Hoop jumping through Nektropos Castle

So Everquest Legends released a new update just a few days ago that included a couple of new playable zones, a new dark half-elf race (the Ayr'Haeth), and a Halloween quest. It's actually a pretty great free expansion, and the fact that the raid zone Nektropos is our new end game area, it's causing a lot of buzz for players.

Hanging with the family portrait

Hoop 1: I had to find where the new content was. To get to Nektropos Castle, you have to swim through a river in Nektolus Forest, which brings you to the new zone called Lake Nerius.

Hoop 2: The problem here is that one can't simply walk into the gates of the Nektropos Castle, you have to be invited, which means there's a key quest. You get that by talking to Retainer Ozval in a little outdoor brick, uh, tent area in the Lake Nerius Zone. 

Retaining friendship with Retainer Ozval

He sends you on a quest that involves killing a high-level fish in Lake Nerius who swallowed a ring. Then you have to go to Felwithe and Ak'Anon to get a couple items from shop keeps that owe the family a favor so you can restore the signet ring to its original splendor. 

Hoop 3: If you're an Iksar like me, you're going to have to illusion up, faction up, or swap races so you can talk to these NPCs. Not too difficult and especially since I recently leveled an enchanter with all my race illusions unlocked.

Hoop 4: Just restoring the ring isn't enough, you need to give it its magic back. To do that, you'll need to go to a new NPC hanging out in the Plane of Hate called the Priestess of Ulkorruuk, so you'll have to be at least level 46 so you can get into the Plane of Hate. The Priestess is deep in the second level of Hate, so you'll have to do some clearing to get to her.

You sleep on those things, High Priestess?

As far as key quests in Everquest go, that's really not that bad! It was like an hour or so of just running around, and NOW you can enter the Nektropos Castle.

Inside the castle, you'll now talk to Lord Ollix Everling who says you'll have to talk to his mother to figure out why Lord daddy Rikantus Everling of the castle is freaking out, killing his beloved daughters, and making freakish monsters in the basement.

Hoop 5: You have to make a key to access the upstairs, so there are four ground spawns in the lower levels you have to gather up. As it turns out, the key is to fix the harpsichord in the downstairs. It's missing a white key, a black key, a string, and a plectrum. Do that and you can now wander around upstairs, but dangit . . .

Hoop 6: To unlock the door to talk to Lady Silenuie you have to go talk to Plimptos (yes that's his name), who is a poor unfortunate soul that's been tortured to death, resurrected, and tortured to death again, over and over like a hundred times. He tells you to kill all of the now undead daughters and the rest of the family, but to do that . . .

This sounds a bit beyond 10 free sessions of therapy.

Hoop 7: You have to talk to the handmaiden to open the doors to the daughters. After that, you can now go around and kill all the daughters and obtain seven different colored robes which seem to be for some kind of a pastel fashion quest, but I just tried them on, giggled, and deleted them from my inventory.

MY NEW NIGHTGOWN!

Hoop 8: After killing off the daughters, you need to head into the basement (behind a secret bookshelf door) to finish off Lord Rikantus Everling, who kicked my butt a few times until I figured out what you needed to do. This was Tier zero mind you. I SHOULD be able to smoke this guy with no issues. Nope. It was probably the most difficult fight in Everquest Legends to date.

Basically, you have to slowly kill him because at set percentages, he spawns things. As soon as he spawns a Guardian golem, you need to switch targets and kill the guardian immediately. If he spawns zombies, just ignore them, they will despawn after you get Rikantus to the next guardian spawn. UNLESS, you kill Rikantus too quickly. 

It's a tricky fight that I eventually won by only using my pet to attack Rikantus to chew him down slowly while swapping between defensive stance, evasive stance, and balanced stance; and letting my pet taunt when I was tragically low on health, sacrificing my pet, and then resummoning a new taunting pet. I think this will be tuned down in the future, but I got it done after 3 deaths and some experimentation.

Screenshotted proof because it was unbelievable.

Hoop 9: Finally you can enter and talk to Lady Silenuie . . . only to find out that she won't talk to you because of low faction issues. There seems to be some complaints on Discord that this is seen as a bug, but others said they were able to get past this by using the Sneak ability and saying the keywords "dead" and then "confess."

