Update 0.1.37: Smooth Movement, Discord and a Long List of Fixes

Update 0.1.37 is rolling out now on Android, iOS and Windows. Everything on the server side is already live, so the moment your app updates you get the new movement, the new mail button and every fix below together. As always, older versions of the app keep working until the stores have carried the new one for a while; versions older than 0.1.36 are now asked to update.

Server

• Link your Discord account from the website (Account ▸ Connections) to carry your Crownfront name into the community server. Discord only tells us who you are; it never signs you in, and you can unlink with one click. Deleting your account releases the link at once.
• The community Discord gets a bot: /link, /profile and /status answer right in the server, and every announcement staff publish in the game is posted there too, once.
• Patch notes published on the website are now posted to the Discord development-updates channel automatically, as the Crownfront bot, once per post and never with a ping.
• The website's Game, Features and Download pages now describe the game as it is: trading and the market are live, the "in development" section is gone, the official App Store and Google Play badges link to the listings, and the old TestFlight link is retired.
• The Download page and the home page now show the four ways to play as plain store badges: Google Play, the App Store, the Mac App Store (the same App Store copy runs on Apple-silicon Macs) and a Windows download button, each with its compatibility listed underneath (Android 7.1+, iOS/iPadOS 15+, macOS 12 on M1 or later, Windows 10 64-bit). The two store badges had rendered as broken pictures; fixed.
• The world now tells your game where every player and creature in view is heading and how fast, so they keep walking smoothly through short connection hiccups instead of freezing and rushing. Creatures chasing someone and companions following their owner say so too, so a hiccup never stops them where their target used to be.
• The world no longer pauses while it saves. Every 15 seconds the server used to stop moving every creature and every other player for several seconds while it wrote the world to storage, so they froze and then jumped ahead, flags finished their countdown late, and walking up to build one could fail as "couldn't get close enough". Saving now happens in the background and the world keeps moving.
• Each player's connection now has its own queue on the server: if your phone falls behind, only the newest picture of the world is kept for you, chat and other messages never wait behind a slow connection, and a connection that stops reading is closed cleanly instead of silently stalling everyone on that server.
• The world can now send only what changed since your last update, with a complete picture every two seconds, cutting the data your phone downloads by about half. It works with the newest app; older app versions keep receiving full updates.
• Crowds: the world server now builds every player's view of a crowded area once and shares it, then finishes each player's copy on several cores at once, and the world servers may use three times the processing power when a crowd gathers. A hundred players standing together no longer slow the whole world down.
• The connection server every phone talks to may now use two cores, and every service's health check waits five seconds before counting a failure. In a 300-player crowd test it had been too busy to answer within one second, so the cluster restarted it and dropped everyone connected to it.
• The front door counted every visitor as one of four addresses and would have turned away new players once about 80 were connected at the same time. It also believed any address a visitor claimed. Both are fixed: each player is seen as themselves, the game's sign-in and public reads are rate-limited per player instead of one shared bucket for the whole world, and claimed addresses are ignored.
• Up to 200 players sharing one internet address (everyone on the same phone carrier or the same campus network looks like one address) can now be online at the same time. The old allowance was 20.
• Game updates now close the realm for the few minutes the servers restart, instead of leaving you inside while menus and actions break. You see the maintenance screen with the reopening time, and the app lets you back in automatically when it is done.
• Walking across the invisible line between two world servers no longer teleports you to your destination. You walk to the line, cross it, and keep walking on the other side.
• When your troll or golem lands the killing blow, the kill is yours everywhere: the Cinderroc banner names you, a fallen player's gravestone reads "Killed by" you, and the kill counts toward your record and your kingdom's bricks. Every real Cinderroc kill is announced, even when the killing blow came from a companion whose owner was not standing nearby.
• Kingdom and city towers can now finish you off. A death to a tower counts as a player kill: you drop items like any PvP death and your gravestone reads "Killed by a Kingdom Tower" (or "a City Watch Tower"). Towers used to stop at 1 health.
• When a Kingdom Hall or City Hall falls, everything the kingdom or city owned now falls with it everywhere in the world, not only nearby: warehouses, trade hubs, and player houses, workshops and yards built on that ground all burn down, and whatever was stored inside drops on the ground for anyone to pick up.
• Attacking a flag from too far away now works the way attacking a creature does: the server walks you to the edge of your weapon's reach and strikes when you arrive. If you cannot get there (trapped, or you wander off), you are told so.
• A catapult's shots now brand its owner an outlaw everywhere at once, even when the owner is standing on a different part of the world than the engine.
• The Cinderroc's ground fire now burns your trolls and golems as well as players standing in it. Wild creatures are untouched.
• Call to Me now reaches a companion anywhere in the world, not only on your own world server. Golem work orders work anywhere on your server too, and ordering a golem to a Crystal Works or Oil Well while it is following you now makes it stop following and go to work.
• Shield Charge now works on any creature inside your walk circle. It used to refuse anything more than a few steps away with "Too far to charge".
• A polished ring or amulet dropped on the ground now shows its full name ("Divine Ring of Swiftness"), the same name the Trade Hub shows. Rings, amulets and infused weapons you drop when you die keep their names too.
• Trolls now drop Wayfeathers as generously as morning sprites do: 10 to 30 at a time, about half the time.
• Blueprints now drop from ordinary creatures at 0.01% each (were 0.5%). Unpolished rings and amulets: deer and wolves drop them at 0.04% and 0.02%; spiders, morning sprites and trolls at 0.06% and 0.03%. The Cinderroc's drops are unchanged.
• Polish tier odds are now Basic 60%, Advanced 27%, Grand 12%, Divine 1% (Divine was 3%, Advanced 25%).
• Refine Oil at the Personal Workshop takes 5 seconds per refined oil (was 60).
• Dragon Scalemail and Preserving Salt no longer need sulfur (stone instead). Sulfur is kept for destructive things like firebombs and siege engines.
• The Frozen Seal is harder to make: 5 Frost Sap, 5 Frostbloom and a Topaz. It still guarantees a failed forge attempt costs you nothing.
• Every account now receives its one free Skill Reset Scroll the first time it enters the world, not only when it opens its profile.
• Crafting a gem at level 45 took the 80 Royal Sigils but never handed over the gem (the app still announced it). Fixed, and the one craft this had happened to on the live game was granted its gem.
• Retired the Guardian Stone, Shopkeeper Contract, Woodcutter's Kit and Wolf Pelt, along with the Stone Golem, Street Merchant and Woodcutter. They were early experiments that nothing in the game provided or used.
• Refunds now take the Royal Sigils back. When Apple refunds a purchase, the sigils it granted are removed within seconds, even if they were already spent; the balance then shows as negative until the next purchase covers it. The same rule applies to web shop refunds, and Google Play refunds are picked up within about five minutes and handled the same way. If you ask Apple for a refund, Apple now gets our answer about whether the sigils were delivered and how many you have already used, as the privacy policy describes; Apple decides.
• Fixed a fault in the purchase checker that could make every App Store or Google Play purchase after the first one on a server show "we couldn't reach the store just now" until that server restarted.
• A banned player can no longer get around the ban by having their account deleted and signing up again with the same email address. The address is remembered only as a scrambled fingerprint (never the address itself) for as long as the ban would have lasted. Deleting an account that is not banned still frees its email and name immediately.
• The Economy page now shows who holds the crowns and Royal Sigils: player purses, kingdom vaults and city treasuries each get their own figure under the headline total.
• Support tickets now email you: when the team replies to your ticket or marks it resolved, you get a message with a link straight to the ticket on the website (it is also under Menu ▸ Support in the game).
• Game versions older than 0.1.36 are now asked to update before they can sign in or enter the world.
• Housekeeping: an unused server (a trading skeleton that never moved an item — trading lives in the Trade Hubs and trade tents) was retired, leftover code from old tools was removed, and the service that stores flags, buildings and positions was given more memory after running out once. Nothing changes for players.
• For the team: staff can now post to any channel of the community Discord from the Control Center as the Crownfront bot, with Discord's own formatting, a live preview and pings; administrators can see and change what each staff rank may do; staff who link their Discord receive the Discord role for their rank; staff can open a player's whole record, give or take currency and items (every action confirmed, recorded and reversible except taking a unique item), and mail every player from Crownfront with claimable gifts; in-game events can be scheduled from the Control Center; the staff level tool also grants the skill points those levels would have earned; store reviewers get a single flagged review account; and several Control Center errors ("Request failed (500)" on staff actions, the Site Defaults page saying "Nothing found", the admin role failing to save, a mass mail sending twice) are fixed.

