The biggest update yet — touching every layer of the stack from the Python rules engine to the database to the frontend UI.
Stock Market & the ARCI
The ARCI (Ascension or Redemption Composite Index) is now live. Eight stocks track real player activity across game sectors — when smiths are busy at the forge, Ironforge Guild stock rises. When trade dries up, Merchant's General Co. falls.
- 8 sector stocks — IFG (Smithing), SVC (Enchanting), GLC (Alchemy), THW (Tailoring), HHC (Cooking/Inns), MGC (General Trade), DKM (Mining), CRN (Banking)
- Hourly price ticks driven by actual player activity vs. 7-day rolling average, plus small random drift
- Buy and sell shares — unlock stock trading with 25 Donor Tokens
- Public ticker board and index history (no auth required to watch the market)
- World news feed — events that affect stock prices
Quest System
NPCs now offer quests. Accept them, track objectives, and turn them in for rewards.
- Quest log with filtering by status (active, completed, failed)
- NPC-bound quests — talk to the right NPC to discover available quests
- Accept / complete flow with server-validated rewards (gold, XP, items)
- Tutorial quest seeded for new players
- Quest UI tab in the game client
Crafting Overhaul
Crafting got a full security and stability pass after real-world testing exposed issues with the original implementation.
- Security hardening — RLS tightened on character items, RPC functions validate ownership
- Gold cost for learning recipes — no more free recipe acquisition via direct RPC calls
- Inventory consolidation —
character_itemsandplayer_inventorymerged into a single table to fix items disappearing between crafting and gameplay - Stack handling rewritten — removed problematic unique index, craft output now correctly finds existing stacks or creates new rows
- Crafting panel added to the game UI with recipe browser and craft button
World Expansion: Factions & New Zones
The world has been restructured around two factions and a contested frontier.
- Hearthbound — civilization, order, law. The safe zones, towns, and established trade routes
- Unbound — wilderness, freedom, danger. Frontier camps, monster territory, untamed land
- Tyranthos — contested zone where faction lines blur and PvP tension builds
- Faction NPCs seeded across the expanded world map
Race Reskin
The nine SRD races have been consolidated into four original a20n races — Human, Kethari, Vashek, and Gnokken. Same mechanical bones (ability bonuses, traits, darkvision), but fully reskinned to fit a20n's world and lore. Character creation updated to match.
Class & Character Updates
- Class definitions refined — cleaner stat blocks, updated starting equipment
- Character creation flow improved with better defaults
- Ability score helpers added to the engine
- Game state expanded with new fields for quest and crafting tracking
Game Director Tables
New infrastructure for the AI Game Director — an audit log and deferred proposal system so the Director can analyze game health and propose balance changes that require approval before execution.
Under the Hood
- Activity logging — fire-and-forget economy event tracking that feeds stock price calculations
- Feature unlock system — token-gated access to premium features (business license, stock trading, auction creation)
- Admin endpoints expanded — cache invalidation, character refresh, economy monitoring
- Session manager heavily expanded (~900 lines of new game logic)
- 14 new database migrations covering everything above
- Respawn queue service for managing player death and respawn flow