An offering for the Gods
There is an altar tucked into the southwest corner of the Mileth square. For as long as Mileth has stood it was just scenery. Now you can use it, and it is the closest we have come to that old idea of giving an item away to get something greater in return.
Stand near the altar and throw a gift onto the stone, anything worth more than 500 coins. The offering vanishes in a chime. You can do this once every three hours, and after ten gifts the Gods take notice and pay you for your devotion. A Priest is given a ring, the Red Jade, the Jade, or the Amethyst, a hundred thousand experience, and a mark in their legend naming them a worshipper of the Mileth Altar. Everyone else walks away with a Red Jade Ring and fifty thousand experience.
One thing we did our own way. The altar only takes a gift that actually counts. Throw something too cheap, or come back before your three hours are up, and the item simply sits on the ground with a line telling you why, rather than being swallowed for nothing. It also keeps a tally out loud, so you always know how many offerings you have left to make.
This is built and it behaves on our side, but we have not yet stood at the live altar and thrown a ring at it ourselves. It is the first time anything in the game reacts to an item dropped onto a particular tile, so if you make an offering and something reads wrong, that is exactly the sort of thing worth telling us.
You will both miss a lot
Low-level fights feel different now. Take a fresh character down to the crypt and you and the rat will trade swings and both of you will whiff, often. At equal level with no gear it is roughly one swing in four that simply misses, on your side and the monster's alike.
This was wrong before in a way you could not actually see. The earlier version only let a heavily armoured fighter slip a blow, and at low level that is nobody, so in practice nothing ever missed. Worse, on the rare time a hit did slip, it showed nothing on screen at all. A miss is a miss now: the blow lands for zero and the health bar pops unchanged, so you see the whiff. And your aim improves as you climb. Out-level what you are fighting, or stack up your Hit with Spinel Rings and the like, and the flailing of level two settles into clean, connecting blows by twenty.
These numbers are ours and we are still feeling them out, so the exact rate may shift. Riding along with it, Magic Resistance finally earns its place: it cuts the damage of spells thrown at you now, where before those pips on your sheet were decoration.
The rest of Mileth woke up
Most of this update went into the corners of Mileth that were built but empty, or standing there but dead to the touch. If there is a thread to it, it is that the town answers you now.
The signs, first. Nearly every signpost and notice board you walk past in Mileth used to do nothing when you clicked it. Now they read. Click one in the tutorial, along the road into town, in the church, or anywhere around the village square, and instead of silence you get a short useful note, which service stands nearby and which way its door faces, the inn this way, the bank that way, the crypt stair to the north. The square alone had eighteen of them sitting dead. All eighteen talk now.
Then the empty rooms got their people. Walk the east road out of town into the south courtyard and you can step through the Shrine of Glioca's door, which you could not even open before, and meet Meaveen, the shrine's keeper. She will tell you of Glioca, goddess of compassion, of the shrine, and of the Glioca Fellowship. The shrine itself stood sealed and empty until now; the Fellowship she speaks of is something you will be able to join through the church later, so for the moment it is lore on her lips and not yet a thing you can do.
Off the same road sits the Mileth College and its five reading halls, the Library, History, Literature, Philosophy, and Lore. Every one of them was empty. Each now has its keeper, Uistean, Rory, Steafan, Conn, and Parthalan, with a Loures captain watching over the books, and every shelf-sign reads out a real catalogue of titles, genuine works from the old Loures library down to Takata's own chronicle of the Mileth Crypt you cut your teeth in. The town's two civic halls got their faces too: Aliran the clerk in the Town Hall, and Connlaoi, the Mileth Bailiff, in the Justice Hall. The wider machinery of town government, the votes and the elected Demagogue and the trials, is a system we have not built, so for now the two of them are there to greet you and tell you how it is all meant to work.
A few smaller things
Leaving the tutorial behaves itself now. You walk East off the edge of the Path of Beginnings and the guiding spirit asks whether you are ready to wake. Before, only a thin stretch of that east edge would trigger the question, so stepping off at the wrong row did nothing and left you stuck pacing the border.
Gerard, the gardener in the tutorial garden, stopped calling his floppies "deer" and stopped talking like an old man over a young face. Small, but it read strangely.
We squared the Stick and the Dirk against our records: the Stick's weight and durability were a hair off, and the Dirk now carries the small mana cost and the level-two requirement it is meant to. And a new Wizard or Priest no longer gets handed a staff when they devote at the Hall of Advancement. The staff was too high a level for a fresh caster to so much as hold, so it was a dead gift, gone in the pack; casters now take their starter gold and class book and begin barehanded, which is how a caster ought to start anyway.
While we were chasing warps, the crypt vestibule's down staircase got fixed across its whole width. Only one corner tile of it had ever taken you to the first floor, so the other half of the stairs led nowhere.
Out at Abel, the armorer finished stocking his shelves. Steinar now sells and buys the Brigandine and the Coral Ring, the two pieces his shop was missing, at their proper prices. Two of the skins you bring him read correctly now too, the Wolf's Skin and the Wolf's Fur.
Go throw something on the altar if you have a spare ring, and watch the rats dodge you on the way down.