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Sol Heredit and the Fortis Colosseum

Sol Heredit mid-swing in the centre of the Fortis Colosseum, with ranks of shield-bearing gladiators lining the sand
Sol Heredit mid-swing in the centre of the Fortis Colosseum, with ranks of shield-bearing gladiators lining the sand

Sol Heredit, the Emperor of Fortis, is in the game. He is the hardest fight here and the one built least out of damage, so most of this post is him. Alongside that there is a row of combat dummies at home, the scythe of vitur's passive effect, and a long list of things you reported this week.

Highlights

  • Sol Heredit - a 1,500-hitpoint, six-phase solo fight in the real Fortis Colosseum, where every ordinary attack is a dodgeable area attack that protection prayers do nothing about. Find him on the Bosses tab of ::teles.
  • A combat dummy pen at home - nine dummies in a fenced row west of the Edgeville bank. Every hit lands for exactly your max hit, so you can read a number instead of guessing at one.
  • The scythe of vitur never had its passive at all - it now hits a large target two or three times and sweeps three tiles against a small one, which is most of what the weapon is for.
  • Every powered staff in the game was swinging in silence - tridents, the Sanguinesti staff, both Wilderness sceptres, Tumeken's shadow and the rest all have a cast and an impact sound now.
  • Al Kharid and Varrock rooftops could not be finished - one lap dropped you into a two-tile pocket, and both had an obstacle with no tile a click could route to. Both can be lapped on foot now.
  • Blighted spell sacks work anywhere - the Wilderness restriction is gone, the ice sack covers the whole ice ladder, and the magic tab lights up the spells a held sack pays for.

New content

  • Sol Heredit - six phases at 100, 90, 75, 50, 25 and 10 percent of his health, each opening something new: typeless spear and shield area attacks, molten sand that piles up permanently, light beams fired down whole arena lines, the Triple Attack, and the grapple. The Triple Attack is a prayer-flick puzzle, not a prayer you hold: Protect from Melee only blocks a strike on the exact tick it lands, so running it as standard forfeits the first hit. The grapple calls out one of your worn items and gives you four ticks to Defend it from the Worn Equipment tab, and answering on the last tick makes your next hit a guaranteed maximum.
  • The Colosseum, and a dangerous death - the fight is your own instance over the real arena, entered from the lobby beside Minimus. Death there loses items like anywhere else, but nothing drops on the sand: a gravestone in the lobby holds everything you lost, and only you can claim from it. A kill takes 12 to 14.5 minutes, and he pays blood money at the top tier for it.
  • Nine combat dummies at home - ornate undead dummies at (3076 to 3084, 3513), west of the Edgeville bank. Every hit lands and deals your exact max hit with no accuracy roll, they never fight back, and they never die. Undead, demon and Slayer task bonuses all read correctly on them, and so do the Wilderness weapons, which now show their Wilderness bonus rather than their plain value.
  • The Armourer gives a demonstration - the supplies shopkeeper south of the pen walks up to a random dummy every so often, swings a greataxe, lands exactly 99 and goes back to her counter. She only does it when somebody is watching and never while you are stood at her till.
  • The west building in Edgeville is demolished - walls, roof and the furnished upper floor nobody could reach. The stone floor is kept as a patio, and the Make-over mage is still standing on it.
The fenced combat dummy pen at home, a player hitting the front dummy for a 26, with the portal nexus and altar on the rise behind
The fenced combat dummy pen at home, a player hitting the front dummy for a 26, with the portal nexus and altar on the rise behind

