This update overhauls the Meta Spider’s Instinct stances — a brand-new Pounce stance and a reworked, defensive Carapace — expands our visual-effect toolkit for reward chests and world objects, and fixes a tournament crash. Here’s what’s new.

Meta Spider — Stance Overhaul

The Meta Spider’s offensive and defensive Instinct stances have been rebuilt from the ground up.

• New: the Pounce Stance. With this stance up, ordering your spider to “all kill” sends it leaping through the air and slamming down onto its target. Where it lands it erupts in a green venom shockwave and splatters toxic venom puddles across the ground. If the target is too far to reach, the spider holds the pounce and springs the moment it closes in — one leap per order.
• Your brood leaps with it. Any brood spiderlings your spider has summoned (via the Brood relic) pounce the same target alongside it, each landing with its own smaller shockwave and a splash of venom.
• Carapace, reworked into a defensive burst. The Carapace Stance is no longer a venom-fling — it now hardens the spider’s shell. Every 40 seconds it braces for 10 seconds, taking 80% less damage while it soaks (true damage still gets through), and banks everything it absorbs. When the window closes it erupts, releasing a share of the stored damage as a venom-green blast around it.
• Attack-speed stacking removed. Swapping stances no longer grants the stacking attack-speed & stamina boost. Stances are now about their own distinct effects rather than a speed race.

As always, spider venom is hostile-monster only — it never harms players or pets. The leap and burst visuals are shown on the enhanced UO Forever client.

More Visual Flourishes

Building on last patch’s item & creature scaling, our content and events team now has more ways to dress up the world (on the enhanced UO Forever client):

• Living reward chests. Reward chests — including paragon caches — can now roll from a palette of random hues and be given a size (static or pulsing), a spin, and a particle effect. Expect the occasional oversized, slowly-turning, glimmering treasure chest. Paragon chests once again roll their classic random colours, and the creature statuette they can contain rides inside the chest.
• Animated world objects. Harvestable and destructible world objects can now scale, spin, and emit particles, and can change that look at each stage as they’re worked — think an ore vein that pulses larger when full and shrinks as it’s mined.
• Bolder paragon auras. The paragon rank auras introduced last patch are now far more visible — each rank’s glow (red, blue, white) now radiates as a bright, pulsing outline, so you can spot a paragon and read its rank at a glance across a crowded screen.

These are enhanced-client visuals; on the classic client the game plays as normal.

Fixes & Improvements

• Tournament crash fixed. Fixed a server crash that could occur when a Clash tournament round ended and a participant’s saved status was being restored, which could interrupt the tournament system.