Companions on this server do not use Ragnarok's original AI. All three — homunculus, mercenary and pet — run the same intelligence, written from scratch inside the emulator itself, and it makes a decision every half second.

Having one instead of three is deliberate: a fix to target selection or to walking around an obstacle lands on all three the same day, and there are no three versions of the same behaviour drifting apart over time.

They will not play the game for you. What they do is stop getting in the way: they don't drag monsters you didn't want, they don't get lost across the map and they don't evaporate while you're looking at your inventory.

The first thing a companion does each cycle is work out who to hit. The order is not negotiable:

• Whatever is attacking you.
• Whatever is attacking your pet, homunculus or elemental.
• Whatever is attacking it.
• The aggressive things nearby that are coming anyway.
• And last, the passive ones.

A priority jump always wins: if it was killing something passive and something starts hitting you, it drops what it's doing instantly. Within the same tier it sorts by distance, favouring ranged attackers and things already wounded — finishing a kill beats starting a new fight.

Homunculus, mercenary and pet use the server's advanced pathfinder. They no longer get stuck on a corner or take the long way around a tree: they compute the full route and walk it right behind you.

A companion staring at a monster on the other side of a wall is a useless companion. Before picking a target it checks that there is a path; if there isn't, it shelves that target for ten seconds and tries another.

And if it is next to something but with a corner in between, it repositions until it has line of fire instead of swinging at air.

Ground damage is not treated as a monster to run away from but as a set of cells you cannot stand on. That sounds like a nuance and it is not: you run away from a point as far as you can — overshooting, then coming back, then overshooting again — whereas you simply step out of a zone, and then you stay out.

Three rules follow, and every one of your units obeys them:

That last one is what prevents being trapped: anyone caught in the middle of a large area — knocked back, or with the spell dropped on them — has every neighbouring cell inside the zone, and a no-exceptions "never step on an area" rule would pin them there taking damage until the effect expired.

And because the boundary can only be crossed one way, the back-and-forth along the edge is not so much fixed as impossible.

Waiting for the area to land before moving is moving too late. A ground spell announces itself with several seconds of casting, and during those seconds the server already knows where it will land and how long is left. Your units read both and do the sum anyone would do:

The sum is deliberately conservative: the cell is charged diagonally, which costs 40 % more, and one reaction cycle is deducted. Falling short by that 40 % means taking the whole spell. And if there is not enough time, the unit moves anyway — an area effect spreads its hits over several seconds, so leaving late is fewer hits than not leaving.

Three details that change a lot of what you see on screen:

It runs for all five: your character under @autoplay, the @helpme companion, the mercenary, the homunculus and the pet. One piece of code for all of them, not five similar copies.

The radius is read from the skill itself rather than from a hand-maintained list, which is why it works just as well for Storm Gust as for the area attack of a custom monster added tomorrow.

The underlying change is this: your companions read whether you are at the keyboard. After ten minutes without you touching anything, homunculus, mercenary and pet switch to defensive mode: they stop looking for fights and just protect you from whatever attacks.

The moment you move your character again they get your real configuration back, instantly.

No more coming back from the bathroom to find the homunculus dying in the middle of a monster nest it woke up all by itself.

None of the default behaviour is fixed. Type @merai in chat and its configuration menu opens; it is also on the website, on your character page. Changes apply without resummoning.

Lists can be inherited from your other companions, so you don't have to type the same monsters four times. And in Search & Destroy, when it wanders off, it shows on your minimap: green while travelling, red while fighting.

A mercenary is a soldier you hire, summon to your side and who fights on its own. It is not a pet and not a homunculus: it doesn't eat, doesn't evolve and doesn't need feeding.

There are three companies, each with its guild in its own city. Every manager is accompanied by a Mercenary Merchant selling the potions only mercenaries can drink.

Click any screenshot to see it full size.

Each of the sixty mercenaries has its own name, level and skill list: they are not twenty copies of the same one with bigger numbers.

This is the big departure from how this system works anywhere else. Hiring gets you a summoning scroll, and that scroll is not used up. You buy it once and you have it forever.

What you pay on every summon is SP and cast time, and both go up with the grade. The SP is not a flat number: you are charged a percentage of your max SP with a per-grade cap, and whichever of the two is cheaper is what you pay.

From grade 11 to 20

From grade 10 on the percentage stops at 95%. What keeps climbing is the cap and, above all, the cast time: a grade 20 is 13 seconds standing still, unmoved and untouched. That, not the SP, is its real price.

The point is that a character with little SP can still call a high-grade mercenary. With 300 max SP a grade 10 costs 285 SP instead of the 600 cap; with 900 max SP you pay the 600 and no more. The percentage uses your max SP at that moment, gear and buffs included.

The scroll cannot be sold, dropped, stored or passed to another character: it is yours and nobody else's. If you are short on SP the message tells you how much you need and nothing is spent.

The twenty grades cost the same across all three companies. The first ten:

From grade 11 to 20

The manager only shows you the grades you can already hire. If a step is missing from the list you are short on level, on loyalty, or on both: scrolls you could not use are not sold to you.

Grade 1 scrolls are free: there is no excuse not to try a mercenary at level 15.

The scroll says 30 minutes, and that is how it used to work: a clock running no matter what. Now the clock depends on whether you are playing:

• Playing: the contract renews itself as long as you give orders. In practice, your mercenary lasts the whole session.
• Idle: after 10 minutes without you touching anything, the 30 minute cap kicks in and from there it does leave.

Those same 10 minutes are what switch it to defensive mode, so it doesn't wake a whole nest while you're away.

Loyalty does not belong to the mercenary: it is yours, with the guild. It is stored per character and per company, so archers, spearmen and swordsmen each keep their own count, and what you build with one you do not lose by dismissing it: it stays there forever.

It rises along three paths that add up at once:

• +1 every 50 kills it finishes off (only monsters at or above half your level count). Every time it hits 50 it also gets a random 5-minute buff: attack, flee, hit, HP or SP.
• +1 every 30 minutes at your side, killing or not. Keeping you company counts too.
• +1 when the contract runs its course and ends on time. Dismissing it by hand from its window gives nothing — but takes nothing either.

