April Build Notes

Combat

• New Anti-aircraft, Machine Gun and Heavy Machine gun turrets were introduced. This includes new player-deployable turrets. Turrets can be crafted, or bought from military vendors when you attain the rank of Major. 
• Muzzle flashes now include lighting effects. 
• Added new Blood Splurt effects that will splurt blood when a creature is damaged. They can be disabled in the options.
• Created a new Blood Pool effect that will grow out of an NPCs corpse if gore is enabled.
• The full screen blood splatter effects have been improved and will only occur when you are low on health. They can be disabled in the options.
• Partial Cover no longer reduces your movement speed, and now slightly reduces your detection modifiers.
• Melee animations should no longer step forward when used. This was causing issues for players in first person views.
• Fixed an issue with npcs moving along paths and then attacking and not properly updating this state change to the client.
• NPC Turrets now generate aggro on par with a normal weapon, and had their damage reduced somewhat.
• Significantly increased the damage on the Brute Slap random boss ability.
• Failing to deploy a robot now gives a text banner as well as the chat text.
• Introduced new charge abilities for NPCs which make things like the new stampedes possible.
• Weapons are being moved into the parts system rather than the current item visualization system. This will allow us to have better control over their animations. This is partially implemented at the time of writing.
• Numerous improvements were made to the NPC stealth system to bring it on par with the player and pet stealth changes. The player stealth system also featured some internal improvements.
• NPCs who are flagged to use melee combat will no longer try to crouch.

Crafting and Harvesting

• New harvester system was implemented. This allows for larger quantities of resources to be harvested from a harvester region node using a harvester. These nodes are more rare than the normal harvestable nodes and require a harvester to extract the resources. The system support monitoring the number or spawned out nodes as well as player count to help balance the yield rates for the system.
• Harvestable nodes now have a mastery level that works the same as species mastery. Harvesting resources will increase your mastery level. 
• Species mastery now included mastery for extracting resources as well.  4 catagories were added: Deposits (ore/minerals), Tree (Trees), Plant (plants/herbs), and Fish (fish).
• Extraction code updated for NPCs to add in a bit of a time adjustment for the process for those who are skilled at the process and know the enemy well. The more difficult the creature the better chance for higher grade results (while still maintaining a possibility for less difficult npcs). An auto option was added as well, but will kick back into manual if you land an A grade resource as it might take longer to extract it out than the auto attempt would try.
• Adjusted some harvesting chances as the numbers were off.
• Added 17 new types of wood, 16 harvestable plants, and 12 new minerals. 
• Numerous crafting mission related improvements. See the mission section for more details.
• We went through the species mastery system, adding many new resource types that can be extracted from the various species. Those will be documented below.
• You can now obtain tissue and blood samples by harvesting Hokfig. 
• Arrvor can now be harvested for poisonous stingers and venom.
• Eggs can now be harvested from Vultures.
• You can now harvest Eggs, Tissue and Blood samples from Brachura.
• Tissue and Blood samples can now be harvested from Malagions, Nacoot, T'Seef, Rhinoc and Lingmaa.
• Eggs, Blood samples, Tissue and and Meat are now harvestable from Scaed'ecoo.
• Elkar can now be harvested for Hide.
• Sangicum resources are now available in Mid-Plymouth.
• Iron can nopw be harvested in Blood Valley. 
• Abandoned Bundles can now be found in Torn Mist Valley.
• You can harvest Albus near the falls. 
• Alluvium can now be harvested in Torn Mist Valley.
• Created new Tungston resource areas at the falls. 
• Calibrite can now be found near the falls, on the Southern Range, and along the Falls Trail.
• Harvestable Oudomni Trees are now available along the Falls Trail.
• Thorium is now harvestable in Blood Valley.
• Harvestable Pechum Tree resources are now available in the Southern Range.
• There are new harvestable Cayro Trees in Blood Valley.
• Added harvestable Alluvium resources in Torn Mist Valley.
• Copper resources are now available in Ammann Village and Falls Trail.
• Rezzo Trees are now harvestable in Torn Mist Valley.
• You can now harvest Azul Flowers near the Falls Trail.
• Beryl Deposits are now available near the Plymouth Pond.
• Jessup resources can now be found near the falls.
• You can now find Green Leaf resources in Torn Mist Valley.
• A variety of Fish resources are now available at the falls.

Dens

• T'Seef have been introduced to the den system. This fast-breeding and passive livestock species make for an easy prey, but is also prone to mutation. These dens have been set up in many small towns around the world. 
• Introduced a new Scout Den system which is similar to the Raid Camp den system but targeted at solo players or small groups. Similar to the Raid Camp system these dens can offer missions and spin off missions. 
• Created new types of Lingmaa, Malagion, Okolat, Rhinoc, Raxin, Lesoo, Setlang, Vulture, and Lurker Dens.

