- A new race: Rakshasa: tiger-headed stalkers, quick and quiet,
who see in the dark and are hard to reach by mental attack -- but
holy power bites them harder than anyone, and always will. They
unlock at Paragon 57 at the Adventurers Guild. See help
rakshasa.
- Wilderness traders priced everything as though the shelves were
bare: a daily stock-keeping slip emptied their inventory instead
of trimming it, and prices followed it to the ceiling. Stock now
settles where it should, and so do the prices.
- Naming the second of something finds the right one: 2.bob
and the like could occasionally act on someone other than the one
you named.
- Spotting a trap tells you how bad it is: the level was always
meant to be in that message and never made it.
- Kasath takes up the hammer: Kasath in Evermore's Weapon Smithy now
repairs weapons and armour as well as selling them. repair and
estimate both work there.
- Shops that don't repair: typing repair at a shopkeeper who
doesn't do repairs now tells you so, instead of the baffling "There is
no 'all' here."
- Crash fixed: Death could take the whole game down along with his
victim. He now settles for the victim.
- Buffs that end when they say they do: bless on weapons and
armour, consecrate and envenom were meant to wear off when you
die or rent, and mostly didn't. Now they end at death, at rent, and
when the game reboots. Godhammer ends at a reboot or crash.
- Godhammer on crafted weapons: crafted weapons can now be
godhammered like any other. The few crafted weapons still carrying
an old godhammer from before it was meant to wear off will lose it
the next time their owner logs in.
- Curses on weapons: a cursed weapon's damage cut now ends when
you rent or the game reboots, and casting cure on it (or paying
to uncurse it) gives the damage back straight away. A curse's
no-drop protection works as before.
- Bless doesn't stack: blessing something that is already blessed
now tells you so. Blessing armour you are wearing no longer leaves
your armour class slightly off afterwards.
- Statflex goes higher: new emotes at 50, 75 and 100+, so a truly
legendary stat gets the show it deserves.
- Puff keeps time: Puff now says something every fifteen minutes.
Ask him about the autumn recap video.
- Crashes fixed: donating trash, a Battou Jutsu swing that killed
its target, top10 with a class name it didn't know, and a save
file that couldn't be written could each take the game down. None of
them can now.
- Accented letters: titles and descriptions with accented
letters (like Ø) are saved correctly.
- Height and weight, recalculated: both were stored in a single
byte, so anything over 255 wrapped around -- a giant could weigh less
than a minotaur. They now hold real values, and every character is
given a fresh height and weight for their race the first time they log
in. You'll see a message with your new numbers.
- Top ten lists by class: top10 <list> <class> shows that class's
top ten, e.g. top10 topmobkillers ranger. Every list now ranks
every character, not just the twenty names it used to keep.
(Suggested by Melvaks.)
- Battou Jutsu can be turned off: toggle battou switches it on
and off, and combat lists it with your other auto-skills. It
stays on unless you turn it off. (Suggested by Kelemvor.)
- Everyone sees rage end: when a raging fighter collapses or calms
down, the room now sees it too. (Suggested by Cidolfus.)
- Statflex: statflex str (or int, wis, dex, con, luck) shows off
a stat, with an emote that fits how good it is.
- Hero points add up: the hero points the game used for the
experience cap and the death penalty could lag behind the number
heropoints showed you. They are now always the same number.
- Toss your opponent: toss <name> mid-fight could read the name
as a direction and refuse. (Reported by Ermoke.)
- Poison can be cured: after its first tick, poison forgot how
strong it was and cure poison couldn't remove it.
(Reported by Sanla.)
- SoulMight stops shouting at shopkeepers: it no longer prints
"cannot be attacked" for every shopkeeper in the room.
(Reported by Chyron.)
- Godhammer fixes: a godhammered weapon saved by a link loss,
autosave or reboot came back with its original proc instead of none.
And removing a bought proc at the questsmith left the weapon unable
to take godhammer. (Reported by Hojo and Kelemvor.)
- High damroll holds: above 500 damroll, swapping gear could
quietly knock points off for good. It no longer does.
