Before discussing the patch, I want to point out that we have not had a server crash since the server came up. This is quite surprising given how much has changed from the default scripts with very little in the way of player testing. So, keeping our fingers crossed that this continues and we do not have issues with crashes. It is in my nightmares. In future I will categorize patch notes so they are easier to read, and players can more easily skip over things they don't care about.

It is a semi-big patch today, this should fix some bugs on the server as well as add some new functionality. This patch will remove ALL rare spawns, we will have to manually add them back. Currently existing rares are going to be deleted, as they were spawning far too often. Players who have collected rares will be allowed to keep 1 of each rare they have found. We will talk to any player who has collected rares, before we do this, and offer an amnesty to exchange any existing rare for 200 gold pieces.

A proper rare spawning system is on the list and will be implemented in the coming weeks. Due to our low population, these will be on quite slow timers. We cannot current add "world" rares (eg, ones that are not in containers), as these will decay after they are spawned. We need to change some things on the back end before we do this.

Platinum will be added as a loot type in this patch, so players can start collecting our long term reward currency. There is currently no list of rewards, the system is something that needs to be discussed. We need to figure out how easy it is to obtain platinum and adjust the reward prices suitably, so these items will take weeks, months or even longer to obtain. We do not want the server flooded with rewards.

• NPCs/monsters no longer lose you as a target when you go out of LOS.
  
• Removed scales as a loot type, nothing should give scales now. Please PM me if you find them anywhere.
  
• NPCs use their run animation when fleeing.
  
• You are no longer offered bods when selling items to blacksmiths or tailors.
  
• Scrolls now sell for more. The sell price is based on the resources used to make it, scaled by their circle and fail rate at GM inscription.
  
• Fishermen no longer sell aquarium related items.
  
• Escorts no longer have a crack habit, and run at a somewhat normal speed.
  
• Escorts have had nerfs to both their pack gold and the amount of gold they give on successful escort.
  
• Removed compassion messages from escorts.
  
• Escort corpses no longer delete on death.
  
• You can accept more than one escort at a time. Because of this, spawn rates of escorts will be nerfed.
  
• Escorts now give varying levels of gold. A noble will pay more than a peasant, for example.
  
• Blacksmith guildmasters have no click title (eg, when single clicked, don't display "Jack the blacksmith guildmaster"), and are no longer vendors.
  
• The Orcish Lord is quite a bit tougher. They are still weak against armored opponents.
  
• You can no longer go perma grey if you are not in the thieves guild, as you are unable to steal from players. You will also not go perma grey if you target yourself with stealing.
  
• Brigands no longer drop "severed human ears" as this isn't Diablo
  
• A banker has been added to the city of Cove.
  
• All level 0 treasure maps (normally used by young players), will automatically update to be level 1. Level 0 maps will no longer drop.
  
• Fixed an item description error with magic clothing ("straw hat of of invisibility") Removing charged clothing/jewelry which has run out of charges, no longer gives you a debuff.
  
• Securing something no longer uses lockdowns. It was previously impossible to secure anything in a small house as there were not enough lockdowns (125).
  
• All rares have been temporarily disabled. Before RunUO was spawning a lot of rares by default, and spawning way too many of them. We will be working on rares in the coming weeks, we will get some spawning as fast as we can. The timers will be slower than other shards, due to our low population.
  
• Non players can always be paralyzed, even if they are casting a spell. Note that paralyzing a monster that is already paralyzed, will not increase the duration of the paralyze.
  
• Fixed a bug where melee damage could sometimes be 0. It is now a minimum of 1. This resulted in an interesting exploit to very easily GM a weapon skill with a practice weapon and a creature with natural armor. To the player I saw doing this - very creative
  
• Acquire range is 12, up from 10.
  
• Provocation ranges are fixed. There were issues with provocation that allowed you to provoke a monster, however the two monsters would be too far apart and never actually attack each other. Provocation range is now 16, if they are further apart you will receive a message stating so. Otherwise monsters that are provoked should always attack each other until death and not reacquire a target.
  
• The lower level of Terathan Keep is now considered T2A in regards to recall rules.
  
• Terathan avengers were spawning with a pitiful amount of mana, meaning they almost never took advantage of their magery level. Avengers will now flamestrike more often. Their mana pool is now around 120.
  
• Poison immunity on monsters has been reviewed and there have been a few changes. Try them out.
  
• Damage from/to monsters with mindblast is now calculated from the caster's magery level. The target will never switch when an NPC/monster is involved in being either the caster or target. The new damage is relatively low, mindblast is a spell with little concrete evidence of its use in T2A - we will have to look deeper into balancing this spell properly with regards to monsters. For now, this fixes monsters always doing a flat 25 damage to players.
  
