What’s new in GrindHold

Version 0.3.0

Fixes

• The password reset page shows only the step you're on, instead of all three forms at once, and no longer asks for a world: your account is the same on every world.
• On phones, the login card no longer covers the top of What's new.
• The login screen's stone looks right from the moment it appears, instead of starting flat and changing once the game has loaded.

The website

• The login screen has a theme tune, "The Unspoken Gate", which starts when you first click or press a key and follows your Music volume. It fades out as you enter the world.
• The hiscores, changelog, rules and password reset pages match the game: stone around them, parchment to read on, and links between them at the top.
• The login screen only asks which world to play on when there's more than one.
• Links to the game, hiscores, changelog and rules show a proper preview (title, description and picture) when you share them.
• On wider screens the login card and What's new are a matching pair, the same size with the same corner rivets; What's new scrolls inside its panel.

Version 0.2.0

The world

• Oakmere has a general store, the Mere Stall, which sells pots of flour for the new Bakehouse oven, where you bake bread and meat pies.
• Oakmere also has a drill yard with Drillmaster Cobb and two training dummies, Tutor Aldith, who tells you where each skill is trained, and a wayshrine to Sylvenne by the Hollin Road.
• Highmarket's anvil row has grown to six anvils and two furnaces. The city also has a sawmill, clay in the south-west mine, gravewood trees in the palace park and the Wit ley stone on the palace library steps.
• The Hearthkitchen cooks' guild is open in Highmarket's north-east lot (Cooking 32), with two guild ranges, a bake oven and Cook Pell.
• New dungeon: the Undercroft, Highmarket's drains, with drain rats and cutpurses. Climb down the grate east of the Ledger Hall; the drains come out at an outfall in Sallowmarsh. Bring a light.
• Coldford has a deposit box at Wrenna's camp, and the Ford Inn, whose oven cooks your catch.
• Wendmouth's dock has a deposit box beside Harbourmistress Kell, and its market has a net stall and a seed stall, each with a keeper watching it.
• Warden Harrow gives bounty contracts in Brinkwall from combat 40, filling the gap between Warden Ysolde and Warden Sefa.
• Fletcher Ardo has opened a fletchery in Brinkwall fort, and Scar crows on the Scar lip drop feathers.
• The Bane ley stone (Glyphcraft 20) now stands among the Barrowdown's barrows.
• The Hollow Mill's miller now sells pots of flour.
• Chalkwell has a deposit box at the shaft head, so miners can bank their ore without leaving the lift.
• The Hall of the Anvil now has six training dummies and two knights to spar with, and the Order's squires walk Chalkwell's streets.
• Kindleholt has a Druids' Grove with a leywood patch, a bloodroot patch, a tree patch and a second herb patch, kept by Druid Tamsa, who guards your crops there for a fee and sells bloodroot seeds and farming tools.
• Kindleholt's herbalist has a herb-bench at his door, where unfinished potions mix twice as fast.
• Tollhaven's Anglers' Lodge has a deposit box by the deep water, and the harbour a fishmonger's stall (Thieving 42). The grand market gains the Silk Exchange and a jeweller, and an estate agent keeps an office by the Lord-Mayor's hall.
• Rimeshore: fjord seals haul out on the ice below the moorings, and Captain Brynja sells fur hoods and mittens from her slop chest and buys blubber.
