News & patch notes

Deeds count when they happened

• Saga I now recognizes an early warren-chief kill. If you slew the chief before Chapter III opened, the permanent Chief of the Warren feat proves the deed was yours. The chapter catches up on its own; no respawned chief is owed.
• Gossip cites now keep their sentence together. A place and its age read as ordinary prose—“on Snowy Ridge, earlier today”—and quoted speech begins like speech, not a lower-case template splice.

The first safeguard is within reach

• A first embermark now costs about one ordinary writ's silver payout through level 20. The asking value is 130 at level 1, 250 at 5, 400 at 10 and 700 at 20. Banking several still grows dearer, so preparation remains a choice rather than a free stack of returns.
• Coldhollow's old drains are underground in fact as well as prose. Rooms 1820–1832 no longer report sky or surface weather through their brick vaults.
• Crag kites attack with hooked beaks. They no longer inherit an invisible axe and its combat wording.

The dark asks for preparation

• Ordinary torches and lanterns now work as travel gear. Hold one with flint and steel and LIGHT TORCH or LIGHT LANTERN; SNUFF banks what fuel remains. Torches burn down, while a dry lantern consumes a flask of lamp oil the next time it is kindled.
• Light survives the things a real inventory survives. Snuffed fuel and a burning lamp's deadline persist through reloads, and an exhausted torch cannot quietly refill itself.

The shrine and stable keep honest accounts

• The Flame now weighs promissory notes at face value. Notes, loose silver and valuable goods laid together all count toward an embermark without counting the same note twice.
• Bel Harrow keeps both moor ponies and grey coursers available. Buying a mount no longer removes that choice from every later traveler, and her answers now point to SHOP for the yard's current stock.
• Coldhollow's town side now signs the way back through its west gate. Ambient townsfolk also name the person acting instead of beginning with a stray pronoun whose owner never arrived.

The high world has a truthful shape

• Levels thirty-one through one hundred now have four source-backed routes. Hallward is a finite High Shelves capstone; the Singing Descent is Hammerdeep's separate underroad; Marchhold is one vertically banded institution; and Crownward is the genuinely contiguous Wyrmshoulder-to-Crack ladder. The Roads Beyond Thirty guide names shipped rooms, real resident help, local consequences and every place the geography requires a return to a surface hub.
• Level seventy-nine is now explicit rather than papered over. Ash Perch ends at seventy-eight and Root Hang begins at eighty. Ledger Stone is a staffed interval for passage, preparation, freight and return practice—not a fabricated creature population added to make a table continuous.
• Existing topology and populations remain intact. No travel exit was rewritten, no quiet trunk became a combat belt, and no legacy creature was relocated. The atlas now labels the Singing Muster, March Relief Stable, Crownward Muster and Last Road stations on the same geographic plates as their hunting branches.

The last road has people in it

• Twenty-one new NPC-engine residents staff the high thresholds. Clerks, surgeons, factors, porters, couriers and trail walkers have authored local questions, multiple visible behaviors, persistent memory reactions and concrete work. They join Edda Coll, Osric Farrow, Yarrow Fenn, Ilma Cardew, Sella Oakmantle and Dole Harrow instead of replacing those histories.
• Nine spawn-empty rooms are now protected institutions. The Singing Muster, Crownward Muster, six Wyrmcrown returns and Marchhold Relief Stable provide witnessed departure, healing, proof custody and named search duty. The Wyrmcrown still has no bank, chapel or town, and Survey Return remains its only regional waking fire.
• Eight new desks provide stable local work without flattening the bosses. The Choirmaster, Graven Sexton, Castellan, Gilded Provost, Blind Vigilant, Pin Anchorite, First-Present, Undercount and Firstforged remain singular culminations, never ordinary repeatable quotas.

Closures reach the shelf

• Two high-road freight relays move on the world clock. Rurik Bale changes from pack animal to porters, sledge and chain cradle on the Crownward ascent; Eryn Ledger serves the lower stations. Heavy snow, blizzard, storm fronts and cold snaps can hold either service with a visible reason.
• Six supply-sensitive markets turn those movements into consequences. A relay delivery fills imports and eases their prices. A missed relay removes imports; a closure leaves local and emergency stock, raises prices and increases offers for scarce road goods. SHOP explains the cause.
• Fourteen fixed objects preserve the route's institutional memory. Return boards, closure drums, proof racks, relief records and the future ecology docket make lore inspectable in rooms. Stormmantle hounds, oathplate bailiffs, chainmidges and nullglass remoras remain reviewed future leads, not surprise live spawns.

The world after the first road

• Levels sixteen through thirty now have three coherent journeys. The mountain road descends Hollowrun and the Deep Delvings toward Hammerdeep; the coast road works Brinemoot and the Reaver Skerries before returning to the Kittiwake for Kingsholm; the sunward road follows Southmere and Millharrow to Aldermouth, with Marchhold as its hard eastern fork. The Three Roads After Fifteen guide names every band, staffed marker, return point and place where a nearby room is actually later country.
• ROUTES MOUNTAIN, ROUTES COAST, and ROUTES SUNWARD read those journeys from the live room graph. They show the real markers and resident guides alongside road mileage, transport and hunting signs. Kingsholm remains an island: the scheduled Kittiwake is its only mainland connection, never a disguised footbridge.
• Saga III and the opening of Saga IV now name the country around them. Hollowrun, the Delvings and Hammerdeep make the mountain account legible; the Skerries return to Brinemoot's packet quay before the Drowned Court; the sunward towns show what those old conflicts put at risk without becoming mandatory campaign detours.

