Not everyone knows that heroes are not only good at questing and fighting, but treasure finding as well. Whenever they hear a “dig” voice from their god, they grab whatever lies around and zealously start rummaging in the ground, searching for gold. This could be helpful for melting a golden brick, healing a pet or just to help the hero get more money.

It seems that even-deepening excavations have unleashed something unheard of – the underground lairs of new boss-monsters. These rare creatures can only be met by synchronized digging, are stronger and have incredible abilities that other monsters don’t have. For the first time in Godville, it will take joint efforts of multiple heroes to defeat the beast once it’s unleashed! These guys are also quite rich, so the heroes who manage to get through the fight and win will be rewarded very nicely.

Note: if you play on a phone, make sure to update your mobile app to see these new fights completely.

In other good news, the game finally got a big and long-awaited update for the duel related phrases. To further embrace the content-related activities, Godville Times now features new daily section with updates from the Ideabox and ER. All hail to the ER participants and new game content!

UPD: Forum topic on new boss monsters.

It’s time to add a little bit more purpose into post-temple heroic existence. There’ve already been some things to do, but now there is another big mindless goal – after the great construction for their god is complete, it’s time for heroes to think about themselves and save for a prosperous future! Heroes will now start saving some of their drinking money for retirement and, since heroes whose gods have temples are not the poorest and have high standards, they will need a lot – about 30 million gold coins. Does this number seem unreachable? Well, at one time 1000 bricks seemed unreachable too. In the meantime, you can check out the new pantheon to track your progress.

Another change that we’re making today is about the Ideabox. Here is what’s new:

• From now on all ideas will be voted on for 24 hours from their initial appearance instead of the old 100 votes limit. More votes per idea should better reflect community opinion, so make sure to cast your vote!
• ER acceptance of ideas is determined by the relative number of up votes. The threshold for diary and earthly news submissions stays the same – 50%, but for other types it’s been decreased to 40%, which should increase the chance of these ideas making it into the game.

More details about the approval process can be found in this forum topic. We hope these changes will make idea processing simpler and increase the number of approved ideas. Thanks to all ER participants for the great job they did over the last few months!

PS: We’ve also created new mobile pages for pantheons. Hopefully those on mobile phones will like them.

The last few weeks turned out to be quite productive – pet variety has increased (thank you all for your suggestions!), the game got yet another bunch of new phrases and content (credit and thanks to all players and ER voters) and the forums finally became more mobile-friendly (if you have any thoughts on mobile forums please share those in comments).

Everyone loves it when things work better than they did before and we’re no exception. That’s why in a few hours we’re going to fiddle around a bit with our servers to make them work better. That will cause interruptions and game availability issues, but hopefully most of you will hardly even notice :)

NOTICE: Due to the maintenance, the game won’t be available on Aug 4, starting at 3 AM (Pacific Time, GMT-7) for approximately 2 hours. We’ll update this post once everything is finished.

UPD: Everything seem to be up and running, but if you run into new issues let us know via ideabox.

UPD: Sorry folks, but some heroes were inaccessible today due to some sudden server hardware uprising, Luckily, humans have won this time, so everything is back to normal.

There are sayings among Godville gods that sometimes pets can be even more interesting than the heroes themselves. Therefore, having a pet suddenly die or get replaced could be an unpleasant experience, which is not something that we want. So let’s make it better!

First of all, pets will no longer die. From now on, when a pet saves the life of his master, he won’t die as he would have before. Instead he’ll just be knocked unconscious. The hero can then heal him within 60 hours (same rules as before), but even if he fails to do so, the pet won’t be lost. He will come back to his senses on his own, but this time as a more cautious and down-to-earth animal. An animal that doesn’t care about levels, pantheon competition, battle nicknames and has no desire to sacrifice his life, preferring just to simply be with his master.