And in a party, every member's mercenary records the kill even if someone else landed it. Farming together raises everyone's loyalty.

The cap is 32,767 per guild, a number you will not reach by playing. At 500 you have already unlocked the most expensive thing you can hire.

The AI does not cast at random: it looks at how many enemies are around, whether it has SP and whether the skill is off cooldown.

When something is hitting you, the rotation changes: it stops spending turns on keeping buffs up and throws everything it has, including the Sharp Shooting it normally holds back. Defending you comes before looking after itself.

Out of SP it doesn't just stand there: it keeps swinging until it recovers. And the skills the AI never uses on its own — Provoke, Devotion, Defender, Lex Divina, the archer's traps, Berserk… — are still in the mercenary window for you to cast.

• One mercenary at a time. To change company or grade, dismiss the current one from its own window first. With one already summoned, the other scroll does nothing.
• The experience is yours. Whatever it kills counts towards your level.
• Loot drops on the floor. What it kills alone is not autolooted for you: it stays on the ground, as it always has.
• It has its own potions. Every guild's Mercenary Merchant sells red and blue mercenary potions, plus concentration, awakening and berserk. They only work on mercenaries.
• If it dies, nothing happens. The contract ends, but you lose neither loyalty nor the scroll.
• No combat zones. In PvP, GvG, WoE castles and battlegrounds it withdraws on entry and the scroll cannot be used — and is not spent by trying. Guild dungeons are allowed.

Call Homunculus was changed so it never requires Seed of Life or any other item. Summoning your homunculus consumes no materials.

Same direction as the rest of the companion system: the cost of having one should be in playing with it, not in an inventory toll every time you bring it out.

What your homunculus gains in intimacy per ration, depending on how hungry it was when it ate:

Feeding it can never leave you worse off than you were. In the original game feeding a full homunculus cost 50 intimacy, and there was a path where the server itself deleted the creature if that subtraction hit zero: caring for it at the wrong moment was how you lost it. Here the worst that happens is a wasted ration. It does not sulk about it either.

From newborn (2,100) to ready to evolve (91,100) that is 445 meals given at the right moment, around 74 hours of raising. Intimacy caps at 100,000.

The auto-feed checkbox in the homunculus window feeds it as soon as hunger drops below 30, so it collects +150 instead of +200. Doing it by hand and waiting for the 11–25 window pays a third more; the automatic one, in exchange, never forgets. And from your character sheet you can feed it with the game closed, using the food you keep in Kafra storage.

Until now an alchemist had one homunculus and only one, forever: the only way to get a different one was to let the one you had starve to death. The Homunculus Daycare ends that.

The caretaker does four things:

Where it is

In five cities, and it is the same shelf in all five — what you leave in Prontera you collect in Juno:

• Prontera 219, 184
• Aldebaran 182, 119
• Alberta 90, 82
• Lighthalzen 155, 130
• Juno 186, 203

A homunculus you leave there does not change in any way: it keeps its level, its experience, its stats, the skills it has learned and its intimacy. The Daycare is not a warehouse that charges you in wear and tear, it is a place where they wait.

The Daycare has as many places as your player level: level 1, one place; level 8, eight. It is the same number you see on your account — the one referrals, participation streak and tags add up to.

If you lose player level

None of them is taken from you. The limit is only checked when you put one in. If you have five stored and your level drops to three, they are still five: you can take them out, swap them and put them back, and the only thing you cannot do is add a sixth until you are back over the line.

Same rule as everywhere else on this server: a new limit is checked when you turn something on, never applied backwards to take away what you already had.

The caretaker tells you where you stand the moment you talk to her, including when you are over the limit — and in that case she says so in plain words, so it never looks like something went missing.

The caretaker does not hand just anything to just anyone. She only handles homunculi up to ten levels above your base level, both to leave them and to collect them. If you are level 71, up to 81.

What it is for, then

The shelf belongs to the account, so without this rule you could just make a brand-new alchemist and have it walk around with the level-99 Eira your main raised. With it, the shelf is genuinely shared but each character only handles what its own progress earns.

And rebirth does not take yours away

Transcending leaves you at base level 1, but what you bred yourself you get back all the same, without waiting to climb again. This server has never taken your homunculus away at rebirth, and the Daycare does not either.

The caretaker gives you the exact number as soon as you talk to her — "I can hand you anything up to level 81" — instead of making you do the subtraction every time. And in the list she marks which ones she cannot give you and why, rather than hiding them: a creature that does not appear looks lost.

Type a line in normal chat that starts with an asterisk —*it sure is hot around here— and they answer out loud, in public chat, in front of anyone walking by. No windows, no menus, no commands to memorise.

It is not a menu of canned lines or a dialogue tree: every answer is written right then, for that line, knowing who you are, what they are and what the two of you have talked about before.

They do not stand still while they talk: they can pull a face, walk up to someone or back away from them when it fits, never straying more than 12 cells from their owner. There are twelve seconds between one answer and the next, so a conversation does not turn into a wall of text on top of everyone else's chat.

It can be turned off. The switch lives in Character preferences, inside your account, and takes effect the moment you save it even while you are playing. With it off, nothing leaves the server.

An Amistr does not talk like a Filir, and a Poring does not talk like a Lunatic. The species already brings character, and whatever you write in their past —512 characters in Character preferences— is added to it: how you met, what they owe you, what they are afraid of, what their quirks are.

You need not write anything. With the field blank they talk just the same: the pet and the homunculus from what they are —including the rarer species, which draw their voice from what they are in this world— and the mercenary from what the trade made of them: someone who lives off contracts, has seen it all and does not startle easily. Writing them a past does not switch them on, it makes them yours.

By default, when a pet speaks the line does not come from the server: it comes from your client, out of its own table, and it is the same four lines for every pet of that species in every game in the world. Here each one writes their own, out of their species, their past and what they have been through with you.

Until they have one for a given moment, they say the usual one. That beats standing there in silence; the moment they learn their first line for it, the canned one never comes back.

