-your-own-arrows kit, and Linda in the refugee camp asks for a salmon to cook for the refugee families. Rewards and flags are unchanged, so characters who already finished them are not offered them again and anyone partway through can finish in either place. Captain Kinsey no longer sends you to Sedgewick or Fleta, and Guard Stanley mentions Varren and Linda once after your report (e570fb6552, 4684ce7d49, #13842).
• Anya in Desolis now tells a player carrying a Delicate Feather of the Phoenix that it is not Riei Firefeathers own feather, and that they have to bring him down in Wyntons Folly themselves. The feather players trade is a different item from the one her quest takes, and before she gave no sign of it.
• Five item hand-ins now mark the NPC on the compass and map while you carry the item: Morton's ledger (Owl's Head), elven wine for Vinicius (Blood River Outskirts), a dead body for Davropos, a burial coffin for Shimzu (Spite) and a taming necklace for the stable hands that train horses to carry a rider. Before, the only cue was the "?" over the NPC once you were already nearby. Vinicius's wine request also gets its own task, Bring Elven Wine to Vinicius, translated into all nine languages.
• Fixed a misspelled flag and a missing second dead body in an unused step of A Corpse of Course; the quest plays the same.
• Handing Shimzu in Spite a burial coffin, or Davropos in the Necropolis Barrens a dead body, before agreeing to help now counts as the first delivery, and the quest tracker moves on to the next step instead of still asking for the first item (#14512).
• Shimzu in Spite now laments the coffin shortage as a greeting only while you carry a burial coffin, and Erling in Vikland says "Life is a constant struggle" and takes the amulet only if you still hold Erica's amulet of testimony. Both greetings used to play for everyone because the item check was misspelled in a way that always passed (#14513).

Build

• The project moved to Unity 6000.6.6f1, and every build agent has it installed. Jenkins now opens the project only with the exact editor version the project pins, and a release checks every build node for that editor before it starts (0377a672a8, de9afe53da).
• Moved the Windows client build to a faster drive. On identical work, its asset bundle passes had been running 3-4x slower than the Linux and Mac builds because the build tree sat on a nearly full QLC drive.

Items

• Drinking a Plague Ward now shows "Drinking Plague Ward" on the casting bar, where it used to show an internal code name. The Potion of Community Training and the Illumination torches got the same casting text.

Website

• Fixed picture uploads from the Images window on guild and town desks, which ended on a page reading method_not_allowed and closed the window although the picture had uploaded. The upload now returns to the Images window with a line saying it was published, is waiting for an officer, or why it was refused, and reloading the window no longer sends the file again.
• Minigame Practice is live on the guild and town desk, in the Games folder: a lesson, free practice at any skill level and a scored Challenge for the fishing reel meter and the harvest swing meter (Mining, Forestry, Foraging, Field Dressing). It plays the same fight and swing rules as the game client, with the game's own catch and node tables.
• Built the signed-in player site's new header, not switched on yet: one 40px row with Desk, News, Roadmap, World, Forums and Store, menus under News and World, and a Player | Public switch in the corner that shows the visitor site until the browser is closed. The web store and the new forum carry the same header.
• Built the Desk as every signed-in player's own, switched off for now: a folder for each guild and player-owned town they belong to, chat, the map, the Oracle and the games for players with neither, and a setting to open the Desk on arrival. Not on the website yet: notes and the desk games no longer need a subscription, while posting to guild and town chat from the website and the website Oracle still do.
• Built the forum's side of the Desk for when the new forum opens: the forum inside a Desk window, and a members-only section of the forum for every guild and player-owned town, where members read freely and their forum name shows only after they choose to post there. The Desk's Board threads move into those sections under the names they were posted with.
• Work began on Rogue of Novia, a game for the Desk after the 1980 game Rogue: 26 floors down through dungeons of Novia, from the Soltown Catacombs to The Obsidian Panopticon, then the climb back up with the Heart of Sorrows. Its creatures, places and items come from the game's own data, and each floor's creatures are the ones that live in that dungeon. Not on the site yet.
• Rogue of Novia became playable on a local copy of the Desk, in the Games folder under the Heart of Sorrows' own icon: three starting paths after the Oracle's, Today's dungeon (the same for every player each day, the first run counting on a realm-wide list with Rogue-style epitaphs) and free runs, keyboard, mouse and phone controls, the run kept in the browser after every move, and a gravestone at the end. Not on the site yet.
• Switched on the player site at play.catnipgames.net: a signed-in player now gets the 40px bar with Desk, News, Roadmap, World, Forums and Store, the Player | Public switch, the Desk open to every account with a folder for each guild and player-owned town, and Start in Desk. The store wears the same bar and no longer shows a login name anywhere. The Desks forum window and the guild and town forum sections wait for the forums move.
• Rogue of Novia gained spells: 31 of the game's spells in ten schools, each cast speaking its words of power, paid for with Focus that returns fastest while standing still, cheaper with the school's reagent, likelier to fizzle in heavy armor. Tomes on the floors teach new ones, and a day clock and the eight moons make Sun and Moon magic stronger in their hour. The first floors became fairer for a new character. Not on the site yet.
• Built the news at the top of the signed-in Home on play.catnipgames.net: the lead story first, with its summary and its picture beside it, then the next four posts. The writer marks which post leads, and the newest post leads when none is marked. Staff write posts on the site itself, with a preview, or post from a file, and each post also joins the news archive and its feed. Not on the website yet.
• Every player's Desk now starts with a Games folder holding all the Desk games, and a Links folder with links to the lore pages and front page of the community SotA Wiki. Minigame Practice now also reaches players with no guild or town. Not on the site yet.
• The towns list and world map now count everyone who lives in a player town: the governor, players with a role, and players who hold a lot there. Towns whose residents hold lots without a role, like Umbra, read 0 or 1 before and were hidden by the default filter; Umbra now shows its 8 residents.
• Rogue of Novia gained its set pieces: four of thirteen artifacts hidden on the dungeons' last floors each run (Cuthbert, Undead Bane, the Sword of Speed, the Ring of the Moon among them), the eight Obsidian Potions as blessings for the rest of a run, Cabalists coming for the Heart on the climb with servants that feed their power, the Heart's Wave of Sorrows, Lunar Rifts that carry you two floors on, and the game's master trainers selling spells. The Oracle can now choose your path with three questions, and the gravestone carries the game's skill-mastery title for the school you used most. Not on the site yet.
• Rogue of Novia got a board on the game's Leaderboards, in game and on the website: each player's best run over the last day, week, 30 days and all time, with the deepest floor reached and the number of runs. Players who opted out of the leaderboards in game stay off it. It stays hidden until the game is on the site.
• Rogue of Novia is now on the website: open the Games folder on your Desk to play. Each player's best runs feed a Rogue of Novia board on the leaderboards.
• Town folders on the Desk show the towns own icon in place of the treasure chest. Nineteen NPC towns use the shield from the cover of the games book about the town, the other NPC towns and settlements an item that stands for the town, and a player-owned town a picture of the land it was built on (pine cone, seashell, cactus and seven more). Folders that were named with a scene code, such as Castle Atos, now carry the towns name and open a short page about the town, and scenes that are not towns no longer get a folder. Goes live with the next website update.
• A player-owned towns governor can pick the picture the towns folder shows on the Desk of everyone in the town, from Change the towns icon... on the folders menu or from the towns Manage page. The choices are the Change icon pictures plus a new Towns group of land pictures, a clock tower and a fountain. A player who picked their own picture for the folder keeps seeing theirs, and NPC town icons stay with their towns. Goes live with the next website update.

Chat

• Guild and town chat lines written on the website now show in the authors own game chat when they are playing their default character. The game had been hiding them as if they were already-shown typed lines, so other members saw them and the author did not.
• Tested the self-hosted language model as a chat translator. 110 real chat lines translated into all 10 client languages scored 4.77 out of 5 for meaning, took about 0.1 seconds per line, and kept every linked item intact. The /translate command moves onto it next, replacing the throttled Google endpoint it uses today.
• The /translate command now asks the games own translator, running on our servers, before falling back to the public web translator it used before. Slang and casual tone carry over, linked item names stay exactly as written, and a line comes back in about a tenth of a second. Languages the new translator does not cover still go to the web translator.

Stability

• Five log-triage fixes from build 325: a crafting batch with nothing left to work with now says "You ran out of materials" instead of stopping without a word; a refused merchant sale no longer greys out the items in the cart; the Play As record for the launcher saves even while another program holds the old file open; Call to Arms, lot auction and chess ladder requests are no longer sent between scenes; and the Adventure Mode dungeon light warning only fires on a real change.

Pets

• Dying no longer costs pet gear durability. The collar, ball and harness now wear only while a tamed pet is out and taking hits; worn armor still takes the usual loss on death.
• When a tamed pet dies, an orange paw print now marks its body on the minimap and the Map window, and a chat line says that Resurrect Creature cast on yourself raises it from anywhere in the area. Players had been losing pets they could not find to target in time.
• Peacock Decoration Pet added to the Crown Store under New Pets for 1000 crowns: summon it to follow you or place it on a lot as a house pet. It walks, runs, pecks at the grass, and fans its tail as its dance and now and then while idle.
• A pet, companion or summon attacking a Practice Dummy no longer keeps its owner in combat, so the weapon can be put away and the Fleet Flute plays while the pet trains. A pet fighting a real creature still holds its owner in combat. (340cf8eee9, #14530)

UI

• Quick Deposit, Restock and the Quick Deposit Undo now write a chat log line naming each item and amount that moved and the container it went into or came out of, so a top-up into a chest is on record in the chat log file. A player reported Buckets of Water vanishing from the bank; the item history showed every bucket accounted for, topped up into a lot chest that already held water.
• The I key opens your bags while you talk to an NPC, the same as the bag icon. When a hand-in opens the Give Items window, the conversation box lets go of the keyboard so I reaches the bags. The window also grows to fit a long request: the podium in The Confluence Chamber asks for eleven items, and its list had pushed both item panes and Accept Exchange out of the window.
• The character sheet's Total Resistances section now lists every magic school that Magic Resistance protects against. A character warded only by Magic Warding used to see no Sun, Moon, Life or Death line there, although those schools were resisted in combat. (cc0a65add2)
• In Offline Mode the Cabalist Stronghold on the world map now reads "Online Only" instead of "Dormant". It only opens in online play, so "Dormant" suggested a wait that never ends. Reported through the Oracle.
• The character sheet's Stats tab opens with your Adventurer Level, the level your experience has earned. Buffs, gear and an area's level cap do not change it; inside a capped area, hovering the line names the level the area holds you to.
• The Combat Decks window shows every deck's position number again. The number column was too narrow for most two-digit numbers, so decks 20 and 22 through 48 showed "..." while 16 to 19 and 21 fit.

