Changelog

2026-08-24 - The wilderness grows up

Sim adventurers earn every level now. They used to advance on a timer, on the assumption that a character nobody was watching could not fight. They can, so they do — the monsters they fight genuinely die, and killing is the only way any of them advances. The wilderness is being worked while you are elsewhere, so a camp may be thin when you get there.

They train skills like characters. Weapon skills and masteries, armour, Block, Parry — spent out of the same train budget a character of that level and class would have. A trained level 42 warrior sits around defence 880 and damage 85-203. They also only carry gear their class can actually use, so no more clerics swinging axes they were never taught.

They look after themselves. They rest and heal below 70% instead of throwing themselves at the next camp, they fight back at whatever is actually hitting them, and healers finally cast their own heals.

Parties. Sims group up to farm, in sizes from two to eight, and will not set out without a healer — so you will see them waiting for one, same as anyone. A party multiplies experience rather than splitting it, which is why a healer that groups out-levels one that grinds alone. Healers look for a group three times as often as everyone else.

Guilds, towns and war. Sim guilds found their own towns and build through a real order - bank, inn, warehouse, walls, towers - paid for by what their members actually do out in the world. Kills build a town; killing players builds it about twenty-five times faster. Once two houses reach war, one may bane the other's tree, choosing its target by a named doctrine rather than at random.

They hold grudges, and some of them just don't need one. Kill a sim and its guild may send a war party of guild-mates to where it happened. Separately, every sim carries a fixed aggression rating: most are peaceable, a minority genuinely prefer hunting people, and those ones seek each other out — so the same names keep turning up together.

They talk. Over four hundred written lines across fourteen situations: when you summon a friend, when one decides you are a problem, mid-fight, and when one kills you. Local chat only, and rate-limited hard — at most one sim line every thirty seconds no matter how many are standing around you.

A sim that kills a player is paid for it. It was the only kill in the game that paid them nothing.

See the Sim Adventurers section of the wiki for the full picture.

2026-08-22 (later) - Beast companions, quest writs, and corpses that stay put

Pick a companion at level 1. New characters now start with four pacts - Wolf, Bear, Cat and Rat. Use one and that companion is yours; the other three crumble. Starters stay at the lowest rank and never upgrade, which is the trade for getting one free at character creation.

Beasts join the mercenary pools. Cave Bear and Dire Wolf can roll on Guardian contracts, Great Cat and Dire Rat on Blade. They use the big named-mob models and are named for their species, so you hire Greymaw Lv30 Dire Wolf rather than a generic. They wear no armour. Merc contract drop rates are unchanged - beasts are new options inside the two melee types, not extra contracts competing for the same rolls. See mercenary contracts.

Quest writs. Warrant scrolls now drop from camp mobs and name a different nearby camp to clear, so they give you a reason to roam rather than grind one spot. Kills tally automatically, the writ completes on the final kill and pays experience, and progress survives logging out. One active writ per camp. See quest writs.

Your corpse stays on the floor you died on. Dying on a raised platform put your corpse under the geometry: you were being flattened to the terrain at the exact moment of death, in the one place in the code where that happens without re-checking which floor you are on.

Dying on a corpse run no longer destroys your first corpse. Worth stating plainly, because the report guessed otherwise: there is no one-corpse rule and never was - you can have as many as you die. What was actually happening is worse. The fifteen-minute cleanup counts from when a corpse is made and was never extended, so dying on the way back let the first one expire while you walked. Making a new corpse now pushes your older ones out, capped at an hour. This had been quietly destroying loot.

Minoseeks reaches less far, and leaves other people's kills alone. The mule was working a 150-unit radius when its design says 60, and it was emptying NPC players' bodies as well. Both corrected: it now only takes from the fight you are actually in.

Also: mobs could heal themselves mid-fight without telling your client, and the code doing it could erase an entire sword swing through a threading bug. Both fixed.

2026-08-22 - Charm works, monsters stop running, waystones stop jailing you

A fix batch, mostly from player reports. Thank you for filing them.

Charm actually works now - and it was never just charm. Charm has never functioned in game on this shard. A second bug sitting behind the first was rejecting every cast before the charm code ran, so the earlier fix could not have helped. Twelve powers were dead, not one: Charm Beast (Ranger and Druid), Capture, Capture Prey, Capture Rat, Spirit Chains, Dominate, Redeem the Shadow, Convert the Shadow, Curse the Darkness and both Smite the Dead. All twelve work.

Monsters no longer run on the spot. A mob that reached you was stopped on the server with nothing sent to your client at all, so your game kept animating it running until you moved and it snapped next to you. Measured before and after: about half of all melee approaches ended with no stop message, and now none do. Roots and stuns were worse - your client could be left more than 20 units from where the monster actually stood, permanently.

The waystone is no longer a jail. Dropping one planted it on top of you, and /stuck did not rescue you - it teleported you to the campfire's centre, back inside. It now plants beside you and refuses to plant at all if it would trap you.

Mercenary contracts match the mob, and mercs have a class. A level 30 Ettin now always drops a rank 3 contract instead of a rank 1 about half the time, and your merc reads as a Priest, Prelate or Confessor rather than a generic "Healer".

Runemaster passage to the seven starter safeholds is free - Starkholm, Hengest, Scraefahl, Valkirch, Hrimdal, Hothor's Doom and All-Father's Rest. Free at every level, from any distance. Trips out to anywhere else are tolled as normal. See fast travel.

