Jul 16, 2020

Torchlight III - Echtra Bean

Check out our Discord, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch to get the latest development news and updates.

Hello Torchlight fam!

It’s officially been over a month since we released Torchlight 3 on Early Access, and while we are always excited to share the latest upcoming news, this week we wanted to take a bit of a break from our usual updates and highlight some of the other heroes that make this game possible.

Without further ado, a photo gallery and tribute of the pets, plants, and people who influence and support Torchlight 3’s development less... directly.

And while that is pawesomely adorable, we wouldn’t leave you without some sort of Torchlight 3 update or news; so in addition to the very important content above, we wanted to provide additional details about the incoming exclusive gifts. While we don’t have a specific date to mention yet, we do plan to release these gifts over the next few weeks/updates! Additionally, for those who had access (or should have) to previous Alpha/Extra Life gifts, those will be mailed out separately within the next few weeks as well.

EARLY ACCESS REWARDS

Players will receive this automatically when the gift / update is live if they purchased Torchlight 3 during Early Access.

Reignited Banner

Thank you gift for participation in Early Access, 2020.

Reliquary

Since Relics are receiving a major update, the Reliquary will no longer be used for
storing Relics. This will now become an exclusive fort decoration for those who
were around before Relics were cool...

A big shout out to all the pets, plants, and people in your life that make long days quicker, video games more fun to play, and in general, make it just a little bit easier for you to breathe each day.

- Echtra Bean

We are always in a continuing process to scrub and review bugs that have been reported to our Support Center, but we wanted to highlight a few of the most critical, highly reported, and consistent issues players are still encountering and any updates we might have for those specific problems. This is not an exhaustive or complete list of reported issues.

OPEN ISSUES

CTRL + D copies your Debug information to your clipboard. Logs can be found in your %localappdata%\Frontiers\Saved\Logs windows folder. Please send logs and debug information to feedback@echtra.net. You can also post logs and details to any new or existing submissions here: http://tl3feedback.echtragames.com

Occasionally bosses in Mapworks are dropping level 5 loot.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1408

The team is investigating this and could use additional info - thank you for sending logs, posting debug info, and posting screenshots to Discord and by email!

Pets not attacking.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/219

No updates at the moment, still investigating.

Achievements are triggering for players upon logging into the game for the first time.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/386

We are aware of this issue and are investigating it further. We don’t have any further updates on whether these achievements will be removed at launch or not.

Teleporting to Fort should spawn you at the waypoint.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/317

This is a good suggestion, we will implement in a future patch.

Ultrawide resolutions don’t fit perfectly.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/576

We are continuing to work towards a UI scaling option within our settings menu. In the meantime we are reviewing various resolutions for more ways to improve those who have really big monitors.

It is not possible to disenchant Pet Collar and Pet Tag.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/56

We have fixed this before, but player reports indicate the issue has come back. We are investigating.

UPCOMING FIXES

The next big update is scheduled for next Tuesday (07/21/2020) and contains fixes for all of the following issues:
Rubberbanding’ and General Lag
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1602

We’ve addressed two of our biggest offenders in a recent hotfix, but we are testing and ready to push two additional fixes that we believe will help resolve the issues. After this fix goes out we will review feedback coming in about stability and determine what additional work can/should be done.
As always, if you continue to experience disconnects, lag, and connection issues, please send your logs and debug information (see above) to feedback@echtra.net with an appropriate title for the problem.
Australian servers are not yet available, but we still plan to bring them online in a future patch.

Not enough quest items to complete quests.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1568

Fixed known quests with too few drops. Keep letting us know about specific quests that may not have enough drops.

We are aware that some Mapworks are not producing an exit portal.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1338

This appears to affect specific levels, which we have now been fixed in an upcoming update based on player submitted debug info. If you find more, please share the Ctrl-D from the location where the boss portal should have spawned, and we'll get it done!

We are aware that some Mapworks are not spawning bosses.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1495

This is fixed for an upcoming update.

Some players are reporting getting stuck in loading screens while attempting to travel to Mapworks.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1527

The team has a fix ready for a future update. Anytime you experience infinite loading screens, travel issues, connection problems, weird black screens, etc - please send us your debug info and logs (see details above) and we will try our best to do what we can to get the issue resolved.

When attempting to travel, players get stuck in a blue void.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/186

We have a fix ready for an upcoming update.

Phasebeast Portals not returning you to your original location.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1223

We have a fix for this coming in a future patch.

Multiple duplicate Fort Decorations cannot be deleted, sold, or removed from your inventory.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/94

Quest rewards should no longer be giving fort items that are duplicates of Contract rewards. . For the moment, you can create a new character, transfer the excess items to that character via the Shared Stash, and delete the new character to delete the items from your account.

Resource Nodes stay on the map.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/61

Fixed in a future patch.

Boss Chests or Boss encounters are not dropping loot.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1362 / https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1491

Reported cases are fixed in the next patch. Let us know if additional bosses have this problem.

Players are reporting invisible enemies.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/298

Fixed in the next patch.

You are teleported to the Guarded Path instead of Lake Gobdunk.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/623 / https://torchlight3.nolt.io/602

Fixed in the next patch.

Ember Cores have stopped dropping for some players.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1394

This should not have occurred, but the good news is that Ember Cores will be removed from the game entirely in an upcoming patch due to the aforementioned updates to Relics. That’s one way to solve a problem!

RECENTLY PATCHED

Luck Tree is still not available to some players who may have deleted it or had their quest break.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/768

If you are missing your Luck Tree Sprout, check your mailbox in the settings menu for mail! This message/item will expire on August, 2nd, 2020.

While trying to travel to or from the Fort, players report continuously DCing until they reboot or use Z to travel.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1430

Hotfixed 7/9

Map incorrectly shows Bugswat Burrows connects to Protected Trail.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/769

Hotfixed 7/9

TROUBLESHOOTING

Unable to login to the game.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1105

If you are having trouble logging into the game we have the following suggestions to try before sending us more info.
Are you connected to the internet and launching the game through the Steam library?
Have you rebooted the game, your PC, and verified the Steam files?
Are any 3rd party apps (like torrent software, anti-virus, firewalls, etc) or ISP blocking your connectivity or ports?
Is your clock properly set?
If you have confirmed all of the above and still haven’t been able to login, please send us your logs in an email and we will review the issue further.

Your bugs and feedback are greatly appreciated and can be posted on our Support Center at any time. We will continue to post updates and want to thank you again for the patience, reports, logs, and for stomping out our Goblin problem… (it’s kind of gotten out of control).

Jul 9, 2020

State of the Game: Week 4

Torchlight III - Echtra Bean

Check out our Discord, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch to get the latest development news and updates.

Week 4 of Early Access already!

It seems like there are a million things happening all at once. We’ve delivered the third frontier, the Echonok Mountains, we’re currently revealing our end-game system, Fazeer’s Dun’djnn Challenge, and have a major Relic re-work on the way. Your input is working - we’re responding every way we can to the amazing feedback you’ve given us. It’s not just in these big ticket items, it’s all the way down to minor bugs and tweaks. Last update had 18 internal pages of patch notes, and a lot of it was in direct response to your input. We are not done, so please keep it coming! Aside from these new features, we’re always looking at bugs, balance changes, and quality of life additions. We are aware that there are still some problems with rubber-banding, with portalling issues, and with occasional disconnects. Those are ongoing issues, and while we have fixes being delivered, fixes in QA, and fixes still planned, we know they are issues that are bothering you, so rest assured we are going as fast as we can to keep you playing at full speed. Speaking of full-speed, we are also pleased to tell you that we’ll be implementing a Test Realm, where our new content and features can be tested and proved before they are ready for our live Early Access build. This should actually speed us up, letting us work faster on new content, while also preserving the experience and integrity of the live branch. We have promised you an active and responsive Early Access, and we hope to keep delivering on that promise. You are helping us make Torchlight 3 a worthy successor to our franchise, and our development team appreciates every single one of you!

- Max

Fazeer’s Dun’djinn Challenge

One of the first questions that players ask about Torchlight 3 has always been: “what kind of endgame does it have?” It is an important question that we have dodged for long enough. Taking cues from the previous two Torchlight games, our initial ideas for endgame revolved around ideas about mapworks runs, endless dungeons, new game plus, things like that. At the same time, feedback from our closed beta players was very clearly “it had better not be just mapworks.” The things that we heard from the players was that they wanted an activity they could play forever, improve at, keep finding more cool loot, face exciting new challenges, and importantly, show off their accomplishments to others.

To meet these goals, we have created Fazeer’s Dun’djinn. For those unfamiliar, Fazeer Shah is an all-powerful djinni from Torchlight 2 that helped you save the Guardian of Mana, in exchange for retrieving the Lamp of Marvels. Doing so unwittingly freed Fazeer, empowering him with near-limitless power. Now, over a century later, Fazeer tires of touring the world, and wants to settle down somewhere: your fort.

Fazeer conjures a series of dungeons for you that escalate in difficulty, enchanted with dozens of new arduous and bewildering affixes. Fazeer is a sporting sort and will deal you a hand of challenge choices in the form of cards. From these, you can pick the monsters, elements, detrimental and beneficial affixes you will surmount. At regular intervals you must also complete a challenging boss battle to save your progress. That’s right, if you die in this dungeon, your progress will be reset back to the last checkpoint.

As players progress through each set of cards, Challenge Dungeons will become increasingly more difficult.

Successfully completing milestone Boss battles will allow you to progress to a new tier of Challenge Dungeon cards.

What about fabulous gear and rewards, you ask? The quests, champions and bosses you clear within Fazeer’s Dun’djinn will reward you with fame, which you can use to earn all of the unlimited rewards in our contracts. Fazeer’s Dun’djinn also supports party play, so feel free to grab your friends (since you can’t resurrect yourself when playing solo!) and tackle Fazeer’s challenges as a team.

Invite a group to help you traverse through Fazeer’s Dun’djinn and reap the rewards of extra teamwork.

How far can you go? How about on Painful? Ridiculous? As you delve into Fazeer’s Dun’djinn, other players will be able to see the highest level that you have cleared, at your lowest difficulty played. Just how many levels are there? Who will be the first to reach the end? Is there even an end? Surely Fazeer can just conjure more…

- Shawn

Relic Updates

After a closed community focus group, many chats with our fans in Discord and other channels, and reviewing some of the initial impressions we received surrounding skills during the Early Access launch weekend, we are going to make a big update to our skills - with a big focus on the Relic system. This will come in a future patch.

While we aren’t posting all the details yet (as some of them are still being developed, reviewed, and tested), we did want to provide some insight and a general overview of what we would like to accomplish with the Relic system as we move towards a launch product.

The Relic system has always been designed to be a powerful and unique part of your class build. Currently, when new players login for the first time, not only is there a strong barrier to entry to unlock this third skill tree, but it’s also not very clear that Relics are supposed to be an incredibly important part of your class build. There are also several parts of the current Relic system that cause confusion, can create a broken feel (like deleting a character with your Relic on it), and just don’t feel powerful and unique enough.

We also want Relics to have a more important role in the strategy of a character.

When Early Access began, Relics were all pretty similar, with no real attributes to truly distinguish them from each other. By the time we release this update, each Relic will lean heavily into its own strategy: summoning, healing, crowd control, random damage or consistent damage. There will be purpose and meaning to your choice. It will better define your personal playstyle and class build, and cement Relics as a core component of a character. This update to Relics will include new active skills, a revamp to current skills, and a general reinvention of each Relic to ensure each is useful, unique, and powerful.

