0.5.2 Alpha: A Deeper Tutorial, Support Mobs and Faster Authoring
MMOS: MMO Simulator · published
New in 0.5.2
The tutorial goes deeper
New demo players kept getting lost the moment the tutorial handed them a window and moved on. The guided chain now walks inside every panel it opens:
Research takes you to the Game & Server tab and has you power a rack seat down and back up, so server capacity is something you have touched rather than read about.
MMO steps through History, Zones and Stats.
Economy steps through Gold Economy and the Auction House.
Players steps through Thoughts & Goals, then asks you to click an actual adventurer and walks their profile tabs.
After the dungeon beat, the tutorial walks the top bar left to right: Items, Races & Classes, Abilities, Mounts, Mob editor, Professions. Every editor you own gets opened once, in the order the buttons sit on screen. Guided onboarding is 21 steps and the full guided chain is 27; the sandbox chain stays lean at 10, so a veteran starting a new world is not made to sit through any of it.
The rest of the tutorial pass
Tutorial is now the primary button on the main menu, with a Recommended pill that pulses until you finish it and then never comes back.
Your tutorial realm gets a randomly generated fantasy MMO title instead of "Tutorial Realm", and the copy uses it.
A half finished quest is already sitting on your desk, so the quest step is "finish this draft and point it at your new camp" instead of "write a quest from scratch".
A payoff beat after you publish it: the chain waits for an adventurer to actually pick your quest up.
The research wait is shortened in tutorial worlds only, so the chain no longer stalls on a multi day timer.
Dungeon Save & Exit now asks whether to reopen the instance. That applies to normal play too, not just the tutorial.
The Select tool is highlighted properly when the tutorial asks you to name your city.
A guided tutorial can no longer be skipped or switched off from inside it, since choosing Tutorial on the menu is already opting in. The per step 60 second hatch stays, because that one is anti softlock rather than a skip.
Support mobs
Mob abilities can now be authored on the ally side, so a camp can have a healer add, a shaman that buffs its friends, or a bruiser that shells itself in Stone Carapace. Heals, heals over time, shields and stat buffs all land properly now, and an ally ability with a radius reaches the caster's camp mates instead of only itself. The Enemy/Ally toggle is visible on the Mob tab, the radius field is back for ally defs, and the kit picker finally lets you arm a support ability. Mobs also respect their own buffs: a buffed mob swings harder and faster, and a camp with a healer in it counts as tougher when the game reasons about difficulty and reward. The ability editor's preview was landing mob support abilities on the demo adventurer instead of the mob, which made a working support ability look completely inert; it now shows the mob shielding and healing itself and its neighbour.
Authoring: fewer chores
Recipes name themselves. A new recipe takes its output item's name, follows it if you swap the output, and follows an item rename. The moment you type your ow name it stops following and is never overwritten.
Mobs carry a default loot table. Author the drops once in the Mob editor and every camp you place from that mob starts with them, overworld or dungeon. It is a template, not a live link: existing camps keep what they have, switching a def only seeds an empty camp, and a "Use default drops" button re-applies on demand. Every spawner is still individually editable afterwards.
Copy drops from another camp. The spawner panel can clone the drop table of any other spawner that already has one, overworld camps listed first, so faction fairness is a two click job instead of a memory test.
Controls and readability
Zoom is now a bindable action. It defaults to + and - (numpad + and - always work as well), it is listed in the Controls window, and it is rebindable, so a player without a scroll wheel is no longer stuck.
Tank, Healer, Damage and Support labels in the Players leaderboard were pale panel colours on parchment and close to unreadable. They now use the dark variants.
Achievements, Photo mode and the What's New panel were silently falling back to English in every language but English. All three are now translated across all 24 languages, along with a broad pass over tutorial and interface wording.
The "All" range label in the Economy and Players headings was hardcoded English inside otherwise translated sentences.
Saves
The save format is unchanged: 0.5.1 saves load straight into 0.5.2, mobs simply gain an empty default drop table until you author one.