Project: Gorgon News

We've long planned to add three "advanced" character races to Project: Gorgon: Fairy, Orc, and Dwarf. Unlike the standard races (Human, Elf, and Rakshasa), the advanced races are unlocked by completing quests in-game. This is important because these races are harder to play. They require more experience and knowledge than the other races and aren't suitable for brand new players -- you at least need to understand the basics of the game first.

The next update includes the soft launch of our first "advanced" character race: fairies! Why a soft launch? Because my plan is to create a different play experience for each of these three races. Each will have different trade-offs and new opportunities, and that's going to be tricky to get right the first time.

Fairies in particular are fragile and small, but magical and dangerous. As true immortals, they have a very strange relationship with death. Their experiences are very different from the other races - and so are their game mechanics.

Let's look at the unique game mechanics for fairies.



First off, fairies are significantly smaller than the regular races. They can't carry much, but they can fly. We've modeled this with a couple of attributes:

• They can fly with a default speed about the same as other basic flight, e.g. raven flight.
  
• They have reduced inventory space -- 16 fewer slots than other races.
  
• They are slightly more susceptible to knockbacks. (They are knocked slightly farther away.)
  

It's useful to think of these as "physical attributes" because they're tied to physically being a fairy. If a fairy gets cursed and turns into a cow, for instance, these things go away, replaced with whatever physicality the new form has. In other words, fairies turned into cows do not naturally fly!



When fairy characters physically die, they respawn at their lifestone in the fae realm. In game terms, this means that when fairies press the "Respawn" button after death, they respawn in the fae realm, not in whatever area they died in. They also can't "Enter the Light."

This ironically makes fairy deaths more punitive than other player deaths. Story-wise, other races don't "really" die: they're saved from death at the last instant by a mysterious force. (You meet him when you Enter the Light. The mysterious force's name is Richter.)

But story-wise, fairies aren't prodigies and don't have this protection. When fairies die, they really do die -- except being immortal, they're reborn at their lifestone. This aspect of being a fairy is true regardless of what physical form the fairy has. A fairy turned into a cow is reborn as a cow in the fae realm.

There are many ways for fairies to prevent this. Fairies can benefit from all the regular resurrection methods available to anyone, such as the Resuscitate ability from First Aid, or eating Eternal Greens. Fairies can also use their Fae racial powers to create an item that lets them respawn in the local area like other races would.



That covers most of the bad stuff involved in being a fairy. Let's look at some of the good stuff!

Story-wise, new fairies have had a convenient memory-wipe like new-player humans, elves, and rakshasa. But thanks to thousands of years of practice, fairies still retain some combat memories.

Fairies start with four combat skills at level 30: Ice Magic, Knife Fighting, Animal Handling, and Mentalism. They also get special bonuses for each of those skills -- some bonuses are small, some large. Let's go over each.

Ice Magic: Since the fae realm is controlled by the Winter Court, fairies are currently very in-tune with Ice Magic. It comes quite naturally to them. For game purposes, this means fairies don't have to perform research to learn new Ice Magic spells. Instead, they automatically learn a new Ice Magic spell each time they level the skill, and a few spells are learned from fairy trainers.

Knife Fighting: Fairies can create "crystal ice" with their racial skill (see below) and use it in knife-throwing abilities like Hamstring Throw and Fan of Blades, so they don’t need to carry metal throwing knives. They also learn an alternate version of the ability Slice which uses thrown ice. There are also a few new treasure effects that may be useful to knife-fighting fairies, although those are available to all races.

(Note that the in-game prototype skill "Ice Conjuration" has been obsoleted; fairies don't have to turn their crystal ice into "Ice Throwing Knives"; they just throw the ice directly. Less inventory hassle.)

Animal Handling: Fairies start the game with two free pets already in their stable, a bee and a wasp. These pets weren't mind-wiped like the fairy was, and they still remember how to fight! They are level 100 pets with maxed loyalty Bond Levels. (Animal Handling pets are capped to the player's Animal Handling level, so at first they behave as level 30 pets, since fairies start with level 30 Animal Handling. But they don't need any training or bonding time; whenever the fairy levels up, the pets can immediately be re-summoned at a higher level.)