With this in mind, we are looking to create an experience with Relics that starts with character creation. You will choose the Relic when you first create your character that will ultimately define your build as you play through the game. Ember Cores will no longer be something players loot and use to craft Relics and they will be removed from the game entirely in this update. Additionally, because of the dramatic change we plan to wipe all data on the Live servers when this update goes out in about two or three weeks. We know wipes aren’t something players generally look forward to and we don’t make this decision lightly.

When we have more specific info for this update, as well as a full account/player data wipe, we will post those details so that you are warned in advance and can be better prepared. In the meantime, we are opening up a Public Test Realm (see details below) so that players can enjoy testing out new features in development, have an alternative place to play if their account breaks during Early Access, and enjoy a more lax/loose place to test things with ‘cheat’ NPCs, more available resources, and random Yapper town battles when our community manager wants to cause trouble. We hope this will help bridge the gap for players when the Live multiplayer server is down, wiped, or otherwise unavailable.

- Tyler

Public Test Realm

Next week we are going to open up a Public Test Realm so that players can test new features in development. This Public Test Realm will only be available to US players to begin with, but we plan to update it over the next few weeks to allow everyone regardless of location. Currently the PTR is only configured with US servers and we don’t want to cause lag/rubberbanding confusion for those who attempt to connect elsewhere, especially as we are working to resolve those issues. If you do happen to find your way onto the PTR outside of the US, please understand that you may experience lag/rubberbanding because currently the PTR is only configured with US servers, we will update everyone when this has been expanded to more locations.

We will announce any updates, the steps to access the PTR, and other details pertaining to the PTR on our Discord server within the #tliii-playtest-realm channel. We plan to unlock Fazeer’s Dun’djinn to the PTR next Tuesday for initial impressions/testing - join Discord and keep tabs on the channel to learn how to gain access.

We will adjust our PTR processes as we get more input and involvement from players, but we believe providing a PTR is beneficial for both our team and the community as a whole; we are excited to see how this may help improve our future releases going forward.

As another fun note - Alpha Tester & Early Access gifts are coming soon!!!

The Early Access gift should be automatically delivered when the update goes live.
The Alpha Gift Codes are planned to get emailed out the week of 7/27 (this is subject to change).

We’ll share those details in another update!

- Bean

We are still in the process of scrubbing and confirming bugs that have been reported to our Support Center after the last big patch, but we wanted to highlight a few of the most critical, highly reported, and consistent issues players are still encountering and any updates we might have for those specific problems. This is not an exhaustive or complete list of reported issues.

CTRL + D copies your Debug information to your clipboard. Logs can be found in your %localappdata%\Frontiers\Saved\Logs windows folder. Please send logs and debug information to feedback@echtra.net. You can also post logs and details to any new or existing submissions here: http://tl3feedback.echtragames.com/

‘Rubberbanding’ and General Lag
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1602

This symptom of spiky lag/rubberbanding, especially when playing in a party, is a problem we've encountered and solved before. With all the logs and debug information sent in, we’ve been able to more aggressively attack the issue as it’s cropped up again. The problem stems from the game sending more information to the server and other players than it should be. There is plenty of connection speed and server capacity to run the game smoothly, but if you over saturate the connection with non-critical data, the critical stuff like "where is the player" doesn't get through the pipe as reliably. So you ‘rubberband’ around. We hotfixed the worst offender for this yesterday, but there are 2-3 other spots to address which require a bit more careful surgery to ensure we're not breaking the game. The lag/rubberbanding is our top issue and priority as we know it’s important to our community and to the gameplay experience to be able to play without lag.
As always, if you continue to experience disconnects, lag, and connection issues, please send your logs and debug information (see above) to feedback@echtra.net with an appropriate title for the problem.
Australian servers are not yet available, but we still plan to bring them online in a future patch.

Unable to login to the game.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1105

If you are having trouble logging into the game we have the following suggestions to try before sending us more info.
- Are you connected to the internet and launching the game through the Steam library?
- Have you rebooted the game, your PC, and verified the Steam files?
- Are any 3rd party apps (like torrent software, anti-virus, firewalls, etc) or ISP blocking your connectivity or ports?
- Is your clock properly set?
- If you have confirmed all of the above and still haven’t been able to login, please send us your logs in an email and we will review the issue further.

Luck Tree is still not available to some players who may have deleted it or had their quest break.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/768

We believe this should not happen for new accounts as we’ve changed the way this item and quest unlocks for accounts, but we believe we may be able to give this item away by mail and will provide an update/information when we have more.

Ember Cores have stopped dropping for some players.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1394

This should not have occurred, but the good news is that Ember Cores will be removed from the game entirely in an upcoming patch due to the aforementioned updates to Relics. That’s one way to solve a problem!

We are aware that some Mapworks are not producing an exit portal.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1338

This appears to affect specific levels, which we have now been fixed in an upcoming update based on player submitted debug info. If you find more, please share the Ctrl-D from the location where the boss portal should have spawned, and we'll get it done!

We are aware that some Mapworks are not spawning bosses.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1495

The team is investigating this - thank you for sending logs, posting debug info, and posting screenshots to Discord and by email!

Some players are reporting getting stuck in loading screens while attempting to travel to Mapworks.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1527

The team is investigating this. Anytime you experience infinite loading screens, travel issues, connection problems, weird black screens, etc - please send us your debug info and logs (see details above) and we will try our best to do what we can to get the issue resolved.

Occasionally bosses in Mapworks are dropping level 5 loot.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1408

The team is investigating this - thank you for sending logs, posting debug info, and posting screenshots to Discord and by email!

Map incorrectly shows Bugswat Burrows connects to Protected Trail.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/769

To travel to Murky Miasma, you access it through the "Protected Trail" in Acrid Plains not Bugswat Burrow, the world map is incorrect and will be fixed in an upcoming update.

Not enough quest items to complete quests.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1568

We have received various reports about players who are unable to obtain the correct amount of items for some quests. While this appears to happen more readily in some seeds/areas than others, this is an issue we are aware of and will require more time to fix.

While trying to travel to or from the Fort, players report continuously DCing until they reboot or use Z to travel.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1430

This should no longer be happening on the live servers. The minor hotfix we put out yesterday is a partial solution to the root cause of this problem. The full fix to some of these symptoms will be deployed shortly.

When attempting to travel, players get stuck in a blue void.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/186

We are still investigating this issue, but it’s high priority and will be hotfixed when an update is available.

Phasebeast Portals not returning you to your original location.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1223

We are still investigating this issue, but it’s high priority and will be hotfixed when an update is available.

Multiple duplicate Fort Decorations cannot be deleted, sold, or removed from your inventory.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/94

There are fixes for several of these items in future updates and we may continue to make improvements to ensure items are never stuck in player inventories. For the moment, you can create a new character, transfer the excess items to that character via the Shared Stash, and delete the new character to delete the items from your account. Otherwise, they may stay stuck there until a future update.

Achievements are triggering for players upon logging into the game for the first time.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/386

We are aware of this issue and are investigating it further. We don’t have any further updates on whether these achievements will be removed at launch or not.

Resource Nodes stay on the map.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/61

Fixed in a future patch.

Teleporting to Fort should spawn you at the waypoint.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/317

This is a good suggestion, we will implement in a future patch.

Players reporting the go invisible and are unable to edit their Fort.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1357

We have only seen a couple of reports of this. Is this happening to you? Please send us your debug info and logs (details above) so we can further investigate.

Ultrawide resolutions don’t fit perfectly.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/576

We are continuing to work towards a UI scaling option within our settings menu. In the meantime we are reviewing various resolutions for more ways to improve those who have really big monitors.

Boss Chests or Boss encounters are not dropping loot.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1362 / ]https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1491

We are aware of this issue and are investigating further. Please always send any logs/debug info (details above) for any encounters where you feel like loot is not dropping appropriately or otherwise inaccessible.

Players are reporting invisible enemies.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/298

Some enemies are invisible when Shadows are disabled in the settings. We have a fix ready for upcoming patch.

It is not possible to disenchant Pet Collar and Pet Tag.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/56

A fix is ready for an upcoming patch.

You are teleported to the Guarded Path instead of Lake Gobdunk.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/623[/url] / https://torchlight3.nolt.io/602

We believe a fix will resolve this update with certain seeds causing this problem. We will continue to monitor after the fix is released in an upcoming update.

Pets not attacking.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/219

No updates at the moment, still investigating.

Your bugs and feedback are greatly appreciated and can be posted on our Support Center at any time. We will continue to post updates and want to thank you again for the patience, reports, logs, and just for being you and part of this awesome community.

Jul 2, 2020

State of the Game: Week 3

Torchlight III - Echtra Bean

Check out our Discord, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch to get the latest development news and updates.

During Early Access we want players to get up-to-the-moment information about what's going on with the game & dev team focus. This week's State of the Game letter comes from Guy Somberg, Lead Programmer of Echtra.

Sometimes the best possible way to look to the future of a project, is to understand its past. While next week’s State of the Game will take a deeper dive into the upcoming updates, ongoing issues, and other community feedback, this State of the Game is for those who enjoy a good technical read and want a postmortem on our Early Access weekend launch. This was written shortly after the Early Access launch weekend in order to retain as many details as possible.

Introduction

Wow, what an exciting weekend it’s been. On Saturday morning, we launched Torchlight 3 for early access on Steam, after having been in alpha and then beta for 15 months. After a year of having live players from all over the world playing our game, we had developed a lot of technology and procedures for deploying changes, fixing issues, investigating problems, triaging bugs, and the other fine-grained minutiae of running a live service. The game servers and game clients had been running fairly smoothly, so we felt prepared to open up the floodgates.

Life likes to throw curve balls, and we had a ton thrown at us over the course of this past weekend. Our team was up through the weekend chasing down problems, and now that things have settled down and our service is in better shape, it’s worth taking a look back. So, let’s go on a journey of the release and see what happened and how we fixed it.

Torchlight 3 Launches

Our live team got together early on Saturday morning. Or, at least, early for game developers. At 10am, we had our build ready to go, and being white-gloved by QA. A white-glove test is a test that QA does on a build when there are no other players on it to “check for dust” - that is, to make sure that there are no surprise issues. That process was complete, and at 10:30am - with no fanfare - the game was available for purchase on Steam.

Just after 11am, Max went on the PC Gaming Show to talk about Torchlight 3, and told people that it’s live now. So much for no fanfare. Thus opened the floodgates, and people started playing. For a little while, things seemed to go well. Our concurrent users (CCU) numbers went from zero up to a few thousand in a very short timeframe.

Very quickly, though, we started to get reports of players disconnecting, failing to log on, and failing to travel across zones. The team jumped into action like a cheetah on a pogo stick. We determined that there were likely two root causes here: service scaling and server reaping.

Most of our back-end services are horizontally scalable. That means that, if one of the services is under high load, then we can bring up more instances of it to handle the load. We did exactly that to handle one of the problems. The fact that the load was so high was indicative of other problems, but increasing the resources allotted to those services helped resolve those issues while we investigated the root causes.

The other problem was server reaping. For some reason, the services that were monitoring our game servers were not getting informed that those servers had players on them. We tracked down the connection issue and the disconnects stopped.

