The Ninjas have infiltrated the Artisans' Workshop, making a big batch of updates to the venerable Smithing activity. They've made it a whole lot more user-friendly, and introduced some cool new rewards – including auto-reloading for your dwarf cannon!
The team are planning to do more focused updates like this, bringing older parts of the game up to today's standards. If you've got an idea for a particular part of RuneScape that you'd like to see given the Ninja treatment, let us know on the Ninja Spotlight forum thread.
Read on to find out what the Ninjas have been up to – along with details of Solomon's new Vitality Accessory Pack and this week's live streams.
What's Changed?
- Smithing burial armour has a new side interface, making the activity more responsive and user-friendly:
- By default, the first ingot type in your inventory will be selected.
- The interface will respond as you swap ingots in and out of your inventory.
- Selecting new armour pieces can be done while smithing, and will be applied on the next loop.
- Selecting new ore will immediately stop and restart the smithing process with the new ore.
- Anvils in the burial armour area now have ‘quick start' as the default left-click operation.
- The quick-smithing effects of the Varrock armour now apply to track-making and burial armour.
- When creating a perfect sword, you can request an off-hand equivalent.
- The required amount for the mithril swords daily challenge has been reduced.
- Daily challenges for adamant and rune swords have been added.
- When using a heated ingot on the water pool, you'll be given the opportunity to change your entire inventory at once, rather than one at a time.
- Ceremonial sword-making has been made smoother:
- Tongs can now be stored on the tool belt.
- A single left-click on the anvil now places the ingot and the plans, and opens the interface.
- Ingots can be used directly, without heating them first.
- The artisan burial overlay has been relocated to the left of the screen, remains opened everywhere in the workshop, and displays your current respect.
- The attack rate of ceremonial swords has been rebalanced.
- When withdrawing or depositing ingots, only metals currently held will be offered. Note that this doesn't filter by ingot type.
- Dent size chances have been tweaked to be fairer, in terms of leading to perfect successes.
- Dent messaging is now filtered.
- A warning message now displays when handing in ceremonial swords that would award 0 XP.
- Audio has been reworked.
New Rewards
- Restocking cannon (100% respect, requires royale cannon unlock): Grants your cannon the ability to reload automatically. You must have cannonballs in your inventory and be within 15 squares for this to work.
- Ceremonial sword orders (50% respect): Increases the orders received by the workshop, occasionally allowing you to choose which ceremonial sword you wish to make.
- Sword polishing kit (10% respect): Gives 10 sword polishing kits, which - when held in your inventory - prevent a ceremonial sword from breaking.
- Bonus package (100% respect): Gives 8 mithril ingot IV, 4 adamant ingot IV, 2 rune ingot IV, 50,000 Bonus Smithing XP and 10 sword polishing kits. Note that the ingots in this bundle cannot be exchanged for ore, and do not count towards daily challenges.
Enjoy!
Try your hand at some streamlined artisan smithing this week, and let us know what you think over on the forums.
The RuneScape Team
Solomon's Store – Vitality Accessories
Solomon's expanded his Vitality Suit line this week - with the Vitality Accessories Pack.
The pack comprises a two-handed weapon override for each combat style, plus a spectacular cape - awesome additions to the base suit, or a selection of eye-catching accents for any outfit.
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As with the other Vitality items, the accessories change colour as your life points drop, and can be recoloured for a full-health colour of green or blue – both shifting towards red at lower life points.
Note that it is possible to recolour the Vitality Suit and Accessories in other colours, but the colour-shift effect only works with a base colour of blue or green.
Grab the Vitality Accessories Pack now! If you need more RuneCoins, you can redeem Bonds in-game. You can also purchase RuneCoins directly from the website.
Live Streams this Week
Each week we stream developer Q&As, in-game events and more. Watch our streams and find a full streaming schedule over on our Twitch channel.
Check our YouTube channel, too, for recap videos of streams you may have missed.
Developer Q&A, plus Raids teaser | 16:00 UTC, Tuesday 23rd June
Mods Stu, Kelpie, James and Pi will be on the sofa this week to answer all your questions, as well as to give you a cheeky teaser for Raids – coming this summer!
Ask your questions on the forums, on Reddit, or on Twitter using the hashtag #RSDevQA.
Loot from 2,000 Barrows Chests | 20:00 UTC, Tuesday 23rd June
Following on from our Loot from 10,000 Elite Clue Scrolls stream last month, this Tuesday we'll be opening up 2,000 Barrows Chests and showing you the tasty, tasty loot. Will we get a lucky triskelion fragment? Head to Twitch to find out.
In Other News
- The following changes from the RuneScape Beta have passed via poll and are now live in-game:
- Basic stuns now last for 1.2 seconds.
- Basic and threshold stuns no longer share a cooldown.
- Basic stun abilities will no longer trigger diminishing returns.
- Asphyxiate and Destroy both now deal a 3.6s stun at the start of the ability.
- Threshold and ultimate abilities can now be queued without the required adrenaline. They will trigger once the required adrenaline is reached.
- The Soul Split healing hard and soft caps have been removed in Legacy combat mode, in an effort to bring two-handed Soul Split healing in Legacy mode in line with others.
- The Sacrifice ability is no longer disabled when a player's Magic level is drained.
- The Early Bird Bonus for adamant and rune dragons has been extended until the 6th of July - that's increased spawn rates on both types of dragon, increased change for elites to spawn, and twice the chance to get an adamant or rune dragon slayer assignment.
Read the patch notes for further details of today's updates.