Update 2.6: Firemaking

Firemaking is out. It is the nineteenth skill you can push to ninety-nine, and it is the one that finally gives Woodcutting somewhere to go. The sneak peek showed the shape of it. Here is the whole thing, and the leaderboard patch that followed two days behind it.

Firemaking

You burn a log for experience and it leaves its own ash behind. The ladder matches Woodcutting exactly, so any log you can chop you can burn: oak at level one, willow at fifteen, maple at thirty, yew at forty-five, magic at sixty, elder at eighty. Burning a log pays one and a half times the experience cutting it gave, which makes this the largest use Woodcutting has ever had. Every tier gets its own animated bonfire, each one the color of its wood.

The character learned a new motion to go with it, hauling the log over and feeding it to the fire, and the log in his hands is painted for whichever wood he is burning. All seven pieces of jewelry were redrawn onto the new pose too. Here is the same animation in all six woods.

Ash feeds the farm

The ash is the point. The low three, oak and willow and maple, work up into Supercompost. The hot three, yew and magic and elder, make Ultracompost. The richer the ash the less of it you need, six units to a bucket down to four, down to two. Both are mixed at the Compost Bin and pay Farming experience for the work.

Supercompost cuts disease to a fifth, adds three harvest lives, and rolls a one in ten chance of an extra item every time a patch pays out. Ultracompost cuts disease to a tenth, adds four lives, and doubles that bonus roll to one in five. Every patch row now has a tier picker in place of the old on and off switch, showing what you have banked of each.

That needed a rebalance underneath it. The extra lives and the new bonus yield apply to allotments, herbs and fruit trees. Log trees and flowers keep full disease protection but no longer draw extra harvest lives out of compost, which they did before this update. A log tree carries a single harvest life, so compost was tripling its output, and the logs off that tree burn into the ash that upgrades the compost growing it. The loop was paying for itself several times over. Anything already growing in a composted patch matures under the new rule.

Sacred pyres and Prayer

The other thing to do with a good log. Treat one with Sacred Oil and light it as a pyre and it banks a Pyre Blessing instead of ash, for the same experience an ordinary fire of that log would have paid. The next bones you bury spend your highest blessing for bonus Prayer experience, fifteen percent off an oak pyre up to a full hundred off an elder, and it stacks on top of whatever your altar is already multiplying.

A blessing costs a log, a vial of oil and an input to make, so it stays off until you ask for it. The toggle and your banked count sit in the Prayer panel above the altar rows, and burying with one active tells you which tier it spent and what it was worth. Sacred Oil has three sources: two thousand gold at the general store, a Herblore bench brew from a Ravenweed and an empty vial at level thirty, or a drop off the undead and the demons, from Skeleton Warriors and Zombies up through Aberrant Spectres, Lesser Demons and Abyssal Demons.

The Fire Spirit

Every burn carries a small chance of stirring something in the flames. A Fire Spirit wakes, scatters around you for a second, and leaves a gift behind. It is around one burn in five hundred on oak and it climbs with the log tier to one in two hundred and fifty on elder. Pyres can trigger it too.

Most of what it leaves is rune essence and seeds. Less often acorns, uncut gems and Sacred Oil. At the far end of it there is a raw onyx at one in 1,031 spirits, which works out to somewhere around one burn in half a million on oak.

Your very first spirit gets its own line and a bigger send-off than the ones after it, a genuine jackpot gets the full celebration, and the stats panel counts them for life.

What you are chasing

The Phoenix Chick is the eleventh pet in the game and it drops at the same odds as every other skilling pet, which is to say you will not be planning around it. Ninety-nine pays out the cape, and actually landing the bird pays an achievement of its own on top. Beast Master wants all eleven now.

Always on top and fullscreen games

A long-standing annoyance is gone. With always on top enabled, launching a game in exclusive fullscreen used to minimize that game every time you clicked it, and switching a borderless game to fullscreen would flicker and revert. The only workaround was turning always on top off. RuneClick now hands back the topmost window slot while a fullscreen program is in front and takes it again when you leave. Over borderless and windowed games it draws on top the way it always did, input capture is unaffected either way, and there is nothing to change in Settings.

The rest of it

Sixteen new items, nineteen new recipes, six animated bonfire props, a Firemaking guide page laying out what the ash makes and how the pyres feed Prayer, and a Firemaking leaderboard that takes the total to twenty-two.

Two new achievements come with the skill, one for the cape and one for the Phoenix Chick, and the Completionist bar moved up to 1,881 total levels for a nineteenth skill. Steam caps a game at a hundred achievements and the list was full, so twelve of the oldest first-of-a-kind achievements were retired to make room for this skill and the ones after it. If you had earned one of those, it no longer counts toward your total. The list is ninety now.

Seven items were renamed, display names only, so stacks and recipes and drop tables are untouched. Ranging Potion reads Ranged Potion, Snape Grass is Fenreed, Aldarium is Blackamber, Potato Cactus is Barrel Cactus. The in-game guide finally lists every recipe in level order, which it had not been doing for six different skills. Herblore and Farming got their own ambient effects instead of borrowing the generic one, and Firemaking brought embers and falling ash with it.

The localization pass is the biggest yet, and if you play in something other than English it is the largest part of this update. All the new Firemaking text is in all eight languages, and 619 existing lines were rewritten on top of that, 976 cells in all. Some of that was fixing real errors. Korean was describing a spent crop patch as fully grown. Chinese said protector flowers only work once the crop is grown, when they work from the moment you plant. German and French were handing the Goblin Warrior steel gear where English gives it iron. The rest was consistency: Ranged alone had four different names across panels in Spanish, German, French and Korean.

Saves upgrade on first launch, with Firemaking sitting at level one and nothing else touched. The full notes are on Steam.

And then 2.6.1

Two days later the leaderboards got a patch of their own, and it is worth its own section.

The Global board now opens with accounts flagged for auto-input hidden. All scores is one click away, and whichever view you pick is remembered between sessions. To be clear about what that filter is and is not: it hides accounts that have been flagged, it does not check the ones that are left, so unflagged does not mean verified. Auto-input is still allowed, no scores were reset, nothing was rolled back. You are never hidden from your own board, and the panel tells you if your account is flagged. If you sit below the top hundred, your own row is now pinned under the list with your real rank, which it should have been doing all along.

Total Experience had a ceiling nobody had reached yet. Leaderboard scores are stored as a thirty-two bit number, so it stopped counting at 2,147,483,647. It is now stored divided by ten and multiplied back for display, and the in-game panel reads the true number the way it always has. One side effect worth knowing about: the Steam Community leaderboard page and the Steam overlay read the stored value directly, so those two show Total Experience at a tenth of it. The nineteen skill boards are untouched and still exact, as are Total Level and Total Gold Earned.

A pile of defects went out with it. The Global view had been asking Steam for a hundred entries around your own rank instead of the top hundred, which has only looked right because no board is a hundred entries long yet. Opening a second panel mid load could leave the leaderboard stuck on Loading. Every leaderboard network call has a timeout now, since one stalled request used to stop score uploads for the rest of the session. Switching boards quickly could file one board’s results under another board’s name. The Settings text for the filter described it as something other players opt into, which it never was, and it has been rewritten. And the save edit detector no longer reads a genuinely maxed account as tampering. No save files were touched by any of it.

That is nineteen skills to ninety-nine, and a character who can chop a tree, burn what he chopped, feed the ash to the farm, and light the rest as a pyre for the next set of bones. More when there is more.

— Vosk