The marsh gives something up

Release 0.1.24 went out on the morning of the thirtieth, at a quarter to six by the clock the servers keep, a little under five days after 0.1.23 and 110 commits later. It was built the evening before. The zone server and the client were cooked one after the other, about half an hour each, and the client archive was on the servers by twenty past nine that night. Then it was held until morning, for two reasons: the moment the three zones take a new server, no 0.1.23 client can enter them, and the first update on a real machine needed somebody at the desk to answer Windows. In the morning the zones were moved onto the new server, the gate that sends two test clients into the world passed, and the download page moved to the new installer, 127.3 MB against 126.3 MB last time. The client archive is 350.7 MB, about 3.8 MB more than 0.1.23's.

The marsh fights back now. Two days after the release, eight mire wolves and eight marsh deer stood in Reedhaven, the sixteen its zone allows; the last post counted two deer there and nothing else. A mire wolf has 120 health. It notices a player within nine metres, runs straight at them and bites every two seconds, and once it has been led more than thirty metres from where it stood up it gives up and walks home, ignoring everyone and healing nothing on the way. A deer has 70 health and runs. There is no map yet for creatures to find their way by, so a wolf with a hut between it and you pushes against the hut until it gives up; that is what the code says, and nobody has watched it happen on the live servers. A creature you hit flashes and staggers, the damage you deal and the damage you take rise as numbers, every hit makes a sound, a different one for weapons, abilities, blows you take and killing blows, and a creature that dies goes over onto its side. If a wolf brings you down, you lie where you fell for ten seconds and then wake at full health at the point where your people arrive. For now that costs nothing but the wait: the game puts no penalty on a death, because nothing in it can yet lift one.

And it gives something up. Press E at a body, or right-click it, and a loot window opens with its first row under your pointer. Click a row to take it, press E or the window's button to take everything, or hold Shift as you right-click and everything goes to your bag without the window showing, unless something cannot be taken, a full bag above all, when it shows what is left. The window closes when you walk away from the body or take the last thing on it. A body lies for two minutes, or for ten seconds once nothing is left on it. A marsh deer draws once from reed fibre, marsh hide or the drawing for Reedwoven armour, weighted 60, 30 and 10, and a mire wolf draws twice from marsh hide, bog iron or weave thread. The bag on I is a grid of pictures now, with a border in its rarity's colour around anything uncommon or better, and an item's initials where it has no picture yet.

The first quest can be finished now, as far as the code and the data go; in the release's first two days the servers counted nobody finishing it. Three reed beds grow under and beside the boardwalk where it crosses the marsh. Press E at one, or right-click it, and it gives one to three reed fibre and then nothing for five minutes. What the Tide Left asks for five, and its turn-in gives 500 copper, the drawing for Reedwoven armour and 600 experience, which takes a new character from level one to level four. People now show what they have for you, over their heads and on the minimap: a gold exclamation mark for a quest you can take, a silver one for a quest you can take once you are a higher level, a grey question mark while you hold one unfinished, and a gold one when it is ready to hand in. Talking to them opens a quest window with the objectives and the rewards, and a COMPLETE QUEST button when everything is done. Vessa of the Long Road also asks, once, what you would do about the deer, thin the herd or turn it off the reed, and from then on greets you with what you chose.

The bottom of the screen was rebuilt. The action bar has twelve buttons, on the keys 1 to 9, 0, minus and equals, each with its ability's icon; an icon turns blue while you cannot pay for it, and a cooldown sweeps round its button and flashes when it ends. Every Calling has two abilities today. A cast bar shows what you are casting and turns red with Interrupted or Failed when a cast does not finish, a bar shows the pool your abilities spend, and an experience bar runs under the buttons. M opens a map of the region. Crafting now asks you to stand at the station a recipe names, a forge, a herb bench or a firepit, each inside one of Reedhaven's huts, and all six of its huts can be walked into now. The crafting window was redrawn: a tab for each profession, the cost of an attempt shown before you start it, and a number for how many to make, with Q and E to change the tab, A and D to change the number and F to craft. And leaving takes thirty seconds. Logging out, quitting or going back to the character list counts down on the zone's clock; it is refused while you are in combat, which means hurt or hitting a living creature in the last fifteen seconds, and moving, jumping, swinging, casting or being hurt stops it. If the game closes before the count is done, your character stands in the world for the rest of it. That has been watched on the live servers: a count of thirty seconds cancelled with 26.1 left, and a game closed mid-count whose character stood for 27.4 more. Until now, leaving took a character out of the world at once, even in the middle of a fight.

Three changes reached the servers after the last published copy of the content and before the release did, because what the servers hand the world is built from their tables and not from a published copy. Two are the thirty-second logout and the twelve buttons, rows that changed at five past eight on the evening of the twenty-ninth and waited there for the zones and the client that read them. The third is crafting, and it took effect at once, for 0.1.23 players too: since a minute past six that evening, no crafting attempt fails. That is half of a change, and the other half is not in this release. The servers also hold four grades of quality, from Standard to Masterwork, for the server to roll when a weapon or a piece of armour is made, but the step that rolls them is not running and the client shows no grade, so for now every attempt simply makes what its recipe makes, and still uses its materials and costs its copper.

Updating from 0.1.23 runs the installer, which asks Windows for an administrator's permission. The launcher this release installs runs the next installer quietly under its own window, with none of the installer's pages. The patch notes on the site list what else changed and this post leaves out, from the redrawn character creator to a What's New window.

What broke on the way. Between the evening of the twenty-fifth and the morning of the twenty-eighth, six errors landed that the compilers for the zone server and for the Windows client refused, while every change since 0.1.23 was being checked by building the editor alone. So for about two and a half days the zone server could not be built for the machines it runs on, and for a little over two days the Windows client could not. A check before the release found them, they were fixed on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and every change to the game's code is now built for both. Two faults that 0.1.23 shipped with are gone: quitting from the game menu while in the world crashed the game, and Too Many Deer could not be finished, because its first step, walking the northern grazing line, had nowhere on the map to be counted. The last post said the four people of Reedhaven would stand with their arms held out, because the game looked for their idle in the wrong folder; that path is corrected in this release, which we know from the code, and nobody has yet watched them on the live servers. And a correction to that post, which said that turning in the first quest pays 500 copper: for the first twenty-two hours after 0.1.23 went out, no copper that the counter or the quest owed could be paid at all, and that was put right on the morning of the twenty-sixth.

What is not in it, plainly. Nothing has been killed on the live servers since the release. In the first two days the new zones ran, Reedhaven counted one reed bed gathered and no creature killed, no body looted, no quest finished, no craft, no trade and no word with anybody, so most of what this post describes is what the code does and has not yet been seen by a player in the live world. Nothing in it has been photographed on the release itself. Too Many Deer is still out of a new character's reach: it asks for level eight, which is 2,339 experience, the first quest's 600 makes level four, a kill gives no experience yet, and every other quest asks for a higher level still. The wolves wear the same blockout of boxes the deer do, because the code gives every creature the deer's body, which we know from the code and have not watched. Reedhaven still has its four people: ten more of its townspeople are written and not yet published. Crafting quality is not in it, as above. A right-click on a creature that is still alive does nothing yet. And there is nowhere in the world yet where logging out is instant.