Alter Aeon Recent Changes and Additions

Recent code and server updates can be found in this changelog.  Only the
last 20 changes are listed.  For a complete list, click here.

For new area additions and area updates, click here.

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---- Mar 19, 23 [3089]
Fix function key alias saving bug.  Also fix a similar bug in achievements.

From Shadowfax:
High contrast mode will now properly re-enable after reconnecting.
A ground string within a team arena will now show the target's team instead
of the looker's team, and minions will no longer display a team.

From Draak:
New lapidary/mining stone: fox-eye, courtesy of Morpheus.
Changes to tailoring. There is now a delay similar, but not nearly
as long, as other crafts.
You can now add tailored ribbons to tailored/leathercrafted hats in
place of a feather (i.e. one or the other, but not both).
New tailored items: blouse, tunic, pussybow, partlet, leotard, tutu,
tights. Draak was inspired by ballet and the theater this week.

Builders now have the option to have clothing drop as random loot
or on shopkeepers. Expect some closets, wardrobes and dressers to
start filling up.

---- Mar 11, 23 [3086]
From Draak:
New option for area listings: coordinates.
The syntax is as follows: area coordinates [level]
You can no longer to cast crystal coat on containers and liquid
containers. This is to prevent uncommon but weird weight bugs.
Certain shopkeepers are being updated with new code to create quasi-random
potions, scrolls and jewelry.

---- Mar 05, 23 [3084]
From Draak:
New leathercrafted armor: harness
New forged weapon: thresher
The crushing bite attack from called druid hyenas now has a minor debuff
effect on skeletons.
Fixed up a few bugs/typos in disrupt magic/elemental collapse. (Ezechar)
Fixed a bug in trivia contests that allowed BOGUS to display as an option
for god favored compositions.
Jobs that send you after mobs should respect planar restrictions just
like object jobs. (Morpheus)
When failing to practice a skill/spell due to a stat being too low,
the failure message will now include the skill/spell name. (Godelevator)

New channel cast rune: Marr, Gark
Gark has the old functionality of Arkug. Arkug now drains forage from a
room to do extra damage to entangled mobs. It will not work in rooms
without forage.

Some runes like Xix, Nar and Luam's side effects are now more or less
pronounced depending on the level of the spell you channel cast.

Channel casting has been bumped up 1 more mana. This is to compensate for
both the reduced cost of mage spells and the increased versatility from
added runes. No further increases are planned, though more runes are in
the works.

---- Feb 25, 23 [3082]
From Draak:
New channel cast runes: Dunn, Xix
Fixed a typo in the audio handlers that was making the dclient's wetland
ambient track too lound. (Nell)

Instead of big rooms costing twice the movement as small rooms, small
rooms now cost half the movement of big rooms. Also lowered the move
cost for a few terrains, including MARSH, WATER and SANDY. Move costs
for LAVA terrain has been increased, because its freaking lava. (Xedoc)

---- Feb 19, 23 [3081]
Fix bug with not-saving aliases on newbie characters.

From Valront:
Poison Cloud, Choking Cloud, and Advanced Poisons are now professions.
The 'where group' command will now show the name of the area missing players
are in, if they are not in the same zone as the group.

From Draak:
Found and fixed a crash bug in scrapping! (Pylus)
New forged ceremonial weapon: scepter. These are mostly just for looks,
for now...
Low level players that do not have the sneak skill but accidently turn
it on will now receive occassional warnings when moving about.
Sleeping by a campfire will shorten the time it takes to get sharp.
Locate object should now give correct information about mined fossil-type
spellcomps. (Ezechar)
Meditate fuzzy edge cutoff is now even fuzzier. (Lexie)
New heraldic beast: sea monkey
Changes to messages for hitting composite limits when adding to
equipment that has no stats. (Eggweard)
Channel casting now costs exactly 1 mana more.

Woodcrafted canes are no longer type WEAPON, and will not be given
high dierolls. There were too many composite issues to properly balance
them, and many ended up with disappointing results. Hopefully this
refactoring will make them more useful as held objects.

New channel cast runes: Char, Ciru, Faru, Nar, Pil, Urst, Zeki
The runes Stal and Plat now have different outcomes. Rava rune now
interacts with bleeding and requires knowledge of blood sacrifice,
while Urst rune has the previous functionality of Rava.

---- Feb 12, 23 [3080]
Massive internal rewrite of aliases and alias setting.  It should now
be possible to use the 'alias j=k' format to set a single line alias
without entering a long description.

