Chris “Atos” Spears · Work Log

Oracle

• The Oracle no longer says Black Dragons are weak to Life magic. No player spell deals Life damage to a dragon (Banish Undead only harms the undead), so it now points players at the schools a Black Dragon does not resist. The Animal Lore readout stopped listing Life under "Suffers from" for creatures that are not undead, which had shown it on Black Wyverns and young Black Dragons.
• The Oracle no longer tells players that Ancient and Aether dragon kills are announced on World Events, which stopped on October 17. It now answers that the Aether Dragon, Aether Lich and Aether Corpion are bosses with their own kill achievements and trophies, and that none of them is announced.
• The Oracle now explains why the chat box closes after a line is sent and how Continue Chat After Submit keeps it open for the next one. A player who asked her about it had a bug report filed instead of an answer.
• The Oracle's Repair and Salvage guide now opens with repairs away from a crafting station: dragging a matching repair kit, or Ancient Essence for an artifact, onto an item repairs it anywhere. It used to open by saying repairs are done at a station, so the Oracle told players a station was always needed (#15254).
• Trimmed the Oracle's Crafting and Options and Settings guides back under the size the Oracle reads in one go; the day's additions had pushed the last lines of each past it.
• The Oracle now explains that Earthquake and sowing a stack of seeds from the Utility Hotbar are stand-still casts, and what Prevent Movement While Casting does to them: with it off, a movement key cancels the cast; with it on (the default), you wait out the cast and then walk on.
• The Oracle now explains why Ice Field, Ice Fist and Ice Arrow barely slow ice creatures such as the larger arctic wolves, the Red Ice wolves and Frost Giants: they resist Water heavily, which is intended, and Fire is their weakness.
• The Oracle can answer about thirty more questions players asked her: Galvanic Blast, the attack speed jewel, whether Rend gems stack, Move Speed and Move Rate, the bard chat commands, riding skills, growing Mandrake, the buff icons over pets, the daily login bonus, water houses, the Crusader Village homes, Point West and PaxLair, the Highvale Outskirts looking-glass room, the Myrkur levers, where to fight humans, the best maple and pine wood spots, the Wishing Well, the Steam Hammer, castle wall recipes and the Framed Map of Soltown.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-31 is up: Water ship houses can leave their lots and sail a town's harbour with every decoration still aboard, and boats now take hull damage and go under, taking their crew into the water. Life Warding is retired with a full experience refund after it was found to be cutting every heal a warded character received. There are also fifty-seven more maps charted for sailing, a fair finale for the lava arena, basement doors that finally reach the floor, and a graphics fix for the Sunless Barrens. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Tools

• Recorded the Unity MCP connection setting for a second Windows checkout in the Unity MCP setup doc.
• The release item-catalog check reads the store shelf script from the commit being released rather than the local index, so a mismatch can no longer leave store shelf items unchecked.
• Localization tools: a list separator in the Angler's Log that stopped any new text from being added to the translation database is fixed.

UI

• On short screens such as 1280x768, a party list that is still too tall at its smallest size now carries on in a second column beside the first, both under your own frame. A big party with pets could make the list jump to the right of your frame and cover your own buffs.
• Buff and debuff icons no longer turn black as their timer runs down. The timer wedge over each icon is now a lighter shade, so effects under a target's health bar stay readable to the end (#15574).
• Turning off Show Chat Bubbles now keeps chat text from appearing above names. Your own local chat, and other characters' chat, kept showing over the name whenever the nameplate faded back in (#15524).
• Picking a saved theme in the Theme Editor Theme list now makes it the interface theme. It used to show only while the editor stayed open, so closing it or logging out brought the brown default back (3b0f941cea, #15518). Bug reports sent through the Oracle now say which interface theme the client had.
• Hallucinogenic Gas from the poison mushroom fields now shows Confused as its own debuff icon, separate from the Confusion Resistance buff it used to share an icon with (#15503).
• The Character tab of the Character window now leaves a blank line between the armor set summary and the Gold and Weight line, so the two no longer read as one block.
• The character sheet's Tools button and More tab show the same arrow picture as the other drop-downs, where they used to show the letter "v" and a "^". The Tools arrow points up while the tool slots are shown (c043998035, #15299).
• The Steam and standalone copies of the game now keep their own settings when both are installed on one computer, and each opens on the monitor it was last on. A Steam copy starts from your current settings the first time; -settings-profile <name> gives any other copy its own set (1cd8c4b4df, #15317).
• Using a dye on armor or clothing again lets the player turn their character on the character sheet to look at the dye before confirming. The confirmation had been blocking the character view since the window was rebuilt.
• Open dropdown lists, right-click menus and pop-up dialogs are now at least as solid as the Window Opacity setting. The default theme drew them at half strength, so with windows set near solid the crafting window's inventory dropdown showed the item names behind it (#13960).
• Escape on an add-on's key button in the Add-Ons window now cancels choosing a key and leaves the window open. It used to close the whole window. Escape on a key slot waiting for a key on the Options Controls tab works the same way (ca3565462d, #13947).
• A party member in another zone no longer loses the Location line under their name in the party list after you change zones. The line could go blank and stay that way until the member moved; the party list now puts it back whenever the row is rebuilt (0bb750860f, #13912).

Community

• Filed a player wishlist request to bring back detailed release notes with screenshots instead of the current text-only patch notes page, and followed up on an existing fizzle-reduction suggestion with word that a related change already shipped.

Creatures

• Enemies near a zone exit no longer take a few steps toward a player and then run home, over and over. Since build 343 the flat marker on each exit counted as part of the exit along a strip the full length of the zone, so humanoids and wolves in Twins Foothills, and some creatures in Soltown and Blackblade Pass, turned back mid-chase whenever they crossed it. Enemies that walk into the exit itself still go home.
• Pets and summoned elementals attack the Black Dragon in Despair again. A creature standing in a zone exit close to its own spawn point was sent home and stopped again once a second, which made the dragon drop its target each time and every pet refuse it as a creature walking home. Such a creature now stays and fights.
• Planned a full slime pass: a new translucent cube line that engulfs players in acid (and can paralyze at Tier 8 and up), a new Acid damage type, fixes and new tricks for every existing slime, new species including tendril oozes that reel players in, and a slime boss. Plan in the tracker as #15837.
• High-level kobold, elf and human fighters now cast Bolster Balance on themselves. They had been casting it on a nearby ally, so the combat log read "Kobold Fighter uses Bolster Balance on Kobold Mage". (#15501)
• Slime pass groundwork: reserved the rune ids and added the two shard switches that will let each new slime feature be turned off on its own. Nothing changes in play yet.
• Built the Night Vision veil for the coming slime cubes: a veiled creature vanishes completely for a player looking through Night Vision (body, nameplate, health bar, targeting and damage numbers) while a friend without it still sees it. With Night Vision off its nameplate only shows up close or in a fight. Its sounds always give it away. No creature carries the veil yet.
• Wrote the slime cubes' Envelop: a cube lunges onto a player and folds around them, burning with acid while it holds them still. It lets go after eight seconds, when it has taken a share of its health from the victim's friends, or when a big fire hit lands, and cubes of Tier 8 and up can paralyze the one inside. Ships switched off until it is tested with two players.
• The Forsaken Ghost in the Ruins of Ravensmoor keeps fighting a player who stands next to it. It used to stop casting and float slowly across the room for up to half a minute, trying to get back out to the range of one of its spells. A creature that casts or shoots from range and is too slow to back off in a few seconds now fights where it stands; faster ones such as the kobold archers in The Breach still step back. (bb08bb4458, #14649)
• Slimes now say what size they are: a Great Slime divides into Slimes, and those into Slimelings. They also sound like slimes, with their own gurgles, squelches and bursts in place of a dog's bark and borrowed monster growls, and Slime Ooze has a description.
• Fire now hampers slimes from dividing, as the old tales say: a fire or sun hit seals a slime for a few seconds, and a slime that splits while sealed leaves scorched halves that take more damage for a while.
• Wrote Slime Spit for the coming slime work: a dodgeable glob of acid that also slips two useless Slimed runes into the target's draw pile, three at most, which take up a free slot until discarded. Ships switched off until it is tested with two players.
• Brought the new slime cube and sphere models into the game art: seven cube colours and ten slime species colours, each with its own translucent gel material. The near-clear cube carries a skull, ribs and a thigh bone floating inside, the only thing you can see of it in a dark corridor. Not placed in the world yet.
• Seven new gel cube creatures are built for the slime pass: Bog and Amber Cube, Bile and Curd Cube, Brine and Glass Cube, and the Elder Glass Cube, each with its own acid weapon and a strong resistance to acid. They are not placed in any scene yet. (#15837)
• The Death Metal Slime in Tartarus has its own look, a dark steel body with a green glow, in place of the gold slime look it used to share. (#15837)
• Slimes fight with acid now. Their attacks deal Acid damage, a slime that is cut sprays acid back at its attacker (the old spray never landed on a living player), and the Great Slimes in the highest level areas hit as hard as their level. (#15837)
• Slimes eat the weapons that hit them: a melee hit on a slime leaves the attacker Corroded, 4% less weapon damage per stack, up to 5 stacks, for a short time. Spells and arrows are untouched, and durability is not affected. (#15837)
• Great Slimes now shed Ooze Droplets as they are hurt, one at about 88% health and one at about 76%. The droplets fight alongside the slime, give no experience or loot, and one left alive for 20 seconds flows back into its slime and heals it. Fire stops the shedding for a few seconds. (#15837)
• Creatures that give up a chase now walk all the way back to where they spawned. Most walks back longer than ten seconds used to end with the creature vanishing and reappearing at its post at the health it left with, across every zone (3,597 of 3,748 in one evening on chaos); pets walking back to their owner were snapped to them the same way. Reported in The Obsidian Panopticon (35d29ec13b, #13952).
• Great Slimes in the higher level areas spatter Ooze Slick at the player they fight: a patch of ooze about 3 meters across for 8 seconds that slows whoever stands in it and does no damage. A slime just hit with fire lays none. (#15837)
• The log line written when a creature gives up on a target it decides it cannot reach now names which step of the chase failed, to find why creatures in The Obsidian Panopticon give up on players standing in plain reach (5a4c17eb7c, #13952).
• Slimes settle on fresh bodies when they are not fighting. Where other corpse eaters make a body vanish sooner, a slime keeps the body for at least a minute, so the loot is still there once it is cleared off. (#15837)
• Planned a full satyr pass: higher-level satyrs charge with their horns (a sidestepped charge leaves them stuck), leap onto the weakest player, shrug off slows and roots, and fight to the end instead of fleeing. Archers and casters get readable kits and the casters stop deleting players in one volley. Fauns will calm and heal their satyrs, and killing a faun first enrages its leader. Brule Rocktooth becomes a named fight. Plan in the tracker as #15911.
• Built the Pitch Ooze, a black slime that splits off a Pitch Gobbet whenever a blade or a gust of air hits it hard, and lashes with an acid that eats armor. Fire stops it splitting. It is not placed in the world yet. (#15837)
• Satyr pass groundwork: reserved the rune ids and added the two shard switches that let each new satyr feature be turned off on its own. To make room for them, fourteen live settings that had never been changed (the teleporter destination map switch, the health and focus regeneration rates, the fizzle chances and the rune combo multipliers) now keep their values without a shard switch. Nothing changes in play.
• Built the Grasping Ooze, which lashes a strand of acid at a player, raises a tendril that holds them where they stand, and reels in players who keep their distance. It is switched off and not placed in the world yet. (#15837)
• Built the Sump Stalker, a flat slime that drains its prey with acid. Each draw leaves a mark, and three marks from the stronger stalkers hold a player still for a moment and a half. It is not placed in the world yet. (#15837)
• Satyr pass engine work, not used by anything yet: a creature charge can now be dodged by stepping aside instead of only by outrunning it, a leaping creature visibly leaves the ground while it jumps, and a creature can shrug off slows and roots for a moment after breaking free. These wait for the satyr abilities that use them.
• The rare Gold Slime raises a Gilded Shell that only a mace or hammer can break, and it burrows away with its reward once a fight runs 40 seconds or its health drops below a fifth. (#15837)
• Satyr pass: the hostile satyrs, the Underdweller satyrs and Lord Tolask Nird with his guards now use their own copy of the satyr animation set, so a satyr can stop and square up in its fighting stance before a horn charge. The friendly town satyrs keep the old set. Nothing looks different until the charge ships.
• Built the Rubble Ooze, a slime packed with stones under a crust that a mace or water breaks, which hurls itself at players with a Rockfall Lunge. It is not placed in the world yet. (#15837)
• Built the Blister Ooze, which bursts in a splash of acid when it dies and spills three Blister Blobs. Kill it with fire and it dies quietly. It is not placed in the world yet. (#15837)
• Built the Prismatic Jelly, which takes on the school of the last spell that hit it: it shrugs that school off and takes more from its opposite (fire and water, air and earth, sun and moon, life and death). It is not placed in the world yet. (#15837)
• Fixed a batch of satyr problems. The low-level Satyrs no longer wear Satyr Archer bodies, the satyr fighters' attacks are named Swing instead of Melee attack in every language, the low-level Satyr Mages cast Searing Ray, Underdweller Satyrs swing at you, the Satyr Royal Guard drops from its own Tartarus loot table, and the Satyr Aether Warlock has a pale look of its own. Satyr Mage and Warlock spell power now climbs with their level. (#15911)
• The Death Metal Slime now hits with Death damage. Also built, not yet placed: the Ember Ooze that leaves burning slicks, the Frost Jelly with a freezing touch, the Storm Jelly that shocks whoever strikes it, and the Cinder Cube, a fire cube that water makes let go. (#15837)
• Satyr pass: built the eleven new satyr fighter abilities (the horn charge and the stuck horns that follow a miss, the leap, the footing that shrugs off slows and roots, the rearing stomp, the frenzy, the horn butt, the bardiche sweep, the hewing cut, the landing quake and the horn call). No satyr uses them yet; each arrives with its own kit change.
• Satyr Fighters in the middle levels and the Underdweller Satyrs now have a Horn Butt: a short wind-up, a hit a little lighter than a swing, and a shove of a couple of meters. It never stuns or knocks you down. (#15911)
• The higher-level satyr fighters now Ram Charge: from a short run away a satyr plants itself for about a second, then charges at the spot where you stood and knocks you down if you are still there. Step aside and it misses and gets its horns stuck for a moment. A satyr fighting your pet charges you instead. (#15911)
• The higher-level satyr fighters are now Sure-Footed: a hard slow, or a root that holds them for about a second, slides off, and for a few seconds after they cannot be slowed or rooted again. Stuns and knockdowns still hold them. Satyr Archers and Mages do not have it. (#15911)
• From level 78 up, satyrs no longer run away when they are losing. Once a fight, under about a fifth of their health, they go into a Heedless Frenzy and hit harder, attack faster and move more quickly for half a minute. Lower-level satyrs can still break and run. (#15911)
• The strongest satyr fighters now have a Bounding Leap: from a long run away they crouch, bound at the most hurt player in the fight (or the owner of a pet that holds them), rise off the ground on the way and knock their target down where they land. (#15911)
• The top satyr fighters gained a Rearing Stomp that knocks down everyone crowding them (a jump clears it, and they never use it on a lone player) and a Hewing Cut whose bleed stacks and weakens healing. The Satyr Royal Guard also sweeps its bardiche across everyone in front of it and can shake off a stun. (#15911)
• Satyr archers now draw their heavy shot with a visible cast bar, and a hit during the draw can spoil it. From the Satyr Marksman up they loose a Volley, and the assassins of Tartarus mark a player as their Marked Quarry (more damage taken, and the satyr archers nearby turn on them) and use Quickdraw for a burst of faster shooting. (#15911)
• Higher-level satyr archers now Spring Back: close in on one and it hops about 6 meters straight back out of reach and keeps shooting, when the way behind it is clear. A root stops it. (#15911)
• Satyr Mages and Warlocks no longer burn players down in seconds: their fire arrow is now an Ember Arrow whose burn lasts about 8 seconds and stacks twice (the old one could run for half a minute and stack four times), and from level 78 their fireball is a Cinder Ball whose ground fire dies down in about 8 seconds. The hits are unchanged. (#15911)
• Higher-level satyr casters now step away with a Flame Step that leaves the ground where they stood burning, and the casters of Tartarus put a Cinder Brand on a player that bursts a few seconds later and burns everyone close to them. (#15911)
• The satyr casters, archers and Royal Guards of Tartarus now carry weapons of their own level; the shipped ones stopped at the level 99 weapons, so the stronger satyrs hit like weaker ones. (#15911)

PvP

• Tightened how the Cinderspire arena decides a match: a fighter who dies, drops or goes back to the hub before the roster closes no longer counts toward the contest or the reward tier, a team-up of characters from one account wins when nobody else is left, the lava backstop and the finale tie rule believe at most 5000 health, a reported height far above the keep roof counts as under the lava in the finale, and switching the match off clears the last reward from the scoreboard.

Quests

• Sequanna's Rift in Malice answers every player. Before Sequanna is freed, stepping onto it says the rift is closed and will open once she is free. After she is freed it takes you out to the Novia map right away from her chamber. Before this it did nothing until the Path of Love was done, and sometimes stayed shut until you left the chamber and came back.
• Bodies that carry a quest item now give every player their own copy of the loot: Town Crier letters and packages on the roads, the Spindelskog runestones, the Vikland crystal spheres and buried treasure letter, the vault keys in Lord British's Castle, the Oracle's shards and lens, Quentin's report and two dungeon keys. The first player to open one used to take the item from everyone else in the instance. (e79d50aa2c, #15297)
• Captain Stanley in Soltown kept a gold "!" after you agreed to carry his notes to Guard-Captain Cugel, and it stayed until the notes were delivered. Taking the courier job now clears it. (9bcea679e7)

Skills

• Seafaring review fixes: the game server now takes the boards for a Hull Patching cast from the pack itself and refuses the patch when too few are carried; a patch and a Crew Drill hand count only for a player the server places on that deck; Sea Legs and the patch plan read the skill the same way the server does; while the school is switched off it cannot be learnt and Navigation and Strong Swimmer do nothing.
• The regular adventurer trainers now teach Frost Weapon alongside Ignite Weapon; before this it was only sold by the Water master trainer in Ardoris. Shock Weapon sits a tier deeper in the Air tree and stays with the Air master trainer.
• The Elixir Receptive and Elixir Extension tooltips now name what they work on: Receptive strengthens potions, elixirs, smelling salts and magic torches but not food or drink, and Extension lengthens food and drink as well as timed potions, though not instant health, focus and restoration potions or bandages. (#15528)
• The Magic Warding description now says that its lower attunement also weakens your own spells from those schools, buffs and movement spells such as Dash included, and that it can be switched off per deck in Edit Deck. The Edit Deck tooltip says the same. The skill itself is unchanged.
• Skills taught only by the master trainers in Desolis and Braemar now say where to learn them. At any other trainer, Magic Warding said only that it could not be learned there; it and 31 other Tactics, Fire, Sun and Taming skills now add a line naming Desolis or Braemar.
• The Vanish skill panel now lists the health and focus regeneration Lunar Specialization adds, in and out of combat, with each amount marked as lasting while hidden. The description promised it and the panel showed only the stealth line. New Moon, the Focus combination built from Vanish, lists the same four lines.

Tools

• The Player Health page on the dev portal has a new Specializations tab: how many of the characters played in the last 7, 30 or 90 days specialize in each school, how many hold two, one or no specializations, and the most common pairs.