The bee and wasp pets are similar to ones that are found in the fae realm. So other races CAN tame these pets, but not until they reach a pretty high level.
In addition, fairies can choose to resurrect dead Animal Handling pets using their fae racial magic instead of needing to use First Aid Kits.

Mentalism: Saving the best for last, perhaps: there's a new combat sub-skill for Mentalism called Fairy Magic. (Note: "Fairy Magic" isn't the same as Fae racial magic!) Fairies can put both Mentalism abilities and Fairy Magic abilities on their Mentalism bar, mixing and matching as desired. Fairy Magic has new abilities such as Fairy Fire, Astral Strike, and Fae Conduit, plus new treasure effects. Fairy Magic adds more diversity to the types of builds possible with Mentalism.



Lastly, there is a new racial skill for fairies, representing things that only fairies can do. This involves several new mechanics. Fairies have a new energy meter for Fae Energy, similar to the Metabolism meter. They can use Fae Energy in several ways, usually in conjunction with two new material resources, Crystal Ice and Fairy Dust.

Fairies learn how to turn junk items into Crystal Ice, and how to turn unwanted magical equipment into Fairy Dust. As a side-effect, these transformations also generate Fae Energy to fill up their energy meter.

Fairies can use Crystal Ice directly as thrown weapons (with the Knife Fighting combat skill). They can also directly consume Fairy Dust, which acts as an instant healing item and a flight-speed buff. But the most impressive fairy tricks involve combining ice, dust, and fae energy together. Fairies eventually learn how to create temporary items such as health kits, utility knives, short-lived food, and more. This "fairy stuff" is made partially from ice and so eventually melts if not used, but can act as sources of common items, or at least backups.

The fae racial skill is also where we've stashed other "fairy things" ... powers and abilities that magical beings like fairies ought to have. Some powers are basically cosmetic, such as summoning colored lights or changing the color of their wings. Others are precious convenience features, such as being able to teleport without needing expensive materials.

Fae can also craft a few unique items that other races may want, such as potions that randomly (and permanently) change hair color or beard shape.



All told, fairies have to be more careful when fighting, and they have to travel a bit lighter than other races. But these negatives are offset by positive benefits and unique combat tricks. My hope is that playing a fairy feels like a fresh way to play, with different things to think about and consider. There are a lot of different aspects to the race's balance, so it's likely to be a bit bumpy at first. But we'll work out the kinks over time.

Being a low-level fairy is also notably harder than being a high-level fairy. That's just sort of how it goes, I'm afraid: since fairies get new tricks as they level up, they can eventually take more risks and have less downtime. I'm trying to counterbalance that a bit by giving low-level fairies some extra gifts from quests. For instance, some "pocket pants" help newbies cope with reduced inventory space, and there are alternative ways to unlock a few skills early on (such as Transmutation).

But even after unlocking the later tricks and features, fairies will always need to be more careful than other races. So if playing a fragile yet powerful spellcaster -- or a tiny flying knife-wielding maniac -- sounds fun, then this is the race for you!



There are also a bunch of combat-mechanics changes coming in the same update as fairies. This includes changes to pets, to monster stats, and to monster behaviors and traits (such as the "Thick Armor" monster trait). I'm working on a blog post about those changes which should be ready soon!

The actual update will be ready "soon" too, though, so if the update arrives before the blog, I'll just work some of the background info into the patch notes. (I'm hoping to get both things done by the end of February, but testing and tweaking is taking a while, and the patch may end up being in the first week of March instead.)

[This blog post is from the developer, Citan.]

Discuss this blog post on our main forums here!

(This started out as a forum post but got too big and became a blog post. The Fairy race blog post is about a week away, I expect.)


We're deep in the middle of coding the playable Fairy race, and after that we've got a new dungeon lined up, and after that there's a major city to add! So why talk about housing now? Because that city, Statehelm, is also where we'll introduce housing later in the year. Now is the time to brainstorm housing, to let the wild ideas percolate, to figure out what might be fun.