From Brak:
Remove infrashort setting and allow Infravision to display both short and
long descriptions at the same time.

From Draak:
New leathercrafted item: cestus. These are low ac leather wraps for
the hands. (Taurus)
Different forged helmets now have more diverse effects. Also fixed
a bug with breathsave on frogmouth helms.

If you halve or quarter wood into pieces that weight 1 pound, the resulting
pieces will not be longer than 24 inches. This should make it impossible
to split wood into pieces that are unusable. (Morpheus)

---- Feb 11, 23 [3078]
From Shadowfax:
Add failure string when looking at the moon and not finding it.
Fix instances command column misalignment.
Reduce resistance of mortally wounded mobs to soulsteal.
Allow spirit hammers to be cast as poison damage type.
Add team option to pk arenas.

From Draak:
New sounds for the special double exp modes. Many thanks to the
lovely Capitolina for gracing us with her voice once again.
New channel cast rune: Enti
Fixed a bug with being able to practice multiple attacks even if you
have no practices. (Brucelee)
Jobs should no longer send high level players to low-level extraplanar
areas.
When using survey in Primodrial Chaos, you will get a message indicating
the direction of the entry Font.
The message for plucking multiple feathers from a corpse has been
condensed onto one line.
Shield is now force shield to avoid issues with scribing scrolls and
other naming conflicts. (Myst or Shryth, not totally clear)
Detect magic can detect places that have special teleport restrictions.
Fixed a bug that was allowing soulsmithed jewlery to have an additional
stone added to it.
If your opponent is unbalanced, warrior kicks have a chance to knock
them down.
A few thief skills have been tweaked to increase their odds of hitting
and doing a bit more damage.
You can no longer feint opponents you cannot see. (Lexie)

Warrior power attacks should be somewhat more potent (extra hitroll),
especially if the target is stunned, prone or low on health, and to a
lesser extent if they are nauseated, dazed or unbalanced. This is an
attempt to boost warrior damage in the face of nonorm dents, feedback
is welcome.

The survey mining message for custom mineral deposits will now give
some idea of how likely you are to find the mineral. This is dependent
on your mining skill proficiency - very low chances to find a mineral
may not show up if your mining skill is not high enough.

---- Jan 28, 23 [3075]
From Brak:
Summon demon corpse retrieval now works cross sector but not cross plane
which should now be consistant with the help file and how it was supposed
to work. (Ciella)

From Draak:
Woodcraft check without any arguments will now show '(rare)' after
rare types of wood. (Spike)
Free spirit is no longer scribeable. (Morpheus)
The uncastable 'enchant weapon' is now 'empower weapon' and has a help page.
Bone marrow from harvest bone and any spellcomp made from blood can
now be used by Gisco's Gib Grenade. (Ciella)
Thrust can unbalance opponents on a successful hit, not just misses.
Various minor fixes to crafting skills.

You can now add crafted masks to southern-style forged helmets such
as hanburis and kabutos with 'forge enhance mengu'. This requires
knowing the 'forge kozane and nihonto' skill.

Gather wood no longer shows spammy messages about what druidic items
wood can carved into. Instead, a new option, 'carve check' has been
added to see what items you are carrying can be carved into totems,
weapons, fetishes or spellstaffs. (consensus of lots of people on bovine)
NOTE: this does not check if you can add runes. This would require
some fairly substantial changes to the carving code.

The 'set' command with no arguments will show a LOT more settings,
such as shortid, autocompare, autocraftid, combat message mode,
no gift lootcrate and more! This is also shown with 'show settings'.
The help menu for 'set' has also been broken down into categories
and alphabetized to make it more readable.

---- Jan 22, 23 [3074]
From Brak:
Double exp notifications now send to only those connected to the event
channel, giving players the option to toggle them off. (Draak)
Double exp countdown messages have been removed to reduce spam.

---- Jan 16, 23 [3072]
From Draak:
Fixed 'where guildmaster' to be consistent when 'where' tells you
there are guildmasters nearby. (Shryth, Lexie)
Fixed a bug with woodcraft tower/kite shiled ac not being added
properly. (Ivey)

From Brak:
Modify double exp starting strings so Mush-Z sounds trigger. (Xera)

---- Jan 14, 23 [3071]
From Draak:
Added 'shadow show' to display your shadow exposure, mirroring
'show shadow'.
Randomly generated jewelry has a small chance to have a gemstone
already mounted to it.

