One of the core aims of Upgrade Year is that we take a close look at existing content and make it better – this week this concerns Summoning and hairstyles: better usability, more pets and the return of the fringe.

You have provided us with so many ideas to improve the Summoning skill that we were spoilt for choice, and our wish list of improvements is getting longer and longer, but for now we have decided on the following improvements.

Firstly, we have raised the pet limit so that you can have twice as many pets as before. This seemingly simple change led to a major background change, which will improve the stability of the code so you will experience fewer bugs in future. Secondly, you don’t need to wait until a familiar has disappeared to use the next pouch; now you click a handy button in the Summoning interface to replenish your familiar’s timer to 100% when it has dropped below two and a half minutes. So, if you use beasts of burden to help carry things around, you can now use this button to keep them going, as long as you have another pouch of the same type in your inventory. Additionally, we have made it much more straightforward to trade in your pouches and scrolls with Bogrog, the ogre in Gu'Tanoth.

We often receive comments about and suggestions for new hairstyles from players on the forums. In particular, we read players' complaints that there was once a female hairstyle with a fringe that got removed. We searched and searched, but could not find any indication that this was ever the case, so we scratched our heads for a while... and then created one! Enjoy your fringes, and perhaps you might like to pay a visit to Party Pete to try out a special new hairstyle designed for partying.

Lilies of the valley have also blossomed around RuneScape. These fragrant spring flowers will stay until the next game update to celebrate the start of May.

Last but not least, we would like to point you towards a new link in the quest journals. The QuestHelp system is now accessible directly from your quest journal, and you don’t even need to log into the website to access either a hint or a spoiler for a quest.

As you’ll notice, this set of updates isn’t as large as you might have hoped, for which we apologise. A project we were hoping to release this week was found to have bugs, and so has been delayed until next week. While we’re aware that these are relatively small fixes, we hope that you’ll appreciate them nonetheless.

Mod Fetzki