Blog Post for the New NPCs, Items..etc update!

So, my finals are done so I went full speed ahead on this update. It took some time to setup over the weekend due to some issues that came up and some more stuff I wanted to get in but here's a full list of what went down.

NOTE: Some people have reported the Targeting Module's Overcharged Function doesn't work after the first use. It requires atleast 11-12 trades which is a signficant investment for most through crafting, so I have disabled the use of this item until it's fixed. Should be a quick fix tonight [This won't affect the Aiden questline don't worry].

1. New Items:

a) Materials & Tools - 2 new item types. You may have encountered materials already, but not tools. They are both intended for use in crafting in the Shadow Forge. The thing that's special about them is that when you're crafting a new item, the trades determined for the new item (the lowest trade out of all required items inputted) does not factor in the trades of a Material. As for tools, there will be some recipes where you need a Tool present in your inventory in order to do the recipe. To be quite honest, I'm not so hot on tools being used for that purpose so they may just change to Materials as well but I'll keep you posted on that front. So far, no recipes require any tools.

b) Items can have data associated with them. Example: the new Targeting Module - an item where 1 trade = 10% battery power. Using the item once will consume a trade and destroy the item if it drops to 0 upon a use. The Targeting Module itself comes with some nice features - the cool one being that if you overcharge the battery power (go greater than 100%), you can perform an "Overcharged Scan", which finds a common to rare item for you held by a hunting group and make that a guaranteed drop on your next hunt of that hunting group. See rollin340's top post in his NPC and Items thread! The Targeting Module also, by default, has a list of all the owners of Phantom items, and their locations (if overcharged, it will display wasteland coordinates too). What are Phantom items? Glad you asked.

c) Phantom items are basically like Spectral items, although a simpler form of them. See, items can now have "expiry times" associated with them. So I combined this new spectral-like rarity with that expiry time and we get these Phantom items. When you defeat a player who has a Phantom item, you can claim that Phantom item. It's simple for now as I added it in very quickly as one of the last things as a sort of fun way to bide the time over the weekend while I set things up for this update but yeah, we'll flesh it out soon

d) These items have already been in the game for a while actually, just never been released but Generic/Rare/Epic/Special Blueprints are now available (most as drops, although one or two can be found using a Targeting Module) along with some new recipes to come. We'll keep adding new recipes as well to the Shadow Facility so stay tuned.

e) Throwing Blades - /throw in WL. These are still highly experimental and yes you can kill your own gang member with this. Not really intended but it's funny.. will be patched fairly soon... so, um, don't

2. Shadow Facility received a bunch of updates although a lot of it is behind-the-scenes and stuff you won't see the fruits of until an update or so from now but what's been done that you can see now is:
a) After crafting something, you'll get a "Craft Again" button which will take you back to the crafting page for the same recipe.
b) When you first go to the Shadow Facility, it will by default keep the crafting tab open.
c) When you click "Go back to the Shadow Facility" from the any of the forge/crafting pages, it will take you back to the Crafting tab selected and the last recipe you used open.
d) For every 2 levels of positive difference between your level and the level of the recipe you are trying to craft, you will receive a -20% XP penalty to the total XP possible from that recipe.
e) Some recipes reward you with bonus xp per optional item added.
f) Crafting Skill has been converted to decimal points for greater flexibility with the kind of XP recipes give.
g) Added items are removed from the respective dropdown list in the forge, and vice versa for Removed items. (More to come on this front).

3. New NPCS - X-Corp Markswomen out.


More patches/followup updates to come during the week.

An update to forum search has been added by Lynx in the latest game update. His update covers the following:

Forum search now supports searching for one or more words, matching any or all words. Additionally the time limit between searches has been removed. Results will be ordered by number of words matched. This update has also capped withdrawals from market storage to 30 at a time.

In other news, check out my "April Fools Prank?" thread in Main Forum! That's about all I have to say in this post, just covering Lynx's update here as he's a bit busy today.

Have a good day!

~Aldo

#pmwill #nuggetlivesmatter

Houston.. We have a problem.. It appears to be a giant well of text!

For the sake of transparency and Aldo's announcement yesterday about him quitting, I thought I propose my (rather small) roadmap for now.

First things first, as Aldo mentioned I have an update regarding storage incoming.
This update will allow you to withdraw a given quantity of a certain item through the use of a dropdown.
However this feature will be limited torwards how much inventory space you have left, and how many you have stored.

Secondly I'm most likely going to add another filter for market search, the idea is you should be able to search after items with a certain or more number of trades left.

After that I have a few more forum improvements in mind including:
- Better forum search, less time limit, perhaps remove it? while being able to search for more than one word.
- Checkbox to subscribe to a thread when posting.. Depends if the community want this. please let me know
- A quicker way to subscribe to threads from forum overview... Again depends if the community is not completely against this..
- And some other background additions to how staff/moderators are handling edits & deletions of posts (Staff and mods feel free to pm me about those, and i'll explain).

Now that I have this out of the way... Just to make the development matters even worse..

I'm having a trip to Paris, starting next month. and an upcoming move this year..
In addition to that, a friend is getting married soon, and somehow I have been spun into help planning that...
Meaning I won't be taking on any bigger updates, besides the above, in the next quarter of months perhaps.

Last but not least, if you have any inquiries with the roadmap, suggestions or comments to this, feel free to let me know in a PM or in comments below

Some minor fixes and other things went up today. There were some initial caching issues when the update went live but it should be good now. In case you experience any further issues, please post in the thread I've setup for this update

Patch notes:

Morning, just some minor patches (long list but it's all basically some minor fixes or quality control stuff).

1. Fixed "You" -> "Your" Hard Hat typo when it tells you it has lost durability or it has broken

2. Fixed the lack of most real-time updates when sidechat or the status effects modules were off.

3. Fixed the SC flood filter (thanks rollin for eagerly wanting it to be fixed).

4. Added a hospital quicklink without the '(Heal)' quick heal link.

5. Changed the '(Heal)' text for quick heals to '(Heal for XXc)' where XX is the credit cost required to heal.

6. Fixed bug where the amulet to amulet crystal conversions in the Crystal Exchange wasn't properly giving you back any crystals in the amulet's crystal slots 1 and 2 [IF YOU SUFFERED FROM THIS ISSUE, COMMENT BELOW OR PM ME - I can confirm].

7. Cowbell and Golden Hoof give a fixed +10 and +240 points respectively towards an ability in training currently or to your backlog if you do not have an ability in training.

8. Items that give ability points now show the amount of points they give in the item preview display.

9. When you create a thread now, you auto-subscribe to it. Old threads that weren't autosubscribed to will need to be manually subscribed to by you if you wish to receive post notifications from them.

10. Clan thread subscriptions fixed, along with their display in the Thread Subscriptions settings.

11. (Hopefully) Fixed the Invalid Script Link you would receive sometimes when you quick-entered Wasteland by using the '(Enter)' convenience link.

12. Forge Crafting recipes can now have a minimum crafting level.

13. Added Secondary Loadouts.

14. Avatars can talk to a certain special hunting npc after ..experiencing something.

15. Fixed level 110 badge now displaying correctly in online now.

16. Added colorblind support to the popup WL Overview when in WL.

17. Put some stray quicklinks in their correct lexical order.