Almost all the skilling affixes are in with all the relevant rewrites generally done. Testing + UI next woohoo
We're currently in the process of completely rewriting a lot of the skill modules to support the new hook setup to power skilling affixes as well as give us more flexibility with talent design. To give you an idea of how much spaghetti we're sifting through, we've currently straightening out the mining and foraging modules and each has gotten about 400 lines of redundant/duplicate code cleaned up. Once the modules are converted and tested, we can begin implementing the relevant affix effects; this will realistically take at least 2 or 3 weeks.
Silent has been very busy fixing our legacy and not-so-legacy UI in the Marketplace; you'll find that essentially everything has been improved upon. You can now see other people's buy offers as well as search through all food and potions in a single tab! It should be far more convenient to use now compared to before.
November 14th, 2023
Next week will have a significant rebalance of crafting experience included to make things more consistent across the board, generally; make sure to check the discord if you want more information on it.
We will be updating some of the software that we use to power the game services, this will result in 30-60 minutes of downtime when this update goes live and should hopefully resolve the random server crashes these last couple weeks.
We've begun work on the Quest, Achievement, and Mastery Talent frameworks. Stay tuned :)
November 7th, 2023
A new basic UI has been added to the sidebar to give you access to the user action queue where IS+ subscribers and those who have purchased the relevant platinum tokens can define a set of actions to do automatically with some conditions. Scroll to the bottom to see an example of the UI.
Example Action Queue UI:
Example loadout border coloring:
October 31st, 2023! Happy Halloween!
Happy second week of the season, hope you're having fun with affixes! There's not a huge list of technical fixes this week because of the several maintenance patches that went through last week and hopefully we won't need that many this week, but I'm not holding my breath.
The following buffs have been added for platinum purchase:
October 24th, 2023 hi!
Massive rework to some user defined action queue handling: if an action fails it will skip to the next one, so you can queue up an hour of mining then half an hour of smithing and it will either smith that whole half an hour or end prematurely if out of materials then return to mining, repeating as intended. This means that the queue will run on repeat until your offline timer is exceeded, or if you have the game open it will run infinitely. This should make it MUCH more useful.
Season 1 will feature two modes, the standard marketplace enabled mode and an ironman mode (not NGIM, sorry!) and will be focused around an accelerated XP progression and AFFIXES. There is a quick guide at the bottom of this post by Feylos if the quick FAQ doesn't answer everything.
Affixes are modifiers, like enchantments, that apply various stat boosts or have special chance based effects that can be put onto nearly any equipment item. As of the Season 1 launch these effects are focused purely on combat, though other affixes and types are planned! There are roughly 80 affixes varying from common, basic stat boosts to legendary effects like passive life steal or damage reflect.
You can get affixes in the Runecrafting tab by spending Runic Dust to generate a set of affixes and their strengths on an item, scaling based on the rarity of the item and the strength of the affix. Runic Dust can be generated slowly as a secondary drop from combat related activities, or specifically targeted to generate quickly through a gathering/processing gameplay loop. Combat will produce only about 10% of the dust that gathering/processing does, so get ready to engage in multiple skills!
You can reroll the strength of an affix, but if you want a completely new one you'll need an entirely new item. You can salvage the existing item to produce Gear Scraps which scale by rarity and are used in the rerolling process.
With the bulk of the work being focused on Season 1 lately, we will now be free to pursue more fixes and tweaks for the existing game content. That said, we will also be extended support for affixes and introducing new season specific mechanics or content as the season progresses, so keep an eye open for announcements!
While technically Season 1 is ready for live, our initial feedback on the systems have been that it needs some more polish and balancing before it goes out to the rest of the playerbase as a whole. We have some plans to address these issues so Season 1 will go live next Tuesday instead and will run until February 1st of next year and it will be the primary test bed for some potential polarizing features before we determine if they are something we want on the main leagues or should stay in seasons instead.
99% of this update is backend work or features that aren't accessible unless you're on a seasonal character.
Congratulations to our Pre-Season champs (awarded based on their placement when the timer in the UI ended, not on update launch)!
The winners can find their medals on their main league characters; message me (Nick) if you'd like them on another character as well!
By default you will not receive the Event Tokens from your seasonal character automatically, you have to execute the '/convertSeasonal CHARACTER_NAME' command, where CHARACTER_NAME is whatever your pre-season character is named. Whichever character you execute this command on will receive the tokens. Currently the exchange rate for event tokens is the sum of your total level * 15 and mastery level * 30.
