The exp command shows real numbers now

No more guessing from vague hints like "you are well on your way." The exp command now shows your actual progress: your level and class, total experience, how far into the current level you are, exactly how much you still need to level, and a gold progress bar with a percentage.

Healers earn experience for healing

Support classes no longer have to swing a weapon to advance. Casting a heal on someone else now grants experience based on how much health you actually restore and the target's level — so keeping the party alive is its own reward. Healing yourself doesn't count (no farming), overhealing past full doesn't count, and a single huge heal is capped so it can't out-earn a strong hit. In a group you're rewarded for every ally you patch up.

Healing also feeds the combo system: a heal landed on an ally during a fight builds your combo just like an attack would, so support and healer classes can finally reach their signature finishers without having to trade blows. (Out of combat it does nothing — no pre-stacking.)

Combo finishers tuned & three more classes get their own

Finishers now scale. A finisher's burst grows with your level and your target's toughness, so it stays a real payoff in high-end fights instead of fading against tougher foes. The Warlord's Rampage now lands a proper damage burst on top of its extra strike.

Three classes promoted. Ninja, Witch, and Heirophant — all advanced classes — were borrowing another class's finisher at reduced power. Each now unleashes its own at full strength: the Ninja's Shadow Dance, the Witch's Witchfire, and the Heirophant's Nature's Wrath.

New: Combo system & in-game Hints

Combos. Land combat skills and offensive spells in consecutive rounds to build a combo. Every point raises your damage, and at a full combo your class unleashes a signature finisher — Warlord's Rampage, Wizard's Arcane Surge, Dread Knight's life-draining Dread Reaping, and ten more. Every class has one (the fifteen advanced classes hit hardest; base classes get a scaled version). Misses and idle rounds drain the combo, so keep the pressure on — watch it fill on the battle meter.

Hints. New to the realm? Type hint for survival tips and hint feature to see what's new. Low-level players get tips automatically; silence them any time with tips off.

Fixes. The Hellish Dirk now decays in hand as intended. The battle meter shows your group's tank instead of yourself while grouped and renders coloured monster names correctly. Caster monsters no longer cast their spell twice in a single round.

New: the Battle Meter

Combat just got a heads-up display. After each round of a fight, the new Battle Meter shows colour-coded HP bars for both you and your target — green when healthy, yellow when wounded, red when near death — alongside the status effects (poison, bleeding, stun and more) afflicting each side.

It's off by default; flip it on or off any time with the battlemeter command. Your preference is saved with your character.

Every advanced class reworked

All twelve advanced classes now share a smooth progression from 1 to 100 — no more dumping twenty-five-plus skills on you at level 1. Wizard, Arcanist, Dread Knight, Assassin, Grand Knight, Warlord, Mindflayer, Gold Knight, Crimson Knight, and Beast Master join the earlier Holy Avenger and Dark Bishop rework: every class keeps a handful of core abilities at the start and earns the rest across the climb.

Healing and group spells settle into the mid-game, while the heavy damage and protection spells are now earned at high levels (80+), with capstones around level 95 (the Heavenly and Hellish Swords among them). Redundant low-level spells were trimmed (brew, cure light/critic, dispel good).

Combat text fix. A bash, throw, or slam that lands on a foe under sanctuary or stoneskin no longer falsely reports that they "avoid" it — the message now matches what actually happened.

Server stability — crash fixed at the source

Hunted down the real culprit: a colour-rendering bug that could corrupt memory and crash the server during combat. Patched at the root — no more sudden reboots mid-fight, and characters and gear stay safe.

Permanent address & HTTPS

The Grotto now lives at a real name: connect with telnet world.hiddengrotto.org 4000 — no more memorising a bare IP. The website is now served securely over HTTPS.

Spell overhaul, weather & world fixes

Casters hit harder. Intelligence now boosts the damage of all offensive spells — not just Full Harm. Stack INT gear and your nukes scale with it. Call Lightning is worth casting in clear skies again (and still hits hardest in a storm).

Weather matters more. Scan now sees less far in fog and rain, and Track grows less reliable in foul weather outdoors.

World fixes. The Rite of Chayanrah zone is now reachable from the Shady Clearing, and a tent in the arctic ogre camp that killed adventurers on sight has been made safe. Squashed a long-standing bug where every class wrongly received cleric/mage spell-damage bonuses, plus a backend buffer-overflow hardening for stability.

Grotto Client & this website launch

A brand-new cross-platform client — Grotto Client — arrives for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with aliases, triggers, and hotkeys built in. Download it here. This site goes live alongside it.

Now publicly playable

The world moved to a public server and is reachable anywhere at telnet world.hiddengrotto.org 4000. Old characters, gear, and clans came through intact.

64-bit revival & the great bug hunt

The 1990s codebase was modernized to build and run on today's 64-bit servers. Some two dozen long-standing bugs were squashed along the way — boot crashes, buffer overflows, a broken prompt that hid your HP and mana, the Animate Dead spell, and more. Player saves were carefully preserved. Revived from the ashes for a new age by Burzhum.

Class tuning

Dark Bishop's Detect Invisibility is now learnable from level 1 (matching the other detects), and Mana Flare becomes a high-level spell.