• Mindblast now has a damage range in PvP.
  • Lowest damage is (Highest Int) - (Lowest Int) / 6
    
  • Highest damage is (Highest Int) - (Lowest Int) / 3
    
  • Damage is then scaled by relevant Evaluating Intelligence/Magic Resist.
    
  • Damage is reduced by 50% when successfully resisted.
    
• Elementals that drop loot to the ground on death, will now correctly do so when the last damager wasn't a player. They still don't drop loot when killed by guards.
  
• Ice elementals, Orc Captains and Brigands have gold. Apologies for some messed up loot tables. This is happening because these creatures were not on our list of T2A creatures (taken from stratics) and we changed the way loot is calculated vs the default. Over this weekend I will look at every spawned monster and check they are spawning the correct loot.
  
• Mobs that drop high level scrolls, now drop circles 6-8 instead of 5-8. This should make 8th circle scrolls a bit easier to get.
  
• Platinum (our reward currency) will now drop from monsters. This is a small first step in our reward system implementation. Stronger monsters have a greater chance of dropping platinum, the highest chance of it dropping from monsters is 2% - only the strongest monsters. Medium level monsters will drop at a 1% rate. Lower level monsters have as little as 0.5% chance of dropping platinum. This will be reviewed when we look over monster loot in the coming weeks. Platinum is supposed to be rare, but we will review how much platinum is actually being found later.
  
• Treasure maps have a 2% chance of having platinum in the chest. The amount of platinum in the chest is equal to the level of the treasure map.
  
• Level 4 dungeon chests have a 2% chance of including 1 platinum. Level 3 chests have a 1% chance.
  
• Platinum will later be added to craft skills.
  
• Not patched yet, but will immediately receive attention after restarting server: Terathan keep spawn will be slowed. It is fairly overspawned at the moment to the point it's impossible to clear without a group.
  
• We are aware of a bug with animal spawns which causes animals to bunch up in areas near the edge of the spawners. This is going to require a mass change of these spawners to give the animals smaller home ranges/relative home range.
  
• Bandages will now create a stack when they fall to the floor, instead of continually dropping single stacks.
  

Snow Elementals in Ice and Water Elementals in Destard are dropping no loot whatsoever.
Ancient Wyrm drops no level 8 scrolls.

These seem like stupid questions, but I haven't been able to find answers anywhere.I've been trying to use certain skills, and damned if I can remember how they activate.
For cooking, shouldn't I just be able to double-click the raw meat near a heat source? And for arrow shafts, shouldn't using a bladed item on boards work?
I've checked vendors for tools I don't remember, but I can't find anything.

Hi,
I'm an old UO vetand I've come to have a look around!T2A is myfavourite era of all. I played from December 1997 full time until late 2001 early 2002 and then with my guild moving to other games the amount of play time I had there reduced until 2008 and then finallyin 2010 I dropped my houses and closed my accounts. <wipes a tear>
I know you havea huge amount of work ahead of you (and I know this because I am working on my own Siege Perilous style shard)but as I have just logged on here I thought I would throw a spanner straight in the works! I hope you will take this in the spirit intended, which is to help you get it right for the people who will surely come.
As a new player on any shard the first thing I normally do is go and pick some cotton, flax and sheer some sheep and either tailor to make gold, or just sell the cloth thenspools/balls of wool until I have enough gold to buy some skills. I sometimes do this all the way up to buying a small house so that I quickly have a base to work from.
I have found that I cannot do this here nearly as easilybecause there is no cotton or flax spawning in the cotton and flax fields on Moonglow island. Yes, I could run over to Yew sheep pens and hopefully find some sheep there to sheer, but that cotton and flax spawn needs to be added. I've not checked the Cove field or Skara but if you haven't added the farmable cotton in 'Glow yet I would wager that you haven't spawned the others yet either. I lived in Moonglow at the start of OSI UO on Atlantic so I know that these things should be there and it was a similar story on Siege Perilous although you can't sell anything to NPCs there so it's the bandaid route.
On running back to Moonglow from the flax field I noticed there is no gate on the cemetery, and working on my own shard I know that this is something you have to add with your Godly powers :-)
I hope I can find some way of getting it going here, because starting on afresh, empty shard and building something is a wonderful experience and I do so love the 1999 era. Right now I'm hitting the dummy in 'Glow to get my strength up before venturing out some more later.
I applaud you & wish you luck in tweaking things into shape.


