Category Archives: Update of the Avatar

Play Release 149!

April 29, 2026

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 149 goes live April 29th at 10:30 AM CDT.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 149 (R149), we offer growing things that are, unfortunately, flammable.

For those wishing to participate in any community activities, upcoming one-time and recurring community events have been announced! Be sure to also review the Player Guide and Known Issues for additional information on recent changes and upcoming fixes.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Player Dungeon Fire Elemental Rooms Now Spawning

With this release, we have added three spawned versions of player dungeon lava fishing rooms. This includes the Ancient Stone Lava Fishing Grotto, the Ancient Stone Large Lava Fishing Room, and the Cave Stone Room Lava Grotto (Blackblade Pass room.)

In each of these rooms, you will find a Fire Elemental totem pedestal at Connection One. Currently, there is a known bug where the fire elemental totem visual does not align with the transparent statue slot when placed, but the visual does re-align itself on the next scene-load. We will have the kobolds who sold us the mechanism for this look into why that is occurring.

The range of Fire Elemental mob tiers has been expanded to allow for a more varying population to battle. Currently, the new mobs are only present in these player dungeon rooms, though you may see them appear in Adventure Zones at some point in the future. Did you know? Fire Elementals and Lava Golems have something of an alliance, so you may see one or two Lava Golems in your campaign.

The spawning versions are an added feature of the decoable versions of these lava fishing rooms, two of which are in the Crown Store and the third of which is craftable. If you are already in possession of one of these rooms, you will be able to convert it to a spawning version by using the standard recipe: the deco version of the room, an ancient essence, and a stone chisel on a smelting station. Please note that the existing room will have to be removed from the dungeon in order to convert them. If you do not yet have one of these three rooms, they can be obtained in the Crown Store or a blueprint can drop in Blackblade Pass (which is less convenient but probably more fun.)

As I have done in the past, the footprint of the rooms changes when they are spawnable. For today’s release, two of the three rooms have new areas from which the mob command staff may be plotting against you. The third will get the expansion treatment in a future release. I have made an effort to keep the existing void displacement the same for these changes so the spawnable versions can fit in the same footprint as the deco versions.

NOTE: Removing a dungeon room from an active player dungeon without having a secondary path back to the foyer will result in the collapse of any sections beyond the room being removed! We strongly suggest using the Player Test Environment on our QA Server to try swapping out an existing room before attempting it on the live game server.

The descriptions in the Crown Store will be updated in R149 Patch 1 to detail these new features.

– Ravalox

Doors to Dungeons and Basements

We have (at long last) created a basement door pattern that can be applied to the Basement Hatch Teleporter and then attached to a wall inside or outside your house! What? no, we didn’t forget about Dungeon Entrances; There is a dungeon entrance pattern available as well that, once applied to a Dungeon Entrance Teleporter, will act in the same way.

Both of these doors are a bit more subtle than past versions of the teleporters: no blue swirly VFX to be found! The basement door is completely unassuming, with no pulsing or sparkles of any kind. The dungeon version has a slight pulse of the door’s wood color, but nothing more.

We will be coming out with additional patterns utilizing the various doors in the game in future releases to match the various home styles. Yes, of course there will be a craftable version as well.

– Ravalox

Aggro-Culture Exploit!

There is an agriculture exploit where planting pots are overlapped to allow more plants to be grown than are intended in a given space. This exploit has been on the list of things to correct for some time, but previous attempts by multiple devs were unsuccessful. Recently, a player posted in the forums noting an operational impact to harvesting these overlapping pots which led us to re-re-approach this issue, this time with success.

We have the fix, we have tested it, and we have withheld it for this release to provide players some time to clean up their planting areas. Once the fix is put in place, players will no longer be able to plant in any planter that is overlapping another. We recommend harvesting the current crop cycle and then ensuring the planters are not overlapping for the next planting.