Your seasonal character will be deleted on conversion to tokens, though we keep all the stats backed up so the hiscore may be restored at a later date.
If you delete the character through the character delete page you will lose out on your tokens.
The entire backend work for affixes is now live, though you cannot roll or find anything related to it until Season 1 launches.
Buy Orders are now available! You can create a buy order by going to an item's marketplace page and clicking the "BUY ORDER" button in the top left to pull up the UI. You can then specify how many of that item you want, the most you're willing to spend per item, as well as specify a target augmentation level, enchantment, and enchantment strength. The order will attempt to buy every listing under your specified max price, starting from cheapest and oldest first.
You can now define a specific action queue pattern if you're an IS+ subscriber or purchase the relevant tokens. By default IS+ members can specify up to 3 different actions in a 3 hours pattern. An example could be mining for an hour, foraging for an hour, and then fishing for an hour before repeating, though the actions and their lengths are entirely up to you. It will be as if you had started this action yourself, so relevant loadouts will be loaded automatically. The queue will only check the defined pattern when an action is completed, so if you put a particularly long action in there, like a several minute long smithing action, it will not be cancelled or interrupted to force another action and it will simply move to the next defined action after completing the smithing one.
To do this, use the /useractionqueue command. Try /help useractionqueue to get the options! We will add a UI for it eventually!
You cannot be in a group when using the action queue, though mercenaries will still function like normal.
There was a change to /fixinv to have it replace legacy items in stockpile with fresh copies, but that has since been determined to be a bad solve and will not be in live. Legacy collectors, rejoice!
Season 0, AKA "The Pre-Season", will be starting when this update goes live, it features heavily accelerated progression and a leaderboard. It will run for roughly 3 weeks or until Season 1 begins. Hope you're ready to min/max early and mid-game again, glhf!! Seasons will have their own unique rules, buffs, and starting equipment. Later on they may even feature unique mechanics, like Affixes! Currently, Season 0 features some global buffs, starting gear, a leaderboard, and a separate marketplace. When the season ends your seasonal character will be locked in; I will give out medals to those who manage to get into the top 3 normal and mastery total levels and all players will receive event tokens based on their participation in the season! In the future this will be extended to icons, titles, and cosmetics. Season 0 will specifically feature strength 20 Haste (80% reduction in action time), strength 20 Intuition (double xp), strength 11 Treasure Hunter (+33% drop chance), and strength 5 enlightnment (+5 essence), as well as 10k starting gold and heat, bronze daggers, a flimsy longbow, a driftwood staff, a bronze pickaxe, a bronze hatchet, and a novice tacklebox.
To create a seasonal character simply create a new character and select the Pre-Season as the gamemode. This character will NOT contribute to your max character or active character count, so it is essentially a free slot specifically for a seasonal character for as long as the season runs.
This weapon needed some love so I added two new unique abilities to it; Wrath, which deals up to double damage based on your missing health, and War, which grants your team a short-lived enrage buff. Yes, the same enrage buff that makes enemies super strong over time.
Pings got reworked and should work more as expected now
Chat links reworked
Your chat input is now stored even if the input field isn't rendered anymore. This means that you can switch away from the chat on mobile, without your input getting cleared.
Sidebar has a (hidden) entry point for script authors to inject their own buttons
Sidebar skills expose the player levels and experience
Almost this entire update was on the technical side. It included a lot of retooling of how we handle game data tables (items, loot tables, etc.) as well as rewriting a bunch of legacy UI components. If everything went well you should only notice some basic improvements to gameplay functionality with faster more comprehensive fixes and features coming soon^tm in the changed setups.
We will continue to overhaul things at a technical level, but our primary design/gameplay focus coming up next will be Season 1 and its unique mechanics. Currently the plan is to implement an Affixes system as well as look into how the food combat inventory functions and whether we want to change it.
Forgotten Platebody cosmetic added to Platinum Shop
Production and Combat Guides added
Adjustments to inventory tabbing; global rules are the only rules because non-global are buggy and just not worth it
This rewrite, by Boohi and IceFreez3r, modernizes a lot of the heavily outdated and legacy components that made of the nav drawer. This means the left-side bar interface is much better, including improvements to the loot log and UI customization like pinning the drawer or slimming it. There's some new info tooltips for some skills, with Feylos having written the guides!
Immediately on session start and then every hour afterwards the hiscores are checked and the top 20 players of each category (each skill, normal and mastery levels) are given unique icons. As long as you hold a top 20 spot you will retain that icon, but if you fall out of the top 20 it will be taken from you! We intend to expand this out to more achievements, such as dungeon clears, later on.
