Patch 18 - 01/14/15 - Dungeon Chests, Camps, IRC Bot, Bestiary

[Jack]

No patches for a while due to working more on the website and various unfinished projects. Due to the ongoing work on the website, patches will remain light for a while. This patch will be in effect from the next restart, hopefully tonight.


In other news, the shard population has been very slow lately. There are a number of factors for this. To anyone concerned, keep in mind UO Lost Lands will continue development regardless of how many players are online. There is a lot of work planned to go into this shard, so much that I consider the shard still to be in an alpha state.


Treasure Chests

• A revamp to the difficulty of all dungeon chests. This will make GMing lockpicking a much more realistic goal.
  
• The loot in dungeon chests will now be more consistent.
  
• Changes to the way dungeon chests spawn:
  
  • The chest will no longer start decaying until it is unlocked.
    
  • The decay for these is now dynamic, they do not rely on saves to be removed.
    
  • An empty chest will decay faster than a full one.
    
  
  

Escorts & Camps

• Escorts and prisoners will now have a bulletin board entry at the nearest bulletin board, requesting assistance. The bulletin board entry will tell you exactly where the escort or prisoner is.
  
• All camp types have had a revamp. Their look is much different.
  
• Camps can no longer spawn partially inside houses. If any part of the camp, or the monsters spawned with the camp, are part of a house region, the camp will try respawn elsewhere.
  
• Overall, the spawn system for camps is much better. Camps will not spawn if there are too many things blocking them. For the most part, this will eliminate any spawning inside mountains or on water. It is still possible they can spawn very close to these things, which results in perhaps an orc or two getting stuck in the mountain. Although not impossible to completely eliminate this happening, the checks required would either need to be very specific, or camps would struggle to find anywhere to spawn at all (especially in areas with lots of houses).
  
• A new type of camp has been added, the evil mage towerwhich spawns in T2A.
  
  • This spawns with around 6 mages, regular and lords.
    
  • A prisoner is spawned on the roof, who is chained up and can only be released when the boss mage is dead.
    
  • The boss mage is about 4 times stronger than an evil mage lord. He just has more hit points.
    
  • The boss also has a small chance of dropping: a blood tile (random type) or blood red sandals (currently only hue 1654).
    
  • If the prisoner is not rescued within 60 minutes, the camp will despawn. The camp will spawn once per day, randomly from 12pm EST until 12am EST.
    
  • Since this is the only escort/prisoner type that spawns in T2A, it will be obvious when it has spawned by checking the bulletin boards.
    
    

Bulletin/Bounty Boards

• Entries for bounties and bulletin messages are now seperate. There will be a bounty board and a bulletin board at each bank.
  
• Bulletin messages will automatically clean themselves up after a week.
  

Bestiary

• For those who have not noticed, we now have a Bestiary detailing every monster type in game. This contains info regarding taming values, spawning stats/skill and loot of every monster/animal in the game. It is available under the MyUOLostLands tab on the front page. An index is included, and monster/animaltypes are searchable through the same search as MyUOLL.
  

IRC Bot

• A new bot will join the IRC channel and give information about a few things. The bot is in the server scripts so information can be passed directly and announce statisticsin real time.At the moment the bot is still very basic. The current commands are:
  
  • !help: lists commands
    
  • !status: Returns the shard online count and uptime, and a few other stats.
    
  • !events: Tells you the days/hours/minutes until the next event. If not on the same day, also tells you the exact day/time of it.
    
  • The bot will announce when signups to events start.
    
    

Fixes

• Runebooks now show their label on single click again.
  
• The Bag Ball start timer has been fixed, the game was opening but signups only lasted 30 seconds (left in from debugging). It is now 10 minutes.
  

[yakka]

looks good, but bestiary is missing a couple ophids that I noticed quick

[Jack]

Cheers, shoot me a message on here or IRC with anything you notice missing, and I will add them in. I should have mentioned that the loot tables for monsters are still work in progress and not actually visible yet.

[Kahlua]

Nice updates! Much appreciated