And if you're thinking "housing isn't fun", then that's exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not adding housing to check off a feature list. I'm adding it because I think it can be amazing!



First, let's get the landscaped-vs-instanced question out of the way: we won't be using landscape housing. That's when the houses exist in the regular, non-instanced world, and each house can be bought and owned by one player. This design seems the most immersive at first. Who wouldn't want to own part of your favorite game city? But in practice, landscape housing is always terrible. (Except in pure PvP games, where landscape housing has a different function and can work well... but this isn't a PvP game!)

The most immediate problem with landscape housing is that it doesn't scale. We'd start by adding hundreds of homes to the game, filling every nook and cranny of the existing world with houses... but that wouldn't even come CLOSE to letting every player have a house! It would only let the richest players buy one.

What about the thousands of other players? Well, everyone who plays must eventually be able to have a home, so we'd obviously need thousands more homes. We'd need to add new areas to the game just to have a place to stick their houses. You may have seen areas like that in other MMOs: for practical reasons, they're not very fleshed out. They're just places to stick houses. At that point, the houses might as well be instanced. It's not like their home is in the "real" game world anyway!

The second problem is that landscape housing eventually creates barren, empty game areas. At first, there's a decent chance that some of the homeowners will be in their houses while you log in, so the place might seem bustling and active. But after a year or two, that's never true. Players who own those homes will eventually stop playing... but they won't give up their homes. They'll log in just long enough to pay the upkeep costs of their house, then leave again. This creates ghost towns.

The only way to fix this is to force players to lose their homes if they don't keep playing - for example, by having arduous rental requirements or minimum play times. But that feels kind of like blackmail to me: "Keep playing every month or we'll take your pretend house away." This really isn't a great long-term retention strategy, either, because MMO players tend to take breaks from their favorite game before returning a year or two later. They'll log in to see what's new... but if they realize that their beloved house is gone, they're likely to just log back out again. I want returning players to feel welcome.

(Old-school MMO companies generally LIKED this design, because it meant homeowners had to keep paying a monthly subscription fee forever. But we don't have a monthly subscription fee. We'll eventually have an optional VIP plan, but I want it to feel truly optional, not something you'd need to own a house!)

The third problem of landscape housing is that it "locks in" parts of the game world. As these games mature and housing areas slowly feel more and more empty (due to all the homeowners who never log in), why don't game developers take steps to fix it? Because that would upset those homeowners!

Even adding monster-spawns to quiet areas will piss people off. If someone bought a landscape house because of its safety, they're going to feel betrayed if it stops feeling safe! There are a few other things that can be added, but for developers, it's mostly just too much work with too little reward. Instead of pissing off homeowners, devs are much more likely to create new areas instead. Those old barren areas are left to rot forever.



We can side-step all of those problems by using instanced housing. Instanced housing is where the door to your home is in town, but when you go through that door, you appear in a private mini-area. Lots of players can use the same door in town, and each enters their own "instance" of the interior area.

Lots of games implement instanced housing, mostly just to tick off boxes on their feature list. They add the expected features: some storage, some decorations, maybe a crafting table. In other words, they're pretty boring, so you're forgiven for thinking instanced housing HAS to be boring. But it doesn't! In fact, this is a fertile area for new MMO designs, and I want to try some out.

I want housing to be integrated into the game's systems at a deeper level, so it can be a jumping-off point for high-level player adventures and goals. There are opportunities here for gameplay that wouldn't make sense otherwise. Here's some ideas:



Just because your house is instanced doesn't mean you can't have player neighbors. Quite the opposite! We can avoid the big barren areas of non-instanced housing by using the reality-bending power of instancing. For example, in an instanced neighborhood we could dynamically group players based on who's online.

Suppose that when you go out the door of your instanced apartment, it leads to a hallway with a bunch of other doors -- each one dynamically assigned to be the doors of other people who are in their homes right now. You can knock on any door and say hi, and maybe come in to visit and look around. Or maybe you can slip a note under the door. Or sneak into their homes...

