<!--
  PLAYER-FACING FILE. Everything below the HTML comment is shown to players in
  the in-game Game menu → Patch Notes view. Write in player language, newest
  section first, headed "## YYYY-MM-DD — Title" with bullets under each. HTML
  comments are stripped before rendering, so keep authoring/dev notes here.

  BREVITY (ruled 2026-07-28, wy-h426b): a section is ~350 words, 450 max —
  one sentence per item, stating the new behavior without narrating the old;
  the 2026-07-08 section is the length/voice reference, NOT the sections
  above it (July 2026 sections pre-date this ruling and ran ~2x too long).
  Trim items to fit; don't grow bullets into paragraphs.
  Publish with scripts/publish-patch-notes.sh (pushes this file to GCS; no
  client redeploy needed).

  EMBARGO — unlaunched content must never be announced (wy-4jeed/wy-muwwo):
  landed-on-master does not mean player-reachable. Content that shipped dark
  (calendar slot not prod-enabled, feature flag off, steve-gated launch bead
  open) is listed below, one `embargo: <term>` line per term. The Herald's
  generator is told to filter these, and scripts/herald/embargo.py enforces it
  mechanically — a generated section matching any term (case-insensitive,
  word-bounded, space/hyphen interchangeable) FAILS the night. When a feature's
  prod flip lands, remove its lines and announce it in that day's section.

  THE OTHER HALF OF THE NET (wy-g2yoma.2, backfilled wy-8hqc5b): every open
  steve-gate declares its player-visible vocabulary as bead metadata
  (embargo_terms) or attests it has none (embargo_vocab=none), and
  `embargo.py preflight` reconciles those declarations against THIS list every
  night — a declared term missing here FAILS the night. So a block below is
  half a pair: removing terms at go-live means re-arming or resolving the gate
  that declares them, and a gate armed with new vocabulary means seeding it
  here. A term is only worth listing when it is DISTINCTIVE (word-bounded
  matching makes a common word a nightly false alarm) and NOT already shipped
  vocabulary — an already-announced name cannot be embargoed, because the
  clean-body test forbids the published notes from mentioning their own terms.

  AND THE OTHER END OF THE LIFECYCLE (wy-luca81): the same preflight walks the
  blocks below and FAILS the night on any term no OPEN gate accounts for — a
  gate that resolved at go-live but left its vocabulary seeded here would
  otherwise fail the night on the very bullet announcing the launch. So when a
  gate resolves, delete its block. A block embargoed for a reason OTHER than an
  open gate (a rollback, a surprise feature, a ruling) declares that instead,
  with one `embargo-exempt: <why>` line beside its terms — which exempts it
  from that reverse check ONLY; the terms stay fully enforced against every
  generated section.

  Night Carnival (v1 ROLLED BACK 2026-07-22, wy-p45gl — content removed from the
  tree; announced prematurely 2026-07-10, retracted 2026-07-14. Terms stay
  embargoed until a human-built revival actually launches):
    embargo-exempt: rollback, no gate — wy-p45gl removed the content
    embargo: carnival
    embargo: Jangles
    embargo: Zoltara
    embargo: Bone Bell
    embargo: Hall of Mirrors
    embargo: Mirror King
    embargo: Coin Drop
    embargo: balloon pop
    embargo: claw machine
    embargo: big top
    embargo: Funhouse

  The Almanac (building dark, wy-01qnq; steve-gated launch per wy-uoy28.8 —
  design doc/almanac-design.md. Terms out at launch, announced that day):
    embargo: almanac
    embargo: Dwarf Days

  HoF sprite rolls (rail server-gated dark, wy-t1twt; launch gate wy-1hayc.12
  open; announced 2026-07-13, retracted 2026-07-16 — re-announce at launch):
    embargo: sprite roll
    embargo: sprite rolls
    embargo: roll a sprite
    embargo: Hall of Fame sprite

  Goblin King throne room (builds dark per wy-7navy spec; steve-gated launch
  bead wy-6co0c open — remove at go-live. "Goblin Lord" is NOT embargoed: that
  monster is long shipped in LQ content):
    embargo: Goblin King
    embargo: goblin throne

  Town Crier public status feed (town.crier.status.publish=false everywhere;
  steve-gated launch bead wy-knndr open — flip removes these lines). NOTE the
  bare name "Town Crier" is NOT an embargo term: the Town Crier NPC is long
  shipped and named in published notes below (rotation warnings, shout
  callouts), so the feed-specific terms carry the embargo (wy-4jeed clean-body
  test enforces this):
    embargo: status.json
    embargo: status feed
    embargo: players online feed

  The Prentice Builder's Trail (builder-curriculum arc; all five missions carry
  mission-unlisted and nothing in the live world links to the trailhead, so no
  player can see or reach it — wy-n4zhh.13.4. Steve-gated launch bead wy-ued4b
  open; remove these lines at go-live. "Builder Mode" is NOT embargoed: it is
  long shipped and named in published notes below):
    embargo: Prentice
    embargo: Halder
    embargo: Mind the Gap
    embargo: Hold the Line

  Architect Mode (versioned Live Map Editor, epic wy-etrh9; builds dark — no
  server sets architect.enabled, so nothing is player-reachable. Steve-gated
  launch bead wy-q3c8ie open — remove these lines at go-live. "Builder Mode"
  is NOT embargoed: long shipped, named in published notes below):
    embargo: Architect Mode
    embargo: Atelier
    embargo: Live Map Editor

  RiftGates + the Havishfel redesign (Dyana; building dark — rift/area artwork
  still pending, and this is deliberately a SURPRISE feature players should
  stumble on while exploring, never pre-announced. Dyana says when it goes
  live; remove these lines then, and even then announce only what he wants
  called out. "Havishfel" itself is embargoed although the area is long
  shipped: while the redesign is in flight, ANY Havishfel bullet would tip
  explorers to go look):
    embargo-exempt: surprise feature, no gate — Dyana says when it goes live
    embargo: rift
    embargo: rifts
    embargo: riftgate
    embargo: riftgates
    embargo: havishfel
    embargo: Trapper's Gambit
    embargo: Room of One's Own
    embargo: Bramble Hollow
    embargo: builder curriculum

  Tutorial v2 (tutorial.v2 flag off everywhere; launch gate wy-37f9b open;
  announced 2026-07-10, retracted 2026-07-16):
    embargo: warmer welcome
    embargo: wagon ride
    embargo: opening experience
    embargo: Saana

  Sprite/item animation corpus (one .sprite.json family exists, testcreature
  only; Steve ruled all-at-once rollout, wy-8cnoz; halves announced
  2026-07-11/12, amended 2026-07-16):
    embargo-exempt: gate wy-8cnoz CLOSED 2026-08-04 without a go (Steve ruling:
      art quality) — the embargo outlives it deliberately
    embargo: monsters animate
    embargo: fade out as ghosts
    embargo: item art

  Mission auto-skip (no live mission authors skip-props, wy-zodlj;
  announced 2026-07-12, amended 2026-07-16):
    embargo-exempt: content-absence, no gate — no live mission authors skip-props
    embargo: skipped automatically
    embargo: auto-skip

  Fairy-queen amethyst drop guarantee (no guarantor, wy-25ax.7 open;
  named 2026-07-12, example dropped 2026-07-16):
    embargo-exempt: no guarantor exists in content — never gated (wy-25ax.7)
    embargo: amethyst

  ---- backfilled from open steve-gates (wy-8hqc5b) ----------------------------
  The blocks below were seeded when the legacy gates were reconciled: each one
  is the vocabulary a gate armed before wy-g2yoma.2 now declares in metadata.
  Gates whose subject carries no distinctive player vocabulary (infra flips,
  decision beads, lane charters, VFX registry flips, balance numbers) attest
  embargo_vocab=none instead and seed nothing.

  The Heading Out capstone mission (authored but unregistered and unreachable —
  wiz/elune/village/missions/heading-out.arch; activation gate wy-3wajfm open):
    embargo: Heading Out

  The Great Unbanishment (builds dark under wy-ld2rw; announce/go-live bead
  wy-ld2rw.8 open):
    embargo: Great Unbanishment
    embargo: Unbanishment

  Pristine Restorer machines (placement, crown pricing and announcement all
  gated on wy-mk0s7):
    embargo: Pristine Restorer

  The Wyvern Railway (builds dark; launch bead wy-gjhz8z open — schedule
  activation, station doors, announce):
    embargo: Wyvern Railway
    embargo: railway

  Act 2, "The Calling" (builds dark; launch bead wy-q8p6i open):
    embargo: The Calling

  Clans and Clan Halls (build dark; launch bead wy-vytf2 open. "guild" is NOT
  embargoed — guilds are long shipped and named in published notes below):
    embargo: clans
    embargo: clan hall
    embargo: clan halls

  Rebirth — prestige-at-Demigod opt-in resets (launch bead wy-74eft open.
  "Demigod" is NOT embargoed: the level title is long shipped):
    embargo: Rebirth

  Generative Economy v1 — Wishes / Dream Engine / crowns→compute (launch bead
  wy-3g6ms open). Bare "wish"/"wishes" is deliberately NOT a term: too common a
  word to word-bound safely against ordinary patch-notes prose:
    embargo: Dream Engine
    embargo: Generative Economy

  Economy 2.0 currency reform (cutover bead wy-e2l89 open). The new currency has
  no player-facing NAME yet; re-arm the gate with --embargo-terms and seed it
  here the day one is coined:
    embargo: currency reform

  Ships 2.0 — archipelago travel/combat and the Ship Arena (launch bead wy-u9w27
  open. "ship"/"boat" stay unembargoed: existing boats are shipped content):
    embargo: archipelago
    embargo: Ship Arena

  The Great Rebalancing (program builds dark; the first coordinated wave, any
  adaptive-balance automation and ANY framing of the program are gated on
  wy-uoy28.8. Ordinary balance-tweak bullets are fine — the PROGRAM NAME is the
  embargoed thing):
    embargo: Great Rebalancing

  Thursday Trivia Night (dev rehearsals + prod soft launch gated on wy-qfuj.7;
  the Historian's AI-disclosure line rides wy-vjux9v):
    embargo: Trivia Night
    embargo: Trivia Master

  Pet stabling and home roaming (wy-coad.10 open). NOTE the pet/summon commands
  themselves are SHIPPED and announced (2026-08-06 section), so "pet" and
  "summon" are NOT terms — only the stabling vocabulary is embargoed:
    embargo: stabling
    embargo: kennel

  The Sage channel (internal today: wizards + allowlisted core testers; the
  player-facing widening and any public announcement are gated on wy-iccnd).
  The bare word "sage" is NOT a term — it appears in shipped content:
    embargo: sage channel
    embargo: ask sage

  The Art Generator's return to Builder Mode (pulled 2026-07-24 per wy-2pwd8;
  re-introduction gated on wy-kqa3m. "Builder Mode" itself is long shipped):
    embargo: Art Generator

  Solo-hardcore Season 2 (the season-flip runbook wy-8dozk.13 is steve-gated;
  the flip carries end-of-season prizes and an opt-in reopen):
    embargo: Season 2

  Instant-create landing relaunch (Phase 1 of doc/guest-instant-play-design.md;
  built dark behind VITE_INSTANT_CREATE_ENABLED, launch bead wy-5hf8d6
  steve-gated):
    embargo: ENTER THE WORLD
    embargo: instant play
    embargo: guest play

  ---- from the wrong-attestation audit (wy-mmwuxo) ---------------------------
  The blocks below come from sweeping the 68 open gates that attested
  embargo_vocab=none: the preflight trusts a none-attestation blindly, so a
  wrong one is a silent hole in the net (wy-ymiuq announced an unreachable
  command exactly that way). Four gates were re-armed with the vocabulary they
  really carry; the rest were read and left attested none.