The frontier has people in it

• Twenty-two new residents make the thin regions work. Flumewarden Sella Rook, Truce-Warden Asa Gull, Doorward Ilyen Snowglass, Muster Clerk Ada Mere and their healers, surveyors, factors, chaplains and trail walkers remember prior encounters, answer specific local questions, perform visible work and connect field evidence to law, rescue and trade.
• Six dependable local desks cover the missing middle. Hollowrun, the Skerries, the High Shelves, Marchhold, Millharrow and Aldermouth now issue work appropriate to their ground. Named apexes and conditional Road-to-Sea creatures stay out of ordinary quotas; Aldermouth relies on fishing, forage, locks and relief work instead of asking a traveler to wait for luck.
• Four protected frontier havens make retreat a real system. The Falls Foot, Far Pans' Edge, Rimefield Gate and Marchhold Muster Green have creature-free recovery space, route tokens, closure slates, healing and named help. Runmede, Millharrow and Aldermouth also have their own regional hearts and resting places now.

A closure costs something

• Three freight services now move on the world clock. Iven Bronzebell's copper-bell train serves the mountain, Olin Waveknot moves coast freight by sledge and packet, and Tolla Quill's red-ledger convoy joins the southern towns to Marchhold.
• Six frontier markets answer those arrivals. A delivered train fills named imports and eases prices. Storms, cold snaps and severe weather can hold a leg closed; imports then vanish, local or emergency substitutes appear, scarce goods earn higher offers, and SHOP tells you exactly why.
• Thirteen fixed ledgers, charts and public boards let rooms tell the same truth. Read how a mine claim becomes rescue precedence, how seed debt changes a fair, why a missing relief barge alters shelves, and where topology compresses miles, ice or a ferry voyage.

The first fifteen have a road

• New characters now enter the Hearth equipped for their calling. Each profession receives an appropriate weapon or implement, with shields, ammunition and practical tools issued where the work calls for them.
• ROUTES and ROADS turn the room map into a traveler's atlas. The command names the road underfoot, its mileage and transport, the nearest access, its endpoints and any signed hunting ranges without pretending every quiet trunk road is a hunting ground.
• The climb from first step to fifteenth season is now written as a journey. The Old Drains and Frostspine Warren lead through Coldhollow's outwall toward Emberford, the Wether Fells, Highreach, the Old Emberrun pockets and the Hollowrun flumes. The First Fifteen guide records the route without turning discovery into a checklist.

Every creature belongs somewhere

• ASSESS reads ecology, not just danger. A careful traveler can identify a creature's family, habitats, signs, local use and the named witness who understands the proof it leaves behind.
• Proof can enter the local economy. Skinning carries field provenance with the trophy; show it to the right witness and a first authentication raises its value and records the report. Named wardens, fishers, keepers and tradespeople now answer the corresponding field topics in their own voices.
• Rare appearances are no longer mistaken for routine work. Creatures that emerge only with weather, tide, season or an event are excluded from ordinary cull and skin postings, while explicit named commissions remain possible.

One atlas, one geography

• The public maps and the traversable world now tell the same story. Coldhollow stands in the frigid north; Emberford, Runmede, Southmere, Millharrow and Aldermouth descend into progressively warmer country; Kingsholm remains an offshore destination reached by packet rather than an impossible footpath. All seventeen atlas regions now have paired regional maps and coverage records on the world atlas.
• Three working interiors now anchor the road economy. Emberford's Ford Compact Registry, Lanternwatch's Long Hall and Trade Post, and Thornfold's Reeve's Counter and Hearthhouse give law, tolls, freight and local memory rooms in which to live.

• What the weather did to you now shows on a LOOK. Soaked clothes, snow caked on shoulders and hood, a face wrung out with sweat; the state itself is written into a traveler's appearance (and the mirror's), not just announced in the moment it happens.
• The frozen north's cruelest line stopped being crowded out. A soaked traveler in frigid air is meant to feel their clothes stiffen and sheet with frost under a steady snowfall, the snow kept talking over it. Each condition now waits its own turn, and the longest-waiting speaks.

One sky, many lands

• Weather is geographic now. One front crosses the Hearth, but each land reads it through its own climate. Under the Frostspine (Coldhollow, the Pale Steps, the Wyrmcrown), rain never falls: what the south takes as rain arrives as snow, and the fog itself freezes. The mountain shoulder and the floe coast (Lanternwatch, Brinemoot, the Marchhold) keep hard winters and take honest rain only in their brief summers. South of the hills (Emberford, Runmede, the Thawlands, Kingsholm), the seasons deal fairly: spring rain, sweating summer days, snow when winter earns it.
• Walk a storm across the map and watch it change its mind. The onset lines, the ambient weather and room descriptions; all of it now speaks in the register of the land you stand in, and a shift the south can feel is silent where the north reads both skies the same.
• WEATHER answers for where you stand: and in the far north it has stopped swearing it is a summer day beside the year-round snow. The cold there pays the calendar no mind, and now says so.