You can now do some basic profile customization for your /whois page. These are accessible through the /profile command; you can do /profile cosmetics to save your currently equipped items and cosmetics as your default inspection character as well as /profile icons add/wipe to add your currently selected chat icon as a highlighted icon to be displayed on your profile.
You can now purchase a new selection of profile icons for platinum that can be used like a standard chat icon- either in chat or on display on your /whois page.
Inventory Tabs are now available to help you organize your stockpile and vault. By default you will get 1 additional tab in both for a total of 4 tabs (default stockpile, tab 1 stockpile, default vault, tab 1 vault), but you can purchase Inventory Tab Tokens for 600 platinum that give an additional vault and stockpile tab. This includes an overall rewrite of the primary inventory UI, so it comes with some fun new features like quick filter buttons. I (Nick) set this up, so I will definitely need feedback on the UI/UX side of things, especially in the mobile realm. Currently this replacement UI only affect the vault/stockpile components.
I believe we've finally narrowed down the issue with offline progress seemingly being stuck; the actual data we send to client is only generated on your initial session start. Since new functionality has been added to reconnect you to a previous session this data may not be updated until the server itself restarts and forces your session to shutdown. It should now be fixed since it properly fetches the updated progress data!
We've added the ability for users to delete their own characters to free up slots/usernames
Pre-refactor players may remember when we used to release various tracked global stats, like dungeon runs or augmentation stats, and they are finally back in the game after a very long hiatus! This first iteration in post-refactor is mostly to test the waters and ensure that there's no major changes that need to happen before we can start tracking even more stats than before.
As always please give a ton of thanks to our blue names as they've helped development immensely with Chikenz, Kugan, and Dael helping with new and fancy technical mathy things on the backend and Ice rewriting our super janky legacy components in the frontend! They're the best!
In others news I am planning on adding a few new things to the Platinum shop, specifically some new player commissioned cosmetics, some purchasable icons, and once the /whois profile components are rewritten more options (both paid AND free) to setup your own custom profile! This will be the immediate next step that should have some parts ready to release next week, with the next big update being designed now being the Seasons update.
You can now fight against a DPS dummy in a special location to check your DPS using certain setups. It awards no XP or essence and it is modifiable with an ingame command. This feature will receive more features as requests are made for specific things! The max group size here is 5, so you can test your mercs or your group DPS here!
That's not a typo! We're introducing a change to the buyable plat buffs; if the buff goes longer than 24 hours it gets boosted to strength 3 and if it goes longer than a week it gets boosted to strength 4. These boosted strengths last until the buff fully expires, so once you get over a breakpoint it's boosted for the entire remaining duration!
Bringing combat to non-combat since 2021! ... but also non-combat to combat?
There are an almost innumerable number of minor fixes + QoL throughout the entire game. Seriously, there were like 200+ git commits done for this update. That's a lot.
This is a small update of what we've had ready for live and includes some technical changes to how some chat messages are handled as well as improvements to various mod tools.
The major change for this week is that playtest will go live to hopefully get the next big update ironed out for next week! See the discord for more details!
Once the server stops burning we will be focusing heavily on the next big update since it includes a fair amount of content, the systems that power that content, as well as many various technical improvements across the entire codebase.
You can login with either your account name or your verified email now.
The content and UI overhauls are still in progress and will be entering the testing stage soon! Keep an eye out for teasers posted in the #dev-blog channel.
We initially posted this in the dev-blog channel on discord, but here it is in case you missed it: Hello everyone! This is a quick pre-update blogpost to give y'all some insight into what's happening.
First off: We're aware that there are desync issues that uncommonly occur regarding items in various inventories or the action queue. Generally if the desync begins, it continues to break things until it is fixed. There are 5 main steps you should take to resolve these when it occurs-
There are a few bugs that we need reliable reproduction steps for:
The big content update that I mentioned earlier (non-combat content and balance pass) is still underway as well as the UI overhauls that Boohi showed a little of above this post.
What we're working on right now is getting our test server spinned up to specifically look into desync issues that so far have simply refused to be reproducible. We have a few ideas about what could be causing it as well as changes we can make to improve the robustness of the server in general which will reduce the more apparently random issues. If these general improvements don't prove to fix the issue entirely we've got some more technical changes that are currently being planned that ought to fix it, but these are very in-depth and complex changes that I can't readily put a timetable on yet.
