World Quests Ahead!

Twinkle, twinkle, lil' demon star,You wreak havoc wherever you are!

Blimey! It seems that our lullaby did not soothe the little demon baby that was entrusted to our care. What about you, Tibians? Will you be able to bear a mother's burden? A demon mother has planned to take a few days off in the merry month of May and will then look for caring heroes willing to guard and pamper her cute but spoiled brats during her absence.

But that is not all! If you are lacking parental skills, lots of more challenges are waiting for you in the future:

Bewitched: What's boiling in that cauldron? Good witches need your help in January to avert the wrath of evil spirits with powerful spirit brew. Lend them a hand by collecting the exotic ingredients they need to mix that brew and protecting their bubbling cauldron from the forces of destruction.

A Piece of Cake: Are you hungry? Cake golems are about to invade the Tibian lands in February. Use their doughy corpses to build a bridge to reach a legendary island that will make your tummy happy. Sharpen your... forks... if you are up for a challenge like never before!

The Colours of Magic: It's green! No! Orange! Nonsense! Violet is the new orange! Nay, green it is! Three wizards will spread mysterious letters with coloured powders all around Tibia to see which colour - and thus, which wizard - will triumph. Choose your colour and make your friends join your cause!

Annual Autumn Vintage: Attention juice connoisseurs! In October, the Combined Magical Winterberry Society wants you to help gathering winterberries and process them to extract the juice that keeps the magic in the world flowing. Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!

A Pirate's Death to Me: Ahoy, sea dogs and landlubbers! Show mercy and help a cursed pirate on his desperate voyage that may free his soul once and for all. Team up with old and new friends bound by fate and by the stars, form a jolly crew and explore the raging oceans of the netherworld. Arrrr!

Last Creep Standing: Are you witty and agile enough to face the trials of Kurik? He likes to test mortals and fool around with them so, hopefully, you can count on your reactions and luck in this fun challenge.
Besides these sparkling new world quests, the winter update will also be stuffed with brand-new achievements as well as a couple of new loot items. Also, most NPCs will buy and sell a basic range of goods such as equipment or tools for standardised prices. The standard prices will match the best offers currently available at NPCs. This means that for those basic goods, you will not need to travel great distances anymore to be sure to get the best price for each item, because the price will be the same in each city.

Furthermore, the Magic Academy in Edron decided to restructure the spell lessons to make it easier for students to get their hands on spells. While all ultimate spells will still be sold by Zoltan, Puffels will sell all other knight spells, Ursula will sell all other paladin spells, and Gundralph will sell all other druid and sorcerer spells. In addition, they will also sell all free account spells for the vocation they serve.

Last but not least, we received a letter from Santa lately in which he cancelled his order of 25 extra boat loads of oranges for Christmas. Curious as we are, we snuck up to his house and peeked through the window to see what he is up to. Unfortunately, we only got a glimpse of a huge pile of all sorts of gifts. But after a few seconds, Santa caught us and scolded us for being so impatient. He seemed more talkative than usual, though, and revealed that he had to buy a larger sack this year to hold all the nice goodies.

As you may have noticed, the private test server for the winter update started yesterday so make sure to check our supported and promoted fansites for some interesting reports fresh from the test server.

How to Beat Serpentine Tower?

This is one of the rare times that we officially spoil the next featured article's topic prior to its release. Just skip the news if you want to stay excited for the rest of this month, okay?

The featured article of March will cover the famous Serpentine Tower quest. For years, witty brains have come up with so many fascinating theories about its secrets that we think it is time to dedicate a whole featured article to them. Therefore we would like to know more about the community's ideas on how to solve this quest which is largely believed not to be solvable at all! Have you and your friends ever tried to beat Serpentine Tower? What ideas have you tried out? The article will be community-driven. That basically means, we will write it together! To a large extent it will be based on your personal contributions, your experiences and ideas on how to get the quest done. So get ready to share your thoughts!

Cake, anyone?

Tasty cake golems are about to invade Tibia! On Monday, February 21, the world event "A Piece of Cake" will start and caky beasts will attack certain cities.

Slay some of them to get your hands on a sugary mass and give it to one of the bakers near the cake extractor machines scattered throughout Tibia. Cake extractor machines? Exactly! Besides smashing delicious cake golems, you also need to lure some of them into these machines in order to advance in the event. Further instructions can be found in a special book close by the machines.

If you successfully complete the first stage, a miraculous bridge will be built allowing you to reach the legendary cake isle where the delicious second stage of the event will take place. There, you can also find a book with further instructions. But - who needs instructions when it comes to munching cake? Well, considering the size of the cake that is waiting for you you might want to check it out and gather enough hungry fellows to beat that thing.

