Two fixes from the same underlying problem: the earlier "remove all guards and sentries" cleanup swept too broadly and caught a lot of content that shouldn't have gone with it. This patch un-disables the right pieces and makes the actual guards decorative instead of absent.
Violent Monolith Guardians spawn again
The "Beware the Guardians" quest at Bluemist Forest (Kill Violent Monolith Guardian 0/3) was broken — the Monolith Guardians weren't in the world. They'd been classified as "guard-type NPCs" by the cleanup pass even though they're wild monsters that the quest specifically wants you to kill. 42 spawns restored across Bluemist Forest. Walk back to the quest marker and they'll be there.
Same restoration pass also brought back 509 wild monster spawns across 85 templates:
- Wood Elementals, Stone Elementals (Roaming, Mossy, etc.)
- Dahuta Cult mobs (Zealot, Priest)
- Other monster-faction NPCs that had "Guard" / "Guardian" / "Sentry" in their name and got swept by the keyword filter
If you've been failing other quests because the kill targets weren't spawning, this probably fixed those too. Let us know in Discord if you find more.
Guards and Sentries are back, but they're decoration now
City guards, town sentries, faction patrols — 845 spawns across the Nuian Guard, Harani Guard, Neutral Guard, and Pirate Hunter faction networks are back in the world. They look like guards, stand where guards stand, give the cities the lived-in feel they were missing without them.
They cannot attack anyone, and nobody can attack them. Their faction relations are now Neutral to every other faction in the game — players, wild monsters, other guard factions, all neutral. The CanAttack gate refuses any attack involving a guard NPC regardless of who's attacking who.
Trade-offs:
- You can walk through a hostile faction's city without dying to its guards. (Already true since v1.0.8 made cross-faction players friendly, but now it's also true at the faction-relation level for the guards themselves.)
- You can't grief NPCs by training a bear into a guard post — guards and bears just walk past each other now. Lost a small bit of emergent comedy.
- If a guard NPC was supposed to be a quest objective (kill / interact), it might behave differently now. Report it if you find one.
What's still disabled
1,195 more spawns are still in npc_spawns.disabled.json — friendly-faction "Guards" (Plains Guard, Wyrdwind Guard, etc.), city-specific royal palace guards (Eznan, Crescent Throne, North Ishvara), and named escort/bodyguard NPCs. Some of these are quest-givers, some are atmospheric, some are escorts you talk to during quests. Restoring them is a per-template call that's still in Ashley's queue.
If you find a quest stuck because a named NPC isn't spawning, send the NPC name + zone and we'll fast-track that one.
Behind the scenes
Server-source changes:
SystemFaction.cs::GetRelationState: newRookeryNeutralizedFactions = {162, 167, 168, 164}short-circuit (sibling to yesterday's player-faction check). If either side's mother faction is in that set, return Neutral.compact.sqlite3system_faction_relations: 130 rows involving guard factions flipped tostate_id=2(Neutral).npc_spawns.jsonandnpc_spawns.disabled.json: 1,354 spawn entries shuffled between them (509 wild monsters + 845 guards moved active; 1,195 ambiguous spawns left disabled).
Backups of every modified file in bin/Release/net10.0/Data/ and Data/Worlds/main_world/ with .bak-pre-* timestamps from 20260525 — full rollback is one cp command if anything's wrong.
No client patch — same .pak, no download.