Update 0.6.8.93 - Level Cap 100, XP Rework & Monsters Fight Back

Level Cap Raised to 100

• The ceiling is now level 100. Levels 1 through 50 are completely unchanged - your character keeps its exact level and experience, nothing was rescaled or reset. Beyond 50 the curve continues along the progression it always followed internally, so the climb past the old wall should feel like a natural continuation. Characters sitting at the old cap simply resume earning toward 51.

• Experience totals are now exact. Experience is stored as a whole number rather than a decimal, which is what makes the higher levels actually work - the old storage could not hold the much larger totals at the top of the curve precisely, so level-ups near a threshold could fire slightly early or late.

• Party frames update levels instantly. A party member's level now refreshes the moment it changes rather than waiting for them to leave and rejoin.

Experience and Rewards Rebalanced

• Experience is shared by damage dealt. Killing a monster no longer means one player takes everything. Experience is split between every group that actually fought it, in proportion to the damage each did. Zero-damage supports still receive a full share of their party's experience, so healing is rewarded exactly like fighting.

• Party experience now comes from a capped pool. The old system stacked a group bonus on top of an even split with no ceiling - five players killing a 415-experience monster collectively walked away with over 1,000. The monster's experience is now multiplied once and that pool is split evenly, so at a full party of five the pool is exactly twice a solo kill. On that same monster, two members now receive 311 each (was 257), three receive 228 (was 213), four receive 192 (was 203), and five receive 166 (was 207). Smaller groups gain; full groups give up the inflated tail.

• Your group unlocks only the share it earned. Land 10% of the damage and your group unlocks 10% of the pool, closing the case where joining a fight another group had nearly finished paid out in full. The damage share is measured for the group as a whole, not per player, so a healer who never landed a hit still takes a full, equal share.

• Rewards are now level-aware in both directions. Monsters far below your level pay less experience and drop loot less often, falling to nothing at ten levels apart, and content far above your level no longer pays as if you had earned it. Experience is judged per player, so a level-appropriate member still earns properly even with a much higher-level friend helping. Item drops are judged once, against the highest-level attacker. Quests now carry a level of their own and are measured the same way on turn-in, so old low-level quests sitting in your log will pay a fraction. Game Master grants are never penalised.

• Being in a party alone no longer pays a group bonus. If every other member was out of range, the game still counted you as a group of one and paid a share of the party bonus. A kill with nobody else in range now pays exactly what a solo kill pays.

Monsters Fight Back

• Attacking from behind is no longer free. Monsters now pivot to face whoever is hitting them and square up properly before they swing, instead of standing perfectly still or attacking over their shoulder. Each creature has its own turn speed, so a heavy Cave Troll wheels around slowly while a Corrupted Frog snaps to face you almost instantly.

• Every creature tracks you differently mid-attack. Weaker creatures (level 1-3) lock their aim the moment they start winding up, so side-stepping a Wild Pigglet or a Pondling Frog genuinely makes it miss. Mid-tier creatures (level 4-7) keep tracking you during the wind-up but commit once the swing starts. Level 8 and above track you through the whole attack, so dodging them takes real timing.

• Zone bosses hit like bosses. The Sea Crab, Wild Boar, Corrupted Frog and Feral Werewolf were being treated as level 2 creatures, which made them weaker than the ordinary monsters around them. They are now levels 11, 7, 8 and 14 respectively, with health, damage and defence to match, they chase and track you the way something of their level should, and each drops from its own boss loot table with better odds and larger stacks.

• Twelve creatures were fighting far below their intended strength. Monsters used to work out their own level from the experience they awarded, and that guess was often wrong - a level 15 Cyclops was fighting as though it were level 2. Every monster whose name states its level now uses that level directly. Expect the Cyclops, Earth Golem, Feral Werewolf, Cave Troll, Skeleton Grunt, Dire Wolf and several others to hit considerably harder. This is them working correctly for the first time, not a buff.

• Every level readout finally agrees. One shared answer now drives combat stats, nameplate con colours, the minimap tint and death penalties alike. Previously the minimap read a live value that ticked downward each time a monster died and respawned, so a veteran monster gradually became weaker than a freshly spawned one of the same type.

• Monsters heal on the walk home and cannot be picked off on the way. A monster that loses interest now runs back to its territory invulnerable and rapidly regenerating, and only forgets the fight once it is genuinely home at full health. Attacks, damage over time and crowd control all have no effect during that walk, and your system chat now tells you so with an "is invulnerable to" message instead of leaving you watching your hits do nothing. This closes an exploit where a worn-down monster could be abandoned and the full reward claimed by someone else. If you do kill one while it is walking home, everyone who fought it is still paid normally.

• The trip home is faster and tidier. Monsters move 50% faster on the way back, so the window where they cannot be attacked is noticeably shorter, and they arrive fully restored in both health and stamina rather than standing around slowly regenerating. A monster that somehow cannot reach its destination is now rescued after 30 seconds instead of being left in limbo for three minutes.

Hazards Warn Before They Hurt

• Hazards can now have a warning zone. Crossing into the outer ring wakes a hazard and reveals it without damaging you; the inner zone is the real danger. That gives you a moment to read the situation and back off instead of learning a hazard exists by losing health to it. Traps work the same way - walking into the warning ring wakes one up, but it only springs once someone reaches the damaging area, so it cannot be baited from safety.