Graphics

• Linux client: the black streaks that could flash across parts of the screen in the rain should be gone. The rain splash and rain mist shaders were rebuilt so their lighting cannot produce a broken pixel (they look the same as before), and the game camera now clears any broken pixel before motion blur and bloom can stretch it into a streak (#14438).

Creatures

• Stunned big cats (panthers, jaguars, snow leopards, lions, tigers, sabre-tooths and their cubs) now reel from the blow and stay on their feet for the stun. They used to pop onto their side with no fall, and attacks could only find them at the spot where they had stood.
• Three bosses now show the name their achievements use: the Aether Lich no longer reads "Lich Mage", the daemon boss of The Breach keeps the "Greater Daemon" it always showed and its achievements and portrait trophies now say Greater Daemon too (in every language, with kill counts kept), and every copy of the Tempest Elemental reads Suutak, Master of Tempests.

Images

Creatures

• Dragon wrasses knocked loose in a fight now pay their experience and count toward the Wrasse kill achievements for every player. A wrasse killed by a player whose game had not dropped it could pay nothing before. (df63720a12)

Server

• Two log warnings that fired for ordinary content were quieted: teleporters with no visual effects attached, and Cabalist kills in Lost Vale, which is not a town and never hosts a siege. Half-configured teleporters and Cabalists in besieged towns still warn. (#14480)
• The QA shard has an owner switch that opens its login to every player while every feature in testing stays on. Before this, turning QA's features on also limited logins to testers.
• The game servers can now check sign-ins against a read-only standby copy of the account service when their own copy stops answering, and switch back once it recovers. Only lookups go to the standby; anything that writes waits for the main copy, and the maintenance pause still holds.

Client

• An NPC bark, vendor fidget or merchant emote slot with no emote set no longer logs a "Can't find emote" error in the client log; the earlier fix had only covered conversation lines (#14479).
• Clothing now covers the wooden male mannequins. A dressed male mannequin showed its wooden knees, shins and elbows through trousers, sleeves and robes in every pose, because it drew its own body underneath the gear. All seventeen posed male mannequins now let a garment take the place of the body part it covers, the way the female mannequins have since September. The Wooden Male Mannequin (Invisible) still shows only the clothes (c5dae3ee6f).

Logging

• Three crypt sarcophagus lids in the Novia hills no longer log a warning for collision rows that had no target (#14477).
• Switch lock retries in busy timed traps and a dungeon waygate pointing at a lot with no dungeon no longer write warnings and errors to the client log for conditions the game already handles.

Animation

• Drinking a potion while running now plays the drink on the upper body while the legs keep running; before, a potion used on the move showed no animation at all. Smelling Salts and Immortality Fruit eaten on the move get the same fix.

Fishing

• Mounted fish trophies and placed fish now grow with their Fish Length, so within one kind of fish a longer catch always hangs bigger. Most kinds had stopped growing after the first few sizes, and the larger Sharptooth Catfish trophies showed a different catfish.

NPCs

• The two Town Criers in Central Brittany now give directions to the bank, the docks, the Oracle, the Colosseum and the rest of the city, and mark each place on the map. Asking a crier where the bank was used to get "Where would you like?". Townspeople with no directions to give now answer a where question with "I'm sorry, I don't know where that is."

Conversations

• A player town's Town Crier now remembers characters who met him under the town's earlier name. After a rename he used to offer his one-time visitor gold again to characters already paid it, and the player got nothing. Those characters now get his ordinary greeting.

Crafting

• The Pristine Scarhide, Cinderglass and Hvitr heads now have their Tanning recipes for sale: Mounted Scarhide, Mounted Cinderglass and Mounted Hvitr at the trophy recipe merchants, and the three Skin Rugs at the rug recipe merchants, 300 gold each beside the Rime Mother pair. The six recipes had shipped without being added to the game's recipe list, so no merchant sold them and none could be crafted. (23b27a8f1c)

Conversation Studio

• The Conversation Studio warning about files changed outside the Studio now always shows its Reload and Dismiss buttons. A long list of changed conversations had pushed them past the edge of the window. The warning now names the first five conversations and lists the rest on hover.

Design

• Drafted a name for each of the 210 possible specialization pairs, from Heavy Armor + Life as Paladin and Fire + Life as Phoenix to Taming + Bard as Ringmaster and Heavy Armor + Subterfuge as Silent Knight. This is a design list only; nothing in game shows the names yet.

Security

• Applied the 21 October PHP security release: the login service's PHP was updated, and the team wiki got the PHP project's recommended interim settings until a fixed build of its image ships. The security preflight now fails any of our web hosts that falls below the fixed PHP versions.
• The forum and guild server's PHP was updated for the same 21 October PHP security release.

Vendors

• Buy orders now cover every tradeable crafting material that stacks. The list of orderable items was kept by hand and had fallen behind; it now fills itself from the item catalog at build time, going from 814 to 1,463 items. Strip of Thick Troll Skin, Glowing Belt Buckle, gems and jewels, the Elemental Cores, the Binding Shard, more seeds and dyes, crafted weapon parts and casting molds can all be ordered, and new materials will show up without a list edit.

Dungeons

• Dragons raised by Dragon Totems in player dungeons are now one size at every level, about 5m tall. The level 2 Blue Pit Dragon was about 2m tall and the level 5 and 6 dragons about 8m; every level now also moves and flies at the same pace.

Skills

• Characters with two specializations now see a name for the pair after their two schools in the Skills window and on the character sheet's Stats tab, so Earth and Tactics reads "Earth, Tactics = Sapper". All 210 pairs have their own name, and examining another player shows theirs. The names are in English in every language until the next translation pass.

Agriculture

• Mature apple trees, wheat, barley, corn, carrots, peppers, coconuts and bananas on a farm now keep their full model out to about four times the old distance before switching to a flat billboard. The early switch drew a ring of brighter or darker crops around the player that flipped between facing south and north (#14404).

Infra

• Server alerts from the login probe and the shard watchdog now reach a staff channel on Discord, with a direct fallback when the relay itself is down. Until now they only went to a server log.
• Wrote down where every web address points, who can change it and how short its refresh time needs to be, so the web side of a server that goes down can be routed around in minutes.
• The game login check gained a standby mode for the backup copy of the account database: existing players sign in as usual, and a brand new account's first login waits until the main copy is back.
• A new watch checks both copies of the login service every two minutes and posts to staff when either stops answering, the standby falls behind, or the standby starts acting as the main copy.
• Built the tooling for a live copy of the account database on a second server. It sets the copy up, keeps it current within seconds, checks that it never takes writes of its own, and turns it into the main copy in one scripted step that first waits for the last change and keeps reward and account numbers from being handed out twice. A third copy, held an hour behind on purpose, can run on the backup server.
• The game server start and the account database restore now look for those database copies first. The game will not start against an outdated copy after a switch, and a restore stops while copies are attached, since they would delete their own data along with it.

Login

• Added a standby mode to the account site. A second copy on another server can now sign in existing accounts, including forum and guild page sign-ins, while the main one is down. On that copy, creating an account, changing or resetting a password and choosing a public name show a short "paused" page until the main site is back.
• Website sign-in (the account site, forum and guild pages) can now fall back to a standby copy on a second server when the main one stops answering, and that copy can take over the account address if the server in front fails.
• The account site installer now refuses a normal install on a read-only copy of the account database, so a mistaken run on the standby cannot make the two copies drift apart.

Loot

• Common Earth Elementals and Obsidian Golems of every tier now drop Earth Elemental Essence. Before, only the strongest Earth Elementals dropped it and Obsidian Golems never did. Common Earth, Water, Air, Ice and Sand Elementals drop their element's essence about half the time, and the Ancient Obsidian Golems and Garem Sloe always drop one or more. Reported by Rinaldi.

Leaderboards

• The Leaderboards window keeps its timeframe buttons, Rank By, Size or Type and Options on one line on every board at its opening size. On Guild Prestige, Town Prestige and Dungeons the Size and Type labels had reserved far more room than their text needed, which pushed Options onto a second line on those boards only. (c19475ee18)

Skills

• Elixir Receptive and Elixir Extension now have Train to Level... in their right-click menus in both the tree and list views of the Skills window. Setting one to train still sets the other to Unlearning, and the menu tooltip and a chat line now say so.

Twitch Drops

• Compared what other online games give out as Twitch Drops and checked the whole item catalog against the drop rules (no trading, no salvage, no gameplay power). Fireworks, most plain cloth dyes, the Gustball summons and 55 decorative pets qualify. No existing cloak or outfit does, because every one of them can be salvaged.
• Added the first drop-only rewards: the Spectator's Cloak, a bright purple version of the Streamer Cloak with its camera emblem, and a pair of Aether Glowing and Magical Carnival Cycling dyes. The proposed first campaign gives a dye pack, fireworks, the two dyes and the cloak for longer watch times. Drops are not live yet.
• Added four more drop-only rewards in Twitch purple: two new dye colors, Twitch Purple Dye and the pulsing Twitch Purple Glowing Dye, a purple Ceiling Spectator's Paper Lantern String to finish the colored lantern set, and the Spectator's Clockwork Cat house pet. None of them can be traded, salvaged or bought. Drops are not live yet.

