January 4
January's familiar is now available.

January 3
Happy New Year! January's familiar-of-the-month is being implemented right now, and will probably become available tomorrow.

In other news, the Hall of the Legends of the Times of Old has changed somewhat -- instead of being limited to 30,000 Meat per day, it's now limited to 10,000 Meat times your character level.

January 5
A much-requested feature has finally been added - the ability to have more than one Custom Outfit. Knock yourselves out.

January 12
The soft cap of 200 on adventures has been removed -- during the day, if you eat or drink something that puts you over 200, you will no longer lose the extra. Adventures will still cap at 200 upon nightly rollover, though, so don't go to sleep with more than 200 unless you want to lose them.

In other news, Mr. Store and Trophy Hut have moved to Market Square.

January 16
Minor change: Summoning of dry noodles and Scrumptious Reagents is now done from the skills page, not the campground. It also no longer uses up an Adventure, and instead costs 10 MP per item. The appropriate skills are, in case you've forgotten, called "Pastamastery" and "Advanced Saucecrafting."

January 17
The interface for the campground has changed. Now it's less texty, and more like the rest of the game. Also included in this update are some modifications to the way picket and barbed-wire fences work -- you can now have up to nine units of each of them installed, and their effects have changed somewhat.

UPDATE: My dumb ass forgot to leave room in the new layout for the terrarium, so that's just a text link at the bottom, now. I'll fix this tomorrow.

January 19
After months of painful deliberation, we're proud to announce the winner of the Yeti-naming contest: Riff! See the yetis in their new environment, as well as a list of the runner-up winners, in the newly unveiled Cannon Museum on the Right Side of the Tracks.

January 29
The Hermit interface has been redesigned to be a little bit user-friendlier. In other news, "user-friendlier" is now the preferred way of saying "more user-friendly."

I also added a minor feature to the chat macro system. If you put a "$$" in a macro, it'll replace it with the rest of your chat command, rather than just appending it to the end of the macro value like it does now. If you're the kind of person who will use this, that awkward sentence probably adequately explains it.

February 10

The cocktail system is currently undergoing a revamp, in order to properly balance it. You'll notice minor changes in some of the drinks and recipes over the next day or two. Also, several new items.

Pay close attention when you are drinking. Some items now give more drunkenness than they used to. All of the people who accidentally overdrank before this announcement have had their drunkenness reset to 19. Turns will not cap out at 200 tonight, for the benefit of those who overdrank and don't log on before rollover. Tomorrow night everything will return to normal.

UPDATE: The booze revamp is pretty much done. There might be some more slight changes to the quality and stat gains of certain drinks, but the majority of things will stay the way they are now.

February 15
I added two new chat channels today. /radio is open to everybody, and is for discussion of (huge surprise, here,) Radio KoL. The other channel is /pvp, and it becomes available to you when you break your Hippy Stone.

March 2
Sorry for the lack of announcements lately -- we're hard at work testing a big chunk of new code and content. See the Ascension sticky in the forums for more details.

March 5
In a classic case of "better late than never," March's monthly special has been placed in Mr. Store. It's not a familiar this month, but it's familiar-related.

March 8
Some cosmetic (and invisible technical) changes have been made to the class guilds in town. There's nothing new there, but there's room for new stuff in the future.

March 14
Mt. McLargeHuge has been altered such that it opens up over the course of a multi-part quest, instead of randomly becoming available once you hit a certain stat level. The quest starts at the Council, for characters level 6 and over.

March 15
Another change similar to yesterday's, but less elaborate. The ability to go inside of Cobb's Knob now opens up when the Council gives you a quest to defeat the Goblin King, at level 5.

Also, the Deep Fat Friars' Quest has been bumped up to level 7, and the difficulty of the monsters in the area has been raised accordingly.

March 23
You can now edit your chat macros all at once, from the Account menu.

March 24
There has been a slight change to the way the Turtle Tamer's Headbutt and Spectral Snapper skills work. Headbutt now follows up a successful attack with an addition attack that effectively just uses your helmet as a weapon. Spectral Snapper's damage has been made such that it increases proportionally to your Mysticality.

Combat change: All ranged weapons (accordions, crossbows, and a few others) now use Moxie instead of Muscle when determining whether you hit or not. Crossbow Fever, having been made irrelevant, was changed -- it now just increases your chance of hitting with a crossbow.

Also: The way HP is calculated has changed in a significant way. No matter what class you are, your HP is now based on your (buffed) Muscle in the same way that your MP is based on Mysticality.

Also also: There's a new Pastamancer skill (at level 5) that gives a passive 25% bonus to maximum HP.

