Two small polish passes on top of yesterday's guards-as-decoration change.
All city guards now display [Rookery Isles Alliance]
Walk past a guard in Marianople, Two Crowns, or Mahadevi and the label above them used to read [Nuia Alliance], [Haranya Alliance], or [Neutral Alliance] depending on which continent's old factional government they belonged to. That's the old Korean-vs-everyone-else paradigm. Doesn't fit a realm that's already cross-faction friendly with the 12 Houses as the actual political structure.
As of this patch, all 44 guard-type NPCs (Guards, Sentries, Soldiers, Archers, Watch Cannons, Defense Towers, Prison Guards, Village Vigilantes, Farm Sentries) carry a unified label: [Rookery Isles Alliance].
What's preserved on the original alliance tags: King Andrion II still shows [Nuia Alliance], Queen Amarendra IV still shows [Haranya Alliance], and their named agents. They represent the actual historical Nuian and Hariharan governments — relabeling those wouldn't be roleplay-accurate, they're sovereigns of their nations even within the wider Rookery realm.
If you see a guard NPC still showing the old tag, ping the dev channel — it's probably a quest-related NPC that got skipped by the rename filter and we can fix one-off.
Korean idol-show placeholders removed
Somewhere in the AAEmu Korean event content drop, three placeholder NPCs called CN_Idol_01_TOP3_For Simless_Cho Ga-min, CN_Idol_02_TOP3_For Simless_Lee Ye-dong, and CN_Idol_03_TOP3_For Simless_Kuk Cheong-ui had been wandering the world — clearly K-pop idol-show staging placeholders that were never meant to ship to a live server. Also a debug NPC literally named 74684 DO NOT TRANSLATE. All removed from the spawn data.
25 spawns gone, no quest content affected. If you noticed any of those four floating around, that's why they're gone.
Behind the scenes
- New nickname row in
compact.sqlite3.npc_nicknames(id=9001002, name="Rookery Isles Alliance"), matchinglocalized_textsentry. 44 NPC templates'npc_nickname_idupdated. - Filter for "gibberish-named NPC" recorded in the git commit message — any future content drop that brings in similar placeholders can be re-purged by re-running the script. Pattern catches:
^[A-Z]{2,4}_prefixes (CN_/EU_/TEST_), embedded_TOP\d/_For/_TEMP_tokens, baked dimensions like-2.3 m, multi-underscore asset names, "DO NOT TRANSLATE" leakage. - Backups:
compact.sqlite3.bak-pre-nickname-rename-20260525-125201,npc_spawns.json.bak-pre-gibberish-purge-20260525-125427. Removed templates left in the DB so their IDs don't get reused for anything else.
No client patch — same .pak, no download.