UI

• In a big party, the names in the party list no longer slide up and down as pets come and go or members walk out of range. The list now only redraws smaller or larger when the change needs a whole step. Pet bars under a member drop the repeated owner line, and summoning or dismissing one pet leaves that member's other pet bars in place. Your own companion bars no longer draw over a party row. (1487c239ea, #15716)

Desk

• Wall Chess: a Master streak no longer stops counting after a game is left open for hours, and a streak built on your own page stays there instead of carrying over to a guild or town board.

NPCs

• Characters who pick their nose in conversation no longer snap into a T-pose. The gesture had lost its animation, so Kobold Expedition Warriors froze when told "human"; kobolds, satyrs, fauns, zombies, the Oracle's bodies and human NPCs now each play their own clip for it.

Oracle

• The Oracle answered about forty more player questions: clock and torch recipes, the free camera for decorating, recipe name colours, where to train Animal Lore, the Pumpkin Head quest, where to find Harvest and Large Grey Wolves, which sharks can be caught, where a beginner can fish, what the Myrkdraugr's Heart is for, and what a specialization keeps when it is no longer trained. Her advice on Black dragons no longer suggests Life magic, which no player spell can use against them.

Party

• Matchmaking Preference changes now take effect the next time you enter an area. Switching between Open, Party and Private no longer moves you out of the place you are standing in after a countdown, and the Multiplayer tab of the Options window now says when a change lands.
• Joining a party while you are in a different copy of the same area as a party member now asks whether to join them there, with Join and Stay Here buttons. The question waits until you are out of combat. Before, the game moved you after a one minute countdown without asking.
• Following the party leader after they recall or travel to a lot in a player-owned town now puts members at the front of that lot beside the leader, instead of at the edge of the town. The overworld party marker goes there too.

Calendar

• Calendar Review: moving a listed event to a new time now names any other listed event it lands on at the same place, the same check approval runs.
• The World Calendar Week view on a phone held upright lists the week by day, each event with its start time and full title; the seven-column grid stays for landscape and desktop, and the Show hidden button no longer appears when nothing is hidden. Reported by Elene Sali. Reaches the website with the next calendar page update. (ce0fa6008a)

Fishing

• The fish on the Themed fishing reel meter was drawn belly up, with its back fin pointing down whichever way it faced. The picture is redrawn the right way up for both directions (f7520932e6).
• Gulls now gather where the fish are feeding. Watch the water in coastal towns for a low, noisy flock diving in, and the skies over those towns on the overworld. Not on the test shard yet.
• The Humboldt Squid and the Golden Dorado now draw about as large as other fish of the same Fish Length when placed as a decoration or hung on the wall. Both were sized for a much shorter fish, so a squid looked about half the size of a Mahi-Mahi of the same length; at a length of 1.8 a placed squid now measures 1.69 m against 1.54 m for the Mahi-Mahi. Their wall trophies got a larger plaque to fit (#15689).
• The fishing bite tick plays twice as loud, the splash when a fish bites is quieter so it no longer covers the tick, and a new Fishing Sounds slider on the Audio tab sets the water, rod and reel on their own, for players who could not hear the tick over the water (#13974).

UI

• The box above Play Offline on the title screen now shows where your last offline character was and how long you have played them, under their name. It also stands as tall as the login box across from it, so the two line up top and bottom. Offline play now counts each character's own time played, which also fills the Hours column in Find My Offline Characters.

Fishing

• Wels and Redtail Catfish wall trophies no longer poke through the wall into the next room. The Hanging Great White and Nurse Shark trophies now block decorations along the whole shark.
• Angler's Log fixes: the Kinds tab reads only waters players can reach; a bait tooltip names an extra catch only when other baits bring it up too; the Log forgets the last cast when another character logs in; the tiring-spot line updates while the Log is open; kinds never caught stay dark while catch counts load.

Images

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• Offline box
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• BeforeAfterLedge lever
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• Aether Warlock
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Balance

• Raising Summon Skeleton or Summon Lich now raises the summon's damage. Each skill point adds 1 Strength to the Skeleton Footman, Skeleton Mage or Lich (more with Death Specialization), on top of what Undead Mastery gives. Before, the skill raised only their health. At skill 100 an unspecialized Lich went from 24.9 to 33.0 damage per second and a Footman from 15.7 to 20.2. Mutton Stew and the Death Summoner gem raise their Strength as well now.

Boats

• House ships: a ship's copy is offered sailing in only to harbours she can actually enter from the open sea, so she is no longer lost on the way to one she cannot; turning sinking on floods a boat crippled earlier instead of sinking her outright; riders on a boat that settles in shallow water are let go once she is awash; and a ship launched in a town whose sea chart had not loaded yet is ready on the next try.

Combat

• Hits from an enemy mage's staff shot (Fire Arrow, Ice Arrow, Shock Arrow, Stone Arrow) now end with the shot's name in the combat log, matching the line that says the enemy used it. Other named creature attacks that showed plain damage got the same fix (353a77b6c9, #15740).
• Rend from Skeleton Warriors and other blade-wielding creatures now stacks to 3 on a player, the same as the player version. A pack of skeletons in The Rise used to stack it to 5. (eefa6e8f76, #15600)
• Shield Specialization now carries more of the Shield tree. Angles, Redirection, Ranged Defense, Arcane Defense and the block bonus of Stand Your Ground give three quarters of their bonus without the specialization, all of it at Shield Specialization 80 and a little more above that. Deflect's block chance bonuses and Shield Bash's stun and knockback are about 90% of what they were without the specialization and about 110% at Shield Specialization 100. Stand Your Ground's stun resistance and Shield Preservation are unchanged.
• Melee Damage Reflection on armor such as Obsidian Plate now has its own combat log line, "<name> reflects N points of melee damage back at <creature>", on the wearer's own Combat(Self) channel. It used to be logged as the creature taking damage from its own attack on the Others channel, so wearers could not see it working. Reflected damage that kills a creature now counts as the wearer's kill. (#15513)
• Fixed Break Armor from mace and hammer skeletons leaving an empty debuff on every hit. Only some hits carry the damage resistance penalty, so the buff bar showed "-9 damage resistance" on some hits and a bare icon on the rest; the icon now appears only with the penalty, which is unchanged. (#15521)
• A boar's Rend bleed now grows with the boar: each of its five ticks is a fifth of that boar's own melee hit before armor. It used to bleed a small fixed amount on every boar, so the Razorback Destroyer's Rend showed 1 damage a tick in light and heavy armor alike. (#15516)
• The Kobold energy device's Enrage (also behind the Death Power Shards in The Breach) and the Sprint used by light-armored creatures and pets now make the creature move faster. Both put their speed on a stat creatures never read, so the tooltip promised a gain that never happened; Enrage now adds about 9% movement speed and creature Sprint matches the share a player's Sprint gives.
• Spell fields around the caster, such as Elysian Illumination, now hit liches standing on the same level ground. They used to land only when the lich stood lower than the caster.
• A dragon's Dragon Fire and Magma Breath burns now show their fire damage in red on the debuff icon, as other harmful effects do. Any lingering field another creature or player puts on you reads the same way; your own fields keep their colours (#15500).
• Clicking the green Equipped button in Combat Decks no longer takes the deck off. A stray click there, or a double click on Equip, used to leave a character with no deck and no combat hotbar, even after a relog. To take a deck off on purpose, choose Unequip Deck from that decks options menu. (068815d3c9)
• Shield Specialization now adds to Testudo, Dig In and Shield Smash. Testudo lasts longer, slows its caster less, and raises the block chance of the caster and of every ally inside who carries a shield. Dig In's block bonus builds for the first ten seconds the stance is held, a dug-in specialist resists knockbacks and knockdowns, and allies get more of the avoidance. Shield Smash strikes up to three enemies in front of the player at Shield Specialization 100 and lowers the damage resistance of each one it hits for eight seconds. None of it applies without the specialization.
• Added an Acid damage type and a Paralyzed hold to combat for the coming slime work. Acid is resisted only by acid resistance and is not a poison, so undead and elementals feel it too. Paralyzed stops every action, and nothing that breaks a stun breaks it. Nothing uses either yet.
• Acid damage will wear armour the way weapon hits do, held to a few wear rolls a minute so a creature that burns over time cannot strip a set in one fight.
• Clockwork creatures now spray Slippery Oil on the player who makes them bleed. The oil had only ever been able to land on a corpse, so bleeding a clockwork never lowered the attacker's Dexterity as intended.
• The +N on runes after a Mind Lock now shows the extra time the rune still has and counts down. Casting Mind Lock again and again used to make the number grow without end (one report showed +1958).

Crafting

• Unticking Keep patterns from salvage at a crafting table also skipped the Eternal Pattern an item gives of its own, so a Thorn Wand salvaged with the box off gave no Eternal Pattern: Thorn Wand and the pattern was gone. The box now skips ordinary patterns only, and Eternal Patterns always come back. Reported by Phenyx.

Combat

• Lightning Storm no longer strikes less often as Rapid Discharge rises. The storm had been waiting out its own stun before striking a target again, and Rapid Discharge lengthens that stun, so a caster at Rapid Discharge 146 saw about half the strikes. Strikes now come every 1+(skill/250) seconds at any Rapid Discharge level, and the stun still grows with it. Discharge was checked too and was never affected (#15721).

Housing

• A brewing cask picked up again now stacks on another cask with Alt held over its top. A moved cask taken by its top used to land beside, in front of or behind the cask under the cursor; only casks from the backpack stacked.
• Decorations set on the ground floor now rest on the boards in 22 more house types, including the Viking Village Homes, the Gothic Mansions, the Tudor 1b homes and the Round Tower. Each house's ground decoration floor was 0.7 to 6.6 cm above the floor; items placed before the fix settle when picked up and placed again. A new test checks every house type's ground floor so a new house cannot ship with the same gap.
• The Kobold Corkscrew Wind Power Generator and the other wind power generator decorations now remember when their sound is switched off, so they stay quiet across town visits and server restarts (16813c0fb0).
• Letters placed as decorations (receipts such as Tax Credit Granted, Call to Arms letters and letters you wrote) now rest on top of tables and floors. Before, the sheet sank into the surface and only its corners showed.
• Fixed the town lot list showing an extra available lot of type Dungeon in towns with team-placed decorations, and counting it in the lots available total. First seen in Owl's Head (#15508).
• Lights inside a large player house in a town stay lit wherever you stand in it. In a decorated Viking Great Hall the lamps at one end used to go dark when you walked to the other end, because the town light limit gave their slots to street lamps and neighbouring houses closer by. Lights in the house you are standing in now come first. (#15494)
• The Ichor Witch's Skull can be set on the Wizard's Inlaid Leather Buffet with Open Hutch, on its top and its shelves. The skull's placement shape was tilted with the model and reached about 4 cm below the skull, so every spot on the buffet reported something in the way.
• Search All My Stuff finds the items you keep in a chest that another player, such as a co-owner, placed on your lot. Those items used to show up in the search only after being dragged out onto the floor.
• Dungeon foyers now hold decorations to the foyer area: a decoration dropped on the foyer's own floor or walls is checked like one set on another decoration, and the RedStone and Brown Marble foyers have their area checked for the first time. When the owner visits, foyer decorations standing outside both the foyer and every room go to their backpack, 25 per visit; the check meant to do this had never moved anything. On with the next chaos build. (#15247)
• On the Small Old Keep, the gabled entryway around the front door now takes wall decorations on the stone and plaster beside the door, the plaster above it, the gable and the side of the porch. Before, an Iron Wall Lamp or any other wall item said "Nothing here will hold this item" anywhere on it. (180deee502, #13955)

Leaderboards

• Each control point now has its own leaderboard. The Control Points and Control Point Runs boards gained a Point picker that ranks one point's runs from 1, and a player's best at each point gets its own row. A month of play showed every run past wave 8 landing at Vertas Pass or Eastreach Gap, while Sanctus Spine saw two recorded runs.

World

• Ten of the giant swamp trees in South Celestial Wetlands no longer stop players in open air metres short of their trunks. These trees have broad buttress roots and their collision reached the root tips at every height, so trees that are scaled up or set deep in the ground kept a ring of invisible wall around a much narrower trunk. Their collision now follows the bark (ec2b3f4dd4, #15738).
• The two levers that open the barred prison door in Myrkur hung in the air about a metre out from the rock wall. Both now sit on the wall.
• The medium sized bats in Despair and Myrkur now beat their wings at the same pace as the very large bats, about four beats a second (they were at five to six and still read as a blur after the first fix).
• On Windows, the painted backdrop behind the rows of trees along forest edges could draw as a solid black wall with straight edges, most visible from high ground in Savrenoc Timberland by day and by night. These backdrop models carried no surface direction data on most of their corners, and the shaders turned that into an invalid value that NVIDIA cards drew black. The shaders now fall back to plain lighting on any model missing that data, which covers the same tree rows in about 60 forest zones. (#14528)

Books

• The Final Orders note in the Tower of the Shuttered Eye reads "will face oblivion and be forever forgotten" again; the missing "be" was restored and the note's spoken reading was recorded again to match. The Portuguese page had the same missing word and the Italian page a misspelled one; both were corrected.
• Shroud Classic now reaches books and letters: with Options, Themes, Paragraph Font set to Shroud Classic, every book, note and letter reads in the plain sans-serif face, in the flat window and the 3D book, whatever lettering it was written in. Runic books keep their runes, and the Default paragraph font leaves books as they were (41891e6c54, 6335c91732, #14658).
• Read Aloud re-recorded for 8 books whose words changed since their last recording: Automaton Work Order, Bodil's Rune-Slate, Commander's Orders, Forge Ledger, Hagen's Pledge, Landing Signals, The Crown's Proclamation, Signal Orders.

Fixes

• Answering several party loot rolls quickly no longer reports that your answer did not reach the server, and winning several items close together no longer shows a "could not be placed in your pack" message for items that arrived. Answers and claims are now sent one at a time (d4b98b6c78).
• Lots in busy towns keep their saved door and switch states when their contents take a long time to arrive, instead of opening with defaults. Siege soldiers that reached a client after its siege ended are removed, and opening a placed chest that has no bag yet is cancelled cleanly instead of failing (d4b98b6c78).

Housing

• A jump at the balcony railing of the Crusader Courtyard House no longer leaves a character stuck between the railing and the balcony's roof. The space between the top of the railing and the roof is now closed off, so the character stays on the balcony and leaves it through the upper door. The same change covers the side balcony and upper gallery of the Crusader Veranda House and the roofed ground-floor railing of the Crusader Large House, in both looks.

Dungeons

• The Random Dungeon Generator now places a secret door hall facing the right way. A player walking in from the entrance reaches the side with the hidden brick and the lever stays behind the door. Before, about half of the generated secret doors faced backwards and put the lever in the player's path. A secret door that cannot fit facing the right way stays in the chest.
• Reclaim on the Random Dungeon Generator Chest counts the generated rooms correctly after you leave a dungeon and come back. Before, a return could leave the Generator tab showing 0 rooms to reclaim until a room was removed by hand.
• Stone Dungeon, marble and Ancient Stone stairs no longer attach by their bottom end to rooms with a low door (the Random Encounter rooms, the Prison Stone cells and cell block, the small Dungeon Stone rooms). The door frame stood over the last steps and stopped every character walking down. The Dungeon Builder now says to put a hall between them, and the Random Dungeon Generator follows the same rule. Every other doorway was walked from the bottom of the stairs and passes (1,276 pairings). (496c7ff12f)

GM Tools

• GM possession: added two console commands for measuring how a possessed creature moves: possessdrive holds timed movement keys and possesstrace records facing, direction of travel, speed, animation and camera every frame. The first measured run found a reversed creature sliding backwards at run speed (10 m on a troll), standstill to full speed in a single frame, and the camera rocking with the creature's head.
• GM possession: a possessed creature now turns toward the direction it is driven before it moves off, pivots on the spot with its own turn animations for a big change of direction, and builds up speed and brakes, the way its AI moves it. Reversing a run no longer slides it backwards, Walk uses the creature's own walking pace, its feet follow slopes more closely, and player lots no longer slow it to two thirds. The possession spells use the same drive.
• GM possession: the camera now follows a possessed creature from a fixed point over its body instead of its animated head, so steps, sways and bites no longer rock the view (a troll's view wandered a third of a metre on a straight run). The size-based camera distance now holds instead of sliding back to the GM's own zoom, and the first-person toggle now looks out from the creature's eyes.
• GM possession: a possessed creature now turns to face its target while it attacks and stands its ground through the swing, then moves off on the held keys as the swing ends. Auto-attack no longer starts a new swing while the GM drives away from the target, and a stunned or knocked-down creature can no longer be spun round.
• GM possession: other players now see a possessed creature move smoothly. Its position goes out every tenth of a second while it moves and plays back closer to real time, so it no longer runs past a turn and snaps back. It no longer slides along in its standing pose for the player hosting the area, and stuns that player saw land now clear when the driver never took them. The creature also answers the keys the moment it is taken, no longer jumps back to its starting spot when let go, and no longer freezes when the GM hosting the area drives it far from every player.

Launcher

• Released Launcher 67 on Windows, Linux and Mac. A long What's New list scrolls inside its panel again and the PLAY button stays on screen; launcher 66 went out a few hours before that fix and could push PLAY off the window (#15601).
• The game no longer carries "(DEV)" in its name on your computer: its settings, data folder and window now use Shroud of the Avatar. The first start of the renamed build copies your settings, key bindings, add-ons, songs, chat logs and themes across, and leaves the old folder as it was. The launcher is updated first so it keeps finding your files (f7126c6831, 9b70f557a9, #15317).

Camera

• In the over-the-shoulder camera view, walking through a narrow doorway made the camera bounce against the door frame and the walls beside it, and it could jump right up to the back of the character's head as the frame went past. The camera now eases toward the middle as a door frame comes alongside and eases back out once the character is through. The normal view and first person are unchanged.

Login

• Starting the game with the launcher's Play As button no longer resets Matchmaking Preference to Open; a Private or Party choice now stays. Reported by Rovol.

Balance

• The Elite Ancient Undead in Despair now give experience to match how hard they fight: the Elite Fighter, Guard and Warrior went from 16,500-21,000 to 83,300-92,600 per kill, the Elite High Mage from 21,000 to 30,500, and their corpses gained a gold drop and a chance at potions. The plain and Drone Fighters, Guards and Warriors give about double what they did.

Front End

• On the title screen, the Log in through Steam button now sits at the top of the login form above a thin line, so the User Name and Password boxes lead straight to Play Online. Players with typed details were pressing the Steam button under the boxes expecting it to log them in (#15578).

Voice

• Boletusporis Regem, the mushroom boss in the Psilocybin Lair, now speaks in a deep, wet creature voice made for him instead of a warm female human voice, and his dying cry no longer reads "AHG" out as letters. Live now from the voice server, no client update needed.

Graphics

• The waterfalls at the Artifice entrance no longer flicker. The falling water was sorted together with the mist at its base, so the mist kept appearing through the water and vanishing behind it; the water now draws after the mist. About twenty other places using the same waterfall, including Xenos, Spite and the Varisalla foothills, get the same fix.
• Antialiasing no longer switches itself off on slower graphics chips when the frame rate drops. Under load it now steps down from Temporal or Quality to Fast and stops there, and the Video tab in Options says when it has been lowered and to what. Reported by Barugon on a laptop with built-in graphics. (3779b4ef28, #14652)

Lua Addons

• The add-on submit window shows a character count under the Description box, and a description over the 500-character limit now gets a message saying how long it is. An update filled in from a long package description used to be refused with only the 10 to 500 character reminder. (#15580)

Vendors

• Searching the vendor listings in Chinese for 驯服项链 (taming necklace) now finds every taming necklace, as the English search does. The Wooden and Royal Founder's necklaces had been named with a different Chinese word for taming. Typing the whole name of an item in your own language now also finds listings by its English name.

