This morning was different. The air did not smell as sweet as it did. A sense of dread had encircled the citizens of Celador. Shopkeepers left their stalls, aimlessly staring into the skies. Children stopped playing on the streets and ran home to their kin. Dark storm clouds began a slow march over the horizon, as sudden wind gusts began whipping the hair of frightened folks in the streets of Britain.  The air bristled with a static electricity and a foul stench. The well waters turned black with pestilence.  Crops began dying as if poisoned by some unidentified force, and the birds and animals all fled in every direction until no wildlife could be seen.

Then it happened... something arose from the ground in the center of the City of Britain. It was too dark to perceive who or what it was, but the energy emanating from it was unmistakable.  A great evil. Someone or something has arrived…

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In preparation for the main event, all servers will be offline from 7pm US EST/11pm UTC Friday 18th June. Please keep an eye on #news for further announcements over the course of the weekend.

The Paralyze spell now interrupts the victim's spell cast on success The use of an invisibility potion now breaks spell casts Skeleton Keys now properly open chests of any level regardless of lockpicking skill Carpentry kegs have been fixed and no longer produce deeds

• Players can no longer create Camps while inside Guard Protected towns.

• The Polymorph spell has had its bugs fixed and the spell is now reenabled

• The Incognito spell now properly changes the player's name to a fake one for its duration

• Healing animation should be fixed, and a 3 Second Cooldown has been added to the Healing Hotkeys of Use Bandage, Bandage Self, and Bandage Last Target.
• Harpies and other various creatures in the world that were unexpectedly unaffected by Bard skills, should now work properly.
• Camping bugs were fixed and the time it takes to build the different stages of the campfire and tent/tent upgrades have been reduced slightly.
• A Teleporter has been added on top of Brit Bank roof to allow players to leave the roof if they lack the ability to teleport down from the roof.

We've identified an issue with Looting Rights not being handled properly for bards killing monsters with provocation and have disabled criminal checks on monster corpses for the time being while we work the remaining issues out.

• Corpse mutilate option optimized, double-clicking blood spatter will open corpse as expected, and can also right-click and choose Loot All
• Issue with commanding pets to attack groupmates or your own pets resulting in "they cannot be attacked" erroneously has been resolved
• Blessed objects will now be moved to the backpack if they are inside another container in your backpack when you die

Sorry, everyone, we noticed that some of the fixes we applied during the nightly restart had a flaw and we had to shut down unexpectedly. The server was only up for a short time after, but we still had to roll back to the time of the nightly restart. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be back online as quickly as possible.

Secure Trading issues:

• we've received several reports of players having to click Accept repeatedly until the trade finally accepts

Corpse Looting issues:

• we're aware that many or all corpses are not appearing when attempting to open them and the best-known workaround is to use the Loot All context option

Pet Commanding issue:

• we're aware of an issue with pets not engaging in combat again as expected after being idle; best-known workaround is to say All Stop and then try your commands again

• (Quality of Life) Players will now have Maximum Stamina after resurrecting from death in order to help with corpse runs.
• Fixed getting stuck while tending a campfire through build stages.
• Campfire range has been increased from 10 to 12.
• New 'Check Fire' right-click ability added to Campfires which allows players to inspect a campfire's life duration. Useful for players micro-managing their Campfires while drawing enemies within the Campfire regen range.

As we grow in player count, we are tracking a performance issue that appears to be related to minimap icons (yes of all things.) We are disabling those and restarting to validate this.

We apologise for these teething issues, however we believe this will make a significant difference. We'll work on refactoring the minimap icon system and they will eventually return. In the meantime, use third party tools like http://lou-map.herokuapp.com/ to locate what you need. In particular, we'll have wandering healer locations up there shortly.

Due to another troublesome bug and an even larger player count (which we're not complaining about!), we will temporarily go to a 12 hour restart schedule to avoid a possible stability issue. We'll advise when we've squashed this one and change back to daily restarts.

It's been a bumpy ride, no question about it. Thank you all for bearing with us during this time. Today, we broke another record for number of players online, as more and more folks jump on board with our little project.

With that being said, we absolutely have some growing pains to deal with, and you're seeing evidence of that right now with little annoyances like the occasional crash, disconnects when teleporting and the like. We do have a plan in place to address all of this, however we want to be transparent with you and let you know that this will likely take us well into the coming week before we potentially fix the underlying issues and we're able to achieve better stability.

Rest assured though, we firmly believe it's just a matter of time before we have this sorted and we are working overtime to get these challenges resolved. In as much as we can of course, as we all have families, lives and jobs - this is a hobby for us after all!.

Thanks for bearing with us, it's been an amazing ride so far. We look forward to more to come, and can't wait to get past these initial stability challenges, turn on some more systems (treasure hunting and housing are next off the list) and create more content for you all!

-- The Team

As you're all probably aware, the server is offline right now. We've identified a critical issue that must be resolved prior to us bringing it back online. At this time we cannot offer an ETA, however know that we're all working on it to get things going again ASAP.

Keep an eye out for further announcements here in #news. Sorry for the delay in the release of this notification.

• Fixed issue with Security options not being added to containers being secured by anyone but the house owner
• Fixed issue with double-clicking house sign not refreshing the house in some cases
• Optimized spammy system message "the house has been refreshed"

Thanks for your patience during the downtime, we have received word that the issue is now resolved and we are now bringing our services back online including the game server. See you in-game and thanks again for your support

We are beginning to restore services and will be back online shortly. Thank you for bearing with us. We have extra elements in play now to mitigate any further attacks.

We expect a small rollback as we come back online. These are inevitable in these types of scenarios due to the state of world saves and must be done to ensure integrity of our data.

As always, we appreciate your patience.

• The minimum success chance of using a runebook charge has been returned to 50% (intended value.)

• Murderers who repent will now need to wait 72 hours to resume hostilities.
• Murderers will now need to pay 200 gold per long term count when resurrecting.
• Bosses in various high level encounters have gained new tactics and reinforcements based on the number of players engaging them.
• Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause murder participants to not receive multiple counts.
• Ranged damage and healing will now produce more threat.
• Combat journal will now display entries in descending order.
• Combat journal will now only refresh when new data is available.
• Fixed a bug causing floating damage numbers to be reported twice.

The maintenance is complete, nice and early. Why are you reading this?! Go play!