Aardwolf MUD Blog

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General Aardwolf changes this update:
Main purpose of this reboot was to get code in to allow the imms to start setting materials in areas. You will start to notice ‘material’ appear in identify as these are set.

A few changes other that did make it in though:

• The affect that Timeshifting has on the ‘timeshift’ dodge when used by Navigators has been removed. There is no longer a timeshift penalty when using the timeshifting spell. As a reminder, this spell basically gives the navigator and chance for lower lag time on any action that adds lag. Sounds like no big deal, but the outcome is they can sometimes cast more times per round of combat.
• The duration of the two hex spells has been increased slightly. The initial amount has also been increased with the amount of increase based on the caster’s int.
• Tidied up the ‘whois’ output a little to not be out of line when someone has more than a million qp earned or mobs killed.
• Fixed a bug in the strength affect on hitroll - when you went from 100 to 101 hitroll, HR would actually drop by 5. Affect of this is basically that all characters with more than 100 str now have 5 more hitroll.
• Fixed the output of temporary effects with a duration over 1 day in identify.
• You can no longer place ‘nosave’ items on the marketplace. Nobody could bid on them anyway, but might as well clean this up.
• Have made items won on the marketplace automatically be kept when transferred to you. Did the same with regular auction and rauction.
• Tempering should now improve.
• The ‘free’ identify will now show temporary effects on items.

Blacksmith Skill- Tempering:

A skilled blacksmith can use raw materials at a forge to temporarily increase the abilities of any metal-based weapon. The results of tempering a weapon will depend on the skill of the blacksmith, the quality of the weapon and the ore used.

Only the most skilled blacksmith can temper the highest quality weapons. There are no level restrictions, but a combined strength and dexterity of 4 times the combined hitroll/damroll on a weapon is required in order to temper it.

Your stats determine whether or not you can temper an item and the duration of the effect, but don’t actually determine the strength of the effect. More powerful weapons will get more average damage increase and may get additional effects - depending on the quality of ore used. You can not harm a weapon by failing to ‘temper’ it.

Basic low-grade and high-grade ore can be found at the forge in Aylor (’runto forge’). Other types of ore of varying quality may be found throughout Andolor.

Note that only items of type ‘raw material - ore’ can be used for tempering. Other items might look like they could be used, but if they are not this type, they are not suitable for use at the forge.

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Witch Spell - Petrify

Petrify is a spell available to the Witch subclass which can cause their enemy to become partly petrified. While petrified, the victim will find their weapon attacks ineffective. The strength of the petrification is determined by the attacker’s intelligence, wisdom and luck versus that of their opponent.

The strength of the petrification, the duration of the effect and the recovery are all based primarily on intelligence, with wisdom and luck also playing a part.

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Witch Spell - Hex of Entropy:

The witch Hex of Entropy causes their victim to feel weaker with the strength of the spell increasing over time. The longer a target is affected by this hex, the weaker they become.

The duration of this spell (and therefore its power) is based on Intelligence and, to a lesser degree, Wisdom. The recovery time is exactly twice the duration of the spell.

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Witch Spell - Hex of Misfortune:

The Witch’s Hex of Misfortune causes their victim to feel unlucky, with the strength of the spell increasing over time. The longer a target is affected by this hex, the more unlucky they become.

The duration of this spell (and therefore its power) is based on Intelligence and, to a lesser degree, Wisdom. The recovery time is exactly twice the duration of the spell.

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Witch Spell - Curse of Sloth:

A Witch’s Curse of Sloth makes the victim feel sluggish and temporarily unable to move. The spell holds the target to the spot in a manner similar to web. The strength of the curse is determined by the caster’s intelligence, wisdom and luck versus that of their opponent.

The end result is that a cursed target will find it easier to escape from a single room than a webbed target, but is easier to track down as their subsequent movements / recall attempts are much more likely to fail.

There is no known cure for the Witch’s Curse of Sloth as regular curse removal abilities are ineffective against it.

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General Aardwolf changes this update:

