EQBuddy v1.99.6

What's new in 1.99.6

• WHERE THINGS MOVED, AND WHY THEY KEEP MOVING (discussion #233, thanks mjtrainor - "stop changing every feature and it's location every release... I don't want to need to hunt for 'missing' features every single time I sit down to play EQL"). That is fair, and it has now been said three times - #219 lost the mote rate, #227 and #228 lost the Motes card. So here is the whole map in one place, and a promise about what happens next.
• What has been going on: EQBuddy grew fast, one feature request at a time, and every one of them arrived as its own card on the widget. That is how you end up with fourteen cards and no idea which one holds the thing you want. The 1.98 and 1.99 releases are the ORGANIZING pass - putting things where they logically belong now that we know what they all are. The new homes should make more sense on their own terms, and they are far easier for somebody opening EQBuddy for the first time. But if you have been here a while, none of that is what you feel: what you feel is that something you knew the location of is somewhere else. Both are true, and the second one is the cost of the first.
• The map, as of this release. PROGRESS is one card with four rooms - Experience (xp, AAs, skill-ups, what your next level unlocks), Wealth (coin), Faction, and Raids. It absorbed the old Progress, Money, Motes, Faction and Raids cards. GEAR & LOOT is one card with four tabs - Loot, Items, Wishlist and Inventory - and absorbed the Loot and Gear cards, with the old Gear Locker and Inventory windows now both living on the Inventory tab. KILLS & DROPS is one card with two tabs, Kills and Drops, and absorbed the Kills card and the Drops by Creature window. QUESTS has General, Epic and Sky. MOTES is its own card again if you want it - it is switched on in (gear) - Cards & windows.
• Nothing was deleted in any of that, and there are three ways back to anything. Every folded card can be switched on again in (gear) - Cards & windows. Every card keeps the slot you dragged it to, so a merged card sits where its parts sat. And the arrow on any card header pops that surface out to a full window on a second monitor.
• THE PROMISE, starting now: any release that MOVES a surface will say so in this list, by name, in the form "X is now Y" - the old place and the new one, not just the new one. You should never have to hunt for something EQBuddy relocated, and if you do, that is a bug in this list rather than something to go looking for. The organizing pass is also finite - it is nearly done, not a permanent state of affairs.
• NEW - THE NEXT LEVEL'S SPELLS AND ABILITIES ARE SPLIT UP BY CLASS. Progress has always been able to tell you what your next milestone level opens up; now, on a character with more than one class, each class gets its own heading you can fold open or shut. A Legends character is up to three classes at once, so "what do I get at 34" was never one list - it was three, run together, and the only way to tell whose row was whose was to read the right-hand column of every line. The first class with something in it starts open and the rest start folded; that choice lasts the session and is deliberately not saved, because folding Warrior away to read Druid is a decision about the next thirty seconds. One class still gets its names straight under the heading, with no lone expander to click.
• A class that gains NOTHING at that level keeps its row and says so. Warriors, Monks and Berserkers have no spell table at any level, so "Warrior - nothing new at 13" is the complete answer rather than a gap; dropping the heading would look exactly like that class not being one of yours. Abilities the wiki lists for everyone - General, Archetype and Special AAs - sit in their own "Any class" group instead of being repeated under each of your three, and a spell two of your classes both learn appears under both, because it really is two answers to the same question. The window, the widget and the phone all draw the same groups from the same place, so they cannot drift apart.
• And the preview now stays hidden until EQBuddy actually knows a class for you, which is a change in what it will claim. Before this it would fall back to the abilities that apply to everyone and then jump forward to whatever level had one - so a character with no class picked could be told "at level 39: 1 new AA ability" about a pet ability, five levels away, with no pet. A forecast that cannot be about you should not say it is. If your classes are not showing, tick them in the Quest Tracker's class picker.
• NEW - MOTES PER HOUR, AS ONE LINE ON PROGRESS. It sits in the Experience room with the xp and AA rates - "1 mote - 0.9/hr" - because that is the room open while you are actually at the camp. The Motes card keeps its own surface for anyone specifically farming them, and the Wealth pill stays coin; this is a summary of that card, in the place you were already looking, not a replacement for it. It is the same line the Motes card's own header shows, so the two can never disagree, and it stays off the screen entirely on a session where no motes have dropped rather than reporting a rate of nothing.
• Small, on EQBuddy Mobile: the phone stops being woken by the mote rate ticking over. Its Progress screen used the rate as its way of noticing a mote had dropped, and a rate moves on the clock even when nothing happens - so a paired phone could wake for a number changing by itself. It watches the motes themselves now.
• NEW - PLANE OF SKY STEPS ARE GROUPED BY ISLAND. A quest's pieces used to be one flat list that jumped from island to island; now the steps for an island sit together under its own heading, in island order, so you can see the work for where you are actually standing. Island 1.5 sorts where it belongs. Steps that drop from trash anywhere on the plane - Wind Runes and the like - keep the ungrouped listing they have always had, under "Anywhere on the plane", because "no island" is the true answer for those rather than a gap. Thanks to the Reddit player who suggested it.
