Changes

: This is a bug-fix update. There are no major new features. (There are some fixes that amount to nerfs; see below for details.): Known issue: there are still several bugs with player-music performances cutting in and out, and performance buffs spontaneously changing duration. These will be fixed soon.

: This update switches to Unity 5.4.0. This is a major update to the graphics engine, so <b>please report weird graphics problems!</b>: You will hopefully see a small framerate improvement with this version. There are some advanced features of Unity 5.4 which should give further optimizations that we haven't turned on yet. We'll do so after more testing.: Changes in this version should also improve the recent problems with AI (monster and pet) movement behavior. We'll be monitoring this closely.: Note: the video-driver crash bug that some users experience is NOT fixed in this version of Unity, but it is supposed to be fixed in a patch of 5.4 soon and we will update the game when that patch is available.

:We have addressed some bugs in the druid events. The bugs were mainly in the larger-sized versions that are used when more players are online.:: - The higher-difficulty versions of the Ilmari druid events were not spawning enough monsters. Due to a typo, they were spawning about 1/100th as many as intended... and far fewer than the low-difficulty version! The desert should actually be a horrific bloodbath of doom while this event is active!:: - The higher-difficulty versions of the Kur druid events were not spawning enough monsters. (But not quite as dramatic as the problem in Ilmari.):: - The higher-difficulty versions of the Eltibule event did not shut off correctly. As a temporary fix, we had locked the Eltubule event into using the easy version for the past week. So starting with this update, you will be seeing the higher levels of the Eltibule event for the first time. Keep an eye out for new bugs!:: - We reduced the loot quality of many Druid Event monsters, including both kinds of droaches, Young Kraken, Giant Frost Elementals, and Desert Overseers. But it's still pretty great loot. (Still too good? Probably... but we'll see how it feels.): As an FYI, I want druid events to last at least 45 minutes, and we'll probably increase the length of the druid quests to facilitate that. However, no changes like that have been made yet because of the bugs listed above -- I need to see how these fixed versions feel first.: As another FYI, there will be other kinds of druid events, including a few non-combat ones, but the majority will involve at least some amount of combat. Druids are not pacifists. At all.

: You may have noticed that the XP earned from various item-crafting recipes seemed capricious and arbitrary. This is because, for many crafting recipes, the XP amounts were in fact arbitrary -- I just typed in whatever numbers : I felt like into the spreadsheet while prototyping them, intending to come back to them later. And now is later!: The affected skills are: carpentry, leatherworking, blacksmithing, tailoring, toolcrafting, flower arrangement, calligraphy, and meditation. These now use a formula that is similar to Cooking. (In fact, for most of them it's exactly the same formula.) A few, such as flower arrangement, use a different formula owing to the higher difficulty of obtaining the recipe ingredients.: It is hard to generalize too much about these changes because, again, many of the old XP numbers were arbitrary. But speaking EXTREMELY broadly, low-level recipes are worth a bit more XP and many high level recipes are worth considerably less XP. (And many others are unchanged.): WHAT TO WATCH FOR: Right now the formula uses the recipe's level as the main determiner of XP. This can be flawed because some recipe's ingredients are much rarer than higher-level recipe's ingredients. If you feel that a particular recipe is much harder than another that gives more XP, please report that as a bug.: These changes are hardly "final" -- they're just a step forward from random. There are still some skills using completely arbitrary numbers, and they will get fixed eventually.: As always with changes like this, your skill level is NOT changed. This only affects XP earned going forward.

:: - Fixed minor incongruities in wooden cow and deer horseshoe recipes. (Note: these recipes are still much too cheap to make and they will be changed soon. We just ran out of time for this update.):: - Slight tweaks to some textile recipes (added cotton x1 to recipes that are otherwise pointless 1-to-1 item transfers... more work will be needed with textiles in the future to make these more sensible):: - Improved the cash reward of some reported work orders (e.g. pig snouts, rotten strawberries, wolfsbane muffins, bonnets, many others). There are still several more reported work-orders to fix -- they will be fixed in the next update:: - Fixed errors in some work order scroll titles (they had incorrect names but correct descriptions):: - As of last update, firkins of sour cream were supposed to give you a random amount of sour cream (between 1 and 4). This did not work correctly; the cheese cask would claim to give you more sour cream but only actually gave you one

: As you know if you've followed these patch notes for a while, pets have been using monster stat-tables. This worked fine at first, but as monsters have gotten tougher, pets have also gotten tougher as a side-effect. This meant high-level pets had way, WAAAAY too much health and armor at higher level, and not enough damage. (In fact the damage was so low that I added a "shim" to temporarily bolster pet damage a while back... but it was a flat per-level boost that applied to all pets -- a temporary hack.) : With the advent of the animal-handling changes in the last update, pets can now use their own separate scaling tables, so we've revised the non-animal-handling pets in this update. (Animal handling pets were already changed in the last update.): You can find a mostly-complete table of pet changes in the forums' version of these patch notes.: This is a first stab at these numbers. After we gather real-world performance data we'll no doubt alter these a lot in the future. These numbers are mostly a nerf, but hopefully the temporary nature of the old numbers was explained enough times that this isn't a surprise. (I mentioned it each time monster stats changed.)

: If the pet-stat changes have caught the alpha test community by surprise (and I fear they have), that's a problem we need to work on. It's just damned hard to keep players in the loop about upcoming changes that are more than a month or two away. But it's definitely time to do a round-up list! I'll write a blog post this week that lists a bunch of things that I've explained before to the community and that I naively assume players already know... but which may not be known at all anymore. Once the blog post is written, it would be really helpful if players conveyed this info to newcomers so that it becomes common knowledge. (I'll add a note in the launcher when the post is live.)

:: - Tweaked the pet GUI slightly so that the current pet state is displayed next to the change-pet-state button, not inside the button. (The actual behavior is entirely unchanged; some users just got confused by the button's label)