New: type lua_age() in chat for your character's record - level and xp, creation date, time played, and monster and player kills and deaths with K/D. A real /age is impossible: the client rejects commands it does not recognise locally and never sends them, which is why our commands are shaped like this.

Also: town guards no longer attack your pet or mercenary inside a safehold, and a batch of world mobs that spawned underneath their own buildings - including the Jackal King and Jackal Lord at The Feral Spires - now stand on the floor.

2026-08-21 — Minoseeks, the loot mule

A sixth mercenary contract now drops alongside the other five, and it is the only one that will not fight. Summon it and a minotaur appears whose single purpose is to carry your loot — he follows you, walks over to bodies you leave behind and empties them, gold included.

You get it all back by dismissing him, which kills him, which is exactly what he wants. Everything he was carrying drops where he stood and stays there for an hour. The contract is never consumed, so summon him again and carry on.

• Nothing can hurt him — not monsters, not other players, not your own area spells.
• He never destroys anything. Full, he simply stops picking things up and says so.
• Capacity scales with the contract's rank, from 300 up to 750 — a rank 1 porter already matches a 100-strength character built to be a mule.
• Anyone can loot the pile, so dismissing a full one in a crowd is a real decision. If you disconnect it is held for you alone for ten minutes.

Details, including what he does not do, on Minoseeks.

Also in this update:

• The deed dialog on mercenary contracts is gone. Double-clicking one used to throw up "Drop deed on open NPC slot to use" first. Contracts now disguise themselves as a scroll rather than a hireling deed, and a scroll is used rather than slotted.
• Town guards no longer attack the pets and mercenaries of the people they are protecting.

2026-08-18 — The Leylines: fast travel

The summon-bot era is over. Three additions, all server-side — no client update needed:

• Runemasters teleport everyone. All thirteen safeholds at any level (Perdition and Bastion included, teleport-only), for a distance-scaled toll of 100–5,000 gold charged only when the trip completes. The level-21 wall that silently shrank the list to four cities is gone, and refusals now say why. Repledging is untouched.
• Muster Horn (15,000g at any Runemaster): the group leader sounds it and every online groupmate gets the standard summon dialog — accept and you port to the leader in five seconds, weapon drawn or not. Thirty-minute cooldown per character, never consumed.
• Waystone (5,000g at any Runemaster): plant a personal anchor in the wilderness and channel back to it with a fifteen-second interruptible cast. Stand beside it to take it up and move it. One per character, survives restarts — and it is a real, visible, destructible object, so guard it.

Both items also drop rarely from world loot. The in-game tooltips show a hireling contract for now (same disguise as mercenary contracts — chat tells you the truth); real item entries come with a future client update. Details on fast travel.

2026-08-17 — The wiki is up

Everything we have changed about the game now lives at the wiki — rates, city costs and build times, the AI adventurers, mercenary contracts, named spawns and world events, every bug we have fixed, and an honest list of what is still broken.

It was written from the server code and the live configuration rather than from memory, which turned up a few things this changelog had told you wrongly:

• Cities cost nothing to keep. Maintenance is switched off entirely, so nothing decays, deranks, or falls down from unpaid bills. We had described it as cheap.
• Training and shopping are different discounts. Training is a quarter of stock price; ordinary vendor goods are half. We had said "half price" for both.
• The client is Windows only. The join page claimed it ran under Wine on Mac. It does not — the piece that would make that work is deliberately not in the download.

If you read one page, make it Mercenary Contracts: the contract's own tooltip in game still tells you to drop it on a hireling slot, which is wrong. You double-click it.

2026-08-16 — New launcher, and please re-download

The client download has been rebuilt. Launch the game with Shadowbane.exe — that is now our launcher. Run it and it checks for client updates, fetches only the parts that changed, and starts the game.

If you downloaded before today, please grab the client again. The old zip shipped Shadowbane's original Shadowbane.exe, a patcher that "repairs" your install from a third-party server. Running it repointed Config/ArcaneIP.cfg away from this shard, brought the intro movies back, and reverted our client-side fixes — one double-click and you could no longer connect. The new download replaces that file with our launcher, so it cannot happen again, and re-downloading repairs an install it already hit.

Also fixed today:

• Melee mobs no longer look like they are running away mid-fight while still standing next to you swinging. A range check could never fire for any melee weapon, so mobs never had their movement properly stopped on arrival.
• Standing characters use the idle animation instead of the spellcasting pose.

2026-08-16 — Twelve more bugs down

The whole medium-severity backlog from our original bug sweep, fixed and adversarially verified:

• Dodge now takes its intended out-of-combat penalty against powers.
• PvP death lists record your killer (not… yourself).
• AoE powers hit the closest targets when over the cap, not a random subset.
• Caster-friendly powers no longer clip the caster.
• Chant effects (Call the Blizzard, Call Storm) clean up properly.
• Flying landings on walls and upper floors keep you on the floor instead of teleporting you to ground level.
• Vault weight is actually enforced now.
• Pets stranded by teleports find their way back to you.
• Mobs and resting pets regenerate health correctly — no more chipping a boss down across pulls while it never heals.
• Logging out in your Tree/barracks binds you there, as Shadowbane intended.
• Plus a database write-amplification fix and a login-race fix.

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.

2026-08-16 — The shard goes live

• 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.

2026-08-15 — Wave 2: a living world

• 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%.

2026-08-15 — Wave 1 + rates

• 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.

2026-08-15 — Twelve verified bug fixes

• 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.

2026-08-15 — Under the hood

• 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.