FB

Hi,
Congrats on a new T2A shard!
I registered on this forum and clicked the link in the email sent to me. I then got a red banner in the middle of the forum page saying "We couldn't confirm your email. Check the link in the email we sent you or try sending another confirmation email."
So I clicked on the link to send another email and got the message: Your email doesn't need confirmation.
And indeed it doesn't, because I am posting here
FB

Hello! I've decided to check this out after many, many years. I love the idea of getting reacquainted with the game on a new shard. So far my only concern is that I feel fairly overwhelmed. I'm just now beginning to remember how important macros are since things can be fairly clunky. I'm also a little at a loss on where to begin since there are so few people around. So, I have a few questions.<div style="font-weight: normal;">
<div style="font-weight: normal;">- Does anyone have some advice as to how I should start accumulating gold? I used to love mining, smithing, and selling, but as there isn't an economy yet, I'm not sure if that's the way to go. Thoughts?<div style="font-weight: normal;">
<div style="font-weight: normal;">- Does anyone know of some good, simple Razor macros (or links to guides) I can use to start making things feel less clunky? Along with that, are there any obvious settings that aren't on by default that I should really have turned on?<div style="font-weight: normal;">
<div style="font-weight: normal;">- Finally, where do people typically hang out? I've been tooling around Minoc getting my feet under me, but I don't want to stay in the middle of nowhere if I'll never see anyone.<div style="font-weight: normal;">
<div style="font-weight: normal;">I'll be googling around to try and find some answers myself, but I figured you all would be more familiar with the shard.<div style="font-weight: normal;">
*edit* So I've already found a handy razor guide here, but I'd still love to hear any ideas!

hey, what is the skill cap on this server?

The shard's first house now has the shard's first vendors! I'll try to keep it stocked with things people need to get started but selection will grow. My first priority is gaining enough inscription to make copys of all the important spells you guys want (including summon deamon). What goods do you guys want the most after spell scrolls? Runebooks, exceptional weapons/armor, potions/kegs, bandages, reagents, or something else? Post a reply and let me know!



Located here:

I wanted to wait to put this patch out, however due to a bug causing some monsters to spawn with double or even triple loot, we have put the patch in early. If there are any issues with the patch we will revert with only the monster loot change. Special thanks to Creager for reporting the excess loot on monsters.

• Harvest tools now have a 1 second action delay, including mining and lumberjacking tools.
  
• Scissors must be in your backpack to use.
  
• Bolt of cloth now weighs 5 stones.
  
• Removed messages regarding "Treasure Map Protected Zones".
  
• The minimum cast delay is now 0.5s.
  
• Tinkering now plays a crafting sound.
  
• All regions which should be considered T2A, are now considered T2A. This includes Fire Dungeon, Ice Dungeon, Britain Sewers, Delucia Passage and any other T2A passages. This means you only need to enter these passages to recall anywhere in T2A.
  
• Much of Terathan Keep is now a "no recall/gate" zone.
  
• Animals which require less than 45skill to tame can now be controlled by anyone. This fixes an issue with horses ignoring their owner if their taming skill was too low.
  
• Tamed AI now gives up on attacking players when they either hide, or go offscreen.
  
• Fixed a bug where you would not gain fame/karma when pets/summons killed monsters.
  
• You now correctly lose 10% of your fame on resurrect. There was no fame resurrect penalty before.
  
• You can now enter Lord British's castle, as well as other faction areas (note: we do not have factions, this was a RunUO default).
  
• Monster AI max acquire range is now 10 tiles.
  
• Monsters will only cast spells if one of the following is true:
  
  • • The monster has been attacked (double clicked in war mode).
      
    • The monster has received damage.
      
    • The monster has made its own melee swing.
      

• Vendors will carry a maximum of 2k gold per restock. Buying items from the NPC will increase their cashflow, selling items to the NPC will drain their funds.
  
• Due to the above, scrolls will sell for a bit more and be profitable. We will keep an eye on this.
  
• We will look into an anti-AFK harvesting system (captchas). AFK harvesting on UO Lost Lands is illegal, we will discuss what the penalties for it will be. For now expect to be jailed if you are caught.
  
• We will take a deeper look into selling stackable items to NPCs and how profitable this is.
  
• "Damage counters" will be turned off, the numbers which pop up were supposed to be for testing purposes only.
  
• Monsters seem to be taking a little too much damage and too easy to kill. Some monsters have a damage output that is too high and end up being "glass cannons", we will balance it so they are a bit tougher but deal less damage. We will use era accurate sources where possible.
  

The race is on! Who will be shards first to complete the following achievements and WIN "shard's first" trophies:


First Grandmaster Tamer -- Awarded tovesperian/Troy

First Grandmaster Smith-- Awarded toCreager/American Apparel

First Placed Castle -- Awarded to Baron

First Tournament Winner -- Awarded to Creager/Lajurn


The first to complete each of the above will receive an engraved trophy noting their achievement. These trophies will be able to be kept for display in your home, or exchanged for our upcoming currency of platinum (our long term reward currency).