- A crash fixed: a family of crashes involving a character with
no name or account loaded is closed off.
- Dirge says who ignores it: undead, plants, constructs and other
creatures that dirge cannot touch took nothing and said nothing, which
looked like dirge doing no damage at all. Now they say so: "The
skeleton ignores the dirge." (Reported by Sanla.)
- Repair finds the broken one: with two items of the same name,
repair tattoo picked the first one you wore, even when it was the
one that didn't need fixing. It now picks the one that does, and
repair 2.tattoo works for worn items too.
- Repair totals match the bill: the Total cost after repair worn,
inventory or all left out the magic repairers' double price, so an
estimate at Thalas came to half what he charged. The estimate now
matches, and after a repair the total is what you actually paid.
- For client scripters: GMCP equipment slots say left and right:
Char.Items called your LEFT arm arm_r, and the same for every
paired slot. They are now spelled out: ear_left, arm_left,
wrist_left/wrist_left2, hand_left, finger_left_ring,
finger_left_middle, finger_left_index, leg_left, foot_left,
hind_foot_left, and a _right of each. orbitting is now
orbiting. The old names are gone, so scripts that match them
need updating.
- Quit! explains itself: leaving with quit! drops you to
1 hit point, mana and stamina, and several players came back to that
and took it for a death trap. Now you are told why when you return,
and reminded that rent and camp keep you rested.
(Reported by Turalyon.)
- Remort badges on the website are honest: your account page
could mark characters as remorted that never were. The badge now
follows actual remorts. (Reported by Goliath.)
- Sunday night's crash is fixed: an immortal command for
clearing out stale connections could take the game down, and did
late Sunday night. It no longer can.
- Shapeshifters keep their mana: changing form while a spell
was boosting your regeneration or resistances lost that boost for
good, and enough changes could leave mana regeneration negative and
draining without limit. Spells now carry through a shapeshift, and
a negative regeneration stops at zero. If yours looks wrong, a full
log out and back in resets it. (Reported by Kelemvor.)
- Shop numbers match the list: buying or identifying by number
could pick the item on the next line whenever the shop held two
slightly different copies of something. Numbers now always mean
what list shows. (Reported by Chyron.)
- No more "Error loading!" characters: a character abandoned
during creation stayed on your account list as "Error loading!".
Those entries now clear themselves the next time you see the list.
(Reported by Hojo.)
- The rent bonus counts your whole account: the experience bonus
for time away now measures time away from the whole account, not
from the one character logging in, so a long-rented alt no longer
grants it to a character played yesterday. (Reported by Hojo.)
- Godhammer shows by name: identify now lists a godhammered
weapon as Godhammered instead of a code. (Reported by
Kelemvor.)
- Valmeyjar scares the whole room: the spell stopped at the first
creature it frightened to sleep, so everything after it in the room
was left untouched. It now works through everyone present. Casting
it on creatures already asleep also named you instead of them.
- Practice shows who can really learn a skill: practice
<skill> listed every class on every line, so professions such as
skinning looked open to classes that cannot train them. Each line now
shows the class it is for. (Reported by Turalyon.)
- Your characters stay on your account: after yesterday's update,
logging in could show an account with no characters on it if you had
an empty slot in your mount stable. The characters themselves were
never lost, and the accounts it hit have been put back. It cannot
happen again.
Losing your link no longer takes everyone with you
- Losing your link no longer takes everyone with you: if your
connection dropped in the middle of a fight and you died before you
got back, that death could crash the game for everyone online -- it
happened on the 28th. A death like that is now handled like any
other.
- March sends them to the back, for real: marching a group member
said they had been sent to the back, but they kept their place --
they still walked into each room in the same order, so whatever was
waiting there still hit the same person, and formation kept
showing the old line-up. Marching now moves them behind everyone
else, in the formation and on the move. (Reported by Cidolfus.)
- Paragon death protection covers every character: the paragon
rewards for a lighter death -- half the experience loss from level
35, a chance to lose no max HMS from 45 -- quietly skipped characters
brought over from Kallisti 4.0 and 4.5. Help paragons says they
reach all characters on the account, and now they do. (Reported by
Kelemvor.)
