Update 0.6.9.151 - Combat Rebalance, Fast Travel Overhaul & Loading Screens

Combat Rebalance

• Armour keeps working, all the way up. Defense used to hit an invisible ceiling - past roughly 1.5x an attacker's Attack Power every extra point of armour did nothing, because at least 25% of every attack always got through. Defense is now subtracted from incoming damage in full, so tank builds, shields and heavy armour keep scaling. Attacks always land for at least 1 damage so the hit still registers for aggro, threat and combat credit; genuine immunity - safe zones, party members, true damage-immunity effects - is untouched.
• Monsters of your own level are a consistent fight. Enemy damage used to assume you were wearing the heaviest armour in the game, which meant a level 1 mage with 12 health was taking around 9.7 from a Young Corrupted Frog and died outright to a critical. Enemy attack power is now calculated against the gear you are actually expected to own at your level, and a Standard monster of your own level takes six hits to bring you down at every level from 1 to 100.
• Enemies are tuned around the weapon you realistically carry. Difficulty previously assumed a Bone Sword from level 1, so a level 1 Corrupted Frog took 16 hits to kill instead of the intended 6. The ladder is now Wooden at level 1, Bone at 5, Iron at 7 and Steel at 14, each assumed in hand two levels after you can first equip it - a grace period so spending your money on armour first is never punished. Casting rods follow the same schedule, and heavily armoured enemies react most strongly to an out-of-date weapon.
• Weaker enemies are finally the weaker ones. The strength ladder below Standard was inverted, so Fodder and Weakling enemies were killing you faster than tougher ones. They are now correctly the least dangerous.
• Mage gear caught up. The four casting rods - Wooden, Bone, Iron and Bound - are now on the same power curve as the equivalent melee weapons, and the Pearl necklace, earrings and rings have been rescaled, since jewellery is the only source of magical defence.
• A large batch of equipment and recipes went live. Gear and crafting recipes prepared earlier are now in the game, with the whole item catalogue reorganised into a single tier structure.

Fast Travel

• Teleport fares read like the rest of the game. Each destination now shows the item's icon, its name and an owned/required count that turns green or red depending on whether you can afford it, instead of spelling the price out in words. Hovering a fare row brings up the full item tooltip, and destination names are translatable and will appear in your language.
• Crystals can charge more for travelling hot. Each waypoint can carry its own surcharge for travelling while you are in combat and its own surcharge for travelling while PvP-flagged. The two never stack - being flagged takes precedence - and a crystal can be closed to flagged players entirely, though by default flagged players are still served. If the price moves while you are reading the list, the crystal refuses the trip and asks you to speak to it again rather than charging a different amount than the one you saw, and nothing is taken when that happens.
• Blocked destinations resolve themselves. Travelling to Zip HQ could fail outright with "Something's blocking the way at that destination", which left anyone standing at the Beach or Pine Woods crystals with no fast travel at all. Crystals now search around the landing point for a spot you actually fit in. Destinations can also list several landing points with one picked at random, so two travellers arriving together spread out instead of landing on top of one another.
• Arrivals rebuild you out of light. You now assemble from a cloud of glowing motes shaped from your character's actual surface, so your equipment and build show in the silhouette, and the motes track your animation - start running the instant you land and the cloud runs with you. A ground burst and sound play at the pad, and the screen fades in around you instead of cutting. The fade is yours alone: bystanders see your materialise effect, never a black screen.
• New: the Faoi Teleportation Crystal. An alchemy-crafted ingredient made from 5 Faoi Crystal Fragments, 1 Creature Blood and a Basic Alchemy Tool Kit.

Entering the World

• A real loading screen, from Play to spawn. Pressing Play used to flash through a blank screen and then drop you into Zip Island before it had finished building itself - sky and water with no island under it, your character floating unlit above the sea, then a second or two of a stiff default pose. The cover now goes up before the connection starts, survives the map change, and only lifts once you have a character, the ground around you has streamed in and your character has adopted its real stance.
• The loading screen has something to look at. It now carries the Clash of Adventurers wordmark over a dark drifting backdrop, with a line underneath saying what the game is actually doing - "Loading characters..." while your character list is fetched, and "Entering the world..." while the game connects and streams in the map. Both lines are ready for translation and will appear in your language once the next localization pass lands.
• The character list appears already populated. The selection screen stays covered while your characters are being fetched, so you no longer watch the list fill in.
• Pressing Play with no server selected now says so. It previously did nothing whatsoever, with no message at all. Failures during the connection, including a server that is full, also drop the cover immediately so you can read what happened instead of staring at a blank screen.
• Respawning eases you back in. The screen covers your arrival at the graveyard and fades back in, and your character actually gets up off the ground with a stand-up animation authored separately for male and female characters. Everyone around you sees the stand-up; the fade is yours alone, so bystanders are never blacked out by someone else's respawn.

World and Characters

• Villagers move like people now. Their clothing simulates - skirts, tunics and body cloth sway as they walk, across 115 of the 190 villager appearances. They run on the same locomotion system your own character uses, so they blend properly in every direction rather than only forward, and female villagers use female animations for the first time instead of sharing the male set. They now have a physics body and ragdoll when killed, and they hold their full detail much further away than before.
• The High graphics preset shows what it always should have. A quirk in Unreal Engine's default quality settings meant High rendered exactly the same amount of detail as Medium - an entire tier of hand-placed vegetation and scenery was skipped unless you ran Epic. On Zip Island that brings back over half a million props at High, roughly doubling the visible world dressing from 461k to 992k instances, with the mushroom patches, the safe-zone surroundings and the pine zone most visibly affected. High is now much closer to Epic in density, so if you were running it for performance headroom, Medium is unchanged and the lighter choice.

Fixes

• Dropped items land where you can reach them. Dropping an item from your inventory in certain parts of Zip Island placed it high in the air above you - it still existed and still belonged to you, you simply could not see it or pick it back up. Every drop is now verified against the real ground and falls back to your feet rather than guessing, which covers manual drops, monster loot, crafting overflow and quest rewards. Multi-item drops scatter properly again instead of stacking a whole loot table into one unclickable pile.
• Rings and earrings equip into the free slot on the first click. Equipping a second ring or earring used to pick a side at random, so about half the time it swapped out the piece you were already wearing and you ended up with one instead of two. It now looks for an empty slot first, and when both are full it replaces the same predictable one so you know what you are about to take off. Dragging an item onto a specific slot is unchanged.
• Skills no longer lock up until you die. A charged skill - Fire Bolt, Energy Bolt, Aqua Bolt, Cheap Shot and friends - whose release was never heard by the server left your character permanently mid-cast and blocked every other skill behind it, which is why dying appeared to fix it. The release now always reaches the server, and a hold that somehow still gets stuck is force-ended after a long grace period. Activating a charged skill straight from the Skills menu rather than the hotbar was the most reliable way to trigger it.
• Falling damage and poison respect party protection. Both were bypassing protections they should have honoured, so a party member could be hurt through them. A dead character also no longer quietly regenerates or accepts healing while waiting to respawn. Falls and poison you carried in with you are still lethal inside a town, which is deliberate and unchanged.

Behind the Scenes

• Deployment, logging and content tooling. Regional servers now appear reliably in the server list after an update, consumable use is recorded properly on the server, and internal tooling improvements make world features faster to build - none of it changes anything you do in game.