• The effect of the elementalist air/water/fire/earth focus spells has been doubled. Keep in mind these affects include damage done by weapons also.
• There is a new lbid filter: ‘lbid filter outbid’ which shows items you have been outbid on. Lots of people suggested this or similar so no particular name next to it, but thanks for all the great feedback.
• We see a lot of new users trying to use ’speak’ or ‘talk’ in the game so have added a command which displays a brief help when either of those are used. Also added ’status’ as a global alias to ’score’.
• The health inspectors were concerned about food and drink sitting around in a vault for extended periods of time. They can no longer be sold via the long term auction (marketplace). This includes manor pies.
• As mentioned on mudinfo - the ‘daze’ test on bodycheck was broken and is now fixed. See mudinfo note #1122.
• Green Death was incorrectly using strength rather than dexterity to help determine whether or not the poison lands. Now fixed.
• Have changed the effect of the sharp flag some, it should work more often now. You probably wont notice it in individual hits, but anyone using a damage tracker should see some benefit from it.
• You can now bid on containers on the marketplace regardless of level.
• Trying to enter a level locked area will no longer set the explored flag as if you actually did enter the first room.
• Have changed the code that updates notes with bugtracker links to no longer repeat the note on the board. It still appends to the original note and sends a personal note to the original poster. Anyone interesting in keeping up with all bugtracker additions can just subscribe to the RSS feed on it.
• The auction number on ‘lbid <#>‘ is now validated correctly. Before the change, ‘lbid 45lks’ worked just fine with the ‘lks’ ignored.
• The ‘elemental’ location in Aylor has been renamed to ‘elementalist’ as the elemental area conflicted with it. ‘Runto setweight’ also works.
• The academy leaflet can no longer be listed on the marketplace - this item is intended to teach new players the regular auction system and the ‘bonus chance’ code for it also does not work on the marketplace.
• The vote editor can now accept dates past 2010. I tested it up to 2030, so maybe we’ll have the same problem again then?
• Berserk success message has been changed slightly. Your pulse races as you go berserk!

Martyr Spell - Serenity

A martyr is able to create an aura of serenity around their entire group for a short period of time. This aura is so calming that an enraged attacker will find their anger is ineffective against the target. This spell will not affect berserkers in the casters own group.

The strength of this spell, the duration of the affect, and the recovery time are all based primarily on the caster’s wisdom, and to a lesser degree, luck.

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Martyr Spell - Sacrifice Life:

A martyr is able to sacrifice their life for the benefit of others in their group. Martyrs should use this spell carefully, if the healing needs of the group are higher than their own health, they can be left on the verge of death. The amount a martyr can heal is based on their wisdom. An extremely wise martyr can fully heal either their entire group, assuming they have enough health to sacrifice.

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Martyr Spell - Heavenly Smiting:

The martyr, with complete disregard for their own safety, is able to call upon the fury of their god to smite an entire room. Such is the fury of their god that it takes all of a martyrs focus to avoid hitting friendly characters in their room, leaving the caster themselves also vulnerable to this attack.

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Enchanter Spell - Enchanters Focus:

A member of the enchanter subclass is able to increase their concentraton while performing some types of enchantment. While their enchantment is more focused, the caster may be unsatisfied with the results of solidfying, resonating or illuminating a piece of equipment and automatically choose not to set the hum, glow or invisibile flags. This effectively allows them to try again.

This spell will also add a small amount of intelligence, wisdom and luck to the caster, further increasing their ability to enchant.

Note that this spell does not affect other types of enchantment with more cumulative results, and has no affect on items that cannot receive bonus stats such as keys and trivia portals.

This spell uses the Augmentation recovery, with the time determined by the casters intelligence and wisdom.

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Oracle Spell - Focused Vision:

An Oracle is able to channel their advanced perception into a focused vision. This focused vision allows the Oracle to glance at a room full of characters and identify targets personally assigned to them.

This spell does not affect global quest targets and only works when in the same room as a target. Campaign mobs assigned to the caster will be shown with [CP] after their names.

New Area and Goal - Elemental Chaos:

For centuries the Dra’ork have tried to create the perfect element by harnessing the mayhem and destructive powers of the elements, however, they have failed. The Loud’ra on the other hand have tried to create the perfect element by using the elements in harmony and peacefully. Yet, they too, have failed. Even the Master of the Elements can’t seem to get it right. Maybe if someone was able to learn each technique and combine them the perfect element could at last be created.

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Other code changes this update:

• Default listing period for marketplace is now 2 days. You can still manually set the time to 1-7 days when listing the item.
• The ‘colorset colors’ command now shows the actual color codes next to the output.
• There is now a ‘group’ option to ‘who’ - it will show people in the same group as you. You are always in your own group.
• Using ‘lbid item #’ to see stats on an item in the marketplace will now show time remaining on that auction. (Voldemort). Also tidied up the output at the bottom of ‘lbid item#’ a little.
• The syntax ‘lbid sellers’ shows an abbreviated market list, but showing the name of the seller and last bidder on each type.
• The limt of 3 items at a time on the marketplace will now ignore showcase items (Wereturtle) and auctions for qp.
• The amount of experience taken by a pet while in combat has been lowered significantly. It is less than half what it was.
• The ‘prison’ area has been removed from the game.

The Aardwolf Marketplace - Long Term Auction:

The Aardwolf Marketplace was added today. This is a special version of auction with items being listed for several days and saving over reboots. The full helpfile is included below:

Overview

The ‘Aardwolf Marketplace’ is similar to auction but has a number of additional features. The item listings last for up to a week and save over reboots. It is intended to be used for special items where the seller feels that they will get a better price for an item if it is seen by a larger number of players.