- Paid upgrades keep the rank you were quoted: when you paid the
quest guild smith to enhance, imbue, augment or boost an
item, it was level-locked so its rank stayed where estimate said
-- until your next login, when the lock quietly fell off and the rank
jumped to match the new power. The lock now stays. (Reported by
Hojo.)
- Godhammer declines random and crafted weapons, for now: those
weapons have no pattern to return to, so when godhammer wore off only
the proc came away -- the extra die, the speed and the higher level
requirement stayed behind, and piled up with every cast. Until it
can be undone properly, the gods will decline. Weapons that kept
bonuses this way are being set right. (Reported by Gija.)
- A proc you paid to remove stays removed: if you paid the quest
guild smith to nullify an enchantment on a weapon, and then had a
Templar lay godhammer on it, the original proc came back when the
godhammer wore off -- on camp, or on death. The weapon was being
rebuilt from the way it left the forge rather than the way you paid
to leave it. Your qpoints and gold bought nothing. It now stays
the way you paid for. (Reported by Hojo.)
- Levels stops asking you for eighteen quintillion gold: on the
levels table, the gold column showed 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 --
every coin there is -- whenever you already carried more gold than
the next level actually costs. It was counting downward past zero
and wrapping all the way round. (Reported by Emvor.)
- Your equipment list stops emptying itself: if your client reads
GMCP, saving your character told it that every worn slot had emptied
and refilled -- sixty-six messages saying nothing, on every autosave
and every shop trip. Repair all turned that into over a thousand,
which overran the output buffer and threw away the messages that put
your gear back. That is why the list went blank rather than stale.
If the buffer does overflow now, the server rebuilds what your client
knows instead of leaving it wrong.
- Surviving a fall leaves you on your feet: a landing you lived
through used to put you on exactly zero hit points, stunned. You now
keep a fifth of your health, and never less than one.
- HRDR counts your bloodlust: the +4 hitroll and +4 damroll from a
bloodlust item was always real and always applied, but hrdr could
not see it -- so the command whose job is explaining where your
damroll comes from came up four short.
- Hiself is now himself: bashing someone over could describe them
hurting "hiself". Five years old, hidden because the neutral form
spells "itself" correctly by accident. (Reported by Kelemvor.)
- Harm stops overcharging you: harm works out its mana cost from the
damage it deals, and the table that made a big harm proportionally
cheaper than a small one had been switched off -- leaving it stuck at
the rate meant for a beginner's harm forever. At level 101 it cost 55
mana to do less damage than a lightning bolt costing 21. The table
is back, so the same harm now costs 16. (Noticed by Kelemvor.)
- Siroc wizards can specialize in fire again: a Siroc is a fire and
sky wizard, but the specialization bonus was wired to earth instead of
fire, so fireball, firestorm, hellstream and the rest cast as though
you had no specialization at all. (Found by Gary.) In the same
pass, gust of wind was paying its bonus twice to anyone whose
specialization covered both ice and sky -- Storm, High and Archwizards
will see that spell come back into line with the rest.
- Defend shows a real number: the defend line on your combat sheet
read 0.0% no matter how well it was working, because it was reporting
your defender's chance of saving you rather than your chance of
defending someone else. (Reported by Kelemvor.)
- GMCP keeps up with the fight: if your client reads GMCP, your health,
your opponent's health and your position now arrive with the blow that
changed them instead of up to two seconds later. MSDP was always
prompt; GMCP was not.
- A cyclops can see in the dark again: cyclops are born with
infravision, sense life and sense object, but those were granted
only at character creation -- so the first time you logged back
in they were gone for good, and no spell would bring them back.
If you have been casting crystal eyes and still could not see
your own dark items, that was why. (Found by Gary.)
- Queue depth on your prompt: display queue shows how many
commands you have typed ahead that are still waiting, and only
appears when there are any. (Asked for by Ainzu.) If your
client reads the MSDP QUEUE value, note it had been counting one
short and now reports the true depth.
- Colour codes no longer leak into GMCP: item names sent over
GMCP carried raw colour markup, so a client could show the markup
instead of the name. (Reported by Sanla.)