The weather touches you now

• Rain gets in. Stand in it and it works past collar and cuff: damp, then wet through, then soaked to the skin, with the room able to see it stream off you. Shelter and dry skies wring you back out again.
• Snow rides along. It dusts, builds, and finally cakes head to heel: and stepping indoors carrying it melts it down your back in a cold trickle. In the frigid north a soaked traveler's clothes stiffen and sheet with frost.
• Southern heat draws sweat. A bright summer day on the green builds from a flush to drenched-and-wrung-out; night, cloud, and a roof all give relief. None of it costs you anything but dignity. The world is just keeping honest score.

Also since the lodge opened

• The mob-country gates live now. Pick or unlock a wild gate: the lychgate, the crypt, the winze, the adit, the deep road, and the land relocks it behind you on its own clock; every relocking gate's key now drops from the creatures of its own ground, so the way out is never picked twice. Entry is level-scaled; exits are cheap.
• Six more true beasts skin clean: ravens, gulls, and their kin leave honest pelts and feathers now, and a corpse mid-skinning no longer vanishes out from under the knife.
• The talk of the land stays true to the scene. The idle voices of the world ( taverns, squares, wild places) no longer imagine dust and sun-baked stone over Coldhollow's snow. What they say now answers to what you can see.

The Verderers take the ground

• A fourth guild keeps a hall now. West of Emberford's north gate, where the town fence gives out, the Verderers keep a lodge for the ranger's trade, with a blazing yard, a long hall, a drying shed, and a kennel run. The rail gate stands open; walk in.
• The oath costs what every hall costs: level 5, 1,000 silver to be written in, 150 a week after, and Warden Hesta Crane turns the page so you can read what you are agreeing to. One guild to a life, as ever.
• One track, THE TRAILS. Cut counted blazes into the yard's waymark post (BLAZE, two beats to a set), call the morning's laid sign under Trailmaster Aldous Fenn's eye; from the eighth rank comes the cull: true beasts near your own measure, the kind that leave a pelt. Never people. Never the restless dead; that office belongs to the Hearthwardens, and the lodge does not poach it.
• Every Trails rank reads as extra Survival behind the FORAGE, SKIN and TRACK rolls, the trade you already work, sharpened. The lodge opens no gates that training didn't; it steadies the hand that walks through them.
• At rank ten, the Kennel Right. Kennelmistress Tilda Brock breeds to the trail, not the parlor: a fell brach, a moor goshawk, a black-masked ferret. Wardens of the tenth rank buy from the run; everyone else looks through the hurdles, and no offense meant by it. Mastery at twenty is the title the Verderer.
• HELP GUILD and HELP BLAZE carry the whole of it, and a Hearthwarden's mastery now shows in the Guild titles where it always belonged.

The first hour, smoothed

• The town square's board answers now. The dead notices are still there. They were posted fair, but LOOK BOARD and READ BOARD finally work, and the living word gets pinned over them: town notes, and the news the town is telling.
• GO CHAPEL works on Chapel Street. The chapel's door answered only to TEMPLE; it answers to both words now, and the street says so.
• Market Row is written on the way in. The awning-way off the square's east side says GO MARKET now, and the newcomer hints type the road out for you: south to the chapel, east to the row, keystroke by keystroke.

The spell book, rebound

• Every working in all thirteen catalogues now carries this world's own name. Lesser Breath opens with Spiritshawl; Wizard's Wheel answers with Needle Spark, Riverbolt, and Rime Lance; Bards hold The Rope Round and The Muster; Empaths close flesh, mend limbs, and eventually reach Deep Renewal. The catalogues themselves run from Lesser Breath to the found magic of the Deep Wheel.
• Catalogue codes are addresses, not a progression chart. Public commands use a tradition block with a deliberately shuffled suffix—PREPARE 2148, for example— while SPELLS separately reports required study and mana. Saved pre-launch macros continue to resolve through a private compatibility layer.
• The wiki's profession pages and magic guide speak the new names everywhere.

A watch on the door

• A door-warden now reads every name at the gate: a name that belongs in a tavern brawl and not on a birth record is simply refused.
• Words that have no place here are masked where they are said: in the square, in whispers, on boards and in the mail, and each masking is set before the keepers for review. The reviewed can be answered, up to and including the ban.

The small print grew up

• Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy now stand behind every new account. plain-language, honestly dated, with an age-and-terms gate at signup. The telnet connect banner names them too, so no road into the world misses the notice.

Sharper words for old edges

• The pause after a swing is recovery now: [Recovery: 4s] in the fight, RECOVERY to check it, and the readouts agree.
• The resolved result is the Score; the whirlwind of blows is FLURRY.

Back somebody else's fight

• BET <silver> ON <fighter> lays a wager on a bout you are not in; WAGER does the same, and BET on its own reads back what you have riding. Everyone who backed the winner splits what the losers laid down, share for share with what they risked, less the ring's tenth. No house, no odds, nobody to argue with about the price: the pot is exactly what the room put into it.
• The book closes the moment steel lands. You have until the first blow to make up your mind; after that you are watching, not betting. And no fighter bets on their own bout. Backing yourself is just a bigger stake, and backing the other one is selling the fight.
• The book runs at the Ring and nowhere else. If nobody backed the winner, or the bout ends with nothing decided, it voids and every purse goes home. Log out in the middle and your silver is waiting the next time you walk in.