  Friends Only Mode and its toggle command (server flag friendsonly.enabled
  unset everywhere, so ToggleCommands.kt:24 does not even REGISTER the verb;
  launch bead wy-f0p32.9 open). The MODE NAME carries the embargo again as of
  wy-b7gfm3: the 2026-08-05 section had leaked it ("Friends Only Mode returns
  when a hardcore run ends" — the specimen the audit above was filed about),
  and that clause is now CUT, so the name is unshipped vocabulary once more and
  no longer trips the clean-body test. Nothing about the mode may be announced
  until wy-f0p32.9 flips the flag:
    embargo: friendsonly
    embargo: Friends Only Mode

  Net-death v2's spectral hole (per-phase activation bead wy-rz02h.10 open,
  and its own description says the patch-notes copy is embargoed until each
  phase's go). "Spectral hole" is the player-facing FICTION — broadcast lines
  and the climb-out re-entry, doc/net-death-v2-design.md §3 — not machinery;
  bare "spectral" is NOT a term (ordinary monster flavor):
    embargo: spectral hole

  Reincarnation — race change on rebirth (design bead wy-9806d.7 steve-gated;
  doc/prestige-design.md "Reincarnation". "Rebirth" is already embargoed above
  under wy-74eft; this is the second, unlaunched name in the same subject):
    embargo: Reincarnation

  Resistance rework ward slots (rollout bead wy-xs97b.8 open — its deliverable
  (a) is the player-facing telegraph itself, so any note naming the mechanic
  pre-empts the announcement it gates. Bare "ward" is NOT a term: too common a
  word to word-bound safely. Wards have not landed, so both slot forms are
  clean today — doc/resistance-redesign-design.md §K):
    embargo: ward slot
    embargo: ward slots

-->

# Wyvern Patch Notes

Here's what's new in Wyvern — newest changes first.

## 2026-08-14 — Quests the old-fashioned way

- **Solve it yourself.** `classic on` turns the help off: guidance still walks
  you to where a quest begins, then goes quiet — no compass, no auto-travel, no
  objectives or step lists in your journal. Quests still track and award exactly
  as before, and `classic off` restores the guidance.
- **Summons that actually fight.** A summon no longer head-butts a tree forever
  on its way to an enemy, an ordered pet that loses sight of its quarry falls
  back to normal aggro instead of standing idle, and arrows and bullets are no
  longer swallowed at the muzzle by your own pet or a friendly player. Spell
  summons vanish when you log out rather than returning ownerless and blocking
  the next one, and `pet attack` works inside an alias again.
- **Pets get up to things.** A skunk pet can spray — a temporary dodge penalty
  that hands back exactly what it took — and a leprechaun pilfers the odd coin;
  the Fight Arena is off-leash. Your pet's card also steps out of the corner
  instead of sitting on your HP and SP gauges.
- **Missions pick the row you tapped.** Boards, the mission menu and journal
  rows bind to the mission itself, not its position in a list that re-sorts
  underneath you. A mission you already hold no longer tells you to finish its
  prerequisite first, and a chained follow-up no longer quietly retargets you
  off what you were doing.
- **Plain speaking.** The training menu names the purse it spends from — your
  bank, not your pocket — and quotes the price you'll actually be charged;
  "not enough free hands" names what you're holding and how to free it; opening
  a chest or a door says so, and the chest's lid looks open afterwards.
- Your own say and shout lines are tinted apart from everyone else's, `read`
  finds the sign you're standing beside, and `look grave` prefers the grave to
  the gravel.
- Fixed: auto-travel stopped dead at town gates and city entrances, killing most
  cross-town routes; dying in Alaria's outskirts now wakes you in its own chapel
  instead of across the world; the New Verden catacombs declare their real
  danger level; the starter weapon can no longer be lost by storing it at home;
  and arrow traps fire a visible arrow from the tile you came in on.

## 2026-08-11 — Doors that warn you first

- **The deadliest doors out of New Verden turn you back.** The Old Ruins cave
  mouth, the way down into the water maze and the well past it, and the two
  cottages in Moriart's Maze now refuse anyone too green for what waits inside,
  and they say so in their own voice — "A chill warns you off" — instead of a
  bare error.
- **Graduating leaves you somewhere you know.** Finishing the tutorial now saves
  you at the Adventurers Guild, on the floor in front of the mission board,
  instead of dropping a returning graduate into an inn they had never set foot
  in.
- **Rods keep their charge until they actually cast.** Waving a rod, opening its
  target list and backing out costs you nothing now — no charge, no mana, no
  cooldown — and cancelling a spell prompt no longer credits a fetch-it mission
  step for a reagent that was already in your pack.
- **A friendlier first moment on the web.** play.ghosttrack.com greets you with a
  branded loading screen while it starts up rather than a blank page, and its
  text no longer waits on fonts to arrive.
- **Take Wyvern with you.** After your first session on the web, you'll be
  offered the option to install the game to your phone's home screen.
- Fixed: a failed Continue with Google on the web now shows a message instead of
  leaving the login card silent, the Messages panel's tabs no longer overlap into
  garble on the iPad rail, and the Alaria gem shop's sign reads properly at last.

## 2026-08-10 — Now with feeling

- **Your emotes have bodies now.** Type `laugh`, `shiver`, `dizzy`, `jump`,
  `rage` and friends and your character acts it out — bobbing, trembling,
  slumping, puffing up — and so does everyone around you, with reduced-motion
  honored. A second wave adds two dozen more, from `stomp` and `guffaw` to
  `curtsy`, `flex` and `bigoof`, while `stare` and `flirt` sway gently and float
  little hearts. There's a new `lean` as well, on its own or aimed at someone.
- **A guide to the money.** The Game menu now carries a Currency Guide
  explaining Gold, Crowns, Bonus Crowns, Loot Tokens, Boss Tears and Quest
  Points in a line or two each.
- **Starting out.** Creating a character now drops you straight into play
  instead of back at your character list. Finishing the tutorial hands you a
  chain of missions to follow instead of an empty journal, and the New Verden
  mission board sorts its notices by how well they fit your level. The starter
  weapon from your care package survives logging out now, and retires with a
  ceremonial line at level 8.
- **New Verden says what it means.** The town's under-street hatches, false-front
  cottages and killer doors describe what waits below or behind them — including
  when to bring a light — the Old Ruins junction signpost bands all eighteen
  destinations by danger, and the east-wall Goblin Path teleporter no longer
  yanks a level-1 graduate out of town.
- **A death ray looks like a death ray.** The grave lance is a dark violet shaft
  with an acid-green core and the classic bone-white skull at its head, so you
  can tell it from a lightning bolt at combat speed.
- **Comfort.** Inventory, ground, spell and bag rows scale their text and icons
  to your screen — larger on phones, tighter on desktop. On Android, the login
  card remembers you and offers Continue with Google in a single tap.
- Fixed: four sounds that had been silently missing play again, a music
  regression that had reverted the loudness pass and dropped 175 newer sounds is
  repaired, your paperdoll refreshes when worn gear is destroyed, stolen or
  dropped, a kept stack no longer loses its do-not-sell mark when it merges with
  an unkept one, and characters standing in a poison cloud stop wearing dark
  slabs.

## 2026-08-09 — The Wizard of Sokoban retires his old line

Updated later the same day, after the balance council weighed in: the
red-or-gold choice now applies to **every** piece, and the pouch is no longer
part of the retirement at all — details in the bullets below.

- **Two weeks' notice, straight from the Wizard.** On **August 23** the twelve
  classic Sokoban wizard pieces retire: they become trophies — yours to keep,
  display and appraise, but no longer wearable.
- **You come out ahead.** The Wizard of Sokoban himself sets up shop that day:
  `soko convert` turns an old piece into a bound voucher, and `soko redeem`
  trades a voucher for the matching **red-tier** piece in the class set of your
  choice — warrior, samurai or sorcerer — a full tier above what the old gear
  ever was. Converted pieces stay in your hands as trophies, marked with the
  Wizard's own stamp.
- **No deadline, ever.** Conversion never expires; retire your pieces whenever
  you're ready. Nothing is deleted and nothing converts without your say-so.
- **Every piece redeems red *or gold* — your choice.** The old pieces changed
  hands too many times over the years for anyone to argue about receipts, so
  the Wizard doesn't: every voucher redeems at your choice of red or gold
  tier, no questions asked. The top shelf is open to everyone.
- **The pouch stays.** It's a utility bag, not gear — it isn't retiring, it
  isn't converting, and the earlier plan to pay a crown credit for it is
  withdrawn. Your pouch keeps working exactly as it always has.

## 2026-08-07 — Clear water, moving sound

- **The fountains run clear again.** Public fountains across the realm — Minath,
  Alaria and beyond — had been running an unfortunate yellow since mid-July; the
  alchemists finally traced the contamination and the waters are blue once more.
  Players reported that one.
- **Sound follows what makes it.** A looping sound now re-aims as its source
  moves, so a growling monster circling you swells, fades and shifts from one ear
  to the other instead of staying frozen where you first heard it — and something
  that wanders into earshot after you arrive is audible now.
- **Ball and cone spells find their weight.** Each now carries a pause after
  casting scaled to how strong it is — none at all for the lightest, and a heavy
  spell's pause shortens as your skill grows — with missile speeds matched to the
  same scale. A poison cloud also drifts much further before it thins out.
- Fixed: pressing a button you haven't bound yet points you at
  `button-bind <n> <command>` instead of a command that doesn't exist, and the
  flying balloon names the exit beneath it the way walking does, without calling
  out route markers.

## 2026-08-06 — Orders for your summons

- **Your summon takes orders.** `pet attack` sends it at whatever you've
  targeted, `pet attack <id>` at a particular monster you can see, and
  `pet passive` stands it down — a player asked for a way to point a summon at
  something its own instincts would have walked past. An order that stops making
  sense, because the target died or left the map, simply lapses and normal
  behavior takes over.
- **Health bars over your own summons.** A creature you summoned carries a
  health bar the same way a monster you're fighting does, so you can see at a
  glance how your companion is holding up. Another player request; other
  summoners' pets still draw you nothing.
- **Jump leaves the rest of you free.** Casting Jump no longer parks your
  looking, talking, casting and pack for the length of the two-square hop —
  only your feet ride it out.
- **Safer saves.** A login on a server mid-rotation that would have quietly
  dropped gear that server didn't recognize is now turned away instead; try
  again a moment later and you land with everything intact. And a flaky lookup
  can no longer take away a living character's house.
- Fixed: reconnecting — a page refresh, or picking the game back up on a second
  device — keeps your guidance and Hall of Records listing toggles showing their
  real state.

