DevlogA rebuilt Human City, hidden pits for rogues to find, and portals that take your group

A big day under the city and at its gates: the Human City rebuilt, traps you can fall into, and portals that wait for your group.

The Human City and Harbour have been rebuilt. The new versions replace the old ones. A canal with three bridges now divides the Market Ward from the Keep Ward, and the Keep stands on an island in a moat. The hidden guilds sit behind secret doors in public buildings, such as a rack of kegs in the tavern cellar, with winding tunnels, bones and trip wires leading down to halls under the city. Each guild hall has an entry room and a furnished master's room. The Old Cisterns join the city in five places, and the Smugglers' Run now comes out by a new Smugglers' Stair at the harbour. The East Gate has a square with a guard house, a shop and a second stable, and the harbour's north warehouse is now the Bosun's Rest, a sailors' tavern. Guards and dock folk are not placed yet.

Hidden pits and other traps, and rogues to find them. Step on a pit's lid and it tips open under you. Alarm plates call hostile creatures near by, runes move you somewhere else, a false floor holds nobody up, and some lava only looks like lava. A rogue's Sense Traps names a trap and outlines it for the group. Disarm wedges a pit shut until it re-arms, and a fumble springs it. Rogues now disarm from level 21, and bards sense traps from 20 and disarm from 30. Skill you have already earned is kept.

Portals and zone lines can take your group or your raid. A way out can be set to take just you, or your group or raid standing within about 30 metres. Anyone short of the level or the key stays behind and is told why. A zone can let in only a group or a raid, and a raid goes as 18 at most, with no more than three of a class. Game masters set this with #door set and #zoneline set. A way to another spot in the same zone now moves you at once.

Where you start follows race, class and god. The Starting City box at creation now follows all three. Human and Half Elf warriors, paladins, bards and rogues start in the Human City; everyone else is unchanged. Your starting city stays with your character, for walking home and for corpse recovery, which every starting city now offers, not only Fairhaven and Dreadhaven.

The item window keeps its secrets. It no longer shows an item's value or its story, and merchants still show the price. The story is for Identify: hold the item, cast, and it is read into chat, every time. Wizards, magicians and enchanters get it at 16, necromancers at 20, bards a song at 14, and both cities' scroll keepers will sell a sage's lens. The spell, song and lens are written but not yet added to the world, so they are not in the game today.

See-through item icons. 877 item icons and 59 interface icons have lost their painted background, so the item fills its square with a thin dark rim. Spells and skills keep their coloured squares.

In the workshop. The zone builder can now shape a zone to an outline, with ridges, rivers and walled gates between its parts, and has templates for dungeons, castles and raid planes, with traps placed by level. With it, Kingsmeadow Hills, Silverbough Glade and Brinewatch Coast were redrawn, and the Old Cisterns, Saltwrack Grotto, Galecrest Keep and three raid planes were built with traps. These are drafts on the developer's own machine, not in the game yet. A demo page that makes 3D weapons from words was also set up; nothing from it reaches the game.