A full day's work landed at once today, and this is not a maintenance patch: it changes how you travel, how you fight as a group and what a guild can share. Here is the summary; the links at the end carry the detail.

The warp agent reaches the castle grounds

She now takes you to the WoE castle grounds: you pick the grounds and the castle and she leaves you outside, at the gate, never inside. The option shows up as soon as you have unlocked one of the six towns with grounds next door — Prontera, Payon, Geffen, Aldebaran, Juno and Veins — and there is an agent at every castle gate, thirty in all, so you can get back without walking half the map.

The War of Emperium schedule is no longer written inside the server: it is adjusted without stopping anything, and the Prontera NPC is always the reliable source.

The Geffen Magic Tournament opens

Until today the access NPCs did not exist on the server. They do now: Emmitt White at dali 98,141 and the Dimensional Device at dali 100,147. With them come 441 NPCs: the whole instance, its shops, the sixteen rivals up to Fenrir, the secret Alphonse fight and the warm-up events around the streets of Geffen. You need base level 90 and to be leader of a one-member party, with one entry per calendar day.

Guilds share automation time

The Guild Link at Prontera 151,283 lets the master hand automation minutes to a member. They come out of the shared vault the members fill by donating at any warp agent, and that vault can never go below zero. The minutes land on the recipient's account, so every character and bot of theirs benefits.

Two support skills, rebuilt

Both blessings are now visible: a hollow green heart above your head if Soul Unity reaches you, a solid white one if Renovatio does. The white one is exactly the fill of the green one, so anyone carrying both sees one complete heart. It appears with the first pulse and goes out just as the blessing ends — and if you walk away, the blessing keeps working for a couple more pulses.

Automation learns nine new families

@autoplay and @helpme share the same engine, so this applies to both. The AI now picks its attacks by the damage that will actually land and stops wasting a huge attack on an enemy that dies to a puff; when weighing an area attack it also counts enemies not yet inside it, because they may close in while the spell is being cast.

And it can use nine families it did not know yesterday: Rune Knight, Guillotine Cross, Shadow Cross, Abyss Chaser, Inquisitor, Shinkiro/Shiranui, Shadow Chaser, the three Lord Knight self-buffs and the whole bard and dancer song line — 786 skills integrated in the panel. Bowling Bash is also used far more often, and without a spear it no longer demands a crowd.

Smaller notes: the Espa description was lying — it goes up to 10, not 5, and at level 10 it spends no soul sphere — and it is now fixed. The tournament's sixteen rivals sit at 12.5% of official HP and still hand out full experience, though that is not from today: what is new is being able to see it. Four outdated facts in the tournament entry have been corrected, along with the name "Onward to the Other World" and some panel wording.

Until today, an alchemist had one homunculus and only one. Forever. If you wanted a different one, the only route was to let the one you had starve to death — and that is not a gameplay decision, it is a punishment.

The Homunculus Daycare opens in five cities. Leave the one you are carrying, breed another, and swap them whenever you feel like it. The ones at the Daycare do not get hungry and do not lose intimacy: leave one for a month and you will find it exactly as you left it.

You get as many places as your player level, and they belong to the whole account: what one of your alchemists leaves, another can collect. Leaving one costs 3,500z; taking it out is free. And if your player level drops, none of them is taken from you — you simply cannot add more until you are back over the line.

The caretaker only handles creatures up to ten levels above your own, with one exception that matters: what you bred yourself is yours at any level, even after a rebirth.

She is in Prontera 219,184 · Aldebaran 182,119 · Alberta 90,82 · Lighthalzen 155,130 · Juno 186,203. The same shelf in all five. Trading homunculi between players is coming in a second instalment.

Leaving a shop up with @autotrade and closing the game had not been working properly for a while, and it is worth spelling out exactly what was happening. The stall did stay on the map, but the shop sign was never drawn: the vendor looked like any other character standing there, nobody could click it, and so it sold nothing. It affected every stall alike, both the ones you had just left and the ones the server restored on startup.

The reason fitted on one line. The message that tells the game "hang a shop sign on this unit" was aimed at an identifier that matched nobody on the map, so the game discarded it silently — no error, no complaint. It now carries the right identifier, and with it the sign, the item list and buying all come back.

