← Back to blog

Shroud of the Avatar – August 11 Development Highlights

By admin · 8/12/2026

This week’s work focused on quality‑of‑life upgrades, visual polish, and a major bard overhaul that will start showing up soon in towns and dungeons.

Reliable skill progress
We’ve added a receipt system for skill experience. Your experience gains now stay in a pending batch until the server confirms them, and the client will resend any that didn’t land. This means fewer lost points after a disconnect.

Dungeon navigation and decoration
Player‑crafted dungeons now include waygates: place a portal, attune it, and you can step from the far end back to the entrance—or even jump straight into another dungeon. A long‑standing bug that prevented the final dungeon point from accepting decorations (totems, chairs, torches, chests) has been fixed, and the generator will now seat totems from the chest as well.

Map coordinates go mobile
Following a community request, you can now paste a location into chat, click it, and see a ring on your map with a read‑out and a “Go to” button. This makes sharing points of interest far easier.

Bard revamp
The bard overhaul is complete. Seven older skills have been retired and fully refunded, replaced by six fresh abilities and two new stances that let your songs either boost the party or focus on your own performance. Towns can now build a stage; watching a performer will grant you adventure experience, creating a loop that rewards both players and towns. Crafted instruments have been turned into real gear—quality now rolls from your carpenter skill, masterworks and enchants apply, and a bard song scales with the quality of the lute you carry.

Visual and environmental tweaks

  • The Earth Elemental summon icon has been redrawn (all 144 skill glyphs now display their school colour).

  • Antialiasing finally works in the client, offering four selectable methods and enabled by default on capable machines.

  • Lights can now be set to burn only at night, automatically turning on at dusk and off at dawn, while streetlamps no longer need a manual day/night toggle.

  • Town governors can rotate their town’s orientation, moving the sun, sky, compass, and wind together without rebuilding the map or evicting residents (a request from John Markus).

  • Siege events have been rebalanced: towns now enter sieges on independent schedules with a hard cap of eight besieged player towns across the map.

All of these changes are live on the test server and will roll out to the main world in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for the new bard stage experiences and the smoother visual settings on your next adventure!

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