The first instanced group dungeon has been released in Aether Story! Our MMORPG in Alpha Testing. Read more about this dungeon and download our Pixel Art Retro MMO today!

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Red Fox
Limited Edition Donation Pet
May 2021

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The Abandoned Windmill Dungeon

Requires Level 5

The interior of the windmill has been completely remade to our first group instance dungeon! You may find the Abandoned Windmill in the south-eastern corner of the Meadows zone. There have been reports of haunted activity within. Becareful, this place is dangerous!

Warning! Bring a friend or two. This is a group dungeon. Do not try it alone!

Dungeon Portal and Pedestal:
Every dungeon entrance will feature a swirling vortex to indiciate where you are about to enter is an instanced dungeon.  Near by you will also find a dungeon pedestal. This pedestal allows you to reset instances, and in the future control the dungeon difficulty.
 

New Roaming Encounters:
Enemies that roam the dungeon randomly that you can try to sneak past.

• Cellar Rat - the hardest rats yet
• Skeleton Warrior - heavy physical damage
• Skeleton Mage - heavy spell damage
• Cellar Spider - the first spider in our game
   

New Forced Encounters:
Enemies that require you to defeat to get past them.

• Skeleton Guardians A - Three Skeleton Warriors stand in your way
• Skeleton Guardians B - Two Skeleton Warriors protect two Skeleton Mages. The hardest fight in the whole dungeon.

New Boss Encounters:
Challenging fights with the best rewards.

• Banshee - a banshee lays deep within the dungeon, hits hard and has minions protecting her.
• Hangree - a rat boss that is a bonus encounter in the dungeon. Its up to you to figure out how to find him.

The bosses of the dungeon share some loot from the Todd encounter from last month's Easter Event, but also have new loot items including a new ring, weapons and a rare robe.

The Golden Chest:
Deep within the dungeon is a special chest that respawns each time you reset the dungeon, and may be looted by everyone.

Misc Dungeon Notes:

• Dungeons will have a minimum level required to enter. This dungeon is level 5.
• The party leader should generally enter the dungeon first.
• If you find you are not in the correct instance have everyone leave the dungeon, leave the party, and have everyone reset their own dungeons, then regroup. (Worst case)
• A dungeon will automatically reset after 20 minutes of being empty. This does give you enough time to run to town as a group, resupply and head back in.
• Dieing in a dungeon will respawn you near the dungeon entrance, inside the instance.
• Dungeons are suppose to be hard content. While you can try to run them alone, you probably won't get far. Bring a friend. Use Discord.gg/phanxgames to find people to play with.
• Tip: Stick together while exploring the dungeon. Encounters bring in only players who are near each other.

Devoloper's Comments:

This dungeon was developed as a primary way to allow the player base to continue to get the (current) best gear in the game even after the easter event boss, Todd, was removed.  But since a lot of players already got most of the loot from Todd, and many didn't get the rarest drops from Todd, I wanted to make sure there were not only new items in this new dungeon, but also easier to obtain items that filled the slots that many couldn't fill (mainly the weapon and accessory slots).

This patch also let us test out our instance tech better by introducing a dungeon reset pedestal, encounters that don't respawn in the dungeon, instance based puzzles (even if a light version of such), and a shared consistent instance state that the party shares.

This dungeon will be revisited in the next patch with quests and a small expansion of a few new rooms to support said quests. This will hopefully come with the very same patch that adds some basic skills and spells to the game. All of which will make redoing the dungeon feel fresh and exciting!

One thing many asked, "will this dungeon be going away?" and the answer is no. This is the first dungeon in our game, and is designed for level 5's that want a challenge to experience as an alternative leveling source (once the level cap increases past level 5).

Misc Changes:

• The hill around the Abandoned Windmill has been revamped. The entrance to the Windmill is now from the dirt area with the bridges. This should make getting there faster.
• The Tidal cave with the Battle Crabs has been greatly nerfed. But still contains the same reward. This should make farming potions easier. See the Witch to learn more about the daily potion farming trade-in.
• Soulbound items in the Account Bank now report who it is soulbound to.
• New Alpha goals have been added to the Adventure Guide relating to the Windmill dungeon.

Living World Changes:

• Heroes have successfully helped Ostara and restored the balance to spring.
• Todd has retreated and Ostara, the White Hare and Maika have returned to their dwelling in Ostara's Lair.
• The entrance has been sealed and all Easter Eggs have vanished.
• A Dizwin was tasked with sweeping up the carrots littering the road.

Bug Fixes:

• Message boxes should now close when you DC from the game.
• Idle logout should now close all menus.
• Tab should no longer cycle through active UI components.
• Logging in while battling should no longer instant crash.
• The long standing battle "soft lock" has finally been solved once and for all.
• Most crash reports found by players like you have been resolved.
• The server memory leak has been addressed by cleaning up party and monster references more cleanly.
• Removing an item from the inventory (by either selling, eating it, depositing it) should now move to the next line down, rather than skipping all over the place.
• [Lucky Bunny Foot] has had its gem sockets removed and its base stats restored. All players who placed gems into this item have had the gem restored to their inventory's.
• Loot tables have been improved for the the chests in the game to contain less food and more gold.

Known Bugs:

• The game will get wonky and unstable after playing for more than an hour, usually more than 3 hours. This goes hand-in-hand with high memory usage by the game. If the game consumes more than 2GB please restart the game to continue playing until this memory leak can be found and addressed.

For now be sure to download the game and check out the game's current Alpha.

You may download the early Alpha access easily through itch.io:

We are really enthusiastic to have you play our game! Being a small indie game
dev company, we depend on your support to keep us going.
Please consider making a small donation to help us fund the continuous
development of Aether Story! It will really help us out.

If you already have Alpha Access, head on over to the Game Downloads page and download the new Launcher Setup Installer!

And don't forget to join us in Discord.gg/phanxgames to share your suggestions, find other players to play with, and hang out.