Hello, fellow gods! Lots of exciting news today. Let’s start off with guilds.

Guild Spotlight

After long begging Godville Times editors gave up and agreed to add a whole new section dedicated to guilds. Every day it will feature two guilds, randomly selected from Top-100 of all guild pantheons. Obviously, having a guild included in more than one pantheon increases its chances to appear. By the way, Famous Heroes newspaper section works in a similar way, only requiring heroes to be in Top-200.

On Guild Leaving

It is known that heroes tend to leave a guild during first few months of membership. However, years of continuous training are finally bearing a fruit – the heroes will stop fleeing from guild 1.5 months earlier, once they achieve Grandmaster guild rank. Btw, did you know that if a hero’s alignment is similar to the guild’s alignment he is less likely to leave the guild?

Keep in mind though that godless heroes will still be expelled from guilds after 30 days of inactivity, regardless of their guild rank. The nice change here is that from now on Godville’s postal service will send one-time warning email few days before expelling. Only if you have a recovery email for your account, of course (can be set on Settings screen within the app).

Heroes Birthdays

It was suddenly noticed that Godville heroes are not some perishable item. Their shelf-life is measured in years and it’s worth to keep track of heroes’ birthdays. Now guildmates can see in the Guild Bulletin who were born today (if any), so they can congratulate them. By the way, the heroes will get a present too – on their birthday all drinks and partying are free!

Sparring Checkmarks

One needs to get dozens of Spars with friends to get the Coach achievement and the further you go the harder it gets to keep these records in mind. From now on, the Sparring partner selection list will mark those friends that you already trained with (please install today’s app update if playing on Android). Hooray.

Sea Pets

Last but not least, let’s talk about our lovely pets. It turned out that some monster species are quite amphibious and can lend heroes their paw, fin or limb in sails. Landsharks will accompany heroes starting from level 80. Higher level heroes will be able to tame a Ticking Crocodile, OctoBear, Battle Toad, Presidential Seal and even a Fail Whale. Sea pets will help in sails by peeking into distance and helping to explore islands.

Snow fills the air while winter marks the calendars. This festive combination is known for its consequences throughout Godville.

Let’s start with the changes that will last for the whole winter. Low temperatures in the seas led to occasional formations of ice glaciers on top of the reefs. These things still deal small damage to arks, but thanks to the ice, they also work as natural refrigerators, so arks don’t consume supplies while at it.

Chill in the fields has brought a new activity to our red-nosed champions – ice fishing. The winter counterpart of the widely known activity doesn’t need a bait, so our hard-headed heroes will fish more often. Since holiday air is full of magic and snow, the heroes can fish out festive and very useful snowflakes.

Firstly, the traders will pay a hefty price for this manifestation of holiday spirit. Secondly, magic snowflakes are still snowflakes, so if a hero collects a few, he can make a snowman. Finally, these snowflakes work just great in the Godville Times Bingo, while the Bingo itself is abundant with special holiday rewards.

Last but not least, let’s not forget that it’s time to celebrate. Holiday monsters, including tamable Santa Clawses, are already in the fields. They spread holiday spirit and special holiday gifts that can be activated without godpower. Festive tent-camp next to Godvillle, also known as “Laplandville”, has already opened its doors to the excited heroes. The holiday feast will go on for the next ten days, so there is plenty of time to enjoy.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Greetings, dear gods! We have some great news to share today.

Video Chronicles

As you know, everyone can read chronicles of past duels, boss fights, dungeons and sails. While you could grasp what happened out of the gray wall of text, the drama of the fight and the thrill of exploration were somewhat lacking. It’s time to unveil new high-tech beauty to solve this: video chronicles.

Every duel, boss fight, dungeon or sail exploration can now be replayed as it was happening. Finally, you can see arks setting sail, spelunkers wandering under the ground and heroes clobbering each other – with health decreasing each turn. From now on, all new chronicles will have Replay controls to help you get around. Check out how sailing looks. Quick hint for PC players: you can use arrows and Enter key shortcuts or just mouse-click turn entries.

Life after 1000 pairs

There is important news for the diligent gods with a thousand pairs in the ark, because now there is the next big thing to do. Manimals and fenimals, in some way, are “monsters”, so having a herd like this in an ark makes god… a god of monsters, sort of. Maybe not a full-blown one just yet, but with a new thing to do: now he can design his own boss.