Hoop 10: Since I don't have a rogue class leveled up to 50 and you have to fight Lady Silenuie after you use the keywords, the only method I had to getting the sneak ability was to unlock the Halfling race.(This hoop is a me problem because my rogue is only like level 20) So I ran and bought 500 bandages and turned them in to Joogl Honeybugger in Misty Thicket. And then went into Runnyeye and mass murdered pickclaw goblins until I received the ally faction notification for the Priests of Mischief.

Halfling on a mini horse will never stop being funny to me

Hoop 11: After editing my main character loadout to be Halfling instead of Iksar, I ran back to Lady Silenuie, hit the sneak button, and said the keywords "dead" and "confess." NOTE that you can't just click the word "confess" after seeing it in dialog. You have to physically type "/say confess" -- at which point she'll attack you. 

Ghostbusters!

Finally you go down, deliver that sweet death Plimptos is looking for and return to Lord Ollix for your reward.

WHEW.

I kept ahold of all my keys because I don't trust the keyring in Nektropos just yet and I'd rather just run around without all the hoops, if you know what I mean.

From what I've read, there's another zone beneath Castle Nektropos that is a starting area for the new race . . . I think that's next on the agenda after farming Nektropos a few times on higher difficulty levels.

Happy Dueling!

An Enchanting Beastlord in Everquest Legends

I went back and read through a few of my old EverQuest Legends posts from Blaugust, and I love how cheery and bright-eyed I was about playing the old school EverQuest game again (with a new twist). I was so happy about going through Kedge Keep again and killing mermaids and sharks.

Fast forward to today, I just finished grinding Kedge again for like ten levels, and I still have two more to go until I can enter into the planes, and yeah, I'm not so bright-eyed anymore. ON THE OTHER HAND . . . I accomplished a fun thing that I wanted to do!

DADDY WITH HIS BABY!

STORY TIME! I was hanging out in New Sebilis one day and I saw the craziest looking red Iksar warder, and I was like . . . wait a second, what?! I WANT THAT! Come to find out, it's an enchanter illusion. It was at that moment that I decided to try swapping out Shadow knight with Enchanter (Making my build a Beastlord / Cleric / Enchanter trio).

Adding that Enchanter third class to the mix, you immediately realize that (just like everyone in and out of the game has been saying) Mezzing enemies is incredibly easy. Gone is the need to single pull.  You just pull up to 30 enemies and recast Mez every 20+ seconds while whittling them down one-by-one.

Welcome to the fish processing plant . . .

So far swapping out Shadow knight for Enchanter has been interesting, so let me talk through some of that:

1- Gear -- Surprisingly, not a lot of my gear needed to be swapped out. I've been opting for plate with wisdom stats while I've been going down the Heavy Armor route anyway (vice plate with intelligence stats) and that means most of my gear already had cleric requirements on it. I did have to swap out my super sick ultra-modded out sword for the lesser modded out and less cool Baton of the Sky, but it's been working pretty great regardless.

Baton of the Sky +10 vs. Khyldorn the Blood Drinker +10

2- Playstyle -- Beastlord excels with fast casting nukes (the .5 second variety), and it makes for a very clicky-clicky play style. Throw in the drains and debuffs from Shadow Knight and it's a pretty fun and busy playstyle, which I like. Swapping out the drains for the Enchanter Anarchy nuke, makes me feel like I'm just casting that nuke over and over to melt things down while occasionally taking a swing from my Baton in-between casts. 

Of course, as I stated earlier, it's all about the mezz with Enchanter, so I haven't been really worrying too much about using the Cleric Calm to single pull. I've just been pulling everything and dealing deaths one by one. I am interested to see how this plays out once I switch from targeting trash mobs to fighting raid bosses. We'll see how it goes. No Harm Touch and health drains might make things tricky.

3- Mount -- The big miss here is losing the Shadow Knight's Unholy Steed. I had wasted a lot of my money on a lower quality bridle when I was goofing around with an all caster build, and now I regret it. I actually run faster than my purchased horse and even worse, you can't sell that bridle back . . . so that's just 30k plat wasted . . . I'll have to save up to atone for my mistake.

