This is a huge update with our first new skills and a tonne of balance changes and reworks. We won't spoil too much of fishing and potion making in the patch notes as we want you to experience it yourselves. There's also some potentially controversial changes that we will post an in-depth explanation for clarity on why we think its the best choice for the game.
Features
New Fishing Skill, allows you to obtain both tradeable and untradeable resources and rewards
New Potion Making Skill, allows you to craft both tradeable and untradeable potions
New Dynamic Potions, potions strength is determined by potion type and vial size
New Gems for Mithril and Gold rocks
Items can now be untradeable
Roof can now be hidden by hover over with cursor or being inside building. Only applies to certain buildings atm
Skills and Skill orb UI now shows XP gain per hour
Bug fixes
Hitsplats appearing when you look back
Clicks being blocked by hitsplats
Pickaxe going through body during running animation
Loot appearing underground
Items not dropping directly under player
Boss could sometimes follow a player outside the arena and not attack
Fixed pathing over bumpy rocks
Misc
Attack animation now gets cancelled when you cancel an attack
Current server displayed in ESC menu top left
Current ping displayed in ESC menu top left
Game rules are now listed in game, and can be found in main menu and ESC menu
Combat xp formula changed from 1.5x + 0.005 per lvl to 1x + 0.01 per lvl. More in-depth explanation can be found below.
All Gems are now untradeable. More in-depth explanation can be found below.
Untradeables are converted into half of their currency value and drop as coins on death in PvP, a way of recovering lost untradebles in PvP will be considered in the future.
Drop tables now offer more than just gold
Statue in town can now be clicked through
Potion shop now sells potions at a 2x premium to encourage players to make potions and trade with each other to get a better deal. We will monitor this change in case 2x is too little or too much.
Combat XP Changes
While balancing fishing and potion making—and playing the game undercover—we realized there is a big gap between the time spent on combat versus skills. Ideally, we want at least 50% of your progression to be combat, since that’s our deepest system and what all the other skills eventually lead into.
Right now, if you try to keep your skills balanced, combat levels up way too fast and you're quickly forced back to mining and smithing. This problem was only going to get worse once fishing and potions were added.
To fix this, we’ve changed the combat XP multiplier formula:
Old: 1.5x to 2x (combat levels 1-100)
New: 1x to 2x (combat levels 1-100) 2x to 2.5x (combat levels 100 - 200)
Overall, this is a nerf to combat XP against every current enemy except the Elf Warden. This will slow down early combat leveling, letting you enjoy the fights a bit more and maybe stay for an extra drop or two before you feel like you need to head back to skilling.
On top of this, we are looking at ways to speed up gathering skills by reducing the frequent bank trips that make you feel like just dropping your ore on the ground.
This change might feel strange for people who are already past level 40, since there isn't much incentive to train mining and smithing at that point yet. But for example, if you hit level 60 attack and want to smith a level 60 weapon, the journey to 60 attack shouldn't be nothing compared to the grind for 60 smithing. Even though you could just buy the sword or use faster smithing methods later on, we’d face major balancing issues in the future without this change.
You might also wonder if you're now doomed to never catch up to people who trained with the higher XP rates. While some of the more convenient methods are being nerfed, the best XP rate in the game (the Elf Warden) is staying exactly the same.
Untradeable Gem Changes
We always intended gems to be a untradeable bonus you get from training skills such as mining and fishing but on release we didn't have this functionality or even the ability for players to trade. With this update we wanted to add new gems and therefore needed to tackle the issue.
This leaves a bit of weird situation where people having been trading the current gems and could possibly have them without the mining level, or not have any despite getting multiple drops.
We weren't sure what, the best course of action was for the original 3 power gems. We considered polling this change but that would give players information they could easily abuse, (Buying a bunch of gems before update). Overall we think making them untradeable is best for consistency and in the long run it will just be a weird niche thing that some players will have gems that they traded for rather than getting on their own.
If this ends up being really unpopular we can consider polling to make the original 3 power gems tradeable again.