- Creatures keep the weapon they were built with: a wandering
creature handed a random weapon could destroy the one it was
scripted to carry. It keeps both now, so the scripted one still
drops.
- Your client can read the game directly: Kallisti now speaks
GMCP, so a client like Mudlet can be handed your health, mana and
stamina, what you are wearing slot by slot, the room you are in,
who you are fighting, your group, your affects and your account
progress -- live, without scraping the text. If you build
interfaces or scripts, this is for you; if you do not, nothing
about how the game reads has changed.
- whois showed a stale last-logon: the account login time was
not written to disk until later, so whois could report a login
days out of date -- and NEWS used that same stamp to decide what
you had already read. Both are correct now. (Reported by
Spencer.)
- Item details read in the right order: an object with several
things to look at returned them reversed, so looking at one detail
could show you another.
- Right-leg gear now says right leg: equipment listed an item
worn on your right leg as being on your left.
- If you converted an old character and it vanished, try again:
last release brought the 4.0/4.5 import back, but a converted
character was not being attached to your account -- so it looked
like nothing happened and you had no one to play. That is fixed.
Convert again (account menu, C) and your character will be
there and ready. (Thanks to the returning player who reported it.)
- Quest companions can no longer be renamed: renaming a quest
follower such as Kalare could quietly break the events tied to its
name. Those companions now refuse renaming. (Reported by Gary.)
- Your old characters can be brought across: if you played in
the Kallisti 4.0 or 4.5 days, the game had stopped reading those
old character files and could not restore them. It can again.
At the account menu choose C to convert a legacy character,
choose the version, then give the character's name and its old
password.
- The crash on the 27th is fixed: at 03:49 that morning the
game went down and everyone was disconnected. Something in the
world managed to kill itself, and the code that handles a death
could not cope with the killer and the victim being the same.
Found, reproduced and fixed.
- A charged enemy can no longer flee the instant it stands:
a mob caught by a charge is meant to be pinned for a moment, but
one that scrambled back to its feet could slip away and run
before that window was up. It stays put now. (Reported by
Mizarra.)
- Godhammer now ends when you camp or die, which is what the
spell's help has always said it does. It did not: the enhancement
survived both and stayed on the weapon indefinitely. If you are a
Templar who has been carrying a blessed weapon between sessions,
it will need recasting now.
- Losing your link no longer risks the game: if you were
following a group leader and their connection dropped, the next
death beside them took the whole game down with it. That is what
happened at 01:39 on the 25th. Fixed.
- Teleport picks its destination differently: the spell was
drawing from a random source that other parts of the game reset on
purpose, so it was not as random as it was meant to be. It now
uses the game's own generator. Whether that is what made teleport
feel repetitive in the wilderness is NOT settled -- we could not
reproduce it in testing -- so the spell now records where it sends
you and we are still looking. (Reported by Gary.)
- The wilderness no longer freezes the game: a hunting creature
working out a route through the deep sea could send the world into
a loop it never came out of -- a counter that was never counted.
The game stopped answering and then restarted itself. Fixed, and
the route-finder now notices when it is somewhere it cannot map
instead of guessing.
- Short forms of commands work again: typing par in a
fight said Unknown Command instead of parrying. So did
ban for bandage, stat for stats, for for forage,
and 26 others. Each was quietly reserved by a command only
immortals can run, and the refusal looked exactly like a typo, so
nobody reported them. An abbreviation now finds the command YOU
can use. (Spotted by Rickrat.)
- CB reaches your cabal: if your account belongs to more than
one cabal, cb announced the cabal you were tuned to but
delivered to a different one -- so you heard everyone else while
nobody heard you, and the game told you nobody was listening. It
now goes where it says it goes. (Reported by Freya.)
- The room you are shown at login is the room you are in: if you
had been idled out, the game showed you one room and your first
command ran in another. (Reported by Kelemvor.)
- Idling out no longer strands you where you idled: being idled
out and auto-rented now returns you to the temple, or to the
Gummton Church Narthex if you idled out in the wilderness.
