Designed dungeons get owner-controlled difficulty, the Broodhollow spiders start paying out real loot, and three brand-new families of achievements arrive with titles and big gold rewards.

Choose Your Difficulty

On dungeons where staff have enabled it, the dungeon’s owner can now set the difficulty from the Owner Menu — opened with the [DungeonOptions command while inside the dungeon:

• Normal — the baseline. A place to learn the fight; monster mechanics are survivable while you figure them out.
• Hero — monsters are tougher and hit harder, and you’re expected to actually use the mechanics — dodge the telegraphed attacks, not just tank them.
• Godlike — brutal. One missed dodge on a clearly-telegraphed attack can end you. For groups that want the real test.

The more avoidable an ability is — the longer and clearer its warning — the harder it hits at higher difficulty, so standing in the obvious bad spot is punished the most. Tougher settings also pay out better rewards. The dungeon remembers your choice and starts your next run on the same setting, and difficulty can only be changed while nobody inside is in combat.

Difficulty options appear only on dungeons where staff have switched them on, and owners manage them with the [DungeonOptions command.

The Broodhollow Spiders Bite Back

Spider loot. The tiered Broodhollow spiders now drop loot scaled to how dangerous they are — the deeper and nastier the spider, the better the haul — with an extra bonus on Hero and Godlike.

The Broodmother’s Hoard

The Broodmother pays out a proper boss haul, and her best rewards now scale with the difficulty you beat her on:

• Power scrolls. She always drops a handful of power scrolls on death.
• Meta-pet relic. She always drops a meta-pet relic. Difficulty raises the odds it comes through Flawless rather than Flawed — roughly 15% on Normal, 30% on Hero, and 50% on Godlike (plus your usual luck on top).
• Broodmother’s Instinct. Her signature meta-spider unlock drops on a difficulty curve — 40% / 80% / 100% across Normal / Hero / Godlike.

So you always walk away with a relic — the harder the kill, the better the odds it’s Flawless — and a Godlike clear also guarantees her Instinct.

New Achievements

Three new achievement families join the book, each with escalating stretch-goals, wearable titles, and gold:

• Monster of the Week. Slay each week’s featured monster, climb the lifetime “Monster Hunter” ladder all the way to 100,000 kills, and collect them all for the Gotta Slay ‘Em All payout.
• Contracts. Reward lines for completing monster contracts — count ladders, total-points ladders, per-theme lines, and one-off marquee contracts capped by the Big Game Hunter meta.
• Paragons & Corruption. Ladders for slaying paragons and corrupted creatures, difficulty-scaled “double dip” kills, per-event corrupted kills, and the Corruption Connoisseur capstone.

The toughest, collect-everything achievements award up to 200,000 gold plus their title.

Bard Talisman Tune-Up

The Lute of Lost Harmonies gets a long-overdue pass. Several of its abilities were taking an absurdly long time to level — we’ve reworked the experience curves so they progress at a sane pace.

• You keep everything you’ve earned. All XP you’ve already banked carries over, and if the new numbers put you at a higher level, you’re bumped up automatically. Harmonic Melody and Soul Chorus — the two worst offenders — also get a one-time 2× boost to their earned XP.
• Harmonic Melody and Soul Chorus now fire three times as often (cooldown cut from 90s to 30s), and their healing / mana restore scales with the ability’s level.
• Fairer leveling in a crowd. Relic abilities now count the toughest enemy they hit when awarding XP — so laying into a dangerous mob in the middle of a pack finally pays off the way it should.

Zombieland Moderation

Staff can now ban disruptive players from the Zombieland event. A ban applies to the whole account: the player can’t join, is removed if they’re already inside, and no longer appears on the event scoreboard.

Performance & Stability

This release also includes several performance and stability updates — mostly slow memory-leak fixes and cleanup work in systems you won’t see directly. A couple of them touch things you will, though: if you notice anything off with temporary buffs & debuffs (an icon that won’t clear, an effect that never expires) or with instanced areas (dungeons, events, house interiors behaving oddly), please report it so we can jump on it quickly.

Broad systems touched this patch:

• Buffs & debuffs — temporary effects are now properly released from server tracking once they expire.
• Instances — portal and timed dungeon instances clean up their region correctly when they close.
• Invasions — a lingering event hook is now unsubscribed as it should be.
• Dino Dungeon — a controller no longer holds onto references after it’s cleaned up.
• Corpses — fixed a rare crash when displaying a corpse whose equipped item had since been removed.
• Zombieland — the event scoreboard is far cheaper to refresh.
• Server watchdog — quieter freeze logging, with an operator-triggered panic save.
• Mail & housing — assorted null-reference fixes.

UOForever Client Update — v1.1.17

• Item scaling & rotation now follow the item everywhere. Specially sized or rotated items keep their look while you drag them and while they sit in your bags — matching how they appear in the world. Dragged items also stay anchored to your cursor at any scale.
• Summoned creatures no longer use the pet bar. Energy vortexes, blade spirits, and other summons now show the normal creature health bar — the party-style pet bar is reserved for creatures you actually control.
• Readable tooltips. Dark text in tooltips now gets a subtle white outline so it stays legible against the tooltip background, instead of fading into it.