In other words:

• if all you wanted was to see your hero with a friendly companion, you can now forget about the burden of resurrection and just enjoy the game! The pet will stay with his hero forever.
• if for some reason you care about pet levels and pantheon position – nothing changes (except the terminology and new UI feature showing the time left for pet healing).
• if you want to get rid of a levelless pet, read ahead: once in awhile, your hero will take a quest to bring his companion to a vet for a routine checkup. If you cancel this quest, the hero will set the pet free.

Other news:

• for those playing in a web browser – check out the greetings on the top left area of the page. There might be something interesting up there!
• the most recent iPhone app update has a shiny new feature that should make influencing more convenient. Make sure to install it.
• recent advancements in heroic brain science have finally taught the heroes to turn profit on the old stuff left after an equipment upgrade. It’s never too late to make heroes smarter, right?

UPD: There are no changes for pet medals – they are given upon reaching level 30. As with all other achievements, once it’s given it can be never taken away.

Btw, we’re accepting submissions for new monsters, that can be tamed. Post it right here, in comments (one pre-condition: they must be chosen from the monsters that already in the game).

After having loads of fun with mini-quests, our brave Godville champions have decided to advance even further towards some truly great deeds! Once a hero finishes his first hundred regular quests, he may get a chance to do something bigger – embark on a really epic mission. The epic quests are much longer, but so are the rewards. Impatient gods can easily cancel these quests with the usual god voices should they need to.

Speaking of content, the game just got more than two hundred awesome new quests. In the meantime, ER has been extended to include submissions for the duel phrases , making ER finally available in all ideabox sections! To reward ER personnel for their hard work, we’re adding a button that allows them to convert some of their already sky-high IQ points into gratitude pantheon points.

One more thing. After just two years of continuous patching and rebuilding, the browser version of Godville finally opens its doors to everyone – no Facebook required (we’re not sure how long it will last, so if you have friends who have wanted to register, be sure to let them know). Hooray and welcome!

Pantheons have been in the game since the early days and haven’t really changed a lot, so it’s time to shake them up! The pantheons have been reorganized into 3 big groups. “Short-term” pantheons only include players that have been active during the last five days, and have no hard limits. This should be especially interesting for the newcomers, as they will finally see some pantheon positions right away, instead of those depressing dashes. “Long-term” pantheons list all players and, due to the size limits, are much harder to get in, but once you do it should be more pleasing.

The third group is for guilds. Aside from the old Unity pantheon with its tricky ratings, this group now features two new pantheons: the pantheon of Popularity, which shows how famous the guilds are in the Godville towns, and the pantheon of Aggressiveness, which ranks guilds based on their duel accomplishments.

The new pantheon of Mastery shows how good your hero’s skills and equipment are compared to those of others. The Construction pantheon underwent some renovation as well. The gods with completed temples have been respectfully moved to their very own, newly created long-term pantheon of Templehood, boosting up the ratings for soon-to-be temple owners.

As the total number of pantheons has increased, so did the clutter in the pantheon snippet. To address this issue, the pantheons in which the hero has no active places are no longer shown on the hero and personal pages.

In PvP-related news, arena fights are now guaranteed to postpone skirmishes for at least 3 days. All duel fights now have a special link, which can be used to the share the duel chronicle with other gods. We’ve come up with at least 4 ways of using it and wonder how many uses you will find for it!

As you might have noticed, heroes have started to hear more interesting god voices in the last few weeks. Here is the next change in this area: highly-rated god voices will spread wider and may even bring some reward to their authors. So write thoughtfully, vote wisely and everyone will be happy!

Besides these new measures, there are a few more nice little features in this update, but we’ll leave it to you to discover and share them with others in the comments below.

It’s been two years since we launched this game. That makes today our birthday! We hope that the last year brought you lots of fun and excitement; at least as much as it did for us. Congratulations to everyone and, to mark this great event, all present gods just received 20 godpower charges at their disposal!