We will be putting this on QA for player testing access prior to the end of the Release 150 development sprint. We are taking great care to guard against edge cases where pots left in an overlapping state could not be watered or harvested. We strongly encourage players to log into the QA server during the testing directive for this change to make sure no issues are seen. We also strongly suggest de-nesting planters on the live server before the R150 patch goes into place.

– Ravalox

Release 149 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 149 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R150 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 149!

Play Release 148!

March 29, 2026

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 148 goes live March 30th at 10:30 AM CDT.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 148 (R148), we offer spring things, some of which are red in tooth and paw.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Join the Annual Egg Hunt!

Get ready to jump into the action: the Annual Egg Hunt is back and it’s bigger than ever for our 6th in-game celebration! Join Laney and the Dev Team for an hour of fast-paced fun during one of our event windows on Saturday, April 11th in Mount Midir:

We’ve opened multiple time slots so players across the globe can join the excitement. Stock up on your jump potions, equip your Frogkin rings, gear up in your Boom Bunny gear, and be ready to defend yourself from anything! Keep your eyes open… this year’s event includes some brand-new surprises you won’t want to miss!

Release 148 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 148 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R149 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 148!

Play Release 147!

February 23, 2026

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 147 goes live February 23rd at 10:30 AM CST.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 147 (R147), we offer green things and feathered things and i wouldn’t trust either of them.

News Announcements

Community Updates

The Vault is Permanently Closed

We have many things planned for 2026 and beyond and we’re being careful not to promise things in the manner done by past management. I’ll continue posting in my development blog to give a peek into what we’re working on (and what we’re working toward.)

Over the last few years we have been working to make the game more stable, to provide a solid base to work from. Over the last year or so, we significantly improved the visuals as well as the performance of the game. Even as these efforts are still ongoing, we have put together the plan to move the game forward.

The team recently discussed the Vault section of the Crown Store. Long-time players will remember that many Vault items originated as limited-availability rewards from past events (such as Portalarium Telethons and similar events or promotions). Those items were made available to players through the Vault, with their display names adjusted to indicate “Vault Edition” to distinguish them from the original event versions.

The existence of the Vault as a Crown Store feature has been controversial. The rarity and provenance structure we now have in place is in direct conflict with the Vault as a feature. Therefore, as of this release (R147), the Vault has been removed from the Crown Store and the items within it have been retired.

Vault Edition items already purchased by players will remain in game and retain their “Vault Edition” indicator.

Please note: Vault items are considered scarce, even though multiple versions may exist in the game (original telethon or event versions, Vault Editions, and later variants such as newer year-tagged or re-textured versions.

Since many years and multiple management teams have been involved, here is a bit of a timeline:

Release 55 (July 6, 2018): Under Portalarium, the original Player Rewards program was started. This program automatically enrolled participants for the monthly telethon livestream stretch-goal items. Without the rewards program, obtaining these items would require a minimum five-dollar purchase during the telethon. The program allowed players to get all the stretch goal items without actually attending the livestream.
Release 65 (April 25, 2019): The Vault was introduced specifically for the sale of Vault Edition versions of telethon stretch-goal items. Portalarium added some items from the telethon catalog into the Vault each release manually.
Release 66 (May 29, 2019): The recurring telethons ended, shifting the method of obtaining Stretch Goal items solely to the Rewards Program and/or the Vault. (Rewards program participants would receive up to 3 stretch-goal items monthly).
Release 71 (October 2019): Catnip Games took over the game. The development team was still made up entirely of the remaining first-generation Portalarium developers.
Release 77 (May 22, 2020): The program was relaunched as the “Subscriber Program” and the exclusivity of the items was officially changed to a period of 10-14 days between subscribers receiving the items and them being placed into the standard Crown Store. This provided subscribers first dibs and the ability to display or trade the items with others before they were generally available.
The practice of adding telethon and other special rewards to the Crown Store or Vault ceased after the exit of the second-generation development team members circa March of 2022.

