Greetings Salemites,
This week's patch is early and premature primarily because some naughty players decided to farm the holy #(@$* out of Darkenbear Eyes after realizing I made a goof akin to the one I did when the Wishpoosh was dropping 20+ lard a kill (not 20 eyeballs but dramatically increased drop rates none the less). Unlike Lard, however, the Darkenbear Eye was a bit more fundamental to things and as such I had to employ Hagatha. She has since cast a spell to cause all Darkenbear Eyeballs in the game to fly to her cave, destroyed all Homonculus' on the server, as well as temporarily purged the memories of all witches on the server so that no new Homonculus can be created for a period of time. Prior to this patch the Pentagram was removed to prohibit any mass influx of new witches to the circle who were less deserving. Also because the Darkenbear Eye was a recipe requirement in the Nightmare spell the regeant for that has been replaced. It is also no longer possible to use Darkenbear eyes to gain sight of your cursed victims until I put in a new placeholder for this curse. This should have dramatically mitigated the damage of this event.
I realize that this totally sucks for anybody who had themselves a legit Darkenbear Eyeball, and for that I am sorry. However, I consider this to be the same severity as a 'dupe' and my options were clearly this, or a rollback to the last patch. The progress of the last week for the server as a whole seemed to weigh more valuable than the less than the very few legitimate Darkenbear Eyes floating out there.
The following is the list of stuff I was working on at the moment this all broke loose which also gets scooped up into this patch:
New Flags
*New Craftable Flag: Deerskull'
*New Craftable Flag: Grand Duchy of Lithuania
*New Craftable Flag: Ming Dynasty
*New Craftable Flag: Portugal
*New Craftable Flag: Sweden
New Foods
*New Candy: Candied Kale Chips. Can be found everywhere candy is normally found. Restores Cabbage Food Group.
*New Craftable Food: Saurkraut
Minor Tweaks
*Additional Toy added for Santa Marp.
*New Help Menu Icon Art for Hypothermia, Town, Terraforming, Farming, and Combat to better suit the grahpic style of the other help Paginae icons.
*Players who have received and Eye for an Eye now graphically display their hook hand.
*The Hook hand still disables the use of any tools, weapons, and use of the right hand but no longer gives a speed reduction.