Audio

• K'rul had no ambient sound of any kind. It now has a low cave ambience through its halls and the chasm, and a lava rumble beside each lava pool.
• Looping sounds the player is too far away to hear now give way to sounds they can hear. In K'rul about 50 humming machines held their place in the mix from up to 50 m away, and some skill and creature sounds went silent.
• The first song played from a music sheet after logging in no longer waits several seconds before it starts. The equipped instrument is now made ready in the background after login, a zone change or an instrument swap.

Client

• After a graphics driver update, the first shader preparation on entering a zone no longer freezes the game for minutes at a time. It now advances a few shaders per frame, so the progress count keeps moving, and on DirectX 11 a message explains the one-time wait and asks the player to keep the game open. (#15454)
• Holding Shift (or the Sprint (hold) key) now sprints while running forward on both mouse buttons or on auto run, on foot and mounted. Before, it only worked while the forward key was held (5e8a564ba4, #14003).
• Gamepad support: Shroud of the Avatar can now be played with an Xbox-style gamepad or a Steam Deck. The left stick moves in any direction and walks while only tilted, the right stick turns the camera, and LT or RT held with the face buttons, D-pad and bumpers fire all ten combat bar slots and their self-cast versions. Opening a window brings up a cursor moved by the right stick, with A to click, X for the right-click menu and B to close. Combat bar slots show the pad buttons while you play on the pad. Combat bar chords keep working with a window open without also clicking in it or closing it. Options > Controls has a new Gamepad section and a Gamepad Keys view for rebinding, with its own reset that leaves your keyboard keys alone.
• Steam Deck: Steam's on-screen keyboard now opens by itself when a text box is selected on a Deck, button names use the Deck's own L1, L2 and L3 on its built-in controls, and the interface draws a little larger on the Deck's screen (88% instead of 85%) while still leaving room for a full party list.
• PlayStation controllers: the DualShock 4 and DualSense now work with the gamepad controls. Cross, Circle, Square and Triangle take the places of A, B, X and Y, so every default binding lands in the same spot, and key prompts, the Key Bindings list and the combat bar captions use the PlayStation names. The pad works through Steam Input or with Steam Input turned off, and a new Gamepad Button Names choice under Options, Controls covers pads the game cannot identify.

Gathering

• Being teleported, pulled or knocked away from a resource node by a creature now interrupts the gather. Before, a skeleton mage's teleport left the mining swing meter running wherever the player landed. Mining, forestry, foraging, skinning and water filling all stop once the player is moved off the spot they knelt at.

Chat

• The up and down arrows in the chat box bring back lines from every past session again. Talking to an NPC opened a second chat box that kept an old copy of the list and wrote it back over the lines typed since; every chat box now shares one list, saved after each line is sent.

Website

• Player town pages on the website draw their lot maps again when the towns governor also owns houses inside the town. BuyOrder Bazaars page went from no lots to all 15. The town services deploy script now ships the lot map code too, so later fixes to it are not left behind on the server.

Engine

• Retired eight Live Tunables switches that only ever ran at their shipped value (the chess engine retry, two pathing and flight switches for The Rise dragons, the rule that a creature must stand in a campfire to burn, a save check on relog, and three client hints), taking 284 characters off the settings bag every zone sends to players. New keys landed meanwhile, so the bag is still over its 26,000-character budget and more room comes next (#15461).
• Retired sixteen more Live Tunables switches that had stayed on for weeks (the dragon pass creature combat rules, two charge rules, dragon wrasse drops, the computer opponent thread for table games, achievement counter writes, chess notices and three giant chess board view switches). Their rules now always apply, and the settings bag every zone sends is back under its 26,000-character budget (#15461).

Inventory

• Crafting from many small stacks, Quick Deposit's Undo, Consolidate All Stacks and the bank's Stack All, and crafting pulls from lot storage now send their moves to the server in a few large requests instead of one per stack, so a big inventory action no longer holds up everything queued behind it. It ships switched off on chaos and on for the QA shard.

Tutorial

• The emote tutorial no longer starts in the middle of a conversation. Learning the Hopak from Geof in Soltown used to run the tutorial over his window and his farewell; it now waits until the conversation has closed and he has finished speaking. (1fb7ef98d6, #15011)

Chat

• Redeployed the chat bridge on the chaos shard with the 13 October fix, so the Herald on the Universe chat page stops sending a tag the group server drops (about 9 warnings a day). The bridge installer now leaves its files readable by the service that runs the bridges, after this redeploy kept both bridges offline for under a minute (1d9535a3d7, #14316).

Items

• Moving items, crafting and NPC quest rewards into a bag that already holds 16,384 items now say there is no room and leave the items where they were, instead of failing with a server error. Follows the same fix for merchant purchases.
• Dyes now show at full strength on the Obsidian Order cloth armor set. Magical White Glowing dye had come out flat grey with no glow on every piece; the undyed set looks the same as before.

Audio

• Docks, stone paving, sea-wall tops and bridge decks in player-owned towns play wood or stone footsteps instead of dirt, across all 19 town maps that have them. Rowing boats, including the ferry rowboats, and the wooden pier planks and posts used around the world play wood footsteps too. Reported by Elene Sali (cb3093795f, #14037).
• Earth Elementals no longer crackle like static when they fight. The grunt they make on a swing was recorded far too loud and clipped, and a few of their hurt, death and spawn sounds clipped for a moment. All eight clips were repaired and now sit at the level of the creature's other sounds. Ice and sand elementals and the copper, ice, lava and obsidian golems share these sounds and are fixed as well (b7c84bbc61, #13959).

Economy

• Buy orders that sellers fill a few at a time now show how much is left of what was ordered: your own order reads "Wood Scrap (971 of 1,000 left)" instead of "(971)", and its tooltip says how many sellers have filled. Before, a part-filled order looked like it had lost quantity. The same count shows on the Buy Orders tab of the Vendor Items window.

Loot

• A body or chest lying in the world that another player has already opened stays lootable for everyone else in the instance. Other players used to lose its name on hover and could not open it, even with items still inside. (e79d50aa2c, #15297)

Tools

• Two lines of the chaos deploy script went back to the line endings the rest of the file uses, so the file no longer shows as changed in every checkout.

Guilds

• Guild leaders and officers who were offline when someone applied to join now get a chat line a few seconds after logging in saying how many applications are waiting, and the guild tab Applications button shows that count right away (94e0d9be03, #13915).

Inventory

• Lots banked years ago, before banked lots had names, now show in the bank as Lot, Lot Basement or Lot Dungeon and take items out only. The bank had listed 1,947 of them on the test server as ordinary storage, then refused every drop, Quick Deposit and Consolidate Stacks into them (40e9935794, #14011).

Overworld

• Filled six hexes that were missing from the middle of an overworld map, so a roving creature that catches a player on one of them now starts the fight instead of disappearing.

Bank

• A lot, basement or dungeon sent to the bank only gives items back, and the bank window now treats it that way: Consolidate Stacks, Stack All, Quick Deposit and drops no longer try to put items into it and get refused (e640d99564, #14011).

NPC Voices

• Voiced NPCs now speak their English lines when the game is set to another language, in conversation and in barks; the text stays in the chosen language, and the NPC Spoken Dialog toggle still turns them off. Before, any language but English left every voiced NPC silent. Requested by Elene Sali. (d454f6d9b6, #13964)

Towns

• Added BTR Cove, a new Hamlet player-owned town on the Forest 01c map, on the grass just west of Aerie on the Novia overworld. It arrives with the next chaos build.
• New Heaven now loads with its own sailboats to the Brittany neighborhoods and to Ahnen Hain, Caladruin and Organized Chaos Sanctum, and its caravan wagon to Verat Chaos. Characters whose Recall was set there used to arrive in an empty town template with only the lots and the Town Crier (75e4a571c2, #13833).
• Two cedar trees beside a row lot in Central Brittany were removed; their branches had grown through the walls of the row house built there.

Build

• The new Bosgame build agent completed its first full Windows client build (IL2CPP player plus all asset bundles) from its own USB project drive, with no monitor attached. It takes over Windows builds once the code-signing key moves to it.
• Windows client builds and their code signing moved to the Bosgame build machine. Launcher releases still run from the main workstation and now have the launcher signed on the Bosgame over the local network, where the signing key is plugged in.
• The first signed Windows client build from the Bosgame build machine passed: the game executable and its libraries were signed with the code-signing key and verified before packaging.

Decorations

• The Ornate Shogun Lightstring and Shogun Lightstring now light only from their lamps: each of the four lamps has its own click area, and the rope between them no longer takes the cursor. The far lamp can still be reached from under either end of the string.

Research

• Researched controller support for the Steam Deck: Valve's Deck Verified input rules, how World of Warcraft and other online games handle gamepads, and the plan the gamepad support above follows.

Crafting

• The Reshape Two-Handed Bludgeon recipe named its ingredients "Two-Handed Blugeon Equipment" and "Two-Handed Blugeon Patterns" in the Recipe Book and the crafting window. Both now spell bludgeon correctly; the translations already did.
• Picking a different recipe at a crafting station no longer keeps the quantity from the last one. A recipe you have not made at that station starts at 1, and recipes you have made still come back at the amount you last used.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-30 is up: An Ancient dragon learned to drag its challengers out of its own zone, and both halves of that have been fixed. The Focus school caught up with every other school, eight new fish went into the water, and the whole Twitch Drops failure was a trailing space in one identifier. Plus twenty-six Crusader Village doors that had their hinges on the handle side since the day the houses were built. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

UI

• The Achievements window's All tab now lists earned tiers as their own rows under each achievement, sorted by name; it used to look the same as In Progress. The missing-boss and missing-dog lists on Slayer of Legends and Pet Every Dog! now show when hovering anywhere on the row, and the progress count is underlined on those rows. (4d38abeeea)
• The body and face marking lists in the appearance editor show every marking under its own name. In Spanish and Japanese, Courage and Valor shared one translated word, so the list showed one row for both and the Valor marking could not be picked. A repeated name now carries a number.

Community

• Filed a player wishlist idea from the forum: a Bo Staff melee weapon as a bludgeon alternative (idea by xisle, raised again by Detrick).

Oracle

• The Oracle now answers whether a player can be in more than one guild: one guild at a time, shared by every character on the account. She also explains that player-owned towns are separate from guilds, that town residents cannot farm on a lot opened to them unless given Kindred, and who hears town chat.
• The Oracle can now answer: whether you can be in more than one guild, where the Ardoris guild hall is, Bedrock's cooldown and how long it lasts, whether any specialization pair is called Crusader, the 12,000 character book limit, who Perri the Unchained is, where the Ruined Keep is, which wings can be crafted, what the Astrolabe does, what players mean by "mossy wood", and whether any potion restores durability.

Combat

• Purify now comes back in 15 seconds instead of 30, and a Bucket of Water in 10 seconds instead of 5, so the bucket is no longer the only thing worth using against burning. Purify Burst is unchanged. (8650b94c0b)
• Skill tooltips for weapon swings now show the damage of the hit. Opportunity Strike showed "145% Effective" instead of a number, and Shield Bash, Shield Smash and Flaming Bash never showed their hit at all. The weapon combat skills (Bladed, Bludgeon, Polearm and Ranged Combat, Pugilism) show the range your equipped weapon hits for at each level, in place of "+45% Damage" (e719cebdd6).

Website

• A weekly development update for the Shroud of the Avatar news page on Steam is now built from this work log's daily headlines, with a link back here for the full detail. Names of unannounced content and anything on the patch notes hold list are left out of it.
• Opening the Desk address on play. while signed out now shows a page about the Desk: what it holds (guild and town windows, the games, leaderboards, achievements, the radio and more), which parts are for subscribers, and a button to sign in. The list follows the apps switched on for the Desk itself. Before, the address went straight to the sign-in page.
• Set up the new website to also answer at shroudoftheavatar.online while the shroudoftheavatar.com transfer is pending, laid out the way the .com will be. Every current address, including the ones the game, the launcher, Steam and Twitch use, keeps working unchanged, and signing in, the store and payments return to whichever address they started on. The new address opens once its DNS records point at the site.
• The website is now live at shroudoftheavatar.online. The bare address forwards to the www. address, and play.catnipgames.net keeps working alongside it with its own sign-in.
• Wall Chess joined the Desk's Games folder: a board game against the computer where you race your king across an 8 by 8 board while walls go up between the squares. Walls crumble after eight of their builder's turns, each side has six stones and one Breach to knock a wall down, and the Warden plays at Apprentice, Journeyman and Master, with each member's longest run of wins against the Master on their guild's or town's list. Built, not switched on yet.

Balance

• Added a Focus Cost Audit to the balance tools. It prices every player skill's focus cost against what the skill does and compares it with the skills that do the same job. The first run found that the 68 skills with a fixed focus cost take less than half as much of the focus pool at skill 120 as at skill 60, while costs that scale with skill hold steady, and that Fire Arrow costs too little for its damage while Shooting Star and Death Field cost too much. No costs have changed yet.
• Retired Life Warding: nothing in the game deals Life damage to players, and its Life attunement penalty weakened every Life heal the character received. Characters who trained it get all of its experience back on their next login. Magic Warding no longer lowers Life attunement, so heals on a warded fighter are no longer cut, and the Thaumaturgy Ward Gem and Jewel no longer drop or craft (ones already owned still fracture and sell).
• Opportunity Strike no longer triggers the global cooldown when used within the window right after a successful dodge, so the next skill can be used at once. Used at any other time it keeps its 1.5 second global cooldown. The skill card and description now say so.

Combat

• Splintering Strike now has its own look: it swings the Break Armor strike with Stone Fist's earth effects at the start and on the hit, where it used to copy Crushing Blow exactly. Its skill card also names Bludgeon Specialization beside Earth Specialization on the damage resistance debuff both of them strengthen.
• On keyboards with per-key RGB lighting, a hotbar key now lights in the swap colour during the Mind Wipe swap window, where it used to stay dark and log an error.

Housing

• Decorations placed on the ground floor of the Viking Great Hall now stand on the floorboards. The hall's ground-floor placement surface sat 6.5 cm above the boards, so every item set down there hovered about 8 cm in the air. Items placed before the fix settle when picked up and placed again. A sweep of the other house models found about 20 more with the same gap at 2 to 7 cm; those are queued as their own fix.
• Door-style basement and dungeon entrances now stand on the floor against the inner wall that crosses the ground floor of the Shogun Five-Story Palace (City). The house only took wall decorations from the rail on top of its wooden wainscot upward, so a door could get no lower than about 0.75 m off the floor. Both sides of that wall, its wooden posts included, now take wall decorations down to the floor. The outer walls and the upper floors, where the house keeps decorations off that band, are unchanged.
• Door-style basement and dungeon entrances now stand on the deck inside the Shogun Ship (City) and the Dry Docked Shogun Ship (City). The ships only took wall decorations from the top of the low strip along the bottom of their walls, so a door stopped 0.22 m above the deck on the cabin decks and up to 0.53 m in the stern cabins. That strip, the red posts included, now takes wall decorations down to the deck. The lowest deck, where the strip is 4 cm tall, is unchanged. A survey of the other Shogun homes found none of them needed the same change (#15660).
• Door-style basement and dungeon entrances now stand on the floor against the outer walls on the ground floor of the Shogun Five-Story Palace (City). Aiming low at any of those walls said "This item cannot sit on that surface.", so no door could stand against one. The wooden panel along the bottom of the outer walls now takes wall decorations, and items still stay out of the panel itself. The narrow posts between wall sections and the upper floors are unchanged. Reported by Cathy (#15709).
• Door-style basement and dungeon entrances now stand on the floor in the Obsidian Tower (Town) and the Obsidian Tower (Village). The towers only took wall decorations from the top of the stone skirting along the bottom of their walls, so a door stood 0.12 to 0.4 m above most floors. The skirting now takes wall decorations down to the floor. Reported by Cora Cuz'abich (#15709).

Client

• The grapnel haul meter now loads its painted frame the first time it opens instead of during startup, where its seven textures each waited on the boot's background loading. They were the most common startup stall warning on the last chaos build (4,534 in ten hours).
• Learned recipes no longer load synchronously behind the title screen's background loading on the way into the world; a recipe that would have waited on it loads in the background instead.
• The spawn queue's "drain stalled" warning now waits until the queue has gone 10 seconds without spawning anything. Seats that queued together just before a check read as a stopped queue on arrival in The Rise.
• Wave of Sorrows, the shadow spiders' dark area attack and other spell effects could be left switched off after their first use if the player looked away while they faded, and stayed out of play until the next zone change. They now finish and return for reuse every time.
• Client warnings from the last chaos build were trimmed of false alarms: creature nameplates no longer report a missing collider for a water elemental lying in ambush, the chat selection watch ignores drags that move up or down a line rather than along it, and the Linux typing stall line now tells a launcher start from a desktop with no input method.

Fishing

• The eight new fish can now be placed as decorations. A caught Humboldt Squid, Arowana, Golden Dorado, Wels or Redtail Catfish, Nurse or Great White Shark, and the longer Walleye reached below the floor, so the placement highlight stayed red on every surface; they now lie on top of the floor. The largest Tiger Sharks had the same problem and now place too, and the Great White and Nurse Shark trophies on stands now collide where the shark is drawn.
• On the Themed fishing meter, the fish in the catch zone vanished on Windows whenever it swam down the meter. It now has its own left-facing picture and stays visible both ways (82488f7b35).
• Chum now throws as far as you can cast a fishing line, which grows with Fishing skill. It used to stop at 15 metres for everyone; it still never reaches less than that. Requested by Christ Pallid.
• Bait tooltips now say what each bait is for, worked out from the catch lists with no numbers: the water it does best in or that it works in any water, whether it brings up more of the larger fish or mostly smaller ones, catches it brings up far more often than other baits (Tiny Squid on a Minnow in salt water, Sulfurous Ash on a Gemmed Lure), and that any bait can still bring up a rare one. The old "bonus to catching fish" and day-and-night lines are gone, and the aim marker says when the water under the lure is not the bait's best (fishing proposal S13).
• Added the Angler's Log, a fishing journal opened from the Open a Window menu, /anglerslog or a new Toggle Angler's Log key. Here lists every kind the water in front of you can bring up with the bait you pick, with your count and whether it bites at this hour and moon; Kinds lists all 81 kinds and shows the waters, baits and hours even for the ones you have not caught yet; Bait lists the twelve working baits and where to get each one. Fishing proposal S16, requested by Strider99, kaeshiva, majoria70 and WeirDave. Not on the test shard yet.

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Performance

• Player vendors, dungeon entrances and storage chests wearing another item's look no longer stall the frame when a lot comes into view; the game finishes loading the look first. A town lot that stopped loading its decorations partway now keeps going.
• The Sunless Barrens no longer drops to half its frame rate when the camera turns toward the open cavern. A player fishing the lava measured 62 FPS facing a wall and 23 FPS facing across the lava; the mesas hidden behind the canyon and cave walls were still being drawn. The zone now stops drawing small and distant rock pieces sooner, which took the worst views from 17.4 to 14.3 ms and from 23 to 17.7 ms of GPU time on an RTX 3090 with no visible change.