This is a small update to get us back on the Tuesday schedule.
We're working on some technical cleanup to try and resolve some underlying issues that have cropped up every once and a while (desync primarily). With our fantastic new blue names this will hopefully go well!
There's a lot in this patch, I may have missed something compiling these changelogs. Feel free to shoot us a question for clarifications or explore in-game for answers!
Tooltips received a new overhaul, with a more modern and compact outlook. No more overflowing tooltips!
You can enable and switch between different Tooltips (and comparison mode) in the Settings. The new Tooltips are disabled (for now) by default. Plan is to make them the default option after a while.
The Tooltips were previously part of Dael's userscripts, but now integrated to the official user interface. Thanks Dael!
Thanks a lot for all the feedback both in live server and the playtest one!
We will begin playtesting upcoming major features that will have a huge impact on the game's balance as well as playtest to iron out existing balance issues. Keep an eye out for this! This will be a closed and small scale playtest compared to the most recent TS Playtest, so restrictions may apply to those who wish to be involved.
/maxdifficulty [value]
and /startdifficulty [value]
The focus of next week's update will still be mainly on bugs and tackling the 'larger' bugs we have. With the groundwork done for fixing UI performance and styling issues, expect to more UI improvements in the next update.
We are also working on a new interface for selecting a Combat area to fight in. Nick already gave some teasers for it in the Discord #dev-blog channel. We are currently working on the UI-side of it.
Together with this update there will also be a small Easter Event. We have hidden 20 codes in various places They usually start with # in front of them, with a few exceptions. You will be rewarded with some Event Tokens for every valid code you enter. Happy hunting!
Due to some older bugs some of your inventories have been slightly janked up, hence why some of you have consistently run into particular issues that others may not have we have added an option to show currencies (gold, heat, essences) as items in your inventory. This allows you to vault them to either fix too many stacks making your inventories broken or simply to vault them since that has been a requested feature for a while. We have also enabled the /fixInventory (or /fixinv) command which should resolve these too many stacks issues by restacking all the items in your inventory. This is a last ditch resort to fixing your inventory and functions by finding any items with multiple stacks and moving all instances of them into your vault/stockpile. It does not move them back to their original inventory.
As part of our work on balancing out the new combat mechanics we decided to look into two major issues:
To resolve this we've landed on making it so that food can refill and players can select their starting difficulty. This should increase the demand and usefulness of elite scrolls further since they will boost starting difficulty as well as the demand for decent food as players who are pushing difficulties can continue to resupply as the difficulty of the zone increases. This brought up another issue- that of the healing enchantment. Currently it is an incredibly strong non-consumable heal that you simply buy/make once and stick on equipment to have forever. In many cases these passive heals completely invalidate consumable healing.
Other areas we're addressing in this update are the broken legacy values assigned to a few abilities. We've brought them more in line with all the other abilities as well as added a couple new variants that use different affinities.
A lot of combat related balance changes are coming with this update:
TL;DR = Difficulty is much less effective HP, some more accuracy and damage
Reduced monster HP scaling (new effective scaling is about half as strong as previously), new formula = base * ((1 + 0.1) ^ diff + 0.25 * diff)
Monster prot/res now scales at +1% per diff, which is basically nothing
Monster attack mastery now scales ~3x faster than other monster masteries (3.33% of monster attack additionally gets added as attack mastery)
Monster damage masteries (str/magic/range) now scale 2x faster than other monster masteries (2% of monster skills turn into masteries, i.e. at diff 5 a strength 100 enemy now has strength 100 + strength mastery 10)
Monster damage from gear (str/dex/int) now scales 2x faster than before (+20% per diff)
Monster agility now scales 1.5x faster than other monster defensives (better make acc scrolls!)
Each level of difficulty gives a 1% chance to double loot and a 0.1% chance to triple loot
Enrage timer is reduced by 7.5 seconds per difficulty, capped to 60 seconds as minimum enrage timer
Most of the fixes / additions made it into last week's update in the 0.11.9a-d versions, but here's the remaining set!
Hey everyon! I guess this is our first official patch note, if we don't count the ones posted on Discord and/or Reddit, so yay! In the future all patch notes, news, announcements etc will be posted here too.
This update also included a new Landing page for Idlescape. All feedback on it is highly appreciated! Also feel free to give suggesttions on what to add in there etc.
Now to the actual patch notes:
Some cooking changes are brewing!
The delay counts towards shards, so dangerous zones now generate as many shards as non-dangerous zones.
You will not receive combat XP from the simulated combat.