Game updates/2016-03-23

March 23 Update

This is mainly a bug-fix update, but there's some new stuff as well.

Nature Appreciation

Using flowers now requires a new skill called Nature Appreciation. This was done because flowers are actually intended to be very important at high levels of play, and it didn't make sense to gate their use on a different skill. :Unfortunately that means in the short term you won't be able to use your flowers until you level up this skill. Sorry about that!

Flower Arrangement

There is a new skill called Flower Arrangement available from a new NPC in Rahu. It is an extension of gardening and requires level 50 Gardening to learn.

There will eventually be several other flower-arrangement-related NPCs in the world, but until they show up, a few existing NPCs have stepped in to fill the void:

- Rohina in Sun Vale and Landri the Cold in Kur have additional flower arrangement recipes for sale.

- Tadion has a few new blacksmithing recipes needed by flower arrangers

- Legs and George Madler sell a couple of textile recipes needed by flower arrangers

In addition, several interesting flower arrangement recipes can only be found via random loot drops.

Revision of "Recall Beginnings"

The Recall Beginnings Teleportation ability is supposed to teleport you to the "entrance" to the area you're in. But it actually teleported you to the nearest graveyard spot -- that is, the point where you'd respawn to if you died. That happened to work because there was only one graveyard spot per outdoor area or dungeon. But now there are more graveyard spots in the desert zones, and Recall Beginnings was not useful in those areas. So it has been rewritten to actually teleport you to the spot where you arrived in the current area.

However, it will not work correctly until after you've switched areas once. (It needs to see where you arrive, so it can remember it.)

Ice Magic

- Ice Magic can now be raised to level 60; see Ichin in Rahu.

- There are a bunch of new treasure effects for Ice Magic to flesh out its possibilities.

- There's a new Ice Magic ability called "Chill". It is a basic attack and can be researched at levels 1, 25, 45, and 60.

- Note: one of the ingredients needed for the new research recipes can most easily be obtained by bartering with the Sand Seer in Ilmari.

Favor Quests

There are only a couple of new favors in this update -- three for The Sand Seer and three for Nishika in Rahu. (Plus a couple of hang outs for Nishika.) They use slightly new tech, though, so keep an eye out for bugs: completing some of these favors will add new training options in their training menu.

Everything Else:

- Fixed several bugs related to aggro. It was very buggy. It is less buggy now. I mean, going by statistical likelihood. The system should now be working as described before: it will only check aggro every 5 seconds, or when taunt/detaunt abilities are used

- Improved performance of water in South Serbule (believed to be the cause of framerate problems some people have reported)

- Fainor sells the recipe for Cavefish Filets (req Fishing level 50)

- Modest framerate improvements in Kur Mountains

- Revised some of the existing skill synergy bonuses, so your skill levels may have gone up or down a few points. (Integrating some of the newer skills into the lists)

- If you are more than 40 meters away from a boss when it dies and do not receive the curse-dispel, you can now click on the corpse of the boss to dispel its curse

- Redid the water in Rahu, should reduce framerate spikes when panning across multiple small lakes

- The treasure effect "Tundra Spikes has a 66% chance to deal +200% damage" became "Tundra Spikes deals 200 Armor damage"

- Dishes consisting of only eggs were not considered prepared foods

- Jaime Fatholm's first mining recipe is available at Comfortable favor, not Friends

- Jaime Fatholm loves Silver ore and Sardonyx gems in addition to her original items

- Reduced the stats on low-level snails (less armor, less armor-thickness, less health regeneration)

- More work to keep the goddamned spiders from getting stuck on the stairs in the newbie island and then inadvertently camping the newbie respawn point

- The four pillars that you need to find on the newbie island now give off light and sparks, hopefully making them easier to find (especially at night)

- A new low-level Toolcrafting hammer recipe needed by chefs is available from Yogzi or Amutasa. The completed item is also sold by Nishika at a high markup

- Fixed bugs in the XP table for surveying/mining/geology which made it ridiculously fast to level

- Some motherlode maps were giving out too much ore; intended range is between 15 and 30 pieces, but some were giving 15-40 pieces

- Made skill checks more likely to succeed by increasing the variance of the skill bonus from 1-10 to 1-20. In other words, we used to roll a ten-sided die and add it to your skill level to see if you beat the monster's level. Now we roll a 20-sided die. This makes all skill checks more likely to succeed, and should be most noticeable when trying to autopsy/skin/butcher/etc. corpses that are just a bit above your level, and when trying to apply mind-control effects to monsters. It will also be relevant when trying to decompose items for phlogiston if they are higher-level than your skill

- Fixed a bug that made higher-level versions of Tell Me About Your Mother have a -3 penalty to your skill check to mesmerize the monster, instead of a +3 bonus, as intended

- Lowered the bonuses that elites and bosses receive to their mental defense skill, making it easier to mesmerize, fear, or debuff them.