4- Illusions -- The best I could muster up before was a clicky dark elf or a skeleton illusion. Now I can disguise myself as any race and even cast illusions that give you cool benefits like the Boon of Garou. I can even cast that Boon spell on BOTH me and my warder.

Wereboon daddy and a wereboon baby!

5- Pet -- The thing I haven't tried yet is charming a pet in place of my warder or using the enchanter's animation pet. I figure, if I do, at least I'll still get the beastlord pet buffs to make, whatever pet it is, more awesome. It feels like I'd have to go deep in whatever zone I was in to find whatever charmable pet I want and then spend an additional 5 minutes setting up that pet with buffs . . . so why not just keep using my beastlord pet? It's working fine so far . . . I would parse it of course if I did do it (for the science).

6- Mana -- I don't know if it's the clarity buff, more efficient costing spells, or a combination of the two, but I haven't had to worry about mana . . . AT ALL. I typically use the mana regeneration stance anyway unless I'm trying to land a debuff and opt for the better debuff stance, but right now I'm not hurting for mana in the least.

7- Tradeskill -- If I ever wanted to take up jewelry crafting, now would be the time to do it since I can enchant metals now. I got Alchemy up to 250, but I haven't really leveled anything else so far. I've got a stash of black diamonds just waiting for me to take the time.

Anyway, gimme a week or so and I'll have another level 50 class to add to my collection. I know I did it in an inefficient way by not using three classes I hadn't leveled to 50, but I'm just kind of a sucker for the beastlord/cleric play style.

Have any tips? Drop a comment below.

Happy Dueling!

Trolls, Hate, and VR fakery in Everquest Legends

Heyo! What's up, my peoples?! Drop me a message and let me know what you've been doing lately. I need to hear all about the good things y'all who read my blog are doing!

As for me, I'm going to talk a bit about EverQuest Legends because I'm still playing it quite a bit, and I have a few things I want to talk about with said game.

UNO

I unlocked the Troll Race, and LET ME TELL YOU, that was so freaking time-consuming. 

Croco Pet Wins though . . .

To unlock the Troll Race, you have to max out three factions, and those are Da Bashers, Grobb Merchants, and the Dark Ones. The first one I decided to tackle was The Dark Ones, and the absolute best way to do this seems to be by completing the "More Help for Innoruuk" quest, which involves turning in hundreds of Deathfist Slashed Belts that drop off of the level 10ish orcs out in the camps of East Commons (and other locations). 

For this quest, I bound myself right next to the quest giver in Grobb (Bregna) and hit the two orc camps on the northwest side of East Commons over and over and over . . . and OVER. The great thing about this farm is that after you clear both camps, you can switch to a personal solo instance, and it starts you just a short jaunt away from the first orc camp. After you finish those two, you leave your instance, and your two orc camps in the regular version of East Commons will have respawned. The only problem you might have is if someone is currently also farming the orc camps. In which case, you can switch to a greater difficulty version of East Commons every five minutes and farm there instead.

GAME DEV REQUEST 1!  Can you let me select which difficulty I want to respawn into from a private instance? Thanks! It'd be so much easier and faster.

I managed to confuse the game while bouncing between difficulties, and it gave my mount a pet of its own . . .

By the time you finish this quest, congrats, you'll have maxed like three or four other factions just for funsies and (if you haven't already) unlocked the orc-killing titles for your character. I'm now DEATHFIST Stingite Sleestak the Legend!

The last half of this operation is building your Da Bashers and Grobb Merchants factions. The absolute best way to do this seems to be completing the "grub lockers" part of the "HEHE Meat Quest."

Ok, for this one, bind yourself in the Ocean of Tears, right next to one of the two locations that Nerbilik paths between, then change your race to Dark Elf (oh yeah, I'd probably unlock Dark Elf first). This way you'll be able to use the Origin teleport to get closer to the Gobbler, an ogre that sells general supplies in the Neriak Foreign Quarter.

I made a macro that was, "/say Grub Locker" and just spammed it a bunch of times. A Grub Locker is a quest item that isn't stackable, unfortunately, so make sure you have plenty of bag space available. 

You want a Grub Locker?! How about 50?

Teleport back to Ocean of Tears and hand Nerbilik ALL THE GRUB LOCKERS! He'll be overjoyed and reward you with both Da Bashers and Grobb Merchant factions. This back-and-forth is a bit tedious but much less tedious than the Deathfist Belts. 

