Game updates/2016-12-17

December 17 Update

It's gifting time! The people of Alharth don't celebrate Christmas, but they do like to give gifts to their friends at the years' end. Visit the NPCs that you're Friends with to receive your gifts! We'll have some other small celebrations when we get closer to Christmas and New Year's.

This snapshot update fixes a whole bunch of bugs, and starts the preparations for upcoming high-level content, although most of that work is still behind the scenes. There's one fairly big system change: the new Body Heat system for Kur.

New Kur Mountains "Body Heat" System

Kur Mountains now has a "body heat" meter, which replaces the old system of cold. You no longer take damage immediately upon entering Kur. Instead, your body heat drops until you reach 0, at which point you get frostbite, then hypothermia, then probably die.

You can reduce the rate of body-heat loss by raising your Indirect Cold Mitigation (and/or "Cold Mitigation" -- the generic form covers both direct/indirect).

Some items also boost your Max Body Heat: all "winter" armor falls into this category, as does the craftable Cold Protection Potion.

A few abilities restore a small amount of body heat. Currently these are: Breathe Fire, Flesh to Fuel, Revitalize, and Cryogenic Freeze. (These can augment cold-weather gear, but are not sufficient to prevent eventual freezing.)

You can now deploy small campfires to protect yourself from the cold. There are two versions; the Emergency Warmth Fire just keeps you alive and restores body heat. The Basic Campfire can also be used to cook. Hogan in Eltibule and Ukorga in Kur sell the Emergency Warmth Fires; Ukorga can teach you to make either kinds of campfire via his Training menu. They require Carpentry 5 and 10 respectively.

Treasure and Ability Fixes

- Fixed many possible causes of "pre-Legacy" items (that is, items that are Legacy when they are first created). Please continue to report any new items that are Legacy when you get them! We need to know three things: the full name of the item, what two skills you were using when you got it (or what gems you used when you crafted it), and what the Legacy Item Replacer golem in Serbule tells you when you ask him why your item is Legacy.

- The lower-potency armor-boosting mod that comes from rubywall crystals had gone missing for several months, but is back in rotation

- Added a few more effects to the rubywall crafting profile so that there are at least 4 mods for each gear slot (to accommodate legendary rubywall items without running out of mods).

- The base damage of some high-level abilities changed by a few points (less than 1%) due to rounding from some slight formula changes. For example, Finishing Blow 4 deals 385 damage instead of 387.

- In preparation for adding higher-level content, Sword loot mods now scale to level 80. As a side-effect, it's possible to find level 65 sword items when killing the highest-level monsters in the game. The stats on these items are likely to change.

- While adding higher-tier versions of sword loot mods, a few errors were found and fixed. Most importantly: a few mods only had tiers up to level 50, but their level 50 version had been scaled to have the benefits that a level 60 tier should have. Those mods now have more tiers so that they scale to 60, and the level 60 mods have approximately the same power as the level 50 versions used to have. For instance, the mod "Decapitate deals +X damage to non-Elites" capped out at +325, with a level 50 requirement. That level 50 version now deals 275 damage. There is a new level 60 tier of the mod which deals 325 damage.

- Abilities that boost the damage of the next attack (such as Wind Strike, Skulk, or Premeditated Doom) had stopped working.

- Fixed MANY animal-handling gear mods. They were not able to be found on any gear slot. Several slots (such as legs, ring, and necklace) only had 3 possible mods. Sorry for letting this one go unnoticed for so long.

- In the course of correcting the animal-handling mod, a couple of gear mods needed to be moved to new slots. For this reason, if your Animal Handling gear has become Legacy, you can turn it in to the legacy golem to receive 5 replacements.

- Since I was in there anyway, rewrote a couple of Animal Handling mods that had a random chance to apply, because those suck. Not really a full revision, but most of the AH mods have never been seen anyway, so it might as well be!

- Fixed display errors on the abilities That'll Do and Feed Pet.

- Gear mods that boosted Finish It did not show the correct Finish It icon in the item description.

- The mod "All Sword abilities have a 20% chance to restore X Health to you" did not work.

- The mod "Doe Eyes heals 48 health" was supposed to be available on necklace and feet but was only found on deer feet items.