• Some Sky pieces drop on several islands at once, and there is a tick-box on the Sky tab for how you would rather see those. Off (the default) lists each one once, under a heading that names them - "Islands 1.5 · 4 · 8" - so you can see from where you are standing whether it is reachable. On repeats it under every island it drops on, so a single island's list is complete when you are planning a trip there - the same step then shows up more than once, which is the trade. Either way the score counts each step once, and the setting follows you to the phone.
• FIXED (discussion #109, thanks Frankthetankk) - THE FIRST TWO BEES ON ISLAND 6 STOP GETTING RESPAWN COUNTDOWNS THEY DO NOT DESERVE. The Plane of Sky bee chain is four links - Bzzazzt, then Bazzzazzt, then Bzzzt, then Bazzt Zzzt - and EQBuddy only knew the last two. So the first two fell through to the zone's eight-hour default and started clocks, and because more than one wasp answers to each of those names - three Bzzazzt stand on the island at the start, and the Bazzzazzt they spawn share a name too - a gap between two of them could also be LEARNED as a respawn: kill two Bzzazzt three minutes apart and you had a three-minute timer that went DUE forever. Both are in the catalog now, along with Bizazzzt on the dead-end branch off the first pair, all marked as several-creatures-share-this-name so nothing is learned from them, and a wrong value already saved in your file is cleared the next time EQBuddy starts. Your own typed duration is never touched.
• One of those two is NOT triggered, and it is worth saying why we went the other way on it. Frankthetankk asked for both to be marked triggered, and eqlwiki gives Bzzazzt a real 12-hour respawn - it is the mob that STARTS the chain, and a chain whose first link only appears when something else dies could never begin. His testing is all from personal Sky instances, which do not respawn once cleared, so a 12-hour open-world clock is invisible from there. Both accounts are true about different places; the catalog describes the world, and eqlwiki is what we match when the two disagree.
• FIXED (discussion #101, thanks Frankthetankk) - WHEN EQBUDDY READS YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS DUMP BY ITSELF, IT NOW TELLS YOU WHAT IT DID. Since 1.98.1 EQBuddy has noticed the moment the game announces an /outputfile achievements dump and read it for you - marking Sky rewards you had turned in and raid clears from before EQBuddy. It did all of that silently: no report, no Undo, and no mention of anything it had skipped. The Raids surface now carries the same line the inventory dump has always shown on the Gear tab, with an Undo that puts back exactly what the import ticked and leaves anything you ticked yourself alone.
• And it says what it did NOT do, which is the half that was costing you. Rewards from a class unlock you were GRANTED rather than earned are deliberately skipped - your primary class unlock is complete from character creation and the game flags its rewards as obtained without the items ever existing, so importing them would tick off Sky pieces you never had. That guard has been there since #101 and it was working; it just said nothing, so a dump full of rewards could report "nothing new to mark" and look broken. It now names the count. So does the other one: a reward the dump says you obtained whose name does not match anything on the checklist is counted too, because that one is real progress not being recorded, and only the manual Import achievements preview ever listed them.
• Frankthetankk asked directly whether the automatic path skips the check that the manual menu makes. It does not - both go through the same guard, and there is now a test that says so rather than it being true by coincidence.
• NEW (discussion #217, thanks Frankthetankk) - WHEN THE GAME ITSELF CALLS A CREATURE RARE, THE WIKI PACK OFFERS THAT AS AN EDIT. /consider prints "a rare creature" for a rare spawn, and that is a fact about the creature that eqlwiki has no systematic way to record yet. If your own con said it, the pack now hands you a line for the creature's page - "Confirmed as a rare spawn via in-game /consider" - alongside the drops it was already offering. Frankthetankk took the destination question to the wiki admins himself: there is no rare-spawn field on the creature template yet, they are positive about adding one, and until it lands the description field is the stopgap that matches what editors already do by hand. The pack says all of that, so nobody is left guessing why the line goes where it goes.
• It is careful in three ways, and each one is a thing it refuses to do. It never tells you to replace what an editor has already written - EQBuddy cannot read the description field, so the only honest instruction is to ADD. It is never inferred from how often something drops or how rarely you find it: the only evidence is the game's own word in your own log, and a creature you never conned gets no line at all, because "I conned it and it never said rare" and "I never conned it" are different things. And it always shows both numbers - "on 2 of your 7 /considers" rather than just "rare" - because same-named spawns are not all rare and you are the one pasting it.
• Creature rarity and item rarity stay completely separate, which is the part that was nearly got wrong. A trash mob can drop an ultra-rare item and a rare spawn can drop its piece every single time. The drop-rate labels still need 10+ kills and the wiki's own bands; this needs one /consider, because the game printed the word rather than us measuring anything.