## 2026-08-05 — The road walks itself

- **Travel there hands-free.** The new `travel` command walks you along your
  tracked mission's route, stopping the moment you're hurt, move on your own, or
  type `travel stop` — and your journal's tracked mission gains a Travel action.
  Out on the continent the compass aims down a real trail now, instead of
  through the mountains.
- **Open windows by name.** `window inventory on` — or ground, spells, messages,
  chat, combat — so any window can sit on an alias or key you choose. A player
  asked for it.
- **Comfort & control.** An off-by-default **Settings** → Interface option lets a
  gamepad's bumpers walk the button bar and the left trigger press the
  highlighted slot. The damage flash gets an off switch and a threshold, so by
  default only a hit taking 5% of your max HP paints the red rim. Dragging gear
  in your web inventory drops it where you aimed again. And the Settings dialog
  keeps one size across its tabs.
- **The Minath Monster Arena keeps score.** Clear one of the built-in arenas and
  you get your results and the Town Crier's shout — a player reported that
  neither ever came.
- **For new characters who type.** The first missions name real commands —
  `loot chest`, `sell all` — instead of telling keyboard players to tap, the shop
  errand marks the store's door on your map, and the talking lesson lets you walk
  out instead of holding you there.
- **Combat & spells.** A weapon that procs a spell no longer breaks its own
  concentration on your next step, so the whirlphlosion axe's frost wave grows to
  full size — two players reported that one. A siren's lure drags you without
  locking you out of looking, casting or your pack. And fireballs stop chewing
  the garden doors inside Minath homes.
- **World.** The Crypt of Ernzof's doorway dwarf hands out the quest again,
  Kyalami's Memorial Tower no longer turns away characters above level 5,
  Sokoban's weapons hit harder across the set, and the Obsidian Precipice's
  boulders take a share of your health per hit and shatter into rubble.
- **On a phone browser**, shop floors name the item you step on, exits name the
  teleporter underfoot, and your mail opens the tappable mailbox — affordances
  the iOS app already had.
- Fixed: walls in fog draw as walls instead of dithered floor, a bare `apply` on
  a marked staircase no longer hits the mission marker, a bayonet still attached
  to your gun can be repaired at the anvil, the newbie-house quest stops pointing
  you at unreachable lava, and auto-eat will lick an Everlasting Gobstopper when
  nothing else is left.

## 2026-08-04 — Who's who, and what your gun really does

- **`who` names your guild.** Your guild shows beside your level and race
  everywhere the player list appears — typed `who`, the `#who` dialog,
  `guildwho`, and the Who's Online page. A raid leader recruiting for boss runs
  asked for it.
- **Know what your gun really does.** `appraise` reports malfunction chance and
  reload speed as the wielder actually gets them — a parrot on your shoulder
  reads as the real 0, with the gun's own number in parentheses when the two
  differ.
- **Health bars beyond monsters.** A wall or gate you're attacking now carries a
  health bar while you damage it, so you can see how close it is to giving way.
- **A bigger free stall.** Your free bazaar stall is rebuilt roomier at 8x8 the
  next time you walk into it, with your goods and your own placements exactly
  where you left them.
- **The auction-house concierge** answers in numbered lines, one match each, and
  those numbers are the ones `bazaar find <number>` takes — a player sent in a
  screenshot of the old wall of text.
- **Stay out of the index.** **Settings** has a per-character toggle to keep that
  character off the public Hall of Records player list.
- **Your commands list makes sense.** Some sixty verbs that used to pile up under
  "Other" — enter, swim, learn, forget, equip, keep, the shop verbs, the
  greetings — are filed under the category they belong to, each with the
  description its own handler gives.
- **Combat.** A large character — an uncoiled naga with a wall at their flank,
  say — no longer loses the shot at launch; the arrow leaves the bow.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Flipping the command box in or out of the Messages
  window no longer takes the caret out of your sentence. Steering with the fire
  pad stops parking your other actions for a step. Builder Mode's archetype sheet
  keeps its title and close button clear of an Android status bar.
- Fixed: reloading after a long session reconnects you to the server you were
  actually on instead of timing out, your summoned pet comes along through a
  world rotation even when you're set down somewhere unexpected, a teleporter
  whose destination differs only in capitalization works again, an offering paid
  from your wallet costs what it asks rather than the coin stack you were
  carrying, and `name sword of hover` names the sword instead of vanishing.

## 2026-08-03 — Into the crypt

- **The Crypt of Ernzof.** A new dungeon and quest out of Glacier Point: the
  Frost Dwarves went into exile after their war with Besar, and someone has to
  find out what became of King Ernzof and his court. Level 15 and up.
- **See where your skill points went.** The new `trained` command lists the
  points you've actually spent per skill and how many are left — a player asked
  for it, since `skills` folds every bonus into one total.
- **Know your damage.** Another player request: drink an enlightenment potion
  or type `body` and your derived offense bonuses are spelled out.
- **Crowns, in two numbers instead of four.** Your wallet now reads **Crowns**
  (unrestricted) and **Bonus Crowns** (spendable at most crown machines, not
  redeemable for gold or giftable). Players said four was overkill; nothing you
  own or can spend changed.
- **Full moons.** On a full-moon night, outdoor light lifts one step. Purely
  something to look at.
- **Bazaar.** `bazaar mine` pages ten listings at a time with `bazaar more`, the
  way `bazaar search` does, and a listing keeps its number across pages.
- **Samhoc.** The castle quest points you to the right throne room again, and
  the dungeon beneath the castle is reachable once more — Kris is standing there
  on purpose.
- **Combat.** A missile weapon now searches every quiver you carry, not just the
  first. Your target card drops the moment the target dies or you clear it,
  instead of lingering. And a hardcore run ended by a monster another player
  charmed is a setback, not a retirement.
- Fixed: a gift that fails mid-hand-off no longer leaves the item in two places,
  a failed bazaar purchase can't duplicate what you bought, an item that
  destroys itself as you drop it stops reappearing, a world rotation that
  catches you in a portable hole sets you down outside it rather than at your
  savepoint, spellbooks can no longer teach monster-only spells, and game audio
  stops when the server restarts under you.
- The manual's death-and-recovery page is honest now: the walk back to your
  gravestone doesn't reclaim the XP — a Resurrection spell or scroll cast on it,
  or the crowns rez machine, is what does.

## 2026-08-02 — A better view of the fight

- **Size your health bars.** A new slider in **Settings** → Combat scales the on-map health bars from 75% to 250% — both the floating monster bars and your own. Players asked for it after squinting at them in full bleed.
- **Hotkeys for your windows.** In full bleed, Alt+I, G, S, M, C and B open and close Inventory, Ground, Spells, Messages, Chat and Combat, so a window you closed with its x is one keystroke away instead of a trip through View → Windows. Another player request; each binding is listed in that menu.
- **Run and gun.** Tapping a direction on the fire pad now steers you while autofire keeps shooting, instead of refusing to move — a player reported that one. Aimed shots, like a map tap, still explain themselves rather than walking you somewhere.
- **Combat & balance.** A cannonball bills its direct target once, not twice. Fan-hammering a six-shooter before you've faced anywhere refuses up front and costs you no rounds. And a bare `fire` from a standing start takes the shot instead of asking which way.
- **Hardcore runs end by a real hand.** A kill landed by another player's summon, pet or charmed monster sets your run back, but no longer retires the character for good.
- **Pets keep up.** Your pet can follow you onto the Continent now without VIP, where summon travel used to leave it behind at the border.
- **Dungeons.** A level whose zones share a theme scatters its hazards once instead of twice — crypt floors were laying down double the coffins, and double the undead that come out of them.
- Fixed: a gift that aborts mid-hand-off lands at your feet instead of vanishing, new mail lights the badge with the message already in your mailbox, a mine cart that loses its map lets its rider go instead of wedging them, and a hiccup during a world rotation no longer paints an error banner.
- Under the hood: a burning creature's flames now move in step with the fire beneath it, a spell's flames stop lingering on screen after the spell is done, and a client that dialled its effects down for a slow stretch can climb back to full speed instead of staying there all session.

## 2026-08-01 — Sea legs and safe landings

- **Sailing gets its sea legs.** A broadside that can't clear the muzzle now bursts and says why, instead of silently eating the round you paid for. A ship stays under way until the *last* passenger steps off, rather than mooring herself when the first one does. Tap-steering no longer locks you out of looking, casting or your pack for a step. A portable hole can't be opened below decks. And crew below decks ride a world rotation out aboard their hull, not sealed in an empty copy of it.
- **Dying works properly again.** A death restart is no longer turned away by the gates that seal a map, so you restart instead of standing where you fell with your gravestone down and the monsters still on you.
- **Random dungeons play fair.** A cavern's vault gets a real locked, trapped door like every other vault. A key on the critical path is never hidden behind a lock the level gave you no way through. Nothing hostile spawns inside a village palisade. Levels promised light stay lit. And a dungeon that follows you across a rotation stops rerolling its monsters stronger each time.
- **Spells.** Magic mouth hands your mana back when it stops to ask what to engrave, so a mouth costs one cast rather than two. Shadowstep's `@target` opener reaches five tiles now instead of demanding you stand next to your mark.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Dropping, throwing and picking up work right through the minutes before a rotation. A player reported wizard-only verbs like `drain` and `migrate` showing up in an ordinary `commands` list — they're gone. `keep` now protects your starter food from auto-eat. And a word like "hover" inside an emote, a letter or a chat line stops being swallowed.
- Fixed: an emptied pack and a cleared ground view update on screen, a moving light no longer blinks a waypoint's glow off, and a refused hand-off during a rotation says the server restarted instead of blaming another login.
- World touches: the priest is himself again instead of a year-round snowman (his Christmas coat still comes out in season), Zyxxryth's crash sequence really does unlock the three doors it promises, and Ramtusk's second spooky painting is no longer a blank frame.
- Under the hood: fewer redraws when lights move, when you walk, and during big fireballs.

## 2026-07-31 — No more waiting for the clock

- **Selling and giving work right up to a rotation.** Shops take your loot and pay refunds, and handing an item to another player goes through, in the minutes before the world rotates.
- **Spells stop charging you twice.** Eighteen more spells — bless, repair, charging, the blade spells, charm and paralyze among them — hand back the reagent, food and mana when a mistyped target opens the chooser instead, so picking from the list costs one cast, not two.
- **A mouse sweep is not a purchase.** Hovering an item row no longer reaches the machine underneath it: vending machines, upgraders and the resurrection machine stay quiet until you actually click.
- **Vaults are vaults again.** A random dungeon's locked room now materializes with a real door — locked, sometimes trapped — instead of a gap in the wall, and its guardian stands inside the room rather than on top of the treasure.
- **Boulder blast, bat blast and arrow volley look like themselves** again instead of tinted flame, and each cell of the blast animates on its own beat rather than pulsing in lockstep.
- **Combat & balance.** A pirate's parrot now actually lowers your gun's misfire chance, the way it always advertised. Henteko Forest generates at the difficulty it was meant to have. Sword sounds thin out during a long grind, while a fresh fight's opening blow always lands loud.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Setting the over-the-map combat feed to off or combat-only is honored in every layout now — a player reported that one. With the Messages window closed in full-bleed, a small pill brings the log back. `skills` files guild penalties under Guild skills instead of Natural, from another player report. And your button bar keeps your own icons when you've cleared its commands.
- Fixed: a refused sign-in says so instead of blaming your player file, the tip refusal names your Gifted wallet, your item list can no longer arrive after the updates that index into it, and the door into SirPam's sidescroller area no longer turns you away.
- Under the hood: less redrawing per spell tick and per monster retarget, and crisper flat artwork on standard displays.