The Tallyman counts duels now

• A new column in the ledger, duels won, with marks at one, ten and fifty: The First Yield, Ten Yields, and Fifty Yields, which carries the title the Duelist. Winners only; yielding costs you nothing but the bout. It counts what you have done, and it does not rank you against anybody. The taverns are still the only place the world keeps score.

A horse at the gate

• Out through Coldhollow's town gate and south along the wall is Bel Harrow's stable yard: twelve stalls, four of them occupied, and a hostler of thirty years who will not sell you more horse than you can ride. A shaggy moor pony is 600 silver, a long-legged grey courser is 2,200. ASK BEL ABOUT HORSES if you want her opinion; she has one, and it is short.
• MOUNT to get up, DISMOUNT to get down. The animal is yours the way a pet is yours: bought once, chalked on the post, and still standing there tomorrow.
• What a horse buys you is the road, not the step. Walking room to room was always free and still is. What a mount shortens is TRAVEL, and the long hauls get noticeably shorter for it. The pony is quick and the grey is quicker. Ice is still ice, mind: glaze slows a rider exactly as much as it slows a walker, and no purse buys your way across it.
• She will not climb, will not swim, and will not come indoors. Get down and she waits for you.
• STABLE leaves her in the hostler's care and STABLE OUT collects her; but she is a real animal in a real stall, so she is in that yard when you come back, not whichever town you happen to be standing in. Oats, a currycomb and a riding blanket are on the shelf besides.

Name your opponent. Make them say yes.

• DUEL <player> offers a duel to someone standing with you; the duel exists only when both of you have spoken it. From that word every art in the game opens between the pair: steel, spell, and dirty trick alike, and against no one else. DUEL DECLINE refuses, DUEL alone shows where you stand.
• It ends at the yield, never the grave: the blow that would kill instead leaves your opponent beaten, alive, and on their feet, or they YIELD first. Nothing changes hands that wasn't staked: no experience, no loot, no death. The wounds are real, though. The healers thank you for your custom.
• The walls keep their peace: no challenges inside a sanctuary, and a bout on the road pauses at the gate. Five quiet minutes and the duel lapses with no winner. The polite ending for a vanished opponent. And a third blade cutting in is not part of the bargain: that blow is as real as it ever was.

Silver on the line

• DUEL <player> STAKE <amount> puts a purse on it. The answer must name the same number. The stake is part of the consent, and both purses go into escrow the moment the duel is struck. Winner takes the lot, at the yield or the deciding blow.
• A lapsed bout hands every coin back, and a stake orphaned by a disconnect goes home the moment you next touch the ring's business. The ring holds what the ring is owed, never more.

The Ring

• South off the Frozen Creek Crossing on the trail outside Coldhollow, a birchstand hides a floor of stamped earth. Maud Kettle keeps the gate with ledger, bell, and whetstone, and will tell you exactly how it works: ASK MAUD ABOUT RULES, or about stakes, or about the kettle.
• Fight on her floor and the gallery roars. Win there and the taverns hear of it: word of a duel walks the gossip ring like any other legend. Ask a talkative local ABOUT the winner and see what the world knows.

The law minds the square

• Hurling area magic around a watched town square with no lawful target climbs the same ladder as assault: a warning the first time, WANTED the second. Defending the town when something crawls over the wall is, as ever, exempt.

Sharper edges

• When a spell lands on you, you now see it happen to you in your own person, every rider and every hit. A duel's victim used to catch some of it only from the room's point of view, or not at all.
• A hex that knocks the kit from your hands now leaves it properly at your feet, marked as yours, there to be picked back up, and swept away in time like anything else left in the road. Nothing dropped by violence lies about forever anymore.
• Phoenix Sagas now introduces itself properly to the MUD directories: listing sites that speak the crawlers' protocol get the server's name, ports, and a live player count. Tell your friends the old way; the directories find us the new one.

The last two doors on the Crown

• The Hang (levels 80–89): a district of the deep Wyrmcrown hung under the Pin, lit in exactly two rooms: one because Sella pays for the oil, one because something else pays for that one. Everything between is dark on purpose. The people who live in it surrendered their lamps at a door, and they can hear exactly where you are.
• The Crack (levels 89–100): the wound the Chaining left, open air full of standing radiance with the chain going home down the middle of it. Hanging terraces, a forgeyard three thousand years into its last shift, and above the final stair, the Firstforged, level one hundred, the makers' first work and last sentry. No order to stand down has ever come.
• That is the whole ladder. The climb that begins at level one now ends at one hundred, and there is no gap anywhere on the way up.

Go home. Tell them it holds.

• Saga Arc VII: The Grain and the Eye closes the campaign spine over the new deep. Its last step is not a fight. Walk down past everything with a name and stand at the Eye, and see for yourself what the mountain has been holding all this time.
• Finish, and the world has a word for you: the Witness. The arcs before it are all still open, and SAGA always knows your next step.