The boss is made in a Lab kindly provided by some unnamed mad scientist. The Lab requires special ingredients to do its magic. The first one is pairs. Don’t be afraid, this time only one hundred pairs are needed. The second one is even more interesting – boss parts. Yes, those little boss pieces that a hero gets when he defeats a boss. A full set – from hoof to horns – is needed to create a new living being. There are many new bosses to get the parts from, and every part will affect the end result. However, in the best traditions of ZPG, a god’s involvement is not required – a hero will eventually get the full set all by himself.

Once created, the personal boss will be listed on the god’s page for everyone to see. The god will be able to summon it in their fights. An extra pair of hands will come in handy in their shop too.

Night theme on a PC

Mobile deities have already enjoyed it for a while, but now it’s coming to the browser version of the game too – almost all of the game pages now support night-mode. You can enable night theme in the hero page’s settings (link at the bottom of the page).

New Guild Pantheon

The number of guilds in Godville is increasing, meanwhile the number of guild pantheons hasn’t changed much. Let’s welcome the new guild pantheon – the Pantheon of Adventure. It represents the love guilds and their heroes have to adventures under the ground and in the sea. Every dungeon or sail is rewarded with some points, regardless of the result. Successful campaigns yield more points and sails give more points than dungeons. Let’s see how the guilds succeed in their love of adventures.

Easy Sail Loot

Every elder sailor knows that sails have limited number of treasures, making finding one a bit complicated. From now on the seas will be more generous, spewing out various crates, caskets and small trunks. They are less valuable than the regular treasures, but a lot easier to stumble upon on an island or get out of a random beastie. (Meanwhile the heroes still remember what they are here for – treasure and manimals, so they will always make space for them when needed.) Long story short – now it’s much easier to bring something of value from the sea, even for ZPG-arks.

On another bright note: we’ve just finished going through the vast deposits of sea-related ideabox submissions and now there are hundreds of new phrases in the game.

UPD: The name of the pantheon was changed to Adventure. Thanks for the feedback!

Lots of great news today, so make yourself comfortable and enjoy the long read.

Personal History Graphs

It’s sure good to see what’s the hero is up to right now, but wouldn’t it be great to step back a bit and get the bigger picture? Well, from now on you can. This awesome new page (available from your personal page) shows how the most important stats and pantheon positions of your champion changed over time. A god can now make more informed decisions on whether a hero was “good” or “naughty”, or what divine influences are needed to progress the champion in the desired direction.

The new graphs will sure make the gods’ life even better – but wait, there’s more!

Daily Guild Bulletin

All guilds with at least two members now have statisticians on staff, who will prepare a delicious daily report jam-packed with these gems:

• list of important happenings to the guild’s members yesterday;
• changes over time of guild’s headcount, personality and guild pantheon rankings;
• daily progress of guild members towards the most important goals;
• guild popularity ratings in towns;
• rank distribution in guild and other stats.

Unlike personal histories, which are private, guild bulletins are available to everyone using the link on the guild’s page.

Damage Control

A cool feature from sails made its way to other multi-fighting modes. When you fight a hero or a boss, or explore a dungeon, you’ll see a handy Health Change indicator for yourself and the opponents on each turn. Old versions of the app may have problems due to this, so make sure to update your Godville app to the latest available version.

Longer Chronicles Storage

As you know, logs of all recent duels, dungeons and sails were available only for the past 3 days. Well, as a result of many under-the-hood improvements, these chronicles are now stored for much longer. Take a look at the Recent Chronicles list (Hero tab, Fight Won / Lost line) to see everything that happened in the past 30 days! The logs themselves will probably be kept for even longer than that (in case you share them or keep the link somehow).

Savings and Hero-Traders

The progress in savings towards the personal shop is now rewarded with a brand new achievement. It starts from just 3 million in savings and goes well beyond the shop. (Wait till the next savings deposit for achievement progress to update.)

The next change is related to the heroes-traders themselves. First of all, they finally get their very own medal, just like folks with a temple, high-level pet, completed ark and all pairs! The Savings pantheon now also lists the level of the trader and the name of trader’s shop.