A pet must be loyal to speak for itself: before that it sticks to the usual lines. The mercenary keeps theirs between contracts: dismiss them and summon them again and they are still them, not starting over.

Writing each answer costs real money, so there is a cap — and it is in plain sight, with its two bars, in Character preferences.

What leaves the server. The line you type, your character's name, the companion's name and the map you are on. Nothing else: not your email, not your account, not your IP. What is said is erased after 48 hours and the record itself after 30 days. With the switch off, nothing is sent at all.

It is the only feature on the server that sends text to a third party, which is why it has its own section in the privacy policy. Never type passwords, emails or card numbers there: if you do, they are under orders not to repeat them out loud.

With @autoplay your character fights on its own. It is not a macro bolted on from outside: it is the emulator itself moving your character, with five switches you decide.

Typing @autoplay turns it on, and typing it again turns it off.

Auto-storage is no longer one of these switches: since 11 August 2026 it is a list of specific items on your character sheet, and it works however you play.

The server moving it rather than an external program is exactly what makes limits, time accounting and logging possible. A third-party bot cannot be audited; this one can.

There is more under the hood than it looks:

When the bot has several skills to hand, the question is not which one hits hardest on paper but how much damage is actually going to land. Those are different things more often than you would think.

A 20,000 hit on a monster with 500 HP left is worth exactly 500, the same as a 600 hit. What separates the two is not power: it is waste. And the waste is paid for by whatever resource the big hit spends.

The example this came from

A Soul Reaper with Espa and Curse Explosion. Espa hits one target and takes a second and a half; the explosion hits everything within three cells and takes four, but only really pays off on cursed enemies. At level 10:

It is also why you will sometimes see the bot use the "small" skill while a huge one sits unspent. It has not made a mistake: the big one did not fit.

Plenty of the strong skills are not paid for in SP but in something you have to gather first: souls, spirit spheres, coins, servants, charms. None of that comes back by itself, which is why the AI does not treat it like mana.

Before spending an expensive finisher it checks three things, and it needs all three:

The same idea governs ammunition, charms and crafting materials: what costs something to replace is kept for when it makes a difference.

Support skills — songs, dances, chorus skills and party buffs — follow one simple rule: reach as many characters as possible, and when they cannot reach anyone else, do what they can as long as they harm nobody.

Singing does not stop it fighting either: in this version songs do not pin the performer in place, so the bot keeps attacking while they play.

The AI has no fixed rotation per job. It has a repertoire: the list of skills it knows how to use, each with the condition that makes it worth using. As of 24 August 2026 that is 786, and the list keeps growing.

What is left out, and why

None of these exclusions is an oversight: each one is written down with its reason beside it, so that a year from now nobody "fixes" it without knowing why it was that way.

An automated character following its leader has a rescue warp: stray too far and it gets teleported back. That was meant as a safety net and had turned into the everyday mechanism — the bot wandered off after a distant monster and the warp dragged it back.

Now it holds itself back. It sets a ceiling two cells below the distance that would rescue it, and that ceiling is checked against the cell it is heading for before the step, not against where it already stands. If it still overshoots — because the leader moved, or a knockback — it goes into panic: it drops whatever it was doing and does nothing but win those two cells back.

And the rescue is no longer unconditional. There are three situations:

With the leader dead the unit carries on as if it had no leader: it fights and patrols where it is instead of standing over the body waiting. When the leader revives, the anchor comes back.

And if the leader is inside the area of a boss your unit fears, it is not left adrift: it watches from outside. It gets as close to the leader as it can without setting foot in the danger zone and paces along the edge, always far enough away that the boss cannot see it, until it blows over.

None of this changes what your allowance is charged or how the bot is configured: it is how it moves.

With @helpme you summon another character of yours — a real one, from your account — and it fights beside you with its own autoplay profile, independent of yours.

It is not a clone or an illusion: it earns real experience, picks up real items and really dies.

Autoplay and helpme share a quota, and that quota only runs while the bot is actually working: time spent in town, dead, trading or walking between targets does not count.

The clock runs while you are logged out too: time away counts just the same towards getting it back.

The bar with what you have left is on your account page, with the countdown until it is completely full again.

After ten minutes without touching anything, autoplay and helpme stop walking and attacking. They keep looking after themselves — healing, not dying — but they don't go out picking fights.

It is the same threshold that switches your companions to defensive mode, and for the same reason: automation is there so you can play comfortably, not so you can farm while you are away.

Everything automation does goes into an auditable log, reset on every server start.

Same line as the daily gift box log and the transparency section: if it can't be checked, it's worth nothing.

With a shop open —selling or buying— type @autotrade. The game closes and your stall stays on the map, trading on its own.

What happens underneath is what makes the feature worth having: the vendor's session stops occupying your account and starts running under an identity of its own inside the server. The account is freed on the spot, so you can log straight back in on another character, with no waiting and no message telling you it still recognises your previous session.

A stall sits and faces the same way whether you just left it there or a restart restored it: there is no telling them apart at a glance.

The shop does not live in the server's memory alone. It is written to the database the moment you open it, and it restores itself when the server starts with its title, its spot, its pose and its items. A restart —including the automatic one every night— does not force you to set it up again.

Every sale dispatches the zeny, the cart and the inventory at that very instant. It does not wait for the periodic save, so what you sold is yours even if the server goes down a second later.

Everything a stall does goes into an auditable log: when it opened, every sale with its amount and its buyer, every save, and why it ended.

To get it back, just enter that character from the character selection screen. The server closes the shop, saves everything and lets you through: there is nothing to wait out and nobody to ask.

And if you are playing another character on the same account and only want to close the stall without switching, type @shopclose.

While a shop is running, that character cannot be deleted from the panel. That is deliberate: deleting it would take the shop with it, along with whatever was left unsold and everything it had earned.

Player level runs from 1 to 24 and is earned three ways, which add up:

• Showing up: your streak of days played.
• Inviting: valid referrals, direct and second level.
• Having been here from the start: the tester tag.

Where you see all of it: on your account page. The day-by-day stamp card, the level targets marked out, your current streak and the previous ones, your invitations with each guest's progress, and the exact breakdown of your level.

