Update 0.1.38: The Windows Launcher, Smoother Creatures and a Round of Fixes

Update 0.1.38 is rolling out now on Android, iOS and Windows — and Windows now comes with the new Crownfront Launcher, which installs the game once and keeps it up to date with small patches from then on. Everything on the server side is already live, so the moment your app updates you get every fix below together. Older versions keep working until the stores have carried the new one for a while.

Server

• The website now counts its own visitors: pages viewed, where people came from (Google, Reddit, Discord and so on), the device, the country and which store buttons were clicked. No cookies and nothing stored about you personally; the Privacy Policy explains it.
• Staff get an Analytics page in the Control Center putting that beside the game itself: new players, world entries by phone or computer, purchases, where players are in the world, and how many are online over time — for today, a week, a month or three, each compared with the period before.
• Shield Charge is a charge again, not a blink. It used to move you at twenty times running speed, which is over a kilometre a second, so you simply appeared on your target. It now moves at twice your running speed so you can see it happen, and arriving pins BOTH you and your target in place for 3 to 5 seconds depending on the skill rank, instead of only briefly holding the target.
• Silk Spiders are easier to come across. They used to be missing from 92% of the world, which made a spider wood a rare find; now they are missing from 80% of it and there are a few more of them where they do live. They are still the rarest creature out there by some way — about four times harder to run into than trolls.
• Mr_Z_ is now a Game Administrator.
• After logging in on the website, the bar at the top now shows your name straight away. It used to keep offering Log In until you refreshed the page.
• The website now loads through Cloudflare, a worldwide network of servers close to you, so pages open faster wherever you are, and every visit is put on a secure connection automatically.
• After linking your Discord account on the website you now land back on your Connections page at the real site address. Behind the scenes the server had been sending you to its own internal address (0.0.0.0:3000), which does not exist from your browser.
• Linking Discord as a staff member now gives you your rank's Discord role only (Junior Game Moderator, Game Moderator or Game Administrator) plus Citizen. The old catch-all Community Staff role is no longer handed out, and pressing Re-sync on the Connections page removes it if you already have it.
• Creatures, workers and companions walk smoothly instead of stuttering. Several separate faults were fixed at once. Different parts of the server were sharing one "how long since this creature last moved" stopwatch, so whichever part ran second was told no time had passed and left the creature standing for that beat — the stutter. Every mover now uses the world's own clock beat.
• A worker walking to a tree, and a golem running in to throw a firebomb, now stop exactly where the game told your phone they would stop. They used to walk slightly past the spot your phone was aiming for and get pulled back.
• A player crossing between the two halves of the world now stands still on everyone else's screen while they cross, instead of appearing to keep walking and then snapping back.
• The compressed "only what changed" updates are now built and sent in one place, in order. Two parts of the server could previously work on the same update at the same time, which could leave a creature on screen with its movement information missing — exactly what makes movement look jittery.
• If updates ever do arrive out of order or built on the wrong reference point, the server now spots it and sends a fresh complete picture instead of letting your phone draw from a broken one. If it cannot recover within five seconds it reconnects you cleanly rather than leaving you looking at a frozen world.
• The server now records how often creatures are sent with and without their movement information, so this class of problem can be seen in the numbers instead of guessed at from reports.
• Creatures chasing you now move every single beat instead of once per bite. A wolf that hit you could not take another step until its next attack came due — roughly two seconds later — so it stood still while you ran, then lurched about six metres to catch up. That freeze-then-lurch was the jitter people kept reporting: it was the creature genuinely standing still, not a display problem.
• A chasing creature now stops the moment it is within reach of you, rather than pushing in closer and shuffling. Attack range, attack speed and damage are all unchanged — creatures simply hold station slightly further out than before.
• Nothing can move the same creature twice in one beat any more. A creature switching between chasing, walking home, being lured, following its owner or hauling to a workshop could take two steps in a single beat and appear to skip forward.
• Repairing a Kingdom Tower or City Watch Tower now takes five seconds, and taking real damage during those five seconds interrupts it. The game also walks you to the building itself first, so a repair no longer depends on you standing in exactly the right spot. Once a repair is accepted the payment is durable — disconnecting or walking away can no longer undo it, and you are never charged for a repair that was interrupted. Every other flag still repairs the instant you arrive.
• Tower guns and their defensive aura now reach half your walk circle instead of a fixed distance. On the live world that is 150 metres rather than 100, so a tower covers noticeably more ground. If the walk circle is ever retuned, tower reach follows it automatically instead of drifting out of proportion.
• Buying Royal Sigils on the web shop paid out roughly double. Each bundle is built out of the sigil currency itself, so a 400 pack arrived described twice — the bundle and the 400 sigils inside it — and both were paid, giving 800. It now pays the bundle only. Nothing is taken back from anyone already credited, and buying loose sigils or claiming an offer reward is unaffected.
• Fixed the iPhone bug that made the game refuse to open. Every launch, the map tile store asked the phone for the size of every single file it had saved — thousands of them — before the first screen could appear. Once a player had explored enough, that took over twenty seconds and iOS killed the game for being too slow to start, every single time, until they deleted and reinstalled it. The game now remembers how big the store is instead of recounting, and does any tidying quietly in the background, so opening the game never waits on it however much you have explored.
• Weapons and armour can be taken back off recruited trolls again. A troll's internal id is written two slightly different ways — one while it is walking around, another once it has been reloaded from storage — and the receipt for the gear it was holding used whichever way happened to be in use at the time. So gear put on before a server restart could never be taken off afterwards: the game asked for it under a name that no longer matched and answered "couldn't unequip right now" every time, with the item locked away. Gear already stuck this way is released the next time you unequip, dismiss or lose that troll.
• Packing up a siege golem now walks you to it. If it is anywhere inside your walk circle you head over and it packs the moment you arrive, instead of refusing with "move closer". Outside your circle it still refuses, because no amount of walking would get you there.
• Siege golems move at half speed. They crossed open ground at 45 metres a second, which gave nobody time to react to a catapult coming; they now trundle at 22.
• The game now tells your device exactly when your red (aggressive) status will end, not just that you are red. That is what lets the greyed-out Travel button count down instead of sitting there with no hint of how long.
• Life-steal jewellery finally heals. A ring that heals a percentage of the damage you deal worked out each hit on its own, rounded down to whole health points and threw the remainder away, so a 2% ring on ordinary 10-damage hits healed 0.2, rounded to zero, every single swing, forever. The leftover now carries from hit to hit and pays out each time it reaches a whole point: five 10-damage hits, 50 damage dealt, 1 health back. Small, as 2% should be, but real.
• Companions no longer refuse orders for a few seconds after you cross an invisible map border. Crossing between the two halves of the world server bumped the destination area's version number, and the worker running that area only heard about the new number on its next 5-second check-in. In that gap every save from the area was refused, so recruiting a troll, dismissing one or calling one to you answered "They can't be reached right now" — and players who live on a border hit it constantly. The worker now picks up the new number the instant the crossing arrives, so the gap is gone.
• Shield Charge works on other players, not just creatures. It follows the same rules as any attack on a player: charging someone who is red (or an outlaw, or who just hit you) rushes in and pins you both for the usual few seconds, exactly like charging a creature. Charging a green player who hasn't provoked you gets the single cheap-shot swing an ordinary attack gets and pins nobody — you can't lock someone in place who hasn't agreed to a fight.
• Companions no longer get left behind by a flag jump, and they now catch up on foot for short ones. A jump of a mile or less leaves your followers where they stand and they walk to you at their normal pace; anything further brings them along as before. Separately, a timing gap in how the world's areas hand a travelling player between servers could leave that player's companions with out-of-date records for a few seconds — long enough for Follow, Dismiss and Call to Me to answer "they can't be reached right now" and, in one case, for trolls to stay behind in Reno while their owner arrived in San Diego. The server now refreshes its view the instant it notices, instead of waiting for the next five-second check.
• Server housekeeping during a restart is quieter and can no longer jam: the background job that finishes half-done flag builds is queued once per area instead of stacking up behind a slow one, any background job that hangs on an unresponsive service is abandoned after 30 seconds so the rest keep flowing, and a flooded queue is reported once every 30 seconds with a count rather than once per drop. Players see no change; the servers' error logs do.
• Fixed a server-side problem introduced by today's earlier update: after a restart the two world servers could keep handing areas back and forth to each other, and while that went on the world kept running but nothing was being saved. The server no longer asks for an extra ownership check every time a save is refused, only when a player crosses between servers, and never more than once every couple of seconds.

