Guilds, dungeons, and weather that bites

It has been about two weeks since the last update, and the alpha has kept changing almost daily. Here are the highlights.

Guilds

Players can now form guilds, and they are the biggest addition since the alpha opened.

• Roles and privileges, so a guild leader can decide who gets to spend the treasury or touch the armory
• A guild treasury and a tithe, funded by members as they play
• A guild armory: shared gear that members can draw from and return
• A guild hall that upgrades over time, plus guild structures gated behind it (including XP and drop totems + teleporters)
• Guild chat rooms, notice boards, and a full guild log so nothing happens quietly

Zones effects

Zone effects are live. A zone is no longer a fixed set of rules: weather and other forces can now change stats, danger, drop rates, quantities, craft failure rates, and even travel costs while they last.

• Effects come from several sources, run on either wall-clock or tick durations, and are visible in the Zone view
• Consumables and structures were folded into the same system, so everything shares one set of rules
• Travel is now priced off zone distance and danger instead of a flat cost, and zone effects can re-price it further

Dungeons

The first dungeon is in: an eight-floor procedural descent you take as an active action. An adjusted port of strata.

• Reveal tiles as you move, fight what you find, rest, or bail out with what you are carrying
• Auto-explore and auto-attack if you would rather watch, or take manual control at any point
• Interactions, loot, and a climax fight waiting at the bottom

Bosses

Global bosses are live and deployed: server-wide fights that anyone can free-join while they are open. Rewards you earn while offline or disconnected are held as owed rewards and reconciled the moment you come back, so payouts are not lost to a dropped connection.

Skill adjustments

• Skill loadouts: save a set of gear and up to twelve skills per unit, plus whole formation loadouts, and swap between them
• Gear imbuing: slot Skill Cores into gear to project skills onto whoever wears it
• Meta skills: always-on, off-budget skills that shape luck, learning, crafting, and construction
• World skills: usable straight from the Zone view instead of inside an action, starting with a Home teleport that recalls you home

Crafting, markets, and the rest

• Item crafting with partially-crafted items, so a long craft is no longer all or nothing
• Recipe searching, filtering, and gating, so the crafting list stays readable as it grows
• Gear can now be bought and sold on the market as individual instances, not just fungible stacks
• Resource nodes now show up in the knowledge view alongside enemies and zones
• Chat emotes, served out of band from the CDN
• Rate limiting is now explained in the client instead of silently failing, and a protocol version handshake warns you when the client is stale

Under the hood

Much of the last two weeks went towards backend improvements. The server dropped its ECS (hecs: still a great choice for games that need a minimalist ECS) in favor of a purpose-built actor store, mega-files were split apart, and stat and skill math moved onto shared code with the rest of the toolchain. Beyond that: memory leaks fixed, allocations cut on the hot paths, websocket messages reused instead of rebuilt, queries paged and indexed, database writes made atomic so a crash cannot leave a trade half-done, and a pile of security and hardening fixes. All XP drops now run off authored tables rather than scattered constants.

What’s next

Work has started on real multi-enemy combat and the units and engine seams behind the next questline. The beta is still coming, and alpha progress will be wiped when it arrives.

Guest accounts are still open at online.grindshell.com.