Every day you play fifteen minutes without idling you fill in a stamp on the card.

Fifteen minutes and not four hours: the point is not to punish people with a life outside, it is to reward people who come back.

Stamps chain into a streak, and the streak levels up in eleven steps:

If a streak breaks, how many days you had and which day you missed are recorded: past streaks are not erased, they are kept.

The streak breaks if you miss a day… unless you have a streak protector.

You get into the server by invitation only, and every account hands out up to 64 codes.

This branch's ladder runs from 1 valid referral (level 2) to 52 (level 10). With 64 invitations and 52 needed, there is room for some not to work out.

Your invitations and each guest's progress are on your account page.

A guest does not count for registering:

• During their first month, they count once they have a character at level 60.
• After that month, to keep counting they need one at level 90 or above.

The guests of your guests count for you too. Each one is worth one third of a direct referral, under exactly the same rule: level 60 in their first month, level 90 after that.

Three valid second-level referrals equal one direct. Bring people who bring people and the whole network works for you.

Your account page shows the separate counter: how many second-level you have, how many count as valid, and your weighted total.

Every account picks one gift, and only one, out of the sixteen on the list, and all of its invitees receive it. In turn you receive whatever the person who invited you picked: that is why the panel shows two columns, what you give and what you are given.

A change is not immediate for the invitee: the gift is applied on login and removed on logout, so whatever you change today reaches them at their next sign-in. In exchange, nothing from an old choice is ever left stuck or stored.

Only first-level invitees receive it — the ones who used your code. Second and third level count towards your player level, but get no gift. And there are no conditions: having used a code is enough, with neither validity nor activity switching it off.

The two autocasts differ from the rest in one way: besides the gift you also pick the spell and its level, and that is where the chance of it going off comes from. The others are a flat percentage.

Those of you who were here from the first tests already have your tester tag, and it adds starting levels. There is nothing to ask for: it is already applied.

And it is not a single tag: there are three grades according to participation.

• Grade 1 — adds 3 levels
• Grade 2 — adds 2 levels
• Grade 3 — adds 1 level

The Daily Gift Girl was announced to hand out gifts for the last time on 30 September. That farewell was cancelled. Since 1 August 2026 she is still in Prontera 164, 172, same spot, same face.

This is no longer an event on a countdown: it does not close on any date.

The package stops being the same fixed bundle. It is now four slots and each rolls its prize separately, with its own odds and its own quantity. You might get a stack of ten or a single piece.

Each slot can also come up empty: you will not always take home four things.

The previous bundle was fixed: Elunium, Oridecon, a Myst Case, a Battle Manual and a Bubble Gum.

You don't need to log in to collect it. On your account page, under each logged-out character, there is the claim button.

The box opens in front of you and you see what you got right away. The items appear in your inventory the next time you log in with that character.

You still need free slots and free weight. Whatever doesn't fit waits for you, it is not lost.

One gift per account per day, and one per household per day. It doesn't matter where you take it: claim it in Prontera and the website button goes dark, and the other way round.

Your character measures range as a circle, the same way the client draws it. The server, on the other hand, measured monster range as a square: it only asked that neither the horizontal nor the vertical distance exceeded the range.

In a straight line both calculations agree. On a diagonal they don't: a square of side 9 reaches almost 13 cells of real distance at the corners. That is where the feeling that some monsters shot from outside your reach came from — they did.

It affects 349 monsters out of the server's 2,675: the ones with range 3 or more. The other 2,326 behave exactly as before. It is a server setting, reversible with a single configuration value.

The change was not only about counting cells. A ranged monster walks towards you until it considers itself in range, and then plants itself and shoots. That "I've arrived" was computed with the old rule.

Had only the shot been fixed, long-ranged monsters would have stopped on a diagonal from which they could no longer fire, and would have ended up walking right up to you to attack — an absurd zigzag.

The same problem as range was present in the area of effect of monster attacks: they blasted a square, so at the corners they caught you from further away than head-on. They are circles now.

The range itself was not touched: they still reach exactly as far in a straight line.

11x11 → 40 fewer cells 15x15 → 76 fewer 29x29 → 228 fewer

It affects 58 monster skills, among them Earthquake, Pulse Strike, Hell's Judgement, Frost Nova and every area status skill (Wide Silence, Wide Curse, Wide Stun…). Player skills are unchanged.

The Swordman's Endure was cancelled after 7 attacks. That cap has been tripled to 21 hits.

And since that makes it far stronger, the duration is now stepped, 5 more seconds per level:

Before, level 10 lasted 37 seconds but dropped after 7 hits, which in a serious fight is about two seconds. Now it is 55 seconds and 21 hits: it holds far longer, but it is still a window, not armour.

Until now almost every soul bonus was flat. A level 1 Shadow's Soul gave exactly what a level 5 gave: the same +60 FLEE, the same +25 crit. Levelling the skill only extended the duration and cut the SP cost.

Every bonus now scales with the level, without exception. Level 5 is still strong, but you have to get there.

Two gaps were closed along the way: Golem's Soul gave no MDEF and Falcon's Soul gave no ATK, even though the server already declared both. They were advertised and unimplemented.

All four cost 1 soul sphere, last 60 to 300 seconds depending on level, and are mutually exclusive: you cannot carry two souls, nor give a soul to someone who already has one.

Souls exist to help a party. But they have a downside, and it is better learnt here than the hard way.

There is a skill called Soul Explosion, and it only works against someone carrying a soul. Against anyone else it fails.

• It tears off between 30% and 70% of the HP you have at that moment, depending on the skill level.
• It bypasses everything: it ignores your element, your flee and your defence cards. There is no way to reduce it.
• And on impact it rips the soul off you as well. You lose the buff and half your health.

So in a war, handing out souls is a real decision: you buff your side a lot and at the same time hand the enemy a button that only works on them.

By default, Soul Unity was a one-shot hand-out: casting it stuck the buff on whichever players happened to be in the area at that instant, up to a target cap. Anyone arriving late was left out, and keeping it up cost the caster nothing.