Also, additionally: The damage done by Sauceror combat spells now increases with Mysticality to a higher level than it did before.

And then: Your Max HP will never go below what it would be at your base Muscle level, so negative effects (like Beaten Up) won't affect it as much. The same change has been applied to MP.

March 26

Happy Oyster Egg Day!

Last night, the Enchanted Flying Oyster hid his magical eggs all over the Kingdom. Grab a basket and see what you can find!

April 3
Some more minor changes were made to the Council quest structure. They now give you a quest at level 2 that opens up the Distant Woods.

April 7
I found a weird mistake in the fight code that determines the rate at which items drop from monsters. The fix to this will, I suspect, reduce the overall drop rate, but make item drop bonuses (from skills, buffs, and enchantments) work better. Evidence gathered over the next few days will make the situation clearer.

April 10
I'm aware of the problems with the forums and images, and I'm working on getting them resolved right now.

April 11
Tonight, as every Monday night, Jick and Mr. Skullhead will be doing their weekly radio show, on Radio KoL at 9PM EST (6PM PST) -- if the server is full, check the chat or the forums for announcements about mirrors.

April 20
I've made some changes to the way the Clan Karma system works. Clan leaders can now set an exchange rate for Meat and Karma, and each clan ranking can be given a daily Karma expenditure limit. Existing ranks (which used to be unlimited) were set to 10,000. Members without ranks will not be able to use the stash until they are assigned a rank with a value.

April 26
The way dignity gains are calculated from PVP fights has been changed a little bit. If your level is now lower than that of your target, you gain points as though the target was your level, instead.

April 27
Sorry about the extra-long rollover tonight. I'm a dumbass, and I scheduled a backup (a process that requires a certain amount of babysitting) and then forgot that I had scheduled it, so everything ground to a halt. I'll try to be more careful in the future.

April 29
Due to some random fluctuations in the space-time continuum of Loathing (evidenced mostly by the incomplete Giant Castle quest partially leaking onto the live servers) and a sudden unrelated change in soil pH, any beanstalks you may have planted in the Nearby Plains have withered and vanished.

In other news, there's a new Council quest, which involves the Giant Castle!

In additional other news, two new modes of PvP attack have been introduced: Rank and Flowers. Rank gives a 50% bonus in rank change, but no goodies. Attack for Flowers, and you'll always get a pretty flower if you win.

April 30
I've made some changes to the way Sauceror skills work. Check this forum post for details.

May 1
Disco Bandit skills have been updated. Check this post for details.

May 2
Moving right along, Accordion Thief skills have been rebalanced and modified. Here's the post.

May 3
Seal Clubber skills have been revamped a bit. Check this post for details. Also, I forgot to link to this thread, from yesterday, in which I describe the Pastamancer changes that also went in yesterday.

May 5 (no, really. It's still May 5...)
Happy Cinco de Mayo! There's a brand-new zone, on the Desert Beach. This isn't so much a special event as the introduction of some new permanent content.

May 11
As of today, if you get banned in chat more than 9 times, the ban lasts forever. Jackasses beware.

May 10
As you may have noticed, there has been a change to the way ranged damage is calculated. This change is NOT permanent. It wasn't supposed to roll to the live servers. It will be modified, one way or another, pretty soon.

May 17
You can now view other peoples' familiars by clicking the current familiar in their profiles. Also, familiar names can now be up to 40 characters long.

May 24
New feature: The Gift Shop, in Seaside Town's Market Square.

They sell some random social-y items (only a small portion are available now, most are post-ascension content,) and in the back room, you can send people packages full of items and Meat.

The main reason for putting this in right now is to assuage the worries people had about winning radio contests while in ronin or hardcore mode. You can receive the packages from people during these periods, but you can't open them.

May 29
Maintenance will probably take an extra half hour or so tonight.

UPDATE: All done. Thanks for your patience, everybody.

May 26

People who own Mall stores now get access to a new chat channel, called /foodcourt. This channel would be a good place to do some of the socializing that's currently done in /trade (hint, hint.)

June 4

June 5

June 6

June 7

June 8

The system will go down for maintenance about 3 hours earlier than usual tonight, so we can make sure everything gets properly rolled out to the live servers. It should come back up at the same time it usually does.

June 10
Gah, sorry about that. I made changes to the rollover script last night, and forgot to change them back. I was out, and had my phone turned off. It'll never happen again, I promise. Unless, y'know, it happens again, in which case I'm sorry in advance.

June 9
Pretend there's a giant zero here!

