For most of this project the server was deliberately stupid. It knew where everybody was standing and what they were holding, it kept a copy of your experience, and that was the entire job. Your game ran on your machine and it was the authority on itself. I wrote that down as a rule, put it on this website, and defended it for months on the grounds that a server which actually runs the game is a different program and a much bigger one.

It is a different program. I was right about that part. I'm writing it anyway.

The reason is that everything I actually want out of this is on the other side of that decision, and I kept finding new ways to notice it. You can't have two people trade without one of them being able to invent items. You can't have a hiscore worth looking at when everyone's number comes out of a file they own. And you cannot possibly have people fighting each other over loot when both of them are the final word on what's in their own bag. Every interesting thing on my list needed the same thing underneath it, and I was writing around it instead of writing it.

So: your character is going to live on my server. Not a save file, not a folder, not a key on your machine — a row in a database, with your forum account attached to it. Log in on a different computer and it's the same character. There is no longer anything to back up and nothing to lose.

What that unlocks, in the order I'm building it: PvP in marked areas, where your armour and your Defence level and your prayer all count for something. Then scavenging — the gate in the middle of town that says Dungeon Queue on it actually meaning something, with other people down there at the same time as you, and a way back out that you have to walk to. Die down there and you lose what you found; what you brought in is yours.

None of that is in the build you can download today, and I've marked it that way everywhere on the site rather than quietly moving the goalposts. What's there right now is fourteen skills, a town, two dungeons under it, and a lot of things that will hit you. That part still works, and it's still worth an evening.

There's a board at /hiscores now. Overall and one per skill, and every character gets its own page showing where each of its thirteen skills sits against everyone else's.

Read it as a scoreboard rather than a record. These numbers come off your own machine, because there is no server running the game to watch you earn them, and I would rather say that on the page than let you assume otherwise. Experience only ever counts upward, so a stale save can't roll you backward and a reinstall can't wipe a rank. The same rule means a number somebody inflates is one they can never take back.

[Update, 1 September — this stopped being true about a day after I wrote it. The server is going to run the game, so the board will be reading numbers it watched you earn rather than numbers you sent it. Leaving the paragraph above as it was written.]

You can tie a character to your forum account from User CP. It puts your forum name next to you on the board, and it's how anything you earn on the site finds its way into the game.

I wanted somewhere to put bug reports that isn't my inbox, so there's a board now. You need a name and a password and nothing else. No email unless you want one, though without it there's no way to get you back in if you forget the password, and I'd rather say that up front than have you find out.

It looks the way it looks on purpose. If you'd rather have the version with the folder icons and the tiny Verdana, there's a switch in the navbar that swaps the whole thing over and remembers.

Bug reports go in Bug Reports, one per thread, and tell me what you were doing when it happened. That last part is the whole difference between a report I can act on and one I can't.

The dragon longsword is a drakebone longsword. The pickaxe went with it. The staff is an emberstaff, the bow is a conjured shortbow because it makes its own arrows, and the party hat is a paper crown, which is what my own writeup already called it: nine bits of paper and a band.

Defence became Defense, which it should have been all along, and hitpoints are now vitality.

None of the numbers moved. Same max hits, same speeds, same drop rates, same models. I'd been using names I grew up on as placeholders and never went back for them, and a name is the one part of an item you read before you've seen a single polygon of it.

The build used to sit in the website's own repository, which meant every new one was a commit and a redeploy for a file nobody reads the diff of. It lives in a bucket now. Uploading a new build is a drag and a drop, and the site doesn't need to know.

The link you click hands you a signed URL that dies after fifteen minutes. That's not to stop you sharing it. It's so I can move the file without every old link on the internet quietly turning into a 404.

I put the site up. The rule I set for it is that nothing gets rounded up for the marketing and nothing gets invented, so every figure on it comes out of the actual build.

That rule has already cost me twice. Magic used to be an auto-cast loop you could walk away from, and it isn't anymore, so the page says so. Magic experience follows damage now, which means splashing trains nothing at all. Both of those are less impressive than what I'd written first. They're also true.

The models are the game's own, exported out of the running editor rather than remade to look better on a web page.