Game updates/2018-09-21

September 21 Update

Note: if you normally play the game via a non-Steam shortcut, please make sure to run the game through Steam once to ensure the game has patched!

Red Wing Casino

The Red Wing Casino is now open! You can find the entrance to this "teleportation-accessible luxury resort destination" in Rahu. (And perhaps there are easier ways ...) To help us test the games in the casino, type the command ‘’’/redeem RedWingTickets’’’ in chat to receive some free game vouchers!

Storage Cleanup

In this update we've tried to clean up a lot of storage-related weirdness. For example, one big problem was that many ingredients couldn't be stored in storage for "ingredients" -- because every ingredient had to be manually flagged by us and we often missed some. Now we've switched to automated tagging of ingredient types.

We've also cleaned up the categories. Several NPCs stored "Ingredients for any skill," but now that all ingredients are being tagged automatically, this is far too large a category -- nearly everything is an ingredient for something! In practice, only food items were reliably tagged as ingredients in the past (and not even all of those), so "ingredients for any skill" storage were effectively cooking storage. As such we've converted "ingredients for any skill" storage into "food or cooking ingredients" storage in this update.

We've also changed the storage of Joeh in Serbule. He offered a large amount of storage for equipment, but Serbule is the newbie town. Newbies don't have a lot of extra equipment to store and it's a much better idea for them to sell or gift any excess equipment instead of trying to store it! So Joeh was actually hurting our newbie experience by teaching newbies that they should hoard low-level gear. Joeh now has storage for any type of item, but fewer storage slots than before. (Tyler Green remains unchanged because his equipment storage doesn't open up until players reach Best Friends favor level, at which point they aren't likely to be newbies.)

We've added more Equipment-specific storage in the new casino area (along with tons of other new storage), but it's been tweaked a bit: Equipment storage now also lets you store ammunition. This includes things like arrows (obviously) but also includes anything consumed by an ability: throwing knives, first aid kits, diamonds (used by a certain ability), and many others. The intent is to let you store all the items for a particular combat skill in one place.

In all cases where a storage vault changed, existing items are still there. If you take those items out, however, you won't be able to put them back in if they no longer meet the requirements for that storage.

Specific notes:

- Laura Neth: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"

- Selaxi: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"

- Julius Patton: "Food or Cooking Ingredients" ==> "Food, Cooking, or Brewing Ingredients"

- Joeh: "Equipment" ==> "any item". Max slots reduced from 64 (at Like Family) to 40.

- Tyler Green: "Equipment" ==> "Equipment and Ammunition"

- Charles Thompson: "Alchemy [potions]" ==> "Potions and Alchemy Ingredients"

Monster Crits

High-level monsters needed to do a bit more damage, and high-level combat also needed to be a bit less predictable. So instead of just buffing monster damage as we've done in the past, this time we've introduced monster crits. Monsters now have a chance to critically-hit for double damage. The chance is based on the monster's internal combat level. For every level after 30, monsters gain 0.25% chance to crit. This means that by level 70, they have a 10% chance to crit for double damage. Elite and Boss monsters have an extra +5% chance to critically-hit. (This is a flat bonus that's the same at every level. This means that even newbie bosses will occasionally lay the smackdown. It's for your own good! Dying builds character.)

(Non-AH) Pet Crits

Some of the pet skills are in an awkward place right now because high-level player damage is still so high that pets can't contribute very usefully. We're still working on high-level player damage scaling. In the short term, the tech for these new monster crits give us an interesting way to buff pets a bit.

For every pet-level above 30, the pet gains 0.25% chance to crit. Note this is not YOUR skill level, but the pet's level. (Each summoned pet has an inherent level; to get a higher-level pet you need to use a higher-level summoning ability.) Pet crits deal +100% damage at level 30, plus 1% more for every level above that.

- Example: the pet summoned by Raise Skeletal Archer 4 is level 47. Thus it has a 4.25% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 217% damage.

- Example: the spider summoned by Incubate 5 is level 70. Thus it has a 10% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 240% damage.