GAME DEV REQUEST 2! Can you make both of these factions +10 instead of having Da Bashers be +10 faction and Grobb Merchants only be +5 faction? It set my OCD off. Thanks!

Whew.

That wasn't hard, just time-consuming, and I don't even know why I did it other than that I could do it. I do like the racial stamina and strength boosts you get from being a troll, which seems really good for Shadowknights, but probably not enough for me to drop my lizard skin. I just feel more "me" in it.

DOS

Guys! Remember me complaining about the Plane of Hate Dungeon Crawl? They fixed it!

I went in this morning and killed all 10 (not 11) bosses and a bunch of trash to finish the Tier 4 crawl and secure a huge chest of loot. By the time I was done with the instance, I had about 12-14 AA for my efforts and a whole slew of Major Motes.

Successful Plane of Hate Dungeon Crawl clear! Woot!

TRES

I've been working up a way to play EverQuest Legends in VR through my Quest 3 headset. At some point I may be ready to load it up somewhere, but be warned . . . it's not true VR. It's more like faked VR through using mouse look, a large fixed screen, and assigning hotkeys to controller inputs. It requires a lot of tinkering with settings and UI, so I really don't think it'd be most people's cup of tea. 

Since it's against the Terms of Use to actually modify game files, I'm doing all I can to just create a layer that runs alongside the game rather than messing with the guts. I don't really want to get banned.

If you're interested, let me know. At some point, you may see me release it here.

~~

Again, really want to hear from my people! Please drop me a note and say hello.

Happy Dueling!

Plane of Hate Dungeon Crawl -- Two Tales of Woe

I'm still playing Everquest Legends, which is strangely weird, but it also feels strangely like home? I love when MMOs feel that way, and right now my love language is all about "Frog Slayer Stingite Sleestak the Legend".

Surrounded by gift-giving efreeti and some new shiny claws in the Plane of Sky

I like Frog Slayer as a title, but what I really want for a title is Godslayer because that's freaking heavy metal. To do that, I'm just going to need a couple weeks of farming the end boss of the Plane of Hate and the Plane of Fear. I can do that. I'm already up to ~25 kills out of the 100 I need for the title.

I love my new bee illusion for my warder . . . very fitting for a dude named "Stingite"

Speaking of the Plane of Hate, I have a tale of woe in two parts. There's a brand new Dungeon Crawl mode, which seems to really just be a revamp of the solo non-respawning instance with a new perk.  The basic idea is you create a dungeon crawl and after clearing out all the bosses and the majority of the trash mobs, you'll get rewarded with a bunch of extra loot . . . basically a re-roll of everything you killed. The only places I really want to do that at this point is The Plane of Hate and The Plane of Sky. 

SO, tale of woe part one happened last Thursday night. I roll up a Tier 4 Plane of Hate Dungeon Crawl and have at it. I play for three hours and go past my bedtime by an hour and a half, and I'm working the next day. By the time I finished up, I had destroyed 85 percent of the enemies and only had (what I thought) were like 2 bosses left. I couldn't bring myself to stay on for another hour, so I logged off and went to sleep.

Tale of woe part two happened last night, because you know I was fired up to give the Plane of Hate another go! This time, I'm rocking it and making pretty good time, but it's still a slog solo. The rumor is that this really is a group activity (wow! I've never even grouped in this game!). After three hours in the Plane of Hate, my enemy count is 100 percent, and I've killed every boss except one. I'm looking around the map, and the only "boss" I can see up is the Evangelist of Hate, but he's not really a boss. He's more of a side quest stop for a necromancer quest called Words of Darkness.

The hardest part about the Evangelist of Hate is that he's teaching a class on evil stuff with a classroom full of angry students. A simple pull of these guys will cause you to end up with 13 tier'dal giving you the lesson of your life. So I begin the painstaking process of clearing out the wandering enemies outside the classroom, then using Calm on the students inside the classroom and pulling them out in chunks of 3 or 4.

Finally, after a couple deaths, I triumphantly killed the Evangelist of Hate . . . and . . . the boss counter still says "1 rare creature." GOSH DANG IT! 