PvP

• The Hidden Caltrops trap kit was replaced by Sleep Dust, since caltrops already exist as a thrown item. The Sleep Dust Kit is an Alchemy recipe; the trap puts every player and creature caught in its cloud to sleep for 10 seconds, and a hit wakes the sleeper.

Audio

• Researched voice chat: party voice that works across zones, positional voice for nearby players in towns, spoken lines that can also appear in chat, and voice fonts for role-play, all hosted on our own dedicated voice server. The design and a phased build plan are written; nothing is built yet.

PvP

• Movement updates, swings and casts could wait up to 15 ms after the frame that made them before going out on the network. They can now leave at the end of that frame (switched off until testing).
• The shard gained an option to encrypt and check its network messages with the operating system's own encryption code instead of a bundled library: the messages stay byte for byte the same, with less processing and memory churn for each one (switched off until testing).
• After a zone-in, players near you were drawn for up to half a second from occasional updates only, so they could run the wrong way and then jump into place. Players within 100 m now get each other's movement as soon as they meet, and a player coming into range is asked for at once instead of with the next half-second batch (switched off until testing).
• Most weapon swings landed their hit while the weapon was still winding up. The groundwork is in for the hit to wait until the blade reaches the target, with every player seeing the same swing animation (switched off until testing).
• In PvP, a swing could knock a player down or make them bleed while showing no damage, or show a dodge together with a stun. Those mismatches should now be much rarer (switched off until testing).
• Other players hit by a knockback, pull or charge stood still on your screen and then slid there up to half a second later. They can now move as it happens, and a late update from before the push no longer drags them back (switched off until testing).
• The shard gained an option to read a player's backpack ahead as they enter a scene, so other players in a busy scene are not held up while it loads (switched off until testing).
• Game connections gained a separate reliable lane for combat messages, which a lost packet of other traffic cannot hold up; nothing is sent on it yet (switched off until testing).
• Clicking or aiming at a running player selected a spot ahead of them on your screen, and on a ship or lift a spot away from them. Players can now be selected where you see them, and creatures and pets see other players at most a quarter second ahead and where they stand on a ship or lift (switched off until testing).
• Other players' melee swings played on your screen from where they were last drawn, often a step or two short of the player they hit and still turning, so the blade met the air beside that player. The swing now turns to face that player and closes the last step during the wind-up (switched off until testing).
• In PvP, a homing shot (bow and crossbow attacks, Fire Arrow, Ice Arrow) hit a player who had ducked fully behind a wall or pillar while it was in flight. Such a shot now misses (switched off until testing).
• Other players' feet slid on your screen when their movement was corrected, or as they started or stopped running. Their run now plays up to a quarter faster or slower while their legs catch up (switched off until testing).
• Game connections gained a setting that sends a lost network packet again after about one and a half round trips instead of a little over two, so the casts and hits queued behind it wait less (switched off until testing).
• A stun, knockdown or mesmerize on another player who was casting showed nothing on your screen until the interrupt reached you a moment later. "Interrupted" can now show over them at once, faint until the interrupt is confirmed (switched off until testing).
• In PvP, a swing that hit several players could land differently on each screen after one of them dodged it. Those mismatches should now be much rarer (switched off until testing).
• Movement of players in a PvP fight can now go out on a steady schedule of its own, 10 to 20 times a second instead of about 4 at uneven gaps, so others see them move more smoothly (switched off until testing).
• A PvP swing can no longer knock down or bleed a player who stood well out of the attacker's reach (switched off until testing).
• Ice Field, Ring of Fire, Meteor Shower, gas bombs and tar bombs from another player gave no warning on the ground. A ring can now show where the field will land, from the start of the cast until it appears (switched off until testing).
• Effect and aura timers could run up to a second or more apart on different players' screens, because each game knew the shard's date and time only to the whole second. Each game can now read it to the millisecond from the steadier shared clock (switched off until testing).
• Another player whose game does not send their stops at once is no longer drawn running past where they stopped on your screen (switched off until testing).
• In PvP, up to four bars after an opponent's name can now show how quick their connection is (switched off until testing).
• In crowded fights each player can now get the movement of everyone around them in one message every hundredth of a second instead of one message per update, which cuts the network work on both ends (switched off until testing).
• Another player's weapon swing started on your screen only once all of it had reached you, so its wind-up ran late against the hit. It can now start as far into the swing as it really is, up to 0.15 seconds (switched off until testing).
• Designed traps that any player can set anywhere and that only ever hit creatures and PvP-flagged players: twenty trap ideas, two new skills (Set Trap in Subterfuge, and Trap Sense in Tactics for finding and disarming them), and four short minigames for setting and disarming. Nothing is built yet; the first traps are still being picked.
• Built the first player-set traps. Two new skills, Set Trap (Subterfuge) and Trap Sense (Tactics), and five trap kits with Blacksmithing recipes everyone knows: Bear Trap, Hidden Caltrops, Powder Keg, Bomb Rig and Tripwire Alarm. Setting a trap is a short minigame, and how cleanly you finish it decides how well the trap is hidden; being hit or moving mid-set sets it off on you. Traps always catch creatures, and catch players in PvP only while the setter is in PvP too. Trap Sense slows you to a careful walk that spots hidden traps from farther away, and disarms them: fast keeps the trap, slow breaks it, too slow sets it off. Coming in the next chaos build.

Website

• The guild and town website showed a renamed town under its old name in a player's own town lists, so Ivory Stronghold still read Rampage Island on the Chat window's town tab, in the desk menu, on the home page and on the Your town button. Those places now use the town's current name, as its own page already did. Reported through the Oracle.
• Fixed the guild and town desk sending a member round in a loop when the desk failed to open, which ended on a "Request-URI Too Large" error page instead of the desk.
• Guild and town calendars can now repeat an event on chosen days of the week, with a checkbox per day, so a Monday, Wednesday and Friday event is one event instead of three. The World Calendar's submission form on the website has the same option.
• The person who added a calendar event can now remove a single date from it, even after it was approved. On a guild calendar the date stays struck through and can be put back; on the World Calendar it is removed from Your events without sending the event back for review.
• Guild leaders and town governors can now choose whether their calendar shows the World Calendar's public events (Calls to Arms, game master and player events, the stronghold). It stays on unless they turn it off; events the guild hosts still show either way.
• Blood Bay has its town page, desk and directory entry on the guild and town site again. The town registry bake had skipped towns that fill a whole scene of their own.
• The Roadmap page on the website is now kept up to date directly on the page: each upcoming release with its target date, what it brings and how much of it is done, the releases already out, and a backlog of larger work waiting for a date. Every item is marked Planned, In progress or Done with a coloured dot and the word. The old roadmap address forwards to it.
• Built a Conversationalist window for the guild and town desk: write or edit the text a Conversationalist speaks from and talk to it on the same page, with answers from the same place as the game's. It comes with four sample personalities, the same check the game runs on an upload, and up to 8 saved texts per account that download as .txt files for an in-game upload. It is switched on.

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains the Spoils number beside a Cabalist's power meter: it is the experience multiplier, and the loot bonus is up to three extra, separate rolls of that Cabalist's own loot, so a full-strength kill gives four chances at each drop. Lamp settings, the decoration bar and decoration creatures moved from the Housing and Decorating guide into Decorating Questions after the guide outgrew what the Oracle reads in one go.
• The Oracle now answers how to leave a guild: right-click your own name in the guild roster or type /leaveguild, and either way a Leave or Cancel prompt comes up first, with an extra warning for the guild leader. A player asked and the Oracle could not say, so it filed a request for a confirmation the game already had.
• The Oracle now explains how Engage Opponent picks its target and why its icon can be greyed out: it lunges at the enemy in front of the camera, and on the Utility Hotbar it only works out of combat.
• The Oracle now answers whether Backstab works with spells: its bonus from behind applies to melee and ranged attacks, bows and crossbows included, and never to spells. The same goes for the Subterfuge specialization's harder critical hits from behind.
• The Oracle can now answer about fifty more player questions from this week, including salvaging crafting tools, Hardened Flasks, Bear Surprise and cooking oil, what Nefario drops, the Charnel Glutton, the Belt of Control, which creatures resist water and fire magic, whether horses run at different speeds, and the Offset New Windows option.
• The Oracle window takes emoji: its ask box has the chat box's emoji picker, the list that appears after a colon and two letters, and the text smileys, and your own lines show the pictures. Every emoji works there for every player, the Shroud of the Avatar set included, since nobody else reads an Oracle conversation. The Oracle reads them for meaning, so a thumbs up confirms a report it offered to file. Copying a line with a Shroud of the Avatar emoji in it, in the Oracle or the chat log, now gives its name, such as :ankh:, in place of a blank box. (#14373)

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-19 is up: Monday was a netcode day. A long-standing bug made a motionless player appear to sprint due north on everyone else's screen, and the team spent the day pulling apart how other players are drawn, measured and hit. Also, the ancient dragons lost their second life, the Charnel Pits finally look like pits, the community website got a real calendar, and our test runner was caught spending ninety minutes deciding which tests to run. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Achievements

• Fixed Archivist of the Blade missing Songs of the Sundered Blade cylinders won on a party loot roll. The winner now gets the credit, the same as a cylinder they looted alone; a cylinder handed over by trade still counts only for the player who found it. (#14104)
• The nine Cabalist kill trophies all showed the same small robed figure from the side, so a wall of them looked like one painting repeated. Each portrait now shows its Cabalist from the chest up, facing out, with that Cabalists own mask in the hood. Trophies already owned or placed change with the build.

