Highlights
The performance patch. with increased numbers of players in each room Crowded areas across the overworld run better, other players and NPCs appear within seconds of you arriving instead of trickling in, and they no longer pop in and out as you cross area boundaries.
Mount and camera movement are smoother, with pixel-perfect rendering so the world no longer shimmers as the camera scrolls.
World loading and chunk swapping are faster, and the game now remembers sprites between sessions so returning to an area loads far quicker.
Added a V-Sync option to Graphics settings, and removed the hidden 30 fps fallback that could quietly lock your framerate.
Raised the player cap on the Tutorial and Virelda maps.
Achievements: progress on incomplete achievements is now rebuilt from your play history, achievements you already earned are granted retroactively, and Global achievement rewards can be claimed as soon as you reach them. ENG-1788 ENG-1737 BUG-1586
Performance & Smoothness
Rebuilt how the game loads sprites. Loading now happens in the background with a strict per-frame budget instead of decoding one sprite at a time on the main thread, so a crowd of players or NPCs dressing in no longer causes multi-frame freezes.
Added a persistent on-disk sprite cache. Sprites you have seen before load from disk on your next visit, so returning to a world is much faster. Your first visit to an area is unchanged.
Improved world loading. Nearby players, NPCs, gathering nodes and your tools are now fetched behind the loading screen, so far fewer things pop in after the fade. Loading screens may take a few seconds longer as a result.
Improved chunk swapping. Large world updates are split into smaller packets, spawns are spread across frames, and the game applies incoming data within a hard per-frame limit, removing the 12 to 30 ms spikes that used to hit when a busy area streamed in.
Other players are no longer removed and respawned when you cross an area boundary. They stay in the world for as long as you share a room.
Rebuilt how the game loads sprites. Loading now happens in the background with a strict per-frame budget instead of decoding one sprite at a time on the main thread, so a crowd of players or NPCs dressing in no longer causes multi-frame freezes.
Added a persistent on-disk sprite cache. Sprites you have seen before load from disk on your next visit, so returning to a world is much faster. Your first visit to an area is unchanged.
Improved world loading. Nearby players, NPCs, gathering nodes and your tools are now fetched behind the loading screen, so far fewer things pop in after the fade. Loading screens may take a few seconds longer as a result.
Improved chunk swapping. Large world updates are split into smaller packets, spawns are spread across frames, and the game applies incoming data within a hard per-frame limit, removing the 12 to 30 ms spikes that used to hit when a busy area streamed in.
Other players are no longer removed and respawned when you cross an area boundary. They stay in the world for as long as you share a room.
Other players and NPCs now move smoothly between server updates instead of stepping, and a single slow frame is spread across the following frames rather than shown as one jump.
Improved mount riding smoothness. Chunk streaming is throttled harder while you are mounted, and effects that follow your character now track the mount correctly.
Improved camera movement. The camera now scrolls with sub-pixel precision using integer world positions, and camera motion is capped per frame so a hitch no longer lurches the view.
Quest camera transitions now glide to their target instead of snapping.
Fixed zooming causing a hitch every frame while the zoom smoothed in.
Optimised data processing on both client and server to reduce performance spikes: fewer per-frame allocations, a single garbage collection behind the loading screen, cheaper NPC and gathering-node updates when idle or off-screen, and far less work when a player rejoins.
Off-screen players, NPCs, doors and gathering nodes are no longer drawn or fully simulated on your client until they come into view.
Graphics Settings
Added V-Sync to Graphics settings. It is on by default.
Renamed the Texture Scale options to Normal, Low and Very Low, and removed Auto.
Server & Region Changes
Increased the player cap on the Tutorial and Virelda maps, so more of you can share the same space.
Bug Fixes
Quests, Tasks & Achievements
Fixed Achievements not crediting past play correctly. Partly completed achievements now show your real progress, rebuilt from your history, instead of sitting at 0 or jumping straight to complete. ENG-1788
Achievements you had already qualified for are now granted retroactively on login, covering quest completions, skill milestones, dungeon clears, crafted sets and collected items, with no need to repeat the work. ENG-1737
Fixed Global achievement tier rewards being unclaimable until the backend caught up. Rewards can now be claimed as soon as you reach the required achievement points instead of waiting up to 20 minutes. BUG-1586
Dungeons & Combat
Fixed projectiles, boss telegraphs and spawned abilities sometimes never appearing for other players in your party.
Items
Fixed placing furniture or a crafting or manufacturing station sometimes consuming the item without placing anything, leaving the item stuck. Placement now waits longer for the item service to respond before failing. ENG-1802
Audio & Visuals
Fixed the music playlist skipping forward every 20 to 40 seconds and going permanently silent while a track was still downloading.
Sound effects that arrive more than 1.5 seconds late are now dropped instead of playing in a burst.
Fixed level-up, quest-completion and achievement effects drifting away from your character while moving or riding a mount.
Fixed other players sometimes appearing with a missing name or the wrong gear when they spawned during a busy moment.
Fixed entities keeping the wrong sprite or state after a dropped data read. They now retry on the next update. Reworked the popup stack for level-ups, quest completions, achievements and item alerts. New popups appear at their resting height with the newest at the bottom, older ones shift up, and gaps close when a popup expires.
Burn status particles and victory sparkles now play at a consistent speed regardless of framerate.
Connection & Stability
Fixed an error when disconnecting before the connection had fully established.
Joining a full room no longer waits for every player's account setup in series. Setup requests run in parallel with a cap, and a player is always let into the world within 20 seconds even if the account service is slow.
Under the Hood
Server publish volume per spawning entity cut sharply. A joining player now triggers about 6 state broadcasts in the hub instead of roughly 75, and a player rejoining no longer re-broadcasts every entity in the world.
Chunk resyncs are now versioned, so a client that already has an area's current state is not sent it again.
Fixed a latent bug where spawn-assist settings were shared across every entity in the game instead of being per-entity.