In summary, the original Player Rewards Program ended with the telethons in 2019. The current Subscriber Program does not provide permanent rarity. The current subscriber program tiers offer items that, in total, well exceed the monthly cost and can be traded or sold to others in game, in addition to the other time-based items and benefits, such as exclusive titles.

We have replaced the vault method with a process to provide the players with opportunities to obtain true rares through a number of methods. The Ultra-Rare and Bug Hunter programs have been the best ways to obtain items that will not be sold in the Crown or Web Stores. The initial Ultra-Rare offerings began with the 10th anniversary of Release 1 in December of 2023. These items are released periodically as bonus items accompanying a qualified purchase on the web shop. Going forward, there will be additional classes of rare items (Rare and Very-Rare). These items will be obtained in game, but will be made rare by spawn rules, drop frequency, appearance rates, or other methods. These three classifications of items will never be added to our website or into the Crown Store under any category.

There will be increased offerings of new Ultra-Rares as we move forward into 2026. We are working on the structure now and should have things ready for some different types of offers, special events, and (of course) COTO bonus items.

In addition, we are preparing a new collectible set of in-game items that will provide opportunities to collect items with varying degrees of rarity within the set. Spawned Rare and Very-Rare items will also start making their appearance in game in 2026.

We have been working to create a backlog of items so we are not always under the gun to create assets required for a monthly commitment. The delivery delay of the Ultra-Rare Dolls offering is a good example of what can happen if assumptions are made regarding the amount of time required to create and test assets during a single release cycle. The haunted doll Ultra-Rares vulcanized our determination to not advertise and offer items until they are ready. For example, if we were to have a telethon-style event, any items that would be on offer would already be in game and ready to ship.

A major issue in the past was the lack of written policies and restrictions around limited items, along with insufficient hand-off to newer generations of the development team. Going forward, we now have a structure in place that will support varying rarity levels of items including protection of the permanent exclusivity of Ultra-Rares.

Monthly Login Rewards for subscribers who help support the development of the game will continue to have a 10-14 day exclusivity, after which these items will continue to help support the game by being placed into the Crown Store.

The monthly Login reward for players who log in each calendar month will continue to be no-trade at the time of delivery.

Items flagged as Rare, Very Rare, and Ultra-Rare will include description text indicating how they were introduced and their rarity level. Items created as scarce, limited loot, rare world items, server spawns, or special ‘Ultra-Rare’ bonuses for specific events or sales will be governed by written policy. These classifications of items will only ever be distributed in the manner each is originally intended.

We will not be repeating the methods of past management. Past eras of management would change course, possibly too easily in some cases. We have a course plotted, and even though we have a firm plan to execute, we do read all of the feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions. If ideas, suggestions, or feedback can fit in with our established plan, we will consider them but players may not see a detailed response from the team on them.

For the last three years, we have been cleaning up, organizing, and restructuring systems and content across Shroud of the Avatar and 2026 should be a significant year as more of that work becomes visible to the players. Keep in mind that we are a very small team and we appreciate your patience as we work to deliver a better game with every release. With your continued support, more amazing, mysterious, and dark things will unfold in New Britannia!

This is an extremely busy first quarter, lots of writing needs to be done to flesh out policies, overhaul the website with better, easier-to-find FAQs, details, and … and …

This team is dedicated to moving the game forward and expanding content while continuing to improve the quality of the game. With support from the community who also want the game to succeed, we can increase the number of developers and ensure that New Britannia’s future very bright (if the oncoming darkness in future episodes is dispelled of course!

Thank you for playing and supporting the game!

– Ravalox

Wine Cabinet Ultra-Rares

Now through the 6th of March, we are offering some bonus items when players buy qualifying COTO packs on the website.

With a purchase of a 10K COTO pack, players will receive a bonus Large Vintage Wine Cabinet along with eight wine bottles.

With a purchase of a 6K COTO pack, players will receive a bonus Small Vintage Wine Cabinet along with (the same) eight wine bottles.

The cabinets and wine bottles are Ultra-Rare. As an additional bonus, a non-rare carrying crate for the wine bottles will also be included.