## 2026-07-30 — Clean kills and honest numbers

- **A kill you can see.** When something you're fighting dies, a brief skull burst marks the tile, so a kill still reads clearly even when combat lines aren't in your feed. On phones that feed now defaults to text only; any scope you set yourself still wins.
- **The command box goes where you want it.** Input placement is its own setting now — dock it inside the Messages window or float it on the command bar, from Settings or the Messages title bar. Nothing moves unless you move it.
- **Bazaar search past the first ten.** `bazaar more` pages through the rest of your results, item numbers stay absolute across pages, and a long list is no longer quietly cut off.
- **The compass opens the real world map** on the web client, instead of the old inline picture.
- **Spells stop charging you for nothing.** Cancelling a target prompt hands back the reagent and the food, a join or summon scroll is spent only once the spell reports, and prompt-pass mana comes back only when it was actually charged.
- **Combat & balance.** The protection shown on your paperdoll, in `body` and from `appraise` is now the number combat uses. Bow attacks pick an arrow that can actually kill the target, from your quiver or your pack. Attacks no longer land on a corpse that hasn't been buried. Smart-heal cures petrification ahead of anything merely survivable.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Clicking the map mid-run redirects you at once, and a fresh movement keypress is never swallowed. A greyed target frame no longer sticks on screen after the target dies. Hotbar icons keep their pictures across server restarts, and your button bar is no longer reseeded with generic commands at every login — a player reported that one. Settings now names viewport width and height on the axes you're actually looking at.
- Fixed: a hover no longer opens a panel under your finger or pops a vendor's purchase confirmation, a new inventory row scrolls into view, your load recounts when part of a stack moves in or out of a bag, gold quest footsteps can be called off again, and a network hiccup during a rotation no longer paints an error banner.
- World touches: a log bridge now reaches the marooned hunter across the river in Rakshasa Harmya, your summoned pet no longer strands itself when you cross to the Continent, and loot machines restock on their timer again instead of freezing at their first roll.
- Under the hood: an item dropped in a home you own can no longer be lost when a session ends abruptly.

## 2026-07-29 — One account, every platform

- **Account linking is here.** Play on more than one platform — Steam, iPhone, Android, or the
  web? Link two accounts from the account screen (Game > Sign In...) and they count as one:
  Crowns bought on either are spendable by both, and your account XP and VIP status combine.
  You sign in to the second account once to prove it's yours. Fine print: a linked pair shares
  one daily login gift, only one character across the pair can be online at a time, and
  unlinking is a support request.

## 2026-07-28 — Full plates and open bridges

- **Auto-eat feeds everyone now, and quietly.** Vampires finally have something to reach for — auto-eat handles drinkables, so a starting blood vial counts as a meal — and any new character whose kit carried no food now starts with a ration. When it feeds you it says so in one line, with no sound and no separate heal message.
- **The Bifrost is open again.** A coordinate stored in an unexpected shape made the Point Bifrost abort the load of Asgard's arrival map, locking players out whenever the bridge had spawned.
- **Gifted crowns keep their own wallet.** Crowns someone gifts you land in a Gifted balance that spends on anything a personal crown buys — enchanter, modder, prize vendors — but can't be cashed out at the ATM or passed along again. `currency gifted` explains it; crowns already in your personal wallet are unchanged.
- **Homes that refused to load are recoverable.** A home whose stored map record had been left empty told you "unable to load your home map" at every login and dropped you on the newbie map. An empty record is now recognized and your home rebuilt.
- **Recoil follows the shot.** A gun's kickback sends you back along the line you actually fired, instead of whichever way you happened to be facing — mouse-firing at something south of you no longer shoves you into it.
- **Your inventory keeps in step.** Three ways your item list could drift out of sync with the server are closed: re-equipping your gear at login no longer fires updates at an empty list, a full resend can no longer leave you permanently one item short, and removing an item by position now tells the client instead of leaving a stale row behind.
- **Comfort & clarity.** A bag panel's scrollbar appears as soon as its list runs long, without needing a resize. On a full capsule gauge the readout and highlight sit above the fill again instead of under it — a player caught that one the morning after. And `myreports` lists only the reports you filed yourself, not the crash reports the client files for you.
- Fixed: reconnecting on the web and Steam clients no longer fails on a stale routing token, a quest item no longer goes missing when handing it over is refused, word of recall stops winding up once it can't finish, and an area whose weather never initialized draws its sky again.
- Under the hood: your XP award survives a kill whose map unloads mid-award, and a batch of rare crashes, the most common one in production among them, is guarded.

## 2026-07-27 — A place for everything

- **Find it in one tap.** Your Inventory has an A-Z toggle now — turn it on and your pack and every open bag list alphabetically, purely for display. And once a list runs long — Spells, Inventory, an open bag — an alphabet rail appears down its right edge: scrub it with a finger for a letter bubble, or click a letter, and the list jumps straight there. Letters with nothing under them stay dimmed.
- **A word before the doors close.** A player asked for this one back: a crier now calls out five minutes and one minute ahead of a scheduled server rotation, warning that active spell effects won't carry over — so you can wrap up instead of being caught mid-fight.
- **Health bars that show the hit.** Another player request: every capsule gauge — your vitals, the ready bar, party frames, a boss's banner — now snaps to its new value and leaves a pale trailing wedge that drains away over the next half-second, so you can see exactly what a blow cost you. A flurry of hits reads as one shrinking wedge instead of a smooth slide that hid the damage. Heals get a green wedge, and reduced-motion settings are respected.
- **Combat & balance.** The Berserker's bungle chance now tapers the way it was always meant to — past 16 skill points it eases down a point per level, instead of dropping eighteen points in a single step at that mark and then falling twice as fast.
- **Comfort & clarity.** In phone portrait the minimap is back in its plain top-right corner, with the mission compass hanging centered beneath it. On short landscape phones, the Ground and Messages windows no longer open below the bottom of the screen with only their title bars peeking in — they're pulled up so the whole window fits. A long-press no longer dies if your view gets resized mid-hold. Builder Mode's catalog no longer gets stuck on "Loading…" when its folder listing loses a race — it retries now. And on the Total XP board, an account whose leading character is a staff wizard no longer borrows that wizard's name, level and portrait.
- Fixed: the boss title banner could be cleared by a map change arriving out of order right after it went up, leaving you with no banner until the boss's health next crossed a whole percent — that ordering race is closed.
- World touches: dying in the Forgotten Oak or the ant mines used to strand you halfway across the world, because both areas' respawn points named maps that don't exist; they now point at the church and the Forest Temple in their own areas. The mines' only way out — the automatic teleporter just south of the "Dangerous forest ahead" sign — was likewise pointed at nothing, and now leads to the Deep West Forest it always meant to. Clear, rain and flame skies have their afternoon look back; a typo had them serving the noon backdrop instead. Pirate gear got a wave of new artwork, with coats, hats and baldrics for every rank from bilge rat to pirate lord, plus pet falcons, lobsters, monkeys and parrots — and a tavern NPC can no longer park itself in the pirate guild's doorway. Around 175 props, tiles and pieces of scenery across the world were pointing at picture files that aren't there, and another 19 at mistyped archetype paths; all of those are repointed at the real ones.
- Under the hood: a client that is genuinely stuttering now notices and drops spell effects down to the lighter served artwork until the frames recover — aimed squarely at the multi-second freezes seen in boss-room fights. The Hall of Records got sturdier: one sick board no longer freezes every board on the last good generation — it carries over, honestly stamped, while the rest stay fresh — and a broken packaging step that had quietly been shipping months-old highscores code now fails loudly instead. And if you sign in through Steam, the game recognizes you as your own maps' owner again.

## 2026-07-26 — First snow, and a firmer grip

- **Gamepad play.** Plug in a controller and it just works — the sticks and d-pad move you, buttons cover the things a pad player otherwise couldn't reach (target cycling, your inventory), and with a dialog open the pad switches to menu duty so you can't wander around underneath an open window. On Steam Deck, tapping into a text field now raises the on-screen keyboard. Keyboard, mouse and touch are untouched.
- **It snows in winter.** Yulefrost, Deepwinter and Wolfmoon can now turn snowy — about three winter days in ten, with a full set of winter skies for every hour of the day. The snow comes out of winter's grey, overcast share rather than its clear days.
- **A player pitched this one in-game: boss fights get a title banner.** While a boss is up, its name and a wide health bar ride the top of your screen, holding for a beat after it falls; the boss's own floating bar steps aside while the banner is showing.
- **Report a player.** `report <player> [reason]` files a proper report straight to staff — exact name, one per minute. It shows up in your own `myreports` alongside your bugs and ideas.
- **`autoeat`.** Turn it on and your character eats from their pack once they get properly hungry, instead of quietly starving while you're busy. It won't spend anything you've marked `keep`, nor quest items, unpaid or auctioned goods, spoiled or poisonous food, spell reagents, or anything worth more than 100 gold.
- **Combat & balance.** A monster's ranged damage is now bounded by its own level instead of by whatever weapon it happens to be holding — a level-3 pirate's pistol was hitting for fourteen times that pirate's own melee, and a level-12 archer hit for exactly the same as a level-3 one with the same bow. Players are never capped, and a weapon already inside its level's budget is untouched. Pirate pistols also spawn by rank now — 40% on rank-and-file pirates, 80% on captains, 100% on the pirate king — instead of a flat 75% on everyone. The pixie's Magic Dart costs spell points only: no more pixie dust, so a pixie whose dust ran out no longer loses its starting attack. The Pirate and Caveman meditation penalty now genuinely slows mana regeneration instead of only changing the number on your skill sheet. Quest-givers and talkable NPCs ship unattackable by default, so a griefer can't kill one out from under everyone else's quest. And combat has more voices: claw rakes stop sounding like punches, slings get their own release, absorbing a blow on a shield gets a real sound instead of a parry stand-in, and double hits, misses and bites all have deeper rotations.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Your summoned pet now travels with you across a scheduled server rotation — it's re-summoned at your side on the other end instead of being left behind. Riding a ship plays a proper looping travel sound that starts when you board and stops the moment you get off, rather than playing once and never again. On Android with a hardware keyboard, the emacs-style editing shortcuts in the command box work again — every Ctrl binding was silently missing while an on-screen keyboard was attached. In mobile Safari landscape, the map zoom controls and the command bar no longer hide under the browser's toolbar, and the command bar lifts correctly for the soft keyboard. Being moved between servers mid-session no longer occasionally ends in a false "You were logged in from another client" with no way back. And the client's automatic crash and freeze reports no longer print "Your bug has been recorded…" into your log — they're still filed, just quietly.
- A player asked, we listened: the auction-house wall signs in Minath, Beitdag, Stoneybrook, Coran and on the island still taught the retired floor-offer system. They now teach what actually works — claiming a stall, listing at a display case, searching, buying, rescinding, and reserving a sale for a specific player.
- World touches: thirteen spell names were misspelled in monster archetypes, which meant those monsters' spells silently did nothing when cast — now fixed. Thirty archetype files were malformed badly enough that they couldn't load at all, plus eighteen more with fatal property typos; nearly all are repaired, and a handful of unrecoverable orphans retired. About fifteen maps pointed at soundtracks that didn't exist — a folder typo, a doubled extension, a track filed elsewhere — so those areas played nothing; each is repointed at its real music. Three massive diamond golems were still wearing a blurry blown-up placeholder and now use the proper full-size artwork, and three wall tiles whose filenames didn't match their siblings' capitalization now render on the live server instead of only in testing.
- Under the hood: the map no longer redraws all its unchanging scenery on every single frame while a spell burns — the static bands are baked once and blitted, pixel for pixel the same picture for a fraction of the work. Destination glows, boss auras and flickering lights were each forcing a full map redraw every frame; they now sample on the same clock as fire, which looks identical and costs far less — a boss battlefield had been re-rendering forever at nearly half the main thread. Around sixty terrain tiles were asking for border artwork that was never drawn, so the client was fetching twenty dead paths per tile for nothing. And a connection that stops reading can no longer grow the server without bound — it gets capped and dropped instead.