Telemetry

• Low system memory, low video memory and whole-game freeze warnings now report once per occurrence instead of on every zone change.

Tools

• The tracker comment tool can now attach files to an issue in the same post as the comment, with images shown inline in the note. It was first used to post the wall placement survey of nine Shogun houses (#15660).
• The editor test suite ran into the C# compiler limit on string literals (16 MB per assembly) and stopped compiling for everyone. 1,032 tests that do not touch game code moved into their own test assembly, taking the editor assembly from 99.7% to 84.5% of the limit, and a new heap report shows how close each assembly is (19556bd075).

Housing

• The Property Manager no longer stands a home that was built on an Estercove Extra Land island back up on a water lot without one, where its land house ended up sitting on the water. Changing the house on a lot without Extra Land also stopped banking the lot and rebuilding the old house a second time.

Inventory

• Dragging several selected stacks onto a stack of the same item no longer fails partway when the total would pass the 32,767 stack limit: the stacks that fit merge and the rest land beside it as their own stack.
• Answering No to dyeing an item after dropping a dye on it now sends the dye's move at once, which stops an end-of-frame error in the client log.

World

• The practice dummy in Westend that kept sinking into the shore slope now holds its placed spot on the grass. Its spawn point had snapped to an old navigation layer 0.8 m under the hillside and dropped the dummy through to the water below.
• A spider egg clutch in The Warrens in Malice had its four spider spots bunched within 2 m on a narrow tunnel floor, so two spiders could spawn inside each other. The spots now run along the tunnel, each at least 1.5 m from the others.

Town Siege

• A besieging Cabalist now enters through a town exit whose ground joins the shrine. In Fortus End the chosen exit sat on a three-triangle patch of ground cut off from the town, so he could not walk and appeared at the shrine at once.

Movement

• Characters no longer slide off the edges of crafting stations, chests and placed decorations; the recent slide off a perch now applies only to resource nodes and barrels. Three movement and compass diagnostics that logged a warning on every zone change or every craft now log once per object as info (c19aefc429).

Gathering

• Fast high-level harvesting no longer stops earning producer experience partway through a long gathering session.

Radio

• Nine Royal Jukebox songs, among them Solania, Yew and River Styx, and one Herald episode never became playable on the chaos radio because the step that measures their loudness stalled on them until it timed out, about 700 times since October 25. That step no longer uses the filter that stalled, and a song that keeps failing now waits longer between attempts.

Sailing

• The last two water ship homes became sailable: the Huge Pirate Galleon (73 m) and the Giant Pirate Galleon (94 m), from the water keep and castle homes, with their own decks, the house's ship's wheel as the helm and rope ladders up their sides. Both lie at anchor outside Smokehaven's harbour, one either side of the mouth, and weigh anchor when someone sails them away. A ship that turns as slowly as the Giant galleon now gets enough time to turn back into harbour at a sea gate. Boats are still switched off on chaos.
• Sailing out of Central Brittany's harbour onto the open sea now puts the player at the wheel of a ship before the sea is shown. Players often arrived on foot on the shore, and sometimes no ship came for them at all. A player left standing on the open sea's land is now picked up by a ship, and one whose ship cannot come is taken back ashore at Central Brittany.
• The open sea's map was redrawn without the reddish town markers, which showed as red circles along every coast and out on the water. It now shows only the land, the shallows and the shoreline.
• Boat damage and sinking, dark and on for QA. A boat that loses a quarter of its hull sails slower and smoke rises from its deck. At three quarters gone it sails slower still, sits lower in the water with its crew pumping over the sides, and leaks until it is tied up in a slip. With nothing left it stops answering the wheel, loses way within a few seconds and goes down over about a minute, leaving its crew in the water. A harbour's own boat comes back at its mooring five minutes later. Everyone aboard gets a chat line for each hit with the hull left in percent, and a hull line with a coloured bar sits above the helm's speed readout.
• House ships, dark and on for QA. The owner or a co-owner of one of the nine water ship houses can now set sail from its lot sign. The house leaves its lot and the ship lies in the water beside it with every decoration aboard, and chests, crafting stations and books still work while it sails the town's harbour. Nothing on it can be placed, moved or picked up until it moors. Tied up back at its berth, the helmsman is offered to moor it on its lot. Sailing out of town leaves the house at home and takes the crew on in a bare copy of the ship, which can sail into other harbours and goes away 15 minutes after its owners or its helmsman leave. Every town with water lots got a harbour chart for it, player towns' placed water lots included. Shallow harbours such as Kingsport and Solania float the houseboat but not the galleons. The Pirate Galleon (Town) got a ship of its own size.

Store

• Built Steam Wallet purchases for players who start the game from Steam: Crown packages and Episode 2 Early Access are bought from the in-game Crown window, with the price and the approval in Steam's own overlay, as Steam requires. It stays switched off until the Steamworks account setup and the account move are finished; until then Buy keeps opening the web store.

Build

• The Mac build machine moved to a dedicated Mac mini. Its first build stalled for 18 hours because the mini was sitting at its login screen, where Unity cannot start. Mac builds now stop at once with the fix spelled out when nobody is logged in, client builds are cut off after an hour with no output, and the leftover-Unity cleanup that runs before every build now works on macOS.
• Activated the Unity licence on the new Bosgame build agent for headless builds and documented why a Unity Hub sign-in alone does not license the editor on that install.

Leaderboards

• The Fish and Anglers leaderboards now count the eight fish added on October 30 (Wels Catfish, Walleye, Arowana, Golden Dorado, Redtail Catfish, Nurse Shark, Great White Shark and Humboldt Squid). Their catches had been left off both boards. Catches since October 30 now count too.

Sailing

• Three boat fixes from a playtest. Jumping or falling off a boat no longer leaves you counted as aboard, so the side of a beached or anchored boat offers Climb aboard again instead of Go ashore. Pressing the interact key while steering or rowing only drops the anchor or ties off, and no longer answers "Someone else is at the helm." when the helm is yours. GM fly mode works again after jumping off a boat into the water (74accf3250). Boats are still on the QA server only.

PvP

• Cinderspire can be play-tested straight from the Unity Editor: Play drops the character on a start pad's Tooth with the match clock set to the start of a match (or prep, halfway or the finale, at up to 16x speed), from a new Play Test menu.
• Cinderspire polish, first round: the Medallion tier counts only fighters who stayed in until the lava or a fight took them, a short drop in connection no longer ends a fighter's match, the finale always settles the last roof, and the battleground timers show when a battleground is started from the Editor.
• Cinderspire's terraces now show their edges with a band of glowing ember crust, braziers light every stair head and ladder top, the crystals glow through their facets, and the cave fog is a warm haze that keeps distant fighters visible.
• Cinderspire polish, second round: the timers now count down to the flooding of the level you stand on, flood warnings go to the players they concern, a close finale on the roof always has a winner, terrace edges are marked in scorched stone with clear gaps at every stair and bridge, and the stair-head braziers stand beside the path.
• Cinderspire polish, third round: a tied finale is decided by the health each fighter has left, one player on two characters no longer counts as a contest, the timers warn you at thirty seconds when your own level is next, a player on the start platform but off the pads is told to step on one, the last match's result stays up as the next one gets ready, and being under the lava now reads as a deep crimson instead of a blinding red.
• Cinderspire: closed the gaps and holes in the arena's rock. Neighbouring cliff columns now share one cap edge, every column recess has a solid back wall, terrace tops overlap their edges, and pillar tops are one flush surface (the old hex tiles left thin dark cracks between them). A new crack sweep renders the arena from about 900 viewpoints to find what is left.
• Cinderspire: every bridge now lands on solid rock with its posts planted, and the rope ladders on the Stumps and Needles reach their ledges. Pillar tops and ledges were slightly too small, so bridge ends and ladder feet hung out over the lava.

Rewards

• The two players who salvaged the R155 subscriber reward Dreadhorn Skull Helm on build 340, before it gave back its Eternal Pattern, were mailed a new helm.

Calendar

• The Calendar Review page can now change the time of a listed event. Staff pick a start time, time zone and length, every date still to come moves to that time on its own day so it holds across a daylight-saving change, and the host gets a note with the new time. The event list also shows each series' next date instead of its first.
• The Calendar Review page now names the time zone it shows times in, marks each date CDT or CST, marks dates that have passed, and its preview card shows the next date instead of the first (eb34cc0c64).

Items

• Kettle Chowder, Doc's Special and Gerald's Bane from Smokehaven were added to the list of consumables the client loads, which they had been left out of (32f5fceb26).

Localization

• Caught up translations in all nine languages: the new fish and their trophies, the Crusader player houses, the new combination runes and reworded skill descriptions, house resizing prompts, the "Open to Town Residents" lot permission, new Options entries and Steam purchase messages. Four fished-up corked letters are now translated books, and four older books joined the Ukrainian set. A review pass corrected 2,098 lines, and conversations where two topics shared a typed word now answer both.

Siege Weapons

• The Smokehaven chandler sells the Cannonballs recipe and Cannonball Molds. The mold is a light single-use stackable like the other molds, so a stack of 90 no longer weighs 180. Cannonballs stay QA only while siege weapons are being tested.

Pets

• Grey wolves and brown bears in Highvale Outskirts can be tamed again with Tame Creature. Before, every one of them was refused as part of a quest. The small grey wolves there now say they are too young, like small wolves elsewhere. (ed26ca0d1e)

Boats

• Every playable map with an ocean now has a sea chart, so boats can sail there: 57 more maps, among them Port Harmony, Vertas, Blood River and Dysborg. Ten maps whose water is too shallow or has no floor under it, and the three overworld maps, stay without boats. A new coverage check fails when a map with an ocean is left uncharted without a reason.

Build pipeline

• The chaos release stopped in its first check after the new item classification id guard tried to read a file the check's partial checkout does not include. The guard now reads it from the commit being released, and the release was restarted.

Housing

• Offline play can now move, flip and resize a house from the lot sign. The Move House and Flip House buttons used to appear only online.
• The doors of the twelve Crusader Village homes hung on the wrong edge: on 26 of them the hinges were on the handle side. Every door now hangs on the edge opposite its handle and still opens into the house.
• House resizing for the Crusader Village homes now stops at 140% of their size.
• Crusader Village homes placed from a deed now start at 130% of their size. On a Village lot the House starts at 120% and the Large House at 110%, where the lot has no more room around the house's usual spot. Reset Position now keeps a resized home's size. (8bd6097c76)
• Search All My Stuff reads an item's "at X, Y, Z" from where it stands on the lot you are on. After a house was moved or restored from the Property Manager, rows showed the old coordinates and Set Compass Destination pointed at the spot the item used to be. Rows for lots elsewhere name the lot and its floor without coordinates.
• The lot deed upgrade menus on the lot sign and on a deed in your backpack now end each entry with the list of what that upgrade changes (size, tax, water lots, where it can be claimed, trading). An upgrade that only removes No Trade now reads "Changes: Tradeable" (reported in game by Professor Misery).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-29 is up: Five people in Castle Atos (Baozhai, Corwin, Mirka, Tomek and Vesna) each got a story, an errand and a recorded voice in nine languages. The twelve Crusader Village homes went on sale and their owners can now grow them by half again, stairs and lamps and pet paths included. Diving went in for testing, a week of fixes shipped to the test shard, and the build before it died of a single apostrophe. Listen or read the transcript (18 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Added two player suggestions from the forum to the Wishlist tracker: a new passive skill to mitigate the heavy-armor spellcasting fizzle penalty, and a developer-run monthly rare-loot contest with named, time-limited redeemable items.
• Mailed a Crusader house deed to each winner of the stream prize draw.

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Fishing

• Added eight new fish to catch, built from models already in the game: Wels Catfish and Walleye in northern fresh water after dark, Arowana and Golden Dorado in tropical fresh water, Redtail Catfish in swamps at night, Nurse Shark in tropical seas at night, the Great White Shark in northern seas (a tenth as common as the Tiger Shark) and the Humboldt Squid in any sea at night. Each has sized catches with a Fish Length, trophies, fillets and its own fishing achievement.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer how to claim Twitch Drops and what to do when the drop page still says Connect, the Bulwark Plate Chest recipe, Fabric Scrap, ingot molds, the gold and iron ring difference, the Lute recipe, lifesteal on a weapon, the oil clockwork creatures spray, where Avallon and Mystic Isle are, the areas of Vikland, the named dragons of Grunvald Shardfall, the pet attack keys, emotes on the hotbar, the town crier during a siege and turning a house in smaller steps. Her farming answers also list the current seed sellers.
• The Oracle can now answer how much regeneration Vanish gives, why Magic Warding weakens Dash and how to switch it off per deck, what a Quest Bark is, the current Lua add-on API version, the Locate Player Vendor Items window, inventory Favorites, how askadev works, getting an Oracle Confirmatory for a player town, and the ferries between the islands of Mistrendur.

Gathering

• Fixed an error build 340 logged for every loot sack and creature corpse, about 5,000 times in its first night. Emptying one could also leave it standing until its despawn timer instead of finishing right away. The cause was the fix that stopped players floating beside ore nodes and barrels.

Twitch Drops

• Viewers who linked Twitch on the community site while it briefly used our other Twitch app stay linked. The rewards service now accepts a link made through either app instead of dropping it at the first reward.
• Twitch showed every viewer Connect instead of Claim on the Spectator's Collection drops, even after linking. The game's Twitch Drops settings held our app ID with a trailing space, and the campaign kept that copy from when it was created, so Twitch never matched a linked account. The ID was corrected and the campaign was set up again with the same four rewards, running until November 25; Twitch now shows linked viewers as Connected. Drops claimed before the fix were hidden from us by the same mistake; they are now queued and arrive at each player's next login. Watch time from the first version of the campaign did not carry over, and drops already earned there can still be claimed on Twitch for a day.
• Fixed Twitch Drops claims that were never granted for some viewers: Twitch gives some entitlement ids a trailing padding character, and the drop worker refused those ids. 73 held claims are picked up again once the updated worker is installed, and land in the Rewards window at the player's next login. (1dbc560b5e)

Addons

• ShroudGetDeckLayout on a pasted deck code now names only runes the Skills window shows and items in the game's item list; any other card in a code reads an empty name. Your own decks read as before.

Skills

• The 22 specialization skill descriptions no longer tell players they can set a specialization skill to maintain, since that training mode was retired. Obsidian Specialization's older note now reads like the others. The fix covers English and all nine translations.
• Focus: magic summons cost less maximum focus as you train. Train Summoned Pet Health takes a quarter off at 100 and half at 200, Focus Specialization takes off more while you specialize, and no amount of training takes off more than half. Tamed pets are unchanged. Proposal card S16, requested by spainchaud. (bd55d37e7e)

Community Hub

• The Twitch rewards page on the Community Hub now checks whether Twitch counts a linked account as connected to Shroud of the Avatar, and shows a Reconnect on Twitch button when it does not. 22 accounts linked before the hub switched Twitch apps on 10-29 had not approved the right app, and each of those players got an in-game letter about it. Twitch Drops was requested by necronut.

Build

• The 545 MB decorations bundle that failed the edge check on builds 332 and 340 is now split into two files of about 270 MB. Any resource bundle that comes out over 480 MB is now split on the next build, so it stays under the 512 MB edge cache limit and delta patches again.
• The chaos release now checks that no two item classifications share an id before it starts building. A release failed at the server report step after hours of client builds because the new fish were made from copies of existing classifications that kept their original ids; the same check also runs on every commit and nightly.
• The server-report bake moved to the build box's second Linux agent. On the main agent it waited 46 to 92 minutes behind the Linux client build on each release, so Jenkins showed it at 103 to 150 minutes while the bake itself stayed at about 57; deploys then waited behind it. With no second agent online it falls back to the main one.
• Mac client builds moved from a laptop to a dedicated Mac mini build machine, so nightly Mac builds no longer depend on the laptop being home and awake. The build tree sits on a 4 TB NVMe drive, and the Unity license on the new machine renews itself daily the same way the Linux build box does.
• Chaos deploys had grown to 84-115 min while the deploy itself still took about 20. The extra time was spent waiting for the build box's single Jenkins executor, behind the nightly server-reports bake and behind a sim-host client rebuild. The server-reports bake moved to the box's second agent (579b590e9a), and the sim-host build drop now keeps whichever builds the chaos and QA channels are serving, so the backstop job no longer rebuilds a pruned one for 90 min (0d044eb7d4).
• Set up a new Windows build agent on a Bosgame mini PC: Windows 11, JDK 21, Visual Studio Build Tools and Unity 6000.6.6f1 with Windows and Linux build support. It is connected to Jenkins but takes no jobs until its project drive is attached.

Combat

• Mind Lock now adds more time as it is trained: 20 seconds at level 1, 30 at 50, 40 at 100 and 60 at 200, multiplied by Focus Specialization as before. The existing cap still stops repeated casts from holding a rune forever. (935f6108a7)
• The Highlight Ready Counterattacks option got a tooltip saying it also lights Aetheric Feedback on the combat bar for the few seconds after your own spell critical hit, and a test now keeps that glow working (Focus proposal S13).
• Focus Specialization now raises its mastery rating as fast as every other specialization: 1.0 at level 80 and 1.25 at 100, up from 0.8 and 1.0. Mind Lock, Mind Wipe, Aetheric Feedback and Spellbinder Stance all gain from it. At Focus Specialization 100, Mind Lock adds 45 seconds where it added 40, Mind Wipe’s cooldown drops from about 20 seconds to under 18, and Aetheric Feedback’s critical window grows from 6 to 6.5 seconds, which its tooltip now says in every language. (c4a43a7cc8)
• Focus proposal S15: hovering Focus on your own character sheet now shows a focus ledger. Pets and summons, and buffs like Aetheric Feedback, are named in the maximum instead of folded into Other bonuses, and a new section lists regeneration in and out of combat, rune cost changes from skills like Inner Calm, the deck swap price per changed gear slot, and sprint cost per second, each taken from the same calculation the game charges with.
• Spellbinder Stance now lasts while the caster walks; running or sprinting still ends every part of it, and the stance icon's tooltip says so. Requested by Gatsu. Focus proposal S12.
• For 5 seconds after Mind Wipe deals a new hand, a right-click on one rune now swaps it for the next rune in the deck, once and at no cost. The runes that can still be swapped glow pale violet; locked slots and combined stacks are left alone. The swapped rune goes back to the deck with no cooldown, and the Mind Wipe description and rune card say so in all ten languages. (f73ab88fa4)
• Tranquility now makes running cost less focus as it is trained: an eighth less at level 100 and a quarter less at 200, in any armor. It is the first skill to touch the running discount, which stacks with the raw banana and stays capped so running can be free but never refills focus. From the Focus proposals (S14).
• New Focus rune Eidetic Memory, learned after Mind Lock: cast in combat, it plays the last rune you cast from your hand again without the card, for 150% of that rune's focus cost, and leaves your deck and that rune's cooldown alone. Combos, channels and reaction runes are never remembered. It is the first of the school's six never-built skills to be built. From the Focus proposals (S18).
• Mental Reflex is a new Focus passive after Inner Calm. In combat, a dodge, parry, block or critical hit taken draws the next rune that fits into an empty slot of your hand, once every 6 seconds at first and every 2 seconds at skill 200. Full hands and locked slots are left alone.

Movement

• Characters no longer stay stuck in the falling pose beside stone house walls and their ledges. The edge fix from the day before missed some of these spots. Now a character held in the air for a quarter second slips off whatever holds it, or steps up onto the ledge if the way off is blocked (2ff1f8246d, #15414).