The Next Step: Quests and Characters

With these two problems resolved, we now had a more stable service, and players started running into a new set of problems. This time, the problems manifested as quest progress taking a very long time to appear (if at all). You could still play, but the game would be subtly broken. Around the same time, we were getting reports of players being unable to create characters.

We tracked the quest problem to a database configuration issue that was causing the responses from the database to the backend service to be slow. Unfortunately, in order to deploy those changes, we needed to take the game down briefly. Our expectation was that it would be 10 minutes, so we told people to expect 20 minutes of downtime. 30 minutes after we started the downtime, we were finally able to bring up the servers.

The other issue that we were trying to track down was why some people were unable to create characters. Fortunately, this one was easy. Log files from the affected players all indicated that these people were attempting to name their pets using Cyrillic characters, which is disallowed by the services, but accidentally allowed by the game client. We will fix this one in the client, but in the meantime we just informed these players about this restriction.

We’re All Good Now, Right?

There were still some disconnects and other issues, but toward the end of the day we felt as though we were in good enough shape that we could all go to sleep. We had some inklings that there were still more issues, but we only had a few shots in the dark to try to fix them before bed.

Of course, the world is round and Europe and Asia were just about to get into their respective peak times. Several of our team members were up through the night watching the EU and Asia servers go bad. People didn’t seem to be crashing out, but they did seem to continually be disconnected.

The Next Morning

Our first impulse on having load issues is to scale up the services, which we did as quickly as we could. We were bringing up servers in our data centers as well as in our cloud providers. Unfortunately, the cloud provider has a rate limit on how frequently they’re willing to grant IP addresses - something like 2 per minute - so that severely limited how frequently we could bring up the extra load.

Early Sunday morning, then, one of our devops engineers said - in a very polite and timid fashion - “You know, it seems like we’re trying to run in a way that is not sustainable. This whole thing with loading up 20 zones per player just isn’t going to work long-term.”

Wait, WHAT? 20 zones per player? That’s not how our game is supposed to work at all! Our game servers are a piece of hardware which runs a whole bunch of processes that we call Zones (or sometimes game servers). Each zone runs the game world for a collection of areas - for example, Edgewood Bluff, Heroes’ Rest, and the Den of Upheaval will all be hosted by a single zone process. How many zones do we expect to have per player? Well, we’ve got the collection of zones that you’re in, maybe the last zone you just came from, maybe a town, and maybe your fort. That’s a maximum of 4, but we should be averaging somewhere around 1.2 to 1.5 zones per player. How did we end up with 20 zones? That’s insanity! Something is wrong with what we’re measuring or doing, but that is not right!

Zombie Zones

Now that we knew that we had a problem, we inspected the processes on the servers that were running and saw some defunct processes - colloquially called “zombie processes”, which gave rise to the nickname “zombie zones”. A “defunct” process in Linux is a process which has been killed, but is still lingering. It will still hold on to some minor resources such as file handles and such, but it is officially dead - but not gone. Thus: zombies.

Although we did not realize it at the time that we found the zombies, we later discovered these zombie processes were actually counting toward the capacity of the servers. We would ask a server if it had more capacity to spin up a new zone, and it would say “no, I’m full up”. But it was full of zombies, not actual zones.

At this point, we had to do two things:

We had to kill all of the zombies.
We had to figure out why the zombies were appearing in the first place.

In order to kill the zombies for now, we actually just rebooted each of the servers in order to free up the capacity. Players could then start taking up that space, but we knew that the zombies would be coming back, so we needed a fix for the underlying issue. It was like playing Whack-a-Mole - as soon as we had cleaned up one set of servers, another one would get infested with zombies again.

Background

At this point, we’re going to get a bit more technical. We’ve already discussed the zone servers, but there is also one single other process that we call the Zone Controller (ZC) whose job it is to spin up and monitor zone processes.

So a message comes in (say from a player who wants to travel) to the ZC, and it spins up a new zone process and responds with instructions about how to travel to that zone. The ZC also has a few other tasks. It monitors the zones that it has spun up, and if it sees one that it thinks isn’t responding (due to a crash or hang), it kills it. It also reports back a lot of information such as what zones it’s got, how much capacity it has, and what players are in what zones to another server called Zone Lookup (ZL). (Zone Lookup is another character in our story, which will come up soon.)

More Background

Upon examining the Zone Controller logs, we realized that it was sending 410 HTTP status codes to the zone servers. When a zone server checks in with the ZC, the ZC can examine the server’s state and respond with a message indicating that the zone server should shut itself down. It would do this, for example, if it has observed that there are no players in that zone for a certain length of time.

However, this 410 code is actually a vestigial piece of technology right now, because of a different piece of tech that we implemented. When all of the players leave a zone server, the ZC will actually put the process to sleep using a Linux system call. In this mode, the process is not even scheduled by the operating system, so it consumes zero CPU cycles. We wake the process up if somebody travels back there (like if you portaled to town or to your fort and then returned), but if you never return then we never wake the process up. After the timeout occurs, we kill the process entirely.

That makes it very surprising to see these 410 codes showing up. Under normal operation, we should never see the 410s being triggered. But we were seeing a lot of them. Like, A LOT. On an individual ZC that manages 100 to 200 zones, we would see one 410 every 1 to 2 seconds.

So, that was a thing. And, of course, we’re building up these zombie zones at the same time.

Moving Toward a Fix

Both the zombie zones and the 410s seemed to be related, and both of these problems were pointing at the ZC. We started to dig into the code of the ZC to see what the problem could be.

The ZC stores a map containing information about all of the zones. This map gets locked as a whole entity any time changes are made to it, and we were suspicious that there was some contention over the lock. The zone server sends messages to the ZC at a regular rate containing information about itself and its player counts, and the ZC updates this map in response to those messages. The 410 codes could be explained if the ZC was missing out on these update messages or not processing them fast enough, and then the piece of code that checks the map coming in and noticing that it hasn’t heard from the zone server and killing it, even though there was an update message in the queue that it just hadn’t processed yet.

We still didn’t know why this was happening, but we were fairly confident that this is what was happening.

An Unrelated Problem? Zone Server Spin-up Time

Another issue that we noticed is that new zones were taking a long time to spin up. Ordinarily, it should take about 10-15 seconds, but new zones were taking significantly longer to spin up for some reason. This issue seemed to be unrelated to the other issues. When it rains it pours.

We traced this issue to the ZC reaching out to the content service. When starting up a new zone, the ZC gets information about which content version to use. These are things like our spreadsheets, quests, recipes, etc. Ordinarily, it requests this value every 5 minutes.

However, the code was written such that every new zone that was trying to spin up while it was requesting the new content version would block waiting for that answer. So, if it was slow to get the answer - and we think it was for a while - then new zones wouldn’t come up for a long time because they were waiting for the content version.

This was where we started to realize that if the upstream services like Zone Lookup and the content service were lagging, then they were causing blocks in the ZC. While we started investigating those issues, we rewrote how the ZC was getting the content version so that we store a cached value and reuse it until the new answer comes back.

Blocking Operations While Locking

Now that we saw that there were issues with the locks and communicating with other services, we examined whether there was anything that could be holding onto the lock for long periods of time. The first thing we observed was that we had some situations where we would take a lock on the map of zones, and then perform some operating system calls, which could cause the process to be unscheduled, and can potentially be long-running. We rewrote those sections of code such that the OS calls happened outside of the lock.

Now we had two fixes to try out: the content service cached value, and the OS calls outside of the locks. We put both of these fixes up onto a single server and monitored that one server to see whether or not the situation had improved. After a few minutes, it was clear that the situation was a little better - a 410 code every two seconds instead of two times every second, and we were still seeing zombie servers - but it was still a problem. It was definitely some improvement, but there was still work to do.

Rubber Ducks and Go Channels

At this point, it was back to the drawing board. We knew generally where the problem had to lie, but did not have a specific root cause. So, we busted out our rubber ducks.

What do rubber ducks have to do with it? The parable goes that a junior engineer walks into a senior engineer’s office and asks for help with a problem. The senior engineer stops the junior engineer short, hands over a rubber duck and says “Tell it to the rubber duck, then tell it to me,” then turns around and goes back to work. The junior engineer thinks this is weird, but shrugs and starts to tell the rubber duck about the problem. “Whenever I call this function, it crashes. But it’s always on the last element of the list for some reason. Oh! It’s because that element is one past the end, so I can’t dereference it!” The junior engineer rushes off to fix the code.

The moral is that often times you just need to describe a problem to somebody else - anybody else - in order to realize what the problem is. “Rubber duck debugging” is the process of just having somebody else describe to you how the system works and what the problem is.

So we started asking questions about how the ZC works and how it spins up and monitors zones. As a part of this, one of our engineers noticed that we are sending events on a Go channel while holding a lock on the map.

Most of our backend services are written using the Go programming language, which has many low-level routines for concurrency and communication. One of these primitives is called a Channel, which is a queue that can have messages pushed onto it from one thread of execution and received from another thread of execution. (These threads of execution are called “goroutines”.)

We discovered that the system was set up such that the system would take a lock on the map of zone servers, push some data onto this channel, make some request to the Zone Lookup, and then go into a loop monitoring the zone server process. Ordinarily, this would be fine because the data getting pushed into the channel would be buffered up. However, the buffer length is finite and eventually the buffer gets filled up as the other routines try to hit up the Zone Lookup.

So our procedure looked like this:
Start up a zone
Wait for some network communication with Zone Lookup
Monitor the zone

However, due to some slowness in Zone Lookup, the network communication could take multiple minutes to complete. And, during that time, the routine that is monitoring zones for liveness would come in and see that the zone is empty and isn’t doing anything - or, rather, it appeared that way because the monitoring hasn’t started yet - and then killed it. Finally, when the network communication returned, it would continue operation and start to monitor an already-dead process.

Now, the monitoring would detect that the process was dead and clean it up once it got there. However, because it was waiting for this network communication that was taking multiple minutes to complete, these processes would stick around until the monitoring call could clean them up. Thus: zombie zones!

A Fix for the Zombie Zones

Now that we knew what was happening, we fixed the code that was doing this so that it could start monitoring the process while it was waiting for the zone lookup. Once again, we deployed the change, and…

Still getting 410s and zombie zones. It was definitely better, but the problem was still there. Fortunately, one of our engineers noticed that we were doing this pattern in multiple places, where we were sending data into a Go channel and waiting for a response. But now we had a procedure for fixing them. We found all of the instances where this was happening and fixed them all by putting the channel communication into a goroutine so that it wouldn’t block normal operation.

Now that we had an understanding of the problem, this helped explain a lot of the issues we had been seeing. For example, the zone server sends an HTTP message to the ZC and waits (asynchronously) for a response. The ZC is blocked on its own downstream operation for a long time. Meanwhile, the zone server is trying to send more HTTP requests and waiting for responses, but the zone server also has a limited queue of operations that it’s willing to wait for. The end result is that the zone server drops further requests without sending them, so we start to lose things like quest updates or character saves.

So, to reiterate, we’re blocking up ZC’s ability to monitor zones, we’re blocking up the zone server’s ability to send messages, and we’re leaving these zombie zones around which occupy capacity that should be going to actual players. All of these problems stacked up at the same time due to this one pattern that we were using, which caused all sorts of badness.
Stable(r) Service

It was now 11:40pm on Sunday night, and we deployed our fixes to a single ZC and started watching it to see what happened. Everything looked good initially. We waited for 5 minutes, excitedly - everything was going great! Then we waited for 20 minutes, impatiently - just to make sure. After 20 minutes everything looked good, so we started deploying it out in waves to the rest of the servers across our infrastructure in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Rolling this change out did require us to kick people off of servers, but we did our best to make sure that the players knew what was going on and that it was a temporary thing as we rolled out stability fixes.