## 2026-07-25 — The wait is over

- **`wait` is back.** After four years off-limits to players, `wait <n>` works again — clamped to a 5-second pause so it can't be abused the old way. The bare `wait` still gives you the "waits patiently" idle emote, same as always.
- **Chat, less censored.** The word filter got re-tiered: everyday slang like "lmao," "wtf," "noob," and "crap," plus identity words like "gay," are no longer masked or held against you by the auto-silence system. Slurs, harassment, and explicit content are still caught — that part didn't change.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Tablets (iPad Mini, most 7" Android tablets, unfolded phones) now get the real tablet layout instead of being squeezed into the phone one. In phone portrait, the minimap sits back in its top corner with the mission compass in the lower-right, and both are sized down so they don't crowd the screen; the day/night clock no longer gets clipped off the bottom of the screen in iPhone landscape, and two bigger minimap presets (XL/XXL) are available for high-res tablets. The Spells and Messages windows anchor properly to the right edge on narrow landscape tablets instead of floating over your character, the paperdoll's Equipment and Defense tabs fit above the fold on tablets, and floating windows stay fully on-screen after you rotate a tablet instead of collapsing to a sliver. Dragging the Messages window by touch works properly now without clipping at the bottom, and the combat feed fills more of the screen on tall phones with a longer pause before it auto-scrolls back down. Character select shows your race's default portrait instead of a bare "?" for characters with no saved picture, and on Android, if the app's renderer gets killed by the OS you now see a proper "Reconnecting…" screen instead of a dead black one. Chat speaker names keep their channel color while the words themselves render in an easy-to-read near-white. The title screen's music now actually stops when you mute it (including on iOS) instead of playing on unheard, and the kingdom fanfare hands off to the World Theme after playing through once instead of looping forever.
- **Combat & balance.** Confetti cannons and airborne boulders (Geyser) now show their real effects instead of a placeholder look, and the confetti-gun family's sound effects play correctly again. Fireball's scorched ground now draws as a softer footprint-hugging dither instead of a blocky square with a plain glowing circle, and a billowing poison-gas cloud no longer gets sliced off flat at the tile edge. OmniBlast's shifting four-element look renders in full again instead of only half its palette.
- Fixed: the welcome-back bonus for returning after a break now pays once per character, and only after a genuine absence; deleting your account now fully signs out your saved Google/Apple login too, instead of offering to sign right back into the account you just deleted; and the mission compass no longer occasionally points at a stale destination when your recommended target is on the map you're already on.
- Under the hood: fireball, quake, and other burning/shaking spell effects place a lot less load on the map now, closing several different freezes and slowdowns during a sustained effect, especially on phones and older machines; the animated login-screen background is dramatically lighter on phones too, cutting a stall before you even sign in; and a rare account-identity mismatch that could permanently block a purchase credit for some older accounts is fixed.

## 2026-07-24 — New slots, fewer snags

- **The Slot Forge.** A new machine lets you pay gold from your bank to add an extra upgrade slot to a piece of regular armor — a straightforward gold sink for gearing up further.
- **Right-click (or long-press) a monster** to pull up a quick action menu — examine, talk if it has something to say, or attack — right from the map.
- **Autobag finally works.** Turning it on or off used to just print "coming soon!" — now it actually does.
- **Short on coin at the register?** Shops and the Bazaar now cover a wallet shortfall from your bank balance automatically instead of blocking the purchase.
- **Lock-on gets a face.** Your current target now shows a proper on-screen reticle and frame; Tab/Shift-Tab cycle targets and Escape clears the lock, building on the `target` command.
- **Combat & balance.** Weakness can now be resisted with a saving throw and cured — by a cure item or a new dedicated dispel spell — instead of only wearing off on its own. Monsters whose only ranged option is a sunspear no longer lock up refusing to act against a non-vampire target; they pick something else instead. A charmed monster or other spell target that leaves the world without dying (a wizard's `destroy`, a dismissed summon, a map unload) now properly clears the spell on it instead of leaving it stuck active. A reused Scarer-type trap can no longer strand a lingering fear effect on the monster it last spooked. VampireBlade's alignment hit and "You feel evil" only land on a cast that actually goes through now, not a swing that gets refused. Petrify's grayscale statue and no-corpse marker now wait for the kill to actually resolve, closing another way a monster could get stuck half-dead. WaterBreathing's speed-in-water bonus now removes exactly what it granted, matching its sibling spells. `remove all`/`unequip` now breaks your spell concentration like any other big interruption. Rubble properly blocks line of sight again. Airborne Geyser boulders no longer look clipped at the top of their arc. Earmuffs cure any deafness you're already suffering the instant you put them on, not just future deafness. Fireball's ember-wake trail now follows the bolt's real path instead of a stale served position. Ball spells like Fireball measure their blast radius more consistently and can no longer freeze mid-cast in two more rare situations.
- **Comfort & clarity.** A stuck login handshake can no longer hang your connection forever — it now times out and retries properly. Signing out now fully clears your Google and Apple sign-in hints too, so switching accounts doesn't replay the previous one. `#reslot` can no longer strip your armor's mods without you actually confirming "yes". The race (Hand) button on phones shows its proper hand icon instead of borrowing the spells-scroll one. On phones, your HP/mana bars now float compactly over the map instead of taking their own strip. Cursed or damned items can no longer be listed on the Bazaar to trap an unsuspecting buyer.
- Fixed: a rare timing bug where using the Enchant Machine or `#upgrade` could corrupt an item's base stats is closed, wear/remove timing for armor now correctly accounts for special subtypes instead of just the base class, throwing an item is no longer refused near a scheduled server restart, PortableHole now tears itself down properly no matter how you leave the area, and the Patrons' Gallery tip board no longer counts crowns from a purchase that was later charged back.
- Under the hood: Steam purchase tickets are minted fresh for every call instead of racing each other, and a purchase stranded by a cross-server timing edge case now recovers automatically; character saves write in one atomic transaction in production for extra durability; a corrupted or truncated network message can no longer crash your browser tab; and more spell-effect bookkeeping moved onto the faster per-cell cache.

## 2026-07-23 — More room to work with

- **Type it your way.** The command box can grow now — drag its top edge (or use the arrow keys while it's focused) to expand it from one line up to six, so a long command doesn't get clipped, and it remembers the size you like.
- **Drag it all the way.** Dragging items between your inventory, bags, and the ground now works in every direction — the last few "not yet implemented" corners of item-dragging are filled in.
- **Combat & balance.** Jump can no longer strand you flying — and walking on water or lava — if you die mid-jump or bump a wall at just the wrong moment; the flying bonus now always reverses. Charm Monster now actually redirects your movement keys to the charmed monster like it always promised, instead of quietly walking your own body while the camera watched someone else. Removing all your worn gear at once (`remove all`/`unequip`) now takes as long as your slowest single piece, instead of being a free shortcut. LifeRay no longer awards double XP when it kills an undead. Cursed Enchant Weapon now binds the weapon and blocks resale, matching what cursed Enchant Armor already does. Conjurers no longer lose extra guild-skill points when a bonus wears off. `autocast off <spell>` now always releases the spell, even one that's stopped being autocastable out from under you. AntiMagicShield can no longer leave a stray permanent no-spell tile behind in another rare self-dispel case. A crash when clicking near a coiled naga in a tight corner is fixed, and a coiled naga can now be sent uncoiling around a corner that only has room for one clear elbow tile.
- **Comfort & clarity.** "Open Full Hall of Records" actually opens it now in the packaged Steam client — it used to silently do nothing. Combat sound effects no longer occasionally freeze the game for seconds at a stretch on Safari and iOS. A rare bug that could leave a ghost copy of an object behind after certain map transitions is fixed. The Sage now appears in the world as the old-sage NPC it's meant to be, and can't be attacked. Thunderclap finally has its own spellbook icon instead of borrowing Sonic Boom's.
- A player asked, we listened: on phones in portrait mode, your message log now docks below the map by default and stays visible instead of swapping away when you open it — switch back to the old full-screen log under **Settings** → Split view.
- Under the hood: ball-spell effects like Fireball no longer bog the game down the longer they burn, especially on phones and older machines; a corrupted network message can no longer crash your browser tab; and a cursed amulet's choke timer no longer lingers after you log out.
- World touches: the Minath city wall's southeast corners are fully joined now, with no more forest showing through gaps in the crenellation, and cavern-style dungeon rooms built into composed levels now get their fair share of traps like the rest of the dungeon.

## 2026-07-22 — Patched spells, patchwork places

- **A shape-shifting corner of the world.** Builder Mode has a new Map Splicer object — place one in a map, and every time the area reloads it grafts in a different random scene at that spot: a quiet street that's sometimes under siege, a bank that's sometimes just been robbed. No separate destination maps or portals required.
- **Combat & balance.** Cone-shaped attacks like Howl finally widen with your skill and level instead of always hitting the same fixed swath. Magic Mine detonations no longer get silently blocked by Destruction's cast limit. Electrify's forked bolts now actually launch at a second target instead of vanishing into thin air. FreeAction's resistance to slow and paralysis now removes exactly what it granted, no more and no less. Weapons enchanted with FlameBlade, FrostBlade, or StaticBlade no longer strand your max-SP or lock out other blade spells if the weapon gets destroyed mid-cast. VampireBlade cast under badly cursed Air skill no longer leaves an undispellable drain effect behind. Charm Monster no longer releases your current pet the moment a recast fails, recasting on your own already-charmed pet works again, and a charmed monster that dies no longer briefly reanimates before it's laid to rest. Sunspear-preferring attacks finally fire at vampires instead of at everyone but them. Dying mid-cast of Word of Recall now cancels its windup instead of teleporting you home a second time after you've already respawned there. Continual Light cleans up when you log out and can no longer be cast without limit. BlackSpot's telegraphed hit can no longer chase you through a portal if you escape the map during its wind-up. Weakness now respects the same combat rules as its sibling debuffs, closing a hole that let it be used to drain a player's strength for minutes at a time in a non-PK area.
- **Comfort & clarity.** A handful of wielding bugs are fixed: readying a new weapon while one was already readied no longer leaves the old one live, swapping between one- and two-handed weapons no longer wrongly claims you're out of free hands, a refused wield no longer strips your current weapon first, and re-wielding an already-wielded bow no longer silently does nothing. Breaking someone's armor now tells both sides correctly — the wearer sees their own gear give out, and the attacker gets their own line instead of nothing.
- A player asked, we listened: racial and guild speech-filter flourishes (the "So I deem." style flavor sentences) now only show up in local `say` — tells, group tells, shouts, and channels keep the plain word-swapped text, and the `ooc` channel is fully unfiltered again.
- Fixed: healing spells like Heal, Elixir, and Panacea can no longer push a pet or other non-player ally's HP above its max through repeated casting (and Elixir's "completely healed" message is accurate again), turning autocast off for a spell you've since forgotten actually releases it instead of getting stuck, monsters that occasionally got wedged in a broken dead state now recover on their own instead of needing a map reload, the "accept <tag>" shortcut near a mission-giver now actually checks you meet its requirements instead of skipping them, cursing your own scroll of Enchant Armor properly reduces its sale value instead of raising it (and no longer zeroes out a broken piece's value entirely), a ball spell whose bullet hit a rare snag no longer freezes on the map and locks you out of recasting it, a sweep found and fixed 11 spells with mismatched icons or reagent costs (including Paralyze Self and the Summon Elemental/Insect family), talking to or tapping a mission NPC could stop responding when multiple copies of its map were loaded at once, casting a map-drawing spell that hit a rare snag no longer silently costs you the mana and reagent for nothing, a rare timing bug in how character saves and Bazaar purchases queue up could let an older save overwrite newer data (now they always land in the right order), and closed a rare race that could let the same pool of giftable Crowns fund two gifts at once.
- Under the hood: art that fails to load now retries with backoff instead of hammering the server, and a stale retry can no longer overwrite art that already loaded correctly; stray data from a connection you just left can no longer bleed into a new session, and the server clears out silently-hung connections faster.