To qualify, the COTOs must be claimed by logging into the game (online) while the special offer is in place, which is through March 6th, the end of the sales and bonuses period for the release.

These cabinets and bottles are ready to deliver after the Ultra-Rare bonus event ends and will be in Hometown for viewing when Release 147 goes live.

This Ultra-Rare offering will help fund a series of collectible regional wine bottles. We are planning to introduce these bottles with beautiful Scottie-original custom labels representing some of the regions and more notable cities of New Britannia. The bottles will appear in the game in various ways including, but not limited to, quests, gold purchase, and limited or scarce loot.

These bottles will arrive in the game in waves. Once a new wine rack is completed and the first set of bottles is in game, the rack will be added to the Crown Store.

Sound too easy? Think again! Some of the bottles will be scarce and harder to find than others. Some of them will actually be Rare and may take some time to find and complete your collection. Think of a Trading Card Game or sports card collection: some are harder to get than others, but not impossible.

Details of what cities, regions, or maybe even dungeons will have bottles to offer and how to get them will be found IN GAME. Do not ask the Devs, they will not tell… this (besides killing players during the Annual Egg Hunt) is how we have our fun!

The wine rack itself will act as organized storage for the collected bottles. More details on the look, feel, and function of the rack will be posted in the forum when nearing completion. (No doubt there will be work streams as it is being created.)

– Ravalox

Infrastructure Geek Update

We successfully reduced our footprint in the datacenter by two more servers. Virtualization and consolidation into new hardware proceeds as hoped! I have yet another server that I purchased which should (when put in place) reduce our build times and improve performance overall, not to mention eliminate more old hardware.

As noted in other articles this month, there is much happening. In order to accomplish our goals, all these things need to be worked on in parallel as much as possible. With these last few physical changes, I should now have room to virtualize and shift processes around without having to spend so much time in the datacenter.

This also should allow us to deploy [REDACTED] and a [REDACTED]. :O

– Xolavar

Release 147 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 147 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R148 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 147!

Play Release 146!

January 28, 2026

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 146 goes live January 29th at 2:30 PM CST.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 146 (R146), we offer literal warmth to encourage social warmth.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Doll Cabinets and Overdue Ultra-Rares

The tech for the Doll Cabinets, while not quite complete, IS functional, so the Macabre Cabinet can now be distributed to the purchasers of the ultra-rare dolls. There are still some refinements and addditional enhancements to be done but these will not cause a delay in delivery.

Though the doll cabinets do not use the same tech as the fishtanks, usage is similar. When building them, I tried my best to re-use code and just allow the dolls to be a plugin to the existing scripts. I found issues with the existing code, which caused me to build and then rebuild from scratch.

The doll cabinet functionality is already more resilient and, when complete, will be even more solid. I changed the methods used for applying the ‘slot’ purposes which will make the scripting re-usable for other similar items. I hope to be able to backfill this to the fishtanks and the mannequins, improving their reliability and eliminating some ongoing bugs.

The doll cabinets will have the ability to display one doll each. All of the player-placeable dolls in the game (apart from the Creepy Dolly) have been set up to allow placement in the cabinets. (Since the Creepy Dolly is actually equipable, it will require additional code changes to allow placement in the cabinets due to the current underlying methods used to populate the fishtanks and cabinets.)

The Macabre Doll Cabinet will have additional ‘environmental’ decorations that will appear when the doll is placed, while the Fancy Doll Cabinet is more of a museum display, so no additional ambiance will appear in that cabinet.

Both of the Doll Cabinets will come with a set of three wallboards that the player may optionally place into the cabinets, replacing the glass, to create a solid wall surface. Each wall piece can be placed separately, allowing for interesting customization! (Additional variations of the wallboards will be made available via crown store, in-game gold, and crafting.)

The cabinets will not be accessible as containers and items in the slots will be placed separately into a container, bank or inventory (etc.) when removed from display.