Or maybe that hallway leads to players that have been online recently, and who have left their houses in "open" security mode, so you can wander in and visit.

Or maybe the hallway leads to other active members of your guild, so your neighbors are always guildmates.

Or maybe we organize housing based on skill choices, so if you move into Explosion Heights with the other wizards, you can expect to encounter wizards... and wizard-related problems.

Because instanced houses aren't on the 'real' landscape, we can hook them together in ways that aren't constrained by real physics -- ways that create new gameplay. For example...



Every house has a door, and we can use this to let adventures come to you. Imagine you come home just in time to hear a knock on your door. It's your neighbor: he asks you to deal with the foul odor coming from your basement. What odor? "The movers brought in those coffins yesterday, so I assume that's the stench!" What movers? What basement?! (Okay, discovering that you have a secret basement may be too far. Or maybe not... the basement door could teleport you to a different mini-dungeon depending on what quest is going on.)

Or perhaps your apartment in the Statehelm slums is plagued by a mob of rat-men. They knock incessantly, demanding payment in cheese... do you dare answer? What happens if you don't? Do they try to set your house on fire? Or maybe they let pests into your vents. Or maybe they just sneak in and subtly move the furniture to enrage you... "Notice anything different? This wouldn't have happened if you'd left Roquefort on the mantle!"

Or maybe the visitor is your old friend Rita from Serbule. She's in town to do some shopping and wants to fill you in on the latest gossip. She says Sir Coth has started talking about "invisible intruders" again; maybe you should visit Serbule and see what's up?

Or perhaps the visitor at your door is just a salesman with a magic mirror to sell. "It shows serene pictures of nature when you're trying to go to sleep!" says the merchant. But after you buy it, something else happens...



One of the big benefits of instancing is that NPCs can be instanced too, and they can behave differently inside your home than they do outside. This means you can marry an NPC and unlock all sorts of new behaviors. We've seen the beginnings of fun marriage systems in games like Skyrim, but they're rarely very deep.

Marriage has actually been part of Gorgon's rough design plan since the beginning -- for instance, the internal Favor Level above "Soul Mates" is called "Married" -- But that doesn't mean I've figured out how everything will work. It'll take experimentation to learn what sorts of mechanics are fun and scalable.

Right now, the exact game mechanics are completely open. Marriage could have its own Marriage Mood Meter, and different moods could trigger all sorts of behaviors depending on the NPC you married. Tantrums, fights, sulking, subterfuge... or lovely gifts, cozying by the fireplace, making you a delicious meal...

Or your spouse may have their friends over for parties... which might lead to jealousy later if you paid too much attention to their friends...

Or maybe one of their friends has gotten into serious trouble. There's a mystery to figure out, and your spouse has stakes in the outcome.

Or maybe their friends bring over an exotic housewarming gift with some unusual properties...

I think different NPCs would have very different marriage experiences. Some would crave cozy domesticity; others might have freaky demands for new sex toys every week; some might suffer from depression and need extra support, while others keep inviting their friends over every night and insist that you keep the icebox stocked!

Rakshasa have only had non-arranged marriages for a few decades, so they may have a lot of trouble settling down. And surely some elves have difficulty marrying a non-elf... knowing that they're going to outlive their spouse by hundreds of years might make it hard to have real emotional bonding. And if you marry a mage, are they going to feel jealous of your skill when you inevitably out-level them? What are the repercussions?



None of these ideas are especially well thought out, obviously. This is brainstorming! But I'm excited about the possibilities, and I'd like to hear what ideas interest you.

Of course, housing will also be an opportunity to decorate, to craft, to store items, all the usual stuff. But one of my goals with this game is to dig deeper than most MMOs do, and find the fun ideas that they don't reach. So what sounds fun to you? What outlandish thing do you want to do in your imaginary home?