After about an hour of rollouts, we declared success on this issue. The service is in good shape. Players are able to log in, travel, and play successfully for extended periods of time. It’s not perfect yet - there are still some issues left that we are continuing to monitor and tackle, but our servers were in a much better place after those first 48 hours.

We went to bed late Sunday night (really early Monday morning) and woke up Monday somewhat later morning for a day where our players were discussing skill respecs and other gameplay issues rather than complaining about not being able to play.

Conclusion

In any distributed system, there is always going to be more than one root cause of any perceived issue. We had to dive through about four levels of other problems before we even realized that the zombie zones were an issue in the first place, and then once we tracked down the problem there were several places in our code that had to be fixed in the same way.

The lesson here for us is that the first impression of what a problem’s root cause is is unlikely to be the actual problem, so we need to constantly be re-evaluating our fundamental assumptions.

As we move forward from this Early Access launch, we want to thank all of our fans and players for your patience as we worked through these problems. We know that it can be frustrating sometimes, but rest assured that we’re working tirelessly to fix the problems, and that we are listening to your concerns and feedback about the game.

- Guy Somberg

While we have had many bugs reported to our Support Center, we wanted to highlight a few of the most critical, highly reported, and consistent issues players are still encountering and any updates we might have for those specific problems:

CTRL + D copies your Debug information to your clipboard. Logs can be found in your %localappdata%\Frontiers\Saved\Logs windows folder. Please send logs and debug information to feedback@echtra.net.

Luck Tree is still not available to some players who may have deleted it or had their quest break.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/768

Please confirm this is not in your consumable inventory on any character. If you are still missing this item on all characters (account wide) we are investigating ways to resolve this for those players affected. Stay tuned for more information.

Reliquary is still not available to some players who may have deleted it or had their quest break.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1319

If you are still running into this issue after defeating the Kronch please contact us at feedback@echtra.net. This should not be happening and we need more information if you believe your account has no Reliquary available to it.

We are aware that some Phase Dungeons are not producing an exit portal. Some players are stating they are getting stuck without the option to move.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1358

For those who are experiencing getting stuck in an instance, please send your debug info (see above) to feedback@echtra.net with the title “Stuck in Instance” and we will continue to investigate the cause of players getting stuck in various instances.

https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1338

For those who are experiencing Phase Dungeons that do not end up with an exit portal, please send your logs and debug info (see above) to feedback@echtra.net with the title “Phase Dungeon No Exit” and we will continue to investigate the cause of players unable to find a portal exit.

Tier 1 Entropy is not working correctly.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1353

Investigating for investigating a fix for a future update.

Energy Spike tiers also are not working correctly.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1343

Tier 3 was fixed in a patch yesterday.

Resource Nodes stay on the map.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/61

No updates at the moment, still investigating.

Teleporting to Fort should spawn you at the waypoint.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/317

No updates at the moment, still investigating.

Players reporting the edit Fort button are no longer available (can still press F to edit).
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1357

Fixed in the hotfix patch yesterday.

Map incorrectly shows Bugswat Burrows connects to Protected Trail.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/769

To travel to Murky Miasma, you access it through the "Protected Trail" in Acrid Plains not Bugswat Burrow, the world map is incorrect and should be fixed. No updates at the moment, still working on a fix.

Ultrawide resolutions don’t fit perfectly.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/576

We are continuing to work towards a UI scaling option within our settings menu. In the meantime we are reviewing various resolutions for more ways to improve those who have really big monitors.

Multiple duplicate Fort Decorations cannot be deleted, sold, or removed from your inventory.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/94

There are fixes for several of these items in future updates and we may continue to make improvements to ensure items are never stuck in player inventories. They may stay stuck there until a future update/wipe.

Boss Chests are not dropping loot. This seems to be happening more for those in groups.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1362

There is a minimum threshold needed to be included in a kill. If you do not meet this threshold you may not get the boss loot. However, we do believe something funky might be happening, so if you believe you did not receive loot from a Boss Chest like you should have, please send us your debug info and your logs (see above) and send them to us at feedback@echtra.net with the title “No Boss Chest Loot”.

Players report getting sent to the wrong place after teleporting. This seems to be more apparent and usually only occurs at times of high server load.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/623

We are aware of random travel issues and we pushed a hotfix yesterday to help resolve these issues. If you have updated and are still being sent to the incorrect instance upon travel, please send us your logs and debug info (see above) to feedback@echtra.net with the title "Incorrect Travel'.
If you are getting continuously disconnected from your Fort, try rebooting Steam, this seems to resolve the issue. We are investigating the cause.

Achievements are triggering for players upon logging into the game for the first time.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/386

We are aware of this issue and are investigating the issue. We don’t have any further updates on whether these achievements will be removed at launch or not.

While trying to travel to or from the Fort, players report continuously DCing until they reboot or use Z to travel.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/1430

We are aware of this issue and are investigating the issue.

When attempting to travel, players get stuck in a blue void.
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/186

We are aware of this issue and are investigating the issue.

General Lag & Disconnect Complaints
https://torchlight3.nolt.io/453

We are aware of this issue and are investigating the issue. If you continue to experience disconnects, lag, and connection issues, please send your logs and debug information (see above) to feedback@echtra.net with the title “Consistent Lag/Disconnects”

As always, you can continue to report bugs and feedback on our Support Center and we will continue to update everyone and send out patches as we resolve problems. Thank you again for the patience, help, logs, and community support as we progress through Early Access and make a better launch for all Torchlightkind.

Jun 30, 2020

Mainline Patch - June 30th, 2020 (Part 2)

Torchlight III - Echtra Bean

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Read "Mainline Patch - June 30th, 2020 (Part 1)"

ITEMS & GEAR

Fixed Woodsbeast Shoulders, Skittering Boots and a couple other legendary affixes not showing up in Legendarium.
Revamped Lifebound:
- Lifebound items no longer drop. New "Scroll of Lifebound" items have a chance to drop, starting at level 7.
- Has a relatively low chance to drop from normal monsters (when monsters do drop loot, it's between a 1 - 4% chance), a 1 in 6 chance of dropping from Boss Chests, Champions and Bosses.
- Phase Beasts now begin appearing in hub areas starting at level 7 instead of level 5. Phase Dungeons from Phase Beasts have a 100% chance of dropping Scrolls of Lifebound from the Boss Chest.
- Scrolls of Lifebound allow you to choose which common, magic or rare quality items to turn into Lifebound items, allowing you to choose when to opt-in to the risk involved with wielding these more powerful items.
- Removed Scrolls of Unbinding from the game.
- Updated the Lifebound tutorial and help dialogs.
- Updated quest rewards to no longer give lifebound items, but either give your choice of items or Scrolls of Lifebound.
- Fixed many issues with Phase Dungeons not being set up correctly for some areas, not getting monster affixes, etc.
Added item buyback at town NPCs.
All armor pieces no longer have elemental defense as a Primary affix. Elemental Defense that does roll on items as a Secondary affix now have far greater values than they had before.
"Lucky!" item drops are always magic or higher quality now.
Added random chest cannon option for the gamblers.
Starter items can no longer be destroyed in Occupied Trevail Point, which previously allowed players to get permanently stuck in that level.
Potion cooldown now 5 seconds (down from 8).
Healing Potions now cause a minor knockback to nearby enemies, clearing a path if you are surrounded by enemies.
Godsbeard's Glove now grants 50% bonus healing given by potions instead of reducing potion cooldown by 50%.
Alex Sword and Holy Icon now enabled for Legendarium.
Corrected Contract level rewards to give stash tabs instead of duplicate fort deco plans.
Moved some fort plan contract rewards around in the contract levels to avoid some duplicate rewards.
Fixed Forged freezing when Helmet equipped in character select.
Snecko Stick now has a basic attack description, and always fires a single projectile (sourced from the staff itself, not part of the Legendarium affix).
Revised tooltips on the global "every third basic attack causes lightning strikes" affix.
Standardized the "on basic attack" affix text.
Fixed typo on Storm Driver legendary weapon affix.
Fixed broken immunity status effects.
Fixed an issue with Forged weapons being hidden during Cyclone Mode.
Set the random fort decoration consumables to be valid to destroy or sell, added a gold value (equivalent to rare gear).
Fixed an issue where item details are showing up with just numbers.
Rifle and Pistol basic attack range reduced to the length of one screen (from normal camera distance).
Corrected the minimum level for skill-specific affixes to match recent changes to skill level unlocks (except legendary gear).
Fixed a typo in the description of the buff from the Mega Blaster Legendary chest gun.
Fixed an issue where skill point gear causes issues with spending skill points.
Address a rare case where gifts/items sent by global mailbox messages could be retrieved on multiple character accounts.
Forged Helm now hides his head.
Changed all the potion dropping monsters that appear in boss arenas to attempt to give you either the local area's potion or a general health potion, to help fix situations where it appears that your potion inventory (overall) is not full, but the stacks in the inventory for the local area's potion actually is full. All these potion dropping monsters will now show the standard health potion VFX overhead, as they will be possible for them to drop, depending on your inventory.
Items fall and announcements are no longer made too quickly after killing monsters, especially bosses. Also added back in the time delay between item spawns.
Put developer names into more item names. :D
Added many more skill-enhancing affixes (bonus damage, reduced cooldown, reduced mana cost, etc.).
Redistributed skill-enhancing affixes to provide a better spread.
Fixed some skill-enhancing affixes that were not set to be valid for foci.
Fixed description of recipes or other items showing up in the flavor text if the item was dropped from a Lucky drop.
Renamed the status effect LuckAndMoveSpeed to Lucky Adventurer so it matches the legendary items that grant it.
Fixed an issue with certain Legendary Items blocking skill point usage.
Increased roughness on Character Create gear (work in progress).
Renamed Egg of Wonder to Egg of Mayhem.
'Acid Spew' affix of Skittering set fixed to properly state 'Relic Skill', not relic activation
'Sonic Pulse on Relic' affix should always fire when 3-set is enabled.
Properly formatted Wideload's Cavebreaker to be in line with new age affixes, and removed random roll range from the affix.
Fixed Raging Beater causing an increase to charge cost of Ramming Robot
Added the final set of Forged legendary armor to the game and 3 additional locomotion items.
Re-distributed all non-act-specific locomotion items.
Fixed issues where Legendary items sometimes had too many of the same affix on them.
Fixed an issue where quitting to Character Select does not cause the unpicked Lore Objects to disappear, which allows the player to loot such objects infinitely.
Fixed an issue where the "Lucky!" text appears immediately when you kill a boss, not when the loot drops.
Set vs. Goblin, vs. Hyvid and vs. Voltura affixes to only be valid to appear on items dropped in the Act that those monsters belong to, or the endgame.
Set the vs. undead and vs. skeletons affixes to be valid from level 1.
Set the vs. netherim affixes to be valid from level 5.
Fixed an issue where characters on the character select screen were using the wrong idle/move blendspace if they had no weapon equipped.
Attempting to deal damage without a weapon will give the player a "You need a weapon to deal damage" message.
Renamed the "Object of Power" focus to "Golden Conopa".
Added a new dye set for the global Forged legendary armor set, hooked up to the armor.
Ghost Pets summoned by the Ancient One's token no longer have mouseover capability.
Disabled the "Timepiece" magic quality focus from dropping, as the mesh for it is used for a legendary focus.
The starter Legendarium affix 'Quicksilver' has been nerfed to 25% movement speed when using a potion.
Fixed an issue where some 'Lore Objects' from a given area intermittently fail to spawn.
Fixed an issue where items would not be marked as new if you had previously viewed a new item in that slot.
Added a new secondary affix to melee weapons that reduces potion cooldown.
Fixed so that health regen affixes are valid for Helm, Boots & Hatch items.
Fixed health on kill affixes so that they are valid for Helm, Boots & Hatch items.
Increased chance of health on kill affixes to drop.
Reduced Rifle missile travel distance a small amount.
Increased the chance that Ember Cores drop:
- You always get 1 for every boss.
- For the Big Bad bosses, decreased the chance that no additional ember cores would drop from 70.59% to 61.54%.
- Increased the chance that 1 bonus ember core would drop from 5.88% to 7.69%.
- Increased the chance that 2 bonus ember cores would drop from 17.65% to 23.08%
- Increased the chance that 3 bonus ember cores would drop from 5.88% to 7.69%
- For regular bosses, increased the chance that 1 bonus ember core would drop, from 7.69% to 11.11%

