Shotbow

Your favorite Slaughter developer is back with another major update!

Changelog

Additions

• All Items have been given fancy new descriptions. Buy one and look at it to see what it does in more detail.
• Added new "Passive" item type. These sit inside your inventory and give you special abilities just by having them.
• Added Highscore Leaderboards. Compete for over 50 different positions in the leaderboard, from Darkness on Easy to Thermal Pointe on Hard!
• Added vanilla sweep attack for swords.
• Doors now have a preview for what items await inside.
• New Consumable: Grenades
• New Consumable: Molotovs
• New Consumable: Forbidden Knowledge
• New Equipment: Elixir of Turbulence
• New Equipment: Wormhole Generator
• New Equipment: Void Tether
• New Passive: Aspect of Cinder
• New Passive: Crystalline Spikes
• New Passive: Blood Money
• New Passive: Obsidian Shard
• New Weapon: Blunderbuss
• New Weapon: Skull Cracker
• Full Map Rebuild: Garden
• Full Map Rebuild: Mines
• Major Map Update: Mystical
• Major Map Update: Burrows

Changes

• Joining a game late will give you some gold and armor to give you a headstart.
• XP and Score are no longer linked. While this was a cool idea, it pretty much became impossible to balance. This may be looked at again in the future.
• XP now scales with Difficulty. Playing on Hard is actually rewarding now!
• Gave the Main Menu a fresh new coat of paint.
• Sidebar now displays score, alongside K/D when the game ends.
• Adjusted health and damage of most enemies.
• Armor is now sold as an entire set. Gone are the days where armor accounts for 50% of the item shops.
• Armor and a few other items now grant a flat damage reduction as opposed to the vanilla armor calculation.
• Buying certain items reduces the cost of subsequent upgrades. For example, buying Leather Armor for 10 gold will reduce the cost of Iron Armor from 40 gold to 30.
• Adjusted the price of most items.
• Drastically reduced cooldowns of most items.
• Area of Effect and Ranged Attacks will now give gold directly again.
• Area of Effect attacks now deal knockback.
• Consumables can now be dropped and picked up.
• Good Point can now chain to more enemies.
• Plasmic Shield now grants invincibility based on hit count instead of time.
• Large Hammer now deals more damage but has a small cooldown.
• Weak Restorative Draught renamed to Restorative Draught, changing both potency and duration.
• Fruit of Fortitude now gives bonus armor instead of potion effects.
• Sweet Nectar and Fruit of Fortitude can now be consumed instantly.

Bug Fixes

• Players now regenerate health regardless of hunger.
• Player inventory preferences are now remembered on logout.
• Rejoining a previous game will now restore your progress.
• Notched Bow can now shoot target blocks.
• Temporary Removal: Moria
• Temporary Removal: Isolation
• Both Moria and Isolation were in the process of being rebuilt and sadly were not finished in time for this update. These maps will be making a swift return in an upcoming patch, along with new maps and more rebuilds.

Added the Final Feature...

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Moving Day - COMPLETE

We are still working through little bits and bobs, but we are currently running on our new host

Previous Announcement:


Greetings one and all!

Recently we have had some extended stability issues that prompted us to re-evaluate our hosting situation, and we have spent the last week standing up Shotbow on new infrastructure. Tomorrow we will perform the cutover after some brief (hours not days) downtime so we can capture an up to date snapshot of our database. The cutover will start around 9am Mountain Time Saturday Aug 7th (tomorrow), we anticipate being done by 1pm but it might take longer if issues arise.



During the move, we plan to have a whitelisted vanilla survival server running for those who want to join in the fun. Once we have cut over, there should be little to no noticeable difference (other than increased stability, hopefully). There might be some initial problems as we start using the new hardware, but we'll be on hand to tackle issues that come up.

Closing Words

As part of this move, I made the decision to garage Miner Problems and Warbands. As always we'll re-asses garaged status over time and consider bringing them back around eventually. If you haven't heard, that's exactly what is being done with Wasted: Control, keep an ear out for playtest announcements from RobertTheGoat, or check out the Wasted discord to keep in the loop.

Another side effect of this move is that the planned Slaughter update was released early Expect a thread providing the details soon!

I'm seriously excited about this move. The servers we are moving to have ~30% faster liquid-cooled processors which should translate into some awesome capabilities (Maybe another MineZ view distance increase?), and we had the benefit of building this stack out with our current architecture in mind from the beginning so we've made a few behind the scenes upgrades that should manifest in fun experiences soon.

As always, thank you for flying Shotbow

- lazer

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Heya Shotbow! My name is ShayminPlays and I'll be your host for the August 2021 edition of Dentril's New Moon! This was an exciting month in terms of network updates, with many of our gamemodes receiving quality of life updates that you can catch up on in this issue.