Audio

• Skeleton monsters have a new hollow, rattling voice for their combat and death lines; the old undead voice still sounded like an ordinary man. The Pumpkin Head, a skeleton, no longer speaks with a friendly human voice. Liches, zombies and ghosts are unchanged. The new clips go live with the next voice publish.

Leaderboards

• When several players tie for the last ranked place on a board that ranks by more than one column, every one of them is now published at that place, in game and on the leaderboard pages. Before, the server kept only the first of them by list order, so which tied players showed there depended on the other columns.

Tooltips

• The effect icon for a heal over time now says how much health each pulse restores, the same way the spell tooltip does. Cocoon of Night, Soothing Rain and Potion of Regeneration used to give only the pulse rate and duration. Effects that restore focus over time got the same fix.

Creatures

• A creature's pull, knockback or throw no longer carries a player out of a zone through an exit; only walking out does, and a player thrown past an exit is set back just inside. Creatures that wander into a zone exit now head home. The Ancient dragon in Northwest Blackblade Mountains had been standing in the southeast entrance and pulling the players fighting it out to the overworld. (43ce86c2d5)

Towns

• A town governor or Steward can now tick Open to Town Residents in a lot's Lot Permissions window. Everyone on the town's Resident list then enters that lot as a Guest, past Block Doors, and can use its bank boxes and buy from its player vendors. Requested through the in-game Oracle.

Items

• Four books that NPCs give out for free (Alchemical Study of Dragon Eggs, Ways To Acquire Crowns of the Obsidians, Framed Maps of New Britannia, Doctrine of the Cataclysm) no longer sell to merchants; the NPCs still hand them out. The build check that flagged them also stopped counting offline-only merchant stock as buyable, which cleared six false warnings on storehouse containers.
• The Dreadhorn Skull Helm from the R155 subscriber reward now salvages into Eternal Pattern: Dreadhorn Skull Helm, which Reshape Leather Helm accepts. Before this it salvaged into leather scrap only and the look was lost. (cfe0f5a501)
• Mutton Stew now also adds 10% Summoned Death Creature Damage for its two hours, so summoned skeletons, skeleton mages and liches hit harder after you eat it. Before, it raised only their health. A player spotted it after the Death Summoner gem fix. (3b11833e44)

UI

• After player feedback, Play Online and Play Offline on the title screen now stand close beside the hooded Avatar on every screen shape. On wide and ultrawide monitors they used to drift out toward the edges, with the login box far out on the left; a wider screen now shows more of the background art and moves nothing. A matching panel above Play Offline shows the offline character you last played, the Single Player difficulty, and Select Avatar and Find My Offline Characters links. With a character named there, Play Offline goes straight into the world as that character, and the loading message appears over the panel instead of over the Avatar.
• The lettered title screen buttons now brighten smoothly under the mouse or with keyboard and gamepad focus, with a thin gold line under Play Online or Play Offline. They used to grow a little in a snap. In a narrow game window the login box no longer covers the two Play buttons.

Testing

• Added a test that checks the item name index lines up row for row, so a hand-added row can no longer give every later item its neighbour's name (bb5d8e7550).

Deploy

• Wrote the chaos promote runbook and patch notes for build 343, now on qa: no database migration is due, the patch edge check passes on all three platforms again now that oversized bundles are split, and the security preflight shows no failures. The build carries the November login reward box name fix that missed 340.
• Build 343 went live on chaos at 19:56 UTC and on Steam right after. It carries the November login reward box name in every language, the Focus school pass, eight new fish, Crusader homes up to 140% and town lots open to residents.

Focus

• Added the first seven Focus combination runes, each made by combining a Focus rune with another school's rune in the combat hand: New Moon (Mind Wipe and Vanish), Inner Sun (Mind Wipe and Searing Ray), Rimehold (Mind Lock and Ice Arrow), Warded Line (Mind Lock and Testudo), Anvil Trance (Spellbinder Stance and Berserk), Spring Tide (Aetheric Feedback and Shooting Star) and Foreseen Stroke (Aetheric Feedback and Riposte). Focus had no combos before; nineteen more are coming.
• Added five more Focus combination runes that work on the combat hand itself: Phantom Quiver (Mind Wipe and Rapid Fire) discards your hand and fires an ammunition-free arrow for each rune discarded, Empty Hand (Mind Wipe and Flurry) keeps the hand empty for a second per unlocked slot while your attacks speed up, Read the Bones (Mind Wipe and Chaos Bolt) lets the discarded hand pick the bolt's outcome, Still Point (Aetheric Feedback and Deflect) turns each block into focus and rune time, and Calm Before the Storm (Spellbinder Stance and Passive Stance) banks focus that is paid out when the stance ends.
• Added six Focus combination runes: four Spellbinder Stance forms (Windborne Mind with Dash rewards casting on the move, Immovable Mind with Torpor roots you as a knockback-proof casting stance, Undying Mind with Revenant Stance lets drains heal against undead, Mindforged Plate with Absorb Impacts guards heavy armor against magic and lifts its focus strain) and two with Aetheric Feedback (Flashpoint pours half your focus into a fireball capped at four times a Fireball's damage, Wellspring is an Ice Field that feeds your focus while you stand in it).
• Added four Mind Lock combination runes: Unwavering Gaze (Mind Lock and Judgment) is a beam that survives two hits and freezes your hand's timers while it holds, Full Draw (Mind Lock and Piercing Shot) draws a bow for up to three seconds for a harder shot and lets it fly early if you move or are hit, Blind Spot (Mind Lock and Distract) lets your next Sneak Attack or Sap land as if from behind, and Set Spear (Mind Lock and Puncture) readies a polearm that strikes the first foe to step into reach.
• Added three Focus combination runes for healers and Moon casters: Held Mercy (Mind Lock and Healing Ray) places a heal on an ally that lands by itself the moment their health drops below about a third, Overflow (Aetheric Feedback and Healing Burst) turns healing an ally had no room for into a short damage-soaking shield, and Lucid Dream (Mind Lock and Moon Beams) keeps enemies asleep for as long as you hold your concentration.
• Added Memento Mori (Eidetic Memory and Corpse Explosion), the last of the twenty-six Focus combination runes: it explodes the place your last kill fell, with no corpse needed, for a quarter of that creature's health up to about four Corpse Explosions. Every Focus rune now combines with runes from eighteen other schools, and the Oracle's Focus guide lists them all.

Boats

• Rowboats float higher in the water, so the sea no longer shows over their floorboards; seats, oars and the way aboard moved up with the hull (ffd4326cbd).

Stream Desk

• Added team comments to Stream Desk: every Twitch and in-game question now has a comment thread any developer on the desk can post to, to claim a question or leave an answer for whoever is on camera. The live feed waits while someone is typing a comment.

Housing

• Applying a saved decoration layout no longer skips trees and plants placed on the ground or a floor; before, each one could fail and leave a gap in the lot.
• The twelve Crusader Village homes (House, Courtyard House, Terrace House, Cottage, Veranda House and Large House, each in a Desert and a Stone look) are now in the Crown Store at 1000 crowns each, under Homes, Village. Each listing has a tile picture, a front and a back picture and a short description of the house.
• Search All My Stuff now names the lot, its size and its floor (Basement or Dungeon) for items inside lot containers, where the row used to read only "Wolves Den (lot container)". Rows on a lot also give the X, Y, Z coordinates of the item or its container, and Set Compass Destination points at the container itself when you are upstairs on that lot. Requested by Justyn.
• The tablecloth on the Cherrywood New You Pavilion decoration and the Valentine's plate of treats got their earlier look back after an art pack import had changed the shared shaders they use: the tablecloth pattern was stretched and the treats were lit differently.
• House resizing: the twelve Crusader Village homes can be made up to 150% of their size, in 10% steps, from the lot sign's Move House mode with the decoration scale keys (Alt+X and Alt+Z by default). It is free for the owner and works while nothing is placed on the house.
• A resized house grows only as far as its lot holds it, and every Crusader home reaches 150% on a Town lot. Its stairs, doors, lamps and decoration surfaces grow with it, pets follow their usual paths through it, and Reset Position takes it back to its original size.

Oracle

• The Oracle now answers 21 more questions players asked her this week: where to hunt skeletons at every level (private areas and PvP zones included), where the Myrkdraugr is, stacking identical runes, finding a decoration that vanished from a lot, the coral reef fishing finds, levelling Alchemy, the Sorcery Gem, the Sylvan bow strings, the Wood Rasp, Maple Tree Bark, the Aether Potion of Focus recipe, the Plague Ward, Enter the Necropolis and whether ABC sheet music plays several voices. Two potion recipes she quoted with plain flasks now say Hardened Empty Flasks.

UI

• The compass at the top of the screen now follows Lock HUD Positions like the rest of the HUD. While the lock is on, the compass stays where it is; untick the lock to drag it. Right-click peeking and the Compass Markers menu work either way, and the option's tooltip now lists the compass. (#15427)
• The line under the zone name on the compass now matches your Matchmaking Preference: it says Party, Private or Open. It used to say "Private" for Party and showed nothing for Open. It can still be hidden with Show Scene Access Mode in Options. (fd82726791)
• The Focus tree: Train Summoned Pet Health, Resistance and Damage have their own icons, a heart, a shield and three claw marks, instead of sharing the Focus Specialization eye. Both the Classic and Modern icon sets have them. This finishes card S2 of the Focus proposals.
• The damaged and broken gear warning icons in the upper right now lead to the fix. A left click opens the character sheet (pet gear opens the pet sheet), and a right click opens a Repair menu that repairs each listed item with a matching kit from the bag. Clicking them used to open the Hints window even with Show Hints off; the encumbrance icon now respects that option too.

Addons

• Add-on Lua API 56, requested by Aeva for deck exporters: ShroudCurrentDeck("alternate") reads the alternate deck, ShroudGetDeckCode returns the Share Deck code without using the clipboard, and ShroudGetDeckLayout reads a deck or any pasted deck code as its runes with skill ids plus the ten hand slots in order, each marked locked, assigned or open.

Launcher

• Launcher v66: the line under the progress bar that names the file being downloaded shows in full again. Since v64 it showed only the tops of its letters during every update. The window is 40 pixels taller and the bottom buttons stay pinned to the bottom. Reported by Elene Sali. (ccf147cd34)

Quests

• Hiring Samael or Kardan Marbane as your Necropolis guide in Ardoris no longer adds "fired" to their topic list. Clicking through the topics right after the hire dismissed the guide, while the journal still said he would be waiting at the Necropolis Barrens. Typing the word still dismisses a guide on purpose. (4ba9c87294)
• Captain Bearfield in Blood River Outskirts takes The Cleansing Manifesto again for characters still carrying a warrant copy from an earlier run of the quest; she had been giving no answer at all. Her hand-in window now asks for the copy of the manifesto the player actually has, and Phineas Drumplemouth can be served the warrant past an old copy. (#15409, 62130af140)
• Baozhai, the guard at the front gate of Castle Atos, now has a story. Her voice is so quiet that nobody stops when she shouts "Halt", and she will tell you about her training in Ardoris under Captain Cugel, the bandits who surrendered to her, her lessons with the Town Crier, and Captain Stanley in Soltown. Ask her about halt for a demonstration. Her new lines are voiced and translated.
• New errand at Castle Atos: once you have carried Stanley's greeting to Baozhai, she asks you to take him a sealed letter. She wrote it in capitals so he would finally hear her. Stanley reads it in Soltown and sends an answer back, and Baozhai rewards you when you bring it.
• The two beggars in Castle Atos now have names and stories. Tomek swept the castle's streets for twenty-two years until the cleanliness elementals took over the work, and he would like a job at the stables but can't bring himself to ask Wendelin. Ask him for help and he sends you to her, and Wendelin now answers when you ask about Tomek. He pays you once she agrees.
• Vesna, the other Castle Atos beggar, sold fish in the market until a fever cost her the strength to carry the baskets and she sold her stall to pay the healer. Bring her one salmon and she pays you for it. Both beggars still ask for coins, and each tells you their name once you give a coin or take their errand. Their lines are voiced and translated into all nine languages.

Combat

• Effects that change Move Speed now show the change as a percentage of your on-foot run speed, the same way Move Rate effects do. The Wolf Tendon Attack slow read "-0.1 Move Speed" beside Hamstring's "-10% Move Rate"; it now reads "-1.8% Move Speed", and Sprint reads "+35.5% Move Speed". Only the display changed.
• Chaos Bolt, Obsidian Onslaught and the Chaos Bomb combo cast again while carrying more than your capacity. Only spells that always teleport the caster, such as Blink and Chaotic Step, are refused for weight; Chaos Bolt's rare step outcome now says why it did nothing when over capacity. (#15387)
• One-hit damage debuffs that stay on the buff bar, such as a lich's Burning, now show their damage line in red when hovered. The line used the skill tooltip's colouring, which treats damage as good because on a skill you are the one dealing it.
• Efficient Swapping: the Focus skill Quick Swapping is now called Efficient Swapping in every language. It always lowered the focus cost of swapping decks in combat and never made the swap faster, and its tooltip now says both, plus the old name for one release. Tranquility and the Taming skill Concentration keep their names; the Oracle now explains that they are two different skills. Requested by Xander Xavier and Agra.
• Focus tooltips now state what each trade costs. Spellbinder Stance names its 20 damage avoidance and 20 damage resistance penalty, says the penalties and its spell critical hit bonus last the first half of the stance, and says one step ends all of it. Aetheric Feedback says its bonus needs a spell critical hit in the last 4 seconds, about 2 seconds longer per 100 levels of Focus Specialization. Focus Specialization lists the four runes it improves. Mind Wipe says wiped runes and combos come back with no cooldown and locked slots keep their rune, and its rune card now prints that line where it showed only an effectiveness percentage. Requested by Gatsu and Filter Bubble Algorithm.
• The six Focus skills that were planned and never built (Higher Consciousness, Consumption, Eidetic Memory, Mental Reflex, Mindfulness and Summoned Pet Taunt) are now recorded in the game code as never built, with their places and their five icons held for the revival cards and a test that guards them. The deck swap icon the card listed as an orphan is in use by Swap Deck. This finishes card S6 of the Focus proposals.
• Show Rune Timers on Combat Hotbar, a new option under Options, Interface, Hotbar, puts the seconds left on every rune in the combat hand; the number turns amber as the rune starts to slide out. It is off by default. Mind Lock now shows the seconds it added across each rune it reached, for as long as the glow lasts, with the option on or off. Focus proposal S4.

Gathering

• The Meticulous Collection count on the harvest bar now goes up when a bonus swing lands. It used to count each bonus pass as it started, so it read x1 right after the ordinary opening swing and showed the full count with one swing still to go. How much a node pays is unchanged.
• A harvest with no Meticulous Collection bonus pull now says in chat what it gathered and the producer experience it paid. The experience was always paid, but with nothing showing it, players read it as missing (b2660055b0).

Images

Housing

• Backpacks set down on a lot, such as the Ladybug Backpack, now show how full they are on hover ("Items: 12 / 150"), the same line placed chests already had, for players allowed to put items in them.
• Letters the game mails you can now be placed as decorations: Tax Credit Granted slips, vendor sale and order notices, lot and house sale notices, refunds, and tip jar and prize letters. They arrive as a Receipt that sits on a table like a sheet of paper and opens its mail text when clicked. Letters written by players still cannot be placed. Receipts already in mailboxes will be converted after the update. (80546d4051)

Achievements

• The recipe achievements (Well Read, Widely Read, Recipe Scholar, Recipe Loremaster) and the Master Crafters Recipes Learned column now count recipes learned before the achievements arrived in August. The count catches up with the character's recipe book shortly after login, and each new recipe still adds one. A character with 1,276 recipes had read 50.

Movement

• Walking along the edge of a planter box, a low wall or a crate no longer leaves your character hanging just off the ground in a falling pose until you back away. A character caught partly over an edge now slips off onto the ground beside it, and walking straight at a knee-high ledge still steps up onto it. Since build 332 the narrower ground check that drops you off dock edges had stopped seeing these edges while the character was still resting on them.
• Added diving, for testing on the QA server. In the Volcano Archipelago, pressing Q while swimming dives under the water; Space rises, Q sinks, and swimming forward follows the camera's tilt. A breath bar above the hotbar counts down a minute of air and refills in five seconds at the surface, and a diver who runs out of air starts to drown, losing a tenth of their health every two seconds until they reach air. Under the water the view closes in to a blue-green fog with drifting motes and no sky. Both keys can be rebound. Diving stays switched off on chaos (d172ac2d33).

Items

• The Death Summoner gem now also adds 10% Summoned Death Creature Damage, so summoned skeletons, skeleton mages and liches hit harder with it. Before, it raised only their health. (c5a27a0c36)
• A Teleport to Friend scroll is now used up when you travel with it. The scroll was taken after the trip had already started, which could fail and leave it in your pack. Creature spawns also stop quietly, with no error, when the connection drops while a creature is loading.
• A consumable that casts the same rune as another item now uses itself up when used. Before, it spent the other item instead, or refused to work when you carried none of it, and two such lures could not both sit on the combat bar.

Networking

• Wandering creatures on the Novia overworld could stand still for everyone in the zone for almost ten minutes. They now move and start their encounters again within about 45 seconds (#15431, ad951ef99a).

Tools

• Client smoke test: a new step crafts a Pine Handle at the Castle Atos carpentry station and salvages a lute there, the test client now always runs in English whatever language the install is set to, and the Oracle window closes after its answer so it no longer covers later screenshots.
• Grant mail can now mark the items it sends as no trade, for gifts meant to stay with one character. The script only queues such a mail once the live game servers know the flag, so a mail can never go out tradeable by mistake. (2647699e76)
• Offline Play of the Gaia prototype islands in the Editor no longer draws the scene twice. Entering Play straight into one let the game's camera rig take the island's hidden authoring camera, about 2,200 extra draw calls a frame in the Volcano Archipelago's cove; the rig now always drives its own camera, and the authoring camera is switched off as the island loads (6a7dc2c167).

Travel

• The "Enter K'rul" side of the gate by K'rul's Blood Bay exit now moves you inside to where Blood Bay arrivals land. Before, clicking it did nothing.

Content

• The girl on the lower cargo walkway in Castle Atos is now Mirka, the porter's daughter. She counts the sacks that come off the hooks for her papa Bohdan, talks about her mama at sea and a crate that squeaked, and calls out a few idle lines. Her lines are voiced and translated into all nine languages, and she still answers every topic the other Castle Atos children know.

NPCs

• Corwin, a guard on the stone walk beside the brazier in Castle Atos, now has his own story. He once meant to be an exotic dancer billed as Corwin Lightfoot, until an arrow to the knee the night before his audition in Ardoris ended it. Ask him to show you a spin and he does one. His lines are voiced and translated into all nine languages; the other Castle Atos guards are unchanged.

Maps

• On the website's World map, the 90 player towns on Mistrendur now stand where their towns are placed on the overworld, as Novia and Hidden Vale towns already did; before, each one sat on the centre of the hex it is entered from.

Twitch Drops

• Checked the Twitch Drops delivery service on the test shard after the build 332 update. All four Spectator's Collection rewards are found in the build and the service reports healthy. The campaign starts once it is switched on in the Twitch console.
• Fixed earned Twitch drops showing Connect instead of Claim: the Community Hub now links Twitch accounts through the app registered for the game. Anyone who linked before needs to click Connect once more and approve with the same Twitch account; watch progress is kept.
• Built Watch Rewards for Twitch (switched off for now): viewers who link Twitch on the Community Hub earn minutes on their own while they are in the chat of a participating Shroud of the Avatar stream, and each reward they reach goes to the in-game Rewards window with nothing to claim. Streamers join by making the rewards bot a moderator in their chat and earn their own rewards while linked viewers watch. Requested by necronut.