• The Faoi Miasma has been retuned around it. Its damaging core is considerably tighter than before, with a warning band around it. You will now see the cloud before it starts draining your health, rather than spotting it and being poisoned at the same moment.

• Re-arming hazards are fixed. A hazard that ran out and re-armed after its cooldown used to come back dealing damage with no visual effect at all, and if you were already standing inside it when it re-armed it resumed hurting you without ever revealing itself. Hazards now restore their effect properly, check who is already inside them when they arm, and can no longer deal damage before revealing themselves. Note that the damage-over-time debuff still runs its full duration after you step out - the Faoi Miasma debuff lasts 10 seconds.

Character Sheet, HUD and Cast Bar

• Critical stats are now visible. Physical and Magical Critical Attack Power and Critical Attack Rate were always being calculated for your character, they just had nowhere to show up, so the sheet displayed 0. They now appear as percentages: a critical rate reads 15% and critical power 126.7%, rather than the raw 0.15 and 1.267.

• You can reset your attribute points. The Reset button on the character sheet now works. It refunds every point assigned to STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIT and MEN so you can build your character a different way. You have a limited number of resets, shown next to the button, with a short cooldown between uses, and the count will be expandable through quests and items in a future update. Spending a point into an attribute already at its maximum of 100 also no longer consumes the point.

• Charged abilities show you when to release. Holding a charged ability like Energy Bolt now colours the cast bar. Red means you are still in the cancellation window and releasing wastes the charge entirely. Green means it will fire, and the longer you hold the more damage it deals. Blue means fully charged, with nothing more to gain from holding. The thresholds come from each skill's own timings, so every charged ability shows its own correct windows.

• Level 100 displays as 100. Reaching level 100 showed "00" on both the character sheet and the main HUD, and the same bug hit the attribute points counter once you had 100 or more unspent points. All three now display correctly.

• Health, mana and stamina bars are smoother. The HUD and character sheet bars now fill at the same rate no matter your framerate, where they previously animated faster at high framerates and slower at low ones, and they show the correct value the instant they appear instead of sweeping up from empty.

World, Loot and Crafting

• Dropped items now despawn. Loot no longer stays on the ground indefinitely - items clear after 5 minutes by default, with per-item timers so short-lived clutter like Creature Bone and Creature Meat vanishes quickly while more valuable finds stick around longer. Two protections are built in: a dropped container will not expire while it still holds items, and a drop reserved for you or your party always outlives that reservation, so loot can never vanish before you have had your chance at it. Heavily farmed areas will now stay visually clean.

• Populations vary between server restarts. Each spawn zone now has a minimum and maximum population and rolls a fresh number within that range whenever the server starts, so a clearing that held five ore veins yesterday might hold three today. Where things appear inside a zone already shuffled on every respawn; now how many appear varies too. Loot tables also gained a minimum drop count alongside the existing maximum, so a chest or monster can be set to always drop at least a certain number of things. Every existing loot table behaves exactly as it did.

• Ingredient recipe scrolls are far more plentiful on Zip Island. Scrolls that teach crafting materials - Charcoal, Thread, Linen and Wool Fabric, Leather, Coarse Powders, Faoi Crystal Dust, Flour, Sea Pearl Beads, Iron and Steel Ingots, Hemp, Fine Linen and Cotton Fabric, Coke - now spawn several copies at once and respawn considerably faster: Tier 0 in half their previous time, Tier 1 in 60% and Tier 2 in 70%. Equipment, weapon, armour, tool, food, potion and ammunition recipes are unchanged. If you have been stuck waiting on a single Charcoal or Thread recipe to reappear, that bottleneck should be gone.

Fixes

• Fixed a crash in multi-enemy fights. When a second enemy began chasing you while another was already pursuing, the game could crash outright - most likely when you pulled an extra monster mid-fight or a nearby creature respawned into an ongoing chase. Every pursuing enemy now gets its own chase speed boost, and that boost is correctly cleaned up when a monster dies or is recycled by a spawner, which previously could leave a permanent speed buff attached to it.

• Bloodlust builds stacks again. If your character happened to be standing inside the safe zone at the moment the skill was loaded onto them, Bloodlust was switched off and stayed off for the rest of that session, with nothing to tell you why. It now activates correctly wherever you are. The same underlying weakness affected permanently-active skills in general, so a skill blocked by a temporary condition now starts automatically as soon as that condition clears instead of staying dead until you relog.

• Interrupted looting no longer eats your key. A chest that required a key used to take the key the moment you started opening it, so being stunned, knocked back or walking out of range cost you the key and gave you nothing. The key is now only spent when the loot is actually awarded. A chat message also tells you exactly what was consumed, for example "Consumed Rusty Key.", fully localized into your own language. Gathering, looting, self-cast abilities and sprinting can now also be interrupted by crowd control, in line with combat abilities, though the crowd-control effects themselves are not switched on yet.

• Damage credit follows your account, not your name. Renaming a character partway through a fight used to split your damage across two separate records and short-change your reward, and two players who happened to share a display name could have their contributions confused for one another. Both are fixed.

Behind the Scenes

• Server-side combat performance work, anti-cheat and item-recovery groundwork, attribute-driven skill scaling, the resistance and interrupt systems, and expanded automated test coverage. These ship inert or invisible - combat damage, debuff durations and loot are unchanged by them.