Thanks to an unprecedented few days of reluctant cooperation and minimal[1] bickering, the various orders of wizardry (and hedge wizardry) have been able to iron out a number of thaumic wrinkles with various spells, artifacts and magical miscellanea. The most noteworthy of these changes are summarised below:
Jogloran's Portal of Cheaper Travel (JPCT)
- Burning portals from JPCT should now interact in more intuitive ways with things like hand and foot armour, as well as elemental shielding.
- Several new portal types have been added to JPCT, disproving the long-held belief that "One does not simply walk into more doors".
- The command 'push door with staff' no longer allows you to push the door with random non-staff objects. On the plus side, this has resolved the issue where pushing the door with random objects would refer to them as staves.
- Portals created underwater will no longer show as 'sinking here' when they are, in fact, not sinking.
- Burning doors will no longer appear if you are underwater (being on the surface is still fair game). We will monitor this change closely to ensure that priests of Fish who exclusively use JPCT scrolls to get around do not become overpowered.
Heezlewurst's Elemental Buffer (HEB)
- HEB has changed so that the spell now targets people rather than crystals. The biggest impact of this change is that the spell can now be cast on other people instead of only on yourself. While the spell *can* be cast without specifying components, you will generally find it more helpful to use a command on the lines of 'cast heb on <person> using <crystals>' to ensure you get the result you want. See 'help Heezlewurst's Elemental Buffer' for more details.
- HEB now provides some degree of protection against gas-based bombs. The concentrated nature of these items means that they are still likely to have a substantial effect despite such arcane protection, however.
- HEB now provides a rather more succinct and less spammy output when included in 'group shields'.
Other Spells
- Independent Recurring Vocaliser has been reworked and can no longer add many different messages to a single object. Instead, a single message at a time can be added, at which point nobody can add another message until the first one wears off. The person who added the message can either extend its duration (up to a cap) by re-casting with the same message, or can remove and replace the message by casting the spell with a different phrase.
- Pragi's Lost Gaze had become so lost that it had ceased to work properly and no longer did any damage at all. This has been remedied, and some previously-reported issues with the damage messages have also been fixed.
- You can now 'shoo' the imp summoned by Sageroff's Sentry Summoning if its services are no longer required. Or if you just get sick of passive-aggressive remarks.
- Speaking of which, those with higher skills will find that they are able to abjure the snarky imps summoned by Sageroff's Sentry Summoning to be a good deal less talkative.
- A concerned group of wizards have completely overhauled the casting process for Al'Hrahaz's Scintillating Blorpler to make it 'look the part' and 'bewilder the yokels' more than it previously did. As such, the casting messages for this spell now match the associated magic skills much more closely. The actual functionality of the spell is unchanged, but that's hardly relevant.
- Skeleton warriors created using Grisald's Reanimated Guardian are now immune to spider venom on account of not having any blood.
- Fiddelmaker's Auriferous Embrace now gives different damage messages depending on how, well, damaged your opponent is by it.
- Shells used with Rubayak's Power Storage are now a bit clearer about how much power they hold after many casts.
- Rubbing the tummy of your wooden monkey will now give you some information about how much power they have left. If you do not have a wooden monkey, please either disregard this message. If you do not wish to disregard this message, you can create a wooden monkey of your own using the spell Doctor Worblehat's Flaming Primate Premonition.
- Wurphle's Midnight Snack can now create goat's cheese & red onion tart, as well as some more non-alcoholic beverages.
- Staves with Crondor's Mysterious Sparkling (CMS) active on them can now be tapped to make one of their sparkly effects happen.
- Kelleflump's Irritating Demon (KID) will now respect the caster's capitalisation when making its victims scream their name.
Sto Lat & Surroundings
- The Hillshire wizard has found another of 'Numbers' Riktor's old experiments, in which he tried to unravel the fundamental nature of colour.
- You can now fill bottles etc. from the bucket in the Academy of Artificers garden.
- Bloodstone now pulverises correctly.
- The Academy suites can now be teleported into, but not out of. Wait, no, the other way around. You can teleport out of them, but nobody can teleport in. Except by using the pre-installed door, which makes it less teleporting and more "walking in".
- Billiards tables now tell you which balls remain when it's your turn, and a tie gives achievement credit for both players rather than neither.
Miscellaneous:
- Klein bottles have been (very carefully) persuaded to stop leaking while they don't technically exist. Players should find that their klein bottles only decay while they are logged on now. Please note, however, that any existing klein bottles belonging to offline characters will continue to decay until loaded for the first time, at which point they will be updated to use this new behaviour.
- Colourful glass nuggets that have gone clear will now regain their colour even when placed in a container. Once they have their colour back, they will revert to their normal behaviour of not changing colour while inside a container.
- Offensive-magic wands now have a short cooldown before they can be re-zapped. This change is intended to prevent abuse, and should not affect legitimate use.
- Witches can now glare at distortions in the UU library to move them out of the way (the distortion will remain in the room, but will move to block a different exit).
- You can now 'flick' a piece of "gp light" jewellery that has stopped working in order to encourage it to start again. This should negate the need to remove and re-wear gp-consuming light sources if they go out due to lack of energy.
- The UU library will no longer have weirdly-formatted room descriptions for people with lookmaps turned on.
Enjoy!
Fran, Guildenstern, Kadath & Kake
[1] Relatively speaking, of course. |