Here it is a toggle. Casting it switches it on and it never expires; casting it again switches it off. While it is on, the aura lives on the Soul Reaper and pulses every 3 seconds, sweeping whatever is around — so people who walk in are picked up and people who walk out are dropped, with no need to recast.

The SP is paid by the Soul Reaper, once per pulse and only if there is someone to heal: twenty people healed cost the same as one, and a pulse with nobody wounded is free. It is 44 to 56 SP depending on level.

A higher-level Soul Reaper takes the blessing away from a lower-level one and replaces it with theirs; at equal or lower level, whatever you already carry is left alone.

Switching it off is completely free: no SP, no soul spheres, none of the 4-second fixed cast, and no cooldown — which is three minutes at level 7. And while you carry it, a green heart above your head says so.

Renovatio used to be a targeted buff: you cast it on someone, it healed a percentage of their health every few seconds, and it ran out. It is now modelled on Soul Unity: a toggle with an area, with no duration, pulsing every 5 seconds for as long as you keep it on.

The first pulse activates the blessing and it is yours. You can stay close or walk away: if you leave you still get 2 more pulses, one every 5 seconds, and then it fades. While you stay inside the area the counter refills on every pulse, so it never runs out.

A higher-level Arch Bishop takes the blessing away from a lower-level one, exactly as in Soul Unity.

About the 19x19: an area centred on a cell is always odd-sized, so an exact 18x18 does not exist. The next odd size up is used instead.

Anyone carrying it shows a white heart above their head.

Both blessings come and go on their own — you pick them up by getting close and they fade a few seconds after you walk away — so there had to be a way to see who is carrying what without asking. They are drawn above the head, over the character, so they do not cover it.

The heart appears with the first pulse that reaches you and goes out at the exact moment the blessing ends, counting the bonus pulses you take with you when you walk away. While it lasts it holds steady: it does not blink or visibly restart, even though under the hood it is refreshed on every pulse.

They are artwork made for this server, not effects recycled from another skill. They are drawn in front of the character: the auras the client paints on the ground are hardwired to the game level system and no more of them can be made.

The in-game description for Espa said max level 5, cut off mid-sentence and never mentioned the damage at all. None of that was true, and more than one person stopped levelling it believing it was already maxed.

• It goes up to level 10.
• From 1 to 9 it spends 1 soul sphere. At level 10 it spends none.
• Magic damage: 500% base plus 250% per level — 750% at level 1, 3000% at level 10 — and the result also scales with your base level.
• 52 to 88 SP depending on level, a range of 9 cells, and it lets you use Eswhoo within the next 5 seconds.

Neither the damage nor the cost was touched: this is exactly what the skill already did. What was fixed is the text describing it.

• Estin does full damage to both small and medium targets, and applies a micro stop to non-boss monsters on hit.
• Estun can stun large targets as well as medium ones, and also applies a micro stop to non-boss monsters on hit.
• Leap (Taekwon Jump) was rebuilt as a ground-targeted cell skill, with range by level, and can now land behind obstacles as long as the destination cell is passable.
• Happy Break and Peaceful Break extend the resting and regeneration bonus to any player sitting near a Taekwon who has them active, instead of limiting it to the Taekwon.

Kaahi was adjusted so the SP cost depends on the healing actually applied rather than on a fixed value inconsistent with what the skill did.

The Mechanic's Axe Boomerang is one of the few skills whose damage depends on the weight of the weapon. It is not a change made by this server: it is how the skill has always been written, and almost nobody knows about it.

What matters is where that weight goes. It is not added to the final damage: it is added to the percentage, right next to what the skill level gives.

What each axe contributes

The Doom Slayer is the extreme case: 10 attack, and it still contributes +600% of percentage. The Booster Axe is the warning in the other direction: some axes have no weight defined, and on those the bonus is exactly zero. One glance is enough to tell: if the item page lists no weight for it, it adds nothing.

Other skills do look at weight — Spiral Pierce at the weapon's, Shield Boomerang at the shield's — but those add it to the attack. Axe Boomerang is one of the ones that add it to the percentage, which is why the gap between a light axe and a heavy one is not a few points, but multiplying the hit several times over.

The bug where some monsters performed a ghost-walk on taking multihit — appearing displaced from where they really were — has been fixed.

It is a particularly dangerous bug because it breaks the visual reading of a fight and ends up killing a lot of people. It shows up even on official servers.

The experience a monster drops is multiplied by a rate that comes from subtracting your base level from its own. It is not a penalty that grows in a straight line: there is a band where you actually get more.

It applies the same way to base and job experience, and always against your base level, never your job level.

The extra experience an MVP gives for being one is handled separately and carries no penalty: you get all of it. Item drops have their own table, similar to this one but not the same.

With experience share turned on, every member collects the monster's full experience. It is not a cake cut into slices: the server splits it among those eligible and then adds 100% per extra member, which is exactly what it takes for each of them to end up with the whole thing again.

And if several of you hit it, it pays off: every extra attacker adds another 25%, up to twelve.

What is yours alone is the level gap penalty, applied at the end and against your own level. The killer being on par with the monster does not protect the rest.

Without share turned on everyone keeps the experience of what they kill, and the level gap penalty still applies to them all the same.

Experience share can only stay on while the party fits inside a level window. It is measured between the lowest and the highest online member: it is the width of the whole party, not each member compared against the leader.

The old family exception is still there: parents and adopted baby skip the window as long as all three are online on the same map and both parents are level 70 or above.

The cards and gear that grant uninterruptible cast — so a hit does not cut your spell — charge for it with a slower cast: Phen, Bloody Butterfly, Orleans's Gown, All In One Ring, Home Cherry Blossom. That is their price, and it is fair that they have one.

Not any more. On those same maps — not one more, not one less — the part of your gear that slows casting stops being charged.

The map condition is the very same one the game uses to switch uninterruptible cast off, so the two rules cannot drift apart: where the gift stops counting, its price stops being charged.

The Rune Knight's Hundred Spear shows five numbers on screen, and that is where the most common misunderstanding about this skill comes from: it looks as if every hit carries the full percentage. It does not. The skill computes one single blow with the whole percentage and then cuts it into five to draw it.