Community

• Added a player request to the wishlist: accepting a newly typed vendor price with the Enter key instead of a separate click.
• Call to Arms kill goals now count creatures a GM summons for an event and the wrasses a dragon knocks loose in a fight. A players own summoned pets and companions still do not count toward the realms total.

Website

• The guild and town desk gained a Forums icon that opens the community forum in a new tab. It stays switched off until the new forum opens to everyone.
• Right-clicking any icon on the guild and town desk now offers Change icon..., a panel of 82 of the game's painted icons in groups (the desk's own, weapons, armour, treasure, magic, books, music, creatures, food and home). It works on apps, pages, folders and links, only the member who picks a picture sees it, and Back to the usual icon puts the original back.

Images

Inventory

• When a failed item move makes the game reload your bags, the chat log now lists each item whose place changed under the existing notice, for example "Item (Ruby) is back in your backpack.", up to eight items. Before, the notice alone made it look as if items had vanished. Requested by Lothar Griher.
• A stack in the backpack could lock itself while being split or dragged, because the padlock at the start of each row changed on any mouse release over it. The padlock and the favorites star now change only on a click that starts and ends on them, and a chest refusing a locked item now says it is locked instead of calling it untradeable (e22ff07733).
• An imp stealing gold during a fight could leave the next item change waiting two minutes, usually the reagent stack being cast from, which stayed greyed out until it resynced. The gold request now waits its turn like every other item request (#14310).

Crafting

• Crafting molds are now single-use and stack. Each craft uses one up, a mold costs 1 gold, and every merchant that sells molds also sells a bundle of 100 for 50 gold. Molds already owned become 100 new molds each, and characters whose smelting used up Ingot Molds on build 325 get 100 new molds for each one by mail.
• The recipe hover at crafting stations and in the recipe book now shows the crafting experience your next craft of that recipe will pay, as the server works it out from how often your account has made it and any event or town bonus. It used to show one fixed number (1,200 for Rock Maple Timber) that repeat crafts never paid. A second line gives the amount per craft when crafting several at once. (a3adafe43c, #14387)

UI

• Holding Ctrl over gear keeps the expanded details as one list again: when the list is taller than the screen its text gets slightly smaller first, and only the longest lists continue in a second column.
• Hover tooltips were drawn under the mouse pointer when it had been enlarged in Windows settings or by the display scale, which hid container names, the deco and light counts and a guild member's Last Online date. Tooltips now step aside by the pointer's size as Windows draws it, and Friends, Guild and other list tooltips move to the other side of the pointer near a window's edge (43142ee44e, #13055).
• Every blessing and Obsidian potion has its own buff bar icon. All of them used to show the same purple potion. Blessings now sit on grey stone with a picture for their type: a statue for church shrines, a pool for virtue devotions, a green swirl for reward blessings, a stone stack for the Stack blessings, a castle tower for Blessing of Atos (more pennants on stronger tiers), a horned skull for the elemental monster blessings, and a shield or linked rings for Warding and Harmony. The 14 Obsidian potions also got their own inventory icons.
• Choosing Map in the window selector menu now does what the M key does: it opens the full map from the minimap and returns to the minimap from the full map. Before, it did nothing while a map was already showing. (b621869350)
• On Windows, a game window left maximised now comes back maximised the next time the game starts, and un-maximising returns the window to the size and position it had before. It used to open as a plain window a little smaller than the screen every time. (24da034558)
• The Trade window now shows both players' names above their halves of the trade. The header above each list was empty, so in a crowd there was no way to tell who had opened a trade. Requested by Rinaldi. (b0cf3a2ebf, #14384)
• The compass no longer piles its markers on top of each other. Markers that point the same way now sit side by side, and where a spot is too crowded the farthest place markers give way so quest markers and destinations stay visible. The direction letters are gold again so they read over the markers. A new Compass Size slider (Options, Themes tab, 75% to 200%) enlarges the compass alone for large and ultrawide monitors, without changing UI Scale.

Voice

• Linda, the refugee baker in Soltown, has a new voice. Players reported her old one as robotic; she now speaks with a mature, warm voice, and all 129 of her lines were recorded again (#14213).

Calls to Arms

• An ended Call to Arms now shows its results when clicked on the World Calendar, in game, on the website and on guild and town calendars: how it ended, the final count, how many answered, what it paid and the top ten places. In game it also shows the player's own part and rank. Players who keep their name off the leaderboards are left out of the top list.

Content

• Key-locked treasure chests now take their key from any side. Before, the key worked only by clicking the small keyhole on the front, so a chest set with its front against rock or a wall could not be opened. A Krampus toy chest in the Snowy Mountains Road encounter whose keyhole faced a snowy rubble pile has also been moved onto open snow. (f5c1a75b74, #14207)
• The Castle Atos town crier, Caspian, now remembers what players did with him under his former name. Characters who had already claimed his one-time visitor reward were being offered it a second time and received no gold; they now get his standard greeting, and he again recalls the names players told him.
• The dead end of the passage north of the Locked Room in the Soltown Catacombs now gives a one-time clue, in the centre of the screen and in chat, about the hidden way that most players walked past. The clue is translated into all nine languages. (94d0ef7df0, #14019)

Housing

• Fixed a home that had been moved or turned with Move House going back to its standard spot when restored from the Property Manager, which left yard decorations placed where the house used to stand inside its walls. A restored home now keeps its spot on the same lot size or a bigger one, with its yard as it was stored. (#14281)
• New Deck Building Contest Trophy, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Place: a table-sized black iron cauldron on a carved scrollwork stand in gold, silver or bronze. The cauldron slowly turns and floats a few inches above the stand while smoke and spell and combat glyphs rise from the brew and fade out; 1st Place is the largest. Not on chaos yet.
• An Adjustable Training Dummy on a lot you arrived far away from now takes the defenses its owner picked once its lot loads. Before, a dummy you walked up to more than a minute after arriving stayed on plain defenses for the rest of the visit (518ca161f3, #14315).
• A long Quick Deposit into a lot chest now also finishes when the chest window is closed while it is still running; the rest of the batch used to be refused a minute later.
• Moving a big batch of storage decorations such as trunks into a lot chest could fail with a server error when one of them had broken storage. The move now completes, or is refused normally with the items left where they were (bb898afa4c, #14309).
• Added the Gilded Hoard Tip Jar, a polished gold tip jar about 2.4 m tall standing among stacks of gold ingots with glowing gems round its middle. The Housing Decorations Merchants in Ardoris, Celestis and Solania sell it for 1,000,000 gold. It takes tips like the other tip jars.
• A Dragon Totem in The Rise Shaft player dungeon room raised its dragon inside the closed doorway at the end of the pedestal bridge, where players could hear and fight it without ever seeing it. The dragon now appears on the walkway in front of the pedestal, facing into the room.
• The Large Clover Paver now has the same green as the Small and Medium Clover Pavers, so a floor laid from mixed sizes no longer looks patchy. Pavers already placed pick up the new color after patching. (#14027)
• Rough Stone, Dark Rough Stone, Ice and Black Ice building blocks no longer carry the dark backing added on 9-25, which showed as black lines between the stones and black wedges at corners and wall ends. The flat edges of neighbouring blocks still meet stone against stone either way round. The Ice and Black Ice blocks had stones slightly off square inside, which opened a gap along a flat edge when one was turned end for end; they now line up like Rough Stone (b664489249, #6738).

Audio

• Every player house now plays wood or stone footsteps on its wooden and stone floors, porches, decks and steps, from the inns, towers and airships to the galleons, kobold halls and Castle Set homes. Before the fix 56% of those spots played dirt; now 0.1% do. Metal floors play stone until the game has a metal footstep sound, and the Desert houses keep dirt on their earth floors (2fbdcc2a9f, #14208).

Tools

• Built the Third-Party Emote Baker, an Editor tool that fits bought or downloaded character animation (MoCap Online, Asset Store packs) onto the Shroud of the Avatar player skeleton for male and female characters in one pass. Until now every emote had to be animated by hand for our rig.
• Added a switch that gives every player the newest preview emotes on the internal QA shard so the team can try them in game before they ship. The live shard is unchanged; there emotes are still learned from their items.
• Hex Map Editor: Generate Collision can skip Ocean and Mountains hexes surrounded on all six sides by Ocean or Mountains again. Nobody can reach them, so their collision boxes only cluttered the map. The option is a checkbox, on by default, and the tool now logs how many hexes it boxed and skipped. The skip was turned off in 2020 during work on the Episode 2 map.
• The PvP lag test rig now records what each new PvP setting changed in how other players are drawn, and gained stun, pull, follow, slope and zone-in runs plus a timed mode that switches settings in step with the load-test bots.
• Hex Map Editor: Generate Collision now marks the scene as changed, so a regenerate is saved. It also no longer wipes a map's collision when run right after a script reload. Novia, Hidden Vale and Mistrendur were regenerated with the enclosed-hex skip, keeping 3,701 of 10,976 Ocean and Mountains hexes boxed.
• Oracle questions and bug reports sent from the internal QA test shard are now marked as coming from QA, and questions asked there are no longer used to grow the Oracle's knowledge.

Pets

• Pet gear (collar, ball and harness) now loses durability four times slower when your tamed pet is hit. Per hit, a pet piece had been wearing 2.5 to 12 times faster than a piece of your own armor, because every hit on the pet lands on one of only three items.
• A fighting pet now stays on the side of the monster it is already attacking from. Walking around during a fight used to send it round the monster after you, often to the monster's head. It still goes in on the side nearest you and still steps off your spot. (#13967)

Sieges

• A town whose Cabalist is killed and siege cleared is now Liberated for a day: everyone in that town earns 10% more crafting experience, gathers 10% faster and gets 20% more fish bites. The buff stays with the town and shows on the buff bar while you are there. It is the first of a new kind of town-wide buff.

