It’s been a long year but it’s finally here. Carrot weight has been reduced from 5 to 4. I pray the game’s delicate balance will be preserved and not thrown into chaos. Read on for a few more interesting changes..

Accessory switching: Normally it would give you a warning when you already had 2 accessories equipped. Now it will automatically switch with your oldest equipped accessory.

Fixed a bug with holes sometimes not working. Scholar’s Lens can now show Arrow Tower targets. Altars no longer spawn Dire Wolves or Tentacles. Fixed the Skeletal King sometimes escaping his lair (and players as well).

Infamy System: This is being introduced to reduce abuse against newbies among other things. It is basically a timed debuff that can slightly reduce your movespeed, dodge, and defense vs towers based on the amount of infamy you’ve built up.

Things that add to your infamy currently:

• Killing a player. This adds a base small amount which can increase significantly based on the level difference of your victim. Killing a player with infamy will not give you any.
• Attacking a player who has no infamy. This gives a flat rate of 10 infamy per attack up to a cap of 30. It’s safe to retaliate.
• Getting hit by arrow towers after attacking something. This infamy is easy to get rid of but will stack up to 5 minutes maximum if you keep tanking arrows. Market towers openly target people with infamy but wont target an innocent player so you are safe to retaliate under them. The 300 infamy a raider will get only adds 1 extra tower damage.
• Looting a lock will add a couple minutes of infamy.

Things that remove infamy:

• Time – whenever you use energy (draining your hunger bar) it will also drain your infamy. For small infractions you will lose your infamy after a short time of normal play. Just remember to keep your hunger bar up or it wont drain.
• Death – you lose 80% of your infamy from dying. Keeping some left over also helps against tower rerolling.
• Altar Offering – If you drop gold at an altar you can pay off part or all of your remaining infamy time.

Infamy effects:

• When you first get infamy it show a local notice on your character that says ‘Infamous!’. When it wears off it will say ‘Safe!’.
• Reduced movement speed, dodge, and defense vs towers. These debuffs are capped, so for example the slow will ramp up as you gain infamy but will never go beyond a heavy armor slow. Currently this shows as a ‘slow’ icon until a new icon is made.
• You can’t use fountains or reincarnate.
• Green ‘safe’ maps are not safe for you.
• Special guard towers placed around Market Square will target you.
• Chaos have a chance to target you even if you are below level 60.
• If you would spawn at crossroads you instead spawn at a random spot in ‘Deep Cave’. Recall tiles still work.
• You can click the debuff icon to see how much time you have left, and check other players ‘Info’ to see how infamous they are.

All of this is not only to hinder high level players from harassing newbies but also to encourage people to deal with issues in their own level bracket. So if a level 5 or 10 player is causing trouble then it is best that one or more people under level 20 get to be the hero and deal with them. If a high level player is unmatched on the server then others will have a better chance to catch them after a murder. Revenge can happen more often. PvP becomes a little more exciting knowing that you might be hunted. Tribe battles will be slightly more balanced because death will remove most of the infamy for the losing side and give the winning side more of a challenge. Recall tiles still function normally, and after the fight is over a winning tribe will often have the resources to pay off any remaining infamy if they choose. I’m sure there will be some balance adjustments and extra features added to this system over time. I may also be adding another way to demolish structures in a future patch.

I haven’t had reports of griefing related to wall blocking since the last small patch but I’ve taken some further measures against that just in case. The fresh structure damage bonus has been increased from 1 minute to 5 minutes. So now any structure made in the last 5 minutes can be taken down quickly. Also you can no longer place road or floor tiles on top of stone road to overwrite it. It must be dug up first.

Here are some more changes, some of which you might have already seen implemented since the last patch:

• Dogs now teleport to their owners within 5 minutes if they get lost.
• The bug where towers attack you right after logging in should be fixed.
• The broadcast chat color has been softened.
• Myst formula for bosses reworked to give each attacker myst based on their own myst bonus.
• Added Guard towers around Market Square that will attack players who are fighting or infamous people who walk by.
• The Altar ‘greed’ gold penalty has been reduced from 30 to 10.
• The Dust earned bonus related to ‘Time Alive’ is capped at around 4 weeks, level is still uncapped.
• Raccoons drop potatoes sometimes. Potatoes no longer spawn in the wild. Their weight has been reduced from 10 to 5.
• Death/mercy statues/escape lanterns send you to your recall tile, otherwise crossroads.
• Fixed /tribe list not working for certain tribes.
• Fixed a glitch with Whirlwind.
• You are fully healed when you respawn after death.
• Altar spawns don’t persist through server restarts.
• Fountains in Market Square and Newbie Village only heal for 100 instead of max.
• The Lens now shows days left properly on 1 gold rented doors.
• There is a global notice when a Chaos is killed showing who killed it.
• There is a warning message when you drop items on a large stack informing you that it could be destroyed.
• Structures can’t be built on roads, and take full damage without adjacent supporting structures.
• Fixed a crash related to stair building, and another related to anvils.
• Added /price command to change the quantity you ask for on your trading counter.
• Fixed a bug with transitions occasionally putting players on a blocked edge.
• Fixed mobile nav menu on the website.
• Leaderboards show player avatars properly now and forums include last server played.

Server stability and lag is much better than it used to be, but now capacity is filling up so I will have to continue optimizing and add more servers. I also have to add Google Play Store payments soon. This was a balance and bug fix patch but new items, maps, and monsters are all being worked on in the background. They will probably be released before the taming patch so there is a lot to look forward to 🙂