I've been working hard to add new skills and activities for players in Antorum Online. There have been three new skills added to the game: Armorcrafting, Weaponcrafting, and Salvaging.

Armorcrafting

Armorcrafting is pretty self explanatory - it's a skill that allows players to craft armor!

First equip a Hammer (purchased from a trader), then interact with an Armorcrafting Anvil. There are only a few armor sets at the moment (including the new Crab Shell set) but I'll be adding more soon.

Weaponcrafting

Players can also craft weapons with the Weaponcrafting skill! I added a few new weapons for this, one of them requiring a rare monster part from a certain beast in Antorum. I hope to add more items like this soon.

I separated armor and weapon crafting so that players could specialize in one or the other and get certain rewards down the line. This is kind of the direction I want to take the game - when I play an RPG, I don't really like it when your character can be an expert at everything. I'll be making changes to the skill and stat system in the future to emphasize this, and encourage specialization.

Salvaging

Salvaging is another new skill. It allows you to use Salvage Kits to break other items down into raw materials for crafting. A higher Salvaging level allows players to use better kits, as well as the ability to break down more powerful weapons and armor. Pick up some Salvage Kits from your local trader and get scrapping!

I added some more hostile NPCs around the map so players can actually loot items to salvage. Beware the tiny blue men!

Other

I got a bunch of other random stuff done too, including some critical bug fixes. The game feels a bit more solid these days.

• Added an in-game bug report / feedback tool for players
• Added a "Latest News" box to the main menu which is populated by the server
• Players will no longer aggro NPCs if the NPC has no path to them, or would have too complex of a path
• NPCs will no longer chose a wander destination that would require too complex of a path
• NPCs in combat will no longer get stuck after being dragged away from their designated wander area
• Added a few Roving Traders around the map
• Added a few more campfires around the map
• Tweaked some existing terrain, added more trees, etc
• Added a clientside particle effect that triggers when you level up a skill
• Combat will now choose the closest tile position for the attacker to stand in, instead of a random one
• Tweaked some NPC drop tables and stats for balance purposes
• Reduced the range at which you can see chat messages from other players
• Fixed bug in entity region system that sometimes resulted in duplicated or missing network entities
• Fixed bug with clientside movement interpolation that sometimes teleported players back to an old position
• Fixed bug that allowed players to walk onto non-walkable tiles with certain slopes and get stuck there
• Fixed bug with clientside connection retry where the socket was not properly closed, resulting in an extra connect call to the server
• Modified skill guide to show recipes and other helpful tips for each skill
• Changed shading of a few meshes from flat to smooth
• Implemented basic admin permissions and commands (/add-item, /add-exp, etc)
• Added particle effect and light to campfire model

This was a fun update to work on. Now that these new skills are "done" I'll eventually revisit the (pretty old now) Cooking skill to make it work similarly to Armorcrafting/Weaponcrafting, since they are less buggy, more usable systems. Aside from that, I'll be releasing another content-centric dev log before the end of this month, showing off my new favorite area in the game.

- Declan (@dooskington)