Combat

• Soothing Rain no longer removes the Light spell. The rain's cleanse was reading Light as a harmful effect and could strip it on any tick. Reported by Garfunkel Humperdinck. (198ccd7d39)
• Fixed an error on Doluss wand attack in Cabalist stronghold sieges. When stacked spell damage debuffs pushed a casters spell damage below zero, the damage roll failed with an error. Spell damage now bottoms out at zero. (9fc35223b9, #14286)
• Runes in a combat deck can be set to Always Cast on Me or Always Cast on My Pet from the deck builder: right-click a rune in a hand slot, or Shift+right-click it in the In This Deck list. Heals land on you with a friend selected, and ground spells such as Meteor Shower, Ring of Fire and Fireball land at your feet (or your pet) on the key press with no targeting circle. The setting is per deck and Copy Deck keeps it (#14300).
• Razox Dread in Owl's Head Sewers now has a boss's Fortitude against stuns, knockdowns and mesmerize: a single player can no longer stun-lock him, while five controls landed together still take hold (#14342).
• Pressing a rune that needs a target while an enemy is selected now says why it was refused: the enemy is not in front of you, is out of range, is too far above or below you, or is out of line of sight. Before, every such press said "No valid target found." Engage Opponent greys out this way on slopes and when the enemy is off to the side of the camera.
• The armor spellcasting slowdown from earlier today now applies only to Air magic. Fire and Death spells get half of it, and every other school is back to its old cast time and focus cost. Blink in full plate is still about 46% slower and costs about 46% more focus. (#14329)
• Fireball, Ring of Fire and other ground spells now land on the boulders in the player dungeon Ancient Stone Troll Room. The targeting circle used to slip through the rocks onto floor the spell could not reach, and Fireball and Ring of Fire showed that refused spot in green; a spot a ground spell cannot reach now shows red (604af80313, #13064).

Conversations

• Alvin the Bookseller, Theo the Blacksmith and Gavin the Rug Merchant in Owl's Head, and Beckwith the Trainer in Solania, showed a clickable keyword reading "adventure*" with the asterisk visible. It now reads "adventurer". (#14338)
• The Oracle and Ker the Guard in Ardoris now offer the keyword "Dirae Prophecy" where it read "prophecy", and answer to dirae prophecy, dire prophecies and any word starting with "prophec". The new wording is English only until it is translated. (#14369)

Items

• Trophies handed out as event prizes that the October 14 trophy swap turned into marlin statues get the sword in the stone back as the new Event Trophy, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Place. That covers 230 time trials, PvP event and treasure hunt prizes, and each keeps the name it was handed out with; Fight and Fish and angler prizes stay marlins. The copies change at the next chaos deploy. (a9ddc16c4c, #14185)

Client

• Fixed a saved window size of one pixel that came back at every launch on one player's machine, in windowed and borderless alike, leaving the game window invisible and the client unresponsive once the character was in the world. A stored window size below 640 by 360 now reads as if nothing had been saved, so the launch after this fix comes up at the desktop size, and the post-processing stack passes a frame through untouched when the window is too small to render into.
• Fixed a fault that could cut a song short for anyone who arrived in the middle of it. Joining a scene where somebody is already performing winds the song forward to the point everyone else has reached, and that wind-forward could collide with the client audio work and drop the rest of a chord, most often on instruments that sound one note at a time such as the flute and the cowbell.
• Fixed a Teleport to Zone row tooltip that came up empty instead of showing the zone contents or the reason a zone was blocked, which happened when the window was still open while the client was changing zones or had just lost its connection.
• Taking part of a stack no longer fails when that stack is already caught up in a move the server has not answered yet. The pick-up is refused instead, and the stack keeps its full count rather than coming up short until the window refreshed.
• Antialiasing no longer switches itself off in busy towns on a strong graphics card. The game lowers it when the frame rate drops, and it used to do that even when the graphics card was not the reason for the drop, so Temporal could vanish after a few seconds under 45 frames per second while Options still said Temporal. It is now only lowered when the graphics card is what holds the frame rate back, and it comes back once it is not.
• An effect with no ticks is now noted once in the client log instead of warning on every frame a player hovers its icon; one session logged 128 of those lines in a second.
• Linux and Steam Deck players: travelling to a new scene could freeze the loading screen at 50% ("Reclaiming memory...") until the game was killed, about once every 400 loads. The Linux client now skips the extra memory cleanup step behind the freeze unless the game is using a large share of the machine's memory, and a load that still gets stuck there closes the game after about 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes (96b7494918).
• Closing the game again while the logout countdown runs now leaves at once, like pressing Leave Now. The Steam Decks Exit Game sends several close requests and then force-closes the game, so Deck players were cut off mid-countdown and the next launch reported a crash (#13012).
• The Windows client now records how close the PC is to running out of memory (RAM plus page file) and how much of that the game itself holds, once a minute, with a warning when less than 1 GB is left. Several PCs with 24 to 64 GB of RAM crashed on small memory requests while the game reported only 3 to 6 GB in use, and the next crash report will now say whether the game or another program used up the rest.

Combat

• A summoned fire elemental's burn no longer leaves a fire icon on its target that never deals damage and never ends when the summoner has no Fire Magic Specialization.
• Armor now slows spellcasting and raises the focus a spell costs. The fizzle your worn gear adds sets how much, and fizzle reductions from jewelry, blessings and skill lower the fizzle roll but leave this alone. Blink in full plate takes about 46% longer to cast and costs about 46% more focus; chainmail adds about 27%, leather 14% and cloth nothing. The spell tooltip shows the extra. (#14329)

Conversation Studio

• Restored the original labels on 3,234 keywords in 406 conversations. A September cleanup had stripped the "import" and "DELETE?" notes the designers used to mark duplicate keywords, so 7965 and 8384 both read "hello" next to the real hello keyword, 2218. With the notes back, the duplicates can be merged into the originals they copy.
• The Keywords column lists each keyword once per conversation instead of merging every copy into one row, so the label, display and synonyms shown are what that NPC actually has. It shows what players see when a keyword has no display, flags any that show an asterisk, and edits the label, display and synonyms in place. A new label is refused when another keyword already uses it.
• Planned Keyword List Plan A: one master list of every conversation keyword, the way ConvoBuilder kept them. Adding a keyword to a conversation will search the list, labels must be unique, an edit reaches every conversation that uses the keyword, and a keyword can exist before any NPC uses it. The 368 groups of duplicate keywords get merged first, each one decided by the quest owner.

Creatures

• The Charnel Pits now lie on the ground under them. On a slope the uphill side used to be buried and the bones on the downhill side hung in the air. Each pit also has a zombie hand reaching up out of the mud, which is what your attacks now strike, and a destroyed pit no longer vanishes: the hand sinks, the pit fills in to a heaped grave with skulls showing through the dirt, and the grave stays until the pit returns. Reported by Rinaldi.
• A wild spider egg clutch in Middle Downs had its Spider Egg Sac raised on top of the hut it sits buried under, where nobody could reach it. A clutch with no reachable ground at its egg now has no sac and hatches at once when a player walks up, as clutches did before; the game logs each one so the misplaced eggs can be moved.
• The Charnel Gluttons of Tartarus, Despair and Myrkur are now group fights. They have three times the health and pay experience to match, hit harder, and shrug off stuns, knockdowns and knockbacks once one or two land. The Desolate Hills and Spectral Foothills Gluttons, which a quest sends newer characters to, have twice the health and are no longer announced on World Events.
• The boss Oracle spider in the Mysterious Swamp now shows its own name, Hacked Spider V.4, over its head and in the target frame. It had read "Hacked Watcher" like the ordinary watchers around it, while its achievements and trophies used the V.4 name (#14385).

Chat

• When the group server strips a key a client is not allowed to send on a chat line, its warning now names that key instead of only counting it. The warning had kept firing for the Universe page bridge, which most likely still runs a build from before its #12783 fix.
• New Precise Timestamps option under Options, Interface, Chat & Conversation, off by default. With it on, chat and conversation timestamps show hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds in 24-hour time, such as [14:05:09.250], instead of hours and minutes. Requested through the Oracle (#14241).

Giant chess

• A player who took a station at a giant chess board before any game had been played there got only a Stop watching button, with no Ready button and no game choices. The station now shows Ready and the lobby, and the 2D view shows the board before the first game (22bf4499c8).

Server

• Crafting stations pulling from lot containers: a lot with a large number of containers marked for crafting supply could answer a pull with its container and stack lists missing, so the station read it as empty and took nothing while the containers it had reserved stayed reserved for about five minutes. The answer is now sent in pages and reassembled by the client before the pull starts.
• Moving a container into the bag it was already in made the game server record the attempt as an internal error instead of turning it down the ordinary way. It now gives the plain refusal, and nothing was moved or lost either way.

Towns

• Jaanaford now gives directions too: a new Docent Guard beside the village bonfire and the town's Helpful Automaton by the town crier answer where to find its shops, trainers, the bank, the Reliquarium, the silver mine, its waterfalls and exits, and mark landmarks on the map. Two empty, unused directions files left over in Jaanaford were removed.

Leaderboards

• The World Bosses and World Boss Records leaderboards load in game and on the leaderboards page; they had answered "could not be reached" since they shipped (#13708).
• The Fish leaderboard names each row by its species. Thirteen fish, among them Tiger Shark and Bluefin Tuna, were listed under their smallest size, so a regular Tiger Shark record read "Small Tiger Shark".