The castle that was never relieved

• The Marchhold stands on the Emberrun's east bank: ferry across, east along the Wrackline to the Old Mooring Stones, then NORTH up ninety-one steps. The garrison held nine winters past the Sundering, died at its stations in perfect order, and has held them ever since.
• One castle, seven hunting grounds, levels 26–47, banded floor by floor: orchard to walls to hall to towers to crypt. When the floor changes, the band changes. The dungeons are dark; bring lanterns.
• Hesper Cole, the March-Clerk, keeps the Muster Green below the south face: tasks, gossip, a postable board, and a ledger of three hundred twenty years of wages owed to a dead garrison. Fall anywhere inside and you wake at her green, in her ledger.
• The house enforces order, not territory: walk the aisles, wipe your feet, touch nothing, and much of it merely watches. And the Toll swears a drowned gate opens into the bluff somewhere off the mooring stones, at the bottom of a dive nobody sober attempts. The Toll, notably, does not swim. Strong swimmers with good steel draw their own conclusions.

The Hearthwardens take their oaths

• The third guild is the clerics'. Behind the Coldhollow chapel's vestry the Hearthwardens keep a chapter house; the Prior takes oaths at the door; JOIN, and mind the terms: one guild to a life.
• Their craft is CENSE: counted censing sets over the brazier, the slow office of the fire, learned rank by rank the way the warriors learned the pell. The deepest ranks are said to bless the hands themselves.

Word travels

• Close a saga arc or earn a feat worth telling, and the taverns hear of it. news walks ring to ring, town to town, at the speed of talk. Rumors pass the town gates now, too, instead of dying politely at the wall.
• Ask a talkative local ABOUT a name: ASK KEEPER ABOUT <player>, and hear exactly as much as the world has heard so far. Fame arrives on foot. So does infamy.

The mews is fully staffed

• Posy Underbough's tower on Tallow Lane now keeps eight companions, each one of a kind: mere-bred hound pups, barn kittens, a raven, an otter, and two new small wonders, a harvest mouse who rides in whatever pocket you offer her, and a dun wren for a shoulder.
• Every animal in the tower knows its act and performs on request, buyer or browser alike: SPEAK a pup, PLAY a kitten, TOSS for the otter, PEEK the mouse, TUNE the wren. The raven takes no requests. She repeats what she overhears, when it suits her. The acts deepen for an owner the animal has come to love.
• PERCH a small companion on your shoulder and keep both hands; the mouse needs no basket at all. Sold is sold: when a pup finds a keeper, that pup leaves the listing for good.

Quieter housekeeping

• The reeves stand at their housing desks in both towns again, and HOUSE LIST answers properly.
• Hit points come from Fitness, and only Fitness. Every path that recomputes your pools now agrees on that arithmetic.
• The finders' chest in the Coldhollow square is part of the square; GET tells you so now, instead of letting the chest wander off.
• The Old Mooring Stones remember all three of their roads: ferry west, castle stair north, wrack-coast east.
• Twenty stale HELP topics were trued against the running game, and HELP grew COOK, FLETCH, and TRACK. The wiki caught up everywhere it had fallen behind.

Ten skills went away, and you lost nothing

• The training sheet carried ten skills that no part of the world ever read. nine lore names beyond the four elemental domains, and a row for the circle nobody teaches. They were already unbuyable, so no character ever spent a point on one, but they made the sheet look deeper than it was. They are gone. Every skill you can now see is a skill something in the world actually consults.
• The rule from here: a lore earns a place on the sheet only when a working reads it. Grave Lore remains because multiple Sorcerer workings already use it, even while ordinary trainers keep that study closed.

The swing tells you what you need, and no more

• Brief combat readouts print the one number that matters: [Score +82]. Scores above 90 land; the distance from 90 shows what armor, stance, or training would have needed to cover.
• If you are the sort who weighs one blade against another, the terms are still yours for the asking. SET COMBATMATH FULL spells them out: Attack 143 - Guard 86 + Matchup 25 + Fortune 70 = Score +152. Warding magic uses Focus and Resolve, so the same readable pattern carries from a sword stroke into a spell.
• SET is new, and it is yours: type it alone to see every preference you have, and it travels with your character.

Take it all in one go

• GET ALL sweeps the ground: the whole pile, in order, until your hands run out. EMPTY <container> INTO <container> pours one into another without the trip through your hands, and STASH ALL puts the sweep straight into your pack.
• The parser stopped being fussy about names. A snow-hare answers to hare, and anything the world calls by an adjective answers to that adjective.

Nothing disappears because your hands were full

• A reward, a purchase, a pelt off a kill, a note from a sale. When your hands were full, these used to arrive somewhere you could not see. Now they land at your feet and say so, every time, from every direction they can come.
• And what you earned stays yours: goods that arrive this way are no longer stamped for the sweepers.

Two chains, an arc, and a warren

• The Griefswan's Reckoning: the first authored quest chain in the world, six beats long, and it remembers what you did at each one.
• Saga Arc VI: The Winze and the Waking joins the campaign spine, and Thinning the Frostspine Warren gives the Adventurer's Guild a cull worth taking.
• The Adventurer's Guild registry is finished: writs are posted at a real desk by a real clerk, rescue charges walk home to the town they came from rather than back into the cage, and a snow hare is no longer mistaken for somebody's captor.