FORTS

Re-enabled Contracts and Fame, which reward a massive range of fort decor recipes.
Increased fort complexity limit to 500.
The Reliquary and Enchanting Table no longer require 500 gold to build. They are free starting additions to your Fort.
Fixed "Busted Stone Arch" not being unlocked by default in the Fort.
Fixed Wideload's Decorative Shield (fort decoration) to only drop once per account instead of once per character.
Fixed the title crashes upon interacting with specific buildings in Fort.
Pet tutorial now occurs later in the game (at some point after completing the Fort intro tutorial) so that the message referring to Forts isn't mentioned before you actually acquire one.
Fixed an issue where opening the Fort customization menu in the middle of a skill animation would cause the hidden character's attachments to appear.
The Enchanting screen no longer has a nonfunctional "Details" action for recipes that you haven't unlocked yet.
We now default to showing your inventory instead of your equipped items tab in the Shared Stash.
Fixed an issue where a player would warp to a passage, but it wouldn’t say whose Fort they were in unless they walked away and walked back.
Set all monument visitor buffs to not allow stacks.
Fixed the Hyvid and Echonok armor enchanting recipes that would not unlock.
Fixed an issue where equipping a terracotta figure with any item causes the figure's textures to become a placeholder.
Refining recipes are now sorted in their numeric order, rather than alphabetical order.
Fixed an issue where wardrobe props don't allow the player to equip to inventory with a single action.
Added "Swap Armor" and "Swap Weapons" buttons to the wardrobe prop UI.
Prevented strange item behavior from occurring when swapping items from a wardrobe prop to the player.
Replaced the class skill stations with the upgraded versions.
Changed the naming of Lil' Speckled Mushroom & Pair 'a' Speckled Mushrooms to straight single-quote instead of single-curly quote.
Pet Shelter should no longer get stuck.

RELICS
Blood Drinker

We have revised the activation skill for Blood Drinker. At base it now summons two additional spinning blades that go around the player. At max level it summons four. The AOE and each blade do hits on overlap, and the bleed (shared between the AOE and blades) can stack up to four times instead of once. The blades/AoE damage for the bleeds is 100%, while the hits are 150%.This is part of the larger task to make all activation skills feel awesome.
Fixed invalid data for the Blood Drinker description widget.
Adjusted the amount of cooldown reduction on Blood Drinker's active skill from 50% to 30%.
Extended the duration of the skillshape to 1.5s instead of 1.
Increased Blood Drinker's damage to its active skill. And differentiated the bleed damage.
Adjusting Blood Drinker's text and flavor to differentiate the skillstable tooltips from the skill tree tooltips.

Flaming Destroyer
- Alternate Flaming Destroyer with activation ‘Rain of Swords’ implemented (work in progress).
- Adjusted Flaming Destroyer's activation tooltip to account for its new functionality.
- Also upped its damage from 125% to 200% weapon damage.
Electrode
- Electrode's active skill has been replaced. Localized Storm now makes it so you strike targets around you randomly with lightning for a short duration instead of relying on randomly moving storms projected from the player.
- Made the activation missiles for Electrode and the enhanced activation hazards last way longer.
Bane
- Revised Bane activation to be more impressive right at the start. Removed the baby spiders from the Bane activation missile to reduce poly count.
- Bane active skill rework. Now is a spider ally that can poison enemies on hit.
- Made Bane active skill minion damage scale per point in the active skill damage factor now that it's a sumon and not a casted spell.
- Adjusted wording for Bane's activation skill to make it less confusing.
- Reworked bane tooltips and descriptions for passive skills to reflect their bonus percents and also to not have two tool tips repeating the same information. The base skill tooltip is now for flavor, and the one in the skillstable is for actual information.
Coldheart
- Coldheart active skill and Coldheart baseline activation reworked. Now the glaciers are part of the baseline activation, and the new skill Frost Blast is added for the active skill.
- Increased duration of chill effects. Made chill and frozen work on bosses.
- Fixing Coldheart display texts for tooltips to make it cleaner.

PETS

Increased the aggro range of pets to 1200, which is the range on Light Spear.
Disabled fastforwarding the pet return timer when you arrive at a safe area.
Pets now start with 2 unlocked pet skills and one available slot.
Pet skill slots should now unlock with player level.
You now start with Battle Cry and Defensive Posture, regardless of which pets you pick.
You now can find Screeching Stun on common quality pets when you rescue them, instead of magic quality.
Fixed certain pet skills that were indicating their level (which can never be greater than 1).
You can no longer send your pet to town when its inventory is empty by using the controller or binding a key to the "send pet to town" entry.
Fixed (again) so that pet collars get either base defense or the elemental defense for the current area.
Fixed an issue where pets were not previewed when rescuing them from a pet cage.
Pet Shelter can now be moved within the Fort.

MONSTERS

Fixed an issue where Oakbeard spawned inside the chest and gets stuck and unable to fight.
Brall's phase transition arrows dropped to player-height, to make them a bit easier to dodge.
Brall's hazard markers in the boss cell are now raised to be identical to her arrow shot height, 220 units.
Brall's Illusion health reduced by 75%. They are intended to be dealt with very quickly when targeted.
Fixed an issue where Brall would not spawn her Shadow Wolf when first engaged in combat.
Brall Wolf scale increased from 1.8 to 2.15 (skill shape for howl adjusted to match new size), making it more noticeable on the field as the add threat per phase.
Shadow Well arrow hazard duration tripled, making it more obvious when the phase in which Nether Well arrows begins.
Brall ground telegraph decal added to Variable Line Shot hazard (work in progress).
Fixed an issue where monsters would try to target the Railmaster's train tracks.
Added the following Act 3 random encounter bosses: Scrappy Surgewing, Xymox, 01110100 01101100 00110011, Rodento Rummager, King Tingle, Sparkles, Hunker Junker, 3CH-0H, S4N-1-T1Z3, TR3-NCH-R3Z-N0R
Fixed issue with goblin stabby sometimes getting stuck in their AI.
Fixed rubberbanding issues with knockback.
Don't show "Invulnerable" on a monster that is spawning.
StinkShank (and other Goblin casters like him) AI improved, so he will not wander so erratically, will aggro players from further away, and will spend less time trying to reach dead targets to revive them.
Goblin Chanter resurrection skill shape size increased (work in progress).
Fixed an issue where Psora was not spawning additional waves of bugs as intended. Thus, this fix to a bug on a bug introduces more bugs in the fight with a bug.
Fixed misspelling of "Bererker" for champion "Infernal Archer".
Fixed issue where monsters were still occasionally double-spawning at the same places.
We now preload monsters and bosses when entering an area.
Expanded spawn suite for Zombie Melee and Foul Hurler including new animations, montages and skills.
Sadista's phase transitions now occur at 80/60/40% HP, up from 75/50/25.
Sadista's pre-Phase 3 Glaive Throw missile speed reduced, slightly more windup time added.
Sadista's pistol bullet missile speed increased.
Sadista's Leap Attack now has a ground telegraph where she will land.
Sadista Primal Leap telegraph offset in accordance with her skill shape offset, so the two lineup.
Sadista'a add waves now spawn in a more spread out pattern, spawn many more enemies, and those enemies are standardized tuning appropriate to the area level.
Sadista, when transitioning to Phase 3, no longer places a Nether Well in the center of the arena, where you warp back into when you die.
Sadista now has a Potion Dropper minion, and fixed the overhead visual not displaying on potion dropper minions.
Sadista now summons many more varied Netherim minions during minion spawn waves, including the tougher variants during the first summon.
Sadista Glaive Throw boomerang fixed using the wrong missile orientation (work in progress).
Sadista Glaive Retrieval is now instantaneous (work in progress).
Moved the intro area for Sadista to overlook the arena.
Fixed an issue where Hyvid Soldiers (the big melee ones) dealt too much damage.
Hyvid Juvenile Chargers now move faster.
Made the Juvenile Charger Bugs valid to appear in Sanctum of the Swarm.
Re-enabled the Chargerbug for Sanctum of the Swarm.
Boss Indicators (visual at the feet of the monster) for bosses with their own dedicated fight spaces, such as Wideload and Psora, have been removed.
Fixed an issue where Psora fails to respawn if the players are defeated on high difficulties.
Fixed an issue where Psora boss could be defeated effortlessly when standing outside of the boss arena.
Removed extra boss fight shapes from Psora's arena.
Squawkclaw movement speed increased dramatically.
Squawkclaw electrical orb now launches a volley of them instead of just a single orb
Squawkclaw now summons more consistent waves of minions, and more of them, during his Laser Eyes phases.
Squawkclaw's Laser Eyes now tracks targets 50% faster
Squawkclaw Spin attack now reduces his movement speed by 20% instead of 75%. Get ready to run if you see him start to spin.
Reduced the cooldowns of Squawkclaw's Melee, Electrical Orb, and Spin Attack, making him have less idle time where he is not performing any attacks.
Reduced damage from players vs champions and bosses while in a party to 30% in a party of 2 and 20% in a party of 3.
Phase Beasts were too easy for a party to kill - they have now been adjusted to look for party size and change stats accordingly.
Phase Beast health set to 10x curve, up from 3.7x curve. They also no longer give XP.
Monster spawners will try harder to find monsters that work with its components.
Placed unique spawners for Echonok random boss encounters in appropriate levels.
Strongtusk Pylon, Hyvid Armor Crystals, and Echonok Charging Coils now respect player count tuning.
Fixed issues with Strongtusk remaining invulnerable by converting the Nether Pylon bond skill shapes to hazards.
Netherim Warrior damage increased.
Removed damage over time from Nether Wells.
Fixed client-server sync issues with Nether Wells.
Addressed Mimic camouflage bugs: Mimic chests now show item nameplates, and Mimics / hidden creatures can no longer be revealed by highlighting with the gamepad targeting indicator.
"Lilly Swampseer" is now "Lilly Bonebaker".
Updated monster spawners in Strongtusk arena. This is to make sure that there are 3 monster spawners needed to spawn the pylons, but doesn't solve the problem of them not actually spawning the pylon/monster.
Fixed an issue where Netherim Pylons (Prop_Pylon) are missing from Strongtusk's boss arena (Belly of the Beast) which meant Strongtusk never went into the next boss phase.
Shriekbeak boss now uses a special death montage, different from normal Volt Fighters.
Shriekbeak boss coil behavior changed: Radius reduced, now disables immediately upon firing once, "Phase Change" beam now targets half the coils in the arena instead of all active coils, and turns them on instead of turning them off.
Ordrak summons take half damage.
Ordrak Flame Wave missiles once again hooked up. Looks like they were unhooked by accident.
Ordrak's melee slam skill shape size reduced from 275 to 250 to match the visuals (skill shape should be slightly smaller than visuals indicated to account for player capsule overlap) - work in progress.
Ordrak's Poison Orb summon skill now spawns 3 of them at once. Their duration has been increased.
Fixed an issue with Ordrak's Poison Orbs gaining collision when they die.
Poison Orbs from Plaguebearer no longer have health bars.
When defeating the last of Ordrak's summons, it will end his invulnerability state (instead of it only being able to time out after a duration)
Ordrak's Breath attacks now fire projectiles in a much more predictable, larger conical pattern rather than straight lines. The closest of the breath projectiles now land immediately in front of Ordrak, damaging a player in melee range (rather than melee players being able to stand still to avoid damage).
Fixed issue with Ordrak's Flamewave spawning in the air.
Poison breath hazard duration reduced.
Fixed an issue where Ordrak's Flame Wave would not appear.
Fixed Witch and Ordrak's summons not being set to proper level and stats (work in progress).
Made monsters more difficult to kill on Hard (player damage taken reduced from 60% to 50%).
Disabled Cloaked, Corpse Eater and Dividing monster affixes. (Dividing can still be picked in the mapworks.)
Fixed issue with invisible trail left being left by Hyvid Larvae.
The Hyvid Soldier's damage has been cut in half.
Spider Bosses, such as Spinderella and Skittles, are now much faster when chasing ranged attackers, and can now counter ranged players with a projectile attack of their own.
Increased monster damage to players from 200% to 240% in Ridiculous difficulty.
Increased champion monster damage to players from 180% to 216% in Ridiculous difficulty.
Increased boss monster damage to players from 120% to 160% in Ridiculous difficulty.
Reduced the amount that player vs. monster, champion and boss is lowered at Ridiculous difficulty so that it is just slightly more than on Painful.
Increased the bonus item luck at Ridiculous difficulty from +15% to +20%.
Switched the loot from mimic chests to give the same loot as Bountiful Treasure Chests (including magic or better quality gear).
Increased the amount of damage dealt to champions and bosses in Practice difficulty by 40%.
Set bosses to be immune to Blind, Fear, Knockback and stun.
Removed a dedicated champion spawner that was placed into many Echonok levels, causing too many champions to spawn in any areas that use those levels.
Fixed an issue that when a party member dies in Boss arena the spawn near entrance fails to function.
Plaguebearer Orbs (and similar entities) will no longer target and move towards pets or minions, as they cannot explode on them.
Gundaddy boss scale reduced to 1.15.
Removed a legacy spawner that did not allow Juvenile Chargers to spawn in the Crystal Passage (and some other areas).

