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.

 Got RSS?  Sign up for the Alter Aeon Changelog Feed!


 
---- Jan 09, 21 [2967]
From Draak:
Minor fixes to active quests, including fixing a minor display issue
with 'quest active'. (Deadintor)
Bleeding opponents get poisoned from toxic damage faster.
Bleeding opponents take extra damage from crippling strike.
Minor bleeding effect added to claw rake attacks from called druidic
mountain lions and panthers.
Crystal lights are now spellcomps.
Thief frag grenades can now use any spellcomp made from crystal or glass,
as long as it doesn't have an affinity for lightning or fire.
Thief frag grenades have a chance to cause minor bleeding.
Fixed a bug in lapidary split with levels. (Lokar)

Kaleidescope now works a little differently. Against opponents that are
blinded (such as from the colorspray spell), they have a chance to be
dazed. The demoralizing effect was removed.

Several mechanics have been condensed to create the unbalanced condition.
Unbalanced opponents have less effective hitroll and armor, and are
easier to knock down. A higher dexterity allows you to recover your
balance more quickly. Blobs cannot be unbalanced, and you are immune
to being unbalanced for a short time after recovering your balance.

Missing with certain abilities, such as leap attack, may cause
you to be briefly unbalanced, while avoiding certain attacks
such as thrust or resisting being knocked down from charge may
also cause you to be unbalanced. 

As a rule of thumb, if a skill is used to unbalance or knock down
an opponent, it cannot be used while you are unbalanced.

Unbalancing has been added to or has replaced part of the mechanics
of thrust, knockback, bash, trip, charge, leap attack, earthquake, 
shield slam, frostbite, gust, tempest, sandstorm and flamestrike.

---- Jan 03, 21 [2965]
From Lexie:
Added the gladiator social.

From Draak:
New obscure druid spell, 'fruitage', that makes fruits and berries restore
more hitpoints when eaten.
Ranged weapon attacks are now more effective against creatures with natural
flight, such as birds, bats, giant wasps, many angels and winged dragons.

Tweaks to socials. Charmed mobs will not be annoyed by social interactions,
and animals will accept more intimate interactions from druids well-versed
in animal magnetism.

Added spam extreme to a bunch of events such as mobs and objects falling,
and spellcasting spam flagging to hallowed ground room strings. (Wu)
You can no longer survey or case when performing an action, such as
crafting, healing touch or lockpicking.

You can now have an active quest. Your active quest displays with 'quest
active'. You can change your active quest using 'quest active <number>'.
When you complete your active quest (or become unable to complete it),
the next available quest in your list becomes your active quest, if any.
In cities, 'where quest' will give you directions to the mob with the
next stage of your active quest.
Please mudmail Draak directly with any issues with active quests. Quests
are complex and its likely he didn't think of every single failure scenario.

---- Dec 12, 21 [2963]
From Dentin:
Removed 'heil' social and replaced it with 'hail' (h-a-i-l) social, which
is more of a 'Hail Caesar' Roman salute with a dash of Star Trek.

From Brak:
Fix bug that was causing players to get stuck when porting from the Chapel
of Fonts, Purnima to waypoint 99.
Fix bug that was causing a double error send when using survey while knapping.

From Draak:
Guards should now prevent players from sacrificing, burning or animating
objects under their supervision.
Soothe wounds no longer gives movement, but it can help prevent the subject
from getting dazed or stunned.
Reinforce armor gold costs lowered again.
Fixed leadfoot strings when cast on self. (Deadinator)
Also fixed up a few other cast on self string handlers for other curses.
Restores now stop bleeding.

A direct hit with a defoliate tonic will lessen the duration or outright
strip a character of thorn armor, barkskin and sundrinker, in that order.
The long-term room effect only hits thorn armor.

---- Dec 04, 21 [2962]
From Draak:
Vampire minions now only regain hitpoints while fighting bleeding
opponents, but they gain more per hit.
Shored up bleeding code to be more consistent.
The stone skin salve makes you resistant to bleeding attacks.
The level scaling on cleric healing spells should now be a bit more
noticeable.

If you know reagent lore, you can use a new command: brew check.  Brew
check lists all the spell components, herbs, food and liquid containers
in your inventory. It will attempt to display any affinities the
spellcomps have, dependent on your reagent lore knowledge. (Avalin)

From Shadowfax:
Damage reduction of assisting minions from area-of-effect damage is now
inversely proportional to the level of the minion, starting at about 50%
for level 1 and ending up at 20% reduction for level 30 minions.

Smooth out a couple of trap related issues.  Traps are reduced to 3/4
effective level only in solo areas below level 30, and level offsets
of traps in autolevel zones are only clipped in group areas.

