Greetings, warriors!

Today, we are sending some love to crafters and gatherers of Stoneholm. Thanks to your suggestions and support, we are introducing numerous improvements to the workstation User Interface and increasing the convenience of their use. We believe those well thought changes will greatly improve your experience as crafters and will be much appreciated.

The core of our team is still busy working on the bigger systems we are preparing for you – guild technologies, further part of Interface overhaul, and expanding cluster system to increase server performance and capacity. You can expect them in the upcoming weeks, but as always, we had some time to address your reports and make some other important changes and fixes.

Let’s jump straight to the details, and see you in the game!

The screenshot’s authors have been awarded. KHΞM, Salty, and PowerChopper – check your Ambers!

Changelog v.0.9.9.3.7 Beta

Workstations

Workstations are an important part of the ingame economy and relief from manual crafting. Those are in the game for a while and are helping us every day to process gathered or looted materials into tools of war. But their interface had some space for improvements, so we gathered players' and designers' feedback to introduce a small overhaul of interacting with that system. We want them to be convenient and intuitive, to make it easier to use them. This is why we are introducing what follows:

Get Materials button

We are adding a special button, which will allow you to put the materials required to craft a given recipe automatically from your inventory. No more searching for ingredients in your bags! After clicking the button next to the recipes library, a popup will be shown, allowing you to use the slider to indicate the number of products you want to create. The slider is capped on the least available item required to craft a given recipe. But we wanted it to be even smarter: If there are two or more materials that can be used as one of the ingredients, the system will firstly use the one that is primary for the recipe (shown by default). If you do not have primary resources in your bags, but you have two other ingredients that can be used instead, the system will pick the one that is cheaper, based on the items' market worth.

Choose fuel / finisher / bait

From now on you can also pick various “fuels” for your workstations more automatically. By clicking a proper button in the workstation window, you will get a list of available items – vary on the type of the workstation – and place it in the proper slot. It is also quite convenient to see all items of this type listed in the popup, then search for them in your bags. This system also has a nice automated sorting feature: Fuels are sorted by their burn temperature from the left if they are available. And those which have the same temperature are sorted by price to ensure you are using the cheapest fuel. If you decide to add some more of the already placed item, it will be stacked instead of taking another slot.

Fish trap

As players were not expecting that fish traps yet have a limit to caught items and find that out after his fish trap gets filled for the first time, we decided it will be better to show a live counter of the limit. So from now on, instead of “max 20” products, you’ll find for example a “7/20” indicator, which should give a better idea of how this workstation works.

Minimum temperature

We used to show the range of burn temperatures required to process a given recipe, but to be honest, the most important information is what minimum temperature needs to be kept to keep the workstation running. That’s why we are now showing only this information, as one digit.

Product slots

Product slots were locked and it was possible to only take items out of them. You could not place anything in them, so sometimes they could look unresponsive or broken. From now on, we are hiding empty slots, so it will not lead to such issues and you will not be tempted to try and place any materials or fuel in them.

Doubleclick on fuel items

Simple yet game-changing: items known and understood by the system as fuel/finisher/bait will be automatically moved to proper slots, not material slots like they used to work before. We believe this convenient change will greatly improve the ergonomics of using workstations.

Recipes sorting and highlighting

From now on, known recipes will be nicely sorted on their list. First and foremost, a recipe that is available to be processed, looking at the workstation and player inventory will be shown on the top of the list and highlighted in green color. Secondly, the recipe that is ready to be processed – the workstation has all requested ingredients in it – will be marked with a green tick icon on the list.

Quality of Life improvements

– For the game economy, it is important to maintain it accessible and reasonable for all players. As we want to prevent inflation from impacting the market prices, and ensure good possibilities to earn gold and sell your loot and crafted items with profit, we should take action to increase the currency value. It needs to be addressed, and we do not want to reduce the ways to farm gold, so instead of reducing it globally (especially at events like ragi/Brandon/Sirius), we are giving a choice between item reward and currency, and Contribution Points and currency, which still allows those who came strictly after gold to farm it, and those who do not need it will not help inflation of the market. As a counterweight to this change, currency rewards have been slightly increased in the most popular events. Thanks to that we can ensure lower inflation, which means cheaper prices on the market and more traffic on it.
– We are changing how durability loss works. From now on, durability loss will not be counted on every hit, but it will have a 10% chance of happening for 10 times more value. This way the tempo of durability loss stays the same, but the game is sending ten times fewer updates about durability changes to the database and between player and server. Additionally, It will be much more visible than the amount of lost durability can be lowered thanks to character development tree perks. And on top of the above reasons, we do believe it is more reasonable from a player perspective for an item to be damaged only sometimes not on every single usage.
– Improved character leg movement animation when rotating. This change does not have any impact on the controller, it is purely visual.
– NPCs should not overshoot their waypoint.
– The Minimap menu is now not expanded by default.
– Added an animation of a drunken state and slight screen shaking for the first seconds of that state. To play it, your character needs to be in an unarmed idle state and under the influence of alcohol.

Fixes

– Retaking minor flags by major flag owners will not trigger a siege on major flags.
– Fixed an issue in the loot priority system. From now on, the system should work as intended, and give loot priority for 3 seconds to the player who dealt 70%+ of the damage.
– Fixed the issue where the combat log message about horse receiving damage was not displayed correctly.
– Skill that decreases damage received by horses should now properly impact siege engine damage too.
– Mobs should not be able to launch attacks in the very same frame they blocked which is impossible for players.
– Fixed an issue where it was possible to bypass the “back to armed” state with interruble and stop it to get to block instantly after throwing