Forever stuck at 1 remaining creature with a bag full of motes

I went to Discord to see if I could find out if it was a bug, and yup, it's a bug. One person said they found the Maestro waaaaay out of bounds on the map, but I couldn't see him anyway, so I accepted the already generous pile of loot from a regular D4 Plane of Hate clear, and took myself to the Plane of Sky.

There are a few bugs in this instance, but at least Plane of Sky completes!

It was pretty disappointing to run into a bug and not get a heavy helping of extra loot, but when you're sitting with an inventory full of motes, it's hard to be too upset for too long . . . especially when this is the epitome of a first world problem. Hope they fix the bug soon!

Happy Dueling!

Sailing Takes Me Away to . . . where are we going?

Dylan and I recently embarked on a tour of the seas, floating on a raft, surrounded by hungry sharks . . . which means . . . SHARK HATS!

Shark hats were a toothsome surprise

RAFT launched into the seas of survival games back in 2022. In 2022, my survival game repertoire was mostly Icarus, V Rising, and Planet Crafter. I remember seeing it come up in my recommended games but ignored it at the time. With the recent survival game sale on Steam, Raft was one of the games that Dylan (or should I say Barbra per the picture above) and I picked up to play together. 

The wikipedia article tells more about it's unusual path to launch, which included some influencer attention to their original project back in 2016. Kind of cool! Good on 'em for sticking to it and believing in a project.

This game has a pretty challenging starting point. I think we died several times just from starvation and not knowing exactly what it was we were doing. You start out on a small 3x3 platform, just collecting wood and plastic out of the ocean with a hook. Meanwhile, your water and food meters just keep going down. The best you could hope for was a random island full of watermelon. Eventually, you make a water distiller to cook seawater into fresh water. Next is a fishing pole. Next is a grill. Once you get the basics, you'll be fine, but that break-in felt tough! 

Watermelons ahead!

For a while, when we were about to die, we'd throw all our stuff out to each other in desperation. Die and come back, then the other person would do the same. Basically, when you die, you lose most of your stuff, which is a huge setback. So the next thing you need is storage, and BAM . . . they've got you on the crafting treadmill.

Our first two-tier raft design

You'll occasionally find a good crate of goods that helps you unlock a new thing you can craft, but the research table is clutch to discovering new recipes. You slot raw materials into your research table, sacrifice the item, and that action then unlocks new recipes. 

The main thing we got stuck on was not knowing that the main use of shark bait was to distract the shark while you went diving into the water for clay, sand, scrap, and whatever else is on the bottom of the ocean floor. We were just happily island-hopping and stuck wondering where we would find clay. Yes, Dylan turned to the ultimate source of information (a child of his who had played the game before), and he let us know you park your boat out about 50 meters from an island, throw down some shark bait, and then swim to the island completely unbothered by the shark. In fact you can stay down on the bottom around the island and dig up all the clay you need.

So far it's been a fun distraction . . . give us a bit and we'll have our ship looking amazing. For now it's more functional than fun, but eventually I imagine our vessel will look amazing. Until then, we'll continue badly singing Sailing by Christopher Cross while floating our way to (hopefully) Margaritaville on a couple planks and a prayer.

Happy Dueling! 

My Blaugust 2026 Post-Mortem

Blaugust is done! I made it through! I posted every day at least something, and while I had my mega threads (EverQuest Legends and Poetry Slammers) I think overall I had a good mix of real life, D&D, EQL, and me just making stuff (and meta-talking about making stuff). Pride, I suppose, can live with just having finished the challenge of posting every day.

That said, it is very easy to say to myself . . . yes, but what did it accomplish? To what ends? Honestly, I'm not sure. 

One thing is for sure, with a week left of posting I thought to myself, oh man, I better talk about my Poetry Slammers game while I have a little bit of a wider audience, but ultimately, I think it generated very minimal traction. It wasn't like people were peeling off their skin with excitement saying YES, I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW! On the other hand, I'm glad I have a little developer log I can point to. Hopefully it shows that it was more than just vibe-coding. I was finally designing a dream from five years ago that I couldn't possibly have done on my own without these tools.