Localization

• Caught up the translation backlog: 576 English lines that had no translation are now translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese. They cover the newest loading tips, boat and grappling hook controls, the compass marker menu, item and character names, journal entries, three ferry captains and a few skills and titles.

Vendors

• The vendor window's My Listings and My Buy Orders tab counts no longer grow each time the vendor's list is refreshed, and the "no buy orders" line now shows after a refresh once your last order there is cancelled.
• A player vendor at its listing limit takes a restock again. Dropping more of an item you already list there showed "You may not list an item for sale at this time" instead of opening the restock, though a restock takes no new slot.

Skills

• The Elixir Receptive and Elixir Extension tooltips now say that only one of the two can train at a time and that setting one to Training sets the other to Unlearning. The old note told players to do that by hand, which the game already did for them, and was missing a word. In the Skills window each of the two shows a small copy of the other one’s icon. The new text is in all ten languages. Focus proposal card S5, reported by Barugon.
• Retired the Maintaining training mode. It had worked the same as Not Training since skill decay was removed, so a Specialization skill outside your two schools is now set to Not Training, and skills that were Maintaining show as Not Training with all their experience kept. The Oracle and the loading tips were updated to match.

Character Sheet

• The character sheet picture is full size again. The tall-gear change from the day before measured the avatar too tall and drew every character at about half size; wings and tall hats now shrink the picture only slightly (1e1c8f27c4, #15487).

Chat

• With Talk Like a Pirate on, the names of linked items from bags, vendors and recipes now come through unchanged; before, the item name inside the link was turned into pirate speak too. Pirate's Grog now plays the same drinking animation as Cat's Grace.

Sailing

• On the Great Sea a narrow strait now keeps a channel wide enough to sail. Ships leaving Central Brittany's harbour northward stopped on open-looking water, because the safety margin off each shore took up most of a 150 m strait; that margin now shrinks with the width of the water, and lone sea rocks keep a smaller one (300c133084). Still switched off everywhere.
• Rowboats can now be rowed from their middle seat. The click spots on every boat seat and on the rowboat oars sat flush with the plank under them, so the cursor found the hull instead and nothing lit up; they now stand just above the seat and light the boat when hovered. Pressing A or D on a passenger seat with an oar in each hand now says to move to the middle seat, the rowboat has lost its rope ladders, and the three scenery rowboats on the Volcano Archipelago quay and jetty are real rowboats. Reported by knightrider (980a853a43). Boats are still on the QA server only.
• Ship cannons now stand in the ships' own gun ports. The galleons' guns used to sit in a generic row on the main deck behind the rail while the square gun ports were a deck below; each ship is now measured, and the gun stands on the deck behind each port with its muzzle in the opening, reached by that deck's ladder. The pirate, haunted and shogun galleons carry six, the smaller galleon four. The two baron ships have no gun ports in their art and carry none until they get some. Reported by knightrider (1b3577c828). Ships and their guns are still on the QA server only.

Fishing

• Planned an overhaul of fish tanks: tank fish that swim on their own (each species its own way, tail beat matched to speed, resting at night and coming to the glass), seven new tanks including a Grand Aquarium, a Koi Pond and a Lava Tank, a water and lighting pass with caustics and bubbles, and giant fish to catch in particular waters and hours, with juveniles to raise in the big tanks.

Operations

• Build 340 went live on chaos and Steam, the first chaos update since build 332 on 22 October; the patch notes list what players will notice. During the restart the Penmawr Island map data was moved to the new sheet, so explored areas carry over, and 555,389 game-written letters (sale notices, refunds, tax credits) were turned into receipts that can be placed as decorations. Build 339 never shipped: one item file held an unescaped apostrophe, and the item catalog check now refuses that.

Radio

• The Desk's Radio window is open to everyone now that chaos runs build 340: The Royal Jukebox and New Britannia Herald Radio play on the website, with what is on the air, what plays next, and song requests paid in gold as the last character played. The Desk was updated to build 340 in the same pass, so its Deck Building lessons use the new rune descriptions.

Books

• Read Aloud re-recorded for 1 book whose words changed since their last recording: Baozhai's Sealed Letter.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-27 is up: For ten days the launcher filed crash reports about games that were running perfectly well, and our own triage believed every one of them. A letter in Solace Bridge could only ever be found by one player, because the first person to take it took it from everybody. And the sea large enough to sail around Novia was built, looked at and built again sixteen times in a single day, including the moment we decided every town on its shore should be a third of life size. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Tools

• The dark Pirates Island cliff material on the Volcano Archipelago now uses the same shader as the rest of that art pack.
• Imported three art packs for world building: Tribal Totems (totems, bonfire, torches, tusks and ground textures), the Cobweb cubemap shader set with two new skies, and a set of coral seamless terrain layers.

Sailing

• The Great Sea scene was polished over about thirty rounds of review shots taken from a ship's deck. Its towns are now miniatures at a third of life size, seen from about 100 m out or farther, with quays, moored ships and lighthouses. The land has woods, heath, scrub and fields above cliffs, beaches and surf. The sea reflects the sky and the coasts and changes with the weather, from a flat calm in fog to a storm with whitecaps, and the sky dome now covers the whole map. Still switched off everywhere.
• On the Great Sea a town's landing spot no longer stops the ship, and ships no longer run into it as if it were solid. Sailing through it opens a small window naming the towns there, each with a button to go ashore, and the ship keeps sailing under the helmsman's hand unless they pick one; the window closes once the ship is past, or with Sail on. Still switched off everywhere.

Vendors

• The vendor window's order tab is now called My Buy Orders. Its left list is headed Items You Can Order, and while you have no buy orders at that vendor a line under Your Orders says so and tells you how to place one. A player had read the list of orderable items as orders placed in their name.
• Restocking a player vendor listing that sells as one lot now starts with Add to your listing cleared, so dropping more of the same item makes a separate listing unless you tick it. Before, a seller who typed their usual bundle price ended up with 11,000 lemons in one listing at the price meant for 1,000. Listings sold a few at a time still start ticked, and a restock priced lower per item than the listing now shows a warning. (#15257)

Images

Rendering

• Removed the extra full-screen pass added last week against the black flashes on the Linux client (#14438). It cost GPU time on every frame and players still saw the flashes with it on.
• Fixed the black streaks that flashed across the screen on the native Linux client, worst with Temporal antialiasing (#14438). One broken pixel was kept by the antialiasing and smeared from frame to frame; the antialiasing and the final colour step now discard it. The reporter narrowed it down by testing each antialiasing setting.

Tools

• Fixed an error the Unity Editor logged for every scene light after a script reload.

Client

• Cleared 48 compiler warnings in the Unity 6 client: obsolete engine calls replaced, unused inspector fields quieted and nine damaged script metadata files repaired. Chat and text box keys behave as before.

PvP

• Picking up your own trap no longer cancels the next trap you set or disarm when the server answers the pickup late.

Leaderboards

• Boards that rank by more than one column (Experience, Farmers, Slayers, Recruiters and others) now list the true top 100 for the chosen Rank By, in game, on the leaderboards page, on the player site and on the Desk. Rows past 100 used to belong to another columns top 100 and showed rank numbers that were not real ranks, so a character could appear at 124 one day and be gone the next.

Combat

• Combat decks can now carry your pet gear. In the deck builder, set Pet Gear to Follows Deck on a deck with Linked Equipment and the collar, toy and accessory you are wearing are saved with it, so swapping to that deck swaps your pet's gear as well as your own. Decks start on Stays On, which leaves pet gear alone as before. (0e5632faf0)

Crafting

• With "Keep patterns from salvage" unticked, the item tooltip's Salvage Components list now keeps the pattern line at 0% and adds a note under the list saying that ticking the box at the crafting table is what gives the chance. Before, the line was removed, so the tooltip no longer showed that the item could give a pattern.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer how to unlock Summon Phoenix and Summon Fire Elemental, where to get a Lich Skull and the Ring of the Freshwater Angler, which Meticulous Collection level gives each bonus collection, where the Guild Registrar is in each town, where the Scarecrow boss is, what water a player town has without a statue, whether Tax Credit can be withdrawn, how pet critical damage bonuses add up, and what the website Desk Conversationalist does.

Combat

• Sword of Speed: its +1 Double Slash Attack Count works again. While you wield the sword, Double Slash lands a third guaranteed hit and costs double focus. An August cleanup had removed that hit by mistake, which left the bonus doing nothing.
• Fire, Water and Air Elementals and the kobold archers and mages in The Breach no longer back away from a melee player for the whole fight. A ranged creature with a player at its side now steps back at most once every few seconds and otherwise attacks from where it stands; before, it kept retreating, never hit the player beside it, and pulled the camps it ran through into the fight.

Housing

• New decorations: 15 Tribal Totems, poles and stake frames hung with ram, stag and beast skulls, horns, red rags, banners, feathers and bound stones, from 1.5 to 3.5 m tall. They stand on the ground outside or on a house floor, and seven lean a few degrees so a row of them looks hand-planted. No merchant, drop or recipe offers them yet; for now the tester tools make them.
• 32 new decorations in the Crown Store: twelve carved Gothic, Eldritch and Necromancer's urns that hold 150 items each (200 crowns) and sixteen ornate chests that hold 300 (400 crowns), with lids that swing open on the lidded ones, plus two new Dungeon Waygate arches (500 crowns) and two new Dungeon Entrance arches (1000 crowns) with a swirling portal fitted inside each arch.
• The Miniature Ballista, a two-foot model of a siege ballista, joins the R155 subscriber reward. Once a player is within 25 meters it turns to point its bolt at the nearest player, pet or creature, and it turns back to its placed facing when everyone leaves.

Combat

• Fixed player-set traps hitting far too hard: a trap's strength now grows in ten steps with the setter's Set Trap skill. Before the fix, Bear Traps bit for up to 6,700 and Powder Kegs burned for over 12,000 a tick. At full skill both now deal 250 to 750 per hit.

Moderation

• Renaming an item no longer refuses ordinary names built from everyday words that also have a slang meaning. A chest named "Dump Trunk II" was refused with "It contains profanity." because the name screen read trunk and dump as crude slang. It now reads such words by their plain meaning and treats a trailing number or Roman numeral as a number. Names with real swear words are still refused. Item, pet, guild and plaque names the screen blocked by mistake can now be allowed from the staff review page, which until now only allowed character names.

Items

• The Tribal Totems are on their way to players. The Horned Pole Tribal Totem is the November 2026 login reward and the Antler Pole Tribal Totem is the R155 subscriber reward.
• The Tribal Totems Crown Store bundle was withdrawn before release. The thirteen totems it held stay GM/tester only; the November 2026 login reward keeps the Horned Pole Tribal Totem and the R155 subscriber reward keeps the Antler Pole Tribal Totem.
• The Dreadhorn Skull Helm, the horned skull helm added last week, is now in the R155 subscriber reward beside the Antler Pole Tribal Totem. It stays out of the Crown Store and off every merchant; the Emberveil Horn Mask stays GM/tester only.
• The Locking Emote is now in the November 2026 login reward beside the Horned Pole Tribal Totem, and the Running Man Emote is in the R155 subscriber reward. Using either item teaches that dance.

UI

• Character sheet: the Tools button now stays just under the right-hand column of equipment slots at every window size. On a window taller than the smallest it used to slide down with the stats box and leave a gap under the slots. (#15353)
• In the Compass Markers menu, unticking Exits and Entrances now hides only the ways in and out of the zone. In Jotungrund it had also been hiding Explorer's Camp, the Plateaus, High Peak and the ice cave and crevasse entrances. Those now sit under Places, along with other cave mouths and teleport pads that keep you in the same zone. (c5adf546cd)
• The character picture on the character sheet and the Examine sheet now pulls back to show tall gear in full, reported by Rinaldi. Clockwork Wings, White Feather Wings, tall plumed helms and wizard hats had their tops cut off at the top edge. Characters without tall gear keep their current size. (28c4646880, #15381)
• Compass Markers menu: the boxes are re-sorted the way a tester suggested. Destinations is now Directions and Beacons, and Places is split into Notable NPCs (town criers, banks, trainers, merchants, the Oracle, registrars) and Landmarks. On the overworld, town entrances and adventure area entrances each get their own box. Unticking Quests now keeps a place the quest points at on the compass, in plain white. (7692f1fd64, #15385)
• Names and chat bubbles over characters are no longer cut off by shop signs, awnings and lanterns standing beside them. The game now decides whether a name is behind something for the whole name at once: a prop over part of it leaves it whole, a name that is mostly covered fades, and a character fully behind a wall still has their name hidden. (e5dc2b1f82, #15345)

Crafting

• The recipe tooltip has a new layout. Each ingredient is a heading with its count on the right, still green, teal or red for carried, lot supply or short. A slot that takes a choice of materials lists each one on its own line as "Maple: +5% Base Melee and Ranged Damage", with percentage bonuses in green and flat bonuses in blue. The tier, the chances and the crafting experience figures are coloured so they are quick to find, and the tooltip is wider so most material lines fit on one line.

Maps

• The Penmawr Island map shows the whole island. The old picture stopped at the edge of the island's ground, so the cliffs along its south and west sides were cut off at every zoom and could not be panned into view. The map is a new capture framed on the island with sea on every side. Areas players uncovered carry over to the new picture, and an account that charted the whole island keeps it fully charted, the new edges included (454fd0e4df, #15350).
• The area map stops zooming in when the window still shows about 75 m of ground across its shorter side. The old limit was the same for every picture whatever ground it covered, so standard zones and towns zoomed in to about 50 m across and the smallest maps to a few metres. Large zones zoom as before (454fd0e4df, #15350).

Gameplay

• Walking into a smashed wooden crate no longer leaves your character standing in the air on the broken boards or hopping on and off them, and a smashed barrel no longer gives you a top to stand on. Both now break into low debris you walk through. Reported in Etceter Crag Mines (4b4fe54ee3, #15288).

Gathering

• Running into a gold ore node could leave your character resting on the bottom edge of the rock, slightly above the floor, and standing in the air at its narrow ends. Your character now slides back down onto the floor beside any resource node or barrel (#15283, 52cf1d855c).

Fishing

• The fish picture on the Themed fishing reel meter now turns by mirroring, so it stays right side up facing either way. A player on Windows saw it swim upside down when it faced right. (31b208cd93, #15324)

Bard

• Looked into a report that a party member's Elysian Illumination puts a bard's instrument away. No cause turned up in the code, so the client now notes in its log how each instrument was put away and what had just landed on the player; testers are trying to reproduce it (#15393).

Emotes

• Added a new kind of teachable emote, Re-Teachable after 3 months. It spreads like a Re-Teachable emote, by trade or by dancing it with someone through /partner, but a player can only teach it once they have known it for 3 months, and the player they teach starts their own 3 months. The Locking Emote and the Running Man Emote are the first two. The Emotes window shows the date each one becomes teachable, and dragging one into a trade before then says when it can be taught.

Boats

• Boats stay on the QA shard only: on chaos the character sheet's Tools grid no longer shows the Grapnel slot, and /boat and /setsail answer like any unknown command (9da6f6c95e).

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-26 is up: Monday brought the volcanic island chain to life, with lava that finally hurts, a lighthouse beam sweeping the sea and an eight-K map of the whole archipelago. A daily word game went live on the Desk, ships learned to sail with no server at all, and work began on an ocean large enough to sail around Novia. Plus the enemy pet that could see through stealth, chain lightning that lost its jumps in a crowd, and thirty four tracker issues closed. Listen or read the transcript (17 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Tools

• Volcano Archipelago: five lane lanterns that stood on the plank walks now stand at the walk edge with their arms over the planks, and the creek on the main island now springs from between a cluster of dark boulders instead of fading in out of bare dirt.
• Volcano Archipelago: the scene's editor camera renders with the game's deferred lighting again, so rocks and props on the game's standard shader show their normal and detail maps in the editor and in review renders. Since 2026-10-23 they had drawn with flat per-vertex lighting. Distance fog now comes from the game's fog effect, and a new test keeps every prototype scene's main camera off forward rendering.
• Volcano Archipelago: 14 village doors and shutters opened behind a frozen copy of themselves and looked dead. The copies are gone, so the tavern, warehouse, lighthouse, drydock, cabana and house doors swing again.
• The Volcano Archipelago sky now follows the player. Its sky dome stood at the centre of a 4 km map and reached only 1.5 km out, so from the outer islands the night sky showed as a dome on the horizon. A gold-spill treasure chest by the harbourmaster's house was also removed.
• Added an offline fence runner that runs most of the client's source and data tests without the Unity Editor, so they can run while another session is using it.

UI

• Keys F16 to F24, sent by macro pads and gaming keyboards with extra keys, now show their names in Keybindings and on combat hotbar slot labels. They used to read ?F16? and log a client error each time the label was drawn. The %, {, |, } and ~ keys got the same fix.
• On short screens such as 1280x768, a party list too tall for the space under your own frame now stays on the left under it and is drawn smaller until it fits. Since build 325 it moved to the right of your frame instead. Until you drag the party list somewhere yourself, its left edge now also lines up with the left edge of your frame.

Gathering

• In Etceter Crag Mines, finishing a harvest at a gold ore rock could leave the character standing in the air beside it, and barrels near the player could do the same. A resource node or barrel that becomes solid again while you are standing inside it now waits until you step away before it blocks you (aff98e964f, #15258).

Housing

• Taking ownership of other players' decorations now checks every room of the lot (house, basement and dungeon) before moving anything, so a room that cannot take the items stops the whole action instead of leaving it half done. Other players on the lot now see each room update correctly.
• Grand Gothic Manor: fixed the first QA reports. Strips of the inside floor no longer stick out past the outer walls, the rear door now stands in the outer wall with a stone sill up to its steps instead of sitting back in a gap, doors that swung into walls or columns open clear of them, two upstairs rooms that sat 11 cm low are level with the rest of the floor, and the house textures are sharper.
• Grand Gothic Manor: the upper rooms no longer look up into the inside of the roof. Each now has a plain plaster ceiling where the blue-green roof lining, roof beams and the backs of the dormers showed before. Plain ceilings that fill the gaps between the ornate ones lost their long streaks, windows that were walled up on the inside now light their rooms, corner columns reach the ceiling, a wall that stuck into a room in the north wing is cut back, and pilasters half hidden behind curtains are gone.

Images

Oracle

• The Oracle learned answers to more questions players asked her: where Ulfheim, War Bears and Kugelgeists are, how to find Hyla's father in Highvale Outskirts, how /afk away messages work, how to leave first person view, how to play on a second monitor, how to repair an artifact away from a crafting station, which bait suits bass, and why player dungeon kills do not count toward a Call to Arms.

Launcher

• The launcher no longer pops back up a few seconds after PLAY while the game is still loading, which happened on some PCs (for example with the game set to run as administrator) and sent a crash report for a game that had not crashed. After a real crash it now clears the graphics driver's shader cache at most once a week instead of every time, so a PC that crashes often no longer starts each session with an empty cache.
• Crash reports now include the graphics driver's own error records from the session, so a crash that follows the graphics card dropping out can say why it dropped out. Seventeen crashes on about twelve PCs in the last ten days ended that way with no reason recorded.