• Skarrvik has a carving shed beside the forge, a furrier who buys every pelt the north gives, and raiders home from the summer with full pockets.
• Emberport has the Caldera forge for wyrmbone ingots (Smithing 95), a third lava vent, and a basalt and obsidian outcrop on the beach with a carver who buys what you quarry. The Fury ley stone (Glyphcraft 95) stands on the Caldera's rim.
• Wren on Firstlight Isle now tells you which town is home to which trade before you sail.
• Glasscliff has a deposit box and salt pans by the brine ponds, surf spots for sand-eels, and Salt-wife Irem now runs a shop.
• Zahir's caravanserai in the Shardfields has a deposit box.
• Qesh has a glassblowing bench outside the Glasswrights' Court, where glass blows a little quicker, and a silk stall in the bazaar.
• Candlemire's Ossuary has a bone altar, where bonemeal is worth more and the dark stops draining your Devotion, and the town has an alembic, a bloodroot patch and the Hollow ley stone (Glyphcraft 90). Mirel sells bloodroot seed.
• Tollkeeper Amin sells provisions at the Sunward Gate: eye-veils (dear), water and a trapping kit.
• The Sunward Gate's toll house has a deposit box, so you can send your desert loot home on the way back.
• Rimeshore has a bank at last: a bank chest in the new moorings hut by Captain Brynja's longship.
• The Glasswaste's wilds are busier: dune adders, sand serpents, dune striders and tomb scarabs, a dune raider camp whose stash opens with a key the raiders carry, an abandoned caravan's strongbox, a buried coffer by the Sunken Tombs, and Aurel's shade shrines, where the glare can't reach you.
• New desert gathering: sandstone, granite and rock salt to mine (Glasscliff has a salt flat), gem rocks in the dune mine and on the Shardfields crater rim, palmfin to catch on a fly rod at the Glasswaste North oasis (and a cactus patch beside it), sandgrouse and dune jerboas to trap.
• Ten new quests from the towns' old rumours: "The Undercroft Tithe" and "Orrin's Alibi" in Highmarket, "The Last Beacon" in Brinkwall, "Embers of the First Star" in Kindleholt, "A Crab Called Duchess" in Wendmouth, "The Canal Ledger" and "Greyfin Season" in Tollhaven, "Seven Trials of the Hold" in Skarrvik, "Invitation to Blackspire" in Candlemire and "The Wyrm Beneath the Caldera" in Emberport.
• Two new faces to find them from: Ember-seer Ailsa by the Mother Hearth, and Dues-clerk Fennick on Tollhaven's canal.
• New quest in Coldford, "The Toll of Trolls" (Fishing 25): Innkeeper Tobin at the Ford Inn wants the bridge trolls paid in Wend pike, and then wants their toll broken.
• New quest in Qesh, "The Emira's Mirror" (Crafting 55, Mining 45): the Glass Well is failing, and you help Master Glasswright Ohan cast a new dew-mirror for its dome.
• New quest in Rimeshore, "The Ice Remembers" (Trapping 50): hunt seals for Captain Brynja's lamp to find out who is frozen in the fjord ice, and lead on to "The Drowned Longship".
• The Greywash has an old walled graveyard with grave caches to rob, ghouls and grave robbers, and a haunted watchtower you can climb over into it (Agility 48). Grave bats and marsh wraiths haunt both banks.
• Bleakfen has a vampyre hunters' camp, with fledgling vampyres circling outside its stakes, a ruined chapel full of marsh wraiths, and bog giants in the east fen.
• Blood-bats, spire sentinels and vampyre spawn now prowl the Blackspire crag, and a ruined shrine there holds a blood reliquary for master thieves (Thieving 78).
• Eastwend Wood has redcrown and weepwood trees, fly fishing on the young Wend, forest spiders, highwaymen on the track, and stoats and sparrows to trap.