CLASSES & SKILLS

General
- Removed the cost lines for all charge-based skills. This should reduce confusion that the cost line is indicating the amount of charges you have.
- Add UI to indicate skill charge recharge rate (Ghost Visage, Shadowstep, Hammer Spin). These now use the same cooldown UI as non-charge skills.
- All skills with charges will now display their cooldown time on the skill tooltips.
- Disabled use of skills in towns (except potions and portals).
- The skill tier bonuses no longer stay grey as you are adding points to the skill.
- Fixed an issue where damage reduction for Melee combatants did not count Basic attacks, and did not work for Dusk Mage or Sharpshooter characters.
- Increased damage reduction for Melee combatants to 50% (up from 30%).
Railmaster
- Fixed an issue where Railmaster train cars could steal player clicks.
- Fixed an issue where the Railmaster's turret train car would pop back to the back of the track after moving forward when spawned.
- The Railmaster's train and tracks are now 75% of their former size.
- Fixed the Hammer Spin skill not having charge cooldown displayed in the ability tooltip and on skill bar.
- Adjusted Hammerspin speed bonus down from 50% to 25%
- Designer's Note: This was just too powerful and, with points put in to reduce the charge time of Hammerspin charges, made it too much of a free travel skill.
- Revised the description for the track laying related skills so they tell the player how they function as a toggle.
- Nerfed Pound's Endurance Bonus effect to 30% (from 50%) and duration to 6 seconds (from 10 seconds)
Dusk Mage
- Greatly increased the Netherim Warrior in Spirit Well's attack speed for both his melee attack and his charge skills.
- Dusk Mage's Dark/Light bars now stop draining for a few seconds after gaining their respective charge, rather than instantly begin draining as soon as the 'gaining' state has ended.
- Inverted Holy Bolt's tier 1 and 3 milestones, and reduced the damage of its (now) tier 1 milestone to do 150% skill damage, not double.
- Added 2s cooldown to Shadow Step and Smoke Bomb to prevent unintended use of an extra charge.
- Shadow Step has had its teleport ranges increased by two meters.
- Fixed it so the tooltip for Shadow Step says it gets only an "additional charge" instead of four charges.
- Energy Spikes now does 10 spikes instead of five while dark charged (with anti-shotgunning in place), and does an extra wave of five light spikes if light charged (these will also hit, so 2x hits). Also increased the chaotic pathing for the missiles.
- Increased Consecration's base damage bonus from 25% to 35% for all players in the circle.
- Increased Radiant Blast's range by 2 meters.
- Radiant Blast Tier 1 milestone damage amount increased to 200% (up from 100%)
- Adjusted Damnation's tooltips to match its damage decrease.
- Fixed an issue where Damnation was always gaining its Tier 3 milestone bonus.
- Light Spear healing changed to be 20% instead of 3% per hit, but only triggers on the first hit with each spear.
- Designer's Note: This is to resolve the fact that 3% heal was too weak with a single target, but totally way too powerful when you're fighting a huge group of enemies. So now it can be effective against one or twenty targets, while still providing a satisfying amount of healing.
- Fixed Luminous Run unlock level so it's 15.
- Luminous Run Tier 1 milestone heal amount increased to 25% (up from 10%) of maximum health.
- Adjusting Entropy milestone one; dropped the speed by only 50% (used to be at 75%) and increased its lifespan by only 50%.
- Fixed an issue where Holy Fury wouldn't ignite explosive barrels.
- Swapped the placement of Holy Fury and Radiant Blast in the Dusk Mage skill tree.
- Fixed an issue where casting Holy Fury wouldn't trigger the charge bar's activation proc
- Fixed an issue with Radiant Blast calculating damage bonuses from items twice (notably resulting in the Brilliant Herald legendary increasing damage by 2500%). Propagated this fix to the Dark Spears Tier 3 Milestone bonus, which also suffered from the same bug.
Forged
- Fixed an issue where players couldn't run through Forged players.
- Added missing notify states to the Forged sword basic attack animations for snake locomotion (work in progress).
- Fixed Forged attack blurs for sword / new locomotions.
- Fixed broken 'Forged' basic attack transitions which failed to animate when wielding a 'Great-weapon' with 'Tread/Ball/Snake Locomotion'.
- Revised Forged skill Power Projection to no longer do any sort of heal over time. Instead it hits you and your allies for 15% healing on skill start.
- Added some rattle to the Forged tread and wheel runs with all weapon types.
- Fixed an issue where enemies/players could get stuck inside each other after using Vortex Bomb or other root motion skills.
- Vortex Bomb once again pulls in enemies.
- Fracking Strike now triggers vent legendary effects, and its tier 1 milestone is now unbroken.
Sharpshooter
- Sharpshooter male head added (work in progress).
- Reduced Sharpshooter base ammo regeneration by 25%.
- Ghost Visage has had its teleport ranges increased by two meters.
- Heartseeker's Tier 3 milestone's bonus missiles now start further spread out and seek out targets slower, ramping up that speed over time. This makes them not clump up immediately upon firing and more accurately reflect the intent of the 'seeking missiles'.
- Fixed issues with Targeted Strikes hiding the character's bow.
- Adjusted Sharpshooter ammo regeneration bonus from Targeted Strikes to be 30% instead of 50%.
- Shasta pet now gets a buff whenever you or she takes damage, giving her up to 50% bonus damage.
- Casting Loyal Shasta replaces the current Shasta minion with a fresh summon.
- Changed tooltip for targeted strikes tier two milestone to show that it only adds 30% and not 50% increased ammo regeneration rate.
- Adjusted it so Sharpshooter Goblin skill does one less step and only summons one goblin per skill cast, not multiples. This results in a max of five.
- Designer's Note: This skill was flat out broken, resulting in players getting too many goblins not only per cast, but also overall,
- Onslaught's tier 3 bonus does 75% explosive damage instead of 25%. DoT finally works again after still only dealing 1 damage for some reason.
- Added more damage reduction to the Curse of Pipi skill. From 15% to 25% per stack.
- Fixed an issue where Sharpshooter pets wouldn't attack monsters anymore.
- Sharpshooter tier 1 goblin bonus now extends minion lifespan.
- Fixing more procs for Sharpshooter. Since their creation, these have been implemented, applying, and executing incorrectly, causing a ton of errant behavior. That has all been addressed.

Jun 30, 2020

Mainline Patch - June 30th, 2020 (Part 1)

Torchlight III - Echtra Bean

Check out our Discord, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch to get the latest development news and updates.

Hello Torchlight adventurers!

Act 3 is finally here and adventurers will now be able to wander the abandoned Dwarven structures that still remain locked away in the Echonok Mountains. Contracts and Fame are now available and players will be able to begin collecting all the unlockable loot by earning Fame through quest completion and defeating challenging enemies.

The dusty halls of the industrious dwarves echo with the shrieks of the voltura and clank of the automatons. This abandoned ruin is where the final act of Torchlight 3 takes place. Long-abandoned machinery and watchful clockwork creations are being looted by the avian voltura, who are allied with Mother and the netherim. Blast, break, crush and crash your way through monsters, traps, champions, and bosses as you complete the Torchlight 3 storyline.

“When we started building Echonok Mountains, we wanted two contrasting epic settings: vertiginous mountaintop vistas and classic dungeon crawls,” Senior Game Designer Shawn Stone explains, “perhaps compensating for their reduced stature, the dwarves tended to build their mountain halls at a towering, epic scale.” Contrasting with that careful craftsmanship are the ramshackled shanties that the voltura have hacked together atop the dwarven ruins, like metal nests among a dwarven necropolis. We built a variety of dwarven machinery in the environment to bring the setting to life and give the monsters plenty of locations from which they can emerge. The story climaxes in a satisfying boss fight that evokes some of the best things about Torchlight. We can’t wait for you to visit.

Contracts are a way for players to gain and grind loot through the collection of Fame. Defeating challenging monsters of varying types as well as some quests will earn you Fame. With three (Adventurer, Craftsman, and Homesteader) full Contracts worth of loot, including pets, resources, recipes, fort decorations, extra character slots, stash tabs, and more, players will have loads more content to earn and collect.

