Hey everyone! This week I’ve finally crossed a bunch of stuff off my todo list (sadly, still not the spell system). We’ve got 3 new tradeskills coming in hot, as well as some balance changes to spell damage.

Damage Rework

This week, spell damage got punched down rather significantly to fall more in line with the new HP values, as well as the new physical damage values. In general, all single target damage spells had their damage lowered by 80%. All AoE spells had their damage lowered by 90%. There will need to be a bit of fine-tuning from here, but as this is an iterative process, we’ll see how it goes from here.

Foodmaking

The first new tradeskill: Foodmaking! Learned from the Culinarian, you can now train up the crafting of new foods. The starter recipes from Alchemy (fungus bread) have been moved over to Foodmaking, as they make more sense here. You may see some new ingredients, which can be purchased from Jeeves.

From here, players have a few ways to grow their expertise: Drinks, Breads, Soups, and Refined Foods. There’s a bit of overlap between the different foods, but overall, they should add a somewhat deeper dimension to the food you can find in game today. Every food item (including Cyrena’s Heart, yuck!) should have a corresponding upgrade food to make them even better.

Gemcrafting

The second new gradeskill: Gemcrafting! Learned from the Encruster, you can now create and shatter gemstones, as well as make jewelry. Firstly, shattering gems will give you gem dust. This dust is used to create any number of other gems, most of which already exist - thus making it a bit easier to get gems “on demand” instead of relying on RNG to find them. Most Antanian and Risan gems have been added to this list.

So far, there aren’t any “new” gems that were made just for this trade skill. However, there was a bunch of jewelry added. You can now craft new rings, earrings, and amulets. Perhaps the most interesting of the bunch is the earrings - instead of giving players 5000 recipes to craft each individual earring, you can craft “Hollow” items, that allow for the Encruster to put a Rune Scroll into that item (assuming the tier matches). So, you can craft a Tier I earring and then take that with any Tier I Rune Scroll to the Encruster, and you’ll be able to get that in earring form. The interesting part here, is that this system is flexible for any future item, which means there might be more “Hollow” items in the future!

Weavefabricating

The second new gradeskill: Weavefabricating! Learned from the Tanner, you can now create and tear fabrics. You’ll be able to craft boots, robes/cloaks, gloves, sashes, tunics, and most interestingly, upgrade items.

There are 3 kinds of threads: Fabric, Fiber, and Spellthread. Fabric can be bought from Jeeves, Fiber can be found by tearing up flowers, and Spellthread can be obtained by tearing up quality > 0 tearable items. All items will use a handful of some of these, as well as other reagents periodically.

The crafts here are more interesting and side-grade rather than items that try to interrupt the flow of item progression (at least, for now). For example, you can craft a level 15 sash that gives you the Big Belt trait. Or gloves that give you +50% potion healing.

You can also upgrade some items. This applies more to early game than anything, but having the framework in place is important. Early items like the Werebear Claws can be upgraded to improve them slightly.

Other Fixes & Features

• on crash, the last 300 actions (player/npc) are sent with the crash to help get some context on the crash - hopefully this helps with some of the stranger crashes that come up
• the game can now be just rebooted, instead of requiring a full rebuild of the game to get it back up
• debug commands were documented
• green NPCs, for some reason, could always “see” creatures, even if they couldn’t hit them, making their AI act a bit strangely. this has been fixed.

As always you can find the full changelog here.

What’s Coming Up?

I still haven’t started rewriting the spell system. I’ll get there, eventually…

As always you can find the full roadmap here.

Until next time,

• Seiyria