## 2026-07-21 — Finding the right words

- **Smarter conversations.** NPCs now understand more ways of asking about things — typos, plurals, and close-enough phrasing all work, `talk to <name> about <subject>` is a real command, and if two talkable NPCs share a name nearby, the game figures out which one you mean. Conversations also remember what you've already discussed, so topics can hide, unlock, or get suggested depending on where you are in a quest.
- **Touch controls, reshaped.** On phones and tablets, combat buttons now run up the left edge and menu buttons along the bottom in a leaner L-shaped layout, replacing the old floating button cluster.
- **Combat & balance.** Monster generators actually respawn again — after you clear one out, it comes back on schedule instead of staying empty forever, which had been quietly broken for a long time. Group kills no longer risk silently awarding zero XP to everyone involved. ManaShield and Resist spells now remove exactly the protection they granted when they end, instead of a possibly mismatched amount. Ball spells like Fireball no longer land a stray hit after being dispelled, and cone spells clean up properly if interrupted mid-cast. Casting a spell no longer consumes food, reagents, or mana if you can't actually afford it. Pacify refuses to re-cast on an already-pacified monster, Fortress no longer locks you out of casting again if its outline is fully blocked, and Blink/Teleport no longer misbehave at extreme cast counts. The Trenchcoat's weight-reduction bonus is properly capped, Stunner's effect now fully clears when it ends, AntiMagicShield no longer leaves a permanent no-spell zone behind after you change maps, and invisibility items stop draining their timers in the background after you log out.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Closing a bag now stays closed instead of a background inventory update popping it back open, a rare desynced inventory frame no longer leaves the wrong item hanging around (the client now detects it and resyncs), the Steam Crowns purchase dialog no longer spins forever, a depleted rod keeps showing "(depleted)" after its last charge, status-effect icons no longer linger after the effect's actually worn off, and the arena `stat` command no longer prints a fake 0.0 win/loss rating for every opponent.
- Under the hood: water, fog, minimap redraws, and spell-effect tracking all got smarter about not redoing work every single frame, and leftover sound elements from blocked audio no longer pile up during long sessions — expect smoother play, especially on older phones and weaker browsers.
- Fixed: logging in occasionally failed to re-equip your worn or wielded gear — now retried and logged instead of failing silently, spending Crowns on two things at once could occasionally shortchange your balance from a rare timing bug (now serialized, and reported loudly if it ever recurs), character saves could in extremely rare cases silently fail to write with no error at all, unusual characters in a name or message could corrupt your save data, Raessi, Kriss, and Karl can talk again after their dialogue failed to load, Sword of Mercy's heal charges now persist across logout and login instead of resetting, Unicorn Horn now initializes correctly like other weapons, some monsters showing no defend message when their custom list was empty now fall back properly, certain NPC gifts no longer occasionally count twice against your allowance, art assets that briefly fail to load — sprite manifests, border images, or a sprite that fails a checksum check — now retry and recover automatically instead of getting stuck missing, the minimap no longer gets stuck blank if your browser tab was open across a server deploy, your explored minimap no longer resets when you change maps, swarm spark effects fade properly with the effect they belong to instead of snapping back to full brightness, entities no longer freeze mid-animation when you zoom or move the window between different-DPI displays, your character's drop-in animation no longer snaps to the wrong spot when the camera was mid-move, and a crystal ball no longer crashes if you try to switch what you're watching through it while another camera view is already active.
- World touches: a recent wave of AI-assisted art has been rolled back to the original artwork across the game while we take a different approach — spell effects and other visual effects aren't touched by this. Art generated in Builder Mode now downscales with a smoother method instead of speckled edges.

## 2026-07-20 — Truer aim, quieter screens

- **New naga moves.** Nagas can now sweep with their tails in a fight, and some passages let them slither through with a tight coiled traversal.
- **A doll collector needs your help.** A new mission has NagaLinh asking you to track down her missing dolls.
- **Dream Eater overhaul, and the Tome of Diomoros arrives.** The Dream Eater weapon's damage has been reworked — several races were quietly under-performing thanks to a rounding bug, now fixed, plus an overall damage boost — though it's no longer available to Pirates. The new Tome of Diomoros has also shipped.
- **Combat & balance.** Auto-fire and blast spells no longer aim for a large monster's top-left corner — they now find their target properly. Anti-magic traps ease their Mana Burn severity through the early game, only reaching their harshest bite in danger-30-and-up territory.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Items dropped by a player you've blocked no longer show up for you, Google's sign-in chip no longer lingers on screen once you've started the popup sign-in flow, and the game now skips resending your screen when nothing's actually changed — much less network chatter while you're standing still.
- Fixed: Whipsmen no longer lose extra guild-skill points when a bonus wears off, quest teleporters no longer cross wires between simultaneous quest events, scorch marks and burn effects no longer get stranded in the wrong spot when toggling spell visual effects, Sign in with Apple's silent background login now works even when Apple doesn't hand back your email, some tile and item icons could get stuck showing a stale image after certain updates, rods no longer burn a charge when you don't have enough mana to fire them, the `body` command no longer shows a raw class name for some armor, the Horn of Candy no longer silently wastes a charge when it fails to make food, casting Panacea at a non-player target no longer misbehaves, summon spells no longer eat into your summon-lifetime budget for a summon that never happened, some Slay-weapon combat messages had the attacker's and defender's names swapped, paying an altar's exact asking price in gold now works instead of being rejected for needing "more," Smart-Heal no longer wastes a mana potion once you're capped by Mana Burn, and stashing a second sword in a plain bag no longer wrongly triggers the scabbard's one-sword limit.
- World touches: Alaria got a few touch-ups — a new diorama prop and a rerouted path near the Deep Well dungeon entrance.

## 2026-07-19 — Softer fog, sharper warnings

- **Fog gets smoother.** Fog-of-war no longer cuts off your sight in a hard-edged circle — it now fades gradually toward the boundary, with the old blocky look retired for good and far fewer flickers or stale-frame pops as you move.
- **A living sky clock.** The GameClock's dial is now a Sky Porthole — a sun or moon riding a horizon arc under a shifting sky that reads the time of day at a glance. It floats properly over the map again, and tapping it opens a card explaining the day/night cycle.
- **A real workspace for builders.** Builder Mode gets a proper Map Manager — browse, search, sort, and organize your own maps in a filesystem-style workspace, pick a teleporter destination straight from it, and the old standalone "Open" dialog is folded into one World tab.
- **Feel the danger.** Your screen flashes red for a beat when you take a hit, and dropping below a quarter health rings the edges of your screen in a red vignette that pulses faster the closer you get to death.
- **A bigger view, if you've earned it.** The free viewport grows to 19x17, and VIP tiers see even further — 21x19 at VIP1, 23x21 at VIP3, and 27x25 at VIP5.
- A player asked, we listened: watching a fight through a crystal ball or scrying an arena match now shows the same damage numbers and combat narration the fighters see, including a proper kill line for the finishing blow.
- **Comfort & clarity.** Loot-token machines now let you claim a prize you can't use quite yet instead of blocking it outright (warning you first if you're under-level), a new `flee-hp` command lets you set your own auto-flee threshold, `score` now shows your overall armor rating, the compass's `map` view works from anywhere instead of just the continent, and bags can now be named portably.
- **Combat & balance.** Crowd-control effects from the same source can no longer be chained back-to-back on you, dragon-shifted nagas can no longer wield bows, crossbows, or guns with their claws, and login bonuses are now capped at once every 8 hours.
- **Small touches.** The jar of fireflies now flickers like a tiny campfire in a soft bioluminescent green, firespout ignitions have an opt-in louder sound under **Settings**, and a wave of art refreshed armor, indoor scenes, magic effects, and objects throughout the world.
- On your phone: the Map tab can now float your combat and chat log text right over the map instead of tucking it behind another tab.
- Fixed: Sign in with Apple no longer fails on a doomed second use of your one-time code, the client recovers properly after using your browser's Back and Forward buttons instead of getting stuck, Rangers no longer lose extra guild-skill points when a bonus wears off, a boss fight you're in the middle of now survives a scheduled server rotation instead of vanishing, quest items are rescued no matter how their corpse meets its end (not just when it's left to rot), a Steam purchase that's still settling now shows "Purchase pending" instead of a scary "Purchase failed", a live boss fight is no longer torn down by a scheduled deploy happening elsewhere in its area, and fog no longer flashes or creeps as you move through it.

## 2026-07-18 — Comfort, connection, and quiet fixes

- **Block really means vanish.** Blocking another player now hides them everywhere it should — combat, the ground around you, the Bazaar (their goods stay for sale, but not their name), and even crier shout callouts.
- **Tab it out.** The command box now offers Tab-completion for every player, not just wizards — your commands, your own aliases, and your recent history all included.
- **Choose your feed.** The "Combat feed over map" switch under **Settings** is now a proper choice — off, combat only, combat plus game text, or your whole log — floating over the map.
- **Know before you buy.** Vending-machine and prize-claim purchase prompts now show the item's full appraisal, not just its price.
- **A gentle nag.** Trudging along overloaded now earns you a periodic reminder to lighten your pack — silence it anytime with `tips`.
- **On your phone.** Another round of mobile polish: pinch-zoom the docked map, a smaller corner minimap, a "Tap here to type commands" hint, trimmer Messages/Combat/Chat tabs, Ground gets its own tab, the game clock is hidden by default, tutorial text drops keyboard-only instructions on touch, and the iOS mute button and keyboard-resize bugs are fixed.
- **Never stranded, twice over.** A network hiccup partway through a long session no longer bumps you to the sign-in screen, and a phone stuck on "Reconnecting…" now offers a Sign In option instead of leaving you with nothing to tap. Google sign-in on Android works again too.
- Elsewhere: clock towers fitted with a chime now toll the hour, and the old PC Client Downloads page now presents all four ways to play — Web, Steam, Android, and iOS.
- Fixed: a mansion quest portal that used to dead-end now takes you where you're meant to go, DragonBreath's cone breath finally shows its own fire-cone effect instead of nothing, blizzard and frost-wave victims no longer flash with a stray burst of flame before their frost look catches up, movement no longer stalls for a beat right after a fight ends, bumping a locked door while carrying nothing no longer trips a server hiccup, your own HP/mana bars and glow no longer peek through the veil when you disconnect, and window-layout sync no longer loses your latest layout to a late, stale save.