Engagements

• Added a series of engagements to Ranger Station 56. This includes escorts, air raids, FPR conflicts, and more.
• A new series of engagements has been added in the Outskirts. This includes a long-term peace agreement with the Faugea that will open up new mission oppportunities if players hold to it(including the Faugea language series), or cause an escalating conflict if players slaughter too many Faugea, eventually culminating in attacks on the village. 
• Introduced our first weather based engagement. This engagement provides new spawn types and a more dangerous overall environment with bonus rewards if players manage to defeat all the new bosses before the weather clears up. 
• Stampede engagements are now available. These will sometimes be tied into longer term engagements as a mini-engagement to mix things up and will work just as expected with a type of herd animals stampeding from their previous position to someplace else. Players who get caught in the stamped could be in for some serious trouble. 
• Introduced a new town fire engagement which rewards players if they can help put out the fires before they engulf the town. If players can not put the fires out in time, the engagement will mutate into a rebuilding the town engagement allowing them to provide crafted resources to help rebuild the area and get the town back on track.
• Plymouth City now supports a hidden engagement that ties into an epic mission line. This engagement will not give any indication of what it happening, but it will be spawning opportunities when it occurs. It is the first of its type, but we'll likely see more of these in the future.
• Engagements now pass the full engagement data to custom scripts, providing support for more functionality in OnStart scripts on a per-engagement basis. 

Environment, Graphics and Animation

• The weather system has been improved so that it is easier to share and set up across multiple areas. This includes cross-seam fog fixes and a better overall look and feel to environmental effects.
• New and Improved snow effects which include a wave of mist mixed in with the snow, and when the snowflakes hit the ground they create a small poofing effect. 
• Thunderstorms now contain a lightning effect.
• Introduced some new particle effects which hug correctly to rocks for sandstorm effects, providing a more realistic feel.
• Introduced new foot splash effects when walking in water.
• Created new waterfall and splash effects. 
• The sun has returned to Rhyldan.
• Fixed rifle sheath position visualizations.
• Many new types of props, tents, walls, rocks, platforms, bridges, particles, buildings, trees and foliage were introduced.
• Many new particle effects have been added throughout the world to liven up areas in a subtle way.
• Some NPC species now have a saliva dripping effect.
• Improved Raxin animations.
• Added new rifle and handgun firing animations.
• New and improved robot textures.

Housing

• Housing plots now have a visual indicator letting you know which plot is yours.
• Housing plot distance everything loads in to the client was increased a considerable amount as it was set low for testing.

Items

• Electrical Discharge, Energy, Acid Release and Heated melee weapons have all new particle effects.
• New trophy items for T'Seef and Faugea have been introduced.

Miscellaneous

• Rewrote much of the swimming code in-game to correct some issues and make it more reseponsive. 
• Added Mock, Ridicule and Ponder emotes.
• Victory music effects (played when you complete missions or positive events) will not happen as often as was previously the case.
• Added new titles: Chief-Slayer, and Honorable. 
• Internal improvements to more easily allow us to batch add or modify large groups of data. 
• Particle optimizations.

Missions

• Crafting missions are able to more properly assign orders to players, so they will no longer receive orders that are too easy or too difficult.
• Introduced a new type of mission that allows NPCs to rarely spawn in locations such as Pubs or other meeting locations, tell a story, and for it to offer nearby players a timed mission based on their tale, before the NPC walks away and despawns. These missions provide new opportunities for a short period of time. An example of this is an NPC who was ambushed and lost something important, which will now have a chance of dropping for players who heard his speech for a short (generally 10-20 minutes) period of time afterwards.  
• Crafting results are better parsed for missions so it will pick from multiple results for filters of they are available.
• Added new static research collection missions to Dr. Rosa in Timbertoc and Dr. Spates at the Shed. These missions are repeatable collections, which will give rewards and faction, and also alter the moods and dilemmas of the scientists themselves, creating new mission opportunities. 
• Introduced a new epic series which is initiated by players being passed some dangerous bits of information by an Alledged Thief fleeing persecution. Players must cross paths with this thief before Peacekeepers catch him. Like other epic series, this includes multiple choices and consequences of those choices.
• The Lurker Species research mission series has made a return. This series was in the original Training Facility but had never made an appearance in the world after we revamped that section before the start of alpha. It involves researching the Lurker species and the first stage of it is found in the F.S. Research Center via a generated mission to those who qualify, culminating in small raid content.
• Improvements were made to Escort missions so that the NPCs can hang around and perform interactions with other NPCs after it is completed, but will no longer offer an escort mission and eventually despawn.
• Bounty Collectors will also now accept Lesoo War Plans items which are random drops from bosses in the Lesoo Scout or Raid dens.
• A new series of Patrol missions were introduced around Plymouth to guide you to the new hubs.
• Improved mutable Mood and Dilemma support.
• Made adjustments to the Fitting Order crafting missions so that they require less time investment.
• The Eviction Notice generated mission template is now tagged as a Diplomatic mission rather than an OWON mission, providing new rewards.
• The Military Supplies generated mission is now tagged as a Miltary assignment, rather than Menial. This will provide different rewards and military experience.