As a thank-you and apology for having to wait for so long, the players who purchased qualifying COTOs during the doll Ultra-Rare event will not only receive the bonus doll and an extra bonus Macabre Doll Cabinet as promised, but also an additional doll than will also end up being an Ultra-Rare!

The Ultra-Rare dolls, the cabinet, and three wall boards will ship to the players via in-game mail shortly after the Release 146 patch is in place. Please note that delivery is manual and takes some time, so please be patient. The Extra Bonus Doll will be in game and start to be mailed out after Patch One.

Features being finalized and tested:

Wallboard placement
Macabre environmentals

The Fancy version of the Doll Cabinet as well as the Macabre Doll Cabinet will be in the crown store in a future patch.

– Ravalox

Release 146 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 146 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R147 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 146!

Play Release 145!

December 22, 2025

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 145 goes live December 22nd at 9:30 PM CST.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 145 (R145), we offer snowy, showy, and glowy.

News Announcements

Community Updates

End of Year Update

On the hardware front, we were able to replace and consolidate two physical servers this month, which puts us on track to migrate the the next two during January. This month’s changes included moving the QA Server, which should greatly increase the responsiveness. QA is where players can login to test things helping to squash bugs or, since the QA server provides players with lots of gold, crowns, and experience to test out ideas for skill advancement, new decorations and new houses! We will be monitoring the QA server’s logs to better gauge the increased performance.

A few behind-the-scenes servers were also moved, and there are still a good number yet to migrate to new hardware. This coming month I will be prepping to migrate some of the database servers and possibly the live game server. When we migrate the database servers, we will actually add additional servers to the cluster (synchronized group), so there is no risk of production issues. We should only require downtime when we migrate the primary database server and the game server itself, which will be last.

Elsewhere, the Doll Cabinets are not yet complete. I ran into an issue with functionality and delivering the dolls would prevent us from making changes that may be required to operate with the doll cabinets’ tech. I have most of it completed but need to sort out one issue before I can put them on QA for a public testing directive. More information on this during the livestream on Friday.

Once the doll cabinets are complete, I will be completing the fire elemental player dungeon spawns, the lava lake room, and the Well, all before starting work on the transition to an updated Unity Engine version. I will be posting constantly about the migration progress in the forums and in the release notes each month. The first phase will be to audit outstanding issues Unity has identified when doing an import. Tons of fun!

– Ravalox

Release 145 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 145 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R146 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 145!

Play Release 144!

November 23, 2025

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 144 goes live November 25th at 10:30 AM CST.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 144 (R144), we offer a small army.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Datacenter Changes, Ultra Rares, and Some of What’s Ahead

The Ultra Rare sales event is over. We will be delivering the bonus items shortly. They were to go out starting on the 17th, but since the Doll Cabinets were not ready, we held them back. The cabinet tech is mostly done and I will be working on them immediately after R144 has been deployed (and possibly after some sleep.)

The schedule got thrown off due to the work to implement new servers in our Austin datacenter. There’s a longer story for this, which I will certainly be sharing the details of in Discord during the Release Deployment we host in the #Developer Events voice channel, while I spin tunes and update the servers.

A little more work needs to be done in the first phase: once completed, the QA server will be the first player-facing server to see the performance benefits. This will allow us to test before migrating some of the more critical services to the new hardware.

Once fully implemented, we will be reducing our physical server footprint from eleven to seven, with one additional server that will be eliminated before the end of the year. During Q1, we will be making further hardware changes to update the remaining outdated servers.

I am continuing to work on outstanding content. As soon as things are ready, I will patch them into the game. This includes Lava Room (and other) Player Dungeon Spawns, the Lava Lake room, the LOTI Basement, and the Well adventure dungeon scene.

In 2026, we expect to see new mobs, the Eighth Level of Hell, EP2 questlines, and a lead-in to EP3, and we will continue to clean up the issues that affect many aspects of the game’s performance.