What each level deals

It counts as a piercing skill alongside Pierce, Spiral Pierce and Madness Crusher: if you have Charging Pierce running, every use of any of the four adds one stack.

Ignition Break is not cast on an enemy: it is cast on you. The target you have selected only serves to aim the skill; what decides who gets hit is a 9×9 cell square centred on your character, and everything hostile inside takes the same percentage.

The distance to the target appears nowhere in the calculation. An enemy standing on top of you and one at the edge of the 9×9 take exactly the same blow.

Dragon Breath is the odd one out of the family: it is a physical attack, but it is not built from your attack. The skill manufactures an amount of damage out of your HP and SP, adds it to your attack, and the skill's own percentage is a flat 100%. With normal numbers that addition is so large that the weapon becomes almost irrelevant.

What each level contributes

The cast times in the table already include the half second of fixed cast every level carries. After casting there are 2 seconds of after-cast delay, but the skill has no cooldown of its own: you can chain it as soon as the delay ends. And at every level you must be riding the dragon.

An example with real numbers

A Rune Knight with 30,000 HP, 2,000 max SP, base level 175, Dragon Training at 5 and the skill at 10:

If you have reached Dragon Knight, an active Dragonic Aura adds 10% per level of the buff on top of the result, and merely having it learned changes the formula as well: it puts your POW inside the multiplier, adding POW ÷ 5 to the 90 + 10 × Dragon Training. Without that skill learned, P.ATK does not count for this blow either.

The time a skill takes to go off is really two separate times added together, and they are not reduced by the same things. Nearly every question about cast time comes from this: why someone with 150 DEX still takes just as long to cast Energy Coat, or why boots that promise half a second less make no difference at all.

What a −0.5s fixed cast reduction actually does

Energy Coat is the extreme case and the clearest one to learn from: all of its cast is fixed. Five seconds that will not drop with DEX, with INT or with Bragi no matter how much you stack. The only way to shorten them is a fixed cast reduction. Fire Bolt is the opposite: with high DEX the variable half evaporates and what is left on screen is almost entirely fixed cast.

On top of all that, 63 skills also ignore DEX and INT for their cast time —Mystical Amplification being the best known, and the four runes above are on the list too. On those, the time you see written is exactly the time you will be waiting.

There are 463 items on the server whose description asks for something along the lines of "Base DEX at least 120". The Temporal Boots are the best known of the list, and also the most common source of disappointment: someone checks their stat window, sees 137 DEX, puts the boots on and nothing happens.

The whole Temporal Boots family works the same way

All six also grant, requirement met or not, +300 HP and +30 SP, plus another step of HP, SP and their own stat for every 3 refine levels. That part you always get.

This is not a bug and it is not a decision of ours: it is how the original game works, and it makes sense. If gear counted, you could simply chain +DEX pieces to unlock requirements meant for characters who paid stat points for them.

In PvP, GvG, WoE and battlegrounds there are no pets, no mercenaries and no automation.

Trying to enable @autoplay or @helpme on those maps returns a warning in red. Turning them off does work from inside, in case you walked in with something running.

The goal is simple: when you face someone, let it be your gear and your play that decide it.

Where it applies, exactly:

PvP GvG WoE castles WoE: TE Battlegrounds

Mercenary scrolls, pet eggs and the incubator cannot be used inside a combat zone.

If you try, you get a warning and the item is not consumed. You lose nothing by trying.

In guild dungeons you can still use everything: pet, mercenary, autoplay and helpme.

That is where you go to farm, not to compete, and restricting them made no sense.

There are two editions of the war, each with its own castles:

• First edition: the four realms — Valkyrie Realms (Prontera), Baldur (Payon), Britoniah (Geffen) and Luina (Aldebaran).
• Second edition: Valfreyja (entered from Veins) and Nithafjoll (entered from Juno).

Every war session has its day, its time slot and its own list of castles: they do not all have to take part. The ones left out are closed for as long as it lasts, and if you are inside one of them when it starts, you are taken out.

Where to check the real schedule

At the WOE Information NPC in Prontera. It tells you whether the war is on right now, in which regions, what time it ends, when the next one starts and who holds each castle.

It is the only live source: it reads the very agenda that governs the war, so it cannot drift from it.

The agent's menu has a new entry, WoE castle grounds. It shows up on its own as soon as you have unlocked any of the six towns with castle grounds next door; with none of them, it does not appear at all.

You pick the grounds first and then which castle, and she leaves you on the outer map, on the very cell that castle's exit spits you out on. The agent never puts anyone inside a castle: she leaves you at the gate.

The fare follows what you will find inside, not the distance: Payon costs 100z and Veins 1200z because one takes novices and the other takes anyone. See the class cap of each grounds.

Getting to a castle grounds and not being able to leave without walking half a map made no sense, so there is an agent at every gate: thirty in total, five per grounds, standing three cells from the exact cell the trip drops you on and facing it.

They are ordinary agents and do everything a town one does — travel, healing, storage, the guild menu and the travel kit — with a single difference: they unlock nothing. Town and dungeon stamps are still earned by going to the places.

They also help if you walked in through the field portal: they stand at the gates, which is where everybody passes.

The castles are split into power brackets. Each grounds takes classes up to a cap, and anyone above it bounces off when crossing the gate.

Where each class falls

The bracket is not decided by a hand-written list, it is decided by the classification the server already makes. That is why the expanded classes land where they belong on their own:

Babies count as their class: a Baby Knight is second class, like any other Knight. Fourth classes only get into Veins.

How it is checked

On entering the map, not at the portal. You reach a castle through the field portal, through the agent's trip, through the guild's Emergency Call, through the Kafra inside or through an admin jump, and loading the map is the one door they all go through.

If your class does not fit, you get a chat notice and you are put back at the gate, outside. Nothing is lost and nothing is charged for trying.

Whoever is already inside when something changes stays until they load the map again; this is an entry check, not a continuous eviction.

The agent's menu has an Inventory section. There you state how many Red, Orange, Yellow and White Potions, how many Fly Wings and how many Butterfly Wings you want to carry at all times, from zero to a hundred of each.