Time will run out with the server save on February 26 so you better make enough room in your tummies. If you manage to eat the whole cake until then, your game world will be rewarded with 25% more health and mana regeneration for five days and an experience bonus of 5% for five days.

Fabulous February

Being a premium player in Tibia has many benefits, mounts being just one of them. Rumour has it that no Tibian has tamed the mysterious midnight panther yet.

How about you? Have you already tried to get your hands on this mount to ride across the Tibian lands on its back?

Fabulous February is your chance to win premium time for a whole year! Enjoy all the awesome premium features for 360 days - for free. Enough time to try your luck with taming the fancy midnight kitty or one of other great mounts and to become a real taming expert, don't you think?

Within the next 14 days, 50 lucky winners will be drawn among all players who buy premium time and whose account was created before today. All you have to do is add premium time to your account within the next two weeks and you will automatically take part in the Fabulous February raffle, no matter how much premium time you buy or if you order it via your account page or via an official reseller.

Lil' Flashy Has Grown Up

Four months have passed since the last Flash client teaser was published. In the meantime, the whole project has developed quite well. What we have called "Lil' Flashy" lately now got its features polished and was dressed in a brand-new garment as well. This tiny tot has really grown up, don't you think?

Let's make a short recap. Do you remember what the most impressive feature of the Tibia Flash client will be? Customisability, right! We have worked hard on giving it a pretty flexible layout. You want to have one sidebar on the right, two on the left or no sidebar at all? It is up to you. You want to get rid of the top right minimap and place it on the bottom left of your screen? Sure, why not? Go for it!
By using the Flash client you will also be able to decide yourself if, where and in what colour you want to get most ingame messages displayed. You may assign hotkeys anywhere on your keyboard, walk with WASD, define different hotkey sets and many more. Feel free to tailor the client to your personal needs. That is what makes the Tibia Flash client so powerful.

When you click the screenshot below you will notice that you do not have to take advantage of the Flash client's full potential if you do not want to. As you can see in the image on the left, you can simply go on playing Tibia the way you are used to by sticking to the client's default options. Your new Tibia client will just look and feel better then. And whenever you feel the time is ripe for some fancy gameplay experience, just expand your sidebars and action bars and rock it!

Lil' Flashy Makes Your Character Feel Good

After the previous Flash client teaser, some players had posted comments like "Where is the health and mana bar? I can't see it lol". Right, back then there were no such status bars visible in the client sidebar as all of you are normally used to. Why was that? Two weeks ago, the status bars had just not been completed. Today, though, they are, and so we are going to delve a bit deeper into the status bar theme right away.

In the current client, the status bars are usually located right below the automap. You can move them up and down a bit and place them somewhere else, but only on a very limited scale. There is no customisation at all. Guess what! That is going to change. The Tibia Flash client will come up with a dedicated status bar widget that brings along some decent features:

• It can be moved to any side of the game window. Thus, you can place it in the most convenient spot for you that fits best to your playing style.
• The widget includes your character's health and mana bar, information on special conditions like whether your character is poisoned, burning or even hungry, and a progress bar.
• For the progress bar you can decide yourself what type of progress should be displayed there: your character's level, magic level or a certain skill you are just training to get better in. You can also go without a progress bar, if you wish.
• There are several different styles available to customise the look of your widget. In each style, the bars and icons are arranged in a unique way. Just pick the one you like most.
• If you do not feel the need to see your status bars for a while you can just hide the whole widget.

That, of course, is not all! Another brand-new feature is the HUD, short for heads-up display. It is a semi-transparent overlay that can be switched on and off, and that surrounds your character in the game window when it is activated. With its broad and curved bars, the HUD lets you always keep track of your own character's health and mana status very easily. This display feature will be especially useful for you during battles and risky hunts to prevent your character from dying.

In the light of these fancy new features, there is almost no need to say that you can even choose what types of character information should be displayed to you in the game window. Feel free to show or hide your own character's name, health, mana and marks (when it is skulled, in party mode or involved in a guild war) by simply ticking off the respective checkboxes in the options menu. You can also show or hide the names, health and marks of other characters and creatures in your game window.

Ready to take a peek at the features we were just talking about? Click the screenshot below to enlarge it. The image shows the activated HUD and the status bar widget placed at the bottom of the game window.

It's a Kind of Magic

What is your true colour?

The three wizards Furb of Fun, Feiz of Power and Fern of Nature are about to start a contest tomorrow, March 15, to see who is most popular among Tibians and gets the most followers until March 23. Furb stands for orange, Feiz for violet and Fern for green.

So from tomorrow on, mysterious envelopes with magical coloured powders in red, blue or yellow can be looted from a variety of monsters. Using a powder on yourself will mark your character with the respective colour. Using the remaining powder on another player with a different colour makes you join the wizard which stands for the resulting colour. For example, red and yellow will produce orange. Read the letter included in the envelope carefully to get more information about the world event "Colours of Magic".

