August 21st Dev Log: Pets, Maps, and a Whole Lot More

This week's dev log is packed with quality-of-life fixes, new content, and some serious behind-the-scenes work. Here's what you need to know.

Pets and Combat

Pets got a big fix: they'll now hold their fights properly. If a creature backs away, it can no longer drag your pet off the fight, and the leash won't hand that creature to you unless you were the one who left. No more accidental aggro swaps.

Maps and Performance

The M-key map was secretly hoarding every map picture in the game—1.46 GB of art—just to draw one. It now only keeps the map for the area you're in, which should help with memory usage. Scene maps also got a visual upgrade: they're now 4K, with Ardoris, Central Brittany, Owl's Head, and Soltown at 8K, and they've moved off a 128-colour palette to full colour.

Vendor Search and Oracle

Vendor search stat filters now actually work. Searching "chest" with Dexterity at least 10 went from 1,987 results to 690, and adding Intelligence dropped it to 224. The index had also been rejecting listings since July 31—36,142 of them—so if you felt like something was missing, this was why. The in-game Oracle also now takes suggestions properly, framing them as proposals instead of bug reports.

Animal Lore

Animal Lore got a big expansion: fourteen beast families now have four levels of written lore each, uncovered through study. There's a new Naturalist achievement category and a Master Naturalist title to earn. The lore is fully translated into all eight languages, with 4,178 records checked name-by-name and reviewed by native speakers.

Launcher and Chaos Shard

The launcher now installs a fresh game as one resumable CDN download instead of thousands of individual file fetches, and a new build-farm job keeps that archive current after every release. The Chaos test shard launcher is now public for Windows, Linux, and Mac—install once and it patches itself. Note: Steam sign-in doesn't work on the shard, but you can use your regular account credentials.

New Creature and Crash Fixes

A new creature joins the roster: the Young Tyrannosaur, a tier 15 beast that bites and sweeps its tail through anyone standing beside it. Crash triage also narrowed a week of reports down to six real problems, including two Linux crashes and a loading screen that can never resolve because the client keeps resending credentials the server already refused.

GM Tools

The dev portal got a new Players Online page showing everyone on the test shard, letting GMs boot, mute, message, or flag accounts—with a reason required and every action recorded.

Summarized from Chris "Atos" Spears' work log at Catnip Games.