Devlog: June 2026
Hey adventurers!
The past month has been busy, in a good way. The headline is better monster AI, plus a bunch of combat and PvP groundwork.
Critters, monsters, and better behavior
The biggest update is probably the monster AI overhaul. Monsters in Eldria now have explicit behavior types: aggressive, retaliating, passive, and fleeing. The new system also gives us better control over aggro radius, pursuit distance, preferred attack distance, repositioning, and when a creature decides to flee.
That sounds like boring spreadsheet stuff because, well, it partly is. But the result in game is great: creatures finally feel more distinct and it adds a lot of depth to combat.
All these improvement weren't without a few struggles though. At one point, there was a bug that made all critters in town follow me around. It was kinda unsettling and gave me a chuckle so I decided to record it.
Combat is much more fun now
Combat got better in a few ways. Scrolling combat text above characters has better colors and outlines, blood splashes are less wrong, and visual effects have been moved into a cleaner presentation system. That change touched a lot of render work (uhh again), with one nice side effect: arrows and magic missiles now render much more smoothly.
Archery and wands also got a major rework. Under the hood, these had become incredibly messy because they have side effects (consuming ammo and mana). They now fit much better into the larger combat system, which should make it easier to support interactions with buffs and gear set bonuses. These fixes are my favorite and least glamorous category of progress.
Players can now die, remain unreleased, and then release their spirit to respawn in town. That lifecycle touches more systems than you might expect: the server needs to know your state, the client needs to show the right dialog, login needs to handle edge cases, and monsters need to treat unreleased dead players differently from living targets.
For PvP, death should not necessarily be the end. We want several ways to come back to life, such as resurrection spells or blessings.
Introducing shrines
In Eldria lore, shrines are old artifacts that carry ancient memories. These memories are sometimes haunted, sometimes benevolent. Sometimes they teach you something, sometimes they make you wish you could forget.
We have thought a lot about shrines and have many plans for the future. And finally we have in-game support for the basic shrine functionality! Technically, this means we have added support for learning abilities from item use. I like that direction a lot. It makes knowledge feel like something you can discover by exploring the world, not just something that appears on a level-up screen.
See you in Mirenroot. Do not let the rabbits follow you home.
