Happy March, everyone!  We will be having a general game event this month called the Spring Festival.  It will begin on the evening of Friday, March 15th, run through Saint Patrick's Day weekend, and end after the following weekend on Monday, March 25th.  The event will feature the metarrexi as antagonists, which are plant-based aliens from Diurnus that haven't been seen since the Homecoming event in August of 2017.  This event will have two acts, with the first being available from the start and the second act being introduced on the vernal equinox.  A Death March will be ran on the final night of the event just before everything is shut down.

General game additions and improvements from February include:
- Hiding players will no longer be exposed by searching players, unless both parties are registered for player-killing.
- Successful warrior combos can now daze and stun opponents.
- Field of the grasping dead is now more effective against ethereal creatures.
- As an unintended side effect of the taste project, a 'pine' taste/scent has be added.
- An unnatural spring to be used as a source for the flood spell, thus opening up many more possible places where water spells can be used.

Here are some crafting improvements:
- Certain pieces of forged jewelry will have reduced stats, leaving them with more open composite when adding gems and inlays.
- You can now add gemstones to crafted masks.
- Crafted weapons with high quality will have better dierolls.
- You can now specify a desired weight when splitting items such as spellcomps, herbs and ores.
- If you know lapidary, you can crush ore into powder that can be used in brews. This is especially useful for getting materials of a specific composition for brewing unguents and acids.
- You can now use salty-tasting spellcomps as seasoning when cooking, and a few flavor tweaks.

We can expect the following upcoming changes in March:
- A new necromancer skill called 'soulsmith', which allows necromancers to mount soulstones to jewelry like gemstones.
- Spalted woodcrafted items will have a chance to randomize their stats similar to patchwork leather.
- Additional options to the various mage elemental focus skills, to allow mages to make on-the-fly changes to spells.

For more information, please visit our March audio presentation on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw9ci5cuZgg

-Shadowfax