Okay, guys, welcome back. If you were further up than the bottom of the Sorceress' Tower, you've been reset to there. Enjoy.

Sorry for the relative uninspiredness of this announcement, but, y'know, we're kind of tired... :)

This would probably be a good time to reiterate one of the Policies:

NO SPOILERS IN CHAT.

If somebody asks a question, and you know the answer, PM them. If you spoil puzzle solutions in open chat, you will be banned.

June 14
You can now change the colors of some stuff in chat (channel names, your own name, your contacts' names). Check your account menu for details.

June 28
In an effort to improve overall performance, the Mall has been moved to the secondary database server, and the pricing rules have been altered.

The minimum sale price for items in the Mall is now either 100 Meat or twice the item's autosell value, whichever is higher. Prices lower than these limits were automatically adjusted during the transition.

Note that this change is pretty significant on the backend, and if anything goes wrong, we might have to roll the database back to the pre-rollover state. This probably won't happen, but it's a slim possibility. Just a heads up.

July 1
Only slightly late, July's Item-of-the-Month is now available in Mr. Store.

July 3
There has been a change to the way PvP fights per day limit works. There's a new item available in the Demon Market that gives you extra fights in exchange for a spleen hit. Other stuff that impacts this will be added over the coming weeks.

July 5
The official Store of Loathing is up now. More stuff will be available shortly.

July 8
The Oyster holiday has arrived again, in a way that was totally expected and on purpose. Seriously. The fact that it went off all halfway and screwed up and was fixed a few hours after rollover is part of the... um... Oyster tradition.

July 11
The Inventory page has been modified. Divided into sections. Rearranged somewhat.

You can collapse the sections by clicking on their title bar. This is an "undocumented feature" and using it will make you feel cool.

July 19
Your Display Case can now be divided up into customizable shelves. Everybody thank Armak for suggesting this, many moons ago.

We also made some optimizations to the way effects are handled that we hope will help alleviate lag a little bit.

July 29
The duration of the post-ascension Ronin period has been reduced to 800 Adventures. As the speed run leaderboards continue to mature, this period will continue to decrease, and we expect it to eventually settle around 500.

Also, some adventures were added to the pre-disguise Pirate's Cove.

August 1
August's Item-of-the-Month is now in Mr. Store.

August 2
The way Golden Mr. Accessories work has been changed significantly to make them less useless in the post-ascension Kingdom. You no longer have to equip them to use them (which means they can be used even from Hagnk's,) and the Smile can be cast on somebody in Hardcore or Ronin (instead of the buff, they'll receive a gift-like package that allows them to use the smile once they get out.)

Also, the clan log has been redone, and is now much more comprehensive. Probably too comprehensive, but we'll wait and see how many complaints come in...

August 16
Sorry for the short notice, but rollover is probably going to take a little longer than usual tonight.

August 17
Rollover will be 30 minutes earlier tomorrow than it usually is.

August 18
Rollover will be an additional 30 minutes earlier tomorrow.

August 20
There are a couple of new T-shirt designs available in the Store of Loathing. Stylish!

August 26
Jick, Skully, and countless other KOL players are at PAX (The Penny Arcade Expo) this weekend. If you're in the Seattle area, you should swing by, as a good time is expected to have been had by all.

September 1
September's item of the month is now in Mr. Store.

Also, Preregistration packets for KoLCon II are available in The Store of Loathing. Check the description for details on what preregistration entails, and expect an update of the Con page really soon.

September 4
Tonight, KolMohDee will begin a 24-hour telethon on Radio KoL, to raise money for the victims of Katrina.

Which was also my first girlfriend's name. Except I think she spelled it differently.

Anyway, you should listen to it, because it's for a good cause, and it'll be fun to hear KMD slowly descend into cackling, gurgling madness.

All of the donations for the telethon will be handled by Thor The Mighty and Adrasteia, the people who run the Player Pics Page. You can find their PayPal link at http://kol.stinkernaut.com/paypal.

September 6
Tonight's maintenance will be longer than usual.

In other news, KMD's radio telethon was a tremendous success. Something like $6,700 was raised, which Asymmetric Publications is going to match, for a grand total of... um... something like $13,400.

Thanks to everyone for their eXtreme generosity.

September 19
After tonight, LARP tickets for KoLCon II will no longer be available in the store. So, if you wanna play in the LARP and haven't bought your ticket yet, now's your last chance.

September 21
KoLCon II is coming right up! Check the link above for updated info! And extra exclamation point!

September 28
A change has been made to the fight code. If you win initiative, you now get an entire normal round of combat for free instead of automatically attacking with your weapon. This allows you to use skills and items on the first round.