The other half of the promise is fixed along with it. When you type @autotrade your account is freed on the spot: until now you had to wait a few seconds and try again, because the first attempt answered that it still recognised your previous session. That detour also had a worse, quieter effect — the character that was selling stopped counting as busy, which would have let you delete it from the panel with the shop still up — and that is closed too.

None of this ever touched the money: every sale saves the zeny, the cart and the inventory the instant it happens. What was missing were the sales.

Takes effect with the next server restart.

Until now, a homunculus or a character on @autoplay would stand inside a Storm Gust until it killed them. Not any more: while the spell is being cast, your units know where it will land, how wide it will be and how many milliseconds are left, and work out whether there is time to clear the circle before it arrives. If there is, they move; if there is not, they move anyway, because leaving late is fewer hits than not leaving.

The underlying change is how a damage zone is understood. It used to be a monster to run away from, and you run away from a point as far as you can: overshooting, coming back, overshooting again. Now it is forbidden ground: you leave by the shortest way and those cells stop being a valid destination while the danger is there. Nor do they flee from the caster any more — what bites is the zone, not the monster, so if the spell lands away from it your unit can walk right up to it as usual.

It runs for all five alike: your character under @autoplay, the @helpme companion, the mercenary, the homunculus and the pet. And it does not depend on your settings: dodging is not fighting, so it works with attacks switched off, in defensive mode and while resting.

On top of that, an automated character following its leader now keeps close under its own steam instead of wandering off and being teleported back. And that rescue warp stops firing in the two moments where it did more harm than good: with the leader dead, and with an MVP beside them.

If you see a companion hold still at the edge of an area instead of walking in after its target, it is not stuck: it is waiting for the spell to land. The moment it does, it goes back to the fight on its own.

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. You hire it, you summon it, it works.

There are three companies, ten grades and thirty distinct mercenaries, and here they work differently: the scroll is not consumed, the contract lasts as long as your session does, and loyalty never drops — it can die as often as it needs to.

Underneath they run the same rewritten AI as the homunculus and the pet, and almost everything they do can be changed with @merai.

If you have never had one, grade 1 is free: walk into whichever guild is nearest, ask for it and try. And if yours does something you don't like, don't dismiss it — type @merai, almost everything is adjustable.

Some work, done right, you never notice. This is that kind. We hardened what happens underneath when something goes wrong: the server coming back on its own, us finding out instantly, and your progress still being there whatever happens.

A full daily backup stored off the game machine, a check every minute that the game is genuinely playable, and a daily restart that cancels itself if that day's backup failed.

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, that we hear about it immediately, and that your progress is safe.

If you have a 2K, QHD or 4K monitor and the game sat tiny in one corner, that's over. This update brings the fix that had been missing for years: the client stretches the picture to the whole screen while keeping the aspect ratio, with nothing for you to configure.

It also ships a new setup tool — without the DirectX 9 option, the trap that generated the most tickets — an interface with no dead buttons, new artwork and new music.

In PvP, GvG, WoE and battlegrounds you fight with what you are wearing and what you know how to do. From now on, no pets, no mercenaries, no automation.

Nothing is lost and nothing is consumed: the pet returns to its egg, the mercenary withdraws, and if you try to use a scroll or an egg in there you get a warning and the item stays in your inventory.

Guild dungeons are left out of the restriction: that is where you go to farm, not to compete.

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

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

And it gained a few things along the way: it now works out your class by itself, each disguise remembers its own colour, and the colour you were wearing no longer gets lost.

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

If a Kobold Archer has ever shot you from a corner and your character walked forward instead of attacking when you answered, you were not imagining it. Monsters measured their range one way and your character another, and on the diagonals the gap was enormous. Not any more.

No monster gains range: they only lose the range they should never have had. In a straight line nothing changes, and melee monsters behave exactly as they did yesterday.

The same thing happened with their area attacks, which blasted a square. They are circles now.

It is a server setting, reversible with a single configuration value. If you notice a monster behaving oddly — closing in more than it should, or standing still without attacking — tell us the monster's name and the map.