Maps, Bestiary, Bounty Spotlights and More — What's New This Week

It has been five days since our last update post, and the site has been busy. Here's everything that landed since July 26th — and there's a lot, so grab a cup of coffee (or a mug of Obsidian Stout).

Scene Maps, with Real Battle Data

The headline feature: scene pages now have maps — over 160 of them, built from the official SotA map server — with a live activity overlay drawn from the community kill archive. Pick a scene and see exactly where:

● Monsters are being killed — hunt where the hunting is good
✚ Players are dying — approach with caution
✕ PvP kills happen — or seek them out, if that's your thing
◆ Loot is dropping — follow the goods

Zoom and pan around, click legend entries to isolate a single monster or player, filter by name, and scope everything to a date range. Every scene defaults to the last year of data so it loads fast. And yes — the dots stay crisp no matter how far you zoom in.

A Proper Bestiary

Monster pages grew a bestiary card, courtesy of a weekly sync with the excellent SotAwiki: alignment, category, type, tier, health range, special abilities and a description — plus a "Where it spawns" table with per-location stats (HP, damage, XP, gold) and known loot drops linked into our item pages. Combined with the kill-archive stats already there, a monster page now tells you what it is, where to find it, and what it's worth.

Bounties Level Up

Bounty hunters got the biggest quality-of-life batch of the week:

Request a bounty! Registered users can now propose bounties — pick the monsters and locations, pitch it, and the staff takes it from there. Look for the button on the Bounties page.
Hunter progress pages — during a bounty, click any hunter in the standings to see their qualifying kills broken down by monster and location.
The Bounty Spotlight — a new block on every page of the site advertises a running bounty: the target's portrait, the prize, and exactly how many kills it takes to steal first place. When nothing is running, it counts down to the next one.
Blind bounties keep their secret. For mystery-target events, the spotlight shows only the name, the description and the prize. No hints. Good luck.

A Local AI Joined the Team

We've wired the site to a locally-hosted AI (no cloud services, running right here on our own hardware). You'll see its work in a few places:

"In short" summaries at the top of every release-notes page — the whole patch, distilled to a paragraph.
Bounty ad copy in the new spotlight block, always reviewed by a moderator before it goes anywhere.

Plan Your Day in New Britannia

New Britannian Time ticks live on the home page and the calendar, so you always know what time it is in-game.
The Farming Planner knows every crop's watering windows and yields, and can drop your planting schedule straight onto your personal site calendar — which now supports proper start and end times.
The Lunar Rift tracker shows which rift is open right now and which opens next, down to the second.

Find Anything, Faster

Search moved into its own bar under the navigation, and submitting a search now opens a full results page with filters by type — monsters, players, items, scenes, towns, bounties, release notes and more. Mix and match filters to narrow the hunt.

We're Coming to Your Feed

The site can now post to Discord, Bluesky and Mastodon: bounty announcements and winners, streamers going live, new blog posts, release-note summaries — and community polls. We're setting the accounts up now; as each one goes live, a follow link appears in the new site footer. Watch that space, and come argue with us about the deadliest bounty target.

And the Rest

Live game data now supplements the historical archive, so bounty standings and scene stats include kills from the last few hours, not just yesterday's import.
Combat records — crits and casts — joined the stats family on the site and in the API.
Backer class pages got a management overhaul with image galleries, and item pages keep gaining artwork.
Twitch streamers who are live show in the sidebar (wide screens) or the strip under the nav — now joined by the bounty spotlight.
Plenty of invisible work too: search-engine friendliness across every page, faster deploys, and a small mountain of admin tooling that keeps all of the above running.

Get Involved

Everything above is free to browse; a free account gets you the personal calendar, bounty requests, and a place on the leaderboards under your own name. See a bounty you like in the spotlight? You know how many kills it takes.

Happy hunting, The shroudoftheavatar.net team