With Q1 of 2026, I will start work to migrate the project the current Unity Long Term Support (LTS) version (currently 6.00.) This process will require a migration to 2019, then 2020, etc. up to the LTS version. After that, we will look to keep SotA within the supported version lifecycle of Unity on the most current LTS release (we may lag behind a release depending on what API changes are put in place and how much work there will be to update the game code to work properly under the new versions.)

We will always remain at least one full release behind the generally available version. Especially for a game with as large a code base and age as SotA, the more time that passes, the more retro-fitting will be required.

– Ravalox

Release 144 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 144 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R145 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 144!

Play Release 143!

October 27, 2025

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 143 goes live October 27th at 10:30 AM CDT.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 143 (R143), we offer items meant to display people and …not people.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Doll Display ~~Prisons~~ Cases and Ultra-Rares

It’s that time again! We have a new set of Ultra-Rare items that we will be giving to players who purchase a 10K or 6K COTO pack on the website from October 27th through November 6th.

Receive a Haunted Jackalope Doll with each purchase of a 10K COTO pack and get a Haunted Voodoo Doll with each purchase of a 6K COTO pack. The bonus items will arrive closer to Release 144. To qualify, be sure to make your purchases before the end of November 6th!

What’s that? Wish there was a way to safely display all these haunted dolls? Glad you asked! Our craftspeople have painstakingly created a set of Doll Display Cabinets for just this purpose!

There will be two versions: a Macabre Doll Display Case (a case as dark as the dolls it is intended to house!) and a Fancy Display Case made from the finest wood in Novia. These cases have protections to ensure that those haunted rascals fail any attempt to escape: they will be using the fishtank tech, allowing the player to place any one of the in-game dolls for display.

As we add more dolls to the game, players will be able to use these cabinets to proudly show off which ones they have (haunted or otherwise.) The exact set of features will be detailed when they are released: Xolavar has been tasked with installing the final bells and whistles mainly to strengthen the wards, but also to provide some interesting features.

The Doll Display Cases have arrived just in time too! I believe we have corrected audio issues with the seven pre-existing haunted dolls as well as improved their triggers and grab-ability. Some of the haunted dolls may have different sounds and/or animations as well. Who’s to say?

You have other things to display? There is a third (unlocked) display case that will allow for placement of whatever can be fit into the case. All three of these Display Cases will be in the Crown Store after the sale event is over and should be present in time for when the bonus items arrive via in-game mail.

NOTE: Though the Display Cases are NOT Ultra-Rares, we will be including another bonus item in this round: every Ultra-Rare Doll will be delivered with a Macabre Doll Display Case!

Infrastructure as well as Patching, Patching, and More Patching

This month Unity advised that there was an exploit found that affected any applications built on Unity 2017.1 or later. Unity created a patching tool and advised that if developers used certain commandline options or changed the path of certain directories within the build, then they needed to rebuild all of their software and publish a patch.

Even though Shroud of the Avatar has not utilized any of the methods or commandline options that Unity has identified as putting Unity applications at risk, we have incorporated the patcher into our build environment. We have directly patched our Unity build servers and, even so, we are still running the patcher to verify that the files affected are marked as already patched during the builds.

The patch utility has been updated by Unity a number of times in the last 20+ days, twice in the last 10 days alone, and we have updated our patcher to stay current and ensure that if the patch ever needs to be updated that our build process will handle it automatically. If there’s interest in going down the rabbit hole, here is a link to the document outlining when the issue was discovered.

These things always happen when we have lots of stuff planned. We were scheduled to migrate two servers to a new machine in the Austin datacenter but this was held off to ensure that we didn’t have any additional risk while we altered the build processes and continued to develop for the month. We are currently planning to deploy the new server next week with a few of the roles that we use to develop and maintain the game. We will schedule a maintenance window to migrate anything intrusive to the game. (Watch the forums and the in-game message of the day for more information when we establish our timeframe.)