And as for all my EverQuest Legends posts, I probably didn't post anything earth shattering, but perhaps someday someone will Google "How to cast an illusion on your pet" or "Beastlord / Cleric / Shadow Knight" and stumble upon my journey.  Hard to tell, but I don't think my build will ever be the flavor of the month.

As for real life posts and D&D stuff, I probably would have made those posts anyway. If I hadn't done Blaugust though, I think I would have had a bit of FOMO from not doing it. Probably what I should have done was just signed up and stuck to my normal 3 or 4 posts a month! But that push to get the 31 posts in 31 days goal is what it's all about! Glad I stuck with it, even through a bout with COVID.

Anyway, I don't know what I'm trying to get at here . . . I'm just riffing. The bottom line is that I ended up tracking about 234,000 hits to the site for the month, which is pretty average, if not below average, but I suppose I did garner more opportunities for future blog traffic. The big accomplishment for the blog that happened over Blaugust was hitting the +7,000,000 hits mark. That's kind of fun. (me when it takes almost 20 years to do what some random YouTube / TikTok site does in a day). Of course, and I mean this with all sincerity . . . it's never really been about the hits. That's just a fun number to look at.

Funny enough, after 31 posts, there are still things that would have been cool to talk about more:

- I started Vibe Coding a VR interface for EverQuest Legends. It's faked but works pretty well for being faked.

- I played my song Cosmic Radiation and Bad Luck to a group of people at the cancer institute, and it seemed to go over well. I'd love to talk more about that project and eventually get the music out there.

- I added a set of throwing knives to my axe throwing repertoire. I haven't fully figured out the best way to throw them yet.

- A sale on PVE Survival Games just hit the Steam Store, and so Dylan and I are probably going to go a bit crazy.

- Food, cats, TV Shows, Movies, etc.

So, there you have it. I made it. I'm not sure why I made it. I'll probably do more of it! Thanks for reading and as always . . .

Happy Dueling

Poetry Slammers V7 -- Waterparks and Infinity Mode

Whew! We made it the current build of Poetry Slammers! Version .07 did a lot. Besides adding a new campaign circuit (a monumental task in and of itself), scoring was rebuilt, an infinity mode was added to the game, and a whole slew of word packs were added to the shop.

I hope you get to press Start to play soon!

Being as we're in the middle of summer, it kind of felt appropriate to add a waterpark circuit to slamtown. Sure, I mean, who reads poetry at a waterpark? BUT THIS ISN'T ANY WATERPARK, it's Slamtown's waterpark, and your favorite squid lifeguard is also your poetry judge. Dunk not only loves waterparks and swimming, but he also likes sending his little poems down the lazy river in bottles. Could you imagine if you went to a waterpark and found a poem in a bottle while going down a lazy river? That would either be really creepy or really cool -- I guess depending on the poem. ;)

"Yourt poem" sigh . . . mark that down as a polish fix I need to do . . .

With this build I finally moved away from "the longer the poem, the better the poem" scoring of the previous version and instead made it more based on using all the tools that were given to you. It actually made it much easier to get a 5-star poem. In addition, I added a scoring breakdown that you can check if you really want to know why you got 5 stars . . . before that was hidden and players kept asking themselves, "Wait, how is my creativity being judged here?" Although the illusion of some AI logic in the background actually judging your poem in some magically secret way was kind of fun, it was also a point of frustration. Now the mechanics are right there and explained. Easy.

The scoring breakdown of how I earned 5 stars and 1 happy tear. :)

Because I had now created word banks that matched circuit types, it was pretty brainless to go ahead and create word pack buffs for each circuit and put them for sale in the shop. Getting these to show up in the shop is also a little "chef's kiss" for when you finish a circuit and really like that circuit's word style. Beat a circuit and its word pack now shows up in the shop. 

While I was at it, it really was time to relook at the word bank. There were some pretty non-PC words in there, so I had to rethink a few of them. Also, the "normal" word bank had a few "themed" words, and so I moved those out and replaced them with other words if they were already a part of a circuit word bank.

But the real big win here for me was adding infinity mode. Up to this point, if you beat the game's content, it just stopped and you couldn't play any more until new content dropped. Knowing there's just no way I could keep up if I actually got an invested player, I decided to create an infinity mode so that you can just keep playing. 

