Santa has closed access to his workshop in order to start working on next Christmas. Bye Santa!

• At last, the long-standing bug causing the server to freeze sometimes when players die while poisoned has been resolved

• An issue has been resolved preventing dead characters from using teleporters

• Auto-unstuck and stuck command has had some general optimizations and you sould see improvement both with using the command and when the system detects you being stuck automatically -- please report if you notice any funky behavior with this

• An issue has been resolved allowing anyone to open a Christmas Gift regardless of where the gift was located
  - We've received a couple of reports now regarding stacking items disappearing if trying to place a stack onto another stack inside of a container that is over capacity or over weight causing the incoming item to be consumed and not added to the existing stack. We are investigating but need more details, if you have had this happen please send a /bug report with as many details around the issue you can recall. Thanks!

Santa's gate has closed in Britain, but the North Pole is still accessible (in and out) through the old entrance at the top of Serpent's Pass in very northern tip of Southern Rim.

Santa has opened up a portal to his workshop from Britain. Go visit him and see if he's got anything for you!

Merry Christmas to you all.

• Slightly reduced the chance for mobs to spawn while looting a treasure chest
  - Added a leash to all mobs spawned by a treasure chest
  - Mobs spawned from looting the chest are no longer required to be killed to loot the rest of the box, initial spawn still needs to be killed first
  - Hidden players will now be revealed 100% of the time when looting an item from a treasure chest

The issue with being unable to remove items from a locked down paragon chest has been resolved

• The distance from which NPCs will catch thieves in the act and call Guards on them has been somewhat reduced

• An issue preventing criminal timer from being refreshed during PVP combat has been resolved
  - Line-of-sight requirement for NPCs to call guards has been disabled for Stealing; normally the NPCs in town would wander around and change their perspective, making theiving more challenging and rewarding in some cases, but at this time the NPCs are set to not-wander, so we're doing this to balance in-town thefts until NPC wander has been re-enabled.

Bola Revert

• The most recent Bola changes have been reverted.
• This reduces the success chance to hit the target from 100% back to 66%.
• This also increases the cooldowns from 6s back to 10s.

Plot Deco Changes

• Can no longer decorate locked down objects rotating or moving them outside of the plot bounds.
• Items that are detected out of the bounds will be automatically moved back inside the plot.
• There is now a reasonable min/max limit on lowering/raising objects on a plot.
• NOTE: An autofix has occurred that checked all objects on plots to be out of bounds and has automatically moved offending items inwards towards the plot so not to be extending out of bounds; because of this, some of your decorations or fence pieces may need to be re-positioned.
• GARDENING NOTE: Plants from gardening now require users to be at least friend to use/harvest the plants due to the deco autofix.

Ban List

• Targets that are banned are now prevented from re-entering the plot automatically.
• New tab in the Plot Menu has been added to manage Bans.

Smelting, Milling, Scissors

• Salvaging has been redesigned from scratch to be more like UO.
• You should be able to salvage anything that can be crafted.
• To Smelt something simply double click a forge -OR- use the E ability on a Pickaxe.
• To Mill/Chop something use the E ability on a Hatchet.
• To cut cloth objects, use a pair of scissors.
• You can now salvage items that are on the ground, in your pack animal, or in your inventory, as long as you have access to pick it up.
• You can now salvage items bought from a town vendor, but will receive a greatly reduced amount of resources from them, and no chance to gain skill.
• You can now automatically attempt to salvage objects inside of a container, just target a container or yourself to choose backpack.
• Wooden & Wood Kite shields have been moved to Carpentry recipes and now use wood to craft and are salvageable.

Repairing

• Repairing of equipment will now be done via the crafting menu.
• Applicable crafting stations now have a "Repair" button in their menu.

Disguise Kits

• Thief Disguise Kit & Orc Body Kits have been optimized and should work much more reliably.
• Orc Body Kit is now blessed.
• Orc Body Kit will no longer become locked down on use.