NPCs

• Introduced a new Advanced NPC Trigger system. Without getting too much into the technical details, this feature allows our content team to easily design advanced NPC behaviors that can happen when an NPC enters an area. They can be used formany things including offering missions, speaking or playing animations, spawning or despawning of other npcs, forking to a random path, altering the behavior type (to wander the area, stop, or walk a path). These can be configured with up to multiple timers to perform an advanced series of actions, and can be chained together to make an NPC walk to his shop, stay there for a while and randomly emote things, then 10 minutes later walk to the pub, stay there and chat for a while, before walking to his home 5 minutes after that and giving a mission to plays who meet certain qualifications right before he enters it. While this was possible before it, required custom scripts, where the new system allows our content team to rapidly produce these feautures with no scripting required. We're hoping this system allows us to create a livelier world than was previously possible.
• NPC personalities can now be persistent. This allows NPC mood or dilemma changes to be long-term even after a server restart. 
• Each NPC can now have it's own custom script with hooks to perform advanced actions when they spawn, despawn or die. These hooks allow us to create a greater degree of features that are well suited for generated content. Some examples of things you can see as a result of this include: Splitting mobs, chained spawned, advanced pathfinding choices, missions or opportunities that are only available for small windows, etc. Many of those things required other hooks such as an active mission or engagement to be performed previously. 
• NPC personality can now change, in addition to mood, dilemma and cause. Personality changes will be more rare, but are possible and can be persistent.
• Joseph and Sarah Fisher have assumed a larger leadership role in Ammann Village, and now have persistent personality traits. Their traits will change based on player actions in the area, and they will be more vocal about their feelings.
• NPCs will now use mood or dilemma based chatter more often. This includes the bits where they talk about other NPCs or players based on recent activity. New phrases and filters have also been introduced.
• New forms of mutants have been introduced to the Dead City.
• There are now less drug dealers in the Dead City, but they are more combat savvy than was previously the case.
• Setlang Alphas and Raxin Pack-Leaders can now influence the targeting of their pack, making their packs much more dangerous.
• Setlang bosses now have their own generated boss abilities list.
• Arrvor now have their own ability lists including poisonous sting attacks. 
• Arrvor bosses can now have a new Control Minions ability which will spawn other Arrvor from out of the sand to assist them.
• Okolat are now able to swim.
• OWON Bounties can now be turned in at Ranger Station 56.
• The following new NPC dilemmas were added: Fighting With, Ripped Off, Supply Post Lost, and Peace With the Faugea. Dilemma changes adjust the types of missions available and how NPCs speak to players or one another.
• Many new world, den and engagement bosses have appeared throughout the Plymouth area. This includes a slew of group and raid bosses.
• Trained Rhinocs can now sometimes be found in Lesoo camps. They are similar to normal Rhinocs, but loyal to their Lesoo masters.

User Interface

• You may now enable or disable gore through the options.
• The pop out menu window now features new icons which properly adjust for UI color changes and look better than the previous icons.
• The lighting on your paperdoll model from the Character Window has been adjusted so that it more brightly lit.
• You can now use the /timedmission clear command to clear out any timed missions that are active.

