August 3rd Development Update

Good news all around today! Atos has been tackling a lot of quality-of-life improvements and fixing longstanding issues.

First up, players who enjoy PvP will be happy to hear some adjustments have been made to the Subterfuge skill tree. A particularly strong opener involving Sneak Attack has been reined in – it’s now capped at full hiddenness instead of being able to stack damage multipliers excessively.

Combat itself is also getting a little more flavorful! The Cave Wrasse now behaves much more like…a wrasse, with unique attacks including a bite, cinder spit and sulfur roar. It will even ambush players, hiding until it strikes.

Several very welcome changes have been made to character progression. Skill decay has been completely removed – you’ll no longer lose experience from skills simply by dying. You can also freely unlearn skills without penalty (besides the time cost), and trainers now actually teach the Pet Range skill, fixing a long-standing issue with taming! The Skills window is also much more informative now, showing your current experience levels, costs to level up, and potential returns when unlearning.

For those who enjoy collecting, four iconic artifacts – the Scepter of Dread, Heart of Sorrows, Bonesteel Crown, and Shroud of the Avatar itself – are now correctly identified as artifacts in your inventory.

Finally, a new Public Resource Atlas is live at catnipgames.net/resources, which should be incredibly helpful for harvesters! Load times between zones have also been improved by about 2.4 seconds. Plus, buffs will now persist correctly when traveling between scenes – a bug that has plagued players since 2020 is finally resolved, and encumbrance warnings are much easier to read. The launcher can also now save builds for easy re-loading!

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