Furthermore, we are on the cusp of transferring to a brand new server host, meaning you can expect a more stable performance and connection to the server in the coming weeks. We are excited to share updates about this move in the near future, but for now let's take a look at what's been happening in the past month!

Updates

Annihilation Updates
Following the successful release of the Gentle Iridium update (which you can read about here), we are thrilled to announce that all Annihilation EU player stats have been merged with the US ones! This means that the leaderboards and stats from the long-retired EU server have been combined with the current server, so if you played on the EU server way back in the day your grinding and efforts are no longer lost!

Thanks to Galap, Mosh, Hilly, and the rest of the Anni Team, we are proud to finally fulfill the promise that we made many years ago. You can read about the merge here, and find out your current standing by typing the command /stats show in-game! Thank you to all of our loyal EU and international players alike, and we wish you the best of luck in your climb to the very top of the leaderboards!

MineZ Updates
We started off MineZ with a "bang" this month, with update 4.2.0 ushering in the annual Dawn of the Second Sun! This event saw the reintroduction of fireworks to celebrate the triumph of the Elemental Gods, which also served as the currency in a new NPC-trading system we trialled at the start of the month. This update also introduced the start of a huge food overhaul which changed some values and included a brand new feature: cooking! In the following week, we also released patches 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 to make some bugfixes, buffs, nerfs, and QoL changes.

With the more recent update 4.3.0 we've added salads, a new type of food item found exclusively in the cave town of Ephirion. These provide unique benefits depending on the ingredients you use to craft them, and can prove useful for all playstyles, so I urge you to try them all! The infamous Ghost Ship has also moved and taken a new form. Built by some of our newest Mini Builders, Syphia and 111kittycat111, the Ghost Ship will be the first of many new rebuilds to come. If you'd like to take part in the MineZ build effort, you can apply to become a MineZ Builder by filling in this form.

All of the aforementioned updates can be found in the MineZ 2021 Changelog. The MineZ Team is hard at work paving the way for what's to come, and we hope that you are just as excited as we are for the future of MineZ!

SMASH Updates
SMASH saw a small update at the start of the month which featured changes primarily in celebration of Independence Day. In this update we added a community-submitted map called Steampunk, as well as some festive updates to pre-existing maps for the 4th of July and the summer season. More will be on the way soon, so make sure to keep your eyes peeled!

GG Updates
With the help of another Jr. Developer working on GG, ArsMagia, we have been able to deliver a new system for TeamPvP where you can join one of two teams and battle until one is fully eliminated! GG has also introduced an NPC which shows the top kill count holder since the last reboot, as well as a bunch of other features to make our PvP practice gamemode more than just that! You can read about these changes here, and participate in future events by utilizing our new TeamPvP Public Request feature. Now warm up those clicking fingers and get practicing!

Slaughter Updates
Pyachi2002 and his army of new Mini Builders have been hard at work modernizing our favourite cooperative XP-grinding gamemode, with two complete map rebuilds and a whole host of features to look forward to in the upcoming Slaughter 1.3 update. A few new items are coming to Slaughter in this update, the most notable being the new passive items, which have effects that remain active so long as you have the item in your inventory!

A number of public playtests for this update have been hosted over the course of the month, and there's more to come! In order to be notified of future playtests of this update, you can type the command !notifyme slaughter in the Slaughter channel of our Official Shotbow Discord. Stay tuned for more Slaughter notifications, as the next update is just on the horizon!

Summer Event
A little event for you!

We will be holding an XP hunt in the Annihilation and SMASH lobbies until August 14.
We have hidden some keywords in each lobby. Sort through the hidden characters to make up the XP code.
You can create one XP code for each lobby.
Look for them while you're waiting for your game!

Statistics
Network in General
Staff updates:

• ru555e11 joined the team as a Jr. Developer
• ShadowLAX was promoted to Full Admin and MineZ Lead
• Pyachi2002 was promoted to Full Admin and Slaughter Lead
• trevorix, 111kittycat111, Syphia, Mohawk2, and ProfessorPhill joined the Mini Builder team
• Xhat has rejoined the team as a MineZ Mini Admin

Other statistics:

• A total of 67,158,656 XP was earned by players this month
• There were 1,594 players banned in the last month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 262 on July 24th
• 1,584 in-game reports were handled in the last month
• 129 ban appeals were resolved in the last month

Closing Words
We're really excited about the future and have high hopes for what's to come! Things can only get better from here as we transfer to our new host, and each and every one of us is trying our hardest to deliver the best player experience for all of our most beloved gamemodes. After all, it is our love for this network and its gamemodes that unifies all of us, and brings us together in spite of the pandemic and all that's going on in the world. That's why I want to personally thank all of you for staying strong in these trying times, because as cheesy as it sounds, you're helping to save the world by playing Shotbow! This has been the August 2021 edition of Dentril's New Moon, my name is ShayminPlays, and from the bottom of our hearts:

Thanks for flying Shotbow!