PS - Most of these design ideas could apply to guild halls too! We plan to eventually add instanced Guild Halls, so that every guild can have a meeting spot. (A handful of the most expensive Guild Halls will also have non-instanced lobbies or exteriors, where the guild could set up vendors or signposts or things like that... but the majority of the place will be instanced.)

[This blog post is from the developer, Citan]

[If you're looking for info about the upcoming Fairy playable race, stay tuned -- there'll be a blog post about that soon! This blog post isn't about upcoming features at all -- it's behind-the-scenes design notes about recent game updates.]


Have you ever noticed that all the talking pig NPCs in the game mention that they obtained sentience after being struck by lightning? Probably not. But they do! And this is because of a skill I've long planned to add.

I've often used animal skills as an opportunity to experiment with game-mechanics ideas. The Pig skill was my first try at making a "bard" combat skill. It's been rewritten several times since I first added it, and it's evolved into its own unique group-support style -- one which doesn't step on the Bard skill too much. But it took lots of iteration and experimentation to figure out what would work, and I was able to apply some of those lessons to Bard.

The Charged Pig skill was also intended to prototype something. In this case, it was prototyping "combat sub-skills". The Charged Pig skill didn't have its own combat bar; instead, you could mix-and-match Pig and Charged Pig abilities on the Pig skill bar. This would give the Pig skill some needed solo viability.

(Sidebar: You may be thinking "why bother?" Why not just add more abilities to the existing skill? Adding too much content to a skill makes it harder for players to use. That sounds counterintuitive, but consider treasure-effects: right now the Sword skill has a dozen or so combat abilities, and there are unique treasure-effects for all of them. Since you only use 6 of the 12 abilities on your skill-bar at once, half of the Sword effects you find in loot aren't useful to your particular build. if I added a bunch more abilities to Sword, along with new treasure-effects, it would get harder and harder to find treasure that worked for your specific combat style. When its broken up into sub-skills, the game only gives out sub-skill-specific treasure if you're actually using the sub-skill. That's one benefit; there are similar "compartmentalization" benefits with training, unlocking, crafting, and base-items.)

So I implemented Charged Pig, allocating a full month to work on it since it would need lots of experimenting. I created a handful of unique abilities, added some treasure-effects, worked out all the logistics of how the skill interacted with XP-earning and loot tables and so on. Then I created a pig character and started testing it, and realized I was missing a bigger opportunity. Charged Pig did add more soloing power to the Pig skill, which was nice... but since I could only use a total of six abilities, I ended up losing too much of the fun stuff from the Pig skill. What Pig needed was a new partner skill, something more solo-oriented that could synergize with the skill.

So I turned Charged Pig into a regular combat skill. That way, you could use six Pig abilities and six Charged Pig abilities at the same time. That made a lot more sense! In fact, all of the animal-form combat skills could use another viable partner skill, so Charged Pig evolved into Warden, which is a combat skill usable by any animal.

But a full combat skill requires a lot more work than a sub-skill: it needed more abilities, a LOT more treasure, and unique content to go with it. The earlier experiments used up a lot of the time available for the skill, though, so I crunched to create all the new abilities and treasure, while Sandra created the Wardens' special home, the Sacred Grotto. (We came up with some fun content ideas for the grotto that couldn't be implemented in time, so this is just the first version of the place.)

The Warden skill has one other unique mechanic: special daily quests. This would have been impossible to fit into our schedule, except that I'd already written most of it in an earlier prototyping session. That session resulted in adding gardening almanacs, oddly enough. Which is why, internally, the daily warden quests are driven by their own hidden almanac! But even with the technology handy, we still had to actually write the quests that used the feature.
So, in short, we worked really hard to flesh out the Warden skill, and I think it turned out pretty well, especially for the first version of a major combat skill. Of course, we'll continue to improve and iterate on it over time.

