A New Look
Almost every Sidequest page has been redrawn to look and feel for gamey (and consistent): the hub, the World, the workshops, the Journal, Venture, the gear page, your bag, the Marketplace, the Database, the Bestiary, the Map of the Site, the Seasons Archive, and gifts.
The Sidequest hub now leads with the one thing you should do next, like swinging at a live boss, crafting something on your Want to Craft list, or spending energy before it fills up.
If you have Sidequest open in more than one tab, they all stay up to date with each other.
The Sidequest realm header has a Play button and shows how many members are in the world right now.
The Micro Menu
The action wheel is gone. In its place is a micro menu in the bottom-right corner of every page.
Health and Energy bars are now accessible easier and feature numbers.
Gathering and Fighting are panels in the menu now. Fighting no longer needs a gathering season to be running.
The Scavenger Hunt moved into the menu too, so the extra floating widget is gone saving lots of precious space, especially on mobile.
On the World, the menu folds away and starts collapsed so it doesn't cover your view. Otherwise, we remember your preference of open or closed.
The Bank
You now have a Bank. Deposit items you want to keep but don't need to carry, and they stop using bag slots.
Banked items are stored away from the game. They can't be used, crafted with, equipped, sold, or traded until you withdraw them.
Everyone starts with 20 bank slots. There are more for sale in the Shop's new Bag and Bank category:
Bank Upgrade I to X, +10 slots each, from 100 to 1,000 Gold. They are bought in order.
Each event has one +5 bank upgrade in its event shop for 200 of that event's currency. Reelfest, Breaking Ground, and Oozefest have theirs now.
Slot Expansion I to V are in Bag and Bank too, +10 bag slots each, from 200 to 900 Gold.
Your Bag
Your bag has tabs: Inventory and Bank on the Inventory page, and Gear, Food, and Bank on your gear page.
Drag and drop items anywhere to keep your own order, on mouse or touch. Drop an item on the Bank to deposit it, and drop gear on a paperdoll slot to equip it.
Sort by rarity, name, item level, quantity, or newest, or switch to the By Category view
Thanks World of Warcraft bag addons for the idea of category view. I know a good chunk of players love this.
Items you got since your last visit glow so you can spot them.
On wide screens you can show your bag and bank side by side.
Every item's menu has View in Database, plus Deposit or Withdraw.
An item can now fill more than one stack, so one full stack no longer means your bag is full.
Gear
A piece of gear can now belong to several gear sets. The gear set switcher shows which pieces are in each set.
Your HP stays full when you change gear. If you're hurt, you get a warning before switching sets.
The gear page, Wardrobe, your profile card, and the World all use the same even paperdoll layout.
Unfavouriting equipped gear clears its star straight away instead of requiring a page refresh.
Want to Craft
Add anything you can craft to your Want to Craft list, with how many you want to make (up to 50 entries).
It counts down as you craft and clears itself when you're done.
The list adds up every material you need across all of it, and item tooltips show "Wanted for N crafts" with how many you have and need.
Find it in the micro menu, on its own page, and in a Want to Craft box on each workshop.
Marketplace
Wanted requests: post an item (or gear with the stats you want) and the price you'll pay. Your offer is held when you post it, so sellers who have it can fill your request instantly from their bag. You get your Gold back for anything left when you close it.
You can have up to 8 open requests. They show on every shop and on the Wanted board.
A new search bar and filter builder: item type badges you can include or exclude, and filters for stats, slot, usable by, rarity, price, currency, seller, and item.
Save your searches (20, or 100 with PRO) and load them any time.
You can raise or lower the price of items already in your shop.
Sale, barter, and take notifications now name the other member, the item, the quantity, and the price, for both sides. You're welcome, Sinti :D
Item art and names on listings open the item's Database page.
Database and Bestiary
The Item Database is now just the Database, and it covers items and the Bestiary. Search finds creatures too.
Item pages show which creatures drop them, with the chance per win. Creatures you haven't met yet stay hidden, and fold into one "and X more" row.
Item tooltips show how many you have in your bag.
Long drop and Used In tables fold after five rows and can be expanded.
The Bestiary is redesigned as a monster compendium, and you can search it by creature name.
Crafting materials and items named in your notifications link to their Database pages.
Fishing
Reelfest and Oozefest fish are now evergreen: they can be caught in every season, so you can finish your collection after an event ends.
This is more of a bug fix. The Reelfest fish were already supposed to have rejoined the pool this month. There are not a ton of uses for them right now but a larger fish pool is a good thing overall.
Out of their home season they bite one rarity tier rarer. The Journal and Database say "out of season: rarer now" when that's the case.
Shoals now hand out fish from the regular pool too, including evergreen fish, and there is a new Pixel Shoal for the Reelfest fish.
The World
The World is now a full-width game screen.
World chat lets go of your keyboard after you send a message, and hides when you can't speak.
Boss swings in the World pop your XP bar.
The minimap and world map stay inside the play area and hide whatever the fog hides.
Journal
The Journal is now a collection log. Each section shows your progress, rarity tallies, your records, and the next thing to find, with hints on where to find what's missing.
Section tabs switch instantly.
Unclaimed NPC gifts now show up as a step to take.
Venture
Venture is now an encounter screen. The creature stands on a stage with its health bar across from your party bar, and fights play out line by line until one side drops.
Places are grouped by where they are, with the energy cost, the wait, and who lives there.
Gifts
The Gifts page lists every gift you can claim right now, plus the ones that have expired. Find it under Events > Gifts.
Gifts are delivered by their NPC, and each event has its own gift look.
If your bag is too full to claim a gift, the page now tells you instead of quietly failing.
Seasons
The Seasons Archive is redesigned, with each season in its own colour. Oozefest shows off its boss header art.
Season pages no longer scroll sideways on phones.
Militia picker's text wraps properly.
Profiles
The Sidequest card on your profile is redone.
Character stats on your About tab have the same tooltips as the gear page.
Future
I just wanted to leave a note to reinforce the fact that encounters on the site, "ventures" if you will, are going to change in the future. Definitely not this month and probably not next month either, but by December I expect to have new systems in place to make combat more engaging. I suppose I'm spoiling it a bit but abilities are going to be a real thing and there will be energy costs associated based on your abilities so as you get more powerful, you probably won't have to use as many attacks to slay things which means less energy used which means you can do more things. Energy is one of those things that I'm keeping a very careful eye on because I don't want it to feel too bad. The big problem is this game is meant to work on the site and inside a digital world so a balance has to be struck between both of them and I know we're still so early on so it doesn't all make total sense yet, I just ask that you trust me - and that you keep providing feedback as adjustments get made and new things get added. I'm not expecting many more additions for the remainder of October. A lot of things need to get finalized for November's update of Sidequest so that's the priority right now. Some things from November have been backported (like our redesign, I brought that here early because its a massive quality of life improvement) and there's a chance other stuff could be too. I'm really looking forward to November though. Expect more community projects, and larger, longer-term projects that will have system-wide interactions and will become true goals the community gets to work toward. I do want to throw it out there that with our current player numbers, some of the goals are going to feel insane, but we're seeing new people interacting with sidequest each week so I'm confident our player base will continue to grow. I'm also going to make sure we put out more promotional content for Sidequest to engage more people.
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