Dev Log Digest: Maps, Pets, and Performance Fixes Land in August 20 Build

Hello, Avatars! Here's what the team at Catnip Games shipped in the August 20 work log—a day packed with fixes that should make your time in New Britannia noticeably smoother.

Visual and Performance Overhauls

First up, the big one: zone maps are readable again. Since August 1, 93 of the 316 maps had been loading at their smallest size and never sharpening, with Tenebris Harbor hit hardest. That's now fixed. Alongside that, ambient occlusion is finally running in the actual client—it had never worked outside the editor, meaning every build since the lighting overhaul rendered without contact shading. Expect richer, more grounded scenes.

Quitting the game is also much faster. The Windows client was waiting out a painful 26-second engine teardown on every exit. Now it ends its own process immediately, the confirm dialog answers instantly, and a second Alt+F4 counts as "yes." Two seconds and you're out.

Pets, Achievements, and Tooltips

Tamed pets stay out again—a nasty bug since build 130 had the server refusing every save a taming necklace made, so your companion dismissed itself twelve seconds after summoning. That's resolved.

Achievements now respect your history: the emote counter counts what you already learned, and 11 story quest achievements unlock retroactively for quests finished years ago. The item comparison tooltip also got smarter, with a third column showing exactly what equipping a weapon would change (including which hand it costs), and weapon tooltips now state charge time.

Town and Siege Quality of Life

A few town-related fixes round things out. Armour no longer vanishes on horseback—the visibility box was frozen to your standing pose, leaving riders outside it. The loading screen that stalled at 51% on "Coordinating Data" is fixed, plus a 90-second ceiling on waits that had none.

Towns stuck under siege can be freed again: starting and ending sieges were dev-console-only, and sieges had no expiry if the Cabalist was unreachable. Both now live on the GM panel, alongside a new window for reading and repairing stuck quests. Town governors also gain control of street lighting via Light Settings on any lamp and a new Town Console Lights tab.

Finally, graphics cards with more than 8 GB of VRAM now get up to 8192MB of texture budget instead of a flat 4096MB—ending texture detail drops in decorated player towns.

That's the day's work. See you in the game!

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