The Charged Pig skill, on the other hand, is dead. It remains in the data files, but it'll only be used for internal testing now. It did its job as a prototype sub-skill, though, and the first "real" sub-skill will show up soon! The first one will probably debut with the playable fairy race. Later, I expect to use sub-skills to provide some weapons diversity, among other things. For instance, the Axe skill will tentatively be a sub-skill of Hammer; Spear will be a sub-skill of Staff; there might eventually be a Greatsword skill which is a sub-skill of Sword. Each sub-skill will add a few new abilities to an existing skills' repertoire, as well as unique requirements, unique treasure, and unique training.


Many animals can be druids, but pigs can't. There's nothing explicitly preventing pigs from being druids, mind you, there's just no equipment for it. Druids need to be holding a wooden item, and pigs don't have hands. Other animals have workarounds: for instance, cows can get wooden "cow shoes" made for them by a player carpenter. But I intentionally didn't give pigs an item like that because I knew they would eventually be getting the Charged Pig skill. Druid and Charged Pig don't play the same, but they cover a lot of the same ground, and they weren't designed to stack.

Then Charged Pig evolved into Warden, which is usable by any animal. So now several animal forms can use Warden and Druid together. And yep, it's unbalanced. They share too many of the same tricks, and those tricks stack, and it's too much. It's not "oh crap shut everything down now" levels of overpowered, mind you, but it's something that needs to be addressed during balancing.

Keep in mind that the goal of the Warden skill is to give the animal-specific combat skills (like Cow, Pig, Spider, etc.) a new partner skill, to make those skills more useful and interesting, especially for solo play. If the best partner skill for Warden ends up being Druid, then Warden is a failure at its goal!

So right now I'm leaning toward disabling the Warden+Druid skill combination for balance reasons. I'm not yet sure what game mechanic will prevent the pairing, though. (The silver lining is that once that's done, I can add druid activation-items for pigs.)


(Important background info you may or may not know: the game takes place on the continent of Alharth, where the druids are run by the god Dreva. But on the distant continent of Fosulf, the druids are run cooperatively by Ri-Shin and Au-Shin together. They're much older gods than Dreva, and although they're technically allies of Dreva, there's also a bit of hostility. Dreva is a young hotshot god who has decided to "police the gods", and that doesn't always make you popular with other gods.)

The Charged Pig skill also had its own storyline. It was fairly silly, because we're talking about flying pigs with electricity powers, and that seemed like it should have a lighthearted storyline. The story was that Au-Shin, the god of Animals, got into a huge fight with his brother Ri-Shin, the god of Plants, over who had dominion over fungi. Both gods felt that mushrooms should be in their domain! This debate had been going on for millennia, and it was slowly destroying their friendship.

Due to this impasse, mushrooms had been considered "off limits" by both gods. But then Ri-Shin declared himself God of Mushrooms, and created Mushroom Treants (tentatively those might have ended up being the Myconians, or they might have been a new variety of treant... I didn't get that far into the details).

Au-Shin was outraged at his brother's betrayal, but in public he had to continue to support his brother. It would be devastating for all of nature if animals and plants became enemies! So Au-Shin worked in secret. He created a covert team of intelligent animals to fight these fungi. Pigs are great at sniffing out mushrooms, so Au-Shin chose them as his secret agents. His friend, the god Lo-Maj, helped him bestow powerful electricity powers on them which could even let the pigs fly for short periods.

Like I said, it was a silly storyline. It's basically just enough of a story-hook to create some quests and rewards and so on. But when Charged Pig turned into Warden, the story also shifted. As soon as I started writing the Warden NPCs, I realized I needed something more serious in tone, because it was feeling too silly: I couldn't create any story tension at all. The new storyline still involves Au-Shin (with a little help from Lo-Maj), but all the other details have changed.

In the new storyline, Au-Shin decided to gain more influence on the continent of Alharth. He created dozens of magical lakes and springs that could give animals intelligence and powers. These worked well for a few hundred years -- a very short time by godly standards -- until Norala, the god of the hunt, decided to put an end to it. Her influence is very strong on Alharth and she refused to let other gods move in on her territory. So she directed her werewolves to stamp out the Wardens and destroy their magical springs. She was very successful, and Au-Shin was forced to abandon the project.

