Hello Scapers,
With a few changes - both intended and unintended - popping up in Monday's release, we wanted to check in and provide more information on what's going on.
First, let's talk about two bugs that are most prevalent:
- NPCs have popped up in unintended places, which could also cause the desktop client to sometimes crash
- Some items gained from feeding dinosaurs in Granny Potterington's Accidental Firemaking & Fletching transformed into Green Skirts
Both bugs will be addressed in a Coldfix Update at 08:45 UTC tomorrow morning, April 2nd.
This will result in the server going down momentarily while we apply this fix. It should only be down for a moment but thanks for bearing with us, these were interesting ones to fix.
Wandering NPCs
No, this isn't a badly timed April Fools joke - as much as it's been a bit fun seeing Hans and others running off to a new career!
This bug popped up due to some backend changes that makes it easier for development to swap NPCs around for things like seasonal variant models. This resulted in this sporadic NPC behaviour - and in some instances caused players to crash to desktop. This issue will persist on mobile a little while longer as it would need an alternate solution.
We've since identified the cause and everything will be back to normal post Coldfix. Sorry Hans. As you were.
The Green Skirts & Discontinued Item Removals
Monday's update introduced some new optimisations to the login flow to improve performance & protect stability.
As time has ticked away and more items have added into the login checks, things have started to pile up. This sheer amount of checks contributes to long load in times and even some crashes for some players.
To fix this, the team have rewritten how discontinued items work - moving from bespoke checks for each item dotted all over the place in the login flow to a standardized singular deletion checkpoint in the process. The old system is why things could get a little sporadic in what did or did not get deleted when an event ended or a promotion finished.
As part of the deletion process an item would be turned into a default object like a green skirt. This is where items get a "Delete me" flag, which inadvertently spilled into the output of our beloved dinosaurs due to a misflagged login check that was leftover from the update to the Dinarrow process at the end of 2023.
Back then, they had been given a one time login flag during that time to smooth out the transition - so when Monday's update applied and found that flag again, it would turn the dinosaurs into skirts as they were fed.
So what about the other deleted items? The removal of these items was an intended part of the change in order to up the stability of our login flow and make sure your login experience is as crash-free as possible. We know there are a few questions on this, so we've dropped a short FAQ outlining more below.
Q: Why were these items removed?
These items were part of a large group of discontinued, unusable objects that were causing problems in our login system. Some were old quest items, promotional remnants, or broken data. While they weren’t useful anymore, they still had to be processed every time a player logged in — in some cases, causing crashes. It was critical for us to address these crashes to make sure the game remains stable.
Q: What exactly changed in the login system?
We completely rewrote how discontinued items are handled. Previously, there were hundreds of individual scripts checking for specific items — which created an unstable login process. Now, all discontinued items are handled in one optimised process.
Q: But my item wasn’t hurting anything. Why delete it?
While your specific item may not have been causing problems, the old system treated each item uniquely. We needed to remove the entire outdated structure to fix login stability for all players.
We do understand you may have valued these legacy oddities - however defunct or unusable - and it's not a decision we made lightly. Ultimately, we want to ensure your login stability remains stable and take definitive actions to protect that when we have to.
Q: Can I get my removed items back?
Unfortunately, no. To ensure this problem was rectified at its core, the new system was designed to apply changes to all discontinued items at once — not on a case-by-case basis.
Reversing this change safely isn’t possible without reintroducing risks to login stability. We know this isn't the answer you want to hear, but we hope the decision is understandable given the crashes it was causing.
Q: Why did some items turn into green skirts?
That’s a side effect of items not having proper “clean up” data. Instead of being deleted outright, they defaulted to a placeholder item (like a green skirt). It’s not intentional - just an artifact of how the old system worked.
Thanks for bearing with us as the team worked to get these two issues resolved as quickly as possible. Stand by for resolution in the Coldfix tomorrow April 2nd at 08:45 UTC.