- Removed the universal "% chance to ignore stuns" that all bosses had. (That was from back when when stuns could be easily perma-chained, but it makes less sense now that there are stronger diminishing returns on stuns.) Bosses and elites still have a universal chance to ignore knockbacks though, since knockbacks don't have diminishing returns at the moment

- The "Hunting: <Animal>" quests in South Serbule did not give the combat XP that they claimed to give

- Fixed another bug that could let quests consume items that you were wearing instead of consuming non-worn items in your inventory

- Added a rudimentary map for South Serbule. (Still no map for Rahu yet)

- Raised the level of most Rakshasa in Rahu by 2-5 levels, so that they are over level 60 and have better chances of dropping level 60 gear effects. (The ones on the plateau were already over 60)

- Normalized the repeat-XP values of various ways of dying. Some very old causes of death gave up to 25xp per death, allowing too much farming; now repeat deaths are all worth 5xp or lower.

- Fixed bug that caused any delivery quest to automatically complete without needing to deliver anything

- One of the winterprize crystals in the winter nexus was linked to another so you could only harvest one or the other of them each time

- Hook Beasts drop more hooks

- Lawara no longer accepts Amethysts as gifts, because newbies were giving away their teleportation crystals and getting stuck on the island

- Scintillating Frost didn't actually do more damage to vulnerable creatures although the description suggested it should

- (Untested) When you log in incognito, your friends should no longer be notified, and you won't show up as Online on their friends list. (Pressing shift on the log in screen will make the login button turn into "Incognito Login". Or you can enable incognito mode with the /incognito command in chat... although at that point you're logged in, so your friends already know...)

- Wolfen Speed Potions now buff out-of-combat sprint speed, not in-combat sprint speed. The duration is now 5 minutes (as listed on the item) instead of 2

- Brambleskin no longer puts you into combat mode when used

- Asterion got a little meaner

- Lord Sedgewick can curse again

- Some knockbacks/pull-forwards effects did not work when you were in a group

- Moved Lady Windsong to a more visible location

- Psychology effects "Pep Talk removes ongoing Poison effects (up to 36 dmg/sec)" and "Pep Talk removes ongoing Fire effects (up to 36 dmg/sec)" could each show up on both necklaces and main hand items. But it's dumb for these effects to be available on multiple slots because having two of them doesn't do anything more than having one of them. So the poison dispel is now only for necklace and the fire dispel is now only for main hand.

- The poison used by injector bugs and scorpions has been toned down a bit. Well, actually, the total damage done isn't lower... it's higher! But the poison does less damage more often. Instead of 50 dmg every 3 seconds, scorpions now do 30 damage every 2 seconds. This allows poison-mitigation effects to be more useful. This also makes it possible for Pep Talk to dispel the poison if you have the necessary treasure effect.

- Chickens lay half as many eggs (on average)

- The big desert area around Rahu is still far from complete, but some new kinds of level 60+ solo monsters have arrived to make sure the desert doesn’t feel too empty. Or too safe. (These are not necessarily final monster types for this area; they're just handy. But feedback is desired on how the area feels now)

- Various fixes to Pennoc and Lakrea quests (such as "go stand in a sandstorm"). A few more fixes are still needed but all quests should at least be complete-able now

- Many small fixes to terrain, foliage, pathing, and spawn positions

Another Bug-Fix Update Coming Soon

I'm on a bug-bashing kick right now -- there'll probably be another client update in just a week in order to fix more client bugs. This is a good time to report any bugs that you haven't reported, or really anything that's pissing you off.

I'm still searching for the cause of a crash-bug that some players report happening in certain areas. I suspect it might be a Unity bug, and we're using an older version of Unity 5, so I'm going to upgrade to the latest version this week. :If that goes smoothly we'll roll it out next week and see if it helps. But upgrading is often a time-consuming and painful process, so we'll see how it goes.

There's a lot of different pieces of new content in the works as well, so we'll continue to roll content out in parts as it becomes ready.

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