Skills

• New agility course: the Wendmouth Riggings (Agility 10). Climb over the cargo net, up the trader's mast, along the yard-arm and down the warehouse hoist.
• The Beacon Line is lit: after "The Last Beacon", 12 beacons run from Brinkwall past the Eastwend watchtower onto the Scour lip. Each takes oak, weepwood, redcrown or gravewood logs, depending on where it stands in the line (Firemaking 35-70). Light the whole line yourself inside ten minutes for Loy's bonus.
• Sergeant Bryce's Shieldwall drills in Chalkwell: hold six waves of the Order's sparring men in your own drill pit, for Defence XP and three new Feats of Arms (Defence 20 and a shield).
• Tend the Mother Hearth once a day: lay up to ten logs on her for Firemaking and Devotion XP.
• The Greyfin weigh-in: once an hour, for ten minutes, every spearfish and ironjaw you land in Tollhaven is weighed. The heaviest catches win Anglers' tokens, which Evander trades for the Lodge outfit (up to 2.5% more Fishing XP).
• Salt-curing at Glasscliff: rake the pans for sea salt, then cure five cooked tidecrab, palmfin, spearfish or fjord char into a pack of five portions that keeps (Cooking 40-58).
• Fur gear (hood, coat, mittens, boots) keeps the Cold off: each piece worn makes the chill come one interval later.
• Bait fishing: Wend pike on Coldford's river (Fishing 25), and sprats (small net, Fishing 1) and herring (rod and bait, Fishing 10) off Wendmouth's quay. Wrenna and Barnaby Hook now sell fishing rods and bait.
• Sand-eels in Glasscliff's surf (small net, Fishing 30), and fjord char (Fishing 58) through three new fjord holes on Rimeshore's ice.
• Woodwarden Tyl sells leywood saplings for the Druids' Grove's leywood patch (Farming 75).
• Trapping: birch grouse at Kindleholt (bird snare, 15), scrub quail at the Sunward Gate (bird snare, 20), and sand-lizards now start at the gate.
• Thieving: Highmarket has a merchant's strongbox (43) by the Ledger Hall and a silversmith's stall (50) on the square.
• More people to pickpocket: Anvil squires (Thieving 25) and the Knights of the Anvil (55) in Chalkwell, caravan merchants (65) in Qesh and the Shardfields, and Skarr raiders (70) in Skarrvik. The Qesh silk stall (50) has its keeper.
• New in Mournfen: deadwood trees (Woodcutting 50), peat bogs to dig with a spade (Mining 44; peat burns like logs), fen leeches in murky water (Fishing 42), and bog frogs, dusk-moths and vein-moths to trap (Trapping 44, 63 and 82).
• Verdite and star-iron rocks on the Blackspire crag, cobalt on Bleakfen's crypt mound, and coal and gold under the Scar on the Greywash's east bank.
• The Scour is worth the risk now. All ten PvP regions have new monsters by depth: ash scavengers and ash hounds near the Scar, deserters under the northern cliffs, and Ashfallen knights and cinder shades in the deep.
• Better gathering than the safe lands at the same level, and richer the deeper you go: redcrowns, iron and silver in the shallows; gravewood, cobalt and verdite in the deep; wild herb tangles to pick for Farming XP, with emberblooms in the deep; ash skinks to trap.
• Caches to lockpick: buried caches in the shallow Scour and fallen knights' coffers in the deep. The Scour lockbox finally has a home: bring a Scour key to the Emberwell, where it refills every 15 minutes.
• The Emberwell, a lava pool deep in the Scour, is the only place in the world to harpoon cinder eels (Fishing 62).
• The Cinder Marshal, a roaming rare boss, rides out across the deep Scour every couple of hours. Anyone can join the fight, and anyone can fight you while you do. Watch for his Marshal's embershield.
• Rimeshore's snowfields have a mine of cobalt and verdite guarded by rime bears, a frostpine stand with tundra elk and snow hares, frostcod through the fjord ice from Fishing 55, and a frozen shrine to Aurel kept by the hermit Old Hallvard.
• Greyscree Pass has an old delvers' cut of iron, coal and gold, scree goats, frostpine and snow hares on the heights, and a bandits' camp by the road.
• The Kestrel Downs have wild horses, grouse and sparrowhawks to snare, a chalk pit of iron and silver, more sheep, and a barrow mound where skeletons and zombies walk.
• The Brine Cliffs have a sea cave with a smugglers' cache, rock pools with rocklings for a small net, sand crabs, nesting terns and chalk wolves.
• The Skarr Isles' tundra has frostpine, rime bears, bull walruses, snow foxes, a verdite and cobalt seam and a burned steading.
• The Tarrak Caldera's jungle hides a temple with an altar of Sylvenne, a trapped reliquary and stone guardians; the rim has an obsidian seam, and the slopes bloodheart trees, Tarrak spiders, ember vipers and geckos.
• Emberport's jungle has bloodheart trees, parrots, spiders and vipers, a small gem vein, and a smugglers' camp with its own cache.