Also, each of the three magicians already has a loyal fan who will gladly provide you with some facts. Nature lover Nathaniel can be found in Venore. Funny chap Friedolin will wait for you in Carlin while the powerful lady Paulette can be met in Thais. They will inform you about the current colour you have, the colours with which you can mix, and, finally, the wizard you have chosen. You can also ask them about the status of the world event to know which colour currently is in the lead and which colour is close behind.

The wizard with the most followers on your game world on March 23 will win this contest and thank your world for the support with a special reward for one week:

Furb of Fun: Fireworks rockets, party trumpets, snowballs and party hats can be found in all the creatures which dropped envelopes. The chance to successfully sculpt from ice cubes and marble will be multiplied by 10.

Fern of Nature: All health and mana potions will be enhanced by 10%.

Feiz of Power: The skill bonus of berserk and bullseye potions will be raised to +7, and the shielding decrease will be set to -8 instead of -10. The magic level bonus of mastermind potions will be raised to +5.

Further Reporting Options

The second upgrade of our rule enforcement system is almost done. Since this year's spring patch, all players are already able to report offensive names directly to our customer support team. In the course of the following week, we will release an additional client patch which further extends the players' possibilities to report ingame offenses.

Botting Reports

If you suspect another player of using unofficial software to play, you will be able to report this player to us. All incoming reports will be processed and then analysed. The evaluated data will be used internally for our anti-cheating measures.

Rest assured that bot reports cannot be abused by players. Reported characters and their accounts will not be excluded from the game due to any unfounded accusations. Only if there is sufficient proof for illegal activities, appropriate measures will be taken.

Public Statement Reports

In addition to name reports, players will be able to report illegal statements from the public chat channels. This will allow an easier and more straightforward reporting of inappropriate chat behaviour to the customer support team. However, public statements shall only be reported if they are clearly illegal. Please understand that reports of minor offenses might be rejected.

Note that until further notice, statements in party channels, guild channels, private chat channels and the default channel as well as private messages remain unaffected and still cannot be reported.

In order to make a bot report, public statement report or a name report, open the context menu by right-clicking either on a character or a statement and choose "Report Offense". The current regulations to avoid the spamming of reports remain.

Chill And Grill of Tibia

One of the main aspects of Tibia's community management is improving the communication between players and CipSoft. One of the main communication channels for feedback is the discussion board. There, you can comment on recent news articles or take part in discussions about different topics. This board also gives you the chance to get in direct contact with us, the community managers. We try to explain decisions, clear up misunderstandings, provide additional information, and often answer questions concerning topics that are being discussed.

Sometimes, however, Tibia's developers join a discussion for a short time to directly answer a question or add a comment on a certain issue. These have been very rare cases, though, since the main communication takes place between the players and the community managers. We are the direct link between CipSoft and you, the community. Nevertheless, players enjoy these special moments, especially when they get one of their questions directly answered by a developer. So we thought about feasible ways to provide more of these possibilities to get in contact with other CipSoft teams.

Tibia new map beautiful landscape

While Jan is mainly responsible for creating ingame graphics and textures, the content team plans and assembles everything and builds all the beautiful landscapes in Tibia. In the case of Zao, it was already set since the Yalahar update that the new map expansion would take place east of Vengoth.

At first, the general shape of the new continent was created. Just on the floor level, without any mountains and dungeons. Then, everyone in the team got a printed shape of the new area and drew his or her version of the map: where the mountains are located, the cities and how the area should look like in general. Different designs were talked through and after having come to a conclusion, the areas were assigned to different team members. As soon as they had received the graphics they had requested from the graphics department, they started to build the new areas. "First of all, the general floor tiles and shapes were set, followed by houses, ruins, quest areas and unique landmarks. In the end, decoration such as plants, stones or even rubbish were added," Denson Larika explains. "For the Dragonblaze Peaks, for example, I worked from ground level to the top. Level after level. Then I hollowed the peaks and built the caves for the dragons." The monsters were placed after the whole map work was done. What followed was a time of adjustments and fine-tuning, hopping on and off the internal test server to test hunting grounds. With the start of the external test server, the whole content team was then busy with bug fixing and tweaking things further.

The ideas for the quests and missions in Zao came along with the development of the new continent. Certain quest types were necessary to introduce players to the new area, its inhabitants and its lore, and to guide them around. Other quest ideas evolved around the given themes. The Tomes of Knowledge quest, for example, is a nice way to unlock things like nifty furniture and creepy dungeons. At the same time, the content team could use them to make some selected excerpts of the massive background story accessible in smaller bits for those who are interested in it.