- The Ice Magic version of Cold Protection did not stay active. (It was tied to Fire magic by mistake, so it would stay active if you had Fire Magic and Cold Magic both active, but otherwise not.)

- The shield ability "Quick Bash" did damage to the player instead of the target, and did not actually generate a combat refresh as it says it does.

- You can now get additional bonus levels of Shield from: Armor Patching 25, Armor Patching 45, Staff 32, Endurance 35, Compassion 45, Hoplology 10, and Weapon Augment Brewing 45. Along with the existing bonus level available from Sword 44, that gives Shield a nice range of options for bonus levels.

- The mod "Panic Charge knocks all targets back and restores 50 armor to you" did not knock all targets back.

- The spider ability "Insidious Illusion" now makes you look like a human instead of looking like a mezzed spider. Note that because this is just an illusion, your actually equipped items are not reflected in the appearance.

- If you have the spider mod "Premeditated Doom Increases Sprint Speed +X" on both feet and legs slot, they will now stack correctly.

- Death's Hold, Deathgaze, Wave of Darkness, Spark of Death: treasure mods that boosted flat damage also boosted reuse time by that number of seconds. Which is pretty hilarious if you aren't a necromancer.

- The built-in bleeding effect of Shambling Corpses no longer keeps the owner in combat mode.

- The mod "You Were Adopted deals +36% damage and triggers the target's Vulnerability" did not trigger the target's vulnerability.

- If you have the psychology mod "Inspire Confidence Increases the damage of all targets' attacks +X" on both legs and main-hand slots, they will now stack correctly.

- The ability Ice Armor displayed the incorrect number for how much damage is mitigated. The effect also gave the wrong amount (but a different amount). All are synced up to the intended numbers now (+18 mitigation at max level, instead of +12 or +23).

- First Aid 2 through 5 gave slightly less healing than they said they should. (First Aid 1 and 6 were correct).

- Death-avoidance items like Monger's Boon can no longer protect you from being smote by an admin.

- Meditation #12's combo had a Punch step where it should have had an Any Melee step. (If you are currently using Meditation #12, you will need to re-meditate to get the updated version.)

Other Changes

- Being underwater costs "breath", not metabolism. A breath meter appears at the top of the screen while submerged. You start with a max-breath of 12 seconds. Raising Endurance can boost this number (by +6 at highest current level). A few items can also boost this number.

- Ilmari now has a "hydration" meter. The behavior is unchanged; you just couldn't see the number before until you got a notice that it was very low.

- Ilmari has a first-draft of a map.

- Newbie island bread is no longer too high-level for newbies to eat.

- Newbie island dungeon: removed redundant plot-papers on the ground.

- Removed large white debug columns from Kur Mountains.

- The Thorn of Decay's summoning crystal in Sun Vale can be selected again.

- Adjusted a poorly-placed winterprize node.

- In new installations of Project: Gorgon, the "`" back-quote key is no longer mapped to "Toggle Run/Walk". This is because newbies who accidentally press that button are always confused, and very few people actually want to enter walk mode. (This key made more sense back when sprinting cost power even when out of combat.) The command is still in the game, so if players really want it, they can just manually assign "Toggle Run/Walk" to any key you wish from the Configuration window. Existing installations of Project: Gorgon are unaffected by this change.

- The recipe "Bone Meal (from Femur)" has become "Bone Meal (From Any Bone)". It gives out 1 bone meal for any kind of bone, including femurs of course.

- The recipe "Bone Meal (From Skull)" has been adjusted to more accurately describe the requirements: "Bone Meal (From Humanoid Skull)". Recipe itself is unchanged.

- Therese in Serbule and Yetta in Eltibule have been adjusted to give out their recipes from a Training menu, instead of directly giving them upon reaching a new favor level. Functionality is unchanged (they are still learned for no cost when the new favor level is reached) but now players can see what will be learned when they level up favor.

- Low-level goblin calling cards (with Goblinese requirements below level 10) now drop more often from goblins.

- The "Halloween Loot Chests" outside of the Serbule gate have been removed; the other set (behind the inn in Serbule) have been renamed "Event Loot Chests", and their keys "Event Loot Keys". They will be used for live events or whatever in the future. Their loot is the same, except that all chests now give 3 items. (Low-level chests used to drop up to 6.)

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