Spring Festival Returns, New Dragon Colors

The Spring Festival of Skogronn is now live! The patch also includes new colors for dragon breeding, a new community event area, and a few bug fixes.

Spring Festival

Spring has returned to Patreayl again and with it the spring festival of Skogronn. For some it is a time of celebration, rebirth, and renewal...for others a time of mourning.

With the warmer weather and budding trees, two familiar foes have also made their return: the Skogtrolls, or forest sprites, who can be spotted near the tree shrines maintained in their honor, and the ravens, who are known to steal offerings from the shrines on their migration through Patreayl.

During the early days of spring, the Patreaylians of old used to leave offerings for the Skogtrolls at the base of trees in hopes of ample growth during the season. While many don't keep the old ways alive, one villager believes the Skogtrolls are benevolent spirits vital to the recovery of Patreayl's natural resources. Yet others see the sprites as murderous, malevolent spirits. Whichever side you choose to believe, both could use your help this spring season.

We’re bringing back last year’s questline with a few minor tweaks and one additional quest. Last year’s shrine mount reward is also back, along with a new flower transmog helm and shoulders set and a new spring cape.

Talk to the Spring Festival NPC outside the gates of Highsteppe to pick up the first quest in the storyline.

Dragon Colors

With this patch we will also be adding 3 new colors to the dragon breeding pool: Hot Pink, Yellow, and Taupe. This is something that has been requested by the community, and we are happy to oblige. With the addition of these 3 new colors, there are now a total of 13 colors to achieve with your dragons—which means there are more than 2,000 different color combinations possible to breed into your dragons.

Examples of dragons bred with the new colors

Along with the additional colors, we also added some new data to your dragon's tool tip. From this patch forward, all new dragons bred will have the name of the breeder saved inside the tool tip data that pops up when hovering over the item. We think this will allow for some highly sought after dragons with specific breed, color, size, and now also breeder. Additionally, all new players who are gifted a dragon from a veteran when first entering the game will always be able to remember the name of that awesome community member for all time!

We look forward to seeing the new color combinations! Be sure to share your newest side kick with us on the community forums.

Community Event Area

Something that the Development team has talked a lot about recently after our last in game Developer event is a place for the community to host events that has better overall performance for everyone involved. To that end, with this patch we are introducing the start of such an area, which we have named "Edge of Nowhere." It is a 1 SQ KM, sparsely decorated area with no monsters or other game play elements to keep performance as high as possible.

You can enter the zone through a door inside the Highsteppe Tavern next to the Long-Term Mission vendor. We are hoping that this will be a good area for the larger community events that have been taking place in the overworld and have been experiencing some problems from the amount of players, monsters, environment, etc. While this area will not work for all events, we hope that this can make the next large community gathering run smoother, and the Development team will be using this zone in our future meet-ups and Dev World boss events! One last note, we are not planning on moving the World Bosses to this area, but we do think doing some limited time World Boss events here where we can get a very large group of players together would be fun.

Bug Fixes

With this patch we have also been working on fixing bugs, as well as working on the performance of the game as a whole. We will have a list of all the bug fixes inside the patch notes on the day of the patch. Most of the fixes will not be anything you can readily notice, but should clear up some crashes and de-syncs that have been occurring lately, along with increased reliability with the voice chat system in game.

We appreciate the support and patience of the community while we work through some of the more painful bugs, and appreciate the bug reports the community has been sending in through the in game bug reporting tool.