Also, there are three new shirt designs (non-KoL stuff by the Pretentious Artist) available in the Store of Loathing.

September 29
In the account menu, there's now an option to turn on "auto-attack" if you want combat to work the way it used to.

I also forgot to mention yesterday that in addition to the new shirts, there are new (mostly larger) sizes available for all of the original shirt designs, too. Temporary tattoos and coffee cups are forthcoming.

October 1
October's Item-of-the-Month is now in Mr. Store.

October 3
Temporary tattoos and coffee cups are now available in the Store of Loathing.

October 5
Muscle classes have been given an intrinsic 50% boost to maximum hit points.

October 11
The Barrel Full of Barrels has been revamped to make it more interesting and more useful.

Also, Custom Avatar Forms are once again available in Mr. Store. From now on, though, we're going to be enforcing the guidelines on them very, very strictly. The reason we got so far behind before is that we were indulging some pretty ludicrous requests, and that has to stop for everybody else's sake.

Nothing else interesting happened today. -cough-

October 15
The Typical Tavern quest has been redone to make it more interesting, and to make the rewards a little better.

If you were in the middle of the quest, you'll have to start over. It just... had to be done.

October 25
Tonight's maintenance will be longer than usual while we do some server administration type stuff. I expect it to take less than an hour, total.

October 27
Something is seriously wrong with time. That last hour? It took 48. Who knows how long the next one will take...

October 31
Trick-or-Treating is available today, and all of the previous outfit gaps have been filled in. Some more Halloween-type stuff will happen later tomorrow -- I got kind of behind and didn't get everything done tonight that I wanted to.

October 32
The Council has some news.

November's Item-of-the-Month will be a couple of days late. Sorry 'bout that.

November 2
Doc Galaktik has made a breakthrough.

November 3
November's Item-of-the-Month is now in Mr. Store. The doppelshifter egg will also stay in there until we're done with the item restoration.

November 8
PvP attacks no longer use Adventures. This is the first in a series of minor tweaks/improvements/enhancements to PvP that will happen over the next couple of weeks.

P. S. OMG, this makes Hardcore easier.

November 17
Due to popular (and by "popular" I mean "Fusilliban's") demand, we've added a Clan Whitelist feature -- you can now create a list of players who will be automatically accepted to your clan (and assigned rank and title) if they apply.

You'll eventually be able to set a clan permission for this, but for now, it's only available to the clan leader.

November 18
The temporal rifts are beginning to close...

November 22
Kmails are now, like, paginated and stuff. The same thing will happen to the clan roster very soon.

November 28
The "Money Making Game" guy in the casino has been repurposed as an in-game alternative to the late rafflebot, Gamacodre's popular player-vs.-player coin flip gambling game thingy. Gamble and enjoy!

Also, you can now send stuff from Hagnk's in gift packages.

December 1
December's Item-of-the-Month is now in Mr. Store. On time!

Also, Uncle Crimbo dropped by, and left a little gift in everybody's campground.

December 6
The Toot Oriole has been revamped. You can go through it again, if you want, by clicking the link at Mt. Noob.

December 12
The Temporal Riftlet will disappear from Mr. Store at rollover tomorrow.

Also, the ability to reset the Toot Oriole will also go away, so if you haven't checked it out yet, you best get to checkin'.

Also also, the Feast of Boris is a little more involved than it used to be.

December 13
Custom Avatar Forms are now being accepted again. Please see this post if you submitted a custom avatar form prior to today and still don't have your avatar.

December 19
Rollover will run long tonight, so that we can dump a set of data to use for testing on the new servers. Here's hoping it won't last as long as the last long one did.

LATER: The long rollover went off just fine. Data is currently streaming across the Ethertron to the new servers. In the meantime, the gates of Crimbo Town have been opened, in the Big Mountains.

December 26
After rollover tonight, we're going to be moving everything to the new servers. It'll take at least a couple of hours to get the data across.

The maintenance page will be replaced with a page that I'll update as the situation progresses.

December 27
Okay, so, here we are on the new servers. Everything will be green for a little while -- this is on purpose. Since any problems are likely to be reported by a whole bunch of people, please limit bug reports to the forums for a day or so, instead of the Report Bug link.

December 29
Sorry for the short notice, but there will be a little bit of downtime this afternoon at 3:30 MST while a piece of network hardware is replaced. It's anticipated that the switch will take less than 10 minutes.

December 30
The first task in the Guild Hall has been altered a little bit. It's now necessary to complete the task to gain access to the Barrel Full of Barrels.