Combat and balance

  • The scythe of vitur passive - a 2x2 monster takes two hits, anything 3x3 or larger takes three, each rolled on its own and each dealing half of the one before it. Against a single-tile target the swing reaches the tiles either side of it instead, in multi-way areas. Before this a scythe drew the sweep arc and then dealt one ordinary melee hit.
  • Sol Heredit's drops - the four gear pieces (Sunfire fanatic helm, cuirass and chausses, and Echo boots) are 1/36 each, the Tonalztics of ralos and Dizana's quiver 1/108, and the Smol heredit pet 1/120. They first went out seven times rarer than that: a chase is a number of hours, and at four kills an hour the old rates were charging 63 hours for a single gear piece.
  • 35 items were untradeable that had no business being - the scythe of vitur, Sanguinesti staff, Avernic defender, Blade of saeldor, Bow of faerdhinen, the crystal set, both dragonfire shields, Virtus, every Desert Treasure ingredient and the four imbued rings. None of them holds charges here, so binding them only made them risk-free to wear and impossible to price. They now trade, sell, go in the Looting bag, and are lost on death like anything else.
  • The Brimstone ring was uncraftable, and half of Alchemical Hydra was unpriced - Hydra's eye, fang and heart were not dropped by anything, so the ring could never be made. All three are now on her table at 1/132 each, and the Hydra and Desert Treasure sets are priced properly, with every ingredient below the item it builds.
  • Spawnable items are off the Grand Exchange - anything you can conjure for free with ::spawn can no longer be listed to buy or sell, in either direction. An item with no scarcity has no price, and the guide price beside it was reading as an official valuation of nothing.
  • The Blood casket is buyable - 500 blood slayer points at Blood Krystilia's shop, and the Blood key moved from 100 to 175. The casket deliberately costs more than double the key even though it pays double the odds, so the cheaper rung stays worth buying.

Interface and quality of life

  • A held blighted sack lights its spells - the magic tab greys spell icons out entirely on your own machine, from each button's own rune checks, so the sacks worked while the book said they did not. A sack now satisfies every rune requirement on the standard book, the ancient book's ice column and both autocast tabs, and the info box marks the runes as covered. The level requirement is untouched: an ice sack at Magic 90 still leaves Ice Barrage grey.
  • Powered staves have sounds - the whole family inherited "silent unless told otherwise" from the spell class they are built on. All fifteen now declare a cast and an impact sound. The Accursed sceptre read as half-broken rather than mute because its Condemn special always had one.
  • The item spawner counts items, not slots - asking for 1,000 runes handed you 28, because the cap was one item per free slot regardless of whether the item stacks. It now works out the real room, tops up a stack you already hold, and tells you the quantity that actually landed. The Custom amount box is usable again too: the search field was eating the digits you typed at the prompt.
  • Custom helms have chatheads - wearing any modern full helm left your dialogue head blank, because the game hides your hair and beard under a helm and expects the helm to supply a head of its own, and none of ours did. 197 custom head-slot items now carry one, and chathead expressions play at all, for your head and every NPC's.

Client and performance

  • A launcher jar on the download page - the site's non-installer download is now the launcher itself rather than the raw client jar, so it auto-updates like the installers do. It needs a Java 11 runtime and nothing else. The old direct jar could never update itself, because a running program holds its own file open.
  • Clients older than today are refused at login - the looting bag window, the effect timer sprites, the reworked Combat Achievements and Teleports screens and the new chathead columns are all misread by an older build, so anything before today's client is turned away with a message telling you to restart the launcher.

Fixes

  • Buying the Blood slayer helmet (i) did nothing at all - Buy 1 was silently dropped before it reached any shop code, because the item's id is above 32,767 and the packet read it as a negative number. The same read serves Deposit-5 and the trade and duel offer-5 buttons, so those ignored custom items too. The trade-in is also paid from your head now, not just your inventory, which is where that helm lives while you are on task.
  • Presets rewrote themselves as you played - Create and Overwrite stored the live inventory and equipment rather than a copy of them, so eating, looting, banking or firing a shot afterwards quietly edited the saved preset, down to an empty slot where a stack ran out. This is what looked like presets being scrambled around death. Existing presets need saving once more to be clean.
  • Both dummy health bars are gone - a dummy never loses a hitpoint, so the bar over its head sat permanently full. That was left in deliberately until a row of nine of them made the point.

Behind the scenes

  • The test harness walks every agility course on foot - the old lap test teleported the runner onto each obstacle, which proved every obstacle worked and nothing at all about the roof between two of them. That is where both broken courses lived.
  • The launcher's update loop is tested end to end - fresh install, no-op, update, hash mismatch, resume, a dead server and a missing manifest, against a local stand-in for the download host.