A huge update last weekend! In addition to a totally overhauled cooking and brewing system, we have redone a number of the game's systems, including: skill checks, learning, magic, and mining. We've added an introduction and nicknaming system, and a mentoring system for experienced players to teach new ones.

Full changelog:

• Skill checks have been overhauled entirely to make active skills less useless at low skill levels and less trivial at high skill levels and to make it less pointless to invest in skills you don't have high stat scores in. All skills are now worthwhile to level to 50 if that's what you choose to do. The skill tiers can be summarized as such: 0-9 = Novice, 10-19 = Apprentice, 20-29 = Competent, 30-39 = Skilled, 40-49 = Expert, 50 = Master. Skills are more likely to succeed at low levels, and now always have a probability of failure, however small.
• Additionally, you must now use a skill a few times each time you level it before you can level it again, depending on its current level. We hope that these changes together make skills feel a little more satisfying to learn and improve at, and make dabbling in skills with a handful of skill points more worthwhile, without devaluing what it means to be an expert at them.
• Color Magic skills now require 10 Crystal Magic to begin learning them. With the skill leveling change this means apprentice mages will likely have to make their start charging fire crystals before they get to move on to channeling quartz. As for the availability of Crystal Magic books, might I suggest that Literacy can be used to transcribe skill books from other players?
• New guides will be forthcoming on the website to reflect these changes.
• Climbing has been made more forgiving as well since you can no longer guarantee its success: you will only hurt and embarrass yourself on a critical failure. Successfully climbing also now uses stamina, so no more effortlessly gliding over the trees.
• Implementation of the introduction system. Names are now hidden for people who haven't introduced themselves to you, displaying their species instead. To introduce yourself to someone, just do so naturally through speaking, e.g. "My name is Tom," "I'm Tom," or simply "It's Tom." Indirectly referring to yourself ("Rose? Tom.") will not count as an introduction, but anything else should. You will of course need to introduce existing characters to each other again.
• Impersonating a name will hide your old name and allow you to introduce yourself as the new one. This is persistent; if you've introduced yourself to someone as an impersonated name, they'll recognize you as that name whenever you're using it, but as your true self or any other impersonated name you will be a stranger again. Giving any other name or nickname will be ignored.
• If a player can't or won't say their name to you, or gives you an alternate name, you can nickname the player by right-clicking on them and selecting Nickname.
• Cooking and Brewing have been updated so that the process of cooking and brewing takes time to complete. Food that is cooking will remain on the ground by the campfire for a while until it is finished cooking, likewise for drinks. Make sure the campfire stays lit throughout the process!
• Herbalism, Pestling, Medicine, and Skullduggery may be implemented in the near future...
• New furniture item: Barrel. You can store drinks and stew in it to free up your cups and bowls, or fill it with water for easier cooking and brewing.
• Reworked the quartz crystal system. There are now five types (or more accurately, quality levels) of quartz: two which can be found by scrounging, and three which must be mined and cut by a jeweler. All existing quartz crystals have been grandfathered in as quartz shards. Likewise for channeled crystals.
• The Repair and Harden spells from Green Magic now also take time to complete. If the process is interrupted by being picked up, resources will be destroyed and items with durability will be damaged.
• Mining has been overhauled to be considerably more dynamic, and the map has been updated to take this into account. Have fun finding the new best mining spots! - You can now reverse-pickpocket things onto people.
• Looting a character now costs 1 stamina and the time between looting opportunities has been reduced.
• New Craft/Fortitude skill: Struggle. Your skill in Struggle increases how much stamina it costs to loot you and decreases how likely someone is to get something from looting you.
• Added a mentoring system as a band-aid on the gushing skill book problem. You can now mentor players up to level 15 in a skill by right-clicking on them and selecting Mentor. You can mentor as many players as you like simultaneously. To teach them, simply perform the skill while they are around, and you will demonstrate it to them. They will also need to practice it themselves as normal and have the necessary skill points, and then they will be given the option to learn the skill. You can learn the skill at most once every 2 hours 90 minutes this way, in order to make a mentorship feel more like longer-term apprenticing and let players give it some roleplay flavor, rather than just dumping skill levels into someone.
• Fixed a bug where Mining critical failures applied to the area as well as the player, enabling players to serially critically fail an area completely empty of ore. This applied to scrounging too but was probably more keenly felt in mining since those penalties don't scale with skill level like they do with scrounging. I've also adjusted critical fails to only be counted if you have a good chance of finding the item to begin with, and reset all gathering exhaustion penalties.
• Scrounging area penalties also no longer apply to the library, only the player-specific ones.
• The map has been expanded with a few new zones.
• The crafting menu now remembers your search text and selected recipe when it's opened back up for the sake of repeatedly crafting things.
• You can now right-click on your character and drink rain while it is raining and you are outside. You can also fill flasks from the rain.
• Added an alert when a new character logs in the server while there are few/no other players on to encourage newbies who join during the week to join the Discord and wait for play sessions instead. People who wander it from the wider Internet often don't seem to know the server is empty because we schedule playtimes, so I've taken steps to address this.
• Some fixes to combat: parrying and shield use now account for enchanted weapons and armor. And some other bugs squashed.
• Fixed bugs with Jewelry and Literacy