Alignment restrictions on worshipping gods removed.  You can choose to
worship any god irregardless of preferred alignment, although converting
will require more sacrifices if alignments conflict.  You will no longer
suffer favor penalties if your alignment doesn't match your chosen god's
alignment, but you will not automatically gain favor and will have to
work toward earning it.

---- Nov 27, 21 [2959]
From Draak:
You can use the peek skill while hiding, but it's easier to get caught! (Meyaa)
Adjustments to how headshots with ranged weapons are handled. (Asclepius)
Area heal exp dinged a bit. (Wu)
Bull's Eye Boons awarded by the Turkey Shoot have been cut down to about
an hour.
Rejuvenate will restore more movement on fighting targets, mostly. (Wu)

Tweaks to bleeding, such as from bloodletting stab, specifically the cleric 
heal spell will stop it and the necromancer spell bloodbond can stop it.
Inflict suffering now causes bleeding similar to bloodletting stab, but
it can be stopped by the same effects.

---- Nov 20, 21 [2956]
From Brak:
You can now address board posts to aadevs and mushzdevs.
You can now type 'level cheapest' to choose to level your cheapest class.
Add 'cheapestlevel' to list of show/brag options.
Both 'show level' and 'level' will now display in descending level sequence.

From Draak:
New forged objects: broadhead, blunt-tip
These variant arrowheads allow you to change arrow and bolt damage from
piercing to slash or pound, respectively.
Added help page for brewing spellgroup affinities. (Wu)

---- Nov 14, 21 [2953]
From Valront:
Made the strings from reagent lore a bit more vague to avoid confusion
with scribe-only affinity spellcomps. (Malificent)
Small bump on non-tank/non-protect minion area damage reduction.

From Brak:
Names of invisible clan members will now show up on cwho.

From Draak:
Fixed a bug with remaining capacity for liquid containers on shortid.
New bespoke livery item: bloomers
Tweaks to bloom, specifically shortening of regen cycles.
You can no longer 'tell' while imprisoned, to match reply. (Lexie)
Fixed an issue with spalted/rotten woodcrafted items and craft renaming.
Added 'brew unguent list', for displaying all spells that can be
prepared as unguents. (Nogaki)
Being cursed prevents you from going pkok.

Changed 'brew tincture' to 'brew infusion', in preparation for future
tonic brewing skills. Tonic will be used a catch-all term for all druid
brews that are not salves.

Campfires not made by players will help with regeration and removing
chill effects, but not quite as much as player-made fires.
Campfires are harder to start and maintain in adverse weather, and they
are washed away by floods. Their regeneration effect is somewhat stronger
now, too.

---- Oct 30, 21 [2951]
From Draak:
Fixed issue with brewing cauldron borns.
Various minor safety adjustments to the zombie plague.

From Brak:
Add new bacon social in memory of Colonel. (Xera)

Apply cprefixes to all channels to support Mush-Z. (Asclepius)
Note: any client devs that use cprefix will need to make sure that they
create triggers to match on the new combinations.  This includes special
channels such as tells, whisper, clantell, grouptell etc.
To ensure compatibility with this change it is strongly recommended that
all Mush-Z users update to the latest versions.

---- Oct 23, 21 [2949]
Tweaks to how fly affects movement costs going between rooms.

From Draak:
Permanent sundrinker items should now function properly.
You can no longer add bound crafted objects to things, though you can add
objects to bound items as normal.

---- Oct 17, 21 [2947]
From Draak:
Extended sight can be brewed as a tincture as well as a potion.
New tailoring item: epaulettes, in rembrance of our fallen Colonel.
Appraise strings for weapons will now reflect max weapon speed constraints.
A few more minerals can now be made into cabochon gemstones, such as
gneiss, granite and albite.
Thief and warrior can essence enchant items worn on the waist.

Druid fetishes and totems now have cast level by default. Druids can
enchant essence items that are wielded, held or worn on the finger, wrist,
body and feet, but only if they are not primarily made from metal.

The hawkeye tincture is now awareness, which works differently than
extended sight. Awareness sharpens your senses, making you better at
searching, lockpicking and casing, as well as avoiding traps and
stealthy attackers. It is mentally taxing and slightly lowers mana
regen from the strain. As it is an altered mental state, you cannot
have winterkin and awareness active at the same time.

From Valront:
Added three new mage achievements.
The pk rank leaderboard (previously leaderboard 20) has been removed,
please be aware that this has renumbered some other leaderboards.
Fixed issue sometimes granting permanent increases to cast ability and
dexterity. (Asteroid)

---- Oct 10, 21 [2944]
From Draak:
The Field of Fonts should be much more open than before.
Agility, brawn and waterbreathing can now all be added to spellstaffs.
Fixed event channel announcement spam bug, sorry about that.

From Valront:
Fixed issue causing clumsiness, lethargy and weaken combo with flamestrike
causing permanent knock down effect. (Uicli)
Added brag/show obscure.
Fixed missing sounds in fatigue and exhaustion.

