This patch features gameplay changes that may impact certain play styles in a big way – mainly encouraging a divide between the PvP and PvE style players. We will see how things go and I may make some further changes to this system as we test things out. Continue reading below for more details.

Serenity: Time spent in Wellington and Newbie Village now gives players serenity. This is similar to infamy in the sense that it can build up or decrease over time, but it is for peaceful players. So for example 20 minutes spent visiting Wellington means 20 minutes you will be considered a ‘peaceful’ player until it drains.

Serenity forces you to keep PvP off, meaning you cannot raid or PvP (unless the target has infamy). This can only be drained in non-safe (white named) zones, so if you like fighting other players and raiding you will want to hang out in unsafe areas for the most part. The maximum serenity you can have is currently capped at 24 hours. The myst cost for building and repairing in Wellington is now largely discounted based on how much serenity you have.

This will hinder people who make use of peaceful areas to support their aggressive play style. Here are some infamy changes that further underscore this:

You can no longer enter or recall into Wellington while infamous.

Infamy doesn’t drain while on green maps if you have over 2 minutes of it.

You now gain some infamy if you dash/disorient/walk through a door you don’t have access to.

Dying as a method to remove infamy won’t reduce it under 1 hour, so infamous players will need to burn up to 60 minutes through other means.

You can see how much serenity a player has by using a lens on them. You can see how much your own character has left by trying to turn PvP on. There is one exception to using /pvp while having serenity – you can turn it on temporarily in Wellington in order to remove structures that don’t decay. It will automatically turn off after a few seconds or after you finish removing the structure.

New commands for people that don’t like to be bothered:

/tchat toggles off receiving any private messages through /t

toggles off receiving any private messages through /t /tcchat toggles off receiving any tribe chats

toggles off receiving any tribe chats /notify toggles off online/asleep/offline status notifications for people that have you on their friends list

Currently only /notify is persistent through logins. Here are some more changes:

Added secure house building examples to Newbie Village and updated some signs

Further lowered /report requirements so chat should be easier for the community to moderate

Cooking experience gains limited to 1000 quantity of food at a time

Fixed a bug that allowed cooked food to be cooked further

Optimized player saving functions to reduce certain lag spikes

Fixed a bug that creates a clone of your character in rare circumstances

The game has been running for 3 years now. It started as a fun little experiment and now it’s grown so much it can be difficult to keep up with sometimes! I wanted to release a decoration patch but that content was delayed due to being sick and my normal job requiring more of my time this month so I shifted to some changes that would be easier to implement. Sometimes important bugs or other things come up and push back fun content that I’m working on, but when possible I’ll try to release everything in parts rather than wait on a big future patch.

Bugs like spells being stuck off cooldown and rare crashes are still high priority, but have not been easily reproduced so far (if you discover how to, please let us know in the contact form). I spend some time identifying and optimizing lag just about every month and we’ve come a long way but there’s still some work to do. Especially on USWest and SE Asia I’ve noticed some areas where it looks like hardware upgrades may make a difference. Thanks to your monthly support I’m still able to afford these growing server bills 🙂

There are more ideas in store for Serenity and Wellington to improve other issues people have been having but we want to test all these changes incrementally to make sure things are moving in the right direction. Thanks for all your suggestions and patience during testing and development of this unique game – have fun!