A number of new features were added in 2010 including several from the feature votes page.
This lead to being able to harvest fruit from around the island and extract the seeds. Plant the seeds, add some water and with a little luck you'll have a tree or bush growing on that tile. After some requests, pumpkins were added to the usual list of fruit that can be harvested so now there's a supply of pumpkins all year round.
Start a campfire and add more wood to keep it going. It should keep most animals away while you sleep but be careful not to let it get out of hand though otherwise you could end up setting light to large swathes of land!
We added the ability to use BBCode in both character and clan descriptions and clan news. This provides access to links, colours and various other text styles. The list of supported tags and sample use can be found at https://www.shartak.com/bbcode.html
These are badges that are shown on character profiles and are awarded for a variety of reasons. A list of the ones known about is being maintained on the wiki at https://wiki.shartak.com/index.php/Achievements and the new stats system was brought online at very end of 2010 (just before midnight on New Years Eve!) so there should be plenty of scope for new achievements in the future.
Accounts which have donated for at least one character now have the "fast-switch bar" option available. This is a quick way to change between characters instead of going back to the Account page.
A python has been added to the list of creatures available to hunt. After 6 months, it's killed many people but only been killed 4 times!
Several changes have been made to the contact lists including sorting them and mass-updates (delete and change type).
Announced as eerie lights sighted out to sea off the northern coast near Durham, it wasn't long before someone spotted a ghost ship complete with a small NPC crew. As people soon found out, the living have a tendancy to be dropped into the water as it sails but some have still braved the crew and tried to remain on board.
We now have a number of customised huts around the island ranging from the Botheringham FC Club House in York, to the Spirit Hut in Wiksik. More information about getting your own can be found at https://www.shartak.com/custom_huts.html
We have now moved the main IRC channel to DALnet - this offers more services than EFnet such as NickServ and ChanServ, as well as allowing longer names. If you previously used irc.efnet.org, you need to change your client to irc.dal.net in order to join the right network.
Some of the definitions in the Terms of Use have been clarified and can be found in the Clarification of Terms of Use - all players are encouraged to read them!
You can follow the latest in-game news via the RSS feed at https://www.shartak.com/index.rdf and other comments can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/shartak and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Shartak
Thank you for reading this newsletter and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us through the feedback page or on the official forum