Quieter housekeeping

• Mail carries a rate limit and a retention window, and the boards match authors properly, so a name is harder to wear that is not yours.

The book is whole

• The complete authored library across all thirteen catalogues is castable, including the Deep Wheel no inn teaches and found items alone normally reach.
• Catalogue codes are now addresses. Their suffixes are shuffled and reveal neither study requirement nor mana. SPELLS lists every circle available to you and prints code, ranks, cost, reach, and description as separate facts.
• Each circle has its own authored progression rather than an unbroken “first N entries” ladder. The catalogue stays convenient for commands and macros without dictating balance.
• Most wards reach a companion. Name them. INCANT 2148 wards you; INCANT 2148 Bruiser wards Bruiser. It rides the shared circles rather than the profession-only ones, so a Warrior who trained Lesser Breath can ward the party too. What it costs: a ward you lay on somebody else runs a flat twenty minutes at base strength, with none of your ranks behind it. Warding a companion is always worth doing and never better than warding yourself.
• Healing is the exception that proves the rule: repair workings are self-directed. An Empath mends somebody else with BEAR, removing the injury as borrowed burden and paying for it in health, stamina, capacity, and recovery.
• Some hostile workings produce stepped control outcomes rather than scaling only raw damage, giving Sorcerers and support casters reasons to shape the room instead of racing one damage line.
• Area spells no longer sweep an unbounded room. One cast catches three, plus one more for every 50 points of Attunement bonus, so the attunement disciplines pay for themselves, and the rest of the room slips the working. The game tells you when the cap bit.
• 3146 Weavesight reads what a thing is carrying before you decide to trust it.

Eleven guides, one per profession

• The player wiki now carries a full guide for each of the eleven: what you are good at, what you will never be good at, which circles you may learn, what to train and when, and the mistakes the profession invites you to make.
• They are blunt about the bad news, which is the point of them. Where a profession has no good answer to something, its guide says so instead of selling you the class.

A second town takes deeds

• Kiln Bank, north up the stair from Emberford's Quays, and it is Coldhollow's inverse on purpose. Coldhollow lost its people, so the reeve will nearly press a cottage on you at 12,000. Emberford is winning: the river works, the furnaces upriver want feeding, and everything that feeds them crosses its quays. So five houses above the flood mark cost 25,000 to 100,000 silver and have a waiting list against them.
• What you are paying for is the flood mark. Everything below it went in the flood year; everything above it never had to be rebuilt. Wharfinger Adela Cutts keeps the register and the list, and has been offered eleven hundred silver to lose it.
• Cabinetmaker Osric Yarrow works the bank cistern, selling the same catalogue at the same prices as Bess Trewin in Coldhollow, identical on purpose, since differing ones would turn two towns into an arbitrage. He is also the man who hung doors that Trewin says "lives in Emberford now and is not coming back for one door." He was born in Coldhollow. He left when the work did.
• You may hold one house per town, so a Coldhollow cottage and an Emberford house at the same time is allowed. Sign back the one you hold in a town before taking on another there.

Make it yours

• HOUSE DECOR dresses the room you are standing in out of the joiner's pattern-book, and the paragraph becomes part of the room. Visitors read it too. HOUSE SCENT gives the room a smell that breathes instead of sitting there. Both are per room and owner-only, and both leave with the house when you sign it back.
• The hearth is a real fire. LIGHT feeds a held firewood bundle into a placed hearth: two hours a bundle, banked up to eight, and SNUFF puts it out. A lit hearth shows under LOOK, steady or burned down to embers, and a warm room rests everyone recovering in it a little better. Trewin sells the bundles at 60 silver.
• Furniture you placed no longer disappears with the session that placed it.

Three places with nothing in them

• The First Hollow, west off Snow-Laden Bend at Coldhollow's north edge: seventeen rooms of the old Ore Road alignment, the hollow-way it wore into the ground, and the frozen supply camp it served. There is a root cellar down there that is warm when nothing should be. No creatures, no townsfolk, no items, no keys, and no explanation.
• The High Cairn, west off the High Moor's curricks above the Wether Fells: nine rooms of pre-shepherd cairn line and the turf of a Long Winter village that kept one shared fire. The highest cairn keeps an east face bare of snow and a dished top stone the size of a place something stood. Nothing up there will tell you what.
• The Birch Stand, west off Runmede's Leaning Wall: six rooms, whistling at the treeline, three stands whose north loops forever, and a gap you find by reading rather than by walking. At the middle of a wood full of music there is a green that is perfectly silent, and there is a fourth stand in a three-stand wood. The musician is never named.
• Smaller wonders, too: four tavern windowsills (Coldhollow, Emberford, Runmede, Kingsholm), each holding a copper coin and a candle-stub, with nothing anywhere naming who left them. Emberford's well-head gained the Council of Embers plaque, which records that there was one objection and does not record whose.