From Brak:
Searching now has a chance to show whether there is something left
undiscovered.
Fast Waking has been greatly expanded and renamed to vigilance. (See
help page for more details)

Various updates to traps to make them less of a burden to non-thief
primaries including:
Traps less likely to trigger from a failed disarm
Easier to pass intelligence and thief disarm checks
Sigificantly dial down damage and cap at the high end
Make traps scale less in autolevel zones
Automatically reduce the impact of traps in solo areas

---- Oct 03, 21 [2941]
From Draak:
Standardized the format of event announcement strings. (Asclepius)
Incarnates and aspects will now forsake you immediately after you renounce
your god. (Sophita)
New channel cast rune: Nam
Vampires now heal a little bit when hitting enemies that have blood and
are not poisoend. All vampires do this, including vampire minions!
Raised ghouls do more damage to poisoned opponents.
The ground cleaning routines will now aggressively remove crafted objects
since some people are litterbugs.
Experimental change to the hitpoints of aggro mobs at higher levels that
may need some tweaking.
Fixed lapidary so that it works with coral again. (Malificent)
You can now add studs or spike to woodcrafted clogs. CLACK-CLACK!
Tailored clothing will now have the maker's name in their insult string.
Attempt to remedy a corner-case issue with brew label and clasp of
corruption. (Wu)
Nonorm weapons are being dented a bit. (Lokar)

Strings for casting famine on yourself should look better. Also, you don't
get a saving throw if you cast famine on yourself, but curse ward can
still kick in. (Deadinator)

If you sober up in the middle of a Thirsty Thursday archery challenge,
you should automatically leave the range, so you may want to bring some 
drinks along with you. (Malificent, Morpheus)

Certain minions are now naturally better at sneaking. Help files have been
updated to indicate which are sneaky. Some are sneakier than others, for
example vampires are sneakier than ghouls.

You can add leathercrafted sporrans to tailored kilts. This turns the kilt
into a container (i.e. the sporran is functioning as a container still).
Kilt stats should also be higher.

Forged bars of metal now have an additional name in their keywords to make
them easier to manage. Examples are "pureiron" for iron, "verdantmithril"
for verdant mithril and soforth. (Asclepius)

Spell reworks:
Infravision is now level 8 fire spell dependent on burning hands.
Maintaining spells is now level 9.
Haste is now a lightning spell dependent on shocking grasp.
Frost bite is now level 23 and undo is now level 22.
Waterbreathing is now a druid spell, gills is now winterkin. 
Winterkin increases your mana regen when you are areas with low temperatures.
Strength is now brawn and dexterity is now agility, and both are
now druid spells in the animal spellgroup.
Changes to spell names and classes will be grandfathered for at least a
year to give time to adjust.

---- Sep 25, 21 [2940]
From Valront:
Lots of curses updated to give feedback to the caster when the curse
lands and spam filters are on.
Fatigue and exhaustion received similar string updates to curses.
Fatigue and exhaustion no longer work on machines or undead. It's pretty
hard to make a zombie or elevator feel tired.
Fatigue and exhaustion now start combat properly.
You can no longer recite scrolls while fighting defensively.

Wands and Staffs now have a high failure rate while fighting defensively.
Staffs are a bit more likely to work. Failing to use them with defensive
fighting on will still consume charges.

---- Sep 19, 21 [2938]
From Valront:
Tracked down buggy color spray/eyebite interaction that could cause
permanent blindness on characters. (Ciella)
Added 'ssoul' to future soulstones for real this time.
Changing a minion out of tank or protect roles while in combat now comes
with significant lag for both the controller and the minion.
Most minions that are not in the tank or protect role now take
significantly reduced damage from most area effect damage sources.
Ignore should now partially work in groups.

Consume will no longer destroy most corpses with equipment inside them,
reducing on-the-ground scattered equipment litter. (Thanks Kehlani for
string help.)

From Draak:
Added sound for lightning arrows.
New leathercraft item: girdle. This is a heavy ac waist item, regular
leathercrafted belts are now low ac.
Minor small fixes to scrap and a few other crafts, including an
out-of-the-way string error when stopping bonecraft. (Shryth)
Fixed the permanent prison issue with prison spells. (Ciella)
Ebon steel is now called shadow steel to prevent parser mix-ups with
ebon mithril.

Changes to mage cold spells:
Frostbite does additional damage to prone or sleeping creatures, but less
to flying creatures.
Targets that are knocked down by frostbite take extra damage.
If a target is affected by chill touch or a similar chilling spell,
frostbite has a greater chance of knocking them down.
Mage spell combos should now give bonus exp.