Quests

• In Learn What Happened to Markus, the letter in Solace Bridge lay on one unmarked skeleton among a dozen that all read "Corpse", and the first player in the area to take it removed it for everyone else. That body now reads "Captain Hobart, a Victim of Battle", a "Search Area for Word of Markus" marker shows it while the task is open, and each player finds their own copy of the letter. Quincy's body for Emily's quest in the same town now shows its name and gives each player their own sword too (f735de2796, #15261).

Tools

• Crash triage now recognizes the reports older launchers sent for games that were still loading and files them apart from real startup crashes. Ten days of them, 30 reports from five PCs, had been counted as startup failures.

UI

• The login box now sits on the title screen directly above Play Online, clear of the hooded figure, so there is no extra click to open it. Play Online (or Enter) logs in, the box dropped its Log In and Cancel buttons and the server message line, and its links sit closer together with "I have an invite code" beside "New to SotA: Create Account".

QA

• Players on the QA shard can now always enter test scenes, the Volcano Archipelago included. Before, they were refused for lacking access. On chaos these scenes stay limited to staff and testers.

Accounts

• New character names can no longer carry a pledge title such as Lord, Sir, Baron or Royal Founder, including a title run together with the name like SirRobin, or the name of a famous real person. Real names that only start with a title word, such as Sirius or Earlene, are still allowed.

Desk

• A guild's leader and officers can give every member links on the Desk: each link starts in the guild's folder on every member's Desk and opens in a new tab, and members can move, rename or hide it on their own Desk. A player-owned town's governor and stewards can do the same for residents. Up to 12 links each, set under Links for members on the community's Desk settings page.

Infra

• Rechecked every step of the move off the old website against the live servers and updated the move checklist with what is actually left. The old site's security certificate was renewed until January, so the move no longer has a deadline. The forum server's site settings are a single shared file again, so a later setup script can no longer undo the step that opens the new forum to the public. (b5eda9f0e4)
• The account and forum move runbook was re-dated, with its Frankfurt times moved one hour for the end of European summer time and the old-domain DNS steps narrowed to the records that still need changing.
• The chaos release no longer posts the "patch in about 4 hours" chat message when a build starts. Players still get the countdown before the server restarts.

Sailing

• Boats now move smoothly when the server's position updates come in late or unevenly. The hull used to stop between late updates, then jump ahead and sometimes back, and because the camera follows the player on deck the whole view shook: the shoreline and the nameplates of everyone aboard jerked. Boats are still switched off on chaos.
• In the Volcano Archipelago test harbour the houseboat can now sail out of its cove. The channel buoys stood in pairs 26 m apart for a 17 m wide barge, with the inner buoy right on the line it leaves the pier on, so it struck that buoy 24 seconds after casting off. The pairs now stand 40 m apart, and a new test steers the houseboat from its berth to open sea. The ship homes also gained their ladders, which climb on board as they do ashore, and solid footing over cabin roofs and deck panels that had no collision (a player on the Baron galleon fell through the stern roof into the cabin). Boats are still switched off on chaos.
• While a player steers a boat, its sail is drawn see-through for them so the coast ahead stays in view. It turns solid again when they let go of the wheel, and everyone else always sees it whole.
• The test rowboat can now be rowed: with an Oar in each hand a player sits at the oars facing the bow, the move-left and move-right keys pull the left and right oar (each at most once every half second), one oar alone turns the boat and Shift backs water, and everyone nearby sees the oars stroke. Every boat also got seats, from the rowboat's thwarts to benches on each ship's deck. Still switched off on chaos.
• Grapnels for ships, built switched off: a new Blacksmithing tool, forged from level 20 with a Coil of Rope, that a player throws from one ship onto another ship's rail. They haul the line in on a tension meter, heaving while the swell is low and easing off when it surges; too long in the red and the grapnel tears loose. Shipmates can lend a hand at the coil, and once alongside the two ships are lashed together with a gangplank between their rails, or a ladder where one ship stands much taller. In lawful waters the other crew is asked first and can cut the line. Boats are still switched off on chaos; grapnels are on for the internal QA shard.

Call to Arms

• The Call to Arms prize list was rebuilt from the latest item data, so newer items such as the Peacock companion pet can now be given as a reward.
• Every chaos release now rebuilds the Call to Arms prize list from that build's item data and ships it, so new items can be given as prizes without a separate update.
• A Call to Arms can now reward the realm with Talk Like a Pirate: everyone the blessing covers talks like a pirate in chat for as long as it lasts.

Maps

• On the website's World map, player towns now stand where the overworld places them instead of on the centre of the hex they are entered from. Journeys End Marketplace is back on the Longfall shore with Snug Harbor beside it to the west; before, the two were drawn on one spot and the 10-25 fix put them the wrong way round. 241 towns moved, most by a few metres.

Performance

• Player-owned towns build their decorations in one pass behind the loading screen again, as the old client did, instead of stopping ten times a second to redraw it. Decoration loading in player towns had become 2.6 s slower than on the old client for the same players. (18d7ef116e)

Website

• The world map's town pages draw every lot again for player-owned towns whose governor also owns houses in the town; BuyOrder Bazaar had shown no lots at all.

Creatures

• The Phoenix and dragons no longer fly off across the zone at the start of a fight. The run before a take-off had grown to 115-144 metres at combat flying speed and could be their first move; it is now about 30 metres, and a creature fleeing at low health still runs its full distance.

Lua Addons

• Fixed a several-second freeze the first time an add-on called ShroudGetRecipesMaking or ShroudGetRecipeIndex in a session (4.4 seconds on a book of 1,764 recipes, long enough for the add-on to be stopped). The lookup now reads item names from the game's item catalog instead of loading every item a known recipe makes. (#15321)

Siege Weapons

• Started siege weapons: one aiming system for cannons, ballistae, catapults and trebuchets. Each shot flies a real path with gravity and drag, laid the way the real machine is adjusted, so a cannon fires flat, a catapult lobs and a trebuchet plunges over walls. A two-meter Lay and Train minigame decides how close to the aimed spot it lands. Shared rules and 46 tests so far, nothing in game yet.
• A cannon can now be manned, loaded, aimed and fired in offline test play. The gunner points at a spot, the carriage turns and the barrel rises to match, and the line the ball will fly is drawn: green when it reaches the spot, amber when something is in the way. Two quick meters, Lay and Train, then decide how true it flies, and the reload takes 40 seconds. Added the Cannonball (weight 8), a cannonball mold and a forge recipe that casts three balls from three iron ingots.
• The game server now runs siege weapons. It keeps track of who mans each weapon, takes the cannonball from the gunner's pack and checks the gunner is standing at the gun. It also times the reload and the Lay and Train meters, flies every shot, and decides who a landing hurts (players only where PvP is allowed). It ships switched off, and no weapon is placed in the world yet.
• Staff can now stand a siege weapon anywhere for testing with /siege place, and every player in the area sees it. A cannonball that lands in a boat's hull now takes hull points off it: five hits hole a sloop and twenty a galleon. The crew hear it the same way they hear a hard crash.
• Gates and walls can now be marked as breakable by siege weapons. The game server keeps their hit points, and every client sees them crack, breach and come down, after which the way through opens. Staff can put them back with /siege reset. No gate in the world is marked yet.
• Galleon-sized ships now carry broadside cannons: a row down each side, pointing off the beam, that turn only a little either way, so the helmsman has to bring the ship round to aim. The guns ride with the ship and each shot carries the deck's speed. A crew member standing at a gun can man it, but the helmsman cannot. Switched off for now.
• The ballista and the catapult join the cannon, built from their models and aimed with the same Lay and Train meters. Each fires its own ammunition: the Ballista Bolt (weight 2, four from two wood and an iron ingot at Carpentry), the Throwing Stone (weight 15, cut from three granite at the forge) and the Trebuchet Stone (weight 30, from six granite). The trebuchet waits on a model. All of it is still switched off.

Books

• Read Aloud re-recorded for 17 books whose words changed since their last recording: Smokehaven Constance ObsidianTab, Smokehaven Hesper Lampcode, Smokehaven Honoria Report, Smokehaven Jasper Receipt, Smokehaven Jonah ScenicRouteChart, Smokehaven Kit Kitarticles and 11 more.

Chat

• Built Talk Like a Pirate: while it is on, everything a character types in chat goes out in pirate speak, so "Hello my friend, is the bank over there?" reaches everyone as "Ahoy me hearty, be th' bank yonder?". Item links, web links, emoji and numbers come through unchanged.
• Added Pirate's Grog, a drink that gives an hour of pirate speech. It is not sold anywhere yet; testers can create it.
• The Cutlass of the Swashbuckler and the Quartermaster's Cutlass now give full pirate speech while equipped, where before they swapped seven words and only when typed with the right capital letters. The Pirate Tricorn Hat of the Cap'n now does the same while worn.
• Lines typed to NPCs are no longer changed by items that alter chat, so NPC keywords work while wearing one. The Cutlass of the Swashbuckler used to turn "treasure" into "booty" before the NPC heard it.
• Scenes can now hold a pirate area: anyone standing in it talks like a pirate, and keeps it up for a minute after leaving.

Items

• New one-handed weapon, the Oar: either hand can hold one, it shows in both hands in combat mode, hits like the Rusty Mace and salvages to wood. Carpenters make it at level 20 from two wooden poles, a wooden board and three wax, with the recipe sold beside the Mace recipe in Bramble, Elad's Lighthouse and Xenos. Not on chaos yet.

Fishing

• Casting again right after the last cast ends no longer leaves the character standing idle with the rod hanging at their side while the cast runs. Every cast now holds the fishing pose, for the angler and for anyone watching. Reported by Belladonna Rose. Not on chaos yet.

Dungeons

• Despair has a resurrection ankh at the doorway between the elf cave and the liches and Ancient Undead room, where Myrkur already had one. Before this, a player who died in that last fight had no ankh within reach in Despair, and the closest was behind the shut treasure room doors (fa505e50d1).

Combat

• Chain spells such as Chain Lightning no longer lose their jumps, and their damage, on the screens of players watching in a very crowded area. A chain also no longer jumps to someone who has already left the area.
• Creatures that attack from range no longer back away from a melee player until they cross the edge of their ground, give up and walk home to heal. Once stepping back would take one to that edge, it stays and keeps fighting at close range. Brign, Lord of Water and the Water Elementals in The Breach did this every fight.
• The Lost Vale Cabalist wave battle draws its Cabalists at random from all eight each run, with no repeats in a run, and a chat line names each one as it arrives. It used to bring Indigno, Temna, Dolus and Fastus in that order every time. Hard mode's last Cabalist wave now brings two at once, and Corpus no longer takes worn gear in Lost Vale.

Table Games

• Fixed chess Rematch against the computer being refused on every click with a red "BadPhase" chat line after the table had already gone back to its lobby (settings changed, a lesson, a new game). The board now follows the table back, and Concede and Add computer opponent refusals no longer put developer text in chat. Reported by blueeyes whitedragon.

The Herald

• The New Britannia Herald for 2026-10-25 is up: Sunday went to a volcanic island prototype that was flowing uphill and glowing at night, and to a castle art kit that left the day as twelve player homes with stairs to the roof. Lot owners can now adopt the decorations friends placed on their land, pets remember their orders through a zone change, and six of the great ships that sit as houses have working wheels. Sixty two tracker issues closed. Listen or read the transcript (16 min). Subscribe in any podcast app: /blog/podcast.xml

Community

• Forwarded a player report of trees missing from their player-owned town to the team; it matches a tree-removal bug already found and fixed, due to reach chaos in an upcoming build.

Oracle

• The Oracle now explains what the Obsidian Potion of Expedience does to the gathering mini-game, including when a player calls it by its Spanish name or the Potion of Haste: it speeds up the swing meters marker up to the 100 speed limit, shortens the automatic gather timer when the mini-game is off, and leaves the green zone, passes and yield alone.
• The Oracle now gives the right amount for the Obsidian Potion of Preservation: +50% durability, +62.5% for subscribers.
• The Oracle's notes on her daily virtue test were corrected to match the test itself: she asks one yes or no question about your recent conduct, any answer earns the minor reward, and the test can be taken again each day.

Sailing

• With no game server running (offline Play in the Editor), the client now sails a scene's boats from its sea chart itself, so the Volcano Archipelago's fleet lies at its piers and every ship can be boarded and steered there.
• A player standing on a boat's deck now always rides it. Anyone who reached the deck by a ladder or a teleport, or stood still at the wheel, was told to step aboard and could neither take the helm nor ride along; going ashore could also leave a player tied to the ship.
• Added a sea road for testing. Sailing out of Central Brittany's harbour into the open sea carries the helmsman on to the Volcano Archipelago, at the wheel of the same kind of boat, which arrives just outside the main island's bay with its bow toward the bay's mouth. A message warns the helmsman shortly before the crossing. Boats stay switched off on chaos.
• Passengers now take the Volcano Archipelago sea road too: everyone on deck when the boat sails out of Central Brittany arrives on the deck of the same boat as their helmsman, and only one boat is put in the water for the crossing.
• Began the Great Sea, a person-scale ocean to sail around Novia: Novia about 3 km across, with Mistrendur to the north-west and the Hidden Vale to the north-east, all at three times their overworld size on one 8 km sea. A new generator reads the three overworld maps and lists every coastal town, player town and island town the sea reaches: 186 places in 88 ports, where a ship will stop and offer to go ashore or turn away.
• Ships sailing in toward a port now stop on their own, early enough to turn away again, and the helmsman is asked whether to go ashore at one of the towns there or turn away. A ship that turns away is steered round by its crew and handed back facing out to sea, and harbour mouths can ask whether to sail out into the open sea. Not switched on anywhere yet.
• When a ship stops off a port the helmsman now picks a town to go ashore at from a list that shows each one's kind and size, or turns away, and the crew land with them at the town's waterfront. Ships can also sail on into another sea area and come out aboard the same kind of ship. Still switched off everywhere.
• Built a first rough version of the Great Sea scene. Novia, Mistrendur and the Hidden Vale rise out of their overworld maps at three times the size, with mountains, beaches and a sea floor that shelves into deep water. Every coastal town shows from the water as stand-in buildings at full size: a player town as its own overworld model about 40 m across, Central Brittany about 200 m. The sea chart gives every coast a surf line and every port a stop zone, and a ship leaving a port starts 150 m out along its way to open water. Only the team can load it so far.
• Central Brittany and Blood Bay harbours now have a way out to the open sea. A ship heading out through the harbour mouth stops short of it and the helmsman is asked whether to sail out or stay; staying turns the ship back into the harbour. Where the open sea cannot be reached yet, the ship says so and turns back without asking. A player at the wheel or on the deck of a ship is no longer sent to the overworld by the harbour edge, which used to carry the helmsman off alone and leave the ship and crew behind. A new switch keeps the open sea off on chaos.
• A player who logs in where they logged out on the Great Sea, or is teleported onto it, is now given a sloop at the nearest port and stands at its wheel, instead of finding themselves swimming in open water. Still switched off everywhere.
• The Great Sea now names the towns along its coasts: each town carries its name over it, readable from a ship up to almost 2 km out. The sea also has its own map in the M window, drawn from the same land and towns and uncovered as a ship sails.
• Players can now set sail onto the Great Sea from any town on its coasts with /setsail, which puts them at the helm of a sloop off that town on the open sea; dock signposts will take its place as the towns are detailed. Switched off everywhere for now.
• On the Great Sea a player who falls into the water is hauled back aboard their ship after a few seconds, or picked up by a ship from the nearest port if theirs has gone, and a player at the helm when they arrive now always ends up at the wheel. If the sea is closed while players are on it, they are put ashore at the nearest town that will take them.
• The Great Sea now has room for 120 ships at once, and each player is sent the ships near them ten times a second and distant ones less often, with distant ships drawn a little further behind so they glide smoothly instead of stopping and starting.

Items

• The Obsidian Potion of Expedience description now says +80% in every language, matching the bonus lines under it. It said +40%, and the Crown Shop packs said seven months of +40%.
• The Obsidian Potion descriptions for Preservation, Reclamation, Precision and Stamina now match the bonus lines under them in every language: +50% durability (was +25%), +100 Salvage and Repair (was +50), +20 Meticulous Collection (was +10), and running that costs no focus. The Crown Shop packs say six months instead of seven. With the Stamina potion, sprinting now costs no focus for everyone and no longer refills focus for subscribers.

Oracle

• The Oracle can now answer 34 more questions players asked her this weekend, including what drops Rings of Air and the Forest Mangler, where Spite, Moonshadow and Yama are, crushing versus cutting damage, whether a Haste potion helps gathering, every specialization pair name, applying a Storm Cellar basement pattern, upgrading a tax-free deed, and that there is no Tidecaller title scroll.

Tools

• The Volcano Archipelago village's 45 doors and shutters open again (the house copies had lost their door scripts), its 34 lamps and ten new lanterns along the lanes come on one after another through the sunset and go out at dawn, and the stiff kit flags gave way to the game's pirate flagpoles, whose flags wave and turn to the wind.
• The Volcano Archipelago lighthouse has a turning beam: two shafts of light sweep the sea once every 16 seconds from dusk to dawn, with a glow round the lamp, and are gone by day.
• Lava in the Volcano Archipelago now burns whoever walks on it: the cracked, glowing crust for 10 to 20 fire damage a second, the molten lava for 100 to 250. Fire resistance counts, and a rock, a bridge or a boat over the lava keeps a player safe.
• The shared Unity Editor reservation hook no longer reserves the Editor for searches and commit messages that only mention Unity CLI commands, and it now reserves it for CLI calls made behind timeout, env or a pwsh -c wrapper.
• Players Online now lists only characters the game server has in the world. Accounts sitting at character select or waiting out a logout timer used to show up as online players under their last character; they are now counted on the summary line instead. The page also shows when its data was read and warns when it is more than a minute old. Scene Instances, the sieges page and the players-online count on this blog use the same test.
• The Volcano Archipelago has a player map: an 8192 by 8192 picture of the whole 4 km sea, half a metre to the pixel. The map capture tool can now render a sheet that size directly instead of enlarging a smaller one. Exploring there clears the fog of war at twice the usual distance.
• The Volcano Archipelago fog is thinner and reaches further, taken from Blood Bay's weather: by day it now fades out over 2500 m instead of 200 m, and rain thickens it far less. The islands keep their own light and sky.
• The push guard now asks for approval when a sync-push command carries a nested command or a second line in its arguments. Only the plain sync-push call goes through without a prompt.
• The Volcano Archipelago terrain tools no longer stop partway through painting when a tile has no painted ground layer, set the crack steam vents on the finished ground instead of leaving them buried or floating, and report the real crater lake fill.
• The Volcano Archipelago volcano now has a large smoke plume that follows the wind. It rises upright from the crater and bends downwind as it climbs, leaning further in a strong wind, and it can be seen from the village and out at sea. The old plume always drifted north-east.
• Four seagull flocks circle the Volcano Archipelago volcano two thirds of the way up its west and south slopes, and twelve animal spawns are scattered over the flat south-west side of the main island. Each spawn picks a boar, rabbit, doe, stag, frog or turkey at random every time it fills. The scene got a navigation mesh over the whole map so the animals can walk.
• Volcano Archipelago: the pirate harbour's pier pieces now meet with no water showing between them, the steps up onto the piers face them and finish level with the planks, the two quay guns stand at the sea edge with their barrels out over the water and shot stacked beside them, and 726 branches and other props left hanging over sloped ground now lie on it.
• Fixed the blog publisher refusing every publish since this afternoon: its new check for deleted entries read an empty result as one entry and then failed while writing the refusal.