Syntax:

  market sell [item] [type] [days]   : List an item for sale.
  market sell [item] [type] showcase : List a showcase item for sale.

  'Type' is QP, TP or gold. 'Days' is optional in the range 1-7.
  (NOTE: selling items for TP is only available to Immortals.)

  market list                        : List items for sale.
  market search [search options]     : Search the list of items
                                       for sale. See 'help
                                       ifilter' for options.

  market bid [auction #]             : See stats of an item.
  market bid [auction #] amount      : Bid on an item.
  market bid [auction #] history     : See bidding history on
                                       an item.

  market [on|off]                    : Turn market channel on/off.

Selling an item:

Regular items can be sold for gold at any time. Quest items can be listed for quest points whenever you would normally be able to remort auction them, that is, when you are level 201 and flagged as remorting.

To list an item for gold costs a fixed rate of 100k gold and 10% of the final sale price is taken as commission. There are no tier discounts. The commission is capped at 1 million gold.

To list an item for QP costs a fixed amount of 50qp. There is no commission taken at the end of the auction period and if the item does not sell it will be returned to you automatically (NOTE: this is true for regular auctions as well as QP auctions).

Particularly valuable items can be listed as ’showcase’ items. Showcase items are automatically posted to the Forsale board when they are added and showcase items will always appear at the top of market list and market search. There is also a market list option to show only showcase items. It costs 1 trivia point to make an auction a showcase listing.

There is no way to set a minimum bid when using the marketplace - all auctions start at 1. If you are not confident that your item will fetch a good price, it is better sold manually or listed on the regular auction system.

Listing/Bidding on items:

Type ‘market list’ to see the list of items for sale. You can also filter the list by level, wear location, item type, etc using ‘market search’. See ‘help ifilter’ for information on how to do this.

To see the stats on an item, type ‘market bid ‘, and to actually place a bid use ‘market bid ‘. If you bid on an item selling for QP or TP, you will be asked to confirm your bid. You cannot bid on an item you cannot save with.

You can also see the bidding history of an item using: ‘market bid history’.

Note: Your bid is charged at the time of bidding. If you are outbid your bid will be refunded automatically. This will happen even if you are offline at the time.

If an item receives a bid within 10 minutes of closing, its time will be reset to 10 minutes.

End of auction:

At the end of a marketplace auction, the seller and the highest bidder at that time will receive a note on the personal board stating that the bidding is complete. The item is transferred to the buyer and the bid amount (minus any commission) is transferred to the seller. Neither character has to be online for this to happen and if buyer or seller no longer exist, the other side of the transaction will still completed.

New Area and Goal - The First Ascent:

In shrouded history so distant that it may be expressed as Eternity Past, mankind has feared (and therefore hated) dragonkind. For their part, the dragons have been remarkably patient with man’s misconceptions, and even endured periodic purges and outright wars directed at them. The First Ascent is a detention facility, a prison if you will, where men have detained both dragons and creatures of every other description that have been accused of collaborating with dragonkind.

New Area and Goal - The Maelstrom:

This sea used to be the home of the most exotic creatures, with water as clear as crystal and as sweet as sugar. All who lived and swam in it proclaimed a land fit for the gods, notwithstanding that it was underwater. Tritons swam among the fish, laughing and frolicking in the kelp gardens and basking on the continental shelf. Time was when peace reigned in the lovely subterranean Coral city.

Now, all that remains is a desert. Arid, dry, sandy, it bears no resemblance to the lively sea that once graced the land. Evil lurks in dark places, holding the sea, and all beings in it hostage. Somehow, somewhere, there must be a way to free the Coral Seas.

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Removed Areas:

The stock areas Crystalmir Lake and the Isle of Quake have been removed from the game.

New Goal - Northstar:

The city of Northstar has an underground network of terrorists within it. They have plans to take over Northstar. To save the Queen, the terrorists plans must be figured out and stopped!

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New Area and Goal - Realm of the Sacred Flame:

The Realm of the Sacred Flame is a land ruled under by Trythan, the Master of Fire. This realm seeks to expand the power of the Sacred Flame. Their people are zealots and extremely aggressive. This realm is constantly at war with others as they seek to give enlightenment and belief to the unbelievers. As they are constantly at war, the military gets the majority of the items, leaving little for the average citizen. Therefore the majority of the realm is poor, and there is little choice but to join the military.

Will you join the Realm’s military or will you seek to combat the injustice they represent?

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Other changes in this update

• This one only affects clan leaders - ‘mwhere’ without an argument no long has a visibility check. Mwhere never did.
• A failed enrage no longer costs mana. It still costs the usual amount of moves.
• Create sound and Ventriloquate gave no output to caster when used on self. When used on others, they gave messages to caster in third person. Both fixed.
• Added ‘train convertall’ which converts all practices to training sessions and ‘train reconvertall’ which converts all training sessions to practices. ‘Train allpracs’ also works for this last option.