World

• The Torn Mist Valley has been introduced. This area introduces the Lingmaa species, a small tree-dwelling species which will attack you from range. It also features a Ranger base, a group/raid hunting location, and a new cave. The first time you visit Ranger Station 56 you will receive a small but permanent boost to your Rifle Defense. 
• A large waterfall area has been created in between Plymouth City and the Control Center. This area includes a variety of species, an underwater cave, and two OWON military stations centering around the research of the lurker species near the falls. While there are many research opportunities here for players, the lurkers do not like being used as test subjects, and will eventually take action against either of the two bases if things get too out of hand. If one base falls the other base will provide new missions and direction to retake it, and will become vulnerable to attack itself. The first time you visit the research center you will receive a small but permanent boost to your Genetic Engineering.
• Ammann Village has received a significant content upgrade. The Villagers will ask you to not harm the Faugea from Tikt. If players are able to hold to the truce, an Ambassador will appear in the Village. Players can aid this Ambassador to eventually be taught the Faugea language, opening other opportunities. However, if too many players violate these agreements, relations will sour and conflicts may ensue. This is a longer term engagement, with it forking in several ways based on player actions. There are also other engagements also available in the area, including town fires, our first weather based engagement, and content offshoots.
•  The valley below the Hole on the Hill has been completely overhauled and is now known as Blood Valley. It is a dry region that features Arrvor, Raxin and Lesoo dens, as well as a powerful new Arrvor raid boss which has its own special abilities in addition to some generated boss abilities. This is likely the toughest boss in the Plymouth area to date, so be wary.
• Mid-Plymouth has received a major content overhaul. It now features a new crash site, new den types, raid bosses, a trail between the falls and Plymouth City, and a more visually appealing look.
• There is a new trail that leads from Plymouth City to the falls. It features a number of engagement and den opportunities, including several group and raid areas along the way. The Lesoo have traditionally held a strong influence in this area, and they will attempt to gain a foothold. If players let them gain it, new camps will sprout up and grow, providing additional hunting opportunities, but will also make the area and roads more dangerous. This area also features a rhinoc herd that will stampede from time to time. 
• New buildings and locations have been added to Freedomtown.
• Added the following new map viewable points of interest: Ranger Station 56, Camp Taak, Blood Valley, Falls Trail, F.S. Research Center, and Plymouth Pond. 
• The first time you visit the Plymouth Pond you will receive a small but permanent increase to your Swimming Skill.
• Many new Dangerous Areas have been added throughout the Plymouth area. These areas are targeted at groups or raids, and will give a bonus to your skill gain rate while inside of them. Players receive a visual indication when they are inside of a Dangerous Area.
• Upon visiting Blood Valley for the first time you will receive a small but permanent boost to your Survival skill.
• General optimizations and decoration improvements throughout the Plymouth area.
• Re-introduced seatable stools to the Shady Lady Pub in Plymouth City.
• You can now sit down at the chairs in Kadence's shop in Plymouth City.
• Added new sound effects to the Aemar Mine.
• Disco lights have returned to the Mayflower Pub. They are only available when things get livelier at night. 

Bug Fixes

• Corrected an issue with crafting missions where fitting ids were being used instead of item ids in some cases and causing some odd crafting work orders.
• Fixed a character selection bug that could occur with characters with spaces in their names. 
• Repaired a spawner issue that was causing some NPCs to never respawn after being killed. 
• Fixed numerous room related issues in the Plymouth area.
• Repaired and issue that was causing some areas near Plymouth to not spin up properly on the first visit. 
• The crafting station in Ammann Village is no longer floating.
• Fixed some pathing related issues in the Outskirts, Ammann Village, Outskirts, Timbertoc, and Koleyna.
• Fixed an image/GUI issue with dialog that was left over from earlier builds.
• Stitched borked patches of terrain in Timbertoc, Falls Trail, and Mid-Plymouth. 
• Fixed a bug with NPC knockback that was allowing some NPCs to go into a loop of knocking themselves down.
• Lurkers are now be attackable by engagement spawned NPCs or guards. 
• Fixed a bug with the emote scripts so they now use the full command when outputting text.
• Fixed an error with the disable tips option if the value hadn’t previously been set.
• Switching between first and third person camera modes should no longer change the direction you are facing.
• Fixed a bug that was causing it to play the starting FX of the previous engagement when chained to start a new one.
• Updated several Speedtree types to correct lighting issues when billboarded.
• Fixed a bug in Character Registry where characters were stored twice.
• Fixed a bug in the mission achievement counters that was allowing players to get credit for exiting out of some static collection missions without completing them properly.
• Fixed a floating hammer at the Ammann Village crafting bench.
• Fixed a bug that was causing mission markers to not get removed from your waypoints and minimap after you turned in a mission.
• The Military Supplies mission no longer displays both goals initially. It hides the second goal until needed.
• Fixed a bug in the timed mission system which was causing timed missions to sometimes not abort properly.
• Repaired a bug with Delayed Mail missions that was causing the first player to receive the mail to not receive the mission data properly after a server reset. 
• Fixed an issue with looting corpses.
• Corrected a bug in the Bounty Collection missions that was not giving full credit if you turned in 5 or 25 items as opposed to one.
• Fixed an ability bar related issue that was causing bars to appear in the upper left hand corner the first time you log in if you had them disabled.
• Fixed a mission reward related bug that was occuring when players used skill checks or random rolls and was not always giving them the proper rewards as a result.
• Arrvor Stingers are now properly flagged as an Arrvor branch, previously they were producing craftable results as if they were Faugea stingers erroneously.