Ten Systems, And A World To Use Them In

Added

• Class change, both steps: the first at level 30, the second at level 40. This is the progression the game is built around past level 30 and it was missing entirely.
• Upgrading with taliks, plus crafting, downgrading and exchanging. Higher level gear is harder to upgrade, and a failed upgrade can cost you the item.
• Mining and ore refining. Take a battery to an ore vein, mine it, and refine what you pull out. The grade you get is not always the grade you aimed for.
• The auction house. Register an item for a fee and it sells whether or not you are online. Your proceeds are waiting the next time you log in.
• Guild chat, and the guild information the client asks for when you enter the world.
• Accretia siege mode, and the attack that goes with it.
• The dark hole, so a party can open one and go in.
• The nuclear launcher, from finding the device through to picking where it lands.
• Chip War and the Holy Stone. The three stones and the keeper stand in the world, take damage, and fall. War is declared three times a day, at 06:00, 14:00 and 22:00 server time, and each one runs for two hours. It pays out when a stone is destroyed.
• Race leaders. A character can hold a rank within its race. The rank decides who sees the holy stone’s health and who can arm the nuclear launcher. Rank is granted by a server administrator with %race boss and a slot number from 0 to 8.
• More administrator commands. %* puts an item straight into your bag when there is a free slot for it, %heal fills health, force and stamina back up, and %allskill raises your skills.
• The cash shop answers you instead of leaving the window hanging. Purchases are declined.
• Party dungeons. Forty one of them, each one a private copy of the map that your party opens with a key and fights through: waves spawn as you clear them, a timer runs on each stage, and finishing pays the whole party. Two parties running the same dungeon never see each other.
• Dungeons are described in plain script files under server/scripts/dungeons, one file per dungeon. You can read them, change what a stage spawns or pays, and add your own. A file with a mistake in it is refused by name when the server starts, and the rest keep working.
• Server rates are settings you can change. Experience, ground loot, mining speed and mastery gain each have a multiplier the server reads at startup instead of having it built in. Nothing read them before. Out of the box they match the original: everything normal except force gain, which is one and a half times.
• Map chat. Everything you say on the channel reaches the people on your map, and you can turn receiving it off.
• Race chat, for the archon and the race leadership. Everyone else has the all-race channel.
• All-race chat, which reaches every member of your race. It can be set to cost money or an item to keep it from becoming a spam channel; out of the box it costs nothing, which is what the original does.
• The two race-leadership channels, for the leaders talking among themselves and for the patriarch addressing the people nearby.

Fixed

• The server told returning clients the wrong port to reconnect on. It reported 27780, which belongs to the original 2003 release. The client reuses the connection it already has, so nothing broke because of it, but the number was wrong and would have mattered the day a client believed it. It now reports the port it is actually listening on.

• The party dungeons were missing from the download. All forty one of them are listed above as new in this release, and the server that shipped had none of the files that describe them, so a dark hole refused to open and the log said the dungeons were disabled. The same gap left them off our own server. Both are fixed, and this download contains them.

• The server stopped responding for everyone as soon as two players could see each other. Not a dropped packet or a stutter: nothing moved, nothing was said and nobody could log out until the server was restarted. It needed two people standing in sight of one another, which is why it survived every solo test. Anyone who ran the first build of this release alone would never have met it, and anyone who opened it to a second player would have met it immediately.

• The second character you played in one sitting could not equip anything. It said the item was not available, about an item sitting in your bag. Going back to character select and picking someone else left the server and the game disagreeing about which item was which, so equipping, using, dropping and splitting all failed for that character. Quitting to the desktop and coming back in was the only way around it. Picking the same character again had the same problem for anything you had picked up that session.

• Arrows and bullets could not be equipped at all, and nothing said why. Ammunition goes into the accessory row beside your rings, not into a weapon slot, and the server was refusing that whole row. Clicking the arrows simply did nothing, with no message on screen. Rings and amulets went the same way. You can carry three stacks of ammunition and two rings or amulets, as in the original.