PKOff command:

There is a new command called ‘pkoff’. You can use this to turn on and off your own ability to PK other players. It does NOT stop other players from attacking you. It does NOT remove you from the PK system. The only two scenarios that ignore this flag are combat maze fights and warfare.

Why would you want to do this? Ask anyone who has ever charged into a lurking player with the wanted flag.

Because of this change, the requirement to use ‘all’ for area spells in PK has been removed.

Other updates made in today’s reboot:

• Not sure if the ‘worn’ option to identify was ever announced as the display of the wear location was kind of messed up. This is now fixed and for those who didn’t already know, you can use, for example:

  identify earring worn

  To only search worn items for the target object.

• Fixed a minor channel bug - players lose newbie at 200 hours online but didn’t gain gossip until > 200 (201) hours online. They now correctly get the channel at 200 hours.
• The weather conditions considered ’stormy’ for the call lightning spell now also includes blizzards and hail storms.
• Fixed a couple of issues with autoflee. The first one is quite obscure/hard to trap so please let me know if there are any issues with it:

  1. Fleeing between mobs that attack on entry could mean you fled multiple times instantly with no chance to attempt other commands in between.
  2. Sometimes you could get the flee/run away message and exp loss after already dying. This should not happen anymore.

• Fixed a bug with Gaias Focus being cancelled when entering warfare even though it is a self only spell.
• There is a new item flag called ‘noshare’ that will be set on items such as tier / builder / donation pins that are not intended to be shared even by spouses. Only the owned named on the item can use something with this flag.
• Made 2 changes to the ‘train’ command:

  When you train to max it will no longer show you the cost of a next train you can’t actually do.

  When you type ‘train’ by itself, you will now see lines even if they are maxxed. A ‘*’ at the end of the column means you have trained that stat to max. You can see the same information just looking at the two columns - trained and max.

• You can no longer donate containers that have other items inside them. This was a bug and may be the cause of some object ‘weirdness’ we’ve had recently.
• Fixed a bug with summon showing ‘You have to be a primary class … to enter that room’ when trying to someone out of a guld room.
• Updated ‘raceinfo’ so that the stat costs are also shown in green and red. The green/red are reversed in stat costs (compared to resists) because negative is good.
• Reduced the chances of balor completely misfiring on you and lowered the lag when it does. Also lowered the effect of the level check and, to be consistent with other skills, gave it a small chance to always fail / succeed no matter what the stat differenec. Other than that, it was already set such that if 2 characters with 600 in all stats were to fight each other, balor would pretty much always land. If you’re failing to land balor too much in pvp, the stat gap is simply too wide.

New Goal - Dark Elf Stronghold:

The Dark Elf Stronghold is the legendary headquarters of the dark elves. For centuries, the location of this wicked place remained a complete mystery. After all, what fool hunts out the stronghold of the most vile night creature in all the land? What could possibly motivate someone to seek out certain death from the flesh-eating, blood-drinking drow?

The dark elves recently invaded the Dwarven Kingdom after their spies found a secret entrance inside the mines. With overwhelming numbers, they poured into the kingdom… slaughtering men, women and children. Luckily, the dwarven elite guard were able to rally the troops to beat back the drow and close off the entrance they came through.

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New Goal - The Great City of Knossos:

A loud roar suddenly rips apart the dark and cold night air. You awake from your make shift bunker just in time to watch a young villager come running up to you with fear in his eyes. ‘HE FED MY BROTHER TO THE MINOTAUR!! HE HAS GONE MAD!’ is what the man screams at the top of his lungs at you. You ask calmly ‘Who has gone mad and what is a minotaur?’ The man eyes you suspiciously and suddenly stands up and tries to run away, but you are to fast for him. You grab him by the ankle and wrestle him down. Threatening him, you whisper ‘Tell me now! Or else’

The man only says 4 words, ‘Do not Trust Anyone’.

The man finally breaks lose from you, and after hours of pondering to yourself, you finally pass out.

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New Goal - Cradlebrook:

Cradled in the forested nooks and valleys of the northern mountains lies the Village of Cradlebrook. Far removed from the worries of the outside world, the village was a haven of tranquility and peace until it recently came under attack by bandits and brigands.

The town is split physically by Last Mountain Creek, a fast-flowing waterway that provides the village-folk with fish and drink. Inside, the villagers practice their craft as they always have: Telsa the Weaver provides clothing; Martu the Baker provides unleavened bread and fresh pastries; and Ison provides the weapons and armour in the rare event of war. Quiet for thousands of years, the village has been rediscovered by trackers and wood-folk. Previously hidden by the thick yew-trees of the forest valleys, thin trails have been cut into the land, and the way to the village is open.