Every creature fights at its own weight

• A balance audit found that authored creature stats had been dead data for a long time. the engine was overriding all of them with a synthetic floor, which is how drain rats came to hit like veterans with three hit points between them. All 202 creatures are now stat-matched on a real scale, family by family, each with its own natural weapon.
• The floor still catches content that has no stats, but only where a stat is genuinely missing instead of over the top of the whole world.
• Thirty-three creature spell lists were drawn fresh from the completed catalog, so what casts at you is chosen from the same book you learn from.
• Claws, fangs and hooves read as claws, fangs and hooves.

Your pet finds its own words

• What a creature does when you touch it is authored content now, rather than five rungs of prose welded into the engine, so it can be written and changed like any other line, and a creature with a script of its own answers in character first.
• Generated lines stopped inventing your gender. A pet's line about its owner resolves per reader now, so nobody is told "watching over him" about somebody who is not.
• Generated lines also stopped expiring on a clock. Variety used to drain away on a timer and refill only when the machine happened to be free, which made a pet worse the longer it went unattended. A line now stays until something better displaces it, or until a builder retires it.

Smaller mercies

• The guild halls were unjoinable. Every character read as level 1 at the door whatever their real level, because a stale value was overwriting the true one, so both guildmasters turned everyone away as green, the pitches they make were banded off the same dead read, and writs paid level-1 rates no matter who redeemed them. Fixed at the source, so all four stopped at once.
• DROP works on what is in your hand again. It had stopped resolving held items entirely. A resident spent ninety minutes trying to drop a shield that GLANCE could plainly see in their right hand.
• An emptied satchel stays a satchel. Emptying a container and logging out used to write it back with no capacity at all, so STASH answered "There isn't enough room" forever and you could not see inside it. Characters already stuck this way are repaired on sign-in.
• BUY says so when your hands are full and the goods land at your feet, instead of letting you walk off without what you paid for.
• TRAVEL LOCKSMITH routes to the shop rather than to the locksmith. A wandering tradesperson used to drag the destination around the square on their stroll, and the route re-reckoned every step, so you never caught up.
• HUG and KISS want a willing receiver. "You hug a weary traveller" was the entire interaction with a stranger on the road; they now land on other players, on tame companions, and on anyone an author has opted in, and refuse in words otherwise. Every other social is untouched.
• Eight townsfolk who had been standing there with nothing to say (Bess Trewin, Halvard Tamm, Osric Yarrow, Adela Cutts, Juno Kell, Ordric Sale, Ilma Cardew and Yarrow Fenn) have lives of their own now.
• A room's answer to your command is no longer mistaken for your own echo, so the townsperson who reacts to a FEED and the pet that answers a TALK reach you as narration, the way everything else in the room does.
• The browser client hid its scrollbars. Every pane still scrolls by wheel, touch and keyboard. There is simply no grey bar eating the width any more.

A house on the Shuttered Row

• Coldhollow lost its people, and the reeve has been holding their deeds ever since. Eight of those homes are now yours to take on: four cottages at 12,000 silver, three two-room houses at 30,000, and the factor's three-room house at 60,000, and they are bought outright. One price, no rent, no term, and nothing that can take a house off you for being away. Start with HOUSE LIST at Reeve Halvard Tamm's office, west off Shuttered Lane.
• Your front door answers to the register, not to a key. There is no key anywhere in the world that opens somebody's home, and a HOUSE GUEST can be un-invited in a way a key that outlives a resale never could.
• What you set down on your own floor stays there. Nothing sweeps a house, and nothing you own is destroyed by a command you can type once.

Furnish it

• A room furnishes by slot: hearth, bed, table, seat, storage, floor, wall, light, one piece each, so every purchase is a decision about what the room is going to be. PLACE a new piece into a slot that's taken and the old one comes back to your hands.
• A chair is a real chair: SIT AT it and a good settle actually rests you. A chest is a real chest, and what's inside it costs nothing against the floor.
• Joiner Bess Trewin works a handcart by the row's well, making what she sells out of the timber of the three houses that came down before she got there. Eleven pieces, 250 to 3,600 silver, covering every slot.

The trophy board

• A ninth slot, and the reason for all the rest: hang things on it. The first thing you ever killed, or something a friend gave you, and underneath them a strip of lead engraved with your deeds, cut from your feats and your titles.
• Visitors read the plate as it was last cut, the way a plate on a wall works. Standing in front of it yourself cuts it fresh.

The Warriors' Guild opens its yard

• A second guild, in plain sight off the Lantern Yard at Lanternwatch on the Ore Road: pell yard, arms room, long bench, armoury. Guildmaster Ordric Sale tells applicants what it costs before he tells them what it gives; Armsmaster Juno Kell has an "again" the hall insists has eleven distinct meanings.
• THE FORMS: pell work, then the drill, then real bouts. Its ranks read as extra ranks of whatever weapon is actually in your hands, so every swing you take afterward is better for the yard time.
• A guild trains its own trade, so JOIN now asks what you are at joining only, so anyone already sworn keeps their standing. GUILD works out which hall you are standing in and answers for that one.