Dev Tools

• Corrected the log-errors skill example for filtering by log level, which returned no rows when run as a bare script.

Images

World

• The small steaming basins found in caves and mines, such as the hot pool beside the lava in K'rul, now have a solid water surface. Players could sink through the water into a hollow under the basin and often could not jump or walk back out; they now stand at the water line and step out over the rim.

Decorations

• The Fancy Crystal Chandeliers no longer cast a large dark circle on the floor and ceiling when hung indoors. Their own frame and crystals were blocking the light going straight down and up. All sizes, Long Chain and Great Hall versions included. (5ff518904e)

Front End

• The title screen now shows a note on computers with less than 12 GB of memory: that much is not officially supported and play may vary, including choppy movement. Offline play needs more memory than online, since the game world runs on the player's own computer. (05431e1871)

Localization

• About 480 new lines of game text are now translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Ukrainian: the radio window, sent mail, voice chat settings, boat and calendar text, new house deeds and decorations, and creature skill descriptions. Ukrainian minute counts in the radio window now use the right word form for 2-4 and 5 or more, and lines that name the game keep the title Shroud of the Avatar. (0452a89865, #15183)
• In German, the Freed Prisoner in the Obsidian Panopticon and three other NPC names now use the masculine ending for male characters and the feminine ending for female ones; the two forms had been swapped.

Client

• Fixed three client errors from the chaos logs: the cursor-over-window check no longer throws every frame on systems whose Windows layer lacks the call it uses (it falls back to the check the Mac and Linux clients use), closing a book while leaving a scene no longer errors and leaves the book half-closed, and clicking a list row while zoning is ignored instead of erroring.

Desk

• Loading Tips window on the Desk: all 363 loading-screen tips from the game, the ones for anywhere first and each place's under its name, with a search and a download of every tip as a text file. Desk settings can also show one tip over the wallpaper, changing every 15, 30 or 60 seconds, with a Pause button beside it. Built and switched off for now (9f719c8fca).
• In Rogue of Novia the Desk now plays every finished run again on the server and counts it only when it ends the same way, keeps every run it could not send yet so a later run no longer replaces an unsent daily run, and shows names on the realm-wide daily list only to players of the same guild or town. The Deck Builder loads a deck code holding a rune the Desk does not have yet, leaving that rune out, and the lessons build the right combat bar when a step is reopened or reached with Back.
• In Minigame Practice, the harvesting lesson's three-hits step now counts only the swings landed on that step, and switching tabs while paused clears the Paused notice.
• The Loading Tips window is live on the Desk, with all 412 loading-screen tips (the 50 new ones included), the text file download, and the Desk settings choice that shows a tip over the wallpaper every 15, 30 or 60 seconds.
• New Desk game Novian Word: guess the day's five letter Shroud of the Avatar word in six tries, then two bonus words, the Rune Word written in the game's runes and the six letter Long Word. Guesses are checked on the server, new words come at midnight US Central time, and the season runs to January 31 with a theme each week.
• Novian Word keeps streaks for each player, for their guild or town and for the whole server (a day counts when more than half its players solve it), guess counts, a Lexicon of every word solved, an Archive of earlier days, a Hard mode and a result to copy as coloured squares. It went live on the Desk the same day.
• The season's word list is checked before it ships: no theme, hint, caption or line of lore may name a word the player has not played yet, and no two answers may be forms of one word.
• Novian Word streak prizes: a decoration by mail at 7, 30, 60 and 90 days in a row, each once per season, sent to the account's last played character. Switched off for now.
• The Desk's Leaderboards window now titles the Master Crafters column Recipes Learned, as the website does.
• Every Novian Word of the season has its own picture: a painting in the style of the game's loading screens for each day's word, a woodcut after the crafting book's for each Rune Word and a sepia ink study for each Long Word, 294 in all, each checked by hand for stray lettering, real-world symbols and modern props.
• The Desk's Conversationalist accepts a full-length 20,000-character text in any script. A long Cyrillic or Chinese text was turned away by the web server before the page's own limit check, and the page showed only a general error. A text that is still too long now gets a message to shorten it or turn off "Remember earlier lines".
• Rogue of Novia keeps a saved run that was carried on after a site update: it counts on the Desk's lists instead of ending with "That run was not counted.", so a counted run of today's dungeon is no longer lost. A Desk window left open across an update asks to be reloaded before it starts a new run.
• Deck Building on the Desk shows the six stances' new descriptions, which say how to end a stance early.

Images

Infra

• The QA test shard's server and client logs now reach the team's log search. Until now nothing on that shard received them, so they were lost. They sit in their own qa- indices with a shard tag on every line, so the tester shard's error triage, dashboards and alerts read only the tester shard as before.
• In the team's log search, a log line with an unclosed quote no longer runs its quoted value on into the next field, so that next field is still recorded and searchable.

Pets

• Hovering a pet's name at the top of its pet sheet shows the pet's level again. The hover went missing when the pet sheet was rebuilt, while the character sheet kept its own.
• An enemy player's pet no longer finds a player hidden with Silent Movement or Camouflage when it walks past them in PvP. A pet now sees what its owner sees, and its owner cannot see a hidden player. Wild monsters still notice a partly hidden player up close. (#14842)

Vendors

• The All Zones vendor search no longer fails with an unreadable-response error when a page of results stops downloading partway on a slow connection. That page is now asked for again in smaller pieces, and if it still cannot arrive the log names the timeout.

Client performance

• Compared zone load times in towns for the same players on the old live servers and on the new client. In NPC towns, a typical repeat load went from 16.9 s to 13.5 s and the first load of a session from 39.3 s to 28.6 s. Player-owned towns improved only on the first load (40.0 s to 32.0 s): repeat loads stayed near 16 s because waiting on the town's decorations grew from 4.1 s to 6.7 s, which cancels the gains elsewhere. That decoration wait is the next thing to work on.

Inventory

• Using Take All on a body whose arrows another player had already taken no longer adds those arrows to your own stack until the next inventory refresh. Before, the next shot from your bow was refused and the arrow stack could stop working.

Quests

• Emily in Soltown no longer takes the Give Items window with her when she walks off on her daily routine, so Quincy's sword can be handed over. If the window is closed without handing it in, greeting her or asking about help, Quincy, Solace Bridge or the letter offers it again (9857c943fe, #14999).

Conversations

• In the Soltown refugee camp, Jeanne now answers when asked about the wagons Raymond saved from the fire, Raymond answers "red cloth", and Abigail answers "fire". Each used to reply with a generic line. The new lines are translated into all nine languages. (#15001)

Loading Screen

• Added 50 new loading-screen tips about recent changes, among them the new Options settings, Favorites and deck searches in the backpack, combat deck folders, bank Stack All, Liberated towns, growing a Player-Owned Town, green repeatable-quest markers, pet commands and Set Trap. Retired the tip saying an Ancient dragon rises again, since they no longer do (b833bd79a1).

Login

• A Steam sign-in that is cancelled while the game is still connecting no longer logs an error when the server's late "link your Steam account" answer arrives. The player stays on the login form as before, and the next Steam sign-in still opens the account link screen.

Combat

• Chain spells such as Chain Lightning no longer lose their jumps in crowded areas. Picking the next target read past the end of the list of nearby characters, and every client watching the cast dropped the effect at once.
• Magic Warding can now be switched off per combat deck with a new Magic Warding button in Edit Deck, requested by a player on the forums. A deck set to Off drops both the skill's magic resistance and its attunement penalties while it is equipped, so melee and spell decks no longer need the skill forgotten and retrained. Every deck starts On.

UI

• The Keep patterns from salvage tooltip now says that unticking it also skips an Eternal Pattern that gear gives by itself on salvage. An Eternal Pattern you applied to the item still comes back. The Oracle answers the same question.
• The iron border around the minimap now looks the same on every UI theme. On Air and on custom themes the ring's color showed through the iron and hid the thin inner iron line, so the colored band seemed to run over the border. Both iron edges now sit on the same dark backing on every theme. (c778c7bcf4, #11972)
• The quick loot window on corpses and loot chests now sizes itself to what it holds: one row for a single item or a gold drop, a row more for each extra item, up to the size the player last dragged it to, after which the list scrolls. Fit Loot Window to Contents in Options turns it off. Requested by ZOD.

Crafting

• The Twirling Baton can be salvaged at a Carpentry station for Wood Scrap, as its tooltip said. Items no station will salvage (Glowing Mugs, balloons, wax cylinders and about 65 others) no longer show a Salvage Components list or appear under the backpack Salvageable filter.

Website

• In the members-only guild and town sections of the new forum, a member can now post or react only after choosing to show their forum name there, and thread titles, edited posts and long posts now go through the game's text check like new posts do.
• Rogue of Novia runs can be watched again from start to end: the end screen has Watch the run and the start screen lists your last runs, with Play, step and floor-by-floor controls over the map and every message of the run listed by floor, savable as text. Share the run gives a link anyone can open, naming only your character; a run of the daily dungeon opens to others once that day is over. A long run's moves are now compressed when it ends, so they are kept instead of dropped. Not on the site yet.
• The news editor's Preview now shows the chosen cover picture and keeps it for Publish. Before, a post published straight after a preview went live without its cover. A cover picture that is too large now gets a plain refusal instead of an error page.
• The Desk's Forums window, still switched off, now goes Back to the forum page it showed before, even after clicks in other Desk windows.
• On the events calendar, events you hid while signed out that do not fit under your account's hide limit at sign-in now stay hidden in that browser, with a note saying how many could not be added. Before, they reappeared with no message.
• In the guild and town sections of the new forum, a long post's text check now has time to finish, its parts overlap so a phrase split across two parts is still checked whole, and a post the check could never reach is held for the studio instead of staying up unchecked.
• Rogue of Novia on the Desk no longer loses the Heart of Sorrows when a Chaos Bolt hits its keeper. A creature changed by the wand keeps what it carries, bosses resist the change, and a level drain at level 2 no longer jumps the character to level 21.
• Signing in to the tracker with a game account always lands on that account's own tracker account. A sign-in link opened from the in-game board asks "Sign in as ...?" before it signs the browser in, and never switches a browser that is already signed in as someone else.
• The accounts page's grant owner backfill records a tracker login for the account it was created for, and tracker and tester hub game sign-in gained a setting that turns away any grant with no recorded owner.
• Rogue of Novia on the Desk no longer shuts a character in a room after a teleport. A rift trap, a Teleport to Zone Scroll or a Ring of Wandering could land the character in a room whose only exit was a secret door, about one teleport in three from floor 8 down; there is now always a visible way from the landing spot to the staircase.

Audio

• The quiet pause between background music tracks is now written as true silence. On some PCs that pause could play as about a minute of static before the next track started.

Tavern games

• Window Selector: Chess and Mahjong moved from the main list into a Tabletop Games menu, opened from one "Tabletop Games..." row, so games most players never open no longer crowd the list. The row appears only while one of the games is open on the shard. Requested by Rinaldi.

Voice Chat

• The voice server deploy tooling now refuses to build from uncommitted voice code, always checks both test shards before an update, keeps voice relays updating when speech to text is not ready, and restarts speech to text if a benchmark is interrupted.
• Voice chat now reconnects on its own after the group server connection drops. A microphone picked in Options takes over right away, and a player whose talking becomes subscriber-only mid-session is told so in chat and in Options (eefa1140a1).
• The speech recognition benchmark's clip builder now keeps its long 15-second clips instead of trimming them away as spares, and the model download script now stops when the model list names a bad or empty set of files.
• The speech-to-text worker's internal clock no longer wraps after about 107 days of uptime, which would have stopped its queue cleanup. Its decode-speed metrics now report to four decimal places instead of two.
• Guild voice chat was switched on for the test shard, so the Talk to Guild key now reaches guild members. Part of the smoother PvP work was switched on there too: Blink, Night Step and Charge stay where they land on other players' screens, jumps show their arc, other players face where they aim in a fight, a melee swing at a player who looked within reach lands, and your own hit number, flinch and sound show as the hit lands.
• Voice chat transcription now sets each lines place in the transcription queue, and the audience reported to moderation, from the audiences the speaker is allowed to reach. A line sent just as the transcription service disconnects is now reported to the speaker as unavailable; before, it could sit in the queue with no answer. (92fa1ff094)
• The voice chat end-to-end bot test now fails when any of its audio frames were refused before sending. Before, it judged delivery only against the frames that went out. (a43bba922f)

Website

• The Desk Links folders SotA Lore and SotA Wiki links now open the community wiki at its new address, sotawiki.org. Desks saved with the old sotawiki.net links were moved over too. (b5ab50c767)

Housing

• Door-style dungeon and basement entrances, such as the Gothic Wooden Arched Door Dungeon Entrance, now stand on the floor against the ground-floor walls of the Viking Great Hall. Wall decorations could not be aimed at the knee-high stone base along those walls, so a door stopped at its top. The base now takes wall decorations and a door sits flush against its face.
• Decoration Layouts in basements and player dungeons follow the same placement rules as decorating by hand. The preview skips any item that would land outside the basement's room, the dungeon foyer or the dungeon room it rests in, where a basement item used to be placed anyway and then sent to the bank, and it warns when a layout was saved in a different basement, dungeon or lot. In a dungeon with Adventure Mode on, the window says to turn Adventure Mode off rather than asking for a lot. The Oracle now answers that layouts work in both.
• Added the Gothic Mansion art kit to the project: a modular manor with its walls, floors, stairs, doors, windows, roofs and spires, the furniture that came with it, and the demo map that lays the whole house out. It is the source for a new Keep-sized home that is being built from it now.
• New player home: the Grand Gothic Manor (Keep), built from the Gothic Mansion kit. It is a two-storey stone manor with a clock tower over the street front and 14 rooms, emptied of the kit's furniture, statues, paintings, rugs and candlesticks; its fireplaces, curtains and moulded ceilings stay. Its doors open and close, including the north wing's double doors, which the kit had built shut. The stairs and outside steps are smooth to walk up, every doorway is wide enough for players and pets, pets follow up the stair, and the floors, walls and ceilings take decorations. It has no light fixtures of its own, so owners light it with their own. It fits Keep and Castle lots. For now only the tester tools make the deed; it is not sold yet.

Infrastructure

• The account database mirror tooling now reports a demoted server as demoted, and undemote refuses when the other server cannot be reached. The accounts sign-in edge no longer switches to the standby copy after two ordinary application errors.
• The voice chat server setup scripts now refuse to rewire or remove a tunnel connection that belongs to another server, and the setup check reports when the SSH login ban jail is not running.
• The pre-deploy security check now warns when it cannot read a server's installed packages. Before, a failed lookup passed the PHP version check without checking anything.

Player Traps

• With player traps switched off, a trap someone stopped disarming partway no longer goes off on them when the disarm times out.

Build tools

• The voice chat build check and the chaos release preflight now also run the test bot's voice end-to-end tests, so a voice relay change that breaks the bot's voice check is caught before a deploy.
• The commit check for particle effects that need a readable model now also catches a model that is moved and made unreadable in the same commit.

UI

• Character sheet: the stats box is now only as tall as its lines, so the character and the equipment slots draw larger (full-size slots at the default window size). The Tools button moved into the empty corner under the right-hand slots. Titles and Achievements moved into a new More tab, whose list also opens Emotes, Journal, Combat Decks, Recipe Book, Skills and Social, so every tab label fits at the narrowest width. Suggested by Rinaldi.
• The compass hides its markers while the right mouse button is held on it, so N, E, S and W can be read in a crowded town. The old compass did this and the rebuilt one had lost it; requested on Discord. A quick right-click on the compass now opens Compass Markers, with a box for each kind of marker: Quests, Destinations, Places, Exits and Entrances, Your Lot and Ankhs.

Voice

• Nearby voice position updates now fit in a single network packet, so rooms with more than 40 players in voice no longer lose nearby voice, and a room stops reporting a player's position as soon as they leave voice.
• The speech-to-text benchmark now keeps its results when a clip or a worker fails to load, and it measures game-term recall over the same languages for every decoding mode.

Quests

• Sergeant Sedgewick's quest marker in other zones now points you back to him once you carry the five iron ore, matching his marker in the Solace Bridge Outskirts. Before, it showed while you were still gathering and went away once you had the ore.

Operations

• Staff outage alerts no longer go quiet after a failed send, and a login outage that comes back within minutes of the first now raises its own alert.

Guild Site

• When a town governor keeps squatters off the town's pages, the guild homes layer on the world map no longer shows those squatters the lot holders the governor hides from visitors.

Call to Arms

• During a Call to Arms that counts player kills, the 10-minute limit on the same two players counting again now follows their accounts, on every character and in every scene. A call limited to a player town's template scene now waits for a running call on one of that town's instances, and the reverse, so one kill no longer counts toward both.

Radio

• The community station list check now warns about a station id with capital letters, which the game does not accept. Such an id used to pass, and the station then showed as New again whenever its address changed.
• Official radio: four third-party tracks whose licence is not yet on record are left out of the stations and requests until it is confirmed.
• A radio news bulletin that gets no voice recording no longer uses up the day's bulletin count or voice budget, so a voice service outage no longer silences the rest of the day's news. Bulletins also keep their 40-word minimum length.

Build

• The cross-bundle prefab audit now looks in the new client build location by default, so a plain run checks the latest bundle layout again.

Achievements

• Novian Word counts in the game: 18 hidden achievements in the Games category for words solved on their day, the longest streak, Lexicon pages, Rune Words and Long Words, and the title Wordsmith for a 30 day streak. Game servers read each player's totals from the Desk a minute after login and every five minutes, behind a switch that is off on chaos and on for QA.

Lua Add-ons

• Add-on API 55 carries both of its new features: ShroudGetAllSkills and the owned item counts. The public add-on reference lists all three functions.

Leaderboards

• A Novian Word board for the in-game Leaderboards window ranks this season's longest streaks, with the current streak and words solved beside them. It stays hidden until the word game goes live.

Rogue of Novia

• In Rogue of Novia, an item walked over with a full pack stays on the floor where it lay. Before, it vanished once the player stepped off it, so there was no way to come back for it after making room.

Add-Ons

• Added a QA preview of the Lua add-on docs at catnipgames.net/lua/qa/. It is republished with every QA server build, so add-on authors can read about new functions and build against them before they reach the live game. Each page names the API version on QA and links back to the main docs, which still follow the live game and now link to the preview. It first appears with the next QA build.

Build-tools

• The radio build check builds the radio's tests whenever the radio service's own code changes, so a change that breaks those tests is caught when it is committed instead of in the nightly build.

Towns

• Added a Sync with Lots button to the Town Console's Citizens tab. Lot holders with no town role become Residents and Residents who hold no lot in the town lose the role, after a confirmation that shows both counts. Stewards and the governor are never changed, and a player blocked from claiming lots in the town is not added.

Chat

• /translate no longer shows a translation cut off partway through a long message or keeps serving that cut-off text; it hands those lines to the web translator. Requests waiting behind a busy translator are handed back sooner instead of being answered after the chat window has given up.

Server

• Slow GM account searches no longer count as login server failures, so a few slow searches in a row can no longer send logins to the backup login server.

Books

• Read Aloud re-recorded for 15 books whose words changed since their last recording: Smokehaven Constance ObsidianTab, Smokehaven Hesper Lampcode, Smokehaven Honoria Report, Smokehaven Jasper Receipt, Smokehaven Jonah ScenicRouteChart, Smokehaven Kit Kitarticles and 9 more.