From then on, before every teleport — towns, dungeons, recent places and castle grounds — she looks in your bag and buys what is missing. It is set per character: what a mage wants to carry is not what a novice wants.

If she could not fill the order — for money or for weight — she tells you exactly what is missing and lets you choose between travelling like that or calling the trip off. She does not decide for you.

It can be switched off without losing the numbers you set, and asking for zero of everything is the same as not having the service. While it is at zero, the agent does not touch your bag.

Any member can hand part of their automation time to the guild from the Guild → Donate Time menu at any Warp Agent. What is donated goes into a shared vault the master later draws from.

A member can end up taking more than they ever donated. It is not forbidden: their contribution simply goes negative, and the master is warned before confirming the gift.

The Guild Link stands at Prontera 151,283 and only opens for the Guild Master. Its Give automation time option hands minutes from the guild vault to one member.

• The list shows only members who are online right now. There is no roster of absentees.
• The minutes land on the recipient's account: every character and bot of theirs benefits, not just the one you picked. They also get a chat notice.
• Minimum 1 minute per gift. No fixed maximum — the guild's balance and what the recipient can absorb are the limits.

That has a consequence worth understanding before you arrange anything: the headroom grows while that person is out botting and shrinks while they rest, because time comes back on its own, continuously. If someone asks you for 30 minutes and you take a while to reach the NPC, only 20 may fit by then.

With the current settings the base allowance is 30 minutes per account and a full recharge takes around 12 hours of rest. Recovering means resting: while the account is automating, the recharge is paused.

All the official instance content this server had available was reviewed and enabled. None of them requires a minimum number of players in the party any more (you can go in alone, you just need a party created) and none imposes a maximum level. Each one's minimum level is kept: that is part of its difficulty.

The level colour marks the difficulty band: under 80 80-99 100-129 130-149 150+ no restriction

There are other official instances in the game code that depend on narrative quest lines this server does not implement yet (Bangungot Hospital or Hazy Forest, for instance); they were not enabled so as not to leave them with broken dialogue. If one interests you in particular, say so and we'll look into it.

The Geffen Magic Tournament is live: a daily instance designed for a single player (you must be in a party, but of exactly one member). You travel to the past to take part in a magic tournament against a run of rivals (Arhi, Dio Anemos, Ordre, Blut Hase, Kuro Akuma, Ifodes, Licheniyes, Odoric, Ju and others) up to the champion, Fenrir (2,500,000 HP).

The sixteen tournament rivals sit at 12.5% of official HP here (Fenrir has 2,500,000 instead of 20,000,000), but they still hand out the full experience. The rest of the instance — the two Alphonse of the secret fight and the thugs from the warm-up events — keeps its official values.

Official rAthena content, reviewed and implemented on this server.

This is the official quest that unlocks travel to Midgard Expedition Camp (needed, for instance, to enter the Geffen Magic Tournament). It is long but linear.

1. Recruiter for the Brave — /navi prt_cas 207,165. Pick "Yes, I am interested."
2. Promotional Staff — /navi aldebaran 127,138. Asks for 300 Jellopy (dropped by Poring, Drops, Lunatic and nearly any early-field mob; not sold by any NPC). Hand them over on a second visit.
3. Promotional Staff — /navi geffen 90,67. Asks for 1 Emerald (drops from Mantis and Roda Frog) and then 1 Ruby (drops from Zombie Master). Neither is sold in an NPC shop.
4. Promotional Staff — /navi izlude 102,171. At base level 70 or above you go straight through; below that, come back at 70.
5. Recruiter for the Brave (again) — /navi prt_cas 207,165. Dialogue only. Gives experience and sends you to Lighthalzen.
6. Guide (optional) — /navi lighthalzen 220,292. Explains how to get into the Rekenber building.
7. Sikaiz — /navi lhz_in01 132,259 (2nd floor). Talk to him three times: dialogue, "Sure." and "The three kingdoms…".
8. Alliance Manager — /navi prt_cas 19,98. Dialogue only.
9. Back to Sikaiz — /navi lhz_in01 132,259, two more visits.
10. Alliance Manager (a different one) — /navi ra_temple 119,113. Dialogue only.
11. Back to Sikaiz once more. Here he asks you to type your own character name in the text box. Get it wrong and you can just talk to him again.
12. Officer A or Officer B — /navi lhz_in01 32,22 or /navi lhz_in01 30,24. Talk twice.
13. Rift Guard — /navi moc_fild20 349,179. Pick "Yes, sure."
14. Munkenro — /navi moc_fild22b 230,197. First visit: dialogue. Second: "Ready!!" for the final test.
15. Final test: 80 "Allied Soldier" spawn across the map. You have 15 minutes and need to defeat at least 40. If time runs out, talk to Munkenro again and retry with no penalty.
16. Back to Munkenro to confirm. Quest complete.

Official rAthena content (Episode 13.1), reviewed line by line against this server's actual script.

The Ring of the Ancient Wise King (id 2782) is the New World translator. The Manuk and the Laphine of Splendide do not speak your language: without the ring every single one of them answers in growls and chirps, and there is no way to buy, sell or advance a single quest in either city.

The reason is practical: the ring takes one of your two accessory slots, and in the original game you had to choose between talking to the city and wearing your combat accessory. Here you do not have to choose.

Server change of 23 August 2026. The quest, the dialogue and the rewards are the official episode 13.2 ones; the only thing changed is that the ring now counts while it is in your bag.

Every slotted accessory on the server was reviewed, and over 500 of them (Clip, Belt, Necklace, Nile Rose and many others) turned out to have no job assigned in the database, which made them impossible to equip for any character even if you got hold of one.

Fixed: they are usable by every class now, as they should be.

There are still hundreds of documented job-specific accessories (Blacksmith, Hunter, Alchemist, Priest…) spread across bosses and late content. Check your inventory: you may already have one waiting.

The four pieces of the Ur set and the four of the Peuz set do not come from the same place: two drop from monsters and the other two are bought with Mora Coins. Anyone hunting for all four will never find the shoes or the garment, because nothing drops them.

The two pieces that drop

These are the server's rates, with the equipment multiplier already applied: gear here drops ten times as often as in the original game.

