Blog

Combat Balance

• Distance weapons now respect target defense - small stones and horseshoes were ignoring the target's defense/shielding entirely, which let them outdamage melee weapons on high-defense creatures like bears. Distance attacks now go through the same armor + defense calculation as melee, and would have made shielding skill / shield items irrelevant against ranged attackers if PvP ever opens. Melee no longer feels like the worse choice.
• Small stone always breaks on throw - the break chance was 3% per shot (about 33 throws before breaking on average), making it effectively a free infinite-use ranged weapon. Now breaks every throw, matching its role as a throwaway starter projectile.
• Bears tuned for the Mines - with distance no longer skipping shielding, bears in Floor 9 became a wall (no healing items + many of them). Bear HP 80 -> 60 and defense 10 -> 5. Still tanky, but no longer an expedition-killer.

Bug Fixes

• Dead creatures stuck in the Battle List - wolves you killed and friends who logged off could keep showing up in your Battle List (often with stale HP percentages) until you relogged. The server was only notifying clients of removals within the immediate viewport, but the client tracks creatures slightly further out. Removal packets now reach a wider spectator window, so the Battle List clears properly in those edge cases.

Bug Fixes

• The Mines: floors skipped after a checkpoint - clearing Floor 3 and dropping into the safe room used to teleport you to "deepest_unlocked + 1", which skipped past Floors 4-6 if a previous run had reached a deeper checkpoint. The "deeper" trapdoor now honors the checkpoint of your current expedition (F3 -> F4, F6 -> F7, F9 -> done).
• Animal cap miscounted mounted animals - the 100-animal cap wasn't counting the horse or donkey you were currently riding, which let your total drift above the cap by however many mounts you had. Any subsequent birth was silently skipped (the mother's pregnancy reset to cooldown with no newborn). The cap now correctly includes mounted animals plus those stored at the Livestock Yard.
• Livestock Yard buyer capacity - Harlan and the Livestock Yard kiosk were double-counting your stored animals when checking whether you had room for a new purchase. You can now buy whenever your real total is under 100.

Pet Book Improvements

• Stored animals now appear in the Pet Book - animals you've parked at the Livestock Yard show up in their species category with a "[Yard]" tag. The "Total animals" counter at the bottom now matches the real cap.
• Birth-blocked notifications - when a mother can't give birth because you're at the animal cap, the event is now logged in the Records tab (orange) so you know why the pregnancy reset with no baby.

Documentation

• Cyclopedia and Wiki updated - the pet limit text now correctly states 100 animals (was 50) and clarifies that mounted and Yard-stored animals count toward the cap.
• "Animal Kingdom" achievement threshold bumped from 50 to 100 animals to match the actual cap. Players who already unlocked it keep the achievement.

New Faces in Town

• Castle guards - Captain Harmon, Beric, Oswin, Thane, and Wulfric now patrol the castle gate and walls. Each has their own personality and lore - talk to them about duty, the rules, the Count, or the northern forest. Captain Harmon wrote the Barracks Rules placard; Oswin still hasn't lived down losing two days' pay for sleeping on watch.
• Egbert the tax clerk - the Bailiff's right hand on finances, sitting in the office below Roderic. Twenty-one years on the ledger (three under Count Aldric, the rest under the current management). Polite, pedantic, and impossible to fool.

Outfit Quests

Twelve town NPCs now unlock their personal outfit when you bring them a thematic requirement. The keyword is "outfit" (with a thematic alias like "robe", "apron", "coat", etc.). One outfit per settler per NPC.

• Barnaby (Winged Druid) - 10 white pieces of cloth + 10 brown pieces of cloth.
• Hank (Glooth Engineer) - 50 silver bars.
• Cedric (Formal Dress) - 20,000 gold deposited in the bank.
• Harlan (Warrior) - your first successful sale at the Livestock Yard.
• Ivy (Mage) - 100 strawberries.
• Wick (Beggar) - 30 chicken feathers.
• Rashid (Oriental) - 50 wool.
• Grubb (Grove Keeper) - 30 pig feet.
• Elara (Noblewoman / Nobleman) - 30 cowbells.
• Marlow Pell (Cave Explorer) - 1 golden horseshoe.
• Greta Holloway (Orcsoberfest Garb) - bring a cow with milk gene 5 or better, on the halter. She'll honour her properly.
• Captain Aldwin (Pirate) - 3 marlins.