## 2026-07-17 — Clearing the workbench

- **Lock onto your target.** A new `target` command lets you lock onto a foe at a glance — firing with no argument now aims at your current target, and Duel and Shadowstep fall back to it too.
- **Your phone gets its own view.** The map is now a full-screen tab on phones, with your HP/SP always visible in a persistent strip; a badge lights up if you take damage while you're looking at another tab, and rotating your phone reshapes the layout automatically instead of squeezing it.
- **Maintenance without the kick.** Scheduled server restarts no longer warn you and boot you off — you, and your whole party together, get quietly handed off to a live sibling server mid-session instead.
- **Sound finds its direction.** Sound effects now pan toward their source as you move, and combat gained a fuller sample table — ranged attacks, unarmed hits, and bites all have their own sounds now. New `sound` commands let you replay what you just heard and mute channels you don't want.
- **More light, and better light.** Spells cast their own glow again — Fireball's orange bloom, other bolts in their own hues — glowstones now burn a cooler blue-green, jars of fireflies glow warm yellow, overlapping light sources blend more naturally, and the overall brightness ceiling was raised.
- **Bolt, cone, and ring spells get their moment.** They now render their own casting effects instead of a generic flash, including a first look at sonic boom's own visible form.
- **The Hall of Records grows.** Dedicated arena and Monster-vs-Monster leaderboards join the Hall, a revived Demigods board tracks who's ascended and when, and every board's summary now teases its #1 entry at a glance.
- **Loot, tuned again.** Loot beams lose their washed-out mid-tier flicker, the orange rarity band got brighter, beams slow down as they age, and gear you already own never beams at all — legendary-and-up drops now add a sound cue too. Loot on the ground is properly sized to match players and monsters instead of towering over them, and Sokoban prizes get their own beam colors (azure with gold trim, true red for the Red set).
- A player asked, we listened: you can now place a Monster Pit Crystal Ball in your own home through Builder Mode — apply it to watch a live pit fight from your couch.
- **New in the world.** Nagas can shed their skin to slip out of a losing fight, leaving a decoy husk behind; water-walkers and levitating forms (nagas included) now render properly gliding over water; tougher "badass" enemy variants glow crimson so you can spot them coming; and the massive diamond golem finally has real art — a faceted, translucent crystal form.
- **Missions with a nudge.** The world can now hand you a mission instead of waiting for you to find one — the first is a proper first-timer's guide the moment you land in jail. The road out of besieged Begynne Towne is open again, too.
- **Monster & item balance.** A couple dozen monsters had their damage smoothed out for consistency: pirates and big horn sheep hit softer, purple dragons, monkey king, and riagor hit harder, Kirins attack a touch slower, Frozen Xipes came up near their unfrozen strength, Ghasts lost their near-one-shot double-strike, and apex yaks were reined in while sharks got stronger. Arch Demons' fire recoil, brutal since their old live-quest days, is cut down to size. The Ultimate Warrior ring now grants all ten weapon skills (two were missing) and its bonus rose from +3 to +4. Food got a pass too: high-end foods' fill values were trimmed, K-Ration is a little lighter to carry, and satiety, create food, and the Monk's guild bonus now restore more hunger to offset it.
- **A quieter, cleaner world.** Casino and gambling content is gone from the game, and taverns and a few items got a non-alcoholic refresh. The Coin Box goes further than its odds disclosure, too — it now shows you the exact coin waiting for you before you spend a Crown.
- **Comfort & commands.** `commands` now groups and describes what each one does instead of a flat list, `keys` shows your modifier-key (ctrl/alt/meta) bindings too, aliases can include apostrophes, and your saved UI preset sets now roam with your character across devices, just like your window layout.
- Fixed: quest items are rescued from a corpse before it rots away or gets eaten (and greedy monsters no longer eat them off the ground first), giving an item nobody can accept no longer destroys it, `expand`-ing an empty bag now gets its own panel and stale bag windows no longer linger, point-blank shots at big monsters resolve instead of silently dropping, holding down fire or throw now follows your latest target instead of a stale one, Medusa's Death Wail no longer spares you just because you're blind, buffs tied to a summoned ally no longer linger after it dies or vanishes, a coiled naga wedged into a tight corner no longer crashes the game, dormant fleas no longer throw errors, HP bars now update for spell and ranged hits too (not just melee), elemental sprites face the right direction (no more moon-walking elementals), hovering the upgrade button no longer accidentally confirms a purchase, new players dropped at the newbie shop land inside it instead of on the doorstep, and `wait` works again after an atmosphere-collision bug broke it.

## 2026-07-16 — Parchment and polish

- **Parchment pages.** Item tooltips and your Journal now show their text on a parchment page instead of the dark ground, easier on the eyes — the window frame and title bar keep their usual dragonhide look.
- **Never stranded.** If server discovery ever goes down, the character screen now offers to reconnect you straight to the last server you were on instead of leaving you stuck.
- **Know your climb.** Your level gauge now shows XP-to-next-level at a glance, with the exact numbers a hover away — no more typing `tnl` to find out.
- **Damage numbers hit harder.** Floating damage numbers now scale smoothly with the size of the hit instead of jumping between a few fixed sizes, so your biggest hits and crits really stand out.
- **The manual, easier to find.** The player manual is now linked from the Help menu, the Bazaar, and the website homepage, and reading it on your phone gets a proper navigation sheet.
- **Comfort on the go.** Mobile bottom panels resize to fit your screen better, cascading menus stay within the screen on phones and tablets, tablet tap targets meet the full 44px floor, and typing in the command box on mobile Safari no longer triggers an unwanted zoom.
- **HUD tidying.** The hotbar now stays clear of your stats gauges, and the status-effect chip cluster no longer hides under the mission objective card or drops below a legible opacity.
- Fixed: missing spell lists are back, login refusals now explain why instead of failing silently, your HP and mana bars center correctly under large polymorphed forms, keystrokes typed while your focus drifted off the command box are no longer lost, the chat popup's message styling now matches the main log, touch-tapping to fire toward the southeast no longer hits the game clock instead of firing, and the Sokoban prize colors in your item lists are easier to read.

## 2026-07-15 — Cast in a new light

- **Cast auras.** Casting a spell now wreathes you in a glowing aura keyed to its school — incantation ripples with runic glyphs, evocation gathers crackling sparks, conjuration spins a summoning circle beneath your feet, and enchantment shimmers in a spiraling veil.
- **Paperdoll polish.** Duplicate equipment slots now merge into a single row you can drag gear straight onto, and fighting bare-handed shows an "Unarmed" stat on your Defense strip for your fists or claws.
- **Make it yours.** The status-effect icon cluster can now be dragged to a new spot and its opacity dialed down, you can switch on small health and mana bars under your own character (a player suggested it), and the message log gains real customization — per-channel text colors and a choice of font.
- Blackrose City joins the sign-in screen's rotating cast of backdrop scenes, alongside a touch-up to the Hystria scene and a fix for the animated captures.
- Fixed: a version-refused client now tells you to update instead of wrongly claiming you'd logged in elsewhere, ball-spell detonation flashes fire on every paced cast instead of just the first, holding down a movement key no longer keeps you walking for seconds after you let go, scorch marks and submerged creatures no longer freeze mid-effect, loot beams no longer split oddly, switching from phone to desktop no longer leaves your hotbar empty, edge-of-screen shortcut buttons no longer get stuck behind floating windows, and turning off touch controls no longer hides the switch you'd need to turn them back on. Also mended: character creation and account deletion no longer risk a duplicate attempt after a network hiccup, a stuck purchase setup could no longer strand your ability to buy Crowns for the rest of a session, and some Hall of Records leaderboards that failed to load are back.

## 2026-07-14 — A guide to the game

- **A player manual, at last.** There's now a written guide to Wyvern online at play.ghosttrack.com/manual — a Getting Started walkthrough plus how-to pages for combat, inventory and gear, magic and spells, skills and training, missions and your journal, talking and chat, death and recovery, and finding your way around, all rounded out by a full command reference.
- **Settings, redesigned.** The Settings dialog is rebuilt around eight clear categories — Interface, Combat, Chat & Speech, Map & Display, Text, Sound, Language, and Touch — with a search box that finds any option across all of them, plainer on/off labels, and help text on every switch.
- **Projectiles glide.** Fast-moving projectiles now slide smoothly to their target instead of hopping tile to tile.
- Fixed: reconnecting keeps you on the server you were playing rather than hopping elsewhere, your selected character survives a page refresh, numpad movement keys work again, the corner minimap fits small screens instead of covering the map, sound recovers on its own if it gets stuck, and brief network hiccups no longer desync or freeze your view.

## 2026-07-13 — Light, loot, and living spells

- **The world lights up.** Light sources now cast warm, colored glows across the map, with a soft fog vignette drawn at the edges of your sight — a new **modern** lighting mode (with the old look kept as **classic**) that you can switch under Display settings.
- **Loot beams.** Valuable loot lying on the ground now sends up a colored pillar of light — brighter and taller the rarer the item — so a treasure buried in a pile catches your eye across the room, the very rarest crowned by a white-hot core and rising sparks.
- **Every spell speaks its own element.** Ball spells no longer all detonate like fireball — each element now flashes, pops, shakes, and leaves its own scorch or frost in its own colors, and fire burns with a new procedural flame. Spell-effect controls live under **Settings**.
- **Interactive item cards.** Hovering an item in your inventory or on the ground now opens a card showing its name, rarity, and charm — plus one-click actions: Use, Examine, or Drop from your pack, and Get or Examine from the ground.
- **Know your defenses at a glance.** The Character sheet's paperdoll now shows your defense: total AC with its armor and magic parts, an AC chip on each piece you're wearing, and dashed warnings on empty protective slots that could raise your AC — so you can spot the gaps in your armor.
- **A richer Sign In screen.** The living backdrop got a big upgrade — wider, hand-stitched scenes that slowly pan, with a rotating cast of real places including Alaria, Henteko, and Hystria.
- **On your phone.** Touch controls now show by default on every device (turn them off under **Settings**), the character sheet fits a sideways phone, you can drag items between your inventory and your bags by touch — and drop one onto a row to tuck it into a bag — and speech bubbles no longer wrap one word per line on narrow screens.
- **Comfort & control.** The client no longer connects on its own when you open the page — you pick a server and click Connect, and the server picker now explains what each choice does for you. You can dock the command button bar along the bottom of the screen, the minimap remembers its spot per character, the mission-destination marker is now a soft cornsilk beacon in place of the old fiery ring, and the "Disable hover text" toggles finally do.
- Fixed: the Buy Wyvern Crowns menu now opens the purchase dialog, reconnecting players are no longer dropped onto a server that's shutting down, speech bubbles sit correctly above taller speakers' heads, cached art appears the moment it loads and shows the right tiles across servers, stored panel widths no longer shrink your layout on smaller screens, the public Hall of Records table fits a desktop window, and Google email sign-in works again in the desktop app.