What’s a holiday without a new great feature? Behold: starting today, your hero will occasionally take special mini-quests – a series of very short (less than an hour) quests, which could be minor, yet profitable distractions from the hero’s main task. Since mini-quests are not of the prime importance, the hero can easily give them up, and gods can urge their heroes to drop these quests with the usual “cancel quest” god voice. However, the heroes who successfully finish a series of mini-quests are destined for special outcomes, including a brand new one – a duel-like fight with a boss-monster, resulting in an especially lucrative reward and a new game achievement!

Finally, spring is a good time for cleaning and it’s a great opportunity to remove some stale game content. We’ve opened up a new forum topic where everyone can post their personal list of their most disliked pieces texts. Hopefully, this will make Godville even better.

Thanks for staying with us! Happy Godville New Year!

Due to a hardware failure yesterday the game became unavailable. We’ve managed to fix the initial problem and restore access for most of the heroes, but due to an extremely unlucky streak of events (darn this random!), fixing it for the rest of the heroes turned out to be harder than we thought initially. We’re working hard and still expect to have this issue fixed over the next few hours. We’ll update this post once the problem is finally resolved.

Thank you for understanding.

UPD: All heroes should be reachable again. The issue has not been resolved completely yet, so we’re going to keep looking into it, as well as applying some counter measures to prevent this from happening in the future.

The never ending influx of strong monsters is calling for some countermeasures! Authorities have come up with a new initiative for controlling the rising population of beasts – every day they will publish a reward for two WANTED monsters in the Godville Times newspaper. Everyone who hunts down one of these can claim their prize in the nearest town. In other newspaper news: the items listed in “Buy and Sell” section now can really be sold for much more than they are usually worth.

Some recent developments in the “rankings and measurements” area have brought us a brand new pantheon – the Pantheon of Survival! It ranks the most successful monster-slayers who also happen to have some decent survival skills. Rumor has it that these mystery boxes will be all the rage for their ability to remove death records…

A small, yet important change for arena duels – from now on, if you send your hero to the arena and he didn’t find an opponent, you can send him again after just one hour, instead of four hours like it was before.

A bunch of tech news: players on the Google Chrome browser can now receive nice popup notifications on various heroic events, similar to notifications in our mobile apps. The feature is disabled by default and can be enabled in the hero page settings. If you’re using Chrome (other browsers don’t support this yet) be sure to check it out.

The new version of our Android app has just been released (v3.2) and it features Google Cloud to Device messaging transport (C2DM) support for remote notifications. This should make hero status notifications work on some devices where they didn’t work before and improve battery life as well. C2DM is the new default (on supported devices). The old notification transport can still be enabled using the “Alternative Transport” option in the Notification Settings.

Finally, a few words on all those 502 errors we’ve been having recently. In our continuing glitch-fighting efforts, we’ve just pushed a big Godville-wide update that should make all things run a bit more smoothly. There could be some side effects, though, so if you manage to run into something that stopped working please report it here.

Heroes have always liked to form into groups and socialize throughout Godville. The gods, however, were limited to “fast” but private messages, or very public but “slow” forum talks. The time has come to add one more tool to the divine communication toolbox – the Guild Council. It’s as fast as PMs and can be used by multiple people at the same time. As the name implies, this tool is tailored for guilds, and it should bring even more sense to being in a group and fire up some inter-guild communication. The Council has a simple permission system: all guild members can read messages; Followers can post; and starting from Cardinal rank the gods can jointly expel and impel infidels from their sacred meeting places (elders’ voices have higher priority). Guild Council is already available in the browser and in recent updates of Godville mobile apps (3.3 for iOS app and 3.0 for Android to be precise).

In other news. From now on the personal pages will display achievement progress plus a few more cool stats. The latest mobile apps got highly anticipated multi-line message input capability, and the iOS app now has a new and improved messaging UI. Some under-the-hood changes should have improved Remote Notifications and duel turn progress. Many bugs and other insects were smashed here and there, hopefully making the overall game experience better for everyone. Thanks to the never-sleeping ER, the game got yet another pack of awesome new content. And finally, some heroes are spreading rumors about newly discovered settlements not far from the capital…

Quite a good month for Godville, don’t you think?