- A short link loss no longer pulls you out of the world: once you
had idled out even once, any later disconnect sent you to the void
within seconds instead of leaving you the usual time to reconnect.
- Rakshasa show their name: they were listed as other on
who. Fixed.
- Refused healing no longer costs mana: casting heal,
power heal or full heal on someone already at full
health told you they did not need it and took the mana anyway.
It is given back now. (Reported by Vinculus.)
- The who list no longer claims zero remorts: characters who
have never remorted were showing r0. They now show nothing.
- mobsearch can filter by area: for example mobsearch name
kender area midgaard. Part of a zone name is enough.
(Requested by Kroil.)
- The hourly hitch is gone: once every game hour the whole world
paused for around half a second -- longer on a busy night. If you
have ever had a command hang just as the hour turned, that was
this. One piece of the world's clockwork was counting every
object in existence to answer a question it could answer without
looking. The pause is now about a tenth of what it was.
- Reconnecting shows you where you are: if your link dropped and
you came back after a while, the game used to tell you nothing
until you typed look, and what it showed before that could be
wrong. You now get your surroundings the moment you reconnect.
- Praying for order reaches its end: pray order refused to take
anyone past the last stretch toward a pure alignment, and could
leave you stranded partway with no way forward. It now carries
you all the way. Pray chaos was the same and is fixed with it.
Reported by Gary.
- Under the hood: the scheduled jobs that back up your characters
now report their own failures instead of failing quietly, and the
manor and clan logs stopped rewriting themselves from scratch on
every single line.
- Manors no longer stall the world: putting a single item into
a chest in a well-stocked manor used to lock the game up for most
of a second, while the whole room was written out. The heaviest
manor we have -- some thirty-eight thousand items -- cost 714
milliseconds for one barrel. That writing now happens in the
background: the same action costs 135 milliseconds, and the
pause is gone.
- Unenhance no longer welds an item shut: taking the last point
of power off an item left it at zero, and an item at zero could
not be worked on again -- along with a gap in the qpoints you got
back. Unenhance now stops at one. If you have an item stuck
this way, tell a staff member and we will repair it.
- Yell and ask need you sitting up: both could be used while
unconscious or dying, which no other spoken command allows. They
now want you at least resting, like say and the rest.
- Under the hood: your belongings are now recorded item by item
as you play, manors included -- they were the last thing carried
only in their own files. Nothing about how you use them changes.
- Materials: hides, bones and meat cut from a corpse do not
survive renting or a reboot. This is not new -- they have always
spoiled -- but they used to vanish without a word, which made it
look like a bug. Now it is a rule, and the receptionist will say
so when you rent.
- Work makes it permanent: tan the hide, carve the bone, or
craft it into gear, and it keeps like anything else you own.
Refined materials were never affected and still are not.
- Your manor still works the way you use it: raw materials can be
dropped in your house and donated there, so piling up hides for a
crafting session is fine. They clear at the next reboot.
- Under the hood: the game now measures how long each tick really
takes and how often it runs over. Nothing you can see, but if the
world has felt sluggish lately, this is what lets us prove it
rather than guess.
EXP works again, and we are finally measuring group experience
- Bugfix: EXP works again as shorthand for EXPERIENCE. An
immortal command was quietly claiming those three letters, so you
got Unknown Command -- the same thing that happened to T and
V last night. We have now checked every abbreviation in the
game and found twenty-seven more doing this, including PAR for
PARRY, BAN for BANDAGE, and AT for ATTACK. Those need
a deeper fix and are being worked on properly, not one at a time.
- Under the hood: we have started recording exactly how group
experience is divided -- every share, every bonus, and anything
that goes nowhere. Nothing about how you earn experience has
changed in this release. If we do change it, it will be because
the numbers told us to, and we will say what they said.
- Bugfix: donating to your manor requires a donation room again.
Last night's crash fix accidentally switched on an old fallback
that sent the item to your vault instead. That fallback had never
actually worked, so this puts things back as they were rather than
taking anything away. (Spotted within the hour by Spoony.)
Two crashes, a deathgrip that would not let go, and your name back
- Crash fix: donating an item to your manor could crash the game
if you had not built a donation room yet. It now tells you so
instead, which is what it always meant to do.
