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DARK
PAWNS

A Multi-User DungeonEST. 1994

Dark Pawns v0.1.6

Changes shipped in Dark Pawns v0.1.6, reproduced from the release notes used by the release workflow. Read fixes, operator changes and install details.

Dark Pawns v0.1.6 fixes more player-reported bugs and closes a set of security holes. The gossip channel can now be mirrored to Discord. Every gameplay fix was checked against the original C source.

Gameplay

  • Sleeping characters no longer see what happens around them: spell chants, items appearing, other players leaving the game (#2186, #2187).
  • retreat and escape never take you through a closed door (#2189, #2193).
  • A death cry is muffled behind closed doors, as in the original (#2192).
  • In a multi-attack round, the attacks stop once a blow ends the fight. Low-level characters are left bleeding and incapacitated, as in the original, instead of being killed by a swing that should never have landed (#2166).
  • Shops accept quantities the original way: buy 3 bread, sell 10 jumpsuit. The invented buy bread 3 and bulk sell all are gone (#2174).
  • If your saved equipment fails to load, you now get the original notice telling you to contact a god, instead of silently entering the game empty-handed (#2172).
  • Coin piles weigh nothing, as they did in the original (#2182).
  • Immortals who switch into a mob get room messages in that body only (#2179).

Security and stability

  • Racing two commands can no longer duplicate gold, items or charges. This covers banking, picking up coins, stealing (carried and worn), casting, potions, wands, staves, reagents, practices, the clan treasury and donations (#2175, #2184, #2191).
  • Inventory and equipment are locked against concurrent access. This closes a crash that could take the server down (#2180, #2181).
  • A cap on total web connections keeps telnet and the admin site working under load (#2176).
  • Text from the Grapevine cross-MUD chat is stripped of hidden control and direction-reversal characters (#2185).

New

  • Gossip can be mirrored, one way, to a Discord channel. It's off by default; operators set it up in Admin → Notifications (#2188, #2190).

Mail

Mail keeps working as it did on the original 32-bit servers. The 64-bit build of the original C code can't store mail at all, and we chose not to copy that (#2178).

Testing

None of these change gameplay:

  • harness fixtures for calendar boundaries, seeded players and fault injection (#2165, #2178);
  • proofs for weather, regeneration, save/load, descriptors, death and shops, plus 29 previously blocked output sites (#2168, #2171, #2177, #2182);
  • play-lab scenarios (#2164, #2170, #2173).

The blocked fidelity inventory fell from 98 units to 50.

Install on macOS or Linux:

Terminal window
curl -fsSL https://darkpawns.org/install.sh | bash

Read the portable guide for Windows installation, bootstrap trust, management and recovery. Existing installations can run darkpawns update --check, then darkpawns update.