Three more miles of the Wyrmcrown

• The level ceiling moves from 50 to 78: a hundred rooms in three bands, each one opened by the band below it and not one of them by a key.
• The Ramparts (50–58): a scale-slide bares the gatewatch's benchmark steps, and the Black Stair climbs bare warm stone past the sealed watch to the Aerie Sill, where the realm finally stands in sight of the Perch. The Vigil of the Day are camped up there waiting, and the Blind Vigilant is at the end of it.
• The Underchain (58–68): down the ladder the Gilded left unattended when their Provost fell: a dig whose lamps are still burning because nobody living was told to put them out, the First Wyrm's chain, and the pin it is anchored to. Bring a lantern. Most of it is dark, and the lit stretches are lit because somebody down there is paying for the oil.
• The Perch (68–78): the gulf gets crossed at last, on the gatewatch's own rigging, because the heat coming off it has started going slack between waves. The Attained have been standing in that warmth for forty-one years holding a note that has not stopped. The Roost at the top is empty, and it stays empty.
• Every band keeps a waystation with a fire, a board, and somebody worth asking. Lanternkeeper Osric Farrow, Pitmaster Yarrow Fenn, and Ilma Cardew, who crossed, worked out what she was looking at, and walked back down to keep a fire for whoever came next.

The saga runs the whole ladder

• The campaign grew from one arc to five, warren to Crown: The Warren Beneath the Climb, The Roads South, The Ore Road, The Sealed Gate, and The Crown and the Day. They come strictly in order, each closing on its band's own apex, and everything past the one you're in stays ??? until you get there. Type SAGA.
• Arc I is untouched, so every hero partway through it keeps their exact place. Closing an arc marks you permanently: Wayfarer, the Deep-Delver, Gatefinder, Wyrmcrowned.

The Tallyman keeps the count

• Feats go from 6 to 40. Eleven lifetime columns now keep their own tally: kills, skins, catches, forages, meals, forgings, locks, quests, posts, deaths, raisings, with marks cut at the thresholds, and FEATS shows the next mark waiting on every column you have open.
• Marks for every apex the world has shipped, and for first footfall on storied ground: Beyond the Iron Gate, the Second Seal, the Far Shoulder.
• The ledger is permanent by construction. A visit mark or a board post is written the instant it happens, so nothing (not even a crash) can unwrite it.

Smaller mercies

• A new account confirms its address by email before the first sign-in with one link, once. Everyone already playing is untouched, and if the message doesn't turn up you can send yourself another from the sign-in page.
• Your account page's trophy shelf reads the whole campaign now: written arcs collapse to their title, the arc you're in opens up, and the ones ahead keep their mystery, using the same view SAGA gives you in the game.
• The browser map stopped lying about which rooms touch. Ways out that aren't compass directions hang off their room instead of claiming a square of their own, and edges route around the rooms they used to cut straight through.
• Rooms stopped talking over themselves. A square with six neighbours and three birds in it used to narrate itself every eleven seconds, because every living thing kept its own clock; a room now gets one atmosphere line at a time, however big the crowd, and the birds go on foraging whether or not anyone writes it down. Nothing that matters is ever held back; being fed or petted, speech, arrivals, deaths, and the weather all come through exactly as before.
• A pet with a home always gets there. Where the way is shut (a locked front door, no walkable road at all), it slips off and makes its own way home rather than standing in the lane forever. It does not open the door: a rooster cannot work a latch.
• Scenery answers verbs. POKE the porch the room just described to you and the porch answers, in the room's own words, instead of claiming it was never there.
• Creatures read by their names. POKE REX no longer reports that you poked "Rex rooster."
• The player wiki gained pages for housing, furniture, and the Wyrmcrown.

Boss fights you can read

• The most dangerous creatures now fight in tells: a readable windup, seconds to answer, and a verb that turns the blow: DODGE, or meet a charge with TACKLE or SBASH. Stunning a boss mid-windup breaks the attack entirely. See HELP DODGE.
• The warren chief learned three of them: an overhead cleaver you can dodge, a bull charge you can meet head-on, and an enraged full-circle arc that even a clean dodge only halves. He's tougher now, too. Bring friends, or bring reflexes.

Your saga begins

• Saga I: The Warren Beneath the Climb: a campaign in three chapters, from first blood on the trail to the chief's chamber. Steps note themselves as you play; each pays real experience; the next chapter opens the moment one closes. Type SAGA.
• Chapters land in order, and what lies ahead stays ??? until you reach it.

Feats: the permanent record

• Firsts and finishes are now recorded forever: first blood, the first telegraphed blow you answer, the chief felled, the saga written, each stamped with the day. Type FEATS.
• Some feats unlock titles in the herald's list (TITLE LIST), earned, never invented.
• First Flame: every founding-era login carries the mark home, once, forever.

One account, all your heroes

• Accounts are live: create one, claim your existing characters with the passwords you already hold, and every visit after opens on character select: pick by number, no password, straight into the world.
• Your account page keeps the trophy shelf: every hero's saga progress and permanent feats at a glance.
• Telnet is untouched by all of it: name and password, byte for byte, forever.

The guild's weekly ledger

• Four writs in a week pay a settlement bonus; kept weeks grow a streak that sweetens it. Writs are never limited. The week gates only the bonus, and that promise is written into HELP WRIT.

A kinder first hour

• New arrivals are greeted by name at the fountain, the newcomer checklist now spells out the next keystroke, and finishing it hands you to the saga.
• The connect banner names the game and pins the exact build. Every bug report now points at a precise version.