We will be doing a release tonight that includes the following:

- The social panel has received a major upgrade, and now has a host of new features including online and offline friend and guild tracking and click tells.

- The vendor interface has also been upgraded and now resembles an arsenal. It should be much easier to use.

- The Arcade Assistant now has handy images to help explain the Arcade. Let us know what you think!

- The bug that was causing hallways to be cut off should be fixed, please let us know if you encounter it.

Small one - We fixed the bug with the instant button for selling energy.

We will be doing a release today that includes the following things:

- As mentioned in my previous post, the gate passes required to access more advanced tiers from the Haven Arcade have been removed. A player will still need the appropriate Tier Clearance to access each tier from Haven, but no longer needs to work their way through each tier of each gate from Haven. The current Gate Pass table in the Progress tab of the character panel will remain, albeit slightly tweaked as a handy tracker of tiers you have yet to explore on each gate.

Now that we've all recovered from the holidays, I'd like to take a moment and let you guys know what's coming in the near future. But first of all, thank you for a great holiday experience with Spiral Knights. We all had a great time playing with you all and seeing everyone sport their Santy hats.

Now, down to business:

The servers are currently down but we're working to get it fixed again. We'll update here once it's back up again. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Don't panic!

- Fixed a bug with copying and pasting text containing carriage returns into chat
- Spans of whitespace in chat are now collapsed into single spaces
- Fix for dragging helm/armor within arsenal (had been causing "Unexpected error" messages)
- Elevator fix

Happy holidays!

- Translation fixes for items, recipes
- Fixes for party splitting
- Item tweaks
- Additional information added to progress display
- Entering subtown lobby from Haven takes you to the interior start pad (assuming you have tier access)
- Dialog fixes
- Scene tweaks/fixes
- Full health restored on reaching subtown lobbies
- Tweaks to energy exchange dialog, including one-button instant trades
- Fix for certain graphics cards' being unable to display new gate map background
- Adjustments to difficulty (lower tiers now have higher difficulty but greater reward for advanced players)

- Subtown change as documented here
- "Free for All" loot distribution mode changed to "Random"
- Tweaks to materials, items
- New equipment descriptions
- Recipe fixes
- Fix for mapping controls to triggers on X-Box 360 controller
- Fixes for monsters' attacking each other
- Maintain a members' health if they leave and rejoin the same party
- Fix for players' being pushed out of scenes
- New party splitting interface
- Interface fixes
- Tweaks to spikes (warning before activation)

All this weekend from 7pm to 11pm pst we will be giving away crystal energy, crowns and 5-star items! Simply log in and play during those times for a chance to win. And stay tuned for next week when we will be giving away even more prizes!

Happy holidays from the Spiral Knights Team!

In a future update we will be making some significant changes to sub-towns and player progression.

Sub-towns are revealing... their true form!
Sub-towns will no longer be a 'home' for your character as we are re-emphasizing Haven as the home of every character. Upon logging out, you will always restart in Haven and all 'return' elevators will always direct you to Haven.