This is the largest update the playtest has had so far. Murder now carries a real price, quests have been rebuilt from the ground up with a proper journal and an on-screen tracker, and a set of long-standing combat bugs have been put down.

Karma and the Outlaw System

Killing other players is now a decision with consequences that follow you around.

• Murder earns you Karma. Kill another player unprovoked and your Karma rises and you are marked a Player Killer. Attacking someone flags you for PvP, and both states now travel to every player near you.
• Everyone can see what you are. A Player Killer's name is tinted red above their head, and the red fades as they work their Karma back down, so you can tell a fresh murderer from someone making amends. A player who recently attacked someone but is not a PK shows purple. Danger always shows, even for someone in your own party.
• The Outlaw Lockout. While you carry the Player Killer mark, fifteen actions are closed to you: buying and selling at NPC shops, every stage of player trading, crafting, quest turn-ins, learning skills or changing class, premium purchases, the warehouse, dropping items, destroying items, and loading or unloading containers. You keep your gear, your abilities and your ability to fight. The exile is economic, not physical.
• Blocked actions explain themselves. Every one of those refusals now tells you exactly why it was refused, in your own language, instead of silently doing nothing. You also cannot send a trade request to a Player Killer any more, so the invite no longer sends and then quietly fails.
• Three roads back. Hunting monsters grinds your Karma down, and nothing in the lockout stops you fighting them. Certain quests can now clear Karma when completed, and are deliberately strict: no item rewards, once per character. Consumables can carry a Karma-removal effect, working immediately on a cooldown. A Player Killer can always accept and talk to quest givers, so the one quest that can save you is never the one quest you cannot take.
• Death pays some of it down. A player with a single same-level kill has their Karma cleared outright by one death. A career Player Killer loses only half, however many times they die, so a long record still takes real work to clear.
• Know your own standing. The top of your health bar tints purple while you are PvP-flagged and red once you are carrying Karma, and a new status badge beside your buffs shows either a countdown of your remaining flagged seconds or your Karma total. When you are clean the badge disappears entirely.
• Respawns. Every zone's respawn points are now a list rather than a single spot, with one picked at random, so a contested area no longer funnels every corpse onto the same tile. Zones can also define a separate respawn point for Player Killers.

Death, Drops and Fair Fights

• Getting murdered no longer costs you your gear. If another player kills you and you are not a Player Killer yourself, you drop nothing at all: no inventory, no equipment. That covers an unprovoked killing, a duel you lost, and a kill from someone in your own party. The punishment for murder falls on the murderer's Karma, not on the victim's backpack.
• Safe zones protect your belongings. Die inside a safe zone, to a fall or to lingering damage that followed you in, and you keep everything.
• Neither protection covers Player Killers. With Karma on your record you drop items on every death, anywhere, including inside a town, and worn equipment can drop too. The penalty scales with your actual record, so a serial killer risks substantially more than someone who lost their temper once. Everything dropped is an ordinary lootable ground item.
• Letting a monster finish the job no longer keeps your hands clean. Beating another player to near-death and stepping back to let a wolf or a cliff take them used to cost you nothing. If you dealt a significant share of someone's health in the last minute and they die to anything, you are now charged Karma for it.
• Dying clears your PvP flag, so losing a duel no longer leaves you flagged and vulnerable while you recover, and your nameplate blinks as the flag approaches expiry.

Quests Rebuilt

The whole quest experience has been rebuilt on server authority, which means what you see is always what the server actually recorded.

• A quest tracker on your HUD. Active quests now appear in a dedicated tracker under the minimap, with the name, your current task, and a live counter that ticks up as you fight or gather. Drag it anywhere on screen and drag the grip at its bottom edge to resize it. Your chosen height is remembered between sessions, it hides itself when you have no quests, and it tucks away with the rest of the interface when you hide your HUD.
• The journal shows progress at a glance. Each quest in the list carries a progress bar and a stage count, and inside a quest every step is labelled DONE or CURRENT. Steps you have not reached yet are not listed, so the panel shows the road travelled and the step underfoot rather than spoiling what comes next.
• Rewards are proper item rows. Each reward now has its icon, name and quantity, with variable amounts showing their full range. Quest experience appears as one more row in the same list. The same reward list also appears in the NPC conversation window, so you see what a quest pays, whether it repeats, and what its first objective asks before you commit.
• Party quest progress is now shared. Every party member who earns experience from a kill also earns the quest counter for it. You must be alive and near the monster, but you do not need to have dealt damage, so healers and support players get full credit. The level rules that already govern experience apply here too: a monster far beneath you awards no quest progress, exactly as it awards no experience.
• Quests can now have a level range. The quest window and quest-giver dialog show Minimum Level Required and Maximum Level Allowed, and quest givers will not offer you something outside your range in either direction. Level past a capped quest's maximum and it is abandoned with a message naming it, so a quest never quietly vanishes. Redemption quests are exempt, because the road back always stays open.
• NPC dialogs gained a back button. Drilling into a quest's details used to leave you stuck: the only way back to the quest giver's options was to close the window entirely and start again. The list is now rebuilt fresh from the server each time, so a quest you just accepted correctly disappears from the offers.
• Gathering objectives track your bags live and update the moment an item is picked up, rather than only when something else about the quest changed.
• The Abort Quest button now works. It shipped disabled, which made it impossible to abandon a quest from the journal at all.
• The quest window is dragged by its title bar rather than from anywhere on the panel, so dragging no longer fights with scrolling through your lists.
• Branoc has a new task available for anyone who wants to try the tracker out.

