Server Stability and Economy Fixes Lead a Busy Day of Repairs

Today's work log from Atos shows a wide-ranging day of fixes touching everything from the economy to bard training, with several long-standing issues finally put to rest.

Economy and Item Conservation

The biggest news is a comprehensive audit of a full month of server changes looking for item loss and duplication risks. More than twenty confirmed defects were fixed in one pass, including lot sales that could orphan a chest's contents and a merchant sale that could hand the loot system a second copy of your item. To keep these problems from returning, the economy now has a database-level conservation audit—a read-only sweep that verifies every stored item sits in exactly one container—plus new regression tests pinning each fix in place.

Bard Skills and Catchphrases

Bards, rejoice: eleven of the school's fourteen skills were unbuyable at any trainer, and all fourteen are now on offer. Also, buying a catchphrase and then traveling could leave you looking naked to other players. That's fixed, and the catchphrase bar is now a tile grid.

Creature Harvesting and Totems

Field dressing was failing on almost everything players placed themselves. A decoration turkey could be skinned in only 2 of 396 scenes, and a dragon summoned by a dragon totem paid nothing at all. Both are fixed, along with a harvest bug that threw away every reward when one was refused. Dragon totems now summon dragons a fifth their old size—the top tier had been standing about 27m to the wingtip in a room that couldn't hold it. Their reach, navigation footprint, and name plate all came down with them, while wild dragons are untouched.

Stability and Testing

Crash reporting works again after a rename issue, and a merge that had quietly removed half of a rework from the branch was recovered from original commits. Characters with very long quest histories could fail to load their quest state at character select—that write guard is now fixed. Around 400 places in the game server could drop developer text or raw exception messages into unfilterable red chat lines; all now log the reason instead. The test suite is being walked back to zero, with 96 distinct failures traced to a cause, and a tooltip that caused three quarters of a day's client errors on the test shard was fixed.

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