Updates

Play Release 114!

May 24, 2023

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 114 goes live May 25th 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 114 (R114), we offer a few new quests in Port Harmony and a few old beings who resent have been awakened.

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

Release Day Work Window Changes

[From a Forum Post by Ravalox]

Starting with this release, we will be taking the game server offline at 08:00 AM CT instead of 9am as in the past. This is mainly to streamline the time used for the work window and prevent our maintenance from extending further into the day when additional maintenance is required.

Shifting our work windows to start at 8am better syncs with our pre-scheduled database backups (preventing us from having to execute a second backup when we take the server down) and provides more time to perform any additional maintenance steps, including database migrations, while still returning the server to operation by 10:30 AM CT.

Our published work window will be from 08:00 AM CT to 10:30 AM CT, but we will bring the server back up as soon as work is completed if earlier than the end of the work window. This means that, for most release deployments, the work should be completed and the server restored to service by 09:30 AM CT instead of the usual 10:30 AM CT.

In the event we have a larger deployment, we will still advise the community of any extended outage times well in advance of the scheduled work day/time.
– Ravalox

Play Release 113!

April 26, 2023

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 113 goes live April 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 113 (R113), we offer the new scene of Port Harmony and newly-tameable reef spiders.

News Announcements

Community Updates

New Scene: Port Harmony

The Ministers of Port Harmony welcome all outlanders to their growing seaside community!

With direct access by galleon from both Novia and Hidden Vale, and acting as a cultural hub for all of Mistrendur, Port Harmony is a thriving New Britannian colony with something for everyone. Shop in our bustling dockside marketplace, stroll past the fountain in the nearby town square, wander into our charming residential neighborhoods, chat with our friendly residents, or just relax on a lazy gondola ride in the canals. Our Virtuous city offers many of the amenities of the largest southern communities, including a hospital, a New You pavilion, and a militia that keeps everyone safe both inside our borders and out in the surrounding territory.

So what are you waiting for? Come to Port Harmony, your home in Mistrendur!

Port Harmony is a new Tier 8 adventure scene, available to Episode 2 players, featuring a large city with merchants, crafting stations, and quests.

2023 Roadmap Update

So far we are pretty much on track to keep the roadmap schedule.

The one item we have a delay on is implementing Unity 2021. We are now in process of migrating servers and applications to new Virtual Machines as well as adding new internal build and Dev/QA environments. This will eliminate the process bottleneck we currently have and allow for the parallel development work on our current Unity 2018 platform and Unity 2021 until it is ready to be deployed into production.

The first phase of our Treasure Map system is currently in development. Devilcult is doing a great job of prototyping the maps and setting up the tech and systems that we will need to move forward with more advanced features.

As detailed farther down in these release notes, we are in the final push to get the in-game scene maps completed. There is still much work to be done to catch up but we have met our commitment to ensure that any new qualifying scene released will have a map on day one. Work on the SotaMap server is still on the schedule as well but is blocked by server and infrastructure updates being done to our website datacenter. This will be an ongoing project and updates will be provided as we reach the next stage.

Episode Two work continues and is progressing beautifully! Sannio (Keith Quinn) has created a unique and bright town in Port Harmony that will greet players as they first arrive on Mistrendur. Sannio has outdone himself again!

Look for more roadmap updates at the end of June!

– Ravalox

Play Release 112!

March 29, 2023

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 112 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 112 (R112), we offer a preview of Port Harmony, where is not appropriate to throw eggs at your friends.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Sneak Preview: Port Harmony

Port Harmony is not yet open to Outlanders, but Sannio has provided a few preview images.

Release 112 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 112 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! R112 is a polish month. Content, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R113 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 112!

Play Release 111!

February 23, 2023

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 111 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 111 (R111), we offer wildlife: fish to find and keep in fishtanks and new Brigade bugs to collect.

Please note that the incremental client patch going from build 1633 to 1635 may not apply correctly on Windows clients. This is a known issue. If this occurs, the game client will apply the core patch from 0 to 1635. We will publish the patch as soon as possible after R110’s closing so players may begin downloading and applying the update immediately.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Go Fish and Catch a New Friend!

Devilcult has created a set of fish tanks that can house several species of new pet fish which Sannio has scattered throughout New Britannia. A craftable fish bowl is a magical watery habitat perfect for one fish and three larger tanks in the Crown Store can each host multiple fish as well as one of a pair of decorative accessories to give them an appealing underwater world. More tanks, accessories, and fish are planned for future releases!

New Bug Brigade Rewards

Ravalox has created a set of new rewards for the Bug Brigade which, together with this month’s new subscription reward item, will allow delivery of rewards to those who’d blown through all the previously-scheduled ones. These plaque-mounted insects are of a size to scare off any of their more-lively cousins! Each can be placed on horizontal or vertical surfaces seperately or in an upcoming display case.