GENERAL

New server region added for our Australian players. This should reduce latency for those connecting in this local area. This did not pass QA, we will patch the new Australian servers in an upcoming hotfix/patch.
Fixed a server crash caused by “ASkillBeam:Clear”
Fixed a server crash caused by Skill Stations.
Fixed a server crash in quest code.
Fixed a server crash when claiming a crafting job.
Fixed a server crash that is caused when network requests fail.
Fixed a server crash caused by Fort editing.
Fixed a server crash when failing to load Fort inventories.
Fixed a crash caused by the Skill Manager.
Fixed a crash in Sharpshooter UI.
Fixed a crash caused by the character’s behavior tree within a certain status effect.
Fixed a possible crash with tabbed menus.
Fixed one case of degraded performance over time.
Fixed not being able to party with other players due to perceived difficulty mismatch.
Fixed an issue where sending a party invite via the friend's list doesn't work.
We now force friend status to be ‘online’ if they are on the same server.
Fixed a multiplayer issue where other players would rubberband when using melee attacks without holding shift.
Support integer progress counters for Steam achievements.
Reduced required count of "Break All the Things!" achievement from 10,000 to 2,010.
Fixed a case of achievements unlocking retroactively and forbid retroactive unlocking.
Fixed an issue where some gear-related achievements would complete when opening the reliquary for the first time.
Fixed an issue where all reach level 60 achievements would unlock once the player reached level 60 with any class.
Fixed "Legendary Set" achievement that was previously impossible to complete.
Fixed an issue with "Equip Items with Trait Greater Than" task type not recognizing progress made for required count.
After attempting travel, players will have the travel sickness status effect applied to them.
No longer enable OculusVR plugin, which will prevent Steam from launching it as a VR game.
Fixed Character Create failing due to disallowed character/pet names in non-english languages.

USER INTERFACE

Move build info text from title screen to escape menu.
"Single Player" button is now visible but disabled in the main menu when offline mode is disabled, and there is a label that says "Coming after Early Access".
Updated the framing, size and location of the minimap.
Fixed minimap issues that made tilesets appear 1 pixel off.
Dead ‘Hardcore’ characters are now at the bottom of the list of characters.
Fixed an issue that made it not possible to terminate the game using the 'Exit' option.
Reduced DPI scale for all screen resolutions.
Arrow keys, enter, and double click now work on the character select screen.
Darkened background, increased text padding and added blur to the dialog bubbles.
Dialog bubbles now bounce and then appear.
Fixed cursor jumping to the end every time you type a character for character or pet names.
Buttons with a "press and hold" now give more immediate feedback to the player.
Fixed an issue where the "Critical!" text was disabled when damage numbers were shown.
Fixed an issue where hitting enter to send a chat message does not take focus away from the chat window.
Blob shadow assets & enabling blob shadows now available as an option.
Added toggle overlay map to the keybindings menu.
The hotkeys to move the fort camera no longer collide with other key bindings.
Set gamepad focus to the map when opening with the gamepad hotkey.
Fixed an issue where the Legendarium could sometimes not receive focus when using the gamepad.
Moved the scroll box so that the characters scroll with the gamepad.
Disabled superfluous "Move Item" action in the reliquary when playing on the gamepad.
Fixed an issue with the gamepad where the player was not able to interact with McTyre's Cove and Echo Landing waypoints.
Help buttons are now turned off when the controller is active.
Fixed an issue where the screen that appears when breaking down items at the Enchanter's Altar cannot be closed with the gamepad b button.
Fixed an issue of not being able to rename your pet with a gamepad at Character Create.
Cleaned up layout so that the controller legend prompt fits better at the bottom.
Relic text now shows when a controller is connected.
Removed redundant LT and RT button icons that are visible in the vendor's panel.
Fixed an issue where the loading screen could disappear prematurely when returning to character select.
Added loading screens to teach players about the character system.
Added loading screen for the Legendarium.
Added loading screens for Sharpshooter.
Updated fame Loading Screen text to: "Fame can be earned by completing quests and defeating champions and bosses."
Replace Unreal/Epic branding with Echtra/TL3 in Crash Reporter.
Added Credits screen.
Updated Early Access roadmap image to correct a misspelling.
Added mouse wheel up/down icons.
Added intro animation, blur background and replaced the close button to the right version for the mailbox screen. Moved the "claim" button to the bottom right instead of top right. Updated the font style to the right one.
Other UIs can no longer be opened during video cinematics.
Fixed a single frame of the Character Select screen where all characters have the Dusk Mage thumbnails can be visible for a short period when returning to the Character Select from gameplay.
Updated the gender button icon to read better.
Fixed an issue where the player may not be able to see other player's Character and Account Names Overhead with the setting enabled.
Fixed missing town name plates when entering McTyre's Cove and Echo Landing.
Added icon for defense boost status effect.
Monster target Status effect aligned to the center.
Fixed an issue where Blazing monster burning status effects didn't show vignettes.
Fixed "Show Stats"/"Hide Stats" button being hard to press with the mouse (you couldn't click on the words, only on the button around the words).
Added transition to combat help screen.
Fixed text and icon that overflows out of intended text/icon area in the Legendarium menu.
Players can no longer click on windows behind the Legendarium equip panel.
Fixed text and icon that overflows out of intended text/icon area in the Legendarium menu.
Updated the equipped affix status icons in the Legendarium.
Added scroll box to avoid UI overlap in the Legendarium and tweaked sizing and alignment of Legendary items.
Fixed pluralization when displaying crafting times.
Vertically Centered the Enchanting UI.
Enchanting UI polish.
Fixed issue where the tooltips in the enchanting UI cover the action bar.
Increased the height of the Recipe panel to fit all recipes without the need for scrolling.
Fixed an issue where two menus could overlap if the player received the RPC to open a crafting menu after they had opened another menu.
Updated the Inventory, Skill, Social and Contracts screen to be vertical centered justified.
Moved inventory panel higher to make sure the controller shortcut prompt UI is on screen.
Contracts reward items are now all aligned correctly. Also added a bit of padding on the item sides for the multiple reward slots.
We now close the Contract claim reward window if you use a keyboard shortcut to switch to a different panel (like skills or inventory).
The Contracts UI no longer appears if no Contracts are enabled.
Fixed an issue where lower tier locked Fame rewards show up as claimed in the contracts if Higher tier rewards are claimed in another Contract.
Added new Contracts select screens art.
Contracts reward descriptions now fits on Ultrawide screen.
Added Lifebound decorative frame to Lifebound items.
Added a description for Lifebound.
Removed class requirement text from Wideload's Decorative Shield and Luck Sprout Sack consumable items.
Removed class requirement text from Respectacles.
Removed the colored square of the legend in the skills panel.
Removed selection/deselect animation from relic passive skills in tab.
Relics now shows up in the player info on the left side under the player's name and shield.
Removed tooltip on Relic item in the stats menu.
Relic activation skills now say the activation duration and cooldown.
Removed legend in the Relic skills screen.
Added "Passive Skill" and "Active Skill" text in relic skill descriptions.
Updated all missing icons in the active relic panel and hooked up the missing backgrounds for Cold Heart and Electrode.
Updated the Reliquary crafting UI to fit center vertical aligned.
Fixed an issue where changing the Relic while Relic's active skill is assigned to the LMB causes the player to be unable to move the character using mouse.
Fixed a typo in the Relics tutorial dialog.
Quest Item "Short Fuse" Icon fixed.
Generated an improved icon for the quest item "Automaton Arm".
Fixed an issue where quest text would overlap when coming into the game with multiple quests.
Generated an icon for the Voltura secret message.
Zephora's Amulet icon fix.
Fixed the icon for Cosmic Pauldrons shoulders not appearing correctly.
Removed the unneeded option to 'Friend' an already added Friend appears in the 'Nearby' tab of the Social UI.
Cleaned up layout so that all buttons can fit in the social friend entry widget space.
Friends menu title now includes the platform name the friends are sourced from.
Polished up the social party UI items (invite button, player group info, pending invitation).
Invites from blocked players no longer appear briefly in the UI before they are automatically rejected.
Adding icons for a few for decorations where they were missing.
Added a mention of visiting other players' forts to the Forts help menu.
The tutorial fort will now show that you are in Trevail's Passage when you open up the area map, instead of Edgewood Bluff.
We now hide the tutorial popups when you open the Fort build menu.
Fixed the Fort edit window closing immediately the first time it is opened.
Deleted minimap data for the corner pieces surrounding the Fort.
Fixed being able open the fort edit menu on top of another menu if you happened to press the buttons within a very short timeframe.
The 'Store All' option is displayed when the Decoration, Functional, and Storage tabs are opened during fort customization.
Uploaded missing bitmaps for goblin monument feed.
Updated Hyvid paste and Goblin Rage currency icons.
Wardrobe UI polish.
Added a close button to the Wardrobe screen.
Fixed Wardrobe UI that was labeled "C" in the lower right corner for mouse+keyboard to “Show Stats”.
Added messaging about why players can't interact with some wardrobes.
Reduced the height of the pet swap UI.
Fixed a case on pet details UI where changing a name was not reflected in the actual pet name defense boost status effect.
Added proper icons to all of the Sharpshooter Adventurer Bonus status effects so they aren't displaying placeholder icons.
Sharpshooter is now capitalized in skill description and free from grammatical errors.
Corrected spelling of Scattershot.
Icon camera adjustments for pants and chest gear for Sharpshooter and Railmaster.
Updated Notification icons.
Fixed an issue where players get an alert notification about New Skills Unlocked before they are able to access the feature.
Added a notification when a party member travels to another area.
Fixed party member notifications not occuring when a party member dies.
Fixed an issue with the Sharpshooter's icon is not displayed on the notifications regarding dying for the first time or unlocking a new slot for pet's skills.
Inventory full notification now links to the inventory screen on click.
Red "Out of Mana" now says “Not enough ammo.” when you don’t have enough mana to cast.
Fixed 'Show Stats' button text & 'NEW!' text that spills out of the frame in Russian.
New batch of localization added/updated (all languages received an update).
Fixed the 'Sell All Pet Items' bar that did not fit in the designated space in non-English languages.
Skill damage value missing from skill tooltip when bonus levels put it over the cap. Also capped skill trait bonuses at level 10.
Fixed incorrect tooltip that was displayed under dialogue box when interacting with NPCs marked with three dots.
Fixed an issue where closing the 'Difficulty' menu causes the tooltips present in the bottom-right corner of the screen to disappear, which prevents the player from choosing any character.
Fixed an issue where canceling the difficulty level change confirmation prompt results in the same prompt with different tooltips being displayed for a brief moment.
Fixed an issue where it was possible to progress though the game with the camera being constantly zoomed-in upon performing a specific action.
Fixed a conditional blocker that would occur when the playable character can get stuck upon constantly pressing the LMB on a waypoint while mashing F10 at the same time.

