Release Notes 2011-05-17

The Birdsong Construction Co. has informed me that their recent project has been completed!

The Haven Town Square now features an Auction House located just north of the fountain, and an Advanced Training Hall located by the western stairs leading to the Bazaar.

The Auction House allows players to buy and sell items across all game instances. You can browse by item type, search by item names, manage your own auctions and even search materials by your known recipes!

The Advanced Training Hall is a special, fully interactive combat room that's free to enter and allows new players to learn about various features of the Clockworks. It even contains a room where you can practice defending against custom-built training bots. The hall holds 8 players at a time.

As you will note, we've adjusted prices for certain items in the game. This was intentional based on our analysis of how players are using the different features currently offered in Spiral Knights.

Changing prices for goods and services is a natural, unavoidable part of operating a Free-to-Play game, although we do not expect them to be common. Changes like this will always be a give and take between what we believe is best for the balance of the game and what is fair to players. We will always strive to respect both in any pricing decision we make.

Because this is the first major change of this nature we have made, we are making a correction to the crowns spent by all players with unlearned recipes for the amount of the difference between the price paid and the new recipe prices.

This one-time action will be implemented as soon as you log in.

We hope you enjoy these new features and look forward to seeing you with our next major update that will instead feature content below the surface of Haven...

See you then!

The following changes were made to the game in the release on May 17th:

Haven

• The new Advanced Training Hall can be found on the west side of the Haven Town Square!
• The new Auction House can be found just north of the fountain in the Haven Town Square!

Boss Tokens

• Bosses now drop a single, giant boss token that distributes boss tokens based on participation in the boss dungeon. The more levels you complete of each boss dungeon (in that run) the more boss tokens you have the chance to earn. The only way to guarantee a chance at the maximum number of tokens is to start a boss dungeon from the first level of that boss dungeon (from the terminal).

Levels

• Clockwork Terminals are now free to join. There is no entry fee like other levels. Their minerals have been removed.
• Fixed a minor bug in Royal Jelly Court where some monsters weren't spawning.
• You should no longer get stuck between the door and exit elevator in Spiral Court 2.

Shops

• You will not be able to purchase 2+ star items from a terminal vendor if you have not completed an entire floor before reaching the terminal. Never buy a 'Basil port' from another player unless you're in the market for 1* items!

Crafting

• Using a bound items in alchemy will result in the finished product being bound as well. For example, crafting a 4* item that requires a item of heat level 5 will result in an item that is bound to the crafter.
• Crafting energy costs have increased.
• Alchemy machines have new art.

Items

• Items now display their star value and number of unique variants on the item pill. Handy!

Recipes

• Recipe item costs have been reduced.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where excessive upstream bandwidth usage would cause persistent lag.
• Fixed an issue where you would sometimes join a party in a deeper tier than was specified
• Fixed an issue where you would sometimes join a party behind a closed door and were unable to proceed
• Fixed an issue where you would be charged double energy when proceeding from a subtown