- Crash fix: falling could crash the game when you landed
somewhere with a way down that led nowhere. You now land and stay
landed. Both of tonight's interruptions were these two; our
apologies for the bumpy evening.
- Bugfix: DEATHGRIP lets go when the fight ends. It was only
counting down during combat, so if the fight ended some other way
the grip simply stayed on -- and while gripped you regenerate no
hit points, mana or movement at all. If you have felt inexplicably
stuck after a fight, this was why. (Reported by Tulip.)
- Bugfix: new characters get a capital letter again. For a few
days it was possible to create one without.
- Bugfix: T and V work again as shorthand for TELL and
VISIBLE. Two immortal commands had been added in a spot that
quietly claimed those letters, so typing t got you Unknown
Command -- which looks exactly like a typo, which is why it went
unreported for days. Our fault, and sorry. (Noticed by Rickrat.)
Your plugs stay in, and your bags stop rearranging themselves
- Bugfix: plugs no longer fall out of crafted weapons when you
rent. Your gear recorded what KIND of item something was packed
inside, and a crafted item has no kind to name -- so anything set
into one came back loose, and quietly stopped granting its bonus
until you noticed and re-seated it. Both halves of that are
fixed: it stays put, and it keeps working.
- Bugfix: items packed in a bag no longer migrate into an
identical bag stored inside it. Same cause wearing a different
hat -- two bags of the same kind were indistinguishable, and the
inner one always won the argument.
- Neither fix reaches backwards. Anything already shaken loose is
sitting in your inventory and wants re-seating once. From here
it stays where you put it.
- Bugfix: searching a container with a great many items in it
could crash the game. This is what took the realm down tonight,
and our apologies for the interruption. Fixed -- and it was not
the container's fault, so search away.
- Bugfix: paladins casting SANCTUARY were told only that they
lacked the mana, while PRAC showed a figure that was never the
whole cost. The refusal now names what you actually need and what
you have, and says when your alignment is adding to it. Angelic is
the cheapest it gets. (Reported by Kelemvor.)
- Bugfix: characters returning after a long absence could load
with the wrong experience total -- sometimes wildly too much,
sometimes none. Old character files store experience differently,
and the conversion was not carrying it across. Now it is. If you
came back recently and your experience looked wrong, this was why;
speak to an immortal if it still does.
- Bugfix: CUTCON never actually disconnected anything. Imm
command, but it has been broken for a long time.
- Behind the scenes: work continues on storing player equipment
in the database alongside the existing rent files. Nothing about
your gear changes: the rent files are still what the game loads
from, and every item was checked to make sure both copies agree.
- Bugfix: several problems in that second copy were found and
fixed, including one that emptied it whenever you rented. Your
actual equipment was never affected.
- Note: if you have not played in a very long time, some of your
items may show odd creation dates. Old rent files never recorded
them, so the game invented one each time you logged in. That will
settle once the new storage takes over.
- Bugfix: GWHO could crash the game when someone in your
group had a charmed follower. This is what took the realm down
that night, and our apologies for the interruption. Fixed.
- Bugfix: Clan coin amounts were shown incorrectly. The costs
quoted for inducting and for changing rank titles were the wrong
numbers, not merely badly formatted. They now show what you
actually pay.
- Bugfix: Clan trophies and power displayed the same
value. Each now shows its own.
- Changed: Large numbers are grouped for readability, so
1,234,567 rather than 1234567.
- Bugfix: OBJSEARCH could crash the game. This is what
took the realm down shortly after the last reboot, and our
apologies if it caught you mid-fight. Fixed.
- New: NEWS is now split up by release instead of one long
file. NEWS shows what changed since you last played,
NEWS ALL shows everything, and NEWS 5.3.52 shows a
single release. Older news is still there, under NEWS ALL.
- Changed: EAT, DRINK, SIP, TASTE and POUR now tell you they
looked in your inventory when they cannot find something. They
only ever searched what you were carrying, so "you can't find
it!" was misleading for anything lying on the ground.
(Reported by Ainz.)