Accounts and safety

• The strongbox PIN keypad now closes if you walk away from the bank, and entering your PIN only opens the bank while you're still beside it.
• You can't trade or use the Ledger Hall until you've finished making your character, and Lone Hearth is only offered to characters that have never traded.
• A Lone Hearth who defeats a player outside their group in the Scour can no longer pick up that player's belongings. Only a groupmate's are theirs to take.
• Staff roles now follow the name you sign in with, not your display name, and nobody can rename themselves to a staff member's name.
• Turning two-factor off now asks for your password as well as a code, and five wrong codes in a row lock your account's codes for 15 minutes.
• Changing or removing your recovery email, and turning on two-factor, now ask for your password (and a code, with two-factor on). Your old address gets a notice with a link to undo the change, and password reset links keep going to it for 3 days.
• Changing or resetting your password, and turning two-factor on or off, now signs out every other session on your account, on every world.
• Password reset links are limited to one every 15 minutes for each account, so nobody can flood your inbox with them.
• Ten wrong passwords in a row lock an account's logins for 15 minutes, and the login screen no longer says whether a name exists.
• The login screen now gives up after 30 seconds without a login, or 2 minutes at the two-factor code prompt, so nobody can hold your account at the code prompt.
• Random-encounter visitors no longer call you by name, greet you in different words, and ask a quick question when you talk to them: answer it right for the gift. Moderators get a suspected-bot list (::bots) built from the anti-bot checks, which now also look at how varied your timing is. Nothing is punished automatically.
• Other websites can no longer show the game inside a frame, which stops tricks that get you to click trade or drop buttons without knowing.

Performance

• Worlds do less work finding paths, so crowds of players walking and clicking cause less lag.
• Busy places run smoother in the browser: characters off screen are no longer animated, and distant ones are animated less often.
• The login screen is ready sooner: the game builds its map of the world after the screen appears, while you type, instead of before.
• No more hitch every 30 seconds while the world saves: saves are now spread thinly across every tick.
• Less lag in crowds: the server now sends you one bundle of updates each tick instead of a separate message for every chat line and event. Other players' chat arrives with the tick, a moment later than before.
• No more lag spike when everyone logs in at once after a server update: players are let in a few at a time, and the game waits a random few seconds before bringing you back.

Fixes

• Firstlight Isle's instructors only replace a lost tool, glyph or arrow when you don't have one anywhere (in your pack, worn, banked or dropped), so their spares can no longer be collected over and over.
• Untradeable and quest items you drop, or lose in a fall, now stay visible only to you until they vanish, so nobody else can ever pick them up. A player who defeats you in the Scour no longer gets your untradeable items either: they wait in your cairn.
• Highmarket's shop discount no longer takes a price below a shop's lowest price, so buying from a shop and casting Greater Gilding on it can't make a profit.
• While at sea or aboard a dune skiff, asking someone to trade (or anything else that would move you or use something) no longer walks you around on land. Chat, settings and crew work still work.
• Putting something in, or taking it out of, a Lone Hearth group chest now saves your pack at the same moment, so a server crash can't leave the item in both places.
• You can no longer use, mine or bank at things through a wall or a shut door: a guild hall's seams, furnace, bank chest and ley stone only work from inside the hall. Shopkeepers behind their counters and bank booths serve as before.
• Locked doors and gates (the crypt door, the Greywash gate) now let the keyholder or quester step through and lock again behind them, so nobody else can slip through after them.
• No teleport gets you out of a fight any more. The muster teleport, Hearth Recall and the town teleports, waystones, canoes, boats, the dune skiff, going home and fellowship halls all refuse while you're fighting or were just hit, while you're frozen or stunned, and deep in the Scour. A blow during the cast stops it when it would land.
• Canoe trips pay their Woodcutting XP when you land, not when you set off, and you stay in the canoe until you arrive. Burying bones, scattering ashes or bonemeal and grinding bones now take a moment each, like eating.

