Welcome to the very first AVALON patch notes! Every week we will gather up what shipped across the game, the tools, and the backend and post it here so you can follow along as the universe grows.
Build week: July 3 to 10, 2026. A big one. On-demand worlds went live, the Merlin logic editor grew a full game-mode toolkit (waves, checkpoints, objectives, and persistent game logic), the Skill Nebula got a ground-up visual rework, and crafting moved to a proper server-authoritative atelier. Plus a long list of combat, social, and stability fixes.
Skill Nebula
- An all-new painterly galaxy renderer for the skill tree. Deep skill arms with keystone checkpoints, crossing-free conduits, named constellations, real skill descriptions, and an ability-point pool that is impossible to miss and hard-stops at zero. (How progression works: The Skill Nebula.)
- Try it yourself: click below to open the real renderer full screen in your browser. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, click a star to allocate. Point totals are demo values, not a real character.
CLICK TO EXPLOREThe new Skill Nebula, liveOpen full screen →
Worlds and the Lobby
- On-demand worlds are here. Dormant worlds now appear in the browser and spin up a real server the moment you join. No more waiting for someone to host. (How worlds work: Worlds & the Weave.)
- "The Weave" spin-up experience. When a world materializes for you, a Weave overlay shows the progress, plays its own audio, and reports clearly if something goes wrong.
- Pick your hero while the world loads. Starting a dormant world opens the character selector immediately, and your server provisions in the background. Enter World travels the instant the world is ready.
- Community worlds are visible to players. Player-made worlds show in the browser; dev-only worlds stay dev-only.
- World cover images, hover-revealed #0000 tags for duplicate names, a creator "hide from lobby" toggle, and a lifetime plays badge.
Creator Tools: Merlin
- The Merlin logic editor picked up most of a game-mode toolkit this week. New here? Start with What is Merlin?
The WHEN / IF / THEN chip editor - Persistent counters ("Remembered"). Counters can survive a world reload, created in a declare-first panel with a plain-language "who shares it" scope (Each player vs Whole world).
- Creator HUD. New Show On Screen / Clear On Screen actions push live values to an on-screen HUD (great for kill counters and objectives).
- Announce and Countdown. A center-screen banner and a self-ticking m:ss countdown.
- Waves. A "Units In Area" trigger and counting condition refill enemies. Ships with a Monster Waves starter template.
- Checkpoints and respawns. Set Respawn Point places a checkpoint; Set Respawn Time overrides the death timer per player or world-wide. Ships with a Checkpoint starter template.
- Reorder arrows, chat commands (!keyword), anchorless activation, and many verbs went from stub to real: Wait, Give/Take/Drop Item, Kill Unit, Play Sound, Play Effect, Set Weather, Teleport Actor, Command NPC Move, and more.
Starter templates in the grimoire
Codex
- Stamped interact levers, typed X/Y/Z volume entry, All / This World / My Codex filters with placed-by attribution, and reliable placed-NPC spawning. (What the Codex is: The Codex.)
Crafting
- New full-screen crafting atelier with server-authoritative recipes wired to live inventory, Craft All, persistent station tiers and upgrades, and atomic material transactions (no dupes, no silent loss).
Combat and Characters
- Roll-spam desync fixed, hit reactions scale by enemy level tier, characters spawn as their selected race, first-time stuck loading screen fixed, NPCs march when commanded, moving platforms ride cleanly, and player-to-player trading groundwork landed.
Social and Party
- Native party invites (/invite), party chat on the live group topic, shared kill XP, and zero-setup party testing.
Under the Hood
- Performance and memory: large texture optimization pass across weapons, outfits, characters, environments, and UI; map render target trimmed; unused editor-only plugins disabled.
- Stability: fixed the 25 to 30s selection freeze on large prefabs, several deselect and prefab-destroy crashes, and a Merlin activation crash on stale player state.
- Backend: atomic inventory material transactions, per-stream world scoping (clean dev/prod separation), paid claim capacity, correct skill-write attribution, and richer bug-report notifications.
- AI pipelines: our generation services now record which model produced each 3D asset, and weapon generation switched to front-only image-to-model for cleaner results.