Cooking Expansion

• The Oven now accepts fluid containers. Drop a vial of milk into a slot and the recipe will use it; the vial is returned empty after cooking. Recipes that need "milk" want a vial filled from a Milk Churn.
• Fourteen new recipes join the existing ones. Cheese chain (Cheese -> Soft Cheese -> Golden Cheese Wedge), Brown Bread, Leberkassemmel, Mushroom Pie, Stockfish, Taiyaki, Taiyaki Ice Cream, Yummy Gummy Worm, Cookies (bake 12 at a time from a Baking Tray with Cookie Dough), Cheese Cookie, and three buff foods.
• Three buff foods grant a temporary effect when consumed:
  • Banana Chocolate Shake - +10 speed for 5 minutes.
  • Blueberry Cupcake - +3 HP regen per 3 seconds for 1 minute.
  • Blessed Steak - +5 HP regen per 3 seconds for 1 minute.
• Salt is now sold at Marta's tavern for 5 gold per unit. Required for most savoury recipes.

Order Board & Trade

• Marlow Pell has joined the Order Board NPCs. He orders feed, treats, and horseshoes for his donkey herd.
• New items added to the order rotation: sugar cane, sugar, sugar cube, sugar oat, horseshoe, golden horseshoe, cowbell, pig feet.
• Marta buys and sells every non-buff cooked good at dynamic prices. Buff foods stay player-to-player.
• Ivy now sells Sugar Cane and Sugar in addition to Worms.

Fixes & Polish

• The stone oven (the bigger variant) no longer stays lit forever after a server restart. Lit ovens now recover their auto-extinguish timer the next time anyone interacts with them.
• A long-standing bug where dropping a vial of milk into the oven turned it into a vial of water on retrieve is fixed. Vials now preserve their fluid and come back empty after cooking.
• Traditional Shirt (the salvaged miner's armor from the caves) has its armor value bumped from 2 to 5.
• Cookies recipe finally added: use cake dough on an empty baking tray to fill it, then bake - out come 12 cookies and your empty tray back.

Pet Care

• Pets stay awake while a subowner is online. Previously, leaving only a house subowner logged in (without the main owner) would tick hunger and thirst down, but the animals themselves would not move to the trough - they could die with full troughs nearby. Now any subowner online keeps the ranch fully active for pet AI, just like the main owner does.

Pet Book

• Age in the pet list. Each entry now shows the animal's age in days right next to Feed and Water, so you can scan ages without opening every detail panel.
• "Find" button per pet. A new Find button on each entry locates the animal in the world: the Pet Book closes, a glowing outline appears around the creature for a few seconds, and you get an Exiva-style direction message (e.g. "Chicken is to the north-east, far away."). Handy when you have many animals of the same species mixed together.

This update is the groundwork for what comes next: PvE caves and mines. Combat is now ready to handle them. Soon you will be heading underground to fight, mine, and bring back rare resources. Stay tuned.

Combat Overhaul

• Unified Combat skill - Fist, Club, Sword, Axe, Distance and Shielding now share a single "Combat" stat. Pick any weapon style; they all train the same skill at the same rate.
• Defense still scales with Combat level, but blocking with a shield no longer grants XP - only attacks do.
• Fight mode locked to Balanced. No more offensive/defensive stances to manage.
• 31 new farm-themed equipment items - see the Wiki Combat section for the full list.

New Weapons (18 melee)

Anything in the kitchen or the toolshed is fair game: spoon, fork, kitchen knife, pan, rolling pin, oven spatula, sickle, wooden spoon, wooden hammer, cleaver, hammer, saw, small axe, rake, plank, wooden sword, leather whip, pitchfork. Stats span the Rookgaard range. Each one has its own flavor description.

New Shields (9)

Heart pillow, brush, pumpkin, bucket, empty basket, baking tray, cookbook, merchant portrait, Galthen's satchel. Defense values range from 12 (pillow) up to 23 (Galthen's satchel). Marta now sells the baking tray for 30 gold.

New Distance Ammo (4)

• Small stone - already available, unchanged.
• Throwing cake - atk 7, range 4. Cooks at the oven from 1 cake dough + 1 sugar cube + 1 small stone. Splashes cake on impact.
• Horseshoe - atk 8, range 4. Drops from horses and donkeys, scaled by age (1 from a young one, up to 4 from a 21+ day-old animal).
• Golden horseshoe - atk 11, range 5. Rare drop (50% chance) from 21+ day-old horses or donkeys only.

Quality of Life

• Animal slaughter loot fixed - age tier thresholds for chicken, sheep, pig, cow, bull, horse and donkey were on the wrong scale, so older animals were stuck dropping starter-tier loot. Now correctly scales 1-3 / 4-10 / 11-20 / 21+ game days as the design always intended. Time to butcher that 25-day-old prize pig.
• The dead "Classification: 1 Tier: 0" line on equipment look text is gone (forge system is disabled anyway).
• Christmas token no longer drops from every monster (leftover vanilla scaffold).

Breeding Fixes

• White Horse can finally breed with the older Horse, Brown Horse, and Gray Horse colors - a missing entry was silently isolating whitehorses to their own breeding pool. Mixed-color pairs now produce HEARTS as expected.
• Color inheritance cleaned up: when a whitehorse is born from a mixed-color pair, the coat colors always come 100% from the whitehorse parent (no more random fallback).