The road reaches Abel

Last update opened the map of Temuair and the roads leading off it. Now we followed one all the way to its end, Abel, the second town, and made it a place you can actually walk through. The deep crypt learned some nasty new tricks, the Mileth trainer has a few things to teach, and a lot of silly price tags came down.

Abel, and a square you can walk

Click Abel on the map and you arrive on the Abel Port Way, the road into town. Walk south into Abel Port itself, the busy square at the heart of it.

We went over the gateway road and the square. The road no longer has a guard standing on it pretending to belong, so it is the quiet stretch it should be, with the way south into the square, west to a shrine, and east back to the map all working both directions. The square needed more. It used to be crowded with townsfolk who did not belong, and every shop door was sealed. The strangers are gone and the doors open now, the bank, the tavern, the inn, the restaurant, the armorer, the goods store, the weaponsmith, the combat master's hall, the magic shop, the fish market, or out to the coast, and back out again.

Getting to Abel and moving through its square and doors works. The shops behind those doors are not dressed yet, so the keepers, their wares, and their talk are rough or missing until we get to them. The sea route south also waits on a stretch of map we have not built, so for now you leave Abel the way you arrived, through the overworld.

The crypt learns to bite

The deeper crypt creatures could only bite you. Three of them get their signature tricks now. A Scorpion's sting paralyzes you, locking your limbs. The Chest, the mimic that sits looking like treasure, lulls you to sleep with a drowsy "Zzz" over your head. And the Kardi's touch freezes you stiff. While you are held you cannot walk, turn, or call up a skill or spell for a few seconds, so the thing gets its free hits. You can still talk and gulp a potion, and the hold cannot be chained forever, there is always a guaranteed gap where you get to act again.

This needed a new piece of the engine, since nothing before could take you out of your own control like that. We built it reusable, so the groundwork is laid for players' own sleep and hold spells later.

The Succubus's charm and the Wraith's bewitching are not in yet; those need a different sort of handle and we will come back for them. These new locks pass their tests, but we have not yet watched one land on a player in the live game, so if a freeze or a sleep does something odd, that is the kind of thing to tell us.

One way in, one way out

While we were down there we walked every floor-to-floor doorway across all forty-six maps of the Mileth Crypt and found five that led somewhere they should not. The worst, a tile in the Mileth Training Room, where you go to learn your skills, could dump you into the middle of crypt floor twenty-three, a floor meant for level twenty and up, and the trip ran both ways. Others jumped you from mid-crypt straight into the Mileth Inn.

All five pulled out. The crypt is a clean descent now, a single mouth at the top connecting to the village, nothing leaking between the dungeon and the safe corners of town. As a bonus, those broken doors had been a route for a crypt monster to wander up into the inn, which can no longer happen.

New things to learn

The Mileth trainer has a few new tricks, and a stack of fakes came off the shelf.

A Rogue can learn Throw Surigum at level four, a thrown surigum that catches the nearest enemy a couple of tiles ahead. It is the earliest scrap of damage a fresh Rogue can reach for, the thing you lean on before the daggers come out. Throwing it drops you out of Hide.

We built the poison line. A Priest can learn Beag Puinsein at level eighteen and Puinsein at level thirty to lay a poison that eats away a foe's health over time, the second lasting longer. A Monk can learn Ao Puinsein at level five to purge poison from an ally or themselves. The poison deals real damage now, credited to whoever cast it, so it can finish off a weakened enemy and the kill counts as yours.

And we cleared out the fakes. The trainers used to list a few spells that were never real, a generic "poison," a "fire breath," a couple of stand-in heals and curses. Gone from every teacher's list, so what you can learn is what belongs in the game.

The numbers on the new attacks, how hard the throw hits and how fast the poison bites, are our own first guess and still being felt out.

Fairer prices

Prices got a real going-over. A lot of gear wore wildly inflated tags. You notice it first at the tutorial arms merchant, Tealor, his Long Sword dropped from a frankly silly 45,000 gold to 12,200, his Loures Saber from 12,000 to 1,500. The same correction flows to every town weapon and armor seller that stocks those items, forty-six pieces in all set to their proper price.

We went over the stats on the early Mileth shop gear too, the shields, boots, gauntlets, and earrings you buy right after the tutorial, and fixed eight whose numbers were off. A couple gated at the wrong level, several carried inflated durability, and the Leather Gauntlet was missing the mana penalty it is meant to come with.

Smaller touches

The Hall of Advancement just outside Mileth, where you choose your path at level five, had the wrong attendant. A stranger with a vague "are you worthy" line is gone, and the proper greeter, Gregory, welcomes you and sends you on to Aoife.

And the reagents and rotten food you loot in the crypt read correctly now, a Spider's Eye, a Centipede's Gland, a Bat's Wing, in place of the clipped spellings they used to carry.

Take the road to Abel if you get the chance, and mind the scorpions on the way down.

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