Islesmud 1.2

August 28, 2026 · Enael

Version Change

@everyone Welcome to Islesmud 1.2. This update is met with some massive changes which fundamentally change the core architecture of the game and its progression. Very little of it is entirely player-facing, though it was sweeping enough to warrant a version change.

See the full picture in What's New in Islesmud 1.2, or read on for the complete list of what shipped.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a carriage return appearing after dirty status if a character is unwashed on default prompts.
Fixed roleplay experience (RPXP) continuing to trickle in after you'd disconnected or lost your link.
Fixed Summon Pain being able to leave you bleeding out unattended after paying its cost, the sacrifice still hurts, but it won't quietly finish you off afterward.
Fixed the wound left by Summon Pain not matching its own description, it was reading and treating as the wrong kind of injury.
Fixed Treat being unable to heal even the smallest, easiest wounds, no matter how skilled you were.
Fixed skills left to fade from disuse dropping much further than intended. They now correctly stop decaying at rank 36, as always advertised.
Fixed Inspiration never actually accumulating for anyone.
Fixed auto-travel (travel/navigate) occasionally corrupting your route mid-walk and marching you into a wall instead of your destination. If any such instances continue popping up, please report them with logs.
Fixed auto-travel being completely unable to find a route to or from certain rooms only reachable by going up or down, such as the Library Archive.
Fixed guards never noticing or stopping you from picking a lock nearby, no matter how alert they should have been.
Fixed being unable to tell an invisible immortal even when your standing should have allowed it.
Fixed help levels pointing to an unrelated topic instead of the actual explanation.
Fixed a handful of rare disconnects and crashes tied to very long output (like viewing a large bug list), the server should be noticeably more stable.
Fixed an issue with indoor rooms for player homes still receiving weather updates as if outdoors. Indoor status now requires the right sector plus flag to operate.
Fixed language practice from roleplay emotes and echoes (rpecho, emote) being permanently blocked for a handful of characters who'd landed on a specific stuck training value.
Fixed Treat, and the Escard clinic's physician, being completely unable to do anything for wounds left by elemental magic.
Fixed being able to start a demon summoning while resting, sidestepping the "no resting with a demon around" restriction.
Fixed a character's set action hiding their appearance rating and blood & gore status from onlookers.
Fixed house relocate with no plot specified randomly reassigning your house to whatever plot was first available, instead of explaining how to use it.
Fixed clearing a room's mood in the house editor leaving a blank status behind instead of reverting to the real weather.
Fixed talking NPCs never actually responding to what was said to them, a mismatched internal hookup meant they were "hearing" garbage instead of your words.
Fixed some demonspeak shenanigans.
Resolved demon oath ambiguity.
Fixed threshold issues with summoning circle-sense.
Combat pooling increased, since strikes are no longer on a 3-second roll.
Fixed being unable to draw a weapon once a demon breaks free from a circle.
Resolved issues with self-treating deadlocking from RPXP requirements; RP now accelerates wound healing.
Fixed the physician silently skipping wounds beyond her skill. She will now state when a wound is too complex or intense for her to treat.
Fixed a weird swallowing issue with targeting objects in a room via action.
Fixed income contradictions for characters with poor class and wealth advantages purchased.

Admin Goodies

Levels and "trust" have been scrapped, immortals now operate on ranks, and builders are a separate tier.
All builder commands moved to the builder access tier. Immortals have access to building tools and docs.
Immortal roster tools now show a character's real rank instead of a frozen, meaningless number.
Help topics for TRUST, LEVELS, SCORE, EXPERIENCE, WORTH, MEDIT, and MLEVEL rewritten to match the new rank system.
A complete reshuffle of admin commands has been done, to better control which immortals have which permissions.

Features and Balancing

Class and wealth purchased now influence the ultimate payout on standard jobs.
Eating food now earns a nourishment buff instead of restoring stamina directly. Nourishment increases the regeneration rates of both HP and moves.
Hunger reintroduced, but its decay rate is quite slow. This should add some more value to food, as well as its value fields. A ton of food items were adjusted to provide hunger relief.
Guild salaries can now be recurring, and pause on a 2-week inactivity timer as a back-pay cap.
A new command lets players view their wages at a glance: income.
Tightened up score to remove redundant values.
Aggressive creatures picking a target out of a crowd now do so consistently, instead of following an outdated, inconsistent rule.
A recommendation system is implemented for exceptional RP. Recommendations increase the percentage of RPXP pooled into your account on a character's death (help recommend).
Mining added. Players can now mine for various metals, as well as precious living metal, an incredibly rare alien resource used in metallurgy.
Removed caps on ideas and bugs.
The Escard physician's prices have been slashed considerably, and she now waits for you to sit or rest before naming her price and treating you, passing through her room on your feet won't cost you a thing. She can also treat lighter elemental wounds using a healing poultice, now sold at her own counter.
house relocate reworked: house relocate <direction> or house relocate <plot number> lets you choose exactly where your door goes, instead of it being assigned for you. house plots now highlights the plot you're standing on and shows your own front door.
House rooms can now be toggled between indoors and outdoors with the outside command in the house editor.
Houses can have per-door locks: lock <direction> cuts a unique key for a single door, hand a gardener the key to your lawn without giving them the run of the house.
A room bought after your house is already finalized now gets its own free first round of name/description/mood edits.
Added prompt default to restore your prompt to the game's standard layout. Your roleplay tier now only appears in the prompt while you're actively earning RPXP, and dirty/blood & gore status is now its own prompt element you can include or leave out.
Actions can now target anything in the room, not just other players, items you're wearing or carrying, items on the ground, and yourself, using the same tags emotes already use (/name, *item, |item, @).

What Brings Us to Islesmud 1.2

Massive overhaul: levels have been scrapped entirely, and all checks for levels removed, dead code flushed. The game is now truly levelless.
There were only 16 hidden interactions between spells prior. There are now an additional 47 hidden interactions between spells, covering every single one in the game.
Massive combat overhaul: a complete redo of the combat system, which now operates in rounds on a 5-minute timer. The timer can be adjusted with the delay command. Combat breakdown in helpfiles in-game or on our website: Combat Overview and Combat in Detail.
islesmud.org has by and large also been updated to give some more insight into the game at a glance before even logging in for the first time.
Wilderness has been expanded both east and south of Escard.
New zone: the Aetherspire, a forest of dark and terrible things brushing Mount Caelahad's slopes, looms on the horizon.
Mount Caelahad, a monolith which dwarfs Escard and has it lie in its shadow, has been added beyond the dreaded Aetherspire.
Players can now link their characters to an account. QP is shared account-wide, and on death a portion of your XP will be pooled into your account for other characters to use.
New magic system: Metallurgy. Deadly to sorcerers, but the iron fist of the Isleguard. Mundane characters can tap into the tainted secrets of living metal, making them better, faster, stronger. Six new abilities added: Shaping, Quickening, Vaulting, Mending, Tempering, and Awareness.
Demon summoning entirely reworked from the ground up. Summonings perform more as scenes now, and interact based on the spoken word.