ENVIRONMENT

Added more diversity to the default appearances in character create.
Set players revived by allies to be invulnerable for a short duration to avoid situations where an ally would revive you on/in a hazard and you'd die again right away.
Added the Mysterious Wanderer NPC to Trevail Point.
Removed critters from Trevail Passage (both versions).
Added various critters to all areas.
Redressed scenery and adjusted lighting to account for no longer having map vendors in towns.
Disable portal to party members if you are too close to the party member (currently 20 meters).
Fixed an issue where return Warps were not spawning after opening boss chests in Act 3.
Fixed an issue where using the warp from 'Lakeside Clearing' to 'Firebelly Stronghold' results in the character getting stuck in the air without any possibility to move.
Fixed an issue in the Hyvid Tunnels where the exit portal spawns too close to the boss chest.
Fort specific player portals now display the name of the account rather than the name of the character.
Fixed an issue where portals created in areas that precede boss fights cannot be entered.
Adjusted position of Trevail Point waypoint.
Added a missing seed to the Fields of Unrest.
Increased size of warp trigger for Den of Upheaval so it is clickable.
Tuning the spawners across Act 1.
Adjusted mob spawners in the Voltura Village.
Fixed the tiles of Ascent of Echo to include more environment skirting.
Fixed inaccessible 'Skulls' and 'Pile of Stones' clickables that were visible for the player in the first Fort.
Fixed scaffolding prop that steals clicks.
Removed the funky clickable unopenable spider gooey chest.
Moved or removed weapon rack props so they aren’t hidden behind walls.
Fixed an issue in the Hyvid Hatchery where a specific dormant bug is located inside a wall.
Area before you go to Belly of the Beast shouldn't have spawners, this has been fixed to make sure none exist.
Fixed an issue with metal domes in Act 3 not spawning monsters.
Shocking hazards in Bolt Town zap the player again.
Hazards from traps duration increased to 5 seconds, matching the Spider duration they are based from, preventing the visual from clipping out instead of fading out.
Fixed an issue where fire hazards weren't dealing damage.
Fixed an issue causing Spike Traps in Act 3 to deal far more damage than intended.
Further cleanup of collision, mostly due to foliage objects like rocks and spikes not inherently having collision because the foliage system does not do that. Should resolve some character clipping through rocks.
Updated the Cave of Sorrows to fix extra navmesh is present on the broken bridge asset.
Added collision to missing Murky Miasma sac prop.
Fixed a gap in the environment that could be seen in Hidden Falls.
Fixed a gap in the environment that was observed in 'Firebelly Village'.
Fixed an issue where the player sinks through the bridge in Volutra Village.
Fixed navmesh issue that prevented players from getting into the Bugswat Burrow.
Fixed Stone face statue in Firebelly Stronghold that lacked its collision.
Fixed plant prop in Corpsefire Crypt that had no collisions implemented.
Players now move more smoothly when navigating up and down ramps.
Fixed Treasure Chest that clips through the floor in 'Edgewood Bluff'.
Fixed enemies that clip through the environment when spawning at 'Crystal Passage'.
Fixed some crates being stuck halfway in rocks by the buffalope in the Imperial Outpost.
Fixed issue with chest that can be seen clipping into the ground in Lugnut's Tower.
Fixed character clipping through multiple rocks in Ascent of Echos.
Fixed character clipping through multiple rocks in Scavenger’s Trail.
Fixed character clipping through multiple game objects & environments in 'Grand Hall'.
Fixed character clipping through a 'Metal Deposit' in 'Ascent of Echoes.
Fixed character clipping through a wall in Archives.
Fixed character clipping through multiple walls in Squakclaw’s Perch.
Fixed character clipping through multiple walls in the Library of Firebeard's Legacy.
Fixed character clipping through a wall of Voltura Village.
Fixed character clipping through a wall of Shriekbeak’s Laboratory.
Fixed character clipping through multiple rocks in Cliffs of Ore.
Fixed Skittering Crawlers Legendary gloves to remove clipping through shields.
Fixed some floating crystals in front of the player Fort.
Fixed hard edge on floor texture found in Firebelly Village.
Camera distance and FOV distance increased for Brall, Sadista, and Ordrak boss arenas.
The Fort boundaries are now respected when using mouse camera movement.
Adjusted wardrobe camera.
Removed the stationary Galvanic turret automatons from King's Plateau and Looted Warehouse.
Replaced with Galvanic custodian automatons in the Looted Warehouse.
Extended the length of the player info intro animation to make sure it finishes all the way.
Removed trigger for placeholder boss death cinematic from Ordrak's boss arena.
Updated Act 1 Three Sisters intro with final illustrations. Included temp SFX and Score.
Sadista Death Cinematic with final illustrations. Included temp SFX and score.
Psora fight Intro Cinematic added with final illustrations.
Act 2 establishing Cinematic added with final illustrations.
Act 3 establishing Cinematic added with final illustrations.
SquawkClaw Intro with Kenik Cinematic with Final illustrations. Included temp SFX.
Updated Closing cinematic with temp SFX ands score. Still awaiting all of the final illustrations (work in progress).
Ordrak Fight Intro cinematic added with final illustrations.
Updated character select cinematic to fix some FX issues.
Fixed an issue with Thunderthighs boss's intro cinematic having un-textured crystals.
Fixed an issue where duplicate pylons can appear during Strongtusk's cinematic.
Swapped the geo for the Brall and Sadista boss arenas, the crystal in the middle was intended for Sadista.
Path is missing from the 'Map' & 'Minimap' at a specific location in 'Firebelly Strongehold.
Fixed issues with minimap not reflecting the Trial of Fire boundaries properly.
Railmaster fixes to forearm deformation while using the focus.
Dusk Mage elbow no longer pops backwards when holding a pistol and focus.
Dusk Mage walk to run transition when carrying a Great Weapon now blends as intended.
Sacrifice to Goose animated mesh VFX now performs as expected.
Cat NPC now progresses through idles as intended.
Sharpshooter skill transition blends adjusted to play as intended.
Forged Great Weapon walk run blend with all locomotions now plays as expected.
Fixed an issue where characters clip through multiple rocks in Ascent of Echos.
Adjusted Railmaster animation to use the right notify for Electrode Localized Storm, resulting in unified functionality across all classes for the Relic.
Fixed Railmaster shotgun and mortar turrets having material issues in certain boss instances.
Fixed an issue where clickable animations reset after a period of time and can't be clicked again.
VFX Updates/Fixes:
- Legendary 'pet poison aura' added.
- Made spider spawn web slightly thinner.
- Revision to spiders' poison hazard.
- Revised spiders' electric hazard and goblin grenade hazard.
- New chandelier sway.
- Brall Projectile revisions.
- Revised Brall wolf's hazard visual.
- Revised Brall's ‘tell’.
- Made Brall's arrows more visible, taller and more dramatic.
- New Ghost Material for Fort. Works now for Skeletal mesh props.
- Power Projection reworked.
- Rizzi's Fate Milestone skill follow up (work in progress).
- Fixing Shoulders flippy animation issue on Woodbeast Legendary shoulders.
- New Light Spear Milestone Skill / Dark Spear FX
- Decreased the size of the particle system for Scout's bones to make it more inline with the actual size of the missile.
- Magic sword FX bug fixed.
- Reviewed all critter combatFX & created new censored critter death FX.
- New Champion's Amulet Item FX
- New Blood Drinker Relic FX
- New Coldheart Active Skill FX
- New Legendary Weapon FX with Affix
- New Deadblade Relic Weapon FX
- New Electrode Active Skill FX (work in progress).
- New Legendary GreatWeapon FX (work in progress).
- New Legendary Weapon FX: DeadBlade (work in progress).
- New Legendary Weapon FX: BoneRazer (work in progress).
- Added vfx missiles and impacts to Coal Launch (work in progress).
- Clockwork Boss level (work in progress).
- Entropy Nova update (work in progress).
- Ghost Pick Throw Update (work in progress).
- Spike Throw update (work in progress).
- New Frost Shock (work in progress).
- Added Ember Barrier prop FX.
- New Dead Player / Revive Indicator FX
- New Endurance Indicator FX
- DM Entropy Nova Update (work in progress)
- Torque Swing Updates
- RM Endurance bonus FX for Torgue Missile
- Lantern Flash Legendary Endurance Bonus FX
- Plaguebearer updated.
- Character Create Fixes/revisions (work in progress).
- Train tracks animate and fade into place as more tracks are added.
SFX Updates/Fixes:
- Increased radius for Thorned Strider.
- Revised Shadow Beast attack.
- Revised Glaive iteration.
- Added sound to equipping shield.
- Increased radius for explosive barrel.
- Traps that don't actually spawn anything will no longer trigger the narrator VO.
- Note: this only works for traps without a delay. Traps with a delay will still trigger the VO, even if they would fail to trigger anything after the delay is done.
- Fixed an issue where Fungi themed decoration props in player Fort mismatched their SFX of their type.
- Arms Cart sound implemented.
- Flame Shockwave sound implemented.
- Shock On sound implemented.
- Ghost pets implemented.
- Added sound for party members dying.
- Attempting build a fort prop in an out-of-bounds area no longer plays the build sound.
- New music in second half of Act 1 exteriors!
- Brought sound levels of random distant metallic 'scatterer' effect down a little in dwarf workshop audio ambience mixes.
- Disabled narrator VO in "Fortuitous Arrival" upon completing the quest when entering Edgewood Bluff.
- Voltura melee hit volume raised.
- Fixed cannon sound triggering if you triggered the cannon and then walked away from it and then walked back.
- Fixed subsequent uses of consumable items triggering multiple instances of the consume item sound.
- Voltura Fighter death updated.
- Achievement quests now no longer play narrator VO.

QUESTS

Added 5 second delay on Tutorial: Boss Chests widget pop-up.
Added 1.5 second delay on Tutorial: Skills widget pop-up.
Fixed instances where "Test Subject #29" could sometimes be found in multiple locations around the Excavated Workshop.
Decreased the size of the Automatons Cogs quest item (for the mapworks quest "Part Picking") to 35%. Also generated an icon for this quest item.
Changed close action text on the quest dialog widget from "Not Now" to "Close".
Fixed an issue where it was impossible to complete the Fortuitous Arrival quest if the player closes the game before leaving Occupied Trevail Point to go to Edgewood Bluff.
Fixed an issue where force quitting during the loading screen after Yapper may result in a progression blocker.
Increased required count for killing monsters from 10 to 40 in Echoes of the Past quest.
Fixed an issue where upon completing the quest by speaking with the Ghostly Alpaca, the player receives a level 0 legendary pet collar.
Fixed missing "Upgrade Gear" account tutorial that failed to trigger in Occupied Trevail Point.
Set the mapworks quests "Musky Business" and "Tipsy Gobs" to hide all other quests while active.
Added a reward of 2 magic essence when you complete the step to place the Enchanting Altar in your fort for the account tutorial quest "Simply Enchanting". This should be enough for you to be able to apply at least 1 default enchantment (magic quality) to an item. (currently this gives a broken essence, will be fixed in an upcoming patch.)
Corrected the wording of the "From a Humble Seed" Luck Tree tutorial quest task to ask you to find fertile soil from a tree, instead of a more specific "Ash Tree".
Updated the "From a Humble Seed" tutorial quest to be able to drop fertile soil from any tree in the world.
Increased drop rate of quest items for "Part Picking" quest to help avoid situations where you don't get enough parts.
Slightly increased drop chance of Netherling Jawbones for the "Nether Inkling" quest. Champion Netherlings will also have a 100% chance to drop Jawbones.
Champion Netherim Warriors have a 100% chance to drop Netherim Hide.
Champion packs only drop quest items on the last pack member now.
Fixed issue where name of the area to travel to is not replaced for "Continue On" quest.
Updated Reliquary help tutorial pop-up to refer to the "Functional" section instead of "Production" section.
Reduced the drop rate for the Voltura secret message.

(continued in "Mainline Patch - June 30th, 2020 (Part 2)"