GM Ethos
Staff

It's finally time for the next major content update! We finally get to cross a new skill off the roadmap for the first time since January 2nd. We promised this would be the Year of Farwoods and we aim to deliver.

  • New skill: Artificing.
  • New trait: Sleepwalker.
  • The creation of gem jewelry has been moved from Gemcutting to Artificing. You now create jewelry by dragging the item onto the ring or amulet rather than through the craft menu.
  • New artificed item: Spell Anchor. Spells which target characters by name now target spell anchors which you have attuned to instead. If you want to target a character to Teleport or Summon, for example, they must be carrying a spell anchor. Anchors not carried by a person are unreachable until someone picks them up. You can label anchors to tell them apart more easily.
  • New artificed item: Quartz Jewelry. This essentially acts as a crystal which you don't need to hold in your hand.
  • New artificed item: Fire Crystal Jewelry. You can charge and wear this just like a normal fire crystal, freeing up your hands for other things. Yes, they work with Mundane characters.
  • New artificed item: Conduit.
  • New artificed item: Battery.
  • New artificed item: Access Resonator.
  • New artificed item: Control Resonator.
  • New artificed item: Territory Cairn. This item allows you to claim regions of the map for your exclusive use.


  • When a cairn is built, furnished with conduits and a charged battery, and keyed with a control resonator, it will prevent anyone without an access or control resonator that has been keyed to that cairn from interacting with the surrounding area in any way except moving through it -- characters without access can't scrounge, mine, interact with items, pick up or drop items, etc. Don't want people messing with your planter boxes? Deploy a cairn and they'll be untouchable. Want to claim a mining area for your faction's exclusive use? Cover it in cairns and no one else can mine there, etc.
  • Characters with keyed access resonators can interact with things in the claimed area freely, except for the cairn itself. Characters with keyed control resonators can key additional resonators to the cairn, negate all resonator assignments to that cairn (aka change the lock), swap out the battery, and interact with things like an access resonator. If you want to fight over claimed territory, you'll be fighting over these resonators, not necessarily the cairns themselves.
  • Cairns need to be touched every 24 hours to maintain the claim. Anyone can touch a cairn; they do not require a resonator. After 24 hours without being maintained this way, the cairn's battery will begin to drain faster, continuing to accelerate the longer it goes without being touched. The battery also needs to be charged and replaced every so often by a mage. If the battery turns red, the cairn is unstable and imminently running out of power; if the battery is not promptly replaced, it will shatter and the conduits will be lost. There is then a 24-hour window (assuming to replace the battery and conduits before the cairn crumbles entirely, during which it can be taken over by anyone else. This is more for untended claims to expire naturally; as mentioned above, it's more effective to fight over resonators than target the cairns since you can't really stop people from maintaining them.

  • New artificed item: Enchanting Table.
  • The Enchant Weapon/Armor, Balance, and Heft spells have been removed from Red Magic. All existing enchantments have been removed. Instead, to enchant things, red mages will need to procure an enchanting table from an artificer and use it while holding their red crystal. The enchanting table has eight slots; one for the item to be enchanted, six slots in a circle around the item which hold gems, and another "miscellaneous" slot which may be needed for some enchantments.
  • We have added hundreds of different enchantments to the game. You will have to find out how to apply them and what they do yourself. But don't worry, it won't be a complete shot in the dark; when you have a gem of the right type in the right position for an enchantment, the enchantment table may give you some feedback rather than just fizzling, so that you know you're on the right track. Lore books that contain instructions and details on certain enchantments may also surface in the future. And here's a hint for you: you're gonna need cracked gems.
  • Pica is running a little behind on the enchantment overlays, so if you do manage to enchant something, the enchantment might change color in the future when we backport the appropriate colors. Right now the only color is red.
  • Like other crafting skills, Artificing will continue to expand with new recipes as we finish them.
  • Added six variants to every type of weapon craftable with Weaponsmithing. Note that these are purely cosmetic and change nothing about the weapon except its visual appearance. If you have an item that you'd like to retroactively apply one of the skins to, let us know and we will swap it out for you.


  • Burrow interiors are now permanently dark. You'll need to furnish them with light sources in order to light them up (may I suggest candles?). Nocturnal characters see normally inside of burrows, since there is no moonlight.
  • Ravenous and Parched were clearly a little too favorable, as they are among the most-picked negative traits. They've been nerfed somewhat by making them prevent you acquiring the satiated/oversatisfied buffs from eating and drinking. You're ravenous, your hunger will never be satiated!
  • To punish idlers, spending prolonged periods of time with hunger or thirst at 100% will tick up a Malnourished or Dehydrated effect accordingly on you. They can't be cured, but will tick back down when your hunger or thirst are above zero.
  • You can no longer drink rain. Instead, containers will fill with water if left out in the rain, and you can drink those.
  • Weapon attacks now deal a range of damage rather than a static amount, much like armor has a variable amount of damage resistance. This should help power creep, make fighting well-equipped characters less punishing for non-combat characters or characters with worse equipment, and make fights last a little longer.
  • Tenacity has been reworked as a result of the increased effectiveness of HP pools. Rather than absorbing overflow damage, it now converts some HP damage into stamina consumption, essentially representing you "tanking" blows. The maximum damage it can absorb depends on your degree of success, so it is no longer a pass/fail skill and will never be guaranteed to protect you.
  • The pace of combat feels a little fast, so I've adjusted attack cooldowns across the board, hopefully it makes fights less hectic so people can roleplay more. It shouldn't have a significant effect on combat since you can't fast-heal for a little while after taking damage.


  • Combat skills (Bash, Disarm, etc.) now have a cooldown and can no longer be spammed. The duration may be subject to adjustment in the future.
  • You can now dodge, parry, block, and resist with armor (the damage from) combat skills.
  • Increased the rate at which sitting by a fire warms you up and extended the maximum duration of the effect.
  • Extended the duration during which a Nonviolent character can attack someone who has provoked them from 2 minutes to 10 minutes.
  • The Mundane trait and other forms of spell resistance now provide some protection from Fault Line and Explosive Runes.
  • Knocking on a locked burrow with a Doorbell sigil inside will ring the doorbell if the owner is online but not inside.
  • Fixed a bug causing firelamps/string lights to never give off more than 1 tile of light.
  • Fixed Quills not doing anything on a critical fail (not that anyone plays hedgehogs).
  • Fixed a bug where durability damage to anvils and hammers was only done on the initial craft, and not by reforging.
  • Dialogue spoken outside your screen radius or while you're unconscious no longer lets you practice a language.
  • Switching to a language while typing a message will now switch the message to that language rather than requiring you to close and reopen the dialogue bubble.
  • As this is a major update that rewrites a lot of the underlying server code, a lot of things will likely be broken due to the limits of my regression testing capability. Feel free to report any bugs in feedback directly rather than using the forums for a few days, since I'll be focused on quickly fixing bugs to get the game stable again.


Archaeology is the next and final skill on the roadmap to be implemented before beta. Stay tuned!