Version 0.1.0

The world

• The whole core map of the Braemoor Realms is open: Braemoor, the rivers and the Scar, Hollinmark, the Glasswaste, the west and Tarrak Isle, the frozen north and Mournfen.
• New players start on Firstlight Isle, the tutorial island, then sail to Oakmere.
• Dungeons to explore, from the Old Quarry Deeps and the Barrow of Ogres to the Frostmaw Caves, the Caldera Deeps, the Crypts of Candlemire and the Tomb of the Sand Kings. Most are dark, so bring a light, and carry a flameward shield against wyrmfire.
• Quests across the realm, from "The Mere Remembers" in Oakmere to "The Drowned Longship" in Skarrvik.
• Day and night, weather, music for each place, waystones, canoes, the Wend barge, ferries, and town hearths you can make your respawn point.
• Tidewright charter ships from Tollhaven's pier to any built port, priced by distance.

Skills

• Twenty-four skills to train, from Woodcutting and Mining to Glyphcraft, Building, Bounty and Seafaring, which you train by sailing as a passenger or working your passage as crew.
• Tools, gear and bows from bronze to starsteel.
• Guild halls you can enter once you reach their level, with a hidden boost to the guild's skill, including the Glyphwrights' Spire and the Rangers' Hall in Tollhaven.
• Three daily tasks each day, with modest rewards. Miss a day and nothing is lost.
• The Scour Gauntlet charges a 5,000-coin toll for each lap, paid into the ember cairn at the ashen pipe. Finish a paid lap and you can search the cairn once for coins, ores, bars, glyphs or, with luck, starsteel bars. Dying loses a paid lap.
• Agility Dash (Agility 50) works everywhere, but in the Scour it takes twice as long (20 ticks) to recharge. The run orb shows the longer wait.

Combat

• Melee, bows and spells, with attack styles, special attacks, poison and other effects.
• Bosses and world bosses, Hearthguard (a wave-defence minigame) and two raids for 1 to 5 players: the Sunken Vaults and, for the strongest, Blackspire Keep and its Blood Lord.
• Bounty contracts, the Wanted board, treasure trails, random encounters, Starfall and pets.
• The Scour: a PvP wilderness past the Scar gates.
• A full cobalt armour set (four or more pieces) cuts wyrmfire by 15%, and this stacks with the flameward shield. Wyrmbone armour will cut it by 30% when it arrives.

Social and economy

• Chat, friends and private messages across worlds, and fellowships with their own channels and halls.
• Player trading, the Ledger Hall market, and shops whose prices move with stock.
• Homesteads to build, Lone Hearth accounts, hiscores, achievements, a wardrobe, festivals and seasonal worlds.

Accounts and safety

• Sign-up with a recovery email, display names, a strongbox PIN and authenticator two-factor.
• World hopping, and a staff team with mutes, bans and reports on every world.

News and updates

• What's new: the latest notes on the login screen, a pop-up after each update, and every update in the new News tab and on the changelog page.
• Updates come with a warning: a countdown banner and chat reminders before the server restarts, and you're taken straight back in afterwards.

Graphics and devices

• Characters are smooth-jointed models with a skeleton: elbows, knees and shoulders bend instead of pivoting, clothes and armour have their own cloth, leather, metal and hair textures, and faces have eyes and a mouth. They breathe while idle, walk and run with proper strides, swing their tools, fight in the style of their weapon (a slash, a stab, a crushing blow, drawing a bow), raise their shield to block, and fall when they die. Low graphics quality draws them in flat colour.
• A Graphics quality setting (Settings → Display): Auto, Low, Medium or High. Each device remembers its own.
• Low is a low-end mode for older laptops and phones: a lower resolution, no fire lighting or ground clutter, and a shorter view. Auto picks Low on weak hardware, and if the game keeps running slowly it steps the quality down by itself and tells you.
• Show frame rate (Settings → Display) puts the frames per second and frame time in the corner of the view.
• If your browser can't start 3D graphics, or they crash and don't come back, the game tells you and switches to the flat 2D view so you can keep playing.

Fixes

• On iPhone, tapping the chat box no longer zooms the page, and pinching over the interface no longer zooms it either.
• On phones, the tutorial's step list is no longer hidden under the minimap, and the health, run, devotion and special attack orbs no longer run off a short view.
• Adding the game to your home screen on iPhone and Android now gives it a proper icon.