Changelog

2026-08-16 — Back to standard rates

XP, gold, and drop rates are now stock Shadowbane (1×; hotzone 2×). This is a PvE shard about the journey — no reason to sprint through it.
Quality-of-life stays: fast cheap city building, rank-7 trainers, open mines.

Shadowbane Plus is now public at leisureforce.games. No wipe planned.
Hourly database backups, plus a snapshot before every code deploy — your characters survive our tinkering.

Sim adventurers: ~200 AI characters roam the wilderness, level up, and fight. Non-town zones are never empty.
Mercenary contracts drop as loot: hire the merc, and it follows, fights, buffs, and heals like a party member. Farm better ones like gear.
Named lottery spawns: rare named bosses roll on every respawn and announce themselves to the world.
World events every ~3 hours: incursions spawn waves of mobs worth killing.
Multi-city guilds: one guild may plant up to three trees.
Rank 7 trainers everywhere: every trainer teaches to 215%.

Taunt fixed: no more mob blink / target loss; aggro actually transfers.
Rates: 5× XP, 3× gold, 3× drops (hotzone: 10×/6×/6×). Building construction and rank-ups ~100× faster and at 5% cost. Mines always open. Mob respawns 4× faster. Vendors sell at half price.

Binary to-hit rolls, dead percentage enchants, DoT damage swap, XP loss on logout, vendor NaN pricing, forge double-charging, and six more long-standing MagicBane bugs — each verified with before/after tests.

Server CPU idle dropped from 200% to ~5% (busy-wait fixes in the network layer).
Character saves now flush to the database on shutdown — a server restart can no longer eat your progress.