This change may not be permanent, but it will help high-level pets in the short term. Note that this applies to all pets EXCEPT animal-handling pets. Animal-handling pets use a different critical-hit mechanic already. So this affects necromancy pets, baby spiders, summoned deer, minigolems, etc.

Other Changes & Fixes

- Monsters no longer notice players before the player's loading screen finishes.

- Area-of-effect attacks no longer "loot-lock" monsters hit by the burst.

- Added a button to sort storage vault contents. (This uses the same sort order as the inventory-sort button does.)

- About 200 new Work Orders have been added to the game; there is a new Work Order sign in Red Wing Casino, and all existing boards have at least a few new ones.

- In addition, many old Work Orders have been moved from one city to another (to try to make things a little more sensible... but it still needs more reorganization in the future). You may want to check your active Work Orders in case they now need to be delivered to a different city than before!

- Some melee abilities were not flagged as melee, so buffs/debuffs applicable to melee attacks did not work on them: Phoenix Strike, Bun-Fu Strike, Rabbit Scratch, Doe Eyes.

- Some burst attacks were not flagged as bursts, so buffs/debuffs applicable to burst attacks did not work on them: Wave of Darkness, Song of Discord, various minigolem abilities.

- Druid ability Cloud Sight did not benefit from equipment that boosted druid base damage by a percentage.

- Stopped damage-reply effects (such as Fire Shield Potions) from activating due to friendly damage (e.g. from Restorative Arrow).

- "Fight Me You Fools" had untyped damage instead of Crushing damage.

- Some healing abilities that normally deal 0 damage (since they're heals) could inflict damage when flat damage-type boosts were added (e.g. a Ring of Psychic Pestering, which adds +2 psychic damage, would cause some mentalism heals to deal 2 damage).

- Corrected the Causes of Death from Priest attacks.

- The sidebar ability Fish Gut has been completely redesigned: it no longer uses fish scales as ammo and instead uses a skinning knife (with a 5% chance the knife will be lost). Creatures with Fish anatomy take double damage. This is considered a (non-bleed-inducing) variant of Gut for purposes of equipment and combos.

- Renumbered the IDs of poetry appreciation effects to allow room for new effects in the future; if you had a poetry appreciation buff on, it has been dispelled - sorry!

- Recipes for exotic mushroom substrate have fewer ingredients but only yield half as much substrate.

- The Cow ability Chew Cud now only consumes regular "Grass", and not other grasses such as "Evil Grass" or "Barley". This is because chewing something besides regular Grass is pretty much always a mistake, and sometimes a tragic one (like when you chew up your Eternal Greens).

- For similar reasons, the ability Organ Displacement now only takes basic Aquamarines, not things with aquamarines in them (such as Aquamarine Rings).

- For similar reasons, the ability Resuscitate now only takes basic Diamonds, not fancy diamonds (such as Winterprize) or equipment with diamonds in them.

- The recipe for some Alchemy potions has been simplified: Persona Reducer Potion, Memory Inhibitor Potion.

- Reduced the ingredients needed for high-level Shamanic Infusion recipes.

- Fixed recipe icons that did not match the items generated by the recipe.

- Bottles of Fertilizer now stack to 5.

- Rennet now stacks to 5.

- NPCs that like specific flowers (e.g. Brianna Willer likes Dahlias) now really like bouquets containing just that flower (Dahlia Bouquets in this case).

- Fae Felt can now be dropped by all killable fairy enemies. It is an extremely rare drop for low level fairies such as fairy slaves, and an uncommon drop for higher level fairies.

- Crazed Alphas are more dangerous.

- Fixed missing icons (shown as all-white squares) when viewing player raffle boxes or vend-o-matics.

- NPCs that interact with lamps (such as Sir Coth does at night) can once again actually turn said lamps on/off.

- Slightly shrank the default NPC dialog font text from 18pt to 16pt. (This does not affect existing installations. You can always manually change the font size in Settings->GUI->Font Sizes.)

- Upgraded to a new version of Unity, 2017.4.10

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