The Wardens you meet in-game are some of the last of their kind. After suffering terrible defeats from the werewolves, they've retreated to the Hidden Grotto, one of the last remaining sacred springs. And it's precious! There's a secret community of intelligent animals that use the grotto to give their children human-like intelligence. If the werewolves win and the grotto is destroyed, all future offspring will remain normal animals. So the Wardens are fighting for their survival, as well as the happiness of their children and their children's children.

That's a little more meaty! Abandoned by their god, they're fighting for more than just their lives... they're fighting for their whole way of life! That's good stuff! But the Warden NPCs still ended up being more light-hearted than I intended. I just can't manage to write talking animals that aren't a little silly. It's harder than it sounds! But the new backstory took the silliness down a few notches, and gave them a lot more depth than they would have otherwise had.

And when I step out of my "game writer" role and step into the "game producer" role, I can see that the backstory does its job: it provides some interesting quest-hooks, story locations, tangible god-politics, and a jumping-off point for additional systems in the future.


I originally intended to end this blog post by revealing that the playable fairy race was coming soon. But then I forgot and tweeted that info a couple days ago, ruining the surprise.

So... you may have already heard, but: the playable fairy race is coming soon! This is an advanced race. It's a more difficult game experience than the existing three races, especially at first, but it also offers new benefits and opportunities. My goal is to create a different game experience than humans, elves, and rakshasa have. Not "better", or "worse," but "different". That's a pretty ambitious goal, though, so in the initial launch, the balance will probably be shit. But it's beta, so we're gonna beta-test it!

Since fairies add even more complexity to an already-complex game, you really need to understand some of the game's basics first. So the fairy race is "unlockable": you'll need to use a different character to complete a level 40 quest, which unlocks the ability to create fairy characters.

I have a lot more info to convey about playable fairies, and they deserve their own blog post. I'm working on that now, but the game-mechanics are still in development, and I need to get a few more details locked down first. In the meantime, I answered a few questions about the fairy race here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2384-Some-General-Fairy-Questions

(Discuss this blog post on the forum! https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2385-Dev-Blog-The-Life-and-Death-of-Charged-Pig)

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This is a smallish update with bug fixes and design iterations. We've also added Treasure Cartography to Sun Vale.


Preta in Sun Vale teaches the recipes for creating Sun Vale treasure maps from found clue items. As for finding the clue items, that's for you to figure out... but if you've unlocked Treasure Cartography in Eltibule you'll have a pretty good idea of where to look.

A tip: we had the new selection-box changes (explained below) in mind when creating this content. If you're finding it difficult to click on massive things, turn on the experimental option!


Previously, players were slightly buoyant underwater, meaning they slowly floated to the surface. This was intended to be helpful, but it's annoying to float out of range while fighting or interacting with things underwater, so it's been removed.

Buoyancy was originally added for one specific reason: it helped make jumping from the water's surface more intuitive. If you jump out of the water and splash back in, you might end up underwater, at which point you start losing breath until you get back to the surface. This can be very surprising for new players who don't expect to drown by pressing the jump key.

We've replaced buoyancy with a more subtle technique. Now when you jump out of the water and splash back in, the game automatically simulates pressing the "Up" movement key for a fraction of a second to push you back to the surface. (Unless you're pressing the "Down" key at the time.)

This new solution is supposed to be unnoticeable, so it doesn't last very long. If your character's jump-speed is magically enhanced, you may land too far underwater and will need to press the Up key manually to reach the surface. This is annoying, but it's the best compromise solution so far.


We've tweaked how the selection-box works when you've selected something very large, very close to the camera, or partially off-screen. The box size is more accurate and should move more predictably when you turn the camera around. This is a small iterative improvement, not a massive change. The only time it will be really noticeable is when you've selected massive entities such as giants, statues, or dungeon doors.

For just this update, the change is disabled by default. To enable this change, open the Settings window. In the Graphics screen, check the box labeled "Experimental Optimizations", then press Save. You can turn it off again later by unchecking that box. (If you had previously checked this checkbox for the last experiment, it's been unchecked automatically so that you aren't accidentally opted in to this new experiment. And no, this experiment isn't actually an "optimization", that's just a handy checkbox that we're reusing for this purpose.)