Shopkeeper lapidary services have been expanded. A shopkeeper that can
carve lapidary materials into gemstones can now mount gemstones to jewelry
and other appropriate items. This has a nominal gold cost based on the
level of the base item.

You can put quests on hold with 'quest hold'. A quest that is on hold will
not show up in your quest list. You can still advance and complete quests
on your held list. You can see quests you on hold with 'quest hold show'.

---- Jan 08, 23 [3068]
From Draak:
You can no longer auction CURSE-flagged items.
You can no longer put KEEP-flagged items into clan storage. (Mink)
New base metal: cobalt
New alloy: platina, forged from platinum and cobalt
Added keyword 'rare' to craft labeling.
GLASS composition will now show as GLASS/CERAMIC, since glassware
and pottery have many similar characteristics.
Sickening touch no longer does lingering damage to players, but they
take higher initial damage. (Dizzy)

Fished out a bug in the new player long description generator that
was setting player longs too early in the creation process, before
all the relevant features were set. On related note, your long
long description should now also update if you use a sexchange potions.

Draak is updating the woodcrafting table and code to make it easier
to work with internally and to prep for randomly generated wooden
tableware drops for builders. A few of the lesser-used items will
have new wear locations or object types, but most everything should
remain the same if he did it right.

From Brak:
Double experience is now a proper system event.  This means that there
is now a 10 minute warning before it starts giving players and groups
time to moblize.  Also, double experience should now trigger more
often during the holidays.

---- Jan 01, 23 [3066]
From Brak:
Improve 'credit buy favor' so it gives more mana per credit and is
hopefully more useful.
Slightly lower explorer point requirements to advance in the
cartographers guild.
Total inventory weight can now be shown with 'inv -weight -total'  (Lexie)
The inventory weight switch now sorts from heaviest to lightest.
To see what switches are currently available type 'inventory -help'

---- Dec 17, 22 [3063]
Remove the 'communications port' from the server.  This ancient feature was
only used by a very small number of people and caused a lot of internal
complexity in the code that made sockets more difficult to generalize.

From Draak:
Spell/skill list <level> will now label guild skills.
Grenadier should now improve when you throw grenades. (Ragtime)
New wood trait: luminous. Items made from wood with this trait will
glow. Both new wood types area luminous.
Random metal drops and metal metal supply crates may now contain a
limited selection of alloys. 

New wood types:
sacredheart, found on angelic planes
candlewood, exclusive to the Candlewood Valley

There have been some internal changes to how metallurgy objects are
created that should be transparent to players. However if you notice
something weird when forging, let Draak know. These changes will allow
builders to have random treasure drops of forged jewelry and tableware.

---- Dec 11, 22 [3062]
From Brak:
New 'show  gift' command.

From Draak:
New hairstyles: tonsure, glib, cornrows, flattop, queue
New cheeks: chiseled
Disrupt magic should now work correctly.
New Thirsty Thursday challenge: get a tattoo!
Tattoos should now be somewhat cheaper.
There are now tattoo artists in many cities around the game. Thanks to
Morpheus for helping set them up.
There are now periodic double crafting experience events. (Eggweard)
Like the other double exp events, you can purchase these with credits.

Diseases can alter your complexion and eye appearance! The original
features are restored when the disease is cured.
The symptoms of some diseases have changed a little.
If you have no access to poison curing magic, sleeping for extended
periods can (eventually) cure diseases.

A few active spells strings were slightly altered to avoid conflicting
descriptions of skin tone, such as stone skin and sundrinker.
We were originally thinking of making spells change your long descriptions
skin color, but decided it was more useful to leave them as spell strings
so they could be viewed on their own with 'look <character> -spells'. 

---- Dec 04, 22 [3061]
From Draak:
Collapse elemental lowered to from level 31 mage to level 30.
Several obscure mage spells changed level to spread them out more.

---- Dec 03, 22 [3060]
From Draak:
Added 'show description', for seeing your long description without
anything else.
Creatures without faces should no longer have looks of terror crossing
their face when hit with fear effects on account of not having a face.
New heraldric image: wings
Added some new skin colors that will not show up randomly, but can be
chosen with 'set desc' similar to certain hair colors.

Fixed an issue with female characters getting beards on creation. Now
nobody gets a beard by default. If you want a beard, you must use
'set desc facialhair'. If you want to be a bearded lady, the game will
not stop you.

