Hey all! You know, this week started off pretty slow, but it really picked up, I’m even writing this a day early! I’ll get into that a bit more later. For now, happy holiday and/or thursday! Let’s take a look at what’s changed this week.

You Can Shop

Vendors are now populated, and work! Daily items also work, although I’ve already removed them from the Tutorial area. Those will function similarly to LotR1. You’ll notice here that there are separate tabs for each area in the vendor as well. That’s a change that is fairly common throughout LotR2 - there are tabbed controls where relevant.

Macaroni

Macros are back in full force. You can still have up to 3 rows visible at a time, and you can change between them like before. A difference here you might notice is that if a macro has a hotkey (CTRL+A, ESCAPE) it’s shown on the macro. This is a WIP feature, but it’ll work for now.

Speaking of macros… let’s look at the new macro editor:

It’s probably about the same as you remember, honestly. A few nice things here and there, but the difference from before is you no longer have to load 3 modals to access all of the macro-related data.

Here’s the macro bar editor:

Again, it’ll look about the same. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Green Death

Hmm… where did the armor vendor go? 👀

Green NPCs can now be killed. They’ll respawn on their own on a 5 minute timer. This will allow for me to create town raids - proper raids. It might lead to some cool stuff down the line. You have to manually attack them to kill them, though, so it’ll mostly be NPCs killing NPCs. Also, please don’t grief NPCs. Also, green NPCs will not drop their hands under any circumstance. They’ll probably eventually fight back, too. This is a new system, so it’ll be tweaked a lot, I’m sure.

Improved Chat

You can now bold and italicize your text. This should help when communicating to emphasize whatever you’re talking about. Namely, this will also let NPCs do the same.

You Did What?

I’ve started tracking everything in a changelog, which will be updated frequently. I really wanted to knock this out soon so I could make sure it was all working correctly. It’ll contain more details than these blog posts.

You can find the changelog here.

Other Changes

• The map creator is now shown in player-submitted maps. The only one right now in the game is Blackmoore’s Dedlaen Maze, but I’m hoping this will properly give credit to those who’ve contributed!
• NPCs can now have multiple names. This was added to allow dogs to be added (how were they not added before?) as well as to name those dogs. I’ve immortalized my two dogs and the names of those I know. If you have a dog name you want to submit, please reach out!
• You can use items. Stat boosts and other related potions are working.
• Nourishment/Sated/Malnourished now are treated as buffs for 100% of the time, instead of having a weird variable attached to the player.
• Boss spawners save correctly again.
• You can right click stuff to automatically do stuff based on context again
• Monsters fight other monsters again, even if they’re always hostile
• All of the options for Sound and Interface (seen in previous posts) have been completed.
• Lots of fixes related to combat

What’s Coming Up?

I’m working on Traits. They’ll be a bit different this time around, but I hope to have at least a basic version soon, with the ability to reset traits, learn traits, and cast spells (and have those spells do damage!) soon. I’m not sure if it’ll be a week or not, but hopefully so.

Until next time,

• Seiyria