Crafting and Gear

• Crafting experience now depends on what you make. Every recipe at the same level used to pay the same, whether you forged a suit of armour or stacked up basic ingredients. Equipment now awards the full amount and is unchanged, consumables award slightly less, and bulk ingredients and ammunition award noticeably less, so grinding cheap filler recipes is no longer the fastest route up a profession. The number of successful crafts needed to permanently learn a recipe is per item type as well, so simple recipes commit to memory faster than equipment.
• Items can require a minimum level. Gear and potions that have one show a Required Level line on the tooltip, and items with no requirement look exactly as they always have. If you are too low level the item refuses to equip or be used and tells you the level it needs, whether you double-click it, drag it to a slot or fire it from your hotbar. You can always take gear off and always rearrange what you are already wearing, so a requirement can never trap an item on your character.

Combat Fixes

• Wild Boars and Wild Pigglets were hitting twice per swing. Their attack animation carried two damage markers at the same instant, so the entire species was dealing double its intended damage on every single strike. Fixed, along with the underlying weakness that let it go unnoticed.
• Two monsters chasing you, only one fighting. When exactly two melee enemies engaged the same target, one was assigned to reserve and would follow you around indefinitely without ever swinging, with no way out of that state on its own. Both enemies now engage properly.
• Enemies could hit you through walls. Monster attacks were pure proximity checks with no line-of-sight test, so a monster behind a wall, floor or crate could still land hits. They now use the same line-of-sight rule player attacks already used, and other monsters still never block a hit, so packs do not pull their punches.

Interface

• Two new hotkeys. Press N to open and close the crafting professions menu and L for the premium shop, matching the existing menu keys.
• The HUD map button works properly again. It was opening the map window without starting it up, so you could end up with no points of interest, no markers, no centring and no usable cursor. It now opens the map exactly as the M key always has.
• Window dragging keeps up with a fast mouse. Windows used to fall behind a quick flick and only snap into place on release, and cancelling a drag with ESC flung the window into the top-left corner. Both fixed, and the grab cursor now appears on every draggable window, exactly where dragging actually works.
• Refreshed artwork across the premium shop button, the character statistics window and its attribute boxes, and the NPC dialogue frame. Unused older main-menu icons were removed.
• Fixed incorrect text wrapping in the buff, skill and stat-row tooltips, and removed a redundant label beside each quest objective that always read "Talk with" regardless of type.

Fixes

• Logging in while dead could cost you an item, every time. Logging out dead and back in was treated as a brand new death, rolling the drop-on-death chance again on every login for as long as your character stayed dead. Logging in while dead now restores you exactly as you were and drops nothing. Dying for real is deliberately unchanged.
• The PvP marker clears itself now. Your nameplate could stay purple long after the flag should have lapsed, sometimes for the rest of the session. It also correctly resumes if you log out mid-fight, counting only time you spend in the world, so logging out never sheds it.
• Flag timing is correct online. The remaining-seconds countdown was calculated in a way that only worked when hosting the game yourself, so on a real server your client could believe a flag had expired when it had not.
• Character sheet correction. Being murdered while unflagged was recorded as a PvP Death. You did not consent to that fight, so it now correctly counts as a Non-PvP Death. Six rows track your record in total: PvP Count, PK Count, Karma, PvP Deaths, Non-PvP Deaths and Total Deaths, and they persist across logout.
• Quest offers and the interface can no longer disagree. Quest lists, button labels and NPC dialogue all come from the server now, so the interface can no longer offer something the server would then refuse. Previewing a quest can never accidentally accept it, a stale dialog left open while the world moved on is refused rather than acted on, and a double-click or a duplicated network message can no longer send the same command twice.

Behind the Scenes

• Login credentials are no longer written to server logs, groundwork was laid for encrypted server connections, quest data was rebuilt on a cleaner foundation with every line of quest text verified unchanged, quest networking now sends far less per kill, spell and environment effects were consolidated into one shared library, and the internal build and release checks were tightened.