Updates: August 2022

Probably needless to say and as one would expect after having builders enter the world for the first time, a number of “quirks” were found, so we spent the first week of August squashing bugs and improving some commands and functionality to give builders a better experience and make their jobs at least a little easier (hopefully)!

Aside from the large amount of bug fixing, we focused largely on trying to solidify our General Skills for phase one, along with knocking out some other tasks on our roadmap. So here’s the recap of all our August accomplishments.

New Features:

• General skill updates:
  • The Awareness skill has gained abilities to LOOK, GLANCE and SQUINT <direction> to see varying degrees of information about adjacent locations, SKY SENSE to check for others in the skies directly above you, TRACE <target> to track the target’s location and highlight them on your MAP when they’re nearby, TRAPS to discover unconcealed traps, and RESEARCH HERE to uncover historical notes found in some locations.
  • A few abilities from the Survival skill have been moved over into the Fortitude skill, which also gained entirely new abilities such as: AUTOWAKE ON/OFF to automatically wake up by reflex when put to sleep against your will, CONCENTRATE to regain control of your mind and slowly banish some mental afflictions, and DRAINS to review a list of active defense that have a sustained mana cost.
  • The Survival skill continues to grow with new abilities to set a FLEE/WIMPY health percentage for when you should automatically attempt to flee from battle, BLEEDING to assess wounds, and SPLINT or BANDAGE to forage materials for a makeshift bandage that heals small amounts or sets broken bones. Ironed out some adjustments to EAT and DRINK commands and finally got functionality implemented for PACKing, LIGHTing and PUFFing pipes. There were a few more minor adjustments here, but we managed to complete all phase one abilities!
  • The Assessment skill now allows all players access to the LOCK and UNLOCK commands, so long as they have the appropriate access and/or keys. KEYLIST can be used to review held keys and see how many doors they lock. Additionally, a new ability to CONSIDER <target> allows players to evaluate comparable combat strength of an opponent. This is another one we managed to complete all phase one abilities for with this update!
  • The Animals skill now grants commands for COMPANIONS and MOUNTS for players to see a list of all loyal animals or a list of loyal mounts. Additionally, new abilities have been added to SPUR SKYWARD to head to the skies on flight capable mounts, TROT, CANTER and GALLOP depending on the animal’s speed, COMMAND <animal> <action>, plus quite a bit more (come to Discord, nudge, nudge, hint, hint, wink, wink)!
• Major skill updates:
  • Druids and Nemophilists and now FOREST CLAIM forest locations, provided they have high enough affinity with the forest.
  • Nemophilists can now use PACIFISM ON/OFF, which is one of their most powerful defenses and helps them stay safe against unwanted combat. (Reminder: Nemophilism is aimed to be a very peaceful skill more geared toward tending the forests and animals of Mystavaria.)
  • Elementalism updates continue with EL ICEWALL <direction> to block an exit with a wall of ice, EL BOIL in water locations to raise the water temperature to a scalding boil (searing those swimming in the location), EL SHARDS <direction> to send shards of ice as an AOE attack to all in an adjacent location, and EL GEYSER <target> to knock an enemy out of the skies above.
  • Sky Prophecy has received some minor improvements and utility commands, but because these were started at the very end of August and there is more to come in September, we’ll save the exhaustive update on this skill until next month.
• Minor skill updates:
  • The Flying skill received another overhaul with proper checks and fail messages now in place for the FLY command. Additionally, the FLY <region> and FLY TO <target> abilities have been improved and work as expected. Those with Flying also have new abilities including: FLUTTER WINGS to gain the “flying” defense without actually flying to the skies, SPREAD WINGS to absorb warmth from the sun during daytime, capable of curing the “hypothermia” affliction, WING GUST <target> <direction> to blow a target away, WING DUST to whip up a blinding dust storm and SKY LOCALE to survey all locations under a particular area of sky.
  • The Photonics skill now has a slew of new abilities including: LIGHT WARP <direction>, allowing the player to shift into a beam of light and rapidly project themselves (move) across numerous locations in a straight line, GLOW <object> to make certain objects function as a light source, LIGHT ILLUSION <message> to project illusions in a location (we can imagine endless RP possibilities with this one!), LIGHT SCAN to send beams of light around an area to reveal less obvious and concealed objects and details in a location, LIGHT BLINK to warp to a random location within the zone, and at least seven other abilities we’re not going to bother listing out (but come join our Discord for the details!).
  • We ended up redistributing a number of former “Basic Combat” abilities into our “Attack” skill since there really wasn’t much point in having them both. Instead, we have converted the skill into a more expansive minor “Unarmed Combat” skill, with techniques such as JAB PUNCH, SNAP ELBOW, SWEEP KICK, TACKLE, UPPERCUT and more.
  • The Stealth minor skill can now officially be acquired and learned, though it is not high priority for phase one.
• Map updates:
  • Huge shoutout to our builder Serelliwen who managed to finish descriptions for the village of Laminae.
  • LANDMARKS, NEARBY, and SHOPS commands can all be used to see a list of places of note in your current zone.
• Communication updates:
  • We now have an internal messaging system and players can use MSG <player> <text> to send private message to other players. These can be read using MSGS. Meanwhile, TELLS can no longer be sent to players who are not online.
  • Admin can now set a MOTD for the world which will appear at login to broadcast any important messages.
  • We now have custom emotes with targeting! (Example: emote cheers wildly @aion in celebration!)
  • The HELP system has received a massive override to give it a simplified interface and bring it more inline with the rest of our world’s overall style and colour scheme.
• Custom Settings:
  • We spent some time building out customisation options for our in game prompt, so players can now choose to see variable to show their target, status (passive/aggressive/engaged), whether they are outdoors or indoors, the location type, exits, current zone and skyzone, weather, temperature, coins held, lessons, level, XP, weight held, time of day, month and season. Additionally, players can choose PROMPT HOSTILE to only display the prompt when they are flagged as aggressive, which typically signals they are in combat. There are also new customisable settings for PROMPT PRIMARY and PROMPT SECONDARY <colour>s.
  • Players can now choose to IGNORE room descriptions, exits, objects and some types of objects within a room (like trees) to help customise how much they want to see as they move around the world.
  • Players can also choose room name colours using RN COLOUR <dynamic/static/custom>. Dynamic colour changes to match the location type (example a forest location will have a green room name), static uses our default Mystavaria colour and custom allows the player to set their own room name colour.
  • We now have an internal alias system built in which connects with our internal targeting system and allows player to create their own command aliases and string together multiple commands in one alias.