Travel

• Travelling to a party member in a player-owned town from their overworld marker could open the arrival list, and picking one of the arrival points the town's players had set up did nothing. Those points now take you into the town at that spot. (cfc5269c9a)

Conversations

• Caspian, the Castle Atos Town Crier, remembers characters who met him under his old name, "Castle Atos Town Crier". He had been offering the one-time visitor gold again to 1,872 characters already paid it, and then paying nothing. (fb7958d255, #14311)

NPCs

• Every Conversationalist that speaks from a written personality, and every other talking NPC, now knows the basics of the world it lives in: Novia and New Britannia, Lord British and his family, the major towns and regions, the Fall, the Obsidians, the Titans, the Oracle and the Virtues. Authors no longer have to write it into each personality, and characters use it only as far as their character would know it.
• Fixed Conversationalists given a written personality never talking in game: every personality import was being turned down without a word, and the editor went back to its view as if it had worked. The editor now says why an import was not saved. Reported by Zain Rampage. On chaos with the next deploy.

Magic

• The Shield of Air description now says that charging it with more copies makes the shield last longer and cost less focus but does not change its Focus Transfer Ratio, after a player reported one copy and six absorbing at the same rate (49f4aee2ca).

Quests

• Blood River: when Robert Villines agrees to come along, only one Robert now stands there while the conversation finishes; before, a second copy appeared beside him until it closed. Two new on-screen lines say he follows you around Blood River but is not a party member, and that his whistle (Summon Robert Villines) calls him back; the whistle's description now says it works in Blood River. Requested by Astirian.
• Soltown: in Nyssa's quest Learn What Happened to Markus, looting Hobart's letter at Solace Bridge now writes a journal entry and adds a Return the Letter to Nyssa task, and Nyssa is marked on the compass and map while you carry the letter. Before, nothing changed when the letter was picked up, so the hand-in was easy to miss. The new text is translated into all nine languages.

Launcher

• Added Keep Live and QA in sync to the launcher debug panel. It keeps a second game folder for QA and updates both whenever either server gets a new build, so switching servers in the launcher no longer downloads the game again. Files the two builds share are downloaded once.

Mounts

• Riders can now pass under the open town gates in Resolute and Brittany Wharfs without dismounting. The iron grille on the wide city gates lifted only a few centimetres above a mounted player, so riders stopped against the bars; the grille now rises 3.2 m, and a mounted player takes up 2.2 m of headroom instead of 2.5 m. (#14292)

Books

• The Mustering Notice in Blood River Massacre now ends its heading with a full stop, and its read-aloud was recorded again so the first line no longer lands hard on "a blade".
• Read Aloud re-recorded for 31 books whose words changed since their last recording: Dailies FaunsNotice, Dailies JuxhroExcuse1, Dailies JuxhroExcuse2, Dailies JuxhroExcuse3, Dailies JuxhroExcuse4, Dailies JuxhroExcuse5 and 25 more.

Dungeons

• Leaving a player dungeon you reached through a Dungeon Waygate no longer puts you inside the wall behind an Ancient Tome Dungeon Entrance. You land on the side the book faces, and if that side is blocked, on the first open side of the entrance. A Dungeon Waygate wearing the Ancient Tome look puts arrivals on the reading side too. (36c3704c99, #14333)

Testing

• A boss announcement test stopped failing on bosses that leave their celebration length at the default hour.

Harvesting

• The harvesting swing meter's perfect-hit band now sits in a different spot inside the green target zone on each swing, where it used to sit in the middle every time. The green zone's width also varies a little from one swing to the next.
• The game server now limits how quickly it accepts harvest pulls from one player. The limit sits above the fastest gathering recorded on chaos, so ordinary mining, logging, foraging and field dressing are unaffected.

Agriculture

• A planting bed or pot sitting where a house door swings now takes seeds while the door stands open over it; before, the open door counted as an object in the way and sowing was refused (#13925).

Gathering

• The Oracle now explains why dirt piles never roll a Meticulous Collection pass: they are quest dig spots, dug once for what they hold, and like other quest pickups they skip the gathering meter (6eb85af1f6, #14254).

Client rendering

• Fixed ferns, tree leaves seen from below, tree trunks and Small Apple Trees on player lots looking brightly lit at night while the grass around them was dark. The night ambient light that reaches surfaces facing down or sideways is now held to the level of the night sky, so they darken with the grass; daylight is unchanged. (#13921, #13922)

Fishing

• The fishing reel meter text read as thin dark grey letters over land and water, on both the Themed and Classic styles. The column names, reel hint, callouts, fish name and catch card now draw in solid white (gold for ratings and tags) with a soft dark edge around each letter. (f8aed0e554, #14118)

Skills

• Lowering a Train to Level target to a level the skill had already passed set it to train one more level. The picker for a training skill now starts at its current level, and picking that level stops the skill there and sets it to Not Training. (#14108)

Housing

• Brewing casks can no longer be resized. A resized cask snapped as if it were its normal size and stood off or overlapped the cask beside it. A cask resized before this change returns to normal size the next time it is moved, and the plain Beverage Cask decoration still resizes (0e5328dfe5, #13958).
• The Log Bridge decorations, short and long, can be walked onto from any side. Their edges stood exactly as high as a character can step, so a bridge used as a path on sloped or uneven ground, or scaled up, had to be jumped onto. Each edge now has a low slope up to the logs.
• The Lot Deeds window now marks an overdue taxed lot: its Past Due and Time Left show in red, and hovering the row says how much gold is owed and how long is left before the lot is lost, or how many days are already paid ahead. The Oracle can now explain what the two numbers mean.
• Getting out of a bed, chair, stool or bathtub pushed against a wall no longer leaves the character stuck in the wall or behind it. Getting up now checks that the spot is clear and can be reached from the furniture, and uses the nearest clear spot beside it when the original one is blocked. Reported by Elene Sali.
• Claiming a lot now also clears trees standing just outside it whose branches reach over the lot. Before, only trees growing inside the lot were cleared, and in Hometown a nearby tree's branches showed through a house's inside walls. Reported by Elene Sali. (7bd5a76239)
• Lot fences fit their lot. A fence corner brought near a corner of your lot snaps onto it, and a straight piece or gate near a lot edge snaps onto the edge, so a ring built from the corners closes on the lot line. The status line reads "Fence fitted to the lot edge"; hold Alt to place freely. Several fence styles whose posts reached a few centimetres past a flush lot line are no longer refused. (5f6240efcd)
• Brewing casks stack: hold Alt and point at the top of a placed Beer, Wine or Spirits Cask, and the cask in hand sits centred and squared up on it. Alt anywhere else still places freely, and the status line next to a snapped cask now says how to stack (5a4608d77e, #14165).
• Player dungeon owners can now choose the map visitors get, from the dungeon entrance Options menu. Take the Map Away from Visitors keeps the map and the minimap closed inside, so visitors find their own way. Turn On Fog of War for Visitors shows only the entrance and the rooms a visitor has stood in, and starts over on every visit. Owners and co-owners always see the full map (631a1e238f, #14169).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-18 is up: The community website's guild and town pages became a windowed desktop with sticky notes, a real calendar, a chat window built like the game's, and three games. The alpha wolves that stood motionless in a fight were failing a distance check against themselves. The pirates of Lamech's Bazaar got a reflecting shield, large castle lots stopped rebuilding themselves and hauling their owner to the front gate, and a new achievement asks you to put down all seventy-one bosses. Listen or read the transcript (15 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Filed two player forum suggestions to the tracker: showing a scene boundary outline on the minimap and world map to cut down on accidental zone exits, and a world map bug where towns with residents were hiding because the resident count read zero.

UI

• At a skill trainer, the Skills window showed the schools that trainer does not teach as blank spaces under their point totals, so the other categorys tab looked broken. Those school icons now show darkened. (#13986)
• The Leaderboards window shows 1 Day, 7 Days, 30 Days and All Time as a row of buttons again, reading left to right as the older window did, in place of a dropdown that listed them top to bottom (3d9116d43a, #13988).
• The dismount saddle shown while riding can now be moved like the other movable HUD pieces. With Lock HUD Positions unticked, a grip on its corner drags it. The spot is remembered, and Reset Positions puts it back at the bottom right. A player asked for it because the saddle sat over their map.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer about sixty more questions players asked this week: where to find banks, booksellers, libraries, stable masters and storehouse managers, the Eastmarch Mushroom Cave puzzle, the Hilt Fortress door, where imps, trolls and Aether Liches live, taming lions, dyeing the Leather Flame Armor, how much health Strength gives, slayer damage, city basements, deleting a chat tab and how to see how many players are online.
• The Oracle now files a report it has written up when the player approves it in their own words, such as "sounds good" or "submit my report". Before, some of those answers were taken as small talk and nothing was filed.
• The Oracle files a report when the player tells it to. On about one in four of those turns it had answered "I encountered an error and the report was not filed" with no error behind it, and each "yes" got the same reply; the retry now makes the filing step run, and the made-up error line is never shown.

