A target, a pane and a third quest

Release 0.1.25 went out on the ninth of October, at eleven minutes to nine in the morning by the clock the servers keep, a little over nine days after 0.1.24 and 24 commits later. Most of it had been built and running for days before that. The client was cooked and packaged on the third, the three zones were moved onto the new server at eight minutes past four that afternoon, and the world's content was published at its new version a little before a quarter to six. Then the release waited for the word of the person paying for the game, and the wait had a cost. A zone admits only a client of its own release, so from the afternoon of the third until the morning of the ninth, while the download page and the launcher still offered 0.1.24, nobody on 0.1.24 could have entered the world: five days and nearly seventeen hours. The zones' logs hold no game client in that time but our own test clients, so as far as they show nobody was turned away, but anybody who had tried would have been. The checks a person plays by hand before a release were put on a list on the evening of the third, at that same person's word, due before the next version or the release, whichever came first; when the word to release came on the ninth, the release went out without them. Counted the way the download page and Windows count a megabyte, the installer is 121.6 MB against 121.4 MB last time, and the client archive is 373.5 MB, about 39 MB more than 0.1.24's. Updating from 0.1.24 is the first update to take the launcher's quiet path, and on the one machine where it has been watched the installer ran with its quiet switches and reported success.

You choose what you hit now. Click a creature, a person or another player to make them your target, and click empty ground to clear it; Escape clears it too, once no panel is open. Tab chooses the nearest living creature on screen within forty metres, the next press the next nearest, and Shift with it goes back. Your attacks and abilities go to the target you have chosen, and the zone still judges whether each one can land. With nothing chosen they go to the nearest creature you can see in the 120 degrees in front of you, within the ability's range, and it becomes your target. A right-click on a living creature, which did nothing in 0.1.24, now chooses it and swings at it once. The number on an action bar button turns red while your target is beyond that ability's range; that is advice your client draws, and the zone decides. A helpful ability goes to a player you have chosen if they are on your side, and to you if they are not.

Press C and a character pane opens with eighteen places for what you wear, from Head to Off hand, two of them for rings and two for trinkets. Right-click a weapon or a piece of armour in your bag to put it on; the first time, the game asks you to confirm, because a piece binds to you when you first wear it. Right-click it on the pane to take it off. The pane shows your item level, which is the levels of what you wear in nine of those places, Head, Shoulders, Chest, Hands, Waist, Legs, Feet and the two hands, added together and divided by nine, so an empty place counts as nothing. Bows are held in the main hand now, and the move changed their damage: a reed bow deals 8 where it dealt 7, and an ash bow 25 where it dealt 23. Talking to a person opens one conversation window with everything they have for you: each quest a numbered row with its mark, a merchant's goods behind Show me your wares, Vessa of the Long Road's question with its answers as rows, and Goodbye last. And J, or L, opens a quest log in the same window as the map.

A weapon or a piece of armour you craft now comes out in one of four ranks: Standard, Fine, Superior or Masterwork. The servers roll it, and your skill in the craft moves the odds. At the level a recipe asks for, one attempt in five comes out Fine, one in twenty Superior and one in a hundred Masterwork; ten levels past it, two in five, one in five and one in twenty. A higher rank has better stats and the counter pays more for it, the crafting window and the counter name the rank, and in your bag a better piece carries its numeral, II, III or IV. The post for 0.1.24 said that no crafting attempt fails any more and that the grades the servers held were not yet rolled. Now they are.

Reedhaven has a third quest, Reed for Bread, and it is Halla Tideward's second. She asks those who have finished What the Tide Left and reached level three to bake three loaves of traveller's bread at the firepit and bring them to her, for 700 copper and 700 experience; each loaf takes two reed fibre, and every character can bake it. The reed beds give two or three fibre at a time now, and grow back in two minutes rather than five. And a kill pays experience: 45, and 5 more for each of the creature's levels, to every player who hurt it. Fen hares, of levels one to four, live in the marsh beside the deer and the wolves, run from you and drop what the deer drop; the deer are down from 70 health to 50 and a little slower; and the marsh holds 26 creatures at once instead of 16, which at midday on release day was eight hares, nine wolves and nine deer. Together that brings the quest the post for 0.1.24 called out of reach within a new character's reach, as far as the code and the data go. What the Tide Left and Reed for Bread make 1,300 experience, which is level five, and Too Many Deer asks for level eight, which is 1,039 more: twelve to twenty-one kills, depending on what you kill and at what level.

Reedhaven's ground, the drowned gate, the boardwalk, the huts and the roofs now wear six scanned surfaces that anybody may use freely: mud under the water and along the tideline, grass on the higher ground, mossy stone, dark planks and reed thatch. The first round of that work rendered the ground, the boardwalk and the roofs between 2.8 and 5.9 times too bright, because four of the six pictures keep their colour in sixteen bits, the engine applies its colour curve to such a picture only when it is told to, and the first round did not tell it; so the tideline looked like snow and the roofs like frost. The second round found why, and that round is the one in the release, but it did not finish the job. In its photographs, taken in the editor on the second of October, the mud and the planks are dark again, though the mud reads dark navy; the higher ground and the hills still read pale blue-white, and from across the settlement the roofs still read as pale grey shingle or frost, not as thatch. No photograph of it has been taken in the packaged client a player downloads.

What was checked, and what broke on the way. On the evening of the third two of our scripted test clients, not players, stood in Reedhaven for a little over an hour, to see whether a zone holds two characters that long. It did: one process throughout and no restart, its memory up by about one per cent, each client's session beat arriving every five minutes, and each character standing its thirty seconds after its connection closed and then leaving. An alert meant to speak when two players have stood in a zone for an hour without a word of chat counted the zone's own arrival notices as chat, because the zone writes System with a capital letter and the alert left out system without one, so every arrival started its hour again. It had been that way since it was written on the nineteenth of September, and its test, written with the alert's spelling, was green; the review of the hour-long run found it, and it was corrected on the ninth. That morning a website update stopped while it was being built, because the new build checked itself against the pages the old one was serving and the update had moved some of them; nothing was swapped, the site answered throughout, and about two minutes later the same update was live with a fix. One of the checks on work that is not in this release was stopped partway by a weekly usage limit on the tools much of this project is built and checked with, and nothing was committed between the evening of the third and the morning of the ninth, when the limit had reset and the check was run again. On release morning a watch on Reedhaven's log, kept to see the first players arrive, showed nothing for an hour while a player came and went, because its last step held lines back instead of passing them on; it was read as nobody having come, and found only by counting the log afterwards. And the first client into the world after the release found no What's New window to open, because the release's patch notes were not on the site until later that morning.

What is not in it, plainly. By midday on release day, by the servers' clock, the zones had counted since the third no creature killed, no body looted, no reed gathered, nothing crafted, nobody talked to and nothing bought or sold, so almost everything this post describes is what the code and the data do and has not yet been seen by a player on the live servers, and nothing in it has been photographed in the packaged client a player downloads. Armour shows on the pane and does not yet lessen the damage you take. The pane shows your people's picture and your Calling's crest where your character would stand, the choices on the Appearance and Body pages are kept with your character and do not yet change how it looks, and every creature still wears one stand-in body, so a fen hare and a mire wolf look like a marsh deer. The conversation window marks its rows with plain symbols until their icons are drawn. Health that comes back on its own out of combat is built and is not in this release: on release day its zone half was waiting for the next server build, and the numbers it reads were not on the servers. On release day Reedhaven still had its four people.