---- Sep 11, 21 [2935]
From Valront:
You will now be notified when you qualify for a Cry of Victory.
Minor string updates to leadfoot.
Added 'ssoul' to insult string of all soulstones - this will not impact
previously generated souls, only souls going forward. (Lexie, Shryth)
Wands will now display how many charges are left after you use them. (Shinobi)
Finger command no longer available, use profile instead.
Shadow Mastery now functions as a monster lore skill for shadow type creatures.
Dread Portent now detects hidden ethereal creatures.  (Thanks Shryth.)
Low level warrior hint strings finished - please mudmail valront any typos
in the strings. (Thanks Shryth for helping proofread the strings for me!)
Sense Life now only detects hidden living creatures after all its sense life
not sense everything that isn't undead.
Add new level 15 obscure mage spell 'Lightning Arrow'.

It turns out vampiric vines and poison ivy are violent to their very essence
as such they will now die when the area around them becomes too peaceful and
tranquil.

From Draak:
Fixed a string error with beam channel casting and evasion. (Lokar)
New leathercrafted item: kneepads
Skill guild requirements added to help page headers.
Improved weight checks for leathercrafted items so you can't make weapons
you can't wield. (Uicli)
Various tweaks to metallurgy costs, generally down-trending.
Fixed a bug with bonecrafting and manually designated levels. (Kristy)
Thief skill salvage equipment is now level 27.

New level 28 thief skill: scrap equipment, dependent on salvage equipment
and metallurgy, allows you to strip down metal equipment for scraps that
can be smelted and reused for metallurgy.

---- Sep 05, 21 [2932]
From Draak:
New channel cast runes: Shul, Arim
Various level-related updates to crafting skills, including fixing a weird
bug that set negative dierolls on woodcrafted ammo.
Shield rims without effects should no longer add hp. (Ivey)
Cleave can hit more targets with a flexible weapon, and double attack is
more likely to trigger with a flexible weapon. (Uicli)

The internal mechanisms of lapidary have been changed. Players should
notice no differnce in performance, save for improved strings for cat's
eye, star and rutilated gemstones and prices. Please mudmail Draak if
you encounter an issue.

---- Aug 28, 21 [2929]
From Draak:
New forged item: mining helmet (Shryth)
Tailoring now accepts designated levels and player targets, but you must
specify the color and fabric type first. (Asclepius)
Tailored kilts now have a stat based on their type.
Finishing totems and fetishes should now give experience points. (Nermthegerm)

You can no longer set KEEP flags on ammunition, because it would be a 
nightmare trying to make it behave properly with autoreload, and it is
meant to be flung at your opponents.

A god's favored unguents will now correspond with a brew affinity instead
of the god's favored composition. This should it easier for worshippers
of certain gods to make unguents.

Leathercraft, tailoring and woodcraft should now make total level items
instead of primary level items. Dragonscale armor and bonecrafted equipment
should also make total level items. Please let Draak know if any equipment
with weird level/class flags shows up.

---- Aug 22, 21 [2926]
From Draak:
Dragonbreath rust attacks will now affect weapons as well as armor, and
scale with level. Though the affect is more pronounced, armor values and
weapon dierolls cannot be reduced below 0.
You should be able to brew cure spells again.
Archery contests will no longer allow you to enter the range unless you
are wielding a ranged weapon.
Higher ranks in the alchemists guild reduce costs of bottling.
Added 'set autocraftid'. When active, you will automatically identify
items when you finish crafting them.
Stomp damage has been tweaked, and it should do more movement damage on
a critical hit.
Adjustments to incarnates to better balance their abilities.
New cleric spell: sunbeam!
Radiant orbs does extra damage to shadow mobs.

Grenades are now more powerful and do extra damage to plural mobs.  As a
trade-off, mobs that are alert (have been recently attacked) can avoid
damage from grenades. Expect adjustment to how this works for the next
month or two.

From Brak:
Various exclusions from the global high usage potion denter including those
that are brewed by players, have low level spells, or have a timer.

---- Aug 21, 21 [2924]
From Brak:
Reduce maximum movement cost for skining.
Secondary spells on potions are now lower level than previous ones. (Valront)
High usage potions now have a less effective cast level (Valront)
Reinforce armor is now learnable for those of sufficient level and rank in
the Smith's Guild. This gives non-warriors the opportunity learn it.

---- Aug 14, 21 [2921]
From Draak:
Exp gained from crafting has been bumped up. Crafting higher quality
items will generally result in more exp.
Idomitable will's cooldown bonus against being shadow bound or entangled
has been strengthened.

New enchantment: thermography.  This mage skill can enchant pieces of head
gear with a permanent infravision spell. This requires gold and a spellcomp
with an affinity for infravision.

List switches should now work better when looking up class flags on items.
For looking up cast/skill level effects with list switches, mcl, ccl, tsl,
wsl, ncl and dcl will be the preffered abbreviations.  Thanks to Lokar for
assisting with the diagnosis.


20 entries displayed.