Website

• The guild and town desks' Map window is live, and signed-in players now see who holds each lot on the website's maps and where their guild lives. The same website release carried the site's other changes since 2026-10-15; the player pages and the screenshot gallery stay switched off.
• The World map and the towns list count a player town's residents the way the game does: the governor, players with a Resident or Steward role, and anyone holding a lot there. A town whose residents hold lots without a role no longer reads as empty or gets hidden by "Hide towns with 1 resident or fewer". Reported by Barugon.
• The desk's Map window no longer shows a scrollbar at every size: the place's name, the map and the hint under it now fit the window, and the map grows and shrinks with it. A scrollbar appears only when lists follow the map. Live on the website.
• The guild Overview page and desk window gained a members' view: the message of the day, who is online, who joined in the last 30 days, the leader and officers, and this season's place, score and four pillars as bars. The leader and officers get a list of applications and event proposals waiting on them. It reaches the website with its next update.
• The guild Overview also shows how many members are going to each upcoming event and how long ago each board thread last had a post. Its member count now matches the Members tab, visitors read the guild's About text first, and in a desk window every section lines up with the window's edge.
• The guild Overview changes for members and officers are live on the website.
• The desk's Map window no longer scrolls on any map: the ways in and out, the lot holders and the world map's lists now open in a panel over the map from a Lists button, with their own scroll (e4111e1912).
• Icons on the guild and town desk can be moved with the mouse again: a drag used to pick up the icon as a browser link, so the icon stayed put. A dropped icon settles in the grid square under it, an icon dropped on a taken square takes the nearest free one, and no two icons overlap after a window resize.
• Each player gets their own desk on the website (built, switched off until the owner says go): one desk with their guild and every player-owned town they belong to. Folders, and folders inside them, open as windows; icons drag into and out of them, several at a time; any icon can take the player's own name, be hidden, or be a link to a web page. Each community's shared notes move into a Notes window, and officers' desk choices now set how members' desks start.
• The fix that lets desk icons be dragged to a new square is live on the website. Each player's own desk went out with it, still switched off.
• The guild and town desk on the website has right-click menus. The empty desk offers New folder, Sort icons by name and Arrange icons; every icon's menu ends with Arrange icons. Members can make their own folders there and drag icons in and out; each member sees only their own. Live on the website.
• Members can add their own web links to the guild and town desk: right-click the desk, choose New link, and give it a name and an address. A link opens in a new tab, can be renamed, moved into a folder or removed, and is listed in the start menu. Each member sees only their own. Live on the website.

Content

• Practice dummies and archery targets placed on player lots no longer get carried across town onto the Town Crier's, the Banker's or an animal pen's spawn spot. The return that puts moved training dummies back now only uses the creature's own spot, and only over short distances (#13990).
• The Smoked Wolf Ears pet food now shows its name and description in item, recipe and buff tooltips, where it had shown a raw code name. A check across every skill found no other food or potion missing its text.
• Clicking a highlighted word while an NPC was waiting on the answer to a question (Owen at Brittany Graveyard asking your name, for one) got no reply after last week's riddle-answer fix for Chinese and Japanese clients; clicked words get their normal reply again.
• Removed two unfinished scenes from the game: the Lord of the Isle Pocket Universe basement, announced in 2020 as the Lord of the Isle Fishing Expedition and never completed, and the 2023 pop-up dungeon Eighth Level of Hell, which had been closed to players. Rewards players earned there stay in their inventories. A character whose saved location is a scene that no longer exists now logs in on the Novia overworld instead of the tutorial island.

Inventory

• Selling to a shopkeeper now asks first when the sale includes a mount, a pet or a starred item, and names them. A horse caught up in a large sale of loot used to go with no warning (10c6666bb7, #13979).
• Lore books, notes and journals that showed "Value: 0" are now worth 1 coin, so merchants buy them. 475 books changed; quest books still cannot be sold and the novels keep their 25 (5558935a40, #14153).

Travel

• Teleport to Zone scrolls, the sextant, Teleport to Friend and party summons into Despair and Myrkur now arrive at the dungeon entrance. The Last Location choice in the Choose Destination window is now offered for towns and settlements only (8de9510f2d).
• Teleports into every adventure zone of tier 8 and up, Spectral Peaks, The Rise and Jotungrund among them, now arrive at the zone entrance as Despair and Myrkur already did. This covers the scroll, the sextant, Teleport to Friend and party summons (22ef864ff7).

Combat

• Clicking a lever, lid or switch with Auto-Attack on no longer keeps it as the attack target. One hit pulls it once and the character stops swinging. The crypt sarcophagus in Solace Bridge Outskirts had been opening and closing without end, which kept players from the book inside.
• The skill cards for Cone of Cold, Ice Fist, Icy Thrust, Icy Puncture and Glacial Glissade showed characters without Water Magic Specialization a red "+0% Melee Damage Taken" line. That line is now gray, quotes the amount the specialization gives, and carries a "Requires Water Magic Specialization" note.
• Skill descriptions and stat names now say which attacks a bonus covers, with one set of words: Melee, Ranged, Melee and Ranged (every weapon attack, never spells) and Spell. Stats that said "Weapon" now say Melee and Ranged, and sixteen descriptions were rewritten to match, among them Eagle Eye, Backstab, Armor Weak Points, Flurry and Savage Sonata. Shield of Ice now mentions the spell critical damage it gives, and Stillness describes what it does instead of "Movement bonus." All nine languages updated. (69b29854b0, 4eaa64fa36)
• Ancient dragons no longer rise after their first fall. Their health was doubled to match, Death Throes now goes off as they die, their body can be looted and skinned at once, and their breath attacks deal 50% more damage than an adult dragon's.

Website

• The new guild and town Calendar is live on the website: List, Week and Month views, a click on a day or a time to add an event, filters by source and tag, the World Calendar's events beside the community's own, and members' proposals that an officer approves or declines.

PvP

• Started a PvP smoothness pass after reports that hits do not land: how other players move on your screen, reach for weapon swings, and how quickly a hit shows. Each change ships switched off until two-player testing.
• Fixed other players sliding north on your screen just after they stopped running, and pausing in place for a moment when they set off toward the south (switched off until testing).
• PvP weapon swings and melee skills got the reach allowance for a running or strafing target that shield strikes already had, and area swings such as Rend got it too (switched off until testing).
• Players who reversed their strafe no longer froze in place on other people's screens for up to a third of a second before catching up (switched off until testing).
• Added connection quality measurements (round trip, delay spikes, lost packets and stalls) for players flagged for PvP, so the PvP lag reports can be compared before and after each fix.
• Fixed other players turning late on your screen, and their jumps showing only a small hop followed by a slow, late float (switched off until testing).
• Hits on other players showed their damage number, impact sound and hit effect a moment after they landed. They can now show the moment the hit lands, and a hit that ends up not counting says "No effect" (switched off until testing).
• Fixed other players' Blink, Night Step and Charge jumping back to where they started on your screen before arriving a second time. Their random teleports now show once, at the spot they landed (switched off until testing).
• Added an "Out of range" note over the other player when a PvP melee swing misses because they moved out of reach, and the network warning icon now also comes up while your ping stays high, with the figure in its tooltip (switched off until testing).
• Built a staff-only test rig for PvP movement. Two game sessions on one machine each get their own simulated delay, jitter and packet loss and record where they draw each other every frame, so each PvP movement fix can be measured at 100 ms and 240 ms before it is switched on.
• Fixed the tester reaction overlay's up and down timings, which were measured against two different clocks; both halves now use the same clock and add up to the round trip.
• Your starts, stops, sharp turns, jumps and weapon swings, and stuns or shields put on you, reached other players up to a third of a second late because each waited for the next regular update. They now go out at once (switched off until testing).
• Added the off switches for the second PvP smoothness stage: movement update ordering, a steadier shared clock, a cheaper network receive path, and limits on how many movement updates are passed on in crowded fights (switched off until testing).
• Players in PvP now pass through each other, as players outside PvP do, so nobody runs into an invisible wall where another player was shown a moment earlier, and a duel no longer makes the bystanders around it solid. Opponents and your selected targets keep full movement and animation detail in crowded places, out to about 28 m instead of 14 m (switched off until testing).
• The game set its sense of the shared clock once, when it connected, so a long load at that moment could leave it seconds off, and it drifted from there for as long as you stayed in the zone. It can now ease that clock back into step with the quickest recent ping, a little at a time and never jumping (switched off until testing).
• Crowded fights got limits on how many movement updates the game passes on for each player, keeping full rate for nearby players and anyone you are fighting (switched off until testing).
• Fixed other players snapping back on your screen when an older movement update arrived after a newer one (switched off until testing).
• Each movement update from another player was copied and unpacked several times as it arrived, leaving about 2 KB of short-lived memory for the game to clean up. The game can now read these updates where they land and unpack them in one pass, about 1.2 KB each, to cut down small hitches in busy fights (switched off until testing).
• Load-test bots can now send movement at a chosen rate and watch every other player in the scene, so the planned faster PvP movement updates can be measured with a crowd of 20 to 30 bots before they are switched on.
• The shard gained an option to read incoming network messages in place, without extra copies, for less memory churn with many players online (switched off until a maintenance window).
• In PvP, a stun, root or knockdown on another player now stops them on your screen right away instead of a moment later (switched off until testing).
• Other players' avatars were pushed ahead by their running and pulled back toward their last movement update at the same time, so between updates they surged and slid back about four times a second. They can now be drawn along the way their updates show them moving, with legs and feet that follow that motion (switched off until testing).
• The shard gained two options that shorten how long its network messages wait: outgoing messages can leave every 5 ms instead of every 15 ms, and incoming ones are picked up every 1 ms instead of every 5 ms. A new settings file keeps options like these in place from one update to the next (switched off until testing).

Docs

• The QA shard's servers were started again after the hosting provider's patching restarted its machine this morning, and the QA runbook now gives the start command with QA's own ports and sign-in settings, since a restarted machine leaves them stopped (95baa566cc).

Tools

• The crash triage tool now reads the crash block Unity writes on Linux, so Linux crashes group by fault address and thread instead of falling under the launcher's exit verdict or an earlier out-of-memory warning. Fifteen Linux crash reports since Oct 4 now sort into 10 distinct rows.
• Tracker priorities were renamed to Blocker, Critical, High, Medium and Low, replacing the old P0 to P3 levels that ran in reverse. Existing issues kept their place (P3 became Critical, P2 High, P1 Medium, P0 Low), Blocker is new, and new reports now start at Medium.
• Added a triage pass for the tracker. It sorts player bug reports from suggestions, gives each open report a priority, and copies suggestions to the Player Wishlist as clean entries other players can vote on. The reporter's account details stay on the original report, which is closed with a link to the wishlist entry.
• Bugs imported from the old Jira tracker had their priorities read in reverse after the rename. Each one now carries the level from its original Jira report, and tester verification tasks moved to the new default, Medium.
• The first tracker triage pass sorted 267 open reports. 49 player suggestions moved to the Player Wishlist: 43 became new entries and 6 joined entries that already asked for the same thing. Every open report and all 441 existing wishlist entries now carry a priority on the new scale.
• Every open report on the team tracker was rewritten into a plain summary of what actually happens, based on the player's own words, the details the game attached and what the code shows. The reporter's original wording stays in each report's history.
• The commit check that builds each change the way the player client is built now also picks up files other developers committed since the editor last compiled, so it no longer refuses unrelated changes until someone recompiles.
• The pre-release test suite passes again: one of its checks builds the logging service, and that build had been failing since a giant chess change on October 15 left one of its settings files out of it.