If these changes cause new problems, please let us know! It's easiest for us to keep track of opinion-type feedback if you post it on the forum, but please use the in-game bug reporter for bugs like "the new selection-box goes insane when I select this portal" or similar problems. In-game bug reports automatically include your game coordinates so we can quickly locate the problem.


A few abilities have a channeling time specifically because they're intended for use pre-fight, and they're supposed to be more dangerous to use in the middle of combat. That's a reasonable goal, but it's annoying to have to wait for the channeling time between every fight. So in this update, the relevant abilities no longer have a casting time when used out of combat (but still channel when used during combat). Affected abilities are:

• Shield: Rapid Recovery
  
• Shield: Strategic Preparation. (Casting time in-combat went from 1.5 to 2 seconds)
  
• Spider: Premeditated Doom
  
• Warden: Stun Trap
  

Following up on the previous update notes, we're going to try the "nigiri is basically like potions" approach and see how that feels. Nigiri changes:

• Nigiri items have lower item levels than before, so they heal less health and power when eaten
  
• Nigiri items no longer have a usage delay, allowing them to be eaten in combat
  
• Nigiri recipes now require an herb or lettuce of various types (e.g. dill, swamp weed, oregano... you know, classic sushi ingredients)
  
• Nigiri recipes now require less vinegar
  

In an attempt to make sushi recipes more predictable, we've changed Sushi Roll recipes to use the same herb needed by the corresponding nigiri recipe. For instance, Eel Nigiri now requires Oregano, so Eel Sushi Roll also requires Oregano (instead of Seaweed).

Also, Cavefish Sushi Roll became level 40 food instead of level 35.

[h2]Other Instant-Snack Changes[/h2]
It seems best to be consistent with the idea that instant-snack foods have no usage delay. (In fact, loot items like Rattus Root and Raw Oyster were supposed to be instant already.) The following instant-snack foods are now truly instant:

• Raw Oyster
  
• Cleaned Shrimp
  
• Shark Chew
  
• Cavefish Sticks
  
• House Cat
  
• All Candy Canes
  
• Fried Potato Sticks
  
• Laura Neth's Famous Tart
  
• Pepper Venison
  
• Fairy Honey
  
• Rattus Root
  
• Cactus Juice
  
• Bottle of Sugar Water
  
• Large Strawberry
  

We expect there will be further changes to instant-snack food as we continue to iterate on the design.

• Kelp armor has a new appearance
  
• Kelp armor can now be dyed (with the Organic 1-Color Dye recipe)
  
• Live Event boss kraken "George" now has a boss curse
  
• Certain (non-event) Kraken now deal less damage with their rage attacks... but they still deal more than 1,000 damage per rage attack, so for most players the change is irrelevant
  
• Squidlips has a few new recipes for amberjack
  
• Animal Town inhabitants are now able to differentiate between players killing their guardians vs. killing actual enemies of Animal Town
  
• Fixed the Cotton Gin in Sun Vale
  
• A bug in Khryulek's crystal communication device prevented her from correctly talking about weird items you presented to her
  
• Gazluk plate leggings were unintentionally dyeable; this has been fixed. (The armor material isn't set up for dyes yet, so it looks extra-special terrible when dyed. It'll become dyeable eventually.)
  
• Fixed bug in treasure effect "Armor Received from Patch Armor +X" : it incorrectly restored bonus health instead of armor
  
• Fixed bug that prevented Norbert from finishing the Warden intro sub-quest "The External Resource Coordinator"
  
• Improved equipment rarity in various loot chests, most notably high-end chests dug up with treasure cartography
  
• For technical reasons the game previously allowed you to unearth treasure maps and surveys while swimming at the surface of water, even though it explained that you must be "standing on solid ground" to use a map. Now you must actually be standing on solid ground as intended. In some cases this means you'll need to swim to the bottom of a body of water to reach the ground.