🖼️ The Plague Has a Face: Thirteen New Icons, and Infection No Longer Fades

🖼️ Thirteen stages finally look like what they are

Hunger, thirst and infection each move in steps, and every step hangs an icon in your debuff row. Until today those icons were borrowed from ordinary Blizzard spells - and the borrowed ones lied.

• An empty hunger bar showed a spell promising to halve your maximum health. That was never true for our starvation.
• Thirst showed one that cut your speed in half in a single step, instead of the ladder it actually is.

All thirteen stages now have their own artwork and their own text: hunger from Hungry to Wasting Away, thirst from Thirsty to Dying of Thirst, infection from Bitten to Plagued. Hover one and it says exactly what that stage does to you. The client patch carries them, so the launcher installs them with everything else - nothing to do by hand.

🩸 Infection no longer fades

This is the change that matters most, and it goes one way only.

• Before: the scale fell by itself, slowly but surely - so a bite was a nuisance you could walk off.
• Now: it does not fall at all. What you have is what you keep. Distance and not being bitten stop it growing; nothing brings it down.

And the last stage is no longer decoration. At 100% the plague takes 10% of your maximum health every 30 seconds - a fifth of your health a minute, about five minutes from full health to dead - and your body stops healing itself for the whole of it.

There is no countdown and no instant execution: it drains you, and you watch it happen. Five minutes is enough to reach your base, your bags and your friends - and nowhere near enough to find a cure, because there is still none.

🍖 Your body heals itself slower

The stages bite in a second way, and this one is easy to miss: every stage slows the health you restore on your own - 25% at the first step, 50, 75, and at the last one all of it. Food, drink, bandages and potions are untouched; what suffers is sitting down to regenerate.

So an empty bar is no longer only about the damage. At the bottom of the scale you stop recovering between fights, and then the drain starts:

• Empty hunger, or empty thirst: 4% of your maximum health per 30-second tick.
• Both empty at once: 8% a tick - about twelve minutes from full health to dead on one bar, and about six on two.

🚀 Launcher 1.0.9

Some of you pressed Install and watched the same patch install again and again, for ever. That was our bug, not a broken download: builds older than 1.0.9 lost track of which language file belongs to your client, so they compared the wrong checksum and never reported success.

The current build fixes it. The launcher updates itself - open it and press Update in the bar at the top, or take the file from the front page. If it still refuses to finish, press Verify files and tell us what it says.

The FAQ inside the launcher has been brought up to date as well: it is served from this site, so it is current without a new build. The infection section there now says what the infection really does.

All of it is on the test server right now - come in and try it. Characters will be wiped before launch.