A selection of the new insects shown wall-mounted on five wooden plaques

Release 111 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 111 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! R111 is a polish month, but the fish just wouldn’t wait any more! Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R112 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 111!

Play Release 110!

January 25, 2023

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 110 goes live January 26th 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 110 (R110), we offer a roadmap for 2023, a couple of new craftables, and more new event trophies.

News Announcements

Community Updates

State of the Game and Roadmap for 2023

The Road Ahead: A rider with a red cloak at the beginning of a winding road through a meadow

Happy New Year and welcome to 2023! This past year has certainly been a roller coaster for many of us, and Shroud of the Avatar (SotA) is looking forward to a much better new year.

In 2022, we added lots of Episode 2 content, including Grusk, Grusk Factory, Vikland, and Vikland’s Obsidian Valley adventure areas. We’ve also made many improvements, including offering many new items in our in-game store, removing the Heritage (“account bound”) flag from all store items, and adding a new Emote Hotbar to the UI. On our website, we’ve restored our “Make a Difference” Store — 20% of any purchase from our website charity store will be donated to the charity associated with each category. Shroud of the Avatar supports Water.org, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Breast Cancer, Movember, Children’s Miracle Network of Hospitals, and Doctors Without Borders. Our “Make a Difference” Store can be found here.

Continue reading in the forums

New Lava-Fishing Trophies

To add to last month’s treasure-hunting trophies, Ravalox has made a shiny new set of trophies for lava-fishing contests! Details on requesting them for your events are here. (Thanks, Diablotine!)

Different smoking lava fish spinning above pedestals topped with gold, silver, and bronze

Release 110 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 110 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! R110 is a content month, but some of the content was snuck in early last month with Vikland’s Obsidian Valley. Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R111 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 110!

Play Release 109!

December 14, 2022

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 109 goes live December 15th 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 109 (R109), we offer a hidden Obsidian valley behind a maze of tunnels in Vikland.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Explore Vikland’s Obsidian Valley!

Hagen’s personal tragedy has left a mystery: the most intrepid Avatars exploring Vikland can now solve the puzzle of the Obsidian Cave and venture into the tunnels beyond the locked door. The most clever and resilient ones will make their way completely through the catacombs and enter into a mysterious Obsidian Valley.

Elevator in the tunnels under Vikland

A View Across the Obsidian Valley

New Treasure-Hunting Trophies

Ravalox has made a shiny new set of trophies for treasure-hunting contests! Details on requesting them for your events are here.

Differently-colored treasure chests spinning on pedestals

Release 109 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 109 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! R109 is a polish month. Content, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R110 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 109!

Play Release 108!

November 16, 2022

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 108 goes live November 17th 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 108 (R108), we offer a way to get rid of premium items you don’t want and a better way to dance in celebration after.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Place Emotes in the Hotbar!

The noncombat hotbar filled with color-coded emote icons

Emotes can now be placed in the non-combat hotbar. An icon has been created for each of 278 emotes and, if the player has tooltips enabled, each emote’s name will appear when hovering over the icon. Each has color-coded curtains to help differentiate similar ones by group:

Red – Story/Main game/Seasonal/Quest
Yellow – Telethon/Crown Purchase
Blue – Pledge
Countach Pink – Make a Difference
Green – Meretz
Grey – Obsidian Trials
Gold – Seedinvest
Purple – Unique/Limited-time
Iridescent Pink – Ultra-special

A dedicated (optional) emote bar is on the way in a future release.

Discard Unwanted Items Into Garbage Bins!

Almost all items, including ones normally restricted from deletion, can be removed from the game using this new item. NOTE: Quest Items cannot be deleted, even this way.

To use the garbage bin, drag the item to be deleted onto the bin. Only one item at a time may be deleted and there is a confirmation pop-up box for each.

These are publicly available: they have been added to many NPC scenes (listed in detail in the patch notes below).

If you wish to purchase your own from the Crown Store, it can be placed on either a player lot or on POT land (POT placement requires Steward or Governor access).

Garbage Bin

Release 108 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 108 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! R108 is a polish month. Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R109 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 108!

Play Release 107!

October 28, 2022

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 107 goes live October 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 107 (R107), Vikland is open to Outlander visitors!

News Announcements

Community Updates

Visit Vikland!

Vikland along the shore

The west coast of Slangemagge hosts the small barbarian village of Vikland. This beautiful tier-8+ shore with outlying islands, at the edge of a lush tropical forest, is a lovely area for a day trip for Outlanders with Episode 2 access!