Bug Fixes:

• SAY had some awful grammatical and capitalisation issues, so we made an effort to vastly improve that.
• Entering special exits no longer tosses an error to those without appropriate permissions. Additionally, hidden locations and exits no longer display on MAP.
• The CURE and HEAL abilities in the Healing minor skill no longer toss errors.
• The FOLLOW command is functional once again and you can no longer follow someone while you’re asleep…
• The Flying skill can now be appropriately learned.
• We finally went through and fixed all misspellings of “defence” to “defense”.
• Some shops in Arborvella had incorrect settings causing our map to go wonky. Those locations have been fixed.
• After we improved functionality of fires last month, locations that had previous had a fire in them started erroring. We fixed as many as we could find.
• Non-resource shops now appropriately display any goods for sale rather than offering up errors.
• The Combat skill had some naming inconsistencies in our code which has been cleaned up and no longer errors with basic commands like PUNCH, KICK, and STUN.
• The “bleeding” affliction is now appropriately removed upon death, resolving subsequent related errors.
• VALUE, BLOCK and RUB commands all had various errors that have been corrected.
• A few more bugs in the target finder ironed out – animals can now be targeted again, exits can no longer be the target of certain offensive attacks and if a target is not specified the target finder will now attempt to use the internal target instead.
• New characters now appropriately receive the “Fortitude” skill command set.
• Trying to move without balance no longer sends two “fail” messages.
• Some adjustments to take into consideration mounts and animals: mounted opponents can no longer be DRAGged, FLYing while mounted on a flight capable animal will bring the mount to the skies with you, but on a non-flight capable animal, the animal will get left behind on the ground, DISMOUNTing now appropriately removes any riding based defenses, and riding an animal now appropriately removes any “flying” or “levitating” defenses.
• Duplicate names no longer appear on certain WHO lists.
• Fixed an error that was causing animal friendship to be overridden by certain actions, thus losing stored friendship with all aside from the person who last interacted with them.

Other Progress and Minor New Stuff:

• Canned emotes received a slight facelift and now use words associated with the player’s gender. Quite a few new emotes have been added as well after we received some requests from the builders!
• Worked through some of our help files to make them a little more… well, helpful.
• Players can now mark themselves as AFK.
• The WEAR and WEARING commands received a much needed overhaul after Tailoring was completed and we realised we had many more “body slots” to wear clothing on than before. Along with this, players can no longer give away worn objects (they must be removed first), shoes can now be removed rather than glued to your feet forever, and character descriptions now display worn clothing in a legible format again. NPCs also accept clothing items and automatically wear them if they don’t already have something else equipped in the clothing slot.
• NPCs around Arborvella have been populated with some helpful keywords. They can tell you what topics they know about with the command ASK KEYWORDS and give more detail about a specific topic with ASK <keyword>.
• NPCs now have access to emotes to allow us to flavour up their interactions and responses.

Okay – that was probably pretty exhaustive, but there’s always more to learn in our daily Discord updates, so make sure to come join our Discord server if your interested in even more details!

– Alora and Aion