## 2026-07-12 — Beasts, banter, and a wider world

- **Zoology, overhauled for the naturalist.** Study the wildlife you meet: appraise beasts to learn their worth, and as your Zoology grows you gain a Naturalist's Eye that spots animals even through walls, an Anatomist's knack for extra damage against them, Wildcraft to shrug off their venom and slip their attacks, and a Call of the Wild.
- **Your words now carry your nature — and your afflictions.** Elves speak with an elven lilt and the cat-folk with a feline purr, while whatever ails you shows in your speech: fear sets you stammering, cold makes your teeth chatter, confusion scrambles your words — and a certain duck-curse leaves you quacking.
- **The world feels like one place.** Shouts now carry across every server with shared scrollback, tells reach players wherever they're logged in, and `who` shows everyone online across the realm.
- **Combat & magic.** Meditation now restores you along the same curve as healing — and twice as fast when you're out of a fight — smart-heal cures confusion and fear before it mends your wounds, a slain caster's lingering cone or bolt winks out at once, nagas gain a **constrict** signature move, and Kiz's blade-enchant spells (flame, frost, life, vampire, and static) have been overhauled.
- **Take a seat.** You can now settle onto chairs, benches, and other furniture — or just plop down on the ground — and you'll rise automatically the moment a fight starts.
- **A tidier journal.** Missions you can't yet start no longer clutter your journal.
- **Never hunt forever for a quest drop.** Key quest items and reagents — a Forest Warlock's plants, Samhoc's keys, the zifa-witch's tentacle — are now guaranteed to turn up, and a monster carrying a quest item always leaves a corpse to loot. The pirate guild quest can also be seen through to the end now.
- **UI & comfort.** The Character Card is now the bindable `charsheet` command, ready on button 1; XP boosts announce their size and duration and list their timers in `score`; a new Ground panel sits beside your Spells; the shout gauge stays hidden until you have points to spend; and you can switch the compass and footstep trail off under **Settings**.
- **A classic look, if you like it.** New optional layouts bring back the old-school feel — a legacy stats bar that tucks your vitals into the command bar and off the map, alongside your name, title, and VIP line.
- **A living sign-in.** The Sign In screen now shows a slow, living scene from the world with rotating tips, and when you disconnect the last moment of the map is gently veiled rather than blacked out.
- **World & weather.** Weather now shifts with the seasons, and areas quietly reset and regrow over time so the world feels alive rather than frozen. Out on continent-scale maps, characters and creatures are drawn a little smaller so you can take in more of the view. A number of creatures, characters, and places have also been renamed.
- **On your phone.** A wave of mobile polish: the layout respects the notch and safe-area edges, touch targets are bigger and easier to hit, the quick-slot bar scrolls to reach every slot, tapping empty HUD space moves you, the Android back button closes menus instead of dropping you out of the game, and a short-landscape layout sets the map beside your panels instead of shrinking it to a stamp.
- Fixed: HP and mana no longer flash to zero when you reconnect, guns that were dealing no damage fire properly again, HP bars stop sliding off monsters as you move, phantom missions from an unshipped area are gone from your journal, a single de-registered spell no longer breaks your whole spell list, the "you last logged in with…" notice no longer spams returning accounts, and a stray wall-bounce while walking is gone.

## 2026-07-11 — Color and motion

- **Drag-and-drop your gear.** Move items between your inventory and your bags — and from one bag straight into another — just by dragging them.
- **Combat comes alive.** Creatures now carry floating HP bars, so you can read how a fight is going at a glance. Damage numbers get a full palette — every damage type shows its own color, with stabbing and stinging hits slanted and holy strikes glowing — and they cluster tighter so a flurry stays readable.
- **Smoother strides.** Your character now stays pinned to the center of the view as the world glides past, ending the little jitter that could let your sprite drift ahead of the screen while you walk.
- **Accessibility upgrades.** New under **Settings**: a screen-reader mode that reads fresh messages aloud, a dyslexia-friendly font, and colorblind-safe combat colors. You can also switch on small per-channel icons in the message log so each line's type reads without relying on color.
- **Speech bubbles, dialed in.** Bubbles get their full width back, speech now stacks above emotes (tucked nearest the speaker), long messages gently scroll to the end before fading, and bubble sizing was corrected after last week's overcorrection.
- **Minimap tweaks.** The corner minimap is now slightly see-through, clicking it no longer dims the whole screen, and dragging it to reposition finally sticks — one nudged off the edge heals itself back into view.
- **Layout comfort.** A player asked for the room, so you can now hide the docked Spells panel from **Settings**. And each layout mode gets its own "reset to defaults" — resetting your docked view leaves your full-screen view alone, and vice versa.
- **Reconnect that knows when to stop.** Quick Reconnect now gives up gracefully into the Sign In screen after repeated failed retries, and the login card explains why it stopped trying.
- **The loading sparkle is back.** Art that's still loading once again shows the classic twinkle so you know something's on the way — toggle it under Display settings.
- **Chat:** Ctrl+A now selects your draft in the chat input and Ctrl+C copies from the message log — both after players flagged them.
- Walk into the same wall a few times and the game may now remind you, gently, "You can't go that way."
- Legal pages — Purchase Terms, Refund Policy, and Privacy Policy — are now available right inside the client.
- Fixed: invisible fireballs and patches of black terrain (bad placeholder art no longer sticks in the tile cache), the message log resting slightly above the true bottom of its pane, an unreadable map hover tooltip on light tiles, and a stray period trailing atmosphere bubbles.

## 2026-07-10 — The pit and the bazaar

- **The Monster Pit** — Buy arena tokens from tavern vendors, send monsters into
  the pit to battle, and watch the matches play out live on crystal balls in
  taverns across the land.
- **Set up shop in the bazaar** — Claim your own stall, put items up for sale,
  and browse, search, and buy from other players through a new shopfront —
  complete with price tags and a payout when your wares sell. New directory
  portals and concierges help you find your way between auction houses.
- **New minimap** — A redesigned minimap with fog-of-war, a full-map overlay,
  and markers for doors and stairs. It can show your current mission trail, and
  you can drag it anywhere or close it — your choice is remembered.
- **Missions:** the journal gives smarter recommendations, and finishing a
  mission can now auto-track the next one, so you're never left wondering where
  to go.
- **Save your layout** — Create named UI presets and switch between them
  whenever you like.
- The website front page got a refresh: jump straight into browser play, see how
  many players are online, read the latest patch notes, and peek at the top of
  the Hall of Records — all without logging in.
- **World & creatures:** the great fire, water, and air elementals have been
  rebuilt as fully animated, eight-direction giants; large multi-tile monsters
  like nagas and dragons now scale correctly out on the overworld; and giants
  and nagas standing in water are now clipped at a believable waterline, just
  like everyone else.
- **Comfort:** your message log survives a page reload, docked column widths
  stick between sessions, and heavy bursts like `sell all` or shapeshifting no
  longer briefly freeze the screen. Speech bubbles are a little larger and
  easier to read, and the health and mana gauges look more solid.
- Fixed: a bag-saving bug that could swallow items, smart-heal chugging potions
  forever after you shrank a giant, `stat` wrongly listing your online alts as
  offline, tap-to-move on phones and high-resolution screens, and a chat panel
  that could stop auto-scrolling on its own. Also mended: invisible ravine
  walls, a cut-off old castle interior, and a silent workroom piano.

## 2026-07-09 — Wading in

- **Creatures wade into the water now.** Anyone on foot standing in water is
  clipped at a waterline — ankles in the shallows, waist in open water, chest
  in the deep — with a dash of white foam and a gentle treading bob. A big
  monster straddling a shoreline only sinks the part that's actually in the
  water, and bridges and decks keep whatever's on them dry.
- **Character Card** — a new one-stop card showing your identity, currency, XP
  to next level, vitals, readied weapon, and active effects at a glance, so you
  stop hunting across `stats`, `score`, and `tnl`. Open it from
  Commands → Info → "Character Card...".
- Footpaths are easier to follow: the border glow around dirt, mud, sand, and
  cobblestone paths now reads with sharper contrast.
- Fixed: stepping off the edge of the world could briefly leave the stone floor
  you just walked out of showing in the darkness beyond the map — off-map areas
  now always paint solid black.

## 2026-07-08 — A big day in the forge

- **Speech bubbles!** Nearby speech now floats over the map in reading-speed
  bubbles, with separate NPC/player toggles. Your message log is unchanged.
- **The Hall of Records is public** — browse the leaderboards at
  https://play.ghosttrack.com/leaderboards, no login needed. Share your rank!
- **Patrons' Gallery & tip jar** — `tip <n>` (add `anon` to stay humble) to
  support the game with crowns, plus crown-gifting polish.
- **In-game surveys** — wizards can pose a question to the whole game; vote
  right from a card in your message stream.
- **Patch notes** — you're reading them! Game menu → Patch Notes, updated as
  changes land.
- **New emotes** — consider, pray, hum, meditate, flirt, grin, toast — plus a
  searchable emote picker.
- **Missions:** the journal now has a **Recommended** section, ranked by how
  close each mission is — and when you're not tracking anything, the compass
  points at the top recommendation's giver. There's always a trail.
- Mission rewards now show as chips in the journal, quest-bridged missions
  award XP/gold/tokens scaled to the quest (and auto-complete if you already
  solved it), and clicking the mission compass opens your journal.
- **New players:** no XP loss on death while you're a protected newbie, no
  starvation confusion, and tutorial deaths respawn you in place.
- **Nagas:** new **coil** stance — and a coiled naga in tall grass is
  *hidden*; observers see only a ripple. No other race gets this. Nagas can
  also wear dragon-scale mail now, and long bodies turn corners more smoothly.
- **Combat:** autofire acquires new targets near-instantly, and trees,
  boulders, and bushes now slow movement — for monsters too.
- Untraining skill levels 1–5 now refunds what you actually paid (previously:
  nothing).
- `skills` output is grouped into natural / trained / guild, and `body`
  reports every equipment slot by name.
- Mimic chests are officially evil — paladins take no alignment hit for
  smashing them.
- Arena: round announcements, showman rounds, and lobby signage.
- **Coin Box odds are now fully disclosed** — examine one, type `odds`, or
  see the public web page.
- Monsters now show hover tooltips on the map, and rendering is crisper on
  high-DPI displays.
- `#who` shows a rich player list with avatars and a per-player action menu.
- Bag popups are resizable, HP/SP gauges are draggable in docked mode, the
  chat splitter can shrink again, and your viewport size survives logout.
- Fixed: the empty spell-info dialog, the chat censor triggering inside
  innocent longer words, a rare glitch that drew a tree as a ship, and
  same-name character remakes not fully resetting.
- World: the Ghanar Fyr volcano got bigger, and the dirt road art is back.

## 2026-07-07 — Quality-of-life polish

- **Combat now flows into your Messages window in every chat mode** by default —
  one single stream instead of combat hiding behind a separate Combat tab. Prefer
  the old split? Turn off "Keep combat in Messages when chat is split out" in
  **Settings**.
- The **spell hotbar** now starts hidden so it no longer covers your health
  and mana gauges. Want it back? Turn it on any time from **View → Hotbar**.
- The hotbar has also moved to the top of the screen and can be dragged
  wherever you like.
- Map edges now fade into a soft fog vignette so the frontier feels less like
  a hard wall. Prefer the old flat edges? Switch it off in **Settings**.

## 2026-07-05 — Comfort and control

- You can now **drag to resize** the inventory and message columns in the
  docked layout — set the split that works for you.
- **Disconnect** from the menu now leaves the game cleanly and drops you back
  at the sign-in screen with your account still remembered, instead of leaving
  your character lingering in the world.
- Zooming your browser no longer strands the floating windows and command bar
  off-screen — everything re-clamps to fit the new size.

## 2026-07-03 — Chat and audio fixes

- Combat messages now stay in your **Messages** panel even when chat is split
  out, so you never miss a hit.
- Fixed looping sounds (like fountains) that could go silent for the rest of a
  session after a single hiccup — they now recover on their own.
