This update was added on 17 December 2013.
We've re-opened the Christmas 2006 holiday event for the festive season. Head over to Musa Point on Karamja, and meet Shanty Claws on the pier north-west of the banana plantation. Shanty's got a mission for you, rescuing childernapped childerkins from the stinky gublinch.
As a reward, Shanty will give you two copies of all the tradeable Christmas holiday items. That's two copies of all 6 tradeable party hats, plus two copies of the Santa hat and Christmas cracker. He'll also unlock all the untradeable Christmas holiday items that you haven't already got, including the new untradeable black & rainbow party hats.
This holiday event was originally created by Mod Tytn.
Snowballs
Although the 2006 Christmas event involves snowballs, back in 2006 you couldn't throw them at each other. That feature came in a later year. For our event, we've made a few adjustments to the 2006 code so that you can pelt other players with snowballs as much as you like.
The reindeer hat now has a chance of spawning snow on the ground when you perform its emote, provided you're in a suitable place and there isn't already lots of snow present, so you can get more snowballs when you need them.
We've also added a festive Wintumber Tree to Varrock marketplace, where the weather has taken an unexpectedly snowy turn. You can pick up snowballs there too.
Anti-Santa
The Anti-Santa is the embodiment of all that is evil and in a grinch-like way he wants to ruin Christmas. He has kidnapped Santa and stolen all his hats and Christmas crackers. You may see Anti-Santa roaming around the Wilderness. If you defeat him you have a chance to get some additional Christmas crackers or Santa hats. Keep an eye on our Twitch channel and Twitter to see when the Anti-Santa will appear.
Don't be fooled though, Anti-Santa is no push over and he bites back... perhaps you can find a special weapon to which he is weak?
In other news
We've got a few fixes for you too:
- Firstly, here's the routefinding update for which you voted earlier this year! This addresses the issue where players dance interminably around large monsters when trying to attack with melee, as well as the "rubber-banding effect" that sometimes occurred when you changed direction abruptly.
- The game client is now more responsive when you're trying to equip a lot of items quickly.
- The heath-bars that appear during combat should now always show at least one pixel of green whenever the player or NPC has some health left; you should no longer see a completely red health-bar until their health reaches zero.
- When you are following a player in walk-mode, you should no longer find that you randomly lag behind them by an extra tile, forcing you to consume your run energy to catch up.
- When you switch between different styles of weapon, there's been a long-standing issue where the Special Attack button ignored clicks for a moment afterwards. We've rewritten the combat side-panel interfaces to fix this.
- Some of the bodyguards in the God Wars Dungeon have been adjusted to help them reach players hiding at the sides of their rooms.
After the Christmas break, we're planning to kick off January with the next batch of Slayer updates. Provisionally we'd like this to include the Slayer ring, the ammo and the initial areas of the new dungeon to contain the new monsters. If we can get a suitable model for the Slayer helm, we'll definitely include that too.
If you'd like to see how we're getting on, you can keep an eye on our Twitter channels where we often like to preview our work in progress: @JagexAsh, @JagexReach and @JagexMatK.
Our regular Thursday Q&A livestream will run as usual this week, at 5pm GMT on Twitch.
Please come over to the forums to discuss the update.
Mods Mat K, Ash & Reach
The Old School RuneScape Team