If all goes well, this will be one of multiple server migrations we will need to do over the coming months. Each will likely require downtime to allow for a smooth cutover. The new equipment and software will be staged ahead of time. We will migrate non-production aspects first (like the QA server) to allow for some burn-in.

We have been working diligently to get to this point and we plan to continue into 2026 with more hardware and software updates!

– Ravalox

Release 143 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 143 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R144 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 143!

Play Release 142!

September 28, 2025

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 142 goes live September 29th at 10:30 AM CDT.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 142 (R142), we offer ghosts and goblets.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Sam Who?

Samhain is upon us! For most all of the team this is our favourite time of the year! Well, maybe next to the egg hunt when we get to murder players, or April Fool’s day… Samhain is an ancient Celtic festival which was a pagan holiday celebrating the end of the harvest season and the Celtic New Year. Over the eons it has become Halloween as celebrated today.

There are some really gruesome cool things in this release! I have my favourites, but I am very curious to see what you all think is the best!

This month was a rough one for me. I finally caught Covid and was forced to take a week off to rest. Even after that I was a bit foggy for the next week. This means I didn’t get to stream as much as I wanted this month, and I lost the head start I got on all the things for R142 and R143. Even with that, we got a lot done, and are continuing on into October with a bunch more stuff.

The Blackblade Player Dungeon Room got updates this month. I had this great idea to fix a long-standing issue of people getting burned by lava when they were nowhere near it by creating a mesh that conformed to the lava pools themselves. I did a work stream on this and it looked like it was going to work really well. Sadly I found at the very end that the mesh could not be set as a trigger unless it was set to be convex. Which effectively changed the mesh back into a box collider, which would still set players aflame from a far.

In the end I found that I could use a mixture of Spheres and Cylinders to better hug the edges of the various pools. (I also found that other adjustments needed to be made to better manage the layers required for Lava Fishing (or any fishing to be honest). While I was there I adjusted the “swim height” so the character does not look like they are wading in the lava. I will backfill these fixes into the other lava grotto rooms that have curvy pool edges.

The Blackblade room is also the first room that I have put a mesh deco surface method in place. Usually, we attach a script box colliders to cover the areas we estimate that players should decorate on. The Blackblade room (and the upcoming Lava Lake room) are so large and have so many meshes that is makes more sense to optimize and create decoration meshes.

This means instead of what easily could have been 20 scripts running for Deco, we will have three; floor, wall, and ceiling. I am sure that there will need to be adjustments to some of the surfaces to increase usability along with further reduction of the number of mesh quads. This is similar to what I was trying to accomplish with the lava damage areas (and is the new method we are using for decorations in the new houses we are making).

Still on my list to get done before we shift into the end of the year (planning for 2026, infrastructure stuff, and coding) are the (massive) Lava Lake room, spawning versions of all the lava grotto rooms, and getting ‘the Well’ dungeon in place (at least for beta).

Looking forward to streaming a bunch this month and seeing you all there!

– Ravalox

Make a Difference!

We have a section of the cash shop on our website with items that represent various charities. Catnip Games donates 20% of the net purchase price of these items to the designated charities. We have collected over $50,000 for various charities including Water.org, Autism Awareness, Breast Cancer, Movember, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, and Doctors Without Borders.

At player request, we are adding a new Glowing Magic Mug into the Breast Cancer section this month to help support the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The mug pictured here honors those we have lost.

Most of us know or know of someone affected by breast cancer: not only those diagnosed but also their families, friends, and communities. Supporting the effort to cure and prevent breast cancer is something we can all do.

By supporting the fight against breast cancer, we honor the stories of survivors, remember those we have lost, and protect generations to come. Each donation, each voice raised in awareness, and each moment spent spreading knowledge makes a difference. We hope this brings us closer to a world where breast cancer can be prevented, treated, and ultimately cured.

Release 142 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 142 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R143 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 142!

Play Release 141!