Skinning

• Skinning has been redesigned from scratch to be more like UO.
• All bladed weapons and the skinning knife can be used to:
  • cut corpses to instantly create the meat/hides inside the corpse.
  • cut whole fish, on the ground or in our inventory, into fish fillets.
• Bladed weapons have "Toggle Default" option to set the default double-click action:
  • Use: double click and target something to skin.
  • Equip: double click to equip the weapon.
• Right-clicking a corpse, choosing harvest will check your inventory recursively for a blade to use to skin it.

Treasure Hunting

• Players will now be required to kill all monsters spawned from a treasure chest before being able to loot from the chest.

Lockpicking success rates have been tweaked.

• An issue was resolved with Archery continuing to shoot while players are moving
  - An issue was resolved allowing players to rapidly shoot bows by quickly unequipping and reequipping bows
  
  (This was meant to be posted sooner, but did not get published erroneously.)

The temporary 10% bonus to skills has now been concluded and the gain chance will be restored to normal soon.

• An issue has been resolved preventing players from removing clothing from their own vendors
  - An issue has been resolved with the clothing bless deed not working with 2019 Halloween handouts

• An issue with Pet Brokers being moved on or off of house plot when decorating and moving/rotating items onto the same position as the vendor has been resolved

An issue with players being unable to open the Plot Menu when the plot has a Guild assigned and the character is in a different guild than is assigned to the Plot has been resolved.

• Gardening gains have been slightly increased.

Phase 1 of pet balancing is now live. These changes are to bring pets closer to UO and balance DPS discrepancies. We will see fine tuning as we identify more issues. Happy hunting!

(Some changes may not take effect until reboot or respawn/resummon of creature)
New:
- Frenzied Shadow Wyrm (rare)
- Pet follow and combat speed reduced
- Additional Brood Mother spawn location
- Additional Dread War Horse spawn location
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5 Slot pets
Greater Dragons: Highest health of all pets, high dps.
- 5 Control slots required
- Health increased from 415-654 to 900-1500
- Low end damage roll increased by 10
- Attack speed increased
- Resist skill base increased

Cu Sidhe: Self healing mount with high survivability and mid-high DPS.
- 5 Control slots required
- Health increased from 417-654 to 655-900
- Low end damage roll increased by 6
- Attack speed decreased
- Armor decreased from 25-35 to 11-20
--------------------------------------------
Brood Mother: Highest DPS of all pets, lowest survivability of the 4 slot pets, but immune to poison
- 4 Control slots required
- Low end damage roll increased by 10
- Attack speed decreased
- Health decreased from 417-654 to 209-315
- Only pet to retain poison immunity

Wyrms: High DPS, moderate survival. Good all around pet
- 4 Control slots required
- Low end damage roll increased by 6

Dire Bear: Slightly above your average bear..
- 4 Control slots required
- No changes from current build

Vorpal Bunny: Nimble, stealthy, squishy
- 4 Control slots required
- Armor reduced from 25-30 to 11-15
- Health reduced from 417-654 to 316-360
- Attack speed increased
- Stealth
- Angry
- Will chase you down and kill you
--------------------------------------------
3 Control slot pets
Dread Warhorse: Mountable, highest DPS of the 3 slot pets, pairable with lower slot pets, extremely rare.
- 3 Control slots required
- Similar in power to a dragon, with a higher attack speed
- Treasure map spawns are now a frailer version of their world spawn counter parts

Dragons: Mid range dps, highest survivability of the 3 slot pets
- 3 Control slots required
- Health increased from 316-360 to 417-654
- Armor increased from 11-20 to 25-30
- Low end damage roll increased by 6
--------------------------------------------
2 Control slot pets
Nightmares: Great mount, high magic damage, moderate melee
- 2 Control slots required
- Health increased from 85-140 to 209-315
- Melee Skills raised from 60-80 to 90-100
- Magic casting skill base increased
- Resist skill base increased