A news desk, tidier decks, and the counting house put right

A good deal has been put right this week, and one thing has been put right that will not please everyone. It is all set out below.

This desk

You are reading the first of these. Patch notes, changes to the world and whatever the Company is up to will be posted here from now on, rather than going unremarked or living only in the Discord. The three newest sit at the top; everything older keeps in the archive below them.

Finding your way

The guide has existed for some time, explaining every system in the game with the actual figures it runs on. It was reachable only by a small link at the foot of the page, which is to say it was reachable by almost nobody. It now sits in the bar at the top, under Almanac, alongside this desk.

Mark also mentions it at the end of his tour, since a captain who has just been walked around the port is exactly the captain who wants it.

Industry and the shipyard

• The industry page had grown to six sections stacked one on another, which on a telephone meant a great deal of scrolling to reach the refining. It is now divided into Warehouse, Cargo, Nodes, Refining and Anchorages, and you see one at a time.
• The panel behind Manage in the shipyard has been rebuilt. Her papers now sit on the left and the orders you may give her on the right, each in its own card. Repair leads when she can actually be repaired where she lies, and says plainly why not when she cannot.

The trading floor

A search box has been added to the market. A well-stocked port carries enough goods that finding one meant reading every category; now you type two letters of it.

The counting house

Several things here were not as they should have been.

• Consignments now show what is in them before you pay. Every reward and its odds, drawn from the same table the roll itself uses, so what is advertised is what is actually inside.
• Sales are shown properly. The old price is struck through, the new one stands beside it, and a banner says what is off and until when. A sale was previously applied at the till without ever appearing on the page — you were charged the lower price and shown the higher one.
• Coupons can be redeemed. There is a field at the top of the counting house. Codes have been issuable for a while; there was simply never anywhere to enter one.

The gold lots have been repriced

This is the part that will not please everyone, so here is the whole of the reasoning.

A lot of gold was paying somewhere around twenty-five times what a consignment of the same price was worth, once the hulls inside a consignment are counted at what they actually cost. The cheapest lot in the shop bought a company its port outright, and no consignment was worth opening by anyone who wanted coin, because the same crowcoins bought twenty-five times the gold with none of the risk.

The lots now pay roughly what a consignment of comparable price is worth. The choice between them is a real one again: a consignment is the gamble with a hull in it, a lot is a sum you can count on.

Nothing already in your purse has been touched. This changes only what crowcoins will buy from here on.

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Rather a lot of this came from captains saying plainly what was wrong with it, which is the only reason any of it got looked at. Keep doing that.