• Shooting trained the wrong skill. Every hit you landed raised melee points no matter what you were holding, so a ranger with a bow spent the whole game training a mastery they were not using, and the mastery that should have been raising their damage never moved. Launchers get their own counter back as well, which is what the original does with them.

• Rangers were handed the wrong starter weapon for their race. Everyone got a bow, including Accretia, who have no bow at any point in the game, along with arrows their weapons cannot fire. Each race now starts with the weapon its own rangers actually carry: a bow for Cora, a firearm for Bellato and Accretia, with ammunition that fits it.

• Failing to equip something told you the wrong reason. A server problem reported itself as a race restriction, and a race restriction reported itself as a shield conflict. The messages match what actually happened now.

• Levelling now follows the game’s own experience table instead of a placeholder curve that was never replaced. The client draws your experience bar from its copy of that table, so the two used to disagree, and the gap grew with every level: level 2 arrived far too early, and by the sixties the placeholder was asking for a rounding error of what it should have. The bar and the level-up now say the same thing, all the way to 65.

• Buying from a vendor charged you nothing and gave you nothing, and told you it worked. Every purchase since the first release did this.

• Chip War now survives a restart. The scene, the stones’ health and the countdown all come back where they were, and the time the server was down counts against the clock. What each character contributed comes back with it, where before it died with the process.

• Two of the startup repairs never ran on a server upgraded from an earlier release, so the tables behind the auction house and the race ranks were never created. The auction house failed on every login and only said so in the log.

• Every map has monsters and NPCs, not just the three home towns. Nine thousand nine hundred monsters across thirty one maps instead of two and a half thousand across three, including the resource maps, Sette, Elan, Cora, the Medical Lab and Exile Land.

• Going into a dark hole or through certain portals quietly sent you home instead. Those destinations are real places now.

• Other players slid past the point where they stopped, then snapped back a moment later.

• Race chat showed the wrong sender.

• Nothing you owned could be upgraded. Items were created with no socket capacity at all, so the upgrade always refused.

• Sitting at the character screen disconnected you after five minutes, with nothing to explain why.

• The two hundred and fifty sixth item you picked up in one session took another item’s identity, and acting on either one could hit the wrong one.

• Anything you were wearing at login made the game and the server disagree about which item was which. Equipping a two-handed weapon made it vanish from the bag with an error about sharing items, and a newly granted item could take an identity another one was already using. Both are the same mistake in how items were numbered when you enter the world.

• Levelling up did nothing to your health or force. They are worked out from your masteries and your level now, so a level fifty character has appropriate stats.

• Your race rank did not come back after logging out. It was saved the whole time; the game was never told about it on the way in, so the aura was missing and the race channel stayed shut.

• An archon still could not use race chat. The rank and the channel are two separate things the game has to be told, and only one of them was being sent.

• Money granted by an administrator now sets the amount instead of adding to it, so asking for a number gives you that number.

Known Issues

• Two of the dungeons refuse to open. They are laid out as rooms behind gates, and gates are not built yet, so the server declines those two at startup instead of running them wrong. The other forty one work.
• Almost none of the dungeons have been played yet, and three things inside them are known to be missing rather than merely untested. Gates within a dungeon are read from the script and never open, so a stage that is supposed to end by opening one chains to the next instead. A room that fills only once you walk into it stays empty. A monster that comes back comes back where it died rather than where it started.
• Chip War is the least tested of the new systems. It runs on the original’s schedule now, but it has not been fought through at size.
• Nobody holds a race rank until an administrator grants one. There is no election, so until a rank is granted the holy stone’s health bar has no audience, nobody can arm the nuclear launcher, and the race channel has no one who may speak on it.
• The talk jade does not work. In the original it lets someone who is not an archon use race chat. It comes from the cash shop, which is not built, so rank is the only way onto that channel.
• Health and force are much larger than they were. The numbers follow the original’s own formulas now rather than the placeholder they replaced, which changes how every fight feels. Expect the balance against monsters to be off until it has been played through.
• The playable band is still roughly level 1 to 24 for content, even though the systems above reach further. Combat balance and the full skill list are early.
• Trading directly between players is still missing.
• Nobody has played anywhere near level 65.