One week of beta

The island has been open for seven days. Thirty-six versions went out in that time, most of them on the same day the report came in. The world came down for each one, always with a warning first, and always came back.

The biggest arrival was the Cyclopedia. The Bestiary lists every creature on the island: how many you have killed, what stage of knowledge you are at, the weaknesses and resistances, and the loot split by rarity. Each creature carries a difficulty of one to five skulls, worked out from its health and its defence, and the difficulty decides how many kills each stage asks for and how many charm points finishing it pays. Kills count separately per skull, so the red skull elf is its own hunt. A creature you have never killed shows as Unknown, in silhouette, until the first one falls. The Bestiary Tracker keeps the hunt you picked in a small side window, with a portrait and a progress bar, so you do not open the compendium after every kill.

Eva learned to send gold. Say "transfer 100 to Name" at the bank and confirm, and it goes, from anywhere on the island and even if the other player is offline. Buying with the backpack option now hands you the goods in fresh backpacks instead of dropping them on the floor, and the change from a partial deposit goes back into the gold pouch where it came from. The Highscore has a button and a window of its own, with the champion on display and the ranking criterion picked from a list.

Combat took most of the corrections. Shields block four times as much as they did, which is close to the original, and shielding is now a skill worth training. Reach on the diagonal counts real distance, so six is six in every direction, for the bow and for the sword alike. The first blow lands the moment you mark the target instead of a second later. Monsters follow you three tiles past the edge of the screen, and a skulled monster does not run when it is losing. Life fluid heals sixty to ninety. The rookstayer has mana of its own and can hold the starting wands.

Not everything went well, and the week is worth reading with that in it. Version 82 shipped a client that could not log in at all: the update check called something the client does not have, and it ran before anything could be downloaded, so the game could not even repair itself. It was fixed within hours. Reading books, letters and labels had been quietly broken and came back in 86. The quest log had been answering nothing for days because it shared a channel with the Highscore, and both are now on their own. Side buttons that stayed stuck in the pressed state let go.

The client itself got audited twice, and a good number of ways to crash it were closed: malformed network data, logins missing fields, and a shutdown that could lose your settings on the way out. Settings now save on logout too, and your backpack opens again where you left it when you log back in. The updater only accepts content signed by the world owner, so nobody in the middle of the road can push an update at you.

What is coming is the relic. There is a relic slot in the inventory and a Relics window with four spaces in it — that much is on the screen, and the system behind it is not written yet. The Charm window is in the same state: built, and not yet wired to anything you can spend points on.

Characters are staying. There is no wipe planned, and if one ever has to happen it will be said here first. Keep pressing Ctrl+Z when the world breaks in front of you — the report arrives with your name, your level and the tile you were standing on, and every one of them was read this week.

Back to the news