Update 0.1.40: The Wandering Delves and Parties

Update 0.1.40 is rolling out now on Android, iOS and Windows. The caves are already open on our side, so the moment your app updates you can start finding them. Older versions keep working until the stores have carried the new one for a while.

Server

The Wandering Delves

• About 400 caves have opened around the world, on land, well apart from each other. There is no map marker: you find a cave by exploring, and it only appears once it is inside your walk circle.
• A cave holds exactly one run, for whoever walks in together. Once it starts, nobody else can join. You can go alone. Your whole party comes in with you if they are standing inside your walk circle, and they follow you from room to room as you lead.
• Inside is a dealt chain of tunnels and chambers ending in a boss hall. A door deeper in stays shut until you have cleared the room you are standing in; the way back is always open, so you can retreat or leave at any time.
• The boss hall sends three waves and then the Gravemaw, which bursts up under a marked patch of ground — walk off the mark — and burrows twice, sending rooting tremors after whoever has hurt it most. It waits to be attacked before it fights.
• Five new cave creatures, including one whose bite roots you and one that bursts when it dies. A released wave charges you the moment it appears.
• Dying inside puts you outside at the cave mouth with everything you were carrying, and keeps you out of that same run. A fresh cave is unaffected. If a death leaves nobody standing, the cave collapses.
• Clearing a cave pays every participant straight into their bag, with ninety seconds to grab what is on the floor before it collapses. A new cave then opens somewhere else.
• Delves never drop gear. Creatures drop Gloomsteel Ore (smelts into iron at a Personal Workshop) and Crystalline Marrow (refines into crystal); the Gravemaw drops exactly one Gravemaw Chitin per cave.
• Twenty chitin, iron and refined oil smelt one Gloom Metal at the Metallurgy Station — a second weapon infusion. A gloom weapon saps what it hits, so it walks and swings slower for a few seconds.
• The Dungeoneering skill has stopped "awaiting dungeons": each level gives one extra roll on a cave's clear reward.
• Walking through a door inside any building is refused while you are trapped — a doorway is no longer a way out of a pin.

Parties

• Accepting a player's Invite now puts you in their party (up to 8) and teleports you straight to the party leader.
• Every creature a party member kills pays the killer 5% more experience per party member, and gives every other member a 10% share — wherever they are in the world, even offline.
• When the party leader hops a flag or travels, members standing in the leader's circle go with them, free. The leader cannot hop while anyone inside their circle is still fighting; a member off fighting somewhere else never holds the leader back, and a member who is fighting is never pulled out of their fight.
• The leader can kick a member, who is sent back to where they stood when they accepted the invite. Kicking also deletes any unused invite from the rest of the party, so they cannot tap an old invite and walk straight back in — a fresh invite still works.
• Leadership passes to the longest-serving member if the leader leaves.
• If you are kicked while fighting, trapped, down or inside a building, you are told straight away and taken back as soon as you are free.
• Experience shared by your party no longer counts as "you were just fighting", so it cannot stop you resetting skills or changing attunement.

Cities and mayors

• Mayors can step down. A new Resign button on the city screen hands the office to the resident with the most votes, or — if nobody has voted — to the longest-standing resident who is still playing. Two things refuse it: a city with no city flag, and a city with nobody eligible to take over.
• While you hold the office you belong to one city: a Mayor can no longer found a second city, nor build their City House on another city's land. Resign first. You also cannot vote for someone who is already Mayor elsewhere, the monthly election will not elect them, and the crown never passes to them when a mayor's account is deleted.
• Your vote now belongs to the month you cast it in. A vote cast — or changed — in the first minutes after a month turned over used to be counted in the previous month's election and then deleted. Each month is now counted and cleared on its own.
• While your own City Hall is still being built, you can no longer move into another city or start a second one. The half-built hall is yours, so you can tear it down and go where you like.
• Voting after moving to another city now updates your vote for that city.

