For this update, the team has focused on fixing many exploits, bug fixes, and added many features requested by the community. This update requires a wipe on all official and community servers.

Players may craft totems which can then be consumed by their guild crest in order to grant it a period of invulnerability. A protected crest will have blue flames, an unprotected crest has the standard orange flames. Crests cannot have invulnerability when conquering. Crest invulnerability on a crest will remove if it is picked up. Crest Protection will not stop someone from raiding your base, but it can stop them from simply destroying your crest, placing their crest, then deleting your entire base if you protect your crest using totems. Please keep in mind, this feature may under-go balance or further design changes in the future.

Crests and objects will still undergo decay, but that is a separate system added previously. Players will still have to add wood into their crest to stop them from decaying and protect their crest area from decaying, but the wood is now consumed upon entering the crest.

We also changed the block collapse system to be require blocks to be connected face to face. This means no more unsightly, poor performance inducing checker patterned walls seen everywhere. The higher tiers of blocks are also now about 25% cheaper to craft.

The ping detector has also been added in. Half of the official servers have it turned on. You will noticed in the lobby screen under the ping column which servers have it turned off, and which have it turned off. If you have trouble staying connected to a ping-detected server, you will need to play on servers without ping detection turned on. Servers with this option turned on, will detect your average ping over-time, and kick you from the server if your ping is over the average limit (150ms on official servers currently). You can enable this and edit it on your community servers via the config file.

We also fixed 5 major exploits recently brought to our attention. We take exploits, bug fixes, and optimization seriously, and if you want to report an exploit, or hacker, and learn about our process, please read this thread:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/344760/discussions/4/523890528707976945/

Please remember that any hackers caught will have their access to the game game perma-banned.

Please follow this guide for properly updating your community server:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=435654886

Going forward we will be monitoring this update, and further fixing bugs and newly reported exploits. We are working on a buff system for the musical instruments, an hacker reporting system, a decal system for more realistic gore and harvesting visuals, better server console, and more.

Features:

- Totems can now be added to crest making crest invulnerable for a set amount of time.
- Crests will have blue fire when they are protected.
- Totems will remove from a crest when it is picked up.
- Crests invulnerability will not work when a crest is in the conquering stage.
- Improved the appearance of water visuals.
- You can now collect water and swim in rivers
- Swimming animation added
- Player pings are now recorded by the server, and can be used by ping-limited servers.
- Servers can now enable a ping limit.
- Servers can define a ping limit in milliseconds.
- Servers can define a port for ping communications.
- Servers can define the length of time that a player's ping is averaged over.
- Players may be granted the permission "codehatch.ping.kick.immunity", which omits the player from ping-based kicks.
- Administrators using the wildcard permission "*" are omitted from ping-based kicks.
- The lobby now returns a different data record for ping-limited servers.
- Old versions of ROK will not see ping-limited servers.
- New versions of ROK will still see all servers.
- The lobby now displays ping-limited servers with a unique icon.
- The lobby now displays a ping limit in the ping column for relevant servers.
- The lobby now displays a warning when connecting to a ping-limited server where your ping is either undefined or near the limit.

Changes:

- 5 Major Exploit Fixes
- Blocks must now connect face-to-face, not corner-to-corner, to be considered attached and not collapse.
- Increased no build zone size around throne room on both maps
- Increased no build zone for prefabs only on CrownLand (roughly anywhere under/around the throne room)
- Dialogues with an input field will now automatically select the end of the input field when they open.
- Opening the console with the "/" key will no longer place the caret to the left of the slash.
- Throwable items, blocks, etc… can now be unequipped by pressing their hotbar key again.
- Sleepers have friction and don't slide around.
- Rope can break when strained by wrapping around objects
- Re-added missing "Log Fence" blueprint to Work Bench.
- Removed security warning when picking up crest
- You must now collect all the stone from a Trebuchet before it can be picked up
- Players banished from a guild will receive a banishment notice
- Can repair invincible objects
- Damage counter for invincible objects doesn't show as damage done
- Increased distant terrain detail on higher settings
- Removed visible lake bottom edge on Crownland
- Resource nodes on StormWall scaled to normal size, reduced hay texture on bottoms
- Blocks now collapse properly if door holding them is destroyed

Optimizations:

- Water has better handling of close draw distances
- Optimizations in the networked event code.

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed some code that may be the cause of the multiple character and camera switching bug
- Fixed a bug in the networked events that may have caused unexpected behavior.
- Made some changes to Server.exe to help servers restart automatically if a server crashes.
- Fixed bug with Loot sacks falling through the terrain
- Destroying/Picking up a seat that someone is sitting on won't permanently lock them
- Fixed issue while spamming name change button
- Interaction prompts won't flicker.
- Fixed bug where some attacks could penetrate through blocks.
- Potential fix for being stuck on foliage loading screen
- Fixed specular artifacts on Tribal Mask
- Fixed Crownland swamp's water collection, mud is less shiny

Design Changes:

- Shields had block angle & block look speed values tweaked. This adds further gameplay variety to the different shields.
- Crests will now consume wood/stick fuel as soon as it is added to the crest.
- The crafting cost of blocks above tier three have been reduced by 25%
- Crests now under root category “Area Protection”.
- Increased the time window in which attacks are blockable to include the latter half of the attack's "buildup" phase.

Thanks for Playing,
- The Code}{atch Team