Added three new switches for the look command:
- description: see only a character's long description
- tattoos:     see only a character's tattoos
- condition:   see only a character's health condition

New level 31 mage skill: elemental collapse
New level 39 mage spell: disrupt magic

Elemental collapse causes fire, ice, lightning and crystal elementals
destroyed by dispel magic to collapse into essence, which can be
used as a spellcomp.

Disrupt magic attempts to isolate and destroy spells on a target one
at a time, causing damage as each spell is disrupted.

From Brak and Draak:
New mob service: tattoo artist
Mobs with this service can ink tattoos on your body using the
'buy service tattoo <bodypart> <tattoo>' command. Instead of a tattoo
name, you can substitute 'random' to get a random tattoo on the
chosen body part.

You can list available tattoos with 'buy service tattoo list'.  This
feature must be added to mobs manually, so please us time to integrate
tattoo artists into the world.

You can remove an existing tattoo for a modest fee with 'buy service
tattoo <bodypart> remove'.

Tattoos are derived from heraldry code. For right now, only basic charges
can be made into tattoos. We may or may not do auras and features. We
will be adding more to do with tattoos, including options for holy
symbol and clan tattoos.

---- Nov 20, 22 [3058]
From Draak:
You can no longer delete clan rooms that contain workshops such as forges
and tailorshops.
Debugging of new mtype damage code, including adding caps to avoid mobs
with total immunities.
You can no longer give gold to minions. If a minion is killed, the gold
is obliterated, and nobody wants that.
You can now add grips to lapidary clubs.
Distraction levels should now show up on case for shopkeepers. (Dex)
The navigate command can now be used by anyone in a ship.
Sea navigation has changed to the extremophile skill, which reduces movement
costs through difficult terrains ranging from ice to crystal to lava!
Forest navigation renamed forester, to eliminate help page conflicts.

The event channel will now flag itself listen-only during trivia contests.
This has been tested and you can still answer questions and use other
event commands, it just prevents sending.

Fixed a bug with mastercraft exp that was stacking multipliers. Multipliers
have been raised, but they won't be as high since they should not have
been stacking to begin with.

Two new southern-style weapons: jitte, tekkan.  These are made with a new
weapon part, the jitte blade. These are one-handed pounding weapons with
guards, so they can have gemstones mounted to them.

Ammunition created by the bone arrow spell only has a chance to gain
the FRAGILE flag when used. Each should last 2-5 shots instead of 2.
Higher quality ammunition has a reduced chance of being destroyed when
used. For example, a mastercrafted arrow is less likely to be destroyed
than an expertly crafted one. (Deadinator)

---- Nov 19, 22 [3057]
From Draak:
Due to persistant issues with certain players making long descriptions that
purposely trigger other people's clients, Dentin asked that I unhook the
ability to set long descriptions. This was done with great reluctance.

In its place, 'set desc' now has a set of options for changing your
features for autogenerated long descriptions, including eye color, hair, 
length, hair style, hair color, skin color, complexion, facial scars, facial 
hair and the shape of your nose, chin, cheeks and mouth. You can also
randomize your long description. Eventualy, certain conditions, such as
diseases, may temporarily alter aspects of your appearance.

Special thanks to Capitolina for suggesting hairstyles and consulting for
the hair features in general.

If you had set a custom long description before, it will be preserved. You
can change or randomize your features to generate a new long. You will be
able revert it with the 'set description restore -force' command.

---- Nov 13, 22 [3055]
From Draak:
Added 'set nogiftlootcrate'. If you have nogiftlootcrate on, you will
receive experience as a substitute for lootcrates for daily gifts. (Kliro)
Fixed a bug with the hypothermic chilled condition being applied to
mobs that should be immune, such as ice elementals.
The exp for crafting mastercrafts has been dramatically increased, and
crafting exp should be somewhat improved.

You can no longer use 'event post' when a trivia game is in progress.
This should help prevent people accidently giving away the answers
to questions with the wrong command, while prompting them to use
'event answer'. (Recommended by literally everybody I asked.)

Updates to the way resistances and vulnerabilities to basic damage types
like blunt and pointed are displayed with consider. In addition some mob
types have had their resistances adjusted and several mob types now have
minor resistances/vulnerabilties they did not have before, such as
amphibians being slightly vulnerable to slicing. See updated help pages
about basic damage and creature types for more information.  More
creatures had vulnerabities added than resistances.


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