Launcher

• The launcher's crash reporter no longer attaches a crash folder from an earlier session to a later one. Two clean quits on Oct 18 had sent dumps from one and two days before as their own crashes. Arrives with the next launcher update.

Tools

• Fixed the shared Editor locking up for 90 minutes or more when a large batch of tests was asked for by name. The test runner spent that time rebuilding one very long filter pattern for every test in the project before it ran any of them; the same batch now runs 480 tests in 30 seconds. Every test is also stopped at one minute now (13b8064189).

Client

• Leaving Castle Atos no longer logs a pathfinding error on about half of departures. The client now cleans up stale walkable-area entries left by destroyed objects, and the hidden public Mahjong Table no longer leaves its chairs behind as invisible obstacles.
• Graphics auto-setup on a first launch now recognises Intel Core Ultra built-in graphics (Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake) and more AMD laptop graphics under Linux as sharing system memory. A Lunar Lake laptop had been started on Very Good with a dedicated-card texture budget and crashed on its first load into the Isle of Storms. Dedicated Intel Arc cards are still treated as dedicated cards.
• Six client log lines that reported no fault were corrected or quieted: a second planter clicked while one is open, the quit request record, a creature effect whose caster is gone, the combo button pressed with a card held, the combat stance entered after a cast ended, and a lot with no basement house.

Images

Inventory

• A move the game refuses for lack of permission, such as merging stacks inside a lot that was sent to the bank, now leaves the stacks usable; before, every stack in the move turned red until the next login.
• Letting go of a dragged item while the game is changing zones now sends the item back where it was picked up.

UI

• Windows with a saved position gained a gear on the title bar, left of the pin, that holds settings for that one window: Text Size, Window Scale, Opacity, Lock Position and Size and Reset This Window. Right-clicking a title bar opens the same settings, and Options, Themes, Window Settings Buttons hides the gears.
• The Players in Scene window can be dragged much narrower (its minimum width went from 280 to 160 pixels), and the player names start at the left edge of the list instead of after a blank gap.
• Theme codes from the Theme Editor can carry each window's text size, scale and opacity. A new Include Window Settings box, ticked by default, decides whether Copy Code and Publish include them, and the settings are applied when the player saves the pasted theme.

Creatures

• The Charnel Pit in Myrkur had about 700 health. It now takes the zone's level like the zombies around it: about 34,500 health in Myrkur (Normal) and more in Myrkur (Extreme). Reported by Rinaldi.
• The Charnel Pit in the Spectral Foothills stood on a hilltop that could only be reached through the zone's north exit. It now stands in the hollow just south-west of the north entrance, about 50 meters from the arrival point, with its waves and its Charnel Glutton. Reported by Rinaldi.
• The Charnel Pits no longer look like a dark stone shard. Each one is now a pit dug into the ground: a ring of heaped grave dirt around a mud floor, with skulls in the mud and bones scattered around it, built from the zombie grave mound art at Solace Bridge. The bubbles and the haze stay, and the name sits just above the pit. Asked for by Rinaldi.

Housing

• A Quick Deposit or Take All of several hundred stacks into a lot chest now finishes; the chest used to be handed back after a minute while the last moves were still waiting to be sent.

Infra

• The QA shard was reloaded with a copy of the game world and player accounts as of 19 October, so internal testing now runs on current data. The account restore tool also handles a full-size account list now; it had stopped partway on one.
• Log search now reads the new PvP connection and reach measurements as numbers, so their averages and percentiles can be charted once the next build sends them.

Server

• A party loot roll that started as a member left the room no longer listed the departed player to the others, and no longer waited five minutes for an answer that could never come (#14033).

Crafting

• A craft the server turned down no longer marked the crafting tool and its ingredients as unusable for the rest of the session; the bags are re-read instead and the log line now names the reason (#14032).
• A failed attempt to make Chum no longer uses up the Salt; Salt now works like every other Butchery material.
• The prices NPC merchants pay for a few brewed and farmed goods can now be adjusted on the shard without a patch. No price changed in this update.
• Ingot Molds are single molds with 100 uses again (#14155). The stacking change in build 325 made every smelt use up a whole mold; a mold now loses 1 durability per smelt and lasts about 100 smelts. At the next chaos deploy, mold stacks are split back into full single molds and the molds used up on build 325 are refunded by mail. (f19f17ae5a)

Images

Guilds

• Answering a guild application now only ever acts on applications. A guild invitation sent from the guild website can only be accepted by the player it was sent to.
• Guild application links: the game server can now take a guild application sent from the guild website and let officers answer one from there. Both are switched off until the website side is built. An application sent through a guild's link follows the guild finder's rules (five waiting applications per player, fifty per guild, a week before applying again after a decline), except that the guild does not have to be listed in the finder.
• Guild application links: officers can make links on the guild website's Invitations window and write the guild's own application form, an intro and up to five questions. A player who opens a link signs in, writes a short message and answers the questions. The application goes into the game's own guild application list, the answers stay on the website, and officers can accept or decline it there or in the game. Switched off for now.

Towns

• Broochash has two new townsfolk who give directions: a Docent Guard in the Town Square and a Helpful Automaton at the town's main arrival point. Ask either one where to find a shop, trainer, the bank, a landmark or an exit, and landmarks and exits are marked on the map. The first town worked under Town Directions Plan A.

Emotes

• The EmoteTest scene shows all 315 NPC emotes on male and female NPCs again. It had 270 slots for 315 emotes and so displayed none; it now has 315, laid out in wider rows so every slot stays on walkable ground, with a test that fails when a new NPC emote outgrows the scene.

Pets

• A pet left fighting while its owner is away from the keyboard no longer keeps the owner active. After 10 minutes with no input the player goes AFK and a pet that is still fighting wanders off, which is what the AFK pet rule was meant to do (#3903).

Moderation

• The character name screen now refuses names of famous real people (celebrities, athletes, streamers, politicians) at creation instead of only flagging them for review. Ordinary names that a famous person shares, a single first name or surname, and pre-modern historical figures are still allowed. Guild and pet names follow the same rule.

Build

• Removed six developer test scenes that no player ever entered (a large-creature combat test, the old PvP hub, an event test, a loot test, a Spectral Mines loading stub and the wall kit test town) and the developer teleport board buttons that pointed at them. Four early one-off player town scenes that had been replaced by the shared town templates came off the build list; their files are kept.

Mounts

• Bulletin board flyers, placed books and letters can now be read while mounted; clicking one from the saddle used to print "You cannot interact while mounted!" Requested by Elene Sali.

World

• Castle Aerie: the round tower beside the drawbridge was turned about one degree off the wall next to it, which left a thin crack up the full height of the wall where the two meet. The tower now lines up with the wall and the joint is closed (#14181, b647d8265c).

Player Dungeons

• Dungeon owners now see where their visitors come from. Under the visits line, the owner's Dungeon window and the builder's Record section add two lines: how many different adventurers live in the town versus elsewhere, and how many visits came from town residents versus others. The owner's own visits count in neither, and only the owner sees the lines. (20298157cd, #14175)
• The Dungeon window at a player dungeon entrance now shows the room-by-room list (stairs, transitions, total pieces, floor area) only to the dungeon owner; visitors read one short line with the number of rooms and halls. Owners can write a story of up to 1,000 characters through Options, Write Dungeon Story, and everyone who opens the window reads it under the dungeon name (7b4b30c335).
• Owners standing in their own dungeon now get one Dungeon Menu button in the top right instead of four separate controls. Its list holds the mode switch, the Dungeon Builder and Live Event, and the compass no longer gets pushed left. (c92eca170d)

Towns

• Hired town NPCs in player-owned towns (bankers, shopkeepers, guards, criers, tavern customers) can now walk about. The town owner right-clicks one and picks Patrol to have it stroll a small area around its spot, or Stay here to keep it put. Bankers and shopkeepers keep closer to home and hold still while someone is at their counter. Every NPC already placed stays where it is until its owner chooses Patrol.

Audio

• Floors that played dirt footsteps now play wood or stone: the floors, porches, decks and steps of the Wood & Stone Guard Tower, the Wood & Stone Inn, the Airship, the Cloud Imperium Navy Airship (stone for its metal plate floors), the Shingle Roof home and the Turreted City House, plus the Reliquarium and Devotional of Justice floors and steps and the pile of wooden timbers in Jaanaford. Reported by Elene Sali (c077746741, #14168).

Books

• Read Aloud re-recorded for 8 books whose words changed since their last recording: EP2Main BrokersReceipt, EP2Main CoastRoadRecords, EP2Main Letter Arabella, EP2Main Letter Arabella Returning, EP2Main MusterRoll, EP2Main PassageLedger, EP2Main PerrisPrimer, EP2Main WitchsWorkbook.

Sieges

• The siege scout is back, standing just inside the Cabalist Stronghold. "Report to a Siege Scout" and the Arcane Catalyst turn-in can be finished again after sitting stuck in journals since the road sieges ended. Engineers in town sieges drop Arcane Catalyst, and killing a siege Cabalist moves "Defeat All Cabalists in a Siege" on to the report. (bd1ac7c3b6)