August 28, 2025

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 141 goes live August 28th at 4:00 PM CDT.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 141 (R141), we offer schoolbooks or hooky.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Ravalox’s R141 Update

Release was originally scheduled for Monday August 25th but, due to the amount of content we have been working on, and due to Murphy’s Law causing a flood I had to deal with, we delayed release until Thursday. Not all of the content got done in time, but we will continue to wrap up the items not in the game yet. I have been livestreaming my work over the last few weeks, twice in the last week alone, showing the progress and providing details on the development of the rooms and some info on the game overall. Please be sure to check out our YouTube Channel or on Twitch to see the videos.

This release we continued to work on lava-related content. With the deployment of R141, we will have a good number of player dungeon fixes and additions, though some of these are not yet released. One of the rooms, called “Lava Lake”, is nearly finished but the amount of development time has pretty much paralleled creation of a new zone due to its massive size. We were close, but didn’t pass our internal quality checks and therefore was not even ready for a beta test run on the QA server. The Lava Lake room is the largest player dungeon room we have ever produced, with nine connections (with at least another being added as an expansion later).

We will continue work to finalize the content on the schedule and plan to publish a QA build with testing directives as soon as possible. I also plan to continue streaming work as often as I can.

Still yet to come: New player dungeon spawning rooms, new spawns for player dungeons, new houses, new adventure dungeons (Birch Island), and an Episode 2 zone.

We will be livestreaming on Friday at 4pm CT with more details. Hope to see you there!

– Ravalox

Release 141 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 141 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R142 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 141!

Play Release 140!

July 27, 2025

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 140 goes live July 28th at 10:30 AM CDT.

Welcome! The Catnip Games development team marks this monthly release of Shroud of the Avatar with new content and improvements. For Release 140 (R140), we offer fun in the sun and in the dungeon.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Lava Month

From the depths an ancient horror is coming, where the blood of the planet itself rises to swallow everything in its path… or it’s just a really warm place to fish, who knows?

Did you know that New Britannia has been around for a very long time? This world has been known by other names in the distant mists of time, some of which are not to be spoken lest the wrath of figures still powerful may appear and wreak havoc.

There is evidence that long ago, before the moons collided and even prior to Lord British, there was a civilization that thrived and met some cataclysm even more devastating than the Shardfall events over seven hundred years ago. Just look at the mysterious lava rooms recently uncovered: some of them appear to have been used to farm the prehistoric lava fish that have become such popular prey as of late. There are rooms that may have been used to generate power beyond even what the kobolds can imagine, and others still that are undisturbed natural caverns. It’s the semi-natural ones that have the masters of every skill school arguing. Most appear to have been broken into and modified with enormous ancient pieces of volcanic stone to make what appears to be places of meditation, study, possibly even ritual spaces for sacrifices, or maybe they just used them for sunless tanning. We may never know, though there have been some respected folks who swear they have seen things. Things they will not describe.

…but we don’t believe in things like that, right?

In honor of the hot winds of August, we will be rolling out a bunch of new lava rooms throughout release 140. Coming in the middle of the month we have an enormous lava room based on the Mine Cart Foyer. This room is HUGE: more square meters than Blackblade Pass. A room this large is bound to attract attention; I understand that there have been reports of Fire Elementals appearing in the new rooms and some say they have even been sighted in some of the older ones too!

There’s a little more work to do on the rooms so they are even better than the Lava Fishing Grotto we made a few months ago: the pictures here are of work in progress.

Be on the lookout!

– Ravalox

Bug Brigade’s 5th Anniversary Party

Please join us for a party celebrating the 5th anniversary of the Bug Brigade, hosted by the Bug Moderators Ravalox, Alley Oop, Echondas, Flair Minamoto, and Justyn! The party will start Saturday August 16th at 2PM NBT on the Bug Brigade’s Houseboat at its location in Brekken Bay off Hunters’ Island, indicated in the image on the right. We will have a live DJ spinning tunes while the party-goers dance, play party games, and more! You never know what might happen!

Release 140 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 140 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R141 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 140!

MadDogHux