The two pieces you buy: shoes and garment

Mora Coins come from three places:

• The Mora daily quests, which is the normal route: 1 to 5 coins each, and rather more from some of the longer ones.
• Leria, at the Eden Market: 1,000,000 zeny each, but she only restocks one per day for the whole server. Not a plan you can lean on.
• Dark Merchant K, in Malangdo (236, 179): 10 C Grade Coins per Mora Coin.

Before you go after them

What the full set gives

Short version: the armor and the accessory are hunted; the shoes and the garment are bought in Mora for 10 Mora Coins each. And in the panel's search box you have to type the apostrophe.

An additional Eden Teleport Officer was added in Prontera, and the return coordinates from Eden were adjusted for Prontera and Payon.

The Grave Warden is a set of this server's own making: level 100, three pieces. It is not sold in any shop. Each piece is held by a different keeper, and all three live inside the dungeon whose material they are going to ask you for.

The three keepers serve any level: you can buy the pieces before 100 and store them. What you cannot do is equip them until you get there. Set added on 25 August 2026.

The Seamstress in Prontera (164, 169) had had a broken option forever: "Clothes from my past" worked for no class at all. It wasn't that it covered only some — it worked for nobody.

You can talk to her in Prontera or type @disguise from any map.

It did not work this way before: changing colour with the disguise on overwrote your real colour by accident, with no way to get it back.

Novices cannot use disguises. Not Novice, not High Novice, not Baby Novice. You need a chosen job.

The Super Novice can: it is a complete class.

In PvP, GvG, WoE and battlegrounds everyone fights with their own face. Seamstress disguises are not visible in there.

Your equipment costumes are: you earned those.

The disguise is not lost: on leaving the zone it comes back on its own, with whatever colour you gave it.

The client uses a 1999 graphics technology that on Windows 10 and 11 no longer knows how to change the resolution. That is why, on a big monitor, the game drew itself at its own size in the top-left corner and left the rest black.

The client now ships with dgVoodoo already configured, translating that old technology into Direct3D 11 and stretching the picture to the whole screen while keeping the aspect ratio. No distortion, and nothing for you to configure.

On a 4K monitor the game plays better at 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 than at native 4K: the game menus are fixed-size and at 4K they end up tiny.

dgVoodoo takes care of scaling the picture up. You gain screen without losing legibility.

The setup tool moves to a far more modern version, and with it goes the trap that generated the most tickets: the DirectX 9 option.

Our client has no DirectX 9 inside, so picking it made the game close on launch without any error at all. That option no longer even appears, and there is no resolution cap in the list any more.

Buttons removed for leading nowhere or being redundant:

Tipbox Cash Shop Attendance Adventurer's Agency Reputation Status

And on the minimap side, the Cash Shop and the roulette go too.

The map name banner that appeared every time you entered a zone is also gone.

The login screen has new artwork, and the main menu has a new musical theme.

Client changes are published through the updater, with no full reinstall. That is how, for example, all the companion AI changes reached players.

The updater's internal operation was also hardened to avoid hardlink errors, wrong baselines and empty diffs when publishing new patches.

Until now, an outage could sit there until somebody noticed. You could find the game not letting you in with nobody watching.

That's over. The server now brings itself back up within seconds, with nobody having to be at the keyboard. And if the failure is one of the rare ones, a second system is watching and steps in to fix it.

We won't promise this never goes down, because that would be a lie: every server in the world goes down sometimes. What we do promise is that when it happens it lasts as little as possible.

Every minute it is verified that the game actually responds, not just that the process is running. Those are two different things: a server can look up and still let nobody in.

That case, the maddening one because everything looks fine, is now detected too.

When intervention is needed, it always starts with the least disruptive option: if recovering one part is enough, the rest is left alone.

Only if that doesn't work does it escalate. The idea is that a failure costs you as little as possible.

Every day a full backup of the database is taken, and it is stored off the game machine. If the server burned down entirely, your characters, your inventory and your storage would still exist somewhere else.

There is also a second, lighter daily copy, to further reduce what could be lost in the worst case.

The server restarts once a day in the small hours to stay nimble. That restart does not run if the day's backup has not completed correctly: if something failed with the backup, the restart cancels itself and we wait.

We would rather have a slightly heavier server than a restart with no net underneath.

Any failure raises an immediate alert to the team, with everything needed to understand it. Whatever the hour.

And when a problem fixes itself, the alert still arrives: an automatic fix covers the symptom, but we still go and look at the cause.

Evolving swaps your pet for a different creature: a different egg, a different look and different stats. It is not an upgrade of the one you have, it is a replacement.

Three things are needed at once, and the server checks them in this order:

Of the 47 evolutions, 18 were switched off in the original emulator: the recipe was written but the target creature did not exist. Those 18 creatures were created, copying the matching monster's characteristics and stripping every MVP value.

Ordered the way the game orders them: by creature number. The amounts are the official ones, none of them have been softened.

Several ask for ten cards of the monster itself, so they are long-term goals rather than an afternoon's work.

Creatures that did not exist in the emulator are shown with the image of the monster whose look they copy, which is literally the one they wear in game.

A pet's stats do not depend on your level. They come from its own species, at the natural level that monster has in the field, plus two flat bonuses:

They get attacked now. The monster your pet hits fights back against the pet, not against you. And buffs work: Blessing or Increase AGI cast on it actually apply.

But it cannot die. Its health never drops below 1. On reaching it the pet withdraws: for 2 minutes it does not attack, does not cast and cannot be touched. It comes back at full health when the time is up, or earlier if somebody heals it.

Since pets have no health bar in the client, the server shows their health percentage next to their name. Hover over them.

The numbers are the final ones: the +50% attack and the health curve are already applied. The +50% raises both attacks, physical and magic. Ordered the way the game orders them, by creature number.

On top of this own skill, every pet also uses its species' skills — the ones the wild monster has — except the banned ones: hiding, teleporting, summoning slaves and switching combat mode.

The four traps are Hunter skills, second job, and they are the only exception to the "first job skills only" rule. The two strong ones have a minimum wait between uses, shown next to their name.