Smoother Rides

• Mounts now lean forward climbing a hill and back going down, while staying upright across a slope, and their feet plant on uneven ground. You stay seated firmly in the saddle, and a hitched cart lines up too.
• Every mount can now really jump: a crouch, a push off, a tuck in the air and a soft landing, each in its own style (the rooster flaps, the gator lunges, the cloud squashes and puffs).
• Mounts feel more alive standing still. They breathe, shift their weight, look around, flick their ears and swish their tails, and now and then stamp or snort. The gator blinks, the crab clicks its claws and the boar snuffles at the ground.
• The Moorland Pony is now built like the horses at Odile's Stables, just smaller, so it rides in proportion with them.
• The Bristleback Boar's hind legs now bend like a real pig's, and the Mirescale Gator sprawls and walks like a proper crocodile, with its jaw firmly attached.
• The Astral Cloud floats higher on a gentle bob, drifts silently, and leaves a trail of soft puffs that fade behind it.
• Creature mounts' footsteps now land when their feet do, and carts hitch neatly to the crab, gator and cloud.
• Toolbelts: drag tools to reorder them, hang one at a chosen spot (or swap it with the tool there when the belt is full), or drag one back to a satchel slot. Inspecting a player now shows their toolbelt.
• Weapons and off-hand items on your action bar show a cooldown sweep with the time left whenever swapping them would be refused mid-fight. The game and your screen now agree exactly on when you're in combat.
• Loading cargo onto a wagon now warns you first: cargo only comes off at a weigh station, and raiders can take it while it rides.
• Taking damage while holding a wagon's reins makes you lose hold of them. The wagon stops and anyone in the crew can pick the reins up again.
• A wagon now shows a health bar over it once its wheels are damaged, so everyone nearby can see how close it is to breaking down.
• Health and focus orbs now look completely full at 100%, with no wave gap at the top, and half health looks like half.
• What's New now lists every update in a sidebar, newest first, with the big ones highlighted, and always opens on the latest. The update notice stays on screen until you click it.
• Fixed faces, hair and some armour pieces shading slightly off since the last performance update (detail patterns and hair highlights).
• Players, townsfolk and bandits now take less work to draw, and crowds appearing at once (arriving in town, a respawn wave) no longer hitch the game while their models build.
• Monsters in the distance are now drawn as lightweight animated copies, so big groups of wolves, skeletons, goblins and the rest cost far less to draw. Up close, or as soon as one turns on you, it's the full model again.

A lighter game, update by update

Over the last few updates we've been working through what makes the game heavy on your computer, from older laptops to the busiest fights. Here's what has changed, in plain terms:

• In Truer Ping, Lighter Frames, your ping started showing your real connection. Before, a slow frame could make it read about double. Towns also became about a sixth lighter for slower computers.
• In Lighter Crowds, monsters, bosses and characters started drawing in far fewer pieces. That roughly halved the drawing work in a big fight, and on slower computers a busy fight became about a fifth quicker to draw.
• In Lighter Fights, combat sounds started playing from ready-made copies, so a sound you've already heard costs about seven times less to play.
• This update spreads the work of building new arrivals over several frames, so when a crowd shows up at once, the biggest hitch from each newcomer is about a third of what it was. A bandit now takes under a third of the work to draw it did before these updates, and a player a little over half.
• Far-off monsters now share their animation: a whole pack of the same kind is drawn together, almost as cheaply as a single one.

Everything looks and sounds the same.

We're not finished. We're already working on the next step, making big gatherings of players much cheaper to draw, so a packed town or a large fight stays smooth. If the game still struggles on your machine, press F8 in game and tell us where it happens. Those reports show us what to fix next.