Fini breaks down Infinity Mode

Infinity mode is kind of cool, you reach it and it spins a wheel to select which pre-existing venue you're going to play. After you play those five games, you can actually replace your favorited wall of fame poem with a new poem if you want through a little "versus" UI.  You can also just win free stuff if you're lucky . . . You might get extra stars, happy tears, or even just outright win a word pack.

Spin the wheel to slam a destination!

I kind of stalled here and stopped working for the past month on Poetry Slammers. I had a couple other projects come up, like, I don't know, Blaugust?! I think I just need to finish up version 8 and then really polish the game with Version 9 (this little exercise of reposting each build has made me realize how much polish work I still have to do). 

Below are the patch notes for Version 7:

~~

Poetry Slammers v0.7 --   Waterparks, Word Packs & Infinity Street!

• New Waterpark Circuit
• Dive into 15 new campaign levels spread across three watery Slamtown locations.
• Meet Dunk, a strange little squid lifeguard who loves weird words, big splashes, and sending poetry out into the world by bottle.
• The Waterparks circuit includes:
• A new campaign map and three new buildings
• New judge dialogue, reactions, and story moments
• More than 120 Waterparks-themed words
• A new unlockable Slammer
• A new Waterparks Word Pack
• Rebuilt Poetry Scoring System
• Poems are no longer judged primarily by how many magnets they contain.
• Each of the five stars now represents a clear creative goal:
• Use at least two words made with the Magnet Maker 
• (yellow words from the top row)
• Use at least two Neutral words 
• (regular words from the second row)
• Use at least two words from the current themed circuit 
• (colored labels on the third row)
• Use at least two Common Words (Like "the" and "of") 
• (white labels on the fourth row)
• Add a finishing touch with punctuation or a Star Word 
• (found on the top tray above the poetry making board)
• Judge requests remain optional bonuses. 
• Extra stars beyond the five displayed stars are converted into Happy Tears.
• The results sequence has also been redesigned to create a cleaner, more satisfying final-poem moment before the Share, Score Details, and Continue controls appear.
• Score Details breaks down exactly how your poem was rated.
• Word Packs
• Every completed circuit can now unlock its own timed Word Pack.
• Purchasing a Word Pack from the shop (or winning one in infinity mode) will add one themed premium magnet to every poem you create. 
• Packs can be used in Campaign and Infinity Mode, and multiple packs may be active at the same time.
• Available packs include:
• Coffee Shop
• Record Shop
• Library
• Arcade (obtained through the Poetry Breaks side mode)
• Campground
• Oddity Shop
• Waterparks
• Welcome to Infinity Street
• Players who finish all currently available campaign content can now enter Infinity Street, where time and space collide in a mysterious pocket dimension of Slamtown.
• Spin the reel to do the following:
• Revisit any completed campaign building
• Replay its five original challenges as ∞-1 through ∞-5
• Win Happy Tears, Pixel Coins, Star rewards, and temporary Word Packs
• Complete a five-poem Infinity run
• Replace an older Wall of Fame favorite with a new poem
• Buildings will not be selected twice in a row, even after closing and reopening the game.
• When future campaign content arrives, Infinity Street will temporarily close and return players to the regular campaign until the new material is completed.
• Meet Fini
• Infinity Street is overseen by Fini, a mysterious noir gentleman shaped like an infinity symbol.
• Fini replaces the normal judge visually during Infinity runs while preserving each building’s original prompts, reactions, scoring preferences, and voice.
• A new three-panel tutorial introduces Fini and explains Infinity Street the first time it is entered.
• Paid Re-Spins
• Don’t like where the Infinity reel landed?
• Players may now spend 1 Gem to spin again. 
• Re-spins can be used repeatedly and may land on either another building or a special reward, but the abandoned building cannot immediately repeat.
• Word Bank Cleanup
• The game’s core word library received a substantial cleanup pass.
• This included:
• Replacing unusually long or awkward words
• Correcting misplaced word categories
• Removing outdated or inappropriate entries
• Improving circuit-word consistency
• Preserving legitimate words that belong in multiple categories
• Making more words practical to read and arrange on mobile screens
• The complete bank still contains more than 3,500 unique words.

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Wish me luck!  I may need to call in a few favors to help get this on the app store with some dedicated testers. Let me know if you're interested.

Happy Dueling!