The hourly hitch is gone

5.3.66 · August 14, 2026

 - 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.