East, into the woods

For a while the Mileth Crypt was the only place to hunt. You would clear it out, reach level ten or so, and then what. The roads east ran into empty country. That changes now. Walk out the east edge of Mileth Village Way, open the map of Temuair, pick the Eastern Woodlands, and you arrive at a crossroads with real woods spreading out behind it. A good stretch of its hunting circles, nine of them, have the right beasts in them now.

The crossroads is a safe spot to land. A lone beggar works the path there, and the gate signs read when you click them, each one naming the circle or the place the gate beside it opens onto, so you are not guessing which way runs deeper into the trees and which way leads off toward the Enchanted Garden or out to the Wastelands.

The early circles are gentle. Mantises, a wolf or two, and the bees.

The wolves and the mantises will spot you and come. The bee on that first circle, though, is a Honey Bee, and she keeps to herself unless you swing first. Step one circle deeper and the bee there is a plain Wasp with no such manners. Same wings, meaner temper. There is a circle further in where even the mantis decides it cannot be bothered with you unless you start it.

Push on and the kobolds turn up, then the goblins. One circle is nothing but goblins, a Soldier, a Warrior, and a Guard, and the Guard hits like the level-thirty thing he is.

The whole spread runs from about level nine at the crossroads out to thirty in the deep circles, so it is a clean run of hunting after the crypt. Everything gives up its parts: wolves their skin and fur and teeth and the odd lock of hair, the mantises their eyes, the kobolds their skulls, the bees their Raw Honey and Royal Wax and the occasional wing. The honey is worth a word. Devlin over in Mileth has been asking after it for days with nowhere to send you; now there is somewhere. And the Goblin Warrior will hand over a Hatchet now and then if you keep at him.

Some of what these things carry deeper in their drop lists we have not built yet, the gem and elemental gear families, so for now you get the hides and the coin and the parts we do have. The rest lands when those do.

We caught one bad gate while we were out there. The door between the seventh and eighth circles was dead in both directions, so a chunk of the woods you could see on the map you could not actually reach. It is a clean two-way passage now.

Down the second stair

The crypt vestibule has two staircases down. We wired the second one not long ago and it opened onto an empty room. It is not empty now.

That room is the Mileth Sgath Pit, where Temuair throws its worst criminals. Kieran keeps the entrance and will tell you what the place is for. Past him, sealed off behind a wall you cannot cross, two Shadow Hungers loom.

These are not things you fight. Seven million health, near enough, and they shrug off almost any blow, give no experience, drop nothing. They are there to be looked at: the thing that waits for anyone sentenced to the Pit. The sentence itself, the trial that drops you down there and the scar it brands you with, is a whole machinery of law and punishment we have not built. For the moment the Pit is a grim little room you can walk into and peer through the wall at what waits in it.

The tutorial would not let go

A couple of people got wedged trying to leave the tutorial, and it took us a few goes to get right.

Walk East off the Path of Beginnings and a spirit asks whether you are ready to wake up in the world. You can say not yet. The trouble: saying no, or shutting that prompt with the X, left you parked on the map's edge with no way to make the question come back. Stuck on the very first screen, which is about the worst place to be stuck.

Both are fixed. Turn the spirit down and you can step away and walk East again whenever you like; close the prompt outright and the same holds. There was also a way that same bug could topple the server, which we found and killed while we were in there. If you roll a fresh character and find any way at all to get jammed on the way out, tell us.

Torrance squares his shelves

Last thing, smaller. Torrance, the Mileth armorer, was short a few pieces and stocking one that was never his. He has his two necklaces now, the Amber and the Bone, plus a Ruby Ring and an Amethyst Ring, and the stray Leather Shield is off his counter.

The two rings carried bad numbers too. The Ruby was puffed up with extra health and a hit bonus it had no business with, and reads as a plain +200 health now. The Amethyst had its durability and its resale price tangled into each other. Straightened out.

Anyway. The crypt was the end of the road for a while. It is not anymore. Take the east gate and see how deep into the trees you can get.

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