The village proper hosts a community known for sailing to and trading with local settlements along the coast and across the Drullasund. They (and their war bears) do seem to get the better end of these deals! These earthy people are known for their colorful decor and some saber-toothed tiger trophies have been spotted gracing their walls; perhaps these fearsome beasts can be found nearby! The village does not have significant facilities for guests, but they can act as a base camp and supply you with a good picnic to carry to the long beaches and scenic outcroppings in the area.

Visitors with an archaeological bent may be interested to know that centuries ago, the forces of the Obsidian Eye established an outpost in the area. It was eventually abandoned and lost to history, but remnants can still be found north of the village and inland.

Release 107 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 107 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! R107 is a content month. Polish, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R108 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 107!

R106 Outage and Recovery Process

October 12, 2022

What Happened?

When we deployed R106 on the morning of September 29th, we found that there was underlying database corruption. We worked diligently for the next week identifying the issues and attempting to recover the database. During this time we worked on a number of past iterations restored from our backups. After seven days of work we were still unable to achieve stability and made the very difficult choice to restore a database backup saved prior to releasing R105. The type of restore is known as a ‘Rollback’. This means that any and all progress gained from the point of the restored backup will have been lost. This also means that new characters created will no longer exist.

What’s my impact?

A rollback is like using a time machine. When the Live game server was restored and brought on-line, all progress, stats, etc. are as they were on August 24th at 8am CT. This impacts the following in addition to other aspects of your character’s status:

New Characters: If you created a new character during this window it will be missing, please re-create the character and reach out to support for assistance in having any earned XP reallocated to your XP Pool.
XP and Gold: We were able to extract information from the most current backup, which allowed us to restore player account XP levels. We are investigating what we can do to restore player account gold.
Skills: XP has been placed on your account in the XP pool. We are unable to restore XP to specific skills, so any skill level changes to your character will need to be re-trained.
COTOS/Website Purchases: Any COTOs or store items purchased from 8/24 – 9/29 and throughout the outage will be (re) delivered via the Rewards Chest in game.
Houses/Lots: If you claimed a lot or placed a house during the period of time the rollback covers, you will need to reclaim.
POTs: IF you upgraded or purchased a New POT during the time frame, we are working to re-apply the new or upgraded town to the game.
NOTE: We cannot restore decoration work done on lots or in POTs.
Taxes/House expiration timer: We have suspended the eviction timer and will keep that in place until at least November 18th. During this time we will be working to clear the back taxes on affected lots. If the deed was obtained prior to 8/24 @ 0800 CT then the deed should be where it was previously: in your bank, Inventory, or storage.
NOTE: Weare suspending the eviction timer until Nov 18th, not suspending taxes. The daily increment for lot taxes will continue as normal. The extension of the timer allows us to have time to clear the back taxes on lots without having lots fall. After your back taxes are cleared, you should start populating tax credit funds as normal. If you have paid off your back taxes instead of waiting for the scripted back tax purge, please reach out to support to have those funds refunded (we’ll verify the amount in the server logs).

Rewards?

Please note that Subscriber and Login rewards have been re-delivered as part of the R106 bundles. Due to the game’s structure we cannot re-deliver R105 and R106 rewards separately, so the Releases have been combined into one bundle. Some additional items have been added to the October Login Rewards.

What’s next?

We have a Livestream scheduled for Friday October 14th @ 4pm CT to go into more detail surrounding the issues and the recovery efforts, as well as the changes we are making to ensure this will never occur again. As noted above there are still aspects we are working on to make accounts as whole as possible. We will discuss all of this in detail on the livestream, along with other aspects that have impacted the players.

Did you buy items with COTOS in the Crown store during the timeframe we rolled back over? Though the COTOS will still be in your account, and any COTOS purchased in September will also automatically be delivered to you via the Rewards Chest. We understand that some of the items were purchased when they were on sale, or were available during a Vault or seasonal cycle making it near impossible to re-purchase them. We will be announcing our plans on how we will assist in allowing players to re-obtain these items during the Friday stream!

Thank you for being so patient during this calamity!

Play Release 106!

September 28, 2022

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Release 106 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 106 (R106), we offer bug fixes, the deactivation of the Heritage flag (for real this time), and a small upcoming scene preview.

News Announcements

Community Updates

Vikland Preview

Sannio has shared a nice assortment of views of Vikland in progress, which is looking much more complete and should be available on QA for player testing soon in this release.

Barbarian village in Vikland

Pirate shipwreck in Vikland

Banana trees in Vikland

Bunker entrance in Vikland

Obsidian docks in Vikland

Obsidian statues in Vikland

Release 106 Patch Notes

Below are a list of the updates that are live as of Release 106 in the game of Shroud of the Avatar! R106 is a polish month. Content, additional improvements, and bug fixes are inbound for R107 next month. We hope you enjoy the changes that are live today as of Release 106!