Companions

• Dismissing a companion now works, or tells you it did not. It used to say it worked, take the companion off your screen, and quietly keep it on your account — so you could not recruit another one.
• When a companion dies, a busy cleanup queue or a brief storage failure no longer loses the removal. A routine save that started before a companion died can no longer put it back on your account afterwards.
• Dead companions waiting for cleanup cannot be dismissed or called to another server, and gear already returned to your bag no longer stays equipped on the troll.
• Following companions now check safe ground where they actually land, stop retrying a blocked catch-up every instant, and stay assigned after training instead of silently following.
• Old cabin records no longer duplicate a loaded companion, restore outdated equipment over a newer record, or fully heal a wounded companion when spilled outside.

Speed, saving and stability

• Crowns, experience and kill counts now leave the server the moment you earn them, instead of waiting for a timer.
• Loot piles, finished flags, burning buildings and death drops no longer wait in a single line for the whole world. Different parts of the map are handled side by side, so a drop near you is not held up by routine upkeep far away.
• Progress near the busy borders between our two world servers saves reliably again. Walking into an area no longer counts as that area changing hands, which used to make saves be refused for a while, cancel tower repairs whenever anyone walked in, and very rarely leave a frozen copy of a player behind.
• Fixed the two world servers fighting over areas after an update while players were online, which stopped the game saving for several minutes.
• Areas recover after a brief connection problem between our servers, and players are reconnected instead of being left on an endless loading screen.
• After a server restart your position saves properly again straight away, wolves are no longer unusually slow, and respawned creatures no longer abandon a nearby fight to walk back to an old spawn point.
• Walking into a building now records your doorstep before letting you in, so a crash or logout inside brings you back to that door.
• Entering the world no longer hangs when our accounts service is slow: kingdom chat and friend alerts load in the background.

Balance and fixes

• The Cinderroc no longer out-heals the players fighting it: standing in its own fire heals it 2 health a second instead of 40, and each fighter burning from its fire heals it 1 instead of 5.
• Dropping, burying or storing a backpack now leaves your excess belongings at your feet instead of silently doing nothing. Equipped and protected belongings stay yours, and there is no death penalty.
• A dropped material can no longer be paid twice when the server was unsure whether the pile had landed.
• A Shield Charge dash ends if you are teleported mid-dash, and no longer pins you where you were just moved to.
• A player who has just been struck down can no longer be moved by their party in the instant before they fall.
• Kingdom and city Crowns are shown separately on the economy page, unidentified wallets are no longer labelled player money, and missing market data shows as incomplete rather than zero.

Client

• The Wandering Delves: cave mouths now appear in the world. Tap one and choose "Enter the Delve" to walk in with whoever is standing with you. Inside, each room has its own doorway deeper in and a way back, and a line under the Exit button tells you the wave, when the Gravemaw rises, and when a cleared cave is about to collapse.
• The five cave creatures, the Gravemaw (drawn boss-sized), its tremors and the "Sapped" status from Gloom Metal weapons all show, and Gloom Metal weapons carry their name.
• Parties: accepting an invite from your Messages joins the party and brings you to them right away. A new party strip in the top-right corner shows every member's name, health bar and green/red status dot; tap a name to view their profile or, as leader, kick them; tap the "Party" header to leave or disband.
• A reward now shows the moment the server confirms it, instead of after the next check of your bag. The number shown is always the server's own figure, so it cannot drift, and money owed back after a refund is no longer hidden as zero.
• The Companions menu updates immediately when a removal is accepted and shows that it is still processing. It keeps checking while open and recognises a companion deployed again after recall.
• A new Mayor can build a City House again. The Build menu hid the row from anyone who belonged to a city, but founding one makes you its Mayor without giving you a house.
• The city screen has a new "The Office" section: what holding the office commits you to, and the Mayor-only Resign button.
• Shield Charge only appears on the tap menu when you have learned it and have a shield equipped. Learning or resetting skills elsewhere is picked up within about a minute, without logging out.
• Your Joined date shows in the profile Info card, and an open profile refreshes itself while keeping your tab and scroll position.
• Map tiles can no longer corrupt the cache's size count or evict a tile still in use while the game is starting up.