Client

• Other players and creatures keep walking smoothly through short connection hiccups instead of walking for two seconds and freezing for two. Your game now walks them toward where the server says they are heading and gently corrects them when the next update lands, so a pause in updates changes nothing on screen. When updates arrive in a bunch after a hiccup, every position in the bunch is used instead of only the last one, and catch-up is a brisk walk, never a dash or a teleport.
• Creatures chasing you (and companions following their owner) now aim at where you are, not where you were. During a short connection hiccup a wolf used to run to the spot you had already left; now it keeps following your marker as you move.
• Gifts from Crownfront arrive as mail with a Claim button. Tap it to collect; the mail then reads Claimed, and a second tap does nothing.
• When the realm closes for an update, the app now reconnects by itself the moment it reopens; the Try Again button still works too.
• Building a flag, buoy, sign or decoration at the far edge of your circle no longer fails with "couldn't get close enough". The game waits as long as the walk actually takes.
• A Wooden Sign's text now floats directly above its own sign. With more than one sign in view, each further sign's text was drawn lower and lower, well below its post.
• A request that stalls (for example during a server restart) now gives up after 12 seconds instead of 30, so the bag and its buttons never sit frozen for half a minute.
• On phones the game keeps the connection awake with a tiny signal while other players or creatures are nearby, so power saving cannot bunch the world's updates together. Settings ▸ General has the switch.
• Settings ▸ General gains a Network section: your ping, how often world updates arrive, the longest pause in the last 30 seconds, frame hitches, and how smooth playback is, with an optional live readout in the corner of the map.
• On Android, the Back button now closes the topmost panel (a menu, the chat, a dialog) exactly like the Escape key does on a computer, instead of doing nothing.
• The companion order "Stand Guard" is now called "Halt": one word that means stand right there.
• Rings and amulets on the ground show their full name.

How to update

• Android: update from Google Play.
• iPhone and iPad: 0.1.37 has been sent to Apple and appears as an update once it is approved, usually within a day or two.
• Windows: download 0.1.37 from the website's Download page.