New features are also available for high-level traders. Starting from level 20 their life gets enriched with occasional deals and visits from authorities. Another thing is reached on trader level 30 and this one is for both sides of the trade. Being so well-known, their shops will start attracting regular heroes for their daily trading needs (regardless of newspaper orders, which still work btw). Traders get more business, heroes get more gold. Win-win!

That’s all for now and thanks if you got that far. Lots of new things and possibilities for new bugs. If you happen to find one make sure to report it via Ideabox or here.

Today is a big day. Today Godville turns seven.

Cheers to all the gods, goddesses and their heroes. Cheers to ideaboxers, guild council elders, and forum frequenters.

May the heroes be brave and obedient, ideas be fresh and punny, guildmates be helpful and righteous.

Make sure to congratulate your champion now (and for the next three days) while he is traveling, dueling, spelunking and sailing to grant him a very special holiday bonus.

Happy birthday, yay!

First weekend of April – what a good day to tidy things up and welcome the nature! Therefore, all heroes are ordered to go outside and do something good for environment. Or more specifically – meet, greet, hug and heal monsters in appreciation of their hard service for the last year and the years to come.

Everybody who uses Remote Control a lot knows how inconvenient it could be sometimes to manually discharge the accumulator – especially during a duel or sail, when every second counts. Today’s feature is meant to improve that. Please welcome the new “Auto-Discharge” option in the Settings (disabled by default).

The name speaks for itself, but just in case – here is what happens once you enable it. Influence buttons in the Remote will become always visible, regardless of godpower remaining. Whenever you send an influence without having enough godpower, the Remote will automatically use one accumulator charge to make your wish come true. Very convenient.

It’s also good to keep track of the charges in the accumulator. To make that easier, here is another cool thing – Accumulator Usage History, which shows the last few accumulator discharges and top-ups as well. It can be found in the Remote -> Charging history (mobile apps) or Profile -> Recharges (web browser). Make sure to update your mobile app to the latest version (released today) to use these new features.

A reminder to the gods with temples: the more charges you have in the accumulator, the harder it is for the temple to generate new ones. The temple works better when charges are in the two-digits range.

In other news: the strong desire of heroes to live caused them to beef up their swimming skills, so they will no longer drown or die during sail. If you have an ark but have no time, you can still send your hero sailing – while the hero may or may not find the booty, at least he’ll have a swim.

Dungeons

Underground hikes could sometimes be long and grueling. This is mostly due to the strong boss monsters and the time it takes to defeat them. It’s time to speed things up – boss fight turns will become shorter, those making these fights much faster. Meanwhile, turn duration in dungeon stays the same, leaving plenty of time for planning and directions. (If you still happen to use an old version of the Godville mobile app, now would be a good time to update it to support this feature).

New mole-hole trap rooms have been found in dungeons. This is one time use underground wormhole instantly moves the adventurers into some other area of the map. Despite being a trap, this room can actually be helpful in fighting the gods’ boredom and moving the heroes closer to (or farther from) the treasure.

Also a new variety of nook rooms have been discovered recently – containing a switch that changes the type of current dungeon. So, if a team gets an unlucky dungeon, there might now be a way to change it.

Sails

Two new sail start conditions ought to make sailors’ life more fun. The first one guarantees that all islands will have something on them, but no one knows what it is. The second one allows islands to replenish their resources, thus allowing the sailors to loot them again.

In addition, all outlandish artifacts from sails are becoming more useful. Now heroes may occasionally find a log of gopher wood inside.

Bingo

The popular mini-game in the Godville Times has a new “Ok, I give up!” mode. Made for those who couldn’t play bingo three times in a day, the new button ends the game and instantly rewards the hero with a handful of gold coins. Keep in mind, though, that full-bingo mode is always more profitable.

Finally, another cause to celebrate. Let’s meet and greet the first god who managed to squeeze in one thousand pairs of every kind into a gopher wood ark. What does it all mean?

First of all (and important for many) this fixes the god’s position in the pantheon of Catch, so nobody can outrun him.

Second, the god gets a honorable title of a Creature Master and a shiny new medal with a laurel wreath, expandable by a single tap. (Btw, other medals can also be magically explained by tapping on them.)

Third, the Third Eye of the Creature Master can keep track of twice more heroic events.

More cool things are coming, but let’s give some time to few more gods to finish their gathering first.

In the meantime, congratulations to KingDada!