Client

• Tapping another player now offers Shield Charge once you've learned it, beside Attack Target.
• Placing decorations no longer gets in the way. The "Your Land" option is gone; instead, tapping empty ground you own lists each decoration you carry as its own button — "Place Banner", "Place Stone Lantern" — and taps that land on a flag, creature, resource or dropped item never offer them at all. Dig Here joins that same list as a direct button when you carry a shovel, so you tap the bare ground beside a tree rather than the tree.
• A greyed-out Travel button now counts down the seconds until you go green, and turns clickable on its own the moment you do. You used to have to close the menu and open it again to find out.
• The game no longer keeps walking a creature toward an old destination after the server has said it stopped — a missing update now clears the old destination instead of being ignored.
• The moment in time used to draw other players and creatures no longer shifts when something starts or stops moving, which was itself a small jump every time a creature changed what it was doing.
• Other players near the edge of your walk circle no longer disappear while they are walking. The app was deciding whether to show someone from where it had drawn them a moment ahead, so a player the server placed inside your circle could be hidden a few metres past the edge; now it uses the server's own position, so anyone inside your circle is shown and anyone outside is not, moving or standing still.
• Updates that arrive out of order are ignored rather than dragging a creature backwards, and a creature chasing something that teleports no longer teleports with it.
• Settings ▸ General ▸ Movement troubleshooting can record a short movement trace to a file on your device, to send in if movement still looks wrong.
• Windows now installs through the Crownfront Launcher: download it once, sign in, press Play — it keeps the game updated with small patches instead of a fresh 230 MB zip every